Cuba’s Crisis, Our Response

With Cuba at a crossroads, we must respond to recent protests by listening to the Cuban people and recognizing the country’s accomplishments and its shortcomings, its past and its potential.

Margaret Randall is a feminist poet with a long history of social activism in Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua, as well as the United States. In Mexico, she  cofounded the bilingual journal, El Corno Emplumado. Among her best-known books are Cuban Women Now, Sandino’s Daughters, Sandino’s Daughters Revisited, and When I Look into the Mirror and see You: Women, Terror and Resistance (all oral history with essay). In this article, which appeared first on the NACLA (North American Congress on Latin America) website, Randall imparts some well-chosen and necessary advice to everyone sympathetic to revolutionary Cuba and its people.

– Richard Fidler

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Cuba’s Crisis, Our Response

By Margaret Randall

The recent protests in Cuba, especially those on July 11, 2021 have provoked consternation in some and hope in others. The protests, which began in the Havana suburb of San Antonio de Los Baños, the eastern city of Palma Soriano, and quickly spread nationwide, are the first examples of visible large scale discontent since the demonstrations that took place in 1994 at the height of the economic crisis brought on by the Soviet Union’s collapse.

By and large, the “news” reflects entrenched positions. Corporate media publishes opinion pieces about a people bravely seeking freedom and treats these protests as if they are the beginning of the end of the Cuban revolution. The virulent Right screams about fake disappearances and invented torture, while remaining silent about countries such as Colombia and Nicaragua where such horrors are actually being perpetrated. Meanwhile, acritical sectors of the Left deny any sort of official violence or justify it in the name of the revolution’s survival. None of these lenses reflect the real story. Unsurprisingly, the most factual and complete accounts come from Cubans who live in the country and have for years contributed to constructing its revolution.

It has been 40 years since I’ve lived in Cuba and, although I visit frequently, I know it makes a difference that I am not there on the ground right now, experiencing current events for myself. When reading the variety of interpretations that have emerged over the past several weeks, it is important to take into account not only the writer’s political position but where she or he lives. A Cuban who resides in Cuba, a Cuban who is part of the vast diaspora, or a foreigner defending a particular political position: each of these placements has its lens. And in a country that has surprised us for so long, any opinion may be nothing more than a snapshot of the moment.

The Cuban government’s response to the mass demonstrations set a disturbing tone for their immediate aftermath. President Díaz-Canel went to San Antonio de los Baños hoping to calm the crowd as Fidel Castro had so often been able to do. But Díaz-Canel misjudged the protest’s importance and temperature. Phrases such as “the streets belong to the revolutionaries” and “we are prepared for anything” met genuine discontent with thoughtless dogmatism. To say that this was a poor response is an understatement. Inside as well as outside of Cuba criticism came swiftly.

Díaz-Canel apologized, and the Cuban government announced conciliatory measures on July 14 in an attempt to address the people’s legitimate concerns. The changes, which included lifting some taxes and import limits on medications and food, announcing changes to the state sector’s salary scale, and loosening some restrictions on food rationing, may be all that are possible given the country’s dire economic situation. However, they probably won’t be enough to placate long frustrated demands.

The Cuban Communist Party has demonstrated its ability to remain in power through decades of crises. And those of us who know and love the revolution fear that the focus on survival at any cost will leave us with a situation that is far from the one envisioned by the revolution’s creators. I speak as someone who experienced the revolution’s glory years: nationalized natural resources, newly acquired literacy, free education and healthcare, almost full employment, an equitable distribution of food and other necessities, a legal system with real input from people who discussed new law at neighborhood meetings, extraordinary promotion of the arts and sports. Cuba also developed programs of international solidarity and disaster relief beyond anything carried out by much wealthier countries. While the rich nations offer their surplus, what Cuba offers often means sacrifice for its own population. During the decade (1969-1980) I lived and raised four children there, these achievements weren’t statistics but the day-to-day reality.

Cuba’s reality today is one in which education and healthcare are still free and universal, but also one in which important constitutional changes and party promises aimed at producing a more equitable society have been enacted in word only. In the midst of tremendous economic and social stress, follow-through has not materialized or been too slow.

It isn’t unusual for politicians to promise more than they can produce. It happens on a daily basis in the United States and in most of the world’s countries. But in Cuba, where a genuine people’s revolution created mechanisms for transparency and change, this contradiction is not acceptable. Not to the old timers who remember what life under the Batista dictatorship was like, and not to the youth who, like youth everywhere, demand justice and demand it now.

In Cuba, the list of challenges seems endless. On top of the extreme economic problems brought on by 62 years of blockade and a difficult transition from a socialist system to one that can function in today’s world, Covid-19 is out of control. The country’s excellent biochemical industry has developed two proven vaccines, Soberana (91.2 percent efficacy) and Abdala (92.28 percent efficacy) and is attempting to vaccinate its entire population. But even with Cuba’s organizational expertise, a shortage of syringes—one outcome of the blockade—has rendered this a slow process. The severity of the pandemic has also devastated tourism, putting an additional strain on the country’s economy. A long-awaited consolidation of the monetary system has been rocky. In July, a major power plant suffered a breakdown, causing frequent blackouts. Scarcities became more acute. Tropical storm Elsa was another blow. Many Cubans are frustrated beyond their ability to wait for incremental change.

Over the past decade Cuba has foolishly cracked down on artists and others whose work has protested the status quo, creating the current complex situation. Despite this pattern of repression, authoritative voices from inside Cuba—including Andrés Perdomo Guanche, Jorge Fornet, Arturo Arango, Margarita Alarcón, and Víctor Heredia, to name just a few—are attempting to situate the protests in context.

La Tizza, an independent Cuban news source that describes itself as “a venue for thinking and making socialism,” in its July 15 editorial wrote: “Those who came out to protest the State and socialism in Cuba were ordinary people….Those who continue to read Cuba as if the Caribbean were the Baltic are excitedly sharing via social media images of Berlin or Prague at the moment of European socialism’s demise. They don’t know that the Cuban Revolution won’t melt like some merengue because it’s never been made of merengue. Not because it hasn’t been sweet, but rather because it’s also had its moments of bitterness, which up to now we’ve been able to transform into strength.”

The La Tizza editorial goes on to describe protests not between the people and the state but between two groups of people with two very different social projects. One group, victim of capitalist propaganda, has given up on its dream of a just society. The other is unwilling to relinquish the revolutionary aspirations it has nurtured for generations, the legality of a socialist constitution ratified by democratic referendum, or the idea of a nation of peace, social justice, and national dignity exemplified by a revolution resting on tarnished laurels rather than opening new pathways to the future.

Beloved singer-songwriter and truth-teller Silvio Rodríguez asks, “who are the comrades responsible for the fact that, after two Communist Party congresses and what is set forth in the Constitution, what needs to change hasn’t changed? Who,” he asks again, “in the upper echelons of government? I want names and positions. And I want to hear what they have to say for themselves.”

Marcia Leiseca, one of the founders of Casa de las Américas, who even at an advanced age is still active in cultural work, writes, “it’s time to speak, to exercise opinions and offer ideas.…We must establish a dialogue with young people, encourage their participation in a new present and future. What happened on July 11 has been manipulated by the extreme Left and the extreme Right, the former blaming the unjust blockade and outside interference, overstating the resultant vandalism and absolving us of all responsibility. The latter exaggerates what took place, invents horrors such as disappearances, torture, and violation of human rights.”

Cuba is at a crossroads, and how the current crisis is handled may well determine the revolution’s survival. The U.S. government needs to repeal its blockade and stop the overt and covert operations designed to destroy the revolution. Cuba’s leaders must issue verifiable lists of detainees and name and punish those officials who beat protestors or otherwise failed to follow Cuba’s own civil guarantees.

Cuba is rightly indignant that the United States continues to interfere in its internal affairs. An analysis of social media bots shows that many, although not all, of the protests are being organized and funded from outside the country, by U.S. government agencies and rightwing Cuban forces. During the protests, people received repeated messages claiming that provincial governments had fallen to the demonstrators and urging people to join a victorious situation that didn’t exist. This is understandably a sore point in a country that has endured attacks from the United States throughout the history of its revolution. I hope the Cuban government will begin to answer the protests with dialogue rather than repression.

Before July 11, dissent in Cuba was sporadic and limited to specific social groups or isolated experiences of censorship or repression. On that day, they were larger and more comprehensive. Thousands have protested excessive government control. I believe they should be heard.

I also believe that the Cuban government has a responsibility to issue information about incidents of violence on both sides, make available lists of those currently being detained, and name and punish police and other officials who have gone against the country’s own constitutional guarantees of freedom of assembly and dissent. At the same time, I think it is worth noting that Cuba is a nation of eleven million. The recent protests are far from constituting a tipping point.

I urge people on all sides to think about how extraordinary it is that a tiny island 90 miles from U.S. shores has been able to survive for more than half a century against every sort of covert and overt attack. Let us help Cuba become what its revolution has promised rather than try to mold it to some specious image in which profit obliterates justice and equality.

August 11, 2021

For more on Margaret Randall and her works, see Margaret Randall (Wikipedia) and her website: http://www.margaretrandall.org/.

The July 11 protests in Cuba

 

Photo: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

The following article by Cuban academic and feminist activist Ailynn Torres Santana outlines what happened in Cuba on July 11, discusses the issues raised by the protesters and the government’s response, and concludes that in the wake of the protests Cuba needs political solutions that resist all forms of co-optation. This article was originally published in Spanish and English by OnCuba News. I follow her article with some suggestions for further reading in relation to the July 11 events. – Richard Fidler

J-11 in Cuba

By Ailynn Torres Santana

July 22, 2021

Protests began in Cuba July 11, 2021 (J-11). They spread gradually from San Antonio de los Baños (Artemisa province) and Palma Soliano (Santiago de Cuba province) to other parts of the country. Digital traces show that social media played a central but not singular role in this process. Social media had a kind of contagion effect, spreading protests from one area to another, or served to directly call people to the streets. This also meant that what happened rapidly reached beyond Cuba through “direct” connections on social media and by content going viral on people’s personal profiles and in foreign media.

An unmanageable amount of information circulated and continues to circulate on social media, quickly becoming difficult to process. Fake news with traces of truth and lies also started to emerge. Confronting fake news was a price to pay for accessing information via citizen journalism. Meanwhile, official media exclusively reported the government’s line.

Ailynn Torres Santana

At the time of writing, the government speaks of “turmoil” (disturbios) while others speak of “social outcry” (estallido social), like the popular uprisings in Latin America throughout 2019, 2020, and 2021. An uprising or not, what happened in Cuba touched the region. No one has remained silent. And the country’s politics continues to be a red line in imaginations, instincts, and political agendas and arguments in Cuba, Latin America, and the world.

Numerous artists, influencers, intellectuals, and politicians with different political leanings have weighed in. From [Argentine] neoconservative Agustín Laje—who released a diatribe about what he called “the blockade myth” and has said that “a nation has awakened” against the “left” (zurdaje) in Cuba—to Residente of Calle 13, Noam Chomsky, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Frei Betto, Ignacio Ramonet, Claudia Corol, Gerardo Pissarello, Gayatri Chakrovorty Spivak, and many others.

Internationally, Cuba sparks polarized passions that—it must be said—are caricatures. Some outright claim that the recent protests are nothing more than a U.S. plot amplified by sensationalized media coverage and that the only thing we know for sure is that this is an attack on the Cuban Revolution. Others celebrated the “end of the dictatorship,” seeing protesters as fulfilling their prophecies of the “end of the regime.” It is fair to say that there have also been attempts to critically analyze the situation.

Seen from Cuba—the Cuba both within and outside the island—the situation is more intense and complex. Our material, spiritual, political, and moral life depends on it. For the government, the protests were a mechanism of counterrevolutionary destabilization, led from the United States, that capitalized on “confused” people and manipulated discontent stemming from unmet needs. For some people, these days of protests were a mistake because they worsened the crisis in the country. Other diverse voices called for urgent—and improbable—humanitarian or military intervention to address medical and food shortages; these commentators, often weighing in from outside Cuba, held up the protests as the realization of their own aspirations. They don’t want dialogue with the government and, reaching ever-louder extremes, claim that it’s time to “kill the communists.” They make lists of “pro-government” figures, “disgusting communists,” and anyone who does not align with their political agendas.

For other people and groups, all intervention is unacceptable, and merely the suggestion of it is reprehensible. The anti-intervention camp has achieved a significant level of consensus, but it also contains differences within it. Part of this camp rejects the protests, viewing them as a threat that could spur the restoration of capitalism in the country. Another faction calls for listening to the people in the streets and starting a civic dialogue process. This group does not subscribe to the idea that the demonstrators are puppets of U.S. policy, but rather sees the protests as an expression of exhaustion on the part of at least some Cuban people due to: the impossibility of material survival; the accelerated shrinking of “equality zones,” particularly in terms of health services and supplies, that previously dulled Cuba’s successive crises beginning in the 1990s; absent or insufficient guarantees of rights to civil and political association, participation, and expression; absent or ineffective institutional responses to growing precarity; and the conviction that, if unchecked, this unsustainable situation will continue.

This sketch of different positions is not fixed nor final. There are other perspectives. And the sectors mentioned here sometimes fluctuate, overlap, and change quickly. Nevertheless, this gives a general sense of the landscape.

Agendas, Actors, and Violence

Shortly after the protests started in San Antonio de los Baños on July 11, President Miguel Díaz-Canel went there. This move continued the repertoire that Fidel Castro epitomized in 1994 during the “Maleconazo,” a popular protest in Havana responding to the crisis following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Díaz-Canel soon spoke on national television. He described the protests, not yet expanded to many areas, as part of a “soft coup” attempt or “unconventional war” organized from the United States. He also said that the protesters were “confused revolutionaries” and “people with unsatisfied needs” who had been manipulated by “counterrevolutionaries.”

In the same address, he said, “the streets belong to the revolutionaries,” “the order to fight has been given,” and “we are prepared for everything.” He received strong criticism for these statements. The speech was read as an authorization of violence between civilians. Violence did indeed occur: there were civilians who went out into the streets to confront protesters because they saw them as a threat to their political ideas or to Cuba’s sovereignty; there were civilians who were taken or called by labor and political organizations to do so; and there were law enforcement officers dressed in civilian clothes that acted as para-police. There was violence, and the matter of violence—including its magnitude, actors, means, and settings—is important.

The protests started peacefully, and there is evidence that they continued this way in many places. There was also damage to property, especially police vehicles and state-owned businesses, particularly the new freely convertible currency (MLC) stores. These stores only accept payment in cards charged with the newly approved single official currency, either in a local Cuban bank or online from abroad. [Editor’s note: In January, Cuba underwent a long-awaited monetary reform that unified its former two-currency system, leading to inflation]. There was violence between civilians and between demonstrators and uniformed police forces. This all happened. But the official narrative zoomed in on protester violence against pro-government civilians, the police, and state property. This narrative ignored the peaceful demonstrations and the many cases of violence against protesters. There has been much discussion about this in recent days. But there have been few attempts to connect the violence that took place during these days to the other forms of violence before and after.

Geopolitically, the violence that the United States exerts against the Cuban state and society—through the economic, commercial, and financial blockade and destabilization policies, such as federal funds for “regime change”—are part of these protests. These policies leverage a systematic, one-way force that squeezes the Cuban collective subject and its sovereignty. This violence is important not only because of how it strangles Cuba, but also because of how it links up with other kinds of violence.

Seen from within, from below, and looking into the eyes of those who demonstrated, the violence during the days of protests cannot be understood separate from the violence that deprives them every day of the material conditions of survival. It doesn’t matter, as the president said, that the electricity cuts or the lack of medicines and food are not a malicious strategy on the part of the Cuban government against the people. People can understand the reasons for the crisis and the role the blockade plays. But what does matter, at the scale of survival, is that life is not sustainable.

Many other things also matter: The Cuban government’s proven systematic inefficiency in designing and implementing economic policies. The unprecedented slowdown of the agricultural reform, while millions of pesos, without a clear economic logic, are funnelled into expanding hotel infrastructure. The incomprehensible and zigzagging measures that affect people’s lives here and now and that dramatically increase uncertainty. The demonstrable reduction in social assistance in the last decade. The 30-year decline in real wages, which has become more acute since the start of the monetary reordering (Tarea Ordenamiento). The absence of labor rights in the private sector because it is not regulated, and the absurd reluctance to operate and recognize small and medium-sized businesses with efficient state regulation. The unprecedented halt in the expansion of non-agricultural cooperatives that truly function as cooperatives and that embody democratic forms of production. The lack of interest in workers’ democracy and unions. The impossibility of creating legally recognized associations and the slow passage of a new association law that will allow the dense fabric of Cuban civil society to become formalized. The fact that the most important governing documents for economic and social reform and party congresses do not center a discussion of poverty and inequality. The opacity on issues that people are concerned about and on which many solutions could be provided. Secrecy and lack of transparency, and the criminalization of various kinds of activism as if they were inherently and undoubtedly a threat to institutions and the government itself.

At least a good part of the items identified in this long, incomplete list of issues could be considered together with and in spite of the U.S. blockade—which, besides, will remain in place for an indefinite amount of time and to our detriment.

The blockade was at least partly at stake in the protests, though some want to capitalize on it and others want to ignore it. People demanded “medicines,” “food,” “vaccines,” and “freedom.” They said, “the people united will never be defeated” and “we are not afraid.”

During the protests, criminal offenses were committed, including looting and attacks on MLC stores. Noting that it was MLC businesses as opposed to, for instance private businesses, does not justify the damage. But it allows us to understand part of the logic behind these actions. State media have reported that mostly high-value electronic appliances were stolen, suggesting that these were profit-seeking acts, not acts out of necessity. Even if we assume this to be true, this version of events fails to account for how the popular economy works and how one could sell this equipment later to generate income or meet consumption needs that are forbidden for the popular classes. In any case, the videos aired on national television show people taking mattresses, drinks, soap, and toilet paper in addition to appliances. In one video of these lootings, someone says: “All that belongs to the people.” Theft, looting, and encouraging these acts are crimes. Yet so is ignoring the economic violence, stemming from both external and internal factors, that some sectors of the population experience.

As the government has stated, there are “established channels” for expressing “dissatisfaction” or needs. But those “established channels” don’t work or no longer have legitimacy—and that doesn’t need to be a problem. Institutions respond to people, not the other way around. If, after these protests, the government insists that the only way to channel this unrest is through the “established channels,” in practice that means that the avenues for handling these conflicts and needs are closed off or unacceptably narrow. In any society, the “established channels” are never the only way to intervene in public life. The way civil society has organized for many years during tornadoes, cyclones, and other emergencies has outgrown the “official channels.” For that and other reasons, people should and do explore routes, spaces, and repertoires that they feel represent them and that help to put general and specific political agendas on the table.

Such exploration was also part of the recent protests. A very clear example is that of trans women who asserted their presence in the protests. Their concerns: food shortages, police harassment of trans people, social discrimination of trans people, specific labor policies for the trans community, and the lack of condoms to ensure their sexual and reproductive rights. In the protests they sought space to dignify their existence and to denounce violence in general and specifically against them as trans women. Different groups will try to capitalize on, co-opt, or otherwise wield trans women’s participation in the protests, but “politics doesn’t fit in the sugar bowl,” as Cuban songwriter Carlos Varela sings.

Violence also came after the protests. There was a technological and telephone blackout. People, especially women, visited police stations to get information about their detained loved ones, file appeals, and bring supplies. The president recognized that people could have been unjustly detained, but many innocent people now have criminal records under their belts. At the time of writing, July 15, there are detainees whose whereabouts remain unknown.

There is also violence on social media, including a dispute over arbitrary classifications and reclassifications—an accelerated mission to annihilate difference and frame the narrative. Every character, comma, and screenshot seeking to prove guilt contains cruelty. There are doomsday pronouncements and expressions of the brutality with which “the communists”—or those who want to “dialogue with the dictatorship” or those in “la gusanera”—will be finished off.

“The Bad Victim”

Up to a point, being recognized as a victim is a privilege. It means that you are seen and you are subject to protection. When an attacked person is no longer thought of primarily as a victim, they are erased from the scene.

The government’s handling of the conflict has chosen some victims and erased others. The president and other official political voices have recognized that the protests expressed some legitimate needs and that they contained different groups, who have been classified and reclassified in recent days. At the same time, the narrative constructing the protests as entirely violent paints the actors involved in them mainly as people who carried out “vandalism,” as “criminals,” and as people who interrupted a peaceful family Sunday.

Words have context and referents. President Sebastián Piñera in Chile and former President Lenín Moreno in Ecuador, among many others, also called people who demonstrated during those countries’ respective social uprisings vandals, vagabonds, and criminals. There, the governments responded to protests in a deeply bloody way. Discourses that classify protesters in this way, such as in Cuba now, do little to effectively handle the situation politically. Rather, it shows disinterest, if not directly sets up barriers. This also reproduces the myth that legitimate claims are those of “good citizens,” an idea that is both widespread and classist.

If those who demonstrated were vandals, then so are a good part of those who make up the impoverished population. Some of the images broadcast on national television to support the vandalism narrative show ordinary young people, dressed in the clothes surely sent by family members who send remittances, through which the state survives with revenues from the MLC stores. Criminal acts must be avoided, prosecuted, and condemned. But that is different from the arbitrary classification of good vs. bad citizens that results in erasing some kinds of violence while visibilizing others. No victim can be written off, as happened with Diubis Laurencio Tejeda.

Laurencio Tejeda was the only person killed in the demonstrations that has been officially acknowledged. The statement noted that “36-year-old citizen Diubis Laurencio Tejeda died…with a criminal record of contempt, theft, and disorderly conduct, for which he served a prison term.” Laurencio Tejeda’s criminal record was completely irrelevant in the events leading to his death, just as the way a woman was dressed or whether or not she had ever been convicted matters at the time of a femicide. Communicating Laurencio Tejeda’s death in this way strips him of victimhood, as if he is not deserving of mourning.

Where Is J-11 Going from Here?

We can see a clear transformation in the institutional political discourse in recent days. Since the president’s J-11 “combat order,” the language has progressively transitioned to a vocabulary of conciliation and calls for solidarity, unity, and peace. That matters.

From now on, seeking political solutions is essential. The government announced new measures on July 14. One lifts customs taxes and limits on the entry of medicines, food, and toiletries for travelers. This will cushion some domestic needs of those who have family or close friends abroad who can travel to Cuba. The measure is important not only in content, but because it responds to a demand from Cubans inside and outside the island. The government also announced changes in the salary system in the state sector and access to food ration distribution for people who live in areas other than where they are legally registered.

These measures should be understood as part of the current situation, but they do not respond to it in a broad sense. An extensive discussion and political transformation that allows the protests to be processed is essential. Different strategies are most essential at this time, even more so considering that the change in U.S. policy toward the island will now slow down even further. There are urgent tasks: building a more inclusive framework, recognizing not only the legitimacy of demands but also different ways to express them, imagining a diversity of solutions, and continuing to translate the people’s exhaustion into civic power to propose collective solutions and resist all forms of cooptation of what began on J-11.

Although the protests sparked shock, political upheaval, and sadness, the protests were not the cause. A society does not break down with a social uprising. It goes the other way around. A social uprising occurs when society is already broken. It had already exploded, silently. No matter how carefully it is charted out, there will be no return to total “normality.” The protests did not end when people left the streets. Different sectors tested their strength in public space, and that experience will continue to be deeply processed at home, in neighborhoods, online, on the sidewalks, and in the body.

Crises solidify cracks, and the cracks show the losses. But the losses can also have transformative effects and produce reflections about the meaning of political community and about the awareness that my fate is inseparable from yours and that Cuba is only partly mine and ours because it also belongs to others. If the government resorts to old dogmas, it will effectively blow up bridges and make the political rage of at least a sector of the population unintelligible. More than ever, the question of what is good and just for Cuba is an open question. And now more than ever, the answers cannot be captured in a single still photo or tone of voice.

Ailynn Torres Santana is a postdoctoral researcher with the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation’s International Research Group on Authoritarianism and Counter-Strategies (IRGAC), visiting scholar at the Freie Universität (Berlin), and associate researcher at FLACSO Ecuador. She has a PhD in social sciences from FLACSO Ecuador.

Further Reading:

Canadians Reject Economic War Against Cuba: Thousands Already Sign Parliamentary Petition

Britain: Cuba Solidarity Campaign statement on the current situation in Cuba

Social explosion in Cuba: The ignored signals (Alina Bárbara López Hernández)

From Cuba: a description of the protests (Comunistas)

Cuba today: Homeland, people and sovereignty (Julio César Guanche)

A scream: Leonardo Padura on the recent protests in Cuba

Ecosocialism: A vital synthesis

Posted Dec 12, 2020 by Michael Löwy

Originally published: Global Ecosocialist Network (December 10, 2020) |

Abstract: The capitalist system, driven at its core by the maximization of profit, regardless of social and ecological costs, is incompatible with a just and sustainable future. Ecosocialism offers a radical alternative that puts social and ecological well-being first. Attuned to the links between the exploitation of labor and the exploitation of the environment, ecosocialism stands against both reformist “market ecology” and “productivist socialism.” By embracing a new model of robustly democratic planning, society can take control of the means of production and its own destiny. Shorter work hours and a focus on authentic needs over consumerism can facilitate the elevation of “being” over “having,” and the achievement of a deeper sense of freedom for all. To realize this vision, however, environmentalists and socialists will need to recognize their common struggle and how that connects with the broader “movement of movements” seeking a Great Transition.

Introduction

Contemporary capitalist civilization is in crisis. The unlimited accumulation of capital, commodification of everything, ruthless exploitation of labor and nature, and attendant brutal competition undermine the bases of a sustainable future, thereby putting the very survival of the human species at risk. The deep, systemic threat we face demands a deep, systemic change: a Great Transition.

In synthesizing the basic tenets of ecology and the Marxist critique of political economy, ecosocialism offers a radical alternative to an unsustainable status quo. Rejecting a capitalist definition of “progress” based on market growth and quantitative expansion (which, as Marx shows, is a destructive progress), it advocates policies founded on non-monetary criteria, such as social needs, individual well-being, and ecological equilibrium. Ecosocialism proffers a critique of both mainstream “market ecology,” which does not challenge the capitalist system, and “productivist socialism,” which ignores natural limits.

As people increasingly realize how the economic and ecological crises intertwine, ecosocialism has been gaining adherents. Ecosocialism, as a movement, is relatively new, but some of its basic arguments date back to the writings of Marx and Engels. Now, intellectuals and activists are recovering this legacy and seeking a radical restructuring of the economy according to the principles of democratic ecological planning, putting human and planetary needs first and foremost.

The “actually existing socialisms” of the twentieth century, with their often environmentally oblivious bureaucracies, do not offer an attractive model for today’s ecosocialists. Rather, we must chart a new path forward, one that links with the myriad movements around the globe that share the conviction that a better world is not only possible, but also necessary.

Democratic Ecological Planning

The core of ecosocialism is the concept of democratic ecological planning, wherein the population itself, not “the market” or a Politburo, make the main decisions about the economy. Early in the Great Transition to this new way of life, with its new mode of production and consumption, some sectors of the economy must be suppressed (e.g., the extraction of fossil fuels implicated in the climate crisis) or restructured, while new sectors are developed. Economic transformation must be accompanied by active pursuit of full employment with equal conditions of work and wages. This egalitarian vision is essential both for building a just society and for engaging the support of the working class for the structural transformation of the productive forces.

Ultimately, such a vision is irreconcilable with private control of the means of production and of the planning process. In particular, for investments and technological innovation to serve the common good, decision-making must be taken away from the banks and capitalist enterprises that currently dominate, and put in the public domain. Then, society itself, and neither a small oligarchy of property owners nor an elite of techno-bureaucrats, will democratically decide which productive lines are to be privileged, and how resources are to be invested in education, health, or culture. Major decisions on investment priorities—such as terminating all coal-fired facilities or directing agricultural subsidies to organic production—would be taken by direct popular vote. Other, less important decisions would be taken by elected bodies, on the relevant national, regional, or local scale.

Although conservatives fearmonger about “central planning,” democratic ecological planning ultimately supports more freedom, not less, for several reasons. First, it offers liberation from the reified “economic laws” of the capitalist system that shackle individuals in what Max Weber called an “iron cage.” Prices of goods would not be left to the “laws of supply and demand,” but would, instead, reflect social and political priorities, with the use of taxes and subsidies to incentivize social goods and disincentivize social ills. Ideally, as the ecosocialist transition moves forward, more products and services critical for meeting fundamental human needs would be freely distributed, according to the will of the citizens.

Second, ecosocialism heralds a substantial increase in free time. Planning and the reduction of labor time are the two decisive steps towards what Marx called “the kingdom of freedom.” A significant increase of free time is, in fact, a condition for the participation of working people in the democratic discussion and management of economy and of society.

Last, democratic ecological planning represents a whole society’s exercise of its freedom to control the decisions that affect its destiny. If the democratic ideal would not grant political decision-making power to a small elite, why should the same principle not apply to economic decisions? Under capitalism, use-value—the worth of a product or service to well-being—exists only in the service of exchange-value, or value on the market. Thus, many products in contemporary society are socially useless, or designed for rapid turnover (“planned obsolescence”). By contrast, in a planned ecosocialist economy, use-value would be the only criteria for the production of goods and services, with far-reaching economic, social, and ecological consequences.[1]

Planning would focus on large-scale economic decisions, not the small-scale ones that might affect local restaurants, groceries, small shops, or artisan enterprises. Importantly, such planning is consistent with workers’ self-management of their productive units. The decision, for example, to transform a plant from producing automobiles to producing buses and trams would be taken by society as a whole, but the internal organization and functioning of the enterprise would be democratically managed by its workers. There has been much discussion about the “centralized” or “decentralized” character of planning, but most important is democratic control at all levels—local, regional, national, continental, or international. For example, planetary ecological issues such as global warming must be dealt with on a global scale, and thereby require some form of global democratic planning. This nested, democratic decision-making is quite the opposite of what is usually described, often dismissively, as “central planning,” since decisions are not taken by any “center,” but democratically decided by the affected population at the appropriate scale.

Democratic and pluralist debate would occur at all levels. Through parties, platforms, or other political movements, varied propositions would be submitted to the people, and delegates would be elected accordingly. However, representative democracy must be complemented—and corrected—by Internet-enabled direct democracy, through which people choose—at the local, national, and, later, global level—among major social and ecological options. Should public transportation be free? Should the owners of private cars pay special taxes to subsidize public transportation? Should solar energy be subsidized in order to compete with fossil energy? Should the work week be reduced to 30 hours, 25, or less, with the attendant reduction of production?

Such democratic planning needs expert input, but its role is educational, to present informed views on alternative outcomes for consideration by popular decision-making processes. What guarantee is there that the people will make ecologically sound decisions? None. Ecosocialism wagers that democratic decisions will become increasingly reasoned and enlightened as culture changes and the grip of commodity fetishism is broken. One cannot imagine such a new society without the population achieving through struggle, self-education, and social experience, a high level of socialist and ecological consciousness. In any case, are not the alternatives—the blind market or an ecological dictatorship of “experts”—much more dangerous?

The Great Transition from capitalist destructive progress to ecosocialism is a historical process, a permanent revolutionary transformation of society, culture, and mindsets. Enacting this transition leads not only to a new mode of production and an egalitarian and democratic society, but also to an alternative mode of life, a new ecosocialist civilization, beyond the reign of money, beyond consumption habits artificially produced by advertising, and beyond the unlimited production of commodities that are useless and/or harmful to the environment.  Such a transformative process depends on the active support of the vast majority of the population for an ecosocialist program. The decisive factor in development of socialist consciousness and ecological awareness is the collective experience of struggle, from local and partial confrontations to the radical change of global society as a whole.

The Growth Question

The issue of economic growth has divided socialists and environmentalists. Ecosocialism, however, rejects the dualistic frame of growth versus degrowth, development versus anti-development, because both positions share a purely quantitative conception of productive forces. A third position resonates more with the task ahead: the qualitative transformation of development.

A new development paradigm means putting an end to the egregious waste of resources under capitalism, driven by large-scale production of useless and harmful products. The arms industry is, of course, a dramatic example, but, more generally, the primary purpose of many of the “goods” produced—with their planned obsolescence—is to generate profit for large corporations. The issue is not excessive consumption in the abstract, but the prevalent type of consumption, based as it is on massive waste and the conspicuous and compulsive pursuit of novelties promoted by “fashion.” A new society would orient production towards the satisfaction of authentic needs, including water, food, clothing, housing, and such basic services as health, education, transport, and culture.

Obviously, the countries of the Global South, where these needs are very far from being satisfied, must pursue greater classical “development”—railroads, hospitals, sewage systems, and other infrastructure. Still, rather than emulate how affluent countries built their productive systems, these countries can pursue development in far more environmentally friendly ways, including the rapid introduction of renewable energy. While many poorer countries will need to expand agricultural production to nourish hungry, growing populations, the ecosocialist solution is to promote agroecology methods rooted in family units, cooperatives, or larger-scale collective farms—not the destructive industrialized agribusiness methods involving intensive inputs of pesticides, chemicals, and GMOs.[2]

At the same time, the ecosocialist transformation would end the heinous debt system the Global South now confronts the exploitations of its resources by advanced industrial countries as well as rapidly developing countries like China. Instead, we can envision a strong flow of technical and economic assistance from North to South rooted in a robust sense of solidarity and the recognition that planetary problems require planetary solutions. This need not entail that people in affluent countries “reduce their standard of living”—only that they shun the obsessive consumption, induced by the capitalist system, of useless commodities that do not meet real needs or contribute to human well-being and flourishing.

But how do we distinguish authentic from artificial and counterproductive needs? To a considerable degree, the latter are stimulated by the mental manipulation of advertising. In contemporary capitalist societies, the advertising industry has invaded all spheres of life, shaping everything from the food we eat and the clothes we wear to sports, culture, religion, and politics. Promotional advertising has become ubiquitous, insidiously infesting our streets, landscapes, and traditional and digital media, molding habits of conspicuous and compulsive consumption. Moreover, the ad industry itself is a source of considerable waste of natural resources and labor time, ultimately paid by the consumer, for a branch of “production” that lies in direct contradiction with real social-ecological needs. While indispensable to the capitalist market economy, the advertising industry would have no place in a society in transition to ecosocialism; it would be replaced by consumer associations that vet and disseminate information on goods and services. While these changes are already happening to some extent, old habits would likely persist for some years, and nobody has the right to dictate peoples’ desires. Altering patterns of consumption is an ongoing educational challenge within a historical process of cultural change.

A fundamental premise of ecosocialism is that in a society without sharp class divisions and capitalist alienation, “being” will take precedence over “having.”  Instead of seeking endless goods, people pursue greater free time, and the personal achievements and meaning it can bring through cultural, athletic, playful, scientific, erotic, artistic, and political activities. There is no evidence that compulsive acquisitiveness stems from intrinsic “human nature,” as conservative rhetoric suggests. Rather, it is induced by the commodity fetishism inherent in the capitalist system, by the dominant ideology, and by advertising. Ernest Mandel summarizes this critical point well:

The continual accumulation of more and more goods […] is by no means a universal and even predominant feature of human behavior. The development of talents and inclinations for their own sake; the protection of health and life; care for children; the development of rich social relations […] become major motivations once basic material needs have been satisfied. [3]

Of course, even a classless society faces conflict and contradiction. The transition to ecosocialism would confront tensions between the requirements of protecting the environment and meeting social needs; between ecological imperatives and the development of basic infrastructure; between popular consumer habits and the scarcity of resources; between communitarian and cosmopolitan impulses. Struggles among competing desiderata are inevitable. Hence, weighing and balancing such interests must become the task of a democratic planning process, liberated from the imperatives of capital and profit-making, to come up with solutions through transparent, plural, and open public discourse. Such participatory democracy at all levels does not mean that there will not be mistakes, but it allows for the self-correction by the members of the social collectivity of its own mistakes.

Intellectual Roots

Although ecosocialism is a fairly recent phenomenon, its intellectual roots can be traced back to Marx and Engels. Because environmental issues were not as salient in the nineteenth century as in our era of incipient ecological catastrophe, these concerns did not play a central role in Marx and Engels’s works. Nevertheless, their writings use arguments and concepts vital to the connection between capitalist dynamics and the destruction of the natural environment, and to the development of a socialist and ecological alternative to the prevailing system.

Some passages in Marx and Engels (and certainly in the dominant Marxist currents that followed) do embrace an uncritical stance toward the productive forces created by capital, treating the “development of productive forces” as the main factor in human progress. However, Marx was radically opposed to what we now call “productivism”— the capitalist logic by which the accumulation of capital, wealth, and commodities becomes an end in itself. The fundamental idea of a socialist economy—in contrast to the bureaucratic caricatures that prevailed in the “socialist” experiments of the twentieth century—is to produce use-values, goods that are necessary for the satisfaction of human needs, well-being, and fulfillment. The central feature of technical progress for Marx was not the indefinite growth of products (“having”) but the reduction of socially necessary labor and concomitant increase of free time (“being”).[4] Marx’s emphasis on communist self-development, on free time for artistic, erotic, or intellectual activities—in contrast to the capitalist obsession with the consumption of more and more material goods—implies a decisive reduction of pressure on the natural environment.[5]

Beyond the presumed benefit for the environment, a key Marxian contribution to socialist ecological thinking is attributing to capitalism a metabolic rift—i.e., a disruption of the material exchange between human societies and the natural environment. The issue is discussed, inter alia, in a well-known passage of Capital:

Capitalist production […] disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth, i.e., prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; hence it hinders the operation of the eternal natural conditions for the lasting fertility of the soil. […] All progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil […]. The more a country […] develops itself on the basis of great industry, the more this process of destruction takes place quickly. Capitalist production […] only develops […] by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth—the soil and the worker. ^[6]

This important passage clarifies Marx’s dialectical vision of the contradictions of “progress” and its destructive consequences for nature under capitalist conditions. The example, of course, is limited to the loss of fertility by the soil. But on this basis, Marx draws the broad insight that capitalist production embodies a tendency to undermine the “eternal natural conditions.” From a similar vantage, Marx reiterates his more familiar argument that the same predatory logic of capitalism exploits and debases workers.

While most contemporary ecosocialists are inspired by Marx’s insights, ecology has become far more central to their analysis and action. During the 1970s and 1980s in Europe and the US, an ecological socialism began to take shape. Manuel Sacristan, a Spanish dissident-Communist philosopher, founded the ecosocialist and feminist journal Mientras Tanto in 1979, introducing the dialectical concept of “destructive-productive forces.” Raymond Williams, a British socialist and founder of modern cultural studies, became one of the first in Europe to call for an “ecologically conscious socialism” and is often credited with coining the term “ecosocialism” itself. André Gorz, a French philosopher and journalist, argued that political ecology must contain a critique of economic thought and called for an ecological and humanist transformation of work. Barry Commoner, an American biologist, argued that the capitalist system and its technology—and not population growth—was responsible for the destruction of the environment, which led him to the conclusion that “some sort of socialism” was the realistic alternative.[7]

In the 1980s, James O’Connor founded the influential journal Capitalism, Nature and Socialism. The journal was inspired by O’Connor’s idea of the “second contradiction of capitalism.” In this formulation, the first contradiction is the Marxist one between the forces and relations of production; the second contradiction lies between the mode of production and the “conditions of production,” especially, the state of the environment.

A new generation of eco-Marxists appeared in the 2000s, including John Bellamy Foster and others around the journal Monthly Review, who further developed the Marxian concept of metabolic rift between human societies and the environment. In 2001, Joel Kovel and the present author issued “An Ecosocialist Manifesto,” which was further developed by the same authors, together with Ian Angus, in the 2008 Belem Ecosocialist Manifesto, which was signed by hundreds of people from forty countries and distributed at the World Social Forum in 2009. It has since become an important reference for ecosocialists around the world.[8]

Why Environmentalists Need to Be Socialists

As these and other authors have shown, capitalism is incompatible with a sustainable future. The capitalist system, an economic growth machine propelled by fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution, is a primary culprit in climate change and the wider ecological crisis on Earth. Its irrational logic of endless expansion and accumulation, waste of resources, ostentatious consumption, planned obsolescence, and pursuit of profit at any cost is driving the planet to the brink of the abyss.

Does “green capitalism”—the strategy of reducing environmental impact while maintaining dominant economic institutions—offer a solution? The implausibility of such a Policy Reform scenario is seen most vividly in the failure of a quarter-century of international conferences to effectively address climate change.[9] The political forces committed to the capitalist “market economy” that have created the problem cannot be the source of the solution.

For example, at the 2015 Paris climate conference, many countries resolved to make serious efforts to keep average global temperature increases below 2^o C (ideally, they agreed, below 1.5^o C). Correspondingly, they volunteered to implement measures to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. However, they put no enforcement mechanisms in place nor consequences for noncompliance, hence no guarantee that any country will keep its word. The US, the world’s second-highest emitter of carbon emissions, is now run by a climate denier who pulled the U.S. out of the agreement. Even if all countries did meet their commitments, the global temperature would rise by 3^o C or more, with great risk of dire, irreversible climate change.[10]

Ultimately, the fatal flaw of green capitalism lies in the conflict between the micro-rationality of the capitalist market, with its short-sighted calculation of profit and loss, and the macro-rationality of collective action for the common good. The blind logic of the market resists a rapid energy transformation away from fossil fuel dependence in intrinsic contradiction of ecological rationality. The point is not to indict “bad” ecocidal capitalists, as opposed to “good” green capitalists; the fault lies in a system rooted in ruthless competition and a race for short-term profit that destroys nature’s balance. The environmental challenge—to build an alternative system that reflects the common good in its institutional DNA—becomes inextricably linked to the socialist challenge.

That challenge requires building what E. P. Thompson termed a “moral economy” founded on non-monetary and extra-economic, social-ecological principles and governed through democratic decision-making processes.[11] Far more than incremental reform, what is needed is the emergence of a social and ecological civilization that brings forth a new energy structure and post-consumerist set of values and way of life. Realizing this vision will not be possible without public planning and control over the “means of production,” the physical inputs used to produce economic value, such as facilities, machinery, and infrastructure.

An ecological politics that works within prevailing institutions and rules of the “market economy” will fall short of meeting the profound environmental challenges before us. Environmentalists who do not recognize how “productivism” flows from the logic of profit are destined to fail—or, worse, to become absorbed by the system. Examples abound. The lack of a coherent anti-capitalist posture led most of the European Green parties—notably, in France, Germany, Italy, and Belgium—to become mere “eco-reformist” partners in the social-liberal management of capitalism by center-left governments.

Of course, nature did not fare any better under Soviet-style “socialism” than under capitalism. Indeed, that is one of the reasons ecosocialism carries a very different program and vision from the so-called “actually existing socialism” of the past. Since the roots of the ecological problem are systemic, environmentalism needs to challenge the prevailing capitalist system, and that means taking seriously the twenty-first-century synthesis of ecology and socialism—ecosocialism.

Why Socialists Need to Be Environmentalists

The survival of civilized society, and perhaps much of life on Planet Earth, is at stake. A socialist theory, or movement, that does not integrate ecology as a central element in its program and strategy is anachronistic and irrelevant.

Climate change represents the most threatening expression of the planetary ecological crisis, posing a challenge without historical precedent. If global temperatures are allowed to exceed pre-industrial levels by more than 2° C, scientists project increasingly dire consequences, such as a rise in the sea level so large that it would risk submerging most maritime towns, from Dacca in Bangladesh to Amsterdam, Venice or New York. Large-scale desertification, disturbance of the hydrological cycle and agricultural output, more frequent and extreme weather events, and species loss all loom. We’re already at 1° C. At what temperature increase—5, 6, or 7° C—will we reach a tipping point beyond which the planet cannot support civilized life or even becomes uninhabitable?

Particularly worrisome is the fact that the impacts of climate change are accumulating at a much faster pace than predicted by climate scientists, who—like almost all scientists—tend to be highly cautious. The ink no sooner dries on an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report when increasing climate impacts make it seem too optimistic. Where once the emphasis was on what will happen in the distant future, attention has turned increasingly to what we face now and in the coming years.

Some socialists acknowledge the need to incorporate ecology, but object to the term “ecosocialism,” arguing that socialism already includes ecology, feminism, antiracism, and other progressive fronts.  However, the term ecosocialism, by suggesting a decisive change in socialist ideas, carries important political significance. First, it reflects a new understanding of capitalism as a system based not only on exploitation but also on destruction—the massive destruction of the conditions for life on the planet. Second, ecosocialism extends the meaning of socialist transformation beyond a change in ownership to a civilizational transformation of the productive apparatus, the patterns of consumption, and the whole way of life. Third, the new term underscores the critical view it embraces of the twentieth-century experiments in the name of socialism.

Twentieth-century socialism, in its dominant tendencies (social democracy and Soviet-style communism), was, at best, inattentive to the human impact on the environment and, at worst, outright dismissive. Governments adopted and adapted the Western capitalist productive apparatus in a headlong effort to “develop,” while largely oblivious of the profound negative costs in the form of environmental degradation.

The Soviet Union is a perfect example. The first years after the October Revolution saw an ecological current develop, and a number of measures to protect the environment were, in fact, enacted. But by the late 1920s, with the process of Stalinist bureaucratization underway, an environmentally heedless productivism was being imposed in industry and agriculture by totalitarian methods, while ecologists were marginalized or eliminated. The 1986 Chernobyl accident stands as a dramatic emblem of the disastrous long-term consequences.

Changing who owns property without changing how that property is managed is a dead-end. Socialism must place democratic management and reorganization of the productive system at the heart of the transformation, along with a firm commitment to ecological stewardship. Not socialism or ecology alone, but ecosocialism.

Ecosocialism and a Great Transition

The struggle for green socialism in the long term requires fighting for concrete and urgent reforms in the near term. Without illusions about the prospects for a “clean capitalism,” the movement for deep change must try to reduce the risks to people and planet, while buying time to build support for a more fundamental shift. In particular, the battle to force the powers that be to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions remains a key front, along with local efforts to shift toward agroecological methods, cooperative solar energy, and community management of resources.

Such concrete, immediate struggles are important in and of themselves because partial victories are vital for combatting environmental deterioration and despair about the future. For the longer term, these campaigns can help raise ecological and socialist consciousness and promote activism from below. Both awareness and self-organization are decisive preconditions and foundations for radically transforming the world system. The amplification of thousands of local and partial efforts into an overarching systemic global movement forges the path to a Great Transition: a new society and mode of life.

This vision infuses the popular idea of a “movement of movements,” which arose out of the global justice movement and the World Social Forums and which for many years has fostered the convergence of social and environmental movements in a common struggle. Ecosocialism is but one current within this larger stream, with no pretense that it is “more important” or “more revolutionary” than others. Such a competitive claim counterproductively breeds polarization when what is needed is unity.

Rather, ecosocialism aims to contribute to a shared ethos embraced by the various movements for a Great Transition. Ecosocialism sees itself as part of an international movement: since global ecological, economic, and social crises know no borders, the struggle against the systemic forces driving these crises must also be globalized. Many significant intersections are surfacing between ecosocialism and other movements, including efforts to link eco-feminism and ecosocialism as convergent and complementary.[12] The climate justice movement brings antiracism and ecosocialism together in the struggle against the destruction of the living conditions of communities suffering discrimination. In indigenous movements, some leaders are ecosocialists, while, in turn, many ecosocialists sees the indigenous way of life, grounded in communitarian solidarity and respect for Mother Nature, as an inspiration for the ecosocialist perspective. Similarly, ecosocialism finds voice within peasant, trade-union, degrowth, and other movements.

The gathering movement of movements seeks system change, convinced that another world is possible beyond commodification, environmental destruction, exploitation, and oppression. The power of entrenched ruling elites is undeniable, and the forces of radical opposition remain weak. But they are growing, and stand as our hope for halting the catastrophic course of capitalist “growth.” Ecosocialism contributes an important perspective for nurturing understanding and strategy for this movement for a Great Transition.

Walter Benjamin defined revolutions not as the locomotive of history, à la Marx, but as humanity’s reaching for the emergency brake before the train falls into the abyss. Never have we needed more to reach as one for that lever and lay new track to a different destination. The idea and practice of ecosocialism can help guide this world-historic project.

---

Notes:

[1] Joel Kovel, Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World? (New York, Zed Books, 2002), 215.

[2] Via Campesina, a worldwide network of peasant movements, has long argued for this type of agricultural transformation. See viacampesina.org

[3] Ernest Mandel, Power and Money: A Marxist Theory of Bureaucracy (London, Verso, 1992), 206.

[4] The opposition between “having” and “being” is often discussed in the Manuscripts of 1844. On free time as the foundation of the socialist “Kingdom of Freedom,” see Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Volume III, Marx-Engels-Werke series, vol. 25 (1884; Berlin: Dietz Verlag Berline, 1981), 828.

[5] Paul Burkett, Ecological Economics: Toward a Red and Green Political Economy (Chicago, Haymarket Books, 2009), 329.

[6] Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Volume 1, Marx-Engels-Werke series, vol. 23 (1867; Berlin: Dietz Verlag Berlin, 1981), 528-530.

[7] See, for example, Manuel Sacristan, Pacifismo, Ecología y Política Alternativa (Barcelona: Icaria, 1987); Raymond Williams, Socialism and Ecology (London: Socialist Environment and Resources Association, 1982); André Gorz, Ecology as Politics (Boston, South End Press, 1979); Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle: Man, Nature, and Technology (New York: Random House, 1971).

[8] “An Ecosocialist Manifesto,” 2001, environment-ecology.com; “Belem Ecosocialist Declaration,” December 16, 2008, climateandcapitalism.com.

[9] See www.greattransition.org for an overview of the Policy Reform scenario and other global scenarios.

[10] United Nations Environment Programme, The Emissions Gap Report 2017 (Nairobi: UNEP, 2017). For an overview of the report, see news.un.org.

[11] E. P. Thompson “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,”

Past & Present, no. 50 (February 1971): 76-136

[12] See Ariel Salleh’s Ecofeminism as Politics (New York: Zed Books, 1997), or the recent issue of Capitalism, Nature and Socialism ( 29, no. 1: 2018) on “Ecofeminism against Capitalism,” with essays by Terisa Turner, Ana Isla, and others.

Michael Löwy is a French-Brazilian Marxist sociologist and philosopher. He is emeritus research director in social sciences at the CNRS (French National Center of Scientific Research) and lectures at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS; Paris, France). Author of books on Karl Marx, Che Guevara, Liberation Theology, György Lukács, Walter Benjamin, Lucien Goldmann and Franz Kafka, he received the CNRS Silver Medal in 1994.

Venezuela: Socialist election victory masks deeper problems

Voting in Venezuela’s elections           Photo: PSUV Facebook page

By Federico Fuentes

Green Left Weekly, December 11, 2020

With a majority of the opposition boycotting and an abstention rate of almost 70%, the governing United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) obtained 69% of the vote in the country’s December 6 National Assembly (AN) elections. The PSUV and its allies will now hold 253 of the 277 seats in the new parliament.

This is in sharp contrast to the 2015 elections, when the right-wing opposition won an overwhelming majority in the AN, and announced it would remove President Nicolas Maduro from power “within six months”.

Speaking on election night, Maduro said it was crucial for the new AN to open up a national dialogue involving all political parties and economic and social sectors “to discuss a national agenda for economic recovery”.

Addressing the opposition, he called on them “to make use of [US president Donald] Trump’s defeat to abandon its extremist path, and ask that the sanctions on Venezuela be lifted.”

US-imposed sanctions have crippled Venezuela’s oil industry, blocked the country’s access to international financial markets and scared off potential investors under threat of financial punishment. The result of these sanctions has been devastating on the country’s economy and the lives of millions of Venezuelans.

Taking up Maduro’s call, newly-elected opposition deputy Luis Eduardo Martínez said the inauguration of the new AN on January 5 would “mark a new era of peace and reconciliation, in which all National Assembly deputies should work together to overcome the difficult situation Venezuela is going through”.

“The priority has to be to work towards ending the international, immoral and unjust sanctions, which hurt everyone equally, and recovering the republic’s assets abroad to enable access to fresh funds to attend to urgent needs, especially those arising from the [COVID-19] pandemic,” he said.

Strategy of concessions

This turnaround from five years ago can, in part, be explained by the failures of the strategy pursued by hard-line elements within the opposition. Since 2015, they have sought every avenue possible to depose Maduro, including violent protests, economic warfare, attempted assassinations, calls for a military coup, paramilitary incursions and support for economic sanctions and foreign intervention.

But, with little to show for all this, and demoralisation rising within the opposition’s base, more moderate sections have sought to pursue their own independent path. This led to a group of opposition leaders agreeing to enter into dialogue with the government and ultimately participate in the recent elections.

Discussing this process of convergence between the government and more moderate sectors of the opposition, Latin America researcher and author Steve Ellner wrote that it was, in part, the result of “Washington's policies and the untold suffering they have inflicted on the Venezuelan people”.

But he also believes it was a product of “Maduro's adroit strategy of accepting some of the demands of the centrists, while pursuing a hard-line approach against the insurgent opposition.”

The importance of this convergence, said Ellner, lies in the fact that “the emergence of a bloc of non-leftist parties that either explicitly or tacitly recognise the legitimacy of Venezuela’s political system could pave the way for a new era in the country's politics devoid of the internecine warfare of the past”.

Together with the lifting of the sanctions, it would represent a tremendous leap towards lifting Venezuela out of the years-long crisis it has been engulfed in.

But this strategy has come at some cost to the government.

Revolutionary activist and former Maduro minister Reinaldo Iturriza told Green Left that, as part of this strategy, the government decided it was necessary to grant concessions to business interests in pursuit of “forming an alliance with certain sections of the capitalist class”.

The problem, Iturriza stressed, was not the alliance per se, as “being in a position of weakness, it is not only predictable, but even correct, sensible and recommendable to cede some ground, while reorganising your forces.

“However, what has occurred since then has resembled a disorderly retreat more than anything else.”

As the economic situation worsened with the dramatic tightening of the sanctions in 2017, the government’s policy has largely been to simply offer further concessions.

By 2018, according to ex-minister for the productive economy Luis Salas, the government was essentially implementing the kind of monetary policies adopted by neoliberal governments in the region, “not because of its conviction, but in order to survive”.

The result was the pulverisation of workers’ wages (now the lowest in the region), rising poverty and a de facto dollarisation of the economy that has largely benefited those sectors that can get access to dollars, either due to their wealth, access to the state or corruption.

Acknowledging this reality on December 9, Maduro said: “I recognise that we have gone backwards regarding socialism as a result of the battle we are engaged in, but the battle is not lost.”

Describing the de facto dollarisation as an “escape valve” people have used to overcome the economic war inflicted on Venezuela, he added: “We are going to protect workers’ incomes. When are we going to do it? When Venezuela is able to completely break the blockade, when it recuperates its income from exports.”

In the meantime, protest numbers continue to rise across the country. While the Venezuelan Observatory of Social Conflicts is yet to put out figures for November, its October report noted it was the most conflictive month so far in 2020, with almost 1500 protests taking place, including an average of 18 a day over the issues of wages.

Drawing up a balance sheet of this period, Iturriza said “there is more than enough evidence to show that, in attempting to find a way out, we have ended up deeper within the labyrinth.

"If what occurred was a disorderly retreat, then what is required now is to reorganise our forces to be able to go back on the offensive.”

Disaffiliated Chavismo

The need to reorganise forces was a key factor in the decision taken by dozens of political parties, community organisations and social movements to set up the Revolutionary Popular Alternative (APR) to stand candidates against the PSUV.

In the end, however, the APR won just 3% of the vote and elected a solitary parliamentarian.

The APR largely put this down to the unfavourable conditions in which they competed: several parties involved in the APR were subject to court interventions and had their electoral registration handed over to minority pro-PSUV factions, while state media outlets refused to cover their campaign.

But it is more likely that the APR’s discourse, which focused on attacking the government rather than proposing genuine solutions, failed to gain any real traction among Chavistas.

This can in part be attributed to the strong desire for unity among an important section of Chavistas who viewed voting for the PSUV as the best option, regardless of any criticism they may have of the government.

But the APR also failed to mobilise even a small fraction of the millions of former and current Chavistas who chose not to vote.

“We have a government that, without doubt, has had the merit of resisting successive violent poundings and, despite everything, has remained in power, but at a terribly high cost in strategic terms,” Iturriza said.

“If I had to summarise the profound impact this situation has had in the popular camp, I would say that what we have seen is a phenomenon of mass political disaffiliation.”

“In my opinion, the largest political bloc today could be described as being composed of disaffiliated Chavistas,” he said. They do not see themselves reflected in “the government or the PSUV”.

Faced with this challenge, Iturriza said the left needs to “recover the fundamentals of revolutionary politics”.

Whether they voted for the PSUV, APR, the opposition, or abstained, working people “belong to the same class,” he said. “We need a politics for the working class, with the working class, no matter which party they identify with or whether they identify with none, as is currently the case with many people.

“That is where we need to do politics.”

Bolivia: The people defeat the coup

By Federico Fuentes*

October 22, 2020

Bolivians have overwhelmingly voted the left-wing Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) back into office in a resounding reversal of last year’s coup.

With almost 90% of the October 18 vote counted, MAS presidential candidate Luis Arce has won with 54.5%, thumping his nearest rival, Carlos Mesa (29.26%).

Luis Arce and David Choquehuanca, Bolivia’s newly elected President and Vice-President

Arce even managed to win more votes than former MAS president Evo Morales did in the October 2019 elections. While Morales won that election, opposition protests against supposed fraud culminated in a police-military coup that forced him into exile just weeks later.

Victory for peoples’ power

The vote for Arce, who was economy minister during most of Morales’ 14 years in power, represents a clear rejection of those who sought to trample on Bolivia’s democracy and the many achievements of the MAS government, in particular its empowerment of the country’s indigenous majority.

It also represents a defeat for those internationally, such as the Organization of American States (OAS) and the United States government, who backed the coup and subsequent illegitimate regime headed by right-wing senator Jeanine Áñez.

During her time in office, Áñez focused most of her attention on repressing protests, delaying elections and persecuting the MAS and the indigenous, campesino, worker and urban movements that make up its base, in the hope of blocking its return to power.

While her ministers enriched themselves through numerous cases of corruption, Bolivians were left to deal with a deep economic crisis, a sharp rise in poverty and one of the highest per capita COVID-19 death rates in the world.

Importantly, this rejection was not just expressed on election day, but in the mobilisations that took place immediately after the coup and since.

While largely focused in MAS’s rural heartlands and the largely indigenous city of El Alto, the initial protests marked a clear determination on the part of social movements to reject the racist violence unleashed by the coup and win back democracy through street mobilisation.

They did so while working in coordination with the MAS’s majority in the Plurinational Legislative Assembly.

The response of the regime was military and police repression, including massacres in Senkata, Sacaba and Yapacaní last November that left more than 30 dead, and attempts to circumvent parliament.

Nevertheless, the social movements persisted and expanded their reach, with nationwide mobilisations in August crucial to forcing elections to go ahead after they had been postponed three times.

Through these protests, social movements began a process of renewal and revitalisation, which enabled them to regain some of the strength and autonomy they had lost in recent years.

Some of the new leaders that emerged through this struggle have now been elected to the new parliament on the MAS ticket.

Regain broader support

The vote for Arce was also due to the MAS’s ability to regain support among certain sectors — particularly urban, middle class voters — that had turned their backs on the party.

The opposition aided this process, through the manner in which Áñez governed and their inability to present any coherent project beyond simply opposing the MAS.

But the MAS campaign was also crucial, starting with its decision to select Arce as the presidential candidate. This was despite MAS’ core rural base preferring former foreign minister David Choquehuanca, due to his close links to these movements.

The consensus decision to go with Arce — with Choquehuanca as his running mate — was based on the judgement that he was the best candidate to reach out to more moderate sectors and win back this broader support on the basis of the prestige he had from presiding over years of economic boom.

From this starting point — renewed social movements and Arce as candidate — the MAS set about campaigning hard, particularly in areas where their vote had dropped.

They did so by presenting a project for the country, with concrete solutions to the problems sectors were facing. At the same time, Arce and Choquehuanca publicly acknowledged some of the errors made during Morales’ time in government, demonstrating a willingness to listen and learn from mistakes.

Challenges ahead

The election result means the MAS have a clear mandate to continue building on the achievements of Morales' time in power, while working to fix errors.

Arce is not wasting time, having already indicated what his government’s first steps will be to deal with the impacts of the pandemic and economic crisis.

The day after the elections, Arce announced that distribution of a special hunger payment — already approved by parliament but blocked by Áñez — will begin within weeks, as part of helping ameliorate the effects of the crisis and stimulating internal demand.

Along with signalling his intention to introduce a wealth tax, Arce has said his government will seek to renegotiate its foreign debt with institutions such as the International Monetary Fund for the purpose of deferring or cancelling repayment, as a way to “to share the weight of the burden of the pandemic”.

There will no doubt be many challenges ahead.

Small violent protests by ultra-right forces rejecting the election result indicate they do not plan to go away without a fight. Nor will those foreign governments that have always opposed the MAS in power.

Seeking justice and reigning in the military will not be easy, given the military’s refusal to date to cooperate with the investigation into the massacres last November.

And figuring out how best to handle the complex relationship of being government and social movements at the same time — with the latter’s renewed sense of autonomy and immediate pressure for posts in the new administration — will require profound debate and reflection. As will working out what role Morales will play in this new period.

But for now, Bolivians will celebrate their defeat of a reactionary coup through the exercising of peoples’ power.

______________________

* Federico Fuentes, an Argentine-Australian, writes regularly on events in Latin America in Green Left Weekly, from which this article is reproduced with thanks. He was co-author with Marta Harnecker of the book MAS-IPSP de Bolivia: Instrumento político que surge de los movimientos sociales (Caracas: Centro Internacional Miranda, 2008).

Bolivia’s Perfect Storm: Pandemic, Economic crisis, Repressive coup regime

COB mobilization marches through El Alto Photo by La Razón

Introduction

The rising toll of diseased and deceased from the Covid-19 pandemic has hit Bolivia particularly hard, in a continent that is now in the lead in global contagion rates. As of August 8, more than 100,000 cases were officially confirmed or suspected, with 3,600 deaths among a total population of just over 10 million.

The coup government, installed in November, has mismanaged the crisis from the outset. Hospitals are understaffed and ill-equipped, testing is minimal, and the main response by the de facto authorities is to threaten lengthy jail terms for those who circulate “inaccurate” information about the pandemic — in a country where only a minority of workers are employed, the vast majority eking out a living in the “informal” economy of street markets and self-employment.

Typical of its approach, the interim regime headed by President Jeanine Añez was quick to expel more than 700 Cuban healthcare workers who, under the previous government, had provided needed services in remote areas and helped to train new medical staff.

Aggravating the misery is an unprecedented economic crisis. The coup regime paralyzed state development projects initiated by the previous government, privatized key state enterprises, and brought the IMF back with a $327 million loan. These policies, writes Bolivian journalist Oliver Vargas, have had “dramatic consequences for the ability of the country to weather the economic impact of Covid-19. 38% of the country has lost the entirety of their income, while 52% have lost a part of their income. The deliberate retreat of the state has meant that the 90% who are suffering during quarantine haven’t received any income support, the only gesture has been a one-off universal payment of US$70. In April, to last four months of lockdown.”

Remittances from relatives working abroad — crucially important for many families — have fallen by more than 30% in the first six months of this year, as many of the 3 million Bolivians living abroad in economic exile have lost their jobs.

“Bolivians are again experiencing shortages,” tweets deposed president Evo Morales from his Buenos Aires exile. “Long lines to buy food, drugs and gas amidst uncertainty and pandemic. The people have to struggle not only against the #Coronavirus but to survive as best they can, totally abandoned.”

“In the face of this desperate situation,” says Vargas, “voters were looking forward to ending the eight month coup experiment at the ballot box in September. Polls show that the MAS [the party led by Morales] is on course for a first-round victory, with Añez trailing behind in a distant third. It might have been a peaceful end to a violent period. However, determined to cling on to power whatever the cost, the regime is using Covid-19 as an excuse to postpone those elections. Claiming that elections would spread the virus, even as public transport and most of the economy re-opens, they have pushed for further delays.”

When the new elections tribunal, the TSE, arbitrarily postponed the election to October 18, overruling the legislated date of September 6, mass protests broke out throughout the country, initiated by the Bolivian Workers Central (COB) and the Pacto de Unidad, the coalition of organizations allied with the deposed government party, the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS). Starting August 3 more than 100 roadblocks were set up, only vehicles delivering medical supplies being allowed through. Thousands of Bolivians have taken to the streets demanding the national elections be held September 6.

Road blockade opens way for trucks carrying medical oxygen toward the Altiplano. Photo by La Razón

COB leader Juan Carlos Huarachi stated: “We need a democratically-elected government so as to discuss new policies, not just for social issues, but also for economic issues… in eight months we’ve seen the collapse of our country. Sadly, this is the reality, with recipes from the IMF, by blackmailing the people, by blackmailing the legislature.”

The Añez regime has responded by charging MAS leaders with “terrorism, genocide, sedition” and “offenses against public health.” And it has supported demands that the TSE disqualify the MAS candidates from the election. The TSE has referred the matter to the Supreme Court.

The following article by Cochabamba-based journalist Fernando Molina, published before the most recent events, describes the political climate, the MAS reactions to its overthrow in November, and the difficult perspectives it faces, whether it wins or loses the elections. I have translated it from the July-August 2020 issue of the magazine Nueva Sociedad, edited by Pablo Stefanoni in Buenos Aires. I have supplemented Molina’s notes with a few of my own, for clarification, signed R.F.

– Richard Fidler

* * *

What Outcome for Bolivia’s Crisis?

Elections and political reconfiguration

By Fernando Molina

Bolivia is heading toward presidential and legislative elections amidst a new political scenario. After the fall of Evo Morales and the blow suffered by his political force, the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) has regained ground and could win again. Will it succeed? If so, can it return to power? Whatever the case, a polarized battle looms between the MAS and its adversaries.

Bolivia’s elections, scheduled at this point for next September 6, will express a huge political and social polarization. It is not unique in this: so does the U.S. election in November. But while this is characteristic of the bipartisan U.S. electoral system, it is unusual in Bolivia. Several parties will be participating but the electorate will be divided according to a single alternative: for or against the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS).

We still don’t know which party will manage to represent the anti-MAS voters. Various Center and Right-wing parties are competing, encouraged by Bolivia’s electoral laws which allow for a second round of voting where no party wins a sufficient plurality. This opens space for the parties to make individual calculations — a practice that many MAS opponents consider outrageous, since it jeopardizes what was achieved with the overthrow of President Evo Morales last November, that is, the abrupt departure from office of the socio-political bloc that had managed the country since the early 21st century.

This is now the main concern of Bolivia’s economic, intellectual and media elites: to prevent dangerous games between the old opponents of Morales (who resist yielding to each other and are unable to form a united front against “public enemy number one,” as a La Paz daily calls the former president[1]) evoking the most terrifying specter for the upper classes: the “return of the MAS.”

These parties respond to their critics with claims that each is not only the very opposite of the MAS but has the unique ability to guarantee a definitive and sustainable victory over it.[2] At the same time, each of them seeks to show that their rivals are not trustworthy because their actions bring water to the mill of the MAS. The common accusation is that they are “functional to the MAS.” This was the tone adopted, for example, by the de facto government, which is running interim President Jeanine Añez as the presidential candidate of the Juntos group, toward opposition candidates Carlos Mesa and Luis Fernando Comacho when they criticized her handling of the health crisis caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.[3]

Conversely the other opposition parties have accused the interim government of promoting the return of the MAS through its mismanagement of the crisis.[4] The media are playing the same game, as indicated by this headline in El Deber, the main daily in Santa Cruz, when reporting on the former president and current candidate Carlos Mesa: “Mesa shares a forum with the President of Argentina Alberto Fernández, who gave refuge to Evo.”[5]

Hatred of the MAS

Abhorring the MAS is the dominant passion of the country’s traditional elites. The roots are found in a mix of memories of grievances suffered (the loss of spaces of power due to the dissolution of the technocracy of the 1990s and the devaluation of their “genealogical capital” for 14 years), ideological differences (liberal-republicanism versus national-caudillismo), and racism against the Indigenous and mestizo plebeians or “cholos.”

Hatred of the MAS began even before the coming to power of the “first Indigenous president” and the installation in the government of social movements that brought together Indigenous peoples, peasants and workers. This could already be felt in 2002, when the MAS because a serious alternative for office. Between 2006 and 2008, during the first two years of Morales’s government, it came close to unleashing a civil war between the north-western and south-eastern regions of the country. If this did not happen, it was due to the weight of the president’s popularity, although he did not manage to consolidate himself in government without first blunting the more radical edges of his program of state reforms and reducing to the minimum his program of redistribution of agrarian property.

Despite this, the abhorrence of the leftist party and its leader did not disappear. Even during the boom period, 2009-2015, while the country was experiencing the best economic moment of its history, the majority of Bolivians had more income and social welfare increased, the animosity smoldered like a votive candle on the secret altars of the business organizations, social clubs, lodges, fraternities of the Santa Cruz carnival, the card games of wealthy women, and ultimately in the multiple settings of private life in which the traditional white elites had not lost their primacy. Even if some bourgeois leaders “went over” to the MAS government or pretended they were fraternizing with it, or if most of the intellectuals and journalists were careful not to “overly criticize” the powerful regime, the class and racial enmity was always there, awaiting a better time in which to express itself.

The same thing occurred with racial prejudice. Although public expressions of this prejudice were tempered by fear that the government would implement the legal and moral sanctions it deserved, the country continued to be weighed down by the vestiges of the estates of the colonial order. The MAS even had to make realpolitik concessions to racism, such as appointing figures that were more picturesque than persuasive in the newly created Vice-Ministry of Decolonization, which was intended to direct egalitarian policies, or allowing the Armed Forces to maintain a rule that discriminated against sergeants and corporals, most of whom are of Indigenous origin.[6]

Those longing for the old powers and the old relations between the classes were gradually strengthened as the MAS government was weakened by the natural wear and tear of its prolonged stay in power, the errors it was making and the limitations it revealed. Being “anti-MAS” became a sign of social and racial status, and therefore began to be internalized by the lower middle classes as an “aspirational” element, that is, as a mechanism for social advancement.

What were the mistakes made and the limitations that the MAS government revealed? Its “electoralism,” which ended up reducing the social process to a succession of triumphs at the ballot box and the retention of power at all costs, even with authoritarian methods; its “peasantism,” which must be understood as a relative indifference to the demands of the urban sectors; its cooptation of unconditional “Evistas” as a part of the leadership; its corruption and bureaucratization; its ideological unclarity between extreme pragmatism and “national-Stalinism,”[7] and above all its caudillismo.

With his political, economic and governmental success, Morales became the most important caudillo in a country that had been full of them; a country in which, as its most creative sociologist, René Zavaleta, put it, “the caudillo is the way that the masses organize.”[8] The centrality of the president and the state cult of his personality attained levels as high as those achieved by other great national leaders such as Victor Paz Estenssoro or José María Linares. If at first the official flattery of Morales corresponded in part to reality, it later became a mirage and a mechanism for ratification and manipulation of the Bolivian president’s narcissism. To such an extent that he believed he was even strong enough to turn his back to the source of his power, the electoral majorities, if they were to oppose him.

That was what happened with regard to the constitutional referendum of February 21, 2016, which ruled out his re-election,[9] and perhaps also with regard to the result of the elections of October 20, 2019, which, as most Bolivians perceived it,[10] he had arranged to alter in order to avoid a second round (a notion, however, that Morales and the MAS deny and that is now a subject of dispute in the election campaign and the courts).[11]

In any event, to assume that the undeniable strength of his figure was superior to Bolivians’ attachment to the vote — which in this country is key because it serves to resolve the everlasting disputes over the rents derived from natural resources — was a very serious misstep. It ended up confusing and fragmenting the social bloc that had backed the MAS government, and which was already weakened by its long incorporation within the ruling party with all the advantages and temptations that this situation implied.[12]

In the end, in the final hours of his government the MAS, which had arisen from social struggles, was unable to mobilize its adherents. It had been transformed into an electoral machine that could still get out the vote but which no longer aroused any progressive fervor. Only the ultraloyal cocaleros of the Chapare, the residents of the most Indigenous neighborhoods of the Aymara metropolis of El Alto, and certain groups of state functionaries were willing to fight effectively to prevent Morales from falling.

After his overthrow, the burning of buses, factories and homes of opponents of Morales in La Paz, as well as the “siege of the cities” ordered by the ex-president from exile, aroused the age-old terror of the Bolivian whites of the “Indian thug” and raised the hatred of the MAS to the level of collective hysteria. It was then that there arose the ferociously anti-socialist narrative that still prevails today.

Pablo Stefanoni has singled out “three key words in it: ‘hordes’ (the MAS members are reduced to mere criminal shock troops); ‘waste’ (the widely praised macroeconomic management [of Morales] was simply virtual reality; and ‘tyranny’ (the last 14 years are said to have been pure state despotism).”[13] This narrative has served in part as the motive and in part as the cover for the repression of the MAS carried out by the interim government. Groups that mobilized in support of ex-president Morales were dismantled by the combined forces of the Police and the Army, costing the lives of more than 30 people. Almost 1,000 leaders were temporarily detained. Several dozen former officials, among them Morales and his vice-president Álvaro García Linera, had to leave the country for Mexico and Argentina. Hundreds have been investigated for corruption. Two ex-ministers were arrested and remain in jail. Seven MAS leaders took refuge in the Mexican embassy in La Paz, where they are stranded due to being denied safe conduct to leave the country.

At the same time, the public sphere has been taken over almost completely by the spokespersons — genuine and upstarts — of the “revolution of the pititas,” as the press called the protests that preceded the overthrow of Morales.[14] Even intellectuals who had been linked with and thrived from the previous government have begun to practice target shooting against Morales, making him the “punching bag” of anyone who knows how to string together a few phrases to produce an opinion piece. The most important left-wing academics have been careful not to go against this climate of opinion, and have sought to exonerate themselves.[15] From the outset, the Añez interim government has enjoyed hegemony over the mass media,[16] and only recently has this begun to lessen due to the rapid erosion in the government’s management although it is still unanimous if invoked against the MAS.

In this context, one would have thought that the MAS’s days were numbered, that its future would be that of a secondary political group, and exclusively rural. However, early in the new year, notwithstanding the adverse conditions we have described, the MAS appeared to be heading the first surveys of voting intentions, even before it had named any candidates. The acronym attracted “hard-core” support — ideological and sociological — of massive scope. In January 21% of the electorate was prepared to vote for it regardless of who its candidates were or what they were offering.[17] In March, with its candidates now chosen, 33% of the population supported it.[18]

The workers, the plebeian sectors of the population, the Indigenous peoples and the cholos who had not been upwardly mobile to another social class continued to see the MAS — although it had made no consistent self-criticism of its errors — as the only force capable of representing them and defending the statism, nationalism and racial egalitarianism that the return to power of the traditional elites seemed to have put at risk. But in addition, that force is associated with a period of unusual prosperity and political stability. That is why, among other reasons, the initiative of the most radical “pititas” to use the charge of fraud hanging over the MAS to veto its participation in the election went nowhere. This outcome was counter-intuitive. Despite everything that had occurred, the MAS continued to be at the centre of politics, and the other forces had to position themselves in relation to it. Not even the defeat of historic scope that the party had suffered last November had displaced it from this focal location. It was a surprising example of political resilience that no doubt expressed, as we have said, simultaneous processes of class and racial identification.

The MAS response since its fall

“Evismo,” or the admiration and loyalty — not always healthy — manifested for Evo Morales, on the one hand, and on the other the possibility of obtaining an electoral victory in the coming elections are the two forces that have preserved the unity of the MAS after the terrible earthquake that its violent departure from government meant for this party. For those who suppose that its fall was due solely to the action of an external force (the “empire’s conspiracy to appropriate Bolivian lithium,” or the “police and military coup”), the unity of the Masistas may seem an obvious premise. But this is not the case because, as we have seen, the overthrow of the Morales government was the result of both external and internal causes. Furthermore, the MAS has never been an ideological party; it is “sindicalista,” and part of its appeal has been its ability to enable the social ascent of the most awakened and ambitious elements of the unions and the plebeian middle classes. So the expectation of an early return to power has influenced its unitary behaviour.

Morales has also played a fundamental role in this, by becoming the only reference for groups that without him would probably seek to compete with each other to express that 33% or more of the electorate that today leans to the left. This has always been the role of Morales. If the MAS managed to fulfil one of the most cherished hopes of the 20^th century progressives, the “unity of the left,” it did this not on the foundations predicted (ideological hegemony, defensive front, etc.) but in the Bolivian style, around a guardian figure.[19] Morales articulates the three main wings of his party, all of which are “Evistas.” This ensures that “they stay in the Political Instrument,” while at the same time avoiding the emergence of dangerous competitors for his charismatic leadership.

The three major factions of the MAS, each of which includes many minor groups, are as follows:

(a) The one formed by the workers and peasants organizations of the so-called “Unity Pact.” This is led, on the one hand, by David Choquehuanca, an Indigenous leader in the Altiplano who served as foreign minister between 2006 and 2018 and is now the MAS vice-presidential candidate, and on the other by the young Andrónico Rodríguez, the effective leader of the cocalero union federations that Morales continues to head.

(b) The one formed by the numerous groups of militants that come from the traditional left; radical and “national-Stalinist” leaders predominate in this wing, although it also contains the more moderate candidate for President, the former Minister of Economy and socialist activist Luis Arce.

(c) The one formed by the neo-Marxist, post-modern, left-wing humanists and progressive democrats who joined the MAS just before and after it came to power and who, given their educational capital, played an important role in government management. A minority part of these middle-class elements have links with Choquehuanca, while another, larger part was related with García Linera (whose future role is uncertain).[20]

The Indigenous and sindicalista wing read Morales’s departure from power in a purely racial key. In part, this sentiment was turned against the middle-class members of the MAS, whom they considered opportunists who had taken advantage of the “government of the Indians” to build their fame and fortune. This was the context for the resurgence in popularity of Choquehuanca, who had been “in the freezer” for a couple of years after Morales kicked him out of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs when he was considered a possible successor in the Presidency just at the time when the Chief of State was seeking the unconditional support of his party for his third re-election. Choquehuanca had actually played an important role, as the coordinator of several rural-based NGOs, in promoting the rapid rise of the young “brother Evo” from peasant syndicalism to national politics.

When the MAS was founded, Choquehuanca was its main operator in the Aymara area of the country (the altiplano that includes La Paz and Oruro), while Morales, despite his Aymara origin, dominated the valleys of Cochabamba where the population was primarily of Quechua origin. Choquehuanca is a cultural Indianista and therefore a moderate but he tends to gather political strength from the opposition between the Indigenous and the middle class of the MAS. Within the cabinet, he found himself in muted conflict with García Linera. In accordance with his racially-shaded view of the balance of forces within his party, he accused the then vice-president of being guilty of all the government’s failings, including his own departure from power, while absolving Morales, at least in public.

After losing control of Foreign Affairs, Choquehuanca’s supporters were removed from the government and Choquehuanca himself was sent into “golden exile” in Venezuela as executive secretary of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA). After Morales’s ouster, the Unity Pact nominated him and Andrónico Rodríguez as candidates for President and Vice-President, respectively. The party approved this nomination along with the list of candidates determined by the Unity Pact — an illustration of which of its wings was the strongest. However, Morales objected to this formula and imposed instead a middle-class figure who was close to him, Luís Arce, shifting Choquehuanca to second position. Unlike Choquehuanca, Arce has no social base of his own, and if elected would be dependent on Morales. Characteristically, the former foreign affairs minister accepted Morales’s decision in public, but was reluctant about it in private and attributed it to an intrigue by García Linera. His compliance, hypocritical or not, prevented a clash between the Unity Pact and the exile in Buenos Aires, which would have been very dangerous for the MAS.

However, the tensions between “workers,” “professionals,” rural “founders” and urban “guests,” “nationalists,” and “communists” continue to exist and will surely be expressed more openly in the future, whether the MAS wins or loses the elections. […]

Another political figure who has emerged from the social organizations is the President of the Legislative Assembly, Senator Eva Copa, who has upheld the Indigenista claims and has led the MAS parliamentarians with a certain independence of both Arce and Morales. She can not easily be classified among the Choquehuanca supporters. Shortly after the November overthrow of Morales, Copa reached certain agreements with the Añez government that she did not coordinate with her comrades in Bolivia or, in some cases, with those in Buenos Aires. And she has criticized publicly middle-class leaders like Senator Adriana Salvatierra despite the fact that she was in a difficult personal situation.[21]

None of this has been disavowed by Morales. He, like so many other caudillos, maintains relations with all groups and individuals that he can use to achieve his plans. Evo’s attitude — and, on the other hand, the interim government’s lack of interest in or commitment to achieving this — has prevented the defection of the MAS caucus in the legislature. After the most crucial moment of the repression, when this defection seemed imminent, had passed, the parliamentarians regained the initiative and launched what some observers have viewed as a counter-attack by the national-popular bloc.[22]

The extreme tolerance and even the ideological neglect of the MAS are due to the fact that this party is profoundly electoralist. At the same time, these characteristics determine that it remains as such: amorphous, and thinking that the solution to all its problems — or, better yet, that its only problem — lies in winning the coming elections. Obviously, this has forestalled any systematic debate on the causes of its political defeat, learning from its mistakes, or improving…. If Morales, very reluctantly, came to accept that he had been wrong in trying to re-elect himself for a third time,[23] he has now changed his mind in view of the slight improvement of his situation in Bolivia owing to the problems of administration confronting Añez, among them those related to the health crisis. He has just said, once again, that he was not mistaken in running once again.[24]

Can the MAS return to power? Is this advisable in the medium term?

Can the MAS return to power in September? Technically, yes. It needs to win more than 40% of the votes — not impossible, given that it now polls between 33% and 35% — and hope that Mesa and Añez, running separately, do not rise far above the 20% support they now have. The major obstacle to this lies in the possibility that the anti-MAS electorate, on the eve of the elections, turns massively in favour of either of those candidates. This is what happened in October 2019, and the polling does not discount it. Should the MAS be forced into a run-off second round with either Mesa or Añez, the intense polarization would probably result in a slim victory for the anti-MAS candidate.

Should the MAS win, could it take office? In Bolivia’s history there is a period with similarities to the current one. In the late 1940s, the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR), which had co-governed with nationalist military officers between 1943 and 1946, likewise faced the hatred of the elites. In the 1951 elections Mamerto Urriolagoitia, the outgoing president, did not accept the victory of Paz Estenssoro, and instead handed over power to a military junta. This maneuver went down in history as the “mamertazo.”

Is there room for a new “mamertazo” in Bolivian history? Today, of course, the international situation is quite different. However, very powerful forces could resist with all the resources at their disposal the return of “Bolivia’s cancer” — as a columnist has called the MAS.[25] Among them, a section of the Army.[26]

Urriolagoitia argued that the MNR victory could not be recognized because the “communists” could not be allowed to take power. Today some might argue that it should not be given to “narcoterrorists,” or that the rise of a party that tried to cheat the country with a fraudulent election should be prevented, perhaps by banning it before the elections are held. Morales has warned of this possibility, referring to it as their “Plan B.”[27]

The more democratic section of the Bolivian elites, however, would see a re-edition of a “mamertazo” as the repetition of an error. Bear in mind that a few months after Urriolagoitia’s action, the National Revolution exploded and Paz Estenssoro returned from his Argentine exile to take office as President. An even more interesting (if naïve) question is whether an immediate return to power is advisable for the MAS. It is conceivable that in such case it would not have time or space to overhaul itself, recover from its wounds, establish a healthier relationship with its “President Evo,” in short, it could not avoid making the same errors and suffering the same damages as before. On the other hand, it is also true that as a party now hemmed in by the state security services, staying out of government could end up decimating and dividing it. There is no doubt that such a thing as the “advantage of losing” is not in the mind of Morales, Arce and the other MAS leaders, and much less in the minds of the Masistas involved in trials, imprisoned or exiled.

What would Arce and Choquehuanca do if they came to govern? What would they have to face in 2020-2025? Some forecasts: they would face resistance, at least initially, from the state security agencies; the relentless campaign against them by the economic, social, university and media elites; the constant mobilization of certain sectors of the middle class that would not want to retire to their winter quarters after having tasted again the fruits of power; a divided parliament; a MAS agitated and eroded by the battle between “revanchists” and “conciliators”; and above all the blows of the pandemic and one of the worst economic crises in the country’s history.

In this context, there is no doubt that Arce would be lucky if he could stop the restoration process that his enemies have begun, and administer the state from the perspective of those below. Assigning him any other objective would be unrealistic. And if he failed in this, it would probably compromise even further the possibilities of mounting a far-reaching leftist project in the future. In any case, as the annals and epics testify, the generals have never heeded the fortune tellers when they have already decided to go into battle.

---

[1] Robert Brockmann, “El enemigo público No 1,” Brújala Digital, June 18, 2020.

[2] “[Carlos] Mesa: mi responsabilidad es ganarle al MAS en elecciones para evitar que siga gobernando el país,” ANF, June 24, 2020.

[3] “Samuel [Medina Dorado, Junto’s vice-presidential candidate] accusa a ‘Camacho, Mesa y el MAS’ de conformar un bloque contra el Gobierno,” Correa del Sur, May 26, 2020.

[4] Erika Segales: “Camacho, Mesa y Tuto pasan a la ‘ofensiva’ contra Añez,” Página Siete, May 26, 2020.

[5] Marcelo Tedesqui, “Mesa comparte foro con el presidente de Argentina, Alberto Fernández, qui dio refugio a Evo,” El Deber, June 20, 2020.

[6] For example, they were not allowed to eat in the same canteens as the officers. See Fernando Molina, “Patria o muerte. Venceremos. El orden castrense de Evo Morales,” Nueva Sociedad No. 278, November-December 2018.

[7] That is, a stereotypical anti-imperialism, inclined to fantastic conspiracy theories, with little attachment to democracy and a tendency to organize internal purges.

[8] Zavaleta, “La Revolución Boliviana y la cuestion del poder [1964],” Obras completas Tomo I, (Plural, La Paz), p. 112. [See also Moira Zuazo, “The MAS government in Bolivia: Are the social movements in power?”]

[9] After its narrow loss in the effort to overrule the constitutional re-election limitations, the MAS chose not to select other candidates for president and vice-president but instead to devote its energies to finding ways to circumvent the popular verdict. In the end it got the Supreme Court to adopt a dubious international legal precedent ruling out re-election limits for all elected positions in the country. – R.F.

[10] Katiuska Vásquez, “El 70% cree que Evo se fue por revuelta y 62% que hay fraude,” Los Tiempos, December 23, 2019.

[11] Claims of fraud have been refuted by several studies. See, for example, “New York Times and New Report Confirm CEPR Analysis Refuting OAS Claims of Flawed Bolivian Election Results,” CEPR, June 7, 2020. – R.F.

[12] Pablo Stefanoni, “Las lecciones que nos deja Bolivia,” Sin Permiso, March 14, 2020.

[13] Pablo Stefanoni, “Bolivia: anatomía de un derrocamiento,” El País, January 21, 2020.

[14] An allusion to the strings and thin ropes used to block streets, obviating the need to mobilize many demonstrators — a custom of the Bolivian middle classes ridiculed by Morales in one of his last speeches as President.

[15] For example, see Luis Tapia, “Crisis política en Bolivia: la coyuntura de disolución de la domination masista. Fraude y resistencia democrática,” CIDES-UMSA, November 19, 2019.

[16] Fernando Molina, “Hegemonía instantánea: la prensa en la crisis boliviana,” Contrahegemonía, on-line, December 3, 2019.

[17] Paula Lazarte, “Ciesmori perfila al candidato del MAS como ganador en encuesta,” Página Siete, January 2, 2020.

[18] “Arce aumenta ventaja y Mesa afianza el segundo lugar, según encuesta de Ciesmori,” Página Siete, March 15, 2020.

[19] Fernando Mayorga, Mandato y contingencia. Estilo de gobierno de Evo Morales, Fundación Friedrich Ebert (La Paz, 2019).

[20] The exiled García Linera has accepted an academic position in Argentina. – R.F.

[21] Salvatierra, Senate president at the time of the coup, was next in line for President following the resignations of Morales and García Linera. She promptly resigned too, alleging later that she was instructed to do so by her party leader Evo Morales. – R.F.

[22] Fernando Mayorga, “‘Elecciones ya’: ¿el MAS recupera la iniciativa?,” Nueva Sociedad, June 2020.

[23] Deutsche Welle, Evo Morales: “Fue un error volver a presentarme,” January 17, 2020.

[24] Boris Miranda, “Evo Morales en entrevista con BBC Mundo: ‘Nosotros vamos a recuperar el gobierno,’” June 24, 2020.

[25] Francesco Zaratti, “El cáncer de Bolivia,” Página Siete, November 16, 2019.

[26] Isabel Mercado, “El plan del MAS es «sacar esta ley, maniatarnos y crear milicias»,” Interview with Añez’s Minister of Defense Fernando López, Página Siete, June 29, 2020.

[27] Natalio Cosoy, “Evo Morales cree que puede haber un ‘golpe’ si el MAS gana las elecciones en Bolivia,” France 24, March 17, 2020.