A History of the Bolivian Labour Movement 1848-1971. by Guillermo Lora; LaurenceWhitehead; Christine WhiteheadReview by: Robert J. AlexanderIndustrial and Labor Relations Review, Vol. 32, No. 1 (Oct., 1978), pp. 114-115Published by: Cornell University, School of Industrial & Labor RelationsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2522429 .

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114 INDUSTRIAL AND LABOR RELATIONS REVIEW

would be well served if writers chose, just once, to note that he also was a man with saving graces. Businessmen have said that his word was his bond. His members found him a soft touch when they were down on their luck, a champion when they came to him with a legitimate grievance that had not been resolved. Newsmen who dealt with him honestly found him direct and honest in return. He was a doting grandfather, puritan- ical in his personal habits, a family man who brooked no profanity or off-color humor in the presence of loved ones. He was really a man guilty of more stupid moves than crooked ones, even confessing to his greatest boner: his decision to challenge then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy.

Yet the Velie stereotype has little of a chari- table nature to recommend Hoffa, despite the book-jacket claims that it was carefully re- searched. Carefully researched? "Chances were slim," Velie writes, that Hoffa could have suc- ceeded in his court challenge of the ban against union activity imposed by President Nixon when he commuted Hoffa's prison sentence and challenged Hoffa in court. Velie should have asked more questions. Many experts, including the talented lawyers who argued Hoffa's appeal, thought the lower-court decision upholding the ban rested on bad law. "There was always an un- derlying presumption in the FBI that Hoffa would win on appeal," one law enforcement man said.

This was one reason why the bad guys got nervous about Jimmy Hoffa. They have talented lawyers, too.

Ralph Orr Labor Writer Detroit Free Press

A History of the Bolivian Labour Movement 1848-1971. By Guillermo Lora (edited and abridged by Laurence Whitehead; translated by Christine Whitehead). New York: Cam- bridge University Press, 1977. x, 408 pp. $24.95.

This is an excellent abridgement and transla- tion of a much longer work, the first part of which appeared in three volumes in Bolivia, and some of which has never appeared before, even in Spanish. It is written by a man who was a participant in the post-1930s in much of what he writes about, and it bears the marks of the particular ideological position which he has maintained since his entry into trade union and political affairs almost forty years ago.

Guillermo Lora, the leader of Trotskyism in Bolivia, is perhaps the most important figure that movement has produced anywhere in Latin America. His brother, Cesar, was an important leader of the Mine Workers Federation for a number of years in the 1950s and 1960s, until he was killed by President Barrientos's police in 1966. Guillermo Lora himself, although never a manual worker, has participated in the activities of the Miners Federation and the Central Obrera Boliviana (COB), whenever political conditions have permitted.

Lora traces the origins of the labor movement in mid-nineteenth century Boliva among the artisans of Sucre, La Paz, and a handful of other cities. As he points out, the artisans dominated the labor movement until at least the 1990s, when the railroad workers, miners, and other workers in the more modern sectors of the econ- omy began to form their own organizations. The part of the book covering the period since the Chaco War (1932-35) concentrates very heavily on the history of the mine workers and their federation.

Although being modest about his own partici- pation in organized labor's affairs, Lora does reveal something that was widely rumored pre- viously -that he was the author of the famous "Pulacayo Thesis," the Trotskyist declaration of principles adopted by the Mine Workers Federa- tion in November 1946. He also reveals some- thing that was not hitherto common knowledge, that the miners' principal leader, Juan Lechin, for a fleeting period in the late 1940s held secret membership in the Trotskyist party, the Partido Obrero Revolucionario.

Lora deals at length with the political evolu- tion of the Bolivian labor movement. He notes its close association with the Liberal Party in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the present one, and its association with the Republican Party for a short period before and after the Republicans seized power in 1920. He notes the emergence thereafter of Com- munist and Anarchist influence in the years pre- ceding the Chaco War, and the struggles among the Communists, Trotskyites, and elements of the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR) since the early 1940s.

In treating the labor leaders who were active before he began to play a part in trade unionism and politics himself, Lora is surprisingly ob- jective, and even generous, with those whose ideology he obviously feels was mistaken. He is less kindly disposed toward those who erred in their understanding of history's intentions in the subsequent period.

Understandably, Lora's focus on Bolivian labor is upon its supposed revolutionary role - in a country in which 60 percent of the popula- tion still consists of peasants -as the "vanguard"

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BOOK REVIEWS 115

and, within organized labor in general, upon that of the miners as the vanguard-of-the-van- guard. His quarrel with Juan Lechin and other MNR labor leaders is that they did not see this role and go on in the early 1950s to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat.

Lora argues that the labor movement could have set up such a regime in the early days of the MNR regime, after the Revolution of April 1952, if it had not been for the "betrayal" of Lechin and the other MNR leaders. At that time, he says, the MNR government depended for its existence on the workers' militia, particularly that of the miners, and they could "easily" have ousted the Victor Paz Estenssoro regime and put in one "of their own."

This argument overlooks a number of things. First, it ignores the fact that virtually the only place in which devotees of the dictatorship of the proletariat had real influence in organized labor was in the mines, and even there the MNR was predominant in those years. It ignores the fact that the factory workers, railroaders, and other union groups were almost devoid of Trotskyist influence. It also completely overlooks the fact that the MNR government quickly armed the peasants, with the rifles and munitions taken from the dissolved national army, and so at least after the first few months any attempt to set up a dictatorship of the miners would have met fierce resistance from the MNR-dominated peasants. Also, although he accuses of being "simplistic" the present reviewer's argument that the appar- ent Trotskyist control of the central labor group, the COB, during the first months of the Revolu- tion was artificial, he offers no substantial coun- ter explanation. Nor does he indicate how the Trotskyists so quickly lost their control of the COB once they used it to challenge the govern- ment on the issue of how the Big Three mining firms should be nationalized.

However, regardless of disagreements one may have with Guillermo Lora's interpretation of the events of the 1950s, this is a very valuable book. It is particularly useful in tracing the continued and valiant struggles of the mine- workers, and for its almost day-to-day account of the temporary crushing of the labor movement by the military regimes of the 1960s. The book ends with the seizure of power by General Hugo Banzer in August 1971.

This is the only serious study extant in English of the Bolivian labor movement. It is to be highly recommended to anyone interested in compara- tive labor movements or the history of contempo- rary radical politics.

Robert J. A lexander Professor Department of Economics Rutgers - The State University of New Jersey New Brunswick

Work Without Salvation: America's In- tellectuals and Industrial Alienation, 1880- 1910. By James B. Gilbert. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977. xv, 240 pp. $14.00.

"The work ethic was a convincing explana- tion of the nineteenth-century social order," writes James Gilbert, because it justified social hierarchy, provided an internalized sense of discipline for the citizens of a society with rela- tively few external restraints, and promised each of them material rewards commensurate with his personal exertions. This moral certainty, which the intellectuals of New England (with whom Gilbert is concerned exclusively) had once imbibed from Emerson's essays, evaporated during the last two decades of the century. Labor unrest and the peril of an army of vagabonds at their doorsteps, the mental stress to which they themselves were prone, and the insidious de- personalization of not only factory toil, but office work as well, sapped the intellectuals' faith in the inherent wholesomeness of work as it actu- ally existed in their industrial world.

Gilbert's analysis of their response to this pervasive sense of alienation concentrates on three of its facets, all of which timidly avoid the questions of property, wage-labor, and authority in the organization of production itself. The first is the effort to rediscover self-reliance and social unity alike through leisure-time activities, particularly sports and crafts. His treatment of the latter is revealing. The resurrection of the handicrafts, for all its invocation of John Ruskin and William Morris, was essentially the under- taking of wealthy women, who were rigidly excluded from the world of commodity produc- tion. They sponsored the imitation of Morris's craftsmanship in search of "material surround- ings conducive to plain living and high think- ing," and studiously ignored the socialist in- sights of Morris's Factory Work As It Is and Might Be.

The other two foci of the intellectuals' concern were inseparably related to each other: educa- tional reform and the science of psychology. In both realms the thinkers examined in this book sought not to eradicate the industrial relation- ships that caused alienation, but at best to dis- cover in schooling (John Dewey) or in philoso- phy (William James) a formula for making personal and social life wholesome in spite of their economic environment. At worst, they endeavored (like Hugo Miinsterberg and Edward Thorndike) to slot individuals into vocational stations within the system through precise an- thropometrical, behavioral, and intelligence measurements. The behavioralists could retain work as the touchstone of social life by abandon-

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