The Individual and the Collective: How "Trade Unionists Against Terror" Helped us Rethink Worker Consciousness

• In Event: Deborah Levenson Trade Unionists Against Terror: the Book, a Legacy for the Latin American Workers History

Abstract

One of the many notable features of Deborah Levenson’s brilliant book, Trade Unionists against Terror, is its divergence from a long-established historiography of labor struggles that explains worker protest and mobilization as resulting from collective identities and experiences, and treats individualism as antithetical to a radical political consciousness. In this paper I will discuss the way in which Levenson rethinks the relationship between the identity/experience of the individual and his/her capacity to engage in collective action, even in the face of violent retaliation. I will also consider to what extent Levenson’s innovative and provocative conceptualization of consciousness and her approach to workers’ struggles in Guatemala during the 1970s and early 1980s can help historians rethink the worker insurgency in the ABC region of São Paulo, Brazil, during those same years, a phenomenon that surprised many given the multiple impediments to collective action under the military dictatorship.

Author

• Barbara S Weinstein, New York University