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Working-Class Organization and Politics in Argentina

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2022

Torcuato S. Di Tella
Torcuato S. Di Tella*
Affiliation:
Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO), Buenos Aires
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The political expression of the Argentine working class has been a subject of concern to social scientists and other interested observers for some time. The country was one of the first in Latin America to have autonomous trade unions and political parties or ideological groups dedicated to the defense of labor interests. During the 1940s a major reorientation took place associated with the advent of Peronism. How did this change come about? Was it a totally new departure, or was it rather an adjustment of tactics on the part of the existing structures? How different is the Argentine labor movement—both in its trade unions and its political expressions—from others in comparable countries? This article seeks to explore this problem, based on a theoretical reassessment of the issues involved in working-class organizations as they emerged in the Argentine historical experience.

Type
Research Article
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 16 , Issue 2 , 1981 , pp. 33 - 56
Copyright
Copyright © 1981 by the University of Texas Press

Footnotes

*

This is a revised version of a paper presented at a Seminar on Working Class Culture and Protest in Latin America, held at the Wilson Center, Washington, D.C., 30 November–1 December 1978.

References

Notes

1. Karl Kautsky, La defensa de los trabajadores y la jornada de ocho horas (Spanish translation, Barcelona, 1904), p. 50. For Kautsky, one of the main objectives of the reduction of the working day was to free workers for “attending adequately the development of the associations. … Free time can and should be employed not in frivolous or unhealthy pleasures but in the service of civilization and social progress” (pp. 141–44).

2. Lucio Bonilla, Argentine textile unionist, recalls how “older people included us in internal committees, but always in a slight minority … we always wanted more action, but they were a sort of containment dam, passing on to us the experience they had accumulated.” Oral History Program, Instituto Di Tella, Box 1, No. 2, p. 6. Interviews of this program, taken during the years 1970–72, will hereafter be referred to as OHP plus the numbers of box and file.

3. In M. Bakunin, Selected Writings (London, 1973), p. 170.

4. Letter to Sergei Nekaev, 2 June 1870, in Selected Writings, pp. 185–86.

5. La Anarquía, an anarchist newspaper published in La Plata, commenting on a trade union sponsored meeting where socialists had been harassed and some not allowed to speak, said that in the future “instead of cat calls and protests we should go against them with a dagger, already stained with bourgeois blood, so as not to leave any one of those scoundrels alive” (26 October 1895).

6. After an unsuccessful bakers' strike in 1902, the anarchist paper El Rebelde argued that the defeat had been due to the legalistic character of the movement (in spite of the fact that the leaders of the union were anarchists also). According to its report, strikers just gathered at the Casa del Pueblo (an anarchist union and cultural center) playing games and idling, rather than “employing violence and destroying the interests of the bourgeois.” The paper went on to argue that the numerical superiority of strikers over policemen guarding the bakeries made a resort to violence practical (13 September 1902). After the defeat of a previous strike, the anarchist-controlled bakery union newspaper ridiculed the more radical La Nuova Civiltá, which had published an editorial under the self-explanatory title “O tutto o niente.” The bakers argued that this motto was easy for “those who have ample private means. … If the writers of Nuova Civiltá had blisters in their hands they would soon change their way of thinking” (El Obrero [ex Obrero Panadero], 13 April 1901).

7. Enrique Dickmann, Recuerdos de un militante socialista (Buenos Aires, 1949), p. 68.

8. The bakers union newspaper, after the defeat of the 1902 strike, carried an article by F. Falco, who argued that drunkenness was the main enemy of organization. In the old Andes local “there was scarcely a day when the ‘Moreiras’ didn't start some fight. … Something similar happens in the [new local of calle Rincón] where there is even gambling.” In union locals it was easier, according to him, for people to give vent to their “alcoholic fury,” because they are tolerated by comrades who do not exert the same control as do tavern keepers (El Obrero [ex Obrero Panadero], 29 April 1902).

9. El Obrero (ex Obrero Panadero), 6 October 1901.

10. Events relating to the bricklayers union, where a dispute was raging between the president, F. Balmelli, the Comisión Directiva, and the Asamblea, can be followed in the trade union paper (published by various trade unions, gathering anarchists and socialists) La Unión Gremial, Nos. 15 to 20 (1895-96). The anarchist president was ousted by the Comisión Directiva, but finally reinstated by the Asamblea.

11. El Obrero (ex Obrero Panadero) published extensive reappraisals of trade union tactics after the defeat of the 1902 strike. An editorial argues that though it is true that “energetic and revolutionary strikes” are necessary, they must be backed by organization. The authors go on to admit that “we have also had those [more violent] beliefs, but the frustrations we have undergone have served us as an experience.” They add that “the charlatans who say that [the sort of people who are usually found] in fondas, in plazas, in the market place, in other words, the nonmembers, are as good fighters as those who are organized, are telling a solemn lie. We do not think that a fighter is one who rises when he hears that there is a strike, maybe only because of fear of getting a thrashing” (3 July 1902). See also the following number, of 5 August 1902.

12. Juan B. Justo, Teoría y práctica de la historia (Buenos Aires, 1969; first edition 1909), pp. 351–54. For a description of more recent similar events see Branco Pribicevic, The Shop Stewards' Movement and Workers' Controls 1910–1922 (Oxford, 1959) and V. L. Allen, Trade Union Leadership (London, 1957).

13. José Domenech, socialist leader of the Unión Ferroviaria and the C.G.T. in the thirties and early forties, describes the way he managed an “intervention” against a local branch of the railwaymen union, in Córdoba, which had fallen under the control of the Communist party and was, allegedly, violating statutory norms (OHP 1/11, pp. 48 and following).

14. Justo, Teoría, pp. 347–48, 351.

15. In T. Di Tella, L. Brams, J. Reynaud, and A. Touraine, Sindicato y comunidad (Buenos Aires, 1967), chaps. 6 and 7, an attempt is made to study the operation of these factors in two Chilean union settings. See also Luis Chaparro, “Industrial Workers and Labor Unions in Colombia” (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1972).

16. To use Lucio Bonilla's words, “people with ideas, with principles, they knew what they wanted. … This is what [the revolution of 1943] tried to stop” (OHP 1/2, p. 65).

17. Manuel Fossa, an independent left winger turned peronista, refers to the mass meetings of the communist controlled building union, where “elections were held by acclamation; generally those conventional elections with [ballot box] voting were not held, there was a permanent contact through the daily struggle … in ollas populares [during strikes], there were also several locals in the districts, so democracy was expressed in that way, practically by acclamation in mass gatherings in the Luna Park” (OHP 4/6, p. 6). He then goes on to argue that the same thing happened in the Partido Laborista he helped to create in 1945, and which he divided after breaking with Perón.

18. It is difficult to illustrate this process better than with the words of foodworker Rafael Ginocchio, who, referring to Perón's speeches, says that “he expresses what I feel but which due to lack of capacity I cannot express; it would seem that he would have become reincarnated in me to say what I have been feeling since I was born” (OHP 5/5, p. 23). This feeling can certainly also operate in a less personalized fashion. As for the ideological orientations of the same man, they are quite wide, blending his early socialist sympathies with an admiration for fascism, “one of the political movements which will have a lot of followers in the world” (p. 30), while at the same time proclaiming himself a democrat. His opinions about the way to exert authority are also tolerant. Speaking of Hilario Salvo, peronista metallurgical leader, he says that he “used to take his revolver and put it on the table, saying ‘here I am the boss,‘ that's a true fact, he was a good leader, a man who gained a lot of things for the metallurgical union” (p. 59).

19. Juan Pallas, writing in the intellectually oriented anarchist paper Ideas y Figuras, referred to this type of phenomenon when he regretted that in Argentina “the greatest success … was for those who spoke more to feelings that to reason. … Pure agitation, of a demagogic type, proposing an ‘immediate social revolution’, which in Europe has already been abandoned, is still here in its heyday” (28 May 1915). See also, in the same paper, an article by Alcides Greca, “Psicología de la Bohemia” (8 September 1915) for a perceptive treatment of some psychological traits that can lead to political involvement.

20. Speaking of the great influx of new union members “sent from the Secretaría de Trabajo” in 1945, Lucio Bonilla, at that time in charge of the socialist textile union, said that “we scarcely had the time to make the carnets … they didn't understand anything else, logically, than the material side, they didn't have principles or idealism” (OHP 1/2, p. 81). Though Bonilla—who lost his position as a result of this influx—is not an impartial observer, the fact is that those people who were flocking to the union had not taken the trouble to do it before, when conditions were more difficult. They were not all recent migrants but many belonged to the large majority of the textile labor force that had not been unionized.

21. About recent events in Brazil in this direction see the special number of the journal Ensaio, Año II, No. 4, 1978, São Paulo, dedicated to “O poder sindical.”

22. A participant in the events, Mateo Fossa, leader of the furniture makers, of left socialist sympathies, describes an instance of the confrontation of different attitudes as follows: “I saw the secretary of the carpenters [a noted anarchist union] with a big stick … breaking shop windows. [I said to him] but what, is this the way you make the revolution. … Because when there are those nonorganized movements, control is lost. Particularly the young ones. … [In another place] they were burning two flour carts of the Rio de la Plata mills. They had taken off the horses … and the people were carrying away the flour sacks to their houses” (OHP 1/1, p. 10–11).

23. See Julio Godio, La Semana Trágica de enero 1919 (Buenos Aires, 1972); David Rock, “Lucha civil en la Argentina. La Semana Trágica de enero de 1919,” Desarrollo Económico 11, No. 42–44 (July 1971-March 1972); and Rock's comments on Godio, in Desarrollo Económico 12, No. 45 (April-June 1972).

24. See Acción Socialista, 16 April 1906, for a description of the breakaway, by the official organ of the new group.

25. Luis Gay, admirer of Yrigoyen and later on founder of the pro-Perón Partido Laborista in 1945, was one of the important syndicalist leaders. Others were Tramonti, Cerrutti, Marotta, and Lotito.

26. Syndicalists, according to Domenech, “deep down in their hearts were Radicales, all Radicales.” He believes the majority of union members—not to speak of the working class as a whole—were Radicales, particularly in the Unión Ferroviaria, with its many locals in the interior of the country (OHP 1/11, pp. 75 and 166). During Yrigoyen's government it became ever more tempting for union leaders to try to get concessions from the government, as they often found support for their demands, but this was not very compatible with a revolutionary stance. The railwaymen's Obrero Ferroviario, syndicalist controlled at that time, defended Yrigoyen's intercession on behalf of some dismissed workers, on whose behalf the Federación Obrera Ferrocarrilera had made an appeal (El Obrero Ferroviario, 1 June 1919). In a later issue the newspaper said that it opposed reformism and long antesalas in government offices, but that it would be a mistake to refuse interviews with the authorities. Bandera Proletaria, official organ of the Unión Sindical Argentina, a syndicalist dominated trade union federation, condemned Tramonti (who was also a syndicalist, though of a more moderate orientation) for his alleged compromises with the employers (28 November 1922). The militant Batalla Sindicalista carried many attacks against “syndicalists” who believed that only hours and pesos mattered, and who made transactions in order to defend their organizations (see issue of 6 March 1922).

27. Luis Gay, syndicalist leader of the telephone workers, estimates that in the early thirties some 14,000 people worked in his industry, of which some 3,000 to 3,500 were affiliated with unions, and the militants were not more than 200. Even so he thinks that “in these moments [1970] in the labor movement there are less activists than in those days” (OHP 1/4, pp. 41–42). According to Mateo Fossa, craft unions allowed greater participation of members, both because of their smaller size and due to the fact that the problems which had to be considered affected more directly the everyday work experience of their members (OHP 1/1, p. 27). Socialist party leaders were quite conscious about the moderating influence trade union organization had on the temper of the working class. Thus unionist Martín Casaretto claimed that “conflicts are more frequent precisely in trades where trade union strength is little developed. Workers who permanently overlook the union, who ‘only remember Saint Barbara when it thunders’, tend to appeal to strikes in enthusiasm and suddenly, without stopping to think about the difference of forces at stake” (Anuario Socialista, Buenos Aires, 1929, pp. 166–71). Similarly, another unionist, Alfredo López, argued that “as a result of trade unions, workers have left behind tumultuary practices, understanding the laws of technological progress” (Anuario Socialista, Buenos Aires, 1937, pp. 33–38). The Unión Ferroviaria was very proud of its “legal” statute, which restricted its objectives to the amelioration of the living conditions of workers, making it easier for company officials and government to deal with that union. See interview with Camilo Almarza, socialist railwayman and collaborator of José Domenech in the C.G.T. (OHP 3/8).

28. See declarations by Domenech (OHP 1/11, pp. 20–21) and Juan Rodríguez, socialist railwayman turned peronista, who refers to the “gente matoncita” Tramonti, a syndicalist leader, had in his local area (OHP 3/9, p. 36), and to the “few shots exchanged, but nothing happened,” when Tramonti tried to recover the Unión Ferroviaria from Domenech's control (p. 37).

29. Luis Lotito, a syndicalist leader, wrote a series of articles on the “Proletariado tucumano,” in Acción Socialista, Nos. 58 to 62 (1907-8). See also comments by Domenech about the difference between people in the North and those he was more familiar with in the Buenos Aires-Rosario area (OHP 1/11).

30. La Unión Obrera, February-March 1906.

31. Acción Socialista, 29 January 1910.

32. Revista Socialista Internacional, Año I, No. 7, 25 May 1909, p. 451.

33. See Hernán Ramírez Necochea, Historia del movimiento obrero en Chile: antecedentes, siglo XIX (Santiago, 1956); Julio César Jobet, Recabarren: los orígenes del movimiento obrero y el socialismo chilenos (Santiago, 1955); Luis Emilio Recabarren, Obras escogidas (Santiago, 1965).

34. See Paul Drake, Socialism and Populism in Chile, 1932–1952 (Urbana, 1978).

35. See Peter Klarén, Modernization, Dislocation and Aprismo (Austin, 1973) for an account of social classes in their connection with Aprismo in the “solid North.”

36. The classical Socialist party argument in favor of a separation between politics and trade unionism was that otherwise divisionism would set in. As for the forms for establishing connections between the party and the trade unions, see Juan B. Justo, La realización del socialismo (Collected Works 5 [Buenos Aires, 1947], pp. 276–77, 280 and following, and 301–3).

37. Anuario Socialista (Bs. As., 1934), pp. 149–51.

38. See, among other works, F. F. Ridley, Revolutionary Syndicalism in France (Cambridge, 1970); Leo Valiani, “Le mouvement syndical ouvrier italien entre le fascisme et l'antifascisme,” in International Institute for Social History (collective work), Mouvements ouvriers et depression economique de 1929 a 1939 (Assen, Holland, 1966); Claudio Schwarzenberg, Il Sindacalismo Fascista (Milano, 1972); Ernest Noite, I Tre Volti del Fascismo (Milano, 1974); Renzo de Felice, Mussolini (Rome, 1965—several volumes, others forthcoming). Hubert Lagardelle, first editor of Sorel's Reflections on Violence ended up with life imprisonment, a victim not of the bourgeoisie but of the French liberation, after being Vichy's secretary of state for labor.

39. The syndicalist-controlled C.G.T. of 1930 had to face the new military government with what Luis Gay, one of the leaders at the time, termed “a bit of equilibrio” (OHP 1/4, p. 18). Tramonti's connections with Ortiz, in the attempt to regain control of the Unión Ferroviaria, are described in detail by José Domenech, according to whom “in the union movement, in those days, something of what it is today was already there” (OHP 1/11, pp. 151, 109–14). In 1938, the left-wing division of the Socialist party, the Partido Socialista Obrero, was supported by the newspaper Crítica, in order to help the electoral prospects of the Radicales, according to Mateo Fossa, a member of that party. One of its leaders, Ernesto Janin of the shopworker union, was in charge of the trade union section in Crítica, as he himself declares (OHP 1/8).

40. See Ernesto Wurth Rojas, Ibánez, caudillo enigmático (Santiago, 1958); René Montero, La verdad sobre Ibánez (Buenos Aires, 1953); Elias Lafertte, Vida de un comunista (Santiago, 1961); and Drake, Socialism.

41. See Hugh Clegg, General Union: A Study of the National Union of General and Municipal Workers (Oxford, 1954); Henry Pelling, A History of British Trade Unionism (London 1963), and John Lovell, Stevedores and Dockers: A Study of Trade Unionism in the Port of London, 1870–1914 (New York, 1969).

42. See Annie Kriegel, La Croissance de la C.G.T., 1918–1921 (Paris, 1966) and Antoine Prost, La C.G.T. á l'epoque du Front Populaire, 1934–1939 (Paris, 1964).

43. Affiliation figures are not very reliable, particularly after the consolidation of Perón's government, when they are obviously inflated and approximated. A detailed analysis can be found in Miguel Murmis and Juan Carlos Portantiero, Estudios sobre los orígenes del peronismo (Bs. As., 1971), pp. 77 ff.

44. Yrigoyen, as leader of a mass-based party, always had some labor following. There was no strong organized Radical sector among unionists, though. In this sense, yrigoyenismo is markedly different from such other populist parties as peronismo or aprismo. For alleged support from Yrigoyen to the syndicalist U.S., see interview with socialist municipal worker Francisco Pérez Leirós (OHP 3/12, p. 25).

45. See interviews with Pérez Leirós (OHP 3/12) and Domenech (OHP 1/11).

46. Ibid. Also Félix Luna, Ortiz: Reportaje a la Argentina opulenta (Buenos Aires, 1978) who refers to the good connections between Ortiz and Tramonti, though not in connection with the above episode.

47. To attempt fully to support these three statements would take me beyond the limits of this article. I have argued these points at greater length in El sistema político argentino y la clase obrera (Buenos Aires, 1964).

48. To use their words, “the new elite that proposes a populist project finds an already organized working class, which also has a social project of its own, and to whom it expressly proposes an alliance” and therefore “There would not be a dissolution of labor's autonomy in favour of heteronomy in the initial moment of peronismo in Argentina but rather, if at all, at a later stage,” Estudios, pp. 112, 123. This seems a better description of Roosevelt's than of Perón's tactics, if one takes into account the very strong repression to which many members of the old working-class movement in Argentina were subjected by the military government of 1943–46, including interventions of unions and jailing of leaders.

49. Two of the latest statements by Germani on this subject are to be found in his “El surgimiento del peronismo: el rol de los obreros y los migrantes internos,” Desarrollo Económico (Oct.–Dec. 1973), and in Autoritarismo, Fascismo e Classi Sociale (Bologna, 1975), Chap. 4. A polemic has developed about this subject in the pages of several journals, with various historians criticizing his emphasis on internal migrants. See notes by Peter Smith, Eldon Kenworthy, and Tulio Halperín Donghi, in Desarrollo Económico, Nos. 54 and 56; also by the latter, La democracia de masas (Bs. As, 1972), and Walter Little, “The Popular Origins of Peronism,” in David Rock (ed.), Argentina in the Twentieth Century (London, 1975).

50. The Partido Laborista was certainly an innovator in political methods. Luis Gay, in describing its lightening electoral campaign tells how “central mass meetings [were] transmitted to the whole country through the radio … in each locality where the radio network reaches another meeting is held … just before or after the transmission of the central act. … Those long, tiresome … electoral campaigns no longer exist; the Partido Laborista holds 3, 4 or 5 [central] acts in total, but always with the same character” (OHP 1/4, p. 91). According to Mariano Tedesco (OHP 5/7, p. 45) the idea of the Partido Laborista “was generated in the Consejo de Asesores … of Trabajo y Previsión” (secretaries of trade unions, who had been invited by Perón to become advisers to the ministry). For Rafael Ginocchio “the C.G.T. was not an appendage of the government, it was the government itself” (OHP 5/5, p. 35). Many who became peronistas were recruited after being called from jail to have an interview with Perón, as was the case with Cipriano Reyes (OHP 7/6).

51. See figures given by Germani in his Desarrollo Económico article (p. 448), on the basis of a 1960 census sample, according to which in Greater Buenos Aires 76.9% of unskilled, 57.8% of semiskilled, and 44.6% of skilled workers were internal migrants. Through statistical considerations explained in that article one can come to the conclusion that the situation in 1945 was not too different. As for the participants in the events, of all shades of opinion, the impact of mass internal migration seemed quite obvious. For Mariano Tedesco, textile peronista, it was “a flood coming from the interior” (OHP 5/7, p. 10); for Mateo Fossa it was based on “cabecitas negras” and “people from the interior” (OHP 1/1, pp. 33, 53, 61); for Lucio Bonilla it was “the famous landslide,” made up of people “coming in flocks” (OHP 1/2, pp. 56, 77); for Oscar Tabasco, a political friend of Luis Gay “in 1945 it was a flood, no one remained without being organized” (OHP 1/4, p. 42). Tedesco himself says, not only that he was quite inexpert (he was only 22 at the time), but that so were most of the people who acted with him, and that Perón “had to rely on leaders, almost all of them novatos” (OHP 5/7. pp. 30, 47, 76). On the other hand, José Domenech and Francisco Pérez Leirós, both very bitter antiperonistas, point to the large numbers of old unionists who joined the bandwagon (OHP 1/11, p. 177 and OHP 3/2, p. 165).

52. It is necessary to recall that on 16 October 1945 the C.G.T. supported the plan of a general strike (for the 18th) by only 21 votes against 19. Several important antiperonista unions like the Fraternidad were outside of the C.G.T., which, on the other hand, was heavily influenced by some newly created and state-sponsored peronista unions. The events of 17 October happened more as a result of direct convocation by Perón and his mobilization structure, than by the efforts of the trade union leaderships. See Gino Germani, op. cit.