Bolivia, the US, and Voting Out Fascism
The regime established itself last year, making common cause with police and sections of the army to overthrow Bolivia’s longtime left-wing Indigenous President Evo Morales. Justifying their coup with false accusations of election irregularities, upon taking the Presidential Palace they commenced a project of wiping Indigenous presence from the halls of power as they slaughtered Indigenous people in the streets.
Co-opting the victory of MAS against reactionaries, many reformists in the United States have claimed that MAS’ electoral victory is proof that fascism can be “voted out”. This has been in tune with a general tide of pro-electoralism messaging by the mainstream left in the US, which seems to always limit the “today” to tailing the Democratic Party and to confine independent organizing to the eternally misty “tomorrow.” Rather than spend the duration of this article engaging with the question of electoralism alone, it would be productive to take MAS’ success and this incorrect framing of it as a teaching opportunity for why MAS won and why their strategy cannot merely be transposed to the US.
The first major problem that crops up when attempting to make this comparison is the lack of commonalities between MAS and the Democrats. MAS emerged out of labor, community organizations, and movements among the Indigenous working class in Bolivia, uniting them in the common cause of sovereignty against imperialism. MAS did not swallow them whole to direct all their resources toward electioneering, but rather became a facet of that mass movement. Evo Morales was elected in 2005 during the Pink Tide in Latin America, a period wherein social democratic and democratic socialists were elected to power throughout the region on the waves of mass working class movements.
He retained significant popularity throughout his Presidency, though in the period before the coup it had been declining in the radical wing of Bolivia’s left owing in large part to his dealings with international capital. Morales’ rejection of a lithium deal, Bolivia holding the largest share of lithium on earth, has been identified as a major motivation for the US’s support of the coup. MAS’ loss and reclamation of power following an action directed at them for such a move has only reinvigorated their popularity.
Following the coup against Morales, MASistas and other socialists did not give up. By the fact that MAS is based in a mass movement, they had the means to resist by organized force. MAS and their base rebelled against the far-right regime, using arms to fight for the restoration of democracy.
By giving the government no choice but to concede if they wished to avoid a civil war, the Bolivian left secured the conditions for a final defeat of reaction by electoral means. It was not that the election was primary and the mass movement secondary: it was the other way around. Only owing to these conditions could MAS win as it did.
In vast contrast to MAS, the Democrats are a thoroughly corporate, imperialist party. The Democrats are not a facet of a mass movement. They absorb any masses which try to wield the Party for their own ends. Ever since Jesse Jackson’s left populist Democratic campaign in 1984, the Party has secured the leadership against even mildly social democratic elements, turning more left-leaning tendencies into isolated fringes which merely serve to keep progressives in the Party.
Bernie Sanders’ 2016 and 2020 Presidential campaigns were the last opportunities to reform the Democratic Party even from a left-liberal perspective, and the leadership sabotaged them both times. Sanders’ campaign from 2015 to 2020 raised about $17 million dollars, a figure which does not include the countless hours spent by supporters to campaign for him. The mainstream left in the US contributed to this waste of time and effort instead of establishing roots in communities themselves to become an independent movement. Once again, socialists have merely tailed the Democrats instead of becoming a mass movement.
As a result of Bernie’s loss, many among the US liberal-left are advocating for “settling for Biden” as the only option, once again pushing movement-building into the misty future, even as world-historic anti-racist rebellions continue to thrive across the US. Would electing Joe Biden defeat fascism? Is it not the policies of the US empire, whether headed by Democrats or Republicans, that has birthed the conditions for fascism to emerge? The ultimate end of liberal anti-fascism shows its face here as a mere appeal to bourgeois normalcy and not for a true and decisive defeat of fascism.
The increasingly blatant decline of the capitalist world-system, particularly now with the apocalyptic COVID-19 pandemic, has only made such toothless “anti-fascism” even more ridiculous. Biden’s promise of a “return to normalcy” is not a promise of reform to stave off fascism for a few years, but to merely make the transition into fascism a bit smoother.
There is no chance of fixing the Democratic Party for our own, revolutionary socialist ends. In fact, there is little chance of it being repurposed even for social democratic ends. The Democratic Party has systematically disempowered their social democratic wing. And the domination of the leadership and campaigns by millionaires and billionaires, particularly in the Party’s pockets, gives little opportunity for breaking the tight relationship of the bourgeoisie and the Party.
While the US’ political system stands as it does, resorting to third party electoralism as a strategy is even more of a dead end than Democratic tailism, as the two-party system excludes them from power entirely. If socialists insist on using electoralism, they ought to organize to break the two-party system from the outside and demand electoral reform. Instead, they have either chained themselves to the sinking ship of the Democrats and empire, or isolated themselves from the masses through dogmatism and sectarianism.
Further, the US’ contradictions are not comparable to Bolivia at all. Bolivia has the highest population of Indigenous people in the Americas. Bolivia as a modern nation-state was born out of the colonialism of Spain, which created gradations of races and classes on the basis of a fundamental logic of inclusion characteristic of mestizaje. As a result, Bolivia inherited a colonial contradiction based primarily on the relationship of exploitation of Indigenous people as a large share of the working class. The political system was not born on a basic logic of eliminating Indigenous people, but exploiting them. Working with this logic of inclusion, it was possible for the Bolivian working class to struggle with the system and contest with bourgeois power to establish a pro-sovereignty presence in the halls of power. And importantly, in relation to the world-system, Bolivia is a periphery state to capitalist-imperialism.
By contrast, the US is currently the premier capitalist empire in the world. And it was born on the basis of settler-colonialism. The US has been based on a core logic of exclusion, elimination, and othering. It is thus much more difficult for colonized peoples, who have been interred into core segments of the working class as part of the logic of primitive accumulation and imperialism, to contest power in the political system independently.
But this is not to say socialists and Indigenous people cannot or should not engage with political questions entirely. Rather, they cannot merely transpose the approach of MAS, nor can they depend on the electoral system as a major leg. Glen Sean Coulthard, in the context of Indigenous people in Canada, gives an idea of how to approach this question in Red Skin, White Masks:
What are the implications of this profound power disparity in our struggles for land and freedom? Does it require that we vacate the field of state negotiations and participation entirely? Of course not. Settler-colonialism has rendered us a radical minority in our own homelands, and this necessitates that we continue to engage with the state’s legal and political system. What our present condition does demand, however, is that we begin to approach our engagements with the settler-state legal apparatus with a degree of critical self-reflection, skepticism, and caution that has to date been largely absent in our efforts.
It also demands that we begin to shift our attention away from the vast rights-based/recognition orientation that has emerged as hegemonic over the last four decades, to a resurgent politics of recognition that seeks to practice decolonial, gender-emancipatory, and economically nonexploitative alternative structures of law and sovereign authority grounded on a critical refashioning of the best of Indigenous legal and political traditions. It is only by privileging and grounding ourselves in these normative lifeways and resurgent practices that we have a hope of surviving our strategic engagements with the colonial state with integrity and as Indigenous peoples.
Rather than continuing to do the work of the Democrats for them and keep people tied to a dead-end system, socialists should be focusing on linking up with the masses through their disaffection with a system which has given little care to their suffering throughout a global meltdown and pandemic as well as with long-term disenchantment with the political system.
Now is the time, more than ever, to build coalitions, do mass work, and put in effort to create an independent mass movement. We should not keep colonized and oppressed peoples tied to Democrats. We should become part of their struggles for sovereignty and liberation toward a socialist, decolonized future. MAS succeeded on the basis of mass power because mass power is primary to the movement it represents. If Western socialists want to taste anything like success, we cannot keep putting the cart before the horse and become lackeys for a bourgeois imperialist party.