Laborers and Enslaved Workers: Experiences in Common in the Making of Rio de Janeiro's Working Class, 1850-1920 9781785336300

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Laborers and Enslaved Workers

International Studies in Social History General Editor: Marcel van der Linden, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam Published in Association with the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam Published under the auspices of the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, this series offers transnational perspectives on labor and working-class history. For a long time, labor historians have been working within national interpretive frameworks. But interest in studies contrasting different national and regional experiences and studying cross-border interactions has been increasing in recent years. This series is designed to act as a forum for these new approaches.

For a full series listing, please see back matter.

LABORERS AND ENSLAVED WORKERS Experiences in Common in the Making of Rio de Janeiro’s Working Class, 1850–1920

Marcelo Badaró Mattos Translated by Renata Meirelles and Frederico Machado de Barros

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

Published in 2017 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2008 Marcelo Badaró Mattos English edition © 2017 Marcelo Badaró Mattos Originally published in Portuguese in 2008 as Escravizados e livres: experiências comuns na formação da classe trabalhadora carioca (1850–1910) by Bom Texto / Faperj, Rio de Janeiro All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Mattos, Marcelo Badaro, author. Title: Laborers and enslaved workers : experiences in common in the making of Rio de Janeiro’s working class, 1850–1920 / Marcelo Badaro Mattos ; translated by Renata Meirelles and Frederico Machado de Barros. Other titles: Escravizados e livres. English Description: New York : Berghahn Books, 2017. | Series: International studies in social history ; volume 29 | “Originally published in Portuguese in 2008.” | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017014894 (print) | LCCN 2017032226 (ebook) | ISBN 9781785336300 (e-book) | ISBN 9781785336294 (hardback : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Working class—Brazil—Rio de Janeiro—History. | Slave labor— Brazil—Rio de Janeiro—History. Classification: LCC HD8290.R562 (ebook) | LCC HD8290.R562 M3813 2017 (print) | DDC 331.110981/53—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017014894

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78533-629-4 hardback ISBN 978-1-78533-630-0 ebook

CONTENTS

Tables and Maps

vi

Preface to the English Edition

vii

Introduction

1

1 Work, Urban Life, and the Experience of Exploitation

17

2 Forms of Organization

52

3 Resistance and Struggle

98

4 Consciousness

133

Conclusion

159

References

163

Index

173

TABLES AND MAPS Table 1.1. Total Population of the City

19

Table 1.2. Spatial Distribution of Urban Population

33

Map 1.1. Rio de Janeiro’s Parishes

34

PREFACE TO

THE

ENGLISH EDITION

In the second half of the nineteenth century, some decades after its independence from Portugal (1822), Brazil was a country of continental dimensions whose economy mainly focused on the exportation of primary goods, especially coffee, and was largely dependent on importations from Europe for manufactured goods. However, in the biggest Brazilian cities of the day, increasing numbers of factories were already appearing (food, textiles, and ship-building), and artisans were being turned into wage-earning workers. That scenario was particularly evident in Rio de Janeiro, then capital of the Brazilian Empire, the country’s main port, its most populous city, and the site of the first factories. It was there, in that same period, that antiquated forms of manufacture transitioned to industrial forms. The city remained the country’s capital after the proclamation of the Republic in 1889, and, in spite of all the restrictions to political participation that Brazil was to witness during the 1890s (only literate men over twenty-one could vote, an insignificant minority among the total population), it was there that the early labor parties were founded and the first workers’ associations, formed explicitly for labor union purposes, emerged. Strikes among wage-earning workers had been breaking out sporadically since the late 1850s, but by the 1890s they had become far more frequent. In 1903, in the city of Rio de Janeiro, the first “general strike” was called, interrupting work among various professional groups. Three years later, in 1906, the first Congresso Operário Brasileiro (Brazilian Labor Congress) also took place in Rio, bringing together delegates of associations of various Brazilian states. Presented in this way, these episodes could give the impression that the Brazilian working class was formed, albeit with a relative time lapse in the process, in a manner very similar to that which took place in those northern hemisphere countries that were the first ever to become industrialized. However, mid-nineteenth-century Brazil still embraced slavery; it was, in fact, the last country to end slavery in the Americas (only in 1888), and Rio de Janeiro made the greatest use of slave labor of all the continent’s

viii

Preface to the English Edition

cities. In 1849, there were 110,602 enslaved men and women among its 266,466 inhabitants. Even after the end of the African slave trade in 1850, Rio de Janeiro continued to have a huge enslaved population, and, as late as 1872, there were still 48,939 slaves in the city. Furthermore, they engaged in all kinds of urban activities and all sorts of crafts, working in domestic duties, street trades, in artisans’ workshops, and even in the factories. This book seeks to analyze working-class formation within that framework and focuses on the coexistence of enslaved and free workers in the years before the abolition of slavery, and especially on the impact that such shared experiences had on the process of working-class formation in Rio de Janeiro in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century. The coexistence of different forms of labor relations—including wage-paying and “unfree” workers—as distinct ways of labor commodification have been an object of interest among different historians of various nationalities. I hope that the publication of this work in English will contribute to an understanding of the diverse working relations involved in the exploitation of workers, particularly in the Global South. This is a fundamental step toward building a truly global labor history, as well as contributing toward an empirical discussion less restricted to homologies with the European working-class concept.1

Notes 1. The project of a global labor history is presented, for example, in Marcel van der Linden, Workers of the World: Essays toward a Global Labor History (Boston: Brill, 2008).

INTRODUCTION In his Contribuição à história das lutas operárias no Brasil (Contribution to the History of Labor Struggles in Brazil), originally published in 1955, Hermínio Linhares reveals himself to be one of those authors who considers the typesetters’ strike, which took place in 1858, to be “Rio de Janeiro’s first strike, maybe Brazil’s.”1 This strike, which has been an object of academic studies for some time now,2 is significant indeed. After months demanding a wage increase from the owners of the three major court dailies (Correio Mercantil, Diário do Rio de Janeiro, and Jornal do Comercio) and at a moment when the cost of living was soaring, the typesetters decided to stop work beginning on January 9, 1858. What is most interesting about this strike is the existence of a relatively vast volume of records, because the strikers, supported by the Imperial Associação Tipográfica Fluminense (Imperial Fluminense Typographic Association),3 founded the Jornal dos Tipógrafos (Typographers’ Journal), a daily newspaper that was to present the workers’ arguments in the weeks that followed. In the newspaper’s pages we find a relatively small professional group (the biggest of the diaries, Jornal do Comércio [Commerce’s Journal], employed about thirty-two typesetters only) that presented itself being composed of “artists,” specialized artisans, impoverished by the greed of the newspaper proprietors and their refusal to pay them a decent wage. The strike is all the more remarkable because of the active role played by the typographers’ association, whose main goal was actually mutual assistance, but which eventually assumed the function of representing its members’ interests, interceding with the authorities on behalf of the workers and financing machinery acquisition for the printing of the strikers’ newspaper. In the Jornal dos Tipógrafos we can find evidence of a class identity under construction, for there are clear statements of specificity when the typesetters define themselves as artistas (artisans/artists) or declare that they “gathered” as a consequence of being “a low-paid class.” Nevertheless, they also state that “laborers from many classes” were in a similar situation to the typesetters who recognized themselves in their deeds.4

2

Introduction

In some articles they went even further, affirming the need to put an end to the “oppression of the entire caste” and to fight the “exploitation of men by men,” identifying the “stupid selfishness of the industrial entrepreneurs and capitalists”5 as a target. Regarding the Imperial Associação Tipográfica, it was founded in 1853 with goals of mutuality (to create a fund for sickness, widow assistance, and funeral costs). However, it also made provision in its Statutes whereby one of the association’s aims would be to “contribute to the progress and development of the typographic art in whatever way it can,” and that provision opened the way to the possibility of defending the interests of the associated “artists,” as they considered themselves to be.6 Examining the 1858 typesetters’ movement, its characteristics as a representative of a branch of free and wage-earning workers who gathered together to defend their dignity as artists but fought those who they consciously considered to be their class enemies (the bosses), we could call it an example of the working-class formation process, presenting clear similarities to the classic cases. Nevertheless, taking into consideration the Brazilian case as it was during the second half of the nineteenth century and, particularly as it was in Rio de Janeiro, then focusing on this particular aspect of “free labor” alone in order to reflect on the process of class formation as a whole would impose great limitations on the analysis. After all, that society needed to differentiate some workers defining them as “free” precisely because they lived among other workers who were not “free.” It is hard to determine whether the typesetters’ strike was or was not the first free workers’ or wage-earning workers’ strike in Brazil. However, it is noteworthy that Hermínio Linhares, before making the statement quoted above, commented in the same text on another episode that had occurred the year before. This work stoppage by slave workers at the Ponta d’Areia establishment, the property of the Baron of Mauá,7 was reported as follows in the November 26 issue of the Niterói daily newspaper A Pátria (The Nation): Yesterday, between eleven and twelve noon, according to information received, the slaves from the Ponta da Areia establishment rose and refused to continue working unless three of their colleagues, who had been arrested for disobeying the establishment’s orders, were released. Fortunately, the uprising did not gain ground, for the honorable Dr. Paranaguá [the chief of police of the province] came as soon as he had been alerted, arrested thirty-odd mutineers and took them off to jail.8

It is known that the Ponta d’Areia establishment, which consisted of a foundry and a shipyard and was made up of many smaller workshops, was the largest private enterprise of its kind at that time, employing about six

Introduction

3

hundred laborers, of which approximately a quarter were enslaved.9 We also know that many other arsenals and factories employed a large number of enslaved workers, which allowed Geraldo Beauclair to state that there was “a functional integration … within most ‘factories’ between ‘free men and slaves’, with no suggestion at any time that the latter could not alternate with the former in the most complex tasks (excluding those assigned only to the more highly qualified masters of a craft).”10 Thus, it seems appropriate to ask whether it would be possible to dissociate episodes of workers’ strikes/uprisings that occurred in factories like this one from the process of working-class formation in Rio de Janeiro. It is not hard to imagine a more generalized level of contact among the trajectories of enslaved, ex-enslaved and free workers within the class-formation process, not only in factories but all over a town in which, for many decades, many areas of work and employment were shared by enslaved and free workers alike. This degree of contact between the urban workers of different legal conditions—slaves and free—also allows another question. The experience of freedom should, in the context addressed here but not only in it, be problematized. After all, for enslaved workers, freedom was something to achieve by overcoming the legal situation of slavery. For the socalled “free workers,” many of them former slaves, in various situations, it became evident that their freedom was very limited by the constraints of their lived experiences of proletarianization. Therefore, in many cases discussed in this book, they evaluated their situation as akin to slavery. The hypothesis that, in the formation of the working class in Brazil during the period between the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, the experiences undergone by slaves and former slaves who shared working areas and labor processes were just as important as those of the artisans and other free men who first experienced the process of proletarianization is now being embraced as much by scholars specialized in slavery as by labor researchers, although such convergence is not always acknowledged.11 Some guidelines that inspired the analysis developed in this work will now be briefly mentioned. They will be brought up again at different moments further on in the text. Very rich examples of recent research come from Maria Cecilia Velasco e Cruz, who, in her studies of Rio de Janeiro’s dock workers, has found a strong link between the organization of enslaved loaders working in times of slavery and the practices of the sector’s trade union formed at the turn of the century, which engaged itself in struggles for controlling the workforce hiring process. The way her thesis, defended in a sociology graduate program, embraces the multiple dimensions of class is outstanding, and she manages to combine the two classic areas of the sociology of

4

Introduction

labor, namely labor process and labor movement, demonstrating how sociability, solidarity, and labor market control networks, built when slavery was still in force, played a decisive role in the formation of a unionism in which ex-slaves and their descendants had great participation and whose main objective, in its early years, would be to ensure at least a minimum degree of workers’ control over the process of hiring in the casual labor context.12 In an article in which Velasco e Cruz summarizes part of her PhD thesis, she finds that in the port there was a strong “line of continuity between slaves and freedmen from the former imperial times and the proletarians of the First Republic.” To sustain that conclusion, the author marshals many factors and calls particular attention to the combination of “the mutual solidarity of dock workers and loaders and the speed with which the workers managed to impose their union on the employers.” That is evidence that the “change of historical actors, with the entry of white immigrants and decline of blacks and mulattoes did not occur in the city’s port system in the manner proposed by existing analysis of the Brazilian working-class formation process.”13 João José Reis started from research on mid-nineteenth-century slave laborers—in their vast majority Africans from the “cantos” of Salvador (the corners where slaves waited for work) and most of them ganhadores (money-earning slaves) who provided services, mostly, but not exclusively, as loaders—and advanced his time frame up until the eve of abolition, a moment when very few of the street workers organized in the cantos were still enslaved and only half of most free and freedmen were actually Africans. From his pioneering study of the “black strike” of 1857 in Salvador to the analysis of the same groups in the 1880s—basing his work on a discussion of the livro de matrículas, a registration book instituted under police orders—the author found that if at first African ethnic identity was the fundamental tie explaining their capacity for collective organization and collective action, at a later moment it then became possible to perceive that “class, race and ethnicity were mixed in a complex game, as they have always been, but, at least in the sheets of this livro de matrículas, and supposing these things can be separated, the class side appeared to be making headway in the game.”14 That would in no way remove the stigma of slavery, nor the ethnic aspect, but it would attribute new dimensions to them in the light of the new class experience: That means, that under the pressure of class experience, the ganhadores would be moving towards a racial identity in which mestizos [half-breeds], Brazilian blacks and African blacks would recognize themselves as being, socially, passengers on board the same Negro slave ship in Bahi15

Introduction

5

Researching two cities in Rio Grande do Sul (Pelotas and Rio Grande), Beatriz Loner also found important relations between slaves’ and free workers’ experiences in the class-formation processes. From her study emerges not only the emphasis on the importance of the urban black labor force in those towns but also the encounter between the struggle for affirming a positive racial identity of ex-slaves and their descendants and the first steps being taken by an active labor movement. From her analysis, we can find leaders who combined trade-union activism with antiracist struggles and markedly ethnic social spaces (such as clubs, libraries, and musical societies). According to Loner, Black militants are found in every moment of struggle and organization of the various labor associations. … Their dual militancy in associations of race and of class probably contributed, in a significant way, to the engagement of new workers. … In Pelotas, in particular, the organization of the labor movement mainly reflected this group’s actions.16

Sidney Chalhoub studied the organization of black workers’ associations during the 1860s and 1870s in Rio de Janeiro, a process that he called “a crucial chapter of working-class history in Brazil,” because strong associative models among free workers, mutual associations that were forbidden for enslaved workers, were operated by sectors of Rio de Janeiro’s African-Brazilian population (slaves included) and directed mainly at the fight for freedom. Studying those associations based on the documentation addressed by them to the Conselho de Estado (State Council, highest consultative body to the Emperor) whereby the associations sought a recognition that would eventually be denied them, Chalhoub found a similarity between those black societies and the nineteenth century labor associations. … Here and there we find internal democracy, a great emphasis on member assembly in associative life, an equality of rights and duties, low monthly fees, the objective of attracting new members—“unlimited number of members”—an attempt to dignify labor, to assure a good moral conduct from the members, and to provide various means of assistance.17

International references can also be called into play. The perspective that relates slavery to working-class formation was adopted by Herbert Gutman in his studies on the American case. Author of many essays on the labor movement and on post-abolition African Americans, he discussed, for example, the black workers’ presence in miners’ union movements based on the letters of one Richard Davis.18 In an interview given after the publication of that study, Gutman explains that he hit upon a matter little studied by labor historians when he discovered the “marvelous” letters of Davis, an ex-slave and one of the main miners’ union leaders during the

6

Introduction

1890s, and found that “in the first years of the UMW [miners’ union, founded in 1890], black unionists were proportionally more important than the white ones.”19 In this work, I have attempted to link some of the more or less recent areas of historiographic research that have been generally regarded as circumscribed specialties, and we have also sought to analyze underexplored sources that allow us to address other matters. Taking into account that enslaved and free workers shared common urban work environments; that collective protests from both groups coexisted in time and space, each group’s demands sometimes being closer, sometimes farther from the others in form and content; that associative forms were often shared; and that identity discourses arose from comparisons between enslaved and free work, we have worked with the hypothesis that in the process of working-class formation in Rio de Janeiro—a period that stems from the second half of the nineteenth century to the first decades of the twentieth century—the existence of slavery and of slave struggles for freedom and the means by which the local ruling classes attempted to control their slaves and conduct the process of “un-slaving” without further disturbances to their domination were decisive factors in shaping the new class of wage-earning workers. After all, if we consider class as “process and relation,” and not as a structural position, there is no escaping from the fact that, even if one does not want to demonstrate a single direct evolution from urban slavery to the making of the wage-earning workers’ class, it is not possible to explain the class-formation process by setting an initial mark at 1888 or by merely going back in time to search for free workers’ experiences. For that reason, this work embraces a period that starts in the 1850s, apogee and beginning of the decline of slave presence in the city, when the first strikes occurred and the publication of workers’ newspapers began to mention some of the examples that will be analyzed in the text, and ends in the first years of the 1910s, when strikes were already a widespread experience, labor/socialist parties had sprung up, and the class’s trade union institutions were already constituted with relative stability, as witness the participation in the 2o Congresso Operário Brasileiro (Second Brazilian Labor Congress) of 1913. The historiographic hypotheses and approaches presented here are not detached from theory. The theoretical references that guided this research are situated in an area of study that takes the concepts of social class and class struggle as fundamental for analyzing the dynamics of workers’ social movements. On the other hand, it is a matter here of focusing on a certain moment—the one of formation—in the trajectory of the working class in Brazil, taking strongly into account the coexistence of slaves and

Introduction

7

free workers in Rio de Janeiro’s labor market. For that reason the works that have analyzed class formation based on the European case were read as references, not as models. The contemporary use of the word “class” tends to indicate a new analytic category of social reality capable of embracing the socioeconomic inequalities in capitalist society.20 It also indicates a moment of workers’ conscious self-representation concerning their social situation, common interests, and opposite interests in relation to other classes. Such a process, whose political nature is undeniable, is related to the expansion of socialist ideas. It is especially connected to the proposals for interpreting social reality defended by Marx and Engels from the 1840s on. Although it is possible to observe other matrices used to apply the concept of social class, it is from Marx and Engels’s proposals that the social sciences have incorporated “class” into their analytical arsenal, and, even when diverging from Marxism, in it they have had their main reference and interlocutor in the debate on the concept’s use.21 Given the limitations of an introduction, it would be pretentious, to say the least, to attempt a synthesis that showed even a minimum of respect for the contributions of Marx and Engels (and later of the other “Marxisms”), to history in general, or to the concept of social classes in particular. It is worthwhile, though, to briefly situate in which Marxist perspective on social classes, class struggles, and class formation this text’s guidelines were built. After all, to simply affirm that we are theoretically grounded on Marxism does not grant us a stamped passport to go along without any further care, for it is not difficult to acknowledge that the paths taken by Marxism throughout the twentieth century were various and often even antagonistic. This seems to have been the concern of English historian Edward Palmer Thompson, who in a 1978 book—The Poverty of Theory—summarized the problem. At the beginning of the 1970s, in a polemic article titled “An Open letter to Leszek Kolakowski,” he had referred to the different paths taken by a single Marxist “tradition” during the twentieth century. Though they were opposing paths in many senses, he felt they had something in common, even though it might only be their use of a vocabulary derived from Marx and Engels’s ideas.22 In 1978, however, he self-corrected, for he believed he had been wrong and that actually there were indeed two irreconcilable Marxist traditions: For the gulf that has opened has not been between different accentuations to the vocabulary of concepts, between this analogy and that category, but between idealist and materialist modes of thought, between Marxism as closure and a tradition, derived from Marx, of open investigation and critique. The first is a tradition of theology. The second is a tradition of active reason. Both

8

Introduction

can derive some license from Marx, although the second has immeasurably the better credentials as to its lineage.23

Thompson affirmed that distinction after following a pathway welltrodden by British social history, of presenting a singular Marxism’s reading; a trend that became stronger from 1956 on, when Thompson and others who shared similar concerns ruptured with the Communist Party to build a political movement known as the New Left.24 It was within that context that Thompson, addressing the question of class formation in a specific and minutely studied historical context, attempted to articulate the cultural elements, that is, the systems of values, beliefs, morals, and attitudes involved in the process of articulating class interests and identities stemming from common experiences. According to Thompson himself, the constant concern in his work with the silences of the Marxist approach led him to reflections of a cultural and moral type, understood not as autonomous spheres of reflection but as important parts of the study on “the ways in which human beings are enmeshed in particular, determined production relations, the way those material experiences mold themselves into cultural forms and the ways in which certain value-systems are consonant with certain modes of production and certain modes of production relations are inconceivable without there being consonant value-systems.” For that reason, according to the British historian, “there is not a moral ideology that belongs to a ‘superstructure’, there are these two things which are different sides of the same coin.”25 Such moral and cultural references emerge from the sedimentation and reinterpretation of older values and customs. The interest in these issues led Thompson to the study of the preindustrial period, particularly that of England in the eighteenth century. From the many important analytical suggestions derived from this backward time leap in the analysis, Thompson’s anxiety to explain social conflict in class terms, even at a time when its agents did not identify themselves in such a way, emerges as something decisive for the kind of reflection that this book intends to dwell upon. With those aims in mind, Thompson works with two dimensions of the class concept: “a) with reference to real, empirically observable correspondent historical content; b) as a heuristic or analytic category to organize historical evidence which has a very much less direct correspondence.”26 Concerning this second dimension of the concept, Thompson highlights the indissolubility of the relation between class and class struggle, even indicating the primacy of the second term of the pair over the first. It is worthwhile reproducing a longer fragment of his reflection, where he stresses the fact that

Introduction

9

class, in its heuristic usage, is inseparable from the notion of ‘class-struggle’. In my view, far too much theoretical attention (much of it plainly a-historical) has been paid to ‘class’, and far too little to ‘class-struggle’. Indeed, class-struggle is the prior, as well as the more universal, concept. To put it bluntly: classes do not exist as separate entities, look around, find an enemy class, and then start to struggle. On the contrary, people find themselves in a society structured in determined ways (crucially, but not exclusively, in productive relations), they experience exploitation (or the need to maintain power over those whom they exploit), they identify points of antagonistic interest, they commence to struggle around these issues and in the process of struggling they discover themselves as classes, they come to know this discovery as class-consciousness. Class and class-consciousness are always the last, not the first, stage in the real historical process.27

This is how Thompson systematizes his contributions to the study of pre-capitalist societies departing from a perspective centered on the class concept, or better, on the class-struggle concept. Such considerations assume a fundamental importance for the study of class-making processes, in which the new class’s consciousness is molded from the articulation of values and traditions inherited from the preceding social setting, a setting that was itself marked by class struggles as well, even though not necessarily explicitly understood in terms of class by its contemporaries. Ellen Wood summarizes Thompson’s intention in his studies of eighteenth-century England as an attempt to “demonstrate the determinative effects of class ‘situations’ even where ‘mature’ classes do not yet exist.”28 In the same author one finds a precise synthesis of the relevance of the English historian’s elaborations: His historical project presupposes that relations of production distribute people into class situations, that these situations entail essential antagonisms and conflicts of interest, and that they therefore create conditions of struggle. Class formations and the discovery of class consciousness grow out of the process of struggle, as people ‘experience’ and ‘handle’ their class situation. It is in this sense that class struggle precedes class.29

This type of argument made it possible to construct an analytical framework for the relations between “material life,” “social struggle,” and “social consciousness” on new grounds. Although Thompson has not dedicated much attention in his studies to matters related to the so-called “social-economic structure” (according to him, in order to leave this task to more competent members of a collective historiographic project), one can infer a very rich theoretical and interpretive lode from his work. According to Ellen K. Trinberger, Thompson’s theoretical framework,

10

Introduction

when applied to historical material, could produce an argument that is neither idealist nor economist, neither voluntarist nor structurally determinist. Such an argument could integrate an analysis of cultural (including ideological and moral) production with material (especially economic) production.30

Taking Thompson’s reflections into due account, many consequences can be drawn from materialist theoretical-interpretative guidelines for analyzing social classes in historical situations other than the British one Thompson focuses on in his studies. In a brief summary, the following can be mentioned: the possibility of basing studies on workers in precapitalist/pre-industrial periods on the concept of class struggle, relating the approach to the question of a ‘mature’ working class to the specific historical formation processes and conflicts between classes; the perception of class’s heterogeneity and of their collective behavior based on an analysis of the multiplicity of possible responses to the context, as much at the level of consciousness as at the level of organization and collective action; the obligation to view class not only from the perspective of the production locus but also from the perspectives of neighborhood and social environments, i.e., in the community; the need for the scholar to combine history’s interpretive references with concepts and methods of other social sciences when working with notions such as culture, tradition, customs, and community. Thompson’s perspective is also inspiring in regard to this text’s own specific object, insofar as it proposes that any analysis of the process of working-class formation must hark back to the earlier standards and valuesforming moments, forged in the class struggle, and which eventually came to guide the “new” class’s world vision. It is from the study of preceding class situations that the class and the class-consciousness formation of workers under capitalism will become apparent in a far less simplistic way. Viewed that way, as process and relation, the working class in formation in Rio de Janeiro could not be dissociated from the experience of coexistence between slaves and free workers in the city in the course of the nineteenth century. If life and labor experience engender fields of struggle in which organizations and class-consciousness manifestations emerge, the field of antagonistic social forces up until the decade of 1880—that is, the class situation—still vigorously opposed masters and slaves. The enslaved workers’ struggle for freedom, associated with the abolitionist movement during its last years, was to make that clear. Based on the discussion delineated at the beginning and orientated by the theoretical guidelines briefly presented earlier, this work has been split into six thematically delimited parts, though in each one of them the chronological dimension has been essential to organizing the presentation.

Introduction

11

It is a means of exhibiting the research that should not conceal the fact that the multiple aspects portrayed in each chapter are interrelated within a single historical process, which means that the initial division by themes is a guide not always strictly followed in the course of expounding them. This introduction started off with a brief reference to sources that have enabled us to acquire knowledge of two movements fairly representative of the overall set of labor issues at the time, followed by a presentation of the conceptual grounds on which this research was developed. In the four following chapters, although we shall still make some theoretical references, the analysis of the sources predominates. The first chapter, “Labor, Urban Life and the Experience of Exploitation,” discusses those working-class dimensions that Katznelson, taking E. P. Thompson’s oeuvre as his reference, considers “experience-near,”31 involving the level of economic structuring, the way of living and working in the city, as well as some references as to how such situations determined a given experience marked by the exploitation condition, as depicted in certain workers’ records. In order to do so, it was necessary to have recourse to a vast bibliography. On the one hand, works have been consulted in the field of economic history, dedicated to the first stages of Brazilian industrialization, Rio de Janeiro’s industrialization in particular, and often making use of categories such as “proto-industrialization” or “pre-industry” to define the existence and dynamics of the nineteenth-century factories. The combined exploitation of free and enslaved workers in the first industrial plants had already been identified and analyzed as far back as the 1980s by studies addressing such aspects, and the present work has drawn much nourishment from them. Wide use has also been made of various pieces of labor history research investigating urban slavery in Rio de Janeiro. Furthermore, there is a whole series of academic studies on living conditions (housing, health/epidemics, food/ food supply, cost of living) during the last decades of the imperial court period and the first decades of the Capital of the Republic that are in the true tradition of urban social history, and this work has made copious use of them. To a lesser extent than in other chapters, the first chapter also refers to primary sources that could complement the general analysis of the modes of living and working in the city during the period studied, favoring those that could lead us to a perception of how workers (especially free workers in this case) translated this experience, and for that reason attention is dedicated to the newspapers that first define themselves as representatives of the “artists” (artisans), or laborers. The second chapter, “Forms of Organization,” maps and analyzes the kinds of organizations that workers, whether enslaved or free, built

12

Introduction

over time. The chapter also discusses other forms of organization so that brotherhoods, mutual assistance associations, trade unions, and parties constitute the main focus at that stage of the text. The objectives, the profile and the number of members, the rules, and various other aspects of those organizations have been studied based on a wide range of sources, such as brotherhood engagements, association and trade union statutes, sentences and processes of the Conselho de Estado (State Council), civil records, reports and balances, and surveys from the period. In the third chapter, “Resistance and Struggle,” the focus is on collective action, identifying, in keeping concern with work as a whole, specific and/or common forms of struggle among enslaved and free workers. As in the second chapter, there is an effort to evaluate the amount of continuity (or the force of tradition) of mobilization modes before and after the abolition of slavery. The press, memoirs of militants, and other sources of the period have been used as a means to address everything ranging from urban quilombos (communities of fugitive slaves) to strikes, including riots, rebellions, and social movements with broad repercussions, such as the abolitionist movement. The police repression of those movements is also studied in this chapter, in an attempt to address some of the ways the dominant classes fought collective mobilizations in the labor world by activating the state body responsible for maintaining law and order. The fourth chapter is dedicated to the matter of consciousness. Taking into account that within the process of class formation, the progressive (although not linear) self-identification of workers stemming from their common interests and from the opposition of interests in relation to their exploiters is a fundamental dimension, this part of the book concentrates on analyzing the discourses of organizations and leadership, as well as the evidence of collective manifestations of class consciousness. The main sources for this chapter (although others have been used) are newspapers identified with the workers that began to be published in the 1850s. In them one can notice nuances in the (self-)identification categories such as artist, laborer, worker, slave, African, free, and freedmen, and the changes they suffered as time went by, as well as the projects of social emancipation discussed by laborers, where it is possible to find the moments in which the sense of “class” becomes predominantly one that identifies a collective consciousness. Finally, the last part of the text takes up, once more, the discussion on processes of class formation and includes the case of Rio de Janeiro, with its specificities and common traits with other experiences, in an analytic perspective of greater scope, (re)combining the various levels of analysis discussed in the preceding chapters.

Introduction

13

I could not end this introduction without signalizing that, even in texts written singlehandedly, the marks of collective work and of existing in society make themselves felt. There are formal acknowledgments that, in the current context, gain particular importance. After all, the whole research that fostered this text was done in the period between the final years of the 1990s and the first of the twenty-first century, a time of severe cutbacks in Brazil on public funding for those universities that were still state-run and for scientific and technological research in general. In spite of that, however, the research projects related to this text were supported by the Brazilian National Research Council (CNPq) and by the Rio de Janeiro Research Support Foundation (Faperj). The presentation of papers in scientific events gained a less bureaucratic atmosphere when I joined the National History Association’s (Anpuh) working group Mundos do Trabalho (Worlds of Labor). To avoid a long list of individual acknowledgments (and possible inadvertent omissions), I shall limit myself to declaring the importance of the academic exchanges with all members of the working group for developing the studies reflected in this text. I have always profited and shall continue to do so from the various spaces of social contact (and conflict) in which I take part at the Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF), especially the classrooms and the daily interaction with undergraduate and graduate students; and that transpires in every line I write. My acknowledgments also go to friends and colleagues within the interdisciplinary nucleus for research and studies into Marx and Marxism (NIEP-Marx). Nevertheless, I do not only teach and learn within the UFF environment, and I must stress that during the last years I have intensified an experience that has always been rewarding to me: taking part in courses with social militants, from both the rural and urban areas, such as “Brazilian Reality” and “The History of Class Struggle in Brazil,” both run by the Florestan Fernandes National School. In them I have sometimes had the opportunity to discuss themes related to this work, and those discussions have proved to be highly valuable; and even more valuable, perhaps, was the lesson about sharing that I learned through those classes. Over a period of years Rafael Maul de Carvalho, Marcela Goldmacher, Francisco Josué Medeiros de Freitas, Igor Soares Netto de Oliveira, Branno Hocherman Costa, and Maya Valeriano have received initiation scholarships enabling them to help me with the research that has led to this text. Without their work and the ideas we exchanged, none of this would ever have been possible. Equally fundamental have been the contributions stemming from the discussions of a study group dedicated to class-formation studies made up of the aforementioned colleagues and

14

Introduction

longstanding friends and colleagues Luciana Lombardo Costa Pereira and Júlia Monnerat Barbosa and more recent partners Tiago Bernardon, Érica Arantes, Igor Gomes, Victor Emrich, and Rômulo Mattos, whom I must thank for their comments on the work’s first version, as well as Paulo Terra, Felipe Demier, Gabriel Aladen, Elisa Monteiro, Desirée Azevedo, André Berenger, Tatiane Vasconcelos, Otávia Cláudia Pequeno, Priscilla Gomes, Marco Marques, Demian Melo, Juliana Vieira, Clarice Chacon, Adriano Zão, and my teacher Mirna Aragão. As the study group is also a group of friends, I thank all of them for their friendship, since no work can be expressive of life unless there is affection present. To me, João is one of human life’s greatest expressions, and to him this book is dedicated. For this English version, Marcel van der Linden’s support has been decisive. Over the last few years, the ideas exchanged with him and with others who have dedicated themselves to building a labor history from the Global South have shown me that I am not alone in my thinking and that I have a lot to learn from the studies of my fellow Indian scholars, such as Rana Behal, Prabhu Mohapatra, and Chitra Joshi. Thanks to Renata Meirelles, Frederico de Barros, and Martin Nicholl for the translation.

Notes 1. Hermínio Linhares, Contribuição à história das lutas operárias no Brasil, 2nd ed. (São Paulo: Alfa-Ômega, 1977), 33. 2. For an example, see Artur José Renda Vitorino, Máquinas e operários: mudança técnica e sindicalismo gráfico (São Paulo e Rio de Janeiro, 1858–1912) (São Paulo: Annablume/ Fapesp, 2000). 3. [Translator’s note] The term “Fluminense” refers to somebody or something that comes from or belongs to the province where the city of Rio de Janeiro is located, but Rio de Janeiro itself, as a capital, was a neutral municipality. “Carioca” came to be used to identify somebody or something specifically from the city of Rio de Janeiro. 4. Jornal dos Tipógrafos, Rio de Janeiro, 1/14/1858, 1. 5. Jornal dos Tipógrafos, Rio de Janeiro, 1/23/1858, 2–3. Also transcribed in O Povo Soberano, Rio de Janeiro, 5/3/1858, 3. 6. Estatutos da Imperial Associação Tipográfica Fluminense, Rio de Janeiro, 1866. Biblioteca Nacional (BN), V-253, 2, 8, n. 44. 7. Mauá was a pioneering industrialist and one of the wealthiest men of the period. 8. Quoted in Linhares, Contribuição à história, 32. 9. For further information on Mauá’s enterprise, see Geraldo de Beauclair, Raízes da indústria no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Studio F&S, 1992). For another analysis that shows how common the employment of a slave labor force in industrial establishments was, see Luiz Carlos Soares, A manufatura na formação econômica e social escravista do Sudeste, um estudo das atividades manufatureiras na região fluminense (master’s diss., Niterói: UFF, 1980).

Introduction

15

10. Beauclair, Raízes da indústria no Brasil, 181. 11. There are suggestions of this in an article by labor historian Antonio Luigi Negro, “Imperfeita ou rarefeita? O debate sobre o fazer-se da classe trabalhadora inglesa,” Revista Brasileira de História 16, nos. 31–32 (1996): 40–61, in which the main concern is to associate class-making studies in Brazil with Thompson’s perspective, according to which the analysis of the formation processes should go back to previous historical moments that formed patterns and values forged in the class struggle and that guide the “new” class’s worldview. On the other hand, departing from the slavery issue, we can find Silvia Hunold Lara’s perspective in “Escravidão, cidadania e história do trabalho no Brasil.” Projeto História 16 (1998): 26–38, which attempts to situate the importance of the slave experience in social labor history. John French defends the importance of studies of that kind in the article “A história latino-americana do trabalho hoje: uma reflexão autocrítica.” Revista História Unisinos 6, no. 6 (2002): 11–28. 12. Maria Cecília Velasco e Cruz, Virando o jogo: estivadores e carregadores no Rio de Janeiro da Primeira República (PhD thesis, São Paulo, USP, 1998). 13. Maria Cecília Velasco e Cruz, “Tradições negras na formação de um sindicato: sociedade de resistência dos trabalhadores em trapiche e café, Rio de Janeiro, 1905–1930.” Afro-Ásia 24 (2000): 274. 14. João José Reis, “De olho no canto: trabalho de rua na Bahia na véspera da abolição,” AfroÁsia 24 (2000): 199–242. And João José Reis, “A greve negra de 1857 na Bahia.” Revista USP 18 (1993): 7–29. 15. Reis, “De olho no canto,” 241. 16. Beatriz Ana Loner, Construção de classe: operários de Pelotas e Rio Grande (1888–1930) (Pelotas: Unitrabalho/EdUFPel, 2001). 17. Sidney Chalhoub, Machado de Assis: historiador (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2003), 248. 18. Herbert G. Gutman, “The Negro and the United Mine Workers of America,” in Work, Culture and Society in Industrializing America (New York: Vintage, 1977), article’s first edition in 1968. 19. “Interview with Herbert Gutman,” in Power and Culture: Essays on the American Working Class, ed. Ira Berlin and Herbert Gutman (New York: Pantheon, 1987), 331. 20. The discussion on the concept of social class has been limited here to the elements most directly related to the issue of class formation. For further theoretical analysis of the concept by the author, see Marcelo Badaró Mattos, E. P. Thompson e a tradição de crítica ativa do materialismo histórico (Rio de Janeiro: Edufrj, 2012), especially chapter 2; and Marcelo Badaró Mattos, “The Working Class: A Contemporary Approach in the Light of Historical Materialism,” Workers of the World: International Journal on Strikes and Social Conflicts 1, no. 2 (2013): 77– 104. 21. It is the case of Max Weber, who analyzes social inequalities out of three dimensions: wealth, prestige, and power. For Weber, class is a category that concerns only the first of these dimensions—strictly economical—defining a group of individuals who share the same situation in relation to market. Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). 22. “An Open Letter to Laszeck Kolakowski” was originally published in the 1973 edition of Socialist Register and reproduced in E. P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (London: The Merlin Press, 1978). 23. Thompson, Poverty of Theory, 380. 24. Bill Schwartz, “‘The People’ in History: The Communist Party Historians Group, 1946– 1956,” in Making Histories: Studies in History-Writing and Politics, ed. the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (London: Hutchinson, 1982). 25. E. P. Thompson, “An Interview with E. P. Thompson,” Radical History Review 3, no. 4 (1976): 4–25.

16

Introduction

26. E. P. Thompson, “Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle without Class?” Social History 3, no. 2 (1978): 148. 27. Ibid, 149. On the uses of this notion in historical studies of eighteenth-century England, see E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (New York: The New Press, 1993). 28. Ellen Meiksins Wood, “Falling through the Cracks: E. P. Thompson and the Debate on Base and Superstructure,” in E. P. Thompson: Critical Perspective, ed. Harvey J. Kaye and Keith McClelland (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 146. 29. Ellen Meiksins Wood, Democracy against Capitalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 80. 30. Ellen K. Trinberger, “E. P. Thompson: Understanding the Process of History,” in Vision and Method in Historical Sociology, ed. Theda Skocpol (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 221. 31. Ira Katznelson, “Working-Class Formation: Constructing Cases and Comparisons,” in Working-Class Formation: Nineteenth-Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States, ed. Ira Katznelson and Aristide R. Zolberg (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 16.

CHAPTER ONE

WORK, URBAN LIFE, AND THE EXPERIENCE OF EXPLOITATION This chapter is dedicated to the study of the social and economic scenario in Rio de Janeiro in the period embracing the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. It is concerned with urban demography and the distribution of the working population between the categories of enslaved workers and free workers; with labor relationships and the profile of the labor force within industries and in the streets; and with living conditions in general. Discussing these themes in a specific chapter does not mean considering them to be part of a “structure” that precedes other levels of class manifestation and explains or determines them. We heed Thompson’s warning, based on Marx, whereby instead of attributing primacy to the “economic” and relegating norms and culture to the sphere of secondary reflections, the study of class formation should pay most attention to “the simultaneity of expression of characteristic productive relations in all systems and areas of social life.”1 The division of the present exposition however, obeys a logic that goes beyond the simple didactic organization of thought. Based on the concept of experience, I believe that it is possible to establish an idea of a process and of a relation in which material life and consciousness interact in this “simultaneity” to which Thompson refers. Starting from the discussion on the fundamental Marxian assertion that the social being determines social consciousness, Thompson puts it in precise terms by refuting the association between “social being” and “economic” or “base” and by reintegrating the strong sense of the concept of mode of production—“in which relations of production and attendant concepts, norms, and forms of power must be taken together as one set.”2 For that reason, the British historian affirms that “in any given society, in which social relations have become set in class ways, there is a cognitive organization of life which corresponds to the mode of production and the historically evolved class

18

Chapter 1

formations.”3 Seen that way, the conflictual dynamics of the social dimension take on a less simplistic meaning. The category of determination is not excluded from the interpretation, but acquires greater precision: Change in material life determines the conditions of that struggle, and some of its character: but the particular outcome is determined only by the struggle itself. That is to say that historical change eventuates, not because a given “basis” must give rise to a correspondent “superstructure”, but because changes in productive relationships are experienced in social and cultural life, refracted in men’s ideas and their values, and argued through in their actions, their choices and their beliefs.4

In order to explain this reevaluated—not only “economic”—material determination, Thompson makes use of a concept that plays the role of a “junction point,” i.e., experience: “What changes, as the mode of production and productive relations change, is the experience of living men and women. And that experience is sorted out in class ways, in social life and in consciousness, in the assent, the resistance, and the choices of men and women.”5 Hence for Thompson, in keeping with the best, or one of the best, Marxist traditions based on the concept of experience, high regard for the role of the subject in history is compatible with the refutation of the liberal perspective of the autonomy of a conscious subject who acts rationally and with a free will in the world (or in the market). In his polemic with Althusser’s structuralism, the English historian highlights the importance of experience, an “absent term” in the works of those he criticizes: What we have found out (in my view) lies within a missing term: “human experience”. This is, exactly, the term which Althusser and his followers wish to blackguard out of the club of thought under the name of “empiricism”. Men and women also return as subjects, within this term—not as autonomous subjects, or “free individuals”, but as persons experiencing their determinate productive situations and relationships, as needs and interests and as antagonists, and then “handling” this experience within their consciousness and their culture (two other terms excluded by theoretical practice) in the most complex (yet “relatively autonomous”) ways, and then (often but not always through the ensuing structures of class) acting upon their determinate situation in their turn.6

Therefore, although this work’s attention is directed toward organizations, actions, and the consciousness that outline a process of class formation, it would be incongruous to take the above considerations as references without clarifying which “determined situations” we are addressing, i.e., in what sphere of material transformations the experience of

Work, Urban Life, and the Experience of Exploitation

19

enslaved and free men and women who worked in Rio de Janeiro during that period was molded.

Which Labor Market? In the course of the nineteenth century and in the first decades of the twentieth century, Rio de Janeiro kept its political-administrative importance as the seat of the government, first as the Neutral Municipality of the Court during the imperial period, and after 1889 as the Federal District in the Republic. Regarding the economy, the city’s commercial growth during the second half of the nineteenth century was driven by its distribution of imported products and its handling of the outflow of the coffee production of the Vale do Paraíba. What originally made such economic growth possible was the relative autonomy that Rio de Janeiro’s market had enjoyed in relation to Portugal since at least the preceding century, which had led to the emergence of great fortunes among the big traders established in the city (wholesalers, importers/exporters, and, especially, slave traders) and a consequent mercantile/urban accumulation.7 It was here too that the first industrial establishments of a relatively large size appeared. Furthermore, the country’s financial transactions largely depended on banking institutions based in Rio. The figures of the city population increase are significant. Table 1.1 Total Population of the City 1849

1872

1890

1906

266,466

274,972

522,651

811,443

Sources: Censuses of 1872, 1890 and 1906.

The first findings of the researcher who combines such demographic data with the occupational statistics is the extreme diversity in the constitution of the labor force, which leads to difficulties in defining who the urban workers were, and the task becomes even more complex due to the relatively abrupt changes in its constitution over the course of the century. Thus, according to the 1821 census, Rio de Janeiro (urban and rural parishes) had a total population of 112,695 inhabitants, of which 55,090 were slaves and 57,605 were free workers.8 In 1849, the census survey pointed to the existence of 266,466 inhabitants in the city, of which 110,602 were enslaved and 155,864 were free.9 In 1872, the number of slaves had fallen to 48,939, while the city’s population had grown

20

Chapter 1

to 274,972, of whom 226,033 were free inhabitants. Many reasons can explain these changes. First of all is the importance of the African slave trade’s contribution to the formation of the urban labor force. Paul Lovejoy estimates that a total of around 3.5 million slaves were exported from Africa through the Atlantic routes during the nineteenth century.10 Manolo Florentino has calculated that 700,000 Africans landed in Rio de Janeiro in the period between 1790 and 1830 alone.11 Leslie Bethel estimated that during the last years of the 1840s, 60,000 Africans a year were being brought to Brazil by the slave trade.12 The prohibitions imposed on traffic during the first half of the nineteenth century, culminating with the end of tolerance for the slave trade in 1850, led to a rise in the price of slaves due to the demands of the coffee production zones, which ended up stimulating slave trade from the cities to the rural areas.13 One cannot ignore the fact that the level of social tension (the whites’ fear of slave rebellions, in particular) in the Americas’ largest black city was a further stimulus for diminishing the number of slaves in the court.14 The fact is that the spaces left by slaves were filled by free workers, many of whom were immigrants, in particular Portuguese. It would be a mistake, however, to consider that Portuguese immigrants arrived and took part in the urban labor force only after 1850. Gladys Ribeiro estimates that, in 1834, five thousand Portuguese plus two thousand foreigners of other nationalities corresponded to around 30 percent of the entire population of free workers in the city of Rio de Janeiro.15 In any event, the arrival of foreigners, particularly Portuguese, after 1850 gained new proportions when compared to the total amount of the urban population. According to Luiz Felipe de Alencastro’s estimate, the Portuguese represented about 10 percent of the court’s inhabitants in 1849 and reached 20 percent in 1872, although their arrival was already decreasing by that time.16 In that light, Alencastro concludes that Rio de Janeiro’s labor market passed through three phases during the nineteenth century: “a first phase, entirely African, extends until 1850; a Portuguese-African phase, that goes on until 1870 and, eventually, a Portuguese-Brazilian phase,”17 taking into due account the presence of the Brazilian free and freed, which increased notably during this last phase. One must be careful, however, in using the expression “labor market” when referring to that period. It was definitely not an ordinary free-wage labor market; slavery left its mark, sometimes more and sometimes less significantly, on the entire period extending up to 1888. Among the specificities of urban slave workforce employment, the best known was the existence of enslaved individuals, trained in special-

Work, Urban Life, and the Experience of Exploitation

21

ized crafts or not, who were offered by their masters for hire, as well as others who rambled through the city looking for occasional services in exchange for money. Such slaves, called escravos de ganho or ganhadores (money-earning slaves), were supposed to give a stipulated amount of money to their masters on a daily or weekly basis. They often lived on their own, subsisting on the percentage of money they were allowed to keep, and they definitely took part in monetary relations, although they were still the property of other people. This explains the diversity of professional specialization in Rio de Janeiro shown by the data gathered by Luiz Carlos Soares from the 1872 census. There he found the following slave professional groups: “‘servants and journeymen,’ 5,785, out of which 4,997 were men and 788 were women; ‘mariners,’ 527 (all men); ‘industrial,’ 2,135 workers (all men); ‘seamstresses,’ 1,384; ‘craftsmen,’ 497 (494 men and 3 women).”18 To those should be added many others with no professional registration, often employed as loaders, generically called ganhadores in many of the period’s annals. Checking the records of money-earning slaves in the municipality, Soares found, between 1850 and 1871, “2,715 slaves (within the 2.868 registered as ‘escravos de ganho’) who did not have their activities mentioned and whose masters asked for permission for them to just offer their services on the streets.”19 It would be reasonable to suppose that some of these enslaved workers brought with them crafts learned in Africa, for, according to Priore and Venâncio, the education of the young, including the learning of manual skills and handicraft techniques, was a recurring concern in the most urbanized societies of that continent.20 Besides, certain crafts quite common and well-developed in African societies were often performed by slaves in Rio de Janeiro’s streets, such as those of the barber/surgeon, whose skills had been registered by Jesuit missionaries present on the African continent during the sixteenth century.21 According to Soares, in the urban milieu, the kind of relation in which the money-earning slaves took part corresponded to the “peasant breach” studied by Ciro Cardoso in the countryside.22 That is the reason why he speaks of a “wage breach” in the urban slave economy: They were in formal terms, wage-earning workers in regard to the relations established with the people who required their services, earning a wage that was the means of their survival and, in some cases, even allowed for the formation of a peculium, that enabled them to buy their manumission. Nevertheless, there was the other side of the coin. Being slaves, they maintained a relationship of owned property with their masters as if they were mere objects, insofar as they were obliged to pay their masters a daily or weekly amount, previously arranged according to their level of professional specialization, their strength, their abil-

22

Chapter 1

ity and their skill, and also according to the market conditions associated to that kind of labor force.23

Such duality should be understood as one more factor demonstrating the complexity of slavery, especially in the urban area, and the proximity between enslaved and free workers in the urban working environment. Having found out the existence of that “breach,” the extrapolation made by some authors who proceed to an evaluation of “the contradiction of traditional slave structure … which denoted the transformation of slavery as a system”24 does not seem appropriate. After all, the perception of the existence of contradictions within an economic system does not necessarily mean its transformation. Furthermore, if the starting point for the comparison is the “peasant breach,” analyzed by Ciro Cardoso, it is worthwhile to remember that this author highlights the “functionality” aspects of it for colonial slavery. It does not mean that Cardoso does not acknowledge that the situation brought advantages for the slaves, who perceived them and “fought for them to the maximum, enlarging their autonomy and extension, as far as possible.”25 However, even acknowledging changes in the system over time, Cardoso is far from relating these changes to a contradiction that “denounced” the system’s transformation. On the contrary, he affirms that the study of the “peasant breach” allows for “giving new shades to … , but not for bringing into question, the undoubtedly predominant slave system.”26 Going further in the comparison to the rural situation and understanding more precisely the degree of duality and contradiction involved when the masters chose to leave the slaves’ subsistence under the slaves’ own responsibility, we shall follow Schwartz’s argument, for whom, undoubtedly, the existence of opportunities within the work regime and the internal slave economy of self-provisioning worked to the masters’ benefit. Slaves surely recognized this, but they could also see advantages for themselves. … A certain amount of slave autonomy made the system operate more smoothly, but planters also realized that a slave tradition of self-reliance and autonomy was a potential danger to that system.27

Whereas slavery in the city admitted various modalities of labor force exploitation, it must also be noted that even among free men a typical wage-paying labor market had not materialized at least until the years immediately before abolition, precisely because one of the consequences of this slave presence in the urban environment concerns the establishment of the labor force price. As Eulália Lobo and Eduardo Stotz have shown, based on data from the industrial sector, “the hiring prices [of slaves] probably served as a baseline for establishing wages.”28 Taking in

Work, Urban Life, and the Experience of Exploitation

23

addition to this the fact that the price of the slaves was decisive for choosing whether to incorporate a larger or a smaller number of free workers to the enterprises, we can affirm that, while urban slavery had a greater importance, the free worker’s wage variation was not guided exclusively by classic standards of supply and demand of the proletarian labor force. It is also necessary to observe that various modalities of non-wage paying, or even compulsory exploitation, of such workers were implemented. An example can be found among the engajados, a kind of indentured laborer. They were immigrants, commonly from the Azores, who, in exchange for their travel costs (usually fixed as twice the average value), negotiated their passe (basically the ticket debt) with the ships’ captains, who sold it to persons in Brazil who would in turn exploit their workforce for a determined period of time as a way of paying off the debt. This was more frequent during the moments of larger migrant influxes, such as during the 1850s. One can estimate that these engajados worked at least three years to pay off their debt. Although this form of labor exploitation was more likely to occur in the countryside than in the city, it also existed in the urban environment. Luiz Felipe Alencastro affirms that, besides the combination between their expulsion from Portugal and its islands as a consequence of the economic situation there and the expanded Brazilian labor force demand after 1850, this engajados movement was due to a kind of “recycling” of the Portuguese-Brazilian slave trade, amortizing capital and fulfilling the time of wear of slave ships, which would eventually explain why, after 1860, the engajados traffic decreased.29 Other forms of compulsory labor exploitation can be mentioned, such as the employment of “free Africans,” those who, caught by the state after slave trade prohibition, served the state or its concessionaires directly for periods that could go beyond two decades. Beatriz Mamigonian estimates that eleven thousand “Africans were rescued from traffic and were forced to work for 14 years, under the imperial government’s guard, between 1821 and 1856 … , distributed among state institutions and private concessionaires.”30 Taking all these labor relations into account, it was a peculiar process of proletarianization while slavery existed, or at least until the amount of slave workers was sufficient to determine the limits of wage relations. In the years that followed abolition, it can readily be seen that the marks left by slavery continued to determine a hierarchy/differentiation process in the city’s labor market. Data about color and the individuals’ occupations are interlaced in the 1890 census, when about 30 percent of the total population were foreigners (of which 70 percent were Portuguese), and about 30 percent were classified as non-white.31 Sidney Chalhoub analyzed that census’s figures and concluded that

24

Chapter 1

over half of the 89,000 economically active foreigners worked in the trade market, manufacturing industry and artistic activities; that is, the immigrants filled the most dynamic employment sector. Meanwhile, 48% of the economically active non-whites were employed in domestic duties, 17% in industry, 16% did not have a declared occupation and the remaining population was engaged in extraction, livestock or agricultural activities.32

Working in the Streets and the Factories Given the relative variety of studies available, we can make a quick characterization of two labor areas—street and factory—in order to obtain a better outline of such a “labor market.” Slave labor largely predominated in the streets up until 1850. Mary Karasch gathered information on the various slave occupations in Rio de Janeiro’s streets, highlighting, among others, the presence of loaders, mule drivers, stevedores, water sellers, excrement carriers, sailors, mariners, barbers, surgeons, lamplighters, street cleaners, and itinerant vendors.33 Luiz Carlos Soares also draws up a long list and mentions, among various slave occupations (many of them common in the moneyearning system, in which men predominated), the following: mariners, stevedores, loaders (of luggage, commodities, objects, etc.), coachmen, barbers (also working as surgeons and as sangradores [literally “bleeders”]), barrel-organ players, musicians, greengrocers, sailors, fishermen, hunters, naturalistas (workers who collected animals and plants), and tigres (literally “tigers,” people who carried excrement in barrels used for removing it from the houses).34 After 1850, according to Soares, a slave concentration in the cargo transport services occurred, which led him to suppose that, from that time on, the slaves would have been progressively substituted in the street activities by free immigrant workers. As Soares writes, If indeed the majority of these slaves were employed in cargo transport, it is possible to deduct that already in the 1850s the tendency towards the substitution of slaves by free immigrant workers had manifested more intensely in itinerant trade. It is possible that these white workers would often have rejected cargo transport activities, in which they would more readily be brought down to the level of slave workers. Maybe this explains the massive presence of slaves among loaders throughout the second half of the previous century.35

The experience of the enslaved worker in the streets, often “living on their own account,” as well as their acquaintance with free workers, often sharing the same occupations and searching for the same “customers,”

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25

most certainly led to the emergence of various rivalries and disputes. It also led, however, to the emergence of many forms of solidarity in bigger or smaller sociability networks. A good example of that can be found in the troops of coffee loaders who, according to Karasch, organized themselves in groups in order to buy their manumission, one by one, in each group.36 This experience of solidarity in order to accomplish freedom is similar to some others that will be discussed in the following chapters. In the post-abolition period, working in the streets remained a means of survival for a great number of Rio de Janeiro’s workers. In 1906, the census’s occupation classification reveals a predominance of underemployment in a scenario where the distance between the formal and informal market was hardly noticeable. Thus, 51.8 percent of the economically active population was classified under vague denominations such as “domestic duties” or journeymen, among others.37 The streets, however, previously occupied mostly by slaves, now offered survival alternatives to those who could not get into the formal labor market or who did not fit into its rules. Regarding the factories, these are usually seen as privileged working areas for those who study the formation of the typical capitalist wage-earning working class. However, in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro it is also possible to evaluate the level of diversification of enslaved labor exploitation within the factory environment. It is worthwhile to establish what we mean when we say “factories.” In the introduction we mentioned the Ponta d’Areia establishment, which belonged to the Baron of Mauá, regarded as the greatest private factory of the 1850s, with a capital of 1,250:000$000Rs,38 ten workshops, and a workforce of over six hundred men in its heyday.39 There were only a few factories of that size in this period, and the number of workers employed by Mauá’s enterprise was surpassed only by state establishments such as the Arsenal de Guerra (War Arsenal) and Arsenal de Marinha (Navy Yard).40 In the outline of the urban manufacturing sector, however, small workshops predominated, and even the organization of large enterprises was still of the more antiquated manufacturing type.41 Eulália Lobo presents data that support this characterization. Between the years of 1790 and 1822, the author found that the number of craftsmen or artisans working in Rio de Janeiro increased by 11.5 percent. In 1822, there were 233 artisans in 30 different activities in the city, while in 1852 there were 991 craftsmen and artisans in 46 different categories. In that period, production of goods of wood, metal, clothing, and leather were the most important artisan activities. By the end of the 1850s, based on tax collection figures, the author finds a decrease in the number of artisans, which she considers to be a result of the “decline of

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their corporation and of the tendency towards factories, workshops and the more industrial forms of manufacturing production absorbing those autonomous manual workers.”42 Among the factories, the author observes a significant increase, compared to the data from years close by, 1857–61, when the number of industrial factories jumped from 765 to 1,117, and the workshops sector decreased from 1,228 to 984. Gathering data on the number of employees at 50 of those industrial factories in 1857, she found 1,290 workers, “out of which 640 were foreigners and 650 were Brazilians; 451 were slaves and 199 were ‘free’. The average number of workers in those enterprises was 25.”43 After a certain decline in the number of industrial enterprises between 1860 and 1870, the data gathered by Lobo register, once again, the sector’s growth between the end of the 1870s and the beginning of the 1880s, insofar as there is “a rise in the number of factories from 1,049 to 1,243” between 1875 and 1881. Confronting this data enables the author to speak of “a transition from the artisan and manufacturing system to the industries of textiles, hats, shoes, furnishings and metal products, of which the first was already in a fully industrial phase.”44 According to the 1907 Rio de Janeiro Industry Census, the number of registered enterprises was smaller (though surely underestimated, as it can be seen when one compares it to the number of workers found by the 1906 census mentioned later on), but, considering the size of the enterprises, it is possible to agree with the author’s thesis, according to which, between 1880 and 1890, a “partial transformation of small manufacturers into industries” occurred, followed by the decline in artisan activities and the expansion of production volume. After all, according to those data, out of a total of 726 enterprises, 216 were small (up to 5 workers), 306 were of medium size (6 to 40 workers), and 204 were big (over 40 workers per unit).45 Approximately half of those enterprises had been established between 1889 and 1907. The industrial boom of the first years of the Republic can be explained mostly by the new economic measures taken by the final imperial offices, in particular the reformulation of the 1882 Anonymous Societies Act and the 1888 monetary reform. But it was after Rui Barbosa became head of the Treasury Department during the first government following the proclamation of the Republic that great government stimulus to the investment of larger capital sums in the industrial sector not only made the emergence of new businesses (some of them short-lived) possible but also resulted in the considerable expansion of already established factories.46 Concerning the formation of the industrial labor force, the coexistence of free workers and slaves in the urban specialized crafts was already

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noticeable in the eighteenth century. Examining several sources for the 1789–1817 period, Carlos Lima found 651 free craft masters, examined by corporations in 19 crafts, and also found 238 slave artisans registered in inventories, distributed through 28 crafts.47 Eulália Lobo found 101factories in the records of the Junta do Comércio between 1809 and 1849. Among those, she found data about the labor force in 37, of which only 11 declared that they did not own slaves. “In 25 factories, 424 employees and laborers were free (the number of slaves was not determined) and in 23 factories 418 were slaves.”48 The “functional integration … within most ‘factories’ between free and slave subjects” and the performance of more complex tasks by enslaved laborers, of which Beauclair speaks,49 as well as the variety of crafts performed by slaves already mentioned, can be explained by the effort of the masters to train their slaves in specialized tasks as a way of adding value to their investments in the slave labor force. The state, which owned the larger manufacturing establishments of the period, also invested in the training of its “slaves of the nation.” Studying the Santa Cruz Farm, expropriated from the Jesuits in the middle of the eighteenth century, Carlos Engermann observed a large number of specialized enslaved workers, often “exported” to other public enterprises such as the Arsenal de Guerra, the Fábrica de Pólvora (Gunpowder Factory), and public works. In an 1815 survey, Engermann found 193 male adult slaves and 61 adolescents (a total of 254), out of which almost 200 were distributed in 26 specialized tasks, as carpenters, bricklayers, shoemakers, weavers, blacksmiths, surgeons, etc.50 Studying the Fábrica de Pólvora da Estrela (Estrela Gunpowder Factory), which also belonged to the state and was situated on the road that linked the provinces of Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro, Alinnie Moreira observed that, between 1831 and 1850, there was an intricate hierarchic combination of free workers, enslaved and “free Africans” employed in the various workshops of the establishment (besides those working in the surrounding fields). “The free workers were distributed among the gunpowder workshops and the auxiliary workshops, performing the functions of ‘masters’, boatswains, guards, servants and apprentices, … foremen, oarsmen, store employees, doormen, guards, barn workers, log trimmers and coxswains.” On the other side, the slaves were “mostly specialized professionals, formed in their daily experience.” They worked as “oarsmen, carpenters, blacksmiths, woodcutters, bricklayers, diggers, coopers, barn workers,” but the chances were that “slaves and ‘free Africans’ would eventually become ‘masters’ in the auxiliary workshops.”51 Even with the shortage of urban slaves after 1850, it was possible to find enslaved workers in the industrial sector. Luiz Carlos Soares makes

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use of a statistical survey conducted in 1868 in 32 establishments of the Second District (Santa Rita): We found the presence of slaves in almost all of the establishments of this district, except for a single one, associated with beer production which employed 9 free workers. In 5 foundry and machinery establishments, 608 workers were employed, of which 567 were free and 41 were slaves. In another 5 shipbuilding establishments, the number of employees reached 90; 71 free and 19 slaves. In 2 refinery and distillery establishments there were 25 employees, of which 24 were free and 1 was a slave. Of the 37 employed workers in 12 cigar workshops, 32 were free and 5 were slaves. In 4 soap and candle wax workshops, of the 13 workers employed, 12 were free and 1 was a slave. In the single vinegar workshop, among the 4 workers employed, 3 were slaves and one was free. Finally, there were 2 steam-powered sawmills that employed 12 people, of whom 6 were free and the other 6 were slaves. According to the general reckoning, among the 798 workers employed in those industrial establishments, 722 were free, 248 were Brazilian and 474 were foreigners, and 76 were slaves, which meant that 90.48% of the workers were free and only 9.52% were slaves.52

In the light of the already mentioned data from the 1872 census, it is possible to obtain a more general view of the slave presence in the industrial sector, as this census recorded that there were still 2,135 enslaved workers in the manufacturing sector from a total of 18,091 workers altogether; that is, 11.8 percent were slaves, while 15,956 (88.20 percent) were free. Besides those, there were 1,384 enslaved women referred to as seamstresses and 497 slaves (494 men and 3 women) classified as “artists.”53 The abolition of slavery formally unified the civil situation of the labor force, but that did not mean there was real class homogeneity. The already mentioned presence of foreigners among Rio de Janeiro’s workers continued to be significant at the turn of the century. The 1906 census estimated a total of 115,779 workers among the 811,443 inhabitants of the city, out of which 64,217 were Brazilians and 51,249 were foreigners. In the 315 factories surveyed by the 1907 Industry Census, there were 21,361 employed workers, out of which 5,778 were foreigners (and there were 862 without any nationality registration).54 Besides slavery, color, and immigration, one must consider age and gender factors as well, especially from the final decades of the nineteenth century on, in order to have a clearer idea of the degree of variety in the labor force employed in Rio de Janeiro’s factories. In 1872, the census did not distinguish workers by age group and pointed to only 10 women designated as “workers,” although it listed 11,592 “seamstresses.” Meanwhile, in the 1882 Industrial Inquiry, among the 84 factories and manufacturers whose data have been analyzed, there were 261 (7.6 percent)

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women and 419 (12.2 percent) children among the 3,439 workers.55 Among the 115,779 people labeled by the census as “workers” in 1906, 22,216 were women (19.2 percent). In the 1907 Industry Census, there were 2,859 children (13.4 percent) and 4,316 women (20.2 percent) of the 21,361 tallied as “workers.”56

The Experience of Exploitation How did the records left by free workers reflect the exploitation experience? Resorting to the first newspapers that presented themselves as spokesmen of artistas (in those times, artisans were called artistas, literally “artists”) and workers,57 we can get an idea of the most common images of exploitation of labor and its reflections in the living conditions (health/housing, transport, food supply) of those who depended on a wage to survive between the second half of the nineteenth century and first decade of the twentieth.

Working Conditions The typographers were pioneers not only because they held strikes as a way of fighting for their interests but also because they were the most present voices in those newspapers that defended their interests; this is not surprising, given their quick access to the means of production for printing and to their professional qualification as typographers. Throughout the studied period there appear abundant references to the terrible working conditions in the typographers’ workshops. The work rhythm during the peak moments of production (when the editors handed over the texts to be composed, usually during the night), the requirement of being in the workshop for over twelve hours (usually from 3:00 p.m. to dawn, often including some hours of work preparation during the morning), and the insalubrious atmosphere inside workshops (particularly the bigger ones, in the daily newspapers) are examples of what made the typographers’ work so tiring in relation to what was considered a standard of dignity for specialized artists’ work. The particular nature of the work and the exhausting working rhythm were constantly highlighted: “This effort lasts from 8 to 12 hours, and can be as much as 20 hours long!!! Performing from 5 to 6 thousand precise movements with a steady hand, combining intelligence with ability in order to execute mechanical movements.”58 In 1861, three years after the typographers’ first strike, various editions of the newspaper Eco dos Artistas (Artisans’ Echo) printed denunciations

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of night-shift working regimes—which occurred seven days a week, in completely unhealthy environments—such as the following account: When the other artists are at rest, when all humanity rests (not even excepting the slaves) the typographer artists, for whom there is never any holiday, keep watch and work, and almost always this work goes on until late at night. … And in that way days, months and years go by and those artists are always going from their home to the typography and back home; they waste, if not abbreviate the best of their days in this pestiferous and poisonous atmosphere so harmful to health, where they breathe with difficulty; besides the awful heat they bear in these workshops, the nauseous smell of gas suffocates them. Oh! It is most certainly a way of living to regret; surely, it is a job that deserves better reward.59

Again, a dramatic appeal follows for ensuring at least a rest on Sundays: Would there be no means by which it could be possible to attenuate the fortune of such oppressed artists? … Would there be no possibility of softening such hard work? … wouldn’t it fall within the boundaries of the possible to give them, at least, the holy days for resting?60

This defense of a rest on Sundays was also fundamental for clerks who denounced how absurd it was to have a seven-day work regime of long working hours. Their fight for a weekly rest was based, as in the typographers’ article previously mentioned, on the religious argument of observing holy days and defending the workers’ dignity, as well as on the idea that they deserved a rest and an opportunity to have contact with their own kin. For that it would be necessary for the state to exercise control over commercial activity, imposing as obligatory law the shutting down of businesses on Sundays. So, in 1858 the clerks’ complaints were already being heard: “The man who works the whole week through in order to provide sustenance for himself and his family needs a day of rest. … The commercial establishments should be shut by the laws of the state; of the Catholic state that it is.”61 More than forty years later, in 1899, the demand for compulsory shutting on Sundays was still present in those sections of newspapers especially dedicated to trade employees’ interests.62 Another decisive factor, enabling us to realize how completely negative the working conditions were, was the physical threat represented by the machines, which often caused accidents. A medical report from the Brasil Industrial textile factory referring to the years 1890–91 showed the periodicity of those accidents, such as hand and finger lacerations, hand and finger compression, and other traumatic injuries, even death. Worse, of the fifteen listed accidents, six of the victims were children under ten years old.63

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We can also mention the bakery sector’s attempts at mechanization at the beginning of the twentieth century, which was supported by the machinery producers under the argument of hygiene but at the same time was fought by bakers due to risk of accident: Our machinery only brings us harm, not only to the bakery owners but also to the bakers who are obliged to work with it; equally so for the customers who often are eating bread made with the blood of human fingers smashed by the machines.64

Not by chance, the 1o Congresso Operário Brasileiro (First Brazilian Labor Congress), in 1906, included among its resolutions a proposal for attributing responsibility to patrons for accidents and the strategy of direct action (accepted as the best strategy in general) as a way to impose on them compensation for the victims of accidents: Considering that the boss is always responsible for accidents at work; and considering that the laws proclaimed for the benefit of workers on this issue are not executed … : the Congress advises the trade-unions to decide how much the patron should pay in compensation whenever an accident occurs, forcing him to do so by direct action.65

Taking into account the workers’ health, the accidents can be seen as the critical side of a chronic insalubrity problem in industrial establishments. For this reason, in 1890, a delegation of the Clube Protetor dos Chapeleiros (Hatmakers Protector Club) sent to the Inspetoria Geral de Higiene (General Inspectorate of Hygiene) denounced “too much suffering for this class … surrounded by various diseases, … working next to huge steam machinery, in narrow rooms, with no ventilation and no daylight. …”66 Machinery represented a threat to health and to workers’ integrity mainly because the intensification of working rhythm was the main goal of its use. In textile factories, for instance, the introduction of new machinery tended to substitute various workers. Devices such as the modified looms’ shuttles introduced in a factory in the neighborhood of Bangu in 1902, according to the owners, were of great “advantage” as they allowed “a worker to prepare, within an hour, 800 shuttles of the modified kind ‘without any effort’, while before a worker could only prepare 400 and become totally exhausted in doing so.”67 Among typographers, the introduction of linotypes, machines that substituted many traditional typesetters with a single linotype operator, was regarded as disastrous: “A big bomb in the middle of a defenseless crowd, an awful, brutal, implacable, inexorable damage.”68 To worsen such exhausting working conditions, despotic regulations increased the sensation of injustice for those who were submitted to the

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carioca manufacturing labor regimes of the second half of the nineteenth century. We again turn to the typographers’ records of the end of the 1860s: This individual needs to be a man who has received an education comparable to that of the typographer’s craft, but, despite the sacrifices, he does not earn enough for his vital costs. … These workers live in shabbiness, if not in poverty. The typesetter is subject to the pagers’ regulations which impose on him the obligation to arrive at 3 o’clock, when he starts working, being unconditionally fined for any delays.69

Or in the same tone: Practicing acts of violence in the name of the workshop regulations and, finally, trafficking with everything that is under their management to our detriment, with no means for us to reproach them, as that could mean the threat of dismissal; so we witness all this with a grim smile on our lips, and limit ourselves to saying “What else can we do?”70

So the despotic regulations had their part in aggravating the situation that was imposed on the qualified workers, in a contrast abhorred by these denunciations, namely, the dishonorable experience of poverty. Such experience of exploitation and imposition of poverty, understood as indignity and injustice, was not restricted to those who worked for private enterprises. It was also shared by employees of the period’s greatest industrial establishments: the Arsenals, which belonged to the state. This was the purpose of the following article from the 1880s, which combined in its denunciation of exploitation: the excessive working hours; the despotism of the heads; and the unfair and humiliating regulations that obliged workers to undergo searches: Among us, the poor worker, this instrument of the nations’ wealth, is subject to the most unfair demands of the government which wants to establish aristocracy in the country at any cost and, to that end, it oppresses and suppresses. It oppresses, for it obliges working more hours than is usually required for the so-called public jobs. It suppresses insofar as one can consider it a vile instrument of authoritarian power, which puts itself into effect according to the whim of the director of the State-owned workshops. Administered in that way by the government, the worker in Brazil has arrived at the abject condition of leaving the arsenals under the eyes of rows of soldiers, being checked whenever some sort of bully feels like it. This highly degrading act is imposed on workers every day for all to see, which makes people consider him a crook, an individual of suspicious character, with whom nobody should deal in order to avoid any losses to their property. That is what the government intends with this means of proceeding.71

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Oppression, suppression, abject condition, degradation, treatment equal to that meted to the unqualified are some of the images employed in the article to show the incompatibility between such treatment and the conception of minimum respect that should be given to workers. The tyranny of the regulations that would continue to exist in the following decades was one of the more acute experiences of exploitation lived by the workers. For this reason, among the resolutions of the already mentioned 1o Congresso Operário Brasileiro was the fight against the logic of regulations, such as the one that proposed the “abolition of penalties in workshops and factories.”72

Housing According to the already cited demographic data, during the period studied here the population of Rio de Janeiro multiplied. There can be no surprise then that such population growth generated an expansion of the urban area. Reflecting the city’s overflow into new areas and the larger urban densification in what were predominantly rural spaces, the growth rate in the suburbs was greater, as the following table shows. Table 1.2 Spatial Distribution of Urban Population Freguesias [Parishes /urban regions]

1872

1890

Growth (%)

Central: Santana, Sacramento, Santa Rita, Candelária, São José

131,102

196,075

49.56

Urban and non-central: Santo Antônio, Espírito Santo, Glória, Lagoa, Engenho Velho, São Cristóvão, Gávea, Engenho Novo

97,641

233,670

139.32

Rural: Campo Grande, Jacarepaguá, Guaratiba, Inhaúma, Irajá, Santa Cruz, Paquetá, Ilha do Governador.

42,229

92,906

100.97

Total city population

274,372

522,451

90.24

Source: 1872 and 1890 censuses.

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Nevertheless, the population density in the central area of the city continued to be the highest by far. Therefore, although the number of houses in the center had increased at a slower pace than those in the suburban areas between 1870 and 1906, to the point where it even decreased in some of the central regions, the population density increased. In 1890, while the average of number inhabitants per house in freguesias (parishes) of the Cidade Nova (Santo Antônio and Espírito Santo) and suburbs of Engenho Velho and São Cristóvão was around five to seven individuals, in the freguesias of São José and Santa Rita it surpassed nine inhabitants per house, and in Candelária there lived an average of over sixteen inhabitants in each house.73 The map below gives an idea of that spatial concentration. This housing density in the central area could be explained by the high concentration of jobs, whether in workshops and factories or in the streets, and also by mobility difficulties, during a period in which the tram that connected the central area to the nearby regions was far too expensive for most workers, and train services to the more distant suburbs were quite precarious. Therefore, it was in collective habitations (most of them slum tenant houses, called cortiços) that the majority of workers who chose to live close to work in the central area resided with their families. In order

Map 1.1. Parishes of Rio de Janeiro at the end of the nineteenth century. Modified version of map derived by Wikimedia user Fulvio314 from original by user Nossedotti under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license, via Wikimedia Commons.

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to have an idea of the number of collective habitations in the central area, we can mention Maurício Abreu’s study, which found 348 cortiços in central freguesias in 1868, 771 in 1884, and 658 in 1888. While the number of cortiços grew largely between 1868 and 1884, and later decreased a little (under the pressure of sanitary regulations), the number of rooms did not decrease, jumping from 6,711 in 1864 to 11,737 in 1884 and remaining at 11,765 in 1888,74 with an average density of six to eight inhabitants per house in that area (cortiços, obviously, with an above average density).75 Considering the whole city, the collective habitations represented 3.96 percent of its buildings but sheltered 11.72 percent of the population in 1888.76 The precariousness and unhealthy character of these collective habitations are only too well known, as was the relatively high cost of rent given the scarcity of housing options.77 For that reason, many records registered how workers perceived living in these places as something extremely negative, yet another indicator of the unmerited situation that exploitation brought to workers. The same image of the indistinctness between the meritorious worker “artists” and socially disqualified people portrayed by the article that denounced searches in the arsenals was employed in the early 1860s in order to show the precariousness of workers’ housing: “Go to the most precarious lodgings and there you will find the craftsman surrounded by a large family, mistakenly taken for the dregs of society.”78 This sense of injustice regarding living conditions was aggravated by the fact that the city, capital of the Empire and later of the Republic, was taken as an example of civilization for the rest of the country, mirroring European examples, in particular those from France, which were regarded as a standard to be attained, a “civilizing impulse” according to the predominant view of the period, that seemed to be underlined by the quick introduction of urban services such as sewage (1864), piped water (1880), and the electric tram (1892). The contrast between the acclaimed advent of civilization and the workers’ way of life made the situation even more intolerable: In Rio de Janeiro, where it is said that civilization has advanced swiftly, the crafts and craftsmen remain abandoned, with nobody to turn to. … Search for those lodging places in the city’s backward areas: there you will find him surrounded by children and by his inconsolable wife, covered by tatters, begging the Almighty for the means to obtain a little bread to mitigate starvation and to stop his children’s uncontrollable crying!79

For those artisans, the wish to imitate the European civilization pattern was mainly responsible for such a situation, for instead of creating more jobs and valuing the national specialized workers by encouraging

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the products of local industry, it stimulated the uncontrolled importation of European manufactured goods, closing the market to national artisans: Search for the artisan’s shop. In every street you will find foreign manufactured goods, rubbish and abundant French trinkets, displayed in the most visible points, and the Brazilian artisan contemplates them, and in the face of that show, all he has got to offer is a scornful smile and in his mind, an awful thought to worry him.80

That scenario of an acute housing crisis was aggravated in the first decade of the twentieth century when the great works in the Capital of the Federation, promoted in the federal administration of President Rodrigues Alves with the support of the municipality then headed by Pereira Passos, resulted in the demolition of hundreds of buildings previously occupied by low-income housing.81 In that period of reforms, the Health Service was responsible for shutting down six hundred collective habitations, dislodging thirteen thousand people, and the municipality demolished seventy buildings that sheltered over a thousand inhabitants.82 The state’s demolition fury was not accompanied by any concern with building houses for the unsheltered people. In the 1900s, labor newspapers of socialist orientation oscillated between proposing government intervention, building houses, or even conceding plots of land and assuming a more flexible stance regarding workers’ own building efforts, and the defense of a mutual association alternative: an association of the workers themselves in order to raise funds for the purpose of building houses.83 The few government interventions in the area, such as the small corridor of houses built in Pereira Passos’s government in Salvador de Sá Avenue, would also be criticized by the labor press for, besides being quantitatively insignificant, the buildings were badly built and the houses were rented for a price beyond the possibilities of the working class.84 The analysis of labor newspapers and the daily press allows us to infer that the option of living in the workers’ villages built by the textile factories was not necessarily a better one, since the rents were also expensive and the standard of the buildings was precarious. So, in 1902, in the Bangu factory, the workers rented the sites in which they built wooden or brass shacks. In the same period, the Confiança factory rented wooden shacks, in precarious hygiene conditions, for the monthly amount of 45$000 (such factories paid between 130$000 and 290$000 to male adult workers in that period). The same amount was charged by the Aliança factory in 1903 for renting equally precarious shacks to about a thousand workers. Besides that, the workers of that industry were submitted to visits and ransacking of the dwellings established in the villages’ regulations to

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ensure there was no acquisition of goods from outside the monopoly of the factory’s store.85 As for the possibility of living in the faraway outskirts, it continued to become problematic for many workers as time went by. On the one hand, up until the 1880s it had been possible to build with certain liberty in the most distant regions from the center, but at the turn of the twentieth century, and especially during Pereira Passos’s government, the municipality extended its building regulations to cover peripheral areas, which made building more expensive and complicated and affected the living standards of the workers.86 On the other hand, while before the 1890s the railway passenger transport system, by EFCB,87 was precarious in terms of the number of stations and the frequency of services, the opening of new stations and passenger sidings over the years was not accompanied by the necessary increase in the number of coaches making up the trains, which led to transport conditions that only reinforced the sense of exploitation among workers, as we can notice from the following fragment of a labor press article: These lines serve their purpose because on the trains of the EFCB, Empresa Funerária Cabeça de Burro [literally Donkey Head Funeral Enterprise] as it is vulgarly known, thousands of men, women and children travel in the most uncomfortable positions, clinging on or crouching wherever they can in the carriages, where it is difficult even to stretch an arm. The harm to which these creatures are exposed is so imminent that any collision of the train with an obstacle on the line they speed along would be enough to make hundreds of victims.88

That is why, in spite of the suburbs’ growth, a great percentage of the workers would continue to live in the central area—intensifying even further the occupation of those collective habitations that had resisted demolition—or would choose to build their own houses, a possibility that began to take shape from the 1890s on: to climb hills and live in those slum areas that started to be known as favelas in the early twentieth century. Living in favelas, however, meant facing a double adversity: precarious building conditions combined with the absence of any urban improvements, on the one side, and being associated with several stigmas that served to justify repressive action unleashed on its inhabitants. As Rômulo Mattos shows, since the original representations on the favela hill, these spaces were associated to a host of pejorative representations, such as: territory of “dangerous classes”, site of lethal epidemics, another city inlaid in Rio de Janeiro, place of miserable people excluded from progress, hinterlands in opposition to modernity, place of African

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heritage and of backwardness and, finally, the one of aesthetic shame. Among these images, the strongest was that of territory of the “dangerous classes”, which tended to be linked to the others, increasing its power of impact.89

Health Another dimension of exploitation, experienced as even more violently degrading, was the one related to the insalubrious nature of the working and living environments, responsible for the proliferation of diseases, many of them lethal, among workers. The typographers can guide us again. The period’s newspapers reported many instances, such as the death of a young employee from a typographic workshop in 1861, victim, according to the article’s author, of the working conditions that abbreviated the workers’ years of life: How many young wives … mourn the early passing of their loyal consort who, giving himself entirely to a job (maybe beyond his forces), consumed, abbreviated even the few years of a life as laborious as inglorious!!!90

The dramatic appeal of that mournful discourse was not exaggerated. After all, over forty years later, a medical inquiry led by Moncorvo Filho, head of the Instituto de Assistência à Infância (Childhood Assistance Institute), into the workshops of the Imprensa Nacional (National Press)—a workplace that used to be considered by the typographers themselves as “not so bad” as similar ones—found that two-thirds (thirty-one out of forty-six) of the underage workers employed there had tuberculosis.91 Unhealthy workplaces were not only common in industrial establishments. Clerks also complained about the antihygienic conditions where they worked: “There are taverns and bars of the most repugnant kind, focuses of complete impurity as they embrace both the physical and intellectual, leaving no alternatives to the unfortunate employees except for a martyr’s resignation.”92 Undoubtedly, insalubrious working areas and homes were the main cause of the series of epidemics that have regularly devastated the city of Rio de Janeiro since the mid-nineteenth century. The surveys of the 1910s indicate that diseases such as smallpox had an average mortality rate of 0.30 per 1,000 inhabitants in ordinary housing, but in collective habitations this rate increased to 1.13. For instances of tuberculosis in the same period (1913 to 1917), the mortality rates were in the range of 2.83 to 4.14 in common habitations, but reached 8.55 to 10.13 in collective habitations.93 Although the hygienist efforts in the early nineteenth century had focused on yellow fever or smallpox, the most lethal disease was actually that associated with unhealthy working conditions: tuberculosis. According to Dr. Ernesto Thibau,

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in the period between 1850 and 1908, yellow fever killed 59,065 people, while tuberculosis killed 138,570, which is more than double! … If we go on to compare tuberculosis with other infectious diseases, we come to the conclusion that it beats all of them together, so, from 1903 to 1920, the sum of all the infectious diseases (plague, measles, scarlet fever, diphtheria, malaria, typhoid and paratyphoid fever, dysentery, beriberi, leprosy, whooping cough, influenza, smallpox and yellow fever) led to 64,231 deaths; tuberculosis alone, in the same period, 68,965!!!94

The labor movement militants clearly realized that the matter of public health was a matter of class. Especially on the subject of tuberculosis, we find many articles with a similar content to the one mentioned below, where the daily newspapers’ approach to the problem is commented on. In their reports, the newspapers admit the presence of the disease but only present opinions of the authorities interested in attenuating it, leaving aside any discussion of the root causes of the diseases that could lead to preventive action. According to the article’s author, What is undeniable, because the clearest light is shed on it, is that the main causes of tuberculosis are: excessive work, bad nutrition and insalubrious homes, and that it is precisely these tyrannical factors that devastate the poor, those that make up the great and fatal contingent of tuberculosis-infected people that daily go to the grave. … Check the statistics of people who are victim of this disease and check their social class; almost all of them belong to the working classes.95

The article’s conclusion highlighted, as the already-mentioned research among typographer apprentices showed, that the future of the class was obscure, for children were severely victimized by such diseases at an age when the factory was the last place where they should be: What fate is reserved for these miserable male or female children whom sad necessity has led to atrophying labor in the workshops, precisely at an age that calls for school and treatment?

The insalubrity of workplaces and houses was accompanied by horrible nutritional conditions, an additional factor in explaining disease incidence among the workers. An 1845 medical study, mentioned by Sidney Solis and Marcus Ribeiro, analyzes the diet of the poor, divided into free and slave workers. The first group was in turn divided between those who formed a family and those who did not. Classified in this manner, their nutritional habits were described in the following way: The first ones had a better diet. They had three meals per day: lunch (in the morning), dinner (from mid-day to two) and supper (early in the evening); the first meal was a quick one, composed of coffee, tea or mate [a kind of South American tea] and bread; the second consisted of beans, manioc flour, jerked beef and fruits (oranges or bananas). This meal could also consist of codfish,

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sardines, sweet potatoes, manioc, greens, pumpkin. … The second group had a worse diet. The last two meals were equivalent to those of the poor family. Lunch, however, generally had beans and jerked beef. Finally there were the slaves, eating worse than all the others. Their diet was the poorest, varying according to the city’s region and the occupation. Alimentation was usually divided in three meals, lunch and supper constituted of coffee or sugared water with bread; for dinner, beans, flour and little portions of jerked beef. Concerning the slave worker, the same misery, softened by a small variation: for lunch and dinner, three or four sardines and a big angu pasta; or a small portion of jerked beef (or codfish) and angu.96

It is not surprising then that, in the light of the nutritional problem, one can find in the workers’ newspapers of the early century abundant references to hunger as one of the most significant marks left by the exploitation experience.97

Wages and Employment When the typesetters went on strike in 1858, they had a clear justification for it: wages that failed to accompany the increase in the cost of staple goods; the high cost of living. Their view of the situation was not distorted; the data on the cost of living in the 1850s speak for themselves: The seven main staple foods sought by the public had their prices doubled and went even beyond that in the eight years between 1850–51 and 1858–59, and because the population did not double in this period, nor did production decrease, on the contrary, it increased somewhat, it is clear that only monopoly can be responsible for this price duplication in such a short period of time.98

One of the reasons that can explain the contrast between workers’ low wages in face of the high cost of living was the fact that the national industry was badly in need of greater stimulus and protection given the uncontrolled entrance of imported manufactured goods. Thus, the jobs that could provide a better quality of life to artisans and national workers were in short supply: “The carpenter, the shoemaker, the tailor live almost in miserable conditions.”99 Trapped between the lack of jobs and starvation, many resorted to military service as a way of escaping from poverty: The foreign manufactured goods, exported on a large scale to Brazil, came to steal from the craftsman the best support for his life—work—and would push him, deprived of all means, to appeal to the only honest option left—the uniformed services—to avoid starving to death.100

Extreme poverty became the main identifying element that endowed the proletariat’s experience with homogeneity. Low wages, far removed from

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a fair value for the work done, the high cost of essential goods for the reproduction of labor force, aggravated by high taxes, formed a combination that turned the workers’ living conditions into something very similar to those of a beggar, making the proletariat’s standard of living completely precarious: The proletariat’s life is painful and precarious. … There is no compensation for work. … The taxes on staple goods contribute to turn the artist almost into a beggar. … The blacksmith, the bricklayer, the woodworker, the painter, the typographer; all mechanical artists work without obtaining the fair price for their laborious drudgery, without any wage increase that could help them to bear all the taxes that rise every year and that it make difficult for them to satisfy their basic needs.101

Even working for the state did not assure greater stability for workers. After all, it was the same sense of misery that led the workers of the Arsenal de Marinha to complain to the minister of the navy about the low and delayed wages. The tone of supplication, appealing to a protective authority, was combined with the denouncement of the workers’ degrading situation. Appealing to the minister’s past, as he himself had once been the head of the Arsenal, the workers affirmed that they would keep hoping that he will not refuse to continue to protect the artistic class of the Arsenal de Marinha, not only by increasing wages that they receive, which have effectively diminished in view of the scarcity of staple goods; but demanding that their wages should be paid by the fifth day of each month.102

The comparison between what a worker earned and what he/she spent was constantly presented in the period’s newspapers in order to show the level of exploitation to which workers were submitted. One example is the 1890 article, published in Eco Popular, that estimated the average worker’s wage as 96$000 (taking as a reference the daily payment of 4$ for a worker of the Third Class in the Arsenal de Guerra multiplied by 24 days). In contrast, it presented the average expenses and the negative balance: Considering workers’ expenses: House rent in the neighborhood 30$000 Transportation tickets 8$000 Societies, pension, subscriptions 5$000 Food for the worker and his family, usually constituted by four people 60$000 Total costs 103$000 Comparing now the income (96$) with the spent (103$), we realize that the worker spent 7% more than what he earned.103

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As if the wages being insufficient to cover the workers’ costs wasn’t enough, in some moments their income was reduced, greatly increasing the feeling of injustice associated to exploitation. As recorded in 1900, the coffee warehouse workers complained about the wage reduction in the “Complaints of the people” section of the daily newspaper Jornal do Brasil: As you should know, Mr. Editor, the coffee worker’s craft is painful and mortifying, due to the nature and demands of the job. Usually, we get 160 réis for each sack; still, the coffee tradesmen considered that they should lower the price; 30 réis less per sack. The tradesmen’s procedures, besides being odious, are a clamorous injustice, for it has pushed us into an even more distressing situation than the previous one. For a year now this group has been so short of work that we find ourselves reduced to poverty, and our families have already suffered rigorous privations; there are weeks in which we work only two or three days.104

The Free and the Enslaved So far, we have seen that by the mid-nineteenth century in the working areas the coexistence of enslaved and free workers was something constant, perceivable as much in factories as in the streets. The passing of time would change this relation, with a decrease in slave presence in the city, but the labor force heterogeneity would remain, for the immigrant presence was to become more determinant. Such coexistence was also usual in living areas, feeding places, transportation, entertainment—that is, in all spaces that marked the workers’ experiences in the city. Sidney Chalhoub has already shown how the possibility of living on one’s own—shared by urban slaves, particularly those that worked as ganhadores—led to a situation in which slavery seemed concealable and the contrast between slaves and free workers turned out to be hardly perceived. When sharing homes in tenements, for instance, workers of different civil conditions became part of the same community.105 Generalizing this aspect to whole territories of the city, we find truly African “parts” in Rio at the turn of the twentieth century. In this chapter we shall emphasize the exploitation dimension in workers’ experience, but it would be impossible to ignore the contradictory positivity of sharing common territories from the viewpoint of identity creation between various sectors of the urban working class. Mônica Velloso, relating the affirmation of identities and the demarcation of territories associated with them, presents the “Little Africa” territory that progressively expanded in that period from the docks neighborhoods (Gamboa/Saúde/Santo

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Cristo) to Cidade Nova, around Praça Onze. Inhabited by a significant group of Africans and their descendants, mainly from the state of Bahia, the Little Africa community was the strongest counterpoint to the European ideal in the tropics into which the dominant classes intended to convert the city.106 Regarding the sociability networks’ viewpoint present there, such an area was at one and the same time a dwelling place and a place for the daily exchange of cultural and religious experiences that gave it its own identity. None of this would be dissociated from the “world of labor” in its strictest sense. The women known as tias (literally “aunts”), were true religious and cultural joining poles, and they ruled the area, having known the street environment so well ever since the time of slavery, when many of them were enslaved or freed street vendors occupying all the city center with their trays. The streets continued to be a place for workers’ socialization, where they could learn their craft, as the samba musician (and longshoreman) Heitor dos Prazeres highlights, referring to his experience in “Little Africa”: I belong to the time of apprenticeship, which is now so difficult. Whoever knew more would teach whatever he did, and that led to the existence of groups of people associated to certain crafts which became traditional in the Bahian group of Praça Onze, docks zone, and the Saúde district.107

Furthermore, precarious living areas that tended to promote sociability networks between slaves and free workers were not new at the end of that century. Even in the first half of the nineteenth century, the collective habitations that sheltered urban slaves could serve as a route for those who attempted a path toward freedom. This was the case of the zungus, studied by Carlos Eugênio Líbano Soares, which served the enslaved workers’ favorite food, angu, and provided temporary shelter to inhabitants in their rooms, among other functions. Parties, meetings, and Afro-Brazilian religious services took place there too, and that did not go unnoticed by the police institutions or by the municipal legislation, which attempted to control them. According to Líbano Soares, these aspects meant that they functioned as “points of cultural supply for the black people in the urban milieu, whether they were slaves or freemen, Africans or Creoles.”108 In that sense, the tias from Little Africa had had their ancestry deeply rooted in the city for many decades. Concentrating her attention on those territories identified as having the presence of a strong black population, Erika Arantes researched Rio de Janeiro’s port area, analyzing black workers in particular, and noticed how important this specific group was for mediating and circulating between sociability areas in work, housing, and entertainment, for the

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“sporadic nature of the docks employment allowed those men to often move around from the port to home and in public spaces.”109 The same sporadic nature of their work, accentuated by the fact of belonging to a category with “a history closely associated to slave labor,” would explain the vigor with which the police force acted in that region in its efforts to repress “vagabondage” in the first republican decades.110 From a similar perspective, Rômulo Mattos shows that the inhabitants of the docks zone and the dockworkers, who were largely indistinguishable from one another, were described in a dubious way by the dominating discourses in the articles published in the press of the period. João do Rio, a well-known writer, for instance, wrote some narratives by mid-1904 praising the high level of organization among the dockworkers, an order that seemed to him encouraged by the longshoremen’s own trade union. However, in 1905, after the “Vaccine Revolt,” an episode we will discuss in chapter 3, he wrote articles that contributed to the image of the region as a dangerous place of criminality. The mixture of admiration and fear that marked the images of the longshoremen and of their neighborhoods was also combined with representations of carnival—manifestation of the “pagan religions,” “luxurious, sad, half slave and rebellious,” “blustering, sweet, barbarian, shameful.” And, according to what the same João do Rio pointed out in a 1906 narrative, “the carnival would have vanished … if it weren’t for the enthusiasm of the groups of Gamboa, Saco, Saúde, São Diogo, Cidade Nova.”111 Those were precisely the docks neighborhoods. We have previously highlighted the African side of the community life associated with workers’ houses and neighborhoods, but we cannot ignore the strong immigrant presence in Rio de Janeiro’s labor force of that time. In an 1888 survey, for example, a total of 12,299 foreigners lived among the over 20,000 people in collective habitations.112 Therefore, collective and precarious habitation, just as much as the degrading working conditions, was part of an experience shared by free and enslaved workers until 1888, and it was also shared by natives and foreigners before and after that date. This coexistence could not avoid motivating comparisons between the workers’ different conditions. In the fourth chapter we shall dedicate more attention to this kind of comparison and to its changing and contradictory aspects along the years. Nevertheless, it is worthwhile to highlight some examples of the records of coexistence of enslaved and free workers in the workshops, who shared degrading working conditions. Such records could be employed to affirm a differentiation that should prevail, according to those who wanted to highlight the artisans’ dignity and qualification, especially during the years from 1850 to 1870, as in the case of those who assign to the fatal character of the hard, nocturnal labor

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in the typographic workshops the designation of a form of slavery, equally or perhaps even more degrading than the one experienced by those who belonged to someone else, namely, moral slavery. That was the case of the justification for the creation of the newspaper O Tipógrafo (The Typographer), in 1867: The creation of O Tipógrafo, due to the fact that an infinity of men live morally enslaved, has no other goal than to clearly demonstrate facts of refined iniquity which happen over and over again within the daily newspapers’ buildings, where the work, so terribly managed, shrinks the days of existence of many employees of these houses.113

The comparison, however, could also be taken in an inverse way, as João de Mattos does. Mattos was a bakers’ leader, and will be analyzed in more detail further in this work. In a period such as the 1880s, in which the abolitionist fights took the streets, he denounced a level of employers’ violence toward employees inside bakeries that ended up equating “the truly enslaved” to the supposedly free workers—who, for having but the alternative of choosing who would exploit them, he’d rather call “free enslaved”: The patrons were so cruel and abused their power. The “free enslaved” employees had the same prerogatives as the truly enslaved; for any reason at all they were punched, kicked and pushed out of the door.114

In the early twentieth century, the organized labor movement would not forget this kind of analogy, or the doctrinal issues raised in a 1909 article: “Did we by any chance, come into the world to be worse than slaves, to produce for the bosses alone? No!”115 The same analogy is observed in a situation in which the control over the workers could go beyond the factory area, reaching into their places of abode and other areas of sociability, as, for instance, when factory and neighborhood were indistinguishable, as could be seen in the region of Bangu. The “positive” aspects of forming a worker identity, resulting from life in a relatively homogeneous community concerning working experience and housing, would be noticed and reworked by many employers who, based on the factory-labor village combination (the company-town model), attempted to create a “form of domination that unfolds in the form of a strict political and ideological control of their labor force beyond the sphere of production.”116 The level of intervention of the enterprises in “their” workers’ life could, in this case, embrace the most diverse forms of labor sociability, including their entertainment spaces. In Bangu, José Sérgio Leite Lopes found the origin of “factory football.” The Companhia Progresso Industrial (Indus-

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trial Progress Company), of English origin, introduced football (soccer) initially among the factory’s English managers and employees through the Bangu Athletic Club, but, as their stay was often short, it ended up incorporating workers to the teams. According to Leite Lopes, While in the beginning football was introduced on the initiative of Englishmen for their own entertainment and sociability, soon the enterprise noticed that, in tune with the international practice of other enterprises in Europe which promoted football as a stimulus to workers, creating a feeling of belonging to a corporate community, it was a sport which fitted well into the activities and the employment of time in a labor village.117

The popularization of football, originally restricted to dominant classes, particularly of English immigrants and descendents, but which later became associated to other sectors, especially Afro-Brazilians, can be seen as an appropriation by those from “below” who endowed the “Brazilian football” with a number of peculiarities. However, in the origin of that process, including the incorporation of black men to football clubs, as the Bangu case shows, there were undisguised disciplinary intentions. According to Leite Lopes, The owners of the Bangu factory soon found out what would prove to be one of the main drivers of the diffusion of football among the different social classes in Brazil as was already happening in other parts of South America and Europe: the adoption of football as a pedagogical and disciplinary technique of a ‘total institution’, invented in the elite English boarding schools, but applicable for disciplining lower classes youth by various institutions directed to frame those classes in a moral and symbolic way.118

To the early twentieth-century labor movement militants, the repressive character of the company-towns was very clear, and in it their generation found a tangible parallel to the slave production unit, with plantation and the senzala (slave house) as the integrated spaces of the masters’ domination. According to worker militants who visited Bangu and attempted to give speeches in 1909 but were stopped by the company owners, the paternalist discourse of the owners and the domination of the factory and the churches over local life (almost entirely restricted to the areas of the company and its workers’ housing) led to a situation of complete lack of liberty; a situation marked by long workdays, low wages, high rents for precarious houses, but still passively accepted by many workers. Voluntary captives indeed, according to the article entitled “Escravidão em Bangu” (Slavery in Bangu): “the situation in Bangu was equal to or worse than that in other factories. There was no freedom but there was a strong inducement to forget and even praise the condition of captivity.”119

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The awareness of the existence of this new experience of “captivity” would lead the militants to stand up for class organization and collective action toward conquering a “new abolition.” However, organization, collective actions, and self-identifying traditions had existed among workers since the time of the older form of captivity and would not be extinguished simply with the enactment of the Lei Áurea (the law that abolished slavery in 1888), although they were most certainly reinterpreted after abolition. The following chapters are dedicated to these matters.

Notes 1. E. P. Thompson, “Folklore, Anthropology and Social History,” The Indian Historical Review 3, no. 2 (1978): 261. 2. Ibid., 264. 3. Ibid., 265. The determination of social being over social consciousness is also discussed by Thompson in The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (London: The Merlin Press, 1978), 201. 4. Thompson, “Folklore, Anthropology,” 266. 5. Ibid., 265. Emphasis in original. 6. Thompson, Poverty of Theory, 356. 7. João Fragoso and Manolo Florentino, O arcaísmo como projeto: mercado atlântico, sociedade agrária e elite mercantil no Rio de Janeiro, c.1790–c.1840 (Rio de Janeiro: Diadorim, 1993). 8. According to the systematization of the 1821 census produced by Eulália L. Lobo, História do Rio de Janeiro (do capital comercial ao capital industrial e financeiro) (Rio de Janeiro, IBMEC, 1976), 1: 135. 9. Brazil, Diretoria Geral de Estatística, Recenseamento Geral do Império do Brazil, 1872 (Rio de Janeiro: Typ. de G. Leuzinger e Filhos, 1876). 10. Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 138. 11. Manolo Florentino, “Um comércio singular: tráficos e traficantes de africanos no Rio de Janeiro (1790-1830),” Oceanos 44 (2000): 40. 12. Leslie Bethell, The Abolition of Brazilian Slave Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 312. 13. Eulália Lobo presents data on the cost of specialized slaves, who would cost 150$000 in 1821 to about 1:100$000 in 1842 and 1:180$000 in 1857. História do Rio de Janeiro, 1: 127. 14. See Sidney Chalhoub, Visões da liberdade: uma história das últimas décadas da escravidão na Corte (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1990). 15. Gladys Sabina Ribeiro, A liberdade em construção: identidade nacional e conflitos antilusitanos no Primeiro Reinado (Rio de Janeiro: Faperj/Relume Dumará, 2002), 180–81. 16. Luiz Felipe Alencastro, “Proletários e escravos: imigrantes portugueses e cativos africanos no Rio de Janeiro, 1850–1872,” Novos Estudos 21 (1988): 54. 17. Ibid., 44. 18. Luiz Carlos Soares, “Os escravos de ganho no Rio de Janeiro do século XIX.” Revista Brasileira de História 8, no. 16 (1988): 110.

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19. Ibid., 116. 20. Mary del Priore and Renato Pinto Venâncio, Ancestrais: uma introdução à História da África Atlântica (Rio de Janeiro: Elsevier, 2004), 20. 21. Ibid., 8. 22. Ciro F. S. Cardoso, Escravo ou camponês? O protocampesinato negro nas Américas (São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1987). Also see Ciro F. S. Cardoso, “The Peasant Breach in the Slave System: New Developments in Brazil,” Luso-Brazilian Review 25, no. 1 (1988): 49–57. 23. L. C. Soares, “Os escravos,” 130. 24. Marilene R. Nogueira da Silva, Negro na rua: A nova face da escravidão (São Paulo: Hucitec, 1988), 127. 25. Cardoso, Escravo ou camponês?, 111. 26. Ibid., 90. 27. Stuart Schwartz, Slaves, Peasants, and Rebels (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 48. 28. Eulália L. Lobo and Eduardo N. Stotz, “Formação do operariado e movimento operário no Rio de Janeiro, 1870–1894.” Estudos Econômicos 15 (1985): 57. 29. Alencastro, “Proletários e escravos,” 38. 30. Beatriz Mamigonian, “Revisitando o problema da ‘transição para o trabalho livre’ no Brasil: a experiência de trabalho dos africanos livres.” Paper presented at Jornadas de História do Trabalho, Pelotas, 2002, 1. 31. José Murilo Carvalho, Os bestializados: O Rio de Janeiro e a república que não foi (São Paulo: Cia. Das Letras, 1987), 79. 32. Sidney Chalhoub, Trabalho, lar e botequim: o cotidiano dos trabalhadores no Rio de Janeiro da Belle Époque (São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1986), 51. 33. Mary C. Karasch, Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro (1808–1850) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), see chapter 7. 34. L. C. Soares, “Os escravos,” 117–26. 35. Ibid., 116. 36. Karasch, Slave Life, chapter 7. 37. Carvalho, Os bestializados, 75. 38. In 1851, the amount of capital of this enterprise was highly significant. To give an idea of how significant it was, the entire national budget for the period was about 27,000:000$000Rs, according to data from Geraldo de Beauclair, Raízes da indústria no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Studio F&S, 1992), 156–58. 39. The number of laborers employed in the enterprise varied according to the period and to the source. Vitorino found, in 1856, 622 laborers, of whom 441 were free and 181 slaves; Artur José Renda Vitorino, “Operários livres e cativos nas manufaturas: Rio de Janeiro, segunda metade do século XIX.” Paper presented at Jornadas de História do Trabalho, Pelotas, November 2002, 7. On the other hand, Soares mentions, in 1857, 667 employed in the plant, out of which 507 were free (300 foreigners and 207 Brazilians) and 160 were slaves; Luiz Carlos Soares, “A manufatura na sociedade escravista: o surto manufatureiro no Rio de Janeiro e suas circunvizinhanças (1840–1870),” in La préindustrialization du Brésil, ed. F. Mauro (Paris: CNRS, 1984): 33. 40. Arsenal de Guerra establishment, for instance, counted on 840 laborers in 1851. See Jorge Prata de Souza, “A mão-de-obra de menores escravos, libertos e livres nas instituições urbanas,” in Escravidão: ofícios e liberdade, ed. J. P. de Souza (Rio de Janeiro: APERJ, 1998), 51. 41. In the 1830s, the Junta do Comércio (Commercial Board) “defined as ‘workshop’ an industrial establishment where one or more people were employed at any mechanic activity; ‘fabric’ the one that employs lots of workshops; ‘manufactory’ the one that enlarges many ‘factories’.” It was a matter, therefore, of size scale difference and not of labor organization. Lobo, História do Rio, 1: 115.

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42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48. 49.

50.

51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

61. 62.

63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

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Lobo, História do Rio, 1:176–77, 180. Ibid., 185. The previous data are on p. 194. Ibid., 205. Ibid., 2:487, 488. An excellent synthesis on the historiographical debate about that moment can be found in Maria Bárbara Levy, “República S.A.: a economia que abalou o Império.” Ciência Hoje 59 (1989): 25–49. Carlos A. M. Lima, “Sobre a lógica e a dinâmica das ocupações escravas na cidade do Rio de Janeiro, 1789-1835,” in Souza, Escravidão, 15. Lobo, História do Rio, 120. Beauclair, Raízes da indústria. The thesis of incompatibility between machinery, technology, and slavery for the rural situation is refuted by Peter Eisemberg using the same line of thought. “Escravo e proletário na história do Brasil,” in P. Eisemberg, Homens esquecidos (Campinas: Ed. Unicamp, 1989), 187 ss. Carlos Engermann, “Estado, escravidão e trabalho: Real Fazenda de Santa Cruz, RJ (1790–1820).” Paper presented to XXIII Simpósio Nacional de História da ANPUH, João Pessoa, 2003, 8. Alinnie S. Monteiro, “Trabalhadores do Império: os africanos livres na Fábrica de Pólvora da Estrela. Serra da Estrela, Rio de Janeiro, c. 1831–c. 1850.” Paper presented to XXIII Simpósio Nacional de História da ANPUH, João Pessoa, 2003, 2. L. C. Soares, “A manufatura na sociedade,” 16–17. L. C. Soares, “Os escravos de ganho,” 110; idem, Escravidão industrial, 18. Lobo, História do Rio, 2: 508. Eduardo Stotz, A formação da classe operária: Rio de Janeiro, 1870–1890 (research report, Niterói: UFF, 1984), 22–23. Lobo, História do Rio, 508. A more systematic approach to these newspapers will be presented in chapter 4. O Tipógrafo, no. 3, 11/13/1867, ano I, 2. O Eco dos Artistas, no. 14, Rio de Janeiro, 9/1/1861, 1. O Eco dos Artistas, nos. 15 and 16, Rio de Janeiro, 9/8/1861 and 9/15/1861, 2. Daily labor only and resting on Sundays is also defended in the same newspaper, no. 18, 9/29/1861, 1. O Progresso, no. 2, Rio de Janeiro, 12/12/1858, 1. O Caixeiro, Rio de Janeiro, 3/5/1899, 1. Fabiane Popinigis analyzes the theme in the article, “As sociedades caixeirais e o ‘fechamento das portas’ no Rio de Janeiro (1850–1912).” Cadernos do AEL 11–12 (2000): 110–46. Stotz, A formação, 46–47. “O maquinismo nas padarias,” A Voz do Trabalhador, no. 19, Rio de Janeiro, 10/30/1909, 3–4. “Resoluções do 1o Congresso Operário de 1906,” Voz do Trabalhador, no. 48, Rio de Janeiro, 2/1/1914, 7. In Sidney Solis and Marcus V. Ribeiro, “O Rio onde o sol não brilha: acumulação e pobreza na transição para o capitalismo.” Revista Rio de Janeiro 1 (1985): 53. Ibid., 52. A Voz do Trabalhador, Rio de Janeiro, 6/1/1909. In Vitorino, Máquinas e operários, 119. O Tipógrafo, no. 5, 11/27/1867, ano I, 2. Ibid. Gazeta Operária, no. 4, 12/18/1884, ano I, 3. “Resoluções do 1o Congresso Operário de 1906,” Voz do Trabalhador, no. 48, Rio de Janeiro, 2/1/1914, 7. Eulália Lobo, Lia Carvalho, and Myrian Stanley, Questão habitacional e o movimento operário (Rio de Janeiro: Edufrj, 1989), 152–55.

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74. Maurício Abreu, “Da habitação ao habitat: a questão da habitação popular no Rio de Janeiro e sua evolução,” Revista Rio de Janeiro 2 (Rio de Janeiro, 1986): 50. 75. Lobo, Carvalho, and Stanley, Questão habitacional, 155. 76. Solis and Ribeiro, “O Rio onde o sol não brilha,” 53. 77. Lia Aquino Carvalho, Habitações populares—Rio de Janeiro: 1886–1906 (Rio de Janeiro: Secretaria Municipal de Cultura, 1986). 78. O Eco dos Artistas, no. 12, Rio de Janeiro, 8/18/1861, 1. 79. O Tipógrafo, no. 7, 12/14/1867, ano I, 2. 80. Ibid. 81. There is a great amount of historiographic discussion on the early twentieth-century reforms. Some of the most important works on the theme include Nicolau Sevcenko, Literatura como missão: tensões sociais e criação cultural no Rio de Janeiro da Primeira República (São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1983); Jaime Larry Benchimol, Pereira Passos: um Haussmann Tropical (Rio de Janeiro: Secretaria Municipal de Cultura, 1990); Carvalho, Os bestializados; Oswaldo Porto Rocha, A era das demolições: Cidade do Rio de Janeiro: 1870–1920 (Rio de Janeiro: Secretaria Municipal de Cultura, 1986). 82. Lobo, Carvalho, Stanley, Questão habitacional, 80. 83. On the municipality proposals to solve the problem, see, for example, “Casas para operários,” Gazeta Operária (2a fase), Rio de Janeiro, 12/1/1906, 1. On the proposals for cooperation among laborers for the construction of houses, see “Bolsas Proletárias,” Gazeta Operária, Rio de Janeiro, 11/9/1902, 1, and “Associação Predial dos Operários,” Gazeta Operária, Rio de Janeiro, 1/25/1903, 3. 84. “As Tais Casas para Operários” A Voz do Trabalhador, no. 6, Rio de Janeiro, 11/29/1908. See also the criticism of the buildings during Hermes da Fonseca’s government in the same newspapers in numbers 28, 4/1/1913, and 46, 1/1/1914. 85. See Lobo, Carvalho, and Stanley, Questão habitacional, 81, for the rent prices on workers’ villages, from the newspapers Gazeta Operária and A Nação. On labor wages, see Eulália Lobo and Eduardo Stotz, “Flutuações cíclicas da economia, condições de vida e movimento operário—1880–1930,” Revista Rio de Janeiro 1 (Rio de Janeiro, 1985): 72. 86. Abreu, “Da habitação ao habitat,” 56–57. 87. Estrada de Ferro Central do Brasil (Brazilian Central Railway). 88. A Voz do Trabalhador, no. 48, Rio de Janeiro, 2/1/1914, 2. 89. Rômulo Costa Mattos, A “aldeia do mal”: o morro da favela e a construção social das favelas durante a primeira república (master’s diss., Niterói: UFF, 2004). Emphasis in original. 90. O Eco dos Artistas, no. 9, Rio de Janeiro, 7/28/1861, 3 and 4. 91. Correio da Manhã, Rio de Janeiro, 1/31/1908, 4. In Vitorino, Máquinas, 113. 92. O Caixeiro, Rio de Janeiro, 4/22/1899, 1. 93. Solis and Ribeiro, “O Rio onde o sol não brilha,” 53. 94. Ernesto Thibau, A luta contra a tuberculose no Brasil, in Solis and Ribeiro, “O Rio onde o sol não brilha.” 95. “A tuberculose,” A Voz do Trabalhador, no. 35, Rio de Janeiro, 7/15/1913, 1. 96. Solis and Ribeiro, “O Rio onde o sol não brilha,” 54–55. The authors compare that survey from the nineteenth century with Josué de Castro’s studies of the 1930s and find there more continuity than change. Angu is a dish cooked with flour of manioc and maize, boiled in water and salt. 97. To give but a few examples of only one newspaper, “No Brasil não há fome!,” A Voz do Trabalhador, no. 25, 2/15/1913, 3; “A Fome,” A Voz do Trabalhador, no. 26, 3/1/1913, 3. 98. Sebastião Ferreira, Notas estatísticas sobre a produção agrícola e a carestia de gêneros alimentícios no império do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: IPEA/INPES, 1977). 99. O Tipógrafo, no. 5, 11/27/1867, ano I, 1.

Work, Urban Life, and the Experience of Exploitation

100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106.

107. 108.

109. 110. 111.

112. 113. 114. 115. 116.

117.

118. 119.

51

Ibid. Tribuna Artística, no. 3, ano I, 12/3/1871, 2. Jornal dos Artistas, no. 1, Rio de Janeiro, 1862, 2. Eco Popular, Rio de Janeiro, 3/27/1890, 1–2. Jornal do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro, 6/30/1900, 4. Sidney Chalhoub, Cidade febril: cortiços e epidemias na corte imperial (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1998). Mônica Pimenta Velloso, “As tias baianas tomam conta do pedaço: Espaço e identidade cultural no Rio de Janeiro.” Estudos Históricos 3, no. 6 (1990): 207–28. To better define the idea of a Little Africa, it is useful to call attention to the fact that the majority of the area’s residents was not constituted by Afro-descendants, although proportionally there were more black men and women there than in other regions of the city. In Velloso, “As tias baianas,” 211. First quoted by Roberto Moura, Tia Ciata e a Pequena África no Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro: Funarte, 1983). Carlos Eugênio Líbano Soares, Zungú: rumor de muitas vozes (Rio de Janeiro: Aperj, 1998), 30. Synthetic references to these spaces can be found also in Luiz Carlos Soares, Urban Slavery in Nineteenth Century Rio de Janeiro (PhD thesis, London: University College, 1988), 306. Erika Bastos Arantes, O porto negro: cultura e trabalho no Rio de Janeiro dos primeiros anos do século XX (master’s diss., Campinas: Unicamp, 2005), 63. Ibid., 66. All references to the narratives come from R. Mattos, A “aldeia do mal,” 218–21. Other similar references on the stigmatizing and criminalizing form of viewing that region and the dockworkers can be found in Vellasco e Cruz, Virando o jogo. On the importance of the Little Africa region to carnival, see Rachel Soihet, A subversão pelo riso (Rio de Janeiro: FGV, 1998), especially chapter 2. Solis and Ribeiro, “O Rio onde o sol não brilha,” 53. O Tipógrafo, no. 2, ano I, 11/4/1867, 1–2. Leila Duarte, Pão e liberdade: uma história de escravos e livres na virada do século XIX (Rio de Janeiro: Aperj/Faperj/Mauad, 2002), 65. A Voz do Trabalhador, no. 19, Rio de Janeiro, 10/30/1909, 3. José Sérgio Leite Lopes, “Sobre os trabalhadores da grande indústria na pequena cidade,” in Cultura e identidade operária: aspectos da cultura da classe trabalhadora, ed. J. S. L. Lopes (Rio de Janeiro: EdUFRJ/Marco Zero, 1987), 147. José Sérgio Leite Lopes, “Classe, etnicidade e cor na formação do futebol brasileiro,” in Culturas de classe: identidade e diversidade na formação do operariado, ed. Cláudio Batalha, Fernando Teixeira da Silva, and Alexandre Fortes (Campinas: Ed. Unicamp, 2004), 131. Ibid. On the social scope of football, see also Leonardo A. M. Pereira, Footeballmania: Uma história social do futebol no Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 2000). A Voz do Trabalhador, no. 20, Rio de Janeiro, 11/15/1909, 1.

CHAPTER TWO

FORMS OF ORGANIZATION In the first chapter of The Making of the English Working Class, Edward Thompson analyzes the London Corresponding Society (LCS), founded in 1792 by the shoemaker Thomas Hardy and eight companions with the purpose of promoting a parliamentary reform (extension of suffrage). Within six months the society announced that it had two thousand members. In spite of attributing a merely relative value to the pioneering nature of the SLC initiative, Thompson lists the elements that, in his view, defined SLC as a new type of organization and, for many, the first labor organization: There is the working man as Secretary. There is the low weekly subscription. There is the intermingling of economic and political themes—“the hardness of the times” and Parliamentary Reform. There is the function of the meeting, both as social occasion and as a centre for political activity. There is the realistic attention to procedural formalities. Above all, there is the determination to propagate opinions and to organize the converted, embodied in the leading rule: “That the number of our Members be unlimited.”1

The Corresponding Society, however, was not taken as a model of organization to be reproduced in any other context. Even in England, after the Combination Acts approval (1799–1800) that suppressed the right to association, other forms of labor organization gradually emerged, initially illegal.2 After the accomplishment of the right to association (revoking of the Combination Acts in 1824), an expansion of trade unions occurred. The 1830s and 1840s were marked by an increase in labor mobilization, initially by means of the trade unions, culminating with the foundation of the Grand National Consolidated Trade Unions of corporatist-Owenist orientation. This national organization, however, was not to last long. At the end of the decade the labor movement reemerged with the big Chartist mobilizations (in defense of electoral and parliamentary reforms

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that could assure the extension of political rights to adult male workers). The Chartist mobilizations resulted in some legal accomplishments, such as the reduction of working hours to ten, but the decline of Chartism at the end of the 1840s marked the beginning of a period of decline for English labor struggles that would last until the end of the century. The electoral reform was finally achieved in 1867, and two years later, the English labor movement created a national organization—the Trade Union Congress—but it was almost twenty years later that it would experience a new significant ascending phase. The 1890s saw the emergence of a “new unionism,” typified by new political strategies for labor action, greater radicalism, socialist influence, and the creation of new trade unions among workers who had not been unionized until then. In the 1890s, efforts for a workers’ autonomous organization also emerged. The return of unionism would stimulate such efforts that would lead, in 1906, to the foundation of the Labor Party. Considering this phase at the turn of the twentieth century as decisive for the formation of the English working class, Eric Hobsbawm disagrees with Thompson, as Thompson identifies the Chartist and even the preChartist phase as the moment of the formation of the English working class. According to Hobsbawm, those were important “ancestors,” but “working-class is not ‘made’ until long after Thompson’s book ends.”3 In order to explain the reasons for such periodization, Hobsbawm relates four factors: growth and concentration of the working class; change in its occupations composition; national economic integration, concentration of capital, and the increasing role of government in the economy; and, lastly, the extension of suffrage and mass politics. Departing from those parameters, he identifies the British proletariat based on the following factors: the physical environment in which they lived, by a style of life and leisure, by a certain class consciousness increasingly expressed in a secular tendency to join unions and to identify with a class party, the Labour Party.4

We stand in agreement with Hobsbawm’s valuation of trade unions and labor parties as typical working-class organizations. However, his disagreement with Thompson concerning the moment when the working class was “made” does not seem appropriate. After all, although Thompson has indeed pointed out a moment in which the labor class would be “formed,” his perspective of formation can support a process analysis in which the determination of a starting or an ending point will always be considered problematic.5 In that sense, concerning the experiences of organization, discourses and practices of a class nature emerged even among

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collective organizations of non-union type or non-party type. Therefore, the attempt to assess the amount of class consciousness by measuring the participation in political parties or trade unions does not seem appropriate. Besides, we cannot ignore the coexistence of “traditional” and “new” associations, both claiming to be of a class nature. Thus, taking into account the Brazilian case of the second half of the nineteenth century, it is necessary to embrace the conclusion that “new” examples of European workers’ organizations were in fact available references. Other national experiences help us to perceive the parameters on which the workers based their associating efforts. As we have found various references to foreign experiences and organization models in local sources, it is important to at least mention them, even if only superficially. The French workers’ experiences have been those most referred to in this regard, as is possible to perceive from the comments of the nineteenth-century press. In order to recover such organizing references, however succinctly, it is important to go back further in time. Between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, associations of French artisans were founded in the form of brotherhoods and known as guilds, charities, or fraternities, among others names. The compagnonnage was the form of organization that established a link between those traditional organizations and the nineteenth century, a confraternity that attempted to ensure the employment of the compagnons and supported their circulation in the tour de France, marking its identity by means of various rituals.6 Craft-linked societies of mutual assistance began to appear in the late eighteenth century. The contribution amount was low, as were the benefits; the monthly payment corresponded to one-twenty-fifth of the weekly wage and the insurance, to one-thirtieth of the daily wage, otherwise the workers could not have afforded to belong to such mutual-relief societies. They were made illegal under the 1791 Le Chapelier Act voted by the National Assembly during the period of Girondine rule, which prohibited such permanent or temporary coalitions as well as associations and strikes. The Criminal Code of Napoleon’s period kept up the penalties against workers’ and employers’ coalitions. Although the labor organizations were suppressed during various phases, they were also tolerated at certain other moments. Thus, in 1823, there were 132 mutual societies in Paris, with members numbering 11,143. In the early nineteenth century they even supported some strike movements.7 In the 1830s and 1840s, “resistance societies,” whose aim was no longer to provide assistance to those who were out of work but rather to those who refused to work for low wages, multiplied constituting funds. Comparing the representativeness of these associative models, it is inter-

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esting to notice that those of the resistance type had thousands of supporters, while those of the mutuality type generally had hundreds. Like other experiences of organization at moments when big factories did not yet predominate in the manufacturing sector, the resistance societies were stronger in small factories and in local movements. It is possible to state that those organizations were, in a similar way to those of the British Owenist phase, more cooperative than unionist, even though they were clandestine. In the 1830s, the proposals for production workers’ associations also increased, under the influence of the socialist Charles Fourier and the newspaper L’Artisan. This idea was very strong among the Parisian typographers, who printed newssheets proposing an association of typographers to create a labor press and to resist mechanization of the sector. That kind of proposal, still more of a cooperative type than of a unionist one, faced strong difficulties, which ended up strengthening the idea that the associations would be possible if the government took on the task by creating the National Workshops.8 Even after 1848–51, the proposal of the labor association of cooperative production continued to be strong especially among typographers. Although French labor mobilization was evident in strike waves and mass mobilizations and especially in revolutionary moments, fundamental accomplishments demanded centuries-long struggles, for the strike was only legally formalized in 1864, and the regulation of the right to organize unions was not completed until 1884. At that time, the French debate on the labor movement started to gain the outlines that would characterize the following turn-of-the-century period: reformist traditions versus revolutionary tradition; traditions of autonomy versus the political physiology tradition; the tradition of struggling to destroy the state versus traditions of conquering government. After 1893 the anarchists penetrated the trade unions, but their ideas, like the trade unions themselves, were transformed in the process, thereby originating the so-called “revolutionary syndicalism” that predominated in the movement between 1895 and 1914. Political independence, the idea of unions as the united front of workers’ economic defense, and direct action strategy, particularly general strikes, were its main characteristics.9 In 1895, after the creation of Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) in the Limoges Congress, revolutionary syndicalism’s phase of greatest influence began, when Sorel’s proposition on strikes was often set in motion: “the strike is the proletariat’s specific weapon; whenever led to its highest degree, it shall be the instrument of its liberation.”10 However, that was a unionism of minorities only, numbering just four to six thousand members out of a 10 million-strong labor population.

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It is possible to notice, however, that the expansion of unionism did not mean the end of earlier forms of association, for the compagnonnages and the cooperative organizations continued to exist. It is also important to highlight that the non-party nature of the revolutionary syndicalism pattern did not mean the end of the line for workers’ political party organization. In France, the socialists had been running in elections since 1848 but had represented a minority ever since then until the end of the century (1.5 percent in 1889). In the following years, however, they started to grow in elections (10 percent of the votes in 1910 and 17 percent in 1914 for SFIO [Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière (French Section of the Workers` International)]). Within the European framework at the turn of the century, though, the main reference for the workers’ party was not the English Labour Party, nor the French SFIO, but the German Workers Social-Democratic Party (the SPD). The call for workers’ unity in the form of national political parties launched by the International Workingmen’s Association had its strongest support in Germany.11 There, the conquest of the right to form workers’ associations, in 1869, had been followed by the creation of two parties— the General Union of German Workers, founded by Ferdinand Lassale, and the Social-Democratic Workers Party, led by August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht. Both attempted to represent the enlargement of the laboring class within the period’s move toward industrialization. In 1875, in Gotha, both parties united, adopting the name the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD in German). Between 1878 and 1890, this party was condemned to illegality by the German state. From an electoral point of view, the SPD turned out to be a strong alternative at the end of nineteenth century. In 1877, it received 9 percent of the votes in the elections. In 1890, in the first elections after obtaining legal status, the party received 1.5 million votes, 19,7 percent of the total. On the eve of the First World War, the SPD had 110 chairs in the parliament, conquered with the support of 4.25 million voters (34 percent of the votes). Over a million people were members of the party. The accomplishments of the party have been explained by Wolfgang Abendroth in the following terms: By organizing and training working-class cadres, mostly from the ranks of the skilled workers, and with the cooperation of socialist intellectuals, German socialism showed that it was strong enough to wrest considerable socio-economic concessions from the government. It was thus able to improve the conditions and the living standards of the whole working class in times of economic prosperity and to give it some stability in times of crisis.12

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The main base of this organized social force was in the trade unions. The SPD had strongly invested in the fight to unionize workers—especially in the 1890s—by proposing that “free unions” (this is what the unions of socialist orientation were called) ought to be centrally and nationally organized, by industrial sectors (and not by crafts/occupations). In the early 1890s there were 300 thousand members and in 1913 they numbered 2.5 million associates. Mary Nolan argues that, while England experienced the first industrial revolution and France saw the birth of the first socialist organizations, “Germany produced the largest and best-organized workers’ movement in the late nineteenth century.”13 According to the author, that happened due to social democracy’s successful strategy of constructing a party of the masses and a centralized unionism, although she acknowledges that it only happened within the framework of an ambiguous conception of parliamentary action, the adoption of a determinist-Marxist theoretical orientation, and certain distancing from the majority of society’s most expressive sectors. For that reason, she declares that in the late nineteenth century, social democracy in Germany laid the basis for becoming both the model of success for socialist workers elsewhere and the embodiment of the limits of social democracy as a social movement, a political practice and an ideology of revolutionary transformation.14

In the 1890s, the German example of organization had, therefore, the strongest influence on those who, in Brazil, as much as in other parts, proposed to organize workers with socialist proposals as their parameters. To analyze organizational proposals and practices among Rio de Janeiro’s workers between the mid-nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century while ignoring international experiences would mean failing to take into consideration that such experiences were references available at the time and that they were evaluated by those who wished to create workers’ associations in that city.

Associations We started this work by mentioning a strike movement mainly supported by an organization of the mutual type, the Imperial Associação Tipográfica Fluminense (Imperial Fluminense Typographic Association). That organization was just one among the hundreds that existed at the time. Inspired by the model of its international equivalents, especially the French ones, the mutual-benefit societies were organized by the free association

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of members who generally paid a jóia (fee) in order to enter and a monthly contribution to have the right to resort to the caixa (fund) in case of certain necessities, such as financial aid in cases of illness or for funerals, the most common forms of assistance contemplated in the associations’ statutes, or in situations of invalidity, imprisonment, or pensions for widows.15 The statutes of certain associations allowed for only some of those types of assistance, as in the case of the Caixa Beneficiente da Corporação de Docentes do Rio de Janeiro (Benefit Fund of the Corporation of Rio de Janeiro’s Teachers), which determined in its fourth article, “The society has as its only goal to provide assistance to its members in case of illness, which can be requested by members themselves, or in the case of death, by their families.”16 Other associations, such as the employees of the Inspeção Geral das Obras Públicas (General Inspection of Public Works), established in their statutes various forms of assistance: Art. 2—The Association will provide to its members: a) Assistance whenever they are unable to work, or for disablement caused by accident, illness or old age; b) Contribution towards funeral costs; c) Pension for their families; d) Money loan; e) Bail; f) Insurance;17

The requests for membership varied; some of these associations organized themselves according to members’ national origin, neighborhood, or in a “cosmopolitan” way (open to everyone), or even, as in the typographers’ case, using profession as the criterion. The formula adopted by the London Corresponding Society was the most common: “the number of members is unlimited”;18 or, “the society shall be composed of national members and foreigners, in an unlimited number.”19 There were certainly limitations imposed, especially in national or professional associations. Nevertheless, in a society marked by slavery, immigration, and other variables that created a heterogeneous urban population, it is surprising that so many statutes were open to people “of any sex, nationality or religion.”20 Exceptions to that pattern did occur, such as the case of the statutes of the Sociedade Beneficiente Trinta e Um de Outubro do Amor ao Trabalho (Beneficent Society October 31 of Love to Work), which had various articles contested by the Conselho de Estado (State Council), such as the one that allowed only those who were “born as freemen to join,” which was considered an “awful exclusion” by the rapporteur of the administrative process.21 However, if the restriction to freedmen was a clause that even the government condemned, association of slaves was

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nevertheless forbidden by law, as we will discuss later, and many associations of a professional character clearly defined that only members “in the condition of freemen and of good behavior”22 would be admitted. On the other hand, it is significant that, although statutes generally mentioned the possibility of admitting people of “both sexes,” it was common to find restrictions such as “The admission of ladies can only be proposed by their husbands.”23 Besides, the lists of directors, commonly added at the end of the documents of the first assemblies, rarely present a single woman’s name, which indicates that mutual associations were still places where barriers to women persisted. Regarding the associations of professional character, which most interest us, they usually gathered workers of the same craft or enterprise, which allowed those associations to be close to their members’ collective interests in issues concerning the labor world. Naturally, the workers were the ones most interested in belonging to such mutual societies, for in the absence of any social security policy on the part of the state and in the face of the reality of low wages and a high cost of living, the constitution of caixas (funds) by solidarity contribution could be decisive in mitigating the tough survival conditions. For that reason, such organizations had to balance themselves between their tight budget because of the low subscription charged (or otherwise they would not be able to enroll workers) and the often low number of members and the cost of benefits they paid. Between the 1870s and 1880s, the most common tax charged for their members was 1$000 (a thousand réis), plus a jóia charged at the moment of admission (2 to 5$000), although that could vary. As we have seen in the preceding chapter, in 1890 the labor newspapers considered something around 100$000 as an average labor wage, which allows us to perceive that, even if the workers’ budget was very tight, it was possible for most free workers to join a mutual-benefit society. To balance the budget under such circumstances was indeed a complex task, as shown by the report of the Associação de Auxílios Mútuos dos Empregados da Tipografia Nacional (Mutual Aid Association of the National Typography Enterprise), associating employees of a single public graphic enterprise, from 1881 and 1882. For that association, restricted to employees of a single company, the number of members oscillated between 222 at the beginning, 274 at its height, and 255 at the end of the period (out of which only 207 regularly contributed). Receiving 17:875$361 from the previous administration, the board raised 11:108$593 in contributions during its period in office and spent 6:456$336, which resulted in a balance of 22:527$618. The balance was positive because the number of members benefited by pensions was minimal—just five—and the

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pension amount was very low (they spent a total of 224$100 in that period). The deaths of eight members were a little more expensive, amounting to 800$000 in funeral costs. The benefits paid to members (especially in case of illness) represented the highest amount of all, 4:673$536.24 But the values of the benefits in general tended to be very low, as shown by the report of the Associação Geral de Auxílios Mútuos da E. F. D. Pedro II (an association of railroad employees) from 1877, in which it is possible to see that the assistance for temporary invalidity was 18$000 per month, the assistance for permanent invalidity was 30$000 per month, and funeral assistance oscillated between 50$000 and 100$000.25 In such cases of associations with a clearly profession-based profile, besides the mutual assistance, some entities had among their goals the defense of the craft and education for members, usually of professional type (lessons and/or libraries). For that reason, the already-mentioned statute of the Imperial Associação Tipográfica included among its purposes to “contribute to the development and progress of the typographic art, whenever possible” and defined some possibilities of contributing “artistic instruction of those who dedicate themselves to the art. In order to accomplish that goal, the board shall concentrate its efforts on expanding its library.”26 With the same intention, the statute of the Associação Geral de Auxílios Mútuos da E. F. C. do Brasil registered the entity as having been founded in 1883, “to promote cooperation and solidarity among all railroad employees and workers.”27 There were libraries in many mutual entities, the maintenance of which was included among the statutory goals.28 To provide members with professional education was also one of the statutory goals of many mutual associations, such as the Associação dos Funcionários Públicos Civis (Civil Servants’ Association), which had “professional and literary education for members’ children”29 as a goal. There were even those that were fully dedicated to instructing or gave priority to it, such as the Sociedade Propagadora da Instrução às Classes Operárias da Freguesia da Lagoa (Propagator Society of Instruction of Working Classes from Lagoa), founded in 1872.30 In the course of investigating statutes and process records, we have been able to find hundreds of such organizations. Eduardo Stotz found sixty-seven mutual-benefit societies of the cosmopolitan type and fortyeight of a professional nature from 1883.31 In his survey, Claudio Batalha found the records of the foundation of forty-seven associations between 1835 and 1899.32 In our own research, based on statutes and reports deposited in the Biblioteca Nacional (National Library) and the processes of the Conselho de Estado stored in the National Archives, we found over 180 mutual, beneficent, or similar societies between the 1850s and first decade of the 1900s.

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We also found some other examples of associations with a professional group-gathering character besides those previously mentioned, such as the Sociedade de Beneficiência dos Artistas da Construção Naval (shipbuilding workers), founded in 1858; the Associação Cooperadora dos Empregados da Tipografia Nacional (typographers), founded in 1872; the Sociedade Protetora dos Barbeiros e Cabeleireiros (barbers), founded in 1874; and the Associação dos Empregados do Comércio (shop employees), founded in 1880. The explicit purposes of these entities could be defined, as we have seen in the statutes, in terms of instruction, moralization, and solidarity, as exemplified by the Associação dos Artistas Brasileiros Trabalho, União e Moralidade (opened to all artisans), which declared having as its goal fostering fondness and love for work to the benefit of the country, progress in the arts [crafts and professions], and the reputation of Brazilian artists [craftsmen and professionals]; to unite in a single and great family the sons of labor so that, by drawing on the strength stemming from unity and with each contribution, they may protect each other and mutually help one another as brothers in facing all life’s travail and calamities; to moralize and instruct by example, by counseling and by written doctrine fellow artists and workers, so that they can gain the reputation and social importance of their brothers in the enlightened countries.33

Furthermore, that associative spirit could be defined in broader terms, not only as a compensatory mechanism to address unmet needs and foster the social ascension and recognition of the members but also as the embryo of a less unequal model of social organization, in which cooperation among classes prevailed over exploitation. As the members of the Associação Tipográfica Fluminense put it in 1881, The spirit of the association, establishing relations and fraternizing with every class of society so that they can help each other, is one of the elements that have strongly contributed to the society’s development. The working classes owe the improvement of their living conditions to this spirit, creating charity societies all over, having as their main word the sacred symbol of redemption and the great dogma of universal equality that completely changed the world and called brothers all men.34

Since the 1870s, this seems to have been the mote of the appeals to build associations that gathered workers of different crafts into a single organization; an aim that motivated the pages of the Tribuna Artística (Artistic Tribune) newspaper. At the end of November 1871, it published the article “Direitos dos Trabalhadores” [Workers’ Rights], in which it discussed the importance of mutual-benefit societies, not only by groups belonging to the same profession but by all those who made their living by working:

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By means of this recourse to mutuality, by means of this institution so necessary to ensure that no single class, however strong it may be, shall prevail over its co-sisters, we can overcome the huge problem generated not only by proprietors’ obstinate resistance but also by the fatal subservience of those whose lack of real merit has led them to attempt to distinguish themselves from the proletariat in a disastrous way.

Later, the same article defended how opportune building an association of that nature was in the context of the time: The sooner the true beneficent society is organized, in whose bases workers will find the principle of right by which they should live in society, the better for everyone and for everything: the constant machinations of the enemy will cease and the march, the demand for moral and material progress will begin; one that is long overdue in Brazil, as we will have the opportunity to show.35

The response to the appeal took the form of the foundation of the Sociedade Beneficiente Liga Operária (Labour League Benefit Society), formed according to its statutes “by the union of all the national and foreign workers and artists,” and it also declared among its purposes that it would represent the members’ interests, but in a much wider way, for it intended “by all means within its reach, to improve the fortune of all working classes.”36 The Tribuna Artística enthusiastically greeted the emergence of the still recently launched league, reporting the success of an initiative that had achieved a membership of over eight hundred. It also highlighted the role of Otaviano Hudson as the organization’s proposer and commented on the existence of different ideologies behind proposals that aimed at explaining and interfering in society’s conflicts. The solution defended by the article, however, was not that suggested by those differing ideologies, but the one made possible by their association, directed at instruction and mutuality: At one moment it is socialism, at another democracy that influences the proletarian individuals’ constant efforts against capitalism, with a succession of theories, one after the other. … In the light of constancy and valor of the arguers, supported by the facts of daily life, spirits are kindled to strive for the good of all, people fight and die in the quest for freedom. … This struggle is a huge one, and unless every individual per se tries to solve the problem of life, it will be endless, or it will result in a predominance which is incapable of being what we are—and should be—aiming at. That is why it is up to us to pursue not only association, but also the effects that good sense requires it should have. So, on examination we have perceived instruction and mutual aid to be the only acceptable principle for the organization of labor associations.37

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Knowledge of the available organizing alternatives and the choice of association of the mutual type gained clearer outlines in the speech given by the chair of the league’s initial session, Mr. Ferro Cardoso, transcribed by the newspaper, in which he defined the new organization as “an association that ensured artists’ life would be far removed from politics and from the International’s present aims.” That affirmation reinforces the hypothesis raised here that leadership of the local workers, during the last decades of the nineteenth century, was well informed of the political proposals and the organizing pathways of the European labor movement (even of the International Workingmen’s Association as we can see here) and that they made their choices taking that knowledge into consideration. The rejection of socialist ideology and the organizational models derived from the International Workingmen’s Association did not mean that a class character was not being outlined in the proposal. Many outstanding figures of the day, among them José de Alencar, Limpo de Abreu, José Alves Pereira de Carvalho, Saldanha Marinho, Aristides Lobo, Salvador de Mendonça, Luiz Barbosa, Bittencourt Sampaio, and Pedro Bandeira de Gouvêa, announced their willingness to collaborate with the Liga, but, since the statutes only allowed for the membership of workers, the president of that session “thanked them for their offer of services, but [affirmed] that he could not include them as honorary members, since only a single class was entitled to membership.”38 The class sense that was being outlined with the Liga’s proposal was also noticeable in the awareness that, despite the existence of rivalries between native and foreign workers fighting for jobs in the same labor market, the associating project needed to overcome such rivalries by embracing a much wider perspective of solidarity. Regarding its goals, one of the Liga’s founders, Otaviano Hudson—a typographer, journalist, and one of the founders of the Republican Party—declared: “Equality and fraternity shall rule in this association, composed of natives and foreigners; the slogan shall be one for all and all for one. Mutual protection, union, love for work and instruction.”39 Apparently, this proposal seems to have been initially welcomed, for the first records of the Liga’s assembly counted up to nine hundred people who were present and fifteen hundred associates a little after its foundation.40 That was a relatively high figure considering the available data on reports of associations that gathered workers of a single craft, although exceptions may have existed.41 Data from 1877 indicate that there were few associations of the mutual/craft type with over four hundred associates. On the other side, at the same time, there were associations of a “cosmopolitan” type, which aggregated over a thousand associates.42

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The form of organization proposed by the Liga was also meaningful. It had a federative structure in which each “artistic” class (each craft) had its own place in the organization, electing a president and two delegates who participated in the greater part of the organization’s structure, i.e., the Central Board and the General Assembly. The ordinary members were not part of this General Assembly, which was guided by the representation of the delegates elected by each craft. At the end of the 1870s, it was already possible to associate the emergence of a mutual organization not only with one professional group (or various groups) but also with the fight of such groups on behalf of a labor demand that was contrary to the bosses’ interests. That was the case of the Associação dos Empregados do Comércio (shop employees), mentioned earlier, whose origin was linked, according to its own official records, with the salesmen’s fight against the opening of shops and other commercial establishments on Sundays. Founded in 1880, the association of salesmen was an idea conceived earlier but had only found the right conditions to emerge beginning in 1879, for in that year, according to its Historic, “the shop and trade workers class was aroused by a new advantageous idea for them, which, when it was put forward in earlier days had been stifled at birth. It was the idea of prohibiting commercial activities and work on Sundays and on other holy days.”43 It was usual, however, to find in the periodicals of the time negative balances of frustrated associative experiences, such as the Liga Operária itself. This periodical continued to exist for decades, but would lose the impetus of class unity that seems to have moved it in the early days. The difficulties encountered did not mean the abandonment of the associative ideal, as it is possible to observe by the editorial of the first edition, from 1881, of the newspaper A Gazeta Operária, which presented the Liga as an “entity especially dedicated to the workers’ and artists’ interests” and affirmed: The spirit of association, this powerful weapon that defends and strengthens corporations, even the smaller ones, unfortunately has not been aroused among us and the awful consequences of this lack are perceived at each step.44

In the following edition, the newspaper added to its awareness of the importance of associativism, the expression of its will to defend the workers’ interests in social struggles without assuming party commitments or political conceptions; an ideological point of view very close to that declared in the first moments of the 1871 Liga Operária: We, the sons of work, this undying capital that supports the institutions, that always produces profits, whose benefits we do not enjoy, should investigate ways

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of calling the authorities’ attention so that, albeit they do not shower us with rewards, they at least give us what is our due. Being neutral in party interests, without leaning to this or that political belief, we take our place in the corner of the ring, taking part in the fight every time our interests require it; that our less respected rights demand it.45

The newspaper’s rhetoric does not seem to have been launched in a vacuum. In 1880, another entity dedicated to congregating workers of various occupations was organized, the Corpo Coletivo União Operária (Collective Body Workers’ Union), whose goal was, according to its statutes, “to contribute to the aggrandizement of the working class, promoting all efforts, instructing it, so that it leaves the condition of poverty in which it lies.” According to the Conselho de Estado, their purposes could be summed up in this way: “to deal with the working class’s general interests and those of the country’s arts.”46 Unlike the Liga Operária, which accepted only workers, the statute of the Corpo Coletivo, in addition to the effective members, who should be “worker, artist or have a defined material labor,” allowed for the possibility of associating assistants, consultants, and honorary and corresponding members. That explains why once the Corpos Consultores (Consultant Bodies) had been set up in eight areas, names such as André Rebouças, Benjamin Constant, Saldanha Marinho, Vicente de Souza, and other abolitionists, positivists, and republicans engaged in, or at least sympathetic to, the União Operária’s proposal were included.47 That relativizes the hypothesis of the absolute autonomy of class in the organization of that entity, while at the same time it is a good indicator of the capacity for political articulation among workers and other social sectors. The presence of non-worker (or artisan) associates should not necessarily be regarded as a limitation to the class autonomy of these organizations, though, in certain cases, the intervention of patrons and governments in associate life could be strong. That is what the front page of the 1894 report of the Associação Beneficiente dos Empregados do Jornal do Comércio (associating the employees of a newspaper) suggests, when it hails the head of the daily, Dr. José Carlos Rodrigues, as its “everlasting guardian.” It was similar to the case of the Associação de Auxílios Mútuos da Estrada de Ferro Dom Pedro II (railroad workers), in which the head of the enterprise was honorary president of the association and of its administrative council.48 In those cases, the mutual societies were seen as spaces for fraternizing between patrons (or directors) and workers, toward supposedly common ends, or even taken as being the result of the enterprises’ charitable works. The mutual-benefit societies, however, were not an experience that started from nothing. The workers’ associations had deeper roots.

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Brotherhoods Since the colonial period, the brotherhoods were associations that, though not raised with representative purposes, were often considered by blacks, enslaved and free alike, as having organizational connotations, even promoting, in some cases, the agglutination of collective struggles. In their origins, the brotherhoods had also been the basic organizational kernels of the Portuguese artisans’ corporations, and they continued to be so until the first half of the nineteenth century in Brazil.49 Given those multiple origins, it is not surprising that there were so many of them. Anderson Oliveira found 103 brotherhoods in Rio de Janeiro between 1840 and 1889.50 In our own research, starting from Oliveira’s survey and looking for brotherhood reports and engagement records in the Biblioteca Nacional (National Library), we found over 200 documents of around 110 brotherhoods for the city of Rio de Janeiro between 1830 and 1890. On the brotherhoods that originated from artisan’s corporations, Eulália Lobo explains: According to Portuguese traditions, the crafts were divided in 24 corporations who elected their judges, making up the Casa dos 24 [House of the 24], to which recognition was granted in 1383, and that in turn elected a president, named judge of the people, and a scrivener, who participated in the Chamber Senate. … The 24 guilds organized in Brotherhoods or Fraternities, each of them having a patron saint and formed the Bandeiras [flags]. … It seems that in Rio de Janeiro there has never been a Casa dos 24, but the mechanic officials were represented in the Chamber Senate by the masters.51

Among the typically craft brotherhoods at the beginning of the nineteenth century were the Irmandade de São José (bricklayers, carpenters, woodworkers); the Irmandade de São Jorge (smiths, cutlers, riflemen, tinkers, coppersmiths, gilders, saddlers); the Irmandade de Santo Elói (goldsmiths); and the Irmandade de São Crispim e São Crispiano (shoemakers). In the following years it would still be common to create brotherhoods with a very explicit professional stamp, like the Irmandade de São João Batista dos Operários do Arsenal de Marinha da Cidade e Corte do Rio de Janeiro (for the workers of the navy yard), formed in 1851 and defined in its Compromisso as “the association of all workers of the same Arsenal,” with objectives, beyond the religious ones, of mutual assistance insofar as it was aimed at “helping the navy arsenal’s workers in their needs and illnesses.” The forms of assistance included assistance for medications, funerals, and others, according to specific rules. The admission criteria were broad regarding the brothers’ national and ethnic origins but narrow in

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other ways, not only concerning adhesion to Catholic faith, but the conditions of freedom as well: “Every worker who is a Roman Apostolic Catholic, being of any age, color and nation, being a free, earnest person, can be admitted to the Brotherhood.”52 It was, therefore, a brotherhood that combined mutualist and professional features, like the arsenal workers’ option, at a time when mutual assistance associations were already being widely disseminated. It is a similar case to the one of Irmandade de Nossa Senhora da Conceição do Corpo Policial do Rio de Janeiro in the 1880s, which admitted only officials or soldiers from the Corpo Policial da Província do Rio de Janeiro (Police Department of the Rio de Janeiro Province), which included among its objectives pension payment to close relatives. The value of the entrance and monthly fees varied in proportion to the salary received in each corporation post, affording low adhesion costs to the low-waged soldiers.53 The creation of brotherhoods that gathered slaves of African origin stemmed from Portuguese tradition as well. The first brotherhood of Africans, the Nossa Senhora do Rosário, was founded in Lisbon in 1460, and its compromisso (statutes of the brotherhoods) inspired its Portuguese American counterparts.54 In nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro, many black brotherhoods, some of them lay, kept significant groups of slaves and freemen, Brazilian or African, united by bonds of solidarity, religion, and/or cultivation of traditions. Mary Karasch found twelve churches lodging twenty-four brotherhoods of blacks and pardos (browns) in Rio de Janeiro between 1753 and 1852.55 In the Freguesia de Sacramento (Parish of Sacramento) alone, Anderson Oliveira found six black brotherhoods in the nineteenth century: Nossa Senhora da Lampadosa, Santo Elesbão e Santa Efigênia, São Gonçalo Garcia e São Jorge, São Domingos, Nossa Senhora da Conceição, and Nossa Senhora do Rosário e São Benedito.56 João José Reis studied the black brotherhoods in Bahia and in Rio de Janeiro and found various spaces for identity manifestations (some of them opposing blacks of different ethnic origins) in festive and religious moments, uncovering episodes of resistance to the black’s social position in the society where the reference frame was slavery: The brotherhoods seem to have played an important role in the formation of a “black consciousness,” albeit a divided consciousness that blossomed in Brazil by the end of the colonial regime. The value those brotherhoods had as means of resistance is indisputable. They made possible the construction or the reformulation of identities that worked as a rampart against the dissolution of collectivities that were under great pressures. Even if they were selective in the alliances they made, they showed in many cases that it is possible to get

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along well with differences without losing the capacity to resist. Their greatest limitation, evidently, was the slavery itself, which, however was not accepted without criticism.57

Such duality between the original aims of the black brotherhoods— which involved Christianizing the slaves, or subjecting them to the master’s religious standards, which justified slavery—and their potential for resistance would be more acutely noticed by representatives of the manorial order in moments of fear of a slave revolt. Flávio Gomes found letters between judicial authorities and policemen that revealed great concern with “colored men’s” brotherhoods in 1835, the year of a big slave rebellion, known as the Malês Revolt, in Salvador.58

Associative Combinations and Variations In the second half of the century, black workers also strived to organize mutual-benefit societies designed to provide assistance for sick people, widows, and funerals (a feature, after all, that could already be found among some brotherhoods), but they went further in admitting both slaves and freemen, in defining their potential scope of associates by ethnic origin or color, or even by declaring their purpose as giving financial support for associates to buy their freedom. These associations included the Sociedade Beneficente da Nação Conga (Benefit Society of the Congo Nation), created before 1861, and the Associação Beneficente Socorro Mútuo dos Homens de Cor (Colored Men’s Mutual Help Benefit Association) of 1874.59 The statutes of the Sociedade Beneficente da Nação Conga, which presented itself as “protector of the Sociedade do Rosário e S. Benedito” in the statutes’ approval application, included among its aims benefits similar to the ones given by the other mutual associations, but defined its composition in this way: Art. 1—The Society is called Beneficente da Nação Conga, and will be composed of people who belong to the same nation and who are free, being admitted in its community the sons and daughters of those people who were born in this Empire and have black skin, and will be composed of an unlimited number of male and female members, plus 20 honorary members.60

Such definition created controversy among the State Council’s members. The society’s proposal of association being accepted based on nationality criteria should not be seen as a novelty, for many mutuality associations had been organized based on this kind of principle. But it was not that simple if the respective “nation” (as it was usual to refer to

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the place of origin of Africans submitted to transatlantic trade) was an African one and the society’s members were defined in racial terms. That is why one of the council members stated that, in my opinion there is great difference between the charitable societies of the Italian, the French … and the [so-called] Congos. The former are members of foreign nationalities, and foreign [subjects]. The so called Conga Nation is not a foreign nationality, but an African barbarian horde, and the so called associates are freed slaves, or people born of them. … I believe that it is unsuitable to approve associations composed only of blacks, mulattos, caboclos [afro-indigenous].61

As another councilor saw it, those objections were groundless, because not only was the statute commendable, for it prevented the association of slaves, but also the exclusive association of blacks was already usual among many brotherhoods: Article 1 does not just give {permission} for the admission of free members; it positively prescribes that they should be free. {This clause} seems well-advised. The slaves will find themselves … embarrassed to conciliate their own condition’s {duties} with those of the society. To avoid difficulties with the masters, that restriction is {advisable}. It seems that the clause which restricts the admission of associates to black-skinned people should not be disapproved. In times past brotherhoods of blacks and mulattos were already instituted.62

The council’s verdict ended up being negative, and the association was not registered. The objectives of that group, however, were not buried there; more than ten years later the State Council examined the registration request of a certain Sociedade de Beneficência da Nação Conga “Amigos da Consciência” (Benefit Society of the Congo Nation “Friends of Consciousness”). Although the proponents were not the same, the aims were similar. The first members acceptance clause of the new society was broader than that of the previous one, for it stated that to be a member, the candidate should belong to the “Conga Nation or to any other provided it was African.”63 Its explicit mutual aims, however, were the same: assistance in illness or death. On this occasion there was unanimity among the councilors in rejecting the statutes’ registration request. The State Council alleged technical flaws in the process, disqualified those responsible for the associations, and, what seems to be the main reason, pointed out the fact that “entitling themselves to be of the Congo Nation, their statute admits members from other African origins, and without declaring they (must be) free men, the association may judge itself as having the right to admit slaves, which is not allowed by the laws.”64

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At the same time that the counselors analyzed the statutes of the second Beneficente da Nação Conga, they also studied the request of the Associação Beneficente Socorro Mútuo dos Homens de Cor. In this case, the statutes were more explicit in approving the association of slave or free “color people,” stating that the member could be “free, freedman, or even subject, of black color, of one and another gender.”65 The statutes were also wider in the kind of benefits proposed, for the first article stated that the society had as its goal the promotion of “everything in its reach in favor of its members.”66 Further on, one could better understand the proposal of affiliating slaves and doing everything “in favor of its members,” when it was stated that “the subject associates will profit from the advantage of taking part in the draw … for their liberation; and, once free, will be eligible to any post of the Society.”67 If the people who raised the association were quite explicit in their objectives, the counselors were even more so, turning down the registration not only based on technical issues but also because colored people, when they are free, are citizens and do not form a separate class in the Empire, and when they are slaves, they have no right of association. Thus, the special Society is dispensable as it could bring the drawbacks of creating social and political antagonism: and dispensable because the free colored men must be, and in fact are admitted to the National Assemblies, as it is their right and as it is very appropriate to the good relations among Brazilians. In regard to the slaves, proposed to be admitted under the denomination of subject men, the government cannot approve it in view of the laws in force.68

Concerning the two associations, the counselors also advised the imperial government to “get to know reservedly, by means of the police, those individuals that promote them and the circumstances surrounding them.”69 For proposing that they should represent the slaves too and for defining the associates’ African “nation” of origin, they were considered unwelcome by the Empire’s State Council, but their existence—and not just their formally acknowledged existence, for there are cases where registration request was only put before the council years after the association’s foundation and the beginning of its activities—demonstrates the disposition of the freedmen and even of the slaves to appropriate forms of organization and solidarity that, from the point of view of the men of state, were not adequate. In certain cases the government men seemed to consider those forms not only undesirable but also suspect, and as such regarded them as “a police matter,” something that, as one can see by these documents, accompanied the worker’s organizations for a long time before the republican rulers took up the formula.

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Nevertheless, freeing slaves was a part of some charitable societies’ objectives even before that, as was the case of the Sociedade Filantrópica Liberdade Constitucional (Constitutional Liberty Philanthropic Society) of 1831. This society had many aims, such as providing education for young poor people, finding husbands for poor maidens, helping bankrupted honest citizens, giving alms to the “honored poor,” and helping the incarcerated, widows, and the shipwrecked, among others. But their primary aim was precisely “freeing slaves who, by their own qualities, deserve it,” even if that aim came with restrictive additions like “giving preference to those who have a means of living: in this beneficence the browns are to be preferred.”70 Brotherhoods also supported members to purchase their manumission, in some cases as a direct initiative of the freed and enslaved black population. Mary Karasch mentions brotherhoods as one form of slaves’ association aiming to accumulate savings for this purpose. That has been confirmed by Anderson Oliveira, who shows that the Irmandade de N. Sra. do Rosário e S. Benedito already supported the slaves’ money savings in order to buy manumission even before 1871.71 The chronology of this case is telling, for, as will be seen in more detail in the following chapter, the law called do Ventre-Livre (Free Womb) created legal conditions so that the purchase of manumission by slaves would be considered a right instead of an act dependent on the masters’ sovereign will. Following the advent of the new legislation, many associations appeared with the objective of favoring the purchase of manumissions, but those associations that intended to give guarantees to owners who were facing the risk of losing their capital invested in slaves appeared as well, like the Associação Brasileira de Seguro Mútuo Auxiliar do Trabalho Nacional e dos Ingênuos (Brazilian Association of Mutual Insurance Auxiliary of the National Labor and the Naïve), created in 1876, which aimed at assisting in raising “capital and income in favor of the Ingênuos [literally naïve, those potentially freed by the 1871 law] who, even after 21 years of age, will keep on working in industry or agriculture.”72 The União Seguro de Vida dos Escravos (Slaves’ Life Insurance Union), created in the same year with the objective of “indemnifying the slave owners, both farmers and industrials, for death or forced freedom,” possessed the same class sense—seigniorial.73 On the opposite side, however, the 1870s and, above all, 1880s were prodigal in the creation of associations aimed at freeing slaves; these included the Sociedade Emancipadora 28 de Setembro (28th of September Emancipatory Society), whose exclusive aim was freeing slaves.74 Many of these associations had statutes similar to that of Clube dos Libertos Contra a Escravidão (Club of the Freed Against Slavery), founded in 1882 in

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Niterói, chaired by João Clapp. This statute, printed on a folded sheet of cardboard (which could be carried in the pocket), had as its first article what defined its goal: §1o. Freeing the highest possible number of slaves; §2o. Helping the associates in case of disease or persecution; §3o. Creating free, nocturnal primary schools, workshops for the associates or people foreign to the club, and the attending slaves must submit the consent of their masters.75

As can be seen, although the primary aim was freeing the slaves, the two classic objectives of the workers’ associations of the period followed: mutual assistance and instruction. The club from Niterói and ten additional entities would gather the following year to found the Confederação Abolicionista (Abolitionist Confederation), based in Rio de Janeiro, whose president was João Clapp himself. Among the associations gathered in the creation of the confederation was one entity conceived by the salesmen, and another founded by typographers; the latter was called Clube Abolicionista Gutemberg (Gutemberg Abolitionist Club).76 Artur Vitorino found registers of many manumissions bought by this club of typographers, as well as the creation, on the initiative of the entity in 1882, of a night school that was attended by more than one hundred students.77 The struggle for freedom, particularly in the heyday of abolitionism, would end up mixing associative models and concrete efforts of collective action from old rural forms of slave organization, such as the quilombos (communities of runaway slaves). There were quilombos in the urban milieu too, and they were particularly strong by the eve of abolition, when they assumed a mien of open confrontation.78 Flávio Gomes evaluated the organizational capacity and the levels of relationship between the quilombos and other social sectors. The Quilombo do Iguaçu, for example, in the court vicinity, traded lumber in its surroundings and distributed its production outflow through the rivers of the region, where the quilombolas (inhabitants of the quilombos) got in touch with other groups by means of the oarsmen of the boats circulating nearby. Some special relations seem to have been established with ganhadores (money-earning slaves) from Rio de Janeiro, particularly those related to the docks. Based in this articulation capacity, Gomes coined the expression “black field” as a means of framing the situation: These contacts ended up constituting the base of a larger web of interests and diverse social relations, out of which the quilombolas profited greatly, helping to keep and increase their autonomy. There, a genuine black field was brought into being. This complex net of social relations acquired a logic of its own in which interests, solidarity, tensions and conflicts crossed.79

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Another organizational form that indicated the black population’s capacity for autonomous, organized intervention derived from the maltas de capoeiras (organized groups of capoeira fighters, an Afro-Brazilian practice of fighting and dancing). Carlos Eugênio Soares emphasizes the political role played by this kind of organization when he characterizes it as the “Capoeira Party,” understood not as a specific group with affiliate members but as a method of doing politics, preferably on the streets and with relative autonomy in relation to the traditional groupings (even though a certain closeness to politicians from the Conservative Party predominated).80 We will come back to this further when discussing slave and free workers’ collective movements. It is worth stating here, however, that the organizational experiences of first- or second-generation freed blacks continued after abolition.81

“New” Associative Models In the following decades, other organizational experiences would blossom and coexist, in situations of dispute or complementariness, continuity or disruption of associative models. Parties and trade unions, the most typical labor-class organizations, just to remember Hobsbawm’s guidelines, would arise here in a similar environment to the one in which they spread in Europe. This coexistence can be explained by the quick propagation of the workers’ experiences in the most diverse regions of the world in which capital and waged labor were present, even if in very different degrees. But if the adoption of organizational proposals, formerly or simultaneously tried in other environments, depended upon their adequacy to the concrete, local historical conditions, one should not ignore the fact that it was also a discussion on the preceding or ongoing associative experiences in Brazil. In certain cases, it is even possible to draw charts showing the convergence of workers’ associative efforts covering a large time span. Thus, for example, some of the organizers or heads of the mutual-benefit societies from the preceding decades can be found among the socialist militants of the early Republic. This was the case of José Veiga in the 1870s, typographer and editor of the above-mentioned Tribuna Artística, propagator of the mutualist associative proposal and member of the first commission of organizers of the Liga Operária (Workers’ League). He was responsible for the A Voz do Povo (People’s Voice) in 1890, one of the country’s first socialist newspapers and advocate of the need to create a Labor Party.82 A similar trajectory was that of Otaviano

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Hudson, also a typographer, who was the “starter of the idea” of the Liga Operária, in 1871, and who was invited to collaborate on the newspaper of the Corpo Coletivo União Operária, in 1882, “in honor of the … important services rendered to the labor class by that gentleman,” as defined in a statute. There was also Vicente de Souza, who was one of the most distinguished organizers of the Centro das Classes Operárias (Labor Classes Center) and socialist militant in the early twentieth century, but who had been seen before at the conference for the Associação Tipográfica Fluminense in 1879 (discussed in more detail in the following chapter) and who took part in the Corpo Consultor, of the Corpo Coletivo União Operária, in 1882.

Party The demand for the establishment of a political party that could represent the workers’ interests was relatively old in the carioca press debates. As early as 1871, the newspaper Tribuna Artística defined its objectives as “advocating in favor of social interests of workers of all artistic occupations.”83 In that sense, the newspaper itself, like other newspapers that appeared in the following years, took on the role of defending class interests, but did not consider it enough to achieve this end alone and favored organizing workers into political parties in the stricter sense: And guiding the reader to these considerations we not only intend to show Brazil’s social and artistic state but to present the means we consider to be proper to achieve equality of social rights in order to ensure the existing interests of the peoples’ common life, from which we have concluded that the workers of all artistic occupations should not remain outside of the moral movement lately set in course in all parts of the world, but must embrace a party that sets itself the task of proclaiming the necessary welfare of all.84

It was a wide enough call to be interpreted as standing up for the participation of the class in an organization, not necessarily created by the class itself, but willing to defend common interests. But there was another barrier to overcome if the proposal for a Labor Party was to flourish: census-based suffrage. The restrictions imposed on the workers’ rights to vote, since one had to have enough income in order to enlist as a voter, would become an even more insurmountable barrier after the electoral reform of 1881 that abolished the former form of elections in two rounds (in the first, those who would vote in the second round were determined and the income level required for the right to participate was lower) and raised the census-registered income threshold requirement, also vetoing the participation of illiterates. Ten years after Tribuna Artística had

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spoken out in favor of a workers’ party organization, the concern over their political participation seems to have spread. The Gazeta Operária, specially dedicated to the artists’ and workers’ interests, had to protest against the complete exclusion of free workers (the enslaved workers were implicitly excluded) from the electoral-political process: The worker, who among us represents the class of the poor, the class that has to bear the weight of taxes when the country has its credit jeopardized, the class that, when the nation engages in some external or internal fight, is always the first to leave its interests and facilities aside to go save with its blood the flag that the higher up worship, sees itself now deprived of a sacred right by an absurd law, by those who should take care of its interests, all the more so when those who rob them of their right, offer it to foreigners in exchange for their pretension to naturalization.85

The dramatic tone of this lament, bringing up the journeymen’s role as taxpayers and as soldiers (a strong image at the time, due to the recent impact of the Paraguayan War [War of the Triple Alliance]), stressed the class character of the exclusion. The truth, however, is that a certain nationalist perspective that condemned the immigrant “nationalization” policy was combined with this view. The tone of the criticism of the electoral reform was more virulent among the republican regime propagandists who believed in achieving it by means of mass mobilization, as was the case of the editors of the newspaper Revolução (Revolution): Those deprived of their rights cannot remain in a passive position. That would mean condemning themselves to the worst form of slavery, that which is responsible for subsistence and yet gives the outcome of work to the lazy aristocracy. If the salesmen and workers classes want to get back their lost Brazilian citizenship, they must associate to obtain working men’s universal suffrage, bound to direct representation by districts. Let the representatives of the people come, artists, trade employees, all folks who are just as good as any of those useless bearers of scrolls.86

So, even if in the end the Republic did not arise from the expected popular rebellion, the deployment of the new regime, proclaiming masculine universal suffrage, could be received initially as a victory for those who, in 1881, mobilized for the workers’ political citizenship, and there seemed to be room for enabling the previously discussed proposal for a Labor Party. The ensuing years brought with them many initiatives of raising parties linked to the class. The debate on this theme has persisted for a long time, and historiography has amassed many relevant contributions already, making it unnecessary to go beyond some considerations on the form of

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these parties’ proposals in order to help build a general framework that embraces the issues being dealt with here.87 In January 1890, the newspaper A Voz do Povo appeared, a “worker’s newspaper of the Estados Unidos do Brasil” (United States of Brazil) under the direction of José da Veiga and including among its collaborators most of the leading figures in the Labor Party debate of the months and years to come. The newspaper was emphatic in saluting the recently proclaimed Republic, as one can see from the general tone of the article “O operário e a República” (The Worker and the Republic), published in its second issue: New horizons open up for Brazilian people with the establishment of the republican way of governing the country. Democracy, which in its pure sense … is the regime of equality of rights as much as duties, has come at last to level all classes in sharing social goods, freeing them from the privilege of some over others. The national proletariat, which until today has been just an anonymous force, serving as a base for all ambitions, however inadmissible they might be, has become a dominant force in the society; an element of prosperity and progress.88

The optimism for the egalitarian consequences of the institution of the Republic did not mean, however, that it was enough for the workers to wait for the welfare the new regime was to bring to them. It was necessary to organize in order to have effective influence over the political process. That is why, just after making an evaluation of the new situation, A Voz do Povo, in the same issue, extended an “Invitation”: Given the need to elect in September 1890 the constituent assembly of the United States of Brazil, all the artists, workers and laborers who can read and write are invited to sign up for the Labor Party in order to choose, eight days before the election, the candidates who will vote on behalf of their interests.89

The invitation contained in its terms the definition of the greatest limitation that all proposals of worker unity would face in the following years: the restrictions on illiterates’ voting, which took political citizenship away from the majority of workers of that time. As it turned out, from the outset, that enterprise was to be divided into two fronts, each engaging in different efforts to create a labor party. On one side stood those who, headed by the black typographer Luiz da França e Silva, raised a Partido Operário da Capital Federal (Labor Party of the Federal Capital), which had been object of debate since February and which ended up approving its program and provisional board of directors in May 1890, having Roberto Kinsmann Benjamin, a musician raised outside Brazil and manager of an American company, as its pres-

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ident. On the other side, the structure created under the guidance of Lieutenant José Augusto Vinhaes, a militant republican who occupied the board of the Brazilian Postal Service during the provisional government, consisted of the Labor Party under his “command” but was based on the Centro do Partido Operário (Labor Party Center, CPO is the Portuguese acronym), which in turn had Saddock de Sá as president and an administrative council with representatives elected in many factories and workshops of the Federal District. França e Silva criticized this group, especially Vinhaes’s guidance, since it was not driven by the exclusive representation of the workers’ interests by their own party (Vinhaes was a member of the Republican Party as well). More organically inserted in workplaces however, especially in the state’s workshops and public service concessionaires like railways, the CPO became the most dynamic pole of the labor movement in Rio de Janeiro up until 1893, when Vinhaes, who was elected congressman, adhered to the Revolta da Armada (Armada Revolt), a military insurrection associated with monarchic interests, and his leadership began losing strength. We can find some programmatic definitions in the newspaper created by França e Silva, published from March 1890 on. The Eco Popular (Popular Echo), which initially claimed to be willing to discuss with all groups the issues related to the party, soon became a platform for criticism on the group under Vinhaes’ leadership. For França e Silva, the Republic was not enough, for “as long as, in this country, the worker is not a force in the Parliament, no value will his complaints have.” So it was necessary to create a Labor Party since “gathering the laboring classes into a political party is, nowadays, a universal idea.” To justify that, he mentions the examples of Germany and Switzerland, highlighting the coexistence of the Labor Party and the Monarchy.90 The reference to the German example, as the one to socialism, should not be overlooked. It seems to be placed, however, somewhere within the distinction made by the Eco Popular between republicanism as a “political ideal” and the Labor Party as a “social party.” Out of that perspective emerged both a classical definition of socialism, focused on the struggle of labor against capital, and the idea that the Labor Party and its representatives in the Parliament had as their task to overshadow the “political” debate in order to concentrate on the struggle for social improvements for those they represented: Socialism is, and can only be the war that the Fourth State declares against the Third; the fight of the worker against the bourgeois, the fight of labor against capital. It makes itself out of the sum of the workers’ demands. It is the claims of poverty and hunger, the revolt of justice and slavery vibrating in this orchestra of social life. … So the Labor Party, in this initial phase of its organic life,

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working as it is for electoral exploitation and obliged to free itself from such tutelage, should consider as well, and even more seriously, going against the suicidal possibility of letting itself be absorbed by militant republicanism, be it from the opposition or the government. Its first statement must make a sharp distinction between the political problem and the social problem.91

This would be stressed with the release of the party’s program by the end of April, when the organizers’ intention was to avoid any suggestion of complicity with revolutionary strategies; the party would therefore keep away from “everything that could originate anarchy or sedition” and would aim “only at the improvement and welfare of the classes less-favored by Fortune, at the conservation and widening of the civic rights of each citizen belonging to this very important class,” as well as at “this country’s progress and aggrandizement.”92 The party’s aims were set out explicitly in a thirteen-point program, of which the first point synthesized all the preceding considerations, namely: “To support the rights of all the classes, whatever their professional group, by all means within its grasp, or by means of the class representatives sent to Parliament or by means of intervention on the part of the Executive center itself.”93 França e Silva’s Labor Party, according to the evaluation made by himself and those around him, did not manage to gather a big following. Even the CPO’s efforts shrank, together with Vinhaes’ waning influence, sometime later, as we have already observed. Another initiative occurred in the same context in Rio de Janeiro in August 1892, when, according to Lobo and Stotz, the Congresso Operário Nacional (National Labor Congress) met on the insistence of França e Silva.94 The Congresso, gathering around four hundred militants, discussed and approved the program of the new Brazilian Labor Party. In comparison to its immediate predecessors, this Labor Party was more emphatic in advocating socialism and more explicit in stating the division of society by classes and the social exploitation generated by capitalism, recommending that private ownership of the means of production should be overthrown, as it set out in the introduction to its program: Considering that the socialization of production under the current property regime keeps all social income concentrated under the power of the capitalist class, subjecting the working class to an increasingly accentuated physical and moral exploitation; considering that under these economic conditions of the present society the working class will never be able to emancipate itself from capital’s tutelage if it does not take control over the means of production, that is, the working instruments and raw materials, and give the land back to the collectivity.95

The program’s 41 articles, however, combined demands for the widening of civil and political rights on the grounds of a more democratic repub-

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lican proposal, calling for legal assurances that would lessen work exploitation and for a list of social reforms aimed at inhibiting monopolies, abolishing privileges, and improving workers’ living conditions.96 In the following years, positive expectations regarding the Republic progressively gave way to a certain disappointment on the part of those militants, but the proposal of “making the labor class into a political party” was revived on some other occasions. Some parties were to designate themselves as “labor” in order to present themselves as a means for the “moral and material” elevation of the class, focusing more on care and educational activities (as some of the already mentioned mutual associations did) instead of taking part in the parliamentary struggle for reforms. This seemed to be the case of the Partido Operário Progressista (Progressive Labor Party), founded in 1900 and based on the intense debate that had started in 1896, when the newspaper Tribuna Operária (Labor Tribune), under the direction of Honório França, Heitor de Oliveira and Sanchez de Brito, began to be published.97 Two years later, the newspaper Gazeta Operária (Labor Gazette), headed by Mariano Garcia, a cigar maker and journalist, would claim for itself the program of the Partido Socialista Brasileiro (Brazilian Socialist Party), approved some months before during the 2o Congresso Socialista Brasileiro (Second Brazilian Socialist Congress). For the Gazeta Operária, the distance between the Republic and the socialists’ aspirations was already a large one. It was very clear in how it expressed a new way of combining the “social issue” and the “political issue,” updating the terms of the equation proposed twelve years earlier by França e Silva: The so-called social issue is, to say it clearly, socialism’s organized phase. … The social issue will end up eliminating sooner or later the political issue as it stands. It is becoming more and more evident that the Federal Republic does not represent the forthcoming advent of the true democratic ideal.98

The party’s program, transcribed in the newspaper, was divided into a “Maximum Program” and a “Minimum Program,” a categorization stemming from the perception of society as two classes and the exploitation of workers by capitalists, and holding that only the overcoming of private property would end such exploitation. To achieve this aim, “it is imperative, above all else, to organize the proletariat into a class party.”99 In terms very close to those of the classic formulations of the social democratic Second International (1880–1920), the “Maximum Program” ad, in short, set its goals on taking power and putting an end to the capitalist system: Struggling for the conquest of political power in the Federation, in the State, in the City to transform them, from being the instrument of capitalist exploitation

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and oppression of the peoples they are today into an instrument destined to nullify the dominant class’ economic and public monopoly.100

The “Minimum Program” was comprised of seventeen points, with demands related to working conditions, the right to strike, social policies, and the right to vote from eighteen years old, as well as breaking the literacy barrier and ending the prohibition of the female vote. Less than one month after the newspaper’s foundation, the Federação do Partido Socialista Brasileiro (Brazilian Socialist Party Federation) was created, in accordance with the São Paulo–based party. Mariano Garcia, Vicente de Souza, Evaristo de Moraes, Alfredo Augusto Rodrigues, Januário da Silveira Toledo de Loyola e Santos Alves, among others, took part in the discussion, and, except for the first two, all were part of the Federation’s Directing Committee.101 Mariano Garcia and Vicente de Souza, although attuned to the line of conduct of the party created in São Paulo, were investing at that moment in an organization that combined party and union functions: the Centro das Classes Operárias (CCO— Working Classes’ Center). The CCO and its leaders supported, as did the Gazeta Operária, the struggles of the diverse categories of Rio de Janeiro’s workers in a period distinguished for its many strikes. However, they did have candidates running for federal parliament, such as Vicente de Souza in 1903.102 The involvement of the CCO’s leaders with the mobilization that led to the Revolta da Vacina (the 1904 revolt against compulsory vaccination), to be discussed in the next chapter, and the atmosphere of repression that followed, ended up halting the center’s trajectory as well as those of its main leaders, like Vicente de Souza, who was arrested after the episode. In 1906, however, the Gazeta Operária began publishing again under the guidance of the same Mariano Garcia, and the 1902 Socialist Party Program was recovered in an effort to reunite the socialists from Rio de Janeiro around a new Partido Operário Brasileiro (Brazilian Labor Party).103 Other attempts at setting up labor/socialist parties were made throughout the following years, some lasting longer than others. Our discussion of the organizational forms, however, may recognize the ones observed up to this point as being fairly representative. In order to understand the role played by this kind of party, the best way may not be to expect it to have a significant space in the parliament or an expressive numbers of voters. Antonio Gramsci helps us to understand the dimensions that the concept of party could reach. On the one hand, in the more strict sense of class bodies, “parties come into existence, and constitute themselves as organizations, in order to influence the situation

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at moments which are historically vital for their class.” He also defines parties as a “modern Prince,” “the first cell in which there come together germs of collective will tending to become universal and total.”104 According to Gramsci, however, parties can make themselves present under the most varied names in order to elaborate the political guidelines and educate the classes to apply them. For that reason, in Gramsci’s analysis there is no need for the existence of political action in the strict electoral or parliamentary sense in order to speak of political parties, since “in the modern world, in many countries, the organic and fundamental parties have been compelled by the exigences of the struggle or for other reasons to split into fractions, each one which calls itself a ‘party’ and even an independent party.”105 So the party’s role can be played by different organizations, and in its precise sense “a newspaper too (or a group of newspapers), a review (or a group of reviews), is a ‘party’ or a ‘fraction of a party’ or ‘a function of a particular party.’”106 Based on that perspective of the party as an organizer and educator, whose form or function can be defined by different organizational experiences, we can better evaluate the meaning of the endurance of proposals made by labor and socialist parties in the 1890s and first decade of the 1900s, although the electoral system of the “First Republic” (1889– 1930) did not allow any hope for a working-class party to come to power though elections. Nevertheless, if the labor/socialist parties of the first republican decades showed their clear limitations as instruments for the conquest of power by the class they intended to represent, it is also undeniable that workers could perceive this and try another type of organizational effort, one that was complimentary to the party for some, and for others should have priority as a revolutionary instrument: the trade unions.

Trade Unions As we draw near to the end of nineteenth century, a greater diversity of associative forms among workers can be found, forms that, although differently denominated (leagues, unions, resistances, collectives, etc.), were similar to trade unions insofar as they represented class interests.107 Socialist militants themselves, engaged in building labor parties as they were, acknowledged the importance and the necessity of gathering workers around entities that stood up for their interests and were closely linked to working conditions and salaries. Names like Evaristo de Moraes, a lawyer and journalist, and Mariano Garcia were frequently mentioned in the records of organizational initiatives of new associations with unionist purposes, as well as in references to strike movements. In socialist news-

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papers one can find articles defending workers’ associations that aimed to resist exploitation in terms very similar to those of the French tradition of “resistance societies” mentioned earlier. This is the case of a 1902 article that criticized many organizations in Rio de Janeiro for abandoning their objectives of representing the workers and of promoting collective struggles: Thus we see that in none of them the objectives that should concern all the people are seriously dealt with, which in short are: create resistance funds to make it possible to sustain the strikes, and these strikes should only be done to achieve: a raise in wages; the 8-hour work day; and the extinction of all the absurd regulations of factories and workshops, both public and private.108

A good sample of collective organizations with this demanding profile can be found on the occasion of the 1o Congresso Operário Brasileiro (COB) (First Brazilian Labor Congress) of 1906, attended by representatives of twenty-three entities, sixteen of them based in the city of Rio de Janeiro. The list of carioca organizations that were present gives a good overall view of the categories and models of their associations: the Associação de Resistência dos Trabalhadores em Carvão Mineral (Coal Workers’ Resistance Association); the Associação de Classe União dos Chapeleiros (Hatmakers’ Union Class Association); the Associação de Classe dos Manipuladores de Tabaco (Tobacco Manipulators’ Class Association); the Sociedade de Resistência dos Trabalhadores em Trapiche e Café (Resistance Society of Coffee Dockers); the União dos Operários nas Pedreiras (Quarry Workers’ Union); the Centro dos Operários Marmoristas (Marble Workers’ Center); the Centro dos Empregados em Ferrovias (Railway Employees’ Center); the Centro dos Operários do Jardim Botânico (Botanical Gardens Workers’ Center); the Liga Operária Italiana (Italian Labor League); the Liga dos Artistas Alfaiates (Tailor Artisans’ League); the Liga das Artes Gráficas (Graphic Arts League) the União dos Operários Estivadores (Dock Workers’ League); the União dos Coreiros e Artes Correlativas (Union of Leather Workers and Related Crafts); the União dos Carpinteiros e Artes Correlativas (Carpenters’ and Related Crafts’ Union); the União Operária do Engenho de Dentro (Labor Union of Engenho de Dentro); and the União dos Artistas Sapateiros (Shoemaker Artisans’ Union). Seen from the perspective of organization models, the Congress marked the beginning of a period in which the revolutionary syndicalism inspired by the French CGT (General Confederation of Labour) permeated an expressive number of labor leaderships in the country’s main industrial centers, many of which openly supported variants and combinations of anarchist ideas.109 Thus, in the most important decisions regarding the workers’ organization, they advocated for taking association as a means

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for “resisting” patronage, naming it “sindicato” (syndicate/union) and arranging the many crafts “in the large companies,” the isolated and independent workers in “craft unions” and the “industry unions, in which many crafts are closely bound or attached to the same factory.” The creation of an interunion organism had been approved as well, following the principle of the “union of societies through a federation pact [that] assures to each one of them the largest autonomy; a principle that must be respected in the Confederação Operária Brasileira’s [Brazilian Labor Confederation, also COB] statutes.”110 The general line of the resolutions, however, was far from a sign of the driving force of revolutionary syndicalism in the unions’ milieu of Rio de Janeiro, where the diversity of positions was the prevailing pattern. In a certain way it is possible to say that the first COB’s organizational proposals were well accepted, for in the following years at least the designation of sindicato spread. It can be seen in the list of entities from Rio de Janeiro that were present at the Congresso Operário Brasileiro of 1913, for example, attended by representatives of fifty-nine workers’ associations and four newspapers, included among them the delegates of the following carioca entities: the Federação Operária do Rio de Janeiro (Worker Federation of Rio de Janeiro); the newspaper A Voz do Trabalhador; the Centro dos Operários Marmoristas (Marble Workers’ Center); the Centro Cosmopolita (Cosmopolitan Center); the Liga Federal dos Empregados das Padarias (Federal League of the Bakery Employees); the Sociedade de Resistência dos Trabalhadores em Trapiche e Café (Resistance Society of Coffee Dockers); the Sociedade Fraternidade e Progresso (Fraternity and Progress Society); the Fênix Caixeiral (“Salesclerk’s” Phoenix); the unions of tailors and painters; and the following societies with the name of sindicato: Sindicato dos Operários das Pedreiras (Quarry Workers’ Union); of the shoemakers; of the carpenters; of the Trabalhadores em Fábricas de Tecidos (Workers in Textile Factories); of the plasterers; of the Operários em Ladrilhos e Mosaicos (Tiles and Mosaics Workers); of the Operários de Ofícios Vários (Workers of Various Crafts); of the Operários de Indústria Elétrica (Workers of Electrical Industry); and of the Marinheiros e Artes Correlativas (Sailors and Correlative Crafts).111 On the eve of the Second Congress, seventeen entities in the Federal District were affiliated to the Brazilian Labor Confederation, of which twelve were named sindicato.112 At that moment, the same source recorded seven non-confederated entities, which gives us a significant sample of the dimensions of the trade union movement in Rio de Janeiro at that moment and in that situation. The resolutions of the Second Congress followed the same revolutionary syndicalist/unionist logic that was characteristic of the First Congress

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of 1906. But besides the socialist references and the anarchist-influenced unionism, other forces were capable of setting organizational efforts in motion, like those that gathered in 1912 for the “Fourth Labor Movement Congress,” convened by Mário Hermes, lieutenant, congressman, and son of then-president Hermes da Fonseca. The congress had the support of the railway workers’ sectors from the region of the Central do Brasil railroad and some organizations like the União Operária do Engenho de Dentro, headed by Antonio Augusto Pinto Machado. In these resolutions, words of command from the first moments of carioca associativism were brought back within the definition of the aims of the organization that was funded there: “continuous, intense, quick and ongoing improvement of the economic, social, intellectual and moral conditions of the workers.”113 The 1912 Congress was regarded as “yellow” by revolutionary syndicalist militants and even by some socialists. According to Batalha, the Congress would mark the moment in which the reformist unionism got closer to some sort of unity. For Batalha, “reformist unionism”—a designation he believes to be better than “yellow unionism”—was, more than anything, a conception of how the unions functioned and a practice shared by a constellation of schools of thought.114 Here we have to point out that if the designation “yellow unionism” was imprecise insofar as it was used pejoratively by “the others”—those who criticized class-collaboration unionism—then the word “reformist” also lends itself to various interpretations, for there were reformists who defined themselves as such because of their rejection of the class-collaboration model, believing that reformism was a pathway to another social order and explicitly keeping themselves away from those they pejoratively dubbed as “yellow” too. This suggests, therefore, that one should be very careful in using the word “reformist” broadly to refer to a spectrum of militants. A good solution seems to be the one put forward by Tiago Bernardon, who stands up for the importance of distinguishing “socialists” and “collaborationists,” even though one has to acknowledge the difficulties in differentiating them in regard to their tendency to share reformist strategies. If “reformists” and “collaborationists” were expressions commonly used as synonyms by the anarchist critics, for Bernardon the difference persists, for while the socialists “had socialism as their final end: the creation of a new order, alternative to the capitalist one … the ‘collaborationists’ intended to achieve, at most, some changes that improved the workers’ life and working conditions, without questioning the existing social structure, or only profiting from it or benefiting politicians and entrepreneurs.”115

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Some examples can help us evaluate the magnitude of the debate on associative models and practices, making it possible to see traces of continuity between associative experiences previous to and following the abolition. One of the first can be found in the organization of the bakery employees in the city of Rio de Janeiro. From two sources we can explore their organizational steps in a very synthetic manner. The first of them is the Histórico Social (a kind of social history) written by João de Mattos, leader of this workers’ category and mentioned in the previous chapter.116 The second memorial on the associative aspects of bakery employees is the report presented by the Federal League of Bakery Employees to the organizing committee of the 2o Congresso Operário Brasileiro (Second Brazilian Labor Congress) of 1913.117 To follow João de Mattos’s trajectory—full of the adventures he went through defending his people—is a great opportunity to get access to hidden aspects of social movements at the time. The incomplete manuscript that was found among the documents seized in the 1930s by the carioca political police seems to be a copy made by Mattos himself of a previously written summary of the bakers’ organizational experience and struggles between 1876 and 1912. One can suppose from the date mentioned that it was commissioned to reinforce the report presented by the Federal League to the Second Labor Congress, although there is some divergence among the dates mentioned in the documents. In the next chapter we will come back to João de Mattos’s efforts to organize the escapes of enslaved men who worked in bakeries, from Santos in 1876 to São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro in the following years. In Rio de Janeiro he founded what would be, according to him, the first bakers’ organization, a Bloco de Defesa (Defense Bloc) in 1880 that gathered about one hundred associates. The Bloco de Combate dos Empregados de Padaria (Bakery Employees’ Combat Bloc)—whose slogan was “For Bread and Freedom!”—had as its main objective “fighting for freedom.” It kept its activities clandestine under the cover of a “Dance Course.” After some skirmishes, when the abolition of the “truly enslaved” was achieved in 1888, João de Mattos and his companions, far from abandoning the fight, started to “make war” for the freedom of the “free enslaved” of the bakeries. Thus, in 1890, they created the Sociedade Cooperativa dos Empregados em Padarias do Brasil (Cooperative Society of the Bakery Employees of Brazil), whose motto, “Work for ourselves!,” synthesized the organization’s chief aim of raising funds to buy bakeries that would be cooperatively organized. The idea seems to have been well received, as Mattos reports gatherings with three hundred to four hundred participants and affirms that they were about to buy the first bakery when the treasurer of

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the organization ran away, taking all the money raised in more than a year of the organization’s existence. The history of the Sociedade Cooperativa dos Empregados em Padarias do Brasil was to finish right there. Insisting on collective organization, João de Mattos and his companions created in 1898 (the 1913 report says that the same episode happened in 1893) the Sociedade Cosmopolita Protetora dos Empregados em Padarias (Guardian Cosmopolitan Society of Bakery Employees). Its aims, as can be seen from the motto “Work, Justice and Freedom: with no distinction of color, belief or nationality,” went beyond mutualism, sometimes representing the interests of its associates in a unionist sense. It achieved two thousand members according to the 1913 report, which shows the entity achieving a wide mobilization directed at ensuring hygienic work conditions. Politically, the association’s orientation was, according to the 1913 report (which does not hide its writer’s option for “direct-action unionism”), close to the socialists, and Evaristo de Moraes was an influential leader in it. Through João de Mattos’s report we become aware that the Cosmopolita instituted a library, an educational center, and the newspaper O Panificador (The Baker). Through his report we also get an idea of the methods employed by the bakery employees to accomplish demands like rest on Sundays and the eight-hour workday. At first they forwarded a petition to the mayor with proposals for achieving these things, but obtained from him nothing but the instruction to address their concerns to the National Congress. Thus it was registered in the records that the document forwarded by the bakers was read, but it was unsuccessful in having its demands met. João de Mattos’s conclusions help us understand how the class organizational experience, operating through the peaceful pathway of sending demands to authorities of the executive and the legislative branches, could be perceived: “So that, even demanding to the ruling society, I have obtained nothing, for their politics is one and the society of those they rule is another.” The outcome of this period of bakery employees’ mobilization was that their employers’ organization came together in an assembly to evaluate the Cosmopolita’s deeds. Fully aware of it, Mattos and some of his society companions attended the employers’ gathering and attempted to present their demands, but they were cast out under the threat of physical aggression. The result was that they were fired and the labor market of Rio de Janeiro bakeries became closed to the experienced leader of the class and to other heads of that professional group. The bakery owners, still according to Mattos, encouraged the emergence of the Liga Federal dos Empregados em Padarias (Federal League of the Bakery Employees). According to the 1913 report, the league was

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created in 1902 by a group of bread deliverers in Botafogo who disagreed with the tendency of the Cosmopolita to adopt direct action after João de Mattos’s departure. Around 1910–12, the Liga started to change its orientation, taking to itself the defense of the class and the anarchist-oriented methods of direct action. In 1912, when the organization was representing around six thousand workers, their first strike took place. Records from 1914 document changes in the Liga’s statutes: the organization incorporated completely the “revolutionary” orientation and turned itself into the Sindicato dos Operários Panificadores (Bakery Workers’ Union).118 Although the bakers’ sequence of associative experiences cannot be taken as “exemplary”—because, after all, no other would be—it was nevertheless representative of a series of possibilities spanning the most varied political orientations: cooperativist, socialist, revolutionary syndicalist, and the different possible names of the associations Sociedade Cooperativa (Cooperative Society), Sociedade Cosmopolita (Cosmopolitan Society), Liga Federal (Federal League), and Sindicato (Syndicate/union). Even more significant is the fact that the first experiences of collective organization emerged in the heat of the fight against slavery. Regarding the links between the experience of slavery and the struggle for freedom and the free workers’ modes of collective organization in Rio de Janeiro during the first decades of Republic, another good example is the Sociedade de Resistência dos Trabalhadores em Trapiches e Café (Resistance Society of Coffee Dockers), founded in 1905, and present at the 1906 and 1913 Congressos Operários Brasileiros (Brazilian Labor Congress). Dockers and porters have organized in groups since the slavery times; the ganhadores had been making mutual solidarity arrangements for the purchase of manumissions since the mid-nineteenth century, as Karasch reports.119 Expanding the time frame of her research, Maria Cecília Velasco e Cruz found “in the port of Rio de Janeiro, a strong line of continuity between the slaves and the freedmen of the old imperial times and the proletarians of the First Republic.” Both the Resistência (Resistance Society of Coffee Dockers) and the União dos Operários Estivadores (Dock Workers’ Union) were basically formed by black members. This continuity would explain “the speed with which the team workers imposed their union on the patronage.”120 The trajectory of the Resistência was a troubled one. After being founded in August 1906, it started the first strike of that professional category, a strike that would end in a victory for the workers after about two months. It faced, however, some setbacks, like that in 1908 when an employer lockout practically annihilated the union, but it was reborn with

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its original characteristics intact between 1910 and 1911. It conducted important strikes in 1912, 1914, and 1915. Between 1917 and 1918 it suffered a new attack from the employers and lost half of its affiliates, but it managed to survive and started to strengthen again in the 1920s. A balance of its struggles during the First Republic shows that the main aim of the teams of loaders was achieved by the Resistência: union control of the labor market—the so-called closed shop—that would ensure a relative stability and open up the possibility of a more equitable distribution of the daily workloads in a field that was typified by employment on a daily basis, where avulsos (casual workers) were marked by insecurity in regard to obtaining the daily wages that would ensure their subsistence.121 The example of the bakery employees’ organizations leads us to a professional group strongly marked by the characteristics of the craft professions and the small establishments. The Sociedade de Resistência indicates the organization possibilities of daily workers in the services sector. This quick overview can be closed by bringing in a third example, with a brief commentary, concerning the factory workers of the great industries of the time: the textile mills. The workers in factories initiated many strikes from the 1890s on, and we shall discuss them in greater detail in the next chapter. However, the foundation of the Federação dos Operários em Fábricas de Tecidos (Textile Factory Workers Federation) in 1903 marked the establishment of their first union.122 The Federação organized a strike that year, having obtained some minor material gains, but it engendered an intense repressive response from the employers, who dismissed all the leaders. The Federação languished during the following months, but it produced fruits, as Batalha chronicles: One month after the strike, the Federação das Associações de Classe [Class Associations Federation] was founded and it gave origin to the Federação Operária Regional Brasileira [Brazilian Regional Labor Federation]. The latter in turn organized the 1o Congresso Operário Brasileiro, in April 1906, and eventually became known as the Federação Operária do Rio de Janeiro [Worker Federation of Rio de Janeiro].123

Workers in textile factories would in turn reorganize their class association in 1908, creating the Sindicato dos Trabalhadores em Fábricas de Tecidos (Textile Factory Workers’ Union). This entity was one of the most active in the following years. Thus, in regard to union organization, it is possible to see that, after the first quarter century of the republican regime, there was not only an expressive number of active trade unions in the Federal Capital but, sig-

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nificantly, unionism had become part of the experience of many sectors of the Rio de Janeiro working class. The existence of parties and trade unions that had the experience of urban workers’ associations did not mean, however, the extinction of mutual modalities of associativism (let alone the brotherhoods). On the contrary, at the beginning of the century it was possible to find a great number of mutual-benefit societies in Rio de Janeiro, although the number of associates in many of them was smaller than it had been three decades before. In 1908, the survey made by Luiz Barbosa reports that there were 181 mutual-benefit associations in the Federal District. José Murilo de Carvalho presents data with a wider scope, based on research commissioned by Rio de Janeiro’s City Hall. Taking the year 1912 as a reference, he found 438 mutual societies in the city, with more than 280,000 members, which represents around 50 percent of the population over 21 years old.124 In 1917 the federal government registered in its Annuário Estatístico do Brasil (Brazilian Annual Statistics) the existence of 144 mutual-assistance and charity associations in the city. Regarding the number of associates, we can compare data from 1873, from Guimarães’ book mentioned earlier, with data gathered by Barbosa referring to 1908. In the latter, few institutions with more than 400 members appear, and some older institutions, like the Liga Operária mentioned earlier, appear to be considerably diminished when compared to what they were three decades before (in this case, the nearly 1,000 associates of the first phase were reduced to 160 in 1903).125 The continuity of the mutual-assistance experience can be explained by the fact that the mutual societies were responsible for social security needs that, in general, were not covered by the trade unions or were not yet the focus of public policies. But in 1903 it was also possible to present mutualism as an alternative to more recent models of organization, as Serzedelo Corrêa did in a speech given when the Sociedade Mutualidade Predial e Beneficente (Building and Mutual Benefit Society) was launched, when he affirmed that “the problem of the incorporation of the proletariat to society has imposed itself, and today it is, everywhere, the social problem par excellence.”126 Among the solutions to the social problem discussed then, mutualism would be favored by Corrêa: There are souls that believe the solution is in the hands of the State and socialism gains ground in more than one country. Others, more exaggerated, want the reform of the present state of things through revolution, seeing the source of all evil in society itself and, like Proudhon, they passionately announce that society is a theft. Others, at last, better oriented as I see it, not ignoring the fact that the modern State is a great economic force, seek the means to resolve

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the social problem in individual action and in the power of the association. To those individuals, property is a powerful element of economic progress and in the association, in the expansion of generous and altruistic feelings, they intend to find safe ways of improving the conditions of the proletarian, the worker, the artist, the civil server; ways of ameliorating the existing injurious inequalities.127

While it is true that mutualism persisted, it was no longer the core of working-class associativism when the objective was to represent collective interests, and that role ended up being taken on by the parties and trade unions. But to treat parties and trade unions as the main forms of class organization does not mean to say that they were the only ones. We have highlighted them here in this section because they explicitly aimed to represent the working-class associative spirit. Still, it is worth recalling that many times such associative spirit widened to reach realms of the workers’ experience that were farther from those of the economic and sociopolitical demands represented by parties and trade unions, or the social security expectations associated to the mutual societies. In certain cases it was the outcome of the efforts of the trade unions themselves. We have seen in the first chapter that, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the dockworkers and the port region were associated to the “survival” of carnival through the cordões (carnival enthusiast groups) that originated there. The list of ranchos, cordões, and escolas de samba (different forms of carnival enthusiast organizations) that were formed in the docks region is a long one.128 Erika Arantes lists many founders, leaders of these recreative associations, and prestigious composers that worked in the docks: João da Baiana, Hilário Jovino, Mano Elói, Sebastião Molequinho, Aniceto da Serrinha and others. Many sambistas (samba musicians) were associates of the docks unions, as the same author shows by comparing the lists of founders of carnival associations with those of trade-union members. There have been ranchos (ranches) that were directly defined as belonging to trade unions, as was the case of Recreio das Flores (Recreation of Flowers), associated with the Sociedade de Resistência dos Trabalhadores em Trapiches e Café. In 1915, former president of the Resistência Cypriano José de Oliveira, associated with the Spanish anarchist Caralampio Trille, who was the head of the Sociedade Operária Fraternidade e Progresso da Gávea (Labor Society Progress and Fraternity of Gavea), founded the Sociedade Familiar Dançante e Carnavalesca Clube das Mangueiras [Mangueiras’ Family Dancing and Carnival Society], based in the suburban Marechal Hermes district. Arantes highlights the importance of this “more intimate connection which many dockers had with some of these recreational cen-

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ters, for they left a mark in their experiences as much as those of a union nature did, being part of the cultural universe of those workers.”129 The interconnectedness of working in the port, trade unions, and carnival associations continued, and, although it lies beyond the scope of this research, the significant example of the Escola Império Serrano (a “school of samba,” as the most important carnival societies became to be called in the 1920s) is at least worth mentioning. Founded in the 1940s, the Grêmio Recreativo Escola de Samba Império Serrano originated from a dissident group dissatisfied with the “authoritarian administration” of another escola de samba that existed before in the Serrinha (a favela in the Rio district of Madureira). From the outset, Império Serrano was a school connected to the dockers and, more particularly, to the Resistência. The trade union sponsored the escola’s creation by buying its bateria (the percussion instruments) and continued to financially support its activities over the following decades, contributing to the “democratic” character of an association that arose from the disagreement with authoritarianism and that kept its independence from all kind of illegal activities. Nowadays, the Império Serrano’s headquarters is named Eloy Antero Dias—Mano Eloy—who was president of the Resistência when the Império was founded, and the affiliates of the Sindicato dos Arrumadores (heir of the Resistência in the years following the 1930s) continue to have free access to the escola, which epitomizes its ties to the trade union. In this chapter, what interested us most was the workers’ organization in order to articulate spaces of mobilization and collective movements aimed at defending professional or class interests, which, for that very reason, made them fundamental means for the construction of identity and for class-consciousness formation. In the chapters to come we will follow these other dimensions of the process of class formation throughout the time scope under study.

Notes 1. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 3rd ed. (London: Penguin, 1980), 23–24. 2. The considerations made here on the English labor movement, synthetic to the extreme of risking to be simplistic, are based on G. D. H. Cole and A. W. Filson, British Working Class Movements: Select Documents, 1789–1875 (London: Macmillan, 1967); Mike Savage and Andrew Miles, The Remaking of the British Working Class, 1840–1940 (London: Routledge, 1994); Wolfgang Abendroth, A Short History of the European Working Class (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972); Eric Hobsbawm, Workers: Worlds of Labor (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984).

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3. Hobsbawm, Workers, 196. 4. Ibid., 194. 5. It is possible to find in the last chapter of The Making of the English Working Class some fragments in which Thompson mentions an “already made” working class, around the 1830s, such as when he refers to the radical press of those years, affirming that “an examination of this period would take us beyond the limits of this study, to a time when the working class was no longer in the making but (in its Chartist form) already made” (800801); or when he affirms that “at this point [between the years 1831 and 1835] the limits of this study have been reached; for there is a sense in which the working class is no longer in the making, but has been made” (887). In both cases, however, the affirmation is done with limits—“in its Chartist form,” “a sense in which.” 6. Alain Dewerpe, Le Monde du Travail em France, 1800–1950 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1989), 14–15. 7. Georges Lefranc, Histoire du travail et dês travailleurs (Paris: Flammarion, 1975), 284–86. 8. Ibid., 229–94. 9. Ibid., 307–10. 10. In ibid., 319. 11. The German Social-Democrat Party’s trajectory can be followed in greater detail in Abendroth’s study A Short History. Our synthesis here was based also in Mary Nolan, “Economic Crisis, State Policy, and Working-Class formation in Germany, 1870–1900,” in Working-Class Formation: Nineteenth-Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States, ed. Ira Katznelson and Aristide R. Zolberg (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986): 352–396. 12. Abendroth, Short History, 42. 13. Nolan, “Economic Crisis, State Police,” 352. 14. Ibid., 352. 15. Statutes and processes of legalization of these associations can be found in Biblioteca Nacional (BN) (National Library), or in the codices of the State Council that belong to the Arquivo Nacional (AN) (National Archive). For a general analysis of this period’s organizations, see Cláudio Batalha, “Sociedades de trabalhadores no Rio de Janeiro do século XIX: algumas reflexões em torno da formação da classe operária.” Cadernos do AEL 11–12 (2000): 42–68. For São Paulo’s case, see Tania de Luca, O sonho do futuro assegurado (o Mutualismo em São Paulo) (São Paulo: Contexto, 1990). 16. Estatutos da Caixa Beneficente da Corporação Docente do Rio de Janeiro, aprovado pelo decreto nº 8.581 de 10 de junho de 1882 (Rio de Janeiro: Tipografia Nacional, 1882), 6. This statute, as well as the other statutes and reports here mentioned (except for those that have specific reference from the AN) can be found in the BN collection. 17. Estatutos da Associação de Auxílios Mútuos dos Empregados da Inspeção Geral das Obras Públicas da Capital Federal, aprovados em assembléia geral de 5 de maio de 1908 (Rio de Janeiro: Tipografia de G. Moraes & C., 1908), 3. 18. Projeto de Estatutos para a Associação Geral de Auxílios Mútuos da E. F. C. do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Tipografia de Leuzinger, 1903), 3. The same in Estatutos da Caixa Beneficente da Corporação Docente, 5. 19. Sobre os Estatutos da Sociedade Beneficente Dezoito de Julho, 2 de janeiro de 1872, AN, CODES, Box 551, Pack 1, Document 1, fl . 11. 20. Estatutos do Congresso de Beneficência e Instrução (antigo Operário de Beneficência) sob a alta proteção de S. M. o Imperador (Rio de Janeiro: Tipografia Cosmopolita, 1889), 3. 21. Sobre os Estatutos da Sociedade Beneficente Trinta e Um de Outubro Amor ao Trabalho, 1877, AN, CODES, Box 555, Pack 2, Document 18, fl. 6. 22. Aprovação dos Estatutos da Sociedade Beneficente dos Empregados no Fumo, 1882, AN, CODES, Box 559, Pack 2, Document 11, fl. 7. 23. Ibid., fl. 7.

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24. Relatório da Associação de Auxílios Mútuos dos Empregados da Tipografia Nacional (Rio de Janeiro: Tipografia Nacional, 1883), 9–14. 25. Associação Geral de Auxílios Mútuos da E. F. D. Pedro II, Relatório do ano social de 1877 (Rio de Janeiro: Tipografia De Leuzinger e Filhos, 1888), 12. 26. Estatutos da Imperial Associação Tipográfica Fluminense, 1866, art. 3o, § 2. 27. Projeto de Estatutos para a Associação Geral de Auxílios Mútuos da E. F. C. do Brasil, 3. 28. See, for example, Associação Beneficente dos Empregados do Jornal do Comércio—Relatório apresentado à assembléia geral de 25 de março de 1894 (Rio de Janeiro: s.e.). See also the Estatutos da Associação dos Empregados no Comércio do Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro: Tipografia do Jornal do Comércio, 1889). 29. Estatutos da Associação dos Funcionários Públicos Civis (Rio de Janeiro: Tipografia da Gazeta de Notícias, 1940), 4. See also the Estatutos da Associação dos Empregados do Comércio Rio de Janeiro, 4. 30. On this society, see Luiz Barbosa, Serviços de Assistência no Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro: Tipografia do Louzeiro, 1908), 48. The regulatory process of its statutes, in 1874, can be found in the AN, CODES, Box 611, Pack 1, Document 43. 31. Eduardo Stotz, A formação da classe operária: Rio de Janeiro, 1870–1890 (research report, Niterói: UFF, 1984), 66. 32. Batalha, “Sociedades de trabalhadores no Rio de Janeiro.” 33. Statutes quoted in Joaquim da Silva Mello Guimarães, Instituições de previdência fundadas no Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro: Tipografia Nacional, 1883), 69. 34. Relatório da Imperial Associação Tipographica Fluminense, Rio de Janeiro, 1883. 35. Tribuna Artística, Rio de Janeiro, 11/26/1871, 1. 36. Estatutos da Sociedade Beneficente denominada Liga Operária (Rio de Janeiro: Tipografia da Reforma, 1872), 3. 37. Tribuna Artística, Rio de Janeiro, 2/25/1872, 1. 38. Ibid., 1–2. Not all of these public figures of the time achieved further recognition, but José de Alencar, known as one of the greatest Brazilian novelists of the nineteenth century, was deputy and minister of justice. Saldanha Marinho and Aristides Lobo were prominent militants of the Republican cause, the former having held several executive and legislative positions in the period of the Empire and after the proclamation of the Republic (1889), while the latter would exert mandates as deputy and senator in the 1890s. 39. Tribuna Artística, Rio de Janeiro, 2/25/1872, in Artur José Renda Vitorino, “Operários livres e cativos nas manufaturas: Rio de Janeiro, segunda metade do século XIX,” paper presented in the Jornadas de História do Trabalho, Pelotas, November 2002, 12. 40. The data on the number of people present at the assemblies can be found in the Liga’s process in the Conselho de Estado, AN, CODES, Box 551, Pack 1, Document 8, fls. 8f and 10f. 41. The Associação de Auxílios Mútuos dos Empregados da Tipografia Nacional, for example, had 274 associates in 1882 according to the Relatório da Associação de Auxílios Mútuos (Rio de Janeiro: Tipografia Nacional, 1883). An example of association that gathered many members can be found in the data from the Associação dos Empregados do Comércio, created from the struggles of 112 associates in 1880 to close stores on Sundays, who became more than 3,000 in 1884 and eventually reached more than 13,000 in 1900. Alfredo Nascimento, Vinte anos de labor (1880–1900), Histórico da Associação dos Empregados do Comércio do Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro: Tipografia do Jornal do Comércio, 1900). 42. Such data can be found in Guimarães, Instituições de previdência. 43. Nascimento, Vinte anos de labor, 19 44. Gazeta Operária, Rio de Janeiro, 1/8/1881, 1. 45. Gazeta Operária, Rio de Janeiro, 1/12/1881, 1. 46. Aprovação dos Estatutos do Corpo Coletivo União Operária, 1882, AN, CODES, Box 559, Pack 2, Document 14, fl. 2.

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47. Ibid., fls. 11, 19–20. 48. Associação Beneficente dos Empregados do Jornal do Commércio: Relatório apresentado à assembléia geral (25/3/1894), Rio de Janeiro, 1894. Associação Geral de Auxílios Mútuos da E. F. D. Pedro II. Relatório do ano social de 1887, apresentado à assembléia geral dos associados em 14/3/1888 (Rio de Janeiro: Tipografia de Leuzinger e Filhos, 1888), 7. 49. On brotherhoods and the artisans, see E. L. Lobo, História do Rio de Janeiro (do capital comercial ao capital industrial e financeiro) (Rio de Janeiro: IBMEC, 1976), 1: 109–12. 50. Anderson J. Machado de Oliveira, Devoção e caridade. Irmandades religiosas no Rio de Janeiro imperial (1840–1889) (master’s diss., Niterói: UFF, 1995), 64–65. 51. E. L. Lobo, História do Rio de Janeiro, 1: 109–10. 52. Compromisso da Irmandade de S. João Batista dos Operários do Arsenal de Marinha da Cidade e Corte do Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro: Tipografia de A. M. Morando, 1851), 3–4. 53. Compromisso da Irmandade de Nossa Senhora do Corpo Policial da Província do Rio de Janeiro (Niterói: Tipografia da Irmandade, 1889). 54. See Mariza de Carvalho Soares, Identidade étnica, religiosidade e escravidão: os “pretos minas” no Rio de Janeiro (século XVIII) (PhD thesis, Niterói: UFF, 1997), 15. 55. Mary C. Karasch, Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro (1808–1850) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), chapter 3. 56. Oliveira, Devoção e caridade, 157. 57. João José Reis, “Identidade e diversidade étnicas nas irmandades negras no tempo da escravidão.” Tempo 3 (1997): 29. 58. Flávio Gomes, “História, protesto e cultura política no Brasil escravista,” in Escravidão: ofícios e liberdade, ed. Jorge Prata de Souza (Rio de Janeiro: APERJ, 1998), 75. 59. Debates on the registration of these associations in the State Council reveal not only their objectives but also the counselors’ fears in face of their formation as well. National Archive, State Council, CODES, Box 531/Pack 3/Document 46; CODES, Box 552, Pack 2, Document 43. Sidney Chalhoub explored some of these documents in Machado de Assis: Historiador (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2003), chapter 4. 60. Sociedade Beneficente da Nação Conga, May 7, 1862, AN, CODES, Box 531, Pack 3, Document 46, fl. 11. 61. Ibid., note from the Visconde de Sapucaí disagreeing with the Marquês de Olinda’s manifestation, fl. 1. The words in brackets are of difficult reading in the manuscript. 62. Ibid., Marquês de Olinda, fl. 6. 63. Sociedade de Beneficência da Nação Conga “Amiga da Consciência,” September 24, 1874, AN, CODES, Box 552, Pack 2, Document 45, fl. 9. 64. Ibid., Marquês de Olinda, fl. 6. 65. Associação Beneficente Socorro Mútuo dos Homens de Cor, November 24, 1874, AN, CODES, Box 552, Pack 2, Document 43, fl. 10. 66. Ibid., fl. 9. 67. Ibid., fl. 11. 68. Ibid., fl. 3. 69. Ibid., fl. 3 v. 70. Formulário dos atos de beneficência que devem ser prestados pela Sociedade Filantrópica Liberdade Constitucional (Rio de Janeiro: Tipografia do Diário, 1831), 1–3. 71. Karasch, Slave Life, chapter 11, mentions the brotherhoods among the various forms slave associations who aimed to save for buying manumissions. Oliveira, Devoção e caridade, 155, shows how the brotherhoods acted toward the same ends. 72. Regulamento da Associação Brasileira de Seguro Mútuo Auxiliar do Trabalho Nacional e dos Ingênuos, fundada sob a proteção do S. A. R. o Conde d’Eu e gerida pelo Banco Industrial e Mercantil do Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro, Moreira: Máximo e Cia., 1876), 5. 73. União Seguro de Vida dos Escravos (Rio de Janeiro: Tipografia Alemã, 1876), 5, emphasis mine.

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74. Sobre os Estatutos da Sociedade Emancipadora 28 de Setembro, 1874, AN, CODES, Box 599, Pack 3, Document 73. 75. Estatutos do Clube dos Libertos contra a Escravidão, Arquivo Público do Estado do Rio de Janeiro [Public Archive of the State of Rio de Janeiro] (Aperj)—Fundo PP, col. 66, notação 500. 76. On the abolitionist associations, see Evaristo de Moraes, A campanha abolicionista (1879– 1888), 2nd ed. (1924; Brasília: UNB, 1986), 46, and Robert Conrad, The Destruction of Brazilian Slavery (1850–1888) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), chapter 9. 77. Vitorino, Máquinas e operários, 100–101. 78. Márcia Sueli Amantino studied many quilombos in the city. “Comunidades quilombolas: Cidade do Rio de Janeiro e seus arredores durante o século XIX,” in Souza, Escravidão. On the abolitionist quilombos of the 1880s, see Eduardo Silva, As camélias do Leblon e a abolição da escravatura: uma investigação de história cultural (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2003). 79. Flávio dos Santos Gomes, “Quilombos do Rio de Janeiro no século XIX,” in Liberdade por um fio: história dos quilombos no Brasil, ed. Flavio Gomes and João José Reis (São Paulo: Cia. das Letras, 1997), 278. 80. Carlos Eugênio Líbano Soares, A negregada instituição: Os capoeiras na Corte Imperial, 1850–1890 (Rio de Janeiro: Access, 1999), 243. 81. As the Confederação Brasileira dos Homens de Cor (1903) shows, in Barbosa, Serviços de assistência, 123. 82. On Veiga and the socialists of the 1890s, see Cláudio Batalha, “A difusão do marxismo e os socialistas brasileiros na virada do século XIX,” in História do Marxismo no Brasil, ed. João Quartim Moraes, vol. 2 (Campinas: Ed. Unicamp, 1995). 83. Tribuna Artística, Rio de Janeiro, 11/19/1871, 1. 84. Ibid. 85. A Gazeta Operária, Rio de Janeiro, 1/8/1881, 2. 86. Revolução, Rio de Janeiro, 4/7/1881, 3. 87. Among the various relevant contributions to the debate on political parties at the beginning of the Republic, we can mention Gisálio Cerqueira Filho, A influência das ideias socialistas no pensamento politico brasileiro—1890–1922 (São Paulo: Loyola, 1978); José Augusto V. Pádua, “A capital, a República e o sonho: a experiência dos partidos operários de 1890.” Dados 28, no. 2 (1985): 163–92. Or the first two chapters of Angela de Castro Gomes, A invenção do trabalhismo (São Paulo: Vértice/Iuperj, 1988). 88. Voz do Povo, Rio de Janeiro, 1/7/1890, 1. 89. Ibid. 90. Eco Popular, Rio de Janeiro, 3/6/1890, 1. 91. Eco Popular, Rio de Janeiro, 3/11/1890, 2. 92. Eco Popular, Rio de Janeiro, 4/29/1890, 1. 93. Ibid. 94. Eulália L. Lobo and Eduardo N. Stotz, “Formação do operariado e movimento operário no Rio de Janeiro, 1870–1894,” Estudos Econômicos 15 (1985): 73. 95. In Edgard Carone, Movimento operário no Brasil (1877–1944) (São Paulo: Difel, 1979), 305. 96. Ibid., 305–8. 97. See, for example, for analyzing that organization’s proposals, Tribuna Operária, Rio de Janeiro, 11/1/1900, 2–3. In a 1902 article, Benjamin Mota defines that newspaper and the party it claims to represent as directed by “a Catholic Jacobin,” holding bourgeois political positions (including high praise for Campos Salles, the president of the Republic) instead of socialist ones. Gazeta Operária, Rio de Janeiro, 10/26/1902, 2–3. 98. Gazeta Operária, Rio de Janeiro, 9/28/1902, 1. 99. Ibid., 2.

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100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107.

108. 109.

110. 111.

112. 113. 114. 115.

116. 117. 118. 119. 120.

121. 122.

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Ibid. Gazeta Operária, Rio de Janeiro, 10/26/1902, 4. Gazeta Operária, Rio de Janeiro, 1/25/1903, 2. Gazeta Operária (2a. Época), Rio de Janeiro, 12/1/1906, 3. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (London: Elecbooks, 1999), 452. Ibid., 323. Ibid., 354. A comprehensive analysis of the carioca unionism of the period is not needed here. It can be found, for example, in Boris Fausto’s classic Trabalho urbano e conflito social (São Paulo: Difel, 1976); in the first part of A. Gomes, A invenção do trabalhismo; or still in published synthesis by Cláudio Batalha, O movimento operário na Primeira República (Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar, 2000). I have already sketched a synthesis of this subject in the second chapter of Marcelo Badaró Mattos, Trabalhadores e sindicatos no Brasil (São Paulo: Expressão Popular, 2009). Gazeta Operária, Rio de Janeiro, 11/30/1902, 1. We should mention here the debate proposed by Edilene Toledo, who makes a distinction between revolutionary syndicalism—taken as an autonomous trend—and anarchism in Brazil. See Edilene Toledo, Anarquismo e sindicalismo revolucionário (São Paulo: Perseu Abramo, 2004); and from the same author Travessias revolucionárias (Campinas: Ed. Unicamp, 2004). On our part, we believe that the revolutionary syndicalism’s guidelines could be adopted by syndicalists from different political trends, even the independent ones, creating in a certain precise sense a strictly union trend, since it was a conception of union action that held in high esteem the principle of autonomy. Nevertheless, in Brazil the combination of this unionist conception with anarchist political ideas clearly predominated, as one can see from the doctrinaire articles of anarchist background that were published in the newspaper A Voz do Trabalhador, the newspaper of COB, the greatest entity of revolutionary syndicalist orientation. These resolutions were reproduced in many works. We have found the previously quoted transcription in the COB newspaper A Voz do Trabalhador. The lists of participant entities in both congresses can be found in the newspaper A Voz do Trabalhador, in the many numbers that preceded and followed the 1913 Congress. Edgard Rodrigues presents a systematization in Alvorada operária (Rio de Janeiro: Mundo Livre, 1979), 115 ss. A Voz do Trabalhador, Rio de Janeiro, 8/15/1913, 4. Filho, A influência, 73–74. See also A. Gomes, A invenção do trabalhismo, 122. Batalha, O movimento operário, 33–34. Tiago Bernardon de Oliveira, Mobilização operária na República excludente: um estudo comparativo da relação entre Estado e movimento operário nos casos de São Paulo, Minas Gerais e Rio Grande do Sul nas duas primeiras décadas do século XX (master’s diss., Porto Alegre: UFRGS, 2003), 77. Leila Duarte, Pão e liberdade: uma história de escravos e livres na virada do século XIX. Rio de Janeiro: Aperj/Faperj/Mauad, 2002). Reproduced in A Voz do Trabalhador, Rio de Janeiro, 8/5/1914, 3. A Voz do Trabalhador, Rio de Janeiro, 2/1/1914 and 12/1/1914. Karasch, Slave Life. Maria Cecília Velasco e Cruz, “Tradições negras na formação de um sindicato: sociedade de resistência dos trabalhadores em trapiche e café, Rio de Janeiro, 1905–1930.” AfroÁsia 24 (2000): 270 and 274. Ibid., 288–90. The following information was taken from the “Relatório do Sindicato dos Trabalhadores em Fábricas de Tecidos do Rio de Janeiro” (Union Report of Workers in Fabric Factories

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123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128.

129.

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of Rio de Janeiro), presented to the 1913 Second Labor Congress and published in A Voz do Trabalhador, Rio de Janeiro, 1914, 3. Batalha, O movimento operário, 40. José Murilo de Carvalho, Os bestializados: o Rio de Janeiro e a República que não foi (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1987), 146. Anuário Estatístico do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Tipografia Nacional, 1918); Barbosa, Serviços de assistência. Discurso proferido pelo Exmo. Sr. Dr. Serzedelo Corrêa no salão do Real Club (Rio de Janeiro: Oficinas do Jornal do Brasil, 1903), 7. Ibid. Like the ranchos (ranches) Recreio das Flores, Dois de Ouros, and Sereias; the blocos (blocs) do Atílio, do Jacaré, Brinca quem Pode; the Cordão Guerreiros da Montanha and later the escolas de samba (schools of samba) Vizinha Faladeira, Corações Unidos da Favela, and União do Barão da Gamboa. Erika Bastos Arantes, O porto negro: cultura e trabalho no Rio de Janeiro dos primeiros anos do século XX (master’s diss., Campinas: Ed. Unicamp, 2005), records that the docks region was the one with the greatest concentration of carnival associations in the city. See also Olívia Maria Rodrigues Galvão, A Sociedade de Resistência ou Companhia dos Pretos: Um estudo de caso entre os arrumadores do Porto do Rio de Janeiro (master’s diss., Rio de Janeiro: UFRJ, 1994), 50. Arantes, O porto negro, 133 and 136.

CHAPTER THREE

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AND

STRUGGLE

In this study, we proposed a discussion of the process of the making of the working class, taking into account the fact that there is no starting point from which it would be possible to establish what collective movements were actually embodied by a definitely established class consciousness. We have taken Thompson’s analysis of the riots for food in eighteenthcentury England as a starting point for discussing social movements set in action by exploited people before the specific capitalist class situation. Against the analysis that considered the riots to be sporadic, featuring them as results of irruptions of disorganized rebellions in the face of a lack of food, Thompson finds in these events a regularity that allows him to analyze the “political culture, expectations, traditions and indeed, superstitions of the working population most frequently involved in the actions.”1 Therefore, instead of regarding them as violent irruptions of irrational rebellion, Thompson found the existence of a “highly complex form of direct popular action, disciplined and with clear objectives.”2 This kind of popular action was possible because it had a “notion of legitimation,” since “the men and women of the crowd were informed by the belief that they were defending traditional rights or customs.”3 In that sense, Thompson regards “much eighteenth-century social history as a succession of confrontations between an innovative market economy and the customary moral economy of the plebs.”4 Such confrontations, the moral economy of the plebs, the legitimizing notions, and the experience of eighteenth-century common people’s direct action are not, however, phenomena overtaken by the definitive affirmation of the innovative market economy typical of capitalism. From the point of view of working-class formation, in the following period those processes would be incorporated as part of the arsenal of references from which the new experience of exploitation would be interpreted. For this

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reason, according to Thompson, “in these confrontations it is possible to see prefigurements of subsequent class formations and consciousness; and the fragmented debris of older patterns are revivified and reintegrated within this emergent class consciousness.”5 We shall not endeavor here to seek a “moral economy” of enslaved workers and/or free workers in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro. Thompson had the opportunity to comment and criticize the uses and abuses of the term in later works.6 It is a matter, however, of highlighting the relevance of analyzing preceding social movements for an adequate understanding of the reintegration of such experiences to the actual process of formation of the working class. In Rio de Janeiro’s case, this horizon of analysis puts us face to face with the task of examining movements set in motion by enslaved workers as well as those set in motion by free workers during the slavery period, challenging us to highlight those that combined the actions of both sectors. When dealing with the collective actions of the working class itself, the strikes play an important role in most of the studies. Sticking to a simple dictionary-type definition, a strike is usually understood as being a “temporary work interruption, arranged in a coordinated way by a group of workers and aimed at having their specific demands met at company level, or more general demands involving the greater interests of the population.”7 Furthermore, the strike movements have multiple dimensions that we shall be able to recover. Michelle Perrot researched French strikes from the 1870s to the 1890s and highlighted some of these dimensions. On the one hand, the strikes, according to the author, present themselves as a combination of variables: outreach, duration, and identity, for example, which the researcher needs to relate to one another in order to build his/ her analysis. From that point of view, “every strike behaves as an ensemble constituted by a variable combination of identical elements.”8 On the other hand, the strikes reveal personalities and attitudes buried under the everyday life of work and the city. Despite being momentary, the revelations may contribute a lot to those who are interested not only in strikes but also in the dynamics of class-making and of its conflicts. Still according to Perrot: Figures hitherto unknown surface momentarily, taking the stage for an instant, only to be submerged once again seconds after. These are precious, fleeting forms, the skeleton of a movement in which, too often, we know only the principal actors. … Full of sound and gestures, a strike is an outpouring of words, a psycho-drama in which repressed drives are liberated. It plunges down into the heart of the unknown masses.9

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This approach to the strike’s character not only as an instrument of pressure but also as a means of expression is extended by Perrot to a view of the ensemble of social relations with entrepreneurs, the state, etc., in which the workers are immersed and that gains a greater dramatic dimension in moments of stoppage. The strike “multiplies the relations between classes and social groups. … It is not only the worker that it presents to us, but the employer class, the state and public opinion as they appear in the mirror held up to them by the workers. A strike is a dynamic relationship.”10 Let us get back to some of the first strikes made by free workers, but also by the enslaved, to which we have already referred in the introduction to this work.

First Strikes We shall return to the typesetters’ strike in 1858, which has already been mentioned at the beginning of this work. As we stressed there, that strike, considered by many as the first in Brazil, was a stoppage of the typesetters of the three daily Rio de Janeiro newspapers, and its main demand was a wage increase in the context of the high cost of living. The Associação Tipográfica Fluminense (Imperial Fluminense Typographic Association) grappled with the costs of machinery acquisition (which swallowed up most of the entity’s savings) to publish a strikers’ daily, the Jornal dos Tipógrafos (Typographers’ Journal), during the strike. A mere eighty typesetters adhered to the strike, or “colligation” as they called it, but, thanks to the strikers’ newspapers, it had great repercussions.11 The efforts of the Associação Tipográfica were not limited to acquiring print machinery. A committee of its members wrote an appeal calling for the emperor to intervene in the conflict, and that committee accompanied the strikers’ representatives when they made statements before the chief of police explaining the movement’s reasons. In view of the legal vacuum existing in relation to the strike and to the typesetters’ justifications, the police recommended moderation and dismissed them. In response to the newspaper owners’ pressures on the Treasury Department—which tried to force the typographers of the Tipografia Nacional (the state printing works) to substitute strikers—the typesetters on strike made an appeal to the Empire’s minister. By printing the Jornal dos Tipógrafos, the strikers intended to compensate those who subscribed to the newspapers of the court for the halt in their circulation. For that reason, they published all the columns that normally appeared in the newspapers, such as “a pedido” (by request), the

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ports’ movement, and the government’s actions. But they also published articles in which they explained the miserable situation of Rio de Janeiro’s artisans, focusing on the affirmation of the proprietors’ greed (they cited figures showing the newspapers’ profits and how little it would cost them to satisfy the workers’ demands) and the causes of the high cost of living, which they understood to be the result of intermediaries trading in goods of basic necessity and of an economic policy of exaggerated commercial liberty. They presented, as a background, their view of society and alternatives to improve the lives of those who depended on their specialized craft for surviving. As far as we know, from later records, the strikers gradually returned to work, and the resistance of those who published the Jornal dos Tipógrafos seems to have been interrupted approximately three months after the beginning of the strike, since that newspaper did not circulate after the March 12, 1858, issue. According to the following typographers’ evaluations, we can be sure that the strike deeply marked this professional group, but we found quite different views on the strike among them. A decade later, in 1867, the newspaper O Tipógrafo (The Typographer), which was starting to circulate in the court, published various articles that referenced the strike. In one of them, on the history of the Imperial Associação Tipográfica Fluminese, the “colligation”—“of discord”—is pointed to as the culprit responsible for the depletion of the association’s savings: Once founded, it [the association] has kept going; attempting to equal the main benefit associations of this Court, whose degree of importance it would have certainly attained if the fatal Typesetters’ colligation had not interrupted it in 1858. Throughout that year, in which the disaster occurred, like a gentle mother, it wanted to follow the example of everything that wants to become greater, opening its safes, that were meant to assist their unemployed associates, to publish the Jornal dos Tipógrafos, which came into being only to breathe momentarily and die, for it was the offspring of this union-lacking and support-lacking colligation or, better, a child of discord. Aiming at putting into practice one of those actions that usually enhance everything that seeks to follow the path of progress, it became deprived of everything it possessed. The coffers were emptied, and after everything had been taken, it ended up being abandoned and deceived.12

In the same edition of that newspaper, however, another article defended the formation of a new colligation against the owners of the newspapers. Can we not perhaps overcome the degrading situation to which they have been led by the selfish greed of these blusterers who call themselves proprietors? Are we not living at a time that is ripe for a well planned colligation? We most

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certainly are. In the rest of the world all the artisans come together whenever their most sacred rights are violated so that they can recover them; and for what reason should the artists in Brazil not colligate in the same way? Why do typographers not colligate, now that the dailies have raised the price of their subscriptions, to demand a wage raise? Because they don’t want to. … Because of the lack of unity…13

According to the latter article, the 1858 strike had not succeeded because of its lack of previous planning, and a “treason,” but the colligation was fair and necessary. So the typographers should not fear resorting once more to that fighting resource: The memorable 1858 colligation, planned under the influence of pure ideas, could never achieve the desired effect because of the lack of reflection of its authors, who should first have created a savings fund for the events that were to come, as in fact they did, with contrariety arising everywhere and most of typographers going through great ups and downs due to infamous treason. Some might say that nowadays, such a colligation as we wish for is inappropriate, however, we insist that it should and must emerge de facto and by right.14

The memoir-type literature and the historical studies have recorded some other strikes, like the typesetters’ own in the following decades. To mention three cases of movements with typical waged-workers’ demands, we can cite the salesmen and shop assistants’ fight against the shops’ opening on Sundays in 1866; the strike of the Jardim Botânico (Botanic Garden Railway Co.) coachmen in 1873, demanding the return of their dismissed fellows; or the strike of construction workers in 1888 for overdue wages.15 However—taking into account a stoppage in 1857 of slaves who worked in the Ponta d’Areia establishment, in which the demand seems to have been for an end to physical punishments –we have already said that we should also be thinking of work stoppage movements organized by slaves if we are to effectively embrace the diversity of actions of that kind in the experience of Rio de Janeiro’s workers in the second half of the nineteenth century. João José Reis called attention to the possibility of African workers, enslaved or free, resorting to strikes, which he detected when studying the movement of Salvador ganhadores (money-earning slaves) in 1857.16 They organized themselves into “cantos,” the corners where slaves (most of them loaders) waited for work, and they were mostly Africans, a great many of them freed, and others still enslaved. Those groups, showing a reasonable level of integration, interrupted their work in June of that year for approximately a week, protesting against a local legislation that imposed a matriculation fee for each ganhador and the use of a tag with the workers’ matriculation number (slave or non-slave). When the movement

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ended, they had managed to get the tax dropped but not the rule that obliged them to use the tag. We could not find such large movements in Rio de Janeiro. However, Maria Cecília Velasco e Cruz found references to a collective struggle among the ganhadores of the Praça das Marinhas in 1872, who demanded a raise in the amount paid for transporting beef jerky from ships to land. The traders attempted to block the movement by hiring white workers, which led to a physical fight between blacks and the strikebreakers, and thirteen blacks and five whites were arrested.17 In the factories, besides the movement in Mauá’s establishment mentioned earlier, other similar cases can be noted, such as the movement of slaves at a candle and soap factory in the region of Gamboa on September 6, 1854, mentioned by Flávio Gomes. According to the authorities and the newspapers, it was caused by the slaves’ anger at a threat to sell them all. The protest, referred to as an “attempt at insurrection” by the court newspapers, resulted in approximately thirty arrests, although there is evidence of a greater number of participants.18 It was nothing new for slaves who were employed in factories to use their collective worksite as a trench for rebellions. In another example, on April 15, 1833, there was, as a later report defined it, a “rebellion among the slaves who worked in the coppersmith workshop managed by Rodrigo Pinto da Costa, at 70 Rua da Alfândega.” Fourteen slaves refused to obey the boss’s orders and, using their work tools as weapons, resisted the troops called in to arrest them. At the end of the conflict, a slave named Calixto, considered to be the leader of the insurrection, was dead.19 Both the Gamboa and the Ponta d’Areia movements had causes that involved typical slave issues: sale as form of punishment in the former and physical punishment in the latter. However, even though they were not work stoppages with typical wage demands, such as the typographers’, the enslaved workers’ movements in factories found work stoppages to be a valid way of protesting. The police always treated them as uprisings and revolts and quickly repressed them as a warning to others; this is in contrast to the typesetters’ strike, which lasted for over a month and which featured the police chief as an intermediary, not as the executor of direct repression.

Abolitionism The most significant social movement of the second half of the nineteenth century was certainly abolitionism. Traditionally considered a movement of free men, almost all of whom were white and literate, who fought in

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the Parliament and in the streets for a legislation that would put an end to slavery in Brazil, abolitionism has been reinterpreted in studies that tend to pay more attention to the connections between abolitionists and the slaves’ struggle against slavery. Joaquim Nabuco, the most important parliamentary abolitionist, for instance, considered abolitionism a successful movement that within ten years (1879–88) achieved its purpose of ending slavery, freeing around 2 million slaves who still remained in the country (in 1879, according to his estimate) and setting Brazil free from the shame of being the last country on the American continent to keep slavery going. He listed five different factors that contributed to the movement’s success: 1st the propulsive action of the spirits who created public opinion through the idea, through word, through sentiment, and who made it come about through the parliament, through meetings, the press, academic education, from pulpits, tribunals; 2nd the coercive action of those who proposed to materially destroy the dreadful slavery apparatus, releasing the slaves from their masters; 3rd the complementary action of the owners themselves who, as the movement initiated, decreased their resistance against it, massively releasing [slaves] in their factories; 4th the political action of the statesmen, representing the government’s concessions; 5th the dynastic action.20

As Nabuco’s classic record shows, many forces contributed to the movement’s success, but among them there were no slaves. Nabuco’s interpretation surely was the most influential, for it defined the parameters that would guide studies on slavery that were to follow. However, it is important to acknowledge that other contemporaries of abolitionism gave more emphasis to the role played by slaves in the fights for freedom. Evaristo de Moraes (a young journalist in the 1880s, and after that a lawyer socialist leader, mentioned earlier), for example, followed Nabuco in the periodization of abolitionism (taking the 1879 parliamentary manifestations as a starting point), but listed more causes to explain the movement’s success, among which he includes “the vibrant protest made by slaves against their own enslavement, through mass escapes and by the demands for freedom and wages.”21 Recent theses have also highlighted the importance of the slaves’ struggles against slavery in the process that culminated in abolition, arguing that their involvement was a decisive factor, for “without the support of the slaves through mass escapes, the abolitionist project would have had no means of succeeding.”22 It is worth pointing out that, in spite of a certain agreement on the importance of the slaves’ autonomous actions in the process that culminated in 1888, many historiographic debates on the

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various phases of the fight against slavery have oscillated in the past years, with relevant discussions on the role of the “emancipationist” legislation. A few years ago, one would frequently come across the then-dominant interpretation that the laws before 1888 had merely played a secondary role. In the 1990s, a series of new research efforts sought to emphasize that the efforts toward legal guarantees for the gradual end of slavery were important accomplishments in the fight for freedom, including new studies of the 1871 ventre livre act (which would free, after some years, the children of slaves born after that date) and the 1885 act called “dos sexagenários” (which would free all slaves over sixty years old). Thus the legislation not only ensured that those born after 1871 (after reaching full age) or those over sixty years old in 1885 would be considered free, but also, and more particularly, it offered legal guarantees instituted by the new rules consecrating customs such as the slaves’ right to peculium (savings) and to purchase manumissions. A significant example of the new interpretation of the emancipationist legislation can be found in Sidney Chalhoub’s analysis of the 1871 act. According to Chalhoub, “the 1871 Act is not liable to an unequivocal and totalizing interpretation.” The ambiguous character of the act is highlighted by his analysis that it could be interpreted both as an “example of the survival instinct of the seigniorial class” and at the same time as “a conquest of the slaves in a certain sense, and [that it] had important consequences for the process of abolition in the Court.”23 Chalhoub studied not only the act but also the concrete ways that the slaves of Rio de Janeiro resorted to it in fighting for their freedom. Although they did not take action through collective rebellions or acts of insurrection, according to Chalhoub, those slaves, “far from being passive or resigned to their condition, attempted to change it by strategies that were provided for to a greater or lesser extent in the society they lived in. Moreover, they pressured for institutional changes in that society that would benefit them.”24 Taken to an extreme, however, such a perspective may lead to a much different interpretation of the 1871 act than that proposed by Chalhoub, who emphasized its ambiguous nature insofar. Other authors will give even more importance to the political potential of the law in regard to the slaves’ fight for freedom, overestimating the institutional strategies in striving for manumissions, regarded as those that in the end were the most decisive for the demise of slavery in Brazil. This seems to be the implication of Joseli Mendonça’s affirmations, when she declares, for example, that the efforts of those who searched for freedom by legal means had impact and efficacy, provoking the end of slavery:

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They were, in the limits of their attitudes, sowing embarrassments and fear among the very masters, questioning the continuity of their manorial-type domination. For that reason, it seems to me reasonable to think that attitudes such as those … were political actions challenging the landowners’ domination, and efficient in the sense of bringing about their downfall.25

We consider this valuation of the legal pathway to be exaggerated and do so not only because it treats the individual fight for manumissions as a political confrontation. Considering that the customs of peculium and manumission acquisition were already widespread, the post-1871 novelty was chiefly the greater power of intervention that the government now had over the manorial-type relations that were formerly defended as “private.” Therefore, what took shape in the processes of manumission was just one side of the process of the fight for freedom that, in the context of class struggle, can also be seen as a limitation of that very process. After all, although the masters were individually vexed by the state’s incursion in their “affairs,” from the point of view of the class-role of this same manorial state, it was a matter of attempting to alleviate, by means of stimulating slaves to look for the manumissions, the social tensions and the greater evil (the mass rebellions, which the masters were indeed afraid of). For those who stood for the slaves’ cause, it became clearer by the end of the 1870s, when the relatively small number of liberties achieved through this path showed, even to “emancipationists” who were enthusiastic about the 1871 law, that it was not enough, and for that reason they turned toward full abolitionism, imbuing it with a more radical tone. Some points of Chalhoub’s more recent work seem to reinforce this hypothesis. Data from the ministerial census of slaves, from 1875, inform that there were 1,410,668 slaves in the country (that figure would eventually reach 1,540,000). Figures from another report (1880) show how limited the application of the 1871 act was, since only 35,093 manumissions were recorded (although this number is considered to be underestimated by the report), all paid for privately, either by the slaves themselves or by some benefactor; more shockingly, only 4,584 were released by means of the public fund created for that purpose.26 For that reason, the author considers that “anyhow, in the Brazilian Empire of the beginning of the 1880s, the official statistics continued to show that it was more likely that a slave would die in captivity than that he or she would ever obtain his or her freedom.”27 Based on such evidence, it was possible for the militants of the cause to consider that, by the turn of the 1880s, the legal paths opened in 1871 had been completely insufficient to end slavery in the medium term and they turned to a more consequent way of struggling for immediate abolition.

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The data on the city of Rio de Janeiro tells us that from then on, freedom became a concrete possibility for a much higher number of urban slaves. We have already observed the decrease in the number of slaves in the court from 1850 on. Around the 1880s, however, the flow of slaves from the city to the country had already stopped and the drop in the number of slaves in the city can be mainly explained by the process of freedom. In this phase, Robert Conrad, resorting to official reports, found that in June 1885 there were 29,909 slaves in the city, and 7,488 in 1887, which represents a decrease of 74.9 percent (the country’s highest percentage drop ever).28 The radicalization of the abolitionist movement seemed to decisively erode slavery’s bases. This can be concluded from the actions of the early 1880s abolitionists in Rio de Janeiro, who would go to the downtown shops and houses and pressure slave owners to release their slaves. Evaristo de Moraes referred to the process, analyzing its propaganda: From 1884 on, the Confederação Abolicionista [Abolitionist Confederation] dedicated itself to a propaganda service removing slavery from certain central streets of the city, encouraging those who owned slaves to free them, or achieving this through a symbolic indemnification.29

In 1884, the Confederação Abolicionista’s report on its first year of activities provides further information on that action, showing its success in the streets of Uruguaiana, Ouvidor, do Teatro, and in Largo de São Francisco, that is to say, in the main commercial districts and most important collective transportation centers of the period, which explains the proprietors’ furious reaction to the struggle for freedom: The Confederação’s idea of releasing slaves from areas of the Capital has already begun to be put into practice. The first neighborhood freed of slavery was that of Rua Uruguaiana, in which the Gazeta da Tarde [an abolitionist newspaper] is situated. There are no longer any slaves in the New Street do Ouvidor. Achieving this magnificent result was quite a simple process; commissions formed by members of the Confederação and by some inhabitants of slave-free streets were organized. Together, they obtained cartas de liberdade [freedom letters] for the enslaved, without any corresponding indemnification. The news of that achievement and of a similar episode involving the Centro Abolicionista da Escola Politécnica [Abolitionist Center of the Polytechnic School] using the same means, and which freed the Largo de São Francisco de Paula [a central square] and the Rua do Teatro, has alarmed the defenders of slavery, who have gathered all elements at their disposal to fight against us.30

For the purposes of the present discussion, it is worth paying attention to a detail in Evaristo de Moraes’s narrative on the episode. According to

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him, Procópio Russel (typographer of the Imprensa Nacional, [National Press])31 was part of that committee in charge; interesting evidence that enables us to deepen the analysis of the connection between the abolitionist movement and the free or enslaved workers’ organizations we have previously mentioned. Studies on the abolitionism from São Paulo have already pointed to various records of support for organizations of slaves and freed slaves (such as black brotherhoods) and even of organized workers. Both the abolitionist efforts of Luís Gama (an abolitionist lawyer and former slave) and especially the actions of the caifazes (the most radical group of São Paulo abolitionism) had strong links with the black brotherhoods such as Nossa Senhora dos Remédios, and do Rosário and Santa Efigênia, as well as with the first organized sectors of the laboring class. Antonia Quintão shows that the caifazes’ newspaper, A Redenção (The Redemption), operated in the salons of the Irmandade de Nossa Senhora dos Remédios, a brotherhood in which many abolitionists took part, and which was involved in the acquisition of manumissions and in the organization of abolitionist manifestations.32 The presence of Antonio Bento and other cafaizes leaders was also constant in the brotherhoods of Rosário and Santa Efigênia. The same author identifies the presence of railway employees, coachmen, cigar manufacturers, and typographers in the escapes organized by the cafaizes. These kinds of solidarity networks even included organizations of immigrant workers such as the Círculo Operário Italiano (Italian Workers’ Circle), which promoted events in 1881 to raise funds for the acquisition of slaves.33 Abolitionist newspapers registered the same kind of labor involvement in the abolitionist cause in the province of Ceará, where the movement was very strong in 1881. According to the carioca newspaper, O Abolicionista, the typographers’ class of the Capital gathered and published a manifesto adhering to the Sociedade Cearense Libertadora, deciding to totally deny their services to newspapers that declared themselves in any form of publication to be against the abolitionist movement of the province and of the country.34

In Rio de Janeiro, similar involvements could be found in various organized workers’ groups such as, for instance, among the workers of the Arsenal de Marinha, as the same newspaper informed: “The masters and workers of foundry workshops and blacksmiths of the Arsenal de Marinha decided to raise a monthly fund in favor of the abolition the servile element. Each one of them will donate the amount they can afford, the total being handed every month to the leaders of the Sociedade Emancipadora [Emancipatory Society] for the correct purpose. This is a procedure which is

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worth being imitated and that praises the artistic class which took the initiative, a laudable one.35

The typographers of the court, who have a recurring presence in this book, could not be absent from this section. The records from the first years of the Associação Tipográfica Fluminense report the existence of a slave associate who tried to obtain manumission through a committee of the Tipográfica’s associates.36 During the 1858 typesetters’ strike, the emancipation discussion filled the pages of the Jornal dos Tipógrafos in an article that defended the gradual overcoming of slavery.37 In the first years of the 1880s, the typographers founded, as mentioned in the previous chapter, the Clube Abolicionista Gutemberg [Gutemberg Abolitionist Club], which undertook to buy manumissions and instituted the free evening school.38 The club was no mere auxiliary to the abolitionism of that time—quite the contrary; its president, Alberto Victor, held the post of general secretary of the Confederação Abolicionista in the mid-1880s.39 The effort of the typographers in the abolitionist cause could already be seen before, as shown by the conference given by Vicente de Souza, a republican agitator and one of the main carioca socialist leaderships, at the request of the Associação Tipográfica in 1879. The conference, titled “The Empire and Slavery, the Parliament and Death Penalty,” took place on March 23 of that year in the São Luiz Theatre. His specific purpose was to denounce the reactionary character of parliamentarian Martin Francisco, who, under the pretext of avoiding crimes of slaves that he attributed to an option of them by the galés (forced labor), proposed the adoption of the death penalty for murders committed by slaves. Although he defined Africans as “brutal as the wildness of a hippopotamus, savage as the brutality of their wars,” Vicente de Souza attributed the crimes committed by slaves to the fact that for them it was not possible to appeal to the law, given that the law defended the owners’ right to retain them as property, which was in fact based on conquest, on robbery of the slaves’ own humanity.40 In that conference, Vicente de Souza referred to the purpose of raising funds for the Associação Tipográfica as “begging,” but this should be attributed to his ignorance about the association’s role (not charitable, but mutual). However, it is significant that this republican propagandist, a teacher at the Colégio Pedro II (the most important public school of the country) and future leader of the Centro das Classes Operárias [Labor Classes’ Center], had made various references to the situation of the laboring class, in his view, a result of the orthodox economic policies of the imperial cabinets:

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They economize on everything, and do so to save the country’s finances, astoundingly jeopardized by the conservatives and their delirious ostentation, they make use of the worker and then expel him from the workshop. … They show him the door instead of giving him the means to work, and that is anything but justifiable, citizens.41

In that episode, there are many relevant elements. It is an event that represents a link between the abolitionist campaign, the republican campaign, and labor associations present, once more in the pioneering voice of the typographers. It is even more significant that it happened in late March 1879, about two weeks after the famous discourse of the parliamentarian Jerônimo Sodré, identified by Nabuco as the initial mark of the abolitionist movement, which means that the labor associations had been involved in the fight for abolition since their beginnings. Such involvement could be mediated by other types of association or political ideologies. The freemasons linked to the Grande Oriente [Great Orient], for instance, founded two societies in 1870, one with the purpose of buying manumissions and the other for giving education to the freed slaves, or libertos. The speech at the opening of both societies was pronounced by Saldanha Marinho, a character who will be mentioned again later.42 One should also not overlook the connection that the positivists made between the defense of abolition, the need for policies that would include former slaves in the proletariat, and the first proposals of social protection for wage-earning workers, in propositions they formulated still in the 1880s, as shown by an 1883 pamphlet, distributed by the Sociedade Positivista do Rio de Janeiro [Positivist Society of Rio de Janeiro], that defended the incorporation of the slave proletariat; that is, it defended abolition while at the same time declaring: It is necessary to redeem from the most nefarious captivity, the captivity of industrial times, the mass of men who, stolen from their native soil, have been the direct agents of the social capital that forms our wealth, the base of our nation’s civilization.43

In the following years, the involvement of organized workers with abolitionism, the network of associations dedicated to propaganda and to action toward freedom, even though by illegal means, would increase. In a statement considered by Eduardo Silva to have been made by André Rebouças, an important abolitionist, it can be seen that the labor sector actively participated in the final phase of the fight against slavery, supporting the mass escapes and the formation of abolitionist quilombos (communities of runway slaves). Homes and working areas had been

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used as refuges for enslaved workers who escaped from their owners’ control: In the abolitionists’ homes, in commercial offices, in newspaper offices, in hotels, in bakeries, in large factories, headquarters, typography shops, in every place with an abolitionist soul, there was a safe shelter to keep the poor people in.44

Giving more details on the participation of these sectors, André Rebouças’s statement identifies, among other places, the Tipografia Central [Central Typographic Shop] of Evaristo Rodrigues da Costa and the house of the worker Ignácio de Faria as shelters for refugee slaves.45 It is a matter of fact that there had not always been complicity between the ex-slaves’ fight for freedom and the waged workers’ fights, and there were even disputes for places in the labor market, as the 1891 strike in the docks of Santos shows, when the leader of the former abolitionist quilombo of Jabaquara, Quintino Lacerda, organized quilombolas (the ones from the quilombo), former slaves under his leadership, to break the strike and to attempt to (re)occupy the workspaces that had formerly belonged to enslaved workers in the docks, and in those days had been chiefly filled by European immigrants.46 There are, however, even more significant episodes that reveal quite a high level of exchange between organizations, forms of collective action and social movements of enslaved and free workers, such as the surprising history of the baker João de Mattos, already mentioned in previous chapters.47 His narrative starts in the same town of Santos, in 1876, when he organized an “uprising,” which, according to him, “were like today’s strikes.”48 The uprising consisted of mobilizing all slaves who worked in the five existing bakeries of Santos to interrupt work and then run away. While Mattos prepared the group for the escape, manumission letters were being forged, which would later allow the slaves to find work in the country as “freedmen.” Arrested in the city of São Bernardo two months after the event, João was sent back to Santos, where he spent three months in jail. As there were no witnesses who could incriminate him, he was released on the condition of not returning to the town. In 1877, João moved to São Paulo, where he organized the enslaved workers of eleven or twelve bakeries there for an “uprising” of the same type. With the group of refugees from São Paulo, and following the same strategy of faking manumission letters to find jobs in towns and in the countryside, he moved to the province of Rio de Janeiro, arriving there in 1878. In 1880, in the capital, João de Mattos founded a Bloco de Defesa [Defense Block] of the bakers called Sociedade dos Empregados de Padaria,

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com o lema pelo pão e pela Liberdade [Society of the Employees in Bakeries with the Motto for Bread and for Freedom]49 The Bloco de Defesa, however, was illegal because of its “criminal” purposes of “fighting the proprietorship of slaves” using a “Dance Course” as cover. Through this society, which gathered about a hundred associates, new partial “uprisings” and one general uprising were organized, with slaves fleeing to Barra do Piraí. Returning to Rio, João de Mattos was arrested again after a member of the society informed on him for 100$000 réis. Defended by Saldanha Marinho, he was released three months later. It is interesting to note that João de Mattos’s defense lawyer, already mentioned for his participation in the abolitionist effort of the freemason shops, was the first parliamentarian to defend the republican cause at that moment and integrated the Corpo Consultor [Consulting Body] of the Corpo Coletivo União Operária (Collective Body Workers’ Union), referred to in the previous chapter.50 The end of slavery did not mean the end of João de Mattos’s and his fellow bakers’ fight, for, according to his argument, after defeating the “de facto slavish power,” in the following fights they would manage to “destroy that of the ‘free enslaved’, who continued to be limited to choosing between this or that master.”51 So, as we have seen, the militant baker was involved in the following years in the 1890 foundation of the Sociedade Cooperativa dos Empregados de Padaria, as well as the Sociedade Cosmopolita Protetora dos Empregados de Padaria in 1898, which later would originate the bakers’ trade union, taking part both in the direct fight against the employers and in the institutional fight through the petitions addressed to the National Congress.52 Concerning the period of fights in the 1880s discussed in the previous chapter, we managed to cross-reference João de Mattos’ memories with other evidence/sources, confirming the information he left and filling in the blank spaces. It was not possible however to do the same with this baker’s extraordinary wanderings in the period of struggles for the freedom of the enslaved. But taking into account the level of confirmation of his memories of the 1890s found in other sources, it is acceptable to trust his memories of the previous decades, incorporating his trajectory not as typical case but as possible path in the field of possibilities opened by the period’s social fights.53

From Vintém to Vacina: Urban Riots In analyzing strikes or abolitionism, we are focusing on movements that, in spite of their different outlines, have in common the fact of being

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organized social movements insofar as they have been convoked, stimulated, or propagated by organizations (clubs, federations, leagues, unions, associations, syndicates, etc.). However, no less important at certain moments was the political impact of social movements, which, though not being headed by institutionalized organizations, gathered relatively large groups of the urban population—multitudes that presented explicit goals, chose certain targets (people, institutions, or properties) to attack, and fought the repressive forces for hours or even days. Rio de Janeiro, throughout the period analyzed in the present work, was the stage of many demonstrations and some urban riots of the common people with quite significant political impact. A pioneering event among the movements in that sense was the Revolta do Vintém (“Penny” Rebellion), which took place on January 1, 1880. In October of the previous year the parliament had approved an act that instituted a new tax on tram tickets to be charged directly to the passengers of Rio de Janeiro.54 The historical processes that are linked with the rebellion can be better understood against the background of urban growth and modernization experienced in those years; the housing conditions and collective transportation to which most people from the city were subjected to; the tram services being run by foreign enterprises that associated the activity to urban speculation; discontent with tax hikes; etc. However, the following events that led to the rebellion against the new tax first occurred on December 28, 1879, when around five thousand people rallied in the vicinity of the imperial palace in São Cristóvão to protest against the new taxes. Led by Lopes Trovão (agitator of republican cause), the participants of the rally headed to the emperor’s residence to demand the revocation of the law before the new tax could start being applied. The demonstrators were interrupted on their way by cavalry troops and policemen headed by the chief of police. Peacefully changing its route in the face of such an obstacle, the political parade was ended with a call for another demonstration downtown, in the Largo do Paço (called Praça XV de Novembro [15th of November Square] nowadays) on January 1, when the new tax would take effect. The strategy used by the event’s organizers, however, had changed from an initial demand for the law’s revocation addressed to the emperor to the proposal of a boycott of the new tax; that is, after the first repressive reaction, they proposed civil disobedience. The rally initially took place without further problems on the arranged day, but then at noon the crowd of four thousand people headed through the center of Rio de Janeiro to Largo de São Francisco (the final stop of most trams). Close by, the parade split into two big groups, after which violent conflicts broke

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out between the demonstrators and the hundreds of policemen who followed the crowd. The number of dead and injured people, which will be discussed, illustrates the level of radicalization in repressing the crowds. According to the justifications in contemporary reports, the crowd, trying to defend itself from the cavalry and the shooting, turned over a tram, pulled the tram rails out, and barricaded themselves. Months later, the parliament would revoke the tax. Sandra Graham calls attention to the fact that the rebellion marked the beginning of a new stage of popular political mobilization in the city, with the event and the emerging associations being starting points for the great abolitionist and republican agitations. Considering that the organizations and campaigns that emerged had a multiclass character, the same could be applied to the event. However, in this event, as in previous ones, the fact is that the quantitative dimension of the participants and the level of radicalization of the participants’ resistance indicate that the agitators’ initial intentions would not be enough to explain the developments that followed. These can only be understood if we realize that the protagonists were, as Graham puts it, “the poor workers”55 who could not even afford tickets for trams but who took part in the rebellion with their own logic against urban inequality and state authoritarianism. Between the Revolta do Vintém in 1880 and another great urban rebellion, the Revolta da Vacina (Vaccine Revolt), in 1904, José Murilo de Carvalho found some movements like one that broke street gas lamps in 1882, another which destroyed trams in 1901, and also attacks on trains in Central do Brasil and water meters in 1902.56 In the police reports we could find some similar events, always in their first chapter, which refers to “Public Order.” Regarding what is of interest to our work, dedicated to the workers’ movements and repressive reactions to them as it is, the Revolta da Vacina is, of course, of the greatest importance. It is a movement that has been widely studied by historiography,57 demanding here but a brief reference in order to discuss what concerns us; its profile as an urban working-class protest. That is because it has almost always been represented as a “people’s” uprising or a rebellion moved by the “excluded” of the new urban order. The rebellion, which took place between November 10 and 16, 1904, was mobilized against a law that instituted compulsory vaccination against smallpox in Rio de Janeiro. The opponents of vaccination argued against the violence of allowing the health agents to force vaccination with police support (which they had already experienced during the vaccination against yellow fever), which was supported by the draconian terms of the law, and questioned the efficacy of methods employed, associated by many to the most ancient and dangerous techniques of inoculation. Be-

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hind all the fuss, there were conspiracies against the government both by monarchists and radical republicans, all willing to promote a putsch that would “restore” the betrayed (monarchist or republican) morality. The fact was, however, that the grassroots rebellion far surpassed the agitators’ intentions. Evidence of that lies in its duration—almost a week—and its outreach, involving the entire city. The emphasis was in the central areas, and there was a particular radicalization in the port neighborhood of Saúde, with its high concentration of Afro-descendants and Portuguese migrants. There was also extraordinary violence and conflicts with the state’s repressive forces. Concerning this last aspect, the official data on the repression is not fully trustworthy, for there were many people arrested and deported (usually to Acre) without any due legal process, and there would be numerous deaths to register if that data were to be taken into account. According to the available records, however, it is possible to have an idea of the authorities’ reactionary violence. José Murilo de Carvalho reckoned 30 dead, 110 injured, 945 arrested and 462 deported.58 Among the specialized works, there are many controversies on what motivated the rebellion. However, it is possible to list some of its multiple motivations. On one side, there was the reaction to the government’s authoritarian intervention in the everyday life of the city’s inhabitants. The government healthcare policy was one of strong arbitrariness, and combining that with the diversity of conceptions of health and disease held by the heterogeneous population made it an extremely sensitive issue. On the other side, there was the level of social inequality in the urban milieu, heightened by the government’s intervention with literal demolition in that context of reforms, all of which led Rio de Janeiro’s workers to feel that justice was not being done to them. Housing, transportation, and food costs all soared with the “modernization” fury of the urban interventions, while low wages and the nonexistence of social policies made poverty appear to most workers as a threatening horizon drawing ever closer. Concerning what interests us most, it is notorious that workers played a central role in that movement. After all, the rallies, organized by the Liga Contra a Vacina Obrigatória, (League Against Compulsory Vaccination), called by the Centro das Classes Operárias—CCO (Labor Classes Center), and headed by our already well-known socialist militant Vicente de Souza, were the blasting fuse for the demonstrations. José Murilo de Carvalho mentions various petitions to the government condemning the law, reckoning a total of fifteen thousand signatures, out of which ten thousand belonged to workers.59 The articles in the press of the period, collected by those who study the movement, make it clear that there was also labor participation in areas where the presence of the CCO was limited, as in the textile factories.

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The wide coverage of the episode by the newspaper Jornal do Comércio, cited by Nicolau Sevcenko, points to the presence of workers when it informs that “in Gávea numerous workers of textile factories actively took part in the rebellion.”60 But if the working class that was being formed was not monochromatic, as we have been highlighting all the time, the live presence of the descendants of slavery days ended up being felt in an even more objective manner. The concentration of the resistance in the area of Saúde/ Gamboa (the “Little Africa” as we have seen), the strike in the docks, the identification of the most intransigent leader of the siege (ironically compared to the siege of Port Arthur) in the Saúde district, nicknamed Prata Preta (Black Silver) by the press of the day, all helps us to portray the strong presence of blacks in the episode. José Murilo de Carvalho provides a good illustration of it, using the following newspaper report in his analysis: The reporter from the newspaper A Tribuna, talking about the rebellion to members of the public, heard from a black capoeira man words that express well the nature of that rebellion and this feeling of pride. Calling the reporter “citizen”, the black man justified the rebellion: “that was to keep people from saying that the ordinary folk are just sheep. Sometimes it is good that the blacks show that they know how to die as men.”61

Blacks and workers, the rebels of the dock zone, would be the main target of the press’s negative characterization of those who were involved in the rebellion, legitimizing a tougher repression of the inhabitants of that region of the city. In the newspaper O Paiz, the coverage of the rebellion deliberately associated the rebels to images of “rioters,” and “anarchists,” declaring that the “popular irony and the charlatanism of the rioters dubbed the last anarchist redoubt of Port Arthur,” or even that the trench was formed by “unqualified individuals, evil criminals of the lowest condition, masquerading as sailors and dockers.”62 The rebellion did not end until the revocation of the law that provoked it, in spite of the violent repression it suffered. The movement’s background motivations, however, did not cease there, nor did the government’s repressive will to face of the city workers’ manifestations of that or of other natures (such as strikes).

Back to the Strikes The strikes that occurred between 1850 and 1880 are significant episodes, as they reveal that during certain moments the conflict between

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workers and their employers took the typical form associated to relations in wage-earning disputes. So far, though, that had not been the most common type of workers’ mobilization. In the following decades, however, strikes spread all over Rio de Janeiro, gaining shape as the main instrument of class struggles. Cross-referencing data produced by previous research with other surveys of the period’s newspapers, we found 37 strikes between 1890 and 1899. For the following decade, the data indicate an expressive growth in work stoppages, as we found 109 strikes between 1900 and 1909.63 In research done on the period between 1890 and 1917, Marcela Goldmacher found 234 strikes in Rio. In her survey, she found that the professional groups that interrupted work were mostly weavers/textile workers (34 strikes during the period), followed by coachmen, bricklayers and shoemakers.64 It is interesting to note that among the most mobilized sectors of the city’s working class in its formation process were shoemakers, a typical case of qualified workers, mostly employed in small and average-sized workshops, who fought against disqualification and exploitation, that they perceived as a result of the expansion of the sector’s big factories.65 At the same time, a greater amount of work stoppages can be observed among the textile workers, a typical category of the great factories in that context. This was the case in the 1890s, when they organized six strikes, and the 1900s, when they called another seventeen strikes, contradicting the idea that it was only during the 1917–20 period that industrial workers (most of them employed in textile factories) became more actively aroused for strike mobilization. Analyzing certain strikes enables us to get a clearer idea of the patterns of labor resistance. In the 1880s and 1900s, the urban transport sector, especially the trams, was one of the greatest poles of mobilization and conflicts, led mainly by workers or passengers. That being so, it was not rare to see strikes irrupting in this sector and developing into conflicts of considerable proportions. To take but a single example, there was the strike of coachmen and conductors of the Companhia Carris Urbanos (a tram company), which took place between March 15 and 17, 1898. The demands were of two kinds: the coachmen demanded a raise in wages, while the conductors demanded the end of the minimum turnover per day, recently introduced by the company’s management. Whenever the conductors were not able to achieve it, they would have the amount lacking debited from their wages. In view of the movement’s strength, the company committed itself to raise the coachmen’s wages by 5$ a day and to review the new rules for the conductors. However, it only increased wages by 400R$ and did not change anything for the conductors, which generated even more intense

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discontent among the workers, who completely interrupted the tram services. Only with strongest police repression was the strike ended. This movement illustrates the impact of the strikes on the dominant conservative consciousness, which is evident in the two more typical reactions to these stoppages: on the one side, the minimization of their relevance using the argument of the “pacific nature” of the Brazilian people; on the other side, the criminalization of strike movements, regarded as a serious social disturbance. In this case, the same episode caused two different reactions in the press from the same ruling-class spokesmen. These were the reactions from the newspaper Gazeta de Notícias to the coachmen and tram conductors’ strike in March 1898. On March 16, the newspaper started an article on the strike with the following affirmation: “When one talks about strikes here in Brazil, we do not get scared, for among us, even if it is a serious one, it never reaches the proportions of a true rebellion as in the Old World.”66 On the following day, the newspaper changed its opinion commenting on the continuity of the strike. Now, the coachmen justified the fears of “social disturbance” after all: Conductors and coachmen kept on behaving in the same way as the day before, or changed from a pacific passive resistance position of interrupting work to even attacking fellows who did not wish to follow them. During the morning the uproar started, the alarming news, the scaring rumors of social disturbance.67

We found similar reactions in relation to other strikes. In view of the impossibility of analyzing a greater number of movements, we shall turn to examples of strikes among categories that interrupted work frequently during those years. Among the various shoemaker movements, some quite interesting aspects can be understood in the strikes that occurred between December 1902 and February of the following year. The movements started when seventy workers of the Bordallo & Cia shoe factory, who were paid on the basis of piece work, demanded a raise in their wages. A violent reaction from the owners ended up enlarging the strike, as reported by the workers’ newspaper Gazeta Operária: THE SHOEMAKERS STRIKE The shoemakers of the Bordallo & C. factory … unsatisfied with the diminished price paid for their work … nominated a commission among their fellows for dealing with the owners. The owners did not address their workers’ complaints, even if they were fair, and besides that ordered the arrest of many workers. The police chief, however, did not keep them under illegal arrest and released the shoemakers. Due to that fact, the shoemakers of that factory decided to abandon work at that establishment.68

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Beginning on December 14, the strike was supported by the shoemakers union, União Auxiliadora dos Artistas Sapateiros (Auxiliary Union of Shoemakers Artisans), which hosted the assemblies and mediated the negotiations, presenting a chart of salaries that should be adopted by factories of the sector. Continuing until January 25, the strike ended successfully, as announced by the Gazeta Operária: THE LABOR CLASSES As our readers will acknowledge from the news today, the shoemakers of this town, who have been on peaceful strike for a long time, were victorious. … Long has been the sacrifice, but victory has rewarded them with this triumph they accomplished last Sunday, when one representative of the Bordallo & C’s patrons came to a full assembly and stated they fully accepted the price chart organized by the workers!69

The strike’s success in Bordallo’s factory encouraged the União dos Sapateiros to attempt to impose their wage chart on the other enterprises. In the first days of February, five other strikes were reported, all of them resulting in the adoption of the chart proposed by the class entity.70 Turning to the textile workers, the professional group that made the most strikes at the time, we found that between 1890 and 1902 the weavers organized eight strikes at at least six different factories. No association, however, was able to unite the group’s fight until early 1903, when the Federação dos Operários em Fábricas de Tecido (Textile Factory Workers’ Federation) was founded. Under this organization, the number of strikes increased considerably, and it became possible to build a strike of the entire professional group in spite of the repressive action by patrons and the police in August 1903. The strikers’ main demand was the adoption of an eight-hour working day. In addition to the weavers, the strike stopped various professional groups in the Federal District and effectively took on the form of a general strike. The strike mobilized an estimated total of forty thousand workers, out of which twenty-five thousand were employed in textile factories.71 It is interesting to note that, along with the textile factory workers, tailors and painters played an outstanding role in the strike, sectors with a clearly specialized/artisan outline, as well as dockers, typical non-specialized workers who were beginning to organize themselves into trade unions at that moment. It was inevitable that polemics among the various active political tendencies in the carioca labor milieu should surface during such a large strike movement. The Centro das Classes Operárias, under the leadership of the socialist Vicente de Souza and in which Lieutenant José Augusto Vinhaes took part, kept aloof from the strike and criticized the move-

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ment, and they were answered by the strike leaders in tones suggestive of revolutionary syndicalism. In the debate on the strike, the question, already present in the debates of the Partido Operário (Labor Party) in the previous decade, of the legitimacy and representativeness of non-worker leaders among the working class emerged again, as can be seen in the following excerpt from the Brasil Operário newspaper: Workers! Your fellows are only those who work by your side and those who feel the rigorous winter cold, the intense summer heat, the lack of bread for the family. … Others, however, who may ask why you suffer are mere impostors who will do nothing for you; they simply want to know the mechanism of your sacrificed life, to beg mercy for you for their own benefit. They only want to climb to higher positions using your weary heads full of pain and care for your sons, as ladders. Go away doctors! Go away lieutenants! Go away paper forgers! Only workers for the workers!72

From an economic point of view, the strike achieved for the workers “nine hours and an insignificant [wage] increase,” which was a partial gain. Concerning the political evaluation, though, the memory of the movement was quite negative due to the dismissals: “morally speaking, [the strike] was a complete disaster, for all factories dismissed a large number of workers, making hundreds of men unemployed.”73

Repression Another important dimension for this analysis, as it should be clear from the reports of movements commented on earlier, is the relation of the government with organizations and urban workers’ movements (enslaved and free) in which the police appears as a central agent. The studies on contemporary police institutions in different Western countries converge in demonstrating that some of their main tasks, since the professionalization of police corps, included exercising control over individuals proposing alternative forms of living out of wage-relations, as well as surveillance over the organizations and repression over the struggle strategies of the working class. Some examples from Britain and the United States may add more historical density to this statement. Concerning the British case, given its dimensions and political and economic centrality, the most significant manifestations of resistance against the forms of political domination and labor exploitation in place since the seventeenth century were concentrated in London. Peter Linebaugh shows how the introduction of typical capitalist labor relations (such as

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wages and a factory regime) had to face “part of the libertarian and autonomous inheritance of the English Revolution.”74 Not by chance, most conflicts between employers and the law on the one side and London workers on the other were related to the port activity on the Thames River. Among dockers as much as shipbuilding workers, a situation of extremely depressed earnings prevailed. Workers tried to compensate for this by taking “left-overs” from transportation and the raw materials they handled, an everyday act justified by custom. The conjuncture of the late eighteenth century would open space for changes, because of both the fears of the international force of revolutions and the day-by-day workers’ resistance to the new forms of labor relations. In the 1780s, open forms of resistance such as strikes, riots, and attacks on banks and prisons emerged. In the port region, after failing to control the appropriation of rejects and leftovers by port workers, including an attempt in the 1760s to create a private police force, the West Indian Trading Company transformed labor organization by creating its own docks and accelerating the process of loading and unloading through the employment of cranes and of direct docking combined with labor force confinement. The following step, in 1798, showed the government supporting the private initiative toward this direction, with the approval of the River Thames Police Act, creating “England’s first professional police force.”75 Later in the sequence of that process came the approval of the Metropolitan Police Act of 1829. To Linebaugh: The factory, the wage labor system, money, technical rationality, mechanization and burgeoning trade became the modern and industrialized base for accumulation. … Both in social and production levels, the police reinforced the new civilization organized by money and mechanization.76

That picture was to become defined in 1833, when this new police force violently confronted the protestors of the National Union of the Working Classes (of radical and Owenist lineage). The London Metropolitan Police served as a model for professionalizing the police institutions in United States of America (like the New York Metropolitan Police in 1835).77 In spite of the polemics among various interpretive currents in the history of the American police, it is widely agreed that the stage of consolidation of the standardized professional police occurred between the second half of the nineteenth century and the 1910s. Martha Huggins shows how the process of bureaucratization and professionalization of the American police served to control workers for a

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government guided by the interests of the ruling class. In the first place it did so by putting between the state’s administrative and military branches, on the one hand, and society’s dominated sectors, on the other, a civil force that attracted the wrath of all those it repressed, making state repression less obvious. But professionalization also had the consequence of leaving those responsible for controlling and repressing apart from those who should be repressed and controlled, avoiding the risk of identification between policemen and workers noticed by earlier observers. Professionalization meant disrupting “self-identification of the rank-and-file police with the similar class and ethnicity of those they must control.” In order to achieve that, it proved to be necessary to turn policing into a full-time public service occupation and the rank and file into state-paid employees, providing the police with uniforms to visually separate them from common citizens and encourage occupational self-identification rather than ethnic and class identities.78

During strikes, the class function of the American police became even more obvious. Studies such as those of Sidney Harring show that the necessity of repression and the gradual demonstration of efficiency in this task by the local police led the institution to gain legitimacy among employers and to the existence of an increase in investments in qualification, bureaucratization and specialization of the police staff.79 The police functions gained relevance insofar as they ensured “a measure of discipline and control over the working class that permits a wider measure of exploitation through the labor process, that is, more work with less resistance.”80 In cities like Chicago and Pittsburgh, during the great strikes of the late 1870s, the municipal police proved to be much more efficient than the state police, specializing in controlling these movements all through the 1880s.81 The Anglo-Saxon examples show the strong link between the process of police professionalization and the contexts of urban growth, concentration, organization, and collective protest of the working class in formation. Taking the nineteenth century and making comparisons, it is possible to affirm that there were expressive peculiarities in the process of formation of police institutions in Brazil. Inspired by the Portuguese model of the Intendência Geral de Polícia de Lisboa (General Stewardship of Lisbon Police) in the 1810s, Dom João VI created the Intendência Geral de Polícia no Rio de Janeiro (General Stewardship of Rio de Janeiro’s Police), whose institutional outlines combined administrative tasks and urban works with what we today consider to be strictly police tasks. The

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separation of proper police activities from those linked to other spheres of public administration occurred only gradually after Independence (1822).82 It is possible to affirm that in both Portugal and Brazil the formation of a professional police staff was associated with concerns about labor control, or, more specifically, with those sectors considered to be “dangerous classes,” such as vagabonds and beggars.83 The first chief of Rio de Janeiro’s police, when reporting his deeds at the end of the 1810s, mentions concern about the proliferation of vagabonds and proposes to use them as labor force in state works to avoid any problems with them. The “vice of idleness” appears as a temptation to free men, craftsmen, and journeymen, who, however, whenever their living was ensured, “improved their customs, having no idle time in which to surrender to vices that always do great damage to society.”84 However, as in other realms of the social sphere, the mark of slavery brought peculiarities to the Brazilian case. Among the main tasks of the period’s urban police was that of controlling and repressing urban slaves, punishing their order-threatening behaviors, and attempting to avoid, at any cost, the dreaded slave rebellions.85 The everyday tasks of the Corpo Policial da Corte (Police Force of the Court) included exercising control over urban slaves, especially those, such as ganhadores, who worked in the streets of the city, preventing gatherings, and suppressing any kind of individual or collective behavior considered to be threatening.86 Such police control, especially during moments when fear of slave rebellions was at its height, as in the years subsequent to the Malês uprising (Salvador, 1835), was particularly concerned with collective organizations that congregated slaves, such as brotherhoods. We mentioned earlier the fact that, when dealing with slave work stoppages, whether involved in any kind of violent confrontation with masters or not, the police always regarded these situations as acts of sedition or rebellion and were tough in repressing them. Even when the fight for freedom in the Corte reached the great proportions of the abolitionist wave of the 1880s, the police continued to treat as its top priority the repression of runaway slaves, and the various “abolitionist quilombos” spread around the city were constantly concerned with escaping from the “slaver police” led by Coelho Bastos, whose nickname was “Rapa Coco” (Coconut Scraper).87 The police action, in response to the intensification and radicalization of abolitionist demonstrations, would be considered a priority by the period’s leaders. The minister of justice and domestic affairs, in his 1883 report, justified the need for a police force reform:

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The importance of taking measures to ensure the energy and all the qualities of professional efficacy needed in this field, far from decreasing in interest in the midst of the political movement and of the spheres where certain national needs demand measures to prepare our future, seems to be enlarging in view of what has been happening to the social order in the quarters of the reformist agitation, not always directed by their promoters with the legal spirit that patriotism inspires in those who are akin to stability and law for progress.88

Forms of action such as those of João de Mattos and his group, which had resulted in the 1881 “uprising” in which dozens of slaves had escaped from Rio de Janeiro, seemed to call the police’s attention, since the 1882 report of the chief of police of the court declared the need to keep watch on the “dance courses.” One of them would function as a legal front for the Defense Block mentioned earlier, which was founded with the purpose of “truly fighting slavery.” “The so-called dance courses were established without having their regulations duly submitted to the authorities,”89 said the chief. However, as soon as the slave regime came to an end, the main duties of the police force were the subject of important changes. The marks left by slavery would not be immediately erased, and much of the police priorities were related to arresting and prosecuting vagrants. This can be associated to a view that affirmed blacks were inadequate for waged work, unless a coercive force assured the availability of that labor force for a labor market in process of formation.90 To prevent and repress the disturbances caused by mob uprisings was also one of the main functions of the police during the period of the great popular agitations, such as the urban riots that affected the capital between 1880 (the Revolta do Vintém) and 1904 (the Revolta da Vacina). In the 1880 report of the Ministry of Justice,91 the suppression of Revolta do Vintém, on January 1 that year, resulted in three deaths acknowledged by the police. It is possible to assume that there were unrecorded deaths, since some sources of that period report as many as thirty, but that estimate seems high. The official violence was justified as being necessary in the light of the “disturbing demonstrations that, though momentary, had interrupted part of the services of the tram companies.” According to the report synthesized from the information sent by the chief of police, “in many areas, the rails were pulled out, cars were broken, and there were frequent refusals to make payment of the contribution, followed by threats and other violent acts.”92 The report also stated that, at the core of the conflicts, especially on Uruguaiana Street, “those regrettable scenes gained greater proportions, making the intervention of the public forces inevitable.” Later, the report informs the dimensions of the conflict, which “occurred between the

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public force and the rebels resulting in three deaths, besides some injuries and bruises suffered by 28 people, among them 9 soldiers, including 3 officers, and 15 soldiers of the Urban Guard.”93 The minister’s conclusions praised the police action, in spite of the disastrous result: “By constant vigilance and the authorities’ efficient measures, the public order was restored, with no further tragic consequences to deplore of such facts so contrary to the pacific will of the population.”94 The increasing number of strikes in the 1890s, which was to have immediate repercussions among the police, was a sign of the times and important to any analysis of the class-formation process. The Republican regime, which was instituted in the name of the people, was confronted by an organized collective protest. In that regard, the report of the minister of justice, referring to the period between September 1890 and April 1891, pointed to “two single facts, of serious character, which left the population of the capital in panic”: a strike of coachmen and wagoners in December and a strike of railroaders of the Central do Brasil Railroad in February. The first, whose main goal was to revoke the article of the penal code that criminalized the strikes, was described as the product of the advice being given by “vulgar agitators, who exploited the others’ ignorance and credulity.” In the second episode, a strike moved by wage demands, “some workers of the line attempted to disturb the traffic, the Portuguese Martinho José de Moraes being killed on that occasion in the neighborhood of Cascadura by an agent of the public forces.”95 In that year’s attached report to the minister, the chief of police of the Federal District (the new denomination of the city of Rio de Janeiro) evoked an external factor, immigration, to explain the occurrence of “surprising episodes such as strikes.” According to the chief, The movement that now disturbs all European nations, rallying round the flag of the fight against Capital, against conservative elements of society, now sends us its propagandists, who are charged with fueling the less privileged classes to enable them to make their explosions, alternating disdain for the principle of authority with making the great and real interests of our nation shudder.96

As 1891 turned to 1892, a conflict of even more violent dimensions engulfed the railway company Central do Brasil. Railway workers on strike fought with firearms against the police force, which sent a detachment of three hundred armed policemen to the Central Station. The result of the conflict can be measured by the records of one railwayman and one policeman dead, as well as about thirty injured workers.97 The increased number of strikes in the early twentieth century made Rio de Janeiro’s police watch labor manifestations more carefully. In the passage on “Paredes Operárias” (labor strikes) from Chief of Police Car-

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doso de Castro’s report for 1903–4, two pages synthesize the police’s conceptions and attitudes in regard to the strikes.98 The report informs that the strikes gained new dimensions, but it highlights that they were not yet a threat to the public order and that they should be regarded as a natural phenomenon of industrial development, as the European case demonstrated. After all, according to the chief of police, “wherever capitalists start to profit, labor will end up complaining about their part anyway.” For that reason, the government should not, in his view, “directly intervene in this fight.”99 In practice, however, the theory used was another one, for in a note on this same passage of the report, Cardoso de Castro distinguishes the strikes in factories—“a movement of very slow action, whose effects … do not cause immediate disturbances or losses”—from strikes in sectors such as public transportation, in which “the individual right confronts directly the collective interests.” In such cases, “the police action should correspond in violence to this sudden and inopportune resource that in itself represents an intolerable act.”100 The doctrine of conciliation and non-intervention expressed in the big letters of the text disappears in the little ones of the footnote, which accounts for the repressive actions against the coachmen. In this line, the report clearly reveals the way in which the police justify their exchange of conciliation for repression: It so happens that, under such circumstances, even the strikers generally parted ways, remaining on one side the more disturbing elements and on the other those who would rather choose less violent paths. And the freedom of working, undoubtedly more genuine than that of not working, suffers the most unusual aggressions, requiring government’s most vigorous repression.101

We also cannot ignore the fact that vigilance over the working class in formation, particularly concerning its organization and forms of struggle, had been an attribute progressively more emphasized in police regulations since the 1890s. Therefore, the 1900 police regulation already defined the specificity and importance of the “political police,” and its duties in this way: “The political police is the responsibility of the Chief of Police, who acts according to the orders and instructions of the Minister of Justice.”102 According to the 1907 regulations, such duties would be performed by a specialized group of policemen, gathered in the Corpo de Investigação e Segurança Pública (Investigation and Public Safety Force). In 1920, in the light of the great labor demonstrations of previous years, such as the 1917 São Paulo general strike and the labor insurrection of 1918 in Rio de Janeiro that was interrupted by the police, the degree of police spe-

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cialization intensified, as did the task of controlling the labor movement. The Corp was substituted by the Inspetoria de Investigação e Segurança Pública (Investigation and Public Safety Inspectorate). The new body is defined as “an autonomous institution, under the aegis of the Chief of Police,” and among others duties it was responsible for “the maintenance of public order.” It had eight sections, of which “social order and public security” was the only one that was not under the authority of subinspectors, instead being “under the immediate and direct charge of the Inspectorate.” Among the attributions was “taking care of the political existence and internal security of the Republic … , developing maximum surveillance over any manifestation or kind of violent anarchism and acting rapidly to expel dangerous foreigners.”103 Within Brazilian public law, the social phenomenon of the strike was treated sometimes as a crime and at other moments as a right. The 1890 criminal code established the penalty of one to three months imprisonment for those who “caused or provoked work stoppages designed to impose on workers or employers a decrease of work or increase in wages” (article 206). The campaign organized by the Centro do Partido Operário (Labor Party Center), mentioned in the previous chapter, led the government to suppress that norm, by Act 1.162, dated December 12, 1890.104 However, the police continued, as we have seen, to consider the strikes as crimes. Turning our attention to the workers, in the first decades of the Republic, the police repression of their demonstrations and organizations was something they strongly felt in their everyday life. To give just one example of police surveillance, we can mention the report of a rally against the high cost of living that took place in Largo de São Francisco in 1913, published in Voz do Trabalhador, with the meaningful title of “Só mesmo de um polícia” (Only a Policeman Does That): I don’t know under which law the police commissioner who nervously watched the aforementioned rally, surrounded by a group of those under his command, by the action of one of them, demanded from the speakers their names, home address and even place of work…105

At other times, repressive action went far beyond of the ostensive surveillance, acting to dismantle the striking movements through the infiltration of undercover agents into workers’ organizations. This is what happened, according to the workers’ report, during the strike in the textile factories that occurred at the same time as other strikes among various professional categories in August 1903. In a document registering the historical trajectory of that category of workers produced some ten years later, much of the responsibility for the defeat of the strike was attributed to the ac-

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tion of “Francisco Fernandez, who was said to be a designer from the Ministry of the Internal Affairs, but who was actually a special agent of the public security staff, as was practically verified later.106 It is worthwhile to reproduce an excerpt of the report on the strike, which focuses on explaining how the police agent acted and includes guidance offered to the employers regarding actions for ending the strike: This man was the one who organized a strike committee with three of his fellows for the purpose of breaking the strike, which he managed to do, and according to the version, he advised employers to sound the factory whistles for three days, calling workers back to work and to fix a list at the factory gates threatening to dismiss those who did not show up during those three days, so that the workers, due to their inexperience would be scared and would give up, and that did, indeed, have the desired effect.

It is necessary to record that, in this strike as in others, in spite of all the repression chronciled, there were episodes where commissions of strikers called on the chief of police, asking for mediation with employers. Marcela Goldmacher, in her research about the strikes, found one of these moments and observed once more that the police, which acted repressively, according to the employers’ interests, was called on by workers’ entities to assume the mediation role. The strategy could mean either their recognition of the authority or an attempt to forestall repression by presenting themselves to the police, as strikers, but not as disturbers.107

Either in the form of “conciliation,” “infiltration,” or violent repression, the fact is that the police intervention in controlling workers’ movements, exerting a direct influence in favor of the employers for solving conflicts associated with the establishment of wage prices, clearly reveals the limits of liberalism in Brazil’s First Republic. Nevertheless, while resisting and fighting exploitation through their organizations and collective movements and battling company and police repression, the workers expressed and, at the same time, built their class consciousness—which is the theme of the next chapter.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (New York: The New Press, 1991), 260. Ibid., 188. Ibid. Ibid., 12. Ibid. Ibid., 259–51.

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7. Antonio David Cattani, “Greve,” in Trabalho e tecnologia: dicionário crítico (Porto Alegre/ Petrópolis: EdUFRGS/Vozes, 1997), 120. 8. Michelle Perrot, Workers on Strike: France, 1871–1890 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 6. 9. Ibid., 4. 10. Ibid., 4–5 11. The number of typesetters employed in each newspaper at the moment of the strike is given by Artur José RendaVitorino, Máquinas e operários: mudança técnica e sindicalismo gráfico (São Paulo e Rio de Janeiro, 1858–1912) (São Paulo: Annablume/Fapesp, 2000), 73–74, based on an article in the Jornal dos Tipógrafos. For the synthesis of the strike in the following paragraphs, we have used Vitorino’s book and the collection of the Jornal dos Tipógrafos, available in the Biblioteca Nacional (National Library). 12. O Tipógrafo, Rio de Janeiro, 11/4/1867, 1. 13. Ibid., 3. 14. Ibid. 15. These movements were mentioned by E. Rodrigues, Trabalho e conflito, s.d.; E. L. Lobo (ed.), O Rio de Janeiro operário (Rio de Janeiro: Access, 1992). 16. João José Reis, “A greve negra de 1857 na Bahia,” Revista USP 18 (1993). 17. Maria Cecília Velasco e Cruz, “Tradições negras na formação de um sindicato: sociedade de resistência dos trabalhadores em trapiche e café, Rio de Janeiro, 1905–1930,” Afro-Ásia 24 (2000): 268. 18. See the notes published in the day-after diaries, such as Diário do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, 9/6/1854, 2, and Jornal do Comércio, Rio de Janeiro, 9/6/1854, 1. 19. Arquivo Nacional, GIFI, OI, CODES, Pack 5 b517—Ofício do Juiz de Paz do 2º Distrito da Freguesia da Candelária enviado ao Chefe de Polícia da Corte em 16 de abril de 1833. This movement is also commented on by Flávio Gomes, “História, protesto e cultura política no Brasil escravista,” in Escravidão, ofícios e Liberdade, ed. Jorge Prata de Souza (Rio de Janeiro: APERJ, 1998). 20. Joaquim Nabuco, Minha formação (Brasília: Ed.UNB, 1981), 137. 21. Evaristo de Moraes, A campanha abolicionista (Brasília: Ed.UNB, 1986), 243. 22. Eduardo Silva, As camélias do Leblon e a abolição da escravatura: uma investigação de história cultural (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2003), 33. 23. S. Chalhoub, Visões da liberdade: uma história das últimas décadas da escravidão na Corte (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1990), 160–61. 24. Ibid., 252–53. Emphasis in original. 25. Joseli Nunes Mendonça, Cenas da abolição: escravos e senhores no parlamento e na justiça (São Paulo: Perseu Abramo, 2001), 87. It is important to point out that, in a work of greater scope, the author presents a more heedful view of the process, discussing the ambiguous character of the emancipationist laws, which benefited both landowners and slaves’ interests. Joseli Nunes Mendonça, Entre a mão e os anéis. A lei dos sexagenários e os caminhos da abolição no Brasil (Campinas: Ed. Unicamp, 1999), 370–71. 26. Sidney Chalhoub, Machado de Assis: Historiador (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2003), 239. 27. Ibid., 239. 28. Robert Conrad, The Destruction of Brazilian Slavery (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 353. 29. Moraes, A campanha abolicionista, 50. 30. “Relatório do Estado e das Operações da Confederação Abolicionista,” Gazeta da Tarde, Rio de Janeiro, 5/29/1884, 2–3. 31. Moraes, A Campanha abolicionista, 50. 32. Antonia Aparecida Quintão, Irmandades negras: outro espaço de luta e resistência (São Paulo: 1870–1890) (São Paulo: Annablume/FapeSP, 2002), 95, 104.

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33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

Ibid., 82. O Abolicionista, no. 14, 12/1/1881, ano II, 5. O Abolicionista, no. 12, 9/28/1881, ano II, 7. Vitorino, Máquinas e operários, 99. Jornal dos Tipógrafos, Rio de Janeiro, 1/18/1858, 2–3. Máquinas e operários, 100–101. Gazeta da Tarde, Rio de Janeiro, 4/4/1884, 1. Conferência realizada no Teatro São Luís em benefício da Associação Tipográfica Fluminense,em 23 de março de 1879, por Vicente de Souza. Tese: o Império e a escravidão, o parlamento e a pena de morte (Rio de Janeiro: Tipografia De Molarinho e Montalverde, 1879), 15, 28. Ibid., 22. Alexandre Mansur Barata, Luzes e sombras: A ação da maçonaria brasileira (1870–1910) (Campinas: Ed. Unicamp, 1999), 122–23. A incorporação do proletariado escravo. Protesto da Sociedade Positivista do Rio de Janeiro contra o recente projeto de governo (Recife: Tipografia Mercantil, 1883). 3. BN. “Apêndice E—Depoimento de André Rebouças sobre o quilombo do Leblon e outros quilombos apoiados pelo movimento abolicionista (1889),” in Silva. As camélias do Leblon, 97. Ibid., 101. Silva, As camélias do Leblon, 12. The incredible history of this militant was found in a manuscript of his own ended up in the Political Police Archives, and was partly recovered by the Arquivo Público do Estado do Rio de Janeiro which published it, as we have remarked in the second chapter. See Leila Duarte, Pão e liberdade: uma história de escravos e livres na virada do século XIX (Rio de Janeiro: Aperj/Faperj/Mauad, 2002). Ibid., 64. Ibid., 67. Ibid., 69. Ibid., 71. On these bakers’ organizations, see, besides João de Mattos’s report, the previously mentioned historical report of the Liga Federal dos Empregados em Padarias, presented to the 2º Congresso Operário Brasileiro, 1913, and published in A Voz do Trabalhador, no. 60, Rio de Janeiro, 8/5/1914, 3. We haven’t found the presumed process to which João de Mattos was submitted in Rio in 1881. In our research of the criminal processes in the Arquivo Nacional (National Archive), it was possible to find that someone called João de Mattos was being sued in April 1901 under the charge of attacking a work fellow. The offender would be of Portuguese nationality and would work as confectioner (what would be a clue for associating him with our character’s craft) in a candy shop, but, as he was not found by the law officers, we could not uncover any more details confirming that this was the same João de Mattos. AN, OR. 1757. One can find a good discussion on the Revolta do Vintgo, and we have based the following paragraphs on it, in Sandra L. Graham, “O motim do Vintém e a cultura política do Rio de Janeiro: 1880,” Revista Brasileira de História 10, no. 20 (1991): 211–32. Ibid., 222. José Murilo de Carvalho, Os bestializados: o Rio de Janeiro e a República que não foi (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1987), 134. Among the various works on the theme, see, for example, Carvalho, Os bestializados; Nicolau Sevcenko, A revolta da vacina: mentes insanas em corpos rebeldes (São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1984); Sidney Chalhoub, Cidade febril: cortiços e epidemias na corte imperial (São Paulo:

41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53.

54.

55. 56. 57.

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58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63.

64. 65.

66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

71.

72. 73. 74.

75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81.

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Companhia das Letras, 1999); Leonardo A. Pereira, As barricadas da saúde (São Paulo: Perseu Abramo, 2003). Carvalho, Os bestializados, 126. Ibid., 98. In Sevcenko, A revolta da vacina, 31. Carvalho, Os bestializados, 139. O Paiz, Rio de Janeiro, 11/17/1904, in Rômulo Costa Mattos, A ‘aldeia do mal’: o morro da favela e a construção social das favelas na Primeira República (masterts diss., Niterói: UFF, 2004), 209. On the association of the port workers with disturbances and vagrancy, see the analysis of the press done by Rômulo Mattos and the study on the police actions developed by Erika Bastos Arantes, O porto negro: cultura e trabalho no Rio de Janeiro dos primeiros anos do século XX, (master’s diss., Campinas: Ed. Unicamp, 2005). These estimates are significant. For a comparison, we can resort to the data on the period from 1950 to 1959, when the number of workers and unions was much larger, for which another survey identifies 153 strikes. See Marcelo B. Mattos (ed.), Greves e repressão policial ao sindicalismo carioca: 1945–1964 (Rio de Janeiro: Aperj/Faperj, 2003). Marcela Goldmacher, Movimento operário: aspirações e lutas. Rio de Janeiro, 1890–1913 (master’s diss., Niterói: UFF, 2005), 49. On the international scale of the tradition of the shoemakers’ fight, see Eric Hobsbawm and Joan Scott, “Political Shoemaker,” in Workers: Worlds of Labor (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984). Gazeta de Notícias, Rio de Janeiro, 3/16/1898, 1. Ibid., 3/17/1898, 1. Gazeta Operária, Rio de Janeiro, 12/14/1902, 2. Ibid., 1/25/1903, 1. Gazeta Operária, Rio de Janeiro, 2/1/1903 and 2/8/1903. A more extensive analysis of another shoemakers’ strike in 1906, also motivated by wage demands and led by the same union, can be found in Maria Cecília Baeta Neves, “A greve dos sapateiros de 1906 no Rio de Janeiro,” Revista Brasileira de Administração de Empresas 13, no. 2 (1973): 49–66 According to the previously mentioned “Relatório do Sindicato dos Trabalhadores em Fábricas de Tecidos do Rio de Janeiro,” presented to the 2o Congresso Operário de 1913 and published in A Voz do Trabalhador, Rio de Janeiro, 1914, 3. Brasil Operário, Rio de Janeiro, August 1903, 3. “Relatório do Sindicato dos Trabalhadores,” 3. Peter Linebaugh, “Crime e industrialização na Grã-Bretanha no século XVIII,” in Crime, violência e poder, ed. Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro (São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1983),114. Also see Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). The considerations developed in the following paragraphs synthesize a discussion of the third chapter of Mattos, Greves e repressão. Linebaugh, “Crime e industrialização,” 131 and 132. Ibid., 135. Eric H. Monkkonen, Police in Urban America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 41. Martha K. Huggins, Political Policing: The United States and Latin America (Durhan, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 13. Sidney Harring, Policing a Class Society: The Experience of American Cities, 1865–1915 (Nova Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1983). Ibid., 13. Ibid., 106.

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82. On this aspect, see Mario Jorge da Motta Bastos et al., “A vadiagem—definição, criminalização e repressão (de Portugal no século XIII ao Brasil no século XX).” Anais doV Encontro Regional de História da ANPUH-RJ (Niterói: UFF, 1992), 784 ss. 83. The term “dangerous classes” was widely spread in the nineteenth century, referring to the proletariat in a general way, especially applied to those considered to be vagabonds. See Alberto Passos Guimarães, As classes perigosas: banditismo urbano e rural no Brasil, 2nd ed. (Rio de Janeiro: Graal, 1981). 84. “Abreviada demonstração dos trabalhos da Polícia durante todo o tempo em que a serviu o desembargador do Paço Paulo Fernandes Viana,” Revista do IHGB, 55:1, Rio de Janeiro, 1892. 85. On this issue, see Chalhoub, Visões da liberdade. 86. L. C. Soares, “Os escravos de ganho no Rio de Janeiro do século XIX,” Revista Brasileira de História 8, no. 16 (1988). 87. Silva, As camélias do Leblon, 26 ss. 88. Relatório do Ministério da Justiça e Negócios Interiores (Rio de Janeiro: Imprensa Nacional, 1883), 134. 89. “Anexo G,” in Relatório do Ministério (1883), 13. 90. On the repression of vagrancy at the turn of the twentieth century, see Marcelo Badaró Mattos, Vadios, jogadores, mendigos e bêbados no Rio de Janeiro da virada do século (master’s diss., Niterói: UFF, 1991). 91. Relatório do Ministério da Justiça e Negócios Interiores (Rio de Janeiro: Imprensa Nacional, 1880). 92. Ibid., 3. 93. Ibid., 4. 94. Ibid. 95. Relatório do Ministério de Estado dos Negócios de Justiça (Rio de Janeiro: Imprensa Nacional, 1891), 6. 96. Ibid., 3. 97. Jornal do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro, 12/31/1891, 1/1/1892, and 1/2/1892. 98. “Anexo C,” in Relatório do Ministério da Justiça e Negócios Interiores (Rio de Janeiro: Imprensa Nacional, 1904). 99. Ibid., 28. 100. Ibid., 30 101. Ibid. 102. A historical framework of the political police tasks, especially on worker surveillance, with specific legislation can be found in Mattos, Greves e repressão. 103. Ibid. 104. On this matter, see Amauri M. Rocha Nascimento and Pedro Vidal Neto (eds.), Direito de greve: coletânea de direito do trabalho (São Paulo: LTR, 1984). 105. A Voz do Trabalhador, Rio de Janeiro, 3/1/1913, 1. 106. The information and passages on this episode were taken from the “Relatório do Sindicato dos Trabalhadores em Fábricas de Tecidos.” 107. Goldmacher, Movimento operário, 62.

CHAPTER FOUR

CONSCIOUSNESS This final chapter is dedicated to the discussion on manifestations of class consciousness among Rio de Janeiro’s workers. Returning to the theoretical framework presented in the introduction, we shall recover an aspect of Thompson’s class concept. According to Thompson, people find themselves in a society structured in determined ways (crucially, but not exclusively, in productive relations), they experience exploitation (or the need to maintain power over those whom they exploit), they identify points of antagonistic interest, they commence to struggle around these issues, and in the process of struggling they discover themselves as classes, they come to know this discovery as class-consciousness. Class and class-consciousness are always the last, not the first, stage in a real historical process.1

In The Making of the English Working Class, Thompson had already demonstrated this way of facing the concept by analyzing the historical British case, highlighting two sides of the same formation process of workers’ class consciousness: on one side, the identification of common interests among the most varied professional groups; on the other side, the opposition of those interests to other classes’ interests. The new class consciousness of working people may be viewed from two aspects. On the one hand, there was a consciousness of the identity of interests between working men of the most diverse occupations and levels of attainment, which was embodied in many institutional forms, and which was expressed on an unprecedented scale in the general unionism of 1830–34. This consciousness and these institutions were only to be found in fragmentary form in the England of 1780. On the other hand, there was a consciousness of the identity of the interests of the working class, or “productive classes,” as against those of other classes; and within this there was maturing the claim for an alternative system. But the final definition of this class consciousness was, in large part, the consequence of the response to working-class strength of the middle class. The line was drawn, with extreme care, in the franchise qualifications of 1832.2

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Thompson’s perspective, particularly concerning the first aspect of his consciousness definition (identity of interests among workers of various occupations), is, as in many other aspects of his work, very close to Antonio Gramsci’s reflections on “relations of force,” in situations in which the hegemony of a certain dominant social group is built. Transposing the matter of class consciousness to the area of political struggle in its broader sense and giving examples of his analysis through the construction of hegemonic domination, Gramsci establishes the distinction between a first correlation of forces—which he calls “social,” more connected to structures—and another, more political one, presented on the basis of an example centered on the bourgeoisie: A subsequent moment is the relation of political forces; in other words, an evaluation of the degree of homogeneity, self-awareness, and organization attained by the various social classes. This moment can in its turn be analyzed and differentiated into various levels, corresponding to the various moments of collective political consciousness, as they have manifested themselves in history up till now. The first and most elementary of these is the economic-corporate level: a tradesman feels obliged to stand by another tradesman, a manufacturer by another manufacturer, etc., but the tradesman does not yet feel solidarity with the manufacturer; in other words, the members of the professional group are conscious of its unity and homogeneity, and of the need to organize it, but in the case of the wider social group this is not yet so. A second moment is that in which consciousness is reached of the solidarity of interests among all the members of a social class—but still in the purely economic field. Already at this juncture the problem of the State is posed—but only in terms of winning politico-juridical equality with the ruling groups: the right is claimed to participate in legislation and administration, even to reform these—but within the existing fundamental structures. A third moment is that in which one becomes aware that one’s own corporate interests, in their present and future development, transcend the corporate limits of the purely economic class, and can and must become the interests of other subordinate groups too.3

According to Gramsci, the three moments of the relation of political forces—the economic-corporate level, class solidarity in the economic sphere, and consciousness of the class project—appear as a succession of stages or levels of “collective political consciousness.” According to Thompson, who also points to the pertinence of this kind of sequence for analyzing the working class, there is no way that a class can come into existence, at least in what he defines as its “mature” situation—that is, whenever class is a self-identity for workers and not just an instrument of conceptual analysis—unless the first two moments have been accomplished. That seems to be the drift of the following considerations, opposing the common employment of the term “false consciousness” and

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the idea that, at certain moments, the working class does not manifest its own consciousness, both of which have profound consequences for analyses of class formation processes like those being presented here.4 The similarities and possible distinctions between Gramsci’s and Thompson’s definitions can be explained by the shared discussions of Marx and Engels on social classes. Therefore, Thompson’s proposition, which accentuates the aspect of class struggle, finds support, among other texts, in a passage of The German Ideology in which the formation of the bourgeoisie in the process of antagonism against nobility is discussed: “The separate individuals form a class only insofar as they have to carry on a common battle against another class.”5 Gramsci’s comments, if regarded in relation to the working class, also find a correspondence in various other Marxian writings, as in the wellknown passage of Marx’s correspondence in which he highlights the political nature—that is, the class nature—of those movements in which the interests of all workers in opposition to those of the ruling classes are in play: The political movement of the working class has as its ultimate object, of course, the conquest of political power for this class, and this naturally requires a previous organization of the working class developed up to a certain point and arising precisely from its economic struggles. On the other hand, however, every movement in which the working class comes out as a class against the ruling classes and tries to coerce them by pressure from without is a political movement. For instance, the attempt in a particular factory or even in a particular trade to force a shorter working day out of individual capitalists by strikes, etc., is a purely economic movement. On the other hand the movement to force through an eight-hour, etc., law, is a political movement. And in this way, out of the separate economic movements of the workers there grows up everywhere a political movement, that is to say, a movement of the class, with the object of enforcing its interests in a general, socially, coercive force. While these movements presuppose a certain degree of previous organization, they are in turn equally a means of developing this organization.6

From this point of view, the analysis of class consciousness cannot be dissociated from the study of forms of organization and movement that express the perception and attempt to overcome the common experience of exploitation. For that reason, the previous chapters are also discussions on manifestations of class consciousness. In this chapter, however, the search is for an approach to more systematized manifestations of that consciousness in its formation process, such as those that appear in the workers’ discourses, in particular the written ones. We shall make our way among those texts that express a class language, whether it be in a direct manner or in a more dubious way. The emphasis here is on the discourses

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in which there is an explicit discussion on what workers’ identity is, and we will analyze how some pairs of terms are combined or opposed, such as artists and workers, free and enslaved, classes and class. It is worthwhile, however, to make a previous observation concerning this method. Since the 1970s, there has been a movement in course— that also embraces part of the studies of the labor history—known as the “linguistic turn,” whose main purpose is to consider language, or discourse, as the main (sometimes as the only tangible) structuring element of social life.7 Applied to the class discussion, this perspective can lead to the absolutizaton of an identity analysis, typical of a postmodern model centered on the idea of identities as choices/sharing resulting from the multiple possibilities for the individual’s perception of himself/ herself in the world, stemming from the discourses that make him/her. In this case, the social class phenomenon is reduced to one more among the various identities and it is only noticeable when the social actors define themselves as such, expressing themselves in evident and direct class language.8 We join in the criticism of this kind of posture, present in the discussion of Savage and Miles, who defend the idea that the relation between discourses and contexts is essential for any studies of this nature: In short, in order properly to gauge the meanings of texts for their participants it is necessary to examine how and why they were constructed, and how they are interpreted. This involves moving beyond the formal analyses of the languages they contain to the concrete situations which mediate their production and reception. Given this need to recognize the context in which discourses operate, it is important to note that the linguistic approach signally fails because it ends up by constructing a polarized and ultimately unbridgeable gulf between discourses and social relations. There is no good reason, however, for thinking in these terms. Rather than discourse being contrasted with material forces, or culture juxtaposed to social structures, we would insist on their inseparable and mutually dependent character.9

Asa Briggs’s conception in his pioneering study on the language of class was no different, expressed in an article published in 1960 that influenced Thompson’s analysis in his study on the making of the English working class. According to Briggs, explaining the proposal of his work, the core of the discussion is the relation between words and movements: The change in nomenclature in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries reflected a basic change not only in men’s ways of viewing society but in society itself. It is with this relationship between words and movements … that this essay is concerned.10

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Having then discussed the context in the aspect of its own dynamics in the previous chapters, we shall now emphasize the importance of words in the search for class consciousness as a resource for furthering analysis and exemplification.

Identity Pathways Let us turn to the 1858 typesetters’ strike once more. At that moment, the Jornal dos Tipógrafos, which recorded the strikers’ positions, presented different definitions, sometimes combined, as to who the typographers really were. In most of that newspaper’s records, the typographers were presented as artistas (artisans/artists), free and qualified workers, endowed with specialized skills. At various moments, it would be possible to draw a parallel between such a perspective and the idea of “respectability,” associated by Hobsbawm with qualified workers, identified by a craft. In early nineteenth-century industrializing England, the qualified manual waged workers had “characteristics, values, interests and, indeed, protective devices, that had their roots deep in the pre-industrial past of the ‘crafts.’”11 That is why they remained with a sense of pride, at least when comparing themselves to workers without a craft. At some moments, the “respectable” typographers assumed a more radical tone when defending the end of exploitation, indicating the opposition of interests between owners and employees. In the article “Os Artistas,” the overcoming of inequalities is proposed: It is high time to put an end to the oppression of all castes; it is time to fight, through all legal ways, the exploitation of man by man, and to walk courageously and fearlessly under the flag of freedom, towards the acquisition of fair equality and man’s moral dignity … that the stupid selfishness of industrialists, capitalists and others … keeps [away] through slavery.12

According to the same article, however, overcoming inequalities depended on both capitalists’ and workers’ consciousness, and it was together that they would promote the material and moral progress that would lead them to a higher level: The knowledge of individual rights in the relations of the individual with others and with society, man’s dignity, individual enlightenment and interest will make the citizens, who are disdainfully referred to by the industrial barons as artists, laborers, workers, etc. … will lead them to fraternally give their hands to their antagonists, to the selfish exploiters of their abilities, of their activity, of the

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greater part of their sweat, if by chance they were ever to fraternally extend the hand of partnership, of participation in the profits, as even their own interests and social interests demand.13

That proposal was presented as being different from the radicalized socialist projects then being formulated in Europe, which, as the article’s author shows, were known in Brazil. As the article took pains to point out, its proposal was based on science and religion: This is all very distant from the communism, either of Cabet or Luis Blanc, of Babeuf or Buonoroti, and from all forms of socialism. This arises from the principles of science and of the wealth of nations, which ought to organize labor having in view the most perfect conservation of society and the individual, and the accomplishment of liberty, equality and fraternity, with the solid elements of social organism, work of the Eternal Mechanic, and with Christian’s doctrine at the service of today’s aspirations due to the century’s enlightenment.14

It is possible to follow a longer trajectory of this kind of perspective, which disclosed the awful life conditions of waged workers in factories and workshops. Sometimes it attributed such conditions to their exploitation, but at the same time it stood out for harmonic and collective solutions together with capitalists for overcoming that situation. That kind of thinking seems to have been shared by the engineers, editors of O Artista (The Artist) in 1870–71, for whom “the artistic class fights amongst the greatest possible difficulties … and it does not possess a single element in the country that would enable it to overcome such resistance, and precisely for that reason it is smashed.”15 However, they stood in favor of a union between industrialists and artists within a single “great class”: In all societies the industrial part, which includes the artists, forms a great class on which depends the nation’s happiness and it is also the one that most feels the country’s setbacks. Whenever the wise and liberal laws allow its development, the country makes great strides forward in its development, it heads towards progress: but whenever any cause … jeopardizes men’s useful activity, it is the first one to be affected … and its working men are the first victims of the catastrophe.16

According to this point of view, the responsibility for the workers’ difficulties was a result of factors external to the industrial establishments. Not by chance, therefore, the same newspaper stood for proposals clearly adverse for workers, such as the payment per job or piece work, using the argument that it furthered the industrialists’ interest in increasing productivity, favored industrial planning, and supposedly offered the possibility of increasing workers’ gains:

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When the work is paid per day, it doesn’t matter to the artist if he produces more or less, the loss wholly affects the industrialist; and most of the time abuse is committed by those who work. When the arrangement is per job … , the industrialist safely knows in advance how much he will spend with a certain composition, and the worker has the possibility of increasing his wage. Everywhere, job work has been a powerful stimulus for increasing productivity, because artists generally dedicate themselves to increasing their material resources, as well as searching for means to accelerate each task or reduce the time it takes.17

It is clear that from the beginning this position was far removed from the identity based on the opposition of interests, to which the concepts commented herein have referred. In the following decades, similar positions—the possibility of pacific coexistence among capitalists and workers, regarding them as part of the same social organism—continued to be formulated, although they could sometimes appeal to differing philosophical frameworks. The repercussion of a collaborationist perspective for relations between capitalists and employees, united for common purposes within an industrial communion, could be observed two decades later, when workers proposed the organization of political parties. Thus, among the thirteen goals of the program presented by the Partido Operário (Labor Party), led by França e Silva in 1890, the last goal presented the proposal of solving industrial conflicts by a pact, understood as being a goal shared by employers and employees: To establish a tribunal composed of members of working class and industrialists, to judge all raised questions, this way, avoiding strikes and other disturbances, which besides being a barbarian way of making justice, are highly expensive and are just a way of spending the economic resources that are blood and life of the industrial communions.18

The discourses that attempted to match workers’ and entrepreneurs’ interests went on for decades, but were not the only line of identity and were not predominant. On the contrary, going back in time, it is possible to find clear references to the opposition of interests among employers and workers in the same kind of workers’ press ever since mid-nineteenth century, building the basis on which class consciousness could eventually arise. In regard to the opposition of interests between patrons and employees, we found, for example, the article “Uma Coligação” (A Colligation), published in 1867 in O Tipógrafo, in which the following question was raised on the legitimacy of and need for uniting as a way of overcoming exploitation: “Can we not surely overcome the degrading situation to

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which this selfish greed of these braggarts who call themselves owners has been leading us into?”19 Most certainly, workers often found among their own peers obstacles to the collective action in their own interests as opposed to the employers’ interests. In O protesto (The Protest) in 1899, there was a denunciation of the fact that not all workers assumed the necessary attitude of struggling against oppression, and it complained about the indifference of most of them, which was seen as one of the reasons that it difficult to overcome the humiliations imposed by capitalists. This can be seen in the case denouncing a factory for submitting its workers to a humiliating personal search on their way out, where they would undress in front of the guards. According to the author of the article, that was an example of the indifference of most workers of this capital to their own vital interests, to their dignity; has made even the most conscious rebels endure resignation, cruel, embarrassing and infamous impositions, just to avoid starving to death.20

Not only was the indifference to the call for mobilization problematic for the writers of these articles, there was also the collaborationist behavior of many workers with employers, denouncing their fellows’ faults—behavior seen as a way of surviving and of improving their individual condition in the conflictual environment of labor relations. On that point, there is a noteworthy article published by the newspaper O panificador (The Baker) (1900), which denounces the presence of collaborationists within the labor milieu. After blaming employers for the conditions of extreme poverty in which their employees lived and worked, one states that “the true obstacles to the progressive march towards our emancipation” are the “fellows who, like us, work, fight, sacrifice themselves for obtaining a minimum gain” but who “do not hesitate a single moment in harming a fellow, denouncing his faults, or even provoking intrigues.”21 Thus “unity in poverty” was, in this way, a negative binding force of class identity and seemed not to be enough for forming a unifying consciousness of the need for collective action to defend workers’ interests in opposition to those of their employers. The role of the positive binding force would be represented by the process of valuing labor and the worker’s image. The classes’ antagonism could explain why, in the end, little was left over for the workers, who produced all wealth. On the other hand, awareness of the workers’ social importance could be the binding element needed in the struggle for change, as it can be identified in this 1890 excerpt from A Voz do Povo (The People’s Voice): In modern times, societies grow through their industrial activity. It is the worker who makes prosperity

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It is the worker who promotes well-fare It is the worker who produces wealth Therefore, he is the only indefectible element of progress. … The present time is ours, the future belongs to us: let us stand up for ourselves.22

Although the passage illustrates the necessity of praising the worker as such and anticipates that workers will realize their central importance to industrial activity—as a major factor associated with the much celebrated progress—it is important to notice that this occurs in a period of changes in labor relations, in which the idea of labor as something that dignifies men, something that makes him valuable, is still being built after centuries of slavery. In Brazil, the absence of a positive ethics in labor, since it was regarded as something degrading—something exclusively for slaves—constituted a great obstacle to the valuing of the worker’s image and of his necessities.23 Thus heightening the value attributed to work was to become one of the main purposes of workers’ organization, in the sense of creating their own identity; one that would embrace the class as a whole. It was, however, a value attributed to work that was in complete opposition to that proposed by the classic employers’ discourse. The opposition of class interests was, for sure, one of the central elements of the discourse that built identities at the end of nineteenth century, when the proposals of overcoming capitalism—defended in different ways by anarchists and socialists—filled labor press pages. The tone of moral condemnation of exploitation, however, was to remain very similar to those discourses that focused on the defense of artisans’ dignity or valuing labor, to which we referred earlier. The anarchist newspaper O Protesto (The Protest) praised, in this way, the action of “working classes,” announcing the “extermination of all parasites,” “the fall of all dogmas,” “the abolition of all prejudices and superstitions.” According to the newspaper’s line of thought, the suffering from exploitation and the experiences of struggle were preparing the proletariat for the final fight: The ruling classes, Capital, by oppressing and smashing it with the weight of its greed, the weight of its selfishness, has made it starve, leaving it with no hopes for a better future; watching men without pride guiding humanity’s fate, who sacrifice the life of those who work to ensure they never lack plenty of gold, and with it the finest luxury and most shameless sensuality, the proletariat has prepared itself for the terrible and bloody fight [that] is inevitably to come.24

The article’s conclusion highlighted, in a more optimist tone, that the horizon of struggles was getting closer and that the path toward revo-

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lution was open: “We, outcasts, the sacrificed ones, regard with joy the first rays of revolution’s dawn that shall illuminate the world, rending the darkness with the intensity of its brightness!”25 In this case, however, the moral condemnation of employers’ attitudes does not lead to appeals for reconciliation but to calls for the abolition of property and, consequently, of proprietors. As the writer of another anarchist newspaper, O Despertar (The Awakening), declared: “We want to abolish the capitalists.”26

Artisans, Workers, Classes, Class Given that the consciousness of the opposition between “us” and “them”— workers and capitalists—is a fundamental element of the formation of class consciousness, there is no means of clearly detecting such opposition without a definition of who comes under the heading of “us.” Between the mid-nineteenth century and early twentieth century, the self-identifying terms used among free workers, in particular the employees of the manufacturing sector, were of two kinds: on one side, the artistas (artisans/artists), associated with the idea of qualified work, of the dignified professional, “respectable crafts,” but who, in face of the proletarianization, did not see their importance being recognized; on the other, the worker—the industrial waged worker. The names of the first newspapers that were associated with those workers point to this variation of the possible combinations. In this sense, we find O Artista (The Artist), Tribuna dos Artistas (Tribune of the Artists), O Eco dos Artistas (The Echo of the Artists), but also Tribuna Operária (Labor Tribune) and Gazeta Operária (Labor Gazette) (the last example was one that appeared among the newspapers researched over a period of more than thirty years). There were also those that presented a corporate identity, such as the Jornal dos Tipógrafos (Typographers’ Journal), O Tipógrafo (The Typographer), O Caixeiro (The Salesman), or O Panificador (The Baker). There are interesting combinations among the subtitles of these newspapers, particularly after the 1880s, which indicated a certain perspective of unity overriding the differences. One example was in the 1881 Gazeta Operária, which presented itself as an “entity especially dedicated to the interests of Artisans and Workers,” or the 1890 newspaper A Voz do Povo (The Voice of the People), which best defined “the people” in its subtitle “Labor Entity of the United States of Brazil.” By the first decade of the 1900s, however, there are no longer any references to the term artista, not even in association with the more prevalent terms operário (laborer) and trabalhador (worker).

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Symmetrically, it is possible to follow the changes in the employment of the term “class,” sometimes used to refer to an artisanal category or crafts and, therefore, also employed in the plural—“the classes of the artisans”—when addressing points in common, or when it is presented in the singular form to define “the working class.” Among the texts on the 1858 typsetters’ strike, there are various references to the employment of “classes” in the plural form for defining various artistic crafts, such as in an article that discusses the impact of the typesetters’ decision to interrupt the work: “A silent ominous excitement prevails among the workers of different classes, in whose breasts their resolution has found a painful echo.”27 The same meaning of various professional groups could be associated to the term “workers,” as it can be seen in the purported goals of the 1871 Tribuna Artística (Artistic Tribune), which declared its purpose as “defending the social interests of workers of all artistic occupations.”28 At some moments, there are direct references to a single class of artisans, or artistic class. In this sense, the Eco dos Artistas stated in 1861 that “the artistic class should be more appreciated by country’s ‘great ones.’”29 In a similar way, in 1870, O Artista attributed a similar meaning to “the class of laboring men [that] is completely decadent in Brazil” and to the “artistic class [that] struggles with all kinds of difficulties.”30 In the 1880s, it is possible to find definitions of class more similar to the idea of sharing experiences and interests by those who lived as wage-earning workers, such as that found in the 1881 newspaper A Gazeta Operária, which defined its own publishing as a “vigorous manifestation … of a whole class that feels excluded from the social community.” 31 Three years later, a newspaper that was also called Gazeta Operária established its purposes in clearly defined class terms: “The Gazeta Operária since its first edition has defined its purpose; the union of all workers, the development and autonomy of class.” Another passage of the same article emphasizes the need for workers to unite as a single class by exhorting them to not forget “the purpose of the class, which is ours, which belongs to everyone, because all its useful results will do good for all.”32 Some months later, in the same newspaper, an article titled “The Working Classes” was published, which focused on the defense of an association that would unite artists of the most varied crafts in order to work as the “head” of a body formed by the union of various “classes.” The complex interaction between the professional heterogeneities and fundamental class unity was then presented, using an organic metaphor: “The working class is also composed of heterogeneous parts. It is also a complex organism with its laws of stability, in which the necessary changes through which its different parts pass are intensified.”33

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For that precise reason, the article rejected any idea of inequality between “artisans or workers, industrialist or mechanic, they are all equal, considering the concrete aspect of their hypothetical or positive rights.” The refusal of any inequality between members of the same class was not accompanied by a negation of the distinctions that could be won by the most skilled in his craft, that is, the dimension of the worker’s dignity and skill was not disregarded: The distinction of each man is not a consequence of the class he belongs to; there are no corporations that can ennoble, no matter how much they want to raise them. It is man who leads to nobility, nobility that comes from his talent, his honor, his circumspection.34

It would not be possible to point out a unique moment, a precise inflection point, in which the shared experiences within a common class identity would start to become general. It is rather a matter of spotting a complex process by which the employment of the term in singular form was gradually affirmed, though it coexisted with the plural form. Combinations of the employment of “classes” and “class,” or of craft identity or class identity, were still common at the beginning of the Republic. Thereby, the Partido Operário’s manifesto presents in a passage its adhesion to pacific methods aiming “the improvement and welfare of the less privileged classes.” However, among its purposes, the party affirmed the goal of supporting “those representatives of the class whom it sent to parliament.”35 Equally complex was the definition that the newspaper O Caixeiro (The Salesman), (1899), in its first edition, attempted to establish for the social group it represented. According to the newspaper’s first editorial, “its proprietors come to the press willing to present a light, complete weekly publication, though vigorous in its actions in the fights on behalf of the class,” which they purported to represent and which was defined as “classe caixeiral” (class of the salesmen/clerks), in economic-corporate terms.36 Some level of sharing of interests with the other “classes” was, however, highlighted, for the clerks were the weakest part of the “people”: “We stand for one class in order to defend all the other classes’ rights, we belong to the people, we belong to the weak.”37 However, further on, other bonds of belonging, such as the interests of the “trade,” were highlighted in a sense of multiclassist identity between owners and employees, which underscores the obstacles that the expression of an autonomous workers’ class consciousness had to face. Accordingly, it defined a much wider embrace in these terms:

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Being an entity of the class of the salesmen it will stand up for it, though that of the businessmen shall be fully accepted, and both shall find in our columns, a haven for any ideas that emerge in favor of trade, and to both their benefits and interests, which are the same.38

The editorial’s dualities did not end there, for, in the following pages, the newspaper presented the idea of shutting all commercial establishments on Sundays as the main demand of the “class of the salesmen.” According to the newspaper’s arguments, this was something that didn’t happen because of the government’s lack of determination and, mainly, because of “owners’ ambition,” showing therefore an opposition of interests, which had initially been denied.39 We have seen in the second chapter that only in 1900 would it be possible to find among socialists a more clear definition guided by the class interpretation of the Second International. As the program of the 1902 Partido Socialista Braisleiro (Brazilian Socialist Party) made clear in its first consideration, it affirmed “society’s division into two classes (capitalists and workers); [and] the domination and exploitation of the workers by capitalist.”40 By that time, at least in the labor press, as the newspapers with an anarchist tendency and their interpretation of class struggles show, it is possible to say that a reference to a class, in the singular form, clearly predominated. It was a reference that was built, therefore, among others. It would indeed be rather strange if the formation of a homogeneous class identity among Rio de Janeiro’s workers had been built in a linear and finished way. In the specific case analyzed here, as in many other Brazilian cases, it was within heterogeneity that such identity was built. Overcoming barriers, prejudices, and affirmations of particular identities is not achieved without difficulty. In the first chapter, we have already analyzed some of the signs of the workers’ heterogeneity. We shall now turn to them from the angle of consciousness formation. The first point of distinction among workers that we can mention is national origin. In a city strongly marked by immigrant presence throughout the analyzed period—and in which the labor market for waged workers, even for the most qualified ones, had severe restrictions, imposed by the presence of slavery—native and foreign workers were not always seen as sharing the same interests and projects. The Portuguese presence was dominant among immigrants and in light of the recent history of colonization, reinforced by the profile of the owners in the city, the image of Portuguese as the bosses was very common. Because of that, the class’s internal prejudices were most frequently directed against the Portuguese.41

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Such prejudice can be seen in the article about the typographers published in Tribuna Artística (Artistic Tribune) in 1871. There it was stated that the suffering experienced by the native artists was due to depreciation of the crafts, a result of the colonial settlement; the local dominant classes’ love for foreign fashion, acquiring imported goods instead of valuing national production; exploitation by employers, mainly Portuguese, which was exacerbated by the Portuguese workers’ posture, who tamely accepted such exploitation: The Portuguese owners did not convince themselves that they ought to be more generous to their workers, who are also their patricians, and furthermore those Portuguese workers ought to be convinced that the insane work day from 5 a.m. to 6 p.m., for lower wages, will not improve their fortune. … Concluding, we shall say that the labor class will not improve as long as Portuguese immigration insists on concentrating in the cities, leaving the countryside, for which they are more suitable, since they were peasants in Portugal, not artists.42

Gender was another point of distinction among workers. After the increase of women’s employment in industry, from the late nineteenth century on, we find affirmations on their responsibility for the low wages they earned, as well as for the general wage shrink. Even at the moments when the affirmation of a class identity was more evident, as in the 1906 Congresso Operário Brasileiro (Brazilian Labor Congress), it is possible to spot those gender discrimination marks manifested in situations in which women were blamed for the way their work was exploited by capitalists. Instead of being seen as part of the class, they were seen as its rivals. According to one of the Congresso’s theses, “the main cause of exploitation of women, who have become men’s terrible competitors, is their lack of cohesion and solidarity.”43 Above all, the greatest point of distinction among urban workers, though, was the division between free and enslaved workers. As we have been able to follow in the previous chapters, the coexistence of enslaved and free individuals in the same working area and urban life resulted in shared experiences. Nevertheless, those experiences were not always peacefully shared. In some of those manifestations of “artists’” identity, in which the affirmation of dignity on the part of a specialized craft was involved, the slaves were presented as incapable of working in a specialized craft. Although, as we have already shown in the previous chapters, slaves worked in various specialized crafts, it is possible to find affirmations such as those of the article “Um compositor de folha diária” (A Daily Newspaper Compositor), published in 1867, in which the writer asks and answers his own question: “Is it possible to assign those qualifications [of specialized worker] to any individual? Could an African, for example, ever be a good typographer? We do not think this is probable, or even possible.”44

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We saw, however, that the collective organizations built by workers throughout those decades presented themselves as means of building unity within class heterogeneity, as Otaviano Hudson affirmed in relation to national origin distinctions at the moment of the foundation of the Liga Operária (Labor League): “Equality and fraternity shall rule in this association, made up of natives and foreigners; the motto shall be one for all and all for one.”45 In the 1880s, as previously mentioned in the article appearing in the Gazeta Operária, which represented workers of different crafts (but also of various skin colors and nationalities) as part of a same organism, a same class, the same sentiment was noticeable: Every collective entity splits and splits into many other classes; which are nothing but different members of its body, bound by the same needs, by the same rights and duties; there are neither superiors nor inferiors, not whites nor blacks, not little nor big, not natives nor foreigners, there are citizen-workers who owe each other mutual respect.46

During the 1913 II Congresso Operário Brasileiro (Second Brazilian Labor Congress), the immigration issue is approached in a more precise way from a class viewpoint, and immigrant workers appear not as competitors but as victims of an unemployment crisis resulting from capitalist logic in their countries of origin. Therefore, one of the congress’s resolutions had among its considerations the idea that “workers … are forced to move from a country to another, in search for work, as a result of the unemployment crisis provoked by capitalist greed.”47 Concerning gender distinctions, it would be no easy task to find clear evidence of equality affirmation for a long period of time, but inclusive calls for participation in the union struggle seem to have begun to echo after the 1906 Congress, mentioned earlier. After all, in 1920, by the time of the III Congresso Operário Brasileiro (Third Brazilian Labor Congress), the chair of the closing assembly was assigned to Elvira Boni, head of the Sindicato das Costureiras (Seamstresses’ Union).48 In regard to unity between white and black workers—slaves, Africans, and their descendants in general—it is not the aim of this study to evaluate the level of racism in the labor milieu, as it permeated post-abolition social relations to such an extent that it would be rather difficult to distinguish it from the prevalent “common sense.” However, it is relevant and significant that in the movement’s discourse on identity there are two (non-opposite) paths in which we can identify expressions of common identity among workers that make reference to color distinction. The first one is the parallel drawn between slavery and the exploitation of workers. The second refers to the direct affirmation of the need to unite, irrespective of any distinctions based on race or skin color. But those parallels and

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calls for unity did not emerge only after abolition. To track their history within a broader timeframe means searching for the translations, in the sphere of consciousness building, of the impacts of that shared experience of enslaved and free workers in their working areas and in urban life, a central matter for this work.

Slaves and Workers—Enslaved Workers In the early twentieth century, we could mention numerous examples of parallels between enslaved workers and so-called “free workers” based on the denouncements of the limits set for “freedom” within a society ruled by the logic of capital, as well as on a comparison between the workday and working conditions in both forms of exploitation. Since such categories are central to the discussion on continuities and changes of experience during pre- and post-abolition periods, we will take as an example of this kind a comparison between the experiences of the bakery workers and those of the coffee warehouse workers. In a 1908 article, which refers to the bakers and to their working conditions (from Sunday to Sunday, with full night shifts and additional tasks in the day),49 we find the following: The 88 law that abolished slavery in Brazil seems only not to have reached the bakery workers, who actually are more enslaved than were those of that race, because among all the greedy and exploiting owners, the owners of bakeries are outstanding.50

The 1913 article “Modern Slavery” refers to the loaders belonging to the Sociedade de Resistência dos Trabalhadores em Trapiche e Café (Resistance Society of the Workers in Coffee Warehouses), establishing a parallel quite similar to the previous one: It is a fact that slavery ended on May 13, 1888 and as the popular saying has it “there is no way of arguing with the facts”; however, I tell you, there is a way. There is because slavery has ended, but it has not ended in our tormentors’ minds, those for whom we shed our last drop of sweat, those that do not know how to reward us, and unless we force them to do so by our own hands, they will never know. This class of people we call bourgeoisie, in our labor language.51

Besides the interesting final sentence, in which a labor class language is employed to define “bourgeoisie,” it is worthwhile to highlight that in this last excerpt, as in the preceding one, the slavery situation is associated with exploitation by capitalists, intensified by the diagnosis of the persistence of a manorial-type attitude among employers.

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In a more explicit way, this was the argument of the 1913 article “A luta proletária no Brasil” (The Proletariat Struggle in Brazil) in which the author (signed Graco) states that the bourgeois in Brazil “are still terrified with the shout of May 13 [abolition day] and miss the good old days when they had the pleasure of hearing the horrible screams of the tortured victims in the senzala [slaves houses].” The reason for such longing was not linked to profits but rather to the crisis of the legitimacy of domination that labor questioning had brought into existence. Those employers really missed the old times: Not because they had more profits from workers’ efforts at that time, insofar as the vile death of enslaved waged workers does not affect their interests and the abundance of workers reduces infinitely the value of productive labor, but because they see their prestige falling at dizzying speed in the eyes of the producers, being considered by the latter as robbers or usurpers who own what does not belong to them, that is, what by nature, belongs to the workers.52

A “new abolition” would be necessary, and that could only be as a result of workers’ effort. In the port area, as Maria Cecília Velasco e Cruz has shown, the line of continuity between slavery times and new times of wage-based relations was quite strong. Analyzing a 1906 article in which a loaders’ strike is justified, Velasco e Cruz notices that “what they demanded with the strike was ‘the right’ and ‘our freedom’, that is, not to be treated as negrada that is, as ‘freedmen,’ but as men who were free in the word’s strongest sense.”53 For that purpose, the organizing dimensions of the trade union and the socialist propaganda gained an even greater importance. According to the author’s conclusions, Together with the class dimensions and politicization of the left, I believe that there is, therefore, a deeper meaning to the actions of colored men who made up the majority of the troops—to rid themselves of the marks of slavery, building, through the trade-union, equal treatment and the respect due to free men.54

So it seemed that the key for overcoming the strongest slavery stigmas may have lain in unionist and political organizations and struggles. However, at the same time, it is worthwhile remembering that, according to many of the period’s evaluations, new faces of slavery had appeared behind the forms of waged labor. It is true that the parallels between slavery and waged relations were common among the analyses that criticized capitalist exploitation and were particularly noticeable in the international political references that guided Brazilian leaderships at that time, such as those of Malatesta, the influential Italian anarchist theorist, whose article “Freedom or Slavery”

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had been translated by the newspaper A Voz do Trabalhador (The Worker’s Voice). In that article, Malatesta defended the path of social revolution, opposing the reformist strategy that predominated among the socialists of that time, using the following argument: that in the event that the workers accepted reforms, “they would get used to it, in the position of happy slaves with benign masters.”55 However, it is impossible to ignore the specificity of the parallel with slavery in a society such as the Brazilian one in which slavery had been experienced by some of those workers, and the articles in question precisely place their argument in the context of national reality, beginning their reasoning by mentioning the 1888 law. On the other side, the affirmation of the class identity overcoming color barriers was also present, as the 1913 article “Problema social: os preconceitos de patria, raça e religião,” (The Social Problem: National, Racial and Religious Prejudices, signed by Francisco Tomaz Cardoso, shows. In his words: “What we most need to vigorously fight are prejudices associated to race, mainly Ethiopian, religion and nationality.”56 The racial discussion, however, did not occur without referring to the class situation, as can be seen in the article “Exploração política” (Political Exploitation), in which criticism is made of a “bourgeois politician” who, at risk of losing his seat in the parliament because he is black, appeals for the support of his own race. The author calls attention to the fact that, for workers, such a politician was an opponent to the class: “As a militant worker and black, I vehemently protest against mister Monteiro Lopes’s exploitation of men of his race and the Brazilian proletariat.” According to him, the said politician, while purportedly speaking on behalf of the proletariat, was in fact a “dodgy” who attempted to deceive the “ignorant,” even offering the “government’s aid” for solving workers’ problems. The author attempted to demonstrate his thesis in an interesting way: the said Monteiro Lopes had enrolled his son in the military school—where students were prepared for the army, whose function was to “murder their fellows, especially the workers when they go out in the streets to fight for their rights.” The article’s conclusion returns with an ironic tone to the question of crossing racial and class criteria in workers’ political analysis: “Due to the political skill of his progenitor, it is expected that soon Brazil will have a black general. The proletariat is sure to profit a lot from this.”57 Beatriz Loner, commenting on the same article, showed, however, the contradiction of a denial of discrimination in the passage that refers to “an almost extinct discrimination” to which Lopes was appealing.58 The affirmation of a class distinction, however, did not always mean the denial of racism, since there are various records of the denouncement of concrete cases of racial discrimination in the labor press pages, such as

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that shown by the article “Vergonhoso” (Shameful), published in 1909, which relates the situation of a black female weaver prevented from participating in a dance in the neighborhood of Vila Isabel. The denouncement was made as follows: One of the workers who had an outstanding participation during the last strike went to the club-house, where a group of ladies were giving a party and was surprised by the news that she was not white enough to be with the others who were there. It remains to be seen whether that was indeed the reason but we believe so, because these clubs are built on highly conservative bases.59

Besides the denouncements of racism, the article gives us a good example of the value placed on female participation in trade unions, for the female worker “had an outstanding participation during the last strike,” and it is also a good example of the moral denouncement of the balls and “social clubs” as signs of the bourgeoisie’s decadence—conservative bases—that workers—men and women—should avoid. The parallels drawn between slavery and wage relations, however, are older, as we discussed at the end of the first chapter, in the same way that there were earlier manifestations of valuing the continuity of situations of enslaved and free—a unity in the experience of exploitation, though by different means, which would be translated into awareness of the need for class union in the post-abolition period. In this sense, another interesting link between the different sectors of workers—enslaved or free—in the city of a Rio de Janeiro still under slavery was found in the published articles signed by D. Obá II of Africa in the Gazeta Operária newspaper. What is the meaning of finding D. Obá’s texts in a publication that defined itself as representative of workers’ and artists’ interests? To answer that question, it is first necessary to briefly portray that personality who was very popular during Rio de Janeiro’s last decades of slavery and Empire. According to Eduardo Silva—who recovered D. Obá’s biography, and the ideas and social significance of his presence in the society of the period—D. Obá was much more than the famous street character portrayed as crazy by his first biographers.60 Cândido da Fonseca Galvão was a freeborn black from Bahia’s hinterland, son of an African ex-slave of the Ioruba nation who had achieved freedom during the first half of nineteenth century. As a volunteer (who actually signed up, unlike other blacks), he fought in the Paraguay War and was promoted to the rank of second lieutenant, becoming, consequently, an officer. Living in the Corte from 1880 on, D. Obá, or Prince Obá as he was also known, would become in the following ten years (he died in 1890) an illustrious charac-

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ter respected by that “considerable part of the carioca population—slaves, freedmen and colored free men—[with whom] he seemed to share his world-views, his symbols and ideas.”61 D. Obá was then taken as representative of “Little Africa,” which was inside one of the city’s spatial subdivisions (the neighborhoods of the port area and surroundings), but was also, and mainly identified as, a social territory of Rio de Janeiro. He was a monarchist—after all, he considered himself to be a prince descended from an African monarchic lineage—and monarchy was justified by divine authority, as much as by the most ancient Catholic tradition and the Ioruba reference that also guided him. D. Obá was an assiduous figure in the palace’s public ceremonies, always affirming his proximity to Emperor Pedro II. He took part in the great debates of his time, such as the one on the choice of European immigration to compensate for the decrease in the slave force in agriculture; a choice he opposed, defending the alternative of African immigration (obviously, as free workers). Concerning imperial policy, he defended the Conservative Party. He stood for it not only because he was employed for a short period of time, together with other black veterans of the Paraguay War, during the rule of a conservative cabinet, but mostly because the conservatives were the ones heading the cabinets that implemented reforms after years of discussions, such as the 1871 and 1885 “emancipationist” acts, laws welcomed by many people at the time as important paths toward the end of slavery. In opposition, the Republicans were not a political choice for D. Obá, not only because they lacked respect for the sacred monarchist institution, which he also represented in his own manner, but mostly because there were a lot of barões do café (coffee barons) among them, precisely the sector most identified with the defense of slavery in the previous years. Once more, for this free black man, the end of enslaved work was the decisive point governing his political choice. That defense of the Conservative Party and the choice for monarchy— against the Republicans whom he regarded as “pro-slavery”—were not isolated cases. Other sectors of the court’s black population also defended the Conservative Party, as Líbano Soares shows when discussing the relation between the groups of capoeira players and conservative politicians, in particular the “A Flor da Gente” (Flower of People) of the Glória neighborhood and its surroundings, and the congressman Duque-Estrada Teixeira.62 Returning to the Gazeta Operária, it is not surprising that D. Obá published some of his writings in it. Eduardo Silva, who carefully followed his articles in the O Carbonário (The Carbonari) publication, comments that the reports of the time show that the Prince of Africa brought much longer articles to the editors’ offices but was only able to have published the

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amount he could afford. Maybe the cost of a column in a labor newspaper would have been a lot cheaper, and we could even speculate that D. Obá was not charged anything by them. After all, in the O Carbonário pages, Eduardo Silva has already found articles in which D. Obá clearly defended a fairer wage policy for free workers, whether in private establishments or in the government.63 Besides, the 1880s labor newspapers reported on the abolitionist struggle fairly often, and the Gazeta Operária (published at various moments of the decade) was no exception.64 The content of D. Obá’s articles in that newspaper varied, repeating things that could be found in other of his texts discussed by Eduardo Silva. In these the Prince highlighted his importance for having fought the war, defended the Crown, criticized the liberals, and complained about the lack of respect for his figure. He also noted his interesting demand to be nominated as Brazilian ambassador to Africa, offering himself for the mission of calling on free African immigrants to compensate for the lack of workers in national agriculture. More than the content of the articles, what most interests us here is to point out the significant confluence between a newspaper that presented itself as representative of “free laborers”—workers—and one that published articles of a well-known figure of “Little Africa,” of the city’s blacks, including the ones who were still enslaved, and the freedmen. Turning to a last example of a similar nature, we shall go back to the actions of the baker João de Mattos, quoted at various moments in the course of this work. Even considering that the “memoirs” of his struggle were probably written during the 1910s, and maybe revised in the early 1930s, and that, therefore, his affirmations of the nineteenth century correspond to a post-abolition line of thought, it is still possible to notice from the sequence of organizations and movements in which João was involved that his view on slavery and freedom was indeed formed during the 1870–80 period. After all, as he points out in his memoirs, the bakery employees were the pioneers in abolitionism. According to him, the great figures of abolitionism emerged from 1879 on (and in that he reveals his knowledge of Nabuco’s classic periodization), but he declares that nobody remembers the bakery employees any more, but I state and affirm that they were the first antislavery fighters, and that they did much and fought, with a unique fanaticism for the cause, from 1876 on, and due to our tireless efforts making themselves felt, breaking down and eventually destroying the slavers’ power de facto.65

This protagonist role of workers and of their fights in the abolition process would be confirmed in 1888 when, according to his evaluation,

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“we made the greatest victory of our intransigent fight, leaving the path clear for those actually enslaved.” That great conquest, however, did not mean the end of the struggles, for “we, the enslaved free, are fighting up until the present time.” His own history as leader of escapes and “uprisings” in the 1870–80 period, being founder and head of labor associations during the 1890 and 1900 decades, illustrates the continuity between the fights of those “actually enslaved” for abolition and of the “free enslaved,” “who continued to only have the right to choose between one master or another.”66 The political dimension of the social conflicts would not be absent from his report. The Republic was also something defended by the movements that João de Mattos integrated, but there was no reason for celebrating its consequences, for “one year and seven months after [the abolition], the Republic had been proclaimed, and we have also worked for that, expecting what turned out to be the opposite of what we actually got.” The lesson from that episode was incisive in his affirming the opposition of class interests between workers and capitalists, or between “dominants” and “dominated”: “We cannot expect a thing from the politics of the Dominant Society as it is antagonist to the Society of the Dominated; because the former are universally parasites sucking the juice of the producers just like nocturnal vampires.”67 When justifying the necessity of creating a class association for bakers in the 1890s, João de Mattos highlighted the persistence of the exploitation experience and affirmed, in his own words, that overcoming that situation could only be done by the “workers’ own hands”: With this [the Republic] we did not achieve what we expected. And we observed that slavery was now generalized, we continued to work inhumanly for 16 to 18 hours non-stop, day and night, and I came to the conclusion that only through our own and unique efforts we could achieve improvements.68

Such elements—the fight for freedom originating the labor fight; disappointment with the Republican State; consciousness of opposition of class interests between employers and employees; need for collective organized action—could be translated into the motto of the Sociedade Cosmopolita Protetora dos Empregados em Padaria (Guardian Cosmopolitan Society of Bakery Employees) founded by João de Mattos and his fellows in 1898: “Labor, Justice and Liberty, without distinction of color, belief or nationality.”69 In various moments of this work, including the opening of this chapter, we have taken E. P. Thompson’s contribution on the making of the working class in England as a reference. In order to go back to this reference at this moment of the analysis, we must take special care: being

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process and relation, class, according to Thompson, is a historical phenomenon incarnated in “real people and contexts.” In this sense, for the English case, Thompson was able to identify three fundamental elements of the previous traditions that, at the end of the eighteenth century, were recovered and rearranged by the class identity that began to be formed: The tradition of Dissidence, and its modification by the Methodist revival; the tradition made up of all those loose popular notions which combine in the idea of the Englishman’s “birthright”; and the ambiguous tradition of the eighteenth-century “mob”, of which Wyvill was afraid and Hardy was trying to organize into committees, divisions, and responsible demonstrations.70

The differences in relation to the reality analyzed here catches our attention, not only because of the chronological distance, as we are addressing a historical process that occurred one century later, but also because of the content of the traditions evoked by the new class consciousness under construction. In a country marked by over three centuries of slavery and in a city that had been moved by an enslaved labor force for such a long time, like Rio de Janeiro, there is no possible parallel with the idea of the Englishman’s “birthright.” Freedom was something recent and toughly conquered, and any positive valuing of labor had to be accomplished by the workers’ own efforts. It is a matter, therefore, of locating the traditions—which could be inherited and reinterpreted by the new class consciousness under construction in Rio de Janeiro—in terms of “real people and contexts.” According to the evidence gathered here, two clues seem to be the most propitious for recovering the strong ideas of that process: the artist’s dignity—or respectability of the craft—and the fight for conquering freedom. The elements here highlighted from the discourse of professional and social value of the artisans—specialized, dignified, and respected—could represent, as they in fact did, at various moments, a contrasting tone to the unqualified manual work, or to slave labor. During the last decades of the nineteenth century, however, such discourse was often employed in the light of attempting to draw artists and workers closer to each other— workers, waged workers—and the artistic “classes” were then represented, in many cases, as part of a single working class. The identity representations that have been discussed here, mainly taken from discourses, can also be observed in a series of manifestations of what Cláudio Batalha defined as an “associative culture” of the carioca workers at the turn of the twentieth century. Typical clothes, the entity’s flag, parades on commemorative dates, labor celebrations, and a calendar of events of their own that had May 1 as its most important moment composed this associative culture, which attempted—both in the internal

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areas of the associations within their relations with the class and in the external area of the relations between associations and society—to publicize, to the greatest possible extent, the values associated with the dignity of work.71 In the 1890s and in the many records of the period thereafter, that perspective of the craft’s dignity was recovered as the only possible conducting line for a tradition of positive valuing of work and of workers that had been clearly subaltern during slavery. In fact, in a great part of these records, the valuing of work and the worker occurred within the sphere of attempts to persuade other classes that the decrease of exploitation would be a path toward “equality of classes.” However, in various voices, such as that of João de Mattos, it is also noticeable—when calling attention to the antagonism between the dominant society (“parasites that suck the juice of producers”) and the “society of the dominated”—that there was also a path toward a more incisive affirmation of the incompatibility of interests of workers and patrons in capitalist society. On another track, the long march of the fight for freedom defined, for the enslaved and their allied abolitionists—who, as we have seen, were often organized free workers and militants close to them—the possibility of a protagonist role in social transformation for the “ones from below.” Overcoming the differences between the enslaved and the free was part of that movement. Such overcoming efforts—which, as we know, were not completely successful—are a fundamental reference to be employed in other contexts. Overcoming racial distinctions would be a central value for those who experienced captivity or its most direct impacts, but it was also to become an example to be recovered by any movement whose purpose was engaging workers in the central task of overcoming social inequality imposed by class exploitation. And if the definitive end of slavery was, to a great extent, a social revolution that ought to be celebrated by those who fought for it, there soon emerged evaluations that the results of that fight were still incomplete in regard to the greater ideal of freedom for workers. Nevertheless the set of values and practices accumulated in that long march would persist for those who were mobilized against the new faces of work exploitation. The consciousness of the importance of freedom and the comparison between the earlier and the new sorts of slavery were, in this way, an important inheritance accumulated by workers. In their combinations, not always free of contradictions, those traditions—of the dignity of work and the fight for freedom—stimulated a generation that not only fought against “slavery de facto” but also extended its fight to counter the “slavery of the free,” identifying itself as working class throughout all those struggles.

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Notes 1. E. P. Thompson, “Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle without Class?” Social History 3, no. 2 (1978): 149. 2. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 3rd ed. (London: Penguin, 1980), 887–88. 3. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (London: ElecBook, 1999), 405. 4. E. P. Thompson, As peculiaridades dos ingleses e outros estudos (Campinas: Ed. Unicamp, 2001), 275–76. 5. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (1845–46), http://www.marxists .org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01d.htm#d1, accessed June 2014. 6. Karl Marx, “Marx to F. Bolte in New York (November 23, 1871),” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Correspondence, 2nd ed., rev. and supp. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965), 270–71. 7. A discussion on this kind of perspective can be found in the balance of social history (in particular of labor history) written by Geoff Eley, “Is All the World a Text? From Social History to the History of Society Two Decades Later,” in The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences, ed. Terrence J. McDonald (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 193–43. 8. Ellen M. Wood and John B. Foster (eds.), In Defense of History: Marxism and the Postmodern Agenda (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1997). See especially Kenan Malik, “The Mirror of Race: Postmodernism and the Celebration of Difference,” 112–33, and David Mcnally, “Language, History, and Class Struggle”, 26–42. 9. Mike Savage and Andrew Miles, The Remaking of the British Working Class, 1840–1940 (London: Routledge, 1994), 18. 10. Asa Briggs, “The Language of ‘Class’ in Early Nineteenth-Century England,” in Essays in Labour History, ed. Asa Briggs and John Saville (1960; London: Macmillan, 1967), 44. 11. Eric Hobsbawm, Workers: Worlds of Labor (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 252. 12. Jornal dos Tipheon Bo, Rio de Janeiro, 1/23/1858, 2. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. O Artista, Rio de Janeiro, 11/27/1870, 3. 16. O Artista, Rio de Janeiro, 2/26/1871, 1. 17. O Artista, Rio de Janeiro, 1/15/1871, 1. 18. O Eco Popular, Rio de Janeiro, 5/27/1890, 1. 19. O Tipógrafo, Rio de Janeiro, 11/4/1867, 3. 20. O Protesto, Rio de Janeiro, 12/24/1899, 4 21. O Panificador, Rio de Janeiro, 1/1/1900, 1. 22. A Voz do Povo, Rio de Janeiro, 1/9/1890. 23. On this point, see Angela de Castro Gomes, A invenção do trabalhismo (São Paulo: Vértice, 1988), especially the first chapter. 24. O Protesto, Rio de Janeiro, 12/24/1899, 3. 25. Ibid. 26. O Despertar, Rio de Janeiro, 11/2/1898, 1. 27. Jornal dos Tipógrafos, Rio de Janeiro, 1/14/1858. 28. Tribuna Artística, Rio de Janeiro, 11/19/1871, 1. 29. O Eco dos Artistas, Rio de Janeiro, 9/22/1861, 1. 30. O Artista, Rio de Janeiro, 11/27/1870, 3. 31. A Gazeta Operária, Rio de Janeiro, 1/8/1881, 1. 32. Gazeta Operária, Rio de Janeiro, 12/18/1884. 33. Gazeta Operária, Rio de Janeiro, 2/7/1885, 2. 34. Ibid., 2–3.

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35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

Eco Popular, Rio de Janeiro, 4/29/1890, 1. O Caixeiro, Rio de Janeiro, 3/5/1899, 1. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 2 Gazeta Operária, Rio de Janeiro, 9/28/1902, 2. About this issue, see Gladys S. Ribeiro, Mata-Galegos: os portugueses e os conflitos de trabalho na República Velha (São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1990). Tribuna Artística, Rio de Janeiro, 12/3/1871, 3. “Resoluções do 1o Congresso Operário de 1906,” A Voz do Trabalhador, Rio de Janeiro, 2/1/1914, 7. O Tipógrafo, Rio de Janeiro, 11/13/1867, 2. Tribuna Artística, Rio de Janeiro, 2/25/1872. Gazeta Operária, Rio de Janeiro, 2/7/1885, 2. A Voz do Trabalhador, Rio de Janeiro, 10/1/1913, 4. See Elvira Boni’s statement in Angela Gomes (ed.), Velhos militantes: depoimentos (Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar, 1988), 40. On the bakers’ working conditions in the 1910s, see João Lopes’s statement in Ibid. A Voz do Trabalhador, Rio de Janeiro, 7/15/1908, 2. A Voz do Trabalhador, 7/1/1913, 2. A Voz do Trabalhador, 1/1/1913. Maria Cecília Velasco e Cruz, “Tradições negras na formação de um sindicato: sociedade de resistência dos trabalhadores em trapiche e café, Rio de Janeiro, 1905–1930,” Afro-Ásia 24 (2000): 288. Ibid. A Voz do Trabalhador, Rio de Janeiro, 12/15/1913, 1. A Voz do Trabalhador, 1/1/1913, 3. A Voz do Trabalhador, 5/17/1909, 1. Beatriz Ana Loner, Construção de classe: operários de Pelotas e Rio Grande (1888–1930) (Pelotas: Unitrabalho/Ed. UFPel, 2001), 275. A Voz do Trabalhador, Rio de Janeiro, 10/30/1909, 3. Eduardo Silva, D. Obá II D’África, o príncipe do povo: Vida, tempo e pensamento de um homem livre de cor (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1997). Ibid., 18. Carlos Eugênio Líbano Soares, A negrada instituição: Os capoeiras na Corte Imperial, 1850–1890 (Rio de Janeiro: Access, 1999), 210 ss. The author mentions the articles “Ao país e ao respeitável público” (VI), published September 4, 1882, and “Plano maldito dos adversários … ,” published June 21, 1886. Silva, D. Obá II, 165. See, for example, the news on abolitionists’ clubs and funds for emancipation in A Gazeta Operária, Rio de Janeiro, 1/15/1881, 3. Leila Duarte, Pão e liberdade: uma história de escravos e livres na virada do século XIX (Rio de Janeiro: Aperj/Faperj/Mauad, 2002), 70–71. Ibid., 71. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 76. Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, 27. Cláudio Batalha, “Cultura associativa no Rio de Janeiro da Primeira República,” in Culturas de classe: identidade e diversidade na formação do operariado, ed. Cláudio H. M. Batalha, Fernando Teixeira da Silva, and Alexandre Fortes (Campinas: Ed. Unicamp, 2004), 95–119.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

CONCLUSION We have finished the last chapter with a comment on the memoirs of the baker João de Mattos, a source who has been discussed in various other moments of this book. It is not by chance that we have mentioned this character so many times. After all, the history of João de Mattos and his fellows is one of the most eloquent pieces of evidence, among the others presented here, to confirm one of the central hypotheses that motivated this work: between the fights of slaves for freedom and the first fights of urban waged workers in Rio de Janeiro during the second half of the nineteenth century, there were significant bonds and shared experiences – of work, of communitarian life, of organization, of collective action – and distinct, albeit combined, elements of values and identities activated by the new forms of working-class consciousness. Those are essential aspects for a broader comprehension of the working-class formation process within the historical situation that this analysis has emphasized. The exposition was organized using a thematic approach, to a great extent defined by a theoretical construction guided by certain categories of analysis, such as class, class struggle, and class-formation process, which we hope to have properly explained. While the formal division of chapters reflected a given conceptual reference, the actual presentation of the content depended, at all moments, on resorting to the most diverse primary and secondary sources. This allowed us to follow everything from aspects of life and work experience to manifestations of workers’ class consciousness, along the way embracing forms of organization and collective action that both conformed to and constituted traditions, whose interlacing would be a constitutive part of the process of working-class formation in the city. It couldn’t have been another way, for resorting to those sources not only obeyed the imperatives of the exposition but also became the structuring core of the entire research; if we have learned anything from our theory, it is that class formation processes can only be understood in the light of their relation to the other dimensions of human history in specific historical contexts.

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In this way, we have searched for information on the configurations of the urban economy (particularly of the secondary sector), the “labor markets,” the working relations, and city life, from the viewpoint of those who worked there. We have found similarities between enslaved and free workers in the streets and workshops/factories. We have noticed the dubious situation of the “artist” – who had a specialized craft, but was a waged worker and, therefore, was exploited. We have also seen how abolition, justifiably celebrated, nevertheless neither interrupted nor changed the perception of the difficulties that were inherent to the working-class condition – a class experience that cannot be reduced to a single dimension, and which has been analyzed here based on the various facets of the exploitation dimension, without wishing to diminish the importance of other dimensions. Without dismissing the centrality of the organizations traditionally associated with the working class – party and trade union – we have attempted to recover earlier organizational forms that played an important role in building the typical working-class collective networks of solidarity within a wider chronological scope. Often such associations survived the emergence of new associative models, keeping their specificity or adapting to new situations. Once more, we have observed combinations and exchanges between such models, discussing labor brotherhoods with a clear mutuality outline; mutual associations that took on the character of representing collective interests, including the arrangement of strikes; and also organizations that assumed a mutual form but whose goal was fighting for the freedom of the enslaved, for whom the legal limit of association were the brotherhoods. Although assuming a labor class identity, parties emerged having many of the same goals of valuing work and the worker that had already motivated the associativism of the leagues, collective corps, and other entities of a mutual type. For all of them, the paths toward the spread of trade unions as a central organizing resource were more complex than a first glance would indicate. The search for modalities and patterns of collective action led us to uncover the traditional strikes, especially from the 1890s on. However, they did exist earlier, albeit sporadically, and not only among free workers, as interrupting work was also a strategy of the enslaved, particularly in industrial establishments, with specific purposes related to slavery conditions or within the broader fight for freedom. We have also found within the greatest social movement of that century, abolitionism, active and organized participation of free workers who were aware of the fact that the fight for emancipation of the enslaved was a priority in that context, though it was set within a broader perspective than that which ruled the process’s outcomes and that enhanced rather than diminished the pro-

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tagonist role of the enslaved themselves in that process. Links that were forged there were destined to have consequences. The presence of the workers was also perceived in the most significant rebellions of the city’s inhabitants, which far from being a disordered explosion of the “savage crowd” had their own political logic and a constitutive role in the class-formation process analyzed here. Concerning the strikes once again, but this time focusing on the first republican decades, we have seen the two-way flow of organizations’ influence on the movements and vice versa: being organized – into groups, resistance societies, or trade unions – was a way of taking collective movements further, but often it was from the confrontations that organizations with a minimum degree of institutionalization emerged. However, once active and organized, the class also provoked the capitalists’ reaction and the increasing specialization of government repression through the police. The police force significantly advanced in its process of professionalization and specialization and/or presented itself as a necessary instrument for controlling the “social issue.” The features of a class consciousness among a great part of the workers became noticeable in the first decades of the twentieth century: the identity of common interests in opposition to the exploiters’ interests; the self-identification as a class; the effort to mobilize wider groups in organizations and movements; projects and programs of a more general nature and not just those of corporate interest; etc. This assertion is not based on discourse alone but is also confirmed by the extension of strikes at the beginning of the twentieth century and by the success in organizing trade unions and labor congresses, which confirms that the propositions of the leaderships had some echo. Nevertheless, considering class as process and relation, the consciousness dimension, in particular, cannot be determined as a single fact. For us, then, there remained the task of understanding a specific formation of workers’ class consciousness within a particular historical process, in which those other dimensions – of material life experience, working relations, of organizations and movements – combined themselves in conditions and contradictions. New meanings were, therefore, assigned to the artisans’ efforts in order to make respectability and the dignity of their crafts and of labor in a general sense prevail. The meanings of the struggle for freedom were also (re)signified: from an unfinished freedom from the point of view of those who fought for human emancipation in its broad sense, to a proposal dependent on the end of the division of society into classes. Once the research and writing had been done, we also identified blanks, questions that had not been fully answered until now. The generalizing approach we adopted has brought before us specific organizations

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and movements that, within the brief treatment they have received here, cannot be fully perceived in the richness of aspects that they could reveal if they were to be discussed in depth. Focusing on some professional groups, or on certain strikes, we would surely be able to delve deeper into some of the questions we discuss. On the other hand, the class dimensions emphasized here have their own (sub)dimensions and ties between them to which we have not been able to dedicate the attention they deserve. In the first chapter, for instance, focused on experience, we were able to follow working relations and conditions in the urban milieu, emphasizing those aspects that revealed class exploitation. However, a significant part of workers’ experiences and important identity links worked out by class consciousness were also formed in other spaces and practices, such as those related to leisure, as well as in cultural manifestations, in the more narrow sense of the term, to give just a few examples of the various aspects of the life experience of the class in its formation. When identifying such blanks we do not intend to present excuses in advance. Quite the contrary; posing new issues at the end of a piece of research work is always a stimulus to further studies. For that reason, in spite of the division of chapters by themes and of the writing and research limitations, we hope to have properly situated the analysis within a diachronic dimension, considering class as a process, as an essentially historical category/reality, specially emphasizing its formation. In that sense, in the end, the time scope turned out to be adequate. It is not a matter of attempting to define a precise date by which we can say the working class had been formed, or of considering that the formation process could have a definitive end. However, from the elements gathered in this work, we believe that it is possible to say that we have indeed been dealing with a working class when we have analyzed the organizations, movements, and manifestations of labor consciousness in the first years of twentieth century.

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INDEX abolition, viii, 4, 12, 22, 23, 28, 47, 72, 73, 85, 104–12, 148, 149, 153, 154, 160 abolitionism, 10, 12, 72, 103, 104–12, 123, 153, 160 abolitionist movement. See abolitionism abolitionist quilombo. See quilombo abolitionists, 65, 104–12, 156 Africa, 20, 21, 152, 153 Alencar, José de, 63, 93n38 Arantes, Erika, 43, 90 Association, vii, 1, 2, 5, 12, 36, 54, 55, 57–73, 81, 82, 86, 87, 88, 90, 91, 92n15, 93n41, 94n59, 101, 109, 110, 113, 114, 119, 143, 147, 156, 160. See also International Workingmen’s Association; International (the Second) abolitionist, 95n76 black workers, 5, 69–73 carnival, 90, 91, 97n128 charity, 89 labor, 5, 55, 62, 110, 154 mutual (mutual benefit), 5, 12, 36, 59, 60, 68, 79, 89, 168 recreation, 90 right to, 52, 70 workers, vii, 55, 56, 57, 72, 82, 83, 89 Atlantic, 20 Batalha, Claudio, 60, 84, 88, 155 Beauclair, Geraldo de, 3, 27, 48n38 bourgeoisie, 134, 135, 148. See also owners; ruling class Britain, 120 brotherhoods, 12, 54, 66–69, 71, 89, 94n49, 94n71, 108, 123, 160, 163 Cardoso, Ciro, 21, 22 Carvalho, José Murilo de, 89, 114, 115, 116 Chalhoub, Sidney, 5, 23, 42, 94n59, 105, 106

Chartism, 53 club, 5, 113 abolitionist, 71, 72, 109, 158n64 carnival, 90 football, 46 social, 151 collective movement. See social movement communism, 138 Confederação Abolicionista (Abolitionist Confederation), 72, 107, 109 consciousness, 10, 12, 17, 67, 118, 133–37, 140, 142, 145, 148, 154, 156, 161–62 black, 67 class, 9, 10, 12, 53, 54, 91, 98, 99, 128, 133–37, 139, 142, 144, 155, 159, 161–62 false, 134 social, 9, 17, 47n3 disease, 38–40, 72, 115. See also health Engels, Friedrich, 7, 135 enslaved laborer. See enslaved worker enslaved worker, viii, 3–6, 10–12, 17–28, 42–45, 75, 85, 99–103, 108, 111, 120, 136, 146–56, 160. See also slave factory, vii, viii, 3, 11, 24–31, 33, 34, 36, 39, 42, 45, 46, 48n41, 55, 77, 82, 83, 88, 103, 104, 111, 115–21, 126–28, 135, 138, 140, 160 Fourier, Charles, 55 França e Silva, Luiz da, 76–79, 139 Gama, Luís, 108 Ganhadores, 4, 21, 42, 72, 87, 102, 103, 123 Garcia, Mariano, 79–81 Gomes, Flavio, 68, 72, 103 Gramsci, Antonio, 80, 81, 134, 135 Gutman, Herbert, 5

174

health, 11, 29, 30, 31, 36, 38–40, 114, 115. See also disease Hobsbawm, Eric, 53, 137 housing, 11, 29, 33–38, 44, 46, 113, 115 Hudson, Otaviano, 62, 63, 74, 147 immigration, 28, 58, 75, 125, 146, 147, 152 immigrants, 4, 20, 23, 24, 42, 45, 46, 100, 111, 115, 145, 147, 153 Imperial Associação Tipográfica Fluminense (Imperial Fluminense Typographic Association), 1, 2, 57, 60, 101 International (the Second), 79, 145 International Workingmen’s Association, 56, 63 insurrection. See also rebellion collective, 105 labor, 126 military, 77 slave, 103 Kinsmann, Benjamin, 76 labor history, viii, 11, 14, 15, 136, 157n7 labor movement, 4, 5, 11, 39, 45, 46, 52, 53, 55, 57, 63, 77, 91n2, 101, 102, 103, 114, 120, 127, 128, 135, 147, 153, 154, 156, 162 Labor Party British, 53 Brazil, 6, 57, 73–80, 120, 127, 139, 145 Lisbon, 67, 122 Lobo, Aristides, 63, 93n38 Lobo, Eulália, 23, 25, 26, 27, 66, 78 London, 120, 121 London Corresponding Society, 52, 58 Loner, Beatriz Ana, 5, 150 Marinho, Saldanha, 63, 65, 93n38, 110, 112 Marx, Karl, 7, 8, 17, 135 Marxism, 7, 8, 18, 57 masters craft, 3, 27, 66, 108 slave, 10, 21, 22, 27, 46, 69, 71, 72, 104, 106, 123, 150 Mattos, João de, 45, 85, 86, 87, 111, 112, 124, 130n52, 130n53, 153, 154, 156, 159 Mattos, Rômulo, 37, 44, 131n62 Migrants. See immigrants Moraes, Evaristo de, 80, 81, 86, 104, 107 Mota, Benjamin, 95n97 mutual societies. See associations

Index

New York, 121 newspaper abolitionist, 107, 108 anarchist, 141, 142 labor, 6, 12, 29, 36, 40, 45, 59, 61, 64, 65, 74, 76, 77, 79, 83, 86, 96n109, 101, 118, 120, 137, 140, 142, 143, 144, 145, 150, 153 Socialist, 73, 80, 81–82 Nabuco, Joaquim, 104, 110, 153 Obá II (Dom/Prince), 151–153 Oliveira, Anderson, 66, 67, 71 Oliveira, Tiago Bernardon de, 84 owners, vii, 31, 46, 47, 71, 72, 86, 100, 101, 104, 107, 109, 11, 118, 137, 140, 144, 145, 146, 148. See also, bourgeoisie; masters (slave); ruling class Paris, 54 Partido Operário. See Labor Party Pedro II (Emperor), 152 Perrot, Michelle, 99, 100 Police, 2, 4, 12, 43, 44, 67, 68, 70, 85, 100, 103, 113, 114, 118, 119, 120–28, 131n62, 132n102, 161 political movement, 8, 124, 135 Portugal, vii, 19, 23, 123, 146 post-abolition (period), 5, 25, 147, 148, 151, 153. See also abolition quilombo, 12, 72, 95n78, 110, 111, 123 railroad, 60, 65, 84, 125 rebellion. See also insurrection popular, 75, 98, 113–116, 118 slave, 68, 103, 123 Rebouças, André, 65, 110, 111 Reis, João José, 4, 67, 102 Revolta da Vacina (Vaccine Revolt). See rebellion Revolta do Vintém (“Penny” Revolt). See rebellion ruling class, 6, 118, 122, 135, 141. See also bourgeoisie; masters (slave); owners Salvador, 4, 36, 68, 102, 123 São Paulo, 80, 85, 108, 111, 126 slave, vii, 2–6, 12, 14n9, 15n11, 20–24, 27, 28, 39, 40, 42, 44, 46, 70, 71, 72, 73, 102–110, 112, 123, 124, 151, 152, 155, 161. See also enslaved worker

Index

slave trade, viii, 20, 23. See also slave Silva, Eduardo, 110, 151, 152, 153 Soares, Carlos Eugênio, 43, 73, 152 Soares, Luiz Carlos, 21, 24, 27, 48n39 Social Democratic Party (German), 56, 79 social movement, 6, 12, 57, 73, 85, 91, 98, 99, 103, 113–116, 160, 161 socialism, 56, 62, 77, 78, 84, 89, 138 Socialist Party. See Labor Party Souza, Vicente de, 65, 74, 80, 109, 115, 119 starvation, 35, 40 state, 5, 12, 13, 23, 27, 30, 32, 41, 43, 55, 56, 59, 68–70, 79, 89, 94n59, 100, 106, 114, 122, 123, 134, 154 State Council. See state Stotz, Eduardo, 22, 60, 78 strike, vii, 1, 2, 4, 29, 40, 54, 55, 57, 80, 81, 87, 88, 99–103, 109, 111, 116–20, 125–28, 131n70, 137, 143, 149, 151 Thompson, E. P., 7–10, 17, 18, 52, 53, 92n5, 98, 99, 134, 155 trade unions. See unions transport. See transportation

175

transportation, 24, 29, 37, 41, 42, 107, 113, 115, 117, 121, 126 unions, 12, 31, 52–57, 73, 81–91, 113, 119, 131n63, 151, 160, 161 Veiga, José da, 76 Velasco e Cruz, Maria Cecília, 3, 4, 87, 103, 149 Vinhaes, José Augusto, 77, 78, 119 wages, 22, 40–42, 46, 54, 59, 82, 88, 102, 104, 115, 117, 118, 121, 127, 146 worker, 12, 24, 31, 32, 35, 41, 45, 46, 65, 67, 75, 76, 77, 80, 90, 100, 110, 111, 139, 140, 141, 142, 146, 150, 156, 160. See also working class; enslaved worker workers’ movement. See labor movement working class, vii, viii, 2–6, 10, 11, 25, 36, 42, 53, 56, 65, 78, 81, 89, 90, 92n5, 98, 99, 114, 116, 117, 120 122, 126, 133–36, 139, 143, 154–56, 159, 160, 162. See also worker working conditions, 29–33, 38, 44, 80, 81, 84, 148, 158n49

International Studies in Social History General Editor: Marcel van der Linden International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam Volume 1 Trade Unions, Immigration and Immigrants in Europe 1960–1993 Edited by Rinus Penninx and Judith Roosblad Volume 2 Class and Other Identities Edited by Lex Heerma van Voss and Marcel van der Linden Volume 3 Rebellious Families Edited by Jan Kok Volume 4 Experiencing Wages Edited by Peter Scholliers and Leonard Schwarz Volume 5 The Imaginary Revolution Michael Seidman Volume 6 Revolution and Counterrevolution Kevin Murphy Volume 7 Miners and the State in the Ottoman Empire Donald Quataert Volume 8 Anarchism, Revolution and Reaction Angel Smith Volume 9 Sugarlandia Revisited Edited by Ulbe Bosma, Juan A. Giusti-Cordero and G. Roger Knight Volume 10 Alternative Exchanges Edited by Laurence Fontaine Volume 11 A Social History of Spanish Labour Edited by José A. Piqueras and Vicent Sanz-Rozalén

Volume 12 Learning on the Shop Floor Edited by Bert De Munck, Steven L. Kaplan and Hugo Soly Volume 13 Unruly Masses Wolfgang Maderthaner and Lutz Musner Volume 14 Central European Crossroads Pieter C. van Duin Volume 15 Supervision and Authority in Industry Edited by Patricia Van den Eeckhout Volume 16 Forging Political Identity Keith Mann Volume 17 Gendered Money Pernilla Jonsson and Silke Neunsinger Volume 18 Postcolonial Migrants and Identity Politics Edited by Ulbe Bosma, Jan Lucassen and Gert Oostindie Volume 19 Charismatic Leadership and Social Movements Edited by Jan Willem Stutje Volume 20 Maternalism Reconsidered Edited by Marian van der Klein, Rebecca Jo Plant, Nichole Sanders and Lori R. Weintrob Volume 21 Routes into the Abyss Edited by Helmut Konrad and Wolfgang Maderthaner Volume 22 Alienating Labour Eszter Bartha

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Volume 29 Laborers and Enslaved Workers: Experiences in Common in the Making of Rio de Janeiro’s Working Class, 1850–1920 Marcelo Badaró Mattos