Argentina’s worker-recuperated enterprises (empresas recuperdas por sus trabajadores, or ERTs) began to emerge as workers’ bottom-up responses to the collapse of the country’s neoliberal model during the years spanning the turn of the millennium. As business bankruptcies and unemployment rates soared to unprecedented levels during these years, more and more workers in a broad cross-section of Argentina’s urban-based economy began to takeover and self-manage capitalist workplaces in crisis that had formerly employed them, reconstituting them as worker cooperatives. Today, almost 400 ERTs exist across the country involving almost 16,000 workers. And they continue to emerge in response to a new wave of anti-labour legislation, business closures, unemployment and precarity, and myriad other socio-economic challenges unleashed since early-2016 by the administration of Mauricio Macri (Ruggeri, 2016; Ruggeri & Vieta, 2015; Vieta, 2018). As a rejoinder to these challenges, ERTs have been practicing forms of autogestión (self-management) that both contest the neoliberal enclosures of life while prefiguring other, more directly-democratic and less exploitative economic arrangements grounded in redesigned labour processes and community-centred development. Argentina’s ERTs have thus proven to be viable alternatives by workers themselves to macro- and micro-economic crises, anti-labour policies, and the worst effects of the neoliberal model on working people, inspiring other worker self-management projects in other parts of the world (Atzeni & Vieta, 2014; Vieta, Depedri, & Carrano, 2017; Vieta, 2018).
This paper summarizes research I have been conducting over the past decade with Argentina’s ERTs (Vieta, 2010, 2013, 2014, 2018), soon to be published as a book in Brill’s “Historical Materialism” series (Vieta, 2018). The paper assesses: (1) the political economic conditions and historical labour struggles out of which ERTs emerge; (2) their worker-protagonists’ struggles to re-appropriate once privately owned capitalist firms, reconstruct them as worker cooperatives, and thereby democratize the labour process; and (3) how ERT workers transform themselves (from manage employees to self-managed workers), their workplaces (from hierarchical organizations to democratically run worker cooperatives), and communities (from depleted neighbourhoods to self-provisioning localities).
The study deploys two complementary research approaches: a “political economy of the working class” stream rooted in class-struggle Marxist theory (Lebowitz, 2003; Marx, 1864/1978; McNally, 1993) and an extended case study stream (Burawoy, 1999). Extensive ethnographic observations in four illustrative ERT case studies are complemented by semi-structured interviews with 60 ERT protagonists. Guiding the analysis are the conceptual tools offered by labour process theory (Atzeni, 2010; Burawoy, 1985; Marx, 1867/1867) and social movement learning approaches (Foley, 1999; Hall & Clover, 2005; Livingstone & Roth, 2001; Overwein, 2000; Schugurensky, 2000). The interviews include a series of embedded learning indicators that specifically gauge for changes in worker-members’ subjectivities from having participated in workplace takeovers and the subsequent dynamics of self-managed labour processes that emerge in their new worker cooperatives. The paper’s findings detail how ERT workers: (1) acquire new job skills, learn new cooperative and collective values and practices, and personally and collectively transform from being involved in the ERT; (2) democratize the labour process of once-capitalist firms; (3) incorporate egalitarian pay schemes and job sharing strategies; and (4) recuperate the social production of wealth by opening up shops to the community and engaging in community social and economic development “from below.”
I conclude that Argentina’s ERTs are promising and prefigurative alternative work organizations that sketch out how new worker subjectivities and workplaces can be created from out the shell of former capitalist workplaces. ERTs, in short, delineate suggestive proposals for how workers themselves can—and do—re-conceptualize new forms of work organizations and community-focused social relations of production rooted in solidarity, collaborative information and resource exchange, and mutual aid rather than individualism, commodification, and competition.
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