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.