ARGENTINE WORKER COOPERATIVES in CIVIL SOCIETY: a CHALLENGE to CAPITAL–LABOR RELATIONS Wusa 273 77..106

Workingusa The Journal of Labor and Society ARGENTINE WORKER COOPERATIVES IN CIVIL SOCIETY: A CHALLENGE TO CAPITAL–LABOR RELATIONS wusa_273 77..106 Peter Ranis The worker-recuperated enterprise and worker cooperative movements in Argentina raise fundamental theoretical and practical questions that not only implicate the Argentine political economy but also redound on workers confronted with outsourcing, downsizing, and arbitrary decisions by owners and managers of capitalist enterprises. The Argentine workers so engaged represent a dramatic confrontation between the rights of private property and the labor rights of the working class faced with unemployment and poverty. These examples of worker autonomy have demonstrated significant departures in terms of social formations. By their capacity to form alliances with progressive legal, community, political, and labor forces available to them, they represent an alternative path to economic development that is predicated on worker solidarity and democracy in the workplace. These conflictual visions of civil society are contested in the legal-constitutional, political-institutional, and ideological-cultural arenas. Contemporary Argentine industrial and enterprise worker cooperatives were essentially born in the run up to and during the massive popular societal demonstrations of December 2001. They owe much of their momentum to the social and economic crisis that offered little alternative to laborers and employees but unemployment and poverty. Factory and enterprise bankruptcies and employer abandonment of places of work forced the laborers and employees to seek the redress of their grievances. One of the measures to which they turned, inspired by two prominent worker organizations, was the formation of worker cooperatives that are sanctioned by historical Argentine law. Forming cooperatives became only the first step in often long legal, community, and political struggles that gave the workers temporary rights to reenter the factories and enterprises and initiate or continue production and services. What follows is an appraisal of the capacity of Argentine worker cooperatives to maintain alternative norms of producing under capitalist economic constraints while providing an ongoing critique of traditional capitalist modes of workplace organization. The Argentine worker cooperatives are not movements that have been able to mount a collective insurgency that would inspire one to recall the Paris Commune of 1871. Then workers for several weeks sought to turn factories into democratically run enterprises throughout Paris in the latter days of the French WorkingUSA: The Journal of Labor and Society · 1089-7011 · Volume 13 · March 2010 · pp. 77–105 © Copyright the Author Journal Compilation © 2010 Immanuel Ness and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 78 WORKINGUSA: THE JOURNAL OF LABOR AND SOCIETY defeat at the hands of the Prussian armies and the creation of the Third Repub- lic. In those heady days of revolutionary struggle, the Paris Commune was elaborating a plan to turn all of Paris’s factories and workshops that had been closed by their employers into an amalgamation of one large cooperative network. Of course, these decisions were made in the context of a revolutionary culture, temporary as it was, that sought to change the organs of indirect, parliamentary democracy for direct worker-led municipal councils, universal suffrage, the right of recall of elected representatives, and a whole host of deep structural changes that were, within seven short weeks, aborted by the admin- istrative, political, and military powers of the national government at Versailles (Marx 1998). Although Argentina experienced the heady days of 2002 when the watch words were “Que se vayan todos” (“get rid of them all”), referring to the economic and political powers that be, the resultant caretaker policies of acting president Eduardo Duhalde and return of a Peronist to office in 2003 restored Argentine “normalcy.” The opening for a revolutionary change was, in retro- spect, short-lived, and the return to liberal politics dampened hopes for a spontaneous proliferation of worker cooperatives. The Argentine society after the crisis of 2001–2002, and particularly after the elections (2003, 2007) of presidents Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner from a newly formed Peronist coalition, Frente por la Victoria, has returned to the fold of a liberal democracy, and thus the possibility of forms of working-class power, autonomy, or special access have been marginalized. Civil society has always been a contested and troublesome terrain. Workers, although an overwhelming societal majority, have, throughout history, been unable to achieve political change that offered them advantages befitting their numbers and their contribution to the health and welfare of that same society. This has been amply perceived since the dawn of industrial capitalism. For example, for Hegel, civil society was a combination of the forces of individual desires dominated by economic interests. These needed to be refashioned and mediated by the moral code of the state. As he wrote, “[civil society]...isinthorough-going dependence on caprice and external accident, and is held in check by the power of universality. In these contrasts and their complexity, civil society affords a spectacle of extravagance and want as well as of the physical and ethical degen- eration common to them both” (Hegel 1942, 123). Marx, coming out of this Hegelian vision of civil society, was among the earliest analysts to fully encap- sulate the material nature of civil society as divorced from the principles of political society and the claims of citizenship. In On the Jewish Question, Marx depicted the duality of the civil society where bourgeois self-interested motiva- tions predominate and where people behave largely as individuals pursuing their personal and family interests. On the other hand, political society represents the mythic individual in whom community in citizenship triumphs over material concerns. In the spirit of Thomas Hobbes, Marx saw civil society as predomi- nantly a “war of all against all.” The public persona was transmuted into the private aggrandizing individual (Marx 1978a). In this struggle it has always gone badly for the working class. RANIS: ARGENTINE WORKER COOPERATIVES IN CIVIL SOCIETY 79 The Post-Rebellion Argentine Context Marx’s notion of “species being in community with other men” falls by the wayside as economic man inevitably triumphs. And high on that list of self- interest is the defense of private property so critical to John Locke’s view of civil society. This became for the Argentine workers their most serious obstacle in recovering the factories and enterprises to which they had devoted many years of their lives. Once in default, the Argentine bankruptcy laws favor the primacy of creditors and the rapid auctioning of the factory or enterprise, its machinery, furnishings, and supplies. It is at this point in the commercial litigation that the worker organizations and their lawyers, representing the locked-out workers, commence proceedings that allow for the worker cooperatives to temporarily occupy the factories in lieu of compensation for lost wages and benefits because at the time of the auction, as secondary creditors after the primacy of banking creditors, they would be assured often but 5 percent of what was owed them. It is a strategy that seeks to protect the basic property, machinery, patents, and copyrights from the auctioneer’s gavel. The Argentine community of civil rights groups, the residue of the once prominent neighborhood assemblies, the imme- diate neighbors surrounding the factory or enterprise, assorted groups of unem- ployed workers who were picketing (piqueteros), university and secondary school students, human rights groups, and several small leftist political parties have all at one time or another pitched in to lend their support to the workers to prevent their ouster from their jobs and livelihood. The essence of community-based citizenship, which Marx described, becomes the means by which portions of society necessarily come to the aid of workers exercising their essential task of earning a living (Marx 1978a). This is made absolutely necessary in Argentine society where the balance of interests is tilted so strongly in favor of powerful economic interests with their predominant control over both capital and the state. Thus, in Argentine civil society, the prerequisites for and commitment to a just legal and economic order are still so distant that incredible efforts must be marshaled to attain the most minimal rights for the vast bulk of the working class. Marx correctly envisioned that existing civil society would be dominated by production and commerce and that these entities would be the chief concern of the state (Marx 1978b). Despite these historical and contemporary obstacles, the Argentine worker- occupied factories and enterprises represent a novel on-the-ground departure among social movements. They have the authenticity to flourish, embedded as they are in the survival responses of workers and the moral authority of main- taining national production through working-class employment. The 1990s, under the Carlos Menem presidency, had dramatically accentuated the devas- tating deindustrialization in Argentina that began during the military regime of 1976–1983. Within the first several years of his government, the country sold at bargain-basement prices the national enterprises of petroleum,

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