Lula and His Politics of Cunning

Forty years ago, rather accidentally, John D. French became a historian of the ABC Paulista, the heavily industrialized region southeast of the state capital São Paulo. These were the days of the military regime, accelerating inflation, and the political rise of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who gained national prominence as the public face of several major strikes between 1978 and 1980. French entered the PhD program at Yale in 1979, set to study nineteenth-century Mexico, until his doctoral adviser, Emília Viotti da Costa, encouraged him to learn more about the events transpiring in the ABC at the time and inspired him to become a Brazilianist.Lula and His Politics of Cunning is the fruit of French's lifelong commitment to studying and understanding the metalworkers of the ABC region whom he first encountered during field research for his PhD. Lula was on his mind then and has remained on his mind ever since, resulting in a book that “embrace[s] the biographical approach” that French “believe[s] is essential to understanding how Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva . . . rose to become the thirty-fifth Brazilian president in 2003” (p. 1). French calls the book a “biography” but also insists—in the next paragraph—that his embrace of the biographical “rejects an excessively individualistic narrative,” as if such excess were implicit in writing a biography (p. 3).The tension between his endorsement of the biographical genre and its simultaneous forceful rejection is never resolved, and French's desire to have it both ways erases the fine line he wants to walk. The author never creates the necessary narrative order to guide the reader through the project, and his numerous historiographical interventions do not amount to an overarching argument. His confident and often categorical rejection of a wide range of past and present methodological approaches and the lack of clearly articulated alternatives make it difficult for the reader to gain trust in French's interpretations. The book tries to be a biography and at the same time a broader treatise about the biographical genre and the categories historians use—but ultimately falls short on all these fronts.Some of the evocative chapter titles raise questions of cultural awareness and conceptual clarity. In “Beyond the Parrot Perch” (chapter 2), a historian focused on the period of military rule (1964–85) should have more to say about the dual meaning of “parrot perch” (pau de arara) than to merely state, in a footnote and rather ambiguously, that “pau de arara is commonly thought to refer to a type of torture” (p. 396n1). “Becoming Lula” (chapter 12) hinges on the notion of “Lula's mental revolution between 1975 and 1978” (p. 224), a transformation—narratively convenient but psychologically implausible—that is completed with “The Birth of Lula's Charisma” (chapter 14), when he “acquired ‘an almost mythical aura’” (p. 267). The scant use of archival sources and the reliance on just three speeches by and four interviews with Lula stand in marked contrast to the omnipresent reference to French's own work: twenty bibliographical entries, many unrelated to Lula.French devotes two-thirds of the book to the 20 years that Lula spent as industrial worker and union leader, and he suggests that they were formative. Why, then, does a book about Brazil's politically most successful labor leader have so little to say about the industrial workplaces where Lula spent a good part of his days as worker and maintained close connections in his union years? By categorically rejecting John Womack Jr.'s proposal for a different labor history—namely, one that incorporates industrial context to better understand workers at work and beyond—French deprives himself of an essential tool to make sense of Lula. Concretely, it matters that Lula, as a skilled machinist, understood the factory floor, its hierarchies, and its power dynamics, knowledge that allowed him to speak affectionately and effectively to his colleagues and supervisors—or encourage them to become active in the union. The experience at work informed his actions and decisions as worker, labor leader, politician, and even president.This fascinating and socially, culturally, and politically highly significant dimension of Lula's life as a worker at work does not seem to interest French. Neither “work” nor “industry” are discrete entries in the index, and even the “division of labor” is missing, although French highlights that the great majority of metalworkers in Santo Andre (61 percent), São Bernardo (74 percent), and São Caetano do Sul (86 percent) worked in plants with more than 500 employees (p. 146). Rather than sharpen the historical analysis of the industrial working class in the ABC Paulista under military rule and thereby explain Lula's rise, French offers a cultural interpretation that proposes “cunning” and “charisma” as its central terms.Cunning—a French sui generis—is introduced early (“the cunning wisdom of the weak” [p. 3]), discussed at greater length in the chapter section “Cunning and the Subaltern Art of Maneuver” (pp. 155–59), and resurrected in the conclusion (pp. 365–66), still as James C. Scott's “weapons of the weak” by another name. Discussing charisma, French cites Max Weber (pp. 267–69) but uses the concept as if it were a personal quality (e.g., “the charismatic Lula” [p. 366]), whereas Weber defined it as a quality attributed to the leader by the followers—a relational quality that is, by definition, not permanent. For French to write of a “love affair between the masses and Lula, followed by a lasting marriage between organization and charisma” (p. 270) adds to the confusion, as do references to “miraculous deeds” (p. 268) to characterize Lula's organizational and political skill.French's writing disregards so many scholarly conventions that no review can hope to capture the book's essence. It has no clearly articulated central argument, lacks narrative order and balance, and never establishes a conceptual framework, all flaws substantial enough to make us wonder whether it merits to be thought of as biography—or even as history. French missed a unique opportunity to do justice, as a historian, to the single most interesting Brazilian of the last 50 years. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva deserves better

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