CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

In his classic book on Labor in Latin America, Charles Bergquist attempts to bring the role and forms of the labour movement back into the study of Latin American societies and their historical trajectory. Although Bergquist´s book does not offer an explicit in-depth discussion of the theoretical-methodological approach which informs his historiographical research, he does sketch out a very general framework that structures the empirical case studies of Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Venezuela. Very broadly, his perspective postulates a causal link between the export structure of each country, the consequent potentialities for industrial development, and the features of the workers´ movement (mainly, its ideological and organisational forms and its relative strength/weakness). More specifically, according to Bergquist there is an inverse relationship between the potentialities for economic diversification generated by the export structure, and the political leanings (left/right), organisational forms (independent-classist/corporatist) and strength of the workers´ movement. In this chapter, we shall critically examine Bergquist´s underlying theoretical framework so as to assess its explanatory power for the study of contemporary Latin American societies. In our view, the connection that Bergquist posits between the export structure and its industrialising potential, on the one hand, and forms and strength of the labour movement, on the other, has the merit of involving an attempt at a materialist conceptualisation of the relationship between the economic determinations of the process of capital accumulation and the political action of the working class. However, we shall argue that the particular manner in which Bergquist conceives of the nexus between the economic and political forms of capitalist social relations is problematic for at least two main reasons. In the first place, the connection remains utterly extrinsic. More concretely, the economic structure of society is reduced to some immediately observable empirical features of Latin American countries, which are then seen to coalesce into a set of external circumstances that condition the forms and scope of working-class struggles. In the second place, and more substantively, we argue that Bergquist´s characterisation of the economic structure of Latin American societies in terms of the particular configuration of the export sector of each country, falls short of a rigorous explanation of the specific form of this region´s national processes of capital accumulation and their role in the international division of labour. Against the backdrop of these limitations in Bergquist´s framework, the chapter provides an alternative approach to the specificity of Latin American societies and the manner in which it determines the forms and scope of the labour movement in the region. Firstly, building on a methodologically-minded reading of the Marxian critique of political economy, we maintain that working class struggles are not to be conceived of as an independent, self-subsisting factor that is externally conditioned and shaped by the economic aspects of society. Instead, the class struggle must be grasped as the necessary political form of existence assumed by the contradictory motion of the economic content of the capital accumulation process. Secondly, we submit that the specific form of the accumulation process in Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Venezuela, has been historically constituted around capital´s appropriation of the extraordinary mass of social wealth flowing into those national spaces of valorisation under the form of ground rent. On this twofold basis, we shall sketch out an alternative account of the contemporary developmental dynamics, and the respective forms and scope of the labour movement, in those South American countries.

enviar mensaje