The deep crisis that has been unfolding for some time within the Movement toward Socialism – Political Instrument for the Sovereignty of the Peoples (MAS-IPSP) has prompted various analysts to assess the events that took place during the governments of Evo Morales (2006–19) and Luis Arce (2020–25). The failed coup attempt on June 26, 2024, and increasing military involvement in Bolivian politics are intensifying debates about the end of the political cycle marked by the MAS’s time in power. The 2019 coup d’état revealed that the Plurinational State, which aimed to advance decolonization and democratization, remains as weak and exclusionary as Bolivia’s previous forms of government.

Debates are also fueled by violent disputes within the MAS, whose factions are willing to let blood flow to maintain control of the state, even if this is only to implement austerity plans recommended by neoliberal economists. The disappointment, skepticism, and demoralization among social movements highlight the need for an assessment of recent events to establish a strategy against imperialism, the ruling classes, and a resurgent right wing, preparing the workers and popular masses for a socialist counteroffensive.

Here, we will focus on an assessment that is gaining traction among sectors of the Left, which views the initial period of Morales’s government as a “political revolution” or “partial political revolution.”

This perspective, articulated by Jorge Viaña, Hugo Moldiz, and José Daniel Lorenti’s recently published book,¹José Daniel Llorenti. Historical and Political Limitations of the “Process of Change”: End of a Cycle? (La Paz: Subterránea, 2024). is based on the assumption that the October agenda, including the founding of a Constituent Assembly (CA) and the nationalization of hydrocarbons, will be fulfilled. These efforts seek to explain the current situation of the MAS while avoiding narratives of betrayal of the renovators, or the alleged betrayal and cowardice of the Evistas during 2019, or simply reducing the serious structural problems to a dispute between good people and bad people.

In trying to justify the actions of Morales and the MAS up to the Constitution’s approval, this narrative neglects to address the strategic and programmatic problems that have plagued the MAS, leading to the current state of affairs. The issue of “class” remains unaddressed as analysts focus on MAS policies while giving little attention to the cycle of popular uprisings from April 2000 to May–June 2005. Instead, analyses often center on events since 2006, when Morales took office.

Commentators generally agree that we are now in an “administrative-bureaucratic” phase of the MAS, marked by a focus on management. This suggests that the “transformative and heroic” phase of change has ended, at least until a second phase, according to Morales’s former vice president, Álvaro García Linera.

In a recent BBC interview, García Linera, who has distanced himself from current MAS disputes due to perceived “incompetence” said,

The administrative logic of transition from large hegemonies emerging from collective action to the fragmented and divided hegemonies emerging from these administrative moments requires another type of knowledge and political savvy that I do not possess. I admit my incompetence at this moment.

García Linera’s remarks avoid explaining the transition from “great hegemonies” to “fragmented hegemonies,” seemingly naturalizing these “phases” and evading political responsibility for the outcomes. Most MAS analysts echo these statements without questioning them, failing to recognize that these outcomes result from nonrevolutionary politics. Therefore, we will begin this debate by revisiting the cycle of national uprisings from 2000 to 2005.

Origin of the So-Called Process of Change: April 2000 or January 2006?

Morales and the MAS rose to the presidency in January 2006 and stayed in power for 14 years, until the 2019 coup. This phenomenon is incomprehensible unless we recognize the cycle of class struggle initiated by the Water War in Cochabamba in April 2000 and the subsequent national uprisings that lasted until May–June 2005, which culminated in the fall of Carlos Mesa (president), Orlando Vaca Diez (president of the Senate), and Mario Cossío (president of the Chamber of Deputies). The rise of Rodríguez Veltzé, president of the Supreme Court of Justice, to the presidency of the State marked the collapse of the neoliberal regime known as “pacted democracy,” characterized by agreements among bourgeois representatives to ensure governability. These pacts were, of course, finely lubricated with the distribution of public offices and various deals that guaranteed the commitment of all political forces to the implementation of the neoliberal model.

Neoliberal attacks on workers and communities in late 1999 and early 2000 targeted water resources, aiming to expropriate wells from peasant communities known as regantes (irrigators) and transfer control to transnational companies. This led to widespread social mobilization and resistance against police and military forces, signaling the end of the neoliberal cycle and the start of a new political phase defined by a new balance of power between classes.

The Water War was expressed in the emergence of a united front of the masses,²The Third International, led by Lenin and Trotsky, formulated the tactic of the united workers’ front as a mechanism for fighting the bourgeoisie and advancing workers’ demands, aiming to strengthen revolutionary tendencies by exposing the lukewarm and conciliatory politics of the official leadership. The development of the united front can progress to the point of transforming into soviets or council forms of organization, that is, forms of mass united front. represented by the Water Coordinating Committee, which was composed of trade unions and social organizations in the city of Cochabamba. Meanwhile, Achacachi, an Aymara town in the highlands, became a second epicenter of conflict, organizing tens of thousands of community members in road blockades.

The Water War was followed by the Aymara uprising in September 2000, led by Felipe Quispe, known as the Mallku (Aymara: leader), which presented over 70 agrarian and political demands to General Banzer’s government, inflicting severe political damage on the regime. This uprising brought Indigenous demands, particularly the affirmation of Aymara identity, to the forefront of Bolivian politics.

The years 2001 and 2002 were marked by intense sectoral conflicts, resulting in deaths and injuries. In 2002, national elections saw the MNR narrowly defeat Evo Morales, with Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada (Goni) leading the government. The government’s extreme weakness prompted a grand agreement among neoliberal parties known as the mega coalition, which ultimately lacked social legitimacy, forcing the government to rely on police repression.

The crisis intensified in February 2003, when the government imposed a wage tax, leading to a national crisis that ended with more than 35 people killed after clashes between the police and military forces. The police mutiny on February 12 and 13 occurred a few days before a general strike was called by the Bolivian Workers Central (COB), exacerbating the political crisis and leading to the withdrawal of the tax and resurfacing historical disputes between police and military factions.

The February crisis prompted a renewed commitment among regime parties to governance, with a national agreement intended to stabilize Sánchez de Lozada’s government, which enjoyed a brief period of calm until September 19, 2003.

The popular uprising in October, known as the Gas War, began on September 19 in the city of El Alto after police and military forces attacked a roadblock in Warisata, leaving seven people dead, including a seven-year-old girl. As news of the military action spread, hundreds of roadblocks were set up across the plateau, while Quispe and several leaders of the Single Trade Union Confederation of Peasant Workers of Bolivia (CSUTCB) began a hunger strike at Radio San Gabriel.

The farmers’ massive blockade was followed by an expanded meeting of the COB in Huanuni, where an indefinite general strike was declared and a miners’ march to La Paz was organized for early October. When the miners and the National University of the 20th Century (UNSXX) mobilization reached the town of Ventilla, at the gates of El Alto, they were met by a police and military operation that resembled the operation that defeated the working class in 1986, paving the way for Supreme Decree 21060 and all neoliberal policies.³Supreme Decree 21060 was a set of provisions that opened the door to the neoliberal cycle on a massive scale. It provided for the privatization of state-owned companies and labor flexibility, and it initiated processes that made jobs more precarious. A decisive boost was given to all extractive policies and the surrender of natural resources. After much deliberation, the march decided to break through the operation and continue toward La Paz. The repression was fierce, resulting in the death of miner Atahuichi from Huanuni. This news galvanized the neighborhood councils in El Alto to launch a vigorous and massive uprising, with barricades going up and the government losing control of the city. The great popular uprising in El Alto had begun, ultimately leading to the ousting of Goni and the MNR from power on October 17, 2003.

With the MNR on the run, all political parties and figures that shaped the neoliberal “pacted democracy” regime followed suit. Carlos Mesa’s administration began with certain popular expectations, since he was not a formal member of the MNR and had a background as a journalist. His tenure was relatively calm as he aimed to channel social demands into the electoral arena, trying to avoid the deep social and political polarization that had intensified since the Water War.

Mesa called a national referendum to decide on establishing a Constituent Aseembly and to demand departmental autonomy, a long-standing demand of regional bourgeoisies and segments of civil society seeking a better distribution of national income in the face of centralism in La Paz. The demand for autonomy, historically significant, also served as a means to contain revolutionary tendencies primarily expressed in the west of the country, becoming the banner of the national right wing, which retreated into oligarchic, conservative, and racist regionalism.

By 2005, however, the situation rapidly deteriorated when the hydrocarbons law, promoted by the MAS parliamentary group, was debated in parliament. This law imposed a substantial tax increase on the production and commercialization of hydrocarbons, aligning Bolivia’s tax rates with those of TotalEnergies SE, a French multinational energy and petroleum company. Although the law did not nationalize hydrocarbon companies, it severely reduced their profits and was rejected by parliament. Mesa threatened to resign rather than enact a law he believed would lead to Bolivia’s collapse. The law triggered a new national uprising in May–June 2005, culminating in Morales’s taking office in January 2006, after winning 55 percent of the vote in the December 2005 elections.

This first cycle of class struggle was characterized by an awakening of the masses and accelerated learning about the deceitful mechanisms of neoliberal democracy. A vast experiment was carried out, using various methods of struggle; in this experiment, each major union or social movement emulated the military’s organizational plans, signaling their own street power. Examples included the Aymara General Headquarters established in Kalachaca, the peasant movement’s “flea” plan, and various methods of organizing road and street blockades, as well as support and gathering points in case of clashes with the police.

Throughout those years, various attempts were made to unite trade unions and social organizations, one of the last being the Unity Pact, which was quickly co-opted by the MAS government. There were multiple experiences of self-organization among workers, peasants, and popular sectors — from the power of the neighborhood councils in El Alto in 2003, which remained scattered and failed to coordinate as an alternative to declining representative democracy, to experiences like the multiple committees and forms of self-defense during mobilizations. Perhaps the most advanced form of self-organization was the Water Coordinating Committee in Cochabamba, a democratic body structured around all the unions in the city. It emerged from an NGO initiative as a semi-institutional space but was transformed, under popular pressure, into a united-front organization of the masses.

During those years, the political regime that emerged from the 1976 and 1985 elections collapsed, dismantled in every mobilization, strike, and road blockade. As the way was paved for the MAS to rise to power, Indigenous political formations emerged, such as Quispe’s Pachakuti Indigenous Movement (MIP), with strong roots in the Aymara world, as well as left-wing organizations in Potosí. The class struggle opened a period for the revival of organizations claiming to represent workers, peasants, and the masses. The pressure of mass mobilization compelled Mesa’s neoliberal government to convene a Constituent Assembly, a demand met through negotiations in parliament between the ruling MAS and the right-wing opposition recently united in PODEMOS, led by Tuto Quiroga.

The demand for a Constituent Assembly emerged strongly in major national uprisings, closely associated with the idea of rebuilding the country on new foundations. With the idea of socialism gone, it was popularly understood that the democratic way to end the plundering of natural resources, begin their industrialization, and end large landholdings was through the demand for a Constituent Assembly. In the eyes of the people, the assembly was linked to economic and social demands that, if fully met, would affect the interests of the ruling classes. This is crucial to understanding the subsequent development of the Constituent Assembly and how it served to demobilize the movements and foster the gradual passivization of mass action.

The change in contemporary Bolivia developed in the first five years of the millennium, establishing a new balance of forces between social classes that crystallized into democratic and inclusive laws during Morales’s government. But these changes occurred in a distorted manner, degrading their content. What followed was a series of negotiations with the ruling classes over the scope and depth of social change.

The Constituent Assembly and the Plurinational State: Political Revolution or Passivity of the Masses?

This leads to a key issue regarding how and why we arrived at this situation, making the discussion of how to understand and interpret the entire political cycle strategically important for the upcoming battles simmering in the class struggle.

As noted, the idea of a political revolution to explain Morales’s first government is not only wrong but dangerous if adopted by broad sectors of the vanguard and advanced workers, since it leads to repeating the same mistakes that rebuilt the state and the bourgeois capitalist order that had been demolished in the preceding years. These mistakes contained the mass movement, directing its expectations toward the Constituent Assembly and relying on the government to manage conflicts with the regionalized right wing.

To undertake a comprehensive analysis of this historical period, we must first establish some fundamental concepts and definitions for the Marxist analysis of this period:

1. The social nature of the state. For MAS ideologues and politicians, the state is understood as a field of dispute, a tool that can facilitate social transformation depending on who holds power. This view diverges from classical formulations by Marx, Engels, and Lenin, who emphasized the social nature of this institution in class-divided societies. After the Paris Commune, Marx and Engels argued that the state cannot be reformed, it must be destroyed. This conclusion arises from the understanding that state forms evolve from and refine previous forms, as seen in the development of the Roman ius civile (civil law), which influences modern capitalist states to this day.

Marx and Engels’ perspective on destroying the capitalist state and replacing it with alternatives, such as those proposed by the Paris Commune, is rooted in the state’s historic role: serving the ruling classes while positioning itself above society.⁴It is clear that in times of “social peace” encouraged by economic prosperity, the state presents itself as much more than just a group of armed men, as Althusser theorized, with its various “ideological apparatuses.” In moments of extreme crisis, however, when revolution and counterrevolution come face to face, the state is reduced to just that. All other “ideological apparatuses” without it are almost insignificant. This leads many to view the state as primarily a punitive apparatus, encompassing the courts, police, and military. This is crucial to consider when assessing why the MAS’s decolonization reforms left the armed forces and police untouched, especially after the 2019 coup and the failed coup attempt on June 26.

Bolivia’s workers’ revolution of 1952 dismantled the army, but the white-mestizo bourgeoisie, with the MNR’s assistance, rebuilt it, establishing a new national state with U.S. collaboration; this evolved in the mid-1980s into the neoliberal state. The Plurinational State has formal differences from these predecessors, such as provisions for Indigenous autonomy and legal pluralism, but during crises, the armed forces’ role remains prominent, indicating that the state’s nature, serving mestizo ethnic classes, has not changed despite recent reforms following the 2009 constitution (Constitución Política del Estado, CPE). Events like Pedregal, Sacaba, and Senkata highlight this continuity.

2. The dual nature of radical democratic demands such as the Constituent Assembly. The demand for a Constituent Assembly emerged in every national uprising, rooted in the Indigenous marches since the 1990s and approved by referendum during Mesa’s government.

For Marxists, taking into account the lessons of the four first congresses of the Communist International, we value the great mobilizing power of democratic demands, particularly for a free and sovereign constituent assembly that aims to rebuild the country. But we also acknowledge its potential to demobilize when used to reinforce bourgeois order. The Third International and Trotsky in the Transitional Program advocated integrating minimum and democratic demands into a single program for socialism, as long as they maintained their vitality.

From 2000 to 2006, the demand for a Constituent Assembly was a strong mobilizing force. Yet the negotiations with PODEMOS in 2006 and the financial and agro-industrial oligarchy contributed to growing disillusionment within the mass movement. Agro-industrial landowners retained their land, and big businesses thrived during Morales’s government. The negotiated nature of the Constituent Assembly fostered demobilization and passivity among the mass movement, while trade unions became integrated into the state structure. Consequently, a more coherent regime serving the ruling classes emerged compared to 2005–9.⁵During these years, the political regime could be defined as a “split regime,” since the MAS enjoyed legitimacy and legality in the western part of the country, while in the east, in what is known as the half moon (media luna) during those years, the oligarchic right wing also enjoyed regional legality and legitimacy, fueling the possibility of civil war from August to October 2008. This divided regime was reunited during the negotiations of October 21, 2008, which enabled the referendum on the new constitution.

3. The contradictory relationship between the mass movement and the party and state superstructure. A methodological error in analyzing the “progressive” political cycle is that MAS ideologues often view the relationship between mass movements, the MAS, and the state as linear and uncontradictory. They perceive the social movements and their leaders, who initiated the uprisings, as the same people incorporated into the MAS and state structures, ignoring any transformation in this relationship.

This linear understanding suggests that “the process of change is undergoing an administrative phase,” limited to managing the state and established order, as if this phase reflected a natural evolution rather than the outcome of struggles among classes, parties, and factions within the MAS itself. By interpreting social movements as following a continuous trajectory from the streets to the state, and focusing solely on whether their demands were met, commentators reduce the analysis to government policies, overlooking the relationships these policies provoke between the masses and the state.

Conversely, Trotsky paid close attention to problems like these in explaining the role of workers’ and popular organizations after Franco’s victory in Spain. His analysis offers insights into the complex relationship between the MAS and social movements. For example, he argues against the notion that the Spanish revolution owed its defeat to “the immaturity of the masses” or to “the God of revolutionaries,” who “did not bring a Lenin or a Trotsky to Spain.” These views ultimately naturalize defeats and shift blame from leaders and their strategies to the masses, who worked to end neoliberalism and laid the groundwork for the MAS’s rise to power in 2006.

Trotsky, referring to Spain in the 1930s, states,

There is an old saying that reflects the evolutionary and liberal conception of history: the people have the government it deserves. History shows us, however, that one and the same people can have very different governments for a relatively brief period of time (Russia, Italy, Germany, Spain, etc.) and furthermore that the order in which these occur does not always have the same meaning, from despotism to freedom, as evolutionary liberals believe. The secret of this state of affairs lies in the fact that people is composed of hostile classes, and that these same classes are made up of different strata, partially opposed to one another and having different orientations. Furthermore, all peoples are influenced by other peoples, which are themselves composed of classes. Governments are not the expression of the ever-increasing “maturity” of a “people,” but rather the product of the struggle between different classes and different strata within a single class and, in addition, there are external forces at work, such as alliances, conflicts, wars, etc. It should be added that, once established, a government can last much longer than the balance of power that brought it into being. It is these historical contradictions that give rise to revolutions, coups d’état, and counterrevolutions.

The same dialectical method must be used to address the question of class leadership. Like liberals, our wise men admit tacitly the axiom that each class has the leadership it deserves. In reality, leadership is not at all the “simple reflection” of a class or the product of its own creative power. Leadership is formed in the course of clashes between different classes or frictions between different layers within a given class. But as soon as it appears, the leadership inevitably rises above the class and, because of this, risks suffering pressure and influence from the rest of the classes. The proletariat can “tolerate” for quite some time a leadership that has already undergone total internal degeneration but has not had the opportunity to reveal this in the course of major events. A great historical shock is necessary to sharply reveal the contradiction that exists between the leadership and the class. The most powerful historical shocks are wars and revolutions. For this reason, the working class is often caught off guard by war and revolution. But even when the old leadership has revealed its own internal corruption, the class cannot immediately improvise a new leadership, especially if it has not inherited from the previous period solid revolutionary cadres capable of taking advantage of the collapse of the old leading party. The Marxist interpretation, that is, dialectical rather than scholastic, of the relations between a class and its leadership leaves no stone unturned in the legalistic sophistries of our author.⁶Leon Trotsky, “The Class, the Party, and the Leadership.” Excerpt published posthumously in New International, 1940.

We include this extensive quotation because it offers valuable methodological contributions to a Marxist understanding of the relationship between structure and superstructure and the social movements mobilized alongside existing left-wing parties.

For various MAS analysts, it appears that internal friction within the MAS arose after the coup, but this overlooks disputes that had existed since its inception, overshadowed by Morales’s strong hegemony. Initially, Morales lacked the support of miners, particularly in Huanuni, where a violent confrontation occurred in October 2006 with the MAS’s minister of mining, Walter Villarroel, who aimed to transfer ownership of the mine to the state and to Chinese companies. This was followed by significant rifts with the MAS’s old guard, such as Santos Ramírez, Román Loayza, Félix Santos, Isabel Ortega, and Julia Ramos.

Subsequent friction led to the expulsion of “free thinkers” and a break with factions of the peasant movement, including the coca growers of Yungas de Vandiola and coca growers in northern La Paz, and the persecution of miners and teachers promoting the Workers’ Party (PT).⁷Months before this attack, there had been a general strike led by the COB and the FSTMB (Syndical Federation of Bolivian Mineworkers) against the pension law. The strike was met with fierce repression; hundreds of miners were arrested, and the law was finally approved with enormous inequalities, such as the granting of a pension equivalent to 100 percent of earnings to the military. These tensions solidified the divide between the MAS leadership and their bases. It is misleading to claim that the MAS-IPSP represents social movements, creating a narrative that seeks to embellish MAS leadership and evade serious criticism of its pro-business policies.

4. Political revolution: Changes in the state or in the political regime? Let us revisit the concept of (partial) political revolution as presented by the left wing of the MAS regarding Morales’s first government until the new Constitution’s promulgation. Some extend this phase of the “process of change” to 2013–14, when the MAS won nearly 63 percent of votes in the national elections, the highest percentage ever, although since 2009, the MAS had acted as a guarantor of constitutional agreements, managing the state while accentuating Morales’s authoritarianism.

The argument that the MAS regime amounted to a political revolution rests on significant regulatory and institutional changes incorporated into the new constitution, which ostensibly democratized the state. But if we adhere to classical Marxist understandings of the state, we can see that it remains a class-based and ethnic institution, upholding Bolivia’s semicolonial bourgeois order.⁸We affirm Bolivia’s semicolonial character, given the country’s dramatic external dependence, which maintains and even aggravates a primary export model, encouraging factions of the bourgeoisie to lean on foreign powers in response to the U.S., which views with concern its declining influence and business in the Southern Cone. If this is true, what has changed with the state’s designation as “plurinational”?

In political science, the political regime is understood as the institutional forms through which different governments can alternate according to common rules. For example, a dictatorial regime may have various governments with different orientations over time, while a democratic regime may experience similar variations in a shorter period. Neoliberalism, established in Bolivia after 1985, involved multiple governments operating within a framework defined by elections and governance agreements based on the distribution of state administration.

We could argue that political regimes are the crystallization of power relations between classes. In Bolivia, not only did governments change (from Goni to Mesa, then to Rodríguez Veltzé, and finally to Morales), but institutional structures defining government access also transformed. Yet within Morales’s government and the framework of the Plurinational State (EPB), changes occurred not only in government, with Morales making increasingly authoritarian moves, but also within the EPB regime, developing semi-Bonapartist tendencies in the executive branch.

Following these ideas, one could argue that although capitalist social relations and the ruling classes’ central role were not challenged during the last political cycle, change could come only through mass mobilization, leading to a social revolution that would dismantle the bourgeoisie and capitalist social relations. Nonetheless, that popular mobilization was sufficient to significantly transform the political regime, allowing some to classify it as a “political revolution.” This perspective implies that the masses could not establish better power relations, as if the MAS leadership sought to transcend what the masses would permit. It further suggests that these power relations are given rather than the product of struggles between strategies, programs, and policies. Ultimately, they result from conscious political decisions made by social and political actors involved in the struggle. The MAS leadership managed to implement some political reforms in the state structure, termed a political revolution, at the expense of advancing a social revolution and, therefore, after restructuring the ruling classes’ order, jeopardizing those reforms now questioned by the ruling classes.

Almost all political forces that joined and shaped the MAS shared a Stalinist vision of a necessary initial stage of a “democratic and cultural revolution” to fulfill the unfinished tasks of the 1952 revolution, specifically addressing the Indigenous question and achieving the bourgeois goal of “equality before the law,” an issue that had not been realized in Bolivia due to societal formation based on ethnic social classes, leading to what we now recognize as ethnic classes.

For this concept to be effective, however, it needed to hinder all working-class and popular tendencies that sought to go beyond political reform. It used democratic and inclusive reforms to limit and pacify efforts to deepen mobilization. Far from a political revolution, these were political reforms aimed at reconstructing the battered system without altering the material bases that sustain it, avoiding interference with the interests of big capital, agro-industrial, banking-financial, and mining sectors. In short, political reforms were introduced as part of a strategy of social counterrevolution, a process that intensified from 2009 onward and culminated in the coup of 2019.

These reflections are not new. Lenin, in 1907, when he still viewed the upcoming Russian Revolution as bourgeois-democratic, rejected the notion that it should be led by representatives of the liberal bourgeoisie. He argued that a Constituent Assembly could genuinely express the will of the entire people only if convened through revolutionary means—overthrowing the monarchy, forming a revolutionary provisional government, and convening the Constituent Assembly under that government’s authority, supported by the armed force:

For the establishment of the republic, an assembly of popular representatives is absolutely necessary, an assembly that must necessarily be of the entire people (based on universal suffrage, equal, direct, and secret) and constituent. … To establish a new order of things that “truly expresses the will of the people,” it is not enough to give the representative assembly the name of constituent. It is necessary that this assembly have the power and strength to “constitute.” … The resolution of Congress states that only a provisional revolutionary government, with the particularity that it is the organ of the victorious popular insurrection, is capable of guaranteeing complete freedom of electoral agitation and of convening an assembly that truly expresses the will of the people. Is this thesis fair?

Lenin raised this question while dismissing the recommendations of representatives of the liberal bourgeoisie and some Mensheviks who sought to approach the call for a Constituent Assembly through agreements with the monarchy. Despite significant differences with Bolivia, the MAS has mirrored the actions of the neo-Iskrists and Mensheviks rather than following Lenin’s guidance. Just before the quote given above, Lenin refers to Marx’s ideas regarding the failed Frankfurt Parliament of 1848, emphasizing the difference between an assembly formed from a victorious insurrection, capable of enforcing its decisions, and one convened by liberal and reformist organizations:

The Conference of the Mensheviks-Neo-Christians has made the same mistake that liberals constantly make. … These people throw around phrases about the “Constituent Assembly,” closing modestly their eyes to the preservation of force and power in the hands of the tsar, forgetting that in order to “constitute,” one must have the force to constitute. The Conference has also forgotten that there is a great distance between the “decision” of any representatives and the fulfillment of that decision. The Conference has also forgotten that as long as power remains in the hands of the Tsar, any decision by any representatives is nothing but empty and petty chatter, as were the “decisions” of the Frankfurt Parliament, famous in the history of the German revolution of 1848. Marx … lashed out with relentless sarcasm … because they made beautiful speeches, took all kinds of “democratic decisions,” “instituted” all kinds of freedoms, but in practice they left power in the hands of the king and did not organize armed struggle against the military forces at his disposal.⁹1V. I. Lenin, Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, July 1905. https://www.marxists.org/espanol/lenin/obras/1900s/1905-vii.htm./

Lenin’s orientation contrasts sharply with that of the MAS, which, instead of promoting revolutionary mobilization among rural and urban workers for a genuinely free and sovereign constituent assembly, opted to negotiate and compromise with increasingly weakened bourgeois forces. The parliamentary requirement of a two-thirds majority was accepted with PODEMOS in 2006, and finally, in the face of resistance from the ruling classes and their parties in 2008, the MAS chose to concede over 100 articles of the constitutional text rather than promote revolutionary mobilization against the Right.

It is baffling that, after handing over the CA to the right wing, Álvaro García Linera and other intellectuals described the months from September to October of that year as “the heroic moment of the process of change,” when, in reality, social counterrevolution was stabilizing — a moment they would later term a “political revolution.”

From September to October of that year, the peasant movement and various popular sectors intensely mobilized against the right-wing offensive against the CA, which they saw as insufficiently defending business interests. The right-wing offensive began with the takeover of state offices in Santa Cruz and other departments of the so-called Media Luna (referring to four eastern Bolivian departments: Santa Cruz, Beni, Pando, and Tarija), escalating into racist attacks and street violence. On September 11 in Pando, dozens of MAS-affiliated peasants were brutally ambushed by armed agents loyal to the governor, Leopoldo Fernández, resulting in over a dozen deaths and many injuries. Yet this right-wing uprising was met with massive mobilization from the COB and the CSUTCB in La Paz, alongside spontaneous demonstrations from Cochabamba to Santa Cruz. These protests, organized in response to the El Porvenir massacre, ensured no one faced the authorities unarmed. The first clash between civilians occurred in El Pailón, leading to several hours of conflict until the mobilization continued toward the departmental capital. Once again, rural and urban workers demonstrated their readiness to fight and enforce the will expressed in the CA, targeting the oligarchic and right-wing reactionaries determined to dismantle the Unión Juvenil Cruceñista (UJC, Youth Union of Santa Cruz) and other paramilitary groups that had sown fear among the popular sectors of Santa Cruz.

This combative stance of the mass movement, visible in every right-wing uprising — such as those in Sucre at the end of 2006, Cochabamba in January 2007, and finally August–October 2008 — contrasted sharply with the MAS leadership’s policy. As confrontations with the right intensified, the gap widened between the mobilized grassroots and their political leadership, which prioritized avoiding “excesses” and, consequently, safeguarding the ruling classes’ interests. The right wing, alarmed by the mobilization’s combative spirit, quickly pushed for negotiations that the MAS had set as a last resort to quell confrontations. On October 21, 2008, in Cochabamba, the grand agreement was finally signed, making the constitutional text viable, already modified in over 100 articles, and fully guaranteeing capitalist business in the country.

In this moment, a new political regime emerged: the Plurinational State of Bolivia, with the MAS and Evo Morales as nearly the sole guarantors, exhibiting strong conservative and authoritarian tendencies. The gas price hike of 2011, repression of Indigenous peoples in TIPNIS (Tipnis National Park), and repression of intercultural groups in Caranavi and the Leco people, along with other anti-popular and anti-worker measures, accelerated the rift between the MAS and the mass movement, a rift barely concealed by the control of mass organizations through a corrupt and co-opted union leadership.

The 2019 Coup: MAS Policy Paved the Way for the Right Wing

The period between the approval of the CPE and Morales’s fall in 2019 was marked by a strong tendency to consolidate the new political regime, leading to a hostile and repressive attitude toward popular and democratic demands, such as the struggles against the gas price hike, the MAS’s opposition to the Indigenous peoples of TIPNIS, the Leco peoples of northern La Paz, and illegal coca production, as well as support for oil companies against the people of Tariquía in Tarija. This also included the struggle for land allocation for intercultural communities in San Julián against agribusiness and the MAS government, the use of neoliberal regulations against salaried workers, and the promotion of microenterprises, which evaded labor rights.

While the policy toward undisciplined popular sectors was repressive, the MAS deepened agreements with the ruling classes, exemplified by the 2014 concessions to agro-industry in Santa Cruz, which received new credits and was more strongly integrated with the Chinese market. Despite these concessions, the agro-industrial and financial bourgeoisie maintained deep mistrust of Morales and the MAS, reflecting skepticism toward various “democratic” provisions in the CPE and legislation.

The MAS’s measures during this period had a dual effect: they demoralized popular sectors, who felt betrayed by their political instrument, while strengthening the ruling classes, who felt closer to state power through collaboration with agro-industrialists, mining entrepreneurs, and bankers.

Morales had to sustain this policy in isolation, increasingly relying on the judicial apparatus, police, and armed forces, fostering authoritarian tendencies that culminated in the February 21, 2016, defeat of the constitutional referendum. Morales’s refusal to acknowledge this loss and his “tailor-made” constitutional ruling in 2019 provided the right wing with democratic leverage, leading to the right-wing uprising in October and the coup d’état.

Instead of learning from these events, the MAS leadership continued its negotiation policy with the Right, even during defeat. Deputies and senators now part of the “Evismo” establishment engaged in negotiations during the coup, recognized Jeanine Áñez’s de facto government, and witnessed the consolidation of the coup after the Senkata massacre.

Áñez’s government emerged amid a delegitimization of state institutions and political persecution of those labeled “Masistas.” Attempts to postpone elections sparked popular rebellion in August 2020, threatening to overthrow the Áñez government. But the MAS leadership’s strategy of permanent negotiations led them to accept October 18 as the election date, deepening divisions between MAS parliamentarians and social organizations.

Luis Arce won the October 2020 elections, with 55 percent of the vote, and many coup plotters, including Áñez and Santa Cruz governor Luis Fernando Camacho, were imprisoned. But this did not dampen the strong centrifugal tendencies within the MAS. The party’s crisis and that of key state institutions, such as the judiciary, police, and armed forces, sowed uncertainty about the future of the Plurinational State of Bolivia. These events are crucial for understanding the current crisis.

Originally published in Spanish on July 13, 2024 in La Izquierda Diario.

Translated by Blanca Capetillo.