Bolivia is in a revolutionary crisis. More than six weeks into an indefinite general strike, workers, indigenous people and rural farmers continue to block highways in significant portions of the country. Popular marches persist in major cities, and what began as protests over inflation, fuel shortages, wages, and economic deterioration has developed into a broader political confrontation. As the government of President Rodrigo Paz responds with increasingly violent repression, the movement more and more demands Paz’s resignation. The masses are challenging the institutions of the ruling class in a manner that prevents the ruling class from governing as usual.
At the center of this conflict stands the Central Obrera Boliviana (COB). The COB is a labor federation with deep roots in the twentieth-century struggles of the Bolivian working class. The present-day COB is shot through with bureaucratic conservatism borne of a long partnership with the Bolivian government to generate revenue by selling Bolivia’s underground assets as raw materials on the international market. The result is that, where the international left once called for ‘all power to the COB’ in such Bolivian upheavals, there is now no organization worthy of the workers’ trust to take power in their name.
The Origins of the COB
The COB was founded during the Bolivian Revolution of 1952, one of the most significant revolutionary upheavals in Latin American history. Emerging from the struggles of miners, workers, and peasants, the COB quickly became more than a trade union federation. The COB functioned as a political force capable of coordinating national struggles and, at times, acting as an alternative center of authority. For much of the international left, the COB became a symbol of revolutionary potential. It represented a labor movement that appeared capable of transcending purely economic demands and confronting the question of power directly.
The COB of the twenty-first century is not the COB of 1952. Over decades, the federation has become increasingly integrated into state structures and increasingly invested in maintaining its institutional position. The leadership of the COB is now a bureaucracy that does not have the same interests as its membership.
This split loyalty shows in the current strike. On the one hand, COB leadership cannot openly oppose the movement because it depends upon the militancy of the rank and file. On the other hand, they fear the emergence of a struggle that escapes bureaucratic control and begins directly confronting the existing structures of power. This conflict between a combative base and a conservative leadership is a defining feature of the current crisis.
The scars of extraction
Ever since the sixteenth century colonization of what we now know as Bolivia, the country’s economic foundation has been based on the extraction of its natural resources, starting with the infamous silver mine of Potosí. Natural gas, mining, and lithium continue to provide the basis for state revenue and economic growth. Like the government and many Bolivian communities, labor organizations are dependent upon extraction as sources of jobs and revenue. As a result, sectors of the labor movement have increasingly found themselves defending the continued expansion of industries that produce ecological destruction against indigenous Bolivians demanding the restoration of their lands.
No issue illustrates this contradiction more clearly than lithium, a mineral essential to creating lithium-ion rechargeable batteries. Bolivia’s Salar de Uyuni salt flats estimated to contain 20% of the world’s lithium deposits, which has garnered the rapt interest of Chinese and U.S. imperialisms’ greed for smart phones and electric cars. Bolivia possesses some of the largest lithium reserves in the world, and supporters argue that exploitation of these reserves can generate employment, increase revenues, and strengthen national development. For many indigenous Bolivians, the opportunities presenting by lithium mining is more degradation of their native lands.
Further, lithium mining requires enormous quantities of water in regions already suffering from drought. Communities dependent upon these water sources for agriculture, livestock, and tourism face direct consequences. Furthermore, many projects have advanced without the forms of free, prior, and informed consultation guaranteed under existing legal frameworks.
In solidarity with the indigenous people of Bolivia and in recognition that capitalist modes of exploitation of natural resources will destroy our planet if left unchecked, we Socialists Without Borders say, “leave it in the ground!”
Dual Power and the Question of Organization
The historical significance of the COB once rested precisely upon its potential capacity to resolve problems that the capitalist government could not solve. Now, they participate in that same government and hold a stake in its survival. Workers must pay close attention to how the COB behaves in this struggle and prepare themselves for the moment when they must go their separate ways.
Meanwhile, a strike, no matter how militant, will not resolve the question of power by itself. The central problem confronting the movement is organizational. Throughout history, revolutionary crises have produced new forms of organization when existing institutions proved incapable of addressing the needs of the masses. Workers’ councils, soviets, cordones industriales, neighborhood assemblies, and strike committees emerge when people needed structures capable of coordinating struggle and administering social life as the bourgeois government fails.
Bolivia faces a similar challenge. Independent struggle committees can be established in workplaces, mines, indigenous communities, neighborhoods, schools, and blockade points. Democratically elected and immediately recallable, such committees would not merely coordinate protests. They could begin assuming functions normally monopolized by the state: organizing supplies, coordinating transportation, defending mobilizations, and directing social life in areas under popular control.
When such structures coordinate nationally, they will gain the ability and the authority to contest state power with the government. The problem is that some kind of organization with the objective and the capacity to coordinate such a rebellion at a national level must step up to do this job. The COB is clearly not that organization, and no alternative has yet presented itself.
Bolivia’s Choice
The crisis now unfolding in Bolivia cannot be understood simply as a conflict over wages, fuel prices, or presidential legitimacy. It reflects deeper contradictions embedded within the country’s economic and political development. Indigenous communities are defending land and water. Workers are defending livelihoods. The state responds with repression while labor bureaucracies attempt to contain struggles that threaten to move beyond established limits. Meanwhile, we humans can no longer abuse our environment as we have become accustomed to. We cannot mine our way out of climate change, and workers of the world must join forces and bring unheeding resource extraction to a hasty end.
Bolivia’s crisis is therefore more than a national question. It is a warning to the international left. A socialism that remains dependent upon extraction ultimately reproduces many of the contradictions it claims to overcome. The struggle for social emancipation and the struggle for ecological survival cannot be separated.
The choice confronting Bolivia is increasingly the choice confronting humanity itself:
¡Socialism or Extinction!