Peronism the Conservative and Liberal Saint of Argentina Essay

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Peron did not fundamentally change the relationship between state and labor, state and individual -- he still wished to wield control, although he did value the role of the working class in supporting his personal agenda. He was less reluctant to embrace the image of the common worker than previous regimes, but he did in so in a way that did not truly empower institutions such as labor unions to act as voices for the voiceless. Instead, when he did collaborate with unions when he was coming to power or reasserting his power, it was to use them as his tool. Unions and student groups proved useful in harassing Peron's political enemies -- they allowed him to seem above the fray, while they were terrorizing the opposition through the use of illegal methods (Romero, 2002, p.212).

Still, given the alienation of the working poor from Argentinean society pre-Peron, some scholars, such as Daniel James, author of Resistance and Integration: Peronism and the Argentine Working Class, 1946- 1976. have been tempted to view Peronism in a more positive light. In the mobilization of labor, James sees the decision of workers to support Peron as a fundamentally rational choice, and even if under Peron a new working-class culture did not fully come into fruition. Peronism did expand the notion of Argentine citizenship in a way that did not link it to class.

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James argues that workers did not blindly support Peronist propaganda but had "complex, ambiguous, frequently contradictory responses" to the types of media detailed in Plotkin's work, and they were critical consumers of the Peronist agenda (James, 1988, p.3).

Labor, women, the working class, and student groups, in other words, 'used' Peron, as well as were used by him, according to James. James acknowledges that while union leaders may have been corrupt and thuggish, and served the regime to suit their own ends, individual workers obeyed a kind of pragmatic philosophy, and used the historical moment to further their own ends. He also contrasts the more positive role unions played after Peron assumed power, versus the interim military regimes, after Peron lost power.

James' contrarian thesis, however, seems undercut by his own admission That Peron seemed to view labor as a kind of surrogate of the state, "capable of constantly challenging the status quo" of Peron's enemies "of preventing a peaceful institutionalization which would have excluded Peronism, of evolving a concrete organizational expression for this or that tactical necessity, but never achieving anything permanent" (James 1988, pp. 185-186). This was also true of Peron's policy with women and with students: any institution not linked with Peronism did not meet with his approval, and in Peron's view, what was good for Peron was good for women, students, and the working.....

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