Bolivian Elections: No to MAS’ “Andean Capitalism�

[bolsheviki]

Bolivian Elections: Evo Morales Tries to Straddle an Abyss
No to MAS’ “Andean Capitalism” – Fight for Workers Revolution!
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The landslide victory of Indian peasant leader Evo Morales in the December 18 Bolivian elections was met with jubilation by most of the international left, and dire pronouncements from spokesmen for U.S. imperialism. Winning close to 54 percent of the vote, the leader of the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS – Movement Towards Socialism) is the first candidate in recent Bolivian history elected with an absolute majority. Washington has demonized Morales, who came to prominence as the leader of coca-growing peasants targeted by the U.S. “drug war,” particularly because of his friendship with Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez and Cuba’s Fidel Castro. Yet Morales’ program is for “Andean and Amazonian capitalism.” Despite the hopes placed in him by his peasant and indigenous followers, we warn that the MAS is hardly socialist, and Morales’ bourgeois nationalist government will administer Bolivia within the framework of capitalism, spelling more misery for the masses.

[Click here for full article] (http://www.internationalist.org/boliviaelections0512.html)

[Soheran]

There is more to this issue.

Morales has essentially two tasks, if he is to be a worthy leader of Bolivia:

1. He has to develop Bolivia's economy and make it more independent from foreign capital (the two are more or less synonymous).
2. He has to redistribute wealth and empower the Bolivian proletariat.

Like Chávez, Morales is intent upon ensuring that the parasitic and destructive nature of foreign capital is checked. Thus the "nationalization" scheme; thus his insistence that he will not privatize anything else. At the moment his main focus is (1), to ensure the development of the national economy instead of the mere fattening of the pockets of foreign investors. Because he is a cautious player, whatever his rhetoric, he will follow Chávez's model of using the public sector not to create socialism, but to create a national capitalism with the social objectives of reducing poverty and increasing living standards. In this sense he can indeed be described as "bourgeois nationalist," like other Third World socialists of the past.

None of that changes, however, the essential character of the Morales government, which like Chávez's is not a merely reformist party of the oppressors but a party representing the needs of millions of the oppressed. What makes his party and his policy less than socialist is not a desire to subordinate the Bolivian proletariat to the Bolivian capitalist class, as is asserted in the article, but rather a desire to retain checked foreign investment and national capitalist economic development. The model advanced is by no means the only model, but it is the accepted one, and one that with variations is working in Venezuela, Chile, and Argentina. Until we see what comes of the experiments in Venezuela and Argentina concerning worker control and workplace democracy, that is the model that will be used.

Leaving all that aside, the fact remains that a radically socialist attempt in the Third World to wrest power from capital entirely would be doomed to failure, not for any theoretical error with socialism but simply because the current global economic order would never let it survive. Latin America has immense experience with counter-revolution, and its current left-wing leaders are being very cautious in preventing a replay.