SCHOLARLY CONTROVERSY

Experience versus Structures:

New Tendencies in the History of Labor and the
Working Class in Latin America—What Do We Gain?
What Do We Lose?

Emilia Viotti da Costa

Yale University

Since the beginning of this decade there has been a boom in Latin American
working-class history. Works vary from those still written within the framework of
the theories of modernization and from a managerial perspective1 to those written
by militants still using a schematic Marxist approach.2 Within the boundaries
defined by the contradictory concerns of those interested in class collaboration and
those interested in class struggle—the manager and the militant—there is an
enormous variety of approaches, ranging from traditional empiricism to old and
new Marxism. There are those who want to stress similarities in the history of
labor in different Latin American countries, and those who can see only differ-
ences. There are those who think that an understanding of political economy is
preliminary to the study of labor, and those who think that we can do without it and
who focus instead on what is often called workers' "experience." Moreover,
orientations overlap and concepts are fuzzy. It is not easy to find one's way through
this maze, so I have decided to concentrate on what I call the "new labor history."
From a methodological perspective, the new historiography makes a signifi-
cant shift away from traditional approaches. This shift is both a reflection of new
tendencies in European and American labor history and historiography and a
product of economic and political changes taking place in Latin America today,
changes that in some countries, like Brazil and Argentina, have projected workers
into the center of the political arena and brought into question traditional strategies
of the labor movement. In this essay, I will characterize some of the new
historiographical tendencies and examine their implications for future research. To
make this enterprise manageable, I have restricted myself to examining recent
works on urban and industrial labor, leaving aside the growing literature on rural
labor. And, since it would be impossible to assess everything that has been
published in different Latin American countries as well as in the United States and
Great Britain (not to mention other countries), I have focused mainly on the work
of American and British scholars.

International Labor and Working-Class History

No. 36, Fall 1989, pp. 3-24
© 1989 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
4 ILWCH, 36, Fall 1989

This decision is not as limiting as it might seem. Most of the authors I examine
have relied heavily on the work of their Latin American peers and often have
discussed their points of view in great detail. Besides, there is more similarity than
difference between the recent Latin American historiography and American and
British historiographies. It is still true that Latin American scholars are, on the
whole, more inclined to use Marxist approaches than their American counterparts,
and in this regard they are closer to British or continental scholars, but Latin
American historians have not been immune to the methods of the new social
history. So the characterization of the tendencies of the new Latin American labor
history produced by American and British scholars can also apply to a certain point
to the labor history produced by scholars in Latin America.
For Latin American and American and British writers, the new labor history
represents a break with the past. This change in approaches and methods is
relatively recent. In 1979 Peter Winn observed that Latin American labor history
was in "danger of isolating itself from promising intellectual and methodological
currents and confining itself to institutional chronologies and ideological contro-
versies." He called for a new type of history focusing on workers and studying "not
just structural and statistical parameters, national organizations, and major strike
movements, but also the concrete everyday experience of workers in the factory
and community, their living standards and life styles, culture and consciousness,
internal divisions and relations with other groups," 3 a program he later suc-
cessfully put into practice in Weavers of Revolution: The Yarur Workers and Chile's
Road to Socialism.4
In 1980 Eugene Sofer insisted on the same point. In an essay published in the
Latin American Research Review,5 Sofer lamented that the conceptual or meth-
odological innovation that characterized the work of labor historians in Europe and
the United States—who directed their attention not only to labor leadership,
unions, and parties but to the large majority of workers (who never joined trade
unions)—had not yet made its way into the historiography of Latin American
labor. He argued that by examining the "nature, texture, and structures of working
class life," and by attempting to link everyday activity to political action,
European and American scholars had broadened their understanding of working-
class culture, social structure, and politics. But these approaches, which had
produced a real breakthrough in the history of European and American labor, had
found no correspondence in the history of Latin American labor. Sofer expressed
hope that Latin American labor scholarship would follow this path to a history
from the bottom up, a history in which workers speak for themselves and are seen
as conscious historical actors who contribute and help to define change rather than
merely respond to it. Today we can say that Sofer's wishes have been fulfilled.
Several published books and articles and many unpublished dissertations written
in the 1980s have subscribed to this program. It is time now to assess the results.
To be sure, at the time Winn and Sofer were writing their essays, a few books
had already appeared pointing in the same direction, and it is not by chance that
Experience versus Structures 5

these books were coming from anthropologists, who have always been more
interested than historians in integrating culture into their analysis. Particularly
influential among these works were June Nash's We Eat the Mines and the Mines
Eat Us: Dependency and Exploitation in Bolivian Tin Mines, and June Nash, Juan
Corradi, and Hobart Spalding's Ideology and Social Change in Latin America.6
But it was in the 1980s that the new tendencies became predominant. Sofer's
critique of "structuralist" approaches and his call for a history that would move
away from the study of leaderships to the study of the grass roots, from the study of
unions and political parties to the study of the workers' culture, from the study of
organized labor to the study of the great majority of workers who never joined a
union, became a common trend of the new labor history. While in the past
historians spoke of "structures," now they speak of "experience." This shift in
interest has brought with it a wholesale programmatic repudiation of traditional
approaches.
Scholars like Hobart A. Spalding, Patrick V. Peppe, and Kenneth Paul
Erickson, who approached working-class history from the point of view of the
dependency theory, found themselves under attack.7 In their defense they argued,
correctly, that these two approaches were not incompatible or mutually exclusive.
On the contrary, they were necessarily complementary. The scholars reminded
their critics that, indeed, workers had made their own history, but not under
conditions of their own choosing. One could not understand workers' actions
without incorporating into the analysis elite conflicts and the role of international
capitalism, which limited the range of possibilities opened to Latin American
workers.8 A similar argument was put forward by Charles Bergquist in "What Is
Being Done? Some Recent Studies on the Urban Working Class and Organized
Labor in Latin America." 9 Bergquist argued that the two approaches were not
incompatible or mutually exclusive —something he attempted to show some years
later in his Labor in Latin America: Comparative Essays on Chile, Argentina,
Venezuela, and Colombia.10 The dialogue between "structuralists" and "cultural-
ists" became the central issue in the new labor historiography, and among the
books published recently we find a great diversity of responses to the epistemologi-
cal questions raised by this debate.
A great number of historians turned their backs on earlier attempts to identify
common patterns in the history of Latin American labor and to examine the impact
of structural changes on organized labor. They looked for differences rather than
similarities, conjunctural circumstances rather than structural developments,
internal rather than external determinations.
Ian Roxborough, for example, in "The Analysis of Labour Movements in
Latin America: Typologies and Theories,"11 stressed the "complexity and vari-
ability, both in time and space, of Latin American labour." Roxborough defined
himself as a "splitter" (meaning those who like to separate variables) by contrast
with Spalding, whom he called a "lumper" for seeing a single common pattern
throughout the continent. He criticized Spalding also for arguing that all Latin
6 ILWCH, 36, Fall 1989

American labor movements went through the same stages, for the same reasons —a
trend Roxborough attributed to the impact of dependency theories on the study of
labor. He proposed instead an approach that would take into consideration many
internal variables, including types of union government, the degree of integration
of the labor market, the degree of homogeneity of the working class, rates of labor
turnover, and differing forms of corporatism. Roxborough acknowledged the
usefulness of "typologies," but considered them premature. "At this stage," he
wrote, "we are a long way from even being able adequately to describe Latin
American labour movements, let alone explain them." 12 (Roxborough later revised
his position, as we shall see.13)
It would be wrong to assume that the debates between the new and the old
labor historians, between "structuralists" and "anti-structuralists" or "cultural-
ists," simply reflect conflicts between Marxists and non-Marxists. We find both on
either side. In fact, most of the contemporary debate that seems to divide labor
historians comes out of conflicts within the Left itself. Labor history has been a
favorite domain of the Left, and many of the recent studies of Latin American labor
draw inspiration and guidance from E. P. Thompson and Raymond Williams. But
some of the divisive issues historians are confronting today go back at least as far
as Sartre's Critique de la Raison Dialectique and the ensuing debates within the
Left. From this perspective, the polarization among labor historians only repro-
duces a larger phenomenon that is also detected in other historical areas, as the
recent controversies about English abolitionism and about Chartism suggest, and
the publications of History Workshop amply document.14
When we place the debate about Latin American labor within this wider
framework, it becomes apparent that we are confronting an important epis-
temological crisis —which has as context some contradictory tendencies, such as
the emergence in Europe and in other parts of the world of the "New Left," the
questions raised by groups committed to democratic socialism, their critique of the
Soviet Union and the communist parties and consequently of traditional Marxist-
Leninist approaches, the electoral success of the Right and conservative parties in
Europe and the United States, and the tensions generated by the Cold War.
All this has led many Latin American labor historians not only to question
traditional approaches but to criticize the "anti-democratic" practices of union
bureaucracies and the political strategies of the leftist parties—particularly the
communist parties. It also led them to repudiate the notions of stages of economic
development; to reevaluate relations between labor leaderships and the grass roots,
privileging the grass roots over the leadership; to stress workers' "spontaneism";
and to reject the concept of false consciousness. There has also emerged a positive
reassessment of the role of anarchism in the labor movement, an emphasis on
human agency and subjectivity, and a recognition of the important role of ideology
and political culture in the labor movement.
Following Raymond Williams's path, the new generation of historians ques-
Experience versus Structures 7

tions the use of the concepts of base and superstructure.15 Some have gone so far as
to dispose of completely two other basic Marxist concepts: the material determina-
tion of class ideologies, and the relationship between productive forces and
relations of production. What in the past was often dismissed as superstructural
has become at times a central if not the main concern.
Many labor historians also have rejected a priori theoretical models (partic-
ularly macro-economic models deriving either from the theory of modernization
or from the dependency theory) in favor of what they perceive as the concrete and
empirically demonstrable forms of working-class behavior, perceptions, and
feelings. Repudiating an "essentialist" and static notion of class, and trying to
avoid "reductionist" explanations of class consciousness, some have looked with
suspicion on historians who continue to insist that "objective" conditions set the
parameters within which workers' consciousness can be constituted and workers'
actions can take place. Stages of economic development, changes in the size of
factories and in management strategies, technological improvements, composition
of the labor force, the relative importance of the industrial sector in the national
economy, forms of economic dependency, the nature of the political system, elite
conflicts, forms of imperialism—all the factors that in the past were considered
crucial for the understanding of workers' consciousness and political behavior have
receded and sometimes disappeared altogether from the new labor history. Many
historians of the new generation privilege the political over the economic, and
sometimes even the ideological over the political. Rather than examining the way
changes in economic, social, and political structures interact and affect the labor
movement (as well as being affected by it), or investigating the relation between
forms of capital accumulation and class formation, or the role of the state in the
process of capital accumulation and its policies toward the workers, they prefer to
concentrate on the way workers affected economic and political change. They
focus on workers' subjective perceptions and on the links between political
practices and political discourses, workers' experiences in the workplace and in
neighborhoods, their forms of appropriation and reinterpretation of elite culture,
and their own ways of reading the past and visualizing the future.16
In the new historiography, ideology sometimes becomes the crucial link
between experience and protest. But the very notion of ideology has been
reformulated. Ideology is seen as a complex social process of "interpellation."17
And even though some historians continue to define classes as the bearers or
agents of particular relations of production, they do not assume that there is always
a necessary relationship between class and consciousness, or that the development
of class consciousness is a linear process.18 Following Ernesto Laclau, many have
come to see individuals as the "bearers and points of intersection of an accumula-
tion of contradictions, not all of which are class contradictions." The new
historians are thus more aware than their predecessors that, in the words of Goran
Therborn, there are many and competitive forms of "human subjectivity other
8 ILWCH, 36, Fall 1989

than those of class membership."19 And they are more ready to recognize the
contradictory nature of working-class consciousness. In their analysis, traditional
oppositions between co-optation and resistance, and between bread-and-butter
issues and political issues tend to disappear.
In his study of Peronism, for example, Daniel James shows that allegiance to a
movement whose formal ideology preached the virtue of class collaboration, the
subordination of workers' interests to those of the nation and the importance of a
disciplined obedience to a paternalistic state did not eliminate the possibility of
working-class resistance and the emergence of a culture of opposition among
workers. Perdn's message was ambiguous. By stressing class collaboration it might
tend to legitimize capitalism, but by stressing workers' rights in society and in the
workplace, Peronism set limits to the exploitation of labor and created new
motivations for struggle. Workers' resistance was not translated, however, into an
unambiguous revolutionary ideology of class conflict. Argentine workers' ideolo-
gy contained strong elements that promoted integration and co-optation. James
sees Argentine workers neither as passive and inexperienced victims of Peron's
manipulation, nor as pragmatists seduced by material gains, but as conscious
actors, to whom Peron's message of personal dignity, citizenship, and social justice
had a strong appeal—particularly considering the lack of viable alternatives. He
sees Peronism not merely as a construct of a charismatic leader, but also as a
creation of the workers who continued to shape and reshape its tenets to a point
where Peron himself could hardly recognize his own offspring. If the Argentine
working class was redefined by Peron, his own policies were redefined by the
working class. 20 Both Jeffrey Gould analyzing Somocismo21 and John French
studying populism in Brazil22 have arrived at analogous conclusions.

Workers' Experience and Populism

So far I have discussed some of the tendencies I detect in the new labor history.
This is not to say, of course, that all of these tendencies are found in the work of
every historian who in the 1980s has written about labor in Latin America;
however, they are common enough to deserve our attention. Of these tendencies,
the most pervasive is the concern with workers' "experience." But experience is an
elusive word. What are the relevant components of experience? the workplace? the
neighborhood? the union? labor struggles? relations between workers and other
social classes? political parties? ideologies? political culture? political dis-
courses? the labor market? the composition of the working class? the size of
industries? relations between the state and labor? the forms of capital accumula-
tion? local economic crises and world recessions? the presence of foreign capital?
Can we recognize any form of hierarchy in those many and diverse experiences,
some being more relevant than others? How are they articulated? In other words,
how is experience itself structured? If workers do have many identities how is it
Experience versus Structures 9

that one comes to prevail over others? Few historians have addressed such
questions directly.
One of the few historians who has addressed them is Florencia Mallon. In her
essay, "Labor Migration, Class Formation, and Class Consciousness among
Peruvian Miners in the Central Highlands from 1900 to 1930," 23 she argues that the
form of working-class consciousness that emerges depends on several factors,
"including the form investment takes, the particular labor relations and conditions
experienced by the workforce, the culture the workers bring with them, and the
specific course of the struggle or confrontation in the workplace." And she
concludes that, although in some respects each working class constructs a
historically and culturally unique consciousness, this does not preclude generaliz-
ations across a broad variety of cases. But when we analyze the work of most
historians, we realize that each seems to choose his or her own set of variables.
Each has a different way of selecting what seems to be significant to characterize
the worker's experience. And sometimes, I fear, some may end up with little more
than a laundry list.
In spite of the methodological imprecision inherent to the concept of experi-
ence, the new labor history has profoundly changed our perceptions of the history
of the working class in Latin America. It has uncovered new sources and has made
ample use of oral testimony. It has enriched our understanding of organized labor
by linking it to the workers' day-to-day encounters in the workplace and in their
neighborhoods. It has shown the extraordinary variety and heterogeneity of
working-class experience, and it has challenged conventional wisdom. It has
questioned the traditional image of a passive rural population and reassessed the
relations between urban and rural labor. It has portrayed rural migrants not as
victims of the manipulation of charismatic populist leaders but as conscious and
autonomous historical actors, capable of making rational choices. It has presented
a more complex and variegated picture of the relations between union leaderships
and the grass roots. For example, in his analysis of unions' performance in the
automobile industry in Mexico, Roxborough argues that the more democratic
unions tend to be the more militant ones. 24 This correlation, however, could be
reversed. It is possible to argue that more militant workers tend to create less
bureaucratized and more democratic unions. In fact, in his study of Argentine
workers, James has shown that in some circumstances it was workers' passivity that
contributed to the bureaucratization of the leadership and not the other way
around.
The new labor historians have questioned the view that workers employed in
the oligopolistic, capital-intensive, and foreign-owned industries constitute nec-
essarily an aristocracy of labor. In his study of workers in the Sao Paulo automobile
industry from the late sixties through the seventies, John Humphrey criticizes the
dual labor market approach and dismisses as deterministic those theories about the
development of the working class that begin with the notion of the structural
10 ILWCH, 36, Fall 1989

differentiation of industry.25 He argues that during the last years of the military
regime, "the auto-workers' problems were similar to those of other workers and
they tried to resolve them in much the same way." Instead of pursuing their own
self-interest, the automobile workers were forced into an increasingly political
confrontation with the State and found great resonance among other working-class
communities assuming a position of leadership within the labor movement.
Humphrey cautions us, however, that this does not mean that in the future these
workers could not act as a labor aristocracy.26
The new labor historians have shown how workers appropriated elite symbols
and gave them new meanings, pushing Peronism, Somocismo, and Varguism much
beyond the limits proposed by the original intentions of the leaders. They also have
brought to light generational conflicts within the labor movement and deepened
our understanding of workers' consciousness, showing that workers' views of past
experiences is a construct, an "invention of a tradition," to use Eric Hobsbawm's
words.27
Thanks in part to these new approaches, great progress has been made in the
understanding of populism. Traditionally populist regimes in Latin America were
seen either as a legacy of the Iberian tradition or as political expression of tensions
emerging from structural changes in the economy and society—and sometimes as
a combination of both. But whether scholars analyzed populism from the point of
view of the theory of national character, or from that of either modernization
theory or dependency theory, they tended to see it as an epiphenomenon that
corresponded to a specific stage of economic development. They saw populism as
a manipulative strategy conceived by elites to control the masses.
The new historiography offers a much more complex picture. In his Politics
and Ideology in Marxist Theory,2* Ernesto Laclau repudiates structuralist ap-
proaches. He argues that each time the capitalist system has experienced a serious
crisis, various forms of populism have flourished. Focusing on the ideological and
political dimensions of populism, Laclau links populism to a crisis of the dominant
ideological discourse. In his opinion, this crisis results either from a fracture in the
power bloc, forcing a class or class fraction to appeal to the people to reassert its
hegemony, or from the inability of the dominant groups to neutralize the domi-
nated sectors. In either case, populism has little to do with "stages" of economic
development. Laclau stresses that a class is hegemonic to the extent that it can
articulate different visions of the world so that their potential antagonism is
neutralized. It was precisely this capacity that explains the success of Peronism.
His analysis of the role of ideology introduces greater refinement to the under-
standing of Peronism. Yet Laclau fails not only to examine alternative political
discourses, but also to show how workers translated Peronist discourse in terms of
their own experience.
In his book, James carries some of Laclau's suggestions further and provides
the necessary empirical support. James shows first how Peron's earlier discourse
had a particular appeal to workers, and then how in the years following Peron's
Experience versus Structures 11

overthrow, Peronism's ideological content changed as a result of the workers'

struggles, of the interaction between workers and their leadership, and of that
between the workers' leaders and the government.
Although written from a different perspective, the essays edited by Michael
Conniff in Latin American Populism in Comparative Perspective29 also stress the
varieties of populism. Conniff describes populism as a set of movements that arose
in opposition to entrenched elitist governments. In the struggle for power,
charismatic leaders resorted to multiclass coalitions, encouraging citizen partici-
pation and valuing popular culture. Unlike the traditional historiography, which
emphasized the manipulative intentions of the leadership, the essays in Conniff's
collection underscore the autonomy and inventiveness of the masses.
In one of these essays, "Requiem for Populism?," Paul Drake30 correctly
remarks that the motives of followers and leaders may have been significantly
different, and that both followers and leaders used each other to their own, and
sometimes mutual, advantage. He also shows that popular mobilization and
institutionalization constituted "double-edged swords" for populist leaders and
their followers. While mobilization provided legitimacy and a social base to the
government, it also threatened to outrun its capacity for control. As mass activity
gained momentum, it could destabilize the populist government. On the other
hand, institutionalization also produced contradictory results on the side of the
workers. Success opened the door to co-optation. Puzzling over the crisis of
populism, Drake says that it remains unclear why such movements blossomed from
the end of World War I until the 1960s and then collapsed in the 1970s.31 When he
tries to explain it, he can only come up with vague and unconvincing explanations:
the populists' generation had spent its energies; the political culture and conscious-
ness of many Latin Americans had changed, leaving the masses less susceptible to
the charms of populism; the economic and social imperatives present when
populism had emerged no longer existed. What is missing here is the assessment of
the impact (both subjectively and objectively) on the economic and political arenas
of growing class struggle.
The essays in Conniff's collection reveal that a static analysis of populism
makes no sense. Populisms change in time and space—a statement that finds
support also in the works of James, Gould, French, and Robert Dix. To come to
grips with the variety of populisms, Drake speaks of the early, the classic, and the
late populism. He shows how with the passage of time some populists moved right
and some left. (And one could say that these opposite tendencies coexisted even
within the same movement, as James has shown for Peronism.) In "Populism:
Authoritarian and Democratic," Dix attempts to bring some specificity to this
concept by analyzing the mass base, the ideology, the program, the organization
and leadership, and the variety of circumstances that brought populist regimes to
power.32 The result is a great variety of pictures, including Peronism in Argentina,
Ibanismo in Chile, Rojismo in Colombia, Accion Democratica in Venezuela,
Aprismo in Peru, and the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario in Bolivia.
12 ILWCH, 36, Fall 1989

Connecting Structures and Cultures

All this revision amounts to a considerable gain in our understanding. Workers

have become the subjects of history rather than its mere objects, and are as
important for the understanding of history as are elites—whose limits they define.
This revision is due in great part to scholars who have challenged traditional
structuralist approaches. But they have been at their best when they have managed
to establish a bridge between structuralist and culturalist approaches. This is what
Peter Winn has done.33
Winn starts at the factory level and branches out to encompass the history of
Chile from the 1930s to 1985, from which he extracts what is relevant to the Yarur
textile mill workers and their struggles. Had he remained within the boundaries of
the factory and the neighborhood, had he merely written a history from the bottom
up, had he been concerned only with workers' subjectivity and perceptions, he
would never have given us such an important book. It is because he has followed
the debates about modernization theory, dependency and post-dependency theory,
and the theories of state formation in Latin America, and because he is also
familiar with the contemporary Marxist debate, that he can make sense of the
history of the Yarur workers. And it is precisely because he has done so that it
becomes possible for the reader to discover not only differences but also very
important similarities between the Yarur workers' "experience" and that of
workers elsewhere in Latin America.
Winn shows how workers were central protagonists of the historical drama
that culminated in the overthrow of Allende. He describes how they exposed the
limits of the Unidad Popular political agenda and uncovered tensions between
workers and the political leadership, tensions that issued from their different views
of the revolutionary process. Like other new labor historians, Winn criticizes
traditional approaches to the history of Chile for assuming that national political
actors were the important players in the revolutionary drama, and for ignoring the
relative autonomy of the working class. Like James, Peter de Shazo,34 and others,
Winn wants to see history through the workers' eyes. But what makes his book
succeed, paradoxically, is that he is perfectly aware that the struggles of Yarur's
workers do not take place in a vacuum, that their "experience" cannot be
understood only in terms of their own subjectivity and testimony, that it cannot be
apprehended in isolation from the history of capital and the struggles between
capital and labor, whether they momentarily take the form of pragmatic collabora-
tion or direct confrontation. Workers' oral testimonies would have been meaning-
less had Winn not been able to go beyond the walls of the factory and the limits of
neighborhood to incorporate into his analysis Chile's process of industrialization,
national labor organizations, political parties, national politics, and political
discourses.
It is precisely because Winn is aware of the debate about industrialization in
Latin America that he is capable first of asking relevant questions of the workers,
Experience versus Structures 13

and then of telling in such a compelling way their history, following it through
stages of economic development from the import-substitution period to the age of
multinationals, from paternalistic types of management to Taylorism. Without this
frame of reference the Yarur workers' struggles would be difficult to understand, as
Winn himself recognizes.
Among the new labor historians it is common to exalt workers' spontaneism
and the grass roots initiative, while playing down the role of leftist political parties
and union leadership—a healthy movement to correct the excessive concern with
organized labor that was so characteristic of the traditional historiography. But in
the long run, this new intellectual posture also can have negative consequences,
leading historians to neglect important factors in the history of the labor move-
ment. When he describes the workers' struggle, Winn cannot but acknowledge the
important role of the workers' leadership, and even the union "bureaucrats," from
whom inexperienced workers not only received legal advice but also learned how
to organize and to win their battles. There also is plenty of evidence in Winn's book
of the important role played by leftist parties that defended workers' interests in
Congress and helped to create conditions for their mobilization, both in the city
and in the countryside. Many of the workers who became labor leaders at Yarur
told Winn, in effect, that their "experience" in the workplace had been filtered
through notions they had acquired when exposed to socialist or communist
militants.35 It is also clear that workers were all along very dependent on alliances
with leftist political parties, and it is not by chance that most of the important
strikes at Yarur occurred when popular-front coalitions, including leftist parties,
took power. Finally, for the understanding of the factory occupation by the
workers, it is as important to know about national politics as it is to know about the
workers' experience in the workplace and in the neighborhoods where they forged
links of solidarity.
From the beginning, Winn recognizes that the Yarur workers ought not be
seen in isolation from a long tradition of class struggle and labor organization that
had provided them with an ideology, a Utopia, organizational skills, and a class
culture and politics. And he makes clear that Allende's election freed workers from
their fears. The occupation of Yarur's factory would be incomprehensible without
those points of reference. Even more significant, when we compare Winn's
findings with the history of workers in other Latin American countries during the
same period, we notice not only differences, but striking similarities. And
differences and similarities are equally important to understanding labor history in
Latin America.
The crisis of the export sector and the impact of the recession of the 1930s; the
role of the state in the process of industrialization and capital accumulation
through concessions of preferential tariffs, tax exemptions, special rates of
exchange, etc.; entrepreneurs' dependence on foreign capital and foreign technolo-
gy; the transition from paternalistic forms of management to Taylorism; the
negative impact of Taylorism on the labor force;36 class struggle and the attempts
14 ILWCH, 36, Fall 1989

of the state to institutionalize conflict through the implementation of a corporatist

labor legislation, around which new forms of labor struggle are organized; the
problems created for industrial growth by the narrowness of the internal market;
industries' constant need for technological improvement and renewed loans; the
country's growing indebtedness; inflation and its negative impact on workers; the
formation of conglomerates encompassing a large number of industrial and
financial enterprises; the anti-union politics of entrepreneurs and their easy access
to the media and to the government, their ruthless practices and their attempts to
bribe or intimidate the leadership; the renewed sacrifice of militants; the conflict of
generations within the working-class community; workers' dependence on the
state; the mediating role played by political parties; the ambiguities and limits of
the labor policies of Popular Fronts; the importance of electoral politics in
furthering alliances between workers and politicians; the ambiguous role of the
middle classes, sometimes allied with workers and sometimes with their op-
pressors; the renewed and failed attempts on the part of the government in the
1960s to solve the problems of the economy; growing radicalization and popular
mobilization; and, finally, a military coup and the repression of workers who, in a
short period of time, had their salaries drastically reduced, while they lost many of
the privileges and legal guarantees they had conquered in the past. All this sounds
too familiar for us to neglect.
We could go on establishing parallels between these processes in Chile and in
other Latin American countries. In spite of the obvious differences, we may have
much to gain by looking at the similarities. Behind the similarities it is possible to
recognize generalized changes in the capitalist world and in the international
division of labor: the forms of capitalist development in Latin America since the
1930s, the process of class formation, class alliances and conflicts, the role of the
state, and the different ways the state managed to mediate between capital and
labor. This is far from saying that every country follows the same path, or that
economic development determines the nature of the state, or that class formation is
the same everywhere, or that proletarianization and class consciousness are
automatic processes. It is just to say that workers' experience is inseparable from
the processes described above. Our task is precisely to define how they are
articulated.
Perhaps no other book among those recently published has been as successful
in characterizing such similarities and differences, and at same time conceiving
industrialization "as a dialectical process in which labor is both subject and
object," as The Political Economy of the Latin American Motor Vehicle Industry, a
collection of essays about the automobile industries in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico,
and Colombia edited by Rich Kronish and Kenneth S. Mericle.37 The essays in this
collection bring to light the forms of articulation between the national and the
international economy and the roles of the state in regulating capital accumulation
and controlling labor. The original purpose of the essays was to study the four
nations' automobile industries as examples of dependent industrialization. But the
Experience versus Structures 15

authors arrived at the conclusion that internal conditions —the ways different
governments try to control foreign capital and the nature of the labor movement—
were even more decisive. They make it clear that working-class mobilization set
limits to the bargain between host countries and the transnational corporations, in
some cases even to the point of jeopardizing industrial growth, as they did in
Argentina. In countries where labor had a less strong tradition of mobilization and
thus was more vulnerable to government's manipulation, industries were more able
to succeed—as in Mexico, for example. Wage control, repression of strikes and of
militant groups, employment of a higher proportion of temporary workers —more
vulnerable to company pressures —made Mexican industries, at least temporarily,
more competitive. Yet in spite of these and many other differences, there were
remarkable similarities.
Everywhere, following attempts to develop national industries, governments
turned to foreign capital. Competing to attract foreign capital to their nations, they
tried to offer the best possible deal by exerting harsher control over labor. They
aimed at increasing labor productivity and diminishing labor costs. Trying to
overcome the limitations of the internal market, governments adopted policies that
resulted in the concentration of income at the top. Soon, however, industries were
again in a bottleneck. Sales were declining and profits decreasing. Continuous
dependence on international technology and foreign loans and failure to realize
sufficient production made the unit costs higher in Latin American than in the
developed nations, and also aggravated the imbalance of debt payments, leading to
inflationary surges and growth in the foreign debt. These problems became
particularly serious with the growing internationalization of the economy. Under
these circumstances it is not surprising that the automobile industries' increasing
productivity was not followed by a proportional increase in wages.
Reading Kronish and Mericle's collection of essays, one becomes aware that,
in spite of significant differences among the automobile industries in different
Latin American nations (and these differences are crucial, of course), there are
common patterns. Without the recognition of these patterns, which are constantly
changing under the impact of political struggles, it is difficult if not impossible to
make sense of working-class "experience." Without it, the new labor history,
instead of representing a leap into the future, could turn out to be a return to the
"histoire de la vie quotidienne," a very fashionable genre of the 1950s.
This is not a call for the exhumation of old models, or for the construction of
new ones, but for a synthesis between two tendencies that have often been
perceived as antagonistic, a synthesis that will reestablish the dialectic between
structure and experience. It is reassuring to notice that Ian Roxborough, who, as
we have seen, defined himself some years ago as a "splitter" and criticized Hobart
Spalding for his use of the dependency theory, now is concerned with the
"methodological issues involved in the formulation of an adequate theory of Latin
American development." In 1984, in the Journal of Latin American Studies,
Roxborough reviewed different "structural" approaches, showing his particular
16 ILWCH, 36, Fall 1989

appreciation for the work of Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto.38
In Labor in Latin America, Bergquist calls for a "creative fusion" of the new
social history and the world-system approach, which so far have run independently
of each other. He is mindful of the shortcomings of each. He criticizes the world-
system analysts for focusing "singlemindedly" on the global structural logic of the
world system, neglecting the concrete dynamics of class struggle within national
societies, and also for failing to come to terms with the "issues of human
consciousness and agency, whose importance social historians have so convinc-
ingly demonstrated."39 But he recognizes that this global approach, in its Latin
American version of the dependency theory, provides important conceptual tools
for the study of labor, particularly when combined with "traditional Marxist
premises about the role of class conflict in historical change."
Bergquist's general frame of reference is the export economy. He believes
correctly that, given the importance of the export sector in the economies of most
Latin American countries, workers engaged in production for export have played a
crucial role in the history of their countries. Because he chose to study workers
involved in different activities and in different countries at different times—nitrate
workers in Chile, meat packing workers in Argentina, coffee workers in Colombia,
and oil workers in Venezuela—Bergquist has uncovered the diversity of ideologi-
cal and political trajectories followed by the labor movements: Marxist in some
countries, neo-fascist in at least one, liberal in several others. He argues that, in
part, this diversity can be explained by the different forms of integration of the
various Latin American economies in the "evolving capitalist system," partic-
ularly because no two export economies were alike in terms of capital, labor, and
technological requirements. Some were more vulnerable than others to fluctua-
tions in the world market. In some sectors the ownership of the means of
production was foreign and highly concentrated; in others, domestic and diffused.
Some were more technologically developed and required more investment than
others. Some produced exclusively for the international market, others for both the
domestic and the international markets. There were also differences in the size,
location, and composition of the working classes: some were mostly immigrant,
some were native, some lived in mining enclaves or in rural areas, others lived in
urban centers. All these different conditions help to explain the variety of forms of
labor mobilization. Step by step, Bergquist brings in new political and cultural
determinations, revealing the limits of a mere structuralist approach and proposing
an alternative way of looking at labor that would incorporate the methodology of
the new social history.

The Absence of Women

The new labor history has raised many new and important questions, but in some
very important respects it continues to be very traditional. Considering their
interest in recovering the workers' "experience," it is surprising that most scholars
Experience versus Structures 17

at the forefront of the new labor history continue to ignore ethnic issues —
particularly since a large part of the labor force in Latin America is composed of
Indians, Mestizos, and Blacks. Even more surprisingly, most scholars remain
unresponsive to the growing debate about women in the labor force, and the role of
women in capitalist development.40
Curiously, there are two streams that seem to run parallel to each other, one
that appears under the label "labor," or "working-class history," and another that
appears under the label "women." 41 Each seems to ignore the other. While the new
labor history moves away from structuralist approaches in search of the workers'
experience, labor history written from the perspective of women often goes in the
opposite direction.
In spite of the great vitality of the field of women's history, its impact on the
study of North American social history, the methodological sophistication of many
of its scholars, and the large number of essays and books these scholars publish and
conferences they promote every year, most historians of industrial labor in Latin
America continue to ignore both women workers and the work of women histo-
rians. They devote surprisingly little time to interviewing women workers, and
they seldom describe female workers' perceptions. They seem oblivious to the
gender specificity of their experiences. When they do speak about women in the
labor force, they limit themselves to brief remarks about their "passivity," without
even trying to make sense of it. They may stress the way women's behavior affects a
union negatively, but never ask how the behavior of the union may explain women's
behavior. At most, these scholars attribute the difficulty in organizing women to
"natural dispositions" or to women's discontinuous presence in the labor market. It
seems never to occur to them that, by ignoring women's issues and keeping them
excluded from position of leadership, unions and political parties may have
alienated women and contributed to their "passivity." When they write about
Peronism, for example, the new labor historians seldom discuss what it meant to
women workers, and stress only the importance of Eva Peron for the Peronist
movement.42
These blind spots are for the most part caused by entrenched prejudices, but
they are also products of the ghettoization of women's history and the practical
difficulties that have resulted from it. In the past ten years, women's historians'
interest has spread over a variety of topics, ranging from feminism to marriage,
from dowries and family history to women in revolutionary struggles, from nuns to
prostitutes. Women's historians have their own interdisciplinary conferences and
their own journals, and they publish their own bibliographies, which usually cover
a period that spans from the colonial times until today. There is no doubt that the
creation of interdisciplinary women's studies programs has contributed to an
extraordinary refinement of their methods and a rapid expansion of their field. But
it also seems to have kept them relatively isolated.
There are other factors contributing to this isolation. Women's history has
usually focused either on the colonial period or on the nineteenth and early
18 ILWCH, 36, Fall 1989

twentieth centuries, and has devoted greater attention to women in the rural sector
than to those in the urban, industrial sector. All this may explain why women
continue to be absent from the picture in many works on industrial labor.43 There is
also the fact that most women in the cities have worked in the tertiary sector, thus
escaping the attention of historians interested in working-class history, who
usually focus exclusively on workers in the industrial sector. But even within these
narrow limits, how can labor historians continue to neglect the women in the
industrial labor force? How can they be oblivious to the debates about women and
economic change? Or about the way the dialectic of gender relations shapes class
formation? Is it really possible to understand workers' experience without consid-
ering female workers and their experience? Without examining male/female
relations, and the role of women in production and reproduction? I think not. No
serious working-class history can be written today without incorporating women,
not only those who work in the industrial sector, but also wives and other members
of the working-class family who usually work in temporary jobs in the "informal"
sector.44 I am not talking about merely adding information on women to the new
labor history. I am talking about the need to look at labor and working-class history
from a new perspective. European and United States historians have taken the lead.
Scholars who have studied rural labor in Latin America have been doing this very
successfully for some time. It is time now for scholars who study Latin American
industrial labor and working-class history to follow.

NOTES

1. Charles H. Savage and George E E Lombard, Sons of the Machine: Case Studies of Social
Change in the Workplace (Cambridge, 1986). This is a careful ethnographic study of three factories in
Colombia, written from the perspective of modernization theory.
2. Pablo Gonzalez Casanova, Historia del Movimiento Obrero en America Latino (Mexico,
1984).
3. Peter Winn, "Oral History and the Factory Study: New Approaches to Labor History," Latin
American Research Review 14, 2 (1979): 130^0.
4. Peter Winn, Weavers of Revolution: The Yarur Workers and Chile's Road to Socialism (New
York, 1986).
5. Eugene Sofer, "Recent Trends in Latin American Labor Historiography," Latin American
Research Review 15, 1 (1980): 167-76.
6. June Nash, We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us: Dependency and Exploitation in Bolivian
Tin Mines (New York, 1979); and June Nash, Juan Corradi, and Hobart Spalding, eds., Ideology and
Social Change in Latin America (New York, 1977).
7. Hobart A. Spalding, Organized Labor in Latin America: Historical Case Studies of Urban
Workers in Dependent Societies (New York, 1977); Kenneth Paul Erickson, Patrick V. Peppe, and
Hobart A. Spalding, "Research on the Urban Working Class and Organized Labor in Argentina, Brazil
and Chile: What is Left to be Done?" Latin American Research Review 9, 2 (1974): 15-42; Sofer,
"Recent Trends in Latin American Labor Historiography"; Ian Roxborough, "The Analysis of Labour
Movements in Latin America: Typologies and Theories," Bulletin of Latin American Research 1, 1
(1981): 81-95; and Daniel James, "Dependency and Organized Labor in Latin America," Radical
History Review 18 (Fall 1978): 155-60.
Experience versus Structures 19

8. See Erickson, Peppe, and Spalding's reply to Sofer, "Dependency vs. Working-Class History:
A False Contradiction," Latin American Research Review 15, 1 (1980): 177-81.
9. Charles Bergquist, "What Is Being Done? Some Recent Studies on the Urban Working Class
and Organized Labor in Latin America," Latin American Research Review 16, 2 (1980): 203-23.
10. Charles Bergquist, Labor in Latin America: Comparative Essays on Chile, Argentina,
Venezuela, and Colombia (Palo Alto, 1986).
11. Roxborough, "Analysis of Labour Movements in Latin America," 81-95.
12. Ibid., 93.
13. This is evident in Ian Roxborough, "Issues in Labor Historiography," Latin American
Research Review 21, 2 (1986): 184-88, and in Roxborough, "Unity and Diversity in Latin American
History," Journal of Latin American Studies 16 (May 1984): 1-16.
14. Perry Anderson, Arguments Within English Marxism (London, 1980). For the debate on
abolitionism see American Historical Review 92 (October 1987); for the debate on Chartism see Neville
Kirk, "In Defence of Class: A Critique of Recent Revisionist Writing Upon the Nineteenth-Century
English Working Class," International Review of Social History 32, 1 (1987): 2-47. See also the recent
controversies raised by Joan W. Scott, "On Language, Gender, and Working-Class History," Interna-
tional Labor and Working-Class History 31 (Spring 1987): 1-13; E. P. Thompson, "The Politics of
Theory," in People's History and Socialist Theory, ed. Raphael Samuel (London, 1981); and E. M.
Wood, "E. P. Thompson and His Critics," Studies in Political Economy 9 (1982): 45-75.
15. See Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford, 1977).
16. See, for example, Daniel James, Resistance and Integration: Peronism and the Argentine
Working Class, 1946-1976 (Cambridge, 1988); William Roseberry, "Images of the Peasant in the
Consciousness of the Venezuelan Proletariat," in Proletarians and Protest: The Roots of Class
Formation in An Industrializing World, ed. Michael Hanagan and Charles Stephenson (Westport,
Conn., 1986), 149-71; Winn, Weavers of Revolution; Jeffrey Gould, "To Lead as Equals: Rural Protest
and Political Consciousness in Chinandega, Nicaragua, 1912-1979" (Ph.D. diss., Yale University,
1988); Adriana Raga, "Workers, Neighbors and Citizens: A Study of an Argentine Industrial Town,
1930-1950" (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1988); and John French, "Industrial Workers and the Origins
of Populist Politics in the ABC Region of Greater Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1900-1950" (Ph.D. diss., Yale
University, 1985).
17. Ernesto Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory: Capitalism, Fascism, Populism
(London, 1977). See particularly his essay on Peronism. Also relevant are James, Resistance and
Integration, and Emilio de Ipola, Idelogia y Discurso Populista (Mexico, D.F., 1982).
18. See note 14 and also Florencia Mallon, "Labor Migration, Class Formation, and Class
Consciousness among Peruvian Miners in the Central Highlands from 1900 to 1930," in Hanagan and
Stephenson, eds.. Proletarians and Protest, 197-230.
19. Goran Therborn, The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology (London, 1982).
20. James, Resistance and Integration.
21. Jeffrey Gould, "To Lead as Equals"; and Gould, "For an Organized Nicaragua: Somoza and
the Labour Movement, 1944-1948," Journal of Latin American Studies 19 (December 1987): 353-87.
22. John French, "Workers and the Rise of Adhemarista Populism in Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1945-
1947," Hispanic American Historical Review 68 (February .1988): 1-43. See also French, "Industrial
Workers."
23. Mallon, "Labor Migration."
24. Ian Roxborough, Unions and Politics in Mexico: The Case of the Automobile Industry
(Cambridge, 1984); and James, Resistance and Integration.
25. For an opposite view see Maria Herminia Tavares de Almeida, "O Sindicato no Brasil:
Novos Problemas, Velhas Estruturas," Debate e Critica 6 (1975): 48-74; and Bernardo Sorg and Maria
Herminia Tavares de Almeida, eds., Sociedade e Politico no Brasil pds 1964 (Sao Paulo, 1983).
26. John Humphrey, Capitalist Control and Workers' Struggle in the Brazilian Auto Industry
(Princeton, 1982). Humphrey's comments on the similarity between automobile and other workers and
20 ILWCH, 36, Fall 1989

on the potential for a labor aristocracy are at 235 and 239, respectively. See also Margaret Elizabeth
Keck, "From Movement to Politics: The Formation of the Workers' Party in Brazil" (Ph.D. diss.,
Columbia University, 1986).
27. Eric Hobsbawn and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983); Lygia
Sigaud, "The Idealization of the Past in a Plantation Area: The Northeast of Brazil," in Nash, Corradi,
and Spalding, eds., Ideology and Social Change in Latin America, 167-77; Roseberry, "Images of the
Peasant"; and Gould, "To Lead as Equals."
28. Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory. See also Ipola, Ideologia y Discurso
Populista.
29. Michael Conniff, ed., Latin American Populism in Comparative Perspective (Albuquerque,
1982).
30. Paul Drake, "Requiem for Populism?," in Conniff, ed., Latin American Populism, 217-48.
31. Ibid., 226.
32. Robert H. Dix, "Populism: Authoritarian and Democratic," Latin American Research
Review 20, 2 (1985): 29-52.
33. Winn, Weavers of Revolution.
34. Peter de Shazo, Urban Workers and Labor Unions in Chile, 1902-1927 (Madison, 1983).
35. The importance of the communists in organizing labor in Chile as well as in other countries
is confirmed by Bergquist in Labor in Latin America; Raga, "Workers, Neighbors, and Citizens";
David Tamarin, The Argentine Labor Movement, 1930-1945: A Study of the Origins of Peronism
(Albuquerque, 1985); French, "Industrial Workers"; and many others.
36. See Savage and Lombard, Sons of the Machine; and Raga, "Workers, Neighbors, and
Citizens."
37. Rich Kronish and Kenneth S. Mericle, eds., The Political Economy of the Latin American
Motor Vehicle Industry (Cambridge, 1984).
38. Roxborough, "Unity and Diversity in Latin American History."
39. Bergquist, Labor in Latin America, 384.
40. For example, June Nash and Helen Safa,. eds., Sex and Class in Latin America (South
Hadley, 1980); June Nash and M. P. Fernandez-Kelly, eds.. Women, Men, and the International Division
of Labor (Albany, 1984); June Nash and Helen Safa, eds., Women and Change in Latin America (South
Hadley, 1986); M. Patricia Fernandez-Kelly, For We Are Sold, I and My People: Women and Industry in
Mexico's Frontier (Albany, 1983); Lourdes Beneria and Martha Roldan, The Crossroads of Class and
Gender: Industrial Homework, Subcontracting and Household Dynamics in Mexico City (Chicago,
1987); and Marysa Navarro, "Hidden, Silent and Anonymous: Women Workers in the Argentine Trade
Union Movement," in The World of Women's Trade Unionism: Comparative Historical Essays, ed.
Norbert C. Soldon (Westport, Conn., 1985), 165-98. For a general assessment of the current
bibliography on women in Latin America, see Asunci6n Lavrin, "Recent Studies on Women in Latin
America," Latin American Research Review 19, 1 (1984): 181-89; and K. Lynn Stoner, "Directions in
Latin American Women's History, 1977-1984," Latin American Research Review 22, 2 (1987): 101-35.
41. This is obvious in the articles published in the Latin American Research Review.
42. Marysa Navarro, "Evita's Charismatic Leadership," in Conniff, ed., Latin American Popul-
ism, and Nicolas Fraser and Marysa Navarro, Eva Perdn (New York, 1981).
43. In a Portuguese expanded version of "Brazilian Workers Rediscovered," International
Labor and Working-Class History 22 (Fall 1982): 217-32,1 stress the negative effect of this bias on the
study of labor in Brazil. See "A Nova Face do Movimento Operario na Primeira Republica," Revista
Brasileira de Histdria 2, 4 (1982): 28-38.
44. In The Crossroads of Class and Gender, Beneria and Roldan call attention to the growing
complementarity of the formal and informal sectors (which they prefer to call underground or illegal
economy) and stress the importance that subcontracting and industrial homework have for the modern
industrial sector in Mexico. Interested in diminishing labor costs, avoiding labor conflicts and legal
obligations toward labor, and eager to increase the flexibility of the labor force, many corporations are
Experience versus Structures 21

expanding their putting-out system. Most of their workers are female. Women employed through this
system have little stability and no social benefits or legal protection, and their wages are often below the
minimum wage. They constitute a growing subproletariat.

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