[Lapg] Sin Patron: Stories from Argentina's Worker-Run Factories by the lavaca collective

[Wesley Roe and Santa Barbara Permaculture Network]

Sin Patron: Stories from Argentina's Worker-Run 
Factories by the lavaca collective
   http://www.haymarketbooks.org/Merchant2/merchant.mv?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=Haymarket&Product_Code=LASPA

Price: $16.00

Preface by Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis

This is the inside story of Argentina’s 
remarkable movement to create factories run 
democratically by workers themselves.

In 2001, the economy of Argentina collapsed. 
Unemployment reached a quarter of the workforce. 
Out of these terrible conditions was born a new 
movement of workers who decided to take matters into their own hands.

They took over control of their workplaces, 
restarted production, and democratically decided 
how they would organize their work. “Occupy, 
resist, produce” became the watchwords of this vibrant movement.

Sin Patrón tells the story of Argentina’s occupied and recovered workplaces.

Or rather, it lets the workers themselves tell 
their stories. Appearing for the first time in 
English, this book explores ten case studies of 
recovered companies, featuring interviews with 
movement leaders that provide a history from the 
shopfloor—history that is still being made today.

“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—and, above all, the ability to recall our elected leaders.’”
—From the foreword by Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis

LAVACA is an Argentine editorial and activist collective.

NAOMI KLEIN is an award-winning journalist and author of No Logo.

AVI LEWIS is an author and filmmaker. Together, 
Klein and Lewis produced the film The Take, which 
chronicles the stories of the workers in Argentina’s reclaimed factories.

Haymarket Books, June 2007, isbn 1-931859-43-1, 320 pages, paperback

THE NATION  www.thenation.com/doc/20070730/klein_lewis
comment | posted July 16, 2007 (web only)
Argentina: Where Jobless Run Factories

Naomi Klein & Avi Lewis

Editor's Note: This essay is excerpted 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.

Like a number of other emerging social movements 
around the world, the workers in the recovered 
companies are rewriting the traditional 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 
analyze 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 globalization of alternatives as 
it is one of its most contagious stories. 
Argentine workers borrowed the slogan, "Occupy, 
Resist, Produce" from Latin America's largest 
social movement, Brazil's Movimento dos 
Trabalhadores Rurais Sem 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.

But as much as these similar sentiments are 
blossoming in different parts of the world for 
the same reasons, there is an urgent need to 
share these stories and tools of resistance even 
more widely. For that reason, the translation of 
Sin Patrón: Argentina's Worker-Run Factories is 
of tremendous importance: It's the first 
comprehensive portrait of Argentina's famous 
movement of recovered companies in English.

The Lavaca Collective

The book's author is the Lavaca Collective, 
itself a worker cooperative. While we were in 
Argentina filming our documentary, The Take, we 
ran into Lavaca members wherever the workers' 
struggles led--the courts, the legislature, the 
streets, the factory floor. They do some of the 
most sophisticated and engaged journalism in the world today.

And this book is classic Lavaca. That means it 
starts with a montage--a theoretical framework 
that is unabashedly poetic. Then it cuts to a 
fight scene of the hard facts: the names, the 
numbers, and the m.o. behind the armed robbery 
that was Argentina's crisis. With the scene set, 
the book then zooms in to the stories of 
individual struggles, told almost entirely 
through the testimony of the workers themselves.

This approach is deeply respectful of the voices 
of the protagonists, while still leaving plenty 
of room for the authors' observations, at once 
playful and scathing. In this interplay between 
the cooperatives that inhabit the book and the 
one that produced it, there are a number of themes that bear mention.

First of all, there is the question of ideology. 
This movement 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 the project of cooperativism, the legal form 
chosen by the vast majority of the recovered 
companies, as a capitulation in itself--insisting 
that only full nationalization by the state can 
bring worker democracy into a broader socialist project.

In the words of the workers, and between the 
lines, you get a sense of these tensions and the 
complex relationship between various struggles 
and parties of the left in Argentina. 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 politicized by the struggle, 
which begins with the most basic imperative: 
Workers want to work, to feed their families. You 
can see in this book how 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, this book makes clear 
precisely how 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 premises--based 
not just on what they're 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 the twilight of economic exclusion.

Lessons for America

This argument is, of course, available for 
immediate use in the United States. But this 
story goes much deeper than corporate welfare, 
and that's where the Argentine experience will 
really resonate with North Americans. It's 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. What this book makes clear 
is 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. Privatization, deregulation, 
labor 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 worker says in the book, "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. This book takes 
as a key premise that capitalism produces and 
distributes not just goods and services, but 
identities. When the capital and its 
carpetbaggers had flown, 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 too.

As one of the organizers 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 April 17, 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 
fifty-two 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.


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about
Naomi Klein
Naomi Klein is the author of No Logo: Taking Aim 
at the Brand Bullies (Picador) and, most 
recently, Fences and Windows: Dispatches From the 
Front Lines of the Globalization Debate 
(Picador). Her new book, The Shock Doctrine, will be out in September.

about
Avi Lewis
Avi Lewis is host of the Canadian Broadcasting 
Corporation series On The Map with Avi Lewis, a 
daily half-hour of international news analysis. 
In 2004 he directed The Take, a film about 
Argentina's new movement of worker-run factories, 
which premiered at the Venice Film Festival, and 
won the International Jury prize at the American 
Film Institute festival in Los Angeles.