Dollar and fuel shortages are regularly cited in the media. Bolivia’s main trade partners in South America have suffered their worst economic decade, while the gas field of the “Southern Sub-Andean basin” that have represented the greatest source of income and foreign reserves for decades are drying up. A new major basin was discovered but questions remain about its real size, profitability and the years it will take to begin production.
International reserves have also plummeted from $15 billion to $1.7 billion, and Bolivia’s public debt is among the fastest growing in the region. With nearly half of public spending going into servicing the debt, global capital is demanding deeper attacks on the limited social programs implemented by Morales when gas prices and production were booming.
Most importantly, Bolivia has the world’s largest known reserves of lithium, a key ingredient for the batteries that go in electric vehicles and electronics. But a drop in global lithium prices, legislative hurdles and the massive investments needed have prevented production from really taking off.
The Arce administration has responded to this systemic crisis by enforcing a pact with the main business groups, providing tax and credit incentives, further subsidies, government investments in chemical and other industries, and freedom for exporters and investors to take dollars out of the country. The president has proposed to “relax” regulations in the oil sector to let foreign firms own and exploit larger shares. The government has eroded environmental and other regulatory obstacles to mining and selling gold, whose prices and production have continued to increase.
Regarding lithium, Arce signed an investment deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow last June to develop the processing of the mineral, while it has negotiated several mining concessions with Chinese companies. The projects are merely in their pilot phase, however.
The current context presents enormous dangers for workers in Bolivia.
Time and again across Latin America the revolutionary struggles of the working class have been blocked from taking power by leaderships who backed one or another section of the ruling class as more “democratic” or “progressive.” This opened the doors for imperialist-backed fascist coups and regimes that have then crushed the workers movement and left-wing organizations.
In 1971, the Pabloite Revolutionary Workers Party (POR), which had mass influence in the working class, including in the mining unions, played the most important role in collaboration with the Stalinists in carrying out the most significant betrayal of Bolivian workers. It provided political support for the bourgeois nationalist dictator J.J. Torres and his Popular Assembly, suggesting they could be pressured to fight imperialism. POR leader Guillermo Lora then placed hopes that Torres would arm workers against the threat of the far right, facilitating the coup of fascistic Col. Hugo Banzer Suárez, which launched a regime of mass torture, kidnappings and killings of leftists at the behest of imperialism and the local oligarchy.
The internecine war between Arce and Morales and the efforts of the union bureaucracy and its Pabloite and Morenoite apologists to promote illusions in the national bourgeoisie threatens to become another catastrophic exercise in politically disarming the working class.
The working class and the impoverished peasantry have remained on the sidelines so far, unconvinced by either faction. But without a genuine, revolutionary party leading the working class to power, the prospect of another fascist dictatorship will become inevitable.
Analyzing a similar betrayal by Stalinism in China in 1927, Leon Trotsky explained:
Everything that brings the oppressed and exploited masses of the toilers to their feet inevitably pushes the national bourgeoisie into an open bloc with the imperialists. The class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the masses of workers and peasants is not weakened, but, on the contrary, is sharpened by imperialist oppression, to the point of bloody civil war at every serious conflict. The Chinese bourgeoisie always has a solid rearguard behind it in imperialism, which will always help it with money, goods and shells against the workers and peasants.
The most crucial task today in Bolivia and Latin America is the building of sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International, which alone embodies the lessons of the struggle of the Trotskyist movement against the betrayals of Stalinism, Pabloism and all petit-bourgeois and bourgeois nationalist movements.
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Publish date : 2024-09-30 11:23:00
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