The Common and the Particular

Abstract

At a time of considerable confusion and polarization over the directions labor history should be taking, Emilia Viotti da Costa's reflections on the situation in the Latin American field have a bearing well beyond it. Her survey is sure in its analysis of the main issues and fault lines in current work on Latin American labor, and serene in its arbitration of the contending positions within that work. Review ing the contrast between explorers of experience and diagnosticians of structure, Viotti da Costa is warmly sympathetic to the advances and achievements of the former; but she is also properly?prudently?critical of a potential one-sidedness in their contribution. Her final emphasis falls on the need for a synthesis of cultural and structural approaches, with the unspoken proviso that the usage of each must be genuinely historical. Since I agree fully with her conclusion, I will confine my response to four points where I think Viotti da Costa's elegant account, which is necessarily also a succinct one, could be expanded. first of these concerns the pair of opposi tions that runs through her account?namely: experience versus structure and difference versus commonality; or, the subjective versus the objective, the particular versus the general dimensions of the history of the working class in the region. Although Viotti da Costa may largely be right to assimilate these two antitheses in the Latin American literature to hand?to suggest that, in effect, the subjective and the particular and the objective and the general tend to go together as approaches?in a purely theoretical sense, they do not have to do so. For experience is what is immediately lived. For labor, this means the realities of work, family, margins of leisure; whereas the contours of economic accumulation, political order, and international competition typically form much remoter hori zons. An exclusive emphasis on the first may thus generate its own kind of spontaneous universalism: that of what a famous photographic exhibition, no less famously criticized by Roland Barthes, called (in a dated language) Family of Man. logic of a certain humanist impulse often can lean in this direction. Thus, not wholly paradoxically, the supreme modern champion of experience as the touchstone of labor history, Edward Thompson, on occasion has also argued for a more or less uniform evolutionary schema through which all working classes pass: from initial rebellion to ultimate relative integration (others would add, disintegra tion). It tends to be forgotten that the polemical force of such a familiar title as The Peculiarities of the English was a sarcastic one, born of irritation at too much talk of British exceptionalism. So one needs to bear in mind that as well as the two