ISR Issue 60, JulyAugust 2008
feature REVIEW
Social revolution in Bolivia?
Forrest Hylton and Sinclair Thomson
REVOLUTIONARY HORIZONS: Past and Present in Bolivian
Politics
Verso, 2007
192 pages $23
Review by Sarah Hines
IN THE wave of popular
rebellion and concurrent leftward electoral shift that has swept Latin
America in the last decade or more, nowhere has popular mobilization from
below been as powerful as in Bolivia. As historians Forrest Hylton and
Sinclair Thomson write in Revolutionary Horizons, “In no other Latin American country have popular
forces achieved so much through their own initiative.”
Hylton and Thomson argue that the recent period of
upheaval in Bolivia constitutes a revolution whose defining moment was the
October 2003 insurrection that ousted Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada from
the presidency.
The struggle arose in response to the disastrous
impacts of neoliberal economic policies. Discontent was particularly
focused by the threatened sale of hydrocarbons, one of Bolivia’s most
valuable remaining natural resources, at rock-bottom prices. The movements
made it clear that they would continue to depose successive governments
until the October Agenda—demanding nationalization of the
country’s natural gas reserves, punishment of politicians responsible
for sixty-seven deaths in the rebellion, and a constituent assembly to
rewrite the constitution—was fulfilled.
In what they call an “excavation of the Andean
revolution,” Hylton and Thomson paint a dynamic picture of more than
two hundred years of struggle that they see as intricately bound up with
the revolutionary struggles of today, whose character and trajectory they
also assess.
As the authors emphasize, it was the convergence of a
variety of popular social forces—miners and peasants from the
surrounding altiplano and rural areas, alongside urban workers and poor
from the migrant city of El Alto, which sits above the capital city of La
Paz—that made the 2003 insurrection victorious. In fact, they
demonstrate that the success of popular rebellion in Bolivia has always
hinged on popular forces overcoming “deep rural-urban and
ethnic-class divides” to wage a united struggle against their common
oppressors.
Central to the authors’ perspective is the idea
that popular memory of past struggles, particularly Bolivia’s two
previous revolutions, and radical traditions of collective organization,
serve as “reserves of strength” that popular movements have
drawn on in the current revolutionary cycle.
Bolivia’s revolutionary past
In their view, the first and most important of these
previous revolutions was the indigenous anti-colonial revolution of
1780–81, led by Tupaj Amaru, Tapaj Katari, and Tomás Katari,
which threatened Spanish colonial rule in the southern Andes. The second,
Bolivia’s 1952 national revolution, resulted in agrarian reform, the
nationalization of the country’s mines, and the implementation of
universal suffrage and education.
The authors frame their discussion of divisions and
convergences among popular forces by differentiating between Indian and
national-popular struggles that have “followed separate historical
paths” and whose relations have often been plagued with
“misapprehension, suspicion, and manipulation.” While there
have been elements of each in the other, they find that Indian elements
have generally been subordinated within national-popular blocs, as have
Indian conceptions of nationality.
In tracing the trajectory of popular rebellion and
revolution, they hold that the strengths and limitations of alliances
between the two traditions have consistently born a direct relationship to
the movements’ impact.
The indigenous insurgents briefly found allies among La
Paz’s creole population during the 1780–81 insurrection, but it
was not until the twentieth century that Indians successfully forged
alliances with national-popular forces.
The first major instance of such an alliance occurred
with the 1927 Indian community rebellion. Radical urban allies, including
lawyers, educators, artisans, and intellectuals in the new Socialist Party,
supported indigenous demands for self-government and collective land use.
When 250,000 Bolivians—out of a population of 2
million—died in the Chaco War (1932–35), the radicalization
rekindled and built on the already existing alliances, which in turn helped
pave the way for the 1952 revolution. The pervasive sense that political
leaders had wantonly sacrificed lives at the behest of Royal Dutch Shell
and Standard Oil in this conflict over territory between Bolivia and
Paraguay helped lay the basis for a revolutionary alliance among workers,
peasants, and the middle class.
Although indigenous peasants, proletarians, and
progressive middle-class elements combined forces in the 1952 revolution,
Hylton and Thomson point to tensions that emerged in the alliance in the
revolution’s wake. “Despite the rural origins of much of the
mining labor force,” they write, “relations between workers and
peasants were marked by a sense of cultural and class distance.”
Peasant leaders experienced condescending treatment from proletarian
leaders, and the imbalance was reinforced by the government’s
preference for dropping “ethnic distinctions for class
identification—the country’s rural denizens would be celebrated
as industrious ‘peasant’ laborers rather than stigmatized with
the colonial label of ‘Indians.’”
Counterrevolutionary forces exploited
peasant-proletarian divisions in order to consolidate a peasant-military
alliance that formed the basis for the dictatorships of the 1960s and
1970s. Because the peasantry made up the vast majority of the
country’s population, the military-peasant pact left Bolivian workers
isolated in the face of repressive state violence, particularly in the
mining centers. It was only after indigenous peasant communities broke from
their pact with the state following a horrific massacre of peasants in the
Cochabamba valley in January 1974, that popular forces were “finally
able to beat back reactionary military forces and usher in a return to
democracy.”
The revival of Indian peasant traditions of struggle
renewed the possibility for peasant-proletarian solidarity—and
led to the development of contending political currents within indigenous
peasant communities. Increasingly, a split developed between the kataristas and indianistas. Kataristas had a significant base in the peasant trade union movement
and sought out potential class allies, while indianistas had less of a base in the peasant trade union movement,
emphasized racial rather than class oppression, and “spurned
alliances with what they branded the ‘mestizo-creole’
left.”
In the face of the dismantling of the social welfare
state in the mid-1980s by the same party that had led its construction
thirty years earlier, the peasant-proletarian alliance soon confronted old
tensions. Although its own ranks suffered from the impact of the
introduction of neoliberal economic policies, the leadership of the
Bolivian Workers’ Central (COB) failed to respond to demands of the
CSUTCM (Trade Union Confederation of Bolivian Peasant Workers) to
incorporate greater peasant leadership and representation. Indianista rather than katarista tendencies thus began to
find greater resonance in the CSUTCM while the COB became increasingly
impotent in the face of neoliberal economic restructuring. The result, the
authors argue, was that “peasant political organization was thus
forced in new more autonomous directions in the late 1980s and 1990s, and
class struggle was increasingly recast as, or supplanted by, ethnic
struggle.”
Neoliberalism and new revolt
The late 1980s and 1990s saw further decimation of the
organized working class and the liquidation of public assets—the
national oil and gas, telecommunications, airline, electricity, and
railroad companies were all sold off by the government during Gonzalo
Sánchez de Lozada’s first presidency in the mid-1990s.
Yet the period also saw the rebirth of popular struggle
in the coca-growing region of the Chapare, where many miners migrated after
the state mines were closed. Coca eradication efforts targeted poor growers
(cocaleros) rather
than the wealthy and politically-connected Bolivians and foreigners who
control and reap the lion’s share of the profits from
narco-trafficking. In their struggles of resistance, the cocaleros drew from the
miners’ syndical tradition.
The 2000 Water War in Cochabamba struck the first
decisive blow against neoliberalism in Bolivia. It was successful because
it again brought together a multitude of popular forces, including coca
growers, peasants, urban workers, and the urban poor. Although the Water
War was successful in its immediate goal, the authors argue that the
movements failed to oust President Hugo Banzer (the former dictator who was
elected president in 1997) due to the failure of an alliance between Felipe
Quispe, head of the CSUTCM; Evo Morales, cocalero union leader and founder
of the MAS (Movement Towards Socialism) party; and the coalition led by
Oscar Olivera that coordinated the Water War. So while MAS’s strong
showing in the 2002 elections confirmed that the social movements had
effected a decisive shift in the balance of forces, the rivalry between
Quispe and Morales, as well as their efforts to curb the radicalism of the
movements thereafter, “would plague the social movements until
October 2003.”
In the October 2003 ouster of Sánchez de Lozada
and again in June 2005, when the social movements forced Sánchez de
Lozada’s successor from office for failing to fulfill the October
Agenda, the uprisings drew their strength from the coalescence of the
popular classes.
In December 2005, six months after the movements
deposed President Carlos Mesa, Morales was elected the first indigenous
president in the country’s history. Morales came to power promising
to nationalize natural gas, implement agrarian reform, and call a
constituent assembly that would “re-found” the nation. While
the MAS government has followed through on some of these promises, its
efforts in each of these areas, as the authors explain, have had serious
limits. The gas nationalization raised royalties on foreign corporations
but did not go so far as to expropriate gas fields, and agrarian reform has
benefited many but does not challenge private property.
The most important betrayal from the authors’
perspective has been the party’s approach to the constituent
assembly. MAS’s failure to follow through on its promise to allow
collective representation according to ethnic criteria, trade union or
neighborhood affiliation, or other social association, Hylton and Thomson
write, “began the effective closure of the revolutionary
process.”
In their view, “the election of Evo Morales did
not bring about a revolution. It was a revolution that brought about the
government of Evo Morales.” They argue that Morales’s
government has brought the current revolutionary cycle to a close. While
MAS is concerned with responding to the popular mandate, it is also making
“a bid for state hegemony, intended to consolidate [their]
medium-term governing plans,”—that is consolidate a
“‘social pact’ to resurrect a national capitalist model
of development, decolonize the state, and redistribute wealth and
resources.” For MAS, “decolonization” would involve
greater incorporation of indigenous people in state institutions, which
have historically been run almost exclusively by descendents of the Spanish
colonizers.
For the authors, however, true decolonization would go
much further. The failure of the MAS government to allow for collective
representation evinces its problematic view that “indigenous groups
no longer need ‘special representation’ since they have already
achieved representation—through MAS.” So while, in the
authors’ view, the revolution resulted in the “collapse of the
once triumphant neoliberal model instituted in the 1980s and mounted the
greatest challenge yet seen to the historical structures of internal
colonialism,” they also see both internal colonialism and the need
for revolutionary change to overcome it as continuing to define the
Bolivian reality.
The class question
Unlike many left academics, Hylton and Thomson
unapologetically connect their academic work and historical scholarship to
struggles unfolding today. They themselves witnessed and participated in
the October uprising and have been actively engaged in building
relationships among scholars, activists, and communities in Bolivia and the
United States.
This book is unique among recent books that describe
the processes at work in Bolivia because it contextualizes the current
revolutionary cycle in past revolutionary and radical movements and because
it tries to theorize the process of change that will no doubt continue to
unfold.
Yet the book raises many questions that I believe
cannot be fully answered within the authors’ Indian/national-popular
framework—questions that call for greater incorporation of a class
analysis.
First, they rightly criticize the historic chauvinism
of proletarian organizations toward peasant and indigenous demands, but
mistakenly, I would argue, attribute this blunder to trade union
leaders’ adherence to a classic Marxist or Leninist conception of
workers’ vanguard role in the socialist revolution. The failure to
take racism and peasant concerns seriously was not the inevitable result of
adherence to a Marxist revolutionary vision, but rather can be attributed
to the failure of Bolivian left parties and workers’ unions to reject
the distorted vulgar Marxism of international Stalinism, which infected not
only the Bolivian Communist Party (CPB) but also the Bolivian Trotskyist
movement.
Both the CPB and the right wing of the Trotskyist
Partido Obrero Revolucionario (POR) shared the assumption that revolution
in backward countries like Bolivia would necessarily occur in two stages,
the first a bourgeois revolution that would lead to a period of capitalist
development to prepare the ground for the second, socialist, revolution.
This stagist conception led the CPB to liquidate itself into the national
popular bloc that ran the state after the revolution and the POR to put its
faith in working-class government ministers. The effect of both strategies
was to reinforce a subordination of the working class to the national bloc.
In collapsing the working class into the national-popular bloc, the authors
do not differentiate its interests from the bloc’s middle-class
leadership, which acted quickly to check the working class’s power in
the revolution’s wake.
Furthermore, while they document the complicity of
peasant leadership in the military governments of the 1960s and 1970s, they
seem reluctant to blame peasant leaders as much as they fault proletarian
chauvinism for tensions in later alliances.
Second, I believe the authors under-appreciate the blow
that neoliberalism’s disorganization of the working class dealt to
the Bolivian popular movements. They write that in recent mobilizations,
The nascent national-popular bloc no longer revolved
around proletarian trade unionism, as it did in earlier twentieth-century
movements, but rather acquired an indigenous centrality with a strong
rural peasant thrust. The effects of neoliberalism, particularly
accelerated urban migration, might have been expected to break down
long-standing ethnic solidarities by reinforcing the divide between town
and country. Yet instead solidarities were reconstituted, as urban and
peri-urban territory was occupied by settlers from the countryside, many of
whom retained dual residence in city and country.
While the strengthening of rural-urban solidarities is
no doubt a positive development, the massive migration that serves as the
basis for this solidarity is a product of the severe crisis in the Bolivian
countryside, where poverty rates were 79 percent (as opposed to 29 percent
in urban areas) in the 1990s. The crisis of proletarian trade unionism, for
all its historic weaknesses, was an enormous setback for Bolivian workers
and peasants alike, and continues to undermine the strength of the popular
movements. The 2003 insurrection would have been vastly strengthened, for
example, had other sectors of the movement accepted a proposal put forward
by the mineworkers’ union for gas workers to take control of gas
distribution.
As the authors would likely agree, class and ethnic
struggles need not be counterposed. Until the class struggle is a
partnership of peasants and workers that makes anti-racism central to its
program, the forces of reaction will continue to exploit divisions, and the
possibility for liberation from all the oppressions facing ordinary people
in Bolivia will be indefinitely postponed.
Third, it is unclear from their discussion to what
degree the movements themselves identify with the “ancestral language
of pachakuti,”
“an overturning of time and space out of which a new phase in history
may issue” where “the past can be seen as a future.” This
discussion, I feel, risks assuming that an eternal tradition can be found
among indigenous people and envisioning past societies as models for the
future. It should be noted as well that the attempt to develop a pan-Aymara
identity is a recent phenomenon that originated among urban indigenous
intellectuals and students. The authors criticize non-governmental
organizations and Morales’s MAS party for promoting multiculturalism
to “defuse social conflict,” but do not account for the way
Aymara nationalism too is used to undermine class unity.
Fourth, the authors’ critique of the MAS
government is apt, but incomplete. They rightly criticize the MAS
party’s foremost concern with establishing its own hegemony and
bringing the revolutionary cycle to a close, but it is unclear on what
basis MAS’s vision differs from that of the indigenous forces whose
“political vision, initiative, and leadership” has driven
forward the movements that brought Morales to power. How is it that
Morales, once a leader of the most combative sector of Bolivian society,
the cocaleros, is now
at the helm of the forces bringing the revolutionary process to a close?
Why didn’t the Morales government go further in its efforts to
fulfill the October Agenda? To answer these questions we must go further
than pointing to the stated limits of the MAS program.
Finally, we must call into question the authors’
contention that the recent upheaval in Bolivia constitutes a “social
revolution.” Hylton and Thomson cite Lenin and Trotsky to justify
this view, pointing to the “direct interference of the masses in
history” that occurred in Bolivia between 2000 and 2006, and reject
the idea that the outcome is relevant. But as Lenin wrote in the passage
they cite, more than just the entry of the masses onto the stage of
history, a social revolution occurs when the masses erect a new society and
destroy the old.
A social revolution entails the transformation of
social relations of production and the transfer of state power from one
class to another. The limits of the MAS government can only be explained by
understanding that no such transformation has occurred in Bolivia. The MAS
government has no intention of challenging the social relations of
production and has done its utmost to appease both the international and
national bourgeoisies, despite claims by the international and Bolivian
media and the Bolivian Right to the contrary.
International corporations continue to reap huge
profits from Bolivia’s gas and mineral reserves, Brazil and Argentina
still pay below-market rates for Bolivian gas, and coca eradication has
actually increased during Morales’s tenure. One of the
government’s first moves after taking office was to hose down
striking state airline workers, and clashes between government forces and cocaleros left two coca
farmers dead soon thereafter. In the face of threats from the eastern
departments—the seat of natural gas deposits and agricultural
interests—to secede from the country, Morales has consistently chosen
to make concessions rather than put up a fight.
As the authors agree, Morales and his government are
not interested in challenging capitalism, but in reintroducing a state-led
model of capitalist development at the economic level and pluralizing
government and civil society at the political level. Morales and his party
are committed to a vision of “Andean capitalism” that they say
will have to last at least 100 years before Bolivia can move towards
socialism. This is not because Morales is betraying his base—which he
is—but because he and the rest of the MAS party leadership have a
material interest in maintaining capitalism.
A class analysis of Bolivian society would recognize
that the interests of trade union and political party leadership are not
the same as those of the membership; that the rural indigenous peasantry
cannot but look to allies in the mines and urban working class for in its
struggle for liberation; that the working class must reorganize for the
Bolivian workers, peasants, and the poor to have any hope of beating back
the national and international forces of reaction and challenging middle
class accommodationist leadership; and that the working class is the only
force with the power to overthrow capitalism, Bolivian or otherwise.
Revolutionary Horizons nevertheless
offers a valuable resource for understanding how rural-urban and
ethnic-class divisions can be overcome in struggles to challenge
oppression—and the absolute necessity of doing so in order for
Bolivia’s workers, peasants, and poor to triumph.