Bolivia and The Borg

Here is a confession. Back when I still lived in the US I used to really like watching Star Trek. Not the lesser quality sequel-upon-sequel versions, or even the original with Spock and Kirk (How many times can you watch those over and over anyway?). No, I liked Star Trek: The Next Generation, with the bald and wise Captain Picard. It helped perhaps that the show aired each Wednesday as I returned home from the mind-numbing experience of teaching a three-hour university course on policy analysis.

The show that helped clear my head of the lighter aspects of tax and welfare reform also offered up a rich metaphor: "The Borg".

You Will be Absorbed, Resistance is Futile

For those unacquainted, the Borg were a race of half human/half machines that were connected together with a common central nervous system that allowed them to act as one – not in the "community" sense, but more in the massive inhuman robotic sense. The Borg also had the practice of expanding their numbers through an unpleasant exercise in which they would basically drill into someone's brain, take their identify away and wire them up. Needless to say the crew of the Enterprise were none too keen on joining, which always prompted the following warning from the machine-like Borg:

Resistance is futile.

Right, now how does all this relate to Bolivia and the rest of the real world for that matter? As promised, a metaphor.

I have been pondering recently the similarities between the Borg and the forces of global market economics. Global market fundamentalism does indeed promise to bring us more and more together – in the Borg sense. One world. One market. One culture (materialism). One view of how we relate to nature (privatize and exploit it). One way to live. Absorption requires no cerebral drilling. It is accomplished by a series of tools: the power of markets to forces us to act in certain ways in order to chase economic survival, the conditionalities of global economic institutions such as the World Bank and IMF, and the promise that unfettered markets are the pathway to economic prosperity.

And translated into other words, the message is the same: Resistance is futile.

Any people or nation that does not choose to play by the new economic rules is destined to miserable poverty.

All this is why, I think, Bolivia has captured so much public attention around the world. Since the Cochabamba Water Revolt in 2000, the poor of this country have embarked upon their own bold five-year mission to where no one has gone before. They have resisted and they have won. I guess Star Trek never made it to the Andean television screen.

Two major cities, Cochabamba and El Alto, have taken back their public water systems from mighty foreign corporations. Bolivians stopped an IMF economic belt-tightening package in its tracks. And twice Bolivians have taken to the streets to resist the selling-off of their oil and gas reserves to foreign corporations.

In Bolivia, resistance has actually proven not futile at all.

But Actually Governing, That is Really Hard

One of the more interesting analyses that I have heard about Bolivian politics this year was a talk by Alvaro Garcia Linera, Evo Morales' running mate, when he was still discussing such a move with Bolivian social movement leaders. Alvaro noted that Bolivian social movements had indeed accomplished a great deal, but that simple resistance had also hit the limit of what it could accomplish. Not attainable through resistance, he argued, were the two big goals that top the social movements' agenda: recovering public control of the nation's gas and oil reserves and convening a citizen assembly to rewrite the Bolivian constitution.

"To accomplish these," he observed, "you need to win control of the government and there is only two ways to do that, buy guns or win elections." Linera and a good chunk of Bolivia's social movements have opted for the second. As they now embark on this new mission, contesting a national election and seeking to govern, they might take heed of a lesson I can almost hear coming out of Captain Picard's own mouth:

Resistance is not futile, but governing effectively is a really, really tough job.

Let us look, for example, at the venerable tale of SEMAPA, the public water company re-established in Cochabamba after Bechtel's ousting. It is not a pretty tale. While the company has kept rates down and has made some notable progress in expanding water service to poor neighborhoods, its management has left a good deal to be desired. The union of company workers, in particular, has succeeded in padding the payrolls with more workers than needed and has engaged in acts of petty corruption for years. This week citizens from the poor neighborhoods of the city marched on the water company's facilities and demanded reform.

The lesson? Resistance succeeded in kicking out Bechtel and its search for exorbitant profits on the backs of the poor, which was a good thing. Resistance did not assure or build an efficient public company, a task still to be accomplished. Before some readers seize on this analysis to start cheerleading for privatization, I suggest waiting until we release our forthcoming study comparing Cochabamba's performance with the private water company in El Alto/La Paz. That tale there is pretty ugly too, but in different ways.

So there you have it. The message these five years from Bolivia has been clear.

We will not be absorbed. We will not let our country be remade in an image sent from the north. We will not accept the bogus tale that only unfettered markets can make our dreams come true.

But building an alternative, that is proving to be a lot trickier than a lot of social movement leaders thought. If the left comes to govern the nation, either after the next election or one after, the challenge is going to get even harder.

A task worthy of a whole fleet of Star Ships.

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A note to regular readers of the Blog: I will be away all next week, escaping along with my trusty dog Simone to a remote Quechua village. It is a break to work on a novel that won’t seem to leave me alone. I'll be back with Bolivia news and more in a week.