Development and the Working Class in Latin America

1. Development and the Working Class in Latin America

2. Overview • What is Development? • Bringing the Working Class (Back) In • The Chilean Textile Industry 1930-1970 • The CordonesIndustriales1972

3. What is Development?

4. Development necessitates a transformation of production, exchange, and in working practices • It is those who directly face these changes in the workplaces that come to contest them • Struggles at the point of production give meaning to political protests against policies and firms • These place limits on particular policies and practices, but also provide opportunities

5. Bringing the Working Class (Back) In

6. Research is on experiences of industrial development and workers in Latin America • Trade unions form the conventional focus in analysing the role of labour • Politicisation of struggles in work give meaning to the actions of these representative organisations • Focus on the workplace and point of production struggles shifts focus on to the workers and the importance of their daily struggles experienced as active social subjects and contested as a class

7. “it is necessary to consider the wage-labourer insofar as she exists outside capital…it is time to rise above the level of the political economy of capital, which constitutes only a moment within an adequate totality” (Lebowitz 1992: 49)

8. The Chilean Textile Industry: A Case Study

9. Key economic sector and a key example of worker militancy throughout the period • Highly fragmented and concentrated, low levels of productivity, advanced technology in large firms, and close relations with the state • Textiles were the most dynamic sector in 1930s/1940s; stagnation and decline began during 1950s/1960s • Unions were large in large firms, but a tension existed between ‘yellow’ and the Communists

10. Workers’ Newspapers: A Note on Methodology

11. Problems include political bias and small numbers of these ‘specialist’ publications • A vital part of the historical record on the popular history of workers in the context of ongoing processes of change • The main role of the workers’ press is the linking of specific grievances with the broader political demands of reforming/transforming society • Workers’ press plays a role that is both representative and formative

12. Workers and Limits on Development

13. From the 1930s textile workers experienced increasing levels of organisation and growth • Industry growth under state and domestic capital saw tensions with paternalist discipline and failures to match wages to inflation • Communist affiliations during the 1940s were key – persistent factory floor grievances were extended and given increasing political meaning

14. 1950s and 1960s saw intensification of this process as stagnation and repression were interpreted through historical experiences • State and capital sought to rationalise production and increase productivity • Workers’ response saw increased strike activity and growing mobilisation • The ‘anomaly’ of Chilean socialism

15. CordonesIndustrialesand Alternative Development

16. Electoral victory socialist UP government in 1970 led to nationalisation of key economic sectors • Nationalisation inspired the seizure of a wide range of factories in support of the government • Mixed reaction by government, but movement gained increased momentum through 1972/3 • Rightist reaction led to the consolidation of worker occupations and formation of the cordonesindustrialesandcomandoscomunales

17. Documentary by Chilean filmakerPatricioGuzmán Part 3 ‘El Poder Popular’ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQPgBR8sO5A