People's Climate Summit and protests in Bolivia

We are, above all, fed up with the hypocrisy of rich countries, which are leaving us without a habitable planet while making pompous speeches to cover up their heist. . . . The rights of human beings and the rights of nature are two names of the same dignity.

--Eduardo Galeano

As we go to press, the World Peoples' Summit on Climate Change and Rights of Mother Earth is taking place in Bolivia. Called by President Evo Morales after the disastrous failure of the Copenhagen Climate Summit (see "Copenhagen climate summit sabotages humanity's future," Jan/Feb 2010 N&L), the People's Summit is supposed to present an anti-capitalist alternative coming from the Global South.

"We believe that there are two paths in this time for proposals and action," reads the program for the Summit. "Either we continue down the path of capitalism and death, or we advance on the path of the world's people and the native nations for the harmony with nature and the Culture of Life."

The 17 working groups of the conference range from Climate Migrants to Dangers of Carbon Markets. In addition, many of the 15,000 environmental activists from around the globe are putting on hundreds of "self-called events."

While there is no doubt about the anti-capitalist focus of the event, the most difficult challenge is: How to leave capitalism, economically, politically and socially? What ideas and actions can move in that direction and create an emancipatory alternative?

Take Bolivia. The uprooting change of the last decade, led by Indigenous social movements, has remade the political map of Bolivia. Indeed, the days leading up to the Summit were the 10th anniversary of the great 2000 water war in Cochabamba, a catalyst of Bolivia's transformation. Yet today, the Bolivian masses are experiencing how difficult it is to transform political changes--represented by the overthrow of the old regime, the election of Morales, the first Indigenous president, and a "progressive" Congress--into significant economic and social transformation.

While the People's Summit is happening, an important protest is taking place at the silver-lead-zinc San Cristóbal mine located in the central Potosi region of Bolivia. The mine, owned by a Japanese company, Sumitomo, signed a contract with the Morales government in 2007 to begin operation. Sumitomo came in and promised development, but improvements have not happened. The protesters, residents of the area, object to this agreement and are blocking roads and a railway, so that the ore from the mine cannot be transported.

Sumitomo is one of the companies hoping to get a concession to develop Bolivia's vast lithium deposits. Lithium is used in batteries for electric vehicles.

But this raises the question: How can Bolivia escape the vicious capitalist trap it has endured ever since the Potosi silver mines of the 16th century, when Indigenous slave labor supplied Spain, and thus Europe, with massive amounts of silver? Is lithium to be the new silver extraction from Bolivia?

The question of "What Happens After?" the social rebellion overthrows the old regime, weighs heavily on today's Bolivia, still caught in the web of capitalism. When it cannot be otherwise in a small impoverished country, where are paths forward?

Today the social forces from below--who created the new revolutionary moment in Bolivia over the past decade--find themselves struggling, not alone with the neo-liberal form of capitalism seeking to maintain its dominance, but with the state-form of their own Morales-led government and congress. To be sure they still support Morales and to a lesser extent his coalition, MAS.

But the social movements are demanding their independence. Their demand for a constitutional assembly from below was transformed into writing a new constitution by party representatives. The social movements are questioning the depth of changes within Bolivia--whether the government will take concrete actions that truly match the anti-capitalist rhetoric.

Thus Bolivia, with its dramatic, 2000-2010 transformations, is surely the correct place to hold an alternative climate change conference to confront capitalism's destructive expansion that damns humanity and nature. It is as well, the place that can show us how deep and ongoing is the needed social change, not alone against capitalism, but for a new human world.

--Eugene Walker

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