This year in May and June the masses created an acute revolutionary situation where the question of who rules Bolivia was posed. The bourgeoisie was forced to retreat but the masses too were unable to impose their demands. A pause in the mass mobilisations has ensued but not a pause in the debate as to how to go forward, how to win the nationalisation of the countries natural resources, how to meet the burning needs of the urban and rural workers.
Bolivia is clearly still in the revolutionary period that opened that opened with the Water War centred on Cochabamba in 2000 and whose high point was the mass rebellion of October 2003, known as the Gas War in which 73 people died, and over 400 were injured. President Sanchez de Losada (Goni) was forced to flee to the United Sates. He was replaced by Carlos Mesa whose task was to co-opt sections of the mass movement with politically liberal and populist rhetoric whilst frustrating their demands for total nationalisation of the petroleum and gas reserves, which in 2000 were estimates as minimally worth $120 billion.
The expulsion of (Goni) marked the breakdown of the neoliberal “democratic” regimes which had ruled Bolivia since the end of the last great revolutionary period in 1982-06. Under these regimes Bolivia became a laboratory for the most savage forms of neoliberalism. Much of Bolivian industry was destroyed. The country was handed over to US and European multinationals, the country was subordinated to the dictates of IMF. For this reason the mass popular struggles over the past half decade have been in the forefront of the growing worldwide struggle against corporate globalisation.
The source of the most recent social upheavals lies in the agreement Bolivia signed with the World Bank in the late 1990s. In September 1997, the WB made Bolivia eligible for assistance under the Initiative for Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) that would reduce Bolivia’s external debt to the bank by 13%. A mere 12 months later the bank had secured the agreement of Congress “ to privatize all remaining public enterprises, including those owned by the armed forces.” These included the YPFB oil assets and the state smelting company (Vinto). The decision to sell off the rights to exploit the great natural resource of the country – gas deposits worth billions of dollars – to energy multinationals in Spain and Britain led directly to President Sanchez de Lozada downfall five years later. These reserves were undervalued and their size underestimated, tax on revenues kept low – a naked rip-off.
In 2005 Bolivia has once again witnessed profound revolutionary developments. In March Bolivia’s president Carlos Mesa only demobilised the struggle temporarily with his threat to resign. Another an even mightier struggle including a nearly three week long general strike , mass demonstrations and road blockades forced him to resign on 6 June. The movement had its strongest centre in El Alto and was organised by the popular assemblies in a soviet-type body the Federation of Neighbourhood Committees (Fejuve). The masses demanded the total nationalisation of the gas and petroleum reserves of the country, privatised at the end of the nineties.
The reaction to Mesa’s resignation was a desperate counter-revolutionary ploy by the main forces of the Bolivian ruling class, those closest to the multinationals. The congress tried to reconvene in Sucre- away from the pressure of El Alto and La Paz – to choose a successor who could use bribery and force to crush the popular rising . The Senate speaker, Vaca Diez, a rich rancher from Santa Cruz was chosen for this task. The Cruzeño latifundists and business elite have been considering sizing autonomy for the province and doing a deal with the imperialist oil companies. But mass action prevented either many the legislators getting to Sucre or forced them to flee once they were there. Isolated, Vaca was discouraged by the army from accepting the nomination for the presidency lest this inflame the mass movement.”
So eager is the ruling class to continue drawing their wealth and power from selling the country’s natural resources to European and North American imperialism that they would sooner effectively dismember the nation rather than lose these profits and their foreign masters goodwill.
The Congress chose Eduardo Rodriguez, head of the supreme court, as interim President till elections in December. His job, like Mesa’s in 2003 is to end the revolution on the streets and ensure a transition to a president in whose hands Bolivian capitalism and the holdings of the North American and European multinationals will be safe . Like his predecessor he is resisting nationalisation of the gas industry. Rodriguez is playing for time, hoping the movement will completely demobilise. His election and the truce proclaimed by some popular organisations and parties marks a transition from a revolutionary situation to an inter-revolutionary situation— i.e. a pause between sharp revolutionary crises. The question now is who will use this pause to best effect? The masses to prepare a rapid return to the offensive or the capitalists to prepare a regime which will betray the demands of the May-June uprising?
Rodriguez resistance to the demand for nationalisation, chimes in with the position of Evo Morales and the Movement for Socialism (MAS). Morales was the first to call for the protests and strikes to be called off. He has consistently refused to back the demands for nationalisation, arguing in stead for higher taxes on gas production. Morales is the best placed “popular” candidate to win any presidential election. He came second in the last Presidential elections with 30% of the vote. But a Morales presidency will not answer the basic demands of the Bolivian masses. To divert the mass struggle by putting a reformist leadership into power will lead to the abandonment of the masses key demands. Sooner or later Morales will attack the vanguard militant workers and peasants as just as Lula has done in Brazil.
The demand of the Aymara and Quechua movements since 2000 for the convening of a sovereign constituent assembly is a good one in conditions where Rodriguez and Co are trying to delay and then resort to the normal undemocratic elections for the presidency and the parliament. This usually leaves the designation of the president to the old corrupt party élites and swindles the masses, the indigenous population particularly who constitute 61 per cent of the people yet are hardly represented in the political class.
What is needed is for the popular forces, including the Aymara and Quechua community organisations to take complete charge of the elections to the constituent assembly, with mass meetings to question the candidates and debate their programmes and pledges. Not only that but these assemblies should have the right to instantly recall their elected representatives , to initiate new elections if they break their mandates to the people.
The burning issue the assembly must address is the nationalisation under workers control of the oil and gas industry with no compensation to the multinationals. But scarcely less important is the land question: the nationalisation with no compensation of the large ranches and the distribution of the land to the small peasants. But to combat the inevitable sabotage of the Bolivian capitalists and their US and European masters the nationalization of the big private banks and factories is essential. Only with all these resources in the hands of the working people will the launching of massive health and literacy programme in the countryside and the shantytowns be possible. A massive programme of state investment is essential if access to water supplies and other basic amenities is to be guaranteed to the great mass of the population. This in turn necessitates a wealth tax on the country’s rich and expropriation of all the assets of these seeking to evade it or found guilty of corruption.
How to get such a revolutionary constituent assembly?. The main organisations leading the general strike, the COB and the Fejuve, the popular assemblies, cabildos. have the power to fight for it and they should start now.. The centre of the revolutionary ferment is El Alto and the Fejuve is a body with important features like the Russian soviets of 1905 and 1917. Local districts of the city, the trade unions, the teachers, workers assemblies, the small traders — all send delegates to the Fejuve to organise common struggle.
This form of organisation must be widened and extended across every part of the country. These councils must aim to draw in every sector of the popular masses particularly women. They must link up at a local, regional and national level.
In March and May-June the Fejuve and the other similar bodies played the key role as the central organs of struggle. Now they must transform themselves into organs expressing the workers an peasants power counterposed to the bourgeois state. They must contest the power of the state at every level, in the economy and over the armed forces. They must link up with the rank and file soldiers in the barracks encouraging them to demand democracy, the election of their offices and the armament of a mass peoples militia.
Then these bodies can rapidly become organs of an insurrection. Cob leader’s Jaime Solares statement that “we have to build up power from below” is true but ambivalent at best. At worst it represents a diversion from the question of the need to take state power. Soviet type bodies cannot just be organs of popular self-government, of autonomy from the state, they must become organs of struggle against the existing state power and indeed overthrow it . The capitalist state will not die away, it must be smashed. If not it will, as soon as the movement weakens, move to crush organs like the Fejuve or incorporate them.
The task now is for these organs of workers peasants and popular power to struggle for an alternative government, a revolutionary workers’ government with the support of their allies — the revolutionary peasants and the urban poor. This means arming the masses and winning over the rank and file soldiers to its side It means seizing power and sweeping away both the rotten Congress and Presidency.
The Bolivian people have the chance to deliver a mighty blow against a rapacious imperialism, which through its privatising and neoliberal policies is stripping Latin America and other continents of their natural resources and wealth. It could become a beacon for the oppressed masses not only in Latin America but throughout the world.
The current revolutionary crisis in Bolivia must resolved before long — either in favour of the Bolivian capitalist and their imperialist masters or the workers and peasants. For the latter to win they need a leadership that is clear about the need to organise for the seizure of power. The Bolivian revolution cannot stop halfway with a “democratic”, “nationalist” or “anti-imperialist”, regime as has a happened many time sin the country’s magnificent revolutionary history. This time the revolution must become permanent as the famous Theses of Pulacayo envisaged. Power must pass into the hands of the working class, and the urban and rural poor.
In October 2003 the leaders of the COB claimed they could not have taken power because there was no revolutionary party in Bolivia. This was a poor excuse then. It is a poorer one now since the leaders have done nothing in the intervening years to organise the working class to build one. A revolutionary workers’ party must be built now! It is a task to put before the militants in the trade unions and all the popular organisations.
In fact the claim that “there is no revolutionary party” is just an excuse for looking to other forces to solve the country’s crisis. The leader of the COB, Jaime Solares, declared in early June that he hoped a government headed by “a patriotic and honest military officer” would replace Mesa. Perhaps, probably, he thinks that a Hugo Chavez can be found. More likely a Hugo Banzer will emerge if the army is allowed to remain under the command of its generals admirals and officer corps.
A party of tens of thousands of the most active and courageous militants could move millions behind them as long as they are clear on the immediate tasks: build the popular assemblies, take power into their hands, arm and train the mass organisations to resist the army generals, take over the factories and mines under the control of the workers, prepare and carry out an armed insurrection at the head of the workers and popular councils which will put political power in their hands, destroy the machinery of repression and proceed to expropriate the capitalists and the big landowners.
Above all the revolution must spread internationally. The centres of resistance and rebellion must spread like wildfire across the continent. The Bolivian revolution can appeal for support, and resources from the popular movement in Venezuela and solidarity action from the international working class.
A truce with Rodriguez means a betrayal. Resume the mass struggle for the demands of the working people and for a workers and popular government to see their immediate implementation
• For the immediate convocation of a sovereign constituent assembly to meet the revolutionary demands of the workers, peasants and indigenous people
• Repeal all laws selling countries gas and oil reserves; nationalise without compensation the companies responsible for extraction and distribution.
• End the US directed campaign of coca eradication.
• For an agrarian revolution — land to the peasant communities, cancelling the debts of the poor peasants, nationalise without compensation all large landed estates.
• For workers control of the mines, factories, banks, schools and offices.
• Repudiate the entire foreign debt; reverse all privatisation and renounce all IMF austerity programmes.
• Build joint defence brigades of workers, the urban poor and the poor peasants.
• Build councils of delegates of these classes in every city, town, and rural district to direct the struggle.
• For rank and file soldiers councils and the election of all officers
• For a national congress of the workers peasants and soldiers councils
• For a workers and poor farmers power – for a socialist revolution
• For a revolutionary workers party to lead the fight for the workers and peasants power, as part of a new working class International, the Fifth International.
• For an armed insurrection as the spearhead of a mass uprising to take power from the capitalists and the landlords.
• For a workers’ and peasants’ Bolivia in a United Socialist States of Latin America.
International Secretariat of the League for the Fifth International
July 25th 2005