In the last month the Bolivian bourgeoisie and right wing has launched a huge counter-offensive against the Morales government, involving strikes by right wing students and street battles between left and right.

Two central issues have provoked their revolt – the nationalisation of the gas and oil, and the fight over the Constituent Assembly.

The latter has been the most immediately inflammatory question, because the right understands full well that if the Constituent were able to give to itself the right to change the constitution, then in effect it would have the right to overrule the Congress and take the political power.

The governing MAS (Movement towards Socialism) has a clear majority in the Assembly, so the right wing has demanded that a two-thirds majority be required to change the constitution gives them an effective veto.

It now appears that the government has been split on this issue, and that the vice-president Álvaro García Linera has forced a capitulation to the right, conceding the two-thirds requirement.

The government has also effectively put the nationalisation of oil and gas on hold, arguing that Bolivia lacks the expertise to run these industries alone and that it does not have the money to pay compensation!

All this is very bad news for the left, the working class and the mass social movements. The fight against imperialism and local capital has been stalled; and despite the militancy of the masses there is no alternative leadership with a clear line and a mass base.

In this article Pablo Stefanoni traces the division of the MAS which have led to the current impasse. Stefanoni is co-author (with Herve do Alto) of the recently published Evo Morales: From Coca to the Palace.

The two clashing political lines of the Evo Morales government are today treading on muddy territory that has put a brake on — and put in doubt — the government’s line of march. The resignation of Andres Soliz Rada as hydrocarbons minister has put in relief the lack of governmental homogeneity on the nationalisation of gas and petroleum.

So much so that the deadlock in the Constituent Assembly, which convened on August 6, threatens a premature loss of prestige for those who have the mission of writing a new constitution for Bolivia, which will construct the pillars of a second, “post-colonial” republic.

The exit of Soliz Rada appeared as a door-slam, and revealed evidence of various problems that the Morales administration faces. Two of them: the deficit of political coordination between the ministers and the president — which has already been admitted to in the government’s self-evaluation — and the powers of ministers being chipped away, with their wings clipped by the centralisation of the decisions in the hands of Morales and his vice-president, Alvaro Garcia Linera. That’s how Soliz Rada explained it when he said that he could not even name his own collaborators.

On top of this is another deficit that Soliz Rada did not mention: the absence of spaces for political debate inside of the government, and an empiricism that shines, at the moment, for its improvisation. Within this scenario, Soliz Rada was accused of tackling debates that could not be had out inside the executive through the mass media.

There are two explanations on the table to justify all these and other difficulties that have confronted the process of democratic and cultural revolution in MAS’s first eight months of government: the first is the right-wing plot with US support, the second problem is one of an administration made up of a political personnel without experience in the management of a state. Some even risk claim that the problem is the indigenous president’s “white entourage”.

But are these two responses enough — if they are true — to explain, for example, why Morales, from Havana, denounced North American intrigues to overthrow him, while Garcia Linera was in the United States, appealing to their good sense so that Washington would renew the preferential tariffs for Bolivian products within the framework of the ATPDA (Law for Andean Trade Promotion and Drug Eradication), the trade agreement with the Andean countries in exchange for their participation in the fight against narco-trafficking and the cultivation of coca?

In front of this, many fall into the temptation of looking for internal political lines within MAS and the government. That is why terms such as “guevarismo”, “indigenismo” and “liberation theology” are bandied about, types of magic formulas with scarce correlation to reality.

The truth is that MAS is not a party but rather a diffuse and unstable confederation of ideological factions. City/countryside, originarios (first indigenous peoples)/invited (non-indigenous people invited to be part of the movement), unionists/intellectuals.

“Where the trade unions function well, there is not need for a parallel [political] structure”, explained Morales from the cocalero regions of the tropics of Cochabamba. But what is happening in the cities where the tendency towards union-sectorial structures are less common?

That is where we find a much more opportunist adherence, associated in part with expectations of positions in the state.

This is how political clientalism structures the internal alignments, which have gotten to the point of violence — last Sunday a reunion of District 15 of La Paz finished in blows with the kidnapping of supporters of the majority line and police intervention.

In the municipalities of Quillacollo and Sacaba, in Cochabamba, fights with sticks, rocks and dynamite extended over the last few days in the streets.

On top of this, there is the denouncing of corruption and undue influence of MAS members by other MAS members in the mass media.

“All this means that the opposition [to the Morales government] is disconcerted, because they insist in codifying the MAS as a party and not as the political arm of the social movements”, said MAS constituent assembly delegate Raul Prada, who is counted as one of the “invited”.

Nevertheless, coming out of the oil crisis and the entanglement of the Constituent Assembly, two lines are appearing to emerge, more sociological than political, and associated with interpretive frameworks, lifestyles and levels of radicalism.

They could be grouped — although not without being a bit arbitrary — into two blocs: the “populist unionism” of Evo Morales and the social movements, and the “multiculturalist social-democracy” of Vice-President Garcia Linera and a sector of the functionaries and Constituent Assembly delegates from the middle class.

While in the first group the predominate logic is “friend/enemy” — antagonism between the people and the oligarchy and direct action over “institutionality” — the second favours a social-regional pact over a long time, gradualism in reforms, and a more institutional discourse.

It is no coincidence that it was the vice-president who negotiated the approval of the need for a two-thirds majority of the Constituent Assembly to approve the new constitution, which is now rejected by MAS and Evo Morales.

But, once again: the lack of spaces for debate means these differences are expressed in a disguised form of day-to-day politics.

And the Bolivian left continues to be a jigsaw puzzle that must be put together.

First published in Green Left Weekly, September 27, 2006.