ABSTRACT
Listening to some of the more doctrinaire prophets on the Bolivian Left, one sometimes gets the impression that miners and peasants are as different from each other as quartz is (supposedly) from peas, that the miners act as a monolithic political block due to their highly-developed 'class-consciousness' while the peasants are essentially petty-bourgeois tradesmen whose only interest is the state of the market for agricultural goods, that the miners have left the irrational superstition of the 'indian' peasants behind them and are now firmly on the road to assuming, once and for all, their position at the vanguard of the oppressed peoples of Bolivia. And there can be no doubt that many miners' leaders do nurse an almost unconscious sense of superiority towards the peasants: as one said to me once, 'when the peasants come to the mine they learn how to use toothpaste, they learn what a cinema is, they learn what civilization is.'
