And Decline Of Progressivism.
On the afternoon of June 26, 2024, several militant vehicles and around 300 members of the Bolivian militia and military police, under the command of General Commander of the Armed Forces Gen. Rudy Rodríguez, burst into the Murillo Square in La Paz, surrounded the access to the square and tried to enter by force the Palacio Quemado, the former seat of the presidential office. Immediately, traditional media reported the events taking place in La Paz throughout the country. The information spread through social networks, expanding its reach with the complement of the immediate public opinion of the social sectors with access to the Internet. “Military coup”, ‘government self-coup’, ‘military mutiny’, among other speculations, were established as synthetic hypotheses with epicenter in the internal political crisis of the ruling party, the ‘Movement towards Socialism, Instrument for the Sovereignty of the Peoples (MAS-IPSP)’.
The political crisis that began in 2019, as a result of the coup against the government of Evo Morales, meant not only the rupture of the 14-year hegemony of the MAS-IPSP but also the beginning of the debacle of the party project that managed to articulate in the 2005 elections a popular worker-peasant bloc with the support of the urban petty bourgeoisie, expectant of a turn of the rudder to the neoliberal policies that paraded since 1985.
Without going into the details of the political crisis of the MAS-IPSP or the economic crisis that is deepening in direct relation to the decrease in income from hydrocarbon exports, after three decades of party existence and two decades of government, this recent situation exposes the closing of the first hegemonic period of a popular government five decades after the “recovery of democracy”, and the most important popular process since the Revolution of 1952.
Thus, Bolivia entered a political and economic transition from center-left progressivism towards the center and the right, a contradictory combination of greater liberalization and conservatism. This is a renewed process of political dispute for the support of the working class, self-employed and peasantry, with a weakened left bloc that was characterized by a gray and fragmented political horizon and a right wing that closed party ranks around a caudillo and demonstrated it could use the same 2005 formula of MAS-IPSP, the unity of popular forces and disenchanted social forces of change, to democratically legitimize the assault on the government, given its 2019 coup failure.
Reforms versus Transformation
This circumstance, in the concert of regional processes, is located in three processes of crisis and liberal political adjustment: the installation of governments led by right-wing or neoconservative parties and caudillos (El Salvador, Costa Rica, Panama, Ecuador, Peru, Paraguay, Uruguay and Argentina), the installation of social democratic governments, liberal of the center (Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Dominican Republic) and the continuity of governments of a progressive popular nature, liberal of the left (Cuba, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico and Venezuela).
This schematic grouping does not express the complexity of the particular socio-political processes in each country. However, it allows us to appreciate two situations of drift similar to the Bolivian process:
- The contraction of the influence and isolation of the progressive program as a consequence of having opted for pragmatic reformism to remain in power, abandoning the structural and direct transformative action in the economic, political and cultural aspects;
- The gradual rise of a center-right bloc, with the leadership of the oligarchic bourgeoisie and a popular base disenchanted with public policies, in several cases achieving the capture of the government in countries of a popular nature during the last two decades.
These contradictory processes are the result of the scarce progress in the development of industrialization, the exhaustion of rentierism and distribution policies due to the fall in commodity exports, the elimination of price controls and the liberalization of export and import volumes, the loss of protective cushions in international reserves due to current spending, the limited participation in regional integration policies and vulnerability to the world economic crisis, among other circumstances that reproduce the dependence on the decadent US imperialism or the emerging BRICs.
At the political level, the failure to deepen the reforms of the state and its apparatuses (police and armed forces, justice, education system, electoral system, integral planning system) with the objective of consolidating a new participatory and direct democratic system, the ideological and moral stimuli of economic redistribution in infrastructure, services and assistance to vulnerable populations (women, elderly and children) were wasted. With this, the central role of precarious workers and the peasantry, potential defenders of the process of transformations, was underestimated. At the ideological level, the discourse of the deconstruction of development, the depatriarchalization of politics, the decolonization of the state, and social inclusion, among other programmatic lines that were not translated into concrete policies, became the axis of resistance and of the cultural battle against the “socialist agenda” that attacks the moral tradition and values of the people.
Some specialists propose that this double situation, the rise of the regional right and the fall of progressivism, is linked to the latter’s loss of the capacity to reinvent, in economic, political and ideological practice, a civilizational horizon for the future. In this sense, the projects of the continental right are presented as immediate alternatives of change-oriented towards the working masses, renewing expectations of transformation of the situation of the economic crisis caused by the failure of statist economic policies and “socialist” cultural reformism, all favorable to the subversion of the order of nature and Christian morality. In this way, the right-wing force presents itself as a reactionary countercultural project.
The extreme right on the rise worldwide
The regional reactionary turn is not an isolated phenomenon. At the world level, there is a process of extreme rightism. Although in countries such as France and England, the extreme right failed to reach the government, in the Netherlands, Italy, Hungary, Finland and Slovakia, they now govern. The ideological and social power of the extreme right forces in Germany, France, England and Austria are worrying.
Despite the clear right-wing tendencies, it is very difficult to predict whether we are facing a process of long-term hegemonic domination by the right wing at the global and regional levels.
Everything will depend on the capacity of the subjects involved in the destruction of the advances in social policies developed during the last two decades with the moral encouragement to their followers, as well as on the action of the accumulated reserves of democratic social forces to resist, organize and redefine the projection of transformational horizons against capitalism.
Álvaro García Linera said in 2005 that the “catastrophic stalemate” in the struggle for hegemony consists of continuous tension in which the adversaries have victories and defeats without significant advances. In this sense, it is a political balance of weaknesses. Although García Linera’s proposals took place in a scenario favorable to the progressive project of the MAS-IPSP, the current scenario is the opposite. The collapse of the historical bloc of the MAS-IPSP and the economic and political crisis allow us to see actors and objectives that reveal a fertile ground for regression and catastrophe for the working class.
A worse world
The processes of extreme right-wingization expressed in the electoral victories of organizations or groups that bring together liberal and conservative ideas and concepts, or in which liberal political parties join forces with extreme right-wing parties to form an authoritarian government, is not only the result of the weaknesses and shortcomings of progressive organizations. These processes are part of geoeconomic and geopolitical struggles on a global scale.
In this context, the management of big capital is oriented towards safeguarding strategic borders with nationalist policies and, at the other extreme, with policies to defend its privileges of freedom of movement in the global market. That is, to pressure the governments of the neocolonies around the world to improve their exchange and competitiveness options, as geopolitical and military positioning. Thus, conservative nationalism and liberal globalism complement each other contradictorily to defend and guarantee the survival of relations of domination and exploitation (industrial and financial) on the scale of nations, with the lobbies, once concentrated in the metropolises, now playing in various “regional leagues” with a strong presence of new players combining private, state and mixed capitals.
This transition produces an environment of exacerbated conflict, even to the limit of the use of nuclear force. The war between Russia and Ukraine, the Israeli genocide in Palestine and the military conflicts of the Israeli entity with the nations of the region, the tension between China and Taiwan, and the mobilization of US military forces in Latin America, among other events, are examples of the propagandistic and military chess moves on this geopolitical chessboard.
On the scale of Latin American nations, the ineffectiveness of progressive governments in the structural dismantling of neoliberalism has allowed the traditional bourgeoisie to be reorganized into a new extreme right to ascend to government, validated by democratic institutionality. The pragmatic philosophy of these governments is characterized by ideological discursive vehemence and commitment to violently dismantle the organizations of popular social movements and political parties opposed to their neoliberal agenda.
In the case of progressivism, it moves from a position of advantage to a defensive position in which its own resources, besides being depleted, are dispersed, inconsistent and unclear in ideological and political terms, in addition to having demonstrated a limited disposition to its own readjustment.
Questions, and more questions
If the current movement to the right has, in the immediate term, a social base aligned with the neoconservative reaction, how can we reformulate strategies for the reorganization of a minimally progressive popular bloc in the medium term? More ambitiously and in the longer term, how can we reconstruct a revolutionary horizon of civilization and subversion of the system?
The first stage for this task is to review our understanding of the determining factors of the generalized disenchantment of the exploited and oppressed classes. This has to do with understanding the material and spiritual circumstances of the conditions of life that shape the contemporary identity of these classes at the level of particular socio-economic formations and their role in the global transitional process.
How can we contribute to the organization of the proletariat located in this huge sea of microenterprises with no real possibility of organizing into trade unions? How can we help the organization of the self-employed who are self-exploiting and competing for subsistence and, as a result of neoliberal adjustment, have adopted the ideology of “freedom” in precariousness and, alienated in competitiveness with their peers in their daily lives, have lost the capacity to imagine another relationship, to imagine a shared ideological and political consciousness and alternative to the status quo of injustice and inequality?
In the transition towards multipolarity and the decline of US imperialist hegemony, and the new conditions of exchange of interests with the emerging powers (BRICs: Brazil, Russia, India, China), is it possible to find and propose another form of participation in the production and distribution of global wealth that does not involve emigration from one form of imperialist subordination to another oppressive imperialism? How can we extract and propose a new role for the working class in the field of rebuilding productive forces?
In the context of a resounding new technical revolution of production and labor under the influence of artificial intelligence and the automation of labor, how to warn that a new wave of alienation of social wealth, reproduction and expansion of unequal development between the old and the new metropolises is coming?
In the transmutation of capitalism, the end of the progressive cycle compels the humanist and revolutionary intellectual reserves to continue to develop new strategies of resistance and long-term organization based on the diversity of conditions of the working class. Their unification will only be possible if we employ the appropriate diagnosis and tactics and break out of the traditional molds of emancipatory struggle.