Practice and Ideology

Joel Wolfe's article in this issue examines a formative event in the development of the twentieth-century Brazilian labor movement: the 1917 general strike in Sao Paulo. He focuses on two key relationships: between leaders and led, and between working-class women and class institutions largely run by men. Despite advancing an innovative approach to the topic, Wolfe's article suffers from problems of evidence, historiography, and conceptualization. Wolfe introduces his general thesis at the outset by recounting a 1914 antiwar rally in the city of Sao Paulo where anarchist and socialist speakers are heckled by unnamed in the crowd who demand that they address the immediate problems. Wolfe uses this incident to suggest that there existed antipathy between the city's workers and labor activists in 1914. Indeed, he later talks of the workers' protests during the August 1914 antiwar rally. On the basis of the evidence cited, however, these claims go well beyond the data at hand. If one cannot, as the author rightly argues, equate Sao Paulo's labor radicals with the working-class rank and file, it is equally clear that a group of hecklers, their numbers and identities unclear, should not be viewed as the voice of the tens of thousands of workers of Sdo Paulo. Indeed, do we even know that the hecklers were workers? And which of the two newspapers cited is the source for the account of this alleged heckling? If his main source is the conservative Correio Paulistano, organ of the state's Partido Republicano Paulista, the incident may not have occurred as narrated, given the newspaper's conviction that labor radicals were always outside, usually foreign, agitators who never spoke for the legitimate interests of the masses. His account of the episode is strengthened if it is drawn from the

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Craft · Ideology · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Visual arts · Anarchism and Radical Politics · Brazilian cultural history and politics · History · Law · Political theory and Gramsci