Labor and capital in Latin America's changing social landscape

Cook, Maria Lorena. Organizing Dissent: Unions, the State, and the Democratic Teachers ' Movement in Mexico. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996. Illustrations, tables, figures, acronyms, appendixes, bibliography, index, xvi, 359 pages; hardcover $55, paperback $19.95.

Drake, Paul W. Labor Movements and Dictatorships. The Southern Cone in Comparative Perspective. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Bibliography, index, 253 pages; hardcover $47.50, paperback $15.95.

Martinez, Javier, and Alvaro H. Diaz. Chile: The Great Transformation. Washington/Geneva: Brookings Institution/United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, 1996. Bibliography, index, xii, 156 pages; hardcover $34.95, paperback $14.95.

Pereira, Anthony W. The End of the Peasantry: The Rural Labor Movement in Northeast Brazil, 1961-1988. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997. Bibliography, index, xxi, 232 pages; hardcover $45, paperback $19.95.

Pineo, Ronn F. Social and Economic Reform in Ecuador. Life and Work in Guayaquil. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1996. Photographs, tables, appendix, abbreviations, bibliography, index, 227 pages; hardcover $49.95.

Silva, Eduardo. The State and Capital in Chile: Business Elites, Technocrats, and Market Economics. Boulder: Westview Press, 1996. Tables, bibliography, index; hardcover $59.

Weinstein, Barbara. For Social Peace in Brazil: Industrialists and the Remaking of the Working Class in Sao Paulo, 1920-1964. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Illustrations, bibliography, index, xvii, 435 pages; hardcover $59.95, paperback $24.95.

Although class actors have occupied a permanent place in Latin America's turbulent twentieth-century political landscape, they have not been a focus of continuous scholarly attention. For a variety of reasons, class themes largely disappeared from the mainstream scholarly agenda during the 1980s. At least partly in reaction against the class-tinged structural determinism of theories of dependency and bureaucratic authoritarianism, dominant approaches to the study of democratization eschewed class analysis in order to emphasize institutional engineering and the contingent construction of elite-level political accords (O'Donnell and Schmitter 1986; Higley and Gunther 1992).

In similar fashion, the study of neoliberal economic reforms typically turned the spotlight on global market forces, international financial institutions, and technocratic state elites rather than on domestic class actors (Haggard and Kaufman 1992). Even scholars who retained an interest in (or a commitment to) social reform and the empowerment of subaltern sectors increasingly questioned the transformative potential of traditional class actors, such as labor unions, and directed attention to grassroots popular organizations and other "new social movements" as agents of cultural and political change (Slater 1985; Escobar and Alvarez 1992).

In recent years, however, there has been a modest revival of interest in class relations and class actors in Latin American scholarship. Several influential works have stressed the enduring theoretical significance of class relations in the shaping of political regimes (Collier and Collier 1991; Rueschemeyer et al. 1992), while first-rate studies have dissected the political beliefs and behavior of workers (Ranis 1995; Middlebrook 1995; Buchanan 1995), capitalists (Payne 1994), and peasants (Anderson 1994) in different Latin American societies. The books reviewed here continue this revival of interest in themes related to social class. Although they do not all focus directly on class actors, they all shed light on various dimensions of evolving class relations in Latin American societies, both historically and in the more contemporary era of neoliberal transformation. In so doing, they provide important insights into the social foundations of the region's incessant political change.

This essay is organized around two broad themes that stand out in the works reviewed here. The first is the interactive relationship between class actors and their social and political environment. Class actors are invariably shaped and constrained by the economic structures and political institutions in which they are embedded; characteristics such as the size, cohesion, organizational forms, and strategic orientation of class actors bear the indelible imprint of their surroundings. Several of the books reviewed here, however, suggest that this relationship is interactive rather than unidirectional, because class actors are political agents who seek to influence their structural and institutional environment in varying levels of competition, conflict, and cooperation with alternative sociopolitical actors. Understanding this reciprocal causation is fundamental to any explanation of the role of class actors in the political process.

As for the second theme, these books highlight the heterogeneity of interests and identities that are likely to exist in any particular social class, regardless of objective class positioning in the structure of productive relations. Political expressions of class interest are thus contingent, contested, and socially constructed through a process of struggle that is both endogenous and exogenous to any given class category. These books demonstrate that this process of social construction-of articulating common interests and identities-is never-ending, although it is often associated with a parallel process of disarticulation, in accordance with Schumpeter's characterization of capitalist development as creative destruction.

THE INTERACTION BETWEEN CLASS ACTORS AND THEIR ENVIRONS

Because class actors seek to exercise political influence, their organizational strength is a matter of obvious interest. This is especially the case for labor movements, which must counteract by weight of numbers and collective action the structural power that capitalists derive from their control of investment resources. Organizational strength, however, is not a purely endogenous matter, as it is heavily conditioned by structural and institutional forces. This point is driven home in Ronn F. Pineo's Social and Economic Reform in Ecuador Life and Work in Guayaquil, which explores the limits of social reform in Ecuador at the turn of the century. Pineo's detailed analysis of social and economic development in Guayaquil helps explain the structural and historical factors that caused Ecuador's labor movement to become "one of the most feeble in Latin America" (p. 157).

Drawing from Bergquist's (1986) model of the linkages between leading export sectors and the character of national labor movements, Pineo traces the impact of Ecuador's cacao-based agroexport model of development on Guayaquil's social formation. The export of cacao concentrated wealth in the hands of small commercial and landed oligarchies, yielded few spinoffs in either transport infrastructure or industrial processing, and left behind a minuscule middle class and proletariat. There was no large, strategically located body of workers with the political or economic leverage needed to threaten the export trade, and domestic ownership of the cacao industry prevented workers from mobilizing around nationalist themes.

With a huge glut of cheap labor, attributable to the steady migration of indigenous workers from the sierra to the coast, and with most workers employed in temporary positions, a fluid work force relied primarily on individual mobility rather than collective action for economic improvement. As a labor movement began to emerge in the early decades of the twentieth century, it was led by artisans and workers in the service sector and was heavily dependent on the financial and political support of liberal allies in the state. The collapse of the cacao market in 1922 engendered a powerful spurt of militant labor mobilization, but a general strike was crushed by military repression in a Guayaquil massacre from which the labor movement never fully recovered.

In the aftermath of the massacre, militant labor organizations were disbanded, and the union movement lost its state support and the capacity to monitor the concessions it had won during earlier stages of mobilization. Although Pineo does not explore the broader comparative and theoretical implications of his case study, it stands in stark contrast to the patterns of labor incorporation in most of the Latin American countries studied by Collier and Collier (1991), and it helps in understanding both the endurance of oligarchic domination in Ecuador and the relative weakness of organized labor in that country's populist experience under Jose Velasco Ibarra.

Whereas Pineo explains how patterns of dependent development and political repression constrained the Ecuadorean labor movement during an earlier, agroexport phase of development, other recent works explore the impact of later stages of capitalist modernization on class actors. In The End of the Peasantry: The Rural LaborMovement in Northeast Brazil, 1961-1988, Anthony W. Pereira chronicles the transformation of rural lower-class collective action in Pernambuco during a tumultuous period of economic and political change. Pereira's account artfully synthesizes structural and institutional approaches to explain the demise of peasant leagues, with their emphasis on land distribution claims, and the rise of rural unions with a focus on wages and benefits following the 1964 military coup in Brazil. In addition to political repression, the peasant leagues were doomed by the figurative "end of the peasantry," as accelerated capitalist development modified the class structure of northeast Brazil, diminishing the relative importance of land-hungry tenants, sharecroppers, and landless peasants. With "depeasantization" came commercialized smallholders and rural wage laborers in the sugar industry, who organized in unions under the institutional strictures of Brazilian corporatism. Following Paige (1975), Pereira argues that patterns of collective action are structured by the relations of production in agriculture; as capitalist modernization proceeds, revolutionary struggles over land ownership yield to reformist union movements that bargain over wages and benefits.

One of Pereira's most provocative findings is that economic and institutional change strengthened rural unions' capacity for collective action despite political repression under bureaucratic-authoritarian rule. As he explains, local rural unions gained new political appeal and organizational resources when they were chosen as financial conduits for the military government's new health and retirement programs. These institutional innovations, however, also reshaped the rural union movement. They incorporated the unions into the state's restrictive corporatist framework; they created a leadership caste that was highly dependent on state subsidies; and they encouraged the unions to prioritize wages and welfare benefits in their daily operations. Consequently, although the national union CONTAG (the National Confederation of Agricultural Workers) retained a principled commitment to land redistribution in its formal declarations, in practice its state and local-level affiliates were preoccupied with wage and benefit issues. As Pereira states, "The welfare programs . . . empowered a new category of professional union leaders, connected to the state, with a high degree of influence over their members, but with little interest in challenging the existing distribution of property rights" (p. 75).

Although the rural unions were capable of militant collective action-the agricultural workers in Pernambuco declared the first rural strike in the nation against the military regime in 1979, and they struck eight more times in the subsequent ten years during the negotiation of annual contracts-their militancy did not target the structure of property ownership in the countryside, as did that of the pre-coup peasant leagues.

The impact of authoritarianism on labor movements is also a central concern of the excellent studies by Paul W. Drake and Maria Lorena Cook. The most valuable contribution of Drake's Labor Movements and Dictatorships: The Southern Cone in Comparative Perspective is its cross-regional comparative analysis of labor movements under authoritarian rule in southern Europe, Brazil, and the Southern Cone of Latin America. All the dictatorships Drake studies arose in contexts of class conflict and adopted antilabor positions. Nevertheless, authoritarian rule affected labor movements in very different ways. Where labor was a relatively weak actor before authoritarianism, as it was in Portugal, Greece, and Brazil, "containment coups" led to authoritarian regimes that "enveloped labor in official corporatist organizations" (p. 33) in order to ameliorate class conflict while trying to industrialize their societies. Industrialization, however, created structural conditions that encouraged labor movements to gain strength, while corporatist institutions "offered the outlawed labor parties official structures to infiltrate" (p. 33). According to Drake, "As the working class grew in size, strength, and expectations, it became more militant-and in some cases more radical-than it had been before the coup" (p. 33). In contrast,

rollback or reactionary coups took place to incapacitate stronger labor movements in Spain, Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina. The Southern Cone governments meshed a policy to atomize and shrink the proletariat with an economic program that reduced industry and employment. Their free-market labor strategy to disassemble and disable unions matched their free-market economic strategy.... Not surprisingly, the debilitated labor movements became less militant and more moderate than they had been before the coups in the Southern Cone. (p. 33)

Like Pereira, Drake sees a strengthening of Brazilian unionism under bureaucratic-authoritarian rule, although he focuses more on the success of the "new unionism" in organizing inside and outside state corporatist institutions in the urban industrial sector than on its activities in the agricultural sector. By analyzing the structural, institutional, and political constraints faced by labor movements, Drake uses his theoretical framework to help differentiate Brazil's experience from that of its Southern Cone neighbors. In those countries, labor emerged from authoritarianism both politically and economically weakened.

Both authors provide a useful check on tendencies to accept facile generalizations about the negative impact of authoritarian rule on labor movements. Drake does, however, perceive more generalizable structural effects of the global trend toward market liberalism, which he sees as weakening labor unions (p. 192). Although he acknowledges the resilience and perseverance of labor movements and their partisan affiliates in the face of authoritarian repression and economic restructuring, he is cautious when assessing their political leverage, arguing that they "were much more successful at outlasting these regimes than at battling them" (p. 192). He concludes that capitalist authoritarianism successfully foreclosed socialist development options and circumscribed the potential for democratic social reforms, thus contributing to the growing moderation of contemporary labor unions and leftist parties in Latin America.

In Organizing Dissent: Unions, the State, and the Democratic Teachers 'Movement in Mexico, Cook also explores the impact of an authoritarian political system on organized labor. More specifically, she seeks to explain how a dissident, democratically organized teachers' movement could emerge and survive within an official union structure that is thoroughly integrated into the corporatist, authoritarian framework of a single-partydominant political regime.

One of the most valuable contributions of Cook's study is her adoption of a social movement theoretical framework to analyze dissident teachers' unions. Too often, scholars of social movements and organized labor have talked past one another; the literature on "new social movements" has often portrayed unions as calcified remnants of "old" social movements at best, or as coopted junior partners of establishment institutions at worst. Cook's study builds a bridge between scholars in the two fields and demonstrates that unions can adopt organizational features that are generally attributed to new social movements, such as participatory and democratic organizational structures and a collective identity that emphasizes political autonomy. Indeed, Cook argues persuasively that internal democratic practices are not merely naive expressions of political ideals. Instead, internal democracy in this case was both a means and an end, as it "proved to be a functional strategy for the movement's survival." Democratic practices helped to manage factionalism while providing a number of additional benefits:

the strengthening of a grassroots defense against the movement's enemies through a sense of "ownership" of the movement by its members, the facilitation of mobilization, the reduced likelihood of cooptation, the generation of new leaders, the creation of political consciousness, and the expansion of horizontal alliances. (p. 265) Cook's study, however, does not attribute movement success solely to endogenous organizational characteristics; rather, success is contingent on the interaction between a movement's organization, its strategy, and its external environment. Theoretically, she crafts a political process model of movement dynamics, drawing from Tarrow (1994) and other scholars who emphasize the political opportunity structures that shape and constrain social movements. In contrast to most of the literature, she employs this model to analyze a social movement in an authoritarian context in which a corporatist state seeks to close off organizational space and coopt or repress autonomous forms of sociopolitical organization.

One of the fruits of this approach is Cook's ability to show the fluid character of Mexico's longstanding system of corporatist labor control, which she characterizes as an "unstable equilibrium" (p. 34) plagued by internal contradictions between the interests of state institutions, official union leaders, and their rank-and-file constituents. Dissent springs from the tensions between official unions' contradictory roles as both instruments of government objectives and representatives of constituent interests. That dissent becomes rapidly politicized when even economistic demands cannot be effectively articulated without internal democratic reforms to make unions more representative.

Cook uses the political process model to explain how proposed education reforms triggered the sudden emergence of the dissident teachers' movement at the end of the 1970s; how the closing of political space led to the movement's demobilization in the mid-1980s; and how the 1988 elections and conflicts between President Carlos Salinas and traditional labor bosses provided a context for the resurgence of the movement at the end of the 1980s. She also provides a comparative analysis of the dissident movement in different states, demonstrating the relative advantages of organizational strategies that rely on legal forms of mobilization and demand articulation rather than illegal and highly confrontational challenges to the authoritarian state. In the end, Cook's case study of Mexico's most important dissident labor movement provides a revealing, micro-level portrait of the political and economic changes-and the responses from civil society-that have eroded Mexico's corporatist, authoritarian system of governance.

Cook, Drake, and Pereira all perceive labor movements as important actors in the struggle to democratize political regimes and civil societies, yet they are all guarded in their expectations for significant union impact on democratic policy making in contemporary Latin America. It is indicative of unions' predicament, perhaps, that these authors point to different factors when assessing the limits of labor's political leverage. For Drake, structural changes in the regional and global economies have diminished the relative size and political weight of organized labor. For Cook, democratization of the political system can be a two-edged sword for a dissident labor movement. Although democratization opens organizational space and new channels for representation, the institutionalization of union access may also produce bureaucratic organizational forms with oligarchic leadership structures. It may endanger political cohesion and autonomy, and ultimately may undermine grassroots mobilizational capacity. Pereira, by contrast, emphasizes the coordination problem faced by the rural union movement in representing the diverse, and not always congruent, interests of different sectors of the rural poor.

These concerns are buttressed by the analyses of social and political change contained in the two books on Chile: Javier Martinez and Alvaro Diaz's Chile: The Great Transformation and Eduardo Silva's State and Capital in Chile. Both books are devoted to understanding the nature and consequences of the capitalist revolution that transpired in Chile under the military regime of General Augusto Pinochet, following the overthrow of socialist president Salvador Allende in 1973.

For a relatively short and highly readable account that cuts through the myths surrounding Chile's free-market "miracle," there is no better source than the book by Martinez and Diaz, two of Chile's most prominent social scientists. The authors argue persuasively that the dynamism of the neoliberal economic model imposed by Pinochet and his Chicago School technocrats was predicated on a series of socioeconomic reforms implemented by the military regime's socialist and Christian Democratic predecessors. Agrarian and other reforms undertaken by the Allende and Frei governments transformed paternalistic, precapitalist social relationships; undermined traditional elites that impeded economic modernization; and provided the military regime with the political autonomy required to restructure Chilean capitalism for a new era of export-led growth. This argument has major implications for comparative research. It suggests that the Chilean model-which has been embraced by international financial institutions and emulated by governments throughout Latin America and the developing world-may not be easily replicable. As Martinez and Diaz state, "The task of neoliberalism was made considerably easier by the radical nature of the reforms carried out by the two previous governments" (p. 135). That observation casts doubt on the generalizability of the Chilean experience.

Indeed, Martinez and Diaz challenge conventional interpretations of Chile's economic success, which they characterize as a capitalist revolution but not a free-market one. The authors provide substantial evidence of the numerous ways the Chilean state under Pinochet intervened in the marketplace to shape the course of capitalist development, including the manipulation of tariffs, interest and exchange rates, prices, and wages. In their words,

There is a false, albeit widely accepted, idea that neoliberalism in Chile involved a state that intervened in a "subsidiary" fashion only when private enterprise was not effective, and that markets were left to function freely or savagely (depending on one's viewpoint) without interference of the state. The idea that the neoliberal state worked only to liberate markets, while withdrawing progressively from the economy, takes no account of the real role of the state in Chile between 1973 and 1990. On the contrary, the state was highly interventionist.... (pp. 65-66)

However Chile's capitalist revolution is interpreted, Martinez and Diaz leave little doubt that it has fundamentally transformed Chilean society, including the structure of class relationships. Echoing Drake, they document the structural weakening of labor as a political actor, a weakening attributable to the deindustrialization of the Chilean economy during the first decade of neoliberalism, the repression of organized labor, the reform of the labor code designed to emasculate unions and create more flexible labor markets, and the fragmentation of a "precarious" work force that is increasingly engaged in subcontracting activities or temporary forms of employment. Although Martinez and Diaz hold out the possibility that labor movement strength could be revived as a result of political democracy and the increase in wage labor since the mid-1980s, they argue that the balance of power in Chilean society has swung decisively in favor of capital, as a result of social and economic restructuring. The redistribution of economic resources from the state and labor to capital has reinforced the structural power of dominant classes in Chilean society, particularly the elite sectors tied to finance and to international trade and capital flows.

For Martinez and Diaz, however, this process of restructuring contains a basic paradox: although capitalist elites were the primary beneficiaries of the neoliberal revolution, they were not its political agents. This analysis characterizes Chile's economic transformation as a revolution from above, directed by a technocratic state elite operating with relative autonomy from the capitalist class that undermined Allende's experiment in democratic socialism and ushered the military into power. The authors portray Chile's traditional capitalist class as a reactive and defensive elite, too closely wedded to state protectionism to initiate reforms leading to a competitive marketplace, and too weak to block the policy initiatives of ideological technocrats committed to the restructuring and modernization of Chilean capitalism.

The problem with this argument is that it does not adequately capture the dynamic diversity within Chile's capitalist class, the range of interests that compete for expression among its different fractions, or the personal and organizational bonds that linked economic elites to the state and the policy-making process under the Pinochet regime. It is precisely these factors that form the centerpiece of Eduardo Silva's revealing study of the state and capital during Chile's neoliberal revolution.

Like Martinez and Diaz, Silva believes that Chile's economic transformation has enhanced the political leverage of capitalist elites and narrowed the parameters for democratic social and economic reform. Unlike them, however, he argues that capitalist and landowning elites were important actors in the design and implementation of the neoliberal model. What sets Silva's analysis apart is his effort to disaggregate the capitalist class "as a first step toward examining intraclass conflict and its impact on the formation of more fluid policy coalitions than those found in classic interpretations of the bourgeoisie in Latin America" (p. 19).

Drawing from previous efforts by Jeffry Frieden (1991) and Peter Gourevitch (1986) to disaggregate social groups, Silva develops a categorization that differentiates capitalist class fractions according to their possession of fixed or liquid assets, their orientation toward domestic or international markets, and their degree of international competitiveness. Whereas these various fractions could unite against the shared threat to propertied interests posed by Allende's program of socialization, they had very different interests at stake in the process of economic restructuring under the military regime. Capitalists holding fixed assets in noncompetitive sectors and producing for domestic markets were directly threatened by the neoliberal model, whereas those holding liquid assets tied to international markets were highly favored. The latter, in turn, provided an important domestic class constituency for the Pinochet regime and played an active role in formulating the neoliberal model through the close ties between prominent financial conglomerates and leading figures among the Chicago Boys.

Silva's book is most effective at tracing the interplay between public policies and shifting state-capitalist coalitions during the period of military dictatorship. The initial period of gradual economic adjustment was associated with more mainstream technocratic advisers and a broad capitalist coalition. The period of "radical" neoliberalism after 1975 saw the ascendance of the Chicago School technocrats and internationally oriented conglomerates with liquid assets. With the financial collapse of 1982 and the onset of mass antiregime protests in 1983, the Pinochet regime shifted to a more "pragmatic" neoliberal model that offered various forms of state support for industrial and agricultural producers, thus helping to restore a broad capitalist coalition behind the regime and block the emergence of an opposition movement with business support.

Silva makes a compelling case that capitalist support for Pinochet was not predicated solely on the regime's adoption of favorable policies or on capitalists' fear of the Chilean left; it was also solidified by establishing institutional channels by which Chilean capitalists and their representative associations could gain direct access to the policy-making process. Capitalists' structural power in the aftermath of widespread privatizations and their privileged access to policy arenas weighed heavily on the new democratic regime that took office in 1990. This pressure largely ensured that social reforms would stay within the parameters of pragmatic neoliberalism.

Silva's work is a leading example of the analytical leverage that can be obtained by focusing on the interaction between state and societal actors-in this case, the policy coalitions forged between state technocrats and fractions of a dominant bourgeoisie. As he argues, to ignore these relationships "generates a certain measure of hubris about the relationship between market economics and social equity; it blinds observers to the limitations that Chile's system of interaction between capital and state places on social reform policy; and, hence, it conceals the true nature of the state and society under construction in Chile" (p. 2). Ultimately, Silva's analysis of state-capital relations in Chile has more in common with Peter Evans's (1995) portrayal of East Asian-style "embedded autonomy" than with the image of an economic revolution directed by an insulated and omniscient technocratic vanguard.

The final work reviewed here, Barbara Weinstein's For Social Peace in Brazil, also focuses on the political agency of capitalists, albeit at an earlier phase of political and economic development. The parallels and contrasts between Weinstein's and Silva's accounts of capitalist agency are instructive. Both scholars challenge the traditional assumption that Latin American bourgeoisies are so politically and economically weak that they lack a modernizing project of their own, and must therefore rely on the state as the engine of development. Like capitalists and technocrats in Chile, the Sao Paulo industrialists studied by Weinstein sought to modernize backward productive structures and contain the political threat posed by a potentially militant working class. The methods they chose, however, were strikingly different. Like their Chilean counterparts, they promoted technological modernization to enhance economic efficiency and competitiveness, but within a macroeconomic framework of state-protected import substitution industrialization. And whereas Chilean workers were disciplined by a combination of state repression, market competition, economic dislocation, and social fragmentation, the Brazilian industrialists chose to envelop workers in a network of education, vocational training, and social welfare designed to socialize workers to accept a shared vision of class harmony wrought by economic rationalization.

Weinstein weaves an intricate and fascinating tale of the creation and evolution of SENAI (the National Service for Industrial Training) and SESI (the Industrial Social Service), two public agencies founded by the Vargas and Dutra administrations in the 1940s but financed and operated by associations of industrialists. The two agencies reflected the modernizing vocation of leading Sao Paulo industrialists who sought to rationalize productive relations and implement scientific management principles inspired by Taylorist and Fordist principles. In the process, the industrialists hoped to transform both the capitalist and working-class self-images, in an industrial culture that had been molded by clientelism and apprenticeship.

SENAI and SESI were committed to the establishment of an industrial hierarchy and social discipline in the workplace, but they also believed in the "social functions" of capital. The two agencies sponsored a wide variety of activities, ranging from vocational training to health and education programs, domestic instruction for housewives, and recreation. These programs were designed to create a better-educated, better-trained, and more "cultured" labor force that would be more efficient in the workplace and more resistant to the appeals of communist agitators and other labor militants. Although SENAI encouraged labor organization when corporatist controls contained union militancy, both agencies ultimately collaborated in the state's coercive labor practices during periods of heightened class conflict, both before and after the installation of bureaucraticauthoritarian rule in 1964.

Weinstein is most effective at conveying the tensions and ambiguities between the two agencies' missions of economic modernization, social control, and social welfare. She also provides a nuanced interpretation of their social and political impact. Although they contributed to the consolidation of a "hegemonic discourse" that premised "all discussions of social welfare on rapid economic development and the attendant notions of heightened productivity, rational organization, and technological progress" (p. 340), they did not succeed in disciplining the Brazilian capitalist class to support their activities or to embrace their integrated notion of socioeconomic modernization. Likewise, although SENAI and SESI were able to induce individual workers to take advantage of their services, they had limited success in their mission of social control, as organized labor in Brazil proved resistant to the industrialists' vision of depoliticized social harmony. In reference to the "new unionism" that arose under military rule in the late 1970s, Weinstein says,

it is worth noting the leading role played by skilled workers, a surprising number of them SENAI graduates, in the insurgent labor movement. By the mid-1980s, the presidents of the four most militant metallurgical workers' unions in Sao Paulo were all tool-and-die makers trained by SENAI. And the two most prominent figures to emerge from the new union movement over the last fifteen years-Jair Meneghelli and, of course, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva-were both SENAI graduates. (p. 341)

In the end, Weinstein's account demonstrates the complexity of the historical process by which classes are socially constructed, and the difficulty of imposing any particular political blueprint on such a process. Indeed, many of the works reviewed here shed light on the fluid, heterogeneous, and contested nature of class interests and identities. These issues merit additional consideration.

SOCIAL HETEROGENEITY AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF CLASS

Although all these books take class actors seriously, most of them avoid blanket generalizations about the political or economic interests and behavior of specific social classes. Instead, they analyze the interplay between different class fractions or subgroups as they compete to define collective interests and construct (or refine) collective identities.

With respect to capitalists, this heterogeneity is clearly present in the work of both Silva and Weinstein. Indeed, it is a centerpiece of Silva's analysis, which explains capitalists' policy preferences in terms of objective economic interests derived from differential locations in the sphere of production and unequal access to global capital flows. Even in the context of a relatively autonomous and highly technocratic authoritarian state, macroeconomic policy shifts were shaped and constrained by the coalitional dynamics and conflicts of interest that existed between competing fractions of the bourgeoisie. Weinstein's analysis, on the other hand, places more emphasis on the role of ideology and political discourse in the efforts of a class vanguard to rationalize productive relations, modify both elite and mass-level economic behavior, and construct a hegemonic bourgeois class whose self-interest would be synonymous with that of the nation. The ambitious designs of this class vanguard, however, were obstructed not only by the competing identities of Brazilian workers, but also by the inertia of traditional productive relations and the collective action problems of sympathetic capitalists, who were reluctant to bear the financial costs associated with an integral process of modernization.

Likewise, the books on labor movements reviewed here provide ample evidence of the diversity and tensions that exist within the working classes of Latin America. Three principal sources of differentiation can be identified in these books. The first source is structural in nature, and refers to the divergent interests and identities of workers who occupy distinct positions in the structure of productive relations. This is seen most clearly in Pereira's account of the rural labor movement in Brazil. Pereira traces the rise and decline of different types of lower-class collective action as the political agenda shifts in accordance with changes in the rural class structure and national political institutions. He also shows how different sectors of the rural poor define their interests and collective identities in different ways, and he provides a thoughtful discussion of the problems of representation this creates for a national confederation like CONTAG, which tries to speak for a variety of commercial smallholders, rural wage laborers, and land-hungry peasants. Ultimately, he argues, CONTAG represents these social categories very unevenly, giving precedence to the interests and identities of smallholders and the rural proletariat over those of squatters, migrants, and landless peasants. The volumes by Drake and Martinez and Diaz suggest that the problem of structural differentiation is likely only to grow as market liberalization proceeds.

A second line of division in labor movements is institutional in nature, differentiating union officials from their rank-and-file constituents. This cleavage can be found in the union movements studied by Pereira and Weinstein in Brazil, a country with a long tradition of corporatist control and state cooptation of union leaders. It is a central analytical theme in Cook's study of the dissident teachers' movement in Mexico, which defined its core identity in opposition to the official union leadership. Like structural differentiation, this institutional cleavage raises serious questions about the representativeness of established labor unions, and puts union democracy at the forefront of labor's agenda, especially in countries with state corporatist traditions of labor control.

The final set of cleavages is more political in nature: it relates to the different partisan loyalties, ideological predispositions, and strategic orientations that exist within and between sectors of national labor movements. In Mexico, loyalty to the PRI was a defining feature of the official teachers' federation, whereas dissident unions had political ties to diverse leftist parties or articulated claims for organizational autonomy. Weinstein's analysis suggests that conservative sectors of the Brazilian labor movement were inclined to accept industrialists' vision of "social peace" and economic modernization, preventing SENAI and SESI from becoming pure instruments of social control, whereas leftist sectors were hostile to the notion of class collaboration in a joint project of economic rationalization. Likewise, union movements in Brazil and Mexico faced divisive strategic choices over the relative efficacy of confrontational and collaborative tactics in their relationships with state institutions, as can be seen most clearly in Cook's study of the teachers' movement.

Two final points are worth noting regarding the social construction of class in modern Latin America. First, it is the nature of modern capitalism that workers are more dependent on collective action than on capitalists to defend their interests in both the workplace and the political arena. As such, the aforementioned intraclass cleavages place significant constraints on the political leverage of labor movements in contemporary Latin America. The current power imbalance between capital and labor is unlikely to be redressed unless workers find ways to organize across these divides and find strength in their diversity.

Second, the works reviewed here provide numerous examples of how the construction of new class interests and identities may coincide with the disarticulation or deconstruction of old ones. Thus the rise of rural labor unions in Brazil followed in the wake of the demise of peasant unions, with corresponding changes in the patterns of collective action and the content of collective demands. Likewise, democratic union structures have emerged in the cracks of declining corporatist institutions in Mexico and Brazil, while political repression and economic restructuring in the Southern Cone have caused militant, mass-based labor movements to evolve into smaller, more moderate, and largely economistic union organizations. If, as Schumpeter claims, capitalism is a force for creative destruction, this applies not only to the sphere of production, but to the domain of class relations and social organization as well.

REFERENCES

Anderson, Leslie. 1994. The Political Ecology of the Modern Peasant: Calculation and Community. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Bergquist, Charles. 1986. Labor in Latin America: Comparative Essays on Chile,

Argentina, Venezuela, and Colombia. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Buchanan, Paul G. 1995. State, Labor, Capital: Democratizing Class Relations in the Southern Cone. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Collier, Ruth Berins, and David Collier. 1991. Shaping the Political Arena: Critical Junctures, the Labor Movement, and Regime Dynamics in Latin America. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Escobar, Arturo, and Sonia E. Alvarez, eds. 1992. The Making of Social Movements in Latin America: Identity, Strategy, and Democracy. Boulder: Westview Press.

Evans, Peter. 1995. Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transformation. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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