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	Stories from Argentina’s Worker-Run Factories by Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis New Statesman/UK   September 2, 2007   On 19 March 2003, we were on the roof of the Zanón ceramic tile factory, filming an interview with Cepillo. He was showing us how the workers fended off eviction by armed police, defending their democratic workplace with slingshots and the little ceramic balls normally used to pound the Patagonian clay into raw material for tiles. His aim was impressive. It was the day the bombs started falling on Baghdad.As journalists, we had to ask ourselves what we were doing there. What possible relevance could there be in this one factory at the southernmost tip of South America, with its band of radical workers and its David and Goliath narrative, when bunker-busting apocalypse was descending on Iraq?   But we, like so many others, had been drawn to Argentina to witness first-hand an explosion of activism in the wake of its 2001 crisis - a host of dynamic new social movements that were not only advancing a bitter critique of the economic model that had destroyed their country, but were busily building local alternatives in the rubble.   There were many popular responses to the crisis, from neighbourhood assemblies and barter clubs to resurgent left-wing parties and mass movements of the unemployed, but we spent most of our year in Argentina with workers in “recovered companies”.   Almost entirely under the media radar, workers in Argentina have been responding to rampant unemployment and capital flight by taking over businesses that have gone bankrupt and reopening them under democratic worker management. It is an old idea reclaimed and retrofitted for a brutal new time.   The principles are so simple, so elementally fair, that they seem more self-evident than radical when articulated by one of the workers: “We formed the co-operative with the criteria of equal wages and making basic decisions by assembly; we are against the separation of manual and intellectual work; we want a rotation of positions and, above all, the ability to recall our elected leaders.”   The movement of recovered companies is not epic in scale - some 170 companies, around 10,000 workers in Argentina. But six years on, and unlike some of the country’s other new movements, it has survived and continues to build quiet strength in the midst of the country’s deeply unequal “recovery”. Its tenacity is a function of its pragmatism: this is a movement that is based on action, not talk. And its defining action, reawakening the means of production under worker control, while loaded with potent symbolism, is anything but symbolic. It is feeding families, rebuilding shattered pride, and opening a window of powerful possibility.   Like a number of other emerging social movements around the world, the workers in the recovered companies are rewriting the script for how change is supposed to happen. Rather than following anyone’s ten-point plan for revolution, the workers are darting ahead of the theory - at least, straight to the part where they get their jobs back. In Argentina, the theorists are chasing after the factory workers, trying to analyse what is already in noisy production.   These struggles have had a tremendous impact on the imaginations of activists around the world. At this point, there are many more starry-eyed grad papers on the phenomenon than there are recovered companies. But there is also a renewed interest in democratic workplaces from Durban to Melbourne to New Orleans.   That said, the movement in Argentina is as much a product of the globalisation of alternatives as it is one of its most con tagious stories. Argentinian workers borrowed the slogan “Occupy, Resist, Produce” from Latin America’s largest social movement, Brazil’s Movimiento Sin Terra, in which more than a million people have reclaimed unused land and put it back into community production. One worker told us that what the movement in Argentina is doing is “MST for the cities”. In South Africa, we saw a protester’s T-shirt with an even more succinct summary of this new impatience: “Stop Asking, Start Taking”.   The movement in Argentina is frustrating to some on the left who feel it is not clearly anti-capitalist, those who chafe at how comfortably it exists within the market economy and see worker management as merely a new form of auto-exploitation. Others see co-operativism, the legal form chosen by the vast majority of the recovered companies, as a capitulation in itself - insisting that only full national isation by the state can bring worker democracy into a broader socialist project.   Workers in the movement are generally suspicious of being co-opted to anyone’s political agenda, but at the same time cannot afford to turn down any support. More interesting by far is to see how workers in this movement are politicised by the struggle, which begins with the most basic imperative: Workers want to work, to feed their families.   Some of the most powerful new working-class leaders in Argentina today discovered solidarity on a path that started from that essentially apolitical point. Whether you think the movement’s lack of a leading ideology is a tragic weakness or a refreshing strength, the recovered companies challenge capitalism’s most cherished ideal: the sanctity of private property.   The legal and political case for worker control in Argentina does not only rest on the unpaid wages, evaporated benefits and emptied-out pension funds. The workers make a sophisticated case for their moral right to property - in this case, the machines and physical premises - based not just on what they are owed personally, but what society is owed. The recovered companies propose themselves as an explicit remedy to all the corporate welfare, corruption and other forms of public subsidy the owners enjoyed in the process of bankrupting their firms and moving their wealth to safety, abandoning whole communities to economic exclusion.   This argument is, of course, available for immediate use in the United States and Europe. But this story goes much deeper than corporate welfare, and that’s where the Argentinian experience will really resonate with us. It has become axiomatic on the left to say that Argentina’s crash was a direct result of the IMF orthodoxy imposed on the country with such enthusiasm in the neoliberal 1990s. In their book Sin Patrón: Stories from Argentina’s Worker-Run Factories, to which this essay forms the introduction, the Lavaca Collective makes clear that in Argentina, just as in the US occupation of Iraq, those bromides about private sector efficiency were nothing more than a cover story for an explosion of frontier-style plunder - looting on a massive scale by a small group of elites.   Privatisation, deregulation, labour flexibility: these were the tools to facilitate a massive transfer of public wealth to private hands, not to mention private debts to the public purse. Like Enron traders, the businessmen who haunt the pages of this book learned the first lesson of capitalism and stopped there: Greed is good, and more greed is better. As one Argentinian worker says: “There are guys that wake up in the morning thinking about how to screw people, and others who think: how do we rebuild this Argentina that they have torn apart?”   In the answer to that question, you can read a powerful story of transformation. Capitalism produces and distributes not just goods and services, but identities. When the capital and its carpetbaggers had flown from Argentina, what was left was not only companies that had been emptied, but a whole hollowed-out country filled with people whose identities - as workers - had been stripped away as well. As one of the organisers in the movement wrote to us: “It is a huge amount of work to recover a company. But the real work is to recover a worker and that is the task that we have just begun.”   On 17 April 2003, we were on Avenida Jujuy in Buenos Aires, standing with the Brukman workers and a huge crowd of their supporters in front of a fence, behind which was a small army of police guarding the Brukman factory. After a brutal eviction, the workers were determined to get back to work at their sewing machines.   In Washington, DC, that day, USAID announced that it had chosen Bechtel Corporation as the prime contractor for the reconstruction of Iraq’s architecture. The heist was about to begin in earnest, both in the United States and in Iraq. Deliberately induced crisis was providing the cover for the transfer of billions of tax dollars to a handful of politically connected corporations.   In Argentina, they’d already seen this movie - the wholesale plunder of public wealth, the explosion of unemployment, the shredding of the social fabric, the staggering human consequences. And 52 seamstresses were in the street, backed by thousands of others, trying to take back what was already theirs. It was definitely the place to be.   (In 2004, Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis released “The Take“, a film about worker-run factories in Argentina.This essay is an edited extract from their introduction to “Sin Patrón: Stories from Argentina’s Worker-Run Factories“, written by the Lavaca Collective).
	The planet"s new bankers by Frédéric Lemaître Le Monde France   28 August 2007   July 2005: French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin preached "economic patriotism." From London to Brussels, the condemnations were unanimous. August 2007: German Chancellor Angela Merkel announces a proposed law to "preserve national interests in the face of problematic foreign investments." Nobody is offended by it. Why the difference? Because in two years the perception of globalization has changed.   For two decades, globalization has rhymed with liberalization and privatization. That"s over, or very nearly so. Tomorrow, by a strange reversal of the situation, globalization will rhyme more and more with nationalizations. With one important new detail: companies will no longer be the property of the State in which they were created, but will belong to the planet"s new bankers: notably China, Russia, Norway and the Gulf States.   In fact, thanks to the rise in raw material prices or their trade surpluses, these countries have money. Lots of money. For a long time, they were content to manage it paternally, especially by buying US Treasury Bonds. Then, observing that the stock market offered a better return over the long run, a number of these countries acquired stocks, taking shares here and there in private companies. They went from being lenders to becoming owners.   But, often minority shareholders: they did not interfere in management and settled for collecting their dividends. In this way, the Norwegian government pension fund, which manages a trifling 300 billion dollar (219.5 billion Euros) portfolio, is a shareholder in about 90 French companies, but never holds more than about 1 percent of the shares of any of them.   That could become the exception. The Dubai investment fund just acquired 9.5 percent of MGM Mirage, billionaire Kirk Kerkorian"s company, which owns a third of the casinos and half the hotel rooms in Las Vegas. Through its different subsidiaries, the same investment fund owns 3.12 percent of EADS. It does not hesitate to oppose the Swedish authorities in order to buy up OMX, one of Northern Europe"s stock exchanges. The Qatar fund, for its part, is ready to spend 24 billion dollars to acquire the British supermarket chain Sainsbury.   These funds are not a novelty: the Emirate of Kuwait created its own in 1960. Temasek, the Singapore fund, was created in 1974. But their rise in power and emerging activism change the landscape. According to a recent study by Morgan Stanley, these public investment funds (called "sovereign") which today manage around 2,500 billion dollars - a third of which comes from the United Arab Emirates alone - could, as of 2015, be managing 12,500 billion dollars!   In Russia, a "Fund for Future Generations" will be launched February 1, 2008. Endowed each year with about 40 billion dollars derived from oil and gas manna, it will go shopping abroad, as Gazprom tried to do by attempting to acquire Centrica, the principal British gas distributor.   But it"s China that worries people the most. On the strength of its gigantic foreign exchange reserves (around 1,200 billion dollars), Beijing has announced that a public investment fund would devote about 300 billion dollars a year to foreign investments. An absolute record in international relations.   Recalculated in current dollars, according to experts, the Marshall Plan launched by the United States to rebuild Europe after 1945 would amount to about 100 billion dollars. With 300 billion a year, China could, for example, buy all the French companies that comprise the CAC 40 within five years.   Beijing already created a sensation in June by acquiring 10 percent of the powerful American investment fund Blackstone - shareholder in many companies, notably Deutsche Telekom - for three billion dollars.   Suddenly, the West has begun to wonder. In the name of liberalism and free circulation of capital, must foreign States be allowed to do their shopping and purchase Western technologies? Apart from the Norwegian fund, the other sovereign funds have a frequently opaque management and are, in fact, the secular arms of their governments. In an interview granted to the daily Handelsblatt in July, Angela Merkel did not hide the substance of her thinking: "The question is to know whether the shareholding acquisition of a fund endowed with public money is not tied to the desire to exercise political influence."   Germany is not the only one to worry. The United States, so happy that the Chinese lend it money, is not so pleased by China"s acquisitions. After blocking the purchase of the oil company Chevron by the China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) and the acquisition of five ports by the Dubai fund, Washington decided at the beginning of this year to strengthen the role of the committee charged with controlling foreign investments in sensitive sectors (transport, telecommunications, energy, health).   When the buyer is all or partly controlled by a foreign State, that committee will have 45 days to study the case. There is an obligation to consult the director of national intelligence and to inform Congress of the result of those investigations. The secretaries of state, the Treasury and national security must give their approval.   A sign of the change that has occurred in the last two years: although he seems to deplore the German initiative, the British European trade commissioner, Peter Mandelson, envisages creating a "European golden share."   Even the International Monetary Fund is getting into the act. Its next annual meeting in October will focus on sovereign investment funds liable, according to one of its directors, to threaten "global stability." That"s also the opinion of Morgan Stanley, which deems that the tensions between emerging and developed countries on this question could "undermine globalization."   The West will have much to do in order not to be accused of latent racism. The opacity of sovereign funds is no greater than that of hedge and investment funds. And if they are the armed branches of their governments, one could not swear that certain American or European groups do not play an equivalent role in their respective countries.   On this issue, the West is consequently on the defensive for good and for certain. That would be normal: for the first time, it"s no longer the West that holds the strings to the stock exchange.
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