This book is analytical rather than purely chronological. It traces the origins and early growth of the organized labor movements of Latin America against a background of the evolution of the class structures of the area.
The author, arguing within a broadly Marxist context, maintains that preindependence Latin America was basically “pre-capitalist,” its economy and society being based on the conquest, with its origins in the medieval Iberian peninsula. That system of large landholdings was “coopted” after independence by the growth in dominance of the rural landholding group, which was tied to exports to the world market. It established the new nations, and allied itself, on the one hand, with “subsistence” large landholders, and, on the other, with foreign commercial interests. This emerged in the 1830-80 period. There did not exist any modern working class in the area.
In that same period, however, there did exist a utopian-socialist current in Latin America. Some European Utopians went there, and some Latin American intellectuals had contacts in Europe and brought back those ideas to their own countries. Thus socialist ideas of that time took root among intellectuals and some artisan groups even before the “appropriate” class for socialism, the wage-earning workers, had come into existence on an appreciable scale.
During the 1880-1910 period, there was a transformation of Latin American links with the world market from purely commercial to “imperialist,” as the result of European and United States investments. This brought about growth of middle sectors, birth of a modern working class, and in some countries, massive immigration, particularly from southern Europe. The new working class organized, first in mutualist groups, then in “resistance societies” and other unions.
It was the immigrants who were to a considerable degree responsible for bringing both anarcho-syndicalist and Marxist socialist ideas to the area. As the author points out, these were the two dominant ideological trends in the organized labor movement through the end of World War One.
This general discussion is followed by specific studies of the labor movements of Argentina, Chile, and Mexico, each developed in a different way. During the 1880-1920 period anarcho-syndicalism and syndicalism were dominant in Argentine organized labor. Although socialists were also present, the author claims that they did not constitute a major challenge to the other two ideological tendencies because the socialists concentrated almost exclusively on electoral and parliamentary activity, and followed the political philosophy of Juan B. Justo, who, the author claims, sought marginally to reform the traditional oligarchical system rather than to destroy it.
In contrast, the author argues, in Chile, the socialists (who ultimately became the Communists) supplanted the anarcho-syndicalists because, under the leadership of Luis Emilio Recabarren, they built a close relationship between the unions and the party. In Mexico, a still different evolution took place: the early anarcho-syndicalist leaders of the labor movement themselves formed an alliance, as subordinate partners of the petty bourgeois leaders who emerged by 1920 as the dominant force in the Mexican Revolution.
This is a serious and informative study. It should be of interest to all students of contemporary Latin America and of the history of the labor movement.
