Latin American and International Working Class History on the Brink of the 21St Century: Points of Departure in Comparative Labor Studies

Abstract

The last two centuries have been marked by the triumphant expansion of capitalism which has converted an initially regional phenomenon into a compelling world-wide reality embracing the entire globe, including Latin America. As capitalism's necessary offspring, the modern wage-earning working class has also experienced a global quantitative expansion and qualitative transformation that has strikingly shaped world politics in the twentieth century. After glancing at the labor studies boom Latin America and its political context, this article offers a Brazilian/North Atlantic example in order to illustrate the intellectual gains, for students of both areas, that come with the transcendence of geographical parochialism. At the same time, it argues that the reinvigoration of the labor history enterprise depends, in large part, upon setting a more ambitious collaborative agenda - across regional and chronological boundaries - designed to establish the study of labor as a truly transnational and comparative field of research appropriate to the challenges of this age of global capitalism.