Marxism and Latin American Politics

Historical Materialism

Workers’ Self-Management in Argentina Contesting Neo-liberalism by Occupying Companies, Creating Cooperatives, and Recuperating AutogestiónThis paper arises from my recent book - Workers’ Self-Management in Argentina: Contesting Neo-liberalism by Occupying Companies, Creating Cooperatives, and Recuperating Autogestión - Historical Materialism (volume 199) (Brill, https://brill.com/view/title/25183,Haymarket, https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1585-workers-self-management-in-argentina).In the book, I home in on the emergence and consolidation of Argentina’s empresas recuperadas por sus trabajadores (ERTs, worker-recuperated enterprises), a workers’ occupy and control, company recuperation, worker co-op, and self-management movement that surged at the turn of the millennium in the thick of the country’s neo-liberal crisis. Since then, around 400 companies have been taken over and converted to cooperatives by almost 16,000 workers. Grounded in classstruggle Marxism, political economy, labour process theory, and a critical sociology of work, the book situates the ERT movement in Argentina’s long tradition of working-class activism and the broader history of workers’ responses to capitalist crisis. Beginning with the voices of the movement’s protagonists, the book ultimately develops a social theory of autogestión—a politically prefigurative and ethically infused notion of workers’ self-management that unleashes radical social change for work organizations, surrounding communities, and beyond.Argentina’s 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 selfmanage capitalist workplaces in crisis that had formerly employed them, reconstituting them as worker cooperatives. And they continue to emerge. Between 2015-2019, they contested a new wave of anti-labour legislation, business closures, unemployment, precarity, and myriad other socio-economic challenges unleashed by the administration of Mauricio Macri (Ruggeri, 2016; Ruggeri &amp; Vieta, 2015; Vieta, 2019). Today they are rallying to contest the socio-economic ills unleashed by COVID-19.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 &amp; Vieta, 2014; Vieta, Depedri, &amp; Carrano, 2017; Vieta, 2019). The presentation will assess: (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 managed 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 book 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 three illustrative ERT case studies and observations in numerous other ERTs are complemented by semi-structured interviews with 60 ERT protagonists and Argentine labour leaders and policy makers. 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 &amp; Clover, 2005; Livingstone &amp; 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 book’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.”The book concludes 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. Marcelo Vieta, (University of Toronto, Canada)Some Observations on the Return of the State in the Context of a Crisis of Hegemony (2019-2021)In October 2019, Chilean society experienced its most radical political event in almost fifty years, revealing underlying contradictions within a country that has been presented as a paradigmatic case of extreme neoliberalism. The social unrest against the political and economic establishment showed that the political structures created to ensure neoliberal reproduction have exhausted their capacity to provide governance. At the same time, it exposed an ambivalent ‘return of the state’, which activated its emergency powers to control the situation, on the one hand, and offered a political way out based on a plebiscite to draft a new constitution that would replace the current one established under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in 1980, on the other.In this context, some protesters and politicians rushed to chant the mantra ‘neoliberalism was born and will die in Chile’. However, this aspiration has several limitations. The arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020 not only raised questions about the extreme simplicity of this slogan but also led to a radicalization of the contradictory ‘desire for the state’ (Alberto Toscano, 2020) within a country characterized as a ‘neoliberal paradise’. Taking into account this tumultuous situation, this talk will offer a preliminary explanation of the situation of crisis that has emerged in Chile since October 2019 until today, contrasting the changes that have occurred in the political system, the advance of the left-wing forces in the electoral field, and the measures assumed by the ‘return of the state’ in the pandemic situation. Understanding how the state – forged in the cradle of neoliberalism – has reacted to the emergence of the social and health crisis could shed some light on how to move towards a ‘post-neoliberal’ society.Andrés Cabrera Sanhueza, (Goldsmiths, UK)Post neoliberalism and neo developmentalism: the current pattern of capitalist accumulation in MexicoThe López Obrador’s administration has defined itself as a disruption with the immediate neoliberal past. In the National Development Plan (2019-2014), we can read, for example: «Before the world, we have the responsibility to build a post-neoliberal proposal and to turn it into a viable model of economic development». Such a model aims to coordinate economic growth with society’s welfare (in direct contrast with neoliberal political economy, which favoured the former to the latter’s detriment). «Sustained growth» was the name of the Mexican miracle between 1940 and 1970 and is also the miracle that Obrador wants to perform again. Nevertheless, the question is if this coordination is even possible under capitalist conditions. From the Marxist point of view, economic growth and social welfare can concur, but only to a certain degree, and only insofar as the social movements contain the capitalist accumulation processes. Maybe (or not) more robust state control over these processes (such as the one proposed by Obrador) could empower the social resistance. Still, the long term fact is that social opposition might delay the effects of capitalist accumulation only to realize them as tendencies, as Marx states. All this is because, on the one hand, the Obrador administration’s primary investment projects only replicate the conditions of all capitalist accumulation: 1) the dispossession of the native communities’ means of reproduction, and 2) the recreation of the labour market on a large scale. On the other hand, the neodevelopmentalist doctrine, on which the obradorist project grounds, justifies this reproduction of the capitalist social relations with the hope that they could lead towards the formation of an autonomous national capital. However, as the Marxist dependency theory has stated, this is grounds for the belief that capital formation could occur endogenously or regardless of international capitalist relations. This contradiction has been mystified in Mexico by a solid left populist rhetoric (with a long tradition in Latin America that goes from Laclau to Dussel). In this sense, my main concern is to demystify this rhetoric that obscures and distorts the authoritarian and capitalist nature of the Obrador administration. But I want to do so under the light of the Marxist critique of neo-developmentalism.Yankel Peralta García (UNAM, Mexico)PLEASE NOTE: All events for HM Online are free to register, however we would ask comrades who are able to please consider making a donation, which would help us enormously in covering the costs of putting of this programme of events. Like all left organisations, HM has had a very tough period since the beginning of 2020 and our budgets are very stretched and bank balance is sinking all the time, with very little revenue coming in. If you can make a contribution to keep us afloat, please don’t hesitate! You can donate by selecting the &#x27;donation&#x27; ticket type at registration.Once you have registered, a link to the live session will be emailed to you on the day of the event. For any technical queries please contact historicalmaterialism@soas.ac.ukPlease consider subscribing to the Historical Materialism journal, published by BRILL. www.brill.com/hima

Our {communityGuidelinesLink} describe the sort of content we prohibit on Eventbrite. If you suspect an event may be in violation, you can report it to us so we can investigate.

To report other categories of prohibited or illegal content, submit {link}

Marxism and Latin American Politics

More events from Historical Materialism

Follow organisers to get events picked for you

Still looking for the right event?

Explore all online events to browse and filter by date, category, and more.

Marxism and Latin American Politics

More events from Historical Materialism

Follow organisers to get events picked for you

You might also like...

Browse more events with different dates, prices, and formats to find your next great experience.

Still looking for the right event?

Explore all online events to browse and filter by date, category, and more.