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T’sandra Paquette
Michelle Stairs
IDPL 8104
December 7th 2012
Liberty is something that is often taken for granted in a society whose citizens are given
equal rights and freedoms since birth, however for those who are not promised this, liberty is a
goal worth dying for. One person who understands this better than any other is Domitila de
Chungara, a female miner from Bolivia who believed in a social justice and a free country for her
people. At the time, Bolivia could have been seen as demonstrating Karl Marx’s theory of
economic determinism, there by inciting revolution by the proletariats of the state against the
bourgeois. Enduring poverty, torture and humiliation, Domitila Chungara would agree with the
statement ‘there can be no liberty without economic equality’ as she has lived through the
oppression of capitalism and the revolutionary repercussions.
Domitila made the best of a very trying life; one contributor to the stress of her days was
the poverty she lived in. In Bolivia at the time, the mining communities had very poor living
conditions with minimal food, light and housing. Depending on the specific jobs and duties,
miners were paid very little and struggled to care for their families. This struggle is a prime
example of Karl Marx’s theory of economic determinism, which states “the most important
things about a society – the structure and history of its political, social and religious institutions –
derive fundamentally from its economic structure” (Blackboard). Marx was an enormous
advocate of economic equality and covers this in his works The Communist Manifesto.
Economic determinism is exhibited through-out Domitila’s life for example, when the mining
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communities and wives would protest until the State would improve and increase housing for the
miners. This protest would never had taken place if the country had the extra money to improve
the living conditions the employees and citizens were forced to tolerate. Basically, much of
Bolivia was too poor to be free. In Chungara’s book, Let Me Speak, she explains her husband’s
income and how that weekly pay is distributed to cover the necessities, she claims “Sometimes
my husband gets 700 pesos, sometimes 500, sometimes we end up owing the company money.
And from that my family of nine has to live. But there are workers who are even worse off”
(Blackboard 5). If at the end of a strenuous work week the employee owes the company money
in return, how is one to advance in life? To give her family a fair education, a healthy home and
opportunities to achieve is something that was deprived of Domitila, hence why she would agree
with the statement ‘there can be no liberty without economic equality.’
Now with such a low quality of life and high rights of poverty, one can only take so
much. Domitila strived for egalitarianism for her people, it was not right for all the resources and
income from Bolivia be given to Western cultures to thrive when the country of origin suffered.
This is why she joined the Housewives Committee and became somewhat of an activist for the
rights of the mining community, even if the repercussions were torture and humiliation by
officialdom. These drastic times caused for drastic measures, and protests and unions were not
making the cut. Similar to Marx’s theory that to achieve economic equality, the working class
must revolt against the capitalist system; the motto he used and Domitila demonstrated was
“workers of the world unite!” (Blackboard 2). Countless attempts at this were demonstrated, and
revolution almost happened for Bolivians once before in 1952, Chungara wrote in her novel:
The revolution of 1952 was a great event in Bolivia’s history. It was really a people’s victory.
But what happened? The people, the working class, the peasants, we weren’t ready to take
power. And so, since we didn’t know anything about the law, about how you govern a country,
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we had to give the power to the people of the petty bourgeoisie who said they were our friends
and agreed with our ideas. We had to turn the government over to a doctor, Victor Paz
Estenssoro, and other guys. But they immediately made up a new bourgeoisie, they helped make
new people rich. Those people began undoing the revolution. And we workers and peasants lived
in worse conditions than before (Blackboard 14).
Now if Estenssoro had kept his promises to the people, the revolution of 1952 would have
precisely depicted the idea given by Marx that “capitalism carries the seeds of its own
destruction” (Blackboard 3). However he did not, and Bolivians ended up in an even deeper hole.
Modern day Bolivia however does prove this as their economy is in a poor state and the entire
country is vastly underdeveloped, partially because the country that was once rich with natural
resources is has been stripped clean by the capitalist system. This is covered also covered in Let
Me Speak when Domitila explains how at one point, miners only used the best tin they could
find yet after time they would literally blow up the mines to extract whatever was left directly
from the rocks. All in all, the severe conditions the mining conditions and Bolivians were
subjected to resulted in attempts of revolution and numerous protests, however Capitalism
maintained its rule which ended up not only destroying the country, but its resources and people
as well.
On the whole, it had been these events; the poverty Domitila Chungara and her people
were subjected to and the failed attempts at ending the conditions that nurtured Chungara’s
communistic values. As covered by Karl Marx, the economic determinism of Bolivia at the time,
which made freedom an impossible dream and the revolutions and protests in attempt to
overthrow the bourgeois only catalyzed the downfall of the capitalist’s power and the overall
health of Bolivia. Due to the events that were indignant to Domitila, her people, her culture and
her life, it is clear that she would stand beside the statement that there can be no liberty without
economic equality.
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Works Cited
Chungara de, Domitlia.Let Me Speak. www.niagara.blackboard.com
Marx, Karl. Karl Marx and the Revolutionary Tradition. www.niagara.blackboard.com