The basic argument of this book is that the nature of the export structures of Latin American countries and the sources of their financing have an important, almost determinative, effect on the strength and militancy of organized labor and on the overall health of the economy. The thesis is applied to the labor history of contrasting pairs of countries, Chile and Argentina and Venezuela and Colombia, to demonstrate that “foreign ownership and concentrated production that favor the development of cultural autonomy and class-conscious anticapitalist labor organizations among export workers tend at the same time to inhibit the vigorous development of the economy as a whole,” while “national ownership, limited capital and technology demands, and diffuse geographical production systems, all of which inhibit labor organization in the export sector, tend at the same time (through their positive effects on other sectors of the economy) to promote economic development” (p. 12).
The model works well with copper in Chile and coffee in Colombia. It is obviously more difficult in the case of Argentina, since Bergquist has to explain the continuing difficulties of the Argentine economy despite national ownership and diffuse production. He blames Peronist economic policy, explaining the rise of Peronism in terms of “fear of a class-conscious labor movement” (p. 158). The lack of class-conscious militancy on the part of the Venezuelan labor movement is easier to explain as resulting from the considerable benefits that organized labor has received from petroleum-based prosperity.
The book is obviously sympathetic to efforts to organize a class-based movement which, as he says in the case of the Colombian coffee workers, can demonstrate the “power of unalienated human labor … against large and richly endowed capitalist rivals.” Such actions are “part of the answer to the excesses of industrial civilization, capitalist and socialist alike, bent on destroying the natural systems on which we all depend in an unnecessary and self-defeating effort to transform them” (p. 375). The author’s economically oriented but critical point of view leads him to condemn the oversimplifications of Marxist determinism (pp. 311, 323, 344, 383). while at the same time he shares Marxism’s dialectic method of analysis (there is much talk of contradictions), as well as its ultimate vision of a humane and unalienated workplace and society. This vision is contrasted with the horrors of industrialization in Latin America through vivid portrayals of the exploitation and suffering of the copper, meatpacking, petroleum, and coffee workers. Liberals are not spared either, often being lumped with the Marxists as equally misguided, while Latin American social welfare legislation is generally dismissed as “corporativist,” without any attempt to define that much misused term or to use it in a consistent fashion.
Bergquist recognizes that there are difficulties in extending his model to other countries in Latin America, although he attempts to do so in a brief section. What he feels he has done is rescue the organized workers in the export sector from the inattention that they have received in most contemporary discussions. For those who want a detailed, well-written, provocative, and inexpensive account of the economic and political role of organized labor in the four countries discussed, this is an excellent study.
