Found via Pedantry, an article by Naomi Klein in the Guardian talking about worker occupations of factories in Argentina:
Here in Buenos Aires, every week brings news of a new occupation: a four-star hotel now run by its cleaning staff, a supermarket taken by its clerks, a regional airline about to be turned into a cooperative by the pilots and attendants. In small Trotskyist journals around the world, Argentina’s occupied factories, where the workers have seized the means of production, are giddily hailed as the dawn of a socialist utopia. In large business magazines like the Economist, they are ominously described as a threat to the sacred principle of private property. The truth lies somewhere in between.
[…]
But isn’t it simple theft? After all, these workers didn’t buy the machines, the owners did – if they want to sell them or move them to another country, surely that’s their right. As the federal judge wrote in Brukman’s eviction order: “Life and physical integrity have no supremacy over economic interests.”
Perhaps unintentionally, he has summed up the naked logic of deregulated globalisation: capital must be free to seek out the lowest wages and most generous incentives, regardless of the toll that process takes on people and communities. The workers in Argentina’s occupied factories have a different vision. Their lawyers argue that the owners of these factories have already violated basic market principles by failing to pay their employees and their creditors, even while collecting huge subsidies from the state. Why can’t the state now insist that the indebted companies’ remaining assets continue to serve the public with steady
jobs?
Dozens of workers’ cooperatives have already been awarded legal expropriation. Brukman is still fighting. Come to think of it, the Luddites made a similar argument in 1812. The new textile mills put profits for a few before an entire way of life. Those textile workers tried to fight that destructive logic by smashing the machines. The Brukman workers have a much better plan: they want to protect the machines and smash the logic.
Also via Pedantry, a collection of articles on the Argentine crisis and the factory occupations available at the Workers Power Global site. Take the propaganda for their own groups with a grain of salt, but their reporting is sound.
I was vaguely aware of what has been happening in Argentina, indeed mainly through “small Trotskyist journals”, but this is the first mainstream report I’ve seen of it. Glad to see some positive news for a change, especially from a country which in all accounts seemed destined to descent into anarchy. Guess we underestimated the Argentine people…
As Naomi Klein alluded to, what is happening in Argentina really is the purest form of socialism: workers taking control of the means of production, not because some glorious vanguard led them to it, but of their own accord democratically and from bottom up, because capitalism failed them. Though it’s unlikely a socialist utopia will come from this, this is highly encouraging. We’re not helpless victims of neoliberalism, of an uncontrollable and unpredictable global market we just have to put our trust in and hope for the best. We can actually do something, instead of staying victims.
The main question now is whether this can be sustained, if those companies which are now in the hands of their workers, will stay that way, if these can survive in what is still a market-capitalist economy. (Also, whether people actually want to continue this way, or whether they’d rather go back to the old situation and not have to worry about anything but their own job. The biggest mistake you could make in evaluating the Argentinian situation is assuming the former is the case.) An important step has already been made with the establishment of
national meetings of workers and other groups.
I’m going to keep an eye on this. Here’s a link to Google News Argentina stories. Finally, for those who think those workers are little more than thieves: what’s more important, the “theft” of unused factories or these people’s livelyhoods?