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Gill’s reading of the predicaments facing former miners – once members of a highly militant union movement and now casualties of privatization – is also telling. She emphasizes the established history of “worker solidarity” (p. 80) and mobilization against state-sponsored injustices, and contrasts this to the present decline of the Fordist system of labor regulation, which has created the miners’ unemployment and undermined their heroic basis for struggle. Gill makes the good point that lessons of the past are not always applicable to the present. She explains how ex-miners, now primarily tenuously surviving in the informal economy, have had to distance themselves from the struggle of collective mining unionism, something she laments. In a funny sort of sleight of hand, “collective” resistance in the mines is aligned with the “community” currently being dismantled by neoliberal reform. And yet, the state-sponsored miner’s life of past decades was clearly not an enviable one, but instead characterized by the extremes of family hardship, isolation, and vulnerability to not infrequent government oppression. Collective action amid misery and fractured communities are both bleak choices, but Gill’s framing of the history of miner activism serves as heroic past counterpoint to grim current reality, where collective mobilization against unjust capitalist practices seems, in her words, “extremely difficult” (p. 183). And yet just this has happened in Bolivia, in spectacular fashion, and with an unexpectedly successful outcome. In a series of confrontations between an inter-class and inter-ethnic coalition movement and the Bolivian government between April of last year and April of this year, “ordinary Bolivians” won a major victory over global capitalism, forcing the Bolivian government to renege on a deal it made with the Bechtel corporation to privatize the water system of the department of Cochabamba. Since called the “Bolivian Water War,” in effect participants were able to give the boot to a multinational corporation, Bechtel, while reasserting their local autonomy, and inalienable right to the precious resource, water. Not surprisingly, perhaps the key figure unifying and mobilizing the movement, Oscar Olivera, cut his teeth on the same style of “radical” worker union politics as the militant mining unions. It seems the outcome for a post-neoliberal Bolivian is not a totally grim and foregone conclusion, and nor is the story yet written. In El Alto, the City of the Future, whatever might once have been “community” (and this includes the community of erstwhile “community studies) has become a “sick joke” (p. 27), an “extremely unstable amalgam of social relationships relative to the conflicts and contradictions that generate, sustain, and often dissolve it” (p. 35). Evoking and interrogating this unstable amalgam amidst neoliberal reform is no easy task, given the difficulties of tracing out its manifold and often alarming effects. We should thank Lesley Gill for taking it up.

journal of political ecology

Global Multiculturalism: Comparative Perspectives on Ethnicity, Race, and Nation, edited by Grant H. Cornwell and Eve Walsh Stoddard, Lanham, MD: Rowman &amp; Littleﬁeld Publishers (2000). Reviewed by Frank J. Lechner