Latin America: Tragedy and Prospect

Before 1930 a passable history of Latin America might have been written without any reference to its labor movement. Today this would be impossible. Peronist demagogy and its equivalents throughout the continent have inadvertently succeeded in drawing the working class into political life, where it now begins to constitute an influential, if not determining, force. Having acquired a taste under the Peronist demagogues for being taken into some account, the workers would resist the relinquishment of what only yesterday had seemed a rare and barely attainable privilege.

For this very reason, by virtue of the curiously mixed development of Latin America, the labor movement now faces new possibilities and responsibilities. Foremost of all, it must determine whether its mission in society is inclusive or fractional, the lifting of Latin America out of its primitive poverty or the protection and aggrandizement of a small “aristocracy” of labor. Until very recently the Latin American labor movement had been chained by the prevalence of misery to the immediate task and the immediate moment; in matters of broader scope, in defense of interests only indirectly related to the pressure of daily needs, it had seldom been more than an echo of the middle class.

But the future will require a choice: either a continuation of the present role, nestling uneasily behind the swords of the dictators, or an effort to become a decisive factor in the evolution of Latin America. And if it chooses the latter, the Latin American labor movement must confront those essential problems which the middle class has not been able to solve, the caudillos have not known how to solve, and neither the old landed oligarchy nor the new industrial powers even acknowledge to be problems.

Until recently Latin America has consisted of states; only during the last few years have nations come into existence. The democratic regimes, where they exist, have managed during the past decade to give their peoples some sense of nationality. Independence, aborted in its economic phase by imperialism, is slowly becoming a political reality. What antiimperialism could not achieve, revolutionary nationalism has.

But nationalism has great dangers. Like Peronism, a caricature of revolutionary nationalism, it may place a false emphasis on the noun and obliterate the adjective. Demagogy renders nationalism sterile, preventing the solution of such basic problems as absentee landlordism and the ownership of national resources. In Argentina the workers have fallen into this trap. But in other countries the demagogues have either been less skillful or less daring, and for the time being the workers have been saved from purely nationalist contagion.

In the notes that follow I want to outline the trying problems that face the Latin America labor movement, and to suggest—particularly through emphasis on its relation to the middle class and to revolutionary...