The present non-existence of massive anti-intervention protests is partly a response to the failure of our major mobilizations of hundreds of thousands in 2002-2003 demanding a halt to the planned war on Iraq. In 2011 the Occupy movement spread like wildfire, only to be snuffed out by government repression, and again, very little changed. People do not struggle and fight for a goal if we feel our time and effort won't pay off and make it worthwhile. This combined with the disillusion from the unfulfilled hopes of the Obama era has left many today feeling ripped off, powerless and demoralized.
When people feel this way, they shrink their lives into a small safe zone and pursue their private lives in a little bubble where they find some measure of comfort. The coming economic crisis and climate disaster will pop many a bubble and people will be pushed into active political opposition to the 1%. Once some important victories for us have been won, many thousands and then millions will be inspired to again awaken and fight for our demands.
Mistakes of our Bolivian allies and Lessons for us
- The State as Armed Bodies of Men
Lenin wrote in State and Revolution that the state consists of special bodies of armed men, and those who controlled these special bodies controlled the state. With the coup in Bolivia we were given a reminder. Luis Alfonso Mena S. wrote, entirely correctly, "The most important lesson from what happened on Sunday, November 10, 2019 in Bolivia is that a revolution is vulnerable when it relies on armed forces from bourgeois institutions. That is why Hugo Chavez transformed his country's armed forces, gave them a popular and class character, turned them into defenders of the Venezuelan revolution and its people, and today they constitute one of the fundamental supports of the Bolivarian process, since they have never yielded to offers, blackmail or threats from U.S. imperialism and its lackeys on the continent."
Moreover, as Nino Pagliccia pointed out, "Venezuela has developed a strong civic-military union supported my thousands of voluntary militias that has been the bastion against which the Hybrid War has failed despite the numerous attempts to break that union."
A people's militia in Bolivia could have maintained order in most of the country after the police forces declared they would not interfere against anti-Evo violence and before the military chiefs told Evo to resign. Fidel Castro said right after the coup against Allende in Chile, "If every worker, if every laborer, had had a rifle in his hands, the fascist coup in Chile would not have happened." However, the MAS government never built a popular militia, and did not fill the military command structure with loyal defenders of the constitution.
Marxists often state that as long as a socialist government does not destroy the old capitalist state and create a new system of governing, including a new military and police force to replace that inherited from previous regimes, the price for this error will be a counter-revolutionary coup by the old military hierarchy. This is often true but oversimplified.
Nicaragua's military high command is not loyal to the capitalist class because it was reconstituted after the 1979 Sandinista revolution. With the return to power of the capitalist class with Violetta Chamarro in 1990, the Nicaraguan military remained under the Sandinista high command of Humberto Ortega. Change in the military leadership continued to remain largely under its own control: to replace a current military chief, the military limits the president's options to three names it submits to the president to choose among. The military today is committed to the constitution and to not repressing the people. In Nicaragua's 2018 protests and violence, the military stayed in their barracks.
Venezuela is another case of a pro-socialist government presiding over a capitalist economic system, with the military loyal to the Chavez-era Bolivarian constitution. Venezuela's military was somewhat restructured by nationalistic officers back in the early 1970s, and later received a much more progressive education. Venezuela had no military caste as in Argentina or Chile, with many senior officers coming from poor urban and peasant families.
One of Chavez' first decisions after assuming the presidency was the creation of Plan Bolivar, sending the troops to the barrios to help clean up, paint buildings, distribute food, provide medical care, and attend to the people. The failed coup attempts since 2002 enabled the government to remove right-wingers from the military. Chavez opened the Military Academy to low-income Venezuelans so they could rise up in the officer corps. He also created an efficient intelligence service, which enabled the government to unmask coup-plotters. Today the Venezuelan military defends the revolutionary nationalist process.
2. Importance of mobilizing and educating the people
Diosdado Cabello, president of Venezuela's National Constituent Assembly, hit upon another mistake of Evo when he spoke right after the right-wing coup in Bolivia. The main antidote against fascism is popular mobilization. Under Evo Morales' long presidency this lesson was neglected. MAS also did not lead a nationwide effort to protest the coup as it was unfolding; rather it compromised and sought "peace." Cabello added "we [in Venezuela] are going to the streets to reject the violence of imperialism... We are not surprised by the actions of the right, here in Venezuela they tried the same thing, we already know them." Venezuela is well-prepared and experienced in mobilizing the people to combat attempted coups.
Over the years, MAS had become an electoral party, ill-equipped to respond to the right wing's abrupt switch from electoral politics to street violence. Evo and his circle did not place sufficient emphasis on political education of the masses, nor on their self-organization, nor on building a national network of political activists committed to mobilizing people in defense of The Process of Change. In contrast, Fidel's Cuba understood these measures were needed to survive under the relentless US imperial pressure, and Cuba made itself impenetrable to regime change.
The Bolivian military coup against an elected progressive head of state provides lessons for Bernie Sanders' campaign supporters. In the US, the two-party system has developed many tools to make sure figures like Bernie never becomes the candidate, such as rigging the primaries and engaging in corporate media-smear campaigns. Nor is electing such a seeming progressive leader, like we saw in 2008, close to the end of the battle. The leader's initiatives could be blocked by Congress, by in the courts, in the federal bureaucracy. A genuinely progressive president could be removed from office on unwarranted charges, as with Dilma and Lula in Brazil, or here, as the Democrats seek to do with the isolationist Donald Trump.
The national-security state has a vast array of tools developed from its extensive experience in wars, coups, and disruptions that it can employ at home to terminate a progressive president's tenure or neutralize any progressive movement. Unfortunately, most people still suffer from the naive delusion that we live in a uniquely free and democratic country, that we are exempt from coups and similar methods the US routinely uses abroad.
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