In the 1960s and 1970s, across the globe, trade unions had already begun a process of decline that would rapidly pick up over the next few decades. In the United States and many other industrialized countries, the establishment labor movement had been thoroughly purged of opponents of American Imperialism through the combined efforts of labor laws aimed at incorporating unions into the state, reactionary labor bureaucrats, and repression from law enforcement, leaving only class collaborationists at the heads of most trade unions. The militant, independent unions built in the late 1800s and the first few decades of the 1900s had almost entirely been dissolved by revisionist Communist Party leaders in the lead-up to World War II, or repressed into obscurity by state governments. Those that remained had been almost entirely captured by the same style of sellout leadership and union bureaucrats, and they had first risen up in opposition to or had been reduced to small, isolated remnants with little connection to the working class. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), for example, had dwindled to just 100 members by 1960, a massive drop from its peak of 150,000 in the late 1910s.

However, in Latin America, a movement rose among workers that would defy this trend.

Beginning in the late 1960s and gaining momentum through the 1970s, militant rank-and-file currents, particularly among auto workers, miners, and teachers in Argentina, Chile, Peru, Mexico, Bolivia, and other countries, arose. This new generation of organizers rejected class-collaborationism and instead, they built worker-led organizations rooted in class struggle, in what became known as the clasista movement. These groups emphasized democracy in union decision-making, mass participation in workplace actions, and uncompromising defense of workers’ interests over closed-door negotiations with the ruling class. They organized militant strikes, mass protests, and factory occupations, putting forward demands on terms that reflected the interests of the workers themselves rather than the priorities of the state or employers. Several classista unions and trade union centers, such as the Movimiento de Obreros y Trabajadores Clasistas (MOTC) in Peru, would go on to play important roles in revolutions and mass uprisings.

This article serves as the first part of a multi-part investigation of the origins, line, and lessons of the Latin American clasista movement. The first entry mainly explores clasismo in Argentina and Peru, two countries where it had some of the earliest national impact.

To understand how the clasista movement emerged as a force in the late 1960s and 1970s, it is necessary to trace the deeper history of labor in Latin America. The first trade union organizations in Latin America emerged in the 19th century, growing rapidly in the first decades of the 20th century. Many arose from mutual aid societies, which were associations formed among workers to provide basic support in the absence of state welfare. One of the first was Argentina’s Sociedad Tipográfica Bonaerense, founded in 1857 by printers in Buenos Aires, which combined mutual aid functions with collective bargaining and strike action. In Chile, the proletarian mutual aid organizations were referred to as mancomunales, had a significant impact on the Chilean revolutionary movement, and were often tied to their early labor organizations. These early unions were typically craft-based, representing skilled trades such as printing, dock work, and cigar making, and often fused workplace demands with broader social and political objectives. These early organizations were bolstered by the influx of millions of European immigrants, especially from Spain, Italy, and Portugal, who brought with them syndicalist, socialist, and anarchist ideologies as well as practical experience in European workers’ organizations.

These early unions and workers’ organizations, while often craft-based, tended to remain highly local or regional in scope. As Latin America’s economies expanded, however, workers increasingly recognized the need to unite across trades and beyond their immediate localities. In the early 20th century, revolutionaries guided by socialism and syndicalism spearheaded the creation of the first national labor federations, uniting workers across crafts and localities. In Argentina in 1901, twenty-seven unions, representing around 10,000 workers, united to establish the Argentine Workers’ Federation, the first major nationwide alliance of trade unions in the country. Others soon followed, with the Federación Obrera Regional Uruguaya, formed in Uruguay in 1905, Confederação Operária Brasileira in Brazil in 1906, Federación Obrera de Chile in 1909, Federación Obrera Regional Peruana in Peru in 1912, and Casa del Obrero Mundial in Mexico in 1912. These federations quickly demonstrated their power through large-scale strikes paralyzing ports, railways, and factories, and in some cases confronting state repression head-on, setting a precedent for coordinated national action that would shape Latin American labor struggles.

By the late 1910s and into the 1930s, the powerful wave of strikes and militant organizing that had built the first national labor federations began to recede under mounting pressure from both state and employer offensives. Governments across Latin America responded to the post-World War I strike waves with a mix of violent repression, mass arrests, deportations of foreign-born radicals, and even massacres of strikers. In addition, new labor legislation was designed to channel worker demands into state-controlled frameworks and bribe union leaders. The state also exploited deep ideological divides between anarchists, syndicalists, socialists, and the rising influence of reformist leaders, splintering once unified movements. In many countries, populist and nationalist politicians offered unions legal recognition and institutional power in exchange for abandoning confrontational tactics, laying the groundwork for arrangements that tied labor to the state. By the 1930s, much of the early radicalism that had defined Latin American trade unionism had been blunted, with independent federations either absorbed into official labor structures or pushed to the margins. An exception to this trend was the creation of new Marxist-led trade union centers during the Communist International’s “Third Period,” such as the Confederación General de Trabajadores del Perú, founded in 1929 by José Carlos Mariátegui and the Peruvian Communist Party; Mexico’s Confederación Sindical Unitaria de México, established in 1928; and Brazil’s Confederação Geral dos Trabalhadores, formed in 1929. These organizations aimed to rebuild the combative, class-struggle unionism of the early 20th century, organizing workers on an explicitly revolutionary basis. However, most were quickly dismantled either by fierce state repression or liquidated due to a poor understanding of the Comintern’s popular front policy within only a few years. In Peru, for example, the Confederación General de Trabajadores del Perú launched militant strikes among miners and dockworkers shortly after its founding, but within two years it was driven underground by a wave of arrests, deportations, and martial law.

Few examples better illustrate the state’s ability to capture and domesticate the trade union movement than the rise of Peronism in Argentina. Emerging in the mid-1940s under Juan Domingo Perón, the Argentinian state forged an alliance between the state, employers, and organized labor. In exchange for social benefits, wage gains, and legal recognition, unions were integrated into a framework where their leadership was closely tied to the Peronist political apparatus and dependent on state patronage. This model fit into a broader Latin American trend of state unionism. Getúlio Vargas in Brazil and Lázaro Cárdenas in Mexico had established similar arrangements in the 1930s and early 1940s, using state intervention to institutionalize labor rights while simultaneously containing independent worker militancy. While Perón was not the first Latin American leader to pursue this kind of labor incorporation, he was among the most influential in shaping state unionism in Latin America.

In 1955 Juan Perón was overthrown in a coup. However, Peronism survived as the dominant ideology among Argentine trade union leaders. By the 1960s, a growing number of Argentine workers had become disillusioned with Peronism and the consolidation of power by sellout union bureaucrats, known as the “burocracia sindical ” whose positions and privileges depended on their loyalty to the state and cooperation with employers, aligning their interests squarely with that of the ruling class instead of the workers they were supposed to represent. Meanwhile, economic conditions for workers steadily deteriorated: inflation eroded real wages, productivity drives and speed-ups intensified the pace of work on assembly lines, and workplace conditions declined. Workplace grievances piled up, but union officials either stalled them in endless negotiations or actively suppressed strike actions to avoid destabilizing relations with management. For many in the factories, rail yards, and schools, it was becoming clear that the burocracia sindical functioned less as a defender of labor rights and more as a pillar of the ruling class order that kept workers subordinated.

By the late 1960s, Córdoba stood out as one of Argentina’s most industrialized and politically vibrant cities. The arrival of foreign and domestic auto manufacturers, Industrias Kaiser Argentina (IKA), and FIAT had transformed the city into a modern industrial hub, drawing thousands of rural migrants and younger workers into its factories. Many of these workers quickly discovered that the jobs they had migrated for were not stable, middle-class pathways. Instead, they were subjected to low wages, grueling speed-ups, and miserable working conditions on the assembly line. The Peronist union bureaucrats of the General del Trabajo de los Argentinos acted as little more than a negotiating partner for the companies, cutting deals behind closed doors and refusing to confront management on issues central to workers’ daily lives, particularly shop-floor control and production quotas. This climate of harsh exploitation and betrayal by union bureaucrats gave space for revolutionary trade unionists to meet the frustrations of workers with ideas for more militant, worker-controlled organizations. Córdoba, unlike other Argentine cities, had a significantly higher degree of political pluralism in it’s trade union movement and there was a heavy influence of underground disciplined and committed Marxist trade unionists.

By early 1969, conditions in Córdoba had sharpened, and the city was a powder keg. That January, militant trade unionists and Peronists issued the Declaración de Córdoba, a bold call for a broad front against General Juan Carlos Onganía’s dictatorship, which had suppressed both Peronists and the Left since seizing power in 1966. In response, the regime’s governor in Córdoba, Carlos Caballero, tried to defuse tensions by proposing an “Economic Advisory Council” that would bring labor, business, the Church, and the military together in a purely symbolic body. Workers, however, immediately recognized the scheme as an attempt to co-opt the movement while maintaining authoritarian control.

The crisis deepened in May. The government’s repeal of the long-standing “English Saturday” law, which granted workers a half-day off with full pay, cut real wages by nearly 10 percent and ignited outrage among Córdoba’s auto and metalworkers. On May 14, SMATA members clashed with police in street battles that briefly placed parts of the city under workers’ control, a confrontation widely seen as the dress rehearsal for the explosion to come. At the same time, student protests spread across the country, with Córdoba’s university students forging ever-closer ties to the labor movement. On May 28, militant representatives from Córdoba’s unions met with student leaders to coordinate a two-day general strike. Rejecting the passive “stay-at-home” model favored by the national Peronist leadership, they resolved instead to launch a paro activo: an active strike that would take workers out of the factories and into the streets in mass demonstrations. Within twenty-four hours, this decision would set the stage for one of the most dramatic uprisings in modern Argentine history, the Cordobazo.

On May 29, 1969, Córdoba erupted. As planned, thousands of auto workers from IKA-Renault, FIAT, and other factories streamed into the city center, soon joined by students and other sectors. What began as an organized march quickly turned into an urban insurrection. Workers and students built barricades, seized control of key intersections, and held much of the city for nearly 24 hours. Police forces were overwhelmed, forcing the government to deploy the army to retake Córdoba street by street. Tanks and live ammunition were used against demonstrators, leaving dozens dead and hundreds injured, but the scale and militancy of the uprising shook the foundations of the dictatorship. The Cordobazo marked a decisive break. For the first time since Perón’s overthrow in 1955, Argentina’s working class had demonstrated its capacity to act independently of both the Peronist leadership and the bureaucratized official unions. The paro activo, organized from below, revealed the potential of factory committees and rank-and-file currents to bypass the burocracia sindical and lead militant action.

In the aftermath of the Cordobazo, Córdoba emerged as the epicenter of a new stage of labor militancy in Argentina. The uprising revealed both the limits of the union bureaucracy and the power of collective worker action. Inspiring rank-and-file workers to consolidate on this. Taking control of the comisiones internas (internal commissions), which had already existed prior to the revolt, as shop-floor bodies meant to mediate between management and union leadership. But after 1969, Marxist trade unionists and combative workers seized upon the atmosphere of militancy to reorganize these committees into instruments of direct shop-floor democracy and struggle. Elected by workers in each department, the comisiones internas provided a means to bypass Peronist bureaucrats and act on workers’ grievances directly. At IKA-Renault and FIAT, for instance, workers used these structures to assert real power over production, transforming what had once been tools for class collaboration into shop floor militancy.

It was in this that the label clasista, a term long used by Marxists to describe unions that acted on the basis of class struggle and direct confrontation with the ruling class, took hold among the working class. What had once been a slogan was now embodied in practice: clasismo came to signify worker democracy, militant autonomy, and a vision of unions not as bargaining agents within capitalism but as instruments for overthrowing it. Clasista organizations organized their struggles around more than wages and benefits; they put forward demands for workers’ control, political power, and an end to exploitation itself. This was exhibited through collective action, such as in 1971, when workers at SITRAC-SITRAM, the auto unions at Córdoba’s Renault and FIAT plants, launched a strike that went well beyond economic issues. Where workers denounced the Peronist union bureaucracy, asserted the principle of rank-and-file control over union decisions, and raised the banner of workers’ control of production. In doing so, they explicitly linked immediate shop-floor battles to a broader need for an end to capitalist exploitation.

The impact of clasismo did not remain confined to Córdoba. Its emphasis on shop-floor militancy and independence from the Peronist state unions, resonated with workers across Argentina. In Greater Buenos Aires, textile workers adopted similar strategies, while in the sugar mills of Tucumán and the oil fields of Patagonia, workers began organizing their own rank-and-file committees inspired by the Cordoban example. Though conditions varied by region, the common theme was the refusal to subordinate workers’ struggles to state institutions or ruling class party machines. Beyond Argentina, clasismo also found echoes in other parts of Latin America. Such as in Mexico and Chile, where clasista ideas also found fertile ground in the late 1960s and early 1970s, though they took different forms shaped by local struggles. Yet it was in Peru where clasismo reached new heights through the Movimiento de Obreros y Trabajadores Clasistas.

As mentioned earlier, Peru had a vibrant history of militant unionism in the first few decades of the 1900s, first with the syndicalist Federación Obrera Regional Peruana and later with the Confederación General de Trabajadores del Perú, which was founded by José Carlos Mariátegui and the Peruvian Communist Party (CGTP). However, by the 1960s, the CGTP had lost all of its militant character and its leaders had been absorbed into the state. In 1976, the revolutionary nucleus led by Chairman Gonzalo that would later reconstitute the Communist Party of Peru (PCP), created the Movimiento de Obreros y Trabajadores Clasistas (MOTC), a national labor organization. Drawing inspiration from the clasista organizations in Argentina, the MOTC insisted on independence from the state and rejection of the sellout union bureaucracy that had long subordinated workers’ struggles to the interests of the ruling class. Its ranks were made up of autoworkers, teachers, textile workers, nurses, miners, and other industrial and semi-professional sectors who had grown disillusioned with the bureaucratic CGTP and its class-collaborationist leadership. In direct opposition to the class-collaborationist leadership of the CGTP, the PCP would sustain strikes until their demands were met, only agreed to shorter contracts that met workers’ sided with workers, and immediately mobilize new strikes whenever those agreements were violated.

In accordance with its military strategy to “surround the cities from the countryside,” the PCP concentrated its labor work along Peru’s central highway, the vital corridor linking Lima to the country’s interior. In 1988, this effort culminated in the formation of the Comité de Lucha de Obreros y Trabajadores Clasistas de la Carretera Central (CLOTCCC), was formed as part of the MOTC to further develop the work of creating alternative organizations to the state unions along the central highway. Over time, the PCP fused the labor struggles with its armed struggle, developing the tactic of the “armed strike.” These actions combined mass work stoppages with guerrilla offensives, effectively paralyzing regions and demonstrating workers’ capacity to directly challenge the state. In May 1989, for example, over a million workers in Peru’s mining and agricultural heartlands refused to work for three days while the People’s Guerrilla Army carried out coordinated actions. Between 1988 and 1992, at least nine armed strikes were carried out in Lima, alongside others on the central highway and in key urban corridors. For the PCP, these militant actions symbolized the fusion of clasista worker-led unions with people’s war, aiming not only at better conditions but at the seizure of political power itself. In fact the MOTC was one of the first mass organizations to take direct action in support of the people’s war, when on June 13, 1980 less than a month after the people’s war began, 60 young workers affiliated with the organization rallied and threw molotov cocktails at the municipal office of the Lima district of San Martín de Porres (for more on the MOTC, see our earlier article).

Outside of Peru by the late 1970s, the clasista movement which had spontaneously emerged in the 1960s encountered a reactionary counter-offensive. Across Latin America, waves of repression targeted militant unions: leaders were jailed, exiled, or disappeared, and organizations were fragmented by systematic surveillance and infiltration. In Argentina, the 1976 military coup crushed the gains of Córdoba’s worker committees, dismantling SITRAC-SITRAM and executing or “disappearing” dozens of clasista organizers.

While the clasista movement reached its height in the early 1970s across Latin America, its influence continues to shape militant unionism today, with organizations that persist and develop to this day. In Brazil, the Liga Operária, created in 1995, emerged as a combative, class-based trade union center opposed to the opportunism and state-aligned bureaucracy that dominate the country’s established labor movement. Guided by a clasista orientation, it emphasizes the unity of workers and peasants, independence from the state, and an uncompromising defense of working-class interests. In Peru, one of the original clasista unions, the SUTEP Único, formed in 1970 as a national teachers’ union organized on the class line of José Carlos Mariátegui, carries forward the clasista tradition by organizing educators on the basis of class struggle, with a militant base in the city of Ayachucho. These are only a few examples; despite the severe repression, international imperialism was unable to prevent the spread and growth of clasismo across Latin America.

Clasismo is not just a chapter of the past; it is the living movement of combative workers’ independent organization, militancy, and uncompromising struggle against exploitation. From Córdoba to Ayacucho, from the factory floor to the classroom, its banner remains raised not just in militant unions, like those that comprise Liga Operária in Brazil or the SUTEP Único in Peru, but among all those who seek to break the chains of exploitation and build a future where power rests in the hands of the working class itself. The history of clasismo teaches us one lesson above all: that workers cannot rely on the state, on bureaucrats, or on reformists who time and time again sell out the workers’ struggles for their own benefit. Only when workers take control of their own organizations, fight on the basis of class struggle, and refuse to compromise with the ruling class, has the labor movement moved forward. In future entries in this series we will explore the clasista unionist movement’s influence in other countries, such as in Chile, or in respect to the indepdent labor movement in Mexico.