Labour must support the Bolivian people

 

Yesterday some of us managed to have a very enjoyable Xmas social organised by Brighton Pavilion Constituency Labour Party (CLP). This got me thinking about what socialists should be doing in the Labour Party in the coming year.

We very much need to raise our eyes from our parochial problems and adopt an internationalist perspective. Often this will mean determining how to show solidarity with peoples suffering the consequences of oppression or imperialist war (the Rohingya, the Palestinians, the people of Yemen, there’s quite a list).

However, we can also draw inspiration from international examples of victories being won by socialists elsewhere in the world, for example in Bolivia, which a year ago experienced what even the Guardian acknowledged to have been a military coup, after election results were challenged, following a sustained campaign to undermine the Government of former President Evo Morales. 

The enthusiasm of the Trump regime in Washington for this development (and of our own UK Government) (and of mainstream journalists acting as their echo chamber) may or may not have had anything to do with the discovery of the world’s biggest lithium deposit in that country. (Lithium is vital to the batteries which power electric cars and so to the future of the economies of advanced nations).

The Bolivian people, particularly the indigenous people who have been the support base of the Movement for Socialism, resisted the military backed interim Government and fought for fresh elections - which, took place in October, were found by the Carter Centre to have been “pluralistic and administered in a transparent, impartial, and well organised manner” and led to a victory for the left.

The election result did not bring an end to the struggle (witnessed by the assassination of a leftist union leader days after the election), but the people of Bolivia have shown that it is possible to resist global imperialism, even after a successful military coup and in the middle of a global pandemic. Socialists in the UK should take heart, and Labour Party members should find ways to support the Bolivia Solidarity Campaign to lobby for the right of the Bolivian people to control their own resources .