By Lincoln Secco*

A brief balance of a lineage of Brazilian historiography

The end of the New Republic (2016), the uncertainties of a neo-fascist government (2018) and the attack on critical thinking bring us a difficult question: what is the role of the historiographical debate, in particular, and the intellectual in general in this conjuncture?

The extensive agenda imposed on us every day by the enemy stuns us. But it is likely that, just like in 1964, the fundamental strategic problem that consciously or unconsciously bothers militants, intellectuals and union and party leaders is the lack of definition of a social subject of the desired change. Who can attract the political forces that can overcome the Brazilian impasse? Around which class or social group can existing organizations gravitate?

The new working class has become a challenge for the left in the XNUMXst century: outsourcing, the use of applications, GPS, automation of services and robotization in factories have created a mass of permanent unemployed or intermittent underemployed: a “leftover mass” , “a population that is being discarded by the total autonomization of the economic process”[I]. Social waste, precarious [ii], subproletarians[iii], subaltern, excluded, marginalized are terms that transit through the vocabulary of sociology and social movements.

In the Marxist tradition, one could already count on the judicious stratification made by Marx in The capital about those sectors he identified below the proletariat, particularly the stagnant population "characterized by maximum length of service and minimum wage"[iv]. It was within the framework of Marxism that the Latin American intelligentsia inaugurated the conceptual debate on marginality.[v]. 

Brazilian historiography has its own contribution to this debate. Informality, rotation, fluidity, seasonality and unlimited exploration are colonial legacies that have been reproduced up to the present.

Historiography

Oliveira Viana had already focused on the population sector that did not fit into the fundamental categories of the economy (slaves and masters): mulattos and mulattoes, repululent mestizos, declassified, aggregates, carijós freedmen, incorrigible vagrants, vagabonds, road bullies, salaried assassins , contractors of riots, mobs, robbers, pimpões, the brave caboclo, the subversive goat, the fearsome cangaceiro, the troglodyte, the bandit hunter, the quarrelsome, the brawler, the brave of the mills and the mameluco. The fluidity and indetermination of the vocabulary hid, in addition to racism, the conceptual impotence[vi].

Caio Prado Júnior was a reader of Oliveira Vianna but departed from “inorganic forms” to elevate the “disqualified”[vii]to a theoretical level. In a thesis defended at the University of São Paulo in 1954, Dante Moreira Leite pointed out that “like other historians, Caio Prado Júnior found documents about the unemployed population of the colony. However, instead of interpreting this datum as a consequence of decay in the tropics or the degeneration of the hybrid, he shows how the colony system would inevitably lead to this result, as it offered practically no other opportunity for free labor”[viii].

If in the structural moment of his analysis, Caio Prado disconnected the situation of the classes from a biological explanation, in the political moment in general he ignored the active participation of the free poor, indigenous people (whom he considered semi-civilized[ix]), Italian immigrants who he found more rustic and less demanding than the Swiss and Germans[X] and enslaved, which he divided among those of inferior culture[xi] and those from Sudan to which he attributed high culture[xii].

He reproduced, albeit marginally, racist expressions in his work. His method did not allow him to evaluate race and class as a pair of opposites in the same social being. At the very time when Caio Prado Júnior wrote Mario de Andrade resorted to folklore in order not to reduce color prejudice to a question of social class[xiii]. And it is known today that changing the social and economic structure does not lead to the end of racism.[xiv].

However, Caio Prado Júnior recognizes black participation in the final period of the abolitionist movement when citing mass escapes. And at every turn he registers the manorial elite's fear of an uprising.[xv]. Unlike Oliveira Vianna, the prejudice in his language had a cultural and not biological origin and the rational core of his theory was anti-racist[xvi].

His focus was on the structural moment from which he derived the behavior of classes. The (industrial) proletariat emerged for him not from European immigrants who were destined for coffee plantations, but from urban centers and from the “marginal population”; “poor but free”; “no fixed occupation and regular means of life”; that he did not belong to the “master and slave binomial”; composed by the “misfit”, “idle, with an uncertain and random life”[xvii]. Both in the colony and in the national phase, this “low price” labor was linked to the secondary sector, therefore intermittent and always subject to the main one (agrarian-exporter)[xviii]. Obviously, as free workers, blacks submitted themselves more than whites to the new “set of disciplinary practices” that framed them after the abolition of slavery.[xx].

That “socially indecisive” population contingent, which vegetated in the solitudes of the immense Brazilian territory and roamed from one region to another, derived its disaggregated condition from the cycles of the export economy, its crises, the inconstancy of subsistence activities and, finally, the very form of incorporation of the colony into commercial capitalism. 

Free or freed people were left with prostitution, mechanical trades[xx], some domestic services, construction work, transport and, particularly, police and repression troops. When not the crime. 

Nelson Werneck Sodré had discussed the emergence of the middle classes, the narrowness of the labor market and the origins of the working class based on the “leftovers that agriculture throws at the cities”, sections of the middle class with no prospects and immigrants.[xxx].

It was Alberto Passos Guimarães who understood better than Caio Prado that it was necessary to go beyond the registration of the origin of the small property in the immigration process that only brought as an ideological product the supposed “broadness of vision of the dominant classes”. This served to “erase from history the long and obstinate battle that the generative elements of the peasant class had to fight against their enemies”. It was imperative “to take into account the previous gestational stage” from the “crowd of miserable free workers, aggregated and semi-proletarians maintained as reserve labor in the vicinity of the latifundia”. In the wake of Miguel Costa Filho, he came across the craft production of cachaça in gadgets and reels, but he went further and glimpsed in the documentation the link between the drunkenness of enslaved people and the disorders feared by the Portuguese crown. An unusual form of resistance, therefore.

The essential thing is that he highlighted the “dynamics of the class struggle” between “labor and the territorial aristocracy” (in the expression he took from Rocha Pombo). He attributed the genesis of the peasant as much to the objective conditions of misery, exclusion from land and indebtedness as much as to conflict. With no alternatives, the poor had to settle down under the “protection” of the lord or wander aimlessly through the fields and cities. The agreement and accommodation are for the author the result of defeats and the need for survival. In other words, one only negotiates after the conflict or the threat: “It took three centuries of harsh and continuous struggles, many of them bloody, sustained by the poor populations of the countryside against the all-powerful lords of the land so that finally, despite so many failures, the embryos of the peasant class would emerge in Brazilian life”[xxiii].

Combining resistance and agreement, Ciro Flamarion Cardoso drew attention to the peasant gap. The independent plantations and the “informal activities of slaves” highlighted by him allowed the redesign of social life in its complexity with “accommodative expedients” that contributed to the stabilization of social tensions[xxiii].

Passos Guimarães and Werneck Sodré were practically ignored by academic historiography (with the usual exceptions) and when presented they were soon removed from the main scene because they considered the latifundio “feudal”. The mere mention of this word was reason for its exclusion from any debate. Even Jacob Gorender[xxv], who wrote outside the academy, contributed to this without even asking why, despite that incorrectness, they produced works of undeniable historiographical value.

In general, we can find in Brazilian Marxist historians not only a systemic, structural approach that highlighted the great historical processes, but also forms of collective and anti-systemic resistance.[xxiv]. By starting from colonial production relations they revealed internal forms in more detail. But they did not pay attention to the fact that it is in the central countries that the Marxist analysis naturally started from the inside out, since that was where the dynamic core of capitalist expansion lay. This explains why a relevant theoretical debate took place there on the transition from feudalism to capitalism. But here there was no “transition” but a conquest enterprise and the nationalization of the debate gravitated around the transplantation of Portuguese feudalism on slavery. In that reading key, the property relations did not correspond to those of production. The real was saturated by an idealization and not by the sources[xxv].

Roberto Simonsen conceived the economic history of Brazil based on export cycles and its external relations, but he lacked theoretical tools for an overall appreciation of what Caio Prado called the old colonial system.

The historian on the periphery could only approach the totality of out in, capturing the logic of the system through the circulation of capital, as it provided the meaning of colonial production. Shifting the focus of analysis allowed Caio Prado Júnior to scrutinize the misfits in the colonial gear, that is, what went wrong: the inorganic.

Roberto Schwarz’s statement that before the Marx seminar at the University of São Paulo, Marxism (with the exception of Caio Prado) was “confined in a precarious intellectual universe” and without “deep relationships with the country’s culture”[xxviii] is wrong, as can be seen from the extensive and qualified Brazilian historiographical debate.

However, Marxist historians did not have the mass of basic monographs that the university later produced; nor did they have the access, time and conditions of intellectual work to compile a wide documentary mass in archives, except exceptionally. The advancement of empirical research was essential to refine and deepen knowledge about the free and poor population, as well as about resistance to slavery.

The risk was to drown in empiricism and in the absence of any notion of historical process. The prize would be to find the universal in the particular and describe structures without sacrificing the flesh, blood and spirit individualities that produce the story.

Uspian background

Maria Sylvia de Carvalho Franco, whose thesis was defended at USP in 1964, portrayed the violent daily life she encountered in court proceedings and minutes of the Chamber of Guaratinguetá[xxviii]. Roberto Schwarz, in turn, showed that the free poor make up an entire social class whose access to goods depends on favors, the aggregate being their caricature.[xxix].

In the 1970s, Ecléa Bosi published two books on the readings of female workers and the social memory of old age: two fragile groups with a precarious life[xxx]. Even though she dealt with a formalized working class, she focused on gender and age, highlighting forms of oppression such as machismo and forgetfulness of old age. The condition of being a worker is central to the memory of the elderly men and women she interviewed[xxxii].

Historiography surreptitiously reacted to USP's sociological research on slavery, such as those by Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Otávio Ianni. The delay of historiography in relation to sociology on slavery is explained by the fact that History already had a tradition that goes back to historical institutes and to the national historiography inaugurated by Varnhagen. History chairs were filled by local scholars without theoretical and methodological concerns. As Carlos Guilherme Mota stated, the creation of the Faculty of Philosophy in 1934 favored Sociology, Geography, Anthropology and Economics more[xxxi]. Obviously, the judgment is restricted to the university because Marxist historiography persisted in the area of ​​influence of the Communist Party, as we saw above. Displaced[xxxii] between the “two worlds” Caio Prado Júnior had a unique role[xxxv], but this certainly cannot be explained by his having combined Marxism with the “intellectual accumulation of a large coffee family”[xxxiv].  

From the 1960s onwards, Fernando Novaes began to develop the Caiopradian idea of ​​an old colonial system at USP. The observation post itself Formation of Contemporary Brazil from Caio Prado and that he inherited from Capistrano de Abreu was the moment of crisis for that system: the beginning of the XNUMXth century. But no progress had been made in terms of the insertion of individuals and social classes in the colonial economy.

Three Pioneering Historians

In the 1980s, three important historians focused on the social declassification to which segments of the Brazilian population were subjected. Obviously, I ignore other decisive contributions from the turn of the 1970s to the 1980s.[xxxiv].

Maria Odila Leite Silva Dias, Laura de Mello Souza and Emilia Viotti da Costa stated that it was not just a matter of social exclusion, but also historiographical, although this can now be nuanced by greater knowledge of the memoirs of workers, communist and socialist historians, scholars self-taught etc. The first showed the work dynamics of greengrocers in the center of São Paulo in the XNUMXth century; the second exhibited those disqualified on the fringes of the gold cycle; the third wrote methodological essays in which she highlighted the presence of women, black people and the feminist approach[xxxviii], but condemned the exchange of economic reductionism for cultural[xxxviii].

Street vendors survived on the margins of history in nineteenth-century São Paulo for Maria Odila Dias[xxxix]; Laura de Mello e Souza researched that entire population that in the vocabulary of Minas Gerais in the XNUMXth century included the loafers, the indomitable scoundrels, gypsies, mulattoes, black women, freedmen, brown people, freedmen, witches, etc. They were the protagonists of misery, forcibly recruited by colonial militias to repress those not recruited.[xl]. Oliveira Vianna had already written that those disqualified were also the henchman of the local potentate and the guard, infantryman and militia soldier. As in the official police and illegal militias until today.

There were salaried professions on the mills and numerous intermediaries who weighed and packed the sugar or were in charge of selling and shipping the product. Even surgeons who bled Negroes and administered medicines could have steady employment. But all were subjected to the social disqualification of work: “without the possibility of ascending the social scale and pressured to stand on a par with slaves, the free man was left with the option of being a vagrant”, in the words of Vera Ferlini[xi].

This was the choice of the protagonist of the short story by Machado de Assis Father against Mother. It perfectly portrays the dilemma of a poor man free from unstable occupation who finds himself between delivering a newborn baby to the exposed and hunting a pregnant woman. It is the portrait of the impossibility of the universalization of the human condition under slavery. The indecision, resolved by the chance of finding the fugitive black woman whose capture would yield a reward, reveals the very situation of those border groups, sometimes integrated, sometimes marginalized, always in search of an ascension via the selection that allowed them to become aggregated. But the favor of an established family did not remove the instability.

Poverty simultaneously generated disputes and solidarities, the latter at the level of kinship and neighborhood. In a very poor society like that of São Paulo in the XNUMXs, e.g., where poverty dissolved social distancing, the Chamber’s edicts sought to strengthen the distinctions inscribed in the skin color of blacks, mulattos and carijós[xliii]. Colonial society therefore had multiple hierarchies in addition to the one based on property: that of color, blood purity, ideal of nobility, etc. 

History (but also literary studies) revealed marginalized groups that otherwise were not in a world apart, outside of global culture. Urban free labor competed with that of slaves for gain, and the links between free, enslaved, and masters flowed in myriad ways. They trickled through the social interstices. 

This population was permanently subjected to vertical violence (repression by local bosses or the State) or horizontal violence, in neighborhood relations or casual work. For Maria Sylvia de Carvalho Franco, domination appeared almost as inescapable, as subjection would be supported as a benefit, to the point that the individual would not exist as a social being, leaving at most personal revolt[xiii]. A reading that was nuanced by historiography.

For Maria Odila there was no possibility of rupture, other than the “structural continuity of poverty and unemployment” [xiv], but she rescued the subjectivity of women in everyday life. In it emerges the warp of tensions between authoritarian elderly women and women who are married and disorderly; between violent men and their wives; rejected wives and slaves who became their husbands' mistresses; poor widows; lonely women; the male woman[xlv]; the free ones; the slaves to gain[xlv]… In 1804 and 1836, 40 and 36% of urban households were made up of single women, heads of families, mostly single (in general white or brown)[xlv].

Everyday life is not the routine opposite of a private life that safeguards intimacy. There is no such rigid separation in the colony. For Maria Odila, domestic tensions were felt by women as the mediation of social conflicts. The violence they suffered from husbands, lovers or masters does not appear disconnected from general processes such as the collapse of urban slavery and the impoverishment of small female slave owners. The historian finds the structural marks in the processes of divorce, debts, inventories and wills. Women “channeled the system of domination in crisis”[xlviii]. Subjectivity is not isolated from the urbanization process of the city of São Paulo between the end of the XNUMXth century and the eve of abolition.

Laura de Mello e Souza carried out an in-depth, documented and theoretically consistent study in dialogue with European historiography and sociological studies on marginality. It presented a more penetrating analysis capacity of individuals as bearers of a blocked universalization[xlix].

Professor Laura deepened the reading of Caio Prado Júnior, to whom she explicitly referred in her work. For her, it is as if the forms of collective consciousness appeared on the historical horizon as a result of a common structural condition, but were then neutralized.[l] by a form of inconstant economic insertion, geographically dispersed and politically subordinated.

As consciousness is not external to being, it is inscribed for the individual in the order of short duration, of the here and now, at the same time that his social being is in the order of long duration. Immediacy gives the appearance of discontinuity and hides its persistence in time.

Laura de Mello e Souza found, amid the oppression of the colonial era, “intermittent forms and (...) of group conscience” alongside “many factors that acted (...) dismantling solidarities and dissolving conscience”[li]. A “social stratum where the roles of individuals were transitory and fluctuating, where poor free men drifted in and out of declassification” was the norm in the colonial period. But “there were many characteristics in common between them: the color of their skin – black, brown, red, copper, sometimes white – the bastard birth, the insecurity of everyday life, the permanent panic in the face of attentive and rigid justice, itinerancy, concubinage …”[liiii].

Although they dealt with different periods, regions and objects, those historians brought to light the same long-term problem. They combined macro and micro history in the wake of Nathalie Zemon Davis and Carlo Ginzburg[iii], whose books they indicated in their courses. But it was Emilia Viotti da Costa who systematized that theoretical and methodological stance in some articles, conferences and books written in the 1980s.

In 1982 Emilia Viotti returned to USP momentarily. She had been excluded in 1969 by the Dictatorship and was teaching in the USA. At a conference she analyzed two collections of documents from the labor movement. One by Edgard Carone, his former colleague at USP, a pioneer in the systematic study of the republican period; the other by PS Pinheiro and M. Hall, from Unicamp, spearhead of the new History of work.

Interestingly, the two works offered Emília Viotti a new face of historiography on the working class, now not only focused on immigrants, but also on blacks and women.[book]. For her “no history of the working classes worthy of respect can be written today without incorporating women, not only those who work in the industrial sector but also the wives and other family members who work in temporary jobs in the informal sector”[lv].

Everyday life is the fundamental sphere of any person's existence. In it one lives, suffers, feeds, feels and reflects. There are thought and action. Only there is no theory and therefore no praxis[lv]. In everyday life, the “immediate character of experience” prevails[lviii] and that is why History cannot only reproduce the voice of the oppressed.

Emilia Viotti did not limit herself to assertions of principle or just the observation of a historiographical turn. In that same 1980s, she researched the uprising of slaves in Guyana, trying to insert the various local discourses and subjectivities within the world's economic structures.[lviii]; he linked the different accounts to sugar price curves and general changes in capitalism. In a conference held at USP about that revolt, he stated that it was necessary to go beyond the discourse of the oppressed or the oppressor because their subjectivity was constituted by objective conditions[lix].

In 1988 she published a historiographical pamphlet on abolition. Most of the work follows the same scheme as the Economic History of Brazil by Caio Prado Júnior, although he does not mention it. English pressure, the end of the slave trade, the increase in investment in the initial acquisition of the slave due to the increase in price; changes in the demographic composition of the free and enslaved population and in the relations of production; the economic boom in coffee; public opinion favorable to abolition, etc. Like Caio Prado, who described slave behavior as “passive”[lx] until the abolitionist campaign, she stated that “most slaves seem to have accommodated themselves well or badly to slavery. Otherwise, slavery would have been destroyed as an institution much sooner than it was.”[lxi].

Her concern with the subjectivity of the enslaved led her to consider rebellion and accommodation, but with a predominance of the second characteristic.[lxii]. For the second half of the XNUMXth century, it documents the anti-slavery collective actions[lxiii] and registers the participation of the “subaltern classes”: women, free poor men, the jangadeiros from Ceará, immigrants, former slaves and, like Caio Prado Júnior, highlights the mass escapes from the farms in the last years of slavery[lxiv]. It still deals with literati, journalists, parliamentarians and even the divisions between farmers.

But his contribution is especially methodological. By presenting the biography of the abolitionists Luiz Gama, Antonio Bento and Joaquim Nabuco, it offers a lesson in historical analysis. The diversity of origin, social class and color of the three converges with the objective conditions in which they acted: economic, generational, ideological. They experienced a reformist discourse that reacted to the economic transformations of their time; suffered the conjuncture of the liberal ostracism of 1868[lxv] which led them to other forms of struggle in journalism, at rallies, fairs, lectures, etc.; all maintained an ambiguous relationship with the oligarchies in power between supporting them and sponsoring them.

Although he was alluding to leading figures of the abolitionist movement, his intention was to find a general method that would account for “why some individuals became abolitionists and others did not” without getting entangled in the personal motives that get lost “in the multiple circumstances of the life of each one". Comparing three succinct biographies she can understand “some general determinations that explain her behavior”[lxvi].

But without a doubt, the tone she sought to give to her book, written a few years before the centenary of abolition, only appears in the final pages where she highlighted that the “most important role was that played by a number of white, black, mulattoes, free and slaves who anonymously fought for abolition”[lxv].

Actuality of a Historiographical Debate

My scope was not to debate the content of the works and authors cited here in the light of new research, since I would lack specialization in studies on slavery, leaving me only with the experience I had as a student or political interlocutor of many of the people cited here.

The three professors at the University of São Paulo produced their work at a time of accelerated urbanization; exhaustion of the dictatorship; and the emergence of popular organizations that also sought to represent the socially disqualified. And it is no coincidence that all the academic authors cited here were women, although there are no black[lxviii].

In 1980, the Workers' Party emerged not only from the ABC Paulista working class, but from a myriad of autonomous initiatives by rubber tappers, landless (the MST appeared in 1984), domestic[lxix], street vendors, rural workers and a whole range of middle-class radicals[lxx]. That working class had never ceased to be largely informal, precarious and economically insecure. How that political experiment was possible is a challenge to historical research.

In the following decades, the works of Silvia Federici appeared[lxxi] and Roswitha Scholz[lxxiii]. The condition of the periphery has always been to function as an external market to the capitalist mode of production in the center.[lxxiii] and this extended to the bodies. Those authors demonstrated that the bodies of women[lxxiv] and enslaved were also colonized and that capital accumulation does not happen without women's reproductive work, environmental degradation, and colonial exploitation. With commodification, female care work, free and invisible, became more visible[lxxv]. This reinforced the importance of activities considered unproductive from the immediate point of view of capital.[lxxvi].

In Brazil, the nationalization of the labor market did not occur until after the Revolution of 1930[lxxvii]. That year, the law of 2/3 of national workers in companies was instituted, which allowed the integration of blacks in the industry. Women constituted, as a priority, the disqualified population in domestic services, for example[lxxviii]. In the following decades this has not changed. In 2019 the IBGE[lxxix] estimated at 41,4% the rate of informality in the labor market[lxxx].

Until the 1980s, it was common for groups of unemployed people to be dispersed or arrested in Praça da Sé in São Paulo based on a 1941 Decree-Law known as the vagrancy law. As much as in the colony, when blacks were feared to gather in the streets and they only circulated with prior authorization. Control via mobile phones and surveillance cameras has its antecedents there.

Also slavery, although residual, persisted in the country. The Pastoral Land Commission calculated that the northeast provided the majority of slave labor in Brazil between 1995 and 2005. black man who ran away was hunted and given to the dogs of the captain of the bush[lxxxi]. This “disqualified” population is located in the XNUMXst century between salary and modern slavery, sometimes integrating the Disposable People by the American sociologist Kevin Bales[lxxxii]. The poor families of black farmers in Goiás[lxxxiii]; the migrant cold float; the “captive” rubber tapper from Acre[lxxxiv] now live with the rappi “cyclist” in the center of São Paulo and what awaits 600 reais from the State during the 2020 epidemic[lxxxv]. Submission to the shed (which generates imprisonment for debt on the farm) is much tougher, but the application is not a paradise as shown in the film You were not here by Ken Loach.

Without neglecting the impact of the Information Technology Revolution on work, we can say that it supersedes old inorganic forms, mentalities inherited from slavery, racism and obstacles to the universalization of working class interests.

More than in the colony, a common life was generalized which is the “running around”, the violence, the fleeting bond, the poverty and the uncertainty of the next day. But this shared condition does not translate into perennial solidarities and organizations. The universality of the human condition can be declared, but it is hardly practiced because there are no organic links that materially support a common effort to build a national economy.

Conclusion

But beyond the impasses, historiography allows us to unveil possibilities, gaps, alternatives, survival strategies, organization (even intermittent) and revolt. First of all, it reminds us that we once had a regime more ferocious, cruel and enduring than any we can experience in our individual existences: slavery persisted for three centuries.

The recurrence of the struggle, even fragmented, was vital to overthrow the slave regime. It was important to support all of them even when they failed; the subaltern classes and races had an objective interest in the struggle, but not all of them had the same conscience and did not act at the same pace; in everyday action, many poor people perceived the relationship of their class, race or gender condition with general processes, but it took a lot of individual frustrations to seek a political alternative; Alliances between the middle classes, poor people, free and enslaved, were rare and difficult, but when they occurred they were decisive and an example of this was abolitionism.

The “horizon of contestations” is never predefined. If a “theory and practice of contestation in the colony”, in the words of István Jancsò, most often concerns seditions that “did not go beyond the immediate plane of tensions, that is, of the short-term developments of the fundamental contradictions of the system against which was being debated”, she also reveals to us “the future practice” that would solve, in another historical context, the crisis of the old colonial system[lxxxvi].

Organized action created public opinion favorable to the enslaved and disqualified, gave their individual protest increasing legitimacy, gave it meaning and increased the viability of their collective revolts; there were objective issues that were beyond the reach of the movement, such as the end of trafficking and changes in production conditions, but the victories in parliament also contributed to burden interprovincial trade and demoralize slavery; the abolitionist campaign was plural and united both those who reduced it to a legislative reform and those who used illegal methods; it teaches us that as important as the parliamentary reformist action was the dissemination of the cause in fairs, fundraising, lectures, publications, etc. Ultimately, what went down in history as reform from above was only possible with mass action from below by independent radical organizations in illegal and clandestine actions.

The movement of politics must be that of the abstract to the concrete. Acting in everyday life without the proselytism of ideological formulas. Finding the right watchword, the one that translates the multitude of different empirical experiences, based on experience itself. But without denying the essential role of theory, knowledge of the past and organization in successive geographic scales of action. Historical knowledge does not replace the learning that can only be obtained in militant practice, but this alone is insufficient. Simply activating subaltern groups does not necessarily lead to a progressive horizon.[lxxxvii].

Activity, even by individuals or small groups, is most effective if it is armed with theory produced first and foremost in the left organizations themselves and outside them as well. A myriad of small gestures that are repeated also contribute to crumble a form of domination and modify objective questions.

The meaning of informality is not new, as the historiographical debate reveals, but it would not become a residue of the past, but a destiny at the exact moment that that historiography appeared. The working class never managed to spread its conquests to the entire population because there was an immense reserve of labor force in the countryside until the 1964 coup and in the urban peripheries when the Sixth Republic emerged.

A formal labor market was scarcely set up between 1930 and 1980. Before there wasn't and today we don't know if what existed was just part of a single cycle of global capitalism. If in the formalized dynamic pole there is the struggle of the “collective worker” for rights that are later individualized, in informality the struggle of individuals prevails, whose conquest is materialized collectively outside the wage relationship.[lxxxviii] and it spreads[lxxxix].

Antonio Gramsci quotes in his Prison Notebooks a story by Tacitus: a senator proposed that all enslaved people wear a uniform. The Roman Senate rejected the proposal because they could realize that they were equal to each other and that they formed the majority of the population. It is not so difficult to recognize the informality that makes us uniform. It is difficult to give it meaning.

*Lincoln Secco He is a professor at the Department of History at USP

Notes

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[I]Arantes, Paul. “Entrevista”, in: Humanidades em Diálogo, USP, 2017. Available at: file:///sysroot/home/trocken/Downloads/140535-Texto%20do%20artigo-274319-1-10-20171113.pdf. Accessed on 23/4/2020.

[ii]Although formalized, this category was particularly concentrated in Brazil on the daughters of non-white domestic workers. Since 2005 there have been strikes in the sector. Braga, Ruy. “Precariat and syndicalism in contemporary Brazil: A look from the labor industry call center". Critical Magazine of Social Sciences n.103, Coimbra May 2014. See also Sá, Guilherme C. Proletarianization, precariousness and entrepreneurship in the Education Department of the State of São Paulo (1995-2015): neoliberalism forging the crisis of the Republic and privatization of the State, USP, master's degree, 2019.

[iii]Singer, Andrew. The Senses of Lulism🇧🇷 São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2012.

[iv]Marx, KH The capital. São Paulo: Abril Cultural, 1983, VIT 2, p. 208.

[v]Nun, Jose. “Relative Superpopulation”, in: Pereira, Luiz (org). Marginal Populations. São Paulo: Two Cities, 1978.

[vi]Viana, Oliveira. Southern Populations of Brazil. Brasília: Senado Federal, 2005. Terms are scattered throughout the book.

[vii]Prado Junior, Caio. Formation of Contemporary Brazil. São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional, 1942, pp. 279 and 284. About the author see: Pericás, Luiz Bernardo. Caio Prado Júnior: a political biography. São Paulo: Boitempo, 2016. Ricupero, Bernardo. Caio Prado Jr and the Nationalization of Marxism in Brazil. São Paulo: Publisher: Ed 34, 2000.

[viii]Milk, Dante Moreira. The Brazilian National Character. 4 ed. São Paulo: Pioneira, 1983, p. 349.

[ix]Prado Junior, Caio. Economic History of Brazil, P. 220.

[X]ID ibid., p.203.

[xi]If in this case the meaning is obvious, in general the term inferior refers to a social position, as in inferior classes.

[xii]ID Ibid., p. 188.

[xiii]Andrade, Mario. Aspects of Brazilian Folklore. São Paulo: Global, 2019, p. 103. The ambiguity of Brazilian racism was the subject of a classic study: Nogueira, Oracy. Both Black and White. São Paulo. TA Queiroz, 1985. See also: Schwarcz, Lilia. Neither black nor white quite the contrary🇧🇷 São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2013.

[xiv]Mbembe, Achilles. Critique of Black Reason. 2nd ed. Trans. Marta Lance. Lisbon: Antigone, 2017, p. 72.

[xv]Prado Junior, Caio. Economic History of Brazil, P. 195.

[xvi]Regarding the enslaved, he highlighted the “low intellectual level”, “deprivation of rights”, “isolation in rural areas”, the language, the limitless discipline imposed by the masters and “tribal rivalries” that prevented their political participation. But he foresaw its future transformation from "class in itself to class for itself". For him, the middle strata were not a class but “clusters of individuals”. Prado Junior, Caio. Political Evolution of Brazil. São Paulo: Revista dos Tribunais, 1933, pp. 120-121.

[xvii] Prado Junior, Caio. Economic History of Brazil. São Paulo: Círculo do Livro, 1986, p. 213.

[xviii] The pre-eminence of coffee in the export basket lasted more than a century and its currency made it possible to pay royalties, remittances of profits and imports of technology and machinery, even though they were already lagging behind in the center. But as the peripheral economy functions as Department II (raw materials) of the central one (Mandel), it never managed to completely autonomize the internal reproduction of Department I (means of production). For Caio Prado Júnior, industry is secondary not because of its weight in national production, but because it does not change the direction of the economy that aims to export. Since the colony, Department I was dependent on foreign countries because the direct producer was sequestered in Africa and accounted for as fixed capital from the point of view of circulation. But from the point of view of production, it was variable and added value (only the inattention to forms makes it possible to mistakenly speak of the labor market). By not recognizing the worker's humanity, there was a tendency to treat him as a machine that had to be worn down to death and replaced. This also prevented any technical revolution, since it was commercial capital that dictated the dynamics of production, from capturing labor to selling the product on the foreign market. The enslaved person was not supported by the master, since he reproduced the value of his work force on the farm. And aged could be killed or expelled, without cost. This explains the resistance to abolitionism until 1888 and, nowadays, the attack on social security (so that the workforce can be disposed of free of charge at the end of its useful life for capital).

[xx]In 1989, a historian verified this when studying the case of former slaves from the charqueadas in Rio Grande do Sul. Pesavento, Sandra J. “Free labor and bourgeois order. Rio Grande do Sul – 1870-1900”, History Magazine, n.120, p. 135-151, USP, Jan/July. 1989.

[xx]Florestan Fernandes recalled that the number of colonizers was not enough to transplant all kinds of poor people to the colony for mechanical trades. See: Fernandes, Florestan. Closed circuit. 2nd ed. São Paulo: Hucitec, 1979, p. 40.

[xxx]Sodré, Nelson Werneck. Introduction to the Brazilian Revolution. 4ed. São Paulo: Livraria Editora Ciências Humanas, 1978, p.53.

[xxiii]Passos Guimaraes, Alberto. Four Centuries of Latifundia. 6 ed. 1989, pp. 105-119. The first edition is from 1963.

[xxiii] Machado, Maria Helena PT “Around the Slave Autonomy: One new. Direction for the Social History of Slavery”. Brazilian Journal of History. V. 8, no. 16, São Paulo, March 1988. The author does not disregard that these were residual activities and says it is necessary to “disclose the process economic and social that allowed its absorption by the work slave trade” (emphasis mine).

[xxv]About his career, see: Quadros, Carlos F. Jacob Gorender, a communist militant: study of a political and intellectual trajectory in Brazilian Marxism (1923-1970). Master's dissertation, USP, 2015.

[xxiv]The Marxist study by Clovis Moura is exemplary in this respect. Moore, Clovis. Senzala Rebellions. Quilombos. Insurrections. guerrillas. São Paulo: Zumbi, 1959. The front cover of this first edition informs that Caio Prado Júnior highlighted the pioneering nature of the work and the considerable importance of the theme.

[xxv] The debate on sesmarial property is long and largely outdated.

[xxviii] Schwarz, Robert. “A Marx Seminar”, Folha de São Paulo, October 8, 1995. This opinion without empirical basis in no way changes the fact that this is a notable critic. Already in a purely idealist and politicalist formulation we find the incredible condemnation of the Brazilian communist movement for lack of knowledge of the dialectic... See: Konder, Leandro. The Defeat of the Dialectic. São Paulo, Expressão Popular, 2009. Contrary to this reading, among numerous studies already carried out, I cite two by way of example: Quartim de Moraes, João (Org). History of Marxism in Brazil. Campinas: Unicamp, 2007. See especially volumes 2 and 3. Secco, L. The Battle of the Books: Formation of the Left in Brazil. São Paulo: Atelier, 2018.

[xxviii] Franco, Maria SC Free Men in the Slave Order. São Paulo: Ática, 1974, p.14.

[xxix]Schwartz, Robert. To the Winner the Potatoes. São Paulo: Two Cities, 2012, p. 16.

[xxx]Bosi, Eclea. “Sensitive Narratives about Fragile Groups”; Interview in: Fapesp Magazine, no. 218, São Paulo, April 2014. Ecléa Bosi was a student of Dante Moreira Leite who denounced the lack of commitment of the intelligentsia until the 1950s with the “unprotected classes”.

[xxxii]Bosi, Eclea. Mass Culture and Popular Culture: Workers' Readings. Petrópolis, Voices, 1973. Bosi, Ecléa. Memory & society: remembrance of old people. Sao Paulo-SP. TAQ, 1979.

[xxxi]Motta, Carlos G. Ideology of Brazilian Culture. Sao Paulo: Ed. 34, 2008, p. 65.

[xxxii]See Rodrigues, Lidiane Soares. “A Communist Historian”, USP, Advanced Studies 23(65), 2009.

[xxxv] Seco, L. Gaius Prado Junior. The sense of revolution. Sao Paulo: Boitempo, 2008.

[xxxiv] Schwarz, Robert. “A Marx Seminar”, Folha de São Paulo, October 8, 1995.

[xxxiv] A historiography focused on the worlds of work, exclusion, marginality, madness, witchcraft, prisoners, dreams, sexuality, everyday life, women, children, etc., is not only too broad and essential in the Brazilian university. Here, a chronological and institutional cut is made: the Department of History of the University of São Paulo in the eighties. This leaves out fundamental contributions. Just think of João José Reis, who wrote about the Malê revolt in 1986. The historians cited here were also marked by the work of Caio Prado Júnior, a former student of the History and Geography section of USP. In addition, they highlighted the subjectivity of subordinate historical actors without breaking with the structural moment of the constitution of everyday life, the obstacles to political awareness and without neglecting the notion of historical process. Evidently works from the 1980s (or a little earlier) by other historians could be analyzed, such as: Mesgravis, Laima. Assistance to helpless children and Santa Casa de São Paulo: the wheel of the exposed in the XNUMXth century. History Magazine, v. 52 N. 103, v. 2, 1975. Moura, Esmeralda Blanco B. de. Women and minors in industrial work: sex and age in the dynamics of capital. Petrópolis: Voices, 1982; Silva, Mark. Against the Whip – Brazilian Sailors in 1910. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1982; Sevcenko, Nicholas. The Vaccine Revolt: Insane minds in rebellious bodies. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1984. Pinto, Maria Inez Borges. Daily Life and Survival: The Life of the Poor Worker in the City of São Paulo 1890-1910, USP: Doctoral Thesis, 1985 (she became a professor in 1989). Machado, Maria Helena Pereira Toledo. Crime and slavery: work, struggle and resistance in São Paulo plantations 1830-1888. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1987 (but she was not yet a teacher during the period in question). Another USP professor had already dealt with the subject, but before the 1980s: Queiroz, Suely Robles. Black Slavery in São Paulo. Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1977. In the 1990s and 2000s, other works appeared by researchers who would become professors in the Department of History at USP.

[xxxviii]Costa, Emilia Viotti da. Inverted Dialectic. São Paulo: Unesp, 2006, p. 21. For a review of the collection: David, Antonio. “Theoretical impasse of historiography according to Emília Viotti da Costa”. Advanced Studies, vol.30, no. 88. São Paulo, Sep./Dec 2016.

[xxxviii]ID Ibid., p.13.

[xxxix]Dias, Maria OLS Daily Life and Power in São Paulo in the XNUMXth Century. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1984, p. 185.

[xl]Souza, Laura de Mello. Disqualified from Gold. Rio de Janeiro Graal, 1986, p. 84. The thesis is from 1980 and the first edition is from 1982.

[xi]Ferlini, Vera L.A. Land, Work and Power. Bauru: Edusc, 2003, pp. 180-200. The overseers indulged in torture, rape and murder inflicted on their enslaved victims, such as “kicking” the bellies of pregnant women (see p. 186). Professor Vera Ferlini's thesis dates from 1986.

[xliii]Campos, Alzira Lobo de A. “The configuration of aggregates as a social group: marginality and sieving (the example of the city of São Paulo in the 117th century)”. History Magazine, n. 1984, USP, XNUMX.

[xiii]Franco, op. cit., pp. 104 and 106.

[xiv]Days, op. cit. P. 185.

[xlv]ID Ibid., p. 86.

[xlv]Later studies revealed that throughout Portuguese America women of various conditions marked everyday life in small businesses. In São Paulo in 1603, a gypsy woman who owned an inn for “things to eat and drink” was already known. Miranda, Lilian Lisboa. “Daily social clashes in São Paulo in the XNUMXth century: the role of the city council and the poor free men. History Magazine, n.147, 2002.

[xlv] Samara, Eni MR “The black family in Brazil”. History Magazine, N. 120, p.27-44, Jan/July. 1989. Maria Luíza Marcílio found 40% of illegitimate children among those born alive in the city of São Paulo between 1750 and 1850. The single mother of natural (illegitimate) children was freed, brown, married, widowed or bastard.

[xlviii] Days, op. ct., p.104.

[xlix]Alfredo Bosi showed this same impossibility: the colonial condition, caught in Father Vieira's work, undoes his universalist discourse. Bosi, Alfredo. Dialectics of Colonization. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1992, p. 148

[l]Unlike the popular strata, the dominant classes had more means to elaborate their own race and class consciousness. In order to maintain their privileges, they had a monopoly on the means of cultural production and dissemination. An example is the performance of some lecturers at the Faculty of Law of São Paulo in the XNUMXth century who were perfectly aware of their structural situation and the values ​​of their class. See: Ayres, Vivian. From the Reading Room to the Tribune: Books and Legal Culture in São Paulo in the XNUMXth Century. São Paulo: USP, 2019, p. 454. A broad and innovative reading of the imperial period in: Deaecto, Marisa. The Empire of Books🇧🇷 São Paulo: Edusp, 2011.

[li]Souza, op. cit., p. 212.

[liiii]ID Ibid., p. 212. Your book became a classic not just for its pioneering spirit, but for its narrative beauty.

[iii]Ginzburg, Charles. The cheese and the worms. Trans. Maria B. Amoroso. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2006. A brilliant historical reconstruction of the inquisitorial process against an unknown miller in the XNUMXth century, where popular and erudite culture, writing and orality, everyday life and high politics come together in a detective narrative.

[book]Costa, Emilia Viotti da. Inverted Dialectic, p.155.

[lv]ID Ibid., p. 176.

[lv]Heller, Agnes. The daily life and history. Trans. CN Coutinho and L. Konder. Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1972, p.45.

[lviii]Chaui, M. Culture and Democracy. 4 ed. São Paulo: Cortez, 1989, p.27.

[lviii]Costa, Emilia Viotti da. Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1998, p. 19.

[lix]Id The Inverted Dialectic, P. 127.

[lx]Prado Junior, Caio. Economic History of Brazil, quote, p193. He published this book in 1945. In 1933 he dealt with the “mutinous plebs” in the regency revolts. Prado Junior, Caio. Political Evolution of Brazil, pp. 120-121.

[lxi]Costa, Emilia Viotti da. The Abolition. 8 ed. enlarged. São Paulo: Unesp, 2008, p. 114.

[lxii]But it is worth emphasizing with Vera Ferlini that it was an adaptation to a regime based on detailed planning and surveillance, with “violence as the guiding principle of work”. Ferlini, V. Op. cit., p. 213.

[lxiii]Suely Robles Queiroz and Maria Helena PT Machado gathered information that demonstrated the qualitative shift from predominantly individual criminality in the 1870s to collective crime in the following decade. Constructed or carried out insurrections, criminality and escapes evidenced a permanent state of resistance in the XNUMXth century. Apud Gorender, Jacob. slavery rehabilitated. São Paulo: Ática, 1990, p. 159. I leave aside the importance of this work by historian Jacob Gorender in which he defended that abolitionism took the place of our bourgeois revolution. He also dedicated himself to the analysis of aggregates in an approach that sought to unite the logical and the historical “at the level of categorical-systematic knowledge of history. Gorender, J. Colonial Slavery. São Paulo: Ática, 1988, p. 17; pp. 289 and ff.

[lxiv]“Hitherto they had remained only passive spectators of the struggle being waged on their behalf; now they become participants in it, reacting against their state through collective flight and mass abandonment of farms”. Prado Junior, Caio. Economic History of Brazil, op. cit., P. 194. “The most important immediate cause of abolition was the flight of slaves from the coffee plantations of São Paulo and Rio”. Graham, Richard. Slavery, Reformation, and Imperialism. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1979, p. 72.

[lxv]The fall of the Zacarias Cabinet, which Caio Prado described as a coup d'état, removed the Liberal Party from power for ten years. Prado Junior, Caio. Economic History of Brazil, p. 191.

[lxvi]Costa, Emilia Viotti da. The Abolitionp.96.

[lxv]Costa, Emilia Viotti da. The Abolition, P. 110.

[lxviii]Professor Wilson Barbosa studied the abolitionist period from the perspective of quantitative economic history. He joined the Department of History at USP coincidentally on the centenary of abolition… Barbosa, Wilson do Nascimento. The chrysalis: historical-economic aspects of the end of slavery in Brazil, 1850-1888. Introduction to a quantitative analysis. USP, Free Teaching, 1994.

[lxix]Its organization intensified in the 1970s. Cf. Santos, Leticia Leal. Associations of domestic workers in Brazil in the 70s: From marginalization to the struggle for professionalization. USP, Scientific initiation project, 2019.

[lxx]Seco, L. History of the PT. Foreword by Emilia Viotti da Costa. São Paulo: Ateliê, 2011.

[lxxi]Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch. Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. São Paulo: Elephant, 2017, chap. 3.

[lxxiii]Scholz, Roswitha. Value is man: theses on socialization through value and the relationship

between the sexes. Krisis Magazine n. 12, 1992, pp. 19-52. Available in:

[lxxiii]Gomez, Rosa Rosa. Rosa Luxemburg: Crisis and Revolution. São Paulo: Ateliê, 2018, p. 217.

[lxxiv]An example of the colonization of the female body by imperialism in: Proença, Marcela. Capital Accumulation and the Sterilization of Women in Puerto Rico: 1947 – 1968. USP, Scientific Initiation Report, 2019.

[lxxv]Hirata, Helen. Changes and permanence in gender inequalities: sexual division of labor in a comparative perspective. Analysis, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, 7, 2015.

[lxxvi]It is a question here of labor in general and not of immediately productive labor for capital. On the concept of productive work see: Cotrim, Vera.Productive Work in Karl Marx: Old and New Questions. Sao Paulo: Alameda, 2012.

[lxxvii]Luiz F. Alencastro states that, from 1550 to 1930, the labor market was born and grew outside the colonial and national territory, as the labor force was imported (first the enslaved and then the immigrants). Alexandre Barbosa questioned him, demonstrating that there was no job market while slavery lasted; moreover, a large part of the labor force after Abolition, with the exception of the coffee west and the city of São Paulo, was composed of the “national element”. See: Barbosa, Alexandre Freitas. “The labor market: a long-term perspective”; Advanced Studies, no. 30 (87), 2016, p.12; Alencastro, Alencastro, LF The treatment of the living: formation of Brazil in the South Atlantic. Sao Paulo: Cia. das Letras, 2000, p.354.

[lxxviii]A maid in São Paulo in the 1950s could work from Monday to Saturday, sleeping on the job and being free on Sundays. Still, she might have to take care of one of the boss's children with her on her walk. Information from Ozória Ferreira Secco to the author.

[lxxix]The State of Minas, 27/09/2019.

[lxxx]Informal workers are employees who have no ties to the company they work for, small businesses without a CNPJ, domestic workers without a formal contract, people who work on their own or help a resident of the household or a relative without receiving payment. https://agenciadenoticias.ibge.gov.br/agencia-noticias/2012-agencia-de-noticias/noticias/25066-pesquisa-revela-retrato-inedito-do-mercado-de-trabalho-do-interior-do-pais. Access: March 1, 2020.

[lxxxi]Barbosa, Wilson. “Black Discrimination as a Structuring Fact of Power”. Sankofa 2 (3), São Paulo, 2019.

[lxxxii]Sakamoto, L. (Coord). Slave Labor in Brazil in the 2006st Century. Brasilia, XNUMX.

[lxxxiii]A short experience of colonization in Goiás during the Estado Novo included a majority of blacks and browns, but without economic support, the properties were swallowed up by the latifundium and the predominance of a business form of land occupation. Borges, Barsanulfo G. Goiás in the Tables of the National Economy. Goiânia: UFG, 2000, pp. 75-77.

[lxxxiv]In contrast to the self-employed rubber tapper, the captive remains subject to a rubber tapper boss. Paula, Elder Andrade de. Unsustainable (Dis) Involvement in the Western Amazon. Rio Branco: EDUFAC, 2005, p.82.

[lxxxv]See: Amano, André TL “Crisis: Opportunity for What(m)?”, GMARX-USP Bulletin, Year 1 No. 9, April 2020.

[lxxxvi]Jancsó, István. In Bahia against the Empire. History of the 1798 Trial of Sedition. São Paulo / Salvador: Hucitec / Edufba, 1996, p. 205. For Professor István “people from the Bahian elite would be at the center” of the conspiracy of 1798. Jancsó. Istvan. “Andanças com Ilana Blaj”; History Magazine, USP, N. 142-143, 2000. Jancsó, István. “Addendum to the discussion of the social scope of the Bahian Inconfidência of 1798” in Blaj. I. and Monteiro, JM History and Utopia. Sao Paulo, ANPUH, 1996.

 On the author's trajectory, see the interview in which Professor István recalls his life from childhood in Hungary to teaching at USP: Morel, Marco; Slemian, Andrea; Lima, André Nicácio (Orgs.). A historian of Brazil: István Jancsó. São Paulo: Hucitec, 2010. On the conjuncture of the period see: Reisewitz, Marianne. D. Fernando de Portugal e Castro: illustrated practice in the Colony. USP, Master's Dissertation, 2001. For the Bahian conjuration: Valim, Patrícia. Corporation of stepchildren: tension, contestation and political negotiation in the Conjuração Baiana of 1798. Salvador: Edufba, 2018.

[lxxxvii] The examples of Lula, Peron, Vargas etc are incomprehensible to those who believed in joining the reaction against PT governments. It is not understood that in the same social group there is the programmatic retreat of a “labor” party and popular self-organization. They are opposites, but a unity. It must be overcome, not denied. Marinho, Adriana C. “A Lulism beyond Lula: São Bernardo and the consolidation of an idea”. In: Secco, L. (Org.). The Idea: Lula and the meaning of Contemporary Brazil. São Paulo: NEC/Contraf, 2018, p. 111-117.  

[lxxxviii] The defense of common spaces, free public services, zero transport tariffs and universal basic income (a minimum regulator of the price of the workforce) constitute forms of a “social right unrelated to a labor relationship”, apud Liberato, Leo Vinicius . Contemporary Expressions of Rebellion: power and actions of autonomist youth. Florianópolis, Doctoral Thesis, UFSC, 2006. Suplicy, Eduardo. Citizen's Basic Income. Porto Alegre, LP&M, 2006. Singer, Paul. A left-wing government for all: Luiza Erundina in the City Hall of São Paulo (1989-1992). São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1996.

[lxxxix]This does not mean shifting the class's search to other identities (but rather aggregating them); much less of the production process for the culture, but to combine them. An innovative analysis that completely reassesses the impact of Fordism and reconstitutes “the importance of the productive structure for the analysis of social conflicts in the 1920s in the city of Buenos Aires”, highlighting new forms of conflict, strikes – or the difficulty of realizing them. las – and the trade union movement was carried out by: Ferreira, Fernando Sarti. The productive counterrevolution: ebb and stabilization of social conflict in Buenos Aires, 1924-1930. USP, doctoral thesis, 2020.