Workers in Argentina taking over dead factories and running them democratically
As Argentine factories go bankrupt and shut their doors, workers are breaking in, starting the machines up again, electing their own leaders, and running the businesses themselves, putting up fierce resistance when the police try to evict them.
On 19 March 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..."Occupy, resist, produce" (Thanks, Malgas!)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.
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I imagine it's much easier to run a factory when you don't have to worry about making back the cost to build the factory...
@ #CICADA
Factories going bankrupt and being bought for a loaf of bread are a common occurrence. Quite often one level of government or another will subsidize such undertaking. This doesn't make it any easier to run the business.
Such abandoned enterprises are rarely in top shape and have to be maintained if not completely renovated in the long run. This as you (should) know is vastly most of the cost. After a number of years, whatever the initial value of the assets may, or may not, have been pales in comparison to the added value by the new owners.
#1 - Not having the factory run by corrupt, greedy self-serving rat-bastards also makes it easier.
Here's hoping they don't follow the usual pattern, and end up creating new monsters that are as bad, or worse, than the previous ones.
Let me get this straight. The company was shut down, but the workers came in and took over because they had pride in what they worked for?
We need to bomb them. Bomb them quick before anyone else realizes that workers control the means of production.
If the big 3 shut down, the expected result is a load of whining that jobs were lost, and that is how it should be. No one should ever get the thought that what they produced is something people would want to buy.
The workers should never get thoughts in their heads that they can just go in and make cars that people want to buy, and sell those cars in a manner that keeps the factories running. For starters, if they do well, who are they going to give fat bonuses to? If it's just workers working, there'd be no management to pick up that slack of profits coming in.
@#2- No problem with that, but you have to admit it's simpler than building from scratch, equipping the factory, etc, etc.
@#3- By definition they're self-serving...they did want jobs for themselves, right? The degree of greed and rat-bastardry we do not know as of yet, but it stands to reason that the most rat-bastardy of the crowd o' inspirational workers will be working eagerly to put themselves in comfortable positions.
@#4- As to the Big 3, do you think that the UAW, if given the factories, would make cars that people want to buy, or would they make only the cars that they themselves want to build?
Wonderful. Fantastic. More power to them.
Here's hoping the idea spreads everywhere.
This is all well and heartwarming, but kind of old news. If you want to take a trip down Buenos Aires Way the farming industry is currently what's known as "Quilombo". The gruesome twosome that is Nestor "El Pinguino" Kirchner and Cristina Kirchner are not only abusing electoral rules in an effort to build a dynasty for themselves, but have also imposed harsh taxes on farm products, especially soy which is one of the most important crops in the country. The farmers have responded by striking numerous times and these strikes have led to some violent confrontations. Mrs. Kirchner has claimed that the farms are an Oligarchical relic and while there is some truth to that, it is also important to know that it provides 7% of all jobs and makes up the bulk of Argentina's foreign exchange.
Err... no again Cicada. If it were the case then the enterprise wouldn't have shut down in the first place. You have to know that there comes a time when a factory is abandoned for the simple reason that it does cost more to keep it open than to build a new one. It happens every day all over the world. Also you are seemingly assuming that the former owners aren't compensated by the workers but this assumption isn't supported and very unlikely in Argentina as I know it.
Like you I doubt that everything is so rosy as it is described in that story, filled with hope as it is. Yet it is no reason to invalidate their effort out of hand.
@#8 On the other hand, if having a pre-existing factory wasn't a benefit, the workers would have just built a new one rather than taking over one that, if I'm reading you right here, would cost more money to keep open than they'd spend building a new one.
If the maintenance and upkeep and repairs are being done by the workers to get it back to efficient working shape in addition to their normal work at the factory, it may account for an effective cut in pay even if salaries increase. Devil's in the details here, and we don't have any to look at, unfortunately.
I'm not trying to invalidate the effort-- no problem at all with a well-run coop. But the rosiness probably flakes off somewhere, and it'd be a good idea to see where and how before considering whether this notion is generally applicable.
In America the insurance companies would effectively forbid this.
I'm betting the ISO audit wouldn't go swimmingly either.
They were trying not to starve...
The story's over a year old...love it as i do :)
cicada yer right - standardization is valuable and essential, particularly for waging modern mechanized warfare. Maybe only for that? No that's too broad - but it's the primary historical reason for standardization, though. Efficiency of mass warfare, can't do it without standards. Or bar-code inventory/parts control.
A history of industrial and technological standardization is needed, I think. Anybody got a link?
It can be done, but it is never pretty.
Check "Pascual Boing" for an example of this in Mexico
People, Cory....have you never heard of "The Take" documentary?
http://www.thetake.org/
It tells the story of the "democratic reposessions" in a moving and compelling way. Unforgettable.
Halfadrop posted his comment while I was typing...
Trailer for 'The Take' film trailer here:
http://thetake.org/index.cfm?page_name=watch_the_trailer
Related film:
'The Corporation' directed by Mark Achbar, based on the book by Joel Bakan.
http://www.thecorporation.com/index.cfm?page_id=312
Trailer here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xa3wyaEe9vE
I was gobsmacked when one of the local big box cinemas here - there are only two - ran 'The Corporation' for two weeks when the film came out. At the time, I supposed that their copy of "Just Married" had been waylayed and this was used as filler...
(I spoke to one of the staffers there afte the movie: my guess was correct... I just can't remember which Hollywood drivel it really was, though.)
'The Corporation' will/can provide some background, some context, some 'recalibration of our starting point' - and help illustrate why the actions taken by the workers in 'The Take' are quite justifiable.
While I'm at it, Achbar and co-director Peter Wintonick produced 'Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media'
Trailer here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LVsiP0s33A
If you don't understand how the world works, you're just a gear in the works. That may be OK for some of you, but it isn't for me.
Holy crap! An AdHoc! One step closer to the Bitchun society.
#10 "In America the insurance companies would effectively forbid this."
Dude, around here they're called cooperatives. I work for one.
Why are the factories being "taken over"? What precluded them from buying it legally?
Aside: We are tool-using mammals; economic action requires both capital and labor (e.g. the hammer, and the hand that wields it). Labor alone is impotent. Capital alone is idle. Managers and owners do actually do something, typically some of the most risky aspects of such an undertaking. (i.e. Risking investment in building a factory, which may or may not yield a profitable return.)
More accurately, even the cognitive separation of "capital" and "labor" is faulty; as "labor" is nothing more than renting of your body (including the brain it contains, with regard to knowledge work) in a mutual exchange.
A sit-in sit-down at a Chicago factory this week.
So it begins....
Jatfx: My apologies, i had indeed forgotten the Co-ops.
http://cbs2chicago.com/local/republic.windows.sitin.2.880850.html
though it seems they just want pay-outs at this point.
@ 5's '@#3': "we want a rotation of positions and, above all, the ability to recall our elected leaders."
@Cicada generally: Whom does a fallow field really help? If I understand your argument(s), you suppose that (e.g.) the bank that wants to foreclose on an American house and evict the person who is failing to make his/her mortgage payments *even if the house will then join the thousands of other un-occupied and un-sellable houses similarly evacuated* has a moral imperative to do so.
Property rights are a man-made fiction, not a natural quality of material. It can be as wrong to uphold them as entirely to disrespect them. Or do I have a moral right to destroy the ice-cream cone I no longer want even when my brother would very much like to eat it?
Have I missed your point, or addressed it fairly?
creation of easements
Let's hope that among the workers who are running these factories there are effective accountants, mechanical engineers, market analysts and designers for any new products that they may have to switch to, and industrial engineers who can make sure that they're deploying every individual to the highest efficiency and avoiding any injuries from repetitive motions.
What's with all the communist postings today?
I guess we're just a bunch of goddamn communists.
Boo!
Capitalists, communists, nihilists, all ists suffer from the same malady eventually - human nature. And that is: My importance is probably greater than that guy's.
"i the film" covers the formation of an indymedia collective in argentina that formed around this time, and when one of the filmmakers toured the US showing it, he said that a lot of the popular assemblies had fallen apart but a lot of the syndicalists had held the factories. it's a great movie - it was posted at indytorrents.org when it came out but i don't know if there are any seeders left.
@27 If there aren't any of those specialists they can be hired can't they?
Zuzu @8
Why are the factories being "taken over"? What precluded them from buying it legally?
Lack of money, perhaps? I doubt Venezualan factory workers are paid so much money that they could just pool their savings and buy a factory.
Getting a loan would presumably be prohibitively burdensome (assuming any banks would lend money to a workers' cooperative - they tend to be allergic to that sort of thing). If it weren't, the original owning company presumably would have continued paying the mortgage and running the factory.
And that's the trick - you have a factory that can potentially operate at least profitably to sustain employment for its workers, but not profitably enough to pay down the debt that went into its construction. No one is willing to forgive the debt, so a perfectly functional factory is abandoned and the workers locked out. Ruining a local economy just doesn't figure into the value calculation for the creditors.
PaulR- You are awesome! That is all.
A slightly related story: In my hometown (Saskatoon, SK, Canada), there were two big-chain breweries producing the standard indistinguishable watery mess that big chain breweries produce.
Molson shut down their brewery, and the workers there decided that rather than all go looking for other work, they would run the brewery. They got enough loans to buy the brewery (they borrowed from the government in the end, as banks are allergic to anything that smells of cooperation and solidarity). The Great Western Brewing Company was founded as a workers' cooperative. It started off slightly better than Molson, and has steadily improved since then.
Some years later, Labatt also shut down their brewery. Having learned their lesson, they swiftly had the plant demolished, lest it provide undesired employment, solidarity, and pride of accomplishment to their former workers.
The resultant park, "Labatt Gardens," for many years felt exactly like what it was - the vacant lot left behind by a factory demolition, with a nice river view and hastily planted trees. When I was a teenager living not far from there, this was fantastic. There was a gently decaying amphitheatre deep in a thicket of trees, and all sorts of mystery to discover. It has of late been considerably gentrified, and is rather nice, if much less mysterious.
A lot of the factory occupations in Argentina are a direct result of their economic crash in the early 00's.
The capitalists and owners left the country for the duration of the crisis, and in the meantime the workers re-opened the factories, and ran them.
When the owner class returned to take the factories back the collectives fought them off and essentially took over what was left to rot by the owner class.
I am a firm proponent of that mindset happening here as well, if they are shutting down your towns lifeline take the damn thing back and retool it to produce something that is wanted/needed.
Viva la Argentinian workers!
Solidarity for the Chicago workers at Republic Door & window!
4649:
The law has long held that one's property rights do not extend to Waste of the property to deprive subsequent owners of its bounty....assets ought to be used, if the owner abandons, people should use...we all have a right to stand on the shoulders and to benefit from the labors of previous generations. And this, from a guy who thinks that inheritance taxes should strip 90% of all fortunes greater than 100 million dollars....
Yep. Tax each generation back to zero. Make each generation prove its worth.
Just force the local government to make the original owners sell the property to the workers at fair market value at the time.
and inheritance taxes can be easily sidestepped by handing it over to junior before you die.
Correct takuan, the answer is democracy, which can always to trump mere property rights. the people are sovereign, after all. (Which is why men of property are always a little nervous about democracy...)
Social needs always have trumped individual property rights in human society...if your house has to be razed for the fire-break, it's gonna get razed. Fair compensation amounts and circumstances when such are to be paid are up to those concerned, and will vary from time to time and place to place. But it ought to be noted that without the consent of the legislature no Corporate entity is capable of holding property.
Tax each generation back to zero. Make each generation prove its worth.
That would of course obliterate all small businesses in a couple of decades while leaving large corporations untouched. Are you Weyland or Yutani?
True Takuan, but they hate to do it that way, you know. And such transfers often attract significant taxes, as deemed dispositions at fair market value, where the parties are related. Or, such taxes become payable while liquidating the real estate. etc. to hand the cash over to Jr.
Anyway, the screams from some US media moguls about "death taxes" some time ago says to me that such things would indeed be effective at preventing accumulations over generations.
* Dictatorship of the proletariat
* Herd mentality
The Democracy you refer to is venerated beyond credibility -- a magical panacea of "goodness" to right all wrongs and solve all problems -- a form of political religion.
p.s. There's nothing any more significant about the property/wealth acquired through inheritance than there is the physical and mental abilities acquired through genetic inheritance.
Zuzu, that is as may be, yet still it's best to have the consent of the governed, and better the tyranny of the majority, than a tyranny of the minority, or the one.
And the first form of property/wealth in your PS may be transferred, in fact this is of its essential nature. Your 'genetic' abilities, not so.
That makes the former more of interest to others, to society. In fact: Property is a creation of Laws, and men acting together have created the Laws.
No Laws, no property. It really is that simple.
And a Law which does not have the consent of the governed, is no Law. It is tyranny.
@ antinous
If we were able to get rid of corporate personhood too than the large corporations would be on the same playing field as the smaller businesses. Of course it could be a nightmare figuring out what to do with the corporation's assets when the founder died, leaving a lot of peoples jobs depending on the health of the guy who started the company.
@24- 4649. If we continue the field analogy, a fallow field is far better than one that gets depleted by overfarming.
To cut to the chase, though, my main objection was to the notion that the worker takeover of the factory would necessarily result in a better outcome for the workers than doing something else. Might, perhaps probably, would, at least in the short run.
@45- "And a Law which does not have the consent of the governed, is no Law. It is tyranny."
Which suggests that nearly every law is tyranny, of course. How many people consent to be thrown in jail for smoking marijuana, for example?
And on the far extreme of democracy, we have lynch mobs, where the majority in the local polity decides to kill a member.
The problem with the "All laws are created by men, and may be altered by men" approach is that there's very little reason to object to that mob in that case. Right to life? Legal fiction, changeable at will. Right to due process? Same. Limitation of legislation to a legislature? Ditto.
Majority rule (democracy) is vastly overrated. Some of the worst parts of history had a majority consent, and the some of the most redeeming aspects of American government are specifically anti-democratic. The first amendment, an amendment that all American BoingBoingers love and cherish is great because it is specifically anti-democratic. It states something that the a mere majority CAN'T take away, no matter how badly they want it or how justified they think it is.
Majority rule on its own is an invitation to slavery and oppression of the minority. Don't get me wrong, majority rule is not a horrible way to go about things if for no other reason than that it is better than the alternatives, but I'll take my big heaping slice of democracy with with liberal amounts of utterly anti-democratic protections (like the bill of rights).
Sometimes the majority needs to be told to fuck off.
So, I personally would stop holding up democracy as some high virtue. Democracy ensures neither justice, morality, nor even a decent decision. The only thing that democracy ensures is that a majority of the asshole citizens are okay with whatever you are about to do. They could be giving a thumbs up to gassing all the Jews, killing everyone with glasses, enslaving the blacks, or stripping away freedom of speech and privacy to protect us from the terrorist.
@RINDAN
I think you make a good point, but there is a small technicality in your thinking that, if addressed, will shed more light on why Democracy is a good thing.
I don't think that the bill of rights is anti-democratic in the way that you are citing it. Also, the bad decisions made by the majority that oppressed the minority (slavery, holocaust, prop 8, etc..) were made democratically.
The technicality is that many of the bad decisions made historically that oppress minorities are made by a simple majority voting system. This means that if any proposed rule or law gets 50% of the vote, it becomes enforced by the police and the courts.
If you change this 51% to something like two-thirds it is much harder to get lynching laws and other such mob-rule laws passed.
Go even further to consensus, where every party that is affected by a law gets equal say on what that law is, and the tyranny of the majority becomes impossible.
Take the cops & courts out of the equation and systemic violence becomes less likely because no one group (the ones with badges or gavels) has complete impunity to kill or oppress the minority group.
This gives the minority group a fighting chance!
There are more details I won't go into, but you can see that by looking past a simplified conception of 51% majority rule democracy we can catch a glimpse of a society that isn't mechanistically inclined toward denying individuals or groups their rights, and that people can stand up for their rights without complicated lobbying of government or people across the country that they don't know (the 51%).
@#50- "Go even further to consensus, where every party that is affected by a law gets equal say on what that law is, and the tyranny of the majority becomes impossible."
Impossible generally because no laws would get passed once a society passed a certain size.
p.s. There's nothing any more significant about the property/wealth acquired through inheritance than there is the physical and mental abilities acquired through genetic inheritance.
Whoa, zuzu. I knew you had a soft spot for theories which justify the wealth of the elite, but Social Darwinism? That's a bit much, don't you think?
@Rhinokitty
I personally would find super majority rule interesting, but that isn't democracy that you are advocating. Democracy is straight up majority rule. There does not exist any nations in this world that runs purely off of super majority rule. The closest that you get are a handful of non-democratic protections that some countries have. Stuff like the US constitution and bill of rights, British common law, and other such anti-democratic institution that can't be overthrown with a simple majority vote are about it.
Personally, I like some parts of the idea of super majority rule. It would certainly ensures that injustice is damn hard to come by. Of course, no one else with an agenda would like it. Moral conservatives would find every single attempt to regulate morality beyond the basic don't kill/steal/rape utterly impossible. Fiscal liberals would hate it because taxation and government spending would be limited to only the most essential government services that everyone can agree on are needed. Your government would default into some sort of libertarian utopia where the government taxes only enough to run law enforcement, a paltry military that doesn't do anything beyond self defense, and the only social safety net to speak of would be provided by private charity from money collected via donation. Even then, law enforcement would find itself vastly stripped down because most things would be legal. You could go to the pharmacy and by yourself a pound of marijuana grown legally and in the open in Ohio.
True super majorities default into libertarian utopias where everyone is unhappy except for libertarians.
#10 Said: "In America the insurance companies would effectively forbid this."
In Argentina these factories operate in a kind of gray/black area so in most cases there is no insurance at all (there are traditional factories hiring people w/o insurance, so go figure).
#20 Said: "Why are the factories being "taken over"? What precluded them from buying it legally?"
Most taken factories are in a judicial limbo (very long and complex chapter 11 like process) that take in Argentina million of year to set (if ever!). So workers can't buy the factory, so it is not only a question of money, but it is more a legal related problem.