[News] Bolivia's Path to Socialism

Tue Apr 6 12:47:49 EDT 2010

http://www.counterpunch.org/burbach04062010.html

April 6, 2010

Bolivia's Path to Socialism

Evo's Way

By ROGER BURBACH

When Bolivia’s president, Evo Morales, was sworn 
in to a second term in January, he proclaimed 
Bolivia a plurinational state that would 
construct “communitarian socialism.” In an 
accompanying address, Vice President Álvaro 
Garcia Linare, envisioned a “socialist horizon” 
for Bolivia, characterized by “well-being, making 
the wealth communal, drawing on our heritage . . 
.” The process “will not be easy, it could take 
decades, even centuries, but it is clear that the 
social movements cannot achieve true power 
without implanting a socialist and communitarian horizon.”[1]

During the past decade Latin America has become a 
scene of hope and expectations as its leaders and 
social movements have raised the banner of 21st 
century socialism in a world ravished by imperial 
adventures and economic disasters. Proponents of 
the new socialism assert that it will break with 
the state-centered socialism of the last century, 
and will be driven by grassroots social movements 
that construct an alternative order from the 
bottom up. There is also widespread concurrence 
that the process will take a unique path in each 
country, that there is no singular model or grand strategy to pursue.

The new socialism has been characterized by a 
much slower and transitory process than the 
revolutionary socialism of the past century, 
which was based on the overthrow of the old 
regime, with a vanguard party seizing control of 
the state and moving quickly to transform the 
economy. A different scenario is occurring in 
Latin America where new governments take control 
politically, with the previous economic system 
largely intact. In Venezuela, Bolivia, and 
Ecuador, where the socialist discourse is the 
most advanced, constituent assemblies were 
convened to draft new constitutions that 
restructured the political system and established 
broad social rights. The process and pace of 
transforming their economies has become the task 
of the political and social forces acting through 
the new legislative assemblies and the “refounded states.”

In Bolivia, the struggle for a constitutional 
assembly and a new constitution was particularly 
strife-ridden with the oligarchy, centered in the 
resource-rich lowland departments, engaging in an 
outright rebellion with the tactical backing of 
the US embassy. Little was heard of socialism in 
this period, in spite of the name of Morales’ 
political party, Movement Towards Socialism (MAS).

Now, with the consolidation of the new political 
system and the plurinational state, socialism has 
been placed on the agenda. In a number of public 
addresses and interviews, Vice President Garcia 
Linare and Foreign Minister David Choquehuanca 
have articulated what they envision as the Bolivian road to socialism.

The vice-president--a member of an armed guerilla 
movement in the early 1990’s who was captured and 
imprisoned for four years--now asserts that “in 
Bolivia we are working and betting on the 
democratic path to socialism. It is possible 

because socialism is fundamentally a radical 
democracy.” He goes on to add: “The constitution 
provides the architecture for a state constructed 
by society and it defines a long path in which we 
participate in a process of constructing a new 
society, pacifically and democratically.”[2]

Noting the uniqueness of the Bolivian process, 
the vice president states: “Bolivia is inserted 
in planetary capitalism, but it is different from 
other societies
community structures have 
survived, in the countryside, in the high lands, 
the low lands, and in some parts of the cities 
and the barrios that have resisted capitalist 
subjugation.” He adds, “This is different from 
American and European capitalism, and it gives us an advantage.”[3]

David Choquehuanca in an interview elaborated on 
the communal roots that facilitate the 
construction of socialism: “We have always 
governed ourselves in our communities. This is 
why we maintain our customs, perform our own 
music, speak our own Aymaran language, in spite 
of a 500-year effort to erase these things – our 
music, our language and our culture. In a state 
of clandestinity, we have upheld our values, 
economic forms, our own types of communitarian 
organization, which are all being reappraised 
now. This is why we are incorporating into 
socialism something that has resisted for 500 
years - the communitarian element. We want to 
build our own socialism.” He added: “In the 
communities, we always had our ulacas 
(assemblies), where debates took place. Those 
political spaces are being recovered. I don’t 
know if this can be called ‘the seeds of a 
people’s government’. What existed, what exists, 
is being reappraised, is beginning to be valued 
and developed. These are the times we’re in.”

Choquehuanca also described the contemporary 
communities and the unions that exist both in and 
outside of them: “We organize ourselves in the 
communities. In Bolivia there must be around ten 
thousand communities, and in each community there 
is a union of campesino workers. Each union has a 
base which is associated first on a provincial 
level, and then on a departmental and national 
level. The national level is the Confederacion 
Sindical Unica de Trabajadores Campesinos de 
Bolivia (CSUTCB). They’re not naturally existing 
organizations, but organizations that helped 
allow us to table our demands and participate in 
elections. There are various organized sectors 
with similar structures, such as the teachers, 
the miners, the indigenous groups, women, factory 
workers. And we have a mother organization which 
is the Central Obrera Boliviana (COB). These are 
the people’s organizations. President Evo Morales 
has called for strengthening them, since they are 
the agents driving this process of change.”[4]

Some are skeptical of Morales’ commitment to 
socialism. Jim Petras, a Marxist scholar who has 
written on Latin American politics for half a 
century, asserts that Morales gives a “high 
priority
to orthodox capitalist growth over and 
above any concern with developing an alternative 
development pole built around peasants and 
landless rural workers.” This he says has led to 
“the increased size and scope of foreign owned 
multinational corporate extractive capital investments.”[5]

Others from an ecological perspective like Marco 
Ribera Arismendi proclaim: "We´ve changed the 
discourse, but not the model.” A member of the 
Environment Defense League, one of Bolivia´s 
largest environment organizations, Ribera adds, 
"We had great hopes in this government to solve 
or make a change on these issues," but it has 
instead followed an extractive industry model 
that is driven by transnational capital.[6]

While it is true that Morales has not launched a 
full assault on capital, his government along 
with the other New Left governments in Latin 
America have ended the neo-liberal era in which 
the International Monetary Fund and the World 
Bank imposed free market policies, severely 
curtailing social spending, and enabling 
transnational corporations to gain unprecedented 
control of the region’s nonrenewable resources. 
Now many of these governments are using the state 
to exert greater control of the economy and are 
renegotiating the terms of investment in order to 
capture a greater portion of the revenue for 
social programs and to facilitate internal development and industrialization.

Morales, soon after taking office in 2006, moved 
against the foreign-owned natural gas and 
petroleum companies to take 50% of the revenues, 
and to make the state-owned petroleum company the 
administrator and, in some cases, a co-investor. 
Similar deals have been made with transnational 
capital in the iron-mining sector, and the 
government is in the process of negotiating 
state-dominated agreements for the exploitation 
of Bolivia’s huge lithium deposits.

Pablo Solon, Bolivia’s ambassador to the United 
Nations, who previously served as the 
representative on trade and economic integration 
issues, summed up the government’s policy: “We 
need foreign investment. The issue is the rules 
under which we are going to allow this foreign 
investmenthow much they are going to leave for 
the country, how much they are going to have as 
profit, who is going to own it, the transfer of 
technology, the transformation of raw materials 
inside the country. Those are the key issues that 
Bolivia has synthesized into the words ‘When it 
comes to foreign investment, we don’t want 
bosses; we want partners.’ If they can accept 
that rule, they are welcome. We will no longer 
accept the relations that we had before.”[7]

The process of transforming Bolivia’s social and 
economic institutions will be the task of the 
legislative branch, which will be drafting over 
100 bills to implement the provisions of the 
country’s new plurinational constitution. Of 
central importance is the empowerment of the 
indigenous communities and granting them the 
economic resources to construct communitarian socialism.

The existing agrarian reform law will be 
revisited. According to Victor Camacho, the 
Vice-Minister of Land Issues, “we are going to 
re-territorialize the indigenous communities,” 
recognizing that the ancestral communal lands 
have been seized from the indigenous peoples 
since the conquest.[8]While advancing at a rhythm 
that reflects the country’s particular 
correlation of social and political forces, the 
Bolivian experiment is contributing to the 
advance of socialism on a global level. As Vice 
President Garcia Linares declares: “The society 
we have today in the world is a society with too 
many injustices, too much inequality
We have the 
seeds of communitarian socialism, badly treated, 
partially dried up, but if we nourish this seed 
in Bolivia a powerful trunk will grow with fruit 
for our country and the world.”

For Evo Morales, the necessity for socialism is 
global and urgent, given the state of the planet. 
“If capitalism produces crises in the financial 
system, in energy, in food, in the environment, 
in climatic change, then what good is this 
capitalism that brings us so many crises? 
 What 
is the solution? I am convinced that it is 
socialism, for some socialism of the 21st 
century, for others communitarian socialism.”[9]

Roger Burbach is the director of the Center for 
the Study of the Americas (CENSA) and a Visiting 
Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley 
and author of 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1842774352/counterpunchmaga>The 
Pinochet Affair.

Notes

[1] Garcia Linare: Bolivia deja el Estado 
aparente e impulsa el Estado Socialista, 
Arzobispado de La Paz, 22 de Enero, 2010, 
<http://www.arzobispadolapaz.org/noticias/Nacional>http://www.arzobispadolapaz.org/noticias/Nacional

[2] Garcia Linare Plantea Socialismo Comunitario 
Contra el Capitalismo, Jornadanet.com, 8 de 
Febrero, 2010, 
<http://www.jornadanet.com/n.php?a=43340-1>http://www.jornadanet.com/n.php?a=43340-1

[3] Bolivia Vira al Socialismo Comunitario y 
Comienza a Sepultar el Capitalismo, Cambio, 
Periodico del Estado Plurinacional Boliviano, 8 
de Febrero, 2010, 
<http://www.cambio.bo/noticia.php?fecha=2010-02-08&idn=14526>http://www.cambio.bo/noticia.php?fecha=2010-02-08&idn=14526

[4] Bolivian Foreign Minister: Communitarian 
Socialism Will Refound Bolivia, Bolivia Rising, 
<http://boliviarising.blogspot.com/2009/05/bolivian-foreign-minister-communitarian.html>http://boliviarising.blogspot.com/2009/05/bolivian-foreign-minister-communitarian.html

[5] James Petras, Latin America’s Twenty First 
Century Socialism in Historical Perspective, The 
James Petras Website, 
<http://petras.lahaine.org/articulo.php?p=1789&more=1&c=1>http://petras.lahaine.org/articulo.php?p=1789&more=1&c=1

[6] Juan Nicastro, Environment Continues to 
Suffer, Latinamerica Press, Febr. 11, 2010, 
<http://lapress.org/articles.asp?art=6061>http://lapress.org/articles.asp?art=6061

[7] Jason Tockman, Bolivia’s New Political Space: 
An Interview with Ambassador Pablo Solon, NACLA 
News, Views and Analysis, March 15, 2010, 
<https://nacla.org/node/6473>https://nacla.org/node/6473

[8] Victor Camacho, Vamos a Reterritorializar las 
Comunidades Indigenas, La Prensa, 16 de Febrero, 
2010, 
<http://www.laprensa.com.bo/noticias/16-02-10/noticias.php?nota=16_02_10_nego2.php>http://www.laprensa.com.bo/noticias/16-02-10/noticias.php?nota=16_02_10_nego2.php

[9] Evo Morales Defiende al Socialismo como la 
Solucion al Capitalismo y sus Crisis, EcoDiario, 
<http://ecodiario.eleconomista.es/politica/noticias/1740280/12/09/Evo-Morales-defiende-al-socialismo-como-la-solucion-al-capitalismo-y-sus-crisis.html>http://ecodiario.eleconomista.es/politica/noticias/1740280/12/09/Evo-Morales-defiende-al-socialismo-como-la-solucion-al-capitalismo-y-sus-crisis.html

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