iCochabamba! -Water War in Bolivia by Oscar Olivera in collaboration with Tom Lewis, South End Press [http://www.southe ndpress.org/books/ cocha.shtml], 2004, 189pp. Reviewed by Phil Hearse EVERY socialist, every global the selfgovernment of the poor led by their local and regional organisational structures. sive defeats and its vanguard has been all-but destroyed.
In particular, of course, most of the tin mines have been closed and the miners, historic vanguard of the class, have become a very small section of the workforce.
What then is the 'new world of labour', how can global justice fighters construct the necessary forces for progressive social change, and through what organisational methods?
A fundamental factor of the Cochabamba struggle is that it was based on the mobilisation of what one of the book's contributors, Alvaro García Linera, calls (after Negri) 'the multitude' - masses of the people, including informal workers, unemployed, peasants, retired people, children and students - not just the ranks of the 'industrial' working class.
Oscar Olivera and Tom Lewis comment: "If it is true that a reduction occurred in the number of workers organized in unions and concentrated in large workplaces, it is also true that over the 1990s an inverse process of re-proletarianisation' unfolded within the economic and social structures of the country." (pp105-6)
In fact the number of work-