Class Formation and Struggle in Latin America

Abstract

Dale L. Johnson* Historical development can only be adequately understood as a process of unfolding class relationships. Yet, on a world scale or within regions and nations, class formation, class structure, and class struggle are far from the main preoccupations of most investigators. Research on Latin America has produced an abundance of studies and a considerable advance of knowledge in the areas of political economy and the state. Research on social classes is less advanced. This robs studies in political economy of their necessary social and historical components and results in less than adequate appreciation of what lies behind changing features of states in the region. This issue is organized around the formation of social classes as a historical process, and it provides analyses of some of the main features of class structure and class struggle in Latin America today. As in issue 34 of Latin American Perspectives (Rural Class Relations), our concerns are less to present descriptive studies of particular classes than to try to identify patterns of historical development in the region as shaped by ongoing class formation and struggle. While class formation and struggle concretely take place in national contexts, they are highly conditioned by international forces. This introduction and the studies that follow emphasize that classes are not empirical entities, but changing social relationships. The most salient social relationship is that of capital to labor. Throughout the history of capitalist development on a world scale, one feature has been central: the polarization of class relations. There is, today, at one pole, concentrated and centralized wealth and power that exploits labor and appropriates value, whereas at the other pole, millions upon millions of producers are reduced to nothing except their labor power to sell. This polarization is a gradual historical process, proceeding nonlinearly. As the pace of polarization *Dale Johnson teaches in the Department of Sociology, Livingston College, Rutgers University. For their editing of this issue, the coordinating editors would like to thank a New York-based group of editors including Dale Johnson, Thomas Bamat, James Cockcroft, Judith Evans, and Hobart Spalding. Each editor provided first drafts of sections of this introduction. Johnson edited their drafts and added sections. The final positions stated (not necessarily adhered to by all the editors) are the responsibility of Johnson. The coordinating editors would also like to thank Barbara Metzger for her assistance in editing this issue.