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State and Labour in Argentina: The Portworkers of Buenos Aires, 1910–21
Abstract
Latin America's workers perplex historians. Despite chronic political turmoil, revolt and undiluted class conflict, Latin America's mobilised workers have not been the vanguards of social revolution. Rather, variations of authoritarianism, populism and clientilism are said to characterise labour politics more accurately. The absence of independent working-class politics has prompted the search for aetiologies of class-formation in Latin America – the search for the missing ingredient to revolutionary working-class action.
... "Después de una calurosa discusión (…) se acordó declarar la huelga general del gremio". 57 Entonces, la paralización del puerto abarcaba cada vez más trabajadores, además de los estibadores y carreros, se sumaron los marineros y foguistas (Adelman, 1993;Caruso, 2016). Lejos de solucionarse, el conflicto continuó agravándose. ...
El ciclo de protestas obreras iniciado a comienzos del siglo XX, a partir de la huelga general de 1902, se extendió hasta 1910 y fue clausurado de manera violenta por la represión estatal y paraestatal. Las organizaciones obreras quedaron muy debilitadas. El proceso de recuperación fue lento. Sin embargo, hacia mayo de 1911 comenzó un proceso de creciente agitación obrera, que se profundizó en los meses siguientes. A comienzos de 1912, los ferrocarriles y el puerto se encontraban paralizados. Este ciclo de protestas obreras terminó en duras derrotas para los trabajadores. En este trabajo nos proponemos analizar los inicios, el desarrollo y el cierre de este ciclo de conflictividad gremial. Prestaremos especial atención a la estrategia desplegada por los sindicatos, los organismos estatales y las patronales involucradas. En la reconstrucción de estos sucesos hemos utilizado fuentes oficiales, diarios comerciales y periódicos gremiales y políticos de diversas orientaciones ideológicas.
... This wave of labor and peasant protests in Latin America intensified between 1917 and 1920. State responses were highly violent and repressive including the use of police and military forces, paramilitary squads, laws restricting labor organization, and suspension of civil liberties in most countries such as Argentina (Adelman 1993), Bolivia (Klein 1969), Brazil, (Wolfe 1991), Chile (Albert 1988), Colombia (Valencia 1984), Ecuador (Ycaza 1991), Honduras (Meza 1985), Paraguay (Alexander 1965), Peru (Collier and Collier 1991), and Uruguay (Sala de Touron and Landinelli 1984). ...
This chapter provides an overview of the relationship between state repression and mobilization in Latin America, using the sociopolitical history of the region to divide its study into two periods. In the pre-democratization era (1900s–1980s), most mobilization was undertaken to challenge the authoritarian and highly corporatist governments of the region. State repressive responses during this time varied according to cycles of moderate liberalization or entrenched authoritarianism. This resulted in a pattern of political opportunities-based and threat-induced mobilizations, which led to radicalization and a wave of transitions to democracy. As most Latin American states completed their transitions to electoral democracies (1990s-present), more overt and severe forms of state coercion diminished, giving way to lighter forms of repression (e.g., more professionalized police forces, the use of nonlethal weapons). As a result, opportunities for mobilization began to open, leading to the rapid growth of social rights and identity-based movements, as well as movements in response to globalization and neoliberal policies. The chapter concludes by noting areas that are currently underdeveloped and offer potential opportunities for further research.
... La diversidad de fuentes consultadas, políticas, gremiales, comerciales y estatales, nos permitieron realizar una exhaustiva reconstrucción historiográfica. 2 Entre las producciones académicas, apenas contamos con un estudio de caso, un trabajo donde se analiza la huelga ferroviaria de 1912 (Suriano 1991). También encontramos menciones a la huelga de los marítimos, acontecida en aquella época, en investigaciones más amplias sobre el sector (Adelman 1993;Caruso 2016). Estos años fueron analizados especialmente desde la perspectiva del sistema político, por la novedad que representó la Ley Sáenz Peña. ...
... About this trade union see RuthThompson (1984); on port workers seeAdelman (1993). 0002727259.INDD 52 5/24/2016 11:18:37 PM ...
As it spreads its tendrils across the globe, one of Neoliberalism's most important policy demands has been "labor flexibilization"--coded language for tearing up collective bargaining agreements and dismantling trade unions. In this well researched and insightful study, Santella focuses on the auto industry in Argentina between 1990 and 2007 to draw out how workers have resisted these changes. (from a review).
... (Adab de Santillan, 1961: 110;Marotta, 1961: 167) Tras la creación de la FOM en abril de 1910, una nueva huelga general a fines de 1911 se desarrollo en solidaridad con los portuarios y en reclamo de mejoras salariales y de condiciones laborales, sin éxito. (Adelman, 1993) Las huelgas producidas entre diciembre de 1916 y 1921 fueron claves en la mejora de las condiciones laborales, salariales, la reducción de la jornada laboral y los turnos a bordo, así como en la consolidación de la organización gremial y el control sindical del trabajo a bordo. (Caruso, 2010b) En marzo de 1917 un nuevo conflicto se suscitó ante el incumplimiento de la Mihanovich de lo acordado dos meses antes. ...
This thesis seeks to explain Argentina’s repeated currency crises, including the need to return time and again to the IMF for a stabilization package, using the domestic contestation of the populist left and military right. This thesis argues that Argentina’s domestic politics have contributed to the recurrence of currency crisis, filling a gap in several distinct academic discussions by giving an exhaustive account of how each period of currency crisis in Argentina was rooted in and was exacerbated by the policy choices of domestic political actors. In particular, thesis argues that the nature of Argentine politics has meant that there is no domestic champion for the kind of economic stabilization packages prescribed by the IMF, and, simultaneously, there is an enduring public pressure to enact leftist policies devoid of sustainable macroeconomic rationale. Unlike other countries such as Chile (where there has been political space for pro-stabilization parties to emerge), Argentina’s political landscape is structured in a way that has consistently undercut the health of the peso. I offer a two-part theory of “unique political pathways”. First, I argue that in Argentina the following four characteristics have combined to push the country toward currency-destabilizing policies: (a) the spectrum of popular parties; (b) party allegiance of the military; (c) the presence of powerful unions; and (d) the specific priority of the far right. Second, I map the manner (or “pathways”) by which this unusual political landscape manifests in currency crisis, highlighting the domestic political roots of Argentina’s IMF dependence.
Resumen El objetivo de este artículo es estudiar la vigilancia del anarquismo en el espacio atlántico sudamericano, entre finales del siglo XIX y comienzos del siglo siguiente. Si bien la historia de la represión del anarquismo no es desconocida por la historiografía de la región, el trabajo se aleja de los abordajes clásicos, guiados por preguntas sobre su lugar en el movimiento obrero, dentro de las fronteras nacionales. A partir de la trayectoria de dos inmigrantes que circularon entre Buenos Aires, Montevideo y Río de Janeiro se busca mostrar una dinámica red de conexiones atlánticas, que abarcaba los intercambios diplomáticos, la cooperación policial y la vigilancia de los barcos que ingresaban en los puertos. En respuesta a la coyuntura, los anarquistas hicieron un uso estratégico de recursos legales (habeas corpus, peticiones a las autoridades) e ilegales (desembarcos furtivos), que no solo les permitieron sobrevivir a las embestidas represivas, sino también ampliar redes transnacionales de solidaridad libertaria.
In this chapter, we reflect on the distinctive ways in which historians have contributed to our understanding of social movements and collective action. We find that historians interrogate the historical record in at least one of three ways. First, historians characterize their task as interpretative; that is, they attempt to establish not only the “actuality” of an event by constructing a textual account of it, but also its meaning by providing a detailed description of its causes, scope, and outcomes, as well as of the parties involved, their motives, and their accomplishments. A second approach is expansive. Scholars working in this vein seek to augment the historical record with respect to established events, legitimating their particular contribution to the literature by showing how it fills a gap or omission. Third, historians of social movements and collective action portray their narrative accounts of particular events as corrective. This often involves providing an interpretation that challenges the official or established view of an event.
World-systems scholars have recently advanced a framework for the analysis of “antisystemic” movements, with one important component of this approach being the integration of global forces into causal accounts of social movement mobilizations. This perspective, both an extension and a critique of existing movement theories such as political opportunity structure and political mediation approaches, is an outgrowth of the long-running trend of constructing larger and more elaborate models of the economic and political structures that bear upon movement outcomes. I elaborate three strategies of antisystemic movement analysis, and go on to combine these strategies with Event Structure Analysis (ESA) in order to investigate episodes of syndicalist mobilization in Argentina in 1917 and Chile in 1923. These cases reveal a set of crucial world-scale determinants at work in each mobilization: the relations between local and foreign capitalists, fluctuations in the world market transmitted through foreign-dominated enclaves, and direct and indirect influence by powerful core states such as Britain and the US. In contrast to the sorts of nationally-bound causality assumed in many social movement theories, I demonstrate that these world-scale forces cannot be included merely as external context; instead, they actively condition ostensibly “local” actors and are crucial determinants of each mobilization’s shape.
For nearly 250 years a desolate, rocky archipelago between Tierra del Fuego and the Antarctic Peninsula has captivated, inspired, and angered the empires of the Atlantic world. The Falkland Islands have witnessed the clash of cultures and politics, the competing destinies of Britain, France, Spain, Argentina, and even the United States. Although recent tensions between London and Buenos Aires have renewed interest in the Falklands, scholars and commentators alike continue to omit the vital historical and contemporary role cartography plays in this longstanding dispute. This article demonstrates that at significant moments in the Falklands’ past, maps and their makers acted both as potent visual manifestations of national propaganda and imperial interest, as well as important tools of negotiation. Ultimately, Falklands cartography proves to be an invaluable asset of historical knowledge as well as a problematic source of friction and confusion.
Populism and its aftermath have dominated the political history of modern Argentina. Much of the style and rhetoric of politics derives from populism. More important, some seemingly unbridgeable schisms in today's society can be traced directly to populism. While populist movements attracted the support of masses of people, they simultaneously repelled major sectors of society. Populists defined themselves as the saviors of the nation and their opponents as enemies of the people. Thus politics revolved around movements that won strong allegiances but excluded their enemies. This contributed to a cycle of military takeovers that ultimately produced massive violence, involving both the military and civilians. Populism addressed certain problems, but it also produced new ones. The answers that it provided, or perhaps the style of the answers, deeply divided Argentina.
Horowitz examines how Argentina's Radical Party rallied popular support in Buenos Aires from 1916 to 1930. He argues that the methods used for popular mobilisation helped to undermine democracy. The popularity of President Hiplito Yrigoyen is explored, as well as the government's relationship with unions.
From 1868 through 1939, anarchists' migrations from Spain to Argentina and back again created a transnational ideology and influenced the movement's growth in each country. James A. Baer follows the lives, careers, and travels of Diego Abad de Santillán, Manuel Villar, and other migrating anarchists to highlight the ideological and interpersonal relationships that defined a vital era in anarchist history. Drawing on extensive interviews with Abad de Santillán, José Grunfeld, and Jacobo Maguid, along with unusual access to anarchist records and networks, Baer uncovers the ways anarchist migrants in pursuit of jobs and political goals formed a critical nucleus of militants, binding the two countries in an ideological relationship that profoundly affected the history of both. He also considers the impact of reverse migration and discusses political decisions that had a hitherto unknown influence on the course of the Spanish Civil War. Personal in perspective and transnational in scope, Anarchist Immigrants in Spain and Argentina offers an enlightening history of a movement and an era. © 2015 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. All rights reserved.
This article charts the emergence of several immigrant-run social welfare institutions in Argentina between 1880 and 1930.
Using German-language organizations as an illustrative case study, it argues that immigrants played an important role in shaping
the system of social welfare in Argentina over a long historical period. It focuses on the autonomy affluent immigrants sought
to attain and the ideas about class, gender, and ethnicity they invoked in their pursuit of this goal. The cause of social
welfare helped self-proclaimed leaders construct a specific image of their community, solidify gender and class hierarchies,
and paternalistically organize workers under their leadership. These actions fostered a place for affluent immigrants within
a broader system of social relations in Buenos Aires. In carving out a space for ethnic communities in a domain where the
state, the Catholic Church, and Spanish-speaking philanthropists also had influence, German and other wealthy immigrants transcended
the individual communities they aspired to care for and helped shape the relationship between community and society.
Positioned at the intersection of studies in gender, labour history and migration, this article is anchored in both Australian and Hispanic scholarship. It analyses the Hispanic communities of rural northern Australia during the fi rst half of the twentieth century, and integrates local responses with those of the broader Hispanic world. In particular, it demonstrates that Hispanic women used their political experiences from Spain and Argentina to assume public positions of community leadership in an Australian region frequently characterised as highly masculinise. As migrants, they applied Hispanic culture and precedent to the Australian industrial context. In doing so, the women defied characterisations of passivity and, instead, exemplified female participation in political activism based on transnational experience.
Despite thorough analysis of the Spanish Civil War, its impact on Spain's emigrant communities remains largely unstudied. This article focuses on the Australian Spanish community to demonstrate that migrants experienced a twofold response. They were galvanised to oppose Anglo-Australian control of the Solidarity campaign, and attempted to create an alternative public discourse. Secondly, the Civil War prompted the community to reassess their relationship to politics, dividing local Spaniards according to radical ideologies, as they debated how best to achieve socialist goals in both Spain and Australia.
How do organized workers take advantage of political transitions to gain ground for their movements, and conversely, in what ways do these transitions shape workers' tactics and agendas? This essay compares popular responses to political opportunities in three countries in the throes of deep crises. Exploring the routes to divergent outcomes from a common juncture during and after the First World War draws attention to the possibilities of and constraints on working-class imprints on constitutional development.
In reflecting on the distinctive way in which historians have approached the study of social movements and collective action,
we call attention to a number of issues that have been addressed in the literature on history as a discipline. A distinction
that has often been made between the disciplines of history and the social sciences concerns the general and the particular.
Historians are purportedly more concerned with context-dependent generalizations, offering findings that are relevant only
to the particular context they are studying and overly cautious in making inadequately contextualized generalizations based
on evidence from a particular time and place. However, historians cannot avoid the use of general concepts, such as revolution
or social movement; hence they necessarily generalize. Such concepts select certain instances as “facts” and make their descriptions
more meaningful by suggesting causal analogies to phenomena in other times and places that may also be labeled revolutions
or social movements. Nevertheless, the types of generalizations and levels of generality with which historians are typically
comfortable are those that apply to a relatively limited number of cases delimited in time and space, rather than the decontextualized
general laws to which social scientists sometimes aspire. As a discipline, historians are organized along the lines of time
and space, and most historians focus their research on a particular place during a delimited period of time. Philip Abrams
(1982:194) contrasts the historians’ “rhetoric of close presentation (seeking to persuade in terms of a dense texture of detail)”
with the sociologists’ “rhetoric of perspective (seeking to persuade in terms of the elegant patterning of connections seen
from a distance).”
This article emphasizes the key role of labor in shaping trends and patterns of pica change. The first section of the article
argues that during the interwar period, continental Latin America experienced common trends in several areas, including a
general upsurge in labor unrest, deepening conflicts among elites, the implementation of new modes of state regulation, and
a disruption of prevailing trade arrangements within the world economy, all of which were accompanied by a brief but significant
wave of democratization in the 1920s. Noting that these general trends were unevenly distributed through the region (particularly
after the 1930s), the second section of the article proceeds to abstract four patterns of political arrangements (repressive
dictatorships, party competition, corporatist nationalism, and unstable labor politics). The article uses two principal variables
(the relative weight of the middle and working classes and the degree of cohesion/fragmentation among elites) to explain these
patterns of political change. Overall, the article suggests that the relative strength of labor and subordinate groups was
key to shifts away from repressive dictatorship, while the degree of convergence among elites was significant in shaping political
outcomes, but not in promoting democratic outcomes.
There is currently a renewed interest in the relationship between economic fluctations and strike movements which refers back to an article by Eric Hobsbawm ¹ and an even earlier polemical piece by Leon Trotsky. ² This article offers a contribution to the growing literature, focusing, unlike most other studies, on a Third.World country. It also reflects the increasing influence of social history in Latin American research on the making of the working class.
From 1870 to 1930 Argentina underwent massive changes. The development of the working classes shaped the direction of those changes by promoting democratization and economic redistribution. This text looks at the formation and weaknesses of the Argentine working classes during this period.
causes?' has given rise to an extensive debate. This paper argues that using the Gramscian concepts of hegemony and counter-hegemony makes it possible to advance a positive evaluation of the place of rights strategies within progressive politics without succumbing to illusions about what Stuart Scheingold called 'the myth of rights'.1 The rights debate continues to run and to produce an energetic opposition between 'pro-rights' and 'anti-rights' positions. These positions are as far apart as ever. I have no illusion that it would be possible to bridge the gulf between the important intellectual and political issues at stake. But I will start with an attempt to restate in the most basic form what is at stake and divides the positions. A diverse range of positions have warned against illusions that the quest for legal rights and their realization through litigation can achieve substantive gains for progressive social movements. These voices have taken the form of both general theoretical critiques of rights2 and conclusions derived from the study of the experience of particular social movements.3 In their most general form the core of these criticisms consist of a warning against the illusions
After a good deal of thought I have decided not to respond directly to Professor Trubek's exhaustive review of The Dialectics of Legal Repression, but will rather leave it to readers of my book to determine for themselves the adequacy of his description, analysis, and evaluation of the material contained therein. However, insofar as Professor Trubek also refers briefly in his essay to my "more recent," and until now unpublished, work, it seems appropriate to present a sample of this work, especially since Trubek himself argues that it entails a "major refinement" which "allows Balbus to explain what remains unexplained in The Dialectics." Indeed, in certain respects the following essay constitutes an autocritique of the theoretical analysis in my book, and a comparison of the two will thus permit the reader to assess indirectly the extent of my agreement with Trubek's critique. At the same time, what follows also constitutes an implicit and, at times explicit, critique of Trubek's own effort to elaborate and apply an alternative to my position, the effort he calls "critical social thought about law."
We reach, then, not a simple conclusion (law = class power) but a complex and contradictory one. On the one hand, it is true that the law did mediate class relations to the advantage of the rulers; not only is this so, but . . . the law became a superb instrument by which these rulers were able to impose new definitions of property to their even greater advantage. . . . On the other hand, the law mediated these class relations through legal forms, which imposed, again and again, inhibitions upon the actions of the rulers. [Thompson, 1975:264] As always in social life, the heart of the mystery lies in the relationship between the struggle for power and the beliefs people hold about what is good for them and what they are capable of achieving. That relationship is the cave into which we must follow the enigma. [Unger, 1976b:242]
Through the late nineteenth century, capitalist entrepreneurs in Argentina introduced major innovations in the organisation of the workplace and the labour market. These innovations were largely designed to undermine craft controls over access to skills, thereby allowing employers to bypass the informal craft organisations that had previously regulated labour supplies and the labour process. Skilled and unskilled workers, with varying degrees of success, responded to these innovations by creating formal labour organisations and enhancing their own bargaining power through strikes and other forms of labour unrest. This article focuses on the impact of this transition upon the development of new institutional arrangements among labour and the state at the turn of the century. -from Author
THIS ESSAY EXPLORES three broad issues involved in viewing Latin American labour history in comparative perspective (mat is, in the context of worid labour historiography, especially that of Western developed societies). The first issue is the appropriateness to Latin American labour history of conceptual paradigms, particularly liberal and Marxist, constructed in Western Europe in the course of that region's 19th-century industrialization. The second is the application to Latin American studies of the so-called "new labour history," which has flowered in the historiography of North Atlantic developed capitalist societies, especially in the Anglo-American context, during the last 25 years. The third issue concerns the comparative advantages of First and Third World labour history in the context of the logic, as well as the special strengths and weaknesses, of the discipline of history itself. Each of these themes, I believe, illustrates an aspect of comparative labour history seldom appreciated or addressed by students of labour in Latin America and abroad: the pervasive, distorting influence of cultural forms emanating from the First (and later Second) World on the scholarship of the Third. I consider this influence an insidious form of cultural imperialism because I believe it is fun-damentally negative, and because it is generally unacknowledged and thus unex-amined.
Critical legal writers pay a lot of attention to history. In fact, they have probably devoted more pages to historical description - particularly the intellectual history of legal doctrine - than to anything else, even law and economics. Such a preoccupation within a radical movement is at first glance surprising. After all, lawyers have, by notorious custom, used history conservatively, appealing to continuity and tradition. And in the less common situations in which lawyers have used history to criticize the status quo, they have usually resorted to social and economic history, to show that the original social context of a legal rule reveals that it was adopted for wicked or obsolete reasons, rather than to the history of legal doctrine. What could conceivably be radical - or, as some unkindly ask, even interesting - about rewriting the history of doctrine?
This Article represents a revised and expanded version of a talk given at the Sixth Annual Conference on Critical Legal Studies, which was held at Harvard Law School in March 1982.
Thesis (Ph. D.)--Yale University, 1979. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 346-355). Photocopy.
Typescript. Vita. Thesis--Rutgers University. Dept. of History. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 442-449).
The Failed General Strike of 1921: A Turning Point in Argentine Labor History’ (paper prepared for the Southern Labor Studies Conference
- Joel Horowitz
Organised Labour in Argentina: The Railway Unions to 1922
- Thompson Ruth
Estado y trabajadores: el caso de la huelga de maquinistas ferroviarios de 1912
- Suriano
Aspectos políticos de la actividad sindical
- Augusto Pellegrini
Workers' Control and the Problem of Organisation
- Nun José
El control social y la política de Buenos Aires, 1880–1920
- Ruibal