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When the Plumber(s) Come to Fix a Country: Doing Labor History in Brazil

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 March 2013

John D. French and
Alexandre Fortes
John D. French
Affiliation:
Duke University
Alexandre Fortes
Affiliation:
Universidade Federal Rural do Rio de Janeiro
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Extract

Those with a sharp tongue might say that labor historians in contemporary Brazil operate in the shadows or, to be more accurate, the shadow cast by the success of Latin America's most famous trade unionist, who served as president from 2002–2010. The field's growth in the number and quality of practitioners, as well as the breadth of their ambitions, cannot be separated from the memorable metalworkers' strikes of 1979 and 1980, the subsequent defeat of the military dictatorship in 1985, and the construction of a militant trade unionism and the radical Workers' Party that ran Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva for president in five successive elections between 1989 and 2006.

Information

Type
New Directions in Labor History Around the Globe
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 82 , Fall 2012, pp. 117 - 126
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2013

Introduction

Those with a sharp tongue might say that labor historians in contemporary Brazil operate in the shadows or, to be more accurate, the shadow cast by the success of Latin America's most famous trade unionist, who served as president from 2002–2010. The field's growth in the number and quality of practitioners, as well as the breadth of their ambitions, cannot be separated from the memorable metalworkers' strikes of 1979 and 1980, the subsequent defeat of the military dictatorship in 1985, and the construction of a militant trade unionism and the radical Workers' Party that ran Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva for president in five successive elections between 1989 and 2006.

As front-runner in 1994, Lula faced off against a former ally, Fernando Henrique Cardoso (FHC), the internationally known Marxist sociologist identified with the creation of dependency theory in the 1960s. In a famous interview, Brazilian theater director Ruth Escobar stated the choice as it appeared to many educated people who had opposed the dictatorship: “I can vote for a plumber [Lula] or for Jean Paul Sartre [FHC].” Hence the image by the Brazilian cartoonist known as Angeli (Arnaldo Angeli Filho) of a disheveled Lula, in presidential sash, entering his official residence with his tool box: “Brazilian men and women: where do I start?”Footnote 1 Today, almost all admit that Lula and the PT did a good job in office,Footnote 2 although the limits and complexity of this political breakthrough is revealed by another Angeli cartoon that features Lula, in a suit and tie, visiting an exhibition on working-class struggle. Surrounded by TV cameras, the president gazes upward at posters filled with ubiquitous bearded images of a younger and incendiary Lula in a T-shirt and cap: “Strike,” “Arms Crossed,” “Workers of Brazil,” “The Struggle Continues.” Bemused, the cigar-smoking Lula observes: “Jesus, how kitschy and old-fashioned.”Footnote 3 The heroic days are past, the cartoon suggests, perhaps even outdated in a country where former trade unionists and subversives serve as cabinet ministers.

This short article reflects on the relationship between the labor history boom, international intellectual currents, and contemporary political and electoral affairs in Brazil—the largest country in a region known for the diversity of its social movements and the success of its Plural Lefts over the last decade. Overall, we will argue that the dynamism of Brazilian labor history is the result of a sustained process of network construction driven by two broad objectives: (1) to explore the complexity of class formation while attending to the diversity of cultures and identities among working people, including ethnicity, race, and regionalism; (2) to redefine the field as the “history of work” through a conscious effort to encompass those who fall outside of the urban-industrial world of free labor while simultaneously moving backward in time to include slavery and other nonwaged forms of labor.

Discussion

Increasing interest in the study of Latin American labor was noted in the earliest attempt at a field synthesis,Footnote 4 again fifteen years later,Footnote 5 as well as a decade after that.Footnote 6 From its demarcation as a field of interdisciplinary study, we moved toward an historical approach that emphasized workers' agency within systemic limits and, from there, toward increasingly sophisticated attempts to grapple with the complexities of class formation under populism while recognizing the fact that the working class has two genders. Overall, the field's trajectory in Latin America has never been immune to the international intellectual trends from the North Atlantic world. Although working within a dependency theory perspective, the authors of the 1974 interdisciplinary synthesis were explicitly open to the “new labor history” of the 1960s, inspired by E. P. Thompson, whose hypotheses, they suggested, “must be concretely tested in Latin America.”Footnote 7 While slowed by delays in translation, Thompson would indeed have an enormous impact on Brazilian social and labor history; in fact, Brazilian enthusiasm would lead one US scholar in 1990 to comment skeptically about “Brazilian historians citing and quoting Thompson the way orthodox Marxists used to cite Marx and Lenin.”Footnote 8

By 1989, the impact of the “new labor history” was already being felt. As Brazilian historian Emília Viotti da Costa rightly noted, it had already “profoundly changed our perceptions of the history of the working class in Latin America” by making workers “the subjects of history rather than its mere objects” and treating them as just “as important for the understanding of history as the elites whose limits they define.”Footnote 9 Yet she also worried about the “methodological imprecision inherent in the concept of experience.” Would it lead to the virtual abandonment of questions concerning “the material determination of class ideologies, and the relationship between productive forces and the relations of production”?Footnote 10 Cautioning against slighting structure or culture, she also pointedly noted the crucial failure to address ethnic and racial issues in the work to date—despite the fact that “a large part of the labor force in Latin America is composed of Indians, Mestizos, and Blacks.”Footnote 11

This debate became tied up with theoretical disputes associated with a poststructuralism that would later briefly be dubbed postmodernism, until it stabilized under the capacious labels of “cultural studies” and “cultural history.”Footnote 12 Originating within and among practitioners of labor history in the US and the UK, this shifting theoretical terrain brought with it the “linguistic turn” as well as the powerfully revolutionizing impact of women's and gender history, which quickly emerged at the center of innovation among Latin American labor historians.Footnote 13 Whether located in the United States or Latin America, few of the region's labor historians have joined the rearguard that argues these developments should be condemned, whether in outright or veiled terms.Footnote 14

These theoretical developments were associated, of course, with “the worldwide crisis of Marxist paradigms,” which had “particularly strong reverberations,” Peruvianist Iñigo García-Bryce has noted, in her country of study. The thriving social movements and an increasingly successful electoral Left in Peru in the 1980s were eviscerated by the impact of a murderous cult (the Shining Path Communist Party) and a hyperviolent state response. In Peru at least, there was a turn away from the study of class in intellectual circles, accompanied by an “overt or implicit rejection” of Marxism and a growing “incorporation of the new methodologies of cultural history.”Footnote 15 The disillusionment in the North Atlantic world that accompanied the simultaneous crisis of “really existing socialism” and European social democracy was mirrored in Latin America but on distinct foundations. Mass antidictatorial protest, with a prominent role played by the working and middle classes, had been central to defeating the region's US-supported dictatorships. As revolutionary dreams ebbed in Central America, most of the region experienced a transition to uninspiring forms of delegative democracy.Footnote 16 Debt crises, economic stagnation, and neoliberal restructuring weakened social movements, organized labor, and the Left.Footnote 17 The results could be brutal as trade union membership fell in country after country; from fifteen percent in the 1970s to five percent today in Colombia, as the country's leading labor historian noted in a recent survey.Footnote 18

It would be surprising if the monumental geopolitical and ideological shifts of 1989–1991 did not have wide impacts. Trends similar to Peru's can be found in other countries in the region to one degree or another. In the Brazilian case, the most recent historiographical review of slavery studies in that country noted that interest in “structural questions” had fallen so dramatically that “we might even say that the notion of ‘system' has disappeared altogether.”Footnote 19 The focus on slave experience, they write, is now overwhelmingly understood as a preference for exploring the lives of “individual slaves and free people.”Footnote 20 With the loss of a systemic vision, the field has also seen a tendency to marginalize overt resistance and open rebellion in comparison with forms of behavior that operate within the rules. Further, it has revived the concerns first raised by da Costa in 1989 about the need to build up “a bridge between structuralist and cultural approaches,” avoiding rigid dichotomies such as structure/agency, collective/individual, or resistance/integration.Footnote 21

While the quantity and diversity of work continued to increase, preeminent practitioners of the new labor history were starkly realistic in their assessments. In 1997, Danny James observed that the “old narratives” of class struggle, trade unions, and parties had been dethroned within the field of labor history, but “no new synthesis had yet emerged to take its place.”Footnote 22 This fragmentation of the labor history project in Latin America, he went on, had prompted various attempts to fill the perceived void, but, as one Brazilian labor historian lamented, the study of labor seemed far more marginal than it had been in the late 1970s and early 1980s.Footnote 23

Yet it was precisely during these years of apparent eclipse—always far less true in Brazil than elsewhere in the region—that a younger generation of historians of labor and slavery emerged in Brazil who moved beyond the politically charged disputes that marked the 1970s and early to mid-1980s. This new generation reflected an increasing professionalization of academic history that went hand-in-hand with the construction of a rich and diverse archival infrastructure with a particular emphasis on labor and social movements. The domination of labor studies by sociologists in the 1970s had finally come to an end, it was clear, but so had the artisanal phase of historical production about working people in a country that was experiencing an expansion of higher education.

Today, the new Brazilian historiography takes as its object of study the multifaceted phenomenon linked to the economic, socio-political, and cultural relationships known as “work” and “labor.” Since its founding in 2001, the Worlds of Labor Working Group (WG) of the Associação Nacional de História (ANPUH) has become a reference point for international networks building a more truly “global labor history.” As part of this process, scholars from countries of the global south, especially India, South Africa, and Brazil, have been contesting the Eurocentrism characteristic of the “old” labor history—a narrative that begins in the nineteenth century with the Western European “industrial revolution.” They also are pressing for a broadening of the “new” social history of labor that emerged in the 1960s.Footnote 24

On a national level, the Worlds of Labor WG has been hailed by the Brazilian agencies that support academic production as the only true research network within the historical profession as a whole. This national and even international recognition of our emerging field of study has been facilitated by several factors. On the one hand, the newly industrialized countries of the global south have gained increasing weight in the international economy compared to the ongoing processes of deindustrialization in the earlier core countries of international capitalism. The other factor has to do with the collapse of the neoliberal euphoria, with its belief in the “end of history,” that followed capitalism's victory over the Soviet system. Since the turn of the millennium, the shift to the Left in Latin America has challenged the sway of neoliberal groupthink by proving “another world is possible.” New, more creative, and plural forms of post-Cold War critical thinking allow a reinterpretation of the experiences of workers and other subaltern actors in the past and present.

One should also note that the ascent of neoliberalism, in the Brazilian case, faced a formidable obstacle in a labor movement that was still relatively strong and whose leaders exercised increasing electoral influence in the new democratic context. After 2002, the most distinguished leaders of the “New Unionism” of the 1980s became key figures in the most popular government in the history of the country. This political context contributed decisively to the new prominence of the labor theme in academic circles despite the inevitable polemics over the achievements, limits, and compromises posed by the political-institutional participation of those who emerged from the labor movement.Footnote 25

Yet such factors are insufficient to explain the relevance and recognition labor history has achieved in Brazil, which depended, above all, on the conscious and deliberate action by individuals who turned this potential into reality. On the one hand, there is the persistent and dedicated role played over decades by pioneering historians of labor writ large, such as Silvia Petersen (Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul) and a remarkable group of historians at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas that includes Michael Hall, Silvia Lara, and Sidney Chalhoub.Footnote 26 These scholars fostered the emergence of a new generation of scholars while building up the diversified archival foundations for such a history, including UNICAMP's remarkable Arquivo Edgard Leuenroth.Footnote 27

After Lula's election, some members of the newly established Worlds of Labor WG seized the new opportunities to present labor history as public history. They won government approval for the “Memory of Labor Project” that subsequently raised two million reais (1.2 million dollars) in funding from the state-owned oil company Petrobras in 2005–2006. Two-thirds of the money was used to produce a photographic exposition that was shown in eleven state capitals and at trade union conventions, in public schools, and at academic events.Footnote 28 The other third was used to fund a national competition that awarded grants for preservation and access projects. Drawing on the energy of its members in a dozen states, the “Memory of Labor Project” reflected the innovative and animating spirit of labor history in twenty-first century Brazil. A collective mobilization produced three thousand photographs with identification for possible inclusion, while those involved in the selection process faced a steep learning curve. How was one to represent the immense diversity of work, working peoples of both genders, and their many cultures? How was one to ensure regional representativeness and address historically controversial topics while avoiding tendentious politicization? (The exhibition included no photograph of Lula, for example.) Finally, there was much to be learned about the language of images, including their presentation and sequencing; hundreds of decisions had to be made about dividing the exhibit/book into sections and integrating textual elements such as quotes and poetry. Overall, the positive public reception of this multimedia meditation on the relationship between work, working people, and democratic citizenship was judged an enormous success by its sponsors, its coordinators, and the WG.Footnote 29

The project provided an excellent illustration of the collaborative spirit of the new generation who eschewed ideological disputation and competitive individualism. In consciously constructing a network, their aim was to create a plural field that allowed for the integration of a diversity of approaches and foci. Calling the group “Worlds of Labor” in the plural, for example, reflected a conscious decision to bring together the study of the free and nonfree, the urban and rural, manual and nonmanual, and the formal and informal sectors. The drive to broaden a narrowly Eurocentric labor history to include slavery was especially important given the institution's absolute centrality to the Brazilian economy, demography, and politics (abolition came only in 1888).Footnote 30 This has opened the way for a deepening understanding of the powerful but hitherto neglected continuities between two Brazils that had for so long been falsely conceptualized as radically and even racially distinct: an archaic world of slavery, backwardness, and the African descended majority and a modern one of “free labor,” industrialism, and the European immigrant minority. The twenty-first-century labor history being done in Brazil today has now directly tackled the lacunae identified by Emilia Viotti da Costa in 1989, including the fundamental issues of racism, discrimination, and the dynamics of race, color, and ethnicity.Footnote 31

The Worlds of Labor WG has benefited enormously from this broadening of the field's conceptual horizon, which is also reflected in its increasingly impressive journal on the Web.Footnote 32 Subjects addressed in some of the most innovative research conducted by the WG members range from white-collar workersFootnote 33 and sex workersFootnote 34 in the early-twentieth century to biographical trajectories of labor activists,Footnote 35 as well as a social history approach to the labor court system.Footnote 36

Hundreds of researchers have been drawn to the WG's thematic symposiums at ANPUH's biannual national and state meetings, as well as its four WG-specific national conferences. Not all of those who attend explicitly define themselves as “labor historians,” but all find work and labor to be relevant to their object of study. This corresponds, to some degree, to the proposal advanced by David McCreeryFootnote 37 (2000) that we should substitute a “history of work” for “labor history” per se, although in the Brazilian case there has been no loss of focus on the study of trade unions or the political participation of workers.Footnote 38 The work/labor distinction lacks a direct translation in Portuguese and Spanish, of course, but the “history of labor” (história do trabalho) in Brazil has long ago replaced what was called, in earlier decades, the “history of the workers' movement.”

Not all Latin American labor historians have welcomed this “widening of the parameters of what constitutes labor history.” Indeed, James Brennan's 2011 assessment defends a highly restrictive definition for the field as the “history of labor in modern capitalism”Footnote 39 and “the many industrial worlds of modern Latin America.”Footnote 40 Moreover, Brennan, an historian of Argentina, explicitly rejects the inclusion of slavery within labor history, an intellectually untenable position for Brazil and much of Indo-Afro-Latin America. Like his advisor, John Womack,Footnote 41 he signals his dislike for culture, identity, and the term “subaltern.” Instead, he stakes out a future in which labor history would ally more directly with business history (“good labor history will also be good business history”Footnote 42 ) in its focus on the material and the economic (the political is curiously neglected). Criticizing the mainstream of the field for its “fixation on the merely anecdotal, even trivial,” he also expresses condescending reservations about the use of oral history by nonnative speaking “foreigners,” while allowing at most for an individual exception in the case of Danny James.Footnote 43 Little of this is likely to be convincing to those who do labor history in and about Brazil. Oral history is being actively deployed not only to address classic “economic” issues like the skilled workers' role in labor markets,Footnote 44 but new ones such as the ways racism and slavery are reflected in the complex story-telling of two black trade unionists in the zona da mata sugar plantation region of Pernambuco.Footnote 45

Conclusion

While we have focused on the Brazilian case, we would like to end these reflections by suggesting that the broad trends we have identified can also be found in other Latin American countries, including those that have not yet joined the Latin American Left Turns. In surveying “Latin American Social Movements at the Start of the Twenty-First Century,”Footnote 46 Colombia's most important labor historian cites not only the vibrancy of the region's social movements but their successful incursions into electoral politics, even in countries like Colombia still governed by the Right. Rather than lament the loss of the imagined Latin America once constructed by a certain genealogy of Marxism, Mauricio Archila frankly admits the declining “importance of social movements based on a homogenous class identity, which had been common in Latin America.” He points out that “the organizational modes characteristic of capitalist modernity are currently in crisis,” and, as result, “the concept of social conflict seen as class struggle in the sphere of production [has] declined in its centrality.” Nonetheless, he adds, it does not mean that “the class factor in the struggle for socioeconomic equality” has disappeared. Rather, “the traditional pursuit of class or socioeconomic equality” now incorporates wider issues, including “respect for cultural differences.” The result is that “class-based movements have been undergoing an interesting process of renewal, as issues of gender, ethnicity, and the environment have been given growing importance in their agendas” and trade unions have increasingly incorporated informal sector workers and freelancers. “[N]ew activists, or long-standing ones with new identities, [have begun] addressing ethnic, gender, regional, and generational dimensions and the breadth of human rights in its most comprehensive sense.” Moreover, “the new identities, and the fields of conflict to which they subscribe, have given new meaning to the term social in Latin America. The battlefield for social movements extended into the cultural and political spheres—perhaps it always did so, but now this has become more apparent.”Footnote 47 The real world, in other words, is by no means distant from our professional métier as Latin American labor historians. We look forward, therefore, to the struggles that will define the new postneoliberal era.

Footnotes

Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.

References

Notes

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2. Anderson, Perry, “Lula's Brazil,” London Review of Books 33 (2011): 3–12 Google Scholar; French, John D. and Fortes, Alexandre, “Nurturing Hope, Deepening Democracy, and Combating Inequalities in Brazil: Lula, the Workers' Party, and Dilma Rousseff's 2010 Election as President,” Labor: Studies in Working Class History of the Americas 9 (2012): 7–28 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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11. Ibid., 16–7.

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20. Ibid., 182–3.

21. Costa, “Experience,” 12. These interrelated and poorly understood conundrums stood at the center of da Costa's 1994 masterful study of an 1823 rebellion among missionized slaves in Guyana [ da Costa, Emília Viotti, Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood: The Demerara Slave Rebellion of 1823 (New York, 1994)Google Scholar]. The book combined structure, the dynamics and plurality of group (trans)formation, and an exquisite attention to individual subjectivity, including the missionary who dies in prison allegedly responsible for the revolt led by his congregation. Moreover, she executed a superb intraimperial and transatlantic analysis and narrative long before transnationalism had become a buzzword. And finally, she sketched the successful (mis)communication between the white missionary and his African-born or first generation slave congregants in this colony, recently conquered from the Dutch, while encompassing their masters and rulers within the analysis. See her plea to avoid false dichotomies in “New Publics, New Politics, New Histories: From Economic Reductionism to Cultural Reductionism—In Search of Dialectics,” in Reclaiming the Political in Latin American History: Essays from the North, ed. Joseph, Gilbert M. (Durham, 2001), 17–31 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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25. The classic role of workers' and socialist and communist movements in the various waves through which democratic rights were conquered in Europe was taken up in Eley, Geoff, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000 (Oxford/New York, 2002)Google Scholar. His overall conclusion has direct relevance to the contemporary South American context: that democracy cannot be reduced to a set of institutional rules disassociated from the social and class struggles that give them substance.

26. For a recent example of Chalhoub's work, see Chalhoub, Sidney, “The Precariousness of Freedom in a Slave Society (Brazil in the Nineteenth Century),” International Review of Social History (2011): 1–35 Google Scholar.

27. For an update on archives on labor and social movements in Brazil, with a broader glance at Spain and Portugal and some other Latin American countries, see the volume that came from a conference cosponsored by the CEDOC, the archival section of the CUT labor confederation, and the Brazilian National Archive: Marques, José Antonio and Stampa, Inez Terezinha, eds., O Mundo dos Trabalhadores e Seus Arquivos (Rio de Janeiro/São Paulo, 2009)Google Scholar.

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29. “Mostra em homenagem ao Dia do Trabalhador é vista por 250.000 pessoas,” Jan 10, 2007. ADITAL (Agência de Informação Frei Tito para América Latina), http://www.adital.org.br/site/noticia2.asp?lang=PT&cod=26031 (accessed in March 26, 2012).

30. Lara, Silvia H., “Escravidão, Cidadania e História do Trabalho no Brasil,” Projeto História, 16 (1998): 35–38 Google Scholar. Law has proven a wonderful avenue for advancing this unifying agenda from the colonial world to the twentieth century: Lara, Silvia H. and Mendonça, Joseli, eds. Direitos e Justiças no Brasil: Ensaios de História Social (Campinas, 2006)Google Scholar.

31. Loner, Beatriz Ana, Construção de Classe: Operários de Pelotas e Rio Grande, 1888–1930 (Pelotas, 2001)Google Scholar; do Nascimento, Alvaro Pereira, Cidadania, Cor e Disciplina Na Revolta dos Marinheiros de 1910 (Rio de Janeiro, 2008)Google Scholar; Velasco e Cruz, Maria Cecília, “Puzzling Out Slave Origins in Rio de Janeiro Port Unionism: The 1906 Strike and the Sociedade de Resistência dos Trabalhadores em Trapiche e Café,” Hispanic American Historical Review 86 (2006): 205–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mattos, Marcelo Badaró, “Experiences in Common: Slavery and ‘Freedom' in the Process of Rio de Janeiro's Working-Class Formation (1850–1910),” International Review of Social History 55 (2010): 193–213 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32. Open access at http://www.periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/mundosdotrabalho (accessed September 12, 2012).

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34. Schettini, Cristina, Que Tenhas teu Corpo: Uma História das Políticas da Prostituição no Rio de Janeiro das Primeiras Décadas Republicanas (Rio de Janeiro, 2006)Google Scholar.

35. Schmidt, Benito B., Um socialista no Rio Grande do Sul: Antônio Guedes Coutinho (Porto Alegre, 2000)Google Scholar.

36. Corrêa, Larissa R., A tessitura dos direitos: patrões e empregados na justiça do trabalho, 1953–1964 (São Paulo, 2011)Google Scholar.

37. Fontes, Paulo, Um Nordeste em São Paulo: trabalhadores migrantes em São Miguel Paulista (1945–66) (Rio de Janeiro, 2008)Google Scholar; Fortes, Alexandre, Nós do Quarto Distrito: A Classe Trabalhadora Porto-Alegrense e a Era Vargas (Rio de Janeiro/Caxias do Sul, 2004)Google Scholar.

38. This statement is broadly true for the labor history elsewhere in Latin America as in the case of a recent prize-winning monograph by Pavilack, Jody, Mining for the Nation: The Politics of Chile's Coal Communities from the Popular Front to the Cold War (State College, 2011)Google Scholar. Pavilack offers a compelling reinterpretation of the Chilean Popular Front by taking a bottom-up approach to the role of trade unions and the Communist Party in the country's coal mining region between 1938 and 1947. One might also cite the impressive recent study of the 1932 Communist uprising in El Salvador and its violent repression by Gould, Jeffrey L. and Lauria-Santiago, Aldo, To Rise in Darkness: Revolution, Repression, and Memory in El Salvador (Durham, 2008)Google Scholar.

39. Brennan, “Latin American Labor History,” 343.

40. Ibid., 360.

41. Womack, “Doing Labor History”; Womack, John, “On Labor History, Material Relations, Labor Movements, and Strategic Positions: A Reply to French and James (as Nice and Civil as I Can Make It),” Labor 5 (2008): 117–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42. Brennan, “Latin American Labor History,” 360.

43. Ibid., 359–61, 342.

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46. Archila, “Latin American Social Movements.”

47. Ibid., 65, 74, 71.