< Reviews 36 The Shape of Things to Come A review of Jeffrey Webber's Red October: Left-Indigenous Struggles in Modern Bolivia by lain Bruce more accessible paperback edition is a gift to anyone interested in understanding the resistance to neoliberalism in Latin America. But it is more The heart of the book is a fascinating, intricate account of the way new forms of struggle have emerged in 21st century examines how these have fused and given new dimension struggle and indigenous interest goes well beyond Bolivia. Its analysis of how the politics of class struggle combine with resistance to other kinds of oppression, makes this a profoundly thought-provoking book for all those seeking to understand the shape that struggles for emancipation have begun to take in many parts of the world over the last decade or so. And even if it was never the author's overt intention, this also means the book is a most attempts to re-imagine the kind of socialism we can hope to build out of such 21st century It doesn't explicitly mention eco-socialism, but its analyses should prove an inspiration to Red October, or the doctoral work that forms its basis, in fact precedes Jeffrey Webber's already well-known book on the politics of Evo Morales, From Rebellion to Reform in Bolivia. completes the later book in several important ways. That book is an important and political struggles leading up to and following the election of Evo Morales as Bolivia's first indigenous president in December 2005. However, its central thesis has been a controversial one: namely that Morales's election effectively shut the door on a potentially revolutionary outcome to five years of intense social and political struggle, and that his maintenance of many existing economic policies means his administration since then is best characterised as one of reconstituted neoliberalism. Red October does not deal directly with that - in our view - mistaken judgement. But it does help explain how Jeffrey Webber reached it. One other limitation of the later book is that the idea of 'indigenous struggle, although present throughout, is never elaborated in much detail. We are told little about its roots or specific characteristics. Red October goes a long way to redressing this. Both of these aspects are woven into a rich, analytical narrative of the three main moments of what Webber calls the 'insurrectionary cycle' of 2000-2005: first the Cochabamba Water-War of 2000; then the First Gas-War of 2003, with Red October as its high point; finally the Second Gas-War of 2005. These are the subjects of chapters five, six and seven, and make this the most valuable and absorbing part of the book. But none of this would make sense without the book's earlier account of the two main traditions of struggle in Bolivia since colonial times. These are the long history of resistance by the country's indigenous, Aymara and Quechua, majority, and the more recent but intense experience of struggle by the organised working class. These are dealt with in chapters two, three and four. It is worth recalling, and the book reminds us, that this comparatively small, landlocked country has played a special part in the history of world capitalism, and in the resistance to it. The vast quantities of silver and gold torn by the Spanish from the mountains of Potosí ended up in banks in London and Amsterdam, fuelling the emergence of a commercial bourgeoisie and later the northern industrial revolution. In the middle of the 20th century, a few thousand Bolivian miners - tin miners this time - became the core of one of the best organised and most politically militant proletariats on the planet. In 1946, the miners' union, the FSTMB, adopted a programme, the Pulacayo Thesis, written by Trotskyists and closely modelled on Trotsky's Transitional Programme - the first and probably the only time a significant mass organisation ever did that. Not surprisingly then, Bolivia has also featured in many of the twists and turns of the history of the Fourth International itself. Bolivia's 1952 National Revolution, in which Trotskyist miners again featured largely, was one of the backdrops to the first major split in the F.l. After Che Guevara was killed in eastern Bolivia in 1967, the country was at the centre of a major debate on armed struggle at the F.l's Ninth Congress in 1969 and in the years that followed. Oppositional consciousness Jeffrey Webber's book shows why today, in a new situation presenting new challenges, revolutionary marxists still have a lot to learn from the Bolivian experience. There are a few obstacles the reader has to overcome on the way. Mostly these seem to result from the book's origins as a doctoral thesis. One is the structure of each chapter, first stating the hypothesis, then elaborating the detail, and concluding with another But something else also happened in the course of this neoliberal restructuring. The miners, who had always been mostly Aymara (or in a few cases Quechua), as they moved into the valleys or the shanty towns, now became "indigenous'. summary of the main points. This can feel unnecessarily repetitive for the ordinary reader. Another is the need to place the valuable meat of the book (chapters two to eight) within the framework of an arid and often seemingly pointless academic debate (chapter one and the first part of chapter nine). So for example, Jeffrey Webber develops and applies throughout the very useful and suggestive concept of combined oppositional consciousness', to describe the meeting of indigenous traditions and cultures of resistance with the organisational and ideological habits of the working class. However, several pages have to be expended in Chapter One justifying this in relation to previous academic literature on the concept of oppositional consciousness', which - at least to the uninitiated -seems like another case of academic social scientists giving a pretentious name to the blindingly obvious. The usefulness of Webber's version ('combined oppositional consciousness ) becomes apparent in chapter four, where he describes how the Neoliberal Counter-Revolution from 1985 to 2000 not only destroyed the old bastions of working class power in Bolivia, most importantly in the tin mines, but how
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in the process it produced the bases for the new insurrectionary cycle of 2000 to 2005. This is an extraordinary and complicated phenomenon which deserves continued attention to tease out more of its aspects, not least because it has clear echoes in so many late twentieth century social developments in other parts of the world. Put simply the story goes like this. The dismantling of the mining industry expelled thousands of miners and miners' families from the tin mining towns and villages of the Altiplano. They went in two main directions: into the countryside to seek a living off the land, and into the shanty towns around the main cities to join the growing informal economy. The most important example of the first was the large contingent of miners' families who moved down into the valleys of Chapare to join the coca leaf growers already there. In the second case, many former miners found their way to El Alto, the huge slum-turned-city in its own right, up on the edge of the crater above Bolivia's main city, La Paz. The miners them memories from several generations of bitter, workingclass struggle. And along with those memories went the practical skills of proletarian organising, and some considerable baggage of Marxist and revolutionary marxist education. This is one aspect of why the coca-growers, or cocaleros, on the one hand (Evo Morales, of course, was one of their main community organisations of El Alto, on the other hand, became driving forces of the new revolts happened in the course of this neoliberal restructuring. The miners, who had always been moved into the valleys or the shanty towns, now became 'indigenous'. That is, they collided with and to some extent became part of an emerging 'indigenous movement', which in earlier decades had rather been seen as, and saw itself as, a simply a peasant movement. In other words, there was a meeting, and a complex combination, of class politics and identity How this played out in new demands, new organisational forms and new forms of action in those three big struggles of 2000-2005 is the fascinating material of this book's central chapters. As Jeffrey Webber shows, one other aspect of the neoliberal offensive was central to all of these revolts: the privatization of natural resources. In 1928, the pioneer Peruvian marxist, José Carlos Mariateguí, wrote with the simplicity of so many great insights, that 'the problem of the Indian is
37 the problem of land'. To the added, of course, the problem of water. The two go hand in hand, and both are intimately connected to the extraction of natural resources, including, contradictorily, that of fossil fuels. These resources, who controls them and how they are used, were at the centre of Bolivia's water and gas wars, as they have been in different ways at the centre of indigenous struggles across the Andean region. They are one of the main reasons that Latin America has been, and remains, at the forefront of the challenge to neoliberal Jeffrey Webber's book is an invitation to look again at the these struggles. And like all good ground-breaking works, its greatest merit is not that it supplies all the right answers, but that it gets us asking many