Remaking The Making: E.P. Thompson´s Reception in Argentina and the Shaping of Labor Historiography

LUCAS POY

INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF SOCIAL HISTORY

Cambridge University Press

Año: 2016 vol. 61 p. 75 - 93

0020-8590

This article traces the reception of E.P. Thompson´s work in Argentina over the past three decades. It explores the context in which Thompson was read by labor historians as a means to analyse the way in which the country?s labor historiography was shaped over this period. It argues that, in the 1980s and the 1990s, against a context characterized by a crisis of the political left and a downturn in the labor movement, Thompson´s appropriation was focused on his critique of Marxist ´determinism´. While this corresponded to similar developments in other countries, Argentinian labor historiography started to show a different path in the early 2000s, when a tremendous social, political, and economic crisis shook the country. The article concludes that recent developments in labor historiography in Argentina show a different pattern to those seen in the ´Global North´.