Official No N Fighting to Organise Bolivian Women

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Women were allowed to Movement. be face workers organised But contrary to the in the same union until cross-class 'progressive' legislation favoured by bourgeois denied them access to these feminists, it is definitely jobs and therefore to the organised on class as well as trade unions. sex lines.

In 1961 a march was •The capitalists repress organised from Siglo XX to the people, they're La Paz to demand 3 months organised. Their wives are backpay, medical equip- also organised in those This is a moving personal account by an articulate, class conscious woman sadly overshadowed by her failure to develop politically and align herself to revolutionary Domitila Barrios de Chungara, daughter and wife of tin miners at the Siglo XX (Twentieth Century) mining camp site of Bolivia's largest mine, has been for several years the Secretary General of the Housewives Committee.

The positive side of the book is the first hand account it gives of workers' struggles against poverty and exploitation in a country where strike action provokes the arrival of truckloads of trigger-happy sołdiers who fight pitched battles against workers who are left to defend themselves with sticks and dynamite.

The miners are highly organised in a union which has as its programme the Thesis of Pulacayo, based on Trotskyist principles, and which controls the three local radio stations.

Domitila's husband has a relatively privileged jobworking seven days a week in a government mine for a wage of £6 per week partly paid in vouchers for the company store and a oneroom house for himself and his family.

This house, however, is available only until he like all the other miners contracts silicosis and possibly TB as well, and dies by the age of 35.

Less fortunate, but still highly coveted work is a place in one of the exhausted mines-for which payment is only made for tin extracted.

March

The third option is a two year waiting list for panning tin in the river for less than starvation pay. ment and food.

Arrested

The leaders were immediately arrested and several of their wives went to La Paz and went on a hunger strike sponsored by the Federation of Factory Workers.

The enormous support and solidarity which built up around this pressured the government to release the leaders, pay the wages and provide supplies to the company store.

The success of this action prompted the formation of the Housewives' Committee of the Siglo Veinte (similar committees have since been set up in other sites) which is affiliated to the COB (Central Obrera Boliviana, Bolivian equivalent of the TUC).

The committee organises demonstrations and solidarity action with the workers but also sets up its own campaigns on issues such as increasing family allowance and jobs and housing for miners' widows.

The Housewives' Committee, and Domitila in particular, have been lionised by the Women's Bolivian miners in struggle in 1971 organisation groups like 'Lady Potamans' and Lady Lions' that exist in Bolivia and that surely exist in other countries too. So we, the wives of the workers, need to be organised too, don't we?"

It is clearly the exclușion or women from the labour market which has given rise to this curious phenomenon because Domitila is not a bourgeois feminist.

She was horrified at the self-indulgence of the International Women's Year Conference in which she was invited to participate.

On the other hand her position on "women's work" is deeply reactionary.

She makes no criticism of the sexual division of labour, seeming almost to subscribe to the 'wages for housework' theory, which seeks to legitimize women's status as domestic servants, although she pushes for women to be involved in politics from that position.

She makes no demands for the socialisation of child care and domestic labour, but rather demands that women should be politicised in order to "educate their Chungara with Moema Nezzer. Stage 1. Price £2.95 children with other ideas"

The logic of this position is to arrive at a shorter working week and better pay for the men: and simply bigger houses, well fed children and more housekeeping money for the women.

Domitila's general politics reflect the " most backward aspects of the Housewives Committee.

Her individualistic approach extends to all levels of government.

Recognising that the working class has been betrayed by its leadership, she blames this on the individual leaders. worker like us in wower a and calls for leaders who will not betray the people; but she appears, to have no concept of the need for total economic and social revolutionary change.

She had illusions in 'progressive' General Torres when he was in power in 1971 and glosses over the Popular Assembly that emerged at that time.

Dual power

Unable to understand the importance of the development of dual power which potentially emerged during that stormy period prior to the coup by General Banzer, she says that the government was not a government of the people not because of its thoroughly capitalist character, but because the workers should have taken Ministerial posts in Torres' cabinet.

As a result, despite the fact that she professes herself in favour of armed insurrection, Domtila cannot be characterised as a However, despite its political weakness the book should be read as a reminder that the capitalist bribes paid to the labour aristocracy of the industrialised west can only be afforded through the cruel and brutal exploitation of our comrades in the underdeveloped nations.

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NDUSTRIAL NEWES Union the first thumping paid out civil servi officers, dentists. leaders have been to bleat at the salary increases this week to top nts, judges, army doctors and They are not so much hostile to the Tories rewarding their friends' and allies in high places as bitter at the fact they will now have to fight harder to head off the growing militancy on wages among their members.

NUR leader Sidney Weighell particular pointed to the problems he will have to face at his union conference, where a 30% claim is to be debated.

But the sheer size of the Tories' £199 million pay hand-out dwarfs such claims.

Dentists for instance-among the most reactionary and money-grabbing elements of the medical profession-are to receive an annual basic rate increase. of nearly £3,000: that's more than the total wage of many workers in the public sector who were so viciously witch-hunted by the Tory press last winter for demanding a £60 basic rate!