[NYTr] Argentina worker coops"Occupy, resist, produce"

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

sent by Alanna Hartzok (activ-l)

GlobalCirclenet - Sep 2, 2007
globalnetnews-summary at lists.riseup.net


New Statesman - August 30, 2007

"Occupy, resist, produce"

by Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis

In response to Argentina's economic catastrophe of 2001, unemployed
workers took over the running of bankrupt factories. In this exclusive
essay, Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis explain how, six years on, these tiny
co-operatives have nurtured a powerful social movement

On 19 March 2003, we were on the roof of the Zansn ceramic tile factory,
filming an interview with Cepillo. He was showing us how the workers
fended off eviction by armed police, defending their democratic
workplace with slingshots and the little ceramic balls normally used to
pound the Patagonian clay into raw material for tiles. His aim was
impressive. It was the day the bombs started falling on Baghdad.

As journalists, we had to ask ourselves what we were doing there. What
possible relevance could there be in this one factory at the
southernmost tip of South America, with its band of radical workers and
its David and Goliath narrative, when bunker-busting apocalypse was
descending on Iraq?

But we, like so many others, had been drawn to Argentina to witness
first-hand an explosion of activism in the wake of its 2001 crisis - a
host of dynamic new social movements that were not only advancing a
bitter critique of the economic model that had destroyed their country,
but were busily building local alternatives in the rubble.

There were many popular responses to the crisis, from neighbourhood
assemblies and barter clubs to resurgent left-wing parties and mass
movements of the unemployed, but we spent most of our year in Argentina
with workers in "recovered companies". Almost entirely under the media
radar, workers in Argentina have been responding to rampant
unemployment and capital flight by taking over businesses that have
gone bankrupt and reopening them under democratic worker management. It
is an old idea reclaimed and retrofitted for a brutal new time. The
principles are so simple, so elementally fair, that they seem more
self-evident than radical when articulated by one of the workers: "We
formed the co-operative with the criteria of equal wages and making
basic decisions by assembly; we are against the separation of manual
and intellectual work; we want a rotation of positions and, above all,
the ability to recall our elected leaders."

The movement of recovered companies is not epic in scale - some 170
companies, around 10,000 workers in Argentina. But six years on, and
unlike some of the country's other new movements, it has survived and
continues to build quiet strength in the midst of the country's deeply
unequal "recovery". Its tenacity is a function of its pragmatism: this
is a movement that is based on action, not talk. And its defining
action, reawakening the means of production under worker control, while
loaded with potent symbolism, is anything but symbolic. It is feeding
families, rebuilding shattered pride, and opening a window of powerful
possibility.

Like a number of other emerging social movements around the world, the
workers in the recovered companies are rewriting the script for how
change is supposed to happen. Rather than following anyone's ten- point
plan for revolution, the workers are darting ahead of the theory - at
least, straight to the part where they get their jobs back. In
Argentina, the theorists are chasing after the factory workers, trying
to analyse what is already in noisy production.

These struggles have had a tremendous impact on the imaginations of
activists around the world. At this point, there are many more starry-
eyed grad papers on the phenomenon than there are recovered companies.
But there is also a renewed interest in democratic workplaces from
Durban to Melbourne to New Orleans.

That said, the movement in Argentina is as much a product of the
globalisation of alternatives as it is one of its most con tagious
stories. Argentinian workers borrowed the slogan "Occupy, Resist,
Produce" from Latin America's largest social movement, Brazil's
Movimiento Sin Terra, in which more than a million people have
reclaimed unused land and put it back into community production. One
worker told us that what the movement in Argentina is doing is "MST for
the cities". In South Africa, we saw a protester's T-shirt with an even
more succinct summary of this new impatience: "Stop Asking, Start
Taking".

The movement in Argentina is frustrating to some on the left who feel
it is not clearly anti-capitalist, those who chafe at how comfortably
it exists within the market economy and see worker management as merely
a new form of auto-exploitation. Others see co-operativism, the legal
form chosen by the vast majority of the recovered companies, as a
capitulation in itself - insisting that only full national isation by
the state can bring worker democracy into a broader socialist project.

Workers in the movement are generally suspicious of being co-opted to
anyone's political agenda, but at the same time cannot afford to turn
down any support. More interesting by far is to see how workers in this
movement are politicised by the struggle, which begins with the most
basic imperative: Workers want to work, to feed their families. Some of
the most powerful new working-class leaders in Argentina today
discovered solidarity on a path that started from that essentially
apolitical point. Whether you think the movement's lack of a leading
ideology is a tragic weakness or a refreshing strength, the recovered
companies challenge capitalism's most cherished ideal: the sanctity of
private property.

The legal and political case for worker control in Argentina does not
only rest on the unpaid wages, evaporated benefits and emptied-out
pension funds. The workers make a sophisticated case for their moral
right to property - in this case, the machines and physical pre mises -
based not just on what they are owed personally, but what society is
owed. The recovered companies propose themselves as an explicit remedy
to all the corporate welfare, corruption and other forms of public
subsidy the owners enjoyed in the process of bankrupting their firms
and moving their wealth to safety, abandoning whole communities to
economic exclusion.

This argument is, of course, available for immediate use in the United
States and Europe. But this story goes much deeper than corporate
welfare, and that's where the Argentinian experience will really
resonate with us. It has become axiomatic on the left to say that
Argentina's crash was a direct result of the IMF orthodoxy imposed on
the country with such enthusiasm in the neoliberal 1990s. In their book
Sin Patrsn: Stories from Argentina's Worker-Run Factories, to which
this essay forms the introduction, the Lavaca Collective makes clear
that in Argentina, just as in the US occupation of Iraq, those bromides
about private sector efficiency were nothing more than a cover story
for an explosion of frontier- style plunder - looting on a massive
scale by a small group of elites. Privatisation, deregulation, labour
flexibility: these were the tools to facilitate a massive transfer of
public wealth to private hands, not to mention private debts to the
public purse. Like Enron traders, the businessmen who haunt the pages
of this book learned the first lesson of capitalism and stopped there:
Greed is good, and more greed is better. As one Argentinian worker
says: "There are guys that wake up in the morning thinking about how to
screw people, and others who think: how do we rebuild this Argentina
that they have torn apart?"

In the answer to that question, you can read a powerful story of
transformation. Capitalism produces and distributes not just goods and
services, but identities. When the capital and its carpetbaggers had
flown from Argentina, what was left was not only companies that had
been emptied, but a whole hollowed-out country filled with people whose
identities - as workers - had been stripped away as well. As one of the
organisers in the movement wrote to us: "It is a huge amount of work to
recover a company. But the real work is to recover a worker and that is
the task that we have just begun."

On 17 April 2003, we were on Avenida Jujuy in Buenos Aires, standing
with the Brukman workers and a huge crowd of their supporters in front
of a fence, behind which was a small army of police guarding the
Brukman factory. After a brutal eviction, the workers were determined
to get back to work at their sewing machines.

In Washington, DC, that day, USAID announced that it had chosen Bechtel
Corporation as the prime contractor for the reconstruction of Iraq's
architecture. The heist was about to begin in earnest, both in the
United States and in Iraq. Deliberately induced crisis was providing
the cover for the transfer of billions of tax dollars to a handful of
politically connected corporations.

In Argentina, they'd already seen this movie - the wholesale plunder of
public wealth, the explosion of unemployment, the shredding of the
social fabric, the staggering human consequences. And 52 seamstresses
were in the street, backed by thousands of others, trying to take back
what was already theirs. It was definitely the place to be.


In 2004, Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis released "The Take", a film about
worker-run factories in Argentina.This essay is an edited extract from
their introduction to "Sin Patrsn: Stories from Argentina's Worker-Run
Factories", written by the Lavaca Collective (Haymarket Books, $16)

Copyright 2007 New Statesman Ltd.