CLASS STRUGGLE AND INTERNATIONAL TRADE: RIO DE LA PLATA'S COMMERCE AND THE ATLANTIC PROLETARIAT, 1790-1850 (ARGENTINA)

This study analyzes the relationship between class struggle and international trade in the case of Rio de la Plata, during the period 1790-1850. It shows how fluctuations in exports, overproduction crises, the formation of a market for imports, and the conquest of overseas markets all constituted different moments of class conflict in the ambit of the Atlantic economy. Examination of the autonomous struggles of different segments of the Atlantic proletariat provides important help to understanding the evolution of the region's international trade. The struggles of British textile workers during the cycle 1790-1810 played a major role in the incorporation of Rio de la Plata within the sphere of British commerical influence. During 1820-1840, a series of localized conflicts in the United States contributed to the formation of a market for South American hides. In Rio de la Plata, the struggles of gauchos for the preservation of their lifestyles shaped the pattern of social relations and employment in the ranches producing the hides exported to the United States and Western Europe.;The analysis of these relations provides evidence that the Atlantic economy of the early nineteenth century was already an international network of production processes in which capital mobilized the labor power of different groups to create an international proletariat. Foreign trade appears as a mediating agent among different social formations and modes of organization of labor, providing the necessary linkages for the operation of this international economy. On the other hand, the role of foreign trade was to facilitate the circulation of capital. Foreign trade served to control workers' resistance to capital accumulation: it recreated internationally the divisions within the working class, displaced and obscured localized class conflicts, contained workers' demands within the boundaries of international prices, and temporarily alleviated social and economic crises. At the same time, foreign trade also constituted a vehicle of working class mobilization. It transmitted the contradictions of the productive system and was itself a productive activity fraught with the antagonism of living labor. Because of this, the pattern, evolution, and fluctuations of international trade cannot be disassociated from the development and resolution of class conflicts. (Abstract shortened with permission of author.).