Latin American Populism historiography

Knight’s critique of populism?

• populism is not the best fit term to Latin America - suggests best understood as a political style characterised by othering during a period of crisis and emphasises the rationality behind it

• Although academics lack consensus on what it entails, it continues to be used

• More useful to understand populism in terms of historical processes rather than historiographical convergences

Knight’s definition of populism

• More useful to understand populism in terms of historical processes rather than historiographical convergences

• ‘Populism therefore connotes a political style’ rather than ‘a specific ideology, period or class alliance’

• Tends to be in times of crisis

• Challenges the idea of ‘unmediated mobilisation’ - fundamentally require a functional network or hierarchy, not just a ‘mass’

• ‘Invocation of ‘the people’ is regularly and logically associated with a dichotomisation of ‘people’ and - the permutations are endless - the ‘non-people’, ‘anti-people’, ‘the other’, ‘the oligarchy’, the ‘elite’, foreigners, Jews and traitors’

• Importance of recognising historical processes, understood in dynamic terms, has a particular momentum and can often be understood in terms of routine

• Ideas of economic populism - ‘spendthrift irresponsibility’ entailing inflation, hyper-inflation, economic and political crisis, having to resort to austerity

De La Torre on ‘Classical Populism’

• Populism emerged in the 1930s and 1940s ‘with the crisis of the oligarchical social order that combined liberal-inspired constitutions with patrimonial practices and values in predominantly rural societies

• Characterised by ‘relations of domination and subordination’ 

• Populist leaders emerged as a result of industrialisation and urbanisation

• Redistributive social policies, political inclusion of previously excluded sectors, coinciding with import substitution industrialisation

• ‘In some cases, such as Argentina and Peru, the polarised construction of politics ended in a total and fundamental struggle or cleavage between ‘the people’ and ‘the oligarchy’ - created social and poltiical organisations

De La Torre on the role of worker

• ‘Populist leaders exalted workers as the soul of their nations while simultaneously repressing and co-opting labour groups’

• Wolfe - Brazilian workers’ populism under Vargas

• James - Argentine workers used the Peronist opening and discourse to attack the symbols of their exclusion from the public sphere and to demand their recognition as workers and citizens’

• Turned ‘the stigmas of the poor into virtues’

Arditi on how populism embodies an ambigous space between liberal democracy and authoritarianism

• Seen in ‘both democratic and undemocratic variants’

• Populism can be a ‘fellow traveller of contemporary, media-enhanced modes of representation at work in both emerging and well-established democracies’

• Three posssibilties

  • Mode of representation

  • ‘Politics on the more turbulent edges of democracy’

  • ‘Threatening underside’

• ‘Determining when the mode of representation and disruptive edge cross the line and become an underside of democracy is a matter of political judgement and cannot be sttled by conceptual flat’

Arditi on populism as a mode of representation

• A hallmark of modern democratic politics - they both interact with each other

• A populist style, rhetoric or mode of persuasion - simple and direct language

• How do we distinguish between democracy whic also appeals to the people - is it the ‘degree’ of the appeal?

• Often ambiguous in their claims - claim to represent those who have no voice

Arditi on populism as a symptom of democracy

• ‘As an internal element of the democratic system that also reveals the limits of the system and prevents its closure in the presumed normality of institutional procedures’

• Both populism and democracy endorse public debate but releases negativity

• ‘Whether it is by disregarding the ‘table manners’ of democratic politics or by observing them in a discretionary way, the ‘disruptive noise’ of populism stands in for the return of the repressed in the sense of the negativity of the political’

• ‘In this interpretation, populism might not necessarily break loose from a democratic setting, but it becomes an unstable and potentially destabilising phenomenon’

• Becomes an ‘internal periphery’ of the democratic order alongside with other radical movements

Arditi on populism as an Underside of Democracy

• Populism as a mirror for democracy, can transition to its underside

• Canovan - populism arises in the gap between redemption and pragmatism ‘primariy as a way to counteract the pragmatic excess of established democracies’

• Shadow of democracy - connection between the two but they are also separated

• A sign of danger, ominous - dangers of the cult of personality, and populist disregard for the rule of law, and ‘all sorts of authoritarian behaviour while maintaining a democratic facade’

• ‘The paradox is that this move towards the underside might not entail a loss of legitimacy or support among populists as long as the government delivers the goods’

FINCHELSTEIN AND URBINATI ‘ON POPULISM AND DEMOCRACY’

• Locate populism between government and dictatorship, has resemblances with both politica systems

• ‘Populism is a transfiguration of representative democracy that attempts once in government to reshape the democratic fundamentals, from the people and the majority principles to elections’

• ‘Used representation to construct a holistic image of the people that a leader promised to bring into power at the cost of downplaying pluralism and humiliating political and cultural minorities’, taking democracy to its extreme

• Populism has commonalities with fascism but they are fundamentally different - fascism destroys democracy

Finchelstein and Urbinati on Latin America’s ‘Third Way’

• The global history of populism has been understudied

• Theories of populism seek to define rather than explain, obscuring a global history approach

• ‘Historical bifurcation has induced scholars to think that, even if populism was always part of a global history, the insistence on it as a ruling power did not pertain to its European centre but to its margins instead’ - problematic European exceptionality

Finchelstein and Urbinati on connections with authoritarianism

• Takes away pluralism but not the institutions and procedures, although may refigure them

• Populism is therefore not only a style of discourse but also an attempt to reformulate democracy by reinterpreting its two fundamentals (the people and majority rule) in ways that are at the same time inclusive of the electoral majority and exclusive of the minority, paternalistic and at times autocratic, but not yet dictatorial 

• Agree with Arditi’s internal periphery theory

Finchelstein and Urbinati on populism’s relation to democracy

• Redefinition of the people

• Right wing populism - racialisation or ethnicisation

• Left wing populism - lower and middle classes

• Elections serve to validate a certain truth of the ‘good majority’ - the rest are understood as ‘corrupt’ or ‘immoral’

• ‘Populism ultimately distorts electoral procedures by transfiguring them into rituals of political confirmation’ 

• Based on faith rather than free and open deliberation - mistrust creates the logic of treason

• ‘Populsm does not cultivate nor actually appreciate the idea of accountability but rather claims that to have a beloved and populist leader is enough condition for trust’

• Born through protest movements or parties - relation to the style of liberal democracy

• ‘Predictably, the ideological dualism between the moral many and the immoral few is much more than simply a discursive construction since it reveals a conception of political power that twists democracy in the very moment it celebrates it’

Overview of Cardenas

• Constitution of 1917 (arts 3, 27 and 123)

• Sweeping agrarian reform

• Worker’s organisation

• Strong nationalism

  • Oil expropriation

  • ‘Socialist’ education

• 1940 first Inter-American Indigenista Conference in Mexico, including indigenous leaders

• Cardenas as leader: was not actually charismatic but was seen as kind and trustworthy, as a paternal figure

• Social reform and co-optation: Incorporation of industrial and rural wokers (CTM, CNC) into the party: Partido Nacional Revolucionario (PNR), later PRI, which would be hegemonic for the rest of the XXc.

PAUL GILLINGHAM ‘UNREVOLUTIONARY MEXICO’

• Elites tried their best to prevent popular mobilisation

• Did not look like the populism of Trujillo or Somoza

• 71 years of rule by the same party

  • After 1940 there were neither caudillos nor top level assasinations

  • The progressive leaders were not murdered, although there was extensive repressive violence in the countryside, which was successfully hidden

• ‘Neither fish nor fowl, an enduring mixture of both democratic and authoritarian elements’

• Combined dictadura, dictatorship, with blanda (soft)

  • Election riggins, a broad governing coalition, cultural control, a mixed economy

• ‘This is a balancing act of definition, as is clear from debate as to whether the concept of dictablanda overprivileges violence, underprivileges violence, or, according to one innovative commentary, does both at the same time’

  • Term was also used by Pinochet

• Dates the end of the revolution to the end of the 1930s or the beginning of the 1940s

  • Cardenas’ death - the end of revolitionary personnel 

  • President Manuel Avlia Camacho - ended socialist education, removed Cardenistas and apppinting conservatives to governorships and the Supreme Court, winding down agarian and labor reform, and introducting the usefully totalitarian law of disolucion social

    • But this was still a piecemeal and fragmented protest

• 1945-1955 saw a ‘new and very different regime’ - decisive rupture

  • Similtarities between the repressive governments of the 60s and 70s, adn Southern Cone dictatorships

Gillingham on Aleman’s government 1946-1953

He was the first civilian president after a string of revolutionary generals.

• Importance of agraristas

• The federal government did not have provincial capabilities, and could not keep in check those who committed violence, outside of the boundans of civilian authorities

• 1940s- growth of civilian rule over the military - middle classes and military men increasingly turned to the party as a means for social mobility, violence plummeting meant that elections became less transpart and less contested

Gillinsgham overview

• Gillingham joins a growing number of revisionists who see the post-revolutionary state more as the institutional concretization of Porfirio Diaz's personalist regime than as a radical novelty.

• The PRI's twentieth-century domination was far from a foregone conclusion. Evidence of plenty of agitation, would-be coups, and the implausible retention of cacical power shows how Mexico's dictablanda, or soft dictatorship, narrowly evaded the military dictatorship pitfall in which nearly every other contemporary Latin American nation found itself—but not for lack of violent ambition in military and political circles.

• the pervasive fraud and repression endemic in electoral processes does not point to a successfully repressive machine. Instead, the level of investment poured into turning out desired electoral results spoke rather to the persistence of public belief in them.

• But Gillingham demonstrates how the pervasiveness of corruption translated to political capital at the most local level, introducing both stabilizing and destabilizing effects that ultimately strengthened the PRI.

• At the provincial level, the remaining commanding officers of a deeply diminished army found their rent-seeking outposts to be lucrative and influential enough to temper higher ambitions. 

• At the federal level, the most imposing military brass—ex-presidents and revolutionary veterans among them—operated as an unofficial senate behind the scenes of the elected president. But the balance of power was tenuous at best, and secret security archives reveal that Mexico only very narrowly escaped succumbing to a military coup.

Knight’s key questions about Cardenismo

• How far did the regime ‘break with precedent and seek to transform Mexican society’

• ‘How democratic, as against authoritarian, was Cardenismo?’

• ‘How powerful were the Cardenista regime and movement: i.e how great was their capacity to achieve their goals, especially in the face of resistance’

• How far did the regime implement radical changes?

Knight on historiography of cardenismo

• Official PRI view ‘accomodates Cardenas with the teleological progress of the Mexican revolution’, stressing continuities in continuing a goals - would tend to stress the popular characte of Cardenismo

• Revisionsts stress continuity from a more critical standpoint - ‘conceives of the institutional revolution as an engine of capitalist development and capital accumulation’

  • Co-opted and subordinated popular movements 

• OtKher revisions docs on the state - view it as the culmination of the subordination of popular classes to the revolutionary state - ‘top-down process of centralisation, of cultural imposition’

• These different interpretations have different implications for the Mexican Revolution

Knight on the popular support for Cardenismo

• Some who had a tactical Cardenista allegiance

• Others who had a genuine ideological Cardenista allegiance - especially in the ideological polarisation of the 1930s

• Blended with material interest

  • E.g benefits to oil workers

  • ‘Affective element’ around Cardenas own appeal

• ‘Whirling galaxy of political groups and individuals’

• Complicates the motivations of Carenismo - focuses on policies instead

• Recent historiography has emphasised the attachment to the Status quo, but Knight focus on the genuine radicalism

  • Advises comparing against other abstract models, particularly of populism

Knight on main Cardenistas policies

• Agrarian reform - extensive and innovative - accelerated the process and promoted the collective ejido - should avoid anachronism, was truly revolutionary for the time

• Many denounced the experiment, socialist associations - especially from landlords and business owners

• Labour and industry - industrialisation and economic development, great state regulation

  • Needed the support of organised labour - the CTM - but a conditional alliance as they diverged on important questions 

  • Workers such as the railroad and Aguila Co were denied support during and after 1938

  • Anti-Cardenista Callistas spoke of ‘Communist chaos’

  • Mobilisation of labour connected to Cardenista economic nationalism 

• Regarded as a dangerous radical, confirmed by the petroleum nationalisation of March 1938 - the bourgeoise did not appreciate this attack on foreign capital, business and professional classes had little reacton

• Regime’s committment to socialist and sex education

Knight - ‘popular policies?’

The drift of the argument so far is that the Cardenas regime adopted radical policies and rhetoric and that, no less important, both supporters and opponents saw the regime as attempting radical new initiatives, which they loved or loathed according to taste. Ultimately, many of these initiatives failed. They either died an early death or survived under a new dispenation, adopting different roles and charactersitics?

• Role of agrarian demands, rural unionisation - ‘marched by a definite radicalisation’

  • Oil workers and railway workers - wanted a comprehensive contract, ideas of nationalisation

  • Greater unity between workers - general strike threats, connections between teachers workers, peasants

• Could have a catholic and conservative form - e.g the ‘Second Cristiada’ - half a million members by 1943, support beyond the traditionally Catholic Baijo and Centre-West

• Popular mobilisation was unprecedented in scale and organisation

  • Local guerillas > mass based poltiical mobilisation

• The regime utilised popular organisations

  • Workers and peasants had more room for negotiation

  • Most successful labour and agrarian reform - not so much indigenistas 

Knight on popular pressure and representation

• significant agrarian struggle preceded reform in most cases: in the Laguna; in Chiapas; in the Yaqui Valley; in Michoacdn; and in the many lesser, more localised cases, where agrarista forces now found 'the centre 'inclining to their cause.

• Major industrial unions were tactical supporters of the government

• Non-liberal democratic forms - popular mobilisation characterised by ‘bossism, violence, vendettas and corruption’

• Similar failings - liberal democratic regimes

• Direct democracy may have been absent, but there certainly was political mobilisatiion

Teixeia of the Third Parth of corporatism

• The importance of looking at the third path of corporatism - often obscured by the binary Cold War lens of communism and capitlaism

• Corporatist experiments mattered not only because they happened but because they fundamentally redesigned the architecture of state market relations in Brazil and Portugal, and in many other countries too

• Historiography of developmentalism usually conflates it with the ‘revival of liberal democracy’ after the war, but historians of Latin America have long argued against this

• Moving beyond developmentalism as a response to the great depression - way to maintain social peace, political authority, and a deeply hierarchical society’

• Focused on price controls to secure social peace - ‘mobilising corporatist producer associations, new government agencies, and ordinary citizens to enforce price controls’

• ‘In both Brazil and Portugal, Estado Novo dictators branded those who defied price controls or hoarded goods as speculators and capitalist rouges, mobilising military tribunals and police campaigns to enforce increasingly byzantine market regulations’

Teixeira on defining corporatism

• Sets out to organise society to economic and social interests - ‘and vertically integrate these groups into the state so that it can intervene in labour relations and economic production’

• Emphasised existing social hierarchies but also stressed the importance of social rights and representation through sectoral interest groups

• Could be a strategy for political survival, could be a general orientation, could have corruption

• Used existiing repertoire of the idea of each part of society having a role - can be seen in the Spanish and Portuguese empires - 6 ‘assigning rights and privileges to corporate instiuttions, and in effect legalising social and racial hierarchies

• Role of the Catholic church and model of governance’

• Puzzling question of the relationship between fascism and corporatism

• Some view them as synonymous, while others argue that ‘corporatism was a labor and economic system that could be adapted to different political regimes’

• Share a political and intellectual hsitory but are distinct

  • Fascist Italian influence through intellectual networks

Teixeira on underdevelopment connecting authoritarianism and corporatism

• Used to explain authoritarianism in Latin America - would compensate for underdevelopment through the integration of key groups

• ‘Corporatism, however, was hardly a static system, nor could its architects ever quite insulate it from change - or fully define it outside of capitalism’

• 20 Historians in the 1970s explained authoritarianism through corporatism - ‘incomplete transition from an agrarian society to an industrial one’ but this has since been challenged, emphasising how industrialists shaped the corporatist scale

• ‘A Third Path does not intervene in debates over whether corporatism should be considered its own system or enfoldd as a variation of capitalism. Rather, it considers how those who supported corporatism were themselves trapped by this debate’

• ‘Corporatism cannot be reduced to an authoritarian model for development, but its history is essential to understanding the enduring appeal of top-down, technocratic and even undemocratic policy actions in times of economic crisis’

Eduardo Elena on Peronism and consumption

• Unique historiography exploring the connections of populism and mass consumption

• He argues that Peronist actors redefined national citizenship around expansive promises of a vida digna (dignified life), which encompassed not only the satisfaction of basic wants, but also the integration of working Argentines into a modern consumer society.

• He shows how the consumer aspirations of citizens overlapped with Peronist paradigms of state-led development, but not without generating great friction among allies and opposition from diverse sectors of society. Consumer practices encouraged intense public scrutiny of class and gender comportment, and everyday objects became charged with new cultural meaning.

Elena on Peron’s 1951 reelection

• Peron faced reelection and needed a good electoral turnout and result

• Him and his wife Eva recounted all of the accomplishments - big public infrastructure projects but also the improvements in everyday life

• ‘He assured his listeners that, thanks to government action, the popular majority lived with true ‘liberty and dignity’

• Inspired people removed from the political sphere to appraise this - e.g Hilda Benitez de Maldonaldo lamented her cost of living and that her husband's wages weren’t high enough and were unable to source relief through other channels

• ‘They were joined by a host of other actors who grappled, in their respective and sometimes competing ways, with the quandaries posed by this era’s commercial offerings, social inequalities and material aspirations’

Elena - Peronist era redefined state and citizen relationships - lack of historiographical attention to consumerism

• Adopted social sceintice concepts and embedded them in popular political language, such as the standard of living - through market forces

• Idea of modern citizenship, dignified living, and statist progress

• Avoiding a top down narrative - dynamic and dual process

  • Intense local and individual demands

  • To many, Peronism represented a challenge to the norms of property, order, deference and personal liberties

• Political culture should be understood as a materialist context - the significance which everyday symbols took on

Elena - placing the case of Peronism in the region of Latin America

• National history can be insular - but large web of economic forces - ‘historical conjencture’

• Mid century moment after the world wars and great depression - loss of faith in lassez faire economics and liberal republics

• The early 1930s saw a military coup overthrow the country’s civilian president, ending over 50 years of electoral rule 

• 1943 - another military coup from which Peron rose to power

Elena on political experimentation across Latin America

• Vargas in Brazil, Cardenas in Mexico, Gaitan in Colombia, Arbenz in Guetemala

• All identified themselves with ‘the people’

• The term populism itself is ambiguous and controversial, but ‘remains a valuable means to draw comparisons between different national histories and the region’s political practices’

• Theatric and dramatic style but went to the core of liberal crisis

  • Incorportion of citizens

  • ‘Inadequacies of republican institutions, the desire to assert anticolonial forms of economic sovereignty’

Elena on the paradoxes of Peronism

• ‘What is one to make of a government that was democratic in the sense of being popularly elected and boasting majority but that employed mobilisational and authoritarian methods of rule?’

• ‘How do theories of citizenship apply to the Peronist government, which extended entitltements and collective modes of participation in public life but abrogated of civil liberties and minority rights’

• ‘Social citizenship’ which compensated for previous exclusion

  • Challenged earlier focus of the elites and individuals felt as if they were included

Elena on the social component on citizenship

• 1940 constitution - proclaimed new rights for workers, elderly and family

• Emphasised the improved living standards but used the language of developmentalism

• What did people then mean by ‘social justice?’

  • Better living standards and inclusion

  • Not a unified conception

    • Emphasised labour for the benefits of all

    • ‘Privileged ideals of class and gender comportment, and the discussions of living standards focused on the needs of male headed households and heterosexual, married unions’

    • Understandings of masculinity and femininity were further naturalised but contradiction with the emphasis on labour

Elena on recasting consumer society

• Value of analysing the relationship between abundance and scarcity - ‘the commercialisation of everyday life that stoked new desires while reproducing old material inequalities’

• Modernisation and commercialisation - new consumer offerings, new goods and foreign imports - shrinking peasantry and regional flow

• The contradictions of mass consumption - new novel experiences, but also a sense of frustration and powerlessness at constrained purchasing power 

• Demand for control and enhanced rights - contested matters of  rural property and industrial production

Elena - ‘A certain ‘double movement’ characterised state responses to issues concerning the standard of living in Peronist Argentina

• State officials wished to shield working class sectors from risks associated with the excesses of capitalism

• However, they also sought to incorporate ordinary citizens more fully into the nation as economic actor

• In the mid 1940s, the Peronist leadership supported a redistribution of income to wage earners on a scale unprecedented in Latin American history, a move that contributed to a rapid surge in consumer spending power

• Peron and his officials saw themselves as pioneering a ‘third way’ between the extremes of laissez-faire liberalism and Soviet-bloc capitalism

• There were several different ideas of consumption - ordinary consumption, consumer politics, even creating own department stores and shops

• The issue lay in striking a balance between these impulses and contradictions

  • Despite celebrating working-class spending and affluence, officials also viewed mass consumption with anxiety

  • Peron and Evita simultaneously attacked oligarchic elites but also reprimanded popular consumers for their supposed wastefulness and indiscipline

Elena’s conclusion

• Peronism’s practices of social citizenship

  • ‘Articulation of an expansive sense of national belonging that spoke to the material needs and aspirations of popular households

• State power

  • Peronist institutions shaped a worldview - shaped ways of thinking, rejecting pluralism and enforced ideological consensu

• However, ‘mid century forms of mass politics cannot be reduced to crude manipulations’

  • Emphasises the importance of popular support in balance with state power

• Drew support from the long-term frustration of reform not being enacted - social assistance programs in the 1940s

• Peronism can be placed in the context in the departures from lassez faire liberalism - regional trend of state intervention in Latin America

• Inclusion became understood in terms of consumption 

• Citizenship embodied material ideals of inclusion too now, but ‘was plagued by inconsistencies’

• Peronism spanned the nation - across urban and rural, different ethnicities, classes 

• The polarisation that Peronism produced

  • Through pitting followers against internal enemies

  • Anti-Peronists were also vehemently opposed

Daniel James on the importance of the Peronist union movement to Argentine history

• Importance of the Peronist union movement to Argentine history

  • Mediator between the armed forces and civil society?

• The development of Peronism within the unions in the 1955-73 period - what was the relationship between union leaders and members

• Historiography has focused on the working classes through the lens of populism 

• Historical experience of Argentine workers in the decades following the overthrow of Juan Peron in 1955 

  • Peronist union hierarchy, relationship with rank and file

  • Issue of Peronist ideology and impact on the working class

  • Importance of a grassroots perspective

• The working class ‘usually appears as a cypher, almost an ideal construct at the service of different ideological paradigms’

  • Global binaries of traditional/ modern, cooption/ autonomy, false consciousness/ class consciousness, resistance/ integration

• ‘Much of the internal debate within Peronism over the last thirty years has indeed revolved around the conflicting idealisations and stereotypes of working-class history and experience’

James on organised labor 1930

• 1930s world recession - Argentine conservative governments increasingly produced products that had once been imported - increasingly industrialised economy by the mid 1940s - changes in the social structure reflected these economic developments, more industrial establishments, 

• However, the working class did not benefit from this expansion - wages declined as salaries lagged beyond inflation, state and employer repression

• Weak and divided labour movement 

  • Anarchist Federacion Obrera Regional Argentina

  • Syndicalist Union Sindical Argentina

  • Confedaricion General de Trabajo divided into 2

• ‘The great majority of the industrial proletariat was outside effective union organistion. The most dynamic group to attempt to organise in non-traditional areas were the communists who had some success in organising in construction, food processes and wood working.’

James labour 1943

• 943 - Peron as Secretary of Labour and late Vice President

  • Addressed basic concerns but suppressed radical working class - union leadership was sympathetic

  • ‘The growing working class support for Peron which this engendered first crystallised in the 17 October 1945 demonstration which secured his release from confinement and launched him on the pathy to victory in the presidential elections of February 1946’

• 1946-1955 - huge impact on the working class

  • Greater organisation and social weight - state was sympathetic to increasing organisation

  • Union structure was based upon economic activity rather than individual trades - overseen by the Ministry of Labour

  • Subordination 

  • Eliminiation of old guard radical leaders who had formed the Parti

James of the incorporation of the workers into the state

• Social network 

  • Ministry of Labour and Social Welfare, the Fundacion Eva Peron

• Labour leaders consulted on several national isss

• Economic gains for the working class, increase in real wages

• New political loyalities - shift from socialists and communists who had supported the anti Peronist coalition, the Union Democratic in the 1946 elections - still some important strkikes but could not really challenge Peronist hegemony

James - was worker support purely class based?

• ‘distinct rhetoric and political style of particular appeal to Argentine workers’

• Support wasn’t purely class based - greater appeal

• ‘Working class was constituted by Peron’ - used the Peronist political discourse of the working class

• Working class passivity? - working closely with employers

  • ‘In this sense Peronism could be considered to have played a prophylactic role in preempting the emergence of autonomous activity and organisation’

• Centralised mass union movement - articulated class interests - negotiating relationship

James on the oppositional culture of Peronism

• ‘Peronism aspired to be a viable hegemonic alternative for Argentine capitalism, as a promoter of economic development based on the social and political integration of the working class’

• The oppositional culture of Peronism?

  • Represented a rejection of all that had gone wrong before - politically, socially and economically

  • ‘Now, for those who controlled the political and social apparatus of Peronism this oppositional culture was a burden, since it meant that Peronism was unable to establish itself as a viable hegemonic option for Argentine capitalism’

Patroni’s overall argument about Eva Peron

• Eva Peron’s role as an intermediary - gained immense popularity among workers

• ‘The central proposition is that through her discursive strategies and her personal background she was effective in neturalising some of the key contradictions inherent in the political alternative proposed by Peron in Argentina’

• Peronism create a new working class identity, that would endure even after 1955

• Most historiography ignores Eva’s intervention

Patroni on Eva and the consolidation of labor power

• Peron and Eva likely met January 1944 and became involved then - famous as a radio star in soap operas - participated in military and political meetings, married in October

• October 1945 - labour leaders called for the formation of labour’s political party - founding of the Labour Party by the end of October 1945

• Feb 1946 - Peron coalition won the vote - importance of the Labour Party but a few months later Peron dissolved the Labour and other parties

• Created a new unified party, named Sole Party of the Revolution (Partido Unico de la Revolucion), renamed Peronist Party in January 1947

• The ex-president of the labour party, Luis Gay, was made the new secretary of the labour federation but was forced to resign in January 1947 after Peron made serious charges against him

• ‘Gay’s departure from the CGT is probably the event that most clearly marks the

Patroni on the risks of this process

• He had to broaden his appeal - e.g to the army, could create tensions with the labour

• He could not maintain the same relationship with labour as he had during being the Secretary of Labour - Eva could ‘undertake these functions without posing a theeat to him. Rather, she could achieve these objectives as an extension of Peron’s own political persona’

• She became very effective - she dealt with key political issues, had a dight for public speaking

• Her message identified working class demands, and she embodied key working class values

• She referred to herself as the ‘bridge of love’ uniting Peron and his descamisados

Patroni argues Eva was an extension of Peron, but not a second figure

• Did not pose a threat - emissary of Peron, not an original claim to legitimacy or base of power

• She ‘herself had experienced social and economic marginalization’ - understood as an insider

• Neutralised political contradictions

  • Melodramatic political discursive technique 

• Had some freedom 

  • He aimed to build ‘class harmony’ - tensions with workers as could lead to demobilisation

  • ‘Eva’s interventions was directed at asserting the position of the working class as a key actor within a political alternative that represented first and foremost its interests as a class’

  • Made Peron an almost god-like figure, ‘depicted as the origin and source of social justice in Argentina’

• Emphasised the importance of feeling - emotional identification

Patroni on Eva’s own background

• Eva - humble social origins and being a woman

• Relevance of gender

  • Crisis of gender roles in the 1930s as women were incorporated into the industrial labour force

  • Female suffrage - increased ambivaelnce

• ‘Peronism itself provided some relief to this anxiety through the strengthening of the traditional family by making it the main recepient of redistributive policies’

• ‘But populist discourse also served a crucial role in the casting of women in their traditional role as mothers and wives and, most fundamentally, as requiring the protection of men

• She emphasised women’s position at home - appealed to both women and men

• ‘She was one of them that in their lives, suffering and hopes needed no explanation to her. Yet, she simultaneously embodied their desires for social mobility and their claims over conventional symbols of success and prestige’

Patroni - Eva becoming Vice President>

• Eva’s contact with labour began in 1946, intensified later - wanted to support those who had shown loyalty to Peron

• Selectivelly allocated benefits and resources 

• 1947 - CGT - election of a new executive committed to Peronism - owed to Eva’s influence over the labour movement

• 1951 - She was nominated as vice president 

  • Public campaign organised by CGT - massive show of support

• But she declined due to Peron’s relationship with the militancy? Or Peron’s awareness of Eva’s cancer, that would kill her a year later?

• Following demonstrations of support - became a martyr, an icon

Plotkin on Peronist doctrine and political imagery

• Conservative policies and social organisation 

• The business sector and middle class had rejected Peronism - ‘forced Peron to redefine his relationship with sectors connected to the world of work’ 

• His doctrine and theory was rather incoherent and fragmented, therefore people with very different ideological reasons

• ‘Alluvial’ character - absorbed ideas from different ideological discourses

  • Tension between modernity and tradition - ‘Peronism presented itself simultaneously as a complete and revolutionary rupture with the past and as a conservative force preserving the most traditional national values’

• may have not been as extreme a totalitarianism as the Nazis but definitely had a totalitarian conception of politics - admired the European dictators and wanted the state to be involved in everyday life and the public sphere

•  As he said in his speech opening the congressional session in 1954: "It is no secret that the Republic now has only two sectors: the na tional Peronist movement and the anti-Peronists;

• However, not a ‘vernacular version of fascism’

  • He was forced to align himself with the working class and use the language of class conflict

Plotkin on Peronism and democracy

• Peronism's route to power was directly the opposite. Peron emerged as "the leader" as a consequence of the popular movement of October 17, 1945. 

• What that movement made possible was the election on February 24 1946, that placed Peron in the government palace. 

• Therefore, the founding moment of Peron ism was closely linked to the restoration of the democratic system, not to its elimination.

•  Even the coup of 1943, another symbolic landmark in the history of Peronism, was presented in the Peronist imagery as a milestone in the restoration of the "true democracy" that had been mocked during the dicada infome

• . Peronism's democratic "birthmark" strongly conditioned the Peronist imagery. Peron never tired of claiming that he had come to power through the cleanest election in the history of the country.

Plotkin on the overthrow of Peron in September 1955

• New government of General Aramburu began a policy of removing Peronist symbols in the vein of ‘denazification’

• 1960s - several radicalised sectors of middle class youth became attracted to Peronis,

• By the early 1970s, Peronism covered wide range of ideologies

• September 1973 - Peron was inaugurated as president for the third time after 18 years in exile

Plotkin on Peronism as a revolutionary government

• Deeply changed Argentine political culture

• Changed Argentine social, economic and political structures

• Redefined the relationship among social classes and between the state and society

• ‘But the same revolutionary character was what, on the one hand impeded the general from generating consensus, and at the same time, was what made possible the durability of Peronism’

Derby on Trujillo’s theatricity

• 930-61, Trujillo’s dictatorship - was a very flamboyant and theatrical character who captured the public imagination

• 2 His rule was very much authoritarian, characterised by ‘random abductions, pervasive surveillance, and institutionalised forms of ridicule’

• Systematic and abritary repression which occurred in waves through intelligence gathering and paramilitary organisations

• ‘Indeed, a prominent psychologist who directed a mental hospital during the Trujillo period has even argued that, as a result of the regime, paranoia became a national characteristic’

• Terror was designed to be a public, theatric affair, scuch as trough parades and paegants 

  • E.g ‘the theater of violence included highly public episodes of grotesque brutality such as the slaughter of 20,000 Haitian border migrants by machete, a tactic chosen to horrify both Haitian victims and Dominican collaborators compelled to assist’

Derby on the importance of formal poltiical repression

• Regime has been described as totalitarian - impressive control over military and civil service

• ‘Systematic torture, espionage and random arrests made dissent an impossibility on Dominican soil’

• Combined bossism with developmentalism 

• He created the impression that all public works and policies were personal gifts from him to the pueblo

• He developed a system of highly profitable economic monopolies, giving them to his family and his cronies

• Nationalised industries dominated by foreign investors and then distributed wealth through a system of subordinates - patronage and kinship

Derby on the creation of ‘a republican mirage’

carefully choreographing elections and even fictive opposition parties, yet this official face camouflaged a personal kleptocracy run by Trujillo and his family’

• Created a rumour culture and an immense suspicion - speculation about the upper circle 

• ‘Civil servants were both a highly privileged and particularly vulnerable group, since their salaries were relatively high, yet their proximity to Trujillo and access to the secrets of power made them suspect as potential conspirators’ - frequent bureaucratic turnovers

• Public space - dominated by Trujillo’s image 

  • Everything renamed - capital Santo Domingo renamed Ciudad Trujillo

  • Busts of Trujillo displayed everywhere

  • National time constructed to highlight Trujillo’s achievements

• New style of mass participation

  • Expected to display photos

  • Placards ‘Only Trujillo cures us’ ‘God and Trujillo are my faith’

• ‘Theatre state’

  • After inauguration - procession of armed forces on horseback

  • Months before assassination in 1961, citizens asked to march to demonstrate their faith

• ‘Yet to Dominicans, state culture was a very serious matter since failure to comply with the myriad rites of political participation could be met with economic pressure or even death, and nationalism was a powerful political currency which Trujillo deployed very effectively to conjure support for his regime’

Derby - populism should be understood horizontally and vertically

• Socieities with much class stratification - e.g Argentina - populists claiming to represent the working class

• Mestizo societies such as the Dominican Republic - populists ‘offered an alternative symbolic politics, one based on providing the illusion of upward mobility’

• Trujillo elevated the population through status markets 

  • Eg - gave ‘Hollywood beds’ as nuptial gifts, mass marriages, invited the poor to banquets with European cuisine, shipped pianos to farmers, subsidised classical music, invested in popular entertainments

  • Distributed whiteness, including them in the ‘gente decent’ - allowed poor brown Dominicans into elite social spaces

    • Observers believed that he ‘socially democratised’ the country

    • University education and civil service expansion

• ‘If mestizos were defined as transitioning to white, Trujillo made them feel as if they had arrived. Such practices conveyed a powerful sense of recognition to the masses who had previously not been accorded personhood by the state but had remained a faceless, shoeless, anonymous multitide