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THE ALLURE OF LABOR
Workers, Race, and the Making of the Peruvian State
By Paulo Drinot
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2011 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5002-6
Chapter One
RACIALIZING LABOR
In his 1913 annual report, the Peruvian minister of government included the following remarks on the new law regulating strikes introduced by the government of Guillermo Billinghurst (1912–14):
The unusual frequency, lately, of conflicts between capital and labor, and the urgency to adopt measures that will make their consequences less disastrous, forced the government to introduce the supreme decree of 24 January regulating strikes, which has had, once applied, excellent results, making it possible to resolve disagreements between bosses and workers with a positive outcome for both, establishing in this way the harmony that had disappeared. All countries have labor legislation, and the time has come for this country to have it too.
According to this view, Peru had entered a new phase of historical development, one in which conflicts between capital and labor henceforth would play a central role and, as such, one in which the state would need to intervene in order to create the conditions for such conflicts to be resolved. Indeed, a series of strikes had shaken Peruvian society since the 1880s, and urban workers had played a key role in the rise to power of President Billinghurst in 1912. Labor militancy, the minister suggested, signaled at once Peru's entry into a new industrial age and its vulnerability to the less palatable consequences. The implication was that for reasons both of social order and economic efficiency it was imperative for the state to address the labor question. In this, Peru was but one part of a broader process. As Daniel Rodgers notes in his study of the transnational rise of "social politics" in the North Atlantic, strikes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries "were the most unnerving sign of the new order ..., they grew in scope as the era proceeded, pulling the state more and more deeply into the role of policeman, negotiator, or military suppressor."
As I show in this chapter, the minister of government's comments on the rise of labor militancy and on the need for labor legislation suggests that ideas about the causes and consequences of strikes and about the need for a state response to labor militancy circulated in the early twentieth-century world beyond the North Atlantic economies examined by Rodgers. I begin by examining the ways in which the rise of the so-called labor question in Peru, the coming into being of labor as a problem that needed to be addressed, resulted in new conceptions of the state, of the state's social role, and of labor. I argue that these changes reflected both rationalities of discipline (the purpose of the state is to control and discipline labor, a threat to social order) and rationalities of government (the purpose of the state is to protect and improve labor, an agent of progress) that responded, at once, to elite fears of labor unrest and, in turn, to transnational currents that linked Peru to developments in "social politics" in Europe and North America, and more generally, to the coming into being in Peru of what I call the labor state. In a second section, I examine early labor legislation to show that, as elsewhere in Latin America and beyond, early social politics in Peru were shaped by, and were expressive of, gendered assumptions. The labor state was, in practice, a patriarchal state. However, to a greater extent than in many countries, as I show in the final section, in Peru the rise of the labor question was a racialized process. Labor in Peru came to be envisioned in ways that excluded the indigenous from the sphere of labor and conceptions of progress or, rather, that included the indigenous in ideas of progress insofar as they ceased to be indigenous as a consequence of the civilizing effect of labor upon them. Either way, I argue, the study of the rise of the labor question in Peru reveals how the indigenous were perceived as incommensurable with the labor state, and more generally, with the project of an industrial and civilized nation.
THE LABOR QUESTION
Like their contemporaries in Europe, North America, and much of Latin America, a new generation of university-educated professionals in Peru responded to what came to be known as the social question by fashioning themselves as social reformers and seeking to influence and shape policy in various spheres. This group included engineers who hoped to map Peru's vast mineral assets and physicians who sought to modernize public health provision. It also included a number of lawyers and budding social scientists who sought to address what they referred to as the labor question, by which they usually meant the tendency for workers to strike and their susceptibility to unpalatable social and political doctrines, but also the conditions in which workers worked and lived and which served to enhance that susceptibility. For much of the nineteenth century, Peruvian elites had agreed largely that it was the role of private philanthropy or the beneficence of religious orders to address society's, and more specifically laboring peoples', ills. However, by the early twentieth century many agreed that the state was better placed to address social problems and assume responsibility for social order, but also public health or education. As elsewhere in the world, what George Steinmetz has aptly called the "regulation of the social" was expressed in Peru in an emulation and adaptation of European and North American examples of social "improvement." Specifically, it was expressed in the expansion of the state's coercive and cognitive capacity through the enactment of legislation and the creation of institutions that equipped it with the tools to implement projects of social regulation and improvement. But it was expressed also in fundamental changes in ideas about labor and about the state.
For the most part, social reformers in Peru did not understand labor unrest as an aberrant phenomenon but rather as reflective and constitutive of an industrial capitalist age. In 1905, Luis Miro Quesada, then a young university graduate but soon to become a pioneer of Peruvian social thought, argued that the social question "is merely the expression of the evils produced by the profound division that exists between the two classes that seek to conquer the benefits of industry: that of capital and that of the proletarians; classes that mistakenly consider themselves enemies, and that, in open struggle, forget the more permanent interests of humanity as a consequence of selfishness in the case of one, and of desperation in the case of the other." In other words, for social reformers such as Miro Quesada the rise of the social question was the consequence of the imperfections of capitalism. Along with several of his contemporaries, Miro Quesada argued that it was the purpose of the state to address these imperfections. Various observers reprised this idea time and again during the first half of the twentieth century. On the one hand, social reformers argued that the state should intervene in the sphere of labor in order to ensure industrial peace and secure production, which meant addressing the conditions that produced labor unrest. Typically, they identified unrest as a product of militant influences on labor, which the state, naturally, needed to counteract. But social reformers also understood unrest as product of the conditions that workers faced in their mediate and immediate environments; that is, in the workplace and in the home.
In 1906, for example, Alberto Elmore, the newly chosen president of the revamped Peruvian Academy of Legislation and Jurisprudence, decided to dedicate his inaugural lecture to "the industrial and commercial conflicts, veritable battles that pit capital either with labor or with consumers." Recalling the recent Callao dockworkers strike, Elmore noted that Peruvian legislation did not even mention the terms "strike" or "coalition" (by which he meant unions), but he argued that the right to strike and the right to unionize needed to be accepted. However, although he saw these legislative developments as necessary in light of developments elsewhere, he was concerned by the fact that such laws were typically abused by those they were intended to protect. Workers, he claimed, were susceptible to the influence of "socialist" agitators who sought "political outcomes." The idea of a corrupting external influence on otherwise peaceful Peruvian workers was reprised regularly in government publications and the press. The minister of government's warning in 1916 that foreign anarchists who had recently arrived in Peru had begun to gain followers, set up organizations, and organize publications found echo in an article published in La Crónica on a series of strikes in the northern ports of Salaverry and Pacasmayo that argued that it was imperative to "find out whether behind all of this is the cowardly hand of the foreign agitator." Significantly, the article allowed the possibility that the source of militancy was local but suggested that only criminals would resort to such measures: "And if the agitators are our own workers, it is the responsibility of the working class, which, fortunately, has in this country achieved a high level of culture, to name them and to present them to the judgment of public opinion as unconscious and perverted workers and creators of a criminal enterprise." The implication, in this and many other texts on labor unrest of this period, was that workers had no legitimate cause to protest; indeed that workers who protested were not true workers.
Labor militancy may have appeared to Peruvian elites as evidence of Peru's industrial progress, and as one of its inevitable and natural consequences, but its "othering" (its denaturalizing as foreign to Peru) served to legitimize its repression. In this way, labor militancy created a role for the state, which was called upon to protect labor from perverse foreign or militant influence, and more generally to bring order to, and regulate, conflicts between capital and labor, a role that expressed what I call rationalities of discipline. As Miro Quesada argued, "Given the difficult situation that society finds itself in today, recognizing the danger represented by that dull and persistent struggle that for many years has pitted capital and labor and that threatens to destroy ... progress, peace and social institutions, we have to conclude that the state not only has the right to intervene to regulate labor, it has the duty to do so." Similarly, Augusto Elmore argued that it was imperative for the state to act in order to repress the negative influences that labor was exposed to: "A special and vigorous legislation is needed, to be executed by an active and intelligent government aided by public opinion; only in this way will it be possible to avoid or reduce these dangers, guarantee more effectively the freedom to work, give greater protection to the involved public interests, and to put a brake on the unscrupulous complicity of political speculators." This was the thinking that, as we saw, led the minister of government to argue in 1913 that the increase in conflicts between labor and capital had created "the urgency to adopt measures that will make its consequences less disastrous."
If intervention in the sphere of labor was justified by the need to protect labor from "political speculators," it was similarly justified by the belief that it was the modern and civilized thing to do. As the minister of government had noted, "all countries have labor legislation," by which he meant all "modern" and "civilized" countries. As this implies, social reformers believed that if the time had arrived for Peru to have labor legislation it was because Peru had arrived at a historical "moment" that made such legislation necessary. Indeed, as David Parker has argued in a seminal article on the general strike of late 1918 (considered to be the founding moment of the Peruvian labor movement), the strike may have contributed to President José Pardo's decision to extend the eight-hour day to all workers on 15 January 1919 (it had been granted to dock workers in 1913 and to women and children in 1918). However, the impetus for the law came from within the elite: from lawyers, academics, and politicians who had come to see labor legislation as a necessary component of "modernity." The law was not a victory for anarchist organizers as some contemporaries believed and some historians suggest, but rather a top-down measure that reflected the anxieties and aspirations of Peruvian elites. Indeed, social reformers like Alberto Ulloa Sotomayor argued in 1919, perhaps overstating his case, that workers were only really interested in agitation and that "no law and no initiative of that order has been demanded by workers or their unions; those few that exist and those that are being debated have been given to them by the good faith of far-sighted men." Certainly, Peruvian elites were aware of international developments in labor legislation and viewed progressive measures such as laws regulating the hours of work in a favorable light, since by adhering to them it became possible to proclaim, or so they believed, Peru's firm march down the road to "civilization." As Parker states, "Reformers felt that Peru needed an advanced labor code just as much as it needed railroads, electric lighting, bowler hats, and everything else in vogue across the Atlantic."
Two seemingly contradictory transnational discourses influenced Peruvian social reformers' view that state protection of labor was evidence of a country's march toward civilization. The first of these was the social thought associated with the Rerum novarum, the papal encyclical of 1891, and later texts that developed social Catholic thought, such as the Social Code of Cardinal Mercier, which articulated a social philosophy in favor of a third way between capitalism and socialism. As David Rock suggests, Rerum novarum "wove an ambiguous synthesis of reactionary and outwardly progressive prescriptions." It criticized the selfishness and rapaciousness of capitalists and the subversive tactics of socialists. In particular it rejected the claim that class conflict was inevitable. Significantly, however, "its concept of the functions of government stood closer to socialist interventionism than liberal laissez-faire.... The encyclical called on the state to 'promote public well-being and private prosperity.' The state should curb the accumulation of excessive wealth, and seek 'distributive justice.'" These ideas are clearly evident, for example, in the speech given by Francisco Cabré a Franciscan missionary, at the Círculo de Obreros Católicos, in Arequipa in 1918, where he critiqued both "the absurdity of socialism, which seeks to alter God's work, thus upsetting the current social order," and the exploitation of labor by capitalists and called for the creation of institutions, such as mutual aid funds, that would improve the lives of workers.
The impact of social Catholic thought on the debates over the labor question in Peru is most clearly expressed in V?tor Andrés Belaúde's La realidad nacional, first published in 1931 and a response to José Carlos Mariáegui's Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana. Belaúnde placed the social Catholic thought that had emerged from Rerum novarum at the forefront of social policy, noting that "it is unnecessary to restate the traditional position of social Catholic philosophy with regard to the right to strike, the work of children and women, industrial accidents, and so-called vocational or professional training." Social Catholicism, Belaúnde stressed, recognized workers' right to organize in trade unions, and, "as regards social conflicts, [social Catholicism] has always favored conciliation and arbitration, and has sought to avoid giving too much influence to capital in such processes." Moreover, Belaúnde stressed that in contrast to liberalism, social Catholicism envisaged a strong role for the state in addressing the labor question: "Social Catholic philosophy has not, like individualist philosophy, sought to keep the state outside of the country's economic life. On the contrary, it favors its intervention for the protection and maintenance of the principles previously discussed." For Belaúnde, social Catholicism's prescriptions with regard to the labor question were particularly suitable to Peru since they provided "a series of reasonable and just practical orientations that, in addition to the importance that derives from their universality, given that they are supported in the principal countries of Europe and America by eminent people, also correspond to the religious background and the traditional psychology that the Church has given our people."
At the same time, social reformers' belief that labor was amenable to protection by the state was shaped by positivism, the influential view that society presented a series of problems that could be overcome rationally and through the application of the scientific method. As a number of historians have shown, the early decades of the twentieth century witnessed the development of an elite gaze influenced by positivism on the poor, the marginal, the criminal, the "racially degenerate," the female, and the suicidal. This gaze led to growing state intervention in the spheres of public health, policing and imprisonment, and education; a state intervention that reflected the belief that scientific "progress" enabled the reordering and "improvement" of society. This was no different with regard to the labor question. As Luis Miro Quesada argued:
The state, in protecting labor, has to do so inspired by justice and the public good; it must seek to harmonize, wherever possible, the interests in conflict, subordinating individual interests when they conflict with those of the community. The implementation of these principles is the responsibility of legislators and of the men of state [hombres de estado] in each country, who are the only ones who, following a careful examination of the industrial laws of other countries, of the study of the race, character and customs of their people, can determine the level of intervention that is convenient and the means to undertake it in order to achieve peace and progress.
Like Belaúnde, Miro Quesada too conceived of state action with regard to the labor question as a necessary combination of the universal (Catholicism; scientifically derived industrial legislation) and the local (a "religious background" and "traditional psychology"; "the study of the race, character, and customs of the people").
(Continues...)
Excerpted from THE ALLURE OF LABOR by Paulo Drinot Copyright © 2011 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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