Workers' Liberty

Reactionary landlords based in Bolivia's Santa Cruz province have pledged to set up "self-defence groups" - i.e. paramilitary forces - in the wake of Evo Morales' announcement that much of the country's land is to be redistributed to poor peasants. According to the BBC, "Bolivia's big landowners, he said, had to accept that the lands their ancestors stole during the Spanish conquest five centuries ago would now be returned to their original owners". The landowners' association will fight "by any means" to defend its "rights".

They need not worry. While the bourgeois press both in Bolivia and in the UK is falling over itself to express how "radical" and "populist" every step taken by Morales is, the land reforms are very limited. Perhaps the most laughable aspect of the claim that Morales is inciting "conflict" and "provoking" landowners is the fact that the land he plans to redistribute did not belong to landowners anyway - but to the state.

In the short term, 3 million hectares of state-owned land are going to be shared out amongst some of the indigenous-agricultural communities; a sector of the population representing at least 3 million campesinos. To put that into context, 25 million hectares of land are currently controlled by a clique of 100 land-owning families - there are 250,000 campesinos with no land whatsoever. Morales has announced "a land revolution" - in reality such piecemeal reforms are nothing more than the tip of the iceberg.

To Morales' credit, some challenge will be made to landowners' property rights. According to existing Bolivian law - dating from the 1952 Revolution - unused arable land may also be taken over by the state and put into use. Morales has announced that his five-year goal is to redistribute to campesinos a total of 20 million hectares, comprising 20% of Bolivia's territory. No doubt this will be of some benefit to landless campesinos and people who under the status quo rely on subsistence farming - Morales is expropriating the ruling class to give to the poor.

But the programme of our latter-day Robin Hood is hardly revolutionary. What is most important about the land he plans to expropriate is that it is unused and unproductive - the landowners so angry about losing the land obviously have no desire to use it anyway. Much like Chávez in Venezuela, Morales has declared a "redistribution of land" without actually giving poor peasants anything worth having. The largest estates on the most fertile land will remain under the control of a tiny élite, while the near-50% of Bolivians who are poor peasants will be given mere hand-me-downs, scraps which are largely marginal to the economy.

The real answer is to finish the task of the 1952 Revolution in seizing all private estates off landowners and putting them under the collective control of local communities. Workers' and peasants' power in Bolivia cannot be built from such hand-outs as Morales is proposing - their rise out of poverty can only take place if they are able to harness the country's whole productive resources and produce for the common-social benefit.

The landowners' reaction is not based on a serious threat to their authority from the government, even if their "talks" with Morales have broken down. The real threat to landowners comes from the landless campesinos themselves, who have over the last few years mounted a number of "land invasions". The radicalism of the Bolivian masses represents a real challenge to the capitalists because, unlike Morales, they are not worried about property rights or offending the World Bank. They do not think it's acceptable for landowners to cling on just because they can prove that they use their land for "economic function". They can see that the landowners' seizure of the land had no legitimacy in the first place.

The Movimiento Sin Tierra is pushing the real "land revolution" by recuperating land - property which was first seized by the Spanish and later distributed free by military juntas to wealthy families who were counted on as allies. The real right to the land belongs to the Bolivian peasants and labourers who actually work it, not the ruling class which has plundered it. By failing to recognise this, and conceding the right of landowners to keep farms which are "productive" - even if this production is only to the benefit of a tiny clique - Morales puts himself in opposition to the landless movement and the needs of desperately poor campesinos.