The chapter is divided into six parts which will be briefly summarized here. "The great 'war of the labor movements'" examines the rebirth of Brazilian labor unionism during the period of the military dictatorship from 1964 to 1984. In "The war of positions," the analysis focuses on the intense "war of attrition" fought against the military dictatorship, when the first signs of the crisis of "peripheral Fordism" appeared. An interesting dialogue between the "new labor unionism" and the political opposition to the dictatorship reinforces with concrete data the critique of the Brazilian "model" of growth that the political opposition had always maintained.

In "From the war of positions to the assault on the skies: prolegomena to the counterhegemony," the focus is on the anti-hegemonic element that begins to emerge with the unfeasibility of the economic policies of the dictatorship due to unionist mobilization. "The assault on the skies: the Automotive Sector Chamber" addresses the moment when the unions of the workers of large automobile assembly plants dared to propose an industrial policy as an alternative to market regulation. An extraordinary conjunction of processes-on one side, the ability demonstrated by the union movement, on the other an overwhelming globalization and the option by the new Brazilian government for an open policy-led to what has been called the "totalitarian neoliberal slippage and the reinvention of democracy," in which a "Pandora's box" of neoliberal deregulation almost inexorably runs into the paroxism of the erosion of the State in an attempt to frame both labor and political movements of opposition to the new power scheme within a situation of "permanent exception."

Finally, the chapter asks whether the new proposals of the so-called "Cutist" unionism (after the opposition union federation CUT [Central Única de Trabalhadores]), which took shape in a national work contract of metalworkers, have any possibilities of being established against the current of the dismantling of the State, the Federation, and the superfluousness of unions. Is it possible to sing L'Internationale again in a corner of the capitalist periphery?