Labor Movements and Dictatorships: The Southern Cone in Comparative Perspective

A comparative study of the experience of working-class movements under capitalist authoritarian regimes from the 1920s to the 1990s. This text offers a series of extended country studies - on Uruguay, Chile and Argentina - set against a larger comparative context that includes Portugal, Spain, Greece and Brazil, all of which experienced similar transitions into and out of authoritarianism. In these countries , the author explains, labour movements advocating far-reaching political, economic, and social reforms were met by authoritarian governments determined to preserve capitalism and erase any hope of socialism. The autocrats imposed antiworker economic structures, institutional rules and political prohibitions. They succeeded in breaking labour in the short run, he concludes, but their efforts ultimately failed. A work of historical perspective and synthesis, the book tells the story of how workers' organizations around the world suffered, subverted, and survived the tyrants.