Marcelo Vieta, Workers’ Self-Management in Argentina: Contesting Neo-liberalism by Occupying Companies, Creating Cooperatives, and Recuperating Autogestión (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2021). 644 pages, $36.00.
In Workers’ Self-Management in Argentina, Marcelo Vieta provides the most comprehensive account to date of worker-recuperated enterprises, former capitalist workplaces that were occupied by their workers and reinvented as cooperatives. Based on nearly two decades of research, Vieta details the emergence, experience, and consolidation of these businesses across Argentina, offering not only rich empirical description, but also a compelling theoretical lens to understand cooperative self-determination and self-management. Blending case studies with an analysis of trends and common experiences, Vieta takes readers into the social world of people who transformed themselves from managed employees to self-managed workers, offering an up-close look at how they have socialized production, challenged private property, blurred the boundaries between work and community, and experienced subjective transformations in the process.
This book addresses core questions about class, adopting a historical-materialist lens to illuminate how workers develop a critical awareness of their class position and how they might move beyond the tensions of capitalist productive relations. Vieta asks: How does the working class come to know itself? And how do workers respond to crisis? Crises, he convincingly shows, offer moments of rupture – openings for new experiences – that provide an opportunity to examine “radical, bottom up-working class protagonism” (xvii).
Workers’ Self-Management in Argentina is organized in four parts, which explain the phenomenon of workplace recuperation, theorize autogestión, detail the social innovations and challenges workers confront, and then review the book’s key findings.
Part 1 describes the emergence of worker-recuperated enterprises, known as empresas recuperadas por sus trabajadores, starting with three case studies of a print shop (Chilavert), recycling and construction company (Unión Solidaria de Trabajadores), and community health clinic (Salud Junín). The story of workers at the health clinic stands out, as Vieta describes how nurses and staff who never intended to run the clinic without a boss formed a cooperative. As one worker explained to him, “…we realise[d] that our struggle had to be more than just a fight to recuperate our 11 months of unpaid wages. Rather, our struggle gradually became one of defending and reactivating our source of work” (87). With community backing and political support, workers were able to not only keep the clinic open to patients but also earn recognition as one of the most efficient and fastest-growing clinics in the province.
The subsequent chapters provide an empirical overview of recuperated businesses in Argentina and situate them in historical and political context. Impressive in scope, Vieta covers a wide terrain, mapping the political economy of Argentina’s working class and the rise of neo-liberalism from 1900 to 2016 and then zooming in on key moments in Argentina’s 20th century history that are critical for contextualizing recuperated businesses later on. Drawing on the author’s cross-national research on self-management, this section also situates Argentine experiences as part of a broader movement of workplace recuperation in countries around the globe.
One of the most important contributions of this book is its genealogy of autogestión. In Part 2, Vieta theorizes the concept of autogestión, which loosely translates as “self-management.” Drawing on Marxist theories of labor and technology, these chapters locate associated practices in what Vieta calls modern socialism’s “stream of self-determination.” Rather than using the English translation (“self-management”), Vieta develops a more profound interpretation of the Spanish term that has been at the heart of workers’ efforts to recuperate businesses. More than individual responsibility or freedom from managerial control, autogestión—or what Marx called “associated labour”—implies potentiality and prefiguration, “a future possibility of becoming something other than waged-workers relegated to spending life producing for others…” (299). Or as one worker from Salud Junín explained, “the possibility that we—all people—have to realise ourselves professionally, economically, and in our capacities to labour” (18).
Part 3 of the book responds to a perennial question in the study of organizational alternatives and worker self-management: Can cooperatives really survive in capitalist economies? The subsequent chapters delve into the myriad and multifaceted challenges, state indifference, and deep-rooted logics of free market capitalism that recuperated businesses have confronted in order to stay open for business. To address these tensions, Vieta argues that recuperated businesses are situated in a “dual reality” as they straddle competitive markets and prefigurative social practice.
Workers occupied businesses in Argentina not out of revolutionary fervor, but as a very pragmatic attempt to secure their livelihoods. The lived experiences of “micro-economic crises,” however, cohered into bonds of solidarity that built up workers’ commitment to the collective and to autogestión. Vieta traces the process of recuperation—crystalized in the slogan “occupy, resist, produce”—to document common motivations, forms of direct action, and the operational, legal, and political strategies used to occupy private property, restart production, and build solidarity. Vieta convincingly shows that understanding the moral economy of work—from what motivates workers to how they justify their strategies and tactics—is critical to not only explain their emergence and persistence, but to making sense of their symbolic power. This is particularly salient as workers make legal claims on private assets. Through the coordinated efforts of workers, lawyers, political groups, and federations of recuperated businesses, workers leveraged Argentina’s expropriation law to argue for the use of private assets for the common good. One worker described the advice he gave to others, “…the first thing they have to do is to take their conflict to the street. Let the neighbours know, let all the community organizations know about your struggle because those who will come first to support you…will be the people from the neighbourhood” (381). In developing these claims, workers took their cause to the streets, broadening the productive sphere and honing their appeals for the moral legitimacy of their tactics.
In addition to presenting careful qualitative research, Workers’ Self-Management in Argentina also draws on data gathered through the author’s collaboration with Andrés Ruggeri and researchers and activists at the Programa Facultad Abierta at the University of Buenos Aires. From this longitudinal data on recuperated businesses in Argentina, Vieta maps out three periods of workplace takeovers since the 1990s and then presents a series of conceptual typologies. These include seven “radical social innovations” that unpack workers’ uses of direct democracy, creative response to crises, reconsideration of divisions of labor, and development of solidarity. He also outlines six “recuperative moments”—in other words, what workers seek to recover (jobs, tools, machines, workplaces)—that ultimately help explain the prefigurative promises of autogestión. Part 3, in short, is a must-read for anyone interested in a thorough overview of the movement of recuperated businesses.
Part 4 concludes the volume by discussing the social innovations of recuperated businesses as alternatives to capitalism. The main argument woven throughout this work is that Argentine worker-recuperated businesses have directly addressed capitalist exploitation and alienation through autogestión and prefigured a social reality that can help us rethink working class agency, cooperativism, and the possibility of radical economic change. Ultimately, this book is not only about what workers struggle against, but also about what they are fighting for: secure, meaningful, dignified work. In many ways, this is a rosy conclusion. But throughout the book, Vieta provides serious analyses of the very real challenges, tensions, and contradictions that recuperated businesses confront. Rather than offering an oversimplified view of workplace recuperation, Vieta explains and historicizes the “intractable systematic barriers” that workers confront in the process (31). In the end, Workers’ Self-Management in Argentina offers a hopeful interpretation of workplace recuperation, as one through which workers can unify the separation of labor and capital, take back their labor power, and cultivate their capacity to cooperate and build social wealth.
Katherine Sobering
University of North Texas
Denton, Texas
katherine.sobering@unt.edu
