The Heritage of Authoritarianism and its Impacts

In 1989 Brazil was celebrating the Centenary of the Republic, although there was actually little to celebrate if one takes into account the fact that, on the whole, democratic governments have been an exception throughout the republican period. At that time the country was going through yet another democratic transition following the end of a military dictatorship that had seized power in 1964. Today, after almost two decades of free elections and democratic life and the election of former metal worker and union leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva as president in the elections of 2002,Footnote ¹ the shadow of dictatorship seems to have faded away. However, it is important to shed light on the processes that unfolded during the long winters of authoritarian regimes, as we can still find their influence in the working-class memory of today.

If we think about the most recent authoritarian experience, which lasted from 1964 up to 1985, we can easily identify the working class and its organizations as having been the main targets of the period. Urban and rural workers were victimized by the harsh economic measures and by the repression that reduced their attempted political participation by smashing their organizations (unions and political parties).Footnote ²

From the mid-1950s to the beginning of the 1960s, the Brazilian urban and rural labor movements had lived through a sort of golden age of their history. It came to its apex during the João Goulart government from 1961 to 1964. It was a period of intense political activity as Goulart, picking up on Vargas' heritage and modernizing it within the Brazilian Labor Party (PTB), tried to reform Brazilian capitalism by means of his so-called “basic reforms.” The labor movement participated intensely in an alliance under the coordination of the Communists and Labor Party militants. The activities of the illegal Brazilian Communist Party (PCB) within the unions and its undercover activities inside other parties put it in a relatively strong position in Brazilian society. Using the supposed implantation of a “trade unionist republic” in Brazil as an excuse, military forces and right-wing civilian movements staged a political coup that launched the country into more than two decades of military dictatorship.

Just after the 1964 events, an intervention in the trade unions banned the most militant leaderships and introduced conservative elements into their directorates. That turned them into highly collaborative organizations that put support for government's interests in first place, to the detriment of workers' demands.

For the working class and those who want to reconstruct its history and memory, the authoritarian regimes have created difficulties in researching and accessing certain kinds of sources such as registers, minutes of meetings, economic records, memos, photos, etc. One of the most aggressive actions that took place during the periods of dictatorship was the widespread destruction of working-class documents and sources within the trade unions. Any intervention process always meant that all militant activities were to be banned and everything that was a reminder of such militancy was to be destroyed. In the search for proof to justify its persecution, the government and its agents captured and removed from circulation large numbers of important documents. Some of those documents have since been recovered. The opening of the Political Police Department files (DOPS)Footnote ³ in the 1990s has given access to a large number of the documents seized in the past.

The impacts of repression on members of the working class were even more profound. Using torture, imprisonment, and banishment, the authoritarian governments established a dividing line that has split generations of militants and activists. It created a feeling of discontinuity between the histories of two generations.Footnote ⁴ Each new generation has become used to thinking of itself as starting everything from point zero, with no links to the past. Thus the scene was set for a battle with both symbolic and material dimensions, between what would come to be called the “New Unionism” (post-1964) and the “Old” (prior to 1964).

That struggle can be clearly identified in the events of the last period of the military dictatorship, at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s. The left-wing parties at that time struggled for hegemony within the labor movement. The new generation of union leaders coordinated by Lula criticized and battled against what they called pelegos (conservative union leaders) and their allies, the “traditional” left-wing parties like the PCB. Those new leaders would build the “New Unionism”—which would be organized within the Trade Union Confederation (CUT) and the Workers Party (PT) as alternatives to what they criticized in the attitudes and tendencies of the labor movement in Brazil. They tried to build an identity more related to certain aspects of the anarchist tradition associated with the beginning of the twentieth century than to the laborite or communist ones of the immediate pre-1964 period.

The “new unionists” and the PT, in their dispute with the PCB, produced a highly critical vision of the working-class trajectory, especially in regard to the pre-1964 period when the PCB was hegemonic. Obviously that ideological clash had a major impact on the way labor history and labor memory were viewed and treated. The allied set of union militants and academics worked intensively on the building of a new identity for the labor movement, which came to be hegemonic in the 1980s.

Nevertheless, it must be stressed that the struggles against the authoritarian regime continued. Even with the internal debates and disputes they had to deal with, the Unions did not paralyze their history in those periods of change. Besides that, the period of the 1970s and 1980s was very prolific if we think in terms of the university research groups involved in the debate about the world of labor in Brazil. If we avoid being overly captivated by the representations of the actors themselves, we can see that many questions about the trajectory of the Brazilian working class in 1970s and 1980s need to be analyzed very carefully from two perspectives: rupture and continuity.

If we were to begin by presuming that what we have is a trajectory of rupture, we would only be addressing part of the problem. Moreover, if we believe, as Michael PollakFootnote ⁵ does, that continuity and shared experience, however slight they may be, are important for the feeling of belonging and the relationship of that feeling to memory, then we can easily imagine the impact that the sensation of rupture and tearing apart has had on the experience, identity, and memory of the Brazilian working class.

Considered from that angle, the past is of no account as the class has been defeated in its attempts, and therefore it becomes necessary to build up a new trajectory that can lead the new generation away from the mistakes of the past. That implied that history was not to be remembered or celebrated. What came out of it all was a certain carelessness in the way the new unionists treated class history. Nevertheless, it is important to mention that there was some concern about social memory at that time and actions were being taken to try to deal with the labor movement documentation produced “during the struggle against dictatorship.”Footnote ⁶

The idea of rupture (very vivid, especially in the 1970s and 1980s due to the ongoing ideological disputes) endured in academic working-class history and in union circles for a long time. However, given the peculiarities of the times, from the 1990s onward, there was an increasingly strong movement to establish a view more concerned with the continuities than the ruptures. In that regard, the studies of E.P. ThompsonFootnote ⁷ have made a fundamental contribution.

The authoritarian regimes have strongly marked the remembrances of those who have had to face them. In the accounts of militant workers it is very common to find the dictatorships as the hallmarks of their narratives. As Maurice HalbwachsFootnote ⁸ has pointed out, the individual memory of a member of a group is marked by the group's collective memory. That means that to elaborate his memory the individual utilizes collective reference points and social contexts. Despite the fact that it is an individual construction, we can always find group parameters imposed upon it.

In the workers' accounts of events, whether great or small, the violence of the authoritarian regimes is always present.Footnote ⁹ They talk about themselves as an entire generation that survived the dictatorships, discuss the loss of their jobs, how they went into prison, how they dealt with the violent interrogations, and the impacts on their families. The memory of the working class bears the marks of the authoritarian regimes. In the unions' archives it is not hard to find testimonials that portray the everyday struggle against the government's repressive power.

As we have shown, it is easy to identify the various difficulties introduced into working-class life, in its broader sense, by successive authoritarian governments. For certain moments of those periods when the dictatorships were in power, the only surviving material sources for those who wish to research the workers' trajectories in Brazil consist of newspapers and incomplete official archives and records, which makes their task exceedingly difficult. It has been made somewhat easier however, by the unions' participation in the effort to build a more democratic history. Oral history and social memory projects have helped a lot in those initiatives, increasing the importance of public history.

The Return of the Repressed: Memory and Public History Formation

In a scenario marked by missing union archives and silenced voices, the application of oral history to social memory issues obviously had a larger role to play, and it has been doing just that. There are now a considerable number of studies in Brazil dealing with working-class history and memory based on oral history methodology.

The Brazilian Association of Oral History (ABHO), created in 1994, is an example of how the response to the challenge of collecting the voices of the past has grown in the last fifteen years. In spite of the young age of the national association, oral history methodology has been known in Brazil since the 1970s, and the first oral history course was headed by Mexican and North American professors at the Getúlio Vargas Foundation (Fundação Getúlio Vargas) in Rio de Janeiro. The 1980s were the scene of many masters and doctoral programs in oral history, and there were an increasing number of publications devoted to it. The Rio de Janeiro Working Class Memory Archive (AMORJ), created in 1987, was the result of years of research into the working class in that region of Brazil, showing that this subject was already a social science and history priority.

In that sense, we can identify the perspectives adopted by some of the works produced concerning memory and oral history of the working class. The work of Angela de Castro Gomes gives us primary sources by publishing interviews with militants and workers;Footnote ¹⁰ other studies, like those of Helio da Costa and Paulo Fontes, are more analytical works that have made use of oral sources.Footnote ¹¹ In regard to the field of public history, increasing use is being made of memory by social groups as a form of social representation and construction of their pasts. An oral history approach enables the establishment of an important dialogue between society and the means of knowledge production. That could also be the case when memory discourse is used to support collective, institutional and public actions undertaken by both working and militant groups.

Without denying the importance of other perspectives, we can definitely relate the emergence of that kind of work to the democratic transition of the 1980s, which, with the strong support of the working-class movement, led the country away from the authoritarian regime. It was important to listen to not only what the new generation of workers was saying about the combative present, but also to what the older generation was saying about its past. As GomesFootnote ¹² indicates, a part of the undercover working-class memory then came to light.

It must also be noted that even within the trade unions, sporadic attempts were made during the 1980s to encourage members to donate and preserve any documents they had relating to class history. The union and political education processes within the unions also played a distinguished role in using and stimulating the work done with memory.Footnote ¹³ In fact, if that kind of concern was an exception at the time, it is now becoming much stronger in the Brazilian working-class scenario. Nowadays, the unions can see a bigger field to be occupied in the public sphere. As one militant has put it:

Here, we would point out a few examples of unions that have been creating so-called “working-class archives,” which have working-class memory preservation as their goal, namely: ABC Metal Workers (ABC region of São Paulo), Volta Redonda Metal Workers (Rio de Janeiro), Railway WorkersFootnote ¹⁵ from Rio de Janeiro and, even more recently, the Oil Workers Union of Brazil's state oil company Petrobras-Sindipetro (all over Brazil).

Despite the fact that for many years they were scattered and isolated experiences and in certain cases did not survive, they have nevertheless made an important contribution by calling attention to such a sensitive issue. Even though several of such efforts within the labor movement have disappeared, another set has sprung up within the universities, as we have shown.

Although based on a broader foundation than oral sources alone, those experiences have brought together a wide range of workers, and union documentation offers an opportunity for a much wider public (workers, students, press, militants, researchers, etc.) to come into contact with the accounts of different generations of workers and militants, thereby expanding knowledge about a variety of periods. It must also be said, however, that there is still a lot to be done, especially in Brazil, where part of working-class history and memory is still far from the archives, especially the public ones.

The university archives have not only been important for academic researchers, they have also established links with the labor movement regarding the organization of debates, seminars, and exhibitions, thus imbuing the subject with greater legitimacy. Moreover, the university archives and the labor movement have exchanged knowledge about the production and circulation of information. That kind of articulation between university and other social groups represented by their institutions, such as the unions, has pointed to the existence of a more mature dialogue between those two spheres. The experience is still relatively new and has not spread very widely in Brazil but it can be observed in those countries where the unions still have an identity role in the local political culture.

This is the case to a much greater extent in France, for example, where there is the Collective (Collectif) of Oral and Social History Documentation Centers (CODHOS), the Maison des Syndicats et de la Mémoire Ouvrière (ADIAMOS), the Seine-Saint-Denis Oral History and Memory Association (AHMO—in association with University of Paris); and the CGT Social History Institute, created in France by the General Workers Confederation (CGT) in 1982 for the purpose of registering and narrating to the workers their very own history. Despite the distance in terms of time and space, the French experience certainly has something to tell us if we consider that most of its archives and institutes were created after or during the great crisis the French unionsFootnote ¹⁶ lived through in the 1980s.

In Brazil, something very similar happened in the 1990s as a crisis of identity and belonging hit the workers and the labor movement hard, producing a need to review the historical legacy of the working class. The unions' productions concerning workers' history and memory seemed to be a good alternative way to reach out to a changed working class that was undergoing a process of fragmentation and having to struggle with a reduced sense of class identity. In fact, such concern on the part of unions regarding historical documents, remembrance, and heritage, offers other opportunities for undertaking institutional and collective actions within their institutions as well as in public spheres.

Political Uses of the Past: Unions, Memory, and Public History

The key issue here is to make it clear that the production of historiography is definitely not restricted solely to intellectual academic discourse. Many institutions, organizations, and media related to unions and left-wing militants are determined to tell their own history with their own interpretations. Many of them are sponsored by labor unions. Such attitudes are intended to support certain ideological and political points of view. Those fields of production and use, however, belong to a particular study area of public history that is increasingly being analyzed by professional and academic historians like university research groups.Footnote ¹⁷

The examples of the ABC Metal Workers Union (SMABC) and the Petrobras Oil Workers' Union (Sindipetro), among others, show the rise of a fresh awareness and knowledge about their own historical processes and contemporary public roles. This considerable expansion in the issuing of bulletins, newspapers, and periodicals, as well as in the use of the internet by union members, is all evidence of the use of social memory. Consequently, there is also a symbolic and political discourse to back up the unions' choices as to what should be ratified as part of their memories. François Hartog and Jacques Revel have already indicated that

That is the reason behind our argument that it was not just by luck or chance that those memory-preserving actions increased after the beginning of the twenty-first century, especially after 2002, with Lula's victory in the presidential elections. It was obvious that after the elections and the admission of many left-wing politicians and union actors from the PT and CUT into important governmental positions, there was bound to be some formal marking and symbolic representation of their background of struggle and that this was welcomed within the ABC Metal Workers Union and, shortly thereafter, within the Petrobras Workers' Union (Sindipetro) in the form of the “Petrobras' Workers' Memory” project.Footnote ¹⁹ Those projects were possible, not only because of the new weight of the political Left, but also because of its new financial power. After all, not every union, association, or group of workers can afford to invest in archives, publishing, research, or other such activities.

The great resurgence of archives and their production in our contemporary society confirms the desire of many social groups and institutions for the presence of memoryFootnote ²⁰ as one of the parameters of their search for identity and recognition. However, it is very difficult to piece together all the aspects and reasons behind such mnemonic actions. In fact, one good aspect that we can identify is the celebrations and other activities undertaken by militants and unionists in the performance of their new political and public roles.

The desire of the ABC Union workers for an authentic history constructed by themselves is also a way of seeking public affirmation and marking their presence in the Brazilian social movement, in history, and in the resistance to dictatorship. Furthermore, it represents an attempt to refresh a sense of tradition detached from the trajectory of the workers' movement prior to 1964, which they referred to as “Old Unionism.” Such practices could be used as a means of acquiring information for the purpose of creating an historical consciousness as experienced by the militants of the New-Unionism movement from late the 1970s and early 1980s up to the present. For them, social memory represented a way of creating, not only public history material, but a collective identity with younger workers that had not yet shared the same experiences.

Recognition of such facts is determinant in the discussions about the trajectory of New Unionism in Brazil and the years of change and labor movement crises of the 1990s.Footnote ²¹ The de-nationalization of the Brazilian economy and the neoliberal paradigms that were imposed placed the working class in a very menacing situation. Besides, in a more silent and subtle way, the economic transformations were decisive to the development of the workers' identity crisis in that scenario: the clash of generations within the factories, the changing of the workers' profile at the same time as the very spaces of work were shifting, transformed by the global markets and their modern industrial and managerial strategies.

This entire scenario has turned the Brazilian world of labor upside down compared to the experiences of the “heroic 1980s.” The need for change was clearly present in the 1990s, mainly inside the unions, in their pursuit of new strategies that would be acceptable to workers of the younger generation that had not experienced the struggles of the past:

Accordingly, achieving some kind of involvement between the unions and their workers became even more necessary. What was at risk was union recognition by the social actors involved in those relations. If the union could not be recognized and identified by the workers as a symbolic and collective social space where their own experiences could find other voices and faces, then its own political identity constructed in the previous thirty years could be menaced.

The threat of “corrosion”Footnote ²³ of the workers' identities by the new modalities of work that confronted them and the continuous changes of labor, time, and space was a real problem. It had to be dealt with by a class and by unions that had lost their powers to act (conquered in the previous decade) when all the economic and political rules were changed. That forced the need for something that could act as a kind of “tool” for maintaining labor and union identities and their policies.

In fact it was at the end of 1990s that the Center of Documentation and Memory (CDeM) was created by the ABC Metal Workers Union. Shortly after that, in 2001, their biggest union and workers memory project was launched: the “ABC de Luta” (ABC of Struggle).Footnote ²⁴ On the union's webpage, the first words about this project are “We have a history to tell.”Footnote ²⁵

Their stance introduces a discourse in which the workers have finally achieved a collective situation brought about and maintained by their own associates that shows the historical trajectory of struggles and memory of work and unionism in Brazil. Furthermore, it indicates that those Unions are deeply involved in processes of learning and using new communication and information channels within cyberspace. Collective identity-building and preservation is legitimized with the help of the symbolic capitalFootnote ²⁶ that is to be found in a new space that is not limited to the Union's walls. Now it is displacing and connecting many other publics. At the very least, this effort reveals that today there is a need for some unions and some former workers' groups to be able to talk about the past with legitimacy.

From a public history perspective, that quest for legitimacy puts workers at the center as the authors of their own history. Created in and focused on the public domain, on the World Wide Web, where all material is accessible to everyone, whether they are researchers or not, the ABC workers' example has become not merely a social or political project but a singular strategy, a process of fighting for recognition conducted by the class itself and directed at civil society as a whole.

The recognition and identity issue expressed by the conflicts and reconciling acts taking place between the social actors has been pointed out by Axel Honneth.Footnote ²⁷ In this relationship, identity is created whenever the individual or collective actor is recognized by others in one or another of their capacities or singularities. It is not all that different for the unions. Firmly linked, as they are, to the recent political scenario, their actions within society are representing an ever more heterogeneous public, thus making their recognition important.

A Risky Task: Between the “Desire” and “Work” of Memory

In our research we felt that the issue of recognition was a good pathway toward an increased understanding of the internal complexity of workers' identity (collective or otherwise) which nowadays appears more fragmented and plural than ever. Paul Ricoeur affirms that the dynamics implicit in the activity of recognition, in the legal sphere, are formed in every institutionalization process in which legitimacy is being sought.Footnote ²⁸ Thus, that search can be considered as part of the social and political self-development process within the sphere of social life.Footnote ²⁹ In order to offer a broader space that could be distinguished in the public domain, a mechanism of national recognition and identity also had to be brought forth. However, between the “desire” and “work” of memory, addressed by the research work of Nora and Ricoeur, respectively, the unions' working-class goal of developing an institutionalized policy of valorization of the past could also lead us to a situation of “abuse of memory.”Footnote ³⁰

What we are saying is that memory, as well as identity, is possible only in a field of disputes. Thus, like Tzvetan Todorov,Footnote ³¹ we understand that the search for memory, sometimes tied to the desire for justice, can also lead to a fight for power and an abuse of memory. If the act of “conservation without selection does not constitute the work of memory,”Footnote ³² it is clear that the memory that unions want to transmit to society should also be considered and chosen carefully to serve their goals.

Their actions are extremely important to show that the working class and the unions are not “dead,” and also to point out the workers' own knowledge of their historical trajectory. The work of memory could be viewed here as a part of a class consciousness undergoing a process of continuous development. Even in this case, however, we need to be aware of the fact that when a so-called “collective memory” is designed to fit a union's webpage, the possibilities of a biased selection are very real. Likewise, if we think about the network of interviewees, when someone in particular is interviewed and recorded while others are not, we could actually be dealing with a similar situation.

It is clear that constructions based on memory always involve some kind of selection process. Even when the individual remembers something, he does so based on reference frameworks that are part of his own identity. The concept of social memory frameworksFootnote ³³ tells us that memory is a construction built up by groups or individuals that is possible only when the social environment is recognized as being part of the set of things, persons, groups, and symbols that are identified by the person who remembers. In short, when unions' institutions put their past on display and attempt to create an official memory with accesses involving all types of media (electronic, virtual, printed), it gives those groups an opportunity to make their own history, telling it with their own actors, and that may lead either to salvaging a genuine heritage based on information and experiences effectively lived by workers or to the kind of “abuse of memory” of which we have spoken. After all, this effort is not only justified by the needs of the working class, but also by its quest for legitimacy, political identity, and power. Furthermore, some unions have moved from complete indifference to memory to being strongly seduced by it, something that is not so unusual in Brazil.

In the meantime the ABC Metal Workers Union has its ongoing project, “ABC of Struggle” (with a large amount of material in the form of photos, registered accounts, and many transcript documents from congresses, mandates, and newspaper clippings with the Union as the target subject). The Memory of Petrobras Oil Workers (Memória dos Trabalhadores da Petrobras) also presents a large online database with at least three hundred recorded interviews, photos, and other documents that are related to their own labor experience. On the unions' webpages, it is possible to navigate easily through photos and other documents, and unabridged recordings of interviews with workers and unionists. Access to this material enables us to get closer to unions' timelines and plunge deeper inside their trajectories in the Brazilian political scenarios from the 1970s on.

However, one problem still persists. What is the method used to handle and organize those materials so they can finally be displayed in public by means of virtual spaces, considering that origin of the sponsorship lies in the very companies that the unions have links with? Companies like Volkswagen, Scania, Ford, General Motors, and also Petrobras are sponsoring the projects but they may also be viewing them as a good way to score points in favor of their own company trajectories. There has also been important support stemming from the effects of the so-called Cultural Incentive Law promulgated by the Brazilian government.

There are different interests involved in this process of building and maintaining this memory. Whether from the union perspective or from that of company marketing, the dialogue established in the cooperation between them shows an even more complex strategic game underway in which memory is used as a political and symbolic instrument. Even so, we do not overlook the fact that union participation in the process seems to have been strong. After all, the way the interviews were done, the original idea, and most of the decision-making was in the unions' hands. On the other hand, it is very important to point out none of those actions is entirely controlled by union resources or union actors.

It has been necessary to negotiate with the companies from the beginning, as well as to employ private groups experienced in working with archives, interviews, and this type of production. Thus, the collective memory that they declare themselves owners of is also constructed by other hands in addition to those of the workers and union activists. That consideration was present even in the case of the metalworkers and exemplified by their dialogue with the Museum of the Person (Museu da Pessoa), a specialized organization that seeks to

All of this shows that the field of public history research is expanding in Brazil. Activities related to the world of labor have been on the increase ever since the mid-1990s. A good example is a project called “Profession in Extinction,” sponsored by the National Confederation of Metal Workers (CNM-CUT) and developed by the Museum of the Person, which demonstrates the need to talk about the past. It is clearly the Union's effort to blend with its past and, most of all, its need to tell, register, and protect it. Memory content undoubtedly shows how information management (not only of the memory subject) and its technologies could be useful inside the unions in Brazil and other countries.

In the year 2001, a New York Times article stated that “unions can stage a comeback by the effective use of information technology. The internet could provide the means for a strategic advance by organized labor.”Footnote ³⁵ The interesting idea here is that this kind of judgment crops up among different unions in different places. It can also be seen in the Brazilian experience, as one union member puts it:

Some researchers have identified the increase of media and virtual approaches as signs of a new kind of unionism and militancy. Boaventura de Sousa SantosFootnote ³⁷ and Fabien GranjonFootnote ³⁸ have pointed to some of these actions, relating them to global cases and French cases, respectively.

In that sense, some aspects of memory building and management by unions that have been shown here and the ongoing expansion into cyberspace could become the object of public history research yet to be undertaken in Brazil. In France, as in Brazil, the knowledge that is being constructed points to a very similar idea:

What they are doing, combined with the information and communication technologies they are using, demonstrates the possibilities of a potential field for public history research. Public history could be an essential element in the struggle against a lack of history by providing the general public with a useful entryway. Historic experience that has been voiced by the very militants who lived it out seems to offer a new and promising way forward.

In addition to all the iconographic, audio, and written documents that exist in the SMABC and Sindipetro-Petrobras archives and webpages, their bulletins are now on the internet as well, and their memories review an important part of the political trajectory of those union institutions.

Andreas Huyssen indicates that the “boosting” of memory (in those cases where technology plays an important role for groups with computers, internet, and digital archives) is in fact the warning sign of an age without memory.Footnote ⁴¹ All this technology could actually create the threat of forgetting. Nevertheless, it was this very technology that almost ten years ago gave the ABC and Sindipetros unions the means of telling others something of their past. Even with the selection made by them, their sources are now more accessible and well known to themselves and to others.

It seems that at present, all that we can see in this field still only represents what the academic researchers, or nowadays, the unions themselves, feel inclined to analyze and expose. The main problem that we continue to face is that most unions continue to lack any archives at all, while others try to fight that lack of history, memory, and information by making a rational projection of the memory they desire.

It can be seen that some well-organized unions, politically expressive and vertically well-structured, may be creating the foundations for a “desirable” history. It is clear from the union projects examined above that the unions are providing a response to all that they believe has been destroyed by the changes in the world of labor. It is possible that a new working-class history or a “more desirable” Brazilian working-class history could be arising from the hands and mouths of the militants themselves.

Conclusion: Alternative Ways into the Future

In this brief conclusion, by drawing on our own experiences in researching working-class life and actions, particularly the aspects of history and memory,Footnote ⁴² we would like to pinpoint some relevant issues.

In general terms, oral history has played a crucial role in Brazilian working-class studies as a contributing factor in enabling the limitations of the traditional perspective to be overcome, and it needs to be firmly placed on political agendas and research agendas. Oral history can be used to reestablish the severed links between past and present and show that despite the differences between periods and generations, there are visible links of identity in the trajectory of the working class.

If we consider the last fifty years we could say that oral history and social memory also have an important role to play in regard to working-class studies. While it is true that the trade union archives are, by and large, very disappointing, the retired workers associations, for example, offer a very interesting starting point. Sometimes, because of the idea that they are things of the past, old people are almost completely left out of the everyday life of the trade unions. By working with retired people, the researcher may be able to uncover large parcels of material that they removed from their trade unions during certain periods to preserve it from the fury of repression.

We would say that in the Brazilian case the workers’ organizations are sometimes much more departure points than points of arrival. Digging into trade union archives, we managed to uncover photos, records, minutes of meetings, and so on, but it was not easy to get to that point. Victimized by repression, the members of the group needed to go through long sessions of interviews before they could build up a relationship of trust and the oral history approach made that process easier. After that, the interviewees would keep offering materials they had saved from the military interventions in their trade unions.

What makes that task so urgent is the fact that the militants from the 1940s and 1950s are dying. After their deaths, it will be almost impossible to address their memories, as, by and large, they have never recorded or written anything down about their lives or their militancy. We could try to get at something through their families, but it would inevitably be only a part.

This reality shows us that the researcher's path is a long and unpredictable one, as much of the material is discovered as part of the process of establishing a relationship with the militant. However, part of that trust is fed back to the trade unions, and in that perspective those same unions can eventually become transformed into a symbol of the struggle to preserve the militants' heritage. In fact, as we have indicated by narrating the actions of some unions over the last ten years, there is increasing concern to make issues of memory a priority on union agendas.

The 1990s brought a time of internal and external crisis to the Brazilian working class because of the changes in Brazilian economy and politics, and so the unions were also obliged to modify their own strategies and union objectives as new forms of work appeared and new workers took their places alongside the 1980s militants.

There is already a clash of generationsFootnote ⁴³ inside the Brazilian working class, and that is one of the reasons why memory has been so well-developed in the last ten years. Furthermore, the ideological and political questions that are linked with the trajectory of the Brazilian political Left over the last few years have to be reviewed (going beyond mere considerations of rupture and continuity); not only have labor relations changed but so have the workers themselves and their identities.

When analyzing the cases of SMABC and Sindipetro, it can be seen that all those aspects could have been articulated during the time when the trade unions' directorates were receiving incentives from the government and private groups to conduct projects on working-class memory. But that was not so easy to accomplish if we think about the obstacles to trade union activities that existed during the restructuring process that took place in the late 1980s and through the 1990s. All trade union efforts were being directed at facing unemployment and harsh economic conditions. Nevertheless, those unions actually managed to elaborate such projects and include them in their union routine. Nowadays, when the very existence of the unions is under attack, new forms of identity based on the trajectory of the class are being created.

The existing archives and memory projects that (according to them) have used oral history methods of research should increase their articulation and communication. However, from the academic and historical point of view, the way the unions have used technological and virtual media resources to handle their material it is not yet clear. In the projects we can detect the presence of many “organic intellectuals”Footnote ⁴⁴ that could be constructing another parallel memory at the same time as public history is being produced. It is clear that it would not only serve the interests of researchers but also the trade unionists if they could both be induced to head in the same direction. Only by integrating academic and political efforts will it be possible to achieve success in such activities. However important the political support stemming from some unionists may be, the individual efforts of interviewing workers and the ensuing scientific and academic works could effectuate the broader approach that this kind of project needs.

That is why they need to have their experiences heard, even if the channel chosen is not perfect or ideal. One of the difficulties of this research is analyzing the impact of those projects on the workers themselves. Another challenge is to analyze whether the manner of those practices represents positive or negative points in regard to the future of working-class memory in Brazil. Despite their intersections we should be aware that the fields of institutional memory and public history are not necessarily identical.