Introduction

This path that we have begun to travel on together is an historic challenge. We need to take up this challenge with the best that we have in order to strengthen over time the idea that we workers are indeed capable of forging a future where a social economy is the considered reality. Yet, we need to always keep in mind that we came from a dark night where egoism, fear, and ignorance marked [the other] path towards the abyss. Since the beginning of time rebels have emerged, rebels ready to search out other destinies and change directions so that fraternity and reason mould the soul of the new person. Hugo Cabrera and Gabriel Rojas1 ∵

1 Neo-liberal Crisis, Popular Revolt, and Autogestión

On 19 and 20 December 2001 Argentina became the site of a massive popular uprising that brought the economic and political crisis of its neo-liberal experiment to a breaking point. With a broad cross-section of the population rising momentarily in unison during these days and the weeks that followed, banging pots and pans, occupying streets and plazas, and chanting ‘¡Qué se vayan todos, que no quede ni uno sólo!’ (‘Everyone [in the political and economic establishment] must leave now, let not even one stay!’), the collective scream of popular fury radiating from Argentina resonated throughout the world in a rejoinder to diminished economic prospects, dwindling political voice, frozen bank accounts, lost jobs, heightened government corruption, and rapidly rising poverty. Throughout December 2001 the nation experienced escalating social turmoil and in the week or so following the 19 and 20 December events went through five presidents in quick succession.2 In the subsequent months, with a devalued peso and in the wake of what was at the time the largest national debt

1 Cabrera and Rojas n.d., p. 1 (Curso básico sobre cooperativas de trabajo). 2 These five presidents included: the fall of Fernando de la Rúa, three short-lived interim pres- idencies following the line of succession, and the eventual congressional appointment of Eduardo Duhalde as caretaker president.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2020 | doi:10.1163/9789004268951_002 2 introduction default in history, Argentina’s social and economic crisis worsened to unpre- cedented levels as unemployment soared and poverty engulfed around half of its population. Between December 2001 and mid-2003, the country meandered from the collapse of Fernando de la Rúa’s presidency (1999–2001),3 to relative political stabilisation (but continued socio-economic instability) by the end of 2002 under the caretaker administration of President Eduardo Duhalde4 (2002–3), to the restitution of relative social peace and eventual economic steadying with the nationalist-developmentalist policies of President Néstor Kirchner’s administration beginning in 2003. In response to the prolonged crisis and the eventual blighting of the lives of millions of Argentina’s working people – instigated in no small part by the government of President Carlos Menem’s (1989–99) earlier acquiescence to IMF-sanctioned deregulation, privatisation, and austerity – already by the mid- to-late 1990s myriad spaces for social and economic renewal from below were being created by organised movements of the unemployed, neighbourhood assemblies, housing and human-rights groups, and the empresas recuperadas por sus trabajadores (ERTs, worker-recuperated enterprises5) – the group at the heart of this book.6 Through community-based projects centred on values of social justice, a desire for economic self-reliance, and practices of direct democracy and horizontal organising – all of which stood in stark contrast to neo-liberal values and practices of individualism, consumerism, and free mar- ket competition that had dominated Argentina throughout the 1990s – these bottom-up movements managed to directly address the inability of the country’s traditional institutions to contain record levels of socio-economic exclu- sion and poverty.7 Argentina’s empresas recuperadas thus predate the social and political up- heavals of what became known as el Argentinazo of 19 and 20 December 2001. The contemporary phenomenon of workers’ recuperations of workplaces began to slowly emerge some years before, during the first signs of the neo-

3 De la Rúa was the Unión Cívica Radical (UCR) politician who had led the coalition-based administration that, despite its initial opposition to menemismo, had paradoxically continued most of the neo-liberal policies of the preceding regime of President Carlos Menem. 4 Before his brief Senate-appointed caretaker presidency, Peronist politician Eduardo Duhalde had been Menem’s first vice-president (1989–91) and then governor of the province of Buenos Aires (1991–9). 5 Also called empresas recuperadas por los trabajadores (enterprises recuperated by the workers). 6 Pozzi and Nigra 2015b; Svampa and Pereyra 2004; Zibechi 2012. 7 Castro Soto 2008; Damill 2005; Palomino 2003, 2005; Pozzi and Nigra 2015a, 2015b.