Bolivia’s left didn’t just lose an election. The loss exposed deeper issues that had been simmering for the last decade. When Evo Morales took office on January 22, 2006, Bolivia was the poorest country in South America. During his first year in office, he nationalized oil and gas production, redistributed revenues from natural gas exploitation, and implemented major projects to socialize healthcare, housing, and other public services. In 13 years, the Bolivian government managed to reduce poverty by almost half, from 60% in 2006 to 34% by 2019, according to World Bank estimates. Furthermore, extreme poverty fell from 37.7% to 15.2% during the same period. In 2009, Evo Morales promulgated a new Constitution that brought autonomy to 36 Indigenous peoples, who were represented for the first time, and guaranteed rights to minority and marginalized groups in this country of 12.41 million people.
These and many other massive reforms during the MAS party’s rule under President Evo Morales lifted millions out of poverty and expanded the middle class. Historic new rights were secured for the working class and Indigenous majority, but the class character of the state was not transformed. The basic institutions of capitalist rule – the military high command, the state bureaucracy, legislative bodies, and the federal structure of the state that afforded a significant power base for the counter-revolution in the country’s east remained essentially intact. They failed to fully dismantle the old state inherited from centuries of colonialism and elite rule.
My emphasis on the middle class. This is very important, as we'll see.
These challenges are not unique to Bolivia; it’s a challenge every country with a progressive government faces. How can you address the contradictions created by capitalism – namely, unemployment, inequality, and underdevelopment – while fighting off the local bourgeoisie and powerful, right-wing elements of society that seek to overthrow you, empowering the movements that brought you to power, and radically transforming the state and its institutions? It is an intricate dance. And in Bolivia, it remained a constant struggle. Mass movements and trade unions, which didn’t cease their activity, were demobilized during Morales’s time in office from playing an active role in the socialist transformation of the state. Despite MAS cadres and movement leaders taking up roles within the state, the political direction of the state was increasingly in the hands of technocrats like Arce, who administered it with an emphasis on the people but whose aspirations were not transformative, reducing the MAS party to merely an electoral instrument instead of a revolutionary party of the people.
Electoral victory and holding electoral power, even when well-wielded, can very easily demobilize a revolutionary movement who become content with gradual reforms and therefore never take the necessary revolutionary step to tear down the current system.
Mobilizations would only re-emerge in November [2019] when Jeanine Áñez, in a provocative act, swore herself in as president on the bible, members of the security forces ripped the wiphala (the Indigenous flag) from their uniforms, and the right-wing mobs, more emboldened than ever, intensified their attacks. Security forces were given a free license to shoot and kill protestors by Áñez. Over 40 people were killed during the anti-coup protests. The impressive mobilizations and international condemnation of the coup regime would indeed put enough pressure on the Áñez government to force it to call for elections.
The return to mobilization by the mass movement on the streets was able to force elections to be held and turned out in impressive numbers for the MAS candidate, Luis Arce, who scored 55% and a first-round victory. Yet, the same mass movement alongside the progressive government was unable to engage in a meaningful process to address the social, economic, and political crisis after the election.
This is going to be the key for Bolivia - can they remobilize in the face of a new right wing government seeking to tear down what MAS built?
When Arce defeated the right at the polls, he was faced with a deteriorating economy. Instead of robustly bolstering national industries, especially energy like gas and lithium, he was timid, allowing a decrease in national exports and lithium and gas production and processing, leading to an overall economic decline. The far-right exploited the economic challenges and attacked the government, which seemed to offer no political and economic solutions to the crisis.
The infighting between President Luis Arce, a technocrat and economist by training, and former President Evo Morales, a charismatic and revolutionary leader steeled in the struggles of the mass movements, at a time of economic crisis, accelerated the collapse of MAS and its government of change. This division paralyzed the legislature, with Arce unable to pass economic policies, and the Bolivian working class paid the ultimate cost. Inflation soared, reaching its highest level in 38 years, and the national currency, the boliviano, saw a parallel market emerge where its value was nearly half the official rate.
Mr. Self-Coup is a bum.
The deeper issue is that the Latin American electoral left has reached its limits. Despite redistributing wealth and lifting over 70 million people out of poverty, it has been incapable of mobilizing the masses of people to make structural changes towards socialism. Instead, a growing number of left leaders like Arce have shifted to the right in **an attempt to appeal to a new middle class. **
MAS's economic reforms were so effective that they created a new middle class, who were obviously politically influential with the party. But their material interests were now decidedly in continuity, not revolutionary progress. This is a stark challenge for any reformist, developmentalist leftism - the more successful you are, the more you erode your essential political base.
The Bolivian experience offers a sobering lesson. The defeat in Bolivia was not a simple loss at the ballot box. It was a failure to transform the state and to fully empower the very masses who built the MAS party and brought it to power. A genuine socialist project cannot be implemented by a small group of technocrats from above. It requires the active and permanent participation of a mobilized working class and its political organizations, who must take full power to dismantle the old colonial state and build a new one in its place. Ultimately, the defeat in Bolivia will not be a permanent one: Bolivia’s mass movements, rooted in the struggles of the Indigenous and campesino majority that have made history by ousting neoliberal governments in the past, will surely rise again to fight in the streets, in the factories, and the fields for the socialist project.
I agree with this from my limited outsider perspective. In the end, the huge mess of contradictions embodied in Bolivia's last 20 years are coming to a head in a way that appears favorable for a revolutionary upheaval. Let's hope the people of Bolivia can make it happen.
Miyeon Jang (Photo: Jaylen Strong)
I really, really hope this is true. It's believable.