To Be a Worker: Identity and Politics in Peru (review)

In 1986, when this book was first published in Lima, Peru was a very different place. Alfonso Barrantes was Lima's popular Mayor, and his United Left coalition was the second electoral force in the country. Communist, Maoist, and Trotskyist parties played major roles in Peru's labor movement, and their pressure in the streets had contributed to the military's earlier decision to return power to civilians. Aprista President Alan García was at the peak of his popularity, with a message of social change that seemed to echo the rhetoric of the left. Some were convinced that a United Left government was just around the corner.

Two 1986 books poured cold water on the left's premature celebration. One was Hernando de Soto's The Other Path, the best-selling paean to informal sector entrepreneurs. The other was a less-publicized book by sociologist Jorge Parodi, a book based, paradoxically, on interviews with metalworkers organized in a militant Marxist trade union. Unlike De Soto's strident neoliberal manifesto, Parodi seemed genuinely surprised by what he encountered in his interviews with workers at Metal Empresa S.A. He found, first, that ordinary workers' support for their union in the 1970s and early 1980s, while at one level entirely sincere, was not based on any Marxist consciousness or any commitment to their leaders' ideology. Second, he found that ordinary workers and even some union leaders embraced personal goals and aspirations that appeared more petty bourgeois than proletarian; highland migrants in particular saw industrial work as a means to obtain the skills and capital that would enable them to strike out on their own as owners of small-scale enterprises. This explains, for example, why the otherwise powerful and militant union at Metal Empresa did so little to protect workers from layoffs during the recession of the early 1980s, and why the rank and file seemed resigned, even willing, to accept their severance packages without a fight. Many hoped to use that severance pay to start up their own businesses.

These two arguments, the instrumentality of workers' support for their unions, and the unfixed, highly contingent quality of workers' identities as workers, have in recent years become permanent themes in post-Marxist labor historiography. But in Peruvian academic and political circles circa 1986 such observations bordered on heresy, perhaps explaining why Parodi relied so heavily on first-person testimonios, letting workers speak for themselves in their own words. Now that Parodi's arguments have passed from heretical to prophetic to commonplace, these testimonies are arguably the book's principal remaining attraction for the contemporary reader.

If the English translation, published fifteen years later, no longer shatters idols or puts any accepted truths to lie, what purpose does it serve and for what audience? First, as editor Conaghan argues in the introduction, To Be a Worker illustrates the genuinely revolutionary impact of Velasco Alvarado's military reformism on Peruvian labor relations at the shop-floor level, an argument that is hardly new, but which is captured in excellent detail by Parodi's oral histories, particularly in chapters 2 and 3. More significant is the way in which the narrative foreshadows subsequent events, most notably the collapse of Peru's organized left and Alberto Fujimori's successful appeal to people just like the workers of Metal Empresa. Fujimori, Conaghan believes, brilliantly tapped the complexities of "worker" identities, offering not a proletarian revolution but a Peruvian version of the by-your-bootstraps-American-dream, with Fujimori posing as the practical man who would bring "development" and make those dreams possible.

If those contributions do not suffice, "To Be a Worker" still has the testimonios, including fifty pages devoted to an interview with migrant, then worker, then...