rope's running out for worker ownership in Argentina

a theme emerges: I write about stuff going on in the world in a relatively impersonal way, except for snotty comments. Today's submission is a few more pieces of the Argentinian picture, where 170 businesses were "recovered" after the country's 2001 shock recession destroyed manufacturing and living standards for most people. The scare quotes back in the last sentence mean "expropriated." The scare quotes there are just for fun.

A decently prosperous country before the crisis, Argentina saw unemployment hit 20 percent and nearly half the population live under the poverty line after they "did the collapse." Cheap riffs on Guided by Voices are now officially over.

As you might imagine, reclaiming shuttered factories, which put 10,000 people back to work, went over pretty well with the locals. But not everyone was on board. Let's pick up some of the detail from Le Monde not covered in Naomi Klein's heartwarming but lightweight documentary on the Argentinian recoveries, The Take.

Many rescued businesses are operating without legal authorisation and 31% have negotiated a lease. That leaves 29% where there has been an expropriation which, as a rule, authorises the workers to use the machines and occupy the building for two years. After that, if the owners and their creditors have not received state compensation they can demand the sale of the premises and plant.
...
During 2002 there was a lively debate on whether revived businesses should get involved in capitalist markets. A Trotskyist minority called for nationalisation under worker control. It took over four businesses, including Brukman, a garment factory in Buenos Aires, and Zenon, a tile manufacturer in Neuquén. The workers involved saw the rescue as a first step towards a socialist system in which the state would control economic planning. The hard-left parties associated with them did not believe that cooperatives could survive in a capitalist market.

The first paragraph is confusing because 31 + 29 + "many" only vaguely = 100, but in its defense, it might read more clearly in the original French, a language of mystery and wonder that doesn't need to follow elemental rules of writing about math. The extreme precariousness of worker-owned businesses under a capitalist system is only made more urgent here by the attack presented by the vanguard left in the second paragraph. "Nationalisation under worker control" sounds like a good recipe for groups that like to hijack functioning participatory institutions and hew them to the party line. Their intentions are as clear and unmistakably bad for democratic economies as the capitalists' plans.

The vanguard groups are sticking to the script worked out 70 years ago in Republican Spain, where regional anarchist cooperative economies were crushed by their communist rivals, who understandably saw the cooperatives as an uncontrollable threat to their consolidation of power. The communists gradually displaced liberal social democrats from government and proceeded to starve cooperatives that wouldn't obey of credit and material.

The Trotskyist infiltration in Argentina is still small. They just don't have the same pull on political economy these days. The more immediate problem cooperatives face is securing capital and escaping expensive middlemen who exploit the resistance of capitalist firms to buying from cooperatives.

But outside of practical concerns, are those hard-left parties correct -- what can cooperatives do in a sea of gigantic multinationals? Robin Hahnel, co-founder of participatory economics, says they're part of a transition away from capitalism. But don't expect too much, he reminds us in his new book, Economic Justice and Democracy.

The vision of reversing who hires whom--instead of capital hiring labor, labor hires capital--by slowly expanding the employee-owned sector of modern capitalist economies is a utopian pipe dream ... [W]hen forced to compete against capitalist firms in a market environment, even the most idealistic worker-owners find it difficult to retain their commitment to decision making according to human values.

Hahnel concludes that reforms (universal health care, living wage laws, taxes on capital transfers and pollution, progressive tax structures, etc.) and experiments (cooperatives, local currencies, intentional communities) are both important and insufficient. It's going to take a whole lot of both, probably advanced by some crisis, for a fair economy to germinate.

Crisis point reached in French law-and-order

Conservative French interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy, widely tipped to seek the presidency in the next election, pulls out that old favorite, fear-mongering. He told the newspaper, Le Monde that "about 9,000 police cars had been hit with stones this year."

Next, French gendarmes demand improved armor able to withstand round, flat obsidian that skips real good.

it's called burying the lede

On its face, today's headline in the NYTimes that Bush administration officials are pressuring the Palestinian Authority to bar Hamas members from standing for election makes obvious the contradiction between the rhetoric of democracy the administration pushes and the bare fact that they won't allow fair elections in many Middle East states, where groups openly hostile to U.S. interests would win. No surprise there, nor in that the U.S. is unwilling to sacrifice its privileged position so that other people can drink the sweet koolaid of self-determination.

But that's just so much window dressing. The bottom of the piece casually reminds us why dickering over candidates in that terrain isn't really that important.

In addition, as a practical matter, [an unnamed State Department official] said, action by the Palestinian Authority would make it easier to secure Israeli cooperation in easing conditions for the elections to be held. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon jolted the administration last month when he said Israel would not help the elections if Hamas were in the running.

Right, I forgot. Somebody else has to approve your elections before you can have them.

Afterwards, all they remember is the microwave crème brûlée

Ripped from headlines that haven't even printed yet! Morning coffee and e-mail revealed a desperate request on a gigantic listserv for accomplished professional liars. Somehow, shouting this to the world will shore up flagging morale at the company in question. So consider yourself among the privileged few tipped off to the major (ahem, Patrick) indictment (cough, Ryan) that spells doooooom for the endowment of a certain Big 11 powerhouse.

Please see below for a request for a PR consultant:

>>I am looking for a media consultant to develop a plan (similar to what
>>Martha Stewart's spin-artists did), for a prominent Chicago CEO who is
>>facing a federal tax evasion indictment later this week. We want to make
>>sure that his clients and his staff remain positive, in the light of what
>>might be moving forward.

Yes, Ryan's not a CEO anymore, and obviously I have no idea which lucky corner-office autocrat is getting the Fitzgerald treatment, but why not the proud developer of ‘clawback', a neat little trick with a $190 million price tag the insurance giants worked out with each other, mano a mano?

I think this is the kind of crony capitalism that market rapturists like Hernando De Soto get so frustrated over, nominally because it impedes the efficient distribution of capital that naturally brings development and prosperity. Possibly it's frustrating because they keep producing International Monetary Fund action plans that never seem to change how the inequities of power and shielded decision-making of corporate executives that are built into capitalism actually function.

car culture: bad for apes, bad for us.

is it the beginning of the end for the careless Planet of the Apes? a bank heist that can only go terribly awry? a sad and puzzling sketch of the failures of simian culture? i'm really not sure.