Labor History and Its Challenges: Confessions of a Latin Americanist

Author(s): Charles Bergquist

Source: The American Historical Review , Jun., 1993, Vol. 98, No. 3 (Jun., 1993), pp.
757-764
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2167549

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 AHR Forum
Labor History and Its Challenges:
Confessions of a Latin Americanist

CHARLES BERGQUIST

ASKED TO PLACE THE TWO ACCOMPANYING ARTICLES on Latin American labor

history in the broad context of the field, I began reflecting on what may first
appear as a paradox. On the one hand, the world labor movement is arguably at
its lowest ebb in this century. Rates of unionization, to take one important index,
have been declining in many capitalist countries, most significantly in the United
States, where union density today stands at roughly 16 percent of the nonagri-
cultural labor force, down from about 29 percent as recently as 1975 and only half
of the all-time high of 1953, when it reached 32 percent.' The collapse of the
so-called "workers' states" of Eastern Europe, especially the disintegration of the
Soviet Union itself, has involved far more than the elimination of the Soviet bloc
and the end of the Cold War. Ideologically, it has placed socialist goals and
Marxist philosophy itself decidedly on the defensive.2 For more than a century,
Marxist socialism inspired much of the world labor movement and informed, or
deeply influenced, much of the scholarship on labor, especially the field of labor
history. Now, however, neo-liberalism, not Marxism, is the philosophy that is
sweeping the globe. In the "new world order" of free trade and privatization,
market forces are to unleash the productive potential of all human beings and
sweep away inefficiencies of the bureaucratic, interventionist, social welfare state.
In this new world, unions, the subject of traditional labor history, have no
theoretical or practical place.
On the other hand, as this extraordinary historical transformation has been
unfolding, Western Marxists have been fashioning a large body of innovative
work on labor that ranks among the best scholarship of recent decades. Most
historians, regardless of specialization, are aware of the contributions of British
labor scholar Edward Palmer Thompson.3 His work, in some sense a response to
the Stalinist revelations of the 1950s, influenced a generation of Western social
and labor historians. They have focused on the experience of unorganized as well

' David Brody, "The Enduring Labor Movement: A Job-Conscious Perspective," Working Papers
in Comparative Labor History, no. 1 (July 1992), Center for Labor Studies, University of Wash-
ington, Seattle, p. 1.
2 The magnitude of the crisis of the Marxist Left in Latin America is revealed in two remarkable
and moving recent books by long-time labor scholars and activists: Francisco C. Weffort, Qual
democracia? (Sao Paulo, 1992); and Nicolas Buenaventura, ,Que pas6, camarada? (Bogota, 1992).
3E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York, 1963).

757

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 758 Charles Bergquist

as organized workers, incorporated study of workers' private, family, and

community life into the story of labor's public activities, shifted the focus of labor
history from economics and politics to the social and cultural spheres, and
complicated the traditional preoccupation of labor historians with issues of class
by emphasizing ethnic and gender perspectives. The quantity and quality of this
"new" labor history shows no signs of abating. Recent studies in U.S. labor history,
for example, have been showered with prizes by the historical profession.4 And in
my own field, Latin America, labor history has been judged to have "come of age,"
its conceptual and methodological contributions worthy of emulation by histori-
ans working in otherwise far more developed fields.5
The paradox is, of course, artificial, and it is easily explained. Labor historians
have always empathized with the democratic struggles of working people.6 In the
post-World War II era, however, their optimism about the progressive gains
made by organized labor in this century gave way to growing appreciation of the
ways those advances were being distorted and even subverted in capitalist and
socialist societies alike. By the 1960s, they had turned their historical attention to
questions of "what went wrong," "what might have been," or "what still could be."
As they did so, they challenged traditional labor history in ways that have
implications far beyond that field. It can be argued, in fact, that these challenges
contain within them clues to a new, post-Cold War democratic politics, one
capable of confronting the ideology of neo-liberalism and its claim that the
interests of capitalists are coterminous with the interests of humanity.
Generally speaking, the new social and labor history, as commonly understood
in the profession, has not had this political effect. Its concern with the working
majority in society and its claim to write history "from the bottom up" have been
largely depoliticized and painlessly incorporated into mainstream liberal text-
books and the basic guides and syntheses distributed by the American Historical
Association.7 The challenges to traditional labor history to which I refer are more
specific than this, and they are not well known outside the specialized field of labor
history. The four sketched here-I will call them the challenges of control,

4Alex Keyssar, Out of Work: The First Century of Unemployment in Massachusetts (Cambridge, 1986);
Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (Cambridge, 1990).
5George Reid Andrews, "Latin American Workers,"Journal of Social History, 21 (1987): 311-26;
Emilia Viotti Da Costa, "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?" International Labor and
Working Class History, 36 (Fall 1989): 3-24. See also the responses to Viotti Da Costa's essay in the same
issue of ILWCH by Barbara Weinstein, Perry Anderson, Hobart A. Spalding, and June Nash. For an
idea of the quantity of recent work on Latin American labor, see the bibliographies compiled by John
D. French in 1989 and distributed as typescripts by the Center for Labor Research and Studies,
Florida International University, Miami: "Latin American Labor Studies: An Interim Bibliography
of Non-English Publications"; and "Latin American Labor Studies: A Bibliography of English
Publications through 1989."
6 By democratic, I mean greater participation in, and control over, decisions about production,
reproduction, and distribution by the majority in society.
7Latin American labor history is an exception to this generalization. The best of the "new" labor
history keeps questions of national political power at center stage. See, for example, the recent studies
by Daniel James, Resistance and Integration: Peronism and the Argentine Working Class, 1946-1976
(Cambridge, 1988); John D. French, The Workers' ABC: Class Conflict and Alliances in Modern Sao P
(Chapel Hill, N.C., 1992); Peter Winn, Weavers of Revolution: The Yarur Workers and Chile's Road to
Socialism (New York, 1986); and Jeffrey L. Gould, To Lead as Equals: Rural Protest and Political
Consciousness in Chinandega, Nicaragua, 1912-1979 (Chapel Hill, 1990).

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 Labor History and Its Challenges 759

gender, globalism, and postmodernism-are in some sense interrelated and

mutually reinforcing, and each bears on the question of constructing a democratic
politics for the future. I subtitle these reflections "Confessions of a Latin
Americanist," because, like our colleagues in other fields of labor history, Latin
Americanists have failed to realize and convey the full implications of these
challenges for reconceptualizing labor history, for revitalizing the labor move-
ment, and for constructing a viable democratic politics in the world today.
Control. This challenge emphasizes the centrality of the struggle between
capitalists and workers over control of the labor process. Harry Braverman
discussed this issue in powerful Marxist philosophical and theoretical terms in
1974. Following Marx, he argued that the ability to do purposeful, meaningful
work is what defines us as human beings. Capitalist organization of production, he
claimed, progressively shatters the unity of conceptualizing tasks and executing
them, the unity of mind and hand. It then subdivides tasks into their simplest
components, substituting cheap unskilled labor (often women or children) for
skilled. Braverman argued that this dehumanizing process, inherent in capitalism,
was no less characteristic of the Soviet organization of production, which had
incorporated these principles in its effort to match Western standards of produc-
tivity.8
Labor historians have used the concept of control to fundamentally revise our
understanding of worker protest in nineteenth-century Europe. It now appears
more as resistance to proletarianization and loss of control over the labor process
than it does, as orthodox Marxists would have it, a consequence of either.9 Focus
on the issue of control has also led to a radical recasting of the meaning of
workers' struggles in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries.10 This same perspective has demonstrated the similarities of the
organization of production in industrial capitalist and socialist societies and
probed the ways in which authoritarian factory regimes in both induce worker
consent. I I
Yet the full revisionist potential of the issue of control for labor studies is far
from realized, and its importance for contemporary labor politics can hardly be
overemphasized. Focus on the struggle for control over the work process blurs the
conceptual categories that have customarily defined labor studies. Following
Marx, labor history has traditionally defined its subject as the industrial proletar-
iat, propertyless wage workers in manufacturing industry. Control issues force us
to question the supreme utility of distinctions among workers based on access to

8 Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capitalism: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Cen
(New York, 1974).
9 See, for example, in addition to Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, William H.
Sewell, Jr., Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848
(Cambridge, 1980).
10 Most notably in the works of David Montgomery, Workers' Control in America: Studies in t
of Work, Technology, and Labor Struggles (Cambridge, 1979); and The Fall of the House of Labor: The
Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865-1925 (Cambridge, 1987). A marvelous case
study of control issues is contained in Paul Krause's analysis of labor's struggle at the Carnegie-owned
Homestead steelworks, The Battle for Homestead, 1880-1892: Politics, Culture, and Steel (Pittsburgh,
1992).
11 Michael Burawoy, The Politics of Production: Factory Regimes under Capitalism and Socialism
(London, 1985).

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 760 Charles Bergquist

property. They ask us to rethink the usefulness of the binary opposites that
structure traditional labor history-of free versus coerced labor, urban versus
rural labor, industrial versus agrarian labor. The drive for control links motives
and goals of artisans, so-called "peasants," small producers, blue-collar and
white-collar workers; it helps historians make theoretical sense, for example, of
the remarkable unity of rural workers across property divisions documented by
Lawrence Goodwyn in his study of Populism in the United States.'2 Students of
Latin American labor have likewise documented the unity of workers' struggles
across these conventional dichotomies,'3 but they have yet to develop the issue of
control to explain phenomena as diverse as the persistence and competitiveness of
smallholder production in agriculture and the explosive contemporary develop-
ment of the "informal" economy in urban areas.'4 Ideologically, emphasis on the
issue of control subverts the normative bias against rural, preindustrial, "tradi-
tional" workers or "peasants" that informs much liberal and Marxist labor
history.'5 Politically, control issues provide a labor perspective on the crisis and
demise of the socialist experiments of this century. They also offer democratic
concepts to recast current debates, dominated by neo-liberal assumptions, over
productivity and international competitiveness. Control issues can thus contribute
to a rethinking within the labor movement of how to construct a viable coalition
politics (both domestic and international) able to contest the neo-liberal logic of
the capitalist market in the world today.
Gender. Propelled by the development of the women's movement and women's
studies programs in Europe and the United States in recent decades, work on
gender calls into question the dichotomous privileging of production over
reproduction and the public over the private in traditional labor history. In
focusing almost exclusively on work in the formal economy of patriarchal
societies, and on the public expressions of workers' experience, consciousness,
and action, traditional labor history effectively defined itself as men's history. In
marginalizing women, it virtually eliminated half its subject matter and deprived
itself of crucial tools for analyzing some of its most important-and vexing-
problems. These tools include the function of households in mediating conflicts
between productive and reproductive imperatives, and the role of the family and
the community in investing individual experience with collective meanings.
Finally, gender perspectives yield patterns for analysis (such as the ebb and flow

12 Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America (New York, 1976).
13 For example, Florencia E. Mallon, The Defense of Community in Peru's Central Highlands: Peasant
Struggle and Capitalist Transition, 1860-1940 (Princeton, N.J., 1983); June Nash, We Eat the Mines and
the Mines Eat Us: Dependency and Exploitation in Bolivian Tin Mines (New York, 1979).
14 Clues for this kind of analysis of smallholder production can be found in Michael T. Taussig, The
Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1980); and Nola Reinhardt, Our Daily
Bread: The Peasant Question and Family Farming in the Colombian Andes (Berkeley, Calif., 1988). The
voluminous literature on the informal economy largely obscures the issue of control. See, for
example, Alejandro Portes, Manuel Castells, and Lauren A. Benton, eds., The Informal Economy:
Studies in Advanced and Less Developed Countries (Baltimore, Md., 1989).
15 Although he often celebrated worker resistence to capitalist imperatives, the influential United
States labor and social historian Herbert G. Gutman was very much under the influence of this liberal
modernization theory paradigm. See his Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America (New
York, 1976). For a corrective, see James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant
Resistance (New Haven, Conn., 1985).

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 Labor History and Its Challenges 761

of women's participation in the industrial labor force) that cut across the
periodization schemes of traditional labor history.'6
But the issues posed by gender analysis for traditional labor history do not end
here. As Joan Wallach Scott has demonstrated so convincingly, male historians,
even the likes of E. P. Thompson himself, have often projected onto workers'
actions gendered understandings that distort historical evidence. And historical
evidence itself, even the seemingly "hard" data of, for instance, an industrial
census, may be invested with gender perspectives that confuse categories of
workers and their conditions of work.
The promise of gender analysis in labor history has been easier to articulate
than to practice, however, and it is revealing that, for the most part, application
of these ideas has been the work of women. Moreover, both promise and reality
are far more developed in European and U.S. scholarship than in Latin American
studies, where historians have been slow to follow the lead of social scientists
working on contemporary issues.'7 Perhaps the most dramatic illustration of the
power of gender perspectives in addressing the traditional concerns of labor
history-and providing clues to a democratic politics for the future-is the study
of the intersection of work place and community mobilization.'8 Latin American-
ists have long grasped the importance of these issues in the mining enclaves and
company towns of the region, but there are no historical studies emphasizing the
role of gender in articulating union and community mobilization in cities. As
Latin American social scientists have demonstrated, it is just this confluence of
productive and reproductive issues that explains the phenomenal growth and
political success of the Worker's Party in Brazil, an anomaly, to say the least, in the
generally grim world of labor politics today.19
Globalism. This term refers to the interconnectedness of labor and its struggles
in a world capitalist system. Emanating from theories of capitalist development
pioneered by Latin Americanists in the post-World War II era, globalism
questions the definition of labor history as solely the experience of workers in
manufacturing since the advent of industrial capitalism in the late eighteenth
century. It posits instead a definition that encompasses the experience of workers
since the beginning of the capitalist transformation of the whole modern era
(1500 to the present). Globalism thus challenges the definition of labor history as
a simple story of free wage workers who emerge first in Europe, arguing instead
that their history is inextricably bound up with that of coerced labor in Europe's
colonies. In the era of industrial capitalism itself, this perspective questions the

16 Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988); Mari Jo Buhle, "Ge
and Labor History," in J. Carroll Moody and Alice Kessler-Harris, eds., Perspectives on American Labor
History: The Problems of Synthesis (DeKalb, Ill., 1989); Viotti Da Costa, "Experience versus Structures."
17 This social science literature is synthesized in June Nash, "Gender Issues in Latin American
Labor," International Labor and Working-Class History, 36 (Fall 1989): 44-50.
18 A fine example is Elizabeth Faue's study of labor struggles in Minneapolis, Community of Suffering
and Struggle: Women, Men, and the Labor Movement in Minneapolis, 1915-1945 (Chapel Hill, N.C.,
1991).
19 Gay Willcox Seidman, "Labor and Community Mobilization in Contemporary Brazil and South
Africa," forthcoming, University of California Press; Sonia E. Alvarez, Engendering Democracy in
Brazil: Women's Movements in Transition Politics (Princeton, N.J., 1990); Margaret E. Keck, The Workers'
Party and Democratization in Brazil (New Haven, Conn., 1992).

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 762 Charles Bergquist

idea of a labor history focused on the industrial working class in geographical

regions such as Latin America whose primary function in the liberal international
division of labor was to produce primary agricultural and mineral commodities
for export. In the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth,
workers in export production played a primary role in the making of labor
movements outside the industrial core of the world economy.20
The promise of this approach to labor history is far from realized. It is
nevertheless clear that the integration of world manufacturing production under
the aegis of multinational corporations in recent decades and growing pressure
for the liberalization of international trade and investment (on a world or regional
basis) will impel labor historians, like the labor movement itself, to forge analytical
concepts, and informational and organizational networks, that transcend their
traditional focus on the nation-state. The two accompanying articles on Latin
American labor in this issue of the AHR illustrate this trend and reveal the rich
analytical possibilities of this kind of research. Jonathan Brown shows how the
racism of U.S. workers and Thomas O'Brien how U.S. corporate visions deeply
influenced the nature and outcome of workers' struggles in Mexico and Cuba in
the early twentieth century. The international dimensions of these two case
studies are obvious and straightforward-they flow directly from the reality of
U.S. foreign investment in Latin America. It is a measure of the parochialism of
traditional labor history that, as both authors rightly point out, studies of this kind
are still so rare.
Less obvious are the ways in which thinking about labor in global terms raises
fundamental theoretical and interpretive questions. For example, labor-based
theories of economic development-particularly the idea that in a world of
relative capital mobility and labor immobility, trade between high-wage and
low-wage economies is inherently unequal-challenge both classical liberal and
Marxist assumptions and need to be tested through historical analysis.2' Contrary
to the ethnocentric cultural assumptions (and covert racism) that pervade much
scholarly and popular understanding of American history, it is the legacy of
coerced versus free labor that seems best to explain the divergent development of
the European colonies of this hemisphere.22 Lenin notwithstanding, the origins of
imperialism, and of the global expansion of capitalismr generally, may have their
primary locus in the democratic struggles of working people.23 The contempo-
rary debate among European historians over the concept and timing of the
Industrial Revolution, which turns on the notion that long before the late

20 Here I will cite my own work, which can serve as a guide to that of many others: "Latin American
History in World Perspective," in Georg G. Iggers and Harold T. Parker, eds., International Handbook
of Historical Studies: Contemporary Research and Theory (Westbrook, Conn., 1979), 371-86; Labor in Latin
America: Comparative Essays on Chile, Argentina, Venezuela, and Colombia (Stanford, Calif., 1986); "Latin
American Labor History in Comparative Perspective," Labour/Le Travail, 25 (Spring 1990): 189-98.
21 Arghiri Emmanuel, Unequal Exchange: A Study of the Imperialism of Trade (New York, 1972).
22 Despite a formal commitment to liberal development theory, Ralph Davis, The Rise of the Atlantic
Economies (Ithaca, N.Y., 1973), provides much information and analysis to support this argument. See
especially chaps. 15 and 16.
23 I try to make this case for the United States in "The Social Origins of U.S. Imperialism, or,
Linking Labor and LaFeber," in David M. McCreery, ed., Latin American Labor History, forthcoming,
University of Alabama Press.

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 Labor History and Its Challenges 763

eighteenth century, Western Europe experienced a "proto-industrialization,"

including the proletarianization of labor, has developed as though the Atlantic
trading system, built on coerced labor, virtually did not exist.24 Labor historians
could find inspiration to participate in this debate in the classic 1944 study by
Caribbean scholar Eric Williams. Williams found the origins of British capitalism
in slavery, and although his specific arguments have been much revised and
amended, his initial vision remains remarkably intact.25 To establish the links
between the development of free labor in Europe and the history of labor
degradation in the Third World is more than an exercise in establishing historical
truth. Ideologically, it undermines the cultural chauvinism and racism that
continue to divide world labor.
Postmodernism. "Historical truth" is a notion discordant with the postmodern
assumptions that today challenge traditional labor history. Postmodernism decon-
structs discourse to reveal the historically contingent, the contextual, the con-
structed, indeed, the autobiographical nature of all knowledge. For historians,
these are not new ideas in themselves; in fact, they form the core of our
disciplinary logic.26 But many postmodernists carry historicism to the point of
denying the possibility of knowing in any universal sense. More specifically, they
deny the assumption of progress, including democratic progress, embedded in
both of the "master narratives," liberalism and Marxism, that emerged out of the
nineteenth-century European experience with industrialization. Not surprisingly,
labor historians, whose field lies at the core of these master narratives, are often
extremely chary of postmodernism and its implications.27
Clearly, however, postmodernism can have a democratic face. Its emphasis on
discourse can be employed to discover and decenter the social bias in hegemonic
discourse and legitimize understandings of the past generated by groups of the
oppressed-workers, women, non-Westerners, ethnic and religious minorities,
and gays. But to the extent that it denies the possibility that some stories about the
past might be "better" or "truer" than others, postmodernism creates seemingly
insoluble problems for a politics of the oppressed. What one otherwise sympa-
thetic historian called the "terrifying relativist consequences" of postmodern
assumptions28 seem to lead to a politics and a history of unmediated, selfish group
interest.
That some stories about the past prove to be "better" or "truer" over time than
others may be clearer to historians of the Third World than it is to historians in
the developed West. The experience of the oppressed reveals more starkly the
reality of exploitative social relations than does the experience of their oppressors.
Whose story about slavery proved, over time, to be accepted as truer? That of the

24 See, for example, Charles Tilly's synthesis, "Flows of Capital and Forms of Industry in Europe,
1500-1900," Theory and Society, 12 (March 1983): 123-42.
25 Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1944); Barbara L. Solow and Stan
Engerman, eds., British Capitalism and Caribbean Slavery: The Legacy of Eric Williams (Cambridg
26John Toews, "'Historicizing': Is the Historical Turn in the Human Sciences History's Turn?"
typescript, May 1992; Charles Bergquist, "In the Name of History," Latin American Research Review,
25 (1990): 156-76.
27 Bryan Palmer, Descent into Discourse: The Reification of Language and the Writing of Soc
(Philadelphia, 1990).
28 Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, 54.

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 764 Charles Bergquist

slave or the slaveowner? Whose story about European colonialism? In this sense,
the history of the modern world is one of democratic progress. Will the fate of
women's story about patriarchy be different? Or that of labor's story about
capitalism or about the socialism we have known?
All of the challenges I have described work to democratize traditional labor
history by exposing its urban, male, Eurocentric bias. As they decenter labor
history, and question the binary opposites that have been used to define it, they
mirror postmodern precepts. But the labor history described here need not
renounce the idea of democratic progress in the modern world. In fact, it can
provide essential elements for the renewal of democratic struggle.
Democratic struggle will prove futile, however, unless it challenges the other
notion of progress embedded in the master narratives of the past, the idea of
unlimited economic growth. Capitalism's great virtue, its awesome capacity to
expand economic production and consumption, is also its great defect. Capital-
ism's health depends on expansion. And economic expansion (which, for all its
human benefits, has always entailed great social and environmental costs) now
obviously threatens our collective health and that of the planet itself. Clearly, the
issues of production and consumption have different meanings for the developed
and underdeveloped societies of the world and for the privileged and underpriv-
ileged classes within them. But as long as returns to labor are predicated solely on
the logic of economic productivity and we continue to define human progress as
ever greater consumption of material things, struggles for greater social equity
and responsible environmental policy in a world of infinite capital mobility are
destined to failure.
The history of workers' struggle for control over the way they work is replete
with clues to a different, more democratic and sustainable, vision of human
progress. Historically, workers have mixed labor and leisure and have resisted the
fragmentation of production and speed-ups that capitalists pursue in the name of
productivity and competitiveness. They have aspired to do a "fair day's work for
a fair day's pay"-enough of each to allow them to enjoy and control other aspects
of their lives. They have found satisfaction in the fruits of their labor and in doing
a job "right." That for too long these attitudes were associated with free, white,
laboring men need not deter us from recognizing their universal, democratic, and
timely significance for the politics of working people today.

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