The Analysis of Labour Movements in Latin America: Typologies and Theories

Abstract

This article addresses the question of whether an adequate theory for explaining the historical development of Latin American labour movements is currently available. The importance of the question derives from the fact that empirical studies of labour movements (however restricted in time and space) must necessarily refer (even if only implicitly) to some wider context in which the monographic study is situated. For most researchers, the primary focus of attention is (correctly) the delimited case; the context and comparison is usually (and incorrectly) taken as unproblematic. There is, therefore, a need to turn our attention, every now and again, explicitly to the larger picture. In recent years there seems to have been something of a minor boom in studies of the working class. For the first time, an impressive quantity of monographic material is becoming available.! One rather ironic result of this recent flurry of activity has been to highlight the discrepancy between general theories about labour and our concrete knowledge. It is to this issue that the present article is addressed. As an illustration of the present situation, it may be useful to begin with some comments on a recent English-language work on Latin American labour history, Hobart Spalding's Original Labor in Latin America.2 Spalding is an historian with considerable knowledge of his area, who works within a dependency framework. He has written the first detailed treatment of Latin American labour history from this perspective. This attempt to move beyond the narrow confines and arbitrary comparisons set by monographic analysis is laudible, and there is a great deal that is of value in Spalding's account. As our present concern is with Spalding's theoretical framework, we will pass over the detailed historiographic issues raised by his book, and immediately proceed to examine the interpretative schema which he uses to organize the data. Spalding claims to detect three 'stages' in the development of the labour movement in Latin America. These he identifies as: (1) formative (2) expansive and explosive (3) co-optive-repressive.3 The first question concerns the analytical power of these categories: what do they tell us? The answer, unfortunately, is remarkably little. Let us examine them in more detail. The first phase simply states that things have a beginning. It is difficult to imagine not being able to talk about a formative period for any phenomenon. This is not a useful conceptual (theoretical) category. It is just a statement that