The labour movement in Rosario between 1908 and 1913. From boom to reorganisation

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to understand and explain the reorganization process experienced by Rosario’s labour movement between 1908 and 1913 in the context of the reconfiguration of anarchism and the rise of the Radical Civic Union and the change in the electoral system. An extensive quantitative and qualitative analysis of the police records of the Investigation Division of the Rosario Police was carried out, in connection with official sources such as censuses and memories of the mayor’s office, and both commercial and labour press. Contrary to several postulates that indicated a process of demobilization of the workers’ movement in those years, the article claims that it was a process of conflict and was crossed by singular experiences of workers’ organization in the context of increased state repression and ideological reconfiguration of the working class, strained between new political identities.