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Date: Sun Sep 2, 2007 2:05:46 PM Australia/Brisbane
To: globalnetnews-summary(at)lists.riseup.net
Subject: [globalnetnews-summary] "Occupy, resist, produce"
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Copyright 2007 New Statesman Ltd.
August 30, 2007
"Occupy, resist, produce"
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 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 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 Patrón: 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 Patrón: Stories from Argentina's Worker-Run
Factories",
written by the Lavaca Collective (Haymarket Books, $16)