Bolivia and Brazil: brief commentaries
MAS was elected in Bolivia. What does that mean? From both sides of the left’s appreciation of the problem, we see conflicting answers to the question. While one side overestimates MAS’s left characteristics, being MAS an organization soiled by the most vile and rightist opportunism, tied to the bourgeoisie election system, the other side tends to underestimate the character of the Bolivian people, a people which, despite MAS’s opportunists and not because of them, keeps fighting. While one side cheers “democracy” forgetting there is nothing popular to this democracy, that its existence is not guaranteed even in the fake and dissimulated limits of the landowner-bourgeois and imperialistic reaction, the other side says that MAS is only an opportunistic party and that its victory represents nothing.
Let us try and understand the concrete situation. Bolivia was the victim of a coup which stemmed from the fascistization promoted by imperialism in all of the world. There were several attempts to do the same in Venezuela and Honk Kong, the same was done in Brazil and in Ukraine before it, in Belarus they try to score a new win by demonizing a nationalist government. The world’s situation is outlined and from now on we should view it as it is. Neoliberalism finds itself pregnant and it gives birth to fascism, nazism, neonazism etc. in its neocolonialist thirst. Looking at it another way, however, we should not defend stagnation while defending a people’s right to self-determination and we should fight opportunism ferociously, for it is opportunism which gives permission to the fascist bitch, with its disgusting flesh full of worms, to give birth to its puppies.
Wherever stagnation is promoted by the opportunists who want to place themselves as popular leaders or by opportunist parties fascism will find breeches to infiltrate. But opportunism has its limits and the people fight, even when numbed by opportunism.
Should we give support to opportunism and extol the abstract democracy of the bureaucrat and comprador bourgeoisie and of the big landowners? No, that would be ridiculous. To the opportunists we should destine only the harshest criticism, we should completely delegitimize them and feed them to history’s trash can. All opportunism should be destroyed, spat on and stepped on by those who fight alongside the people, by those who serve the people, and should be destroyed, spat on and stepped on by the people itself in general. And that will happen someday.
Should we delegitimize the just popular fight, even when it is insufficient, to erase from latin-american nations and from nations around the world the fascist elements imperialism has forced upon the world? There is not a single reason to do that. Communists act to radicalize popular concerns, the concerns from all the progressive stratums of society, and they radicalize those concerns turning them into struggle. If they don’t do that, they put themselves in an unstable position, they take away their own footing.
Bolivians have fought, amongst other things, for the respect of their choices in the electoral front. It is sad that this struggle has been, in its sensible layer, directed by the MAS’s opportunists, by the most disgusting right wing elements within the party, but that does not take away the legitimacy of the popular struggle. What is this unhappy state of affairs showing us? The urgent necessity of communist action in that nation to create the conditions for the denunciation not only of imperialist intervention but also of the electoral facade and of MAS’s opportunism as a whole. We should support Bolivians in their struggle to eliminate imperialism’s puppets which were handpicked by the empire and also support the development of such struggle to a new level, in which Bolivians will denounce and fight all of those who, being imperialism’s puppets, try to fool them and say they are guardians of the nation and of its people.
A people’s inclination towards a government proposed inside the narrow limits of bourgeois democracy or its indisposition towards it are no more than the most sensible expressions of the complete disbelief of that people in the “democracy” of landowners and of the bureaucratic and comprador bourgeoisie, of the people’s concrete fight, even if unorganized, against the bourgeois world and its unequal manifestations.
The opportunists in the left wing parties use the people’s hatred against imperialism to subdue the people to imperialism while creating narratives and weak economic measures to disguise that. The right wing opportunists use the people’s hatred against a lying and opportunist left to also subdue the people to imperialism. From both sides we see the same thing: the development in the people’s consciousness when it comes to national problems, and with it the necessity of the construction or reconstruction of marxist-leninist-maoist parties that can organize the just rebelion.
But what does this have to do with Brazil? Well, in Brazil we suffered our own coup in 2016 and 2020 elections are only meant to keep it running smooth. We have already criticized the parties that are now entering the elections, and we have demonstrated with ease how the people’s disbelief in the elections, in bourgeois politics, and how the passive boycott of over 30% of brazillian voters in 2018 elections are both instances that justify an unified movement for active boycott. We will not do that again. However, we should again affirm that the passive boycott is a form of unorganized popular struggle and that a failure to understand that is a failure in being materialistic, it’s a negation of leninism. Stalin would say that we should follow the masses and radicalize them in their way.
We should, then, talk about the coup itself. The popular protests against Dilma Roussef, where they were really popular, were more than justified, the anti-popular impeachment of our ex-president, however, was the result of imperialistic needs. At that time, we had no need or reason to defend Dilma as well, but we did have the need and reasons to defend the people of PT’s opportunism and of the fascistization of the State. If we were to have taken advantage of a moment like that one, opportunity to continue the struggle could have arised. There is time to denounce and to actively fight against opportunism and imperialism/fascism, the fight against one side can only exist as a fight against the other as well — and if that does not happen, then there was some deviation on the way.
Bolivians were radical enough to defend the candidates they wanted to elect, but they did it to defend their national interests and their autonomy from imperialism, they do not truly believe in those candidates. The people never truly believes in opportunism. Our worry should always be, regardless of the place, to not let opportunism win also in the ideological front when it wins the electoral one, which is secondary, because, if they do, stagnation will be restored, as well as passivity, and the people’s victory, their true defense of the nation, will be fruitless.
We should not let illusions pile and deviate the people from the just struggle against the oppressive reality. We should not let the people be defenseless against imperialism. We should organize the people’s defenses against the opportunistic side of imperialist domination and against its fascist side, knowing that one breeds the other. Those are two sides of the struggle created by the same manifestation of national oppresion: the internal and external counter-revolution.
