Argentina: Where Workers Run the Factories (The Nation)

[marmar]

Argentina: Where Workers Run the Factories
Naomi Klein & Avi Lewis



Editor's Note: This essay is adapted from the introduction to Sin Patrón: Argentina's Worker-Run Factories, by the Lavaca Collective (Haymarket).

On March 19, 2003, we were on the roof of the Zanón 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 our continent, 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 firsthand 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 neighborhood 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 traditional businesses that have gone bankrupt and are reopening them under democratic worker management. It's 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 in this book: "We formed the cooperative 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. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070730/klein_lewis

[Demeter]

1. Chavez Is Moving Venezuela In This Direction, Too

[pnorman]

3. As sympathetic as I am to what Chavez seems to seems to be trying to do,

his socialism is "authoritarian" --- ie: Leninistic. But this is a lot closer to the anarcho-syndicalistic model. Here's the web-page: http://www.thetake.org/ There's a trailer available for the film there, and the DVD itself can be ordered. I just did so ($30 including shipping).

Of interest is that in the first few years of post-war Japan, there were several examples of "worker control" of industries that were abandoned or "let fallow" by the owners. A few involved a fairly sophisticated arrangement between factories, raw material suppliers, and distributors. They failed, NOT because they were inherently 'inefficient", but because the Occupation government didn't want to see them around. There's a good book about that, "THE OTHER JAPAN Conflict, Compromise, and Resistance Since 1945". Here it is at Questia On-line Library: http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=24184430

Questia is a paid subscriber service, but there's a free trial offer available. You might consider giving it a trial with that one.

pnorman

[OneBlueSky]

2. might be a direction to consider for this country . . . if there were any factories left . . . n/t

.

[Demeter]

4. More Likely Is that the US will go this way when the economic collapse

around the world puts finite to the global economy and the multinational corporations. It is what Henry Ford would never have permitted, which is why we need to reorganize our economy this way. When the workers' efforts are counted as capital shares and profits are divided evenly between the labor investors and the money investors, there will be no megamergers, no golden parachutes, and no need for half the losses we suffer as a people.