Labor History and Its Challenges: Confessions of a Latin Americanist

Abstract

ASKED TO PLACE THE TWO ACCOMPANYING ARTICLES on Latin American labor history in the broad context of the field, I began reflecting on what may first appear as a paradox. On the one hand, the world labor movement is arguably at its lowest ebb in this century. Rates of unionization, to take one important index, have been declining in many capitalist countries, most significantly in the United States, where union density today stands at roughly 16 percent of the nonagricultural labor force, down from about 29 percent as recently as 1975 and only half of the all-time high of 1953, when it reached 32 percent.' The collapse of the so-called workers' states of Eastern Europe, especially the disintegration of the Soviet Union itself, has involved far more than the elimination of the Soviet bloc and the end of the Cold War. Ideologically, it has placed socialist goals and Marxist philosophy itself decidedly on the defensive.2 For more than a century, Marxist socialism inspired much of the world labor movement and informed, or deeply influenced, much of the scholarship on labor, especially the field of labor history. Now, however, neo-liberalism, not Marxism, is the philosophy that is sweeping the globe. In the world order of free trade and privatization, market forces are to unleash the productive potential of all human beings and sweep away inefficiencies of the bureaucratic, interventionist, social welfare state. In this new world, unions, the subject of traditional labor history, have no theoretical or practical place. On the other hand, as this extraordinary historical transformation has been unfolding, Western Marxists have been fashioning a large body of innovative work on labor that ranks among the best scholarship of recent decades. Most historians, regardless of specialization, are aware of the contributions of British labor scholar Edward Palmer Thompson.3 His work, in some sense a response to the Stalinist revelations of the 1950s, influenced a generation of Western social and labor historians. They have focused on the experience of unorganized as well