Today’s La Razón has an interesting article on the Bolivian government’s proposed new budget. The figures include about Bs.10.1 million (about US$1.2 million) for “social movements” (which primarily seems to mean organized unions & sindicatos). The figure, of course, is merely a fraction of the budget (about 0.1% of total projected spending)—so it’s probably not as big a deal as the news report suggests. But it’s still a little troubling.
I certainly don’t object to the MAS government spending money on programs that fit its ideological orientation. After all, Evo did win a majority of the popular vote—the first president to do so in a competitive election since at least 1964 (this depends, of course, on how “competitive” one considers the 1952-1964 MNR era).
What troubles me about this is the appearance of old-fashioned 1940s corporatism. Corporatism, of course, gives power to the central state & organizes political society through carefully managed “corporate” organizations that represent various social sectors (labor, women, peasants, university students, etc.). This in contrast to liberal pluralism, which doesn’t organize people through corporate organizations, but rather assumes that individuals (not collectivities) have rights & that society organizes itself autonomously from the state. Either position can be argued, of course, but they do stand for different views of what government is & how it relates to civil society.
The problem w/ corporatism, in my opinion, is that it can be used to co-opt civil society. The money from the government for “social movements” allocated in the new budget proposal is small. But it may not seem small to the movements receiving it. The money is also apparently earmarked for things like infrastructure [buildings?], courses, and workshops. According to a MAS congressman, it would also make such movements an institutional basis as part of the state. In other words, the unions would lose their organizational autonomy & become state organizations.
Is that in the best interest of the unions themselves? I somehow doubt it. Traditionally, corporatist governments (left or right) reined in organized labor by bringing it into the state. Essentially, by paying off loyal labor leaders, the state can claim to represent labor (though it’s a top-down form of representation). In Bolivian history, the COB was essentially a co-opted part of the MNR alliance during the 1950s. In turn, the COB controlled the peasants (which it organized into rural sindicatos). Only in the 1970s did the CSUTB emerge as a rival rural organization—expressly autonomous of the urban-dominated COB.
There’s also the problem, of course, that not all Bolivian social movements will be funded. After all, Bs.10.1 million is not much money to go around. So some groups will receive funding (and gain access to the state), while others won’t. And funding will likely be based on loyalty to the state (isn’t it always?). In a country w/ a high index of corruption, this becomes problematic, since we’d now have a new avenue for state patronage.
But this is the model of the corporatist regimes typical in 1940s Latin America. To truly understand MAS & Evo Morales, it’s more useful to look at that historical model (though w/ a new “indigenous” face) than it is to look at today’s European social-democratic models. Nearly twenty years ago Philippe Schmitter announced “Corporatism is dead! Long live corporatism!” Long live, indeed.
