MAS Drops the Ball in Bolivia
Published at 10:45 on 18 August 2025
It was clear back in 2020 that the historic mission of MAS was now to find a way beyond the cult of personality that had grown up around three-term ex-president Evo Morales, and to transition from the party of Evo into a party of ideas.
Well, they didn’t. Part of MAS wanted to move on, part clung stubbornly to the cult of personality, and the party basically disintegrated as a result of compromise not being possible between two such factions. And yesterday, the inevitable happened.
It didn’t help that MAS also failed to find a way forward after its initial (and initially very successful) plan of using nationalized natural gas revenues to drive spending on economic and social development started faltering as a result of declining revenue. A logical next step would have been to turn to Bolivia’s lithium reserves and use those similarly, but that was never done.
Except it wasn’t inevitable. It could have also ended in left authoritarianism, as one MAS faction used force to impose its will on the other (and on Bolivians in general). Well, it could have, but it didn’t, because of the decentralized nature of the Bolivian social revolution, which has always been big part of my admiration for it, made such a thing highly unlikely.
The most likely end result is now a bourgeois democracy led by the Christian Democrats. Freedoms to organize for something better will in all likelihood remain, and when the new government sells Bolivia short to foreign capital, as it inevitably will, there be an opening for new social movements to arise. Hopefully they will learn from the failures of the past.
Despite Bolivia’s growing debts and inflation, the end result of the social revolution that began with the popular uprisings of the early 2000’s has been net positive. There has been significant economic growth, infrastructure development, and improvement in public health in the past 20 years.
No, it didn’t usher in a new era of socialist utopia in which Bolivia rocketed to first-world levels of development and became a worker’s paradise. No serious observer expected this: this is the real world we are talking about, where miracles and utopias do not exist. But it also, contrary to the consensus of Establishment naysayers, did not end in tyranny and economic ruin.
Popular revolution can work, if decentralism is embraced and authoritarianism is resisted.