Wie teuer sollte Energie sein? Und: Wie teuer soll Energie auf dem Weg zu einer (solidarischen) Postwachstumsökonomie werden? Im Zuge der Transformation des Weltenergiesystems ist dies eine der zentralen Konflikte. Unter denjenigen mit einer ökologischen Perspektive – durchaus unabhängig von der Wachstumsfrage – stoßen zwei Positionen aufeinander. Die (öko-)liberale Perspektive fordert die Streichung von Subventionen und die Erhöhung der Energiekosten, um die „wahren“ Kosten von Energie abzubilden. Mit Hilfe des Preises sollen so genannte „externe Effekte“, in diesem Fall Umweltschäden wie durch die Treibhauswirksamkeit von C02-Emissionen verursacht, in die Preiskalkulation einfließen. Die Gegenposition sieht das soziale Recht auf Energie für alle im Vordergrund und betont die Verfügbarkeit günstiger Energie für arme Bevölkerungsgruppen. Außerdem wird negiert, dass mittels des Preismechanismus der notwendige strukturelle Umbau angegangen werden kann. Denn statt die existierenden Konsummuster zu verändern, komme es lediglich zu einer Verschiebung durch soziale Spaltung.
In den letzten Jahren nimmt die Intensität von sozialen Kämpfen gegen hohe Energiekosten zu. Sowohl in Europa (z.B. in GB), als auch insbesondere im Süden. Jüngstes Beispiel waren in den vergangenen Wochen die Proteste in Bolivien. Besonders ist die bolivianische Konstellation, weil sich die dortigen sozialen Bewegungen sowohl gegen hohe Preise von Grundgütern wie Energie wenden, als auch sich dem neo-extraktivistischen Entwicklungs-/(Wachstums)modell widersetzen.Diese Auseinandersetzung wird eingebettet in das Post-Development-Kozept des „buen vivir“ des guten Lebens, welches sich gegen die (kolonialen) Paradigmen von Entwicklung und Modernisierung abgrenzt. Die Mobilisierungen in den vergangenen Wochen in Bolivien zielten darauf, die Regierung Morales zur Rücknahme der Kürzung von Subventionen für (fossile) Energie zu drängen. Mit unmittelbaren Erfolg. Die Regierung Morales schien von der Heftigkeit der Proteste überrascht. Dieser Erfolg auf ganzer Linie demonstriert die Autonomie der sozialen Bewegungen, die nicht als kooperatistisch organisierte Zilvilgesellschaft zum Teil des erweiterten Staates wurden, sondern eine völlig eigenständige Handlungsfähigkeit gegenüber der 2005 aus sozialen Bewegungen hervorgegangenen Regierung beweisen. Das Recht auf (bezahlbare) fossile Energie wurde mittels Straßenproteste trotz Polizeigewalt von den gleichen Akteuren durchgesetzt, die das fossilistische Modernisierungsprojekt Boliviens ablehnen. Trotz gegenteiliger Klimagerechtigkeitsrethorik auf internationaler Ebene intensiviert die Regierung Morales im übrigen das extraktivistische Entwicklungsmodell. Die Orientierung an sozialen Rechten vermag es den scheinbaren Widerspruch zwischen Nutzung fossiler Energien und ihrer Extraktion im Rahmen eines wachstumsbasierten „nachholenden Entwicklungsmodells“ aufzulösen.
Besondere Relevanz hat diese jüngsten erfolgreichen Proteste auch deshalb, weil in den letzten Jahren ganz im Gegensatz zu eurozentrischen Wahrnehmungen angesichts der umfassenden ökologischen Krise „der massivste Ausdruck eines radikalen Umweltbewusstseins [in den letzten Jahren] bei den Bauern und Indigenen des Globalen Südens entstanden ist“, wie Victor Vallis beobachtet. Diese seien inzwischen zu einem eigenständigen Akteur auf der internationalen Ebene geworden – dabei sind die Bewegungen in Bolivien ein wichtiger Knotenpunkt. Walden Bello ging in diesem Kontext noch einen Schritt weiter, als er beim G8-Gegengipfel 2008 in Japan analysierte, dass die indigenen und bäuerlichen Bewegungen zur ersten „Klasse für sich“ der Epoche der neoliberalen Globalisierung geworden sind. Angesichts des mangelnden Widerstands gegen das Wachstumsmodell im Norden ein mögliches Pfund Hoffnung.
Im folgenden ein Brief von Vertretern sozialer Bewegungen an Morales, um ihn zur Rücknahme der Subventionskürzungen zu bewegen, welcher ihr beeindruckende s Gegenmachtpotential und ihr Selbstbewustsein dokumentiert:
Subject: Open Letter from Oscar and other former companeros of Evo
Morales and Alvaro Garcia Linera
Companeros,
The leftist press is not saying anything about what is happening here
after the Gasolinazo couple of days ago. We ask you your help spreading
this letter from Oscar and other former companeros from Evo and Alvaro.
We need to start to look seriously at the contradictions in Bolivia
under Morales government,
Thanks!
Marcela
Para la carta en Espanol: http://narconews.com/Issue67/articulo4292.html
Open Letter to Evo Morales and Álvaro García Against the Gasolinazo
and for the Self Governance of Our People
The People Come First, not Numbers nor Statistics
By Oscar Olivera Foronda, Marcelo Rojas, Abraham Grandydier,
Aniceto Hinojosa Vásquez and Carlos Oropeza
Bolivia
December 30, 2010
Cochabamba, (La Llajta) December 30, 2010
Sirs;
Evo Morales Ayma and
Alvaro García Linera
La Paz.-
We speak to you through this open letter although it probably won’t be
read because you don’t hear of it or because it doesn’t interest you.
However, although you may ignore it, although it may not exist, we want
to tell you how we, like many of our people, feel today. We tell you,
Sirs, because years ago you ceased being our brothers and compañeros,
you distanced yourselves from the people, and thus you don’t know what
happens down here, below. Your defects – and not your virtues – that we
know have multiplied ten times in a worrisome, indignant and sad manner.
Oscar Olivera (wearing baseball cap, interviewed by reporters) with Evo
Morales (in the green shirt, to the right of Oscar) during the 2000
“Water War” in Cochabamba.
We still remember when we marched, together with you, Evo, for our
people, when we campaigned to get Alvaro out of prison; when the ancient
textile workers’ building in Cochabamba became our headquarters to
conspire against the bad governments that today look a lot like
yours:BAD GOVERNMENT.
You quickly forgot that we sent you into the government not to
administrate, but, rather, to transform and change the lives of the
people. Today we see all of you transformed and the lives of the people
have changed, but badly so, from bad to worse.
Since that December 22 of 2005, when you cried, Evo and Alvaro, you have
only busied yourselves making traditional and privileged politics,
subordinating and coopting social and union leaders, military and police
officials, with money, with positions, disqualifying and stigmatizing
everything that has criticized you, everything we said we wanted to do
away with. Some of us had the luxury to reject your offers and you
converted us into your enemies or simply behaved as if we did not exist.
We asked you: *Change the economy*, worry about the people more than
your political enemies, create jobs, industry, work, *build solidarity,
brotherhood and generosity.*
Where is your “obedience leads” slogan that was invented by the
Zapatistas? Did the people send you there to pact with the right in the
Constituent Assembly? Did the people send you there to fill your cabinet
with neoliberals, opportunists, incompetents and advisors for
international organizations that we never saw in the struggles of the
people, in the streets, the highways, the communities, the hunger
strikes and factories? Where were most of the members of your cabinet in
2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 and 2005? Did the people send you there to
invite your mayors, governors, “beauty pageant contestants,” and
neoliberal technicians into the government? Who decides in this
government? The people? Or the llunk’us (a Quecha indigenous word for
lackeys and adulators) that surround you in order to not lose the
privileges that gives them power?
Álvaro García Linera (vice president of Bolivia) in a 2002 press
conference with Oscar Olivera and Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar, when Olivera
joined the hunger strike to demand that the Bolivian government withdraw
charges against them.
Who continues controlling the economy of our country? The indigenous and
“social movements”? Or the multinational oil and mining companies and
large bankers who today have made more money than during any previous
government to yours, those which you affectionately call “partners”?
They are partners in the conditions of anguish and poor living to which
we have been subjected during these last five years. Where are the
billions of dollars in fiscal reserves that you constantly tell us are
there?
What about the nationalizations that have been a trick against the
population, indemnifying the multinational looters with the people’s
money? These businesses are being administrated by the old neoliberal
and corrupt bureaucracy.
Where is the industrialization of gas in the country? Where is the new
economy based on respect for Mother Earth and the balance and harmonious
relation with Pachamama that you always proclaim? Haven’t you delivered
thousands of acres to the multinational oil and mining companies so they
can keep exploiting Mother Earth? Have you given the New Political
Constitution of the State to the plantation owners of the Eastern region?
The economic model continues being extractionary, neoliberal,
capitalist, all of it contrary to your speeches.
Was it the people who sent you to buy a private airplane for $40 million
when millions of “your people” do not have housing nor basic services?
Did the people send you to tolerate narcotrafficking like never before
and that, sooner or later, will turn our city into a Ciudad Juárez or a
Medellín? Maybe the same coca leaf that you promoted so that you could
be president will be the same leaf that takes that privilege away from you.
Do you know what it’s like to have to wait on line overnight to sign
your sons and daughters into school or to receive inadequate medical
attention in the public hospitals? The people don’t have private and
privileged insurance for the clinics of the rich.
Felipe Quispe, Evo Morales and Oscar Olivera, in 2003, when they joined
forces as the popular “chiefs of staff” in opposition to the government
of Gonzalo “Goni” Sánchez de Lozada.
Are you familiar with what it is to get on a public bus or taxi and
listen to the sentiments of our people? Have you gone to the markets to
bargain the prices of basic foods that each day are harder to obtain to
calm the hunger of our families?
Did the people send you there to have so many privileges, bodyguards,
assistants, cabinet chiefs who make it impossible to speak directly to
both of you? Who pays you? Who pays your food, your transportation, your
health insurance, your security, your planes, your costs? We do: the
people which you were once part of.
Did the people send you to impose such a brutal, irrational, arrogant
and neoliberal “gasolinazo” (an 82 percent hike in gasoline prices) that
will make the people, who barely survive if they have the luck to have a
stall in the market or a job, even poorer?
You always said that neoliberalism has failed. Is the gasolinazo a
revolutionary and popular measure? Or is it that your economic model has
failed?
Why must you – like all the governments previous to yours have done –
carry out your failures behind the backs of the population, notably over
those making minimum wage whose median income is fifty times less than
yours and whose needs are one hundred times greater than yours?
Álvaro García Linera at the home of Oscar Olivera.
What a pain that you always say that power is in the hands of the
people, that this is an indigenous-popular government, what a pain that
all of this is a lie:LLULLAS! (A very strong indigenous Quechua word for
“liars.”)
Luckily, thanks to the struggles in which we have been together, we
learned something very important. We learned to think and act for
ourselves so that never again would anyone tell us what we must do, so
that nobody ever again would be able to trick us so that the popular
vote, trust and hope that has come in recent times from the most
impoverished and humble sectors would be converted into a party for the
rich, the well-off, the neoliberals in sheep’s clothing, the “beauty
pageant contestants.” The process is not propaganda, it is not a speech,
it is not about marketing: the process is to change the lives of the
people. And read this well, because we won’t allow ourselves to be
tricked again by anybody. That’s the way that people – who come, like
you, from the breast of The People – are.
*We would like to finish by saying something that an Aymara elder said:
The indigenous are not defined by physical traits, nor language, nor
last name, nor culture. The indigenous come from an attitude of
generosity, of respect, of reciprocity, transparency, of listening to
others.*
We ask you: Do you have that? From below and to the left, as the
Zapatistas say, we see arrogants who decide everything, who don’t listen
to anyone, who discriminate, who insult, who disqualify, who defame. Is
that how you want to remain in power for many years?
Oscar Olivera and Evo Morales after Morales’ 2005 election to the
presidency.
The problem is that you don’t understand the enormous responsibility
that you assumed as part of this process with our people and other
peoples of the world: of demonstrating that it is possible to govern
ourselves, that it is possible to lead by obeying, that it is possible
to construct another model of development, of “good living,” that
another world is possible. This was a process that delivered itself to
you with hope and joy. The legitimate owner of this process is the
Bolivian people, the girls and boys, men and women, youths, elders, from
the country and from the city, whose effort cannot be worn down,
diverted, usurped, expropriated, betrayed or subordinated by anyone,
even less by you and those who equivocally decide for us.
We don’t care about governments. We care about the people and this
process is losing the social base that it cost us so much to construct
while returning it to the right against which we fought and will fight.
*To make you understand that we exist we must mobilize and this we will
do, do not forget it.*
But we will not mobilize to fight among brothers and sisters in the way
that you’ve been encouraging in these years in your incapacity, and the
result is in Huanuni, Cochabamba, Pando, Yungas, Sucre… where so many
brothers and sisters, all children of Mother Earth, have hated and died.
*Alvaro, we already told you: The people come first, and later the
numbers and statistics.*
Do not confront us. Do not provoke us. Do not divide us or ignore us. We
exist. We are dignified. We will struggle against everything that harms
our daily lives. We seek:
*
-The repeal of your anti-popular and nefarious Decree 748
-The decolonization of the Plurinational State
-That no political party, not of the left, the center or the right,
can benefit from or involve itself in our actions and decisions
*
*-Like in 2000, like in 2003, Cochabama and El Alto defeated the
anti-popular policies.*
Oscar Olivera Foronda
Marcelo Rojas
Abraham Grandydier
Aniceto Hinojosa Vasquez
Carlos Oropeza
