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Recovering and Recreating Spaces of Production: A Virtual Roundtable with Protagonists of Argentina’s Worker-Recovered Enterprises Movement*
TORONTO SCHOOL OF CREATIVITY AND INQUIRY
The following are excerpts from a series of exchanges, during the summer of 2005, between protagonists in Argentina’s worker-recovered enterprises movement (movimiento de empresas recuperadas por sus trabajadores, or ERT) and Toronto School of Creativity & Inquiry. These voices are assembled here, in a virtual roundtable, as a narrative about struggles over spaces of production. This act of assemblage is a contribution to the circulation of critical analysis, joyful affects, affirmative statements, and creative actions. 1
We hear from: Pablo Pozzi, an Argentine labour and guerrilla-movement historian and Chair of US History at the University of Buenos Aires who works as a radical pedagogue in numerous villas de emergencias (shantytowns) and unions across Argentina; Eduardo Murúa, an organizer of the autonomist ERT collective Movimiento Nacional de Empresas Recuperadas (National Movement of Recovered Enterprises, or MNER), who is currently in the midst of various workspace recoveries while forging links with the ERT movement across Latin America; Edith Oviedo, former journalist, educational book publisher, and member of the Editorial Cefomar workers’ co-operative; Plácido Peñarrieta, the current president of the Artes Gráficas Chilavert workers’ cooperative and a housing-rights activist; Cándido González, a Chilavert worker, spokesperson for MNER, and an activist who assists recovered enterprises in their crucial moments of struggle; Manuel Basualdo, an experienced book-binding specialist at Chilavert; Walter Basualdo, Manuel’s son, an apprentice machinist who has worked at Chilavert for three years; and Martín Cossarini, an apprentice machinist at Chilavert who has been active in setting up cultural spaces in workers’ cooperatives.
With these protagonists our collective shares common questions: How do bodies insulate themselves from reactive forces? What new forms of constituent sociability, subjectivity, in short, composition, are emerging today? “What alliances might be forged while under siege?”2 What are bodies, in practices of intentional cooperation, capable of? What does it mean to make subjectivity a locus of struggle? What tensions exist between a strategy oriented towards the reclamation of work and one based on the refusal of work? How might creative assemblages keep lines of affinity moving without freezing their fluid material?
We write from Toronto. These voices speak from Buenos Aires. We visit. They stay. We find ourselves recalling a closing line in an email we received from one of the protagonists who speaks in these pages: “the greatest support you compañeros from the North can offer us here in Argentina is for you to continue to struggle against the system in your own localities, where you live.”
The voices gathered here speak across the theme, “occupy, resist, and produce.”3 The last term is, perhaps, the key term, the catalytic force coursing throughout: production not just of goods, but of desires, of affinities, of communities—all circumscribed by struggle, ‘lucha,’ undertaken in response to an urgent need, to produce autonomous spaces. 4
1976 … 19/20 … 2006
Oviedo:I was part of the militant student movement of 1969—the Rosariazo.5 I have conserved my ideals. And, okay, I thought to myself: “My children are grown up now. Now I have time to return to militancy. I can do it again.” Now today I’m freed up to take on the activities of recovering an enterprise.
At each crossroads, dilemma, or
conflict we have to realize that there are also great opportunities. To
confront our challenges, saying, “I can,” and finding the
ways and means to do it, is both a struggle and an opportunity.
Anxieties accompany us along the path of lifting ourselves out of these
difficulties. Lifting yourself out of the void is hard.
Most of us in the movement [of worker
recovered enterprises] have fallen off the system because, financially,
we are not subjects of credit—we can’t show that we have
sufficient incomes, or because we can’t get someone to vouch for
us. We can’t access credit or funds available to small- and
medium-sized businesses because we are a bankrupted enterprise, and, as
a bankrupted enterprise now managed by its workers, we are not
recognized in the system. So where do you start?
Murúa:
One cannot understand the movement of
recovered enterprises without contextualizing what Argentina lived
through. The dictatorship (1976-83) that installed itself in our
country imposed a neoliberal model with a strategic plan to destroy
Argentina’s industrial base. Until 1976 Argentina had an
unemployment rate of three percent. The dictatorship’s
implementation of the neoliberal model—and its continuity under
the subsequent formal democracies—provoked the destruction of
industry in our country.
Throughout the 1990s the process of the
privatization of our state corporations is instigated, together with
the modification of our laws, the flexibilization of labour, the loss
of union power, and a failure on the part of union bureaucracies to
resist the neoliberal model. Unions, it is important to remember, are
part of the business of the state and don’t represent the
interest of workers. What this provokes from 1995 to 1997 is an
unemployment explosion: an unemployment rate of 35% settles in.
In addition to the changes in the legal
framework and labour flexibilization, the national government also
proceeds to modify the national bankruptcy law and the process of
reallocating credits. Before these changes were made, debts owed to
workers were privileged; workers were the first to be paid when a firm
declared bankruptcy. But as part of the neoliberal model that was
entrenching itself, the law was changed so as to screw the workers by
privileging the credits of banks and financial institutions.
Pozzi:
What happened on December 19/20, 2001
affected mostly the middle-class, some sectors of the
upper-class—and the stupid ones who weren’t well-connected
enough to take their money out in spite of the law.
As a middle-class thing, it was mostly
something that was a negative movement, “negative” meaning:
“I don’t want something,” as opposed to “I do
want this.” “What don’t I want? I don’t want
them to take my money away. I want them to pay me dollars for my
deposits. Now, some of those people, my heart goes out to them. But
others were real crooks. Some, I really don’t give a fuck. Some
were people who actually cheered when they were firing workers all over
the place. The middle-class is the middle-class. Some were good guys.
The lower middle-class–moi–we didn’t get caught; we
had nothing to get caught.
Mostly, for the middle-class, these
were symbolic demonstrations. Banging, banging, banging: “We want
our money!” TV covered it. Everybody thought it was great. So
what? That was the bad part. The good part: the good part is that
popular mobilization kicked three presidents out. The good part is that
people sought different forms of organization. The neighborhood
assemblies were one of them… I believe this affects the
collective unconscious. Having lived through the resignation of three
presidents, due to popular mobilizations, no matter who caused it, why
it happened or whatever, in three months, it’s not bad.
It’s something real; it makes a political impact.
The asambleas still exist but more as
an open-air market. I participated in a whole bunch of asambleas. Some
of them were very important. I taught in the Asamblea Dorrego, Asamblea
Parque Centenario, Asamblea San Telmo… I taught in an asamblea
in Córdoba. I helped organize neighbourhoods. And what we were
trying to do in Córdoba was set up a flourmill, a flourmill that
was small enough so that you could mill 46 pounds, enough for several
families, twenty families, let’s say. …
Oviedo:
What happened at our workplace
(Cefomar) was that the former owner was transferring shares privately,
illegally, in order to shift the debt load onto other businesses he
had. He would suspend operations in one locale, transfer shares by
cooking the books, and then open a smaller business that had a similar
name to this one so that the public would continue to recognize the
brand name. At that time Cefomar was called Marymar Sociedad
Anónima. He turned Marymar into a holding company responsible
for the mortgage and sundry debts that plague us to this day. He then
opened another business that he called Editorial Marymar. While he
began to recover market share, he started siphoning off cash and
didn’t pay his debts.
This vaciamiento happened over two years.6
He tricked us into believing that what he was actually doing was
preparing our workplace for renovations. That was the excuse he gave in
order to take away machinery and move employees around. He then carried
out a self-theft,7 and eventually closed the other
publishing house he’d opened up. By that time I was on to him. We
didn’t have much to say to each other because everything was out
in the open.
I started to bring a few
compañeros, like the warehouse attendant, back to this space,
and started to build a new group. This was mid-2000. Since I continued
to resist, and since we were seeing some revenues trickle in, the owner
started to send the creditors from the other firm that he had just
emptied and I ended up with court cases against me, because they still
saw me as a manager of Marymar and thought that I was also a
shareholder. That was when we started to organize ourselves into a
co-operative.
Pozzi:
All of these are new and different
forms of struggle and organization. They are all attempts; most of them
have failed. Eventually some will prosper. But they all help to build a
social experience in a new reality we’re not used to. This means
that all the old forms of organization—unions, political parties,
whatever—they don’t work anymore. In that sense, the
autonomists are right. Their questions are right. Now, social sectors,
social practice, people in general, are inventing new things; they are
inventing them for the best of reasons: necessity.
Occupy … Resist … Produce
Murúa:This new form of struggle—or,
let’s say, the necessity for a new form of
struggle—appears; a new method of workers’ struggle. It was
a form of struggle that no longer is limited to the common type of
union demands for increased wages or for better work conditions.
Rather, it was a struggle to occupy the factory in order to operate it
ourselves—as a response to the neoliberal model. It was, in the
beginning, a defensive struggle. This is when the first recoveries
start appearing, and this is also when IMPA is recovered.8
Oviedo:
When I had first arrived here (when
Cefomar was known as Marymar) the firm was under the control of the
former owner. The successful years of the firm were waning; we had been
recognized as one of the great publishers of educational books in
Argentina. When I first came to the firm, we managed to recapture our
market share. We had reached a point where we had 2000 schools as
clients, with 2000 training workshops set up in each school to apply
our educational products. But that market became dormant. The former
owner slowly started taking away every aspect of the business that was
capable of generating cash, like copies of all of our newest titles. By
2000 we were left with nothing. There were a few books in the
warehouse, that’s it.
Murúa:
We recovered IMPA in 1998. In 1999 we
gathered at IMPA workers from a few of the other enterprises that had
been recovered in other parts of the country. There were only a few
worker-recovered enterprises at that time—maybe four. It was from
there that we co-founded a movement that was made up of not only
recovered enterprises, but also housing co-operatives, mutual
associations from the villas de emergencia,9 and micro-enterprises.
At the time our movement was known as the Movimiento de la Economia Social,10
and was made up of all of us who had something to do with the
‘social economy.’ What we wanted to do was construct a kind
of political direction for the concept of the social economy, in order
to go out and influence state policies concerning the recovery of
employment—beyond the usual formal means. Of course, we brought
together compañeros who were in agreement with us ideologically
and politically, at least with the task of destroying the neoliberal
model.
From 1999 until 2001 there was a surge
in business bankruptcies. This compelled us to transform this movement,
which was constituted by other experiences from the social economy,
into one that was almost exclusively a movement focused on going to
each conflict where workers were losing their employment, in order to
try to see how we could begin to recover the factories. That’s
how we transformed ourselves from the social-economy movement into the
National Movement of Recovered Enterprises.
It was then that we made solidarity our
central theme. We began our practice of rallying around our
compañeros in conflict, and we came up with a slogan that
communicated what we wanted to do: “Occupy, Resist,
Produce.” It has to do with occupation as a founding practice.
When we spoke with our compañeros who were engaged in conflict,
the first thing we would say was, “Occupy the factory and do not
leave!” “Resist,” because it was after occupation
that the law would arrive. While the workers are being swindled, left
out on the streets, and not getting paid, the
“law”—and I say this in scare quotes—fails to
show up. The reason for the word “resist” is because what
the justice system orders is the clearing out of the plant in order to
liquidate it. It is then that we have to resist with our bodies, and
with the solidarity of our people, so that the police cannot move on
the juridical decision. It is this resistance that convinces judges or
politicians to seek a solution that will put the factory back into
operation.
Oviedo:
Perhaps we could have used the money we
used to begin to pay back the former owner’s debt for other
things—but, right off the top, we lost this money. In one year we
lost 150,000 pesos! That loss wore us out tremendously. But eventually
we started to sell things again, just enough to be able to stay alive,
mind you. We sold old books as scrap paper—books that had been in
our warehouse for forty years. We starting selling off our rights to
international titles that Marymar had once owned—the editorial
house held the rights to a huge catalogue of important titles, like
Machiavelli’s The Prince. We sold our surplus stock. We were
eventually able to form a founding co-operative group in 2002.
Murúa:
The number of recovered enterprises
began to grow until 2001, a year which culminated in the severe crisis
of the convertibility model.11 The state fails to
collect its revenues, the sector of the dominant classes made up of
exporters are no longer profitable, and there is a crisis of the system
from above and a high degree of conflict from below, with the maximum
expression of our people being the struggles of work stoppages and mass
picketing. The combination of the experiences of the working class in
these work stoppages, plus the experiences that were generated within
the mobilizations of the piqueteros,12 made the
system reflect on itself and say, “We can no longer continue on
this path.” This was at the time a country in flames!
Our movement saw growth after these
events. Because there were so many factories in crisis, so many closed
factories, the growth of the movement was exponential. The fact that
the country was in flames and that our workers were
mobilizing—and the pressure we began to exert on the
government—allowed us to begin to extract public policies from
the state that were favourable to the recovered enterprises.13
Throughout 2001-02 worker recoveries of enterprises continued, and
there are now 182 recovered enterprises throughout the country.
Oviedo:
When we were in the process of
recovering the firm a lawyer friend of mine with experience in the
recovered enterprises movement told me to go and see Eduardo
Murúa, who was at IMPA at the time. That’s how the Cefomar
co-operative got started after a long time of trying to deal with the
Buenos Aires city legislature on our own. We had at the time a lot of
initiative, but little experience in these matters. When we connected
with MNER they were busy recovering a metallurgical plant in San
Antonio de Areco. But Murúa came to see us anyway. We told him
our plight. That’s how we connected ourselves with the movement.
After that, on my part anyway, because I had a background in previous
political struggles that my compañeras didn’t have, I took
on a militant role within the movement [MNER]. I helped build up the
militancy of my compañeras.
Cossarini:
Now I’m a machinist apprentice.
Before I arrived here at Chilavert I had been at IMPA for four years
working as a cultural organizer. Without a doubt what I most identified
with in the movement was the struggle that the IMPA workers were
engaged in. From that moment I started supporting other factory
occupations that I could support. So, it’s not a coincidence,
let’s say, that I came to work here, understand? At one level, I
was looking to work at a place like this. It was an honour for me to
get offered a position by the Chilavert workers.
M. Busualdo:
Things were very different before,
mainly because, before, someone told you what to do, and you did it.
Now nobody orders you around. Now you’re more responsible,
because our work depends on us and nobody else. It’s just us.
Before, with the owner, it was different, because you would put in your
hours, and leave. But now you sometimes have to work a bit harder, or a
bit longer, do a little more. Before we were controlled so much.
That’s why they built the office with windows as walls. It was
their way of controlling us, making sure we were doing something.
Things are much calmer now.
There’s no comparison with what this place used to be like.
Before you couldn’t even drink a mate during work hours. Now
we’re all so much more relaxed! We work but we also drink mate.
Sometimes during the middle of the workday we’ll sit down and
have a mate. It’s important to have a chat and drink mate with
each other. Before we couldn’t do this. Even if there
wasn’t any work to do, the manager would insist that we grab a
broom and sweep the floor. We had to always be doing
something—picking up a piece of paper, whatever, we
couldn’t be seen doing nothing.
How do we make decisions? Well, here we
don’t have a caudillo who says, “OK, today you’ll do
this because I tell you so.” No, no. Here we take the things we
have to do, we put them on the table, and we hash things out amongst
ourselves. If the majority of us agree, or better said, if we all
agree, then it gets done. But if anyone has a doubt as to what has to
get done, or if there are any outstanding issues, then we discuss
things so that we can all come to some workable agreement. All of our
decisions are made in a group made up of the personalities of this
cooperative. Now, if there are certain decisions that have to be made
in the moment, a group of us, or all of us, will stop working.
We’ll get together and discuss what has to get done, what has to
get worked out, what we have to set up first, and we’ll decide
things at that moment, as a group. Sometimes we don’t have to get
together as an assembly of the entire cooperative. Sometimes a
situation requires that only a small group of us to get together, so we
stop working and clear things up right on the spot, right then and
there. And that’s it: we come to a decision right there. But
whenever we have substantial issues to clear up we bring these to the
cooperative’s assembly that we hold each month. That’s
where we lay out and hash out everything we need to work out as a
cooperative, and the decisions are made amongst all of us.
Murúa:
We don’t want to convert this
movement into a movement that’s only about recovered enterprises,
that only debates the theme of work in Argentina. Our main commitment
is to the social liberation of our people. This means the taking of
power by popular sectors. We do not want the dominant sectors that
manage our country to be made up of private interests or of the export
sector. Rather we want the people to run their own affairs. This
movement is autonomous from the state and from political parties, and
it doesn’t want to be converted—as various union movements
have—into an organization that is based merely on demands.
Although the state might meet the demands that we seek for the
recovered enterprises, it will always require us facing them square on,
face-to-face, to fight for our liberation…
Oviedo:
Cefomar is now starting to publish new
books and 2005 editions of books with authors that sympathize with our
struggle. The way it usually works is that we take care of part of the
costs of producing a book and the author contributes another part. We
contribute our know-how as a publishing house, and we also contribute
our technology. But there is a portion of the costs of paper and other
materials that we can’t finance for all of our authors.
Educational texts are the main product line for our publishing
cooperative and we’ll continue to invest our resources into this
line. We’re more than happy to publish other books, but we have
to take them on as co-published works.
When we decided that we were going to
publish again we chose two main streams: the educational stream, and a
series that I totally fell in love with, the Patagonia Collection. This
Collection contains twenty titles focusing on the history of how
Patagonia was founded and its indigenous communities.
Peñamieta:
Before we were ‘workmates.’ But today we aren’t anymore. We’re more like socios,14
where the problem of one socio affects us all. And there are times when
we have to look at the problem of each socio and try to resolve them so
they won’t affect the entire society we form. Before, if
something happened to someone, it was the owner’s responsibility.
Before, that responsibility didn’t affect us individually. We
were all just mere acquaintances with each other, nothing more. We
didn’t have direct contact with all of our workmates. But now
we’re a much tighter unit. And what binds us together is the fact
that we’re all responsible for this cooperative as a society, and
we all have to contribute to moving it forward. In other words, we have
to know everyone’s everyday needs and problems for the simple
reason that we have to protect our work and each other.
Facilitate … Extend … Connect 15
Oviedo:I’m sure you’ve heard the
words of Eduardo Murúa, and they are well known amongst all of
us: that at the core of this movement is the notion that we must assist
all of our compañeros in the recovery of their workspaces, their
jobs, their means of production. But after a recovery the internal
dynamics of each enterprise belongs to the workers that make up the
cooperative.
If there are internal
problems—and there are many—there is often an important
factor that is worth stating: In many cases the formation of the
co-operative has been a form of legal protection; this legal framework
protects the collective.16 But to a great extent, the
compañeros within the movement haven’t experienced
co-operativism before, or don’t, initially at least, have a
conception of what co-operativism might be. Generally, each recovered
enterprise will have someone who initiates ideas within each group that
will say, “Listen, here we have to form a co-operative, one
rooted in work.” But the rest, the other 80%, remain workers.
With all of the love I have for them I have to say they don’t
know the seven principles of co-operativism, which are like our ABCs.
To begin again as a co-operative is to shed oneself of the mentality of
being a dependent labourer.
Murúa:
IMPA is very important in the process
that was later to form the movement: in the middle of Buenos Aires,
IMPA is not only a factory that begins to produce, but also a factory
that opens itself up to the community as a whole. IMPA, apart from
being a factory with workers, formed a cultural centre so that the
entire society could participate, and it also had a health centre.
When we took the factory we set out to
open it up to the community. That’s why we generated the cultural
centre. This recovery was carried out by a combination of its workers
and a group of militants who, like me, brought with them a background
in union and political struggles. That conjunction of forces gave IMPA
its new project and its political vision. In the middle of the city,
and against the discourse in favour of neoliberal globalization that
existed in the country at the time, we said, with this recovered
enterprise, “Okay, we’re going to dispute this one-sided
discourse of globalization.” That’s why we initiated the
cultural centre, which was envisioned as a ‘factory of
ideas’ where people could go to discuss a different discourse, to
create new cultural expressions, and to generate, from this location, a
space of resistance against the neoliberal model.
Having a cultural centre in a factory
is a unique development in the world of a functioning factory. Yes,
there have been experiences in other parts of the world where closed
factories have been converted into cultural centres. But the difference
with our experience here is that at the same time that the factory was
producing it also had a cultural centre that was also
producing—but producing culture. IMPA’s was the first
cultural centre in a recovered enterprise.
We created it for two reasons. The
first one is strictly political: to have a space where we could go and
discuss the one-sided discourse of globalization from within a factory,
to begin to debate the model. We needed a place from which we could
generate political ideas. Another important factor in the decision to
open a cultural centre was defensive: we knew that constructing and
opening the centres to the community surrounding the factory would make
impossible, or at least complicate greatly, the shutting down of the
factory. We knew that the state and the justice system would not only
be getting involved with one hundred or so workers, but they would also
have to contend with the entire community. In essence, it was like a
shield against the enemies of our initiative.
We became convinced that it is not only
the workers who recover the factories, but that they are also recovered
by the support of our people. Although only a portion of the
politically active population got involved in actively supporting the
worker recoveries, the majority of Argentines saw it as a good thing
that workers were struggling to recover their jobs. Without this
consensus, the state would have acted in another manner and we would
not be here today.
Oviedo:
At one point I said, “Okay, we
have to make a decision and go out and show who we are. We have to
start lobbying. We don’t have money. But we have to create
something in this place. They have to get to know us. We have to
position the name of Cefomar in everything that’s related to
education, to culture, and to the struggle for identity.”
That’s how we started the workshop on oral memory. We also
connected with the Historic Institute of Buenos Aires, with the
Monserrat Development Association, with the organization for the
promotion of culture at the Buenos Aires city government, with
educational initiatives, with community libraries. Cefomar began to be
recognized within these circles and we insisted and dedicated ourselves
to these things. We weren’t producing anything at the time but
our name began to stick. We also joined the network of cultural and
neighbourhood initiatives.
We eventually started to offer a major
free service to our neighbours, which is the assistance that we offer
to children up to five years of age centred on early childhood
education. Because these are very vulnerable kids that come from
families with low levels of economic and cultural means, these children
need to be helped so they can have the capacity to learn, otherwise
they’ll never be able to succeed at the most basic levels. This
initiative started from scratch. We eventually built affiliations with
the group of schools that focus on caring for children with special
needs. While we’re not officially recognized as a special needs
school, these schools always send us cases of children in need.
Our most immediate dream would be to
have total control over the house in which we’re located.
We’d like to have the tranquility of at least a temporary
expropriation for two years. 17 And we’d like
to have the mortgage paid off. We’re also renovating the
warehouse in order to be able to open up a cultural centre. But first
we must fix the roof, the leaks, the walls—basically starting
little by little.
We have a group of workers taking on
the tasks of getting the cultural centre up and running. And this
September we’ll be holding our Literary Conference again, where
poetry is read, where we invite authors. This is an experience
we’ve already had. We also hold debates and discussions
throughout the year, we show films that MNER has been involved with and
that have to do with the recovered enterprises.
We also have a constant stream of
visitors here. Last year we hosted a group of German interns, a young
woman from Portugal who is studying in New York and doing her thesis on
the recovered enterprises, a French fellow that came to shoot a
documentary, and, at the moment, there is a group of Germans shooting a
film out of IMPA. These visits have become a daily occurrence that we
absolutely love. I guess we’re writing history here, something
that is very powerful for us.
Murúa:
One of the things we want from the
state is the creation of various funds for recovered enterprises,
because the state—when it should have been defending the
interests of its workers—failed to keep watch over business
owners to ensure that they were paying workers’ social security
contributions.
What we’re also proposing is the
financing of our cultural and educational centres. This is about the
community development that we do from the recovered enterprises,
together with the community. We know well that in a dependent country
like Argentina, where there is a certain economic model in place, that
that model is certainly accompanied by cultural and educational
policies that complement that model and that obliges the working
classes to be submissive to that model. That is why an organization
that fights for the social and national liberation of our people is
obligated to construct its own cultural and educational spaces. It is
not just about having our own production. It is also about having our
own education and our own culture.
Oviedo:
We communicated the existence of the
free special needs school throughout the neighbourhood. The
neighbourhood of Monserrat, where we find ourselves, is part of the
historic heritage of Buenos Aires. Seventy percent of its population is
in vulnerable situations. There are many hotels for long-term stays
that are financed by the city government here. There are many tenants
with little means, and many houses that are being squatted. Many of
these kids don’t have toys, they don’t have spaces for
playing in. They’ll never be able to learn. In response to this,
Cefomar put together a play area with toys, a library for kids, a
centre for early childhood education. Last year, coinciding with the
Day of the Child,18 we organized, together with MNER
and other co-operatives, a festival for over 300 kids here in the local
plaza in Monserrat. We had balloons, chocolate, and presents for all of
the kids, and games that went on all day. We also held a murga.19 They lived a truly beautiful day. It was the kind of day that most of them had never had before.
González:
Early on in the fight to reclaim our
work we started fighting for our salaries, for getting out of our
severe debt-loads that the owner had left us. But now I know, looking
back on our struggle three years on, now I can see where the change in
me started, because it begins during your struggles. First, you fight
for not being left out on the street with nothing. And then, suddenly,
you see that you’ve formed a co-operative, and you start getting
involved in the struggle of other enterprises. And you don’t
realize it at the time, but within your own self, there’s a
change that’s taking place. You don’t see it directly at
the time. You realize it afterwards, after time has passed. But there
is definitely a change in you that’s been produced—and
it’s a very big change. It’s so big that you don’t
see it. Then, suddenly, you find yourself protesting in the local
legislature, you find yourself fighting, yelling inside of the
legislature to the point where you’re actually stopping the
official proceedings from taking place, influencing
change—something you would never have imagined yourself doing.
Oviedo:
With the passage of time in this
journey, internal problems do arise. So what MNER tends to do is
counsel these workers, or perhaps hold an assembly of workers so issues
can be heard. But the movement doesn’t interfere with any final
decisions that are made. We have always preserved the independence of
each place of work.
Cassarini:
Obviously, I am personally in favour of
the liberation of workers, of workers’ organization as a
political idea. And I try to contribute wherever I can. And, without a
doubt, working in a place where the group of workers that you’re
with has been through a tough struggle means that you have a
responsibility to communicate what was lived. If one commits oneself to
this struggle, one has to be committed to communicate everything that
was suffered, so the things that happened here under owner-management
will not happen again. There’s a responsibility to strengthen
each other, to inspire one another. When a factory is going through its
moments of occupation it is so tough for those going through it. And so
it is necessary for those workers who have already gone through an
occupation, and who are now working, to go to the workers that are
going through an occupation and encourage them. This acts as an
inspiration for those who are in the struggle. For someone who’s
been through it to tell you, “Come on, man, yes, it is possible,
you can do it, we did it!” That’s what we need to do in
those most vulnerable moments of struggle.
Oviedo:
And we have other struggles to
consider. I often speak to Eduardo [Murúa] about needing to go
out and denounce how the “gifts” of our country are being
given away: our natural resources, our land, our water. There are many
other struggles that we have to get involved in…
References
Blackwell, Adrian and Thorne, Kika. (2004). “1:1 over 1:300,” Public 29: Localities. Liinamaa, Marchessault, Shaw (Eds.) Toronto: Public Access.Holdren, Nate, and Touza, Sebastian. (2005). “Introduction to Colectivo Situaciones.” ephemera, (5)4, 595-601.
Monteagudo, Graciela. (2006). “Autonomism in Argentina in a new Governmentality.”
Vieta, Marcelo. (2006). “The Worker-Recovered Enterprises Movement in Argentina: Workers’ Self-Management as a Struggle Against Capital-Labour Relations and Social-Economic Crisis.”
Notes
1 The excerpts of the voices assembled in this piece are part of a greater archive of interviews, conversations, and presentations. These voices were recorded in Argentina by a member of Toronto School of Creativity and Inquiry in the summer of 2005 with the assistance of the Argentina Autonomista Project. While these words first found expression at different moments and in different encounters, they were uttered by individuals with common experiences of recovering production, who live within shared conjunctures, who collaborate in the struggle against the enclosures of everyday life and fight collectively for the liberation of work and their society. We want to express our gratitude to the many workers, organizers, and compañeros in Argentina, Canada, and the US for facilitating these encounters.2 Blackwell, Adrian and Thorne, Kika. (2004) “1:1 over 1:300,” Public 29: Localities. (Liinamaa, Marchessault, Shaw Eds.) Toronto: Public Access, 209.
3 The slogan “Occupy, Resist and Produce” was adopted by MNER to resonate across collective practices of resistance.
4 For an historical overview and analysis in English of the worker-recovered enterprises movement in Argentina, see Marcelo Vieta, “The Worker-Recovered Enterprises Movement in Argentina: Workers’ Self-Management as a Struggle Against Capital-Labour Relations and Social-Economic Crisis ” (forthcoming). For a collection of interviews with protagonists of the myriad bottom-up, grassroots movements that have emerged in Argentina in the past decade and their adaptation of horizontal forms of social organization, see Marina Sitrin, “Horizontalidad in Argentina” (Oakland, CA: AKPress, 2005). For an analysis of the impact of autonomism in Argentina’s worker-recovered enterprises movement, see Graciela Monteagudo, “Autonomism in Argentina in a new Governmentality” (forthcoming).
5 El Rosariazo was a student and union uprising that occurred in the city of Rosario between May and September of 1969. It occurred during one of the most creative times for Argentina’s movements of the left.
6 Vaciamiento, refers to the “emptying” of a closed or bankrupted firm’s machinery and assets by returning owners or court trustees.
7 During the economic crisis of the late 1990s and 2000s, many owners illegally confiscated and hid their moveable constant capital in order to prevent debt collectors from seizing them.
8 IMPA, Industria Metalúrgica y Plástica Argentina, one of the first recovered enterprises of the ERT movement, is a medium-sized metallurgic co-operative in the neighbourhood of Caballito in Buenos Aires. It currently dedicates part of its space to an art school, silkscreen shop, theatre, and cultural centre.
9 Colloquially, villas de emergencia are called villas miseries (towns of misery) in Argentina, commonly known as shantytowns in English. It is telling that Murúa chooses to refer to them using the more empowering term villas de emergencia instead of the rather derogatory term villas miserias. The term villas de emergencia in Spanish has a double meaning: “towns of emergency” and “emergent towns.”
10 The Social Economy Movement.
11 The fixed-rate exchange policy that pegged the Argentine peso to the US dollar was known as the “law of convertability.” It was introduced by the administration of President Carlos Menem in 1991 in order to stem the tide of acute inflation and hyperinflation that plagued much of Raúl Alfonsín’s government, Menem’s predecessor, throughout the 1980s. While inflation was curtailed, an overpriced peso caused exports to gradually decline throughout the 1990s. As a result, a chronic trade deficit took hold by the middle of the decade as cheaper imports saturated local markets. Unable to do business in such an economic environment, an escalating number of once-profitable small- and medium-sized businesses, faced with dwindling national and international markets, declared bankruptcy.
12 A piquetero, or picketer, is the commonly used term for a member of the myriad groups of organized unemployed workers that started to emerge since 1996. Piqueteros usually, but not always, belong to the Movimiento de Trabajadores Desocupados (Movement of Unemployed Workers).
13 These policies include the legal recognition of worker-recovered enterprises that become co-operatives and a redefinition of each provincial legislature’s laws of expropriation. The latter legal reform being spearheaded by MNER would permit workers’ co-operatives to control and use a bankrupted business’ machines and buildings when such recoveries are deemed by local legislatures to be beneficial to the local community. These reforms would see the immediate application of these laws to all workers’ co-operatives instead of requiring the co-operative to have to go through months and years of legal battles in the local courts and legislatures, which is currently the case.
14 The word ‘socio’ translates into English as ‘a member’ or ‘partner’ of a club, a society, a group, a cooperative, or a collective. It is not to be confused with the English word ‘associate.’
15 See also: Nate Holdren and Sebastian Touza “Introduction to Colectivo Situaciones,” ephemera, 5:4 (2005) 595-601.
16 Becoming a legally recognized co-operative is, in part, a pragmatic move taken on as a protective measure against state repression and unfavourable laws. The co-operative model also frames the horizontal form of decision-making that most worker-recovered enterprises adopt.
17 Before definitive expropriation is granted to worker-recovered enterprises, worker co-operatives are usually granted a two-to-five year window whereby the co-operative can control the firm under a law of “temporary” expropriation. Under this law, worker-recovered enterprises are ensured temporary control of machines, customers, trademarks, patents, and real estate while the application of the definitive expropriation law is being heard in the courts and regional legislatures. These temporary reprieves are usually granted after much lobbying, but are never guaranteed. Since this interview was conducted, Cefomar, after years of lobbying and precarious business conditions, had finally been granted the temporary law of expropriation for two years by the legislature of the city of Buenos Aires.
18 Argentina’s Day of the Child (El Día del Niño) is celebrated on the second Sunday in August, when it is customary to give children presents.
19 A murga is a popular form of musical theatre using a chorus and colourful costumes.
Toronto School of Creativity and Inquiry, ‘Recovering and Recreating Spaces of Production’ (Interview). Affinities: A Journal of Radical Theory, Culture and Action, Vol. 1 No. 1, Winter 2007 pp. 33-48. No copyright.
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