Here I am going to quote what I think is a key passage from the book, not because in itself it crystallises all the problems faced by the global justice movement, but because it is a legitimate starting point for a reflection on these problems:
According to Oscar Olivera,
"As the April blockades were winding down, one family stopped me on their way home. "Compañero, now the water is going to be ours, what have we really gained? a woman asked me. My husband will still have to look for work. As a mother and a wife, I will still have to go out into the street to sell things, and my children will have to drop out of school because there's just not enough money. Even if they give us the water for free, out situation still wont have gotten any better. We want (then-president) Banzer to leave, his ministers to go with him and all the corrupt politicians to leave. We want social justice. We want our lives to change."
This of course is the
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ers has gone up, but they are less organised in large manufacturing plants and the mines, and now located across a swathe of manufacturing and service industries:
"..the number of wage workers who sell their labour power is much higher than it was ten years ago. Yet popular perception would have us believe just the opposite: that there are no wage laborers, there is no wage labor, and industrial production is irrel"How can we explain this kind of historical delirium, one that affects not only a certain gang of intellectuals but also experienced trade unionists?
"Almost invisibly, Bolivia has been converted into a semi-industrial workshop in which workers themselves do not realize their social power in relation to Bolivia gets my Lenin prize for revolutionary genius of the new century.
In some ways it is the strategic problem of the whole socialist, workers and global justice movements.
However Oscar Olivera and Tom Lewis explain attempts to use the Fabriles to reach out' to the new world of work, to act as an organising centre for the struggles of the informal sector, of un-unionised workers and especially oppressed sectors of the workforce, in the first place
I will not recount this in detail, but it suggests new forms of organisation and solidarity, the imagining and construction of which are crucial experiments as the socialist and workers movements search for a path forward. RO 'new world of
This autonomy from the bureaucratic structures, anathema to those who repeat the old slogans about the sacrosanct nature of trade union unity, gave the Coordinadora the flexibility and the mobility to dynamise the leadership of a whole city.
If we want to conceptualise what forms of organisation can reach out to the informal and non-unionised sectors, then in many countries it cannot be the traditional trade union form.
In sectors with small workplaces, with a high turnover of the workers, and in which the relationship of forces is so overwhelmingly in favour of the employers, traditional unions are almost impossible to stabilise.
The very attempt to construct them can expose the militants to immediate experiments to imagine and construct the type of fighting organisations capable of articulating overarching demands and struggles.
Autonomy from every aspect of state corruption and clientalism, and de facto autonomy from the bureaucratic apparatuses, are vital preconditions.
The second lesson of Cochabamba (the first in terms of importance) is the impressive type of self-organised structures built around the Coordinadora, at local and regional level.
Such structures, however much they grope towards raising the question of power and self-government, are by nature temporary - unless of course the political content of the struggle which they lead is of sufficiently "high' (explicit) level to propel them
A less sympathetic reviewer than myself might argue that
long-time trade union leader, and former member of a Marxist-Leninist organisation, is also in his own way a "discourse professional', as is the regular activist in any type of organisation.
Similar moods can be found for example within the rebellious masses in Venezuela, including people who don't like the Bolivarian committees in the barrios because they spend too much time discussing 'politics' as opposed to 'real problems.
How can an organisation representing (and involving) the popular masses be put together which can construct a political map of this reality, can foresee, imagine and construct the decisive crossroads and turning points on the map, and know how to approach them?