Book contents
- Making the Revolution
- Making the Revolution
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Editor’s Note
- Abbreviations
- Introduction Revolutionary Actors, Encounters, and Transformations
- 1 Common Ground
- 2 Identity, Class, and Nation
- 3 Indigenous Movements in the Eye of the Hurricane
- 4 Friends and Comrades
- 5 Total Subversion
- 6 “Sisters in Exploitation”
- 7 Revolutionaries without Revolution
- 8 Nationalism and Marxism in Rural Cold War Mexico
- 9 The Ethnic Question in Guatemala’s Armed Conflict
- 10 For Our Total Emancipation
- Index
5 - Total Subversion
Interethnic Radicalism in La Paz, Bolivia, 1946–1947
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 July 2019
- Making the Revolution
- Making the Revolution
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Editor’s Note
- Abbreviations
- Introduction Revolutionary Actors, Encounters, and Transformations
- 1 Common Ground
- 2 Identity, Class, and Nation
- 3 Indigenous Movements in the Eye of the Hurricane
- 4 Friends and Comrades
- 5 Total Subversion
- 6 “Sisters in Exploitation”
- 7 Revolutionaries without Revolution
- 8 Nationalism and Marxism in Rural Cold War Mexico
- 9 The Ethnic Question in Guatemala’s Armed Conflict
- 10 For Our Total Emancipation
- Index
Summary
The 1947 upheavals on haciendas outside La Paz were facilitated by a coalition between indigenous peasants and urban anarchists. Three factors were essential to this alliance. First, the urban anarchists’ own politics – their libertarian socialist vision, their attentiveness to both “ethnic” and “class” demands, and their organizational federalism – proved conducive to coalition building. Second, prior rural mobilization had created local leaders and networks that would form the rural bases for the coalition; those rural actors would also help to redefine the urban anarchist left, conferring it with a more antiracist and autonomist emphasis. Third, a series of coalition brokers bridged traditional divides of language, ethnicity, and geography. This account qualifies common dismissals of the Bolivian left as mestizo-dominated and class-reductionist while also illuminating the process through which the alliance developed. It concludes that ideologies and human decisions are often just as important as structural circumstances in determining the potential for popular coalitions and militant mobilization.
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- Making the RevolutionHistories of the Latin American Left, pp. 129 - 155Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2019