This book, which is based on the author’s doctoral dissertation of 1985, is an ambitious project that undertakes to explore Brazilian labor history by a comprehensive study of the ABC industrial municipalities of São Paulo between 1900 and 1950. On the whole, the author succeeds credibly; and in the process eschews easy answers and avoids grandiose generalizations.
The book is full of excellent insights into how working-class struggles actually take shape and what gains have been achieved and what losses sustained by organized labor. John French successfully questions the notion that Brazilian labor was blindly coopted and demobilized under seductive historical populism. He sensitively fathoms the limits of real working-class autonomy under a capitalist system in which the finances and weapons are in other people’s hands. What workers do possess—organizational skills, the means and desire to communicate their beliefs, and the willingness to vote—takes on gravity only when the state is substantially neutral. This was certainly not the case in Brazil whether before, during, or after Getúlio Vargas Estado Nôvo. Yet French celebrates the historical gains and modest victories trade unions have achieved despite the skeptical assessments by many Brazilian social scientists—whose intellectual constructs were radicalized by two decades of military rule. Apparently the restoration of Brazilian democracy provides a salutary antecedent to examining the real limits of working-class power.
Though the book’s introductory chapter and concluding passages provide sophisticated critical interpretations of the populist literature, most of the interim chapters hew strictly to a chronological tale of unfolding Brazilian industrialization and the ebb and flow of elections and governmental initiatives as organized labor interacts with them. The reader gets a clear picture of the sociological shift from an artisan working-class culture to an industrial labor culture; the parallel phases of anarchist and communist ideological predominance; the political shifts between the “oligarchic republic,” the onset of Getulismo, and the postwar populist state of São Paulo; and fine, nuanced portraits of Vargas, Luis Carlos Prestes, and Adhemar de Barros. Though sharp insights abound throughout the book, they are frequently left as unexplored asides rather than major theoretical departures. This can largely be defended, however, as the craft and caution of the historian.
French’s monograph is a fair and impartial study, based on a prodigious amount of reading of biographies, newspaper coverage, and differing observer and participant testimony. It overwhelms the reader with information. The chronological chapter sequence ignores an organization by themes or concepts that would orient the reader as to why this material was introduced other than its availability to the ambitious researcher. Some of French’s most interesting interpretations are hidden away in end notes. And as a corollary, I would like to make a plea that publishers begin to assess the damage they cause to comprehensive reading and enjoyable intellectual engagement by segregating text and notes, making the reader forever leap pages and lose threads. We can only applaud the university presses that have maintained the integrity of notes at the bottom of each page.
