Populist Seduction in Latin America. Carlos de la Torre

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СКАЧАТЬ leaders. This conservative understanding of crowds as “masses” does not permit the study of the specific meaning of their politics.

      An alternative explanation of working-class support for Perón stresses the formal rationality of the actions of the subaltern (Murmis and Portantiero 1971; Spalding 1977). Unlike previous governments, which had not addressed workers’ demands for social security and labor legislation, Perón, as the head of the National Labor Department (1943–45), met labor demands. Moreover, due to his power in the military government, Perón was able to co-opt and repress the labor movement in accordance with his interests. In the 1946 elections and through his first two presidential periods, Perón counted on the support of most of the working class, which acted rationally in supporting a leader favorable to their short-term interests.

      In spite of the efforts of writers influenced by dependency theory to understand the rationality of the working class and other subaltern groups in populism, their interpretations remain trapped in the same paradoxes of their modernization colleagues. Although dependency studies tried to break with false normative assumptions of what constitutes true and autonomous working-class actions, they are still influenced by orthodox Marxist models of class formation. Because an arbitrary rationalism and transparency is imputed to the actions of the supposedly mature and fully formed working class, these authors can not take into account the values, ideologies, and rituals of working classes or other popular sectors in populism. And even when the thrust of the argument is to understand the specificity of working classes in dependent societies, they can not break with a normative prescriptive model of a what a mature working class should be. It is precisely in the study of who the popular sectors are, what they think, how they feel, and how they interpret their actions that the tools of social history are useful (French 1989; James 1988a, 1988b; Wolfe 1994). As an example, consider Daniel James’s work on Peronism.

      James studies the social history of the Argentine working class between 1946 and 1976, showing how Peronism arose and how the workers contributed its development. Although James recognizes the explanatory power of approaches emphasizing the instrumental rationality of workers, he questions the validity of the economistic vision of history common to such perspectives. Peronism may have responded to the material needs of the working class previously ignored, but that does not explain why this response occurred within Peronism rather than in other political movements that also addressed the workers. “What we need to understand is Peronism’s success, its distinctiveness, why its political appeal was more credible for workers—which areas it touched that others did not. To do this we need to take Perón’s political and ideological appeal seriously and examine the nature of Peronism’s rhetoric and compare it with that of its rivals for working-class allegiance” (James 1988b, 14).

      Although working-class militancy was still present, the década infame (1930–43) “was experienced by many workers as a time of profound collective and individual frustration and humiliation” (James 1988b, 25). This was a time of severe discipline in the factory, where workers were haunted by the threat of unemployment. Tango lyrics from this period express the humiliation and cynicism of the workers. James points out that although traditional tango themes—romantic betrayal, nostalgia for the past, and the glorification of male courage—persisted, they were expressed in a new social context. Lyrics recommended the adoption of the dominant values of the time: egotism and immorality. They go so far as to propose that instead of being resigned to the injustice of the social order, the alternative is la mala vida—prostitution and crime. James also analyzes how workers’ degradation was expressed through silence. He explains Perón’s political success in his ability to give public expression to workers’ private experiences, in his capacity to affirm the value of workers’ consciousness and lifestyles.

      James (1988a, 1988b) analyzes the popular mobilizations from 17 October 1945 through Perón’s victory in February 1946 to understand the contradictory meanings of Peronism. On 9 October 1945, General Perón resigned from his positions as vice president and secretary of labor. He was arrested on the 13th. On 17 and 18 October, the workers in the capital and provincial cities staged enormous demonstrations demanding his release. The festive and carnivalesque⁴ spirit of these events contrasted sharply with the behavior typical of the 1 May demonstrations organized by the Socialists and Communists. Instead of a solemn, ordered march, on 17 and 18 October the workers sang popular songs, played huge drums, danced in the streets, costumed themselves in traditional gaucho gear, and wrote Perón’s name in chalk on city walls. The surprise of the leftist press was such that they did not recognize the demonstrators as workers, but perceived them as marginal and lumpen. For example, the Communist press characterized them as “‘clanes con aspecto de murgas’ [clans with the appearance of carnival] led by elements of the ‘hampa’ [underworld] and typified by the figure of the compadrito” (James 1988a, 451).

      The workers attacked institutions that symbolized and transmitted their social subordination. Their principal targets were the cafes, bars, and clubs of the elites. They also threw stones at anti-Peronist newspaper offices and burned copies of such papers. Students were a favorite target. With the cry “alpargatas si, libros no” (shoes, not books) many students, especially the sons of the well-heeled (jóvenes engominados), were the object of the jokes and at times the violence of the workers. Shouting “menos cultura y más trabajo” (less high culture and more work), they threw stones at the universities. “The central column of demonstrators in Rosario was headed by an ass on which had been placed a placard with the slogan ‘offensive to university professors and a certain evening paper.’ … In La Plata during the disturbances of the 18th a group of demonstrators entered a funeral parlor and demanded a coffin which they then paraded through the fashionable area in the center of the city shouting slogans ‘hostile to the students and newspapers’” (1988a, 452). Young men made obscene gestures and dropped their pants in front of upper-class ladies. Monuments to national heroes, considered sacred by the elite, were covered with Peronist slogans.

      James shows that these actions, which appeared to both elites and the left as acts of barbarism committed by the lumpen and recent migrants to the cities, had a rationality. The workers attacked the symbols marking their exclusion from the public sphere: universities and students, social clubs, and the press. Moreover, their actions constituted a kind of countertheater through which they mocked and abused the symbols of elite pretensions and authority, as well as affirming their own pride in being workers.

      The workers marched from the outlying areas to the central plazas. Their presence was seen by elites and middle classes as the eruption of barbarism, of the cabecitas negras (the dark-skinned) in places reserved for the high society (gente bien). By invading the public plazas—spaces where citizens gather and political power resides—the workers from outlying areas challenged the spatial hierarchy, affirming their right to belong to the public sphere.

       The Paradoxes of Populism and Liberal Democracy

      I have stressed the importance of studying the complex and ambiguous meanings of populism. Particular emphasis has been placed on the social historical analysis of collective action, as well as on discursive political events. This approach to the study of populism takes into account both the actions and discourses of the leaders and the autonomous actions of the followers. It requires examining the concrete mechanisms of electoral articulation in the context of particular political cultures.

      Perhaps the principal effect of populism has been the entrance of the masses into politics. That is why Carlos Vilas interprets populism as a “fundamental democratizing force” (1995b, 98). Populist movements not only expanded the number of voters, they also gave large social groups within exclusionary and racist societies access to a symbolic dignity. Alberto Adrianzén (1998) has argued that the fundamental quality of Peruvian populism has been its antiaristocratic and proplebeian traits. Similarly, the chusma of Gaitán and Velasco Ibarra and the descamisados of the Peróns were transformed into the bearers of the “true” nation in their struggle against the “aristocratic” oligarchical antination. This search for support and legitimation СКАЧАТЬ