EARLIER, this month, Evo Morales won a third consecutive term to the presidency of Bolivia. Unsurprisingly, his election did not garner any comment in this country. It should have, given that Bolivia is one of the most democratic and progressive countries in the world.

The Movement for Socialism (MAS) party that Morales spearheads has overseen an unparalleled period of human development in Bolivia. In 2006, a third of the population lived in extreme poverty; that number is now less than 20pc. In 2009, Unesco declared Bolivia free of illiteracy, while its health indicators have also increased dramatically over the past decade.

On the surface Bolivia’s development successes are largely explained by the substantial revenues raised from its abundant reserves of natural gas. It is the region’s second biggest exporter of hydrocarbons after Venezuela and its stake in the global commodities market has garnered it more than $12 billion annually since 2001.

Bolivia is among the world’s most progressive countries.

Hardly what one would call a principled socialist policy to disengage from the capitalist world system.

An economic model based on intensive extraction of natural resources also engenders substantial environmental costs. There is a growing body of opinion both within Bolivia and outside that is calling attention to the ecological fallouts of the Morales government’s policies. Indeed, critics on the left point out that avowed socialists should learn from the oversights of the Soviet- and Chinese- inspired experiments of the past.

While these criticisms are valid — and in fact essential to keep the MAS on its toes — it is worth noting that the Bolivian economy has long been dependent on gas exports, and that the Morales government has simply redirected revenues generated from these exports towards meeting the Bolivians’ needs.

In many ways, Bolivia under Morales followed in the footsteps of Venezuela under Chavez, where massive oil revenues previously monopolised by a US-backed oligarchy were channelled towards human development instead.

Morales, like Chavez in his later years, is conscious of the longer-term imperatives of reducing dependence on natural resources, developing more sustainable links between use of these resources and the eco-system, and extricating the Bolivian economy from global capitalist hegemony.

This is why Bolivia and Venezuela, Ecuador and Cuba have established a regional trade bloc, co-fund a development bank and seek to phase out media corporations by developing a non-corporate regional media network. These initiatives cannot immediately end 200 years of imperialist interventions by Washington in Latin America but they are important baby steps in that direction.

It is no mean task to build an alternative to neo-liberalism and the façade of democracy that comes with it. The most important lesson to be learnt from Morales and Bolivia is precisely that a mobilised and conscious critical mass of people must be at the forefront of any such alternative.

In three presidential elections, Morales has won 54pc, 64pc and 61pc of the popular vote respectively. These are impressive numbers. But they only tell a fraction of the whole story. Morales and the MAS have not only managed to bring supporters out to vote every five years, they have kept them out and about throughout the past decade. In short, they have put into practice the notion that ‘socialism of the 21st century’ can only be constructed through the active participation of ordinary people.

That is to say that the new democratic experiments in Latin America are based on a somewhat uneasy balance of power between a conservative state apparatus and mobilised popular forces. The former is formally answerable to the latter, but its commitment to the project of social transformation can hardly be taken for granted.

The 20th-century socialist pioneers admittedly put too much power into the hands of unelected and thereby unanswerable state managers. Working people became passive recipients of welfare and the organic relationship between the political project of socialism and the people withered away.

Neo-liberal democracy is worse insofar as it is based on a mirage of freedom. It allows little meaningful policy space and the electorate hence feels disempowered and generally uninterested in politics. Petty gains animate the political field rather than substantive notions of collective progress.

What Morales, Chavez and other Latin American leaders have shown is that acquiring state power is necessary to foment social transformation, but only insofar as the state must be tamed by the people in whose name it exists. This might seem like a somewhat banal realisation, but it is a profound one all the same. Not only for those who seek to rebuild socialism from the ashes of the Soviet bloc but also for those who justify everything the state does in the ‘greater national interest’.

The writer teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.

Published in Dawn, October 31st, 2014