Bolivia Says Official Sent to Negotiate With Miners Is Killed

[blake 3:17]

This is very tragic.

LA PAZ, Bolivia — A conflict between the Bolivian government and miners demanding that the country’s mining laws be changed escalated on Friday as the authorities said that protesters had kidnapped, tortured and killed a top official sent to negotiate with them.


The authorities said the official, Rodolfo Illanes, 56, the deputy interior minister, was killed Thursday after being kidnapped by members of a miners’ cooperative who had blocked the highway from La Paz to the mining state of Oruro. The authorities said captors bludgeoned Mr. Illanes using sticks and stones. His body was recovered on Friday by the side of the highway, officials said.


“There was flagellation,” said a prosecutor, Edwin Blanco, as he told reporters about Mr. Illanes’s killing, which included blows to the head.


The dispute stems from the government’s attempts to enforce the country’s mining laws, which require the cooperatives to allow workers to form unions and put restrictions on cooperatives’ ability to work with foreign companies. The cooperatives, which operate as independent companies and employ about 120,000 miners, say the laws restrict their independence, and they have taken their case to the streets.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/27/world/americas/bolivia-miners-evo-morales.html?_r=0

[Danse Macabre]

More shocking than tragic if you ask me

[(A)]

How is the cooperative not a union? Is it privately owned? Generally cooperative means owned/managed by the workers.

[tresha]

Seems that the mining law in Bolivia has been issue for long time that's why miners was left with no choice.

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

How is the cooperative not a union? Is it privately owned? Generally cooperative means owned/managed by the workers.

The issue is that on one hand, cooperatives can end up serving the private interests of the workers they include, and on the other, social democratic states can end up serving the needs of economic growth in general over the needs of particular sectors of workers.

[(A)]

So in this case we are supposed to support the capitalist state over the worker?
I am confused.
What happened to violent worker revolution? Complete worker control over the means of production? Seizing the means.

Economic growth for who? For the capitalist ruling class?

A strong Worker run enterprise can Expand and take over Capitalist owned land. Add more workers to its collective and challenge the rule of the state
from a stronger position. A strong state will do nothing for the working class save for their continued oppression.

It sounds to me like more of this is needed; that only by the complete syndicalism of the means can a worker run enterprise begin to be egalitarian
and replace the state in caring for the worker.
Egalitarianism threw the state (Welfare state) is a liberal concept and not Marxist.

Am i wrong somehow?
Is the collective of capitalists more important than the individual worker?

[blake 3:17]

While not in favour of murder, I'm generally in favour of direct action by workers. The situation in Bolivia is a bit more complex in that MAS (Movement Towards Socialism in English) government has been trying to balance ecology, native peoples land rights and workers rights while building its economy and defending itself from imperialism and right wing fascists.

Historically the miners formed a kind of revolutionary vanguard, quite commonly Trotskyist and anarchist. I think what this incident (seems gross to call murder of a socialist an incident (ick)) reveals are some of the limits of trade unionism. I am all for workers militancy, the question is what are they fighting for? Mining steals a lot of the Earth's resources and can cause deadly pollution.

I've been trying to understand the current situation, many of the articles are translated from the Spanish and some of the exact terms or descriptions around how mining has been reformed in the last five or ten years I find rather confusing. I used to be in the Auto Workers union here and was part of a left militant caucus. There were very good union militants who were great at fighting the bosses but were very right wing, mostly worried about their own wallets and pensions and overtime. Others of us were less concerned about wages but also had a broader social vision and creating a fairer society.

[willowtooth]

While not in favour of murder, I'm generally in favour of direct action by workers. The situation in Bolivia is a bit more complex in that MAS (Movement Towards Socialism in English) government has been trying to balance ecology, native peoples land rights and workers rights while building its economy and defending itself from imperialism and right wing fascists.

Historically the miners formed a kind of revolutionary vanguard, quite commonly Trotskyist and anarchist. I think what this incident (seems gross to call murder of a socialist an incident (ick)) reveals are some of the limits of trade unionism. I am all for workers militancy, the question is what are they fighting for? Mining steals a lot of the Earth's resources and can cause deadly pollution.

I've been trying to understand the current situation, many of the articles are translated from the Spanish and some of the exact terms or descriptions around how mining has been reformed in the last five or ten years I find rather confusing. I used to be in the Auto Workers union here and was part of a left militant caucus. There were very good union militants who were great at fighting the bosses but were very right wing, mostly worried about their own wallets and pensions and overtime. Others of us were less concerned about wages but also had a broader social vision and creating a fairer society.

Doesn't religion play a huge fucking factor in all of this?

[John Nada]

Cooperatives can be exploitative too. "Workers' self-management" often means workers' self-exploitation. The cooperative workers are still at the mercy of the market and law of value. The de facto owners in the case of Bolivia could be the bureaucratic capitalist and transnational corporations.

Also, Many of these Bolivian mining "cooperatives" seem to be de facto employer-owned and run businesses, complete with shareholding bosses and hired wage workers(child labor even!). Cooperative seems to have become a general name for private, locally-owned mines.
These miners were all part of the same cooperative, but they do not work cooperatively per se. Although structures and practices vary wildly across cooperatives, internal social differentiation is very common: the cooperative’s mining concession area is divided among the socios, or official cooperative members, each of whom might hire a group of workers, or peones, to mine the region to which he has rights (it is almost always a “he,” except in cases where a widow inherits her husband’s cooperative membership). Peones do not receive the benefits of cooperative membership, which include some life insurance and the ability to participate in decision-making processes, and they are most often paid only a very small percentage of the value of the minerals that they extract. Most of the workers with whom I spoke were men in their early 20s who were working as peones for socios. Armed with bags of coca leaves, bottles of 98% alcohol, and several sticks of dynamite, they take tremendous risks on a daily basis to scrape together a living.source: http://clas.berkeley.edu/research/other-side-cooperation-cooperative-mines-bolivia

[Antiochus]

It should be taken with a grain of salt. I can't speak for this particular case but the fact is that much of the world's "cooperatives" and trade unions have become liberal organs of bourgeois rule. Don't get me wrong, the government of Morales is liberal on its face and neo-liberal in practice (if you actually look at his economic policies). The problem lies in the fact that Morales HAS actually tried to do away with most of the excesses of neo-liberalism in Bolivia (trampling native communities; privatization of water and even the most basic of resources etc...).

This is a prime example of a social democratic/bourgeois institution working against nation-wide liberal policies. It might seem a bit weird on its face but just look at Trump. He has received multiple endorsements from Unions and a few Black churches precisely because of his xenophobia towards Mexicans. In Bolivia there have been autonomous movements in the country. Traditionally they were indigenous peoples trying to limit abuse from the Central gov. and so Morales (before the presidency) supported them. But lately these movements have been either co-opted or simply hijacked by right-wing figures who are using it to usurp the central gov's regulations and enactment of laws.

And a cooperative will never be able to "overtake" Capitalism and "challenge the government". This is patently false and is evident when one looks at the historical record. It is a liberal (and indeed bourgeois fantasy) that: "You can't destroy present conditions! But you can build up an alternative and make those conditions irrelevant!!!". Yeah , no. It wasn't true for Capitalism and it isn't true for Communism. If it wasn't for the dozens of failed (and ultimately, successful) revolts and revolutions launched by bourg. radicals: Simon de Montfort, 1381 peasant's rebellion, 1525 peasant's rebellion, Ciompi revolt, English/French/American revolutions then Capitalism would simply not exist. Capitalists did not come into power by "out competing" feudalism but by hacking off their heads. Naturally when most of the killing was done the rest of the feudal states fell in line one by one.