Is
Evo An Evil Enemy Of The People?
By Guillermo Almeyra
23 May, 2007
Countercurrents.org
For some there is no doubt. There
are those that say "there is no reason to look at Bolivia"
and who instead declare that Evo Morales "will never decolonise
the country", that the nationalisations that have been announced
are no such thing and, forgetting that support for the indigenous and
popular government surpasses 75%, say, without flinching, that all the
social movements are against the government.
It is not necessary to explain
that Bolivia is a country which, like the rest of the world, continues
to be capitalist but, like Venezuela, Cuba and Ecuador, is experiencing
a dynamic anti-imperialist process, which in some cases takes an objectively
anti-capitalist form and helps to build embryos of popular power that
confront the logic of capitalism. There is no single party in Bolivia
identified with the state apparatus that could strangle a fragile but
multiform civil society which is in permanent agitation, and which could
therefore run the risk of a rapid bureaucratisation of the current rampant
revolutionary process underway. What's more, the social relations on
which the state is based on have never allow it to consolidate and,
at least since the truncated revolution of July 1952, this has been
the country which has offered the clearest example of the construction
of dual power (Bolivian Workers Central- Nationalist Revolutionary Movement
cogovernment, worker and campesino militias, the red mining zones etc).
As well as this, the Evo
government does not rest on a party that could transmit the pressure
of the state apparatus downwards, but rather, rests on a pool of social
movements and unions - the Movement Towards Socialism - that in a partial
and deformed way applies a continuous pressure from all sectors of the
oppressed and exploited population onto the state, a pressure which
is concentrated in the forms and objectives of a diffuse working class
culture (syndicalism, classism, socialist aspirations), which are still
mixed up - for historical reasons it could not be any other way - with
corporative interests, caudillismo, localism and campesino anarchism.
The very important decision made by Evo of ending state financial contributions
to parties will undoubtably give a greater wieght to the social movements,
local power and their independence in front of the government, that
is, to the process of decolonisation occurring at the movement, and
the political reconstruction of the country.
The social movements pressure
the government to get concessions out of it, but not only do they not
oppose the government, they constitute its only social base of support.
Within the government there is, without doubt, those that want to give
life to a mixture of embryos of popular power and the prehispanic ayllus
on one hand, and the capitalism of the pymes [small and medium companies]
on the other, and baptize this brainchild of a cholo imagination "Andean
capitalism". They want, from their perspective, to "tidy up"the
revolution, to channel and put a brake on the social movements, strengthen
the state apparatus. They are one tendency, but they are not the majority,
and Evo Morales and the campesino unions follow an opposing line. Even
though they sometimes fill their ideological gaps with ideas imported
from Cuba and Venezuela, that at the same time they brought with them,
modifying them somewhat, from the anti-socialist bureaucracy from the
countries that where misnamed "real socialism" (single party,
state capitalism, planning from above, suppression of the autonomous
popular organs -councils- and of the autonomy of the workers' movement).
Bolivia is very small and
poor, it is in a region dominated by three governments dedicate to developing
the capitalism of "its" bourgeoisies (Chile, Argentina, Brazil)
and lives in an international context (and national, given the successionist
intents of the oligarchy) that is hostile, all of which limits the margin
of maneuver of his government. What is therefore surprising is not that
Morales has not eradicated capitalism in the barren lands of the altiplano
within a year, instead it is everything that he has done on its path
of decolonisation, national independence and anti-capitalism, such as
the recuperation of strategic industries despite the pressure of the
transnationals or the beginnings of an agrarian reform. Because in Bolivia
there is the coming together and mixing up of three revolutions: ethnic
and cultural, for equality of indigenous people with cholos and whites
and for the construction of a state for all peoples and the development
of cultures, power and the rights and ways of life of the originarios
peoples; national, for independence in the face of transnational capital
and the United States; and social, for equality, fraternity, liberty,
development.
Clearly, In Bolivia, a democratic
revolution can only culminate with the taking of power by the workers
which certainly MAS cannot assure, but which will be impossible without
this transitory experience with MAS, the embryos of dual power and the
actual Constituent Assembly. Of course, constitutions, said Lassalle,
are pieces of paper on the mouth of a cannon, and without a "cannon",
that is, without a relationship of forces that allows it to be implemented,
they become little more than nice dreams. But this does not mean that
neither the constituent assemblies nor the constitutions have no political
importance, rather, it is necessary to develop popular power in order
to make them reality, parting from the democratic struggle. Because
as you try to change the class base of a country, and create another
state power, many gradually begin, through their own experience acquired
in the school of combat and in the development of their intellectual
capacities, to move from a simple democratic stance to a class, pro-council,
or even socialist position. Or do we have to instead wait, for the oppressed
to mature, aquire consciousness and become politicised thanks to a sudden
aparition or the Word of some Saviour?
Guillermo Almeyra is a member
of the editorial council of Sin Permiso
Translated from
Sin Permiso
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