How Bolivia is Leading the Global Fight Against Climate Disaster
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- Published on Sunday, 12 October 2014 06:40
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1047 .... October 12, 2014
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How Bolivia is Leading the Global Fight
Against Climate Disaster
Richard Fidler
Bolivia goes to the polls on Sunday, October 12, in the country's third national election since the victory of Evo Morales and his Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) in December 2005 and the second since the adoption of its radically new constitution in 2009. The MAS list, led by President Morales and his Vice-Presidential running mate Álvaro García Linera, is far ahead in the opinion polling over four opposition slates, all to the right of the MAS.
Although Bolivia's "process of change," its "democratic and cultural revolution" as García Linera terms it, is still in its early stages, the country's developmental process has already attracted considerable interest – and some controversy – internationally,... not least because of its government's role as a leading critic of global climate change, which it forthrightly attributes to the effects and the logic inherent to the capitalist mode of production.
Some of the highlights of this approach and how Bolivia is attempting to shape the preconditions to "going beyond capitalism" are discussed in this short presentation that I made at a workshop at the People's Social Forum in Ottawa, August 22.
— Richard Fidler.
We are "ecosocialists" because the climate crisis now bearing down on us is the major issue facing the world's peoples. It threatens the very survival of human life. It is directly caused by capitalism as a system. The alternative to capitalism is socialism, and our socialism must reflect the centrality of climate crisis in our thinking and actions.
On a global scale, Bolivia is punching way above its size in drawing attention to this crisis and formulating answers to it – within the limits of its situation as a small landlocked country in South America. And its government is moving to implement its proposals through developing an "economic, social and communitarian productive model" that takes immediate steps toward dismantling the dependent legacy of colonialism, neo-colonialism and capitalism while pointing the way toward what it terms "the socialist horizon."
I will start by highlighting a few notable examples of how Bolivia is contributing to our understanding of climate change and what can be done about it.
When the United Nations 2009 climate summit in Copenhagen ended without any commitment by the major powers to emissions reductions, Bolivia's President Evo Morales promptly issued a call for a "World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth," to be hosted by Bolivia.
