Bolivia’s indigenous anti-austerity revolt is happening in the context of a revolutionary retreat, where the globe’s working-class forces have mostly been getting crushed. Outside of Asia, the overall situation during Trump 2.0 is one of growing desperation for the besieged revolutionary governments, and for the popular movements that exist under increasingly repressive capitalist regimes. Bolivia could make the power dynamic flip, though. And it’s the desire to stop such a global upheaval that’s compelled Trump’s White House to plan for kidnapping Evo Morales, as well as for massacring his movement’s members. If we rally the workers movement behind Bolivia’s revolutionary forces, and combat the “progressive” reformists who’ve betrayed Bolivia in the past, we’ll be able to consolidate our forces behind stopping these schemes.
Bolivia’s workers, and the world’s workers, are struggling to overcome an existential peril for the revolutionary cause. Venezuela, both due to internal weaknesses and the objective strengths of its foe, has now been compromised so much that Rodriguez is handing Alex Saab over to the U.S. Because Washington could get away with facilitating mass starvation in Gaza, it’s engineered a humanitarian catastrophe in Cuba, and is now using this as a stepping stone towards invasion. Whether Cuba and its partners will pressure the empire away from invading has yet to be seen. Amid all of this direness, though, a new source of hope has appeared in Bolivia.
Bolivia’s uprising has the potential to become the next great blow to the hegemon, the act of resistance that reverses the present balance of forces. For the revolt to have such a big effect, it will firstly need to be successful in ousting the country’s far-right government, and secondly need to catalyze a larger wave of rebellions against neo-colonialism. Such a chain reaction is plausible because across the broader region, the recent accelerations in austerity have been creating great mass discontent, as shown by the reactions to Milei’s extreme economic shock policies.
The right has felt confident in waging total war on Argentina’s working class because within Argentina, the imperialists have made major progress in solidifying a bourgeois and pro-Zionist culture. Argentina is the place where the Zionist settlers plan to build their new hub as Israel’s collapse continues. But all of these reactionary designs will be thrown into disarray if Bolivia’s workers revolt spills over into the wider region.
Bolivia is the first country to undergo such an uprising during the post-Milei era because its indigenous movement is immensely strong. This has created a pattern where every time the reactionaries take power in Bolivia, they’re met with popular mobilizations that overwhelm the state. For workers in places where the reactionary state is strong, especially the Global North, it’s essential to learn from these successes by our counterparts in places like Bolivia. We also need to struggle against the opportunist forces within the left that seek to separate our own workers movements from the Global South, while promoting a pro-imperialist “socialism.”
We must not forget that when the U.S. orchestrated a coup against Morales in 2019, the “progressive” AOC met with organizers who were explicitly involved in the effort to oust the working-class leadership. AOC hid behind the pseudo-progressive rhetoric that the coupists used to launder their neo-colonial agenda, establishing a relationship with the “environmentalist” anti-Maduro org Standing Rivers. As AOC cultivated these ties with the regime change NGO network, her office stonewalled anti-imperialists who presented it with a petition from activists and academics, who urged AOC to take action against the coup.
In both the discourse and on an institutional level, the “democratic socialists” worked to undermine solidarity with Bolivia. No doubt they’ll do this again. But when you look at the larger arc of history, it becomes apparent that such fake socialism will be no match for what the hemisphere’s working masses are going to build.
When South America’s proletarians win the decisive battle, the socialism that they construct will be the strongest version of socialism that the Americas have seen by far. The pivotal factor will be when they kick the Zionists out of the region, thereby taking away what’s become imperialism’s essential buffer force against working-class victory within Latin America. An indication that they will succeed in this is how U.S. imperialism has collapsed throughout not just much of Asia, but now also in many of Africa’s Sahel countries; which partly fulfills the prerequisites for a Latin American revolutionary victory described by Kim Il Sung:
When Latin America groans under imperialist yoke, the Asian and African peoples cannot live in peace and when U.S. imperialism collapses in the Asian and African areas, a favourable phase will be created for the national-liberation movement of the Latin American peoples, too. The militant unity and close ties of the Asian, African and Latin American peoples will multiply the anti-imperialist, anti-U.S. revolutionary forces several times, scores of times and will become an invincible force which can frustrate successfully the aggression of the imperialists and the united front of international reaction. Therefore, the peoples in all regions where U.S. imperialism is entrenched should pool their strength and strike it hard.
The anti-imperialist successes that we’ve recently seen don’t mean we aren’t in a state of retreat right now, but they are a sign that this situation could soon change. It depends on how well-equipped the world’s workers are to fight the next battles, which may come sooner than anyone could have anticipated. The world wasn’t thinking about Bolivia prior to when this latest uprising appeared, like the world wasn’t thinking about Palestine prior to October 7.
Bolivia could become the variable that ends a period of darkness, but only if the rest of the world takes up the task that Bolivia has presented us with. The task where we must unify the global workers movement behind Bolivia’s workers, which is a harder mission than one may assume; the chauvinists and opportunists are still capable of doing damage, and splitting the globe’s workers at a critical moment. This is why exposing the “progressives” must be part of our response to the Bolivia development: they’re the ones that could sabotage our ability to assist Bolivia’s masses, and make room for Trump to carry out another intervention.
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