Bolivia’s government sides with workers in conflict with bosses in mining cooperatives

The articles below describe and analyze a major confrontation in Bolivia in recent months that ended tragically in several deaths and blew up an uneasy alliance between the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) government headed by Evo Morales and an incipient bourgeoisie in the mining industry. The government responded to the crisis by strengthening its alliance with the proletarian forces in the mining industry and taking further steps to regain state control over the industry. If, as Pablo Solón maintains, Bolivia’s process of change of the last ten years has “lost its way,” the conflict with the bosses in the mining cooperatives indicates that when push comes to shove the MAS government is still capable of taking decisive action in defense of the national and class interests of the vast majority of Bolivians.

The first article, an informed account of the events, was published by the Bolivia Information Forum based in Britain. The second article, by Alfredo Rada Vélez, vice-minister of coordination with the social movements, has been translated by me from the web site of the Escuela Nacional de Formación Política [National political cadre school].

– Richard Fidler

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Cooperative miners behind violent protests that ended in the killing of a government minister

The bludgeoning to death of Rodolfo Illanes, vice-minister of the interior, by cooperative miners who took him hostage as he went in good faith to seek dialogue, has caused widespread stupefaction in Bolivia. Among the consequences are the weakening of the alliance between the government and cooperative miners and a number of new controls on this sector.

Chronology of events

At the beginning of August, the leaders of Bolivia’s mining cooperatives threatened to block roads if the government went ahead with passing a law that allowed workers in service sector cooperatives to form unions. The law was not to be applied in the case of cooperative miners, but to workers in electricity and gas, water and telecommunications cooperatives, all of whom supported the proposal. The mining cooperatives were therefore taking sides with the members-owners of the cooperatives, not their workers.

The cooperative miners came out in force on 10 August, blocking roads in La Paz, Cochabamba and Potosí in particular. The apparent cause was the question of unionisation (of service sector workers only). They did not present their own demands until after the road blocks started (see below). Miners clashed with police brought in to keep the roads open. Police were armed with tear gas, the miners with dynamite and other explosive devices. In the melee, some 40 police were taken hostage by the miners and given a drubbing. Though the police were under strict orders not to carry guns, two cooperative miners were killed in circumstances that are as yet unclear. Some 18 miners were arrested and ten formally charged.

The conflict was brought to a temporary halt on 12 August in a stand-off, with miners demanding the release of their colleagues as a condition for sitting down to talk, whilst the ten detainees had already passed into the hands of the legal system. On 19 August, the government approved the law allowing unionisation of workers in service sector cooperatives, much to the jubilation of the workers involved.

With the passage of the law, the national cooperative organisation, Concobol, entered the fray. It is the powerful service cooperatives – in Santa Cruz in particular – that feel their interests most affected. As the conflict once again intensified, Albino García, currently president of Concobol and a past president of the national miners’ cooperative federation, Fencomin, announced the renewal of road blocks and the occupation of state institutions. The latter was reminiscent of the violent attacks on public institutions in 2008 during the so-called ‘civic-prefectural coup’ attempt in the lowlands. Organisations representing gold mining cooperatives said they would support the striking miners.

Consequently, the blocking of roads in La Paz and Cochabamba started again on 23 August. Attempts by the ombudsman (Defensor del Pueblo) to bring the two sides together failed and violent conflict continued, especially in and around the village of Panduro on the road between La Paz and Oruro. On the morning of 25 August, Rodolfo Illanes was taken hostage as he went to talk to miners’ leaders, many of whom he knew personally. Videos taken on mobile phones showed how the situation deteriorated as the day wore on. Illanes was beaten and then stoned to death at the end of the afternoon.

The miners (about 10,000 people that day) disbanded immediately, returning to their workplaces or, in the case of the leaders, going into hiding to prevent possible reprisals and/or detention. In this, the second round of conflict, three cooperative miners were killed, two by bullets and one by accidental manhandling of dynamite. Detention orders are out for several miners’ leaders; the president and vice-president of Fencomin, there at the time when Illanes was tortured and killed, are in prison and have been charged with his assassination.

Who are the cooperative miners?

In colonial times, Potosí required large numbers of workers to extract the silver exported to Spain. There were two main sources of labour, the mitayos, sent by communities throughout the Altiplano to provide labour for the mines as part of their tribute to the colonial power, and the k’ajchas, groups of ‘free’ labourers employed to work in the mines. Cooperative mining in Bolivia has its origins in the latter group.

Since the mines were first nationalised in 1952, cooperative mining has witnessed different moments of growth. A first set of cooperatives was formed in the years after 1952, as the state company Comibol closed down operations in less productive mines, such as Kami and Bolsa Negra. A second period of growth was from 1985 onwards, when much of the state mining sector was closed down: the more profitable mines were either rented out or worked as joint ventures with private companies, whilst the less profitable ones were offered to former workers as cooperatives.

In theory, mining cooperatives abide by cooperative principles, with all members or associates holding equal rights and responsibilities, but in practice this is often not the case and many associates take on day labourers to work for them. Also, the principle of pooling production and sharing benefits is generally not respected, with associates making a living from what they individually extract from the mine. Cooperatives tend not to carry out exploration work or investment, and they depend on the state to provide them with workable mines and often the machinery to exploit them. Working conditions are usually precarious, and the cooperatives do little to respect such rudimentary norms as health and safety.

Cooperatives are one of the three main sectors working the mines; the biggest (in terms of output) is the private sector, which produces about 70% of total exports, followed by cooperative miners, with 22%, and finally the state sector which produces only 8%. Cooperative miners pay Comibol rent for the areas they control (1% of the value of the mineral produced) and royalties to the department in which they are situated (5% of value of mineral produced). They do not pay taxes on the profits they make or a special tax payable by private and state mines when prices are high. This helps to explain why several members of mining cooperatives have emerged as part of the country’s new rich, particularly over the decade of booming mineral prices.

Uneasy allies?

Cooperative miners have been one of the organised movements that have formed the social base of the Morales government. Numerically, the sector is important, accounting for 110-130,000 workers, though the figures are unreliable, and only 10,000 are registered for health care in the Caja Nacional de Salud. The sector has provided jobs for large numbers of young people in recent years.

The government has helped the sector, for instance by providing heavy machinery and building mills, setting up an investment fund (Fofim), and creating a minerals marketing company. However, both the constitution and the mining law lay down rules regarding new mining concessions and outlaw alliances with private companies whereby cooperatives provide a back door to private companies to take advantage of their tax benefits. In spite of their involvement in discussions on the mining law over several years, their opposition to parts of the law led to a period of violent protest in 2014.

The recent conflict has shown the extent to which the mining cooperatives’ support to the government has been conditional on the economic favours they have received.

The main demands

Fencomin’s list of demands included ten points. Besides the stance taken against unionisation (in the service cooperatives) the main points were:

• changes to the mining law to allow cooperatives to establish relationships with private companies, whether Bolivian or foreign;
• the opening of new areas for exploitation by cooperatives, including protected areas;
• greater flexibility for cooperative miners in the way environmental norms are applied; and
• other financial benefits.

A conspiracy? What lay behind the conflict?

President Evo Morales strongly condemned the cooperative miners and the action they took, pointing to a possible wider conspiracy in which the miners formed a part. He spoke of the conflict as seeking to create the conditions for a coup d’état. The way the conflict was conducted would suggest that there may have been some truth in this:

• Why did the miners involve themselves (so violently and refusing all efforts at negotiation) in an issue that clearly did not affect them? Unionisation only affected service sector cooperatives, and the workers of these were all much in favour of being able to join a union. It would certainly seem that Concobol was the chief opponent to the unionisation in service cooperatives, and the electricity and telecommunications cooperatives in Santa Cruz have close links with the civic committee and the most conservative sectors of cruceño society.
• Why did they not present their ten-point list of demands before they began blocking the roads?
• Why such a show of force? It is estimated that some 10,000 miners were present in Panduro on 25 August, with the police apparently numbering around 1,500. To organise and sustain such a mobilisation would require substantial economic and logistical resources.
• Why so violent? After the conflict came to an end, Interior Minister Carlos Romero exhibited some of the explosive devices left behind by the miners, devised to cause maximum harm (fragmentation of stones, metal, etc.). Preparation of such weapons (not just sticks of dynamite as are often used in miners’ demonstrations) would involve some considerable prior planning.
• Why did national cooperative leaders, present during the capture and killing of Illanes, not intervene? The speed at which the miners disbanded suggests that they realised they had made a serious mistake. Did they begin to see that they were being used for a wider political purpose?

The way the mobilisation was organised and conducted would suggest that it was indeed part of a wider attempt to discredit and possibly destabilise the government.

Government response

The government’s response has been speedy and tough:

• All areas where mining cooperatives have been working with private companies will now revert to the state. These involve some 31 contracts, including important foreign concerns such as Manquiri-San Bartolomé (Coeur de Lion, USA) on the Cerro Rico in Potosí and Sinchi Wayra with cooperatives in Poopó, Oruro. Sinchi Wayra was formerly Comsur, the company belonging to ex-president Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, and now forming part of Glencore. Concessions not being worked will also revert to the state.
• There will be greater controls on mining cooperatives that take into account cooperative principles. Information will be required on levels of production, profits (and their distribution amongst all associates), lists of workers, monthly accounts (including payments to associates and workers).
• People employed by cooperatives should be protected by labour law and so also be able to unionise and be registered in the Caja Nacional de Salud (to gain access to health care).
• The use of dynamite (and alcohol) in protests and marches will be prohibited.
• Cooperative miners will no longer have representatives sitting on the Comibol board and the government will no longer deduct a percentage of cooperative sales to fund the running costs of their organisation.

Where next?

Even in a country used to occasional violent protest, the violence of this conflict was exceptional from the start, with five workers killed and a member of government – in effect carrying a white flag – beaten to death, a crime which the local UN High Commissioner on Human Rights has called a crime against humanity. In spite of orders, it seems that some police were carrying guns and not just tear gas.

The conflict has led to the breaking of relations between the government and one of its traditional associates, whose support largely derived from the benefits they received. The government has made it clear that it does not accept the cooperatives’ demands and intends to terminate their privileges.

It is unlikely that the cooperative miners will take the measures lying down: they will probably regroup over the coming months and try to renegotiate some of the decisions taken. The government appears to have opened up a new flank of opposition, unless those who work in the mining cooperatives start to take advantage of their rights, something no doubt the members of the cooperatives will do their best to prevent.

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The biggest advance in workers’ rights in a decade

by Alfredo Rada Vélez

As night fell in Panduro on Thursday 25 August the air still reeked of gas, dynamite and death. We now knew about the terrible assassination of the vice-minister Rodolfo Illanes, and within a few hours the huge movement of thousands of cooperativistas had been dispersed, not by the coercive force of the state but by the generalized repudiation of the people.

The road blockades organized by the Federación Nacional de Cooperativas Mineras (Fencomin) were a violent action in a context of falling international mineral prices. Employers who have acquired economic power in the cooperatives wanted to maintain the rate of profit they have gained from three things: (1) greater state subsidies and financing for the industry; (2) preservation of the flexible forms of exploitation of labour within the cooperatives; and (3) de facto recognition of contracts between the cooperativista bosses and national companies and foreign transnational corporations.

These objectives had a clear bourgeois class content, in this case that of a new bourgeoisie that has developed in the larger cooperatives such that they ceased to be “not for profit entities” and have become semiformal capitalist enterprises. The cooperativista bourgeoisie is made up of nouveaux riches that enjoy an elevated status due to the exploitation of the labour of the so-called “second hands” or labourers paid on a piecework basis, without contracts or labour rights. To block the unionization of those workers the bosses also invoke the lie that “within the cooperatives we are all equal” when we know this is not true, that within the big cooperatives there are bosses and there are labourers.

How was this bourgeoisie able to mobilize large contingents of workers? By converting their class interest into a general interest under the slogan of “labour stability.” The bosses blackmailed the workers: “If you don’t mobilize to get the government to stay clear of us, you will have no job.” That’s how the bosses in the mining cooperatives (who are generally the oldest partners) deceived a social base and converted it into a hit squad.

Within the government, the question of our policy in relation to mining cooperatives has up to now not been addressed from a revolutionary standpoint. We fell into the error of considering Fencomin as an ally without seeing that within it social classes were being constituted, a semiformal bourgeoisie and a precarious proletariat, and that, as a government, we had to include this proletariat in the process of change, supporting its organization and defending its rights. In other words, to differentiate the worker base from the bosses’ hierarchy within the cooperatives. Instead, we trusted the leaders, many of them hypocritically aligned with the government not out of conviction but for convenience. To maintain the alliance the government refrained from intervening in matters involving the workers within the cooperatives; it was flexible with them when it came to compliance with environmental standards, and their taxes were not increased. Today we see that this pragmatic orientation has simply led to strengthening the class enemy.

The relation between bosses and workers is central to cooperative mining. It is no accident that what started the conflict was the approval by the Plurinational Legislative Assembly of a law that recognized trade unions within the service sector cooperatives. If the tendency toward self-organization of the workers were to grow, the precarious status of the workers, one of the sources of the concentration of capital in the hands of the bosses, will begin to erode.

The current citizen condemnation of the cooperative mining leadership is similar to the circumstances surrounding the tragedy of September 2006, when the deadly fight between cooperativistas and waged workers for control of the Posokoni hill in Huanuni resulted in the closure of four cooperatives and nationalization of that entire mining district. Today the government, by acting without hesitation, has sent a clear message to the worker base of the cooperatives: we are a government of the workers and will no longer tolerate abuses and exploitation within the mining cooperatives. Equally clear is the message to the employers’ leadership: we are a government that defends the sovereignty of the Bolivian people over mineral resources and we will not permit their privatization or subjection to foreign ownership.

The economic power of the “cooperativista” bourgeoisie must be cut back because it is apparent that it will not hesitate one second to turn against the process of change as soon as its privileges are threatened. I said earlier that this power originates in the accumulation and concentration of capital due to the exploitation of labour and pillage of nature, but it should not be forgotten that this accumulation was facilitated by government concessions.

The conflict with the Fencomin leadership and its tragic outcome have led Evo’s government to take the following decisions: (1) preserving the real cooperative mining industry, separating out the semiformal capitalist enterprises that thrive within it; (2) returning to state ownership the areas granted to cooperatives that have signed contracts with private national or transnational corporations; and (3) stepping up the enforcement of labour laws for all workers in cooperatives, be they casual, day labourers, hired hands, k’ajchas or pieceworkers.

The bosses’ Fencomin is going through one of its worst crises and may well lose all the advantages it obtained from the government. The link disclosed between that cooperativista bourgeoisie and foreign interests — for example, in the contracts signed by Potosí cooperatives with Manquiri, the Bolivian name of the U.S. transnational Coeur de Lion Mines Corporation, which is mining the second biggest gold deposit in the country, in San Bartolomé — has also opened an opportunity to carry out further nationalizations in the mining industry since we have leaped over one of the “allies” that was always hostile to such an advance.

The true ally of the process of change are the more than 100,000 workers in the mining cooperatives, most of them Aymara and Quechua workers. It is Evo’s government that is decreeing that this labour force is likewise governed by the General Labour Law, an act unprecedented in the history of cooperative mining. This is the biggest advance in workers’ rights in a decade, which also indicates the error that a conservative tendency within the process of change had fallen into when it clung to the argument that in times of economic downturn we should not create new social rights, but simply defend those already won. The conquest and expansion of social rights is not dependent on an economic determinism or calculation of costs, it is won by dint of an historical-structural factor called class struggle.

Bolivia’s ‘process of change’ needs a change in course – Pablo Solón

Introduction

The global drop in commodity prices has been detrimental to the development strategy of many Latin American governments, some of which had used the new income from increased exports of largely unprocessed resources, accompanied by higher royalties and taxes, during the last decade to reduce poverty levels and reinforce and institute new social programs, while attempting to create new industries oriented to the domestic market or adding value to their exports.

The new phase of slower growth and even decline in the GDP of some countries shows little likelihood of ending in the foreseeable future. This in turn has renewed debate in the left over alternative approaches to development, ranging from calls to “deepen the process” initiated in the dismantling of neoliberal measures to proposals in a few countries, notably Bolivia and Ecuador, to rethink what we mean by “development,” invoking precolonial indigenous customs and ideologies (real or imagined) of Buen Vivir or Vivir Bien, Quechua and Aymara concepts of communal living in harmony with nature that are expressly adopted as guiding principles in the new constitutions of Ecuador and Bolivia respectively.

A leading exponent of the latter view is Pablo Solón, best known internationally as Bolivia’s ambassador to the United Nations during the first term of Evo Morales’ government. In that capacity he was a prominent advocate of radical action to combat climate change and in 2010 helped to sponsor the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, held in Cochabamba, Bolivia.

Pablo Solón is a long-time revolutionary socialist. In his history of Bolivian Trotskyism,[1] Sándor John describes him as a leader in the 1980s of the Organización Socialista de los Trabajadores (OST), a group that “for a time served as advisers to a new Cochabamba peasant leader named Evo Morales.” In 2011 Solón left the government and worked for a time with Focus on the Global South. He is now back in La Paz, where he heads the Solón Foundation, named after his father Walter Solón, who was one of Bolivia’s (and Latin America’s) greatest progressive artists and muralists of the 20^th century. Pablo Solón is currently campaigning in opposition to the Bolivian government’s plan to build a $6 billion hydro-electric dam. He was a featured speaker in several sessions of the World Social Forum, held in Montréal August 9-14.

Pablo Solón published the article below in February of this year, just days after the narrow defeat of a referendum sponsored by the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) government that would have allowed a constitutional amendment to enable President Evo Morales and Vice-President Álvaro García Linera to be candidates again in the 2019 elections. He analyzes what he considers to be the “underlying problems” encountered to date by the “process of change,” and offers some useful suggestions on how to renew that process and carry it forward, based on measures that would turn it in a direction more consistent with the ecosocialist discourse of Morales in international forums. The translation and notes are by me.

In a subsequent post, I will follow this contribution with another by Solón, translated from his new book ¿Es posible el Vivir Bien?, a further elaboration of the ideas presented here. And in later posts I plan to critically assess these and similar proposals now being debated in Latin America on the appropriate way forward toward furthering the process of change, with special attention to some important recent developments in the ongoing class struggle in Bolivia.

– Richard Fidler

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Some thoughts, self-criticisms and proposals concerning the process of change in Bolivia

by Pablo Solón

What has happened? How did we come to this? What occurred in the process of change that more than 15 years ago won its first victory with the water war? Why is it that a conglomeration of movements that wanted to change Bolivia ended up trapped in a referendum to allow two persons to be re-elected in 2019?

Walter Solón

To say that it’s all the work of the imperialist conspiracy is nonsensical. The idea of the referendum for re-election did not come from the White House but from the Palacio Quemado.[2] Now it is obvious that imperialism and the entire ultra-right are benefiting from this great error, the calling of a referendum to enable two persons to be re-elected.

The referendum is not the cause of the problem but one more of its tragic episodes. The process of change has lost its way and we need to think beyond the corruption scandals and lies, however important, that are only the tip of the iceberg.[3]

I left the government four years ago and during this time I have sought to understand this transformation. What is happening in Bolivia is not something unique. Since the beginning of the past century various revolutionary movements, of the left or progressive, have become the government in various countries, and although some of them have brought about important transformations, practically all have ultimately been coopted by the logics of capitalism and power.

In a very summary form I share here some ideas, self-criticisms and proposals that I hope will contribute to recovering the dreams of a process of change that is very complex and is not the property of any party or leader.

I

The logic of power captured the process

Left activists in the government generally talk of the danger of the right, imperialism and the counter-revolution, but almost never do we mention the danger that power represents in itself. The left leaders think that being in power can transform the reality of the country and are unaware that this power will overtake them, they themselves being transformed.

Generally, in the initial moments of a process of change, the new government promotes reform or transformation of the old state power structures by way of constitutional processes or insurrection. Those changes, while radical, will never be sufficient to prevent the new governing forces from being co-opted by the logic of power that is present in both reactionary and revolutionary power structures. The only way to avoid this lies outside of the state, in the strength, independence of the government, self-determination and creative mobilization of the social organizations, movements and various social actors that gave birth to those transformations.

In the case of Bolivia, which in comparison to other processes of change was very privileged by the strong presence of vigorous social organizations, one of our most serious errors was to weaken the social organizations, incorporating in the state structures a large share of their leaders who in the end became exposed to the temptations and logic of power. Before co-opting a whole generation of leaders there was a need to form real teams to manage the key divisions of the state. The granting of union headquarters, promotions, jobs and benefits to the social organizations that promoted the process of change encouraged a clientelist atmosphere of top-down perks. Instead, we should have strengthened the independence and self-acting capacity of the social organizations, to make them a genuine counter-power that proposes and monitors those of us who had become state bureaucrats. The real government of the people is not in the state structures, nor will it ever be.

We continued with an hierarchical state structure from the past and we failed to promote a more horizontal structure. The concept of “The Leader” or “the big boss” was an extremely serious error from the beginning. The cult of the personality should never have been nurtured.

Many of these mistakes were at first committed under the pressure of circumstances and owing to lack of understanding of how to administer a state apparatus in a different way. Added to our lack of experience was the conspiracy and sabotage of the Right and imperialism, which forced us to close ranks many times in an acritical way (e.g. the Porvenir massacre, negotiation of articles in the new Constitution,[4] etc.). The successes and victories against the Right, far from opening a new stage in which the process could be resumed while identifying our errors, accentuated the more caudillo-ist and centralist tendencies.

The logic of power is very similar to the logic of capital. Capital is not a thing but a process that exists solely for the purpose of generating more capital. Capital that does not invest and produce profits is capital that leaves the market. To exist, capital must be in permanent growth. The logic of power operates similarly. Unnoticed by us, the most important consideration in the government came to be the need to retain power; this meant acquiring more power in order to secure our continuity in power. The arguments behind this logic, justifying a permanent presence in government and its expansion at all costs, are extremely convincing and well-intentioned: “If we don’t have an absolute majority in the Congress the Right will go back to boycotting the government,” “The more governorships and municipal governments we control the easier it is to carry out our plans and projects,” “The justice system and other divisions of the state must be in the service of the process of change,” “Do you really want the Right to return?,” and “What will happen to the people if we lose power...”.

If the original error in the process of change was to think of ourselves as “the government of the people,” the moment of inflexion of the process began with the government’s second term of office. In 2010 the MAS won more than two thirds of the seats in the parliament and had sufficient energy to really advance toward a deep transformation along the lines of Vivir Bien. It was the moment to strengthen more than ever the counter-power of the social organizations and civil society, to limit the power of those who were in the government, the parliament, the governorships and the municipalities. It was the moment to focus efforts on promoting new activist, creative leaderships to replace us because the dynamics of power were starting to wear us down.

However, what happened was entirely the opposite. Power was centralized even more in the hands of the leaders, parliament was transformed into an appendage of the executive, clientelism continued to be fomented in the social organizations, and we even went to the extreme of dividing some indigenous organizations and attempting to control the judicial power through clumsy maneuvers that ended up frustrating the project of achieving a suitable Supreme Court, its judges independent and elected for the first time in history.

Instead of the promotion of free thinkers who would encourage debate in all the spaces of civil society and the state, those who differed with official positions were criticized and persecuted. There was a regression to an absurd toughness in approach that sought to justify the unjustifiable like the Chaparina incident, and to reverse the victory of the indigenous people and citizens who had forced a retreat in the project to build a highway through the TIPNIS national park. This context, in which obsequiousness was prioritized and criticism was treated like the plague, encouraged control of the media through various means, undermined the emergence of new leaders, and strengthened the delusion that the process of change involving millions of people depended on a pair of individuals.

The logic of power had captured the process of change and the most important thing came to be the second re-election and now the third.

II

Alliances that undermined the process

Any process of social transformation displaces certain sectors, catapults others and generates new social sectors. In Bolivia’s case, the process of change meant at first the displacement of a technocratic middle class and parasitic state bourgeoisie that for decades had alternated in government and had always had relatives in the power structures in order to obtain bids, offices, concessions, contracts, lands and other benefits.

In 2006 this sector was displaced and although some of its members continued to occupy state functions it no longer enjoyed its previous power to carry on business with the state. A very intense struggle began in the country between, on the one hand, long dominant social sectors that had been displaced or feared losing their privileges (landlords, agro-industrial interests and business people) and, on the other hand, emergent indigenous, peasant and working class sectors and an extremely diverse popular middle class. The eastern oligarchies skillfully developed a discourse of “autonomies” in order to win support in sectors of the population and the confrontation brought us almost to the edge of civil war. In the end, thanks to the social mobilization and the defeat of these elites in the referendum to revoke the President’s mandate, the most reactionary sectors were cast aside.[5] However, despite its defeat, this oligarchy achieved some partial victories with the amendments to the draft constitution which at the time seemed small in view of the desire to obtain the largest popular consensus in favour of the new Constitution of the Plurinational State of Bolivia. This marked the beginning of a pernicious policy of alliances that over time sapped the spirit of the process of change.

Government leaders who had begun to be captured by the logic of power opted for a strategy of signing agreements with the economic representatives of the opposition even while prosecuting their political leaders. An economic carrot to go with the political stick!

Thus, little by little, the banners of the agrarian revolution were emptied of content. The vast majority of the pre-2006 landholdings were not affected. The emphasis was placed on surveying and titling of lands that for the most part favoured the indigenous and campesinos but did not go on to dismantle the power of the latifundistas. What developed in this context was an alliance with the most important agro-business interests: the exporters of GMO-produced soy, who were allowed to continue and increase the production of these GMO crops. While in 2005 GMO soy made up only 21% of Bolivia’s soy production, by 2012 it accounted for 92%. The auditing of the constitutional requirement that large properties had to fulfill a social and economic function failing which they would be expropriated and turned over to other uses was postponed, the illegal clearing of forests was pardoned and demands were made to expand deforestation for the benefit essentially of the agro-export enterprises.

These alliances, which prior to 2006 would have been thought unthinkable, were justified with the argument that this would split the Santa Cruz opposition and show that the government was well regarded in the cities of the Media Luna, while avoiding a polarization like that in Venezuela, since the economic sectors of the right-wing opposition would see that it was to their benefit not to disrupt the stability of the government.

This policy of alliances to stabilize and consolidate “the government of the people” was adopted in just about all sectors of economic power. The financial bourgeoisie, which from the outset was treated with kid gloves in order to avoid the risk of a bank run, as in the times of the UDP,[6] was one of the biggest beneficiaries. The profits of the financial sector in Bolivia went from $43 million in 2005 to $283 million in 2014. The pattern was similar in the case of the privately-owned transnational mining industry which, notwithstanding a few nationalizations, has retained a 70% share of mining exports throughout the last ten years. The Ministry of Finance reports that private sector profits had risen to more than $4 billion by 2013.

The process of change had not only been captured by the logic of power but the interests of the right-wing business sectors had begun to undermine it from within.

III

The nouveaux riches

These policies of alliance with the enemy would not have been possible had there not occurred as well a transformation in the social foundation of the process of change. In almost all revolutionary processes that have taken place in this and the past century, after a process of confrontation with the old displaced sectors there arise within the revolutionary process groups of nouveaux riches and bureaucrats who want to enjoy their new status and to do so they ally with sectors of the old rich. Improvement in the conditions of life of some sectors, in particular some leaderships, does not necessarily lead to a better development of consciousness, rather the contrary. The only way to resist those nouveaux riches and new middle classes of popular origin is, once again, through having strong social organizations. However, when these organizations are weakened and co-opted by the state, there is no counterweight to the new sectors of economic power that begin to influence in a decisive way the decisions that are taken.

By the beginning of the government’s second mandate, in 2010, it was clear that the major danger for the process of change came not from outside but from within the leaderships and new power groups that were forming in the municipalities, governorships, state enterprises, public administration, armed forces and government ministries. The distribution of the rent from the gas between all of these entities opened up an incredible opportunity to do business — deals of all kinds, both big and small. In the higher spheres they were aware of the danger but efficient mechanisms of internal and external monitoring of the state apparatus were not adopted in time. The dominant logic came to be that of public works followed by more works in an effort to win more popularity and thereby be re-elected. That is how new sectors of economic power came to the fore — political and union leaders, and contractors who began to climb socially thanks to the state. Added to them were merchants, smugglers, cooperativista miners, coca growers, transportistas [bus and truck owners] and others who obtained a series of concessions and benefits as a result of which they represented major sources of electoral support.

The problem of the process of change is deeper than what appears. It involves not only serious mistakes by individuals or soap-opera corruption scandals but the emergence now of a bourgeoisie and popular middle class — chola, Aymara and Quechua — who want no more than to continue with their process of economic accumulation.

To renew the process of change it is necessary to reinvigorate old social organizations and create new ones. Today there is no assurance that those who were the key actors a decade ago will be the key actors of tomorrow. It is foolish to think that with a change of personnel it is possible to resume the process of change. The process is more complex, and requires the reconstitution of the social fabric that gave rise to it.

IV

From Vivir Bien to extractivism

To reinvigorate and renew the process of change it is fundamental to know what country we are building and be very sincere and self-critical. The achievements of the last ten years are undeniable in many aspects and have their origin in the increased income of the state resulting from the renegotiation of the contracts with the petroleum transnationals at a time of high prices of hydrocarbons. Strictly speaking it cannot be said that it was a nationalization since even today two transnational enterprises, Petrobras and Repsol, handle 75% of the production of natural gas in Bolivia. What it involved was a renegotiation of contracts to provide that the share of total profits of these transnational companies got through earnings and recovery of costs declined from 43% in 2005 to only 22% in 2013. It is true that the petroleum transnationals remain in Bolivia and make three times what they were making ten years ago, but the other side of the coin is that the state now has eight times as much income, rising from $673 million in 2005 to $5.459 billion in 2013.[7] This enormous increase in revenue has allowed a leap in public investment, the application of a series of conditional cash grant social programs, the development of infrastructure projects, the extension of basic services, an increase in international reserves and other measures. Compared to past decades, there has undeniably been an improvement in the situation of the population, and that explains the support the government still has.

However, the question is where is this model taking us? To Vivir Bien? To communitarian socialism? Or, on the contrary, have we become addicted to extractivism and the rentism of a basically export-oriented capitalist economy?

The original idea was to nationalize hydrocarbons in order to redistribute the wealth and advance from extractivism of raw materials to diversification of the economy. Now, ten years later, notwithstanding some economic diversification projects, we have not overcome the trend and instead are more dependent on exports of raw materials (gas, minerals and soy). Why have we stalled at the halfway point and made ourselves virtual addicts of extractivism and exports? Because this was the easiest way to obtain resources and to retain power. Of course there were other options, but obviously none of them would have quickly generated the revenue from foreign exchange that would build popular support for the government. Advancing toward an agro-ecological Bolivia would have been a road much more consistent with Vivir Bien and care for Mother Earth, but it would not have guaranteed in the short term large amounts of economic revenue and would have led to a confrontation with the big agro-industrial sector founded on GMO-based soy production and export.

Self-critically, we must say that the import substitution vision we have had for more than ten years is not feasible on the scale we imagined due to competition from much cheaper international goods and the reduced size of our own internal market. And it is still more difficult when no real monopoly of foreign trade and control of smuggling has been established. Appropriate measures such as restraining Bolivia’s free-trade agreements, terminating the FTA with Mexico and breaking from the CIADI,[8] were not accompanied by measures for effective control of foreign trade.

Vivir Bien and the rights of Mother Earth attracted international renown but at the national level were increasingly devalued because they were limited to the realm of discourse, but not practice. The TIPNIS dispute was the drop that overflowed the glass, illustrating the inconsistency between talking and doing.

V

Another Bolivia is possible

Days before the referendum it was reported that a solar energy plant would be built in Oruro that will generate 50 MW of power and cover one half of the demand for electrical energy in the department of Oruro, for an investment of about $100 million. The news attracted little attention, although it is a small indication of how Another Bolivia is Possible.

Bolivia can gradually let go of extractivism and put itself in the vanguard of a real community-based solar energy revolution. If it were to invest one billion dollars it could generate 500 MW of solar energy, which is about one-third of the present national demand. The transformation can be much more profound if we consider that the government has announced it will spend a total of 47 billion dollars on investments between now and 2020.

Furthermore, Bolivia could support community, municipal and family solar power that would turn electricity consumers into energy producers. Instead of subsidizing diesel for agro-industrial interests, that money could be invested to help lower-income Bolivians generate solar energy on their roofs. The generation of electrical energy would be democratized and decentralized. Vivir Bien will begin to be a reality when society is economically empowered (as producers and not only as consumers and recipients of social welfare grants) and activities are promoted to recover our lost equilibrium with nature.

The true alternative to privatization is not statization but the socialization of the means of production. State enterprises often behave like private enterprises when there is no effective participation and social control. Looking to the generation of solar energy based on community, municipal and family efforts would help empower society in place of the state and would help to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that produce climate change.

The topic of community and family solar energy is just a small indication of how we can think outside of the traditional patterns of “development.” Similarly, we must recover the proposal of a Bolivia of ecological agriculture and forestry because the true wealth of nations in the decades ahead will not be in the destructive extractivism of raw materials but in the preservation of our biodiversity, in the production of ecological products, and in coexistence with nature, in which we have a great legacy through the indigenous peoples. Bolivia must not commit the same errors of the so-called “developed” nations. The country can leap stages if it knows how to read the real possibilities and dangers of the 21^st century and leave behind the old developmentalism of the 20^th century.

No one is thinking of putting an end to the extraction and export of gas forthwith. But it is definitely not possible to be making plans to extend extractivism when there exist alternatives that perhaps in the short term are more complicated to implement but in the medium term are much more beneficial for humanity and Mother Earth.

Instead of promoting referendums for the re-election of two persons we should be promoting referendums on GMOs, nuclear energy, megadams, deforestation, public investment and many other subjects that are crucial for the process of change. The process can only be renewed through a greater exercise of real democracy.

A misreading of what has occurred can lead to more authoritarian forms of government and the emergence of a new neoliberal Right, as is happening in Argentina. No doubt there are right-wing sectors operating both from the opposition and from within the government. Nor can we close our eyes to the fact that sectors of the Left and social movements have let themselves be co-opted by power and we have been unable to articulate a clear alternative program.

The renewal of the process of change involves: (a) critically and pro-actively discussing the problems of unviable late capitalist developmentalism underlying the Patriotic Agenda for 2025;[9] (b) evaluating, explaining and adopting actions inside and outside of the state in order to confront the problems and dangers generated by the logic of power (authoritarianism, clientelism, contentment with the status quo, nouveaux riches, spurious pragmatic alliances, corruption, etc.); (c) overcoming the contradiction between what we say and what we do, and implementing in real life the rights of Mother Earth and projects that substantially contribute to harmony with Nature; and (d) being self-critical with ourselves and with the very same organizations and social movements that in some cases reproduce damaging autocratic practices and unwarranted prerogatives for a few.

Vivir Bien is possible!

25 February 2016

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[1] S. Sándor John, Bolivia’s Radical Tradition: Permanent Revolution in the Andes (Tucson, University of Arizona Press, 2009), p. 221.

[2] Palacio Quemado, literally “burned palace,” the popular name for the Presidential Palace, official residence of the President.

[3] During the referendum campaign, opposition and social media fulminated over a number of scandals that were later proved to be without foundation. Perhaps the most notorious began with an opposition journalist’s allegation shortly before the referendum vote that Evo Morales had fathered a “love child” in 2007 with a woman, now the Bolivian head of a Chinese construction company, that was allegedly being given priority in the awarding of state contracts. No such child has ever been produced and a subsequent parliamentary inquiry found no evidence of influence-peddling in the awarding of the company’s contracts.

[4] Following the defeat of the right-wing opposition governors in the 2008 presidential recall referendum, the MAS majority leaders in the Constituent Assembly negotiated with the opposition leaders important concessions (retention of a Senate, no retroactivity of the land reform that would have ended latifundism, etc.) in the draft Constitution in order to obtain the necessary two-thirds majority for adoption of the final version, which was then ratified in a popular plebiscite.

[5] See note 4, above.

[6] See, for example, James Dunkerley, Political Transition and Economic Stabilisation: Bolivia, 1982-1989, Institute of Latin American Studies, University of London, 1990. In particular, pp. 16-17.

[7] Carlos Arce Vargas, Une década de gobierno: ¿Construyendo el Vivir Bien o el capitalismo salvaje?, CEDLA 2016.

[8] CIADI - Centro Internacional de Arreglo de Diferencias Relativas a Inversiones, or International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes, associated with the World Bank.

[9] Evo Morales unveiled the Patriotic Agenda in his annual Presidential Report, January 22, 2013. The full text with explanations, in Spanish, is available here.

Bolivia’s vice-president on the challenge of a new left for the 21st century

by Álvaro García Linera

The following is a speech given in Athens by Bolivia’s vice-president on June 20, 2015, at the Eighth Resistance Festival. Edited for publication, the text appears in the current issue (No. 15) of La Migraña, a magazine published by the Bolivian government.

In a previous article I summarized García Linera’s comments, toward the end of his presentation, on the situation in Greece at the time, just two weeks before the Greek people voted overwhelmingly in a referendum to reject the moves by the Eurozone leaders to impose further indebtedness and austerity on them. This is my translation of the rest of his presentation.

– Richard Fidler

* * *

Greece’s crisis: The challenge of a new left and the resurgence in Europe

I was asked to address the question, What are the characteristics of the left in this, the 21^st century?

As Marx said, basically we have to recognize the movement that is unfolding before our eyes, the real movement that is developing here in Greece, and in Spain, Ecuador, Brazil, Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia and other parts of the world, that is revealing innovations and new themes in the construction of the processes of emancipation.

Given that no revolutionary process is definitive or a formula but instead is a flow with advances, retreats and uncertainties, we do not know whether the new left — or what we call a new left — will deliver humanity to a new destiny in the following century. Perhaps it will do so, or perhaps it will fail. What is clear is that there is a resurgence, a new debate and new experiences; and it is this that I wish to address, starting with five aspects,[1] and then reflecting briefly on what is happening in Greece.

Characteristics defining the emergence of the contemporary lefts

1. Social movement transformed into a drive for state power. Representative state governance and social governance

One of the new things, if we take into account what happened in the second half of the 20^th century, but not so new if we go back to the early years of that century, is the relation between party and social movement.

The experience of the left in the 21^st century has altered the debate that we inherited from the 1940s. Then the main issue was the vanguard, a party of cadres, of professional revolutionaries with their activists, their intellectuals, their central committee (which was the brain and the epicenter of the revolution) and collective actors (fundamentally, workers or peasants) who had to follow and support the decisions, the road traced by that vanguard — an armed vanguard, electoral vanguard or clandestine vanguard, but always the vanguard.

Today it no longer happens that way — and it’s not only that previously it failed but that today it no longer functions. The living experiences of the social struggles in the world at the end of the 20^th century and beginning of the 21^st century are showing us another type of articulation. They are showing us that in some cases the party structures arise from the social movement itself; that the frontier between social movement and party is very ambiguous, porous; and that the party structures (which provide a certain scope for cohesion, unity, principles and organization) maintain very direct, free-flowing and organic links with the social organizing structures and with the emerging social movements.

That is good because it breaks with the concept of the vanguard and an unconscious mass led by it. It shows us that the mass is not so “mass” and much less that it is unconscious, and that civil society is complex. It builds leaderships, thinks and sometimes needs centers of cohesion and control (a party). However, these centers of cohesion and control are not what is fundamental; in fact, they are only necessary and have leadership capacity if they are permanently fostering their organic link (their metabolism) with the social organizations, with the social movement.

Sometimes this shocks people who come from the old school, used to the discipline, the democratic centralism, the cohesiveness, the permanent militancy and the quasi-Jesuitical view of politics as a mission and commitment. But that’s the way it is.

Today, the party affiliation is more lax, more flexible, more ambiguous. And one has to know how to understand those new languages and begin to act in terms of those new spiritual predispositions of the people.

This ambiguous frontier between social movement and party — now not a vanguard but a party, more compact and unifying — while it is something new, something that can be appreciated in the distinct European and Latin American experiences, leaves us with two lessons. The first, that there is no new left that is detached from the social movement; and the second, that there is no successful social movement that does not have, by necessity, a continuity, an organic extension in party structures striving for state power.

That is, a political party will be successful in its proposals for social, economic and political transformation in so far as it has continuity, participation, and links with collective, plural actors. Moreover, the old political systems do not break down unless there is a strong social movement that bursts onto the scene, breaks or smashes the state domination and reconfigures social identities. In turn, if the social movement still wants to be something more than a protest and an indication of discontent it will have to have some extension at the level of the state, and to be able to translate itself into a determination to gain management and control over the state.

However, it is not that the social movement has to lead into a state, since in fact the social movement is more than the state, and confronts the state. Nevertheless, its effectiveness will be gauged in its capacity to work in conjunction with a state actor: to be a social movement outside of the state but with the ability to influence, affect and transform the state. Perhaps the new thing now in the left is that it is an actor of state transformation and simultaneously an actor outside of the state. That, in turn, is going to characterize the forms of government of the new lefts.

Electoral state legitimacy and representative governability: parliament, ministry, state institutions, parliamentary majorities and agreements; but parallel to this extra-state legitimacy, outside of the state — in the society, the streets, the factories, and the mobilizations. The revolutionary stability of a political party of the left will have to have those two pillars: representative state governance and social governance.

The possibility of continuing to carry out changes in the institutions of government, of the state, the laws and the functioning of the parliament itself will always lie in the ability to have a force of extra-parliamentary social mobilization (outside of the parliament), which will be what drives transformations within the parliament and the executive and judicial organs themselves. This is, then, a new system of dual political governance.

Álvaro García Linera with Zoe Konstantopoulou, the Speaker of the Greek parliament. As Vice-President, he also presides over proceedings of Bolivia’s Plurinational Assembly.

2. New material and social condition of the working class. The plebeian form of collective and contemporary action

A second change that I note in the emergence of the new lefts — sometimes not so new because they include a lot of the past experience — is the quality of the social movement.

Two things are happening as a result of the recent processes of globalization of the economy of the last 30 or 40 years: a change in workers’ conditions, in the material conditions of the working class, and an increasing complexity in social conditions.

In the first case, the old composition of working class, big industry, huge factory, a worker stronghold, unionized, disciplined, that passed on knowledge from workers with more experience to younger ones, and that created loyalties on the job based on that transmission of knowledge and hierarchies, controlled by the worker, has disappeared.

Today there are more workers in the world than there were 30 years ago. There is an overwhelming proletarianization of jobs, including those we think of ourselves as middle class and professional. However, it is simply another means of proletarianization, fragmented, diluted, nomadic, without loyalties within the workplace structure and without transmission of knowledge from older to newer workers. Today, knowledge is controlled by the firms and not by the older workers who passed it on to the young worker, as in the case of skilled labour. There are no unions [or rather] there is a huge process of de-unionization, the unions are small and cover only a small part of the working class. We have the emergence of young workers with other mentalities and sensibilities, and a feminization of the working class, with another kind of concerns and languages, different from the classic male chauvinist and centralized language of the union in a big plant.

This is a process of transformation of the class, whose condensation in discourse, organization and collective myths capable of converting it into a visible political force will take decades. The working class that we knew in the Twenties, Thirties or Forties of the previous century took at least one hundred years to mature.

This new working class, which is still dispersed and fragmented in its political visibility, in its constitution as an acting political subject, has yet to go through a long and emergent process that corresponds to the new material composition of the working class, both continental and global. But parallel to this process, we have the emergence of more plebeian social actors or subjects, that is, who develop not according to where they work but according to their interests, and who are more plural and more flexible in the way they interconnect. I am referring, for example, to the mobilizations over the debt, basic services, education, that bring together workers, bus, taxi and truck drivers, shopkeepers, students, neighbours and professionals.

The structures of organization and control of those social subjects are also more flexible and more casual: they last for a time (a few months) and later dissolve after having achieved some result, in order later to convene again and mobilize around other subjects and with distinct hierarchies. There is no longer a unique center of mobilization or a single line of action. In one mobilization a particular sector will take the leadership; in another, another sector. In some cases, the unions will take the leadership, while in others it may be the students who bring together unions and neighbors, or perhaps the public employees in the transportation industry bring students and professionals together.

The processes of mobilization are becoming more complex, and we revolutionaries must know how to understand the quality, flexibility and concerns of collective action, which we have named the plebeian form of contemporary collective action, and which corresponds to the primary levels in the construction of the worker identity and the workers movement.

3. Concerning democracy in the sense of democracy as a space for achieving socialism

A third new aspect in the debate in the left of the 21^st century is the question of democracy. The old school of party membership had taught us that it was simply a tool, a means or a route among many other particular means or routes for obtaining or arriving at an end: socialism. That is, one more tool, available along with other tools, that we could use or leave aside — because a tool is something that one can use or stop using on certain occasions — something circumstantial.

This conception of the democratic as a tool — elections, votes, parliament, representation — is being and must be modified by a conception of democracy as a space of accomplishment (and not only as a means).

The democratic in the full sense, the Greek sense of the word, must be viewed as the place for the achievement of socialism itself. We cannot have socialism, much less communism, if it is not like an expansion, like the radical surge in democratic practices in all conditions of life: in the university, in the college, in the street, in the neighborhood, in day to day life, in the party, in the economy, in the management and control of the economy, the banks, the factories, and in agriculture.

Democracy cannot be viewed as a temporary means toward an end, since it is really more the scenario or territory where the construction of the socialist horizon unfolds. And here we are referring not only to a democratic road to socialism — as opposed to the armed struggle or undemocratic road — but to the fact that socialism either is democratic or it is not socialism. In other words, socialism either is participation and increasing deliberation of society in all the circumstances of life, in the definition of public policy, in the control of the factories, the universities, the educational systems, the financial systems... or it is not socialism.

4. An alternative model of economy and society in the short and long term. The transitional program of the left

A fourth theme — perhaps the most urgent in the experience of the left in the 21^st century — is the alternative model of economy and society in the long term, namely, the communist horizon; but also the alternative in the economy and society of today (2015, 2016, 2017), because the emergence of the new left or the resurgence of the left in Latin America or Europe is inexplicable without the need for some alternative. If neoliberalism were operating marvellously, generating well-being for the people, we would have no left; or, in any case, we would still have those “fake lefts” in charge that do not differ in any way from the European or Latin American ultraright, like the European Social Democracy.

The left emerges in the midst of neoliberalism because there are breakdowns, because there is discontent in the population, people are unhappy and their expectations are unfulfilled. So the left emerges in order to resolve today — not as some distant dream for 700 years from now, but today — the peoples’ problems: work, employment, growth, distribution, justice, dignity and sovereignty.

Accordingly, the lefts that are emerging now are obliged to think about a post-neoliberal economic program of transition (using the old language of the 20^th century), a transitional program of democratization of public institutions, cleaning up public administration, which is full of corrupt scoundrels. The left is obliged to think about that.

And while each country and region has its own particular features and needs, in the case of Bolivia our transitional program — amidst an unchecked neoliberalism — was very clear. Economically, nationalization of natural resources; politically, an indigenous government; socially and institutionally, a Constituent Assembly to reconstitute the long-term social pacts.

We are talking about a very precise, concrete, viable and tangible program that was responsive to the expectations of the people. A concrete proposal to respond to concrete needs, because the people and the society have very concrete needs. However, we must not forget that the concrete is also the most complicated.

Of course we intellectuals can analyze things, but to make the synthesis of multiple determinations — what is concrete, as Marx says — is what is most complicated and difficult. The people have concrete needs, and as revolutionaries, intellectuals, committed academics, party members and activists, we have to be able likewise to have concrete answers....

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[1] In this edited text, as in his oral presentation (pages 25-32), García Linera says he will discuss five aspects, but actually identifies and discusses four, the fifth possibly being what he goes on to say about the situation in Greece. – RF.

Marta Harnecker on New Paths Toward 21st Century Socialism

Introduction by Richard Fidler

Among the many panels and plenaries at the Conference of the Society for Socialist Studies, which met in Ottawa June 2-5, was a Book Launch for Marta Harnecker’s latest English-language book, A World to Build: New Paths toward Twenty-First Century Socialism (translated by Federico Fuentes), Monthly Review Press.

The featured speaker was Marta Harnecker, with Professor Susan Spronk and myself invited as discussants. The session was titled “Author Meets Critics.” I am publishing below the opening presentation by Marta, followed by a slightly expanded version of my comment. Unfortunately, time constraints (our session was followed immediately by a panel on current events in Greece) meant that there was little opportunity for discussion from the audience.

As the chair, Michael Lebowitz, noted in his introduction, Marta Harnecker has authored over 80 books as a leading Marxist theorist and popular educator in Latin America, over the course of a career that began in her native Chile and later included extended sojourns in Cuba, Nicaragua and other countries. A World to Build summarizes what in her opinion are the major lessons to be learned so far from the current advances of progressive governments in Latin America and the issues they pose for radicals everywhere.

The Spanish edition of the book was awarded Venezuela’s “Liberator’s Prize for Critical Thought” in 2014.

Photo by Andrea Levy

Marta and me.

 

A world to build (New Paths toward Twenty-First Century Socialism) – Marta Harnecker

I completed this book one month after the physical disappearance of President Hugo Chávez, without whose intervention in Latin America this book could not have been written. Many of the ideas I raise in it are related in one way or another to the Bolivarian leader, to his ideas and actions, within Venezuela and at the regional and global level. Nobody can deny that there is a huge difference between the Latin America that Chávez inherited and the Latin America he has left for us today.

That is why I dedicated the book to him with the following words:

To Comandante Chávez, whose words, orientations and exemplary dedication to the cause of the poor will serve as a compass for his people and all the people of the world. It will be the best shield to defend ourselves from those that seek to destroy this marvellous work that he began to build.

Twenty-five years ago left forces in Latin America and in the world in general were going through a difficult period. The Berlin Wall had fallen; the Soviet Union hurtled into the abyss and disappeared completely by the end of 1991.

Deprived of the rear-guard it needed, the Sandinista revolution was defeated at the elections of February 1990 and Central American guerrilla movements were forced to demobilize.

The only country that kept the banners of revolution flying was Cuba.

In that situation it was difficult to imagine that 25 years later most of our countries would be governed by left-wing leaders.

Latin America was the first region where neoliberal policies were introduced. Chile, my country, was used as a testing ground before Margaret Thatcher’s government implemented them in the United Kingdom.

But it was also the first region in the world where these policies gradually came to be rejected; policies which had served only to increase poverty and social inequalities, destroy the environment and weaken working class and popular movements in general.

It was in our subcontinent that left and progressive forces first began to rally after the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

After more than two decades of suffering, new hopes were born.

Candidates from left and centre-left groupings managed to win elections in most of the region’s countries.

This process began with the election of Chávez in 1998. At that point, Venezuela was a lonely island in a sea of neoliberalism that covered the continent.

But the neoliberal capitalist model was already beginning to founder. The choice then was whether to re-establish this model with a more human face or to go ahead and try to build another.

Chávez had the courage to take the second path and decided to call it “socialism,” in spite of its negative connotations.

And I say courage because following socialism’s collapse in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, most leftist intellectuals of the world were in a state of confusion.

We seemed to know more about what we did not want socialism to be than what we wanted.

We rejected: lack of democracy, totalitarianism, state capitalist bureaucratic methods, central planning, collectivism that did not respect differences, productivism that emphasized the expansion of productive forces without taking into consideration the need to preserve nature, dogmatism, intolerance towards legitimate opposition, attempts to impose atheism by persecuting believers, the conviction that a sole party was needed to lead the process of transition.

Today, the situation in Latin America has changed. We have a rough idea of what we want.

Yet, why is the region clearer today on what kind of future society we want to construct?

I believe this is largely due to:
First, the practical experience of what we have referred to as “local governments of popular participation.” They are profoundly democratic governments that have opened up spaces for peoples’ empowerment and, thanks to their transparency, contributed to the fight against corruption.
Second, the rediscovery of communitarian indigenous practices, from which we have much to learn, and
Third, what we can learn from those Latin American governments that have proposed moving towards an anticapitalist society.

These beacons, that began to radiate throughout our continent, were strengthened by the resounding failure of neoliberalism, the increased resistance and struggle of social movements, and, more recently, the global crisis of capitalism.

An alternative to capitalism is now more necessary than ever.

Chávez called it “21^st century socialism,” to differentiate it from the Soviet-style socialism that had been implemented in the 20^th century.

This was not about “falling into the errors of the past,” into the same “Stalinist deviations” which bureaucratized the party and ended up eliminating popular participation.

The need for peoples’ participation was one of his obsessions and was the feature that distinguished his proposals from other socialist projects in which the state resolves all the problems and the people receive benefits as if they were gifts.

He was convinced that socialism could not be decreed from above, that it had to be built with the people.

And he also understood that protagonistic participation is what allows people to grow and achieve self-confidence, that is, to develop themselves as human beings.

I always remember the first program of “Aló Presidente Teórico,” which was broadcast on June 11, 2009, when Chávez quoted at length from a letter that Peter Kropotkin, the Russian anarchist, wrote to Lenin on March 4, 1920:

Kropotkin wrote:

Without the participation of local forces, without an organization from below of the peasants and workers themselves, it is impossible to build a new life. It seemed that the soviets were going to fulfil precisely this function of creating an organization from below. But Russia has already become a Soviet Republic in name only. The party’s influence over people [...] has already destroyed the influence and constructive energy of this promising institution – the soviets.

Think about how significant it was that Chávez was quoting Kropotkin in this program that all Venezuela was watching.

This model of socialism, which many have called “real socialism,” is a fundamentally statist, centralist, bureaucratic model, where the key missing factor is popular participation.

Michael Lebowitz has recently called this model the society of the conductor and the conducted.^[1]

Do you remember when this socialism collapsed and people talked about the death of socialism and the death of Marxism?

At the time, Eduardo Galeano, the wonderful Uruguayan writer who recently died, said that we were invited to a funeral we did not belong at. The socialism that died was not the socialist project we had fought for.

Real socialism had little to do with Marx and Engels’ vision of socialism. For them, socialism was impossible without popular participation.

If we look at Latin America, the map of our region has radically changed since 1998. A new balance of forces has been established which makes it more difficult for the United States to achieve its objectives in the region.

The US government no longer has the same freedom as it used to have to manoeuvre in our region.

Now it has to deal with rebel Latin American governments who have their own agenda, which often clashes with the White House agenda.

We should be clear, however, that the attempts of US Imperialism to stop the forward march of our countries continue and have even increased in the last period.

However, the most advanced countries of our region have begun to make steps to build another world. Is has been called Socialism of the 21st Century, Christian Indoamericano Socialism, Indoamericano, Sociedad del Buen Vivir (Good life society) or Sociedad de la vida en plenitude (Full life society). A socialism where the human being is the centre and human development is the goal.

I say that those countries are in transition to socialism.

But what type of transition are we talking about?

We are not dealing with a transition occurring in advanced capitalist countries, something that has never occurred in history, nor of a transition in a backward country where the people have conquered state power via armed struggle as occurred with 20th century revolutions (Russia, China, Vietnam, Cuba and others). Instead, we are dealing with a very particular transition where, via the institutional road, we have achieved governmental power.

In this regard, I think the situation in Latin America in the 1980s and 1990s is in some ways comparable to that experienced by pre-revolutionary Russia at the beginning of the 20^th century. What the imperialist war and its horrors were for Russia, neoliberalism and its horrors were for Latin America: the extent of hunger and misery, increasingly unequal distribution of wealth, destruction of nature, increasing loss of our sovereignty.

In these circumstances, our peoples said “enough!” and began to walk, resisting at first, and then going on the offensive, making possible the victory of left or centre-left presidential candidates on the back of anti-neoliberal programs.

This process of transformation from government is not only a long process but also a process full of challenges and difficulties. Nothing ensures that it will be a linear process; there is always the possibility of retreats and failures.

This process has to confront not only backward economic conditions but also the fact that the people still do not have complete state power.

These governments inherited a state apparatus whose characteristics are functional to the capitalist system, but are not suitable for advancing towards socialism.

In relation to this, we should recall that the first socialist experiment in the Western world by the institutional way took place in Chile, with the triumph of President Salvador Allende and the leftist Unidad Popular (Popular Unity, UP) coalition in September 1970.

I think Allende’s socialist project was the precursor of the 21^st century socialism of which President Chávez was the great promoter.

Not only was Allende the first socialist president in the Western world to be elected democratically, by popular vote, he was the first to try advancing toward socialism by the institutional road and the first to understand that to do this he had to take his distance from the Soviet model.

Socialism by the institutional way cannot be imposed from above, it has to rely on the support of a large majority of the population.

Remember, though, that Allende won with a simple plurality (only 36% of the votes); the rest of the votes were divided between Christian Democrats and conservatives. As a result Allende was obliged to make agreements with the Christian Democrats to have their support in the Congressional vote of ratification in November 1970.

One of the great limitations that the Allende government had was the institutional framework it inherited.

The Chilean president knew they needed to elaborate a new constitution in order to change the institutional rules of the game and to facilitate the peaceful transition to socialism.^[2] Why did he never issue that call? Probably because the Popular Unity still lacked the majority electoral support that was indispensable if a successful constituent process was to be carried out. The UP never managed to achieve 50% or more of the votes.^[3] But why not try to change that situation?

Perhaps he lacked audacity, the audacity that President Chávez had when the opposition called for a referendum to overthrow him and he agreed to enter the fight even though at that point the polls put him far behind. He immediately planned how to achieve the forces to win in this contest and he created the idea of the patrols, that is, groups of 10 persons who could involve people who were not members of parties but who sympathized with Chávez; each of them was to win the support of another 10 by going house to house.

Unfortunately, Allende’s project was too heterodox for the Chilean orthodox left of that time, a left that was too orthodox, as its positions did not correspond to the new challenges that the country was undergoing. I can give you some examples of that orthodoxy^[4] later if you want.

One of the more important lessons we can extract from the Chilean process is the importance of the popular organization at the base. One of our greatest weaknesses was not to understand this, to delegate political action to the politicians, or rather, the fact that the politicians appropriated politics and, with that, the Popular Unity committees — which were basic to Allende’s electoral victory — began to weaken and to disappear.

When Allende was defeated by a military coup on September 11, 1973, most of the left activists saw this as confirmation of the need to destroy the bourgeois state apparatus and abandon attempts to advance toward socialism via the institutional road.

Nevertheless, practice has demonstrated, contrary to the theoretical dogmatism of some sectors of the radical left, that if revolutionary cadres run the government, the inherited State apparatus can be used as an instrument in the process of building the new society.

But we must be clear, this does not mean that the cadres can simply limit themselves to using the inherited state. It is necessary — using the power in their hands — to go about building a new correlation of forces that can be used to begin to build the foundations of the new political system and new institutions — the new rules of the institutional game, that is to say, a new Constitution and new laws, which can create spaces for popular participation that can help prepare the people to exercise power from the most simple to the most complex level.

And we should build a new correlation of forces overcoming the old and deeply rooted error of attempting to build political force without building social force.

However, we should always remember that the right only respects the rules of the game as long as it suits their purposes.

They can tolerate and even help bring a left government to power if that government implements the policies of the right and limits itself to managing the crisis.

What they will always try to prevent, by legal or illegal means — and we should have no illusions about this — is a program of deep democratic and popular transformations that puts into question their economic interests.

We can deduce from this that these governments and the left must be prepared to confront fierce resistance. They must be capable of defending the achievements they have won democratically against forces that speak about democracy as long as their material interests and privileges are not touched. Was it not the case in Venezuela that the initial enabling laws, which only slightly impinged on these privileges, were the main factor in unleashing a process that culminated in a military coup in 2002, supported by right-wing opposition parties, against a democratically elected president supported by his people?

It is also important to understand that the dominant elite does not represent the entire opposition. It is vital that we differentiate between a destructive, conspiratorial, anti-democratic opposition and a constructive opposition that is willing to respect the rules of the democratic game and collaborate in many tasks that are of common interest.

That was the strategy that Fidel Castro followed in fighting against Batista’s dictatorship, as I explained in my book, Fidel Castro's Political Strategy: From Moncada to Victory.^[5]

In this way we avoid putting all opposition forces and personalities in the same basket. We divide the enemy and concentrate our forces on the principal one.

Being capable of recognizing the positive initiatives that the democratic opposition promotes and not condemning a priori everything they suggest will, I believe, help us win over many sectors that in the beginning are not on our side. Perhaps not the elite leaders, but the middle cadres and broad sections of the people influenced by them, which is most important.

Another important challenge these governments face is the need to overcome the inherited culture that exists within the people, but not only among them. It also persists among government cadres, functionaries, party leaders and militants, workers and social movements leaderships. I’m talking about traits such as individualism, personalism, political careerism, consumerism, top down methods of leadership, etc.

Moreover, since advances come at a slow pace many leftists tend to become demoralized. When solutions are not rapidly forthcoming, people get disillusioned.

That is why I believe that, just as our revolutionary leaders need to use the state in order to change the inherited balance of forces, they must also carry out a pedagogical task when they are confronted with limits or brakes along the path.

I call this a pedagogy of limitations.

Many times we believe that talking about difficulties will only demoralize and dishearten the people, when, on the contrary, if our popular sectors are kept informed, are explained why it is not possible to immediately achieve the desired goals, this can help them better understand the process in which they find themselves and moderate their demands.

Intellectuals as well should be widely informed so they are able to defend the process and also to criticize it if necessary.

But this pedagogy of limitations must be simultaneously accompanied by encouragement of popular mobilizations and creativity, thereby avoiding the possibility that initiatives from the people become domesticated and prepare us to accept criticisms of possible faults within the government.

Not only should popular pressure be tolerated, it should be understood that it is necessary to help those in government combat errors and deviations that can emerge along the way.

It is impossible to develop here all the measures that have been taking place in the most advanced governments in the region. But if we have time, we will be able to explore some of them here. I believe that they are the best demonstration that we can advance by the institutional road toward socialism.

If we keep in mind all the factors we have mentioned above, rather than confining ourselves to classifying Latin American governments according to some kind of typology, as many analysts have done, we can evaluate their performance while bearing in mind the correlation of forces within which they operate. We should pay less attention to the speed with which they are advancing, and look more at the direction in which they are going, since the speed will, to a large extent, depend on how these governments deal with obstacles in their path.

To finish, I would like to read out some of the most important criteria that I think help us to evaluate whether or not our most advanced governments are taking steps towards building a new society.

I propose the following questions; you will find many more in the book.

Do they mobilize workers and the people in general to carry out certain measures and are they contributing to an increase in their abilities and power?

Do they understand the need for an organized, politicized people, one able to exercise the necessary pressure that can weaken the state apparatus they inherited and thus drive forward the proposed transformation process?

Do they understand that our people must be protagonists and not supporting actors?

Do they listen to the people and let them speak?

Do they understand that they can rely on them to fight the errors and deviations that come up along the way?

Do they give them resources and call on them to exercise social control over the process?

To sum up, are they contributing to the creation of a popular subject that is increasingly the protagonist, assuming governmental responsibilities?

To the extent that they are doing this, they are presenting a real alternative to capitalism, to the extent they are not, they will disappoint those who have hopes in this Latin American transition to socialism.

I would like to conclude by insisting on something I never tire of repeating:

In order to successfully advance in this challenge, we need a new culture on the left: a pluralist and tolerant culture that puts first what unites us and leaves as secondary what divides us; that promotes a unity based on values such as solidarity, humanism, respect for differences, defence of nature, rejection of the desire for profit and the laws of the market as guiding principles for human activity.

A left that understands that radicalism is not about raising the most radical slogans nor taking the most radical actions, which only a few follow because the majority are scared off by them. Instead, it is about being capable of creating spaces for coming together and for struggle, that bring in broader sectors, because realizing that there are many of us in the same struggle is what makes us strong and radicalizes us.

A left that understands that we have to win hegemony, that is, that we have to convince rather than impose.

A left that understands that what we do together in the future is more important than what we may have done in the past.

* * *

A comment on Marta’s book and some of the issues it raises (Richard Fidler)

Marta’s book is an excellent overview of the “new paths toward 21^st c. socialism” being taken today, with the focus on Latin America.

Particularly useful is Marta’s typology of the governments in the subcontinent: those merely giving neoliberalism a makeover; and those that are antineoliberal, themselves divided between those that don’t actually break from neoliberalism and those that want to go beyond not just neoliberalism but the capitalist system of which neoliberalism is the current expression.

Included in this discussion is Marta’s list of criteria by which to judge how much progress the latter types of governments are actually making.

I am billed at this presentation as a “critic,” however...

If I were to criticize, I think the book may not give enough emphasis to the problems to be encountered along the way, and be more assertive on ways to confront and overcome those problems.

This was brought home to me in her discussion of the correlation of forces, and some of the achievements made so far by Latin American governments in reducing the hegemony of US imperialism. Marta mentions the Banco del Sur, the sucre currency, the ALBA Bank. In the translated edition (the original Spanish text was published in 2013) she might have mentioned the “new financial architecture” of the BRICS, which includes Brazil, with new credit lines, etc. However, much of this is still music of the future: the Banco del Sur has yet to be established after six or seven years of talk; the sucre has had very limited use, in a few transactions; the ALBA Bank barely functions, and I suspect that BRICS credit lines will replicate those of Brazil’s development bank, largely devoted to funding infrastructure projects that benefit Brazilian transnationals.

The reason for these institutional weaknesses is of course that fundamentally all of these countries are integral parts of a global financial, trade and investment system within a global capitalism shaped by the United States and its imperialist allies. In another workshop here this week, Bill Carroll made the point that “regionalization is to globalization as a part is to the whole.” In Latin America today, many theorists wrongly portray the formation of regional alliances as an antidote to globalization instead of seeing it as a particular defensive strategy that still does not address some of the underlying dynamics, and in fact reinforces them in some respects (e.g. Brazil’s growing hegemony in South America, in alliance with China).

The new political alliances, UNASUR and CELAC, while a major advance over the OAS in that they exclude the United States and Canada, still suffer from rules of unanimity, which (through a government like Colombia’s) gives Washington an indirect but effective veto on contentious issues. Also, we need to bear in mind the way in which Washington has successfully divided Latin America with its trans-Pacific strategy — bringing Mexico (already a NAFTA member), Colombia, Peru and Chile into the TransPacific Partnership, under US hegemony.

And despite their success at taking advantage of the rise of China and the initial stirrings of a more multipolar world, the Latin American countries have not managed to escape their rentier dependency on exports of largely unprocessed non-renewable and renewable resources — hydrocarbons, minerals, agribusiness products like soy, etc. Besides making them highly vulnerable to shifts in global prices, this economic pattern is disastrous for the ecology. The economic problems being experienced today in Venezuela, where the chavista government has made the greatest advances socially and in terms of building popular power from below, are directly linked to its hydrocarbon dependency.

I want to talk now about the topic of the last part of the book, on the need for “a new political instrument for a new hegemony.” What I express here is not criticism of Marta’s approach but rather some thoughts to expand on it, with concrete (and critical) reference to our local experiment, Québec solidaire.

First, note Marta’s terminology — which actually mimics the official name of Bolivia’s MAS, which is the MAS-IPSP, the Movement for Socialism – Political Instrument for the Sovereignty of the Peoples. She and Fred Fuentes have authored a fine book (only in Spanish) on how that party developed as a “political instrument” in the 1990s and early 2000s. And how marvellously adapted it was not only to engage in the epic mass conflicts over privatization of water and transnational control of the country’s hydrocarbon resources, but to help mobilize broad rural and urban forces that could overthrow governments and, in 2005, elect a government of its own.

The term “political instrument” is deliberate. I think it is meant (among other things) to differentiate her subject from what most of us associate with the political parties we know from our experiences — both the mass capitalist parties and the much smaller, largely ineffectual (and usually quite sectarian) self-proclaimed “vanguard” parties of the far left.

Marta does a fine job of explaining what she means by “hegemony” and the strategic conception of building “broad fronts” and “social blocs” in pursuit of key objectives that advance the struggle for popular power. She lays great emphasis on the need to change the political culture on the left, to fight class reductionism, and to prioritize points of convergence.

The essential concept here is the idea of a party (or political instrument) as encompassing the proletariat in the broadest sense of that word, to represent all those who are oppressed and exploited by capitalism.

Bear in mind that in most of Latin America, a continent that was devastated by neoliberalism, its traditional left parties and unions destroyed, these political instruments did not exist a couple of decades ago. In most cases (as in Venezuela and Ecuador, in particular) they are quite recent, organized top-down by progressive governments trying to structure and extend popular support; in Bolivia, where the MAS government self-identifies as a “government of the (already existing) social movements,” those movements maintain a problematic and sometimes conflictual relationship to the MAS leadership. The situations vary widely from one country to another. In another period, the Cubans went through a long process of figuring out ways in which to institutionalize their political process.

But obviously when we talk strategy we are talking about leadership. Marta discusses this in the sense of “popular protagonism,” which she explains as finding ways to involve the largest number of people in progressive, grassroots political activity, and she discusses the various approaches that this can involve.

I think it is useful, in this connection, to recall what Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels said about the party question in the Communist Manifesto, where they could hardly avoid it as the Manifesto was predicated on what they saw as the imminence of proletarian revolution. It is yet another part of the Manifesto that was long forgotten or overlooked, but has considerable relevance today.

Although it was titled “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” Marx and Engels saw their party, or political current, as simply the leading edge of the broader proletarian movement. They were categorical:

The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other working-class parties.

They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole.

They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mold the proletarian movement.

The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only: 1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. 2. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.

The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.

I think that is a very good approach to the question of protagonistic leadership, one that is applicable today. But again, this is addressed to the “communists,” whom we can perhaps define, in light of that approach, as a “vanguard.” That term is frowned on today because of the past of so many self-declared vanguards that hang out in exclusive circles, eager to critique and oppose all other currents, often with a self-perpetuating central leadership cadre, awaiting the great day when the masses will finally discover them and accept to be led by them to victory. Obviously, we are talking about a quite different concept. The big debate — and the answers will vary from one country to another — is over how to implement it.

The Manifesto’s vanguard (“the Communists”) is distinguished, inter alia, by its strategic overview and its determination to advance it within the broader party and popular movements (today’s counterpart of the “proletariat” in most countries). To be effective, it will in virtually every case have to have some organized presence and the right to function within the broad party as a tendency or faction, provided of course that it respects the majority decisions of the party membership.

This distinction is not widely understood or implemented in much of the left, even where (as in Venezuela’s PSUV or, closer to home, Québec Solidaire) there is a right to form an organized political tendency. In the PSUV, as I understand it, left factions like Marea Socialista remain quite marginal, lacking resources within the party to publish their views and engage with the membership as a whole. In QS, the recognized “collectives” have little presence, and there is no formal provision for their proportional representation in the leadership bodies, although the party defines itself as “pluralist.”

Yesterday, some of us participated in an excellent panel discussion featuring young activists on current attempts in Quebec and Canada — and Scotland! — to build “a social movement convergence.” The leading attempt on this continent is Québec solidaire, a product of some 20 years of efforts to bring together global justice advocates, feminists, community grassroots activists and survivors of previous far left parties (Maoists and Trotskyists mainly) in a party that purports to practice politics both at the ballot box — it has three members of the National Assembly — and “in the streets.”

It’s a notable achievement, but I just want to note here that it also demonstrates how complex and problematic this process of broad left regroupment can prove to be if it is not accompanied by clear agreement on some fundamentals. For me, there are two major problems in QS, both of which point to the need for leadership by a far-sighted and protagonist party “vanguard” in the sense of the Manifesto.

One is the incoherency on the Quebec national question, where QS projects, in sequence, (1) a Constituent Assembly, (2) a referendum for popular adoption of whatever constitutional proposals or draft the Assembly produces. But the purpose of the assembly is left undefined: whether to design an independent state, or to simply propose some changes to the existing constitutional order, which most Québécois are convinced, correctly, does not represent them adequately as a nation.

This is important, because if you are pro-independence, as QS says it is, you will want the Constituent Assembly to propose the constitution for a democratic sovereign state and see that as its purpose. QS however persists in elevating an abstract democratic right of the Assembly to decide that preliminary issue, over the fundamental democratic right of self-determination as a nation, which points clearly toward a sovereigntist solution. Democracy trumps clarity.

Ambiguity here is not a virtue. In today’s conditions, where sovereignty is not a majority option among the Québécois, a Constituent Assembly without a clear mandate might come up with simply a proposal for membership in a revised federation that continues to bar the way to transcending capitalism.

The QS approach is, quite simply, non-strategic. In my view, the party would benefit greatly if it were to cast its program in the framework of building “another Quebec,” one with the sovereign power, for example, to nationalize the banking and financial sector, which is a precondition to implementing many anticapitalist measures. If you stay within the provincial framework, as QS election platforms do, you cannot address these key challenges with any credibility.

A reorientation on this question is badly needed — especially if QS is to benefit from the current crisis of the Parti Québécois, which still hegemonizes the independence movement with its neoliberal program. QS incoherence on the proposed path to sovereignty has hindered it from winning dissident and disappointed péquistes to its ranks. I keep hoping that the self-identified Marxists within QS, a very small minority, I’ll acknowledge, could find a way to help clarify this conundrum.

The second problem is an ongoing tension within QS over its relationship to the social movements that it seeks to represent. Basically, it’s the tension between the party of the streets and the party of the ballot boxes. QS is largely the latter. Nine years after its founding, it is still in the process of adopting its basic program, although much of the program is being invented and defined by its small parliamentary contingent as they grapple with issues of the day. Most of the party’s activity comes down to organizing for elections. QS members sometimes march in demonstrations with the party’s banner, although in most cases no attempt is made to single out QS proposals (in the form of placards and slogans) for developing the struggle around the particular theme of the mobilization. Its MNAs see their role as spokespeople for the movements, which is necessary of course.

But should the party do more? How can it help to empower, to develop the capacities, of the movements by working with them to find ways to link their immediate aims with the over-arching need to fight for political power in the state and to use that governmental power to transform the relationship of class forces?

Some activists in QS have proposed a much more protagonist approach to the party’s relations with the social movements, which are relatively strong in Quebec. A formal proposal[6] by some members a few years ago included the idea that QS members play an active role in helping to develop a social and political front of popular resistance; host meetings where QS and the social movements could share their experiences, and – perhaps most important – encourage networking within the party of the QS members who belong to the various social movements, to coordinate their work in those movements. That proposal was withdrawn from debate by the party leadership on the eve of a programmatic convention.

These ideas were however advanced again, and adopted,[7] at a QS National Council meeting last November. It was agreed that QS members in the extraparliamentary milieu should network and help to provide the party with a more concrete, more complete vision of the situation in each movement, and to develop common strategic perspectives to encourage the mobilization and convergence of the movements, especially in the trade unions, the student movement and the women’s movement.

However, to date few such initiatives have been taken, and the party’s top leadership seems reluctant to pursue this line of march.

Marta quotes Bolivia’s vice-president, Álvaro García Linera, in a riff on the Zapatista concept of “mandar obedeciendo”, or to govern by obeying. The leader, he says, “is simply a unifier of ideas, someone who articulates the needs of the people, and nothing else.”

I would argue that something else is needed: a leadership that does have a profound understanding of our history as anticapitalists, and of the experiences, both positive and negative, of 19^th and 20^th century socialism. García Linera, an elected leader of a country, does in fact operate that way in Bolivia, as someone with a developed strategic conception of what is to be done now and next.

That’s an idea we can develop further, using the valuable discussion that Marta engages in this book.

---

[1]. Michael Lebowitz, The Contradictions of ‘Real Socialism’: The Conductor and the Conducted (Monthly Review Press, New York, 2012).

[2] In fact, President Allende presented the parties making up the Popular Unity with a proposal for a new constitution in September 1972. I think it is important to study this document because it embodied Allende’s ideas on how the social transition should be made based on the Chilean reality.

[3]. In the 1971 municipal elections, the UP got 49% of the popular vote, the high point in its electoral support.

[4]. See more in: From Allende’s Chile to Chávez’s Venezuela – an interview by Isabel Rauber: http://lifeonleft.blogspot.ca/2015/04/marta-harnecker-on-challenges-of.html.

[5]. Pathfinder Press, 1987.

[6] For the text (in English), see “Québec Solidaire and the social movements,” appended to Quebec election: A seismic shift within the independence movement?

[7] For the text (in French), see note 14 in Les mouvements sociaux et Québec solidaire : réflexions sur une contribution d’Amir Khadir.