Common Men, Exceptional Politicians: What Do We Gain from an Embodied Social Biographical Approach to Leftist Leaders Like Germany's August Bebel and Brazil's Luis Inácio Lula da Silva?

Abstract

Lula and His Politics of Cunning explores the origin, roots, and evolution of Luis Inácio Lula da Silva's vision, discourse, and practice of leadership as a process of becoming. This commentary invites historians of labor movements and the left to think beyond their geographical and chronological specializations. It argues that there is much to gain from thinking globally if we wish to achieve meaningful causal insights applicable to the sweep of capitalist development.

The Politics of the Social Biographical Approach to Working-Class Leaders

“…French suggests that Lula and the PT spoke the language of the famous 1864 inaugural declaration by the short-lived International Working Men's Association: "the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves; that the struggle for the emancipation of the working classes means not a struggle for class privileges and monopolies, but for equal rights and duties, the abolition of all class rule". 59 For French, a history of the left has to involve political militancy. And yet, the PT embraced capitalism.…”