It Could Happen Here - A Decade of Post-Occupy Political Parties Revisited

Episode Date: January 24, 2024

Mia and James attempt to evaluate the common claim by post-Occupy political parties that they were the only ones serious about taking power by looking at the records of nine such parties. They fare poorly.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Calls on media. Elections. No, we're not talking about those elections this is it could happen here we're talking about a bunch of other elections and how fucking terribly they went i'm your host me along with me is james stout hi man i'm stoked i do love a good election it's great to vote for people we are kind of talking about elections today, but the thing that we're actually talking about is what has happened to the left since 2011.

And anyone who was around 2011, 2013, and like any time after that, one of the arguments you got constantly was, okay, so 2011, you have Occupy, you have the movement of the squares, you have these mass millions of people like assembling in squares and trying to do direct democratic stuff and you know figuring it out and making it work and it not working and you know all the complicated and messy things that happen when you have real political movements and that entire time there

was an entire chorus of dipshits whose only line was well if you want to get serious about taking power you have to get into electoral politics and these people got their wish and now we are like almost a decade and a half out i think i think we are finally in a position to objectively analyze how well this shit went and oh boy so join us as we uh wander from disaster to apocal disaster and go over the wreckage of all of these very very uh once promising and inspiring social movements joy i'm so excited i'm so excited to hear yet another attempt at making the world better that in fact failed yeah so okay there's actually two places we could start here so i'm gonna let you pick do you want to start with sars here or do you want to start with podamos

let's start with podamos i do i do enjoy a good spain uh i just been reading about the the another round of exhumations today so uh i do love a country that uh has baked into its constitution amnesty for people who did fucking mass x it like spain has more mass graves than anywhere apart from uh is it rwanda or cambodia cambodia cambodia is the only place i think that beats spain from spain for mass graves jesus christ yeah a country which uh i cannot say enough has not finished its civil war and remains a post-dictatorship and will until uh it recovers allows people whose fucking parents and grandparents were murdered in the street to uh recover their remains and grieve for them sorry i thank you for coming to my ted no no this is good well i mean and part part of the context of this whole thing is that this is one of the underlying things that causes the enormous uprisings in Spain in 2011.

They have one of the biggest, I mean, actually, literally, one of the reasons Occupy happens is that there are specific people who are in, like, actually, we talked to Vicky Osweil on the show about this. Like, she was in Catalonia when this stuff started. There's like a million, like, there were individual squares where there were like a million people. Oh, yeah. I was in Catalonia when this stuff started there's there's like a million there were individual squares where there were like a million people oh yeah i was in catalonia when this stuff started yeah and like and that's one of the things that brought that brings occupied to the u.s people who were there for that being in the u.s and like being in zuccotti park when occupy started and so you know they have they have one of the largest and most powerful like anti-austerity movements like anywhere in the world is very well organized but one of the largest and most powerful like anti-austerity movements like

anywhere in the world is very well organized but one of the things that happens in this is very quickly there's an attempt to hijack this because people see the number of people who are in the streets they see they see this as an opportunity to you know take electoral power right this is the whole line is like we're serious about taking power blah blah blah blah and podemos in particular is influenced by like some of the people on earth who i hate the most they're they're they're influenced by like like they deliberately call themselves post-marxist like left populist philosophers their their model is Peronism. Pfft. It is a shitshow.

It is a catastrophe. Like, every single party who's ever tried their strategy of taking power has failed. Like, left-populism as an elect- as a specifically like, this kind of left-populism as a strategy has a worse record for taking power in Europe than left-wing military coups? Like, it's that bad. To be europe than left-wing military coups like it's that bad

to be fair left-wing military crews rarely succeed at the ballot box so they uh sure they're they're a more effective way of getting into power than this this fucking left electoralism shit so for people who don't really remember putamos was like the like them and sergio were like the thing in like like post sort of like post-occupy like in in that moments of like these are the like the big like left like electoral successes these are the things that are going to take power Podemos specifically so the the thing Podemos calls itself like their whole strategy is to build build what they call the electoral war machine their entire strategy is just to win elections that's it that's their whole thing they're going to pull together a bunch of leftist groups they're going

to win elections do they ever win a single election no zero the entire time it has been since the formation of potables it has been what like 13 years they have lost every single election in a row they were in the uh they were in the Sanchez coalition government with the Pacific. Yeah, yeah. Well, so this is the other interesting thing is that the thing that Podemos' thing, right, originally was, well, they had this whole sort of, one of the things that was very popular in the early 2010s was this whole like, oh, we'll have a political party, but it'll like take, like, it'll take its policy from but it'll like take like uh it'll it'll

take its policy from these direct democratic assemblies those assemblies never material that was all a lie yet anytime someone tells you that their political party is going to take its direction from like assemblies in the street they're lying to you they're trying to get you out of the street don't believe them so that that was all nonsense but the other big thing about about was that they were supposed to be like the big third force in Spanish politics, right? They were going to be like the new force that was going to come in. They were going to wipe away all the corrupt politicians. And they specifically, their big thing was that they refused to enter coalition governments.

Now, fast forward to losing like six straight elections. And now, what is Podemos? Podemos is the permanent minority government coalition partner with the the spanish socialist party and before you get excited about the spanish socialist party like they suck like they are they are literally shit i i will always stand anyone who digs up franco's rotting corpse and flies it across the country that's those ribs but they're also like they're also mostly like they they're also like they're also mostly like they they're they're they're also i mean they've they've kind of been forced to go a bit to the left

like by podemos and like by the sort of transformations that happen but they're also just like a bunch of dealable shits like they're like literally this is one of the parties that podemos was formed to run out of power and now they're just you know they're just a permanent like minority coalition government um pablo ingles, who was Podemos' great political strategist, he was like their guy. He was the guy who wore cool leather jackets and shit. He was the guy who was in every magazine. Tell you what, you see a politician in a leather jacket,

you fucking run. Yeah. You run a mile. That is peak dad trying to look cool energy. He has retired from politics it just abject failure because nothing ever fucking worked um one of the one of one of the big things that you know one of the big recent things that potamus did was help the socialist party crush the massive wave of metal worker strikes that swept spain in 2011 and in 2021 so great stuff happening there

like they're you know they're not literally fascists and that's that's their selling point uh they they fucking lose every election and they yeah ran ran ran the social movements into the ground yeah it's uh they literally had a thing didn't they like yeah their their initial manifesto was like to convert indignation into political change or like the movement that began the occupation of the squares in spain was called the indignats or indignation into political change. The movement that began the occupation of the squares in Spain was called the Indignats or Indignados in Catalan or Spanish. The whole thing was to channel this energy into a process which is literally designed to stop shit changing.

Yeah. And guess what? It didn't fucking change. They lost every election. They've never won an election. They're never going to win an election. Yeah. Remain in the streets my

spanish friends and catalan friends and basque friends and galician friends and other friends in iberia yeah so all right moving on to so you know we talked about how spain had one of the biggest uh like movement of the squares type things greece i think technically gets the honor of having the first post-2008 uprising which was actually not an economic thing it was the cops like murdered a fucking kid and people just lit shit on fire like it was it was fucking wild it was there's a quote about like those first protests that i i always i was thinking about in in like the height of 2020 when i was watching that guy in the elmo mask with the molotov like which is you know that that those

first protests it was like people it wasn't it wasn't that people were trying people weren't trying to build a political movement they just wanted destruction because yeah yeah they were angry and they wanted to burn shit down abject abject fury at the cops just murdering this child um and partially also they murdered this kid like in, in Exarchia, which is like Greece's anarchist like neighborhood. So terrible idea by the police, terrible thing. Greece has repeated massive protests. One of the reasons they're having these protests is that Greece is forced to

accept these like crippling austerity measures by the troika which is this group that was running the bailouts in europe composed of the international monetary fund the european central bank and the european commission which is basically the executive branch of the european union with reps from all of the eu countries and the product of this is that the only faction that ever actually mattered in the troika was just germany effectively what was happening was germany was imposing like a bunch of economic sanctions on yeah this is when like the european union became like what germany says we do especially in regard to this stuff in the context of these massive protests greece elects syriza which is supposedly this left-wing party that is going to you know specifically the mandate they were handed was stop the austerity.

And literally, they are in negotiations with the Troika. They have a plan in hand to tell the Troika to fuck off and for Greece to leave the European Union, to set up capital controls, to start, like, you know, this is a process that would have, like, the only way this could have functioned is they start you know they start literally like seizing property from like a bunch of fucking yacht owners and instead of doing that literally at the last second with the plan in hand at the negotiating table cerisa folds instead they cut a deal with the troika they impose literally the exact same austerity measures they are put in power to stop and then you know now now having done this they're now facing their own giant anti-austerity protests and the the thing that syriza does is ally with the riot police who by the way one of the things one of the one of the ways that syriza got people to support them was specifically by running on basically

completely rebuilding the greek police force because greece's police force oh yeah fuck me just straight up a bunch of nazis and when i say that i i literally they they vote i think it's 97 percent of their members voted for the golden dawn which is like the greek neo-nazi party yeah and like so many of these people vote for the golden dawn that is like the greek neo-nazi party yeah and like so many of these people vote for the golden dawn that they can be considered like a significant part of the total of of the golden dawn's base yeah and perhaps more importantly of of its like street fighting element that yeah that kills anti-fascist right those guys like the golden dawn eventually comes apart because they they ordered the assassination of an anti-fascist rapper from parliament and then

had the guy killed yeah yeah just fucking bad shit and those are the people who the greek police are supporting but sarzia sarisa needs them because they need the police to smash the anti-syrian movement to stop people from like knocking off their governments and stopping the austerity and they do it it works eventually after years and years and years and years of just smashing these like smashing these protests with police they're able to you know they're able to stamp out the sort of the the giant social movements and the consequence of this is that they turn over greece to just like a bunch of just murderously far-right anti-immigrant shitheads who are the people who currently run greece they're unbelievable like just unbelievably right wing these guys are so right wing they were trying to find ways to claim credit for uh getting it like getting those like several hundred people

on that migrant ship earlier this year killed like yeah that's that's who currently runs greece and that's who syriza like turned power over to because they literally did nothing and destroyed their own base yeah it's probably worth like stopping to note here that like fear-mongering around migrants has been the thing that has moved like straight up fascist into power in much southern europe right like italy and greece and like even if you're not a person who lives at the border like this shit is absolutely like the playbook that the far right is using all over the world and they're absolutely using here right now and we have an election year here and and like you owe it to the world to correct that bullshit disinformation whenever you can now that we're talking about greece can we just briefly

mention the archer of syntagma the biggest chad ever to walk the earth yeah sorry i can't do it i can't do an episode without this guy if you are not familiar with uh janice micheladis uh it's this absolute legend dude who took a bow and arrow to the protests given a 13 year sentence and then escaped from prison i think was recaptured and then it went on hunger strike for a while just just a series of exploits that they're truly legendary uh incredible they they replaced this with fucking uh just being another party that imposed austerity yeah like no no one's replaced that guy he's still uh he's still remaining true to the cause. That's true, but they replaced the political movement that produced this guy with just genuinely the greatest glow down in human history.

Just terrible stuff. Yeah, it's very sad. It could have been a wonderful thing. There are still, like Greece has still a very strong and respectable anarchist movement. I'm trying to get over there to... They squat large areas of housing for migrants to allow migrants to live in it, and it's extremely based.

I'm trying to go spend some time with them next time. I forgot to mention this. They also do this in Spain. I've talked about this on the show before, but I should mention it here since we're doing this. One of Podemos' regional allies is Barcelona and Camus thing that barcelona and camus did upon taking power was evict an immigrant squat because they knew it wouldn't have enough defenses to stop the police evicting them so fuck these people those people used to be anarchists they're traitors fuck them

yeah and this happens constantly right like the senate entered into government in 1936 with the spanish socialist party and going and got completely owned by by moscow in extremely predictable fashion and all their friends got in some cases literally flayed alive perhaps consider not doing that next time yeah so speaking of being flayed alive uh do you know do you know who else uh will flay you alive if you don't buy their buy their stuff is it the products and services that support this podcast again isn't it they're fucking they're all over that shit we can't say that can we just bleep it ian hi i'm ed zitron host of the better offline podcast and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tex elite has turned silicon valley into a playground for billionaires

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So, all right, we need to talk about two other places where this kind of stuff happened. We're leaving Europe. We're going to go to, briefly to briefly we're gonna go to the anglophone world no deeply cursed place so in the u.s uh all of these same people gained power uh their giant political project and their only real political project was attempting to elect bernie sanders uh bernie sanders lost two consecutive elections first to hillary clinton the most unpopular democratic presidential candidate in modern history and then lost the second election to joe biden the man so senile he forgot what president he served as vp under and i'm only mentioning this because these are these these are the people who spend all of their time talking about how serious they are about taking power and they got

their ass kicked by again hillary clinton the most unpopular candidate in the entire history of like the modern history of the democratic party and joe fucking bided a man like i just okay and instead the one guy they did run and managed to actually like get into power was uh one john fetter. Yeah, look, he's had some banging tweets, but he's been a complete fucking turd in his time in office. I'm pissed about this because from the very beginning,

I was like, this guy sucks ass. He's a Zionist. He's anti-immigrant. He fucking sucks. He's anti-trousers. He opposes anything below the knee. No one fucking believed me. His campaign was run

by a bunch of fucking DSA people. And instead, they elected john fucking fetterman who hates everyone who fucking worked with him is just screaming like the same fascist anti-immigrant border he's also in the pocket of big egg uh he's made he's introduced a bill to not allow people to call vegan egg substitutes egg but he's not even in like the pocket of like good big egg like he's not in the pocket of like big people who haven't realized that they're trans yet no no he's in the pocket of bad big egg i think that's an act of solidarity like as a man with a giant bald dome he somewhat resembles an egg so he feels like communion with other eggs i think that's what makes sense yeah so okay that's

the us at some point we're gonna do another episode about the all of the just fucking absolute dipshits that they elected and the dsa elected in la who've been doing like just sweeping homeless camps so fuck them but that's not that's not today uh we're we're instead gonna move to corbin so all right so the british left in the beginning of i know it's like this is like impossible to imagine now but in the beginning of the 2010s the britain had a vibrant and expanding left it had a bunch of street movements they had the student protests they had a bunch of riots and all of that energy and all of those fucking people you know got got sucked up by corbinism and corbin lost an election to boris fucking

johnson a man who was ousted by his own party and replaced by liz shorter term than a cabbage trust like you know and all these people all these people i've i've had to talk to these people for fucking years and years and years right and their whole thing was like well okay like but the the media rigged the election against us and the labor party was trying to sabotage us like yeah no shit what the what the fuck did you expect was going to happen did you seriously think if you even like just like remotely wanted to challenge capital at all did you seriously expect that the bourgeoisie were going to play by the rules what the fuck did you think was going to happen did you think they were just going to fucking sit there and let you take power because your ideas were somewhat popular like no of course they fucking

were of course they were going to sabotage you and the whole fucking thing about the media it's like well yeah of course you know like yeah obviously the media in in britain is run by the fucking burdocks it's their press is in unbelievably insanely right wing sure however comma you guys are the ones who decided to pick an arena where your candidate and your entire political project can be sunk by negative press attention. You picked that arena to fight. And then on top of that, you ran a completely conventional political campaign. Right. Literally, all you did was fucking canvas.

You ran a completely conventional political campaign that everyone's fucking Pikachu facing that they had like one of the worst labor losses in modern history. Right. Like, OK, what what the fuck did you think was going to happen right and this is this is again this is one of the reasons why electoralism doesn't work because if you're in a field that is entirely about the popularity of one person and there's an entire apparatus that is able that is better able than you to directly communicate to the entire population to tell them that that one person is fucking bad of course you're gonna fucking lose like what what did you think was gonna happen and now you know the labor party is run by cure starmer who is like the most right-wing labor candidate since like tony blair he prosecuted the people who were in the streets

in 2010 right like that that is where we've got to now it's like we have a choice between like rishi like send gunboats into the channel to sink sink the small ship sunak and and the guy who wants to lock you up for for taking a bottle of water from boots in 2010 like it's yeah it's not a choice and that's and like the corporate left has been basically complete liquidated the only thing that's left of it are these media organizations who are all tacking right as fast as they can possibly fucking move because that's where the fucking money is and because you know starboard actually used to be a trotskyite and all of these people know that the way you actually if you are on the left and you want to take electoral power in britain the way you do it has become a conservative

and it will work yeah yeah i mean look look look at tony blair right he was extremely successful in like criminalizing being a teenager and these insanely right-wing policies again people aren't familiar with anti-social behavior orders in britain they should they should look them up and like god machines that make noise to keep young people out of public space like it's a fully yeah like the shit he was doing was insane and uh but if you ever continue to well look britain's electoral system if you think america's electoral system is fucked check out first past the post like fully insane one of the areas i lived when i was a kid like you just didn't have an option there was some like someone named giles or a similar kind of like giles vibing name

or a token lib dem candidate and like you know marmaduke was your only choice really like like which is why i did not engage in the practice of voting in the united kingdom but yeah it is a fuck system yeah and and again it's like well yeah you you chose a rigged system to participate in in the first place and then it's like well you lost well yeah it was like yes you can complain that it was rigged against you but you should have known that going in if you were genuinely serious about taking power you had to know that and you fucking didn't and now your entire country has been absolutely destroyed so yeah that that that's the uk and

we're going now and so from there we're going to pivot to latin america where there is a very very long history in fact a lot the latin amer we're going to be talking about mostly aren't even parties that took over from the momentum of the 2011 uprisings. They're from the 2001 movements of people who hijacked two generations back of social movements by this point. And I think the post-2011 stuff was inspired by the pink wave stuff in Latin America,ica right like it sort of goes around in a circle yeah so so now we're gonna check in on how the pink tide's doing the answer is absolutely dog shit so we're gonna go to ecuador first so okay ecuador is right now a complete fucking disaster it shouldn't be like this though in theory correa is like the is the guy and he's like the leftist guy in ecuador he's like he is their guy who came out of the pink tide and in theory his party should win

like basically every ecuadorian election from now to the end of time they should in theory have the easiest job of like every every any electoralists are talking about in this party they have had they had a decade in power. To just completely destroy all of their political opposition. And you know to completely rebuild the economy. And political landscape in a way that would have made. The right taking power impossible. Instead.

His party is completely unelectable. And have been out of power for eight fucking years. After Lennon Moreno. Who is the guy that they. Literally the handpicked guy that they picked to run their own party, purged them all, tried to have Correa arrested, and spent the entire rest of his career being a right-winger. Now, even after, even after they got purged from their own party by the guy that they hand-picked to put into Powerdex after they turned out to be

a right-winger, even after that happened, they still should have been able to win, like, every fucking election. However, comma, Correa, instead of, like, doing normal leftist stuff, spent like, his entire career sending riot police to beat the shit out of indigenous ecological protesters who didn't want their drinking water to be poisoned by mines, which means

there are a huge number of, like, indigenous leftists who should be part of, of like the left-wing base who will not under any circumstances vote for korea even if he was running against literally the devil because he fucking beat the shit out of them like fuck you like and you know and this i should briefly explain like okay this is this is obviously a very very simplified this is yeah it's a political i'm gonna do a political compass thing that's very simplified but i think gets across one of the major kind of like breaks in a lot of latin american countries that have real lefts and

also whose economies are largely based on resource extraction which is that okay so you know you you have you have your kind of political compass like you would in the u.s you have a lot you have a left right axis but in a lot of these countries the up-down axis isn't like status anti-status the up-down axis is on the one hand you have like developmental extractivists and on the other hand you have ecological anti-extractivists so what this means in practice is there's this giant divide over whether or not you should do drilling on indigenous land so for example you have the current right-wing ecuadorian government which is extractivist in right wing and this means they think you should drill on indigenous land and

you should take all the money you get from that and give it to rich people. There is, you know, Korea's government was extractivist and left wing, which means that, you know, you do you do all the mining on indigenous land, but then you take the money and you give it to a welfare state. And then opposed to him was a bunch of anti extractivist indigenous ecological groups who want redistribution, but they don't want like they don't want people poisoning their water with mines so they oppose corea because they don't want their shit mined and then there's also chris also opposed by these like liberal environmental ngos who like don't want the amazon destroyed but also like poor people can go fuck themselves and this this has made the, the, the,

the way the constellation of these things have, have worked out means that like, what should be like a pretty normal left, right political alignment thing has gone completely nuts. There's a bunch of like, there's a bunch of sort of like ecological indigenous groups who have gone hard, who have like swung right because the right wingers are the only people who will support them against Korea. Meanwhile,

the actual like indigenous electoral opposition in its various forms is a complete fucking disaster. Patrick Kutik, which is like the this is the like the big sort of like indigenous electoral alliance. They keep running this guy named Yaku Perez, who is like. He's like the only person in the entirety of Ecuadoruador who's more unelectable than correa is like nobody fucking even even the addition is opposition to correa like doesn't like him so and and you know eventually yaku prez like left the party but it doesn't really matter because they still just lose every single election the the left is they're completely dysfunctional and you know there's there's other other things going on here, too, which is that, like,

for example, Correa's, like, has an unbelievably hardline anti-abortion stance. Like, he threatened to resign if his party tried to pass legislation that would allow abortion in the case of rape. Like, that's how anti-abortion this guy is. Fucking nuts. That's bad.

This is like, okay, yes, this is a very, catholic country right sure even by that standards that's fucking nuts like yeah that's bad oh yeah that's uh that's rough you know so the the product of this is that a a country that has a like a decently centered left electoral like electorate in theory has produced three straight conservative governments uh these governments have absolutely annihilated the ecuadorian economy and the welfare state and left it prey to like to organize crime who you know unlike the just completely dysfunctional ecuadorian state can at least provide like a semi-stable income but the downside of this

is that they're organized crime so you know not things going very badly i you've probably seen some of the like absolutely wild videos of stuff of like people storming like like armed groups just like storming uh like tv stations they assassinate they've assassinated actually several presidential candidates now yeah that was uh it's been there on a wild one yeah it's it's really bad on christmas eve if i was talking to a family from ecuador um who's had come to the u.s to get some medical treatment for their son who very manifestly needed help and they were telling me like just of their life experiences and like it was bad uh it was like i've been to some uh some places where violence happens and like the stuff that they were telling me was was shocking it's gotten really really bad since basically between

2015 and 2017 and it's just progressively gotten worse as these right-wing governments have stayed in power and you know right now right now there there hasn't been an alternative to them because the electoralists who are again the people who are supposed to be serious about taking power and you know right now right now there there hasn't been an alternative to them because the electoralists who are again the people who are supposed to be serious about taking power are just a complete fucking disaster and can't do anything yeah correa can't literally can't go back to ecuador now right i i think he might be i think he can go back now there was a while where there was a warrant out for his arrest i think he's back now okay yeah but the the ray of light for ecuador is ecuador still has a lot of very like of of very military street

movements who've been winning have actually been like winning concessions from governments when they go when they go into the streets so that's good uh insallah, one day the electoralists get the fuck out of their way and they win. But it hasn't happened yet. Things are really bleak. On that note, do you know what's not really bleak? The possibility of buying gold coins. Yeah. To insulate ourselves against inflation, yep.

You'd be stoked if you had a buck of gold in ecuador wouldn't you currency's gone to shit sitting on your pile of gold like scrooge mcduck you'd be you'd be living the dream hi i'm ed zitron host of the better offline podcast and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tex elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong,

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So, all right, we're going to take a couple of other i'll take a few other places that the electoral left has won in uh chavismo is dead as a doornail uh maduro's slashing pensions dollarizing the economies cutting a bunch of deals with american oil companies and has arrested the leadership of the venezuelan communist party again keeps doing this uh so you know things things going great like obviously not helped by the blockade which is very bad but like you know not great moreno which we're not going to talk an enormous at some point we're going to like actually do a thing like actually go talk to the zapatistas but things are not good there right now so the left in theory

kind of has taken power in mexico um unfortunately the moment they took power they immediately tacked right-handed control of vast swaths of the country over to the military built a train through a bunch of indigenous land and then gave that to the military yeah switched a bunch of military commands around because they like claimed that the old guys were corrupt uh yeah and you know and one of the other things that's been really bleak about it was that like the whole premise of omlo like coming into power was like he ran in the campaign hugs not bullets right his whole thing was he was supposed to be ending the war on drugs did he end the war on drugs absolutely not gave shit ton of power to the military people still getting

fucking slaughtered yeah i don't know i definitely saw a bunch of dudes in ski masks with a 50 cal chilling uh just the other side of the border uh yeah sent by the government two days ago and and instead of doing that he's also been like continuing to like escalating the war against zapatistas who've been getting just, like, people getting fucking murdered by a bunch of these government-backed paramilitaries. It's really fucking bleak

out there right now. Yeah, so that's been the legacy of AMLO finally winning a Mexican election is the most right-wing possible AMLO government. Like, I will say say they're better on trans stuff than everyone like the other parties who are all completely nuts but that's about the only bright spot yeah i mean like they were in bilateral negotiations with the u.s and like when

the u.s clicked its fingers and said shut down these gaps in the border they uh sent a bunch of national guard soldiers to sit right at the gaps in the border wall they've been they've been doing a bunch of just like horrific anti-border shit um was also just like pretty friendly with trump which yeah there was a populist thing there yeah so that fucking sucks uh and so we're gonna close on the mas oh boy so there's been a bunch of stuff happening in bolivia that i i don't i i don't think most americans have heard much about so the mas movement for socialism there's some other shit but yeah uh they are well okay so for most of the time they've existed it's been even more alice's party however comma it was always kind of a weird coalition because the ms is this coalition between like the social movements and and in this context like people say social movements this

includes like you know like giant like movement groups but also like unions and stuff so it was a coalition of these unions and these like developmentalist capitalists who were welded together by even more allies than some of his allies and you know the sort of common ground of forging a like quote unquote indigenous plurinational state that's based on like oh based on forging a welfare state, based on like mining and extractive stuff and like oil drilling and stuff. And also based on the emergence of this new sort of indigenous middle class. Right now, it has split in two

between an Evo Morales faction and who was the former president, was president for a very, very long time. And Luis Octre, who was the, who is the current president oblivio but has been kicked out of the mas by evo and his faction so this is a disaster they both of them both ocre and evo morales have these they have a lot of personal alliances within the social movements and this means it's been a very very messy split and you know and this is not

okay if you look at these two people you would expect it to be an ideological split because ocre's from like the developmentalist right of the party like he was he was a banker he's been in charge of the bolivian central bank for a long time he was like finance minister so he's from like the center right like developmental faction of the party evo technically speaking has been the representative of like the the sort of like the social movement faction of the party uh he has a lot of allies in a lot of coca growers union stuff like that but it hasn't broken like that because this isn't an ideological fight this is just these two guys both want to be presidents

and so they've literally torn the entire bolivian left in two over over this fucking bullshit yeah never before happened on the left two dudes wanting to be in charge yeah and and this is this has been really really messy and and it's not breaking down the way it's not breaking cleanly politically down because there's a lot of like people from the anti-extractivist left of the party who are pissed off at the way that evo has like personally tried to seize control of what are supposed to be independent social movements and i know people hear that and are like wait what's what's the problem with like social movements being integrated with the state because like we don't the u.s doesn't have social movements like not not in the way that like that

latin america has them like dlm is the closest thing that we have to that but imagine if like blm was like an actual leftist group like the actual like organization black lives matter yeah like capital leftist blm yeah yeah it was like it was like a leftist group that would like lead protests and strikes and shit like we don't have that that's like not a thing here and so mostly when people hear about the stuff they're like wait what what does that mean like why why are we complaining that like these that social movements are being like folded into the state or like folded into this bureaucratic apparatus so i'm gonna run through an example of what that looks like in practice so we're gonna we're gonna talk going to briefly talk about the Confederation of Indigenous Peoples of Bolivia.

Oh, yeah, based. We talk about the We Follow flag. I didn't have anything in there on it. It is very funny. Given what we're about to talk about, it is very funny that all of the pro-MAS people in the US had that as their flag, had that flag as their profile picture when

this coup was going on it's one of the cooler flags out there it rips it does rip so so back in 2011 this is like this is like eight years before the coup um the confederation of indigenous people of bolivia opposed building this road through protected indigenous territory that the government was trying to force through. So they opposed it. Their opposition didn't do anything. They, you know, they joined in this enormous protest movement against this road

construction. Um, even when his supporters had the confederation's offices stormed by riot police and tried to replace his leadership with loyalists, this failed initially. And the, you know, so the,

the, the confederation of indigenous peoples of Bolivia had been part of the, like, of the MAS's, like, formal alliance, right? And after that, they were like, fuck you, man, we're out. They left, and then the Confederation split between the groups who were pro-EVO and everyone else. So another faction of the Confederation split from the regular confederation and went back and joined and calling themselves the same thing and went back and joined the mas again so like this is a shit show right and a lot of it is like you know it's it's it's it's comes down to these sort of like loyalty testings like are you willing to back every single thing that evo wants to do and if

you're not like they're going their faction and this is the thing that like this happens in the fucking dsa all the time right, everyone in the DSA is constantly trying to purge every other faction and install their loyalists, like, in charge of whatever fucking working group, right? But, you know, this is happening in a place where the left actually has power, which means that instead of, like, you know,

a series of weird elections and, like, purging people from positions, you're storming their offices with riot police. Yeah. This is why a lot of sort of groups you would expect to be backing evo aren't and are backing okra instead but really truly this is just two guys having a dick waving contest uh this is what happens when you do electoralism um yeah and but you know it's also worth mentioning the reason we're in the situation in the first place is that evo refused to just like in 2019 refused to just let someone else in his party

run like if literally anyone else had run the nas would have just trivially easily won the election there wouldn't have been a coup it wouldn't have been the potential to do one but he refused because he wants to personally be in power and this is what allows the 2019 coup to happen and the second the second reason that we're here now is that in 2021 and i don't think i don't think most american leftists like know about this i think people know about the coup i don't think people know about the stuff that happened in 2021 which is that there was this massive series of there was this massive series of of like barricades that went up to bring down the coup government so this is the thing that happens periodically in bolivia this is like this is how the social

movements took power in the first place is that they you know bolivia because of the way the terrain works very very mountainous country very narrow roads not many roads into a place you could just block all of the roads that go into the capital and you can just you can shut down the entire country's economy by just doing these roadblocks they very nearly this is actually like again the origin of the nas is that they very nearly like completely destroyed the believing government with this in 2006 um and then evo pulled his people off the barricades and was like no we're gonna do an election he easily wins the election because he's you know he's doing the thing we've been talking about this whole episode which is harnessing the power of of these social movements in order to get elected and it works like he becomes president but in 2000 you know in 2021 it happens again

and these groups are getting very close they've done enough damage that they forced the coup government to like actually have elections which they didn't want to have but they're on the verge of like actually knocking the government out of power and evo once again pulls all of his people off the barricades because he doesn't want the barricades to like disrupt his chance of winning the election and so instead of like bringing down this government and like ushering in like sweeping like left-wing reforms whatever on like the back of a revolutionary seizure of power we have the mas split between two dipshits and yeah these are these are very very serious about taking power

you can tell this because they've split the party over personal bullshit yeah every time right like leaderism is the curse of the left and it stops us doing things because it's always just dudes chest-thumping each other. Yeah, and the second part about it is that this is a product of leaving the streets. And we're going to close on Chile. We did a very optimistic episode on the protests in Chile a couple of years

ago because it looked like they were actually winning. That's not true anymore. Chile in 2019 has these massive massive street protests um they they successfully forced the government to call a constitutional convention to like replace their pinochet constitution but that got everyone off the streets and because it got everyone off the streets i both successive attempts to have a constitution have failed. It's deeply unclear what the fuck's going to happen with the constitution. It's possible they're going to end up with a constitution that is even more right-wing than the current one because they've blown, literally, their moment of opportunity by pulling everyone out of the streets, and now the right's resurgent. It's a complete fiasco. complete fiasco yeah the the repression of indigenous people has continued unabated under the new quote-unquote left-wing government so yeah it's it's a complete fiasco and that that

is today's lesson which is if anyone when people tell you that they are the ones who are serious about taking a wielding power and they want you to go vote for them we have they have failed everywhere for a decade do not let them do this to you again. Don't leave the streets. Yeah, instead... Don't leave the streets. Don't give someone else fucking power. Take it for yourself. That's all I've got. Yeah, that's a good place to end, I think.

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Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline

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