We, the Sovereign by Baiocchi Gianpaolo;

Author:Baiocchi, Gianpaolo;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509521357
Publisher: Polity Press
Published: 2018-06-23T00:00:00+00:00

Not a Party, a Political Instrument: Bolivia’s MAS

The Assembly for the Sovereignty of the Peoples (ASP) was officially formed in 1995, fifteen years after Brazil’s PT, and would assume its current name of MAS–IPSP (Movement toward Socialism—Political Instrument of Popular Sovereignty), or simply MAS, in 1999. This movement-party represents another solution to the problem of political representation of social movements. If the PT was imagined as a party where “movements could speak,” it was still very much a political party, with strong institutional mechanisms to both allow movements to speak and to preserve internal party democracy. Part of this was to preserve the autonomy of movements. The MAS was always less institutionalized than the PT, and was founded with a greater emphasis on organic relationships to social movements rather than formal party structures; it was also less tied to the idea of the political party itself, defining itself as an “instrument” to be overcome; and it owed much less to European debates on socialism and democracy than to decolonial ideas and indigenous political philosophies in combination with Marxism.

The MAS was, very much like the PT, a party borne of radical social and labor movements, though in this case majority indigenous and rural ones. Bolivia is nearly two-thirds indigenous, with sharp racial boundaries defining much of social life. In the years since its founding, rural social movements and unions had been agitating against neoliberal policies of austerity whose brunt was being borne by the already impoverished indigenous majority. Sometimes the demands were articulated as class demands and sometimes in terms of indigenous rights and recognition.

In the mid-1980s, Bolivia closed down several of its state-owned mining enterprises, which had been a site of militant union activity for several decades. Thousands of displaced miners went into coca-farming regions, adding to the growing militancy there, bringing with them both organizational capacity and socialist ideology. The coca growers’ union, despite repression, fought to keep coca production legal and developed a high level of political organization. Other displaced miners went to the city of El Alto, where they formed autonomous mutual assistance associations.

In 1994, the Popular Participation Law created over 300 new governments and indigenous and rural movements began to engage these, with varying degrees of success. But social movements did not want only local participation; bigger goals were sovereignty and the right to self-determination. In that same year, a federation of coca-farmer and peasant unions, the Assembly for the Sovereignty of the People (ASP), formed a “political instrument” that was essentially an arm of the federation, to run candidates and make demands. For procedural reasons, in 1999 it wound up officially adopting the name MAS–IPSP, MAS being an acronym for a political party that was no longer active at the time.

While the first elections in which it participated produced tangible results in rural areas of Cochabamba (the center of coca-farmer activism), by 1997 it had managed to elect Evo Morales, a union leader, to Parliament. At the time, these were all-volunteer electoral campaigns without outside sources of funding; candidates themselves had to contribute two months’ salary.

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