Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Paulo Drinot is Senior Lecturer in Latin American History at the Institute of the Americas, University College London. He is the editor of Che's Travels: The Making of a Revolutionary in 1950s Latin America, also published by Duke University Press.

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THE ALLURE OF LABOR

Duke University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments............................ixIntroduction...............................11. RACIALIZING LABOR.......................172. CONSTITUTING LABOR......................513. DISCIPLINING LABOR......................854. DOMESTICATING LABOR.....................1235. FEEDING LABOR...........................1616. HEALING LABOR...........................193Conclusion.................................231Notes......................................239Bibliography...............................281Index......................................305

Chapter One

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...