In the book The Many Headed Hydra, authors Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker seize upon a symbol that struck fear into the hearts of the ruling classes in 17th and 18th Century Europe and America: the many headed hydra, “an antithetical symbol of disorder and resistance, a powerful threat to the building of state, empire and capitalism.”

In classical mythology, Hercules set out to destroy the monster, a “creature, born of Typhon (a tempest or hurricane) and Echidna (half woman, half snake),” but each time Hercules “lopped off one of the hydra’s heads, two new ones grew in its place.”

In Linebaugh and Rediker’s book, the new hydra was the unruly mob: the seamen, witches, pirates, prostitutes, indigenous peoples and slaves who refused that era’s “new world order” and resisted its implementation. It is fitting that two new books look at some of the descendants of these rebels who today are fighting against the current “new world disorder.”

These books look at how the peoples in two of the poorest countries of the Western Hemisphere have pursued radical change in the face of overwhelming odds. Revolutionary Horizons by Forrest Hylton and Sinclair Thomson, focuses on current Bolivian politics and the rise of an indigenous-led opposition to neo-liberalism. Peter Hallward’s Damming the Flood charts the rise of the Lavalas party in Haiti and the inability of the Haitian elites and their partners, Canada, the US, France and the UN, to stop its movement towards freedom there.

Subtitled “Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment,” Hallward’s book outlines different methods of containment designed to keep the Haitian people in a locked box of oppression, characterized by national debt, deep poverty and military terror over the last two centuries. Once the jewel in the French Empire’s crown, in the 18th century Haiti “generated more revenue than all” thirteen North American colonies of the future United States and it was the “world’s single largest producer of coffee and the source for around 75% of its sugar,” writes Hallward.

France began the process of impoverishing Haiti by enforcing a killing embargo on the country in the early part of the 19th Century following Haiti’s victories over French slavery and colonialism. The embargo forced Haiti to its knees, and imperial France demanded 150 million Francs restitution for the loss of its slaves, which were the newly freed citizens of Haiti. “France received the last installment [of the debt payment] in 1947,” writes Hallward. The author next briefly reviews the Duvalier dictatorships (1957-86), a brutal military repression enforced by the dreaded Tonton Macoutes, which terrorized the population. But it is the evolution of a more subtle form of containment that arose in tandem with neoliberal politics in US, Canada and France that Hallward spends most of the book exposing.

Beginning in the 1980s, Haitians demanded change in larger and larger numbers. A movement from below, Lavalas, a Kreyol word meaning “flood” or “avalanche,” and also a “mass of people” or “everyone together,” gained momentum. Lavalas’s candidate, Jean Bertrand Aristide, won his first election in 1990 with 67% of the vote. The closest runner-up received 14% of the votes cast. Aristide won his second election with 92% of the vote. With that kind of unity, brutal military terror alone was out of the question. Instead the Haitian elites together with their wealthy international partners developed a more nuanced campaign that included “starving the Lavalas government of funds, challenging its legitimacy internationally, entangling it in futile negotiations with an unpopular ‘democratic opposition,’ misrepresenting it as exceptionally violent and corrupt, and provoking its supporters via sustained contra-style paramilitary assault,” according to Hallward. The delegitimizing of Lavalas occurred on many fronts, but the role of Non-Governmental Organizations was central and particularly duplicitous.

Funded by such organizations as the National Endowment for Democracy, which has funded liberal anti-radical NGOs across Latin America, the United States Agency for International Development, and the Canadian International Development Agency, “NGOS provide rich countries a morally respectable way of subcontracting the sovereignty of the nations they exploit,” Hallward asserts. These organizations funded NGOs such as the high sounding Haiti Democracy Project, which Hallward says sought to “replace the unruly threat of ‘popular democracy’ with appropriately docile forms of ‘liberal democracy’” by working “in several constituencies at once.” They also funded student groups who later led small demonstrations against the government. Hallward goes on, the “values associated with ‘democratization,’ ‘pluralism’ and ‘moderation’ have for some time now been indistinguishable from those of the transnational elite, and are perfectly compatible with the preservation if not intensification of global inequalities.”

In Revolutionary Horizons, Hylton and Thomson trace the growth of social movements from below in Bolivia. The authors provide a brief sketch of the history of resistance of the Bolivian peoples to the oppression from local and transnational elites.

In a parallel with Haiti, the Bolivian people once provided the Spanish Empire with rich booty. The Spanish forced native people to work in their Bolivian silver mines producing the wealth that led to the European boom beginning in the 16th Century. It was a blood soaked enterprise. In Open Veins of Latin America, author Eduardo Galaeno estimates that over the three centuries that the mines were active, millions of native people died because of their work. Galaeno explains that mercury was used to extract the silver, poisoning the natives and causing their painful death. The average worker could labour in the mines for only four years before their body gave way.

The book is not a history of this exploitation and resistance as much as an analysis of the current Bolivian political conjuncture. The book excavates the politics of past resistance movements with an eye towards Bolivia’s future. The book plays with the word “horizons” in its title in two senses. The authors write that they “approach revolutionary ‘horizons’ not only as those perspectives of men and women in the past who looked upon the possibilities of future social transformation. . . . At an archeological site, the phased strata of the earth and the remains of human settlement that are exposed by careful digging are called ‘horizons’” as well. “We offer this then as an excavation of Andean revolution, whose successive layers of historical sedimentation make up the subsoil, loam, landscape, and vistas for current political struggles in Bolivia.”

The authors trace the rise of two traditions of Bolivian collective resistance, a tradition born in the struggles of Native peoples and what the authors call a “national popular” tradition of resistance. The “national popular” tradition corresponds with other nationalist struggles throughout the 20th Century that sought to build a state independent of colonial or multinational corporate control.

In Bolivia these efforts began in earnest following Bolivia’s disastrous “Chaco War” with Paraguay in the 1930s. Tens of thousands of Bolivians lost their lives and the country lost thousands of square kilometers of its territory. But the middle-class participation in the struggle “represented something genuinely new in Bolivian politics,” according to Thomson and Hylton. The fruits of this new involvement led to the rise of a nationalist political party, the National Revolutionary Movement, that captured power in 1951, and immediately nationalized the country’s main source of wealth at that time, the tin mines.

Parallel with these national political formations was a long tradition of indigenous forms of resistance. The authors argue that “the current resistance is deeply rooted in non-liberal forms of collective organization” characterized by “patterns of communal insurgency and base-level control over political representatives.” Thomson and Hylton trace these currents to “a matrix of indigenous community politics formed in the anti-colonial struggles of the late eighteenth-century.” The authors illustrate their arguments by pointing out similarities between the uprisings of the 18th Century and the current uprisings that began in response to draconian neoliberal privatization of the water system of the city of Cochabamba in 2000 to a consortium of multinational companies. This was the beginning of a long struggle led primarily by community-based organizations that led to overturning of successive neo-liberal governments and the election of Evo Morales as leader of Bolivia in 2005.

The authors are critical of Morales however. They accuse him of lagging behind the social movements and point out a number of policy failings, for example refusing to abrogate the contracts or expropriate the holdings of multinational gas companies. The authors’ anarchist sensibilities are evident in such remarks as “the election of Evo Morales did not bring about a revolution. It was a revolution that brought about the government of Evo Morales.” And the writers warn that Morales’s party, MAS, could “lose the convergent bases of support that brought it to power in the first place” if it continues along its current path.

According to legend, Bolivian indigenous leader Tupaj Katari stood before his executioners in 1781 and told them, “I will return as millions.” Like the hydra-headed beast, the murder of one, Katari, would give birth to many more like him. In his preface to the book, Adolfo Gilly characterizes revolution as a suspension of linear time, “a resounding explosion, an illumination that lights up an instant, a break in the time of everyday life in which linear time, circular time and messianic time whirl and mix together.”

Katari, like the rebels who fought alongside Haiti’s founder, Toussaint L’Ouverture, sought a break with their brutal European colonizers; today in a much different context their descendants search for a similar break. These two books chronicle two peoples heroic struggles to do so.