marxism/resistance mp3's, part I

robin hood, judy cook (1993): judy cook tries to distinguish between three robin hood narratives: the ruling-class'/hollywood attempt to co-opt robin hood as a disenchanted noble who only wants a better king, the other attempt to portray him as a lawless and aimless bandit, and the third--the one she advocates--which is to put him in the context of the horribly oppressive world in which he matured (roughly by the 1200s you see the first references to robin hood in various literature)--a world in which armed banditry was a terribly attractive form of social entrepreneurship, if you like (freedom from serfdom, etc.). she makes the important, if somewhat stale point, that we couldn't have expected a lenin, insofar as there was no class ready to take over the administration of society (but that's all a bit formulaic, even if also obviously true).

bolivia, andy brown (2008): brown details the revolutionary insurrection from 2003-2005, which came on the back end of two decades of solidly neo-liberal policy ("bolivia as lab-rat for neo-liberalism"). it marked the decisive defeat of national and transnational elite. he asked the question of how to characterize the movement, whether indigenous or national-popular; settled on a developed conception of the former, i think, in the sense that the movement would have been impossible without the contribution of the indigenous campesinos--they were decisive (here some instructive history about how the traditional left in bolivia, in the 50s and 60s, neglected the indigenous movements; this created an opening for their co-option by the military, and thus the downfall of the first revolution). brown is relatively dismissive of what evo morales had accomplished thus far, identifying three key policy areas in which he has not been nearly as radical as the insurrection which took him to power (hydrocarbons--better terms, but not nationalization, land reform--only unused land, which does hurt elite interested in keeping land for speculative purposes, and the constituent assembly--quite insufficient, failing to transcend liberal logic of representation). in sum: the "first revolution of the 21st century," perhaps, but all that energy is, as of now, being only uneasily represented by evo morales in power.

simon bolivar, andy brown (2007): interesting observations about the man's thoroughly liberal commitments (which he "picked up" in Europe). some discussion over how representative he was of the elites' desires around him, which was torn between staying tied to the bourbon monarchy in spain and emulating revolutions on the mainland/to the north. bolivar's liberalism, brown argues, co-existed uneasily with his belief in the paramount importance of a highly centralized state (perhaps this was pragmatic, though), and the danger that he would be caught up in the military, almost bonapartist logic of his own rebellion. nonetheless, he was a believer in racial equality, though the new republics did not emancipate the slaves immediately. all in all, the way in which the contemporary bolivarian republics lay claim to his legacy is, of course, strategic, in the sense that he can only ever represent the bourgeois liberal in his revolutionary role.

who really ended slavery, robin blackburn and weymann bennet (2007): excellent antidote to the official propagandizing around the 200th anniversary of abolition, which celebrates the role of william wilberforce without ever theorizing the context in which this legislation occurred. primarily, blackburn and bennet emphasize that the oligarchical elite in britain were assailed by the revolutionary specter of (a) slave rebellion and resistance in british colonies in the Caribbean, given the fact that in the 1790s slaves in haiti had successfully launched their rebellion; (b) the general rebellions in europe (french revolution, of course) and the american colonies, where a "social contract" was being pursued that exposed the british oligarchy for the reactionary form of government it was (excessively limited franchise, etc.); (c) the explicit anti-slavery agitation of quakers and even working-classes at home, who had launched one of the first mass campaigns against the slave trade. in sum, their hand was forced--they needed to stave off the specter that was haunting their lands (and then, don't forget, they re-wrote this history and deployed it in the civilizing mission--cue leopold and that rubbish).

a people's history of the british empire, john newsinger (2006): the thesis of the talk was simple--"brutality" was a central part of the civilizing mission, throughout. john insisted on the importance of understanding Empire not on the basis of the pretext it provides for its invasions and occupations, but on the objective basis of actual material causes that explain this intervention, the simple barbarity that has always ensued. there are a few examples of this, that are memorable in the worst way: prisoners in the revolting jamaican colonies in 1865 being used as target practice for the new enfield rifle, the obliteration of canton in the second opium war (the fallujah of that war), britain announcing its imminent withdrawal from its seventy-year occupation in egypt on some sixty occasions, the horrors of the suppression of the mau mau rebellion in kenya where some 130 people were hung from the same tree (this is the 1950s, remember).

Since 1985, successive Bolivian governments turned it into a laboratory for neoliberal shock therapy. Privatisation of mines, labour casualisation and market deregulation led to a massive fragmentation and dispersal of the militant miner’s movement shattering any real resistance in the urban areas to the plundering of the country’s economy and resources. In the early 1990s, indigenous communities from the east — marching in defence of land and for a new constituent assembly to found a new, inclusive Bolivia — marked a revitalisation of indigenous movements. Many ex-miners and Aymara indigenous people, who in the ’80s sought out a livelihood growing coca following the mine privatisation and drought wave in the west of the country, found new political homes in the powerful cocalero unions.

weisbrot on bolivia:
Morales had promised to regain control over the country's hydrocarbon - mostly natural gas - resources. This was accomplished and has brought in an extra $1.5 billion of revenue to the public treasury. (For comparison, imagine an extra $1.6 trillion, or four times the current U.S. federal budget deficit, in the United States.)
(...) These provinces produce about 82 percent of Bolivia's natural gas, and get nearly three times the gas revenue per person as do the other five provinces. The Media Luna states have a per capita income that is about 40 percent higher than the other five states. Their population is also much less indigenous: ranging from 16 percent (Pando) to 38 percent in Santa Cruz, as compared to 66-84 percent in the other states.
(...) The Media Luna states also have the big landholdings that give Bolivia one of the most concentrated land distributions in the entire world. Well under one percent of landowners have two-thirds of the country's farm land. These include the big soybean producers of Santa Cruz, Bolivia's largest province and bulwark of the Media Luna alliance. Some of the big landowners are leaders of the political opposition.
(...) With forty percent of the labor force in agriculture and more than three-quarters of rural Bolivians in poverty, a redistribution of arable land is not only a central demand of the voters, but an important part of an economic development strategy that can boost employment and income in the countryside.

The armed revolutionary has no place in modern Latin America, the Venezuelan President has declared. Catching his critics off guard, Hugo Chavez called on the Marxist rebel army in neighbouring Colombia to lay down its arms and release its hostages, declaring that guerrilla armies are now "out of place".

lebowitz on venezuela, before 2006 presidential elections:

the struggle for bolivia's future:
On one side stand the pro-imperialist business elites from the eastern department of Santa Cruz, with direct ties to gas transnationals, large agribusiness, and the U.S. embassy. Their public face is the Santa Cruz civic committee and the four opposition-controlled governorships of the east. Through a concerted campaign they have begun to win over sections of Bolivia’s important middle classes, many of whom voted for Morales but backed opposition parties for the departmental governors.
(...) On the other side stand the combative indigenous and social movements rooted in the western highlands and the center of Bolivia, but which also reach into the east. Together with the middle classes they elected Bolivia’s first indigenous president in 2005. Morales’s victory on December 18, 2005, with 54.7 percent of the vote, was a product of two interlinked factors. First, after five years of intense social struggle, it marked the coming together of Bolivia’s oppressed classes and the eruption of a national revolution, led for the first time by the country’s indigenous majority. Second, it heralded the opening of a path out of the historic crisis of the Bolivian state, a consequence of internal colonization and imperialist domination.
(...) This new wave of struggle was the result of the three components of the historic crisis of the Bolivian state—the lack of economic development, due to its submission to imperialism, the social exclusion of the indigenous people, and the lack of any real popular representation through the existing political party structures.
(...) Instead, it was the platform of Evo Morales and Alvaro Garcia Linera (now vice-president), calling for a constituent assembly and the nationalization of gas, that provided an outlet for those seeking a way out of the crisis. MAS’s program was to promote a process of the decolonization of power, and renationalization of the economy and the state. The results of the December 18 congressional and presidential elections, where MAS received over 90 percent of the vote in the Chapare, around 80 percent in the El Alto and the altiplano, a surprising 30 percent in Santa Cruz, and a clean sweep of all the middle-class seats in La Paz, demonstrated the unification of Bolivia’s oppressed behind a national project of liberation spearhead by the indigenous, campesino, and cocalero movements. It was an unambiguous expression of the desires and hopes of the indigenous majority, who had drawn large sectors of the other oppressed classes behind them, to begin to chart a new path for Bolivia.
(...) Morales was quick to point out there existed the huge problem of the “colonial state”: winning government was not the same as decisively winning power. Morales explained, “After hearing the reports of the commission of transition, I have been able to see how the state does not control the state, its institutions. There is a total dependency, as we have seen in the economic sphere, a transnationalised country.”
(...) Crucially, Morales has continued to organize and shore up his support amongst his main social base. Central to this strategy has been moving forward in the economic sphere—the nationalization of gas, a measure supported by over 80 percent of the population. While some have criticized the measure for being too moderate, Morales has continued to point out that the nationalization is a process aimed at rebuilding the state petroleum company, YPFB, expanding state intervention to the entire productive chain, and increasing the industrialization of gas. Morales has stated that the process can only move forward with the continued mobilization of the people. To ensure this, Morales has made sure personally to deliver the fruits of the nationalization, traveling each week to numerous rural areas to hand out land and tractors, and to inaugurate new literacy and health care programs.
(...) The biggest flashpoint has been the Constituent Assembly, through which the movements hope to “constitutionalize” the steps forward taken so far, and out of which they hope to construct a new Bolivia. This new Bolivia would be based on recognition of the indigenous majority through a united, pluri-national, decentralized, social, and communitarian state. Decision-making power would be exercised by the indigenous and social movements through the creation of communitarian social power.[11] Such a state would “be the principal actor in economic planning and production, imposing a policy of equal distribution of the benefits” and would control all nonrenewable resources together with the indigenous communities that live in those regions. Fundamentally, the aim is the creation of a new state power through which the indigenous majorities can play their rightful role in Bolivian society.
(...) Confronted with this dilemma, the Morales leadership has opted for a change of tack reflected in the growing weight of the line of Garcia Linera: avoid unnecessary radical discourse, work toward achieving consensus in order to move forward, and win back the middle classes.

chavez, democracy, and RCTV:
When RCTV's licence to use the free-to-air Channel 2 expired on May 27, the concession was awarded to a new independently produced station, Venezuelan Social Television (TVes), to provide a national space for those previously excluded from the media. This has been used as the latest pretext for an escalating assault against the revolutionary government and people of Venezuela. An international media war has been launched to create the mirage of a democratic protest movement mobilising against the supposed authoritarian, anti-democratic Chavez government. Anti-Venezuela resolutions have been passed by US Congress, the European Union and the right-wing-controlled Brazilian senate.
(...) "Only 140 days have passed" since the new government's inauguration, Chavez explained, yet a "new period has started up, accelerating the process of revolutionary transformation". He pointed to the recuperation of state control over the oil fields in the Orinoco Belt, the re-nationalisation of the telecommunications company CANTV and six electricity companies, as well as the mammoth turnout to register interest in the new united socialist party, the PSUV (by that day, 4.7 million people had registered, reaching more than 5 million by the end of the following day when registrations closed).
(...) Drawing on the "great Italian revolutionary thinker Antonio Gramsci", Chavez outlined why this process has encountered the reaction of imperialism. Referring to Gramsci's thesis — "a truly historic crisis occurs when there is something that is dying, but has not finished dying, and at the same time there is something that is being born but which also hasn't finished being born" — Chavez explained that already by the 1980s, "Venezuela had entered into a historic crisis … [today] we are in the epicentre of the crisis".
(...) For Chavez, the Fourth Republic represented the rule of the "US empire and its lackeys here in Venezuela, the oligarchy, the bourgeoisie, the class that dominated Venezuela for 200 years". This is the same class, he stressed, "that betrayed [Simon] Bolivar, that killed [Jose Antonio de] Sucre, that murdered [Ezequiel] Zamora", all prominent leaders of Venezuela's 200 years of struggle for independence.
(...) According to Gramsci, the superstructure of the dominant historic bloc has two levels, the political society — "the institutions of the state" — and the civil society, consisting of economic and private institutions, specifically the church, media and education system, which are used by the ruling class "to spread among the social and popular classes its dominant ideology".
(...) Chavez noted that one of the "great contradictions" in Venezuelan society today existed between these two factors. "We have been coming along liberating the state", said Chavez. "Bourgeois civil society used to control" the Venezuelan state, government, legislative and judicial power, state companies, government banks, and the national budget, but "they have been losing all of that". Elucidating the battles that lay ahead for the Venezuelan masses, Chavez said that the bourgeoisie was retreating into its last remaining refuges in the media, church and education system.

obama and funding:
True, Obama has decided to not accept PAC money for his presidential bid, but that doesn’t mean the Illinois senator isn’t packing in tons of cash from the corporate sector (more on that shortly). True also that Obama’s campaign, like Howard Dean’s of 2004, is pocketing many small online donations at an average of $25 a pop. However, small donations from the Democratic grassroots do not mean he doesn’t also have his paws in the corporate cookie jar.
(...) How can this be if companies cannot directly hand over cash to candidates for national office? Well, their employees can donate up to $2,300 per person. In my article I noted that Obama has raised money from several corporations, including Exelon, UBS, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, along with tobacco rich law firm Kirkland & Ellis. Of course there are others that have fattened the accounts of Obama for president that I didn’t mention, such as; Time Warner, Viacom, Williams & Connolly, Level 3 Communications, Credit Suisse Securities, Lehman Brothers and Ariel Capital.
(...) So how can one assume that employee donations are representative of the companies they list on their donor forms? As OpenSecrets.org, a not-for-profit website dedicated to revealing the money trails of Washington, asserts, “Because of contribution limits, organizations that bundle together many individual contributions are often among the top donors to presidential candidates. These contributions can come from the organization’s members or employees (and their families).”
(...) Fact: Barack Obama believes nuclear power is “green” and told the Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works, of which Barack is a member, that Congress should allow “nuclear power to remain on the table for consideration”. Employees of Exelon, which is the nation’s largest nuclear power plant operator, have donated over $159,000 to Obama’s presidential campaign as of March 31, 2007. That amount has likely increased since the first public tallying of campaign contributions two months ago.
(...) Fact: Obama, in one of his earliest Senate votes, departed with his own party and voted for class action “reform” legislation. The bill, as Ken Silverstein wrote for Harper’s, was “lobbied for aggressively by financial firms, which constitute Obama’s second biggest single bloc of donors.” An amendment to the legislation, which the senator opposed, would have capped credit card interest rates at 30%. Obama, unfortunately, didn’t see a need for any cap on such predatory lending.
(...) Aside from the purported corporate pressure on Obama’s campaign, there are other issues we should all consider before jumping on the Obama express — such as his lopsided support for Israel and his all-options-on-the-table approach to dealing with Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
(...) On social movements in South America Obama has argued that citizens there should not follow left-leaning populists like Hugo Chavez, and advocates in his book The Audacity of Hope, that these poor nations should embrace free-market capitalism instead.
(...) By and large Barack Obama is a mainstream Democratic candidate that is exciting many due to his personal, charismatic zeal. There is no question that Obama is a gifted politician, and his youth only adds to the mystique that he’s offering an alternative to business as usual in Washington.

capital gone wild:
Previous Bolivian governments had signed a flurry of bilateral investment treaties that gave foreign investors the right to bypass domestic courts and file such lawsuits through international tribunals. Morales complained that these rules made him feel like a "prisoner" in the presidential palace.
(...) The Bolivian president's predicament is a common one for political leaders around the world. They are caught in an interlocking web of rules and institutions that promote and protect foreign investment -- with little regard for the costs to democracy, the environment, or the public welfare. These increasingly controversial investor protections have become the "get out of jail free" card for corporations in the global economy. They are promoted by the World Bank and other international financial institutions, codified by bilateral investment treaties and free trade agreements, and enforced through the World Bank's arbitration court and other international tribunals.
(...) Argentina has been socked by more than 30 such claims, many of them in retaliation for measures to alleviate the pain of the country's 2002 financial meltdown. A U.S.-based gas company, for example, sued over an emergency law that froze utility rates to protect consumers from runaway inflation. The company, CMS Gas, won $133 million in compensation, money that could have compensated Argentine consumers.
(...) Ecuador is facing a $1 billion suit by Occidental Petroleum, a company widely reviled in that country for alleged human rights and environmental abuses, including using child labor to clean toxic materials, failing to repair pipeline leakages, and operating in protected indigenous lands without authorization.
(...)
In another case with disturbing human rights implications, Italian investors are targeting post-apartheid affirmative action policies in South Africa. They are suing over a law designed to redress historic racism by requiring mining companies to have 26% black ownership and 40% black management by the year 2014. These policies, the investors claim, violate protections against expropriation and discrimination in the Italy-South Africa bilateral investment treaty.
(...) Currently, there are more than 100 cases pending before the World Bank's International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), which decides most investor-state disputes. More than 90% have been against developing countries. Meanwhile, these rules are not delivering increased foreign investment. Tufts University researchers recently found that signing bilateral investment treaties with the United States had no effect on Latin American and Caribbean investment flows. In fact, Brazil, which has refused to sign any such deal with the United States, is by far the region's biggest recipient of U.S. investment.
(...) Canada currently faces a case in retaliation for terminating a project to transport garbage from Toronto to an abandoned open pit mine 600 kilometers (370 miles) away. To protest the mega-dump, the nearby Algonquin indigenous community joined with farmers and other local citizens in a railroad blockade that was the largest act of civil disobedience in the history of Ontario province. When the government responding by dropping the plan, it offered some compensation to the mine owners. But one U.S. investor is still using NAFTA to sue for lost potential profits.
(...) Their demand to include sweeping investor protections in the Free Trade Area of the Americas was one factor in the collapse of those negotiations, after 11 years of talks involving 34 countries.
(...) However, over the past 14 years U.S. trade officials have managed to insert excessive investor protections in trade agreements with 14 countries and in pending deals with four additional nations (as of May 1, 2007). The only exception is a 2004 U.S.-Australian deal. That country's negotiators refused to accept investor-state dispute settlement. Worldwide, these rules have proliferated through more than 2,500 bilateral investment treaties.
(...) On April 29, 2007, the leaders of Bolivia, Venezuela, and Nicaragua announced plans to withdraw from the World Bank's arbitration court. Their joint declaration stated that "(We) emphatically reject the legal, media and diplomatic pressure of some multinationals that … resist the sovereign rulings of countries, making threats and initiating suits in international arbitration." This surprise announcement will not be enough, legally, to release the three Latin American countries from the interlocking web of rules and institutions designed to shield foreign investors. Bilateral investment treaties signed by Bolivia and Venezuela would still be in force, and getting out of them could take years. Nicaragua would still be bound by the investment rules of the Central American Free Trade Agreement. And ICSID is the dominant but not the only enforcement option. Foreign investors could instead demand that their cases be heard under similar United Nations arbitration rules.

chavez [populist?]:
The first morning here I attended a meeting called by one of the currents in the National Union of Workers (UNT) to discuss the formation of Bolivarian Councils of Workers, more commonly dubbed workers' councils. Describing the nature of the discussion over these councils, Marcela Maspero, a national coordinator of the UNT, said that the councils had to be "political organisations of the working class, based on direct democracy and control over production." They had to play the role of "eradicating capitalist exploitation, and transforming relations of production in order to create socialised ownership over the means of production." Although these councils have only just begun to appear in a handful of companies, an intense debate at both the governmental and grassroots levels is unfolding over their nature and role.
(...) In the social sphere, Chávez has called for "an explosion in communal power," urging the rapid construction of Communal Councils. These councils are based on the coming together of 200-400 families in urban areas, even less in rural areas, in order to plan and execute projects for the benefit of the community. In some areas, this has already progressed to the point where discussions have begun on the need to establish federations of Communal Councils, in order to tackle larger projects. There are now more than 19,000 Communal Councils. In essence, the aim of the Communal Councils is for power to reside in the communities. This has led to some cases where these councils have come into conflict with the existing state structures, where those who currently hold power fear losing it — a constant battle the revolution encounters as it comes up against the structures of the old state bureaucracy.
(...) Next, the new joiners will be divided up into basic cells of 200 people based on territorial divisions, universities and factories. Out of each, a spokesperson will be elected to participate in the founding congress. No quotas have been set aside for party officials, nor will anyone automatically secure a place in the congress. Even Chávez will have to be elected by his local cell if he is to participate in the conference.

making bolivia´s new constitution:
Bolivia’s Constitutional Assembly has been charged with a huge task, not just to rewrite the nation’s constitution but also to ‘refound’ Bolivia. This includes restructuring the government, reforming education, dealing with natural resources and deciding what the constitution will say on controversial issues such as coca and autonomy.
(...) Party politics stalled the initial work of the Assembly for seven months over a debate on voting procedures. The assembly eventually ratified a compromise which requires 2/3 approval for each article, while unapproved articles will be presented to the Bolivian public in the national referendum.

interview with john pilger:
"It is too easy," Pilger says, "for Western journalists to see humanity in terms of its usefulness to 'our' interests and to follow government agendas that ordain good and bad tyrants, worthy and unworthy victims and present 'our' policies as always benign when the opposite is usually true. It's the journalist's job, first of all, to look in the mirror of his own society."
(...) For many of your readers, this is known. However, for others in the West, the propaganda that has masked Washington’s ambitions has been entrenched, with its roots in the incessant celebration of World War Two, the “good war”, then “victory” in the cold war. For these people, the “goodness” of US power represents “us”. Thanks to Bush and his cabal, and to Blair, the scales have fallen from millions of eyes. I would like “The War on Democracy” to contribute something to this awakening.
(...) Read Greg Grandin’s recent, excellent history (I interview him in the film) in which he makes the case that Latin America has been Washington’s “workshop” for developing and honing and rewarding its imperial impulses elsewhere. For example, when the US “retreated” from Southeast Asia, where did its “democracy builders” go to reclaim their “vision”? Latin America. The result was the murderous assaults on Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala, and the darkness of “Operation Condor” in the southern cone. This was Ronald Reagan’s “war on terror”, which of course was a war of terror that provided basic training for those now running the Bush/Cheney “long war” in the Middle East and elsewhere.
(...) It’s humbling for someone coming from prosperous Europe to witness the poorest taking charge of their lives, with people rarely asking, as we in the West often ask, “What can I do?” They know what to do. In Cochabamba, Bolivia, the population barricaded their city until they began to take control of their water. In El Alto, perhaps the poorest city on the continent, people stood against a repressive regime until it fell. This is not to suggest that complete independence has been won. Venezuela’s economy, for example, is still very much a “neo-liberal” economy that continues to reward those with capital. The changes made under Chavez are extraordinary – in grassroots democracy, health care, education and the sheer uplifting of people’s lives – but true equity and social justice and freedom from corruption remain distant goals. Venezuela’s well-off complain endlessly that their economic power has been diminished; it hasn’t; economic growth has never been higher, business has never been better. What the rich no longer own is the government. And when the majority own the economy, true independence will be in sight. That’s true everywhere.
(...) doubt that he began as a socialist when he won power in 1998 – which makes his political journey all the more interesting. Clearly, he was always a reformer who paid respect to his impoverished roots. Certainly, the Venezuelan economy today is not socialist; perhaps it’s on the way to becoming something like the social economy of Britain under the reforming Attlee Labour government. He is probably what Europeans used to be proud to call themselves: a social democrat. Look, this game of labels is pretty pointless; he is an original and he inspires; so let’s see where the Bolivarian project goes. True power for enduring change can only be sustained at the grassroots, and Chavez’s strength is that he has inspired ordinary people to believe in alternatives to the old venal order.

racism in bolivia:
The Indians have had two approaches towards the Bolivian state and white or mestizo society. On the one hand, they have pursued integration. They have linked up with populist parties, principally the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (known in Spanish under the acronym MNR). But if you go back even to the colonial period, you can find many instances in which the Indians pursued negotiation and integration with white and mestizo society. Aymaras on the other hand have cultivated their own sense of identity and self determination.
(...) At certain times, we might speak of a white minority in Bolivia, although no one is really white here. As in the U.S. with the black codes, the municipal government of La Paz had certain established forms of discrimination in the beginning of the twentieth century. On buses and trams, you had to sit in the back. There was explicit and implicit discrimination. The possibility that Indians would ever attain important government positions was practically nil.
(...) No. I think actually what has happened is that the Indians´ discourse, which has tended on the radical side, i.e. that all whites have oppressed us, etc., has produced a reaction amongst the middle class which reside in the south of La Paz. As a result, the middle class has become more racist. There's a lot of fear, now that there's an indigenous president. The middle class has been excluded from the positions it occupied before, and has lost a bit of its social position.
(...) I think Morales didn't use to cultivate an ethnic discourse, he was someone who defended coca, who had a more worker oriented, anti-imperialist rhetoric. But then he incorporated Quispe's radicalism, i.e., "I am an Indian, that is why they mistreat me," etc.
(...) In Bolivia, armed movements have never achieved any kind of importance. The 1952 Revolution was much less bloody than the Cuban and Mexican Revolutions and it was also shorter. It was three days of struggle in the streets and boom!, the oligarchy fell. There's no culture of long term violence here in Bolivia. On the other hand we do have a tradition of participatory democracy which comes out of the ayllu [a pre-Inca form of political organization based on extended family groups] and labor movement, which de-emphasizes delegation of power towards leaders.

analyzing bolivia:
I think the fact that topics are being discussed that never have been before is an exceedingly positive “forest”, as if the reality was what is and could not be otherwise. Secondly, the participation of social layers that have never had any decisive say over what happens to them. Thirdly, the fact that an institutional solution has been achieved — which apparently is going to work — in which the topics that are not being defined by two thirds will subsequently be put to a popular vote, so popular sovereignty is maintained with the later decision. Therefore, I think this is a good solution, I think it is a very positive perspective.
(...) Latin America was the laboratory for political experiments by neoliberalism, which were generalized over virtually the entire continent, so now it is experiencing a backlash against what it has suffered. And so the people are voting for changes.
(...)The dividing line today in Latin America is not between a good left or bad left, it is between countries that are signing free-trade treaties with the United States and those which, to the contrary, are prioritizing regional integration processes. These include some that have broken with neoliberalism — this is the case with Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela and Cuba — and others that have a foreign policy that favours regional integration but maintains the model. These include Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay, so there are some significant differences among them. But let’s not forget that the fundamental difference is between the countries that have given up being co-opted by the USA and those that have mortgaged their futures on free-trade agreements; Chile is the clearest case.
(...) And the Bolivian social movement — and apparently now the Ecuadorian movement — have realized that they have to build their own alternatives, so it is a new the fact that the social movements have built a party, with all the problems that entails, because it is a big leap forward. Furthermore, they are not building a party to argue in Parliament, but a party that now has a governmental alternative, something they have never had throughout the history of Bolivia, so this is not a mere exercise but it is a very promising road, because the social movements cannot simply carry on in resistance. To remain at the level of so-called civil society is a road to defeat, because it fails to challenge hegemony at the national level. Autonomy makes sense to prevent the interests of other forces being imposed on the social movement, but it is autonomy to contend for hegemony; if it is an autonomy to not recognize the State, to not recognize the government, I think it is a road that leads nowhere, that leads to exhaustion, to demobilization and the cooptation of some sectors. It is not a question of governing with that State.
(...) The democracies have been governments of the elites to reproduce the power of the elites, so we must not limit ourselves to that type of State that is there, which was made by inertia, by the reproduction of the existing power relationships. I think the social movements will have to do what they are doing in Ecuador or Bolivia, which is to reconsider their instrument of power, to become a transformer, not a reproducer of existing relationships, that smashes the private monopoly of the oligopolies over the media, over the ownership of energy resources, over the banks, the financing capacity, etc.
(...) If the enemies are reacting so forcefully it is because their interests are being undermined. It would be sad event if that white bourgeoisie of Santa Cruz were in agreement with the government. It would mean either that it had no class consciousness — but clearly it does have that, as it has demonstrated — or that the government was not affecting its interests.

morales en bolivia, un resumen:
La nacionalización de hidrocarburos fue el acto más popular de su primer año de gestión. Según los nuevos contratos, el gobierno recibirá 82 por ciento de ingresos de gas, una subida de $240 millones a $1.6 mil millones. Pero la nacionalización solamente se trata de recursos del subsuelo, dejando las refinerías en las manos de las empresas extranjeras que mantienen derechos exclusivos a explorar y explotar las reservas de gas.
(...) El gobierno ha procurado usar las vías legales para implementar las nacionalizaciones y otras reformas. No obstante, la derecha no está interesada en hacer acuerdos, porque no quiere reforma ninguna, por moderada que sea. Los partidos de la derecha bloquearon avance en la asamblea constituyente hasta la última semana de febrero, insistiendo que cada artículo fuera aprobado por dos-tercios. El MAS hizo una concesión que da un veto efectivo a la minoría derechista.
(...) El MAS, lamentablemente, cree que el enfrentamiento con la derecha le hará más audaz. Pero las concesiones del gobierno han provisto un espacio a la derecha para organizarse y cobrar intensidad. Al mismo tiempo han desmovilizado la base que podría defender al gobierno.
(...) Como dijo Eusebio Merlo, un dirigente de la Federación de Juntas Vecinales en El Alto (FEJUVE), “Sabemos que la lucha es larga. No acaba con Evo Morales--la lucha sigue. Continúa--es un proceso. Entonces, nosotros como dirigentes tanto decimos, escuchamos a las regiones, a sus pensamientos, que son distintos, pero quieren un cambio profundo. Queremos que realmente los originarios aprendamos a administrar los recursos naturales, y aprendamos a dirigir nuestro país. Esta es la visión de nosotros, esta es la visión de los vecinos, esta es la visión de los líderes”.

a very detailed account of the venezuelan coup in 2002 (wilpert):
The coup showed just popular Chavez really was and how determined his supporters were to prevent his overthrow. They went onto the streets, at great personal risk (over 60 people were killed and hundreds were wounded by the police in the demonstrations that inspired the military to bring Chavez back to power), to demand their president’s return to office.
(...) Fourth, and perhaps most importantly for the future evolution of the Venezuelan conflict, the coup was the third nail in the political coffin of the country’s old elite. The first such nail was Chavez’s election in 1998, which brought an explicitly anti-establishment figure into Venezuela’s presidency for the first time in forty years. The second nail was the passage of the 1999 constitution and Chavez’s confirmation as President, in 2000, which democratically swept the country’s old elite almost completely out of political power, such as the governorships, the Supreme Court, and the National Assembly. With the third nail, the failure of the 2002 coup, the opposition lost a base of power in the military and a significant amount of good will in the international community. The next three nails, the failed 2002-2003 oil industry shutdown, the August 2004 recall referendum, and the December 2006 presidential election, only further solidified the old elite’s demise as a political force in Venezuela.