Work, Political Ideas and Class Formation in the Chilean Textile Industry 1930-1973

Adam FishwickUniversity of Sussex

adf25@sussex.ac.uk

Overview• Context: Beyond the Estado de Compromiso

• Workers’ Newspapers: A Note on Methodology

• Constructing Textile Workers– Grievances from the Factory Floor– Interpreting Discontent– The ‘Anomaly’ of Chilean Socialism– Historical Memory

• The Working Class and Industrialisation in Chile

• Labour history in Chile

• ‘Heroic’ versus the institutionalised phases

• Limits on institutionalisation of working class struggle and persistence of autonomy

• Experience of work and the politicisation of grievances, ideas and everyday struggle

Beyond the Estado de Compromiso

Workers’ Newspapers: A Note on Methodology

• Representation or formation?

• Insights into the history of struggles and political moments in working class history

• Insights into the politicisation of workers and their interests

• Nexus of representing working class struggle and the contested meanings applied to it

Constructing Textile Workers

• Grievances from the Factory Floor

• Interpreting Discontent

• The ‘Anomaly’ of Chilean Socialism

• Historical Memory

• Beyond political/economic dichotomy

• Concerns over wages and work persistent

• 1930s target employer abuses in early formation of the industry

• 1940s/1950s shift towards concrete targeting government and foreign firms

• 1970s supportive of government and pushes for further reforms

Grievances from the Factory Floor

• Legalism and radicalism as interpreting grievances and relations with state and capital

• 1930s – 1950s sees shift in legalism from supportive of Labour Code to pressure for legal-institutional implementation

• 1970s strong contrast particularly stark between support for legal gains made in the state and radical factory occupations

Interpreting Discontent

• Anti-imperialism, nationalism and, democracy

• Anti-imperialism in the industry emerges in the 1940s and consolidated in 1970s

• Nationalism in a left-wing form supported national industrialists in the 1950s and nationalisation/socialisation in 1970s

• Democracy begins in 1930s with right to unionise, in 1950s against repression, and 1970s in conflicts over worker participation in production

The ‘Anomaly’ of Chilean Socialism

Historical Memory

• Explicit formative role of the workers’ press

• Applying political-theoretical ideas to struggles – Marx, Lenin etc.

• National political history – Recabarren, Nitrate Workers, Union History

• International political struggle – Franco, May Day, Soviet Union

Working Class Formationand Contested Industrialisation

• Shifting grievances reflecting changes in industry and political priorities

• Continuity of political interpretation

• Influence of political-ideological context

• Politicisation and construction of collective historical memory

• Persistence of radical conflict beyond and beneath the institutions of the working class