Evo Morales’ decision to cut the state financial support of political parties will undoubtedly strengthen the decolonization process and the country’s political reconstruction Guillermo Almeyra

Guillermo Almeyra

 

Is Evo the people’s enemy? La Paz – Some have no doubts. Some declare that “we mustn’t look at Bolivia”, and those who, instead, declare that Evo Morales “will never decolonize the country”, that the nationalizations he has announced aren’t such and, forgetting that the support of the indigenist and popular government surpasses 75%, carelessly say that all social movements are directed against the government. It isn’t necessary to clarify that Bolivia, like the rest of the world, is still a capitalist country, but like Venezuela, Cuba and Ecuador, it is living a dynamic anti-imperialist process, which has some objectively anti-capitalist ways and which help to build the origins of popular power that confront the logic of capitalism. In Bolivia there isn’t a unique party which identifies itself with the state apparatus which can suffocate a fragile yet diverse civil society that is in constant agitation and which can, therefore, be in danger of causing the fast bureaucratization of the accelerated revolutionary process in course. Moreover, the social relations which are the grounds of the State have never allowed it to consolidate itself, and at least since the truncated revolution of July 1952, it has been the country which has offered the clearest example of the construction of the double power (the Central Obrera Boliviana-Movimiento Nacional Revolucionario co-government, the worker’s and peasant’s militia, the red mining zones, etc.) Moreover, Evo’s government doesn’t lean on a party which can make the pressure of the state apparatus reach down to the roots, but in a pool of trade unions and social movements –the Movimiento al Socialismo- that makes the continuous pressure of all the exploited and oppressed sectors of the population make its way partially and misshaped towards that apparatus, a pressure that concentrates in the form and the objectives of a diffuse workers’ culture (syndicalism, elitism, socialist aspiration), which still mingle –for historical reasons it couldn’t be any different- with corporate interests, caudillism, localism, peasant anarquism. Evo’s crucial decision to cut the state financial support to political parties will undoubtedly strengthen social movements, local powers, their independence vis-à-vis the government; in other words, the decolonization process and the country’s political reconstruction. The social movements press the government to obtain concessions from it, but not only do they not oppose it, they are the government’s only social grass-roots support. There’s no doubt that in the government there are those who want to create something from the mingling of the roots of popular power and the pre-Hispanic ayllus (a form of Inca social organization. T’s N.) on one hand, and the capitalism of the small businesses on the other, and baptize this monstrosity of some cholo (mestizo of European and Indigenous blood. T’s.N.) imagination as “Andean capitalism”. In this perspective, they want to “tidy up” the revolution, lead and control the social movements, strengthen the state apparatus. They are a tendency, but not the majority, and Evo Morales and the peasant syndicalists are in a completely different line of thought. Although sometimes they might fill in their ideological gaps with ideas imported from Cuba and Venezuela, who, in turn, brought them slightly modified from the anti-socialist bureaucracy of the wrongly named “real socialism” (one party, State Capitalism, central planning, suppression of popular autonomous organizations –councils-, and of the autonomy of the worker’s movement). Bolivia is too small and poor, it is in a region which is dominated by three governments which are set on developing the capitalism of “its” bourgeoisies (Chile, Argentina and Brazil) and lives in an international situation (and national as well, given the secessionist intents of the oligarchy) which is hostile, and all of these elements hinders government’s margin for maneuver. What is surprising is not that Morales hasn’t yet finished with capitalism in the barren lands of the altiplano, but all he has achieved on the road of de-colonization, of national independence and of anti-capitalism, such as the recovery of the strategic industries despite the pressure of the transnationals, or the beginning of an agrarian reform, because three revolutions gather and mix in Bolivia: the ethnic and cultural one, in favour of the equality of the indigenous with the cholos and the white folk, and for the reconstruction of a State for all the peoples and the development of the cultures, the power and the rights and the ways of living of the native peoples; the national revolution, for the independence from transnational capital as well as the United States; and the social revolution, for equality, fraternity, freedom and development. Clearly a democratic revolution in Bolivia can only culminate with the power of workers, which of course the MAS is in no condition to ensure, but which is impossible without the transitory experience with the MAS, the origin of double power and the Constituent Assembly itself. Of course the Constitutions, Lasalle used to say, are pieces of paper in the mouth of the cannon, and without a “cannon”, that is, without a force capable of enforcing them, they are only wishful thinking. But this does not mean that neither the Constituents nor the Constitutions lack political importance, but that popular power must be developed to make them a reality starting from the democratic struggle. Because when trying to change the country based on a different grass-root class and with another state power, many gradually pass from the simple democracy to an elitist or counseling position or even a socialist one, due to their own experience acquired in the school of combat and the development of their own intellectual capabilities. Or should it wait, instead, until the oppressed mature, acquire conscience and have political views thanks to some sudden Enlightenment or the Verb or some Savior? This article has been originally published at www.sinpermiso.info
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Guillermo Almeyra Member of the Editorial Board of SINPERMISO .