Do class-based differences still exist? Can we âseeâ class today? Is there still a working class, or have we in advanced so-called post-Fordist capitalism bid âfarewellâ to it, as André Gorz so confidently concluded in the early 1980s?1 If we havenât yet given the working class its final adieu, is class still âdetermined by oneâs position within the labourâcapital social relation of productionâ?2 And, if the notion of class is still relevant, can the waged and the marginalised come to a critical awareness of their class situation and state of subjugation?3 In short, does class still matter? Ample evidence of persistent inequality today4 â made visible by the deplorable material conditions of millions around the world while a smaller number of people bask in abundance â suggests it still does. Indeed, the plight and struggles of workers, the marginalised, and the dispossessed the world over are to a large extent still shaped and driven by class-based differences that continue to persist in our existing neo-liberal capitalist world order.
This book brings a contemporary instantiation of working-class struggle to light through the story of one group of workers in Argentina â the protagonists of the empresas recuperadas por sus trabajadores (worker-recuperated enterprises).5 These workers have been engaged for over two decades in their own self-determination as they take over and recuperate the former capitalist workplaces that had employed them and reinvent them as worker cooperatives. We will come to know these workplaces reconstituted along notions of autogestión (self-management) more simply by their Spanish acronym: ERT.
The struggle of these workers to stabilise and self-determine their working lives, however, has been anything but simple. Despite continued challenges â especially as the Argentine political economy re-embraced a clear neo-liberal path in late 2015 after 12 years of relative reprieve from austerity and anti-labour, pro-market policies â the story of Argentinaâs ERTâ¯s is, more than ever, full of promise for all workers desiring to control and re-envision their own socio-economic destinies. This is a book about the attempted unmaking of the working class by neo-liberal capital in Argentina and the working classâs continued struggle for its own remaking. It is a story of workers recomposing their places of work and, in the process, regaining their livelihoods and dignity in an Argentina pockmarked by constant macro- and micro-economic crises that in recent decades unfolded within a waxing and waning neo-liberal backdrop.
In 2005 I began a journey that would see me face-to-face with the working class in the (re)making. It involves workers in Argentina confronting capitals, capitalists, and the state in a struggle that begins at the point of production or service delivery, from within the failing firms where they had been employed. On several research trips since the mid-2000s, and in more recent follow-up visits to Argentina, I have witnessed first-hand workers acting collectively in their shops, in their factories, and in their neighbourhoods in order to save their jobs, secure their livelihoods, and ultimately reconstitute their socio-economic circumstances. Most palpably, ERT protagonists transform once-capitalist businesses into worker-run, directly democratic, and horizontally organised productive entities. But they change much more than that, as I have learned over the years. Since beginning this research, I have not only seen workers creating new worker cooperatives from out of the ashes of failed capitalist firms;6 I have also seen them transforming these recuperated workplaces into socially focused enterprises that become deeply concerned with the wellbeing of surrounding communities and neighbourhoods and that respond directly and locally to social distress and economic depletion. As I came to know better these workers and the enterprises they revived, I began to also realise that in recuperating their workplaces and engaging actively with their communities they begin to overturn and take back â again, collectively â that most sacrosanct of class-based institutions: private property as embodied in the capital-centred firm and its hierarchically managed labour process. And, most fundamentally I have learned, ERT workers begin to recuperate for themselves their very productive capacities as creative human beings working cooperatively in associated labour.
Contemporary ERTâ¯s in Argentina first emerged from out of the crisis of the countryâs neo-liberal model that escalated throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s. Driven in part by the implementation of IMF-sanctioned structural reforms under the reconfigured right-leaning Peronism of President Carlos Menem (1989â99) and the centre-right coalition government led by the Union CÃvica Radical (UCR, Radical Civic Union) party of Fernando de la Rúa (1999â2001), Argentinaâs version of the neo-liberal model would eventually â if temporarily â implode during the years spanning the turn of the millennium. As local businesses began to fail at record rates, finding it harder and harder to compete with multinationals and imported goods that had flooded local markets, many Argentine business owners compensated by not paying wages and engaging in the vaciamiento (asset stripping, or literally âemptyingâ) of their dying firms. At the same time, and with an overvalued peso pegged to the US dollar compromising Argentine firmsâ competitiveness and compounding their difficulties, workers began to increasingly experience heightened levels of exploitation on shop floors. With traditional union strategies proving unresponsive to the neo-liberal juggernaut, an Argentine state indifferent to the plight of the countryâs workers, and with no alternative jobs available, more and more workers from a broad cross-section of Argentinaâs urban-based economy would begin to take matters into their own hands by occupying and subsequently self-managing their troubled workplaces.
Reviving a form of bottom-up labour action and organising centred explicitly in the notion of autogestión, as of mid-2016 there were in Argentina almost 16,000 workers self-managing their workplaces in close to 370 empresas recuperadas in sectors as varied as printing and publishing, media, metalwork, gastronomy, textiles, health care, foodstuffs, shipbuilding, waste management, construction, education, rubber and plastics, fuel provisioning, and tourism.7 Found across the national territory, Argentinaâs ERTâ¯s make up â by far â the largest movement in the world of worker-led conversions of capitalist businesses into cooperatives.
While still small in numbers when situated within the broader Argentine economy, ERTâ¯s have defied their numerical weight and have stepped up to the task of saving companies from closure, addressing under- and unemployment, stabilising local economies, and securing the social wellbeing of surrounding communities. Because of this, ERTâ¯s have gained the broad support of the Argentine people as well as inspiring other workersâ struggles and proposals for social change in Argentina and beyond.8 Since coming to the worldâs attention during the political turmoil, economic collapse, and debt default of December 2001 and the immediate years thereafter â by which time around 200 ERTâ¯s had emerged9 â the empresas recuperadas have stimulated new expectations for socio-economic change while actually helping to forge new labour relations in Argentina.10
As the country began to recover under more favourable global economic conditions throughout the first decade of the 2000s, aided by the left-populist and nationalist-developmentalist policies of the Peronist governments of Néstor Kirchner (2003â7) and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (2007â15),11 workplace takeovers and conversions to worker cooperatives would continue to occur, although at a slower rate per year than in the 2001â4 period of crisis.12 By the mid-2000s, and in no small part due to the lobbying and organising efforts of the ERT movementsâ leaders and new self-managed workersâ associations, ERTâ¯s had become a viable solution to firm failure and unemployment in Argentina. And ERTâ¯s have surged again in recent years as the post-2008 global financial crisis touched down in the country and brought with it new economic difficulties and new firm closures.
While new ERTâ¯s had continued to emerge during President Mauricio Macriâs Cambiemos coalition government (2015â19), macrismoâs revival of explicitly neo-liberal policies brought new challenges to ERTâ¯s and other social justice and community groups, challenges that had been partly overcome throughout the first decade and a half of the 2000s. Though this neo-liberal redux confronted ERTâ¯s and other social and solidarity economy organisations as new reactionary forces,13 these self-managed firmsâ broad legitimacy amongst the Argentine public and their proven net-positive effects for Argentinaâs economic wellbeing did not make it easy for macrismoâs brand of neo-liberalism to quell the still-growing movement of recuperated enterprises. As this book will show, ERT worker-protagonistsâ political savvy; their capacity for self-organising; and their demonstrated creativity, innovation, and tenacity over the years provide a solid foundation for the ERT movement to directly contest the new political economic environment and continue to invigorate working-class self-activity in Argentina.
In the midst of persistent socio-economic difficulties, ERT workers have been directly addressing Argentinaâs chronic under- and unemployment. They have also been reviving (for over two decades now) radical, bottom-up working-class protagonism. Over the first decade and a half of the new century, ERT worker-protagonists and movement leaders have also influenced the reform of national bankruptcy and expropriation laws to favour workplace conversions to cooperatives. Moreover, they have been socialising wealth by transforming capital-centred firms into worker-managed cooperatives, returning productive entities to the communities and neighbourhoods that surround them. They especially do so when ERTâ¯s bring the community into a workplace by doubling as cultural centres, free medical clinics, and spaces for alternative educational initiatives. They also do so when they extend out territorially into the community by contributing portions of their surpluses to local community revitalisation and economic and cultural development. Because of this enterprise-community fusion, as this bookâs case studies will show, ERTâ¯s symbolically tear down the walls that segregate a workplace from the community. Most promising for those seeking less exploitative and more humane labour practices and workplaces, ERTâ¯s have begun to return control to workers, even though they still struggle with the realities and tensions of having to exist â at least in part â within competitive capitalist markets.
ERTâ¯s have also inspired the imaginaries of workers throughout Argentina and outside of its borders by proving â despite the contrary claims of orthodox economists, pro-market politicians, and mainstream business media punditry â that workers can effectively run productive enterprises without bosses. In sum, as we will see throughout this book, ERTâ¯s place into question capital-labour relations, the commodification of labour-power, the privileging of property rights over the dignity and wellbeing of workers, and the segregation of businesses from surrounding communities. They do so while, at the same time, bringing to light and addressing myriad other dimensions of injustice and inequality related to the capitalist mode of production. ERTâ¯s are thus exemplary of both the possibilities and challenges for workersâ self-management in our continuing neo-liberal context, providing rich cases for studying the continued relevance of working-class protagonism, self-organisation, and cooperation.
Why did ERTâ¯s emerge in Argentina at this particular historical conjuncture? What are their connections to historical workersâ struggles in Argentina and elsewhere? What is at stake for these workers in their strategies and tactics of âocupar, resistir, producirâ (âoccupy, resist, produceâ), the slogan borrowed from Brazilâs landless peasantsâ and workersâ movement that evocatively captures ERT workersâ paths to autogestión? What exactly are ERT protagonists ârecuperatingâ when they take over troubled businesses in order to self-manage them? How do ERT workers learn cooperative values and practices? How are they bringing to light the continued relevance of working-class struggles? How do their lived experiences of crises and their subsequent practices of autogestión contribute to our understanding of work beyond capital? What can workersâ struggles throughout the world today learn from Argentinaâs ERTâ¯s? These are the guiding questions that drive this book. In addressing these questions, the book takes the position that, as Argentinaâs ERT protagonists repeatedly show, workers have the capacities to lay claim to their creative abilities, run their own places of work, and collectively manage the production of social wealth.
This book seeks to understand ERTâ¯sâ promise for worker-led alternative economic realities today in light of and as paths beyond persistent neo-liberal enclosures and crises. It takes seriously workersâ continued agency in praxis, their implicit and often explicit desire for autonomy from arbitrary control, and their ongoing ability to self-manage their own productive lives despite the contradictions inherent to the capitalâlabour relationship. The book particularly recognises the possibilities that open up for workersâ control and self-management during moments of crises in the political economy of a country or at the point of production of a firm; such macro- or micro-economic crises can put into sharp relief for workers their situations of exploitation as well as the capacities for solidarity and cooperation that they already possess from having been brought together by capital within the labour process.14 At bottom, the following pages delve into the historical-material conditions from out of which ERTâ¯s emerge, their connections to the self-activity of workers within the labour process under capitalism and Argentinaâs long tradition of working-class militancy, and how ERT protagonists face socio-economic crises head-on by taking their productive and creative destinies into their own hands. And in the process of taking control of their workplaces and working lives, these protagonists transform themselves from managed employees to self-managed workers.
Class Matters
Most broadly, this study adheres to a historical-materialist understanding of the concept of the working class, or âthe-class-that-lives-from-labourâ, as Brazilian Marxist sociologist Ricardo Antunes succinctly defines it.15 A historical-materialist perspective most fundamentally posits that in the capitalist system the working class consists of those who must survive by selling their labour-power to those who own the means of production in order to produce surplus-value. With this perspective, class is thus not a âthingâ but rather a social relation, âviz. the internal relation between labour and capitalâ.16 Through a historical materialist-based critical theoretical and sociological analysis of the emergence and circumstances of Argentinaâs ERTâ¯s, this book ultimately manifests the possibilities that remain available to those that live from labour â the working class â for beginning to free themselves from todayâs neo-liberal capitalist order.
Specifically, this bookâs approach adopts a âclass struggleâ standpoint. As E.P. Thompson teaches us, class does not consist of neat sociological categories but, rather, âhappensâ in everyday experiences, actions, and struggles as people together âlive [out] their own historyâ immanently, as a class-in-the-making.17 The experiences of Argentinaâs ERT protagonists, as I will argue, provide us with sketches of how those that live from their labour can act collectively, for themselves and in their own interest, as they struggle against capitalist contradictions, exploitations, and perpetual crises. In the process, ERT protagonists teach us how workers may come to a critical awareness of their class situation and start to move beyond the tensions inherent in the social relations of capitalist production. ERT workersâ resistances and innovations in autogestión begin to map out â via the cooperativisation of their work, the socialisation of the products of their labour, and their forms of horizontal organising â how the working class can forge its own path beyond capital-induced crises and enclosures. In short, ERT protagonistsâ audacious projects to take over and subsequently self-manage once-capitalist businesses, and the continued existence and emergence of the worker cooperatives they create, remind us of the paths still available to the working class for its own (re)making.
This book, then, not only strives to better understand how and why Argentinaâs ERTâ¯s have emerged and evolved, but also seeks, via the ERT phenomenon as case study, to come to grips with how the working class comes to know itself and act for itself in the face of capitalismâs exploitative tendencies and recurring bouts of macro- and micro-economic crises. From out of the lived experiences of Argentinaâs ERT protagonists, the book fundamentally aspires to return to the agentic capacities always already possessed by workers, which is not only about responding to crises and resisting capitalsâ continued encroachments on their lives, but also about inventing new socio-economic realities beyond them.
As made clear by recent experiences with worker-recuperated firms in Argentina and elsewhere â in such diverse places as Brazil, Uruguay, Greece, Italy, France, Spain, Turkey, South Korea, and in pockets of the United States and Canada â recurrent structural crises of the capitalist system offer moments of rupture18 that can potentially become openings for new experiments with workersâ control and self-management. Moments of systemic crises often raise the level of exploitation on shop floors and bring extra hardship to the daily lives of millions â augmented when orthodox economic gurus and neo-liberal governments try to counter crises with austerity. But moments of crises are also, history has shown, openings for possibilities for that âother worldâ that can seize the imaginary of the marginalised and working people, while putting in sharp relief already existing class distinctions and antagonisms.19
In the time it took to write this book, we have witnessed not only the continued growth of the ERT phenomenon in Argentina, throughout Latin America, and in other countries, but also the ongoing and broader mobilisations of âthose withoutâ and on âthe margins of societyâ,20 as working people, the marginalised, and the dispossessed creatively resist and begin to counter neo-liberal ideologies, policies, and practices. Take, for instance, the initial promises of Egyptâs Tahrir Square demonstrations and the Arab Spring of 2011; the situation of massive inequality brought to light by the Occupy Movement in 2011 and 2012; the rise of Spainâs Indignados against austerity in 2011; the Chilean, Brazilian, and Québec student movements against the neo-liberalisation of public education in 2012; Turkeyâs Taksim Square protests and Gezi Park occupation of 2013; the renewed wave of anti-austerity protests in Greece in 2014 and 2015; Hong Kongâs Umbrella Revolution sit-in street protests of 2014 demanding democratic participation and self-governance; and, more recently, Franceâs Nuit Debout movement and related mass protests against reforms to labour legislation that threaten to continue the precarisation of jobs and life; the Idle No More and the Standing Rock organising and resistance against continued imperialist-capitalist encroachments on Indigenous cultures and ways of life; and the growing wave of protests and organising in the US in the wake of President Donald Trumpâs misogynistic, racist, anti-immigrant, and anti-environmental policies. With all of these and in many other recent movements, protests, and revolts, occupations of public and private spaces have merged with actions of solidarity across social justice and identity groups while workers, students, Indigenous peoples, and the marginalised have taken to the streets en masse to demand and fight for better life conditions and an end to exorbitant income inequalities, political and state repression, cultural genocide, and neo-liberal austerity (the latter often most viscerally felt by working people as nothing less than economic repression). Peter Ranis has recently written that these contemporary mass revolts against neo-liberal injustices and recalcitrant state power show how peopleâs resistance from below develop
islands of political and economic autonomy that [draw] attention to what people can do on their own and for themselves. From many walks of life they [stand] up and [speak] with measured purpose and [are] heard.21
Inspired by the popular revolts of another era, Herbert Marcuse in a similar vein reminds us that social changes spawned by political and economic crises and the very struggles of the marginalised against power from above show how social transformation can begin through inventive and non-vanguardist forms of political expression âfrom belowâ and âfrom the marginsâ.22
In all of these moments of visceral struggles of the marginalised over work, life, and meaning, we again and again witness the working class in a state of unmaking and remaking.23 For workers, it is often during moments of broader crises of the status quo economic system or micro-economic crises on shop floors when their circumstances of exploitation, emerging from out of the internal contradictions inherent to capitalist society, become obvious.24 And in the thick of crisis moments, through solidary acts of refusal and reinvention, these circumstances can begin to give way, imaginatively and practically, to new possibilities for working and living. As Michael Lebowitz25 and Maurizio Atzeni26 have argued, the exploitative nature of the capitalist labour process can be made excruciatingly visible to workers as egregious violations of the wage-labour contract when work intensifies, salaries fall, and redundancies increase. Workersâ initially spontaneous self-defensive responses spawned by need can eventually lead to them consciously organising to overcome their exploitation, generating in the process another reality for themselves, their families, and surrounding communities. At times, as with Argentinaâs ERTâ¯s, collective memories and traditions of past working-class militancy also re-emerge during these moments and combine with new modes of collective action that compel new generations of working people to propose and struggle for different socio-economic circumstances. And this can begin with the seizure of the very sites of continued capitalist exploitation: the workplace.
For many in the movements of the exploited and the marginalised over the past two decades, their struggles for self-determination have extended beyond reactive protests and revolts to include, as with Argentinaâs ERTâ¯s, actual proposals and practices for alternatively organising work and economic activity. As we will see throughout this book, ERTâ¯s highlight workersâ ongoing capacities to both engage in direct responses to capitalist enclosures and exploitations and invent socio-economic alternatives beyond them. Argentinaâs experiences with ERTâ¯s, I argue, bring to light the potential for working people to create another socio-economic reality â a potential, I suggest, that exists at the heart of working-class initiatives. These initiatives are rooted in the working classâs creative force that can be unleashed at the right conjunctural moment. For Argentinaâs ERT workers, that moment arrived with the countryâs deep crisis of its neo-liberal model at the turn of the millennium. And it is a story that is still unfolding.
Why I Wrote This Book
Without doubt, this project has been a personal journey for me. Born in Quilmes, Argentina in 1970 to a family of working-class Italian immigrants on both sides, I grew up in Canada, immigrating to Vancouver, BC with my parents when I was five. Growing up in multiple cultures â that of Italo-Argentines at home and as an English-speaking Canadian outside of the home â I have always desired to know better where I come from and who I am in the midst of what has been a polyglot existence.
I was taken by Argentinaâs empresas recuperadas early on in my PhD studies in the Graduate Program in Social and Political Thought at York University in Toronto. In the mid-2000s, when I began to work with and study them, the empresas recuperadas made up a radical labour and social movement in bloom in the midst of a still-smouldering post-2001 Argentina. What particularly struck me at the beginning of my engagement with ERTâ¯s â besides the audacity of workers taking over their former places of employment â was that a fair number of them emerged from the metallurgic and construction sectors, and that many of them were also located in the southern suburbs of Buenos Aires, the heavily working-class and immigrant-based region where I had spent the first five years of my life. This resonated with me. My grandfather on my fathersâ side, who immigrated from the northern Italian town of Forno Canavese in the province of Torino to the industrial city of Avellaneda just to the south of the city of Buenos Aires as a young child in the early 1920s, eventually became a welder and a member of the Argentine steelworkersâ union, the Unión Obrera Metalúrgica (UOM, Metalurgical Workersâ Union). I soon discovered that this was one of the few unions that actively supported Argentinaâs ERTâ¯s early on â especially in the Avellaneda and Quilmes suburbs of Buenos Aires, exactly where my family had immigrated to from Italy and where I was born. My grandfather on my motherâs side was, amongst many other things, a mason and carpenter, occupations also taken up by ERTâ¯s. My motherâs father had arrived in Argentina from Lanciano, Italy in 1950 when then-president Juán Domingo Perónâs administration was promoting a new wave of immigration of skilled workers from Europe to Argentina. Four years later, my grandfather would bring the rest of his family, including my mother, to join him in Quilmes (a typical Italian immigrant story of the early-to-mid twentieth century). And my father has worked in the automotive sector most of his life, starting out as an elevator repair apprentice in Argentina at the age of 12 in order to provide for his family after the early death of his father, and soon learning the craft of auto body repair, which still occupied him in his formal working hours until he retired in early 2017.
This research project has thus offered me an opportunity to return, intellectually and autobiographically, to my origins, a project I had wanted to engage in since my early 20s. The project eventually merged into my own personal journey of radicalisation that began to grow in the late 1990s and early 2000s. As I travelled throughout Latin America on several trips during this period, I began to become deeply disappointed with the inequalities and social divisions that were plainly visible â inequities intrinsic to the neo-liberal capitalist system that has had such a tumultuous passage throughout the region in recent decades. Increasingly in my academic studies, I began to explore why it is that our world is possessed of so much inequality, oppression, and poverty when we have at hand, technologically speaking, the capacity to overcome scarcity and reduce the perpetuation of âtoil, aggressiveness, misery, and injusticeâ for all, as Marcuse put it in One Dimensional Man in 1964.27 As I embarked on my MA work at Simon Fraser University and immediately thereafter my PhD studies at York University, where I read critical theory, Marxist and anarchist analyses, and Latin American history, I began to understand more deeply how the capitalist reordering of our planet has had much to do with these inequalities and injustices.
This research project has encouraged me to merge these autobiographical dimensions with my desire to understand better why these inequities have taken such deep root in Argentina in recent years. Why had Argentina, at the expense of the wellbeing of so many of its people, embarked on such a sharp turn to neo-liberalism in the 1990s? Why had many of its people â including my extended family in Argentina â suffered so much in the eventual, if temporary, collapse of the model in the late 1990s and early 2000s? And why was it that so many Argentines had not stood by idly but had, instead, gone to great lengths to restart their lives via myriad experiments in solidarity-based socio-economic arrangements and direct democracy? My turn to historical materialism, critical theory, the sociology of work, the philosophy of technology, political economy, and Argentine and Latin American history during my MA and PhD studies provided me with a critical intellectual foundation from which to begin to answer these questions. And this foundation has helped me better understand the particularity of Argentinaâs recent history and political economy from macro- and micro-sociological perspectives. The ERT phenomenon was, I began to realise, a rich terrain of study for both satiating my personal interests and responding to my radicalisation while engaging and working with a social movement that seemed to be illustrating vividly how workers themselves, despite continued crises and stubborn hierarchies of power and exploitation, were taking their social, economic, and productive lives into their own hands. Here then, with Argentinaâs ERTâ¯s, was a chance to contribute to a project where I could help disseminate the experiences and stories of workers attempting to overcome much hardship in their professional and personal lives, assist in articulating a contemporary instance of working-class recomposition and self-activity, and be passionate enough about the field of study to sustain me throughout the years it took to work on and complete this book.
This text is the outcome of this intellectual, political, and autobiographical journey that continues still for me as faculty in the Program in Adult Education and Community Development at the University of Torontoâs Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE/UT). It is my deepest hope that the book has done justice to the stories and experiences of the workers and activists who helped me write it with their stories and their time. The validation of this project by the ERT workers with whom I have shared parts of this book begins to set me at ease in this regard.
Marcelo Vieta
Buenos Aires and Toronto
November 2016âMay 2017
Gorz 1982.
Allman 2007, p. 74 (emphasis in original).
Paulo Freire termed this critical awareness, or âcritical consciousnessâ, the âconscientizaçãoâ of the âsocial, political, and economic contradictionsâ of oneâs historical and material situation, which includes âtak[ing] action against the oppressive elements of realityâ (Freire 1970, pp. 35, 109).
See, for instance, Cohen 2015; Doob 2013; Glenn 2009; Piketty 2014; Stiglitz 2012; and Wilkinson and Pickett 2010.
Unless indicated, all translations in this book are the authorâs.
By capitalist firms, capitalist businesses, or capitalist enterprises, I mean businesses driven mainly by the pursuit of profits (rather than social aims), that hire wage-labour, that extract surplus-value from the work conducted by employees, and that are organised by exclusionary forms of ownership and administrative control whereby employees have no or little say in decision-making, strategic planning, or in constituting the ownership and administration of the firm.
See Kennard and Caistor-Arendar 2016; Lewkowicz 2016; Palomino, Bleynat, Garro, and Giacomuzzi 2010; Ranis 2016; Ruggeri 2016; and Ruggeri and Vieta 2015.
Fajn 2003; Magnani 2009; Palomino 2003; Ranis 2016; Vieta and Ruggeri 2009.
Ruggeri 2016; Ruggeri, Antivero, Elena, Polti, et al. 2014. See also Chapter 2.
Palomino 2003; Rebón 2007; Vieta 2010a, 2014b.
The Kirchner years (2003â15) have been understood as forming part of the broader tendency of the âpink tideâ of left-leaning, neo-developmentalist, and anti-Washington Consensus governments across Latin America that emerged throughout the first decade of the 2000s (see Kozloff 2008; Pozzi and Nigra 2015a, 2015b; Schuster 2008; Spronk and Webber 2014; and Wylde 2011).
See Chapter 2. As will be discussed there, the rate of creation of new ERTâ¯s would diminish and plateau between 2004 and 2010 due to various factors, including better economic conditions and the return to more traditional forms of union organising and representation as outlets for workersâ demands.
The âsocial and solidarity economyâ, known in the global North mostly as the âsocial economyâ or the âthird sectorâ, encompasses economic practices and organisations that are primarily driven by social aims rather than private gain (see, for example, McMurtry 2010; Quarter, Mook, and Armstrong 2009). ERTâ¯s can indeed be considered social and solidarity economy organisations, in particular due to their main objectives of securing jobs, their cooperative structures, and the community development projects that many of them take on.
Antunes 2013; Atzeni 2010; Bell and Cleaver 2002; Burawoy 1985; Lebowitz 2003; Marx 1967; Vieta 2014b.
Antunes 2013, pp. 80â95.
Allman 2007, p. 9. See also Thompson 1963.
Thompson 1963, pp. 9, 11. See also Allman 2007, pp. 8â10, 74.
Bell and Cleaver 2002.
Vieta 2016a, 2016b, 2017.
Zibechi 2012, p. 61. For Zibechi, groups âon the margins of societyâ are those that are either excluded or left out of the rights and privileges promised by liberal states. For him, âthose withoutâ are people on the margins âwithout homes, without land, without work, without rightsâ (Ibid).
Ranis 2016, p. 34.
Marcuse 1969, p. 87. See also Vieta, 2016a, 2016b, 2017.
My conceptualisation of the unmaking and remaking of the working class draws on the work of E.P. Thompson (1963) and notions of working-class composition, decomposition, and recompositon developed by other Marxist thinkers such as Negri 1988, 1991, 2005; Thompson 1963; Tronti 1973; Virno 2004; Wright 2010; and Wright 2002.
McNally 1993, p. 153. See also Atzeni 2010; Atzeni and Vieta 2014; and Bell and Cleaver 2002.
Lebowitz 2003.
Atzeni 2010.
Marcuse 1964, p. 5.