Far too often scholarship on the Chilean Revolution, the Salvador Allende era, and the history of labor in Chile represents views from above—views which assume that it was a few important national political figures who played the major roles and directed the outcomes. In Weavers of Revolution Peter Winn has managed to fuse history from above with history from below: while President Allende, his ministers, party and labor leaders certainly figured prominently in the turning point of the Chilean Revolution, so did the workers of the Yarur factory, Chile’s largest cotton mill.
The book is their story, told primarily through their eyes and in their words. Following the 1970 election of Allende on a platform promising a democratic road to socialism, the first factory to be seized by its workers was the Yarur mill. With the actual seizure of the mill in April 1971 and subsequent socialization by the Allende government, the Chilean Revolution reached a turning point. The Yarur workers set off a chain reaction of factory seizures which demanded immediate socialization and forced Allende to accelerate and radicalize his carefully controlled, phased strategy for socialism. Yarur found itself on a collision course with the government, whose plan for reform was less radical and more gradualistic. In his analysis of the ensuing confrontation between the workers and Allende, Winn demonstrates the complex nature of the revolutionary process. Interviews with workers and with the president illustrate the effects both in the Yarur mill and in Allende’s office of a revolution “forged from below.”
Winn integrates a variety of sources—written as well as oral—with his own observations and analyses. He has drawn on published and unpublished statistics and data from the Yarur company archives, government documents and records, private-sector business correspondence, minutes from union meetings, annual reports, court records, police files, notes from journalists and scholars, periodicals, and many other sources. However, he has relied primarily on more than 200 oral history interviews with local and national political and labor leaders, mill owners and managers, local residents, and, most of all, the workers themselves.
Weavers of Revolution is a well-written, copiously documented, very readable contribution to the literature on twentieth-century Chile, especially in the areas of labor, reform, revolution during the Allende era, and class struggle. Original in its scope and perspective, eloquent in its presentation, it would be a valuable and significant addition to any Latin Americanist’s library.
