Abstract
After the Second World War, with industrialisation proceeding in virtually all Latin America’s bigger countries, and governments’, workers’, and academics’ expectations strongly coloured by their belief that underdeveloped countries would follow the same stages of development as the industrialised West,1 social scientists accepted without question that for Latin America, the future held an inexorable process of proletarianisation along Western lines. A ‘modern’ economy was seen to be establishing itself in the region’s urban areas, inexorably pushing back the remnants of the ‘traditional economy’ of rural peasants and urban artesans. Agriculture, the dominant employer in the traditional economy, was becoming less and less important as countries urbanised and manufacturing for local consumption became more important. At some point, the dual economy which social scientists could observe throughout the region would disappear, leaving the modern capitalist sector to stand alone.
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Notes
See Rostow’s Stages of Economic Growth (London: Cambridge University Press, 1960). Rostow’s optimism on the likely evolution of developing countries’ social structures was broadly shared by strategists of industrial development in Latin America such as the influential Raul Prebisch of the United Nations’ Economic Commission for Latin America, ECLA, in spite of their rejection of the automatism of his model. Cf. Vilmar E. Faria, ‘Desarrollo economico y marginalidad urbana: los cambios de perspectiva en la CEPAL’, Revista Mexicana de Sociologia, vol. 40 (1978) no. 1.
On Chile and Argentina, cf. R. Lagos and V. Tokman, ‘Monetarism, Employment and Social Stratification’, World Development, vol. XII (1985) no. 1. On Peru, Hernano del Soto Pilar, Instituto de Libertad y Democracia: cf. Car etas, Lima, passim.
See PREALC, Dinamica del subempleo en America Latina, Santiago (United Nations: Economic Commission for Latin America 1981)
Victor Tokman, ‘Desarrollo desigual y absorcion de empleo. America Latina 1950–1980’, CEPAL Review (Santiago: UN: ECLA, August 1981).
Anibal Quijano, Imperialismo y ‘ Marginalidad’ en America Latina (Lima: Mosca Azul, 1977).
Anibal Quijano Obregon, ‘The Marginal Pole of the Economy and the Marginalised Labour Force’, Economy and Society, vol. 3, 1974.
Cf., for example, the debate between Quijano and James Cockcroft in Latin American Perspectives, Berkeley, California, vol. X, Spring and Summer 1983, nos. 2 and 3 (37/38). A very good review of the international debate on the role of the informal sector in capital accumulation is Caroline Moser’s ‘Informal Sector or Petty Commodity Production: Dualism or Dependence in Urban Development?’, World Development, vol. VI (1978) 9/10.
Cf. Tilman Evers, ‘Sintesis interpretativa del “Movimento do custo de vida”, un movimiento urbano brasileno’, Revista Mexicana de Sociologia, vol. 43 July-Sept. 1981,
Cf. Tilman Evers, ‘Sintesis interpretativa del “Movimento do custo de vida”, un movimiento urbano brasileno’, Revista Mexicana de Sociologia, vol. 43 July-Sept. 1981, and N. Vink, ‘Base Communities and Urban Social Movements — a case study of the Metalworkers’ strike in 1980, Sao Bernardo, Brazil’, in D. Slater (ed.), New social movements and the state in Latin America (Amsterdam: CEDLA, 1985).
Cf. Roddick, Appendix 2, Table 1, below. The point that the firm line drawn between ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ sectors, ‘proletarian’ wage-earners and the non-proletarian self-employed in many academic treatments of the subject may be much less sharp, and take in a significant proportion of small workshops hardly smaller than artisan, is well made by Alison MacEwan Scott in ‘Who are the self-employed?’ in Bromley and Gerry, Casual Work and Poverty in Third World Cities (Chichester: Wiley, 1979).
Rude, The Crowd in History, A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England (New York: Wiley, 1964). For a restatement of the importance of a broader ‘urban crowd’ to union movements throughout the Third World, cf. Peter Waterman, ‘Obreros, campesinos, artesanos y madres: hacia un entendimiento de las interrelaciones de la clase trabajadora en las sociedades capitalistas perifericas’, Revista Mexicana de Sociología, vol. 43 (1981) no. 1.
Payne, Labor and Politics in Peru (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1965).
See, for instance, J.A. Moisés’ study of Brazilian populism, Greve de massa e crise política, estudo do greve dos 300 mil em Sao Paulo (Sao Paulo: Polis, 1978), summarised in Latin American Perspectives 23, Autumn 1979; or Juan Carlos Torre, ‘La CGT y el 17 de Octubre de 1945’, New York University Occasional Papers (May 1976) no. 22. The theoretical point is concisely summarised by Torre in ‘Sindicalismo de masas y sistema politico en los paises del cono sur’, Taller de Estudios Urbano Industriales (Lima, Peru: Pontifica Universidad Católica, n.d.).
Cf. the classic assertion by Sunkel that consumption standards of workers in the modern sector qualify them as members of an internationalised sector, alongside the local elite, in O. Sunkel and E. Fuenzalida, ‘Transnationalism and its National Consequences’, in J. Villamil (ed.), Transnational Capital and National Development (Brighton: Harvester, 1979). The exception to this general scepticism is, of course, Ruy Mauro Marini, whose Dialéctica de la dependencia identified the central axis of accumulation in Latin America as being based on the superexploitation of its labour force.
di Telia, Torcuato et al., Sindicato y comunidad: dos tipos de estructura sindical latinoamericana (Buenos Aires: Instituto Torcuato di Telia, 1967);
Guerrieri, Adolfo, ‘Consideraciones sobre los sindicatos chilenos’, Aportes (Paris: July 1968).
Cf. Pastrana and Threlfall, Pan, techo y poder (Buenos Aires: SIAP-Planteos, 1974).
Maria Herminia Tavares de Almeida, ‘Desarrollo capitalista y acción sindical’, Revista Mexicana de Sociología, vol. XL (April-June) no. 2; Doeringer and Piore, Internal Labor Markets and Manpower Analysis (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath, 1971).
Cf. Colin Crouch and Alessandro Pizzorno, (eds), The Resurgence of Class Conflict in Western Europe since 1968 (London: Macmillan, 1978).
Threlfall, ‘Shanty-town Dwellers and People’s Power’ in P.J. O’Brien (ed.), Allende’s Chile (New York: Praeger, 1976).
John Humphrey, Capitalist Control and Workers’ Struggle in the Brazilian Auto Industry (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press 1982).
E. Jelin and J.C. Torre, ‘Los nuevos trabajadores en America Latina: una reflexion sobre la tesis de la aristocracia obrera’, Desarrollo Economico, Buenos Aires, vol. 22 (April-June 1982) no. 85; cf. also F. Delich, Crisis y protesta social — Cordoba 1969–1973, Buenos Aires (Siglo XXI), 1974, and I.M. Roldan, Sindicatos y protesta social en la Argentina (1969–1974), Un estudio de caso: el Sindicato de Luz y Fuerza de Cordoba (Amsterdam: CEDLA, n.d.).
‘Corporatism’, for instance, is used by US writers on Brazil to refer to the State-dominated labour relations system derived from Italian fascist philosophy, and other elements of a political system similarly dominated by the state. See K.P. Erickson, The Brazilian Corporative State and Working Class Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977). Philippe Schmitter, whose own work on politics laid the basis for subsequent studies in this area, distinguishes Latin American or Francoist style ‘State corporatism’ from the ‘societal corporatism’ characteristic of European societies.
Compare the articles by Adrian Peace and John Saul in R. Cohen and R. Sandbrook, The Development of an African Working Class (London: Longman, 1975).
On the impact of the debt crisis on Latin American standards of living and wages, see Beyond the Crisis, (Santiago: ILO-PREALC, 1985) and Roddick, Dance of the Millions (London: Latin American Bureau, 1988).
For a model of the relationship between political instability and organised labour’s behaviour, see Payne, op. cit., and Juan Carlos Torre, ‘Sindicalismo de masas y sistema politica en los paises del cono sur’, op. cit. The difficulties of working with an economic model of instability even case by case and country by country, are clearly shown in Kronisch and Mericle’s Political Economy of the Latin American Motor Vehicle Industry (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984), in which discussions of the global forces shaping the industry through several decades of sharp changes in company and government strategy coincide with studies of the labour movement in the industry focused essentially on the movement’s own institutions and internal struggles.
The classic statement of this kind can be found in M. Barrera, H. Landsberger and Abel Toro, ‘The Chilean labour leader: a report on his background and attitudes’, Industrial and Labor Relations Review, vol. 17 (April 1964) no. 3,
The classic statement of this kind can be found in M. Barrera, H. Landsberger and Abel Toro, ‘The Chilean labour leader: a report on his background and attitudes’, Industrial and Labor Relations Review, vol. 17 (April 1964) no. 3, and in H. Landsberger’s subsequent, ‘The Labor Elite: Is it Revolutionary?’, in Lipset and Solari (eds), Elites in Latin America (London: Oxford University Press, 1967). Compare its reformulation in F. Zapata, ‘Hacia una sociología del trabajo latinoamericano’, in CLACSO, El sindicalismo latinoamericano en los ochenta (Santiago: CLACSO, 1986).
The classic statement of this kind can be found in M. Barrera, H. Landsberger and Abel Toro, ‘The Chilean labour leader: a report on his background and attitudes’, Industrial and Labor Relations Review, vol. 17 (April 1964) no. 3, and in H. Landsberger’s subsequent, ‘The Labor Elite: Is it Revolutionary?’, in Lipset and Solari (eds), Elites in Latin America (London: Oxford University Press, 1967). Compare its reformulation in F. Zapata, ‘Hacia una sociología del trabajo latinoamericano’, in CLACSO, El sindicalismo latinoamericano en los ochenta (Santiago: CLACSO, 1986).
Samuel Huntington, Political Power in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968).
Jelin and Torre, op. cit. and Eugene Sofer, ‘Recent trends in Latin American labor historiography’, Latin American Research Review XV (1980) no. 1. See also, Samuel Valenzuela, ‘Un marco conceptual para el analisis de la formacion del movimiento laboral’, in CLACSO, El sindicalismo latinoamericano en los ochenta, op. cit.
Spalding, Organized Labor in Latin America (New York: New York University Press, 1977).
Pablo Gonzalez Casanova (ed.), Historia del movimiento obrero en america latina, Mexico City (Siglo XXI) 1984.
Robert Alexander, Organised Labor in Latin America (New York: The Free Press, 1965).
A brief comparison can be found in Skidmore, ‘Workers and Soldiers: Urban Labor Movements and Elite Responses in 20th Century Latin America’, in V. Bernhard (ed.), Elites, Masses and Modernization in Latin America 1850–1930 (Austin, Texas: University of Austin, 1979). Skidmore, however, is regrettably more interested in the anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist ideas of workers than in the influence of Mussolini on the soldiers. For a detailed examination of the influence of such ideas in Chile see Roddick and Haworth, ‘Chile 1924 and 1979: Labour Policy and Industrial Relations through two Revolutions’ (Glasgow: Institute of Latin American Studies Occasional Paper No. 42, University of Glasgow, 1984). Harding, vol. 2 (forthcoming) and Political History of Organized Labor in Brazil, Ph.D., Stanford, 1973 covers the impact of Mussolini’s ideas on Brazil; see also Weffort, ‘Origines do sindicalismo populista no Brasil: a conjuntura do apos-guerra’, Estudos CEBRAP, 4, April-June 1973.
For one possible theory (and an explanation of the increased severity of such upheavals within a partially industrialised economy) see E.V.K. Fitzgerald, ‘The State and the management of accumulation in the periphery’, in Diana Tussie (ed.), Latin America in the World Economy: New Perspectives (Aldershot: Gower, 1983).
Charles Bergquist, ‘What is being done? Some recent studies on the urban working class and organised labor in Latin America’, Latin American Research Review, XVI (1981) no. 2, and Labor in Latin America (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1986).
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© 1989 Jean Carrière, Nigel Haworth and Jacqueline Roddick
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Carrière, J., Haworth, N., Roddick, J. (1989). Introduction: Proletarianisation, Industrialisation and Patterns of Action. In: Carrière, J., Haworth, N., Roddick, J. (eds) The State, Industrial Relations and the Labour Movement in Latin America. Latin American Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-05905-8_1
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