Date: Thu, 14 Nov 2002 12:33:47 -0600
From: John Holloway <johnholloway-AT-prodigy.net.mx>
Subject: Re: AUT: The Economist: Under Workers' Control - Argentina


> THIS MESSAGE IS IN MIME FORMAT. Since your mail reader does not understand
this format, some or all of this message may not be legible.

--MS_Mac_OE_3120122027_1606931_MIME_Part

Please, not Petras, not on Argentina. What is happening is much too
important.
I think the point about the occupied factories is that, while taken on their
own they may not pose a threat to capital, in the context of the general
social upheaval in Argentina (the asambleas barriales, the occupations of
houses, supermarkets, hospitals, factories, the piqueteros), the huge
discontent and (increasingly) people's determination to take things into
their own hands, they are part of a very exciting and important movement.
This, for the first time, is Zapatismo in the cities. 

    I append a short, light piece I just wrote for a Greek student magazine

    John

Argentina Today: =A1Que se Vayan Todos!

John Holloway


"Yo sue=F1o con eso, que mis hijos y los hijos de mis compa=F1eros puedan
descubrir esto, de encontrar una forma de vida ac=E1, de dejar los vicios all=E1
afuera. De dejar de ser depresivos, de volcarse al alcohol y a la vagancia
que nos da el sistema y poder encontrar esa forma nueva de hacer pol=EDtica,
sin partidos pol=EDticos." 

["I dream of this, that my children and the children of my comrades could
discover this, could find a way of life here, leave the vices outside. Leave
becoming depressive, turning to the alcohol and the vagrancy that the system
gives us and that they could find this new form of making politics, without
political parties."]

It was a young woman who was talking. It was Sunday afternoon, in Solano, a
poor neighbourhood on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. I was in a meeting with
a group of about forty piqueteros of all ages. 

The piqueteros are groups of unemployed workers. With the rate of
unemployment at about 50%, many of the unemployed in Argentina are using
their unemployment as a basis for organising and struggling for a better
society. Starting in about 1995, the unemployed began to develop a new form
of struggle - the road block. They go out en masse and block the road - the
main highways or the accesses to the cities - and refuse to move until the
government gives in to their demands, for better services, more subsidies,
whatever it is. The centre of their demands is often the Work Plans, the job
creation schemes under which the government pays a very basic wage to the
unemployed who do certain jobs.

When the piqueteros of Solano take to the streets, there are about a
thousand of them - and this is just one neighbourhood in the city. They do
not demand money to do boring, meaningless jobs, but to do work that they
want to do, that they consider important, "genuine work" as they call it. It
took them a year of struggle to win the right to decide themselves what
should be done with the money and the work. Now, when they win a certain
number of Work Plans, they meet and decide what the priorities are for the
neighbourhood - keeping it clean, repairing the schools, rebuilding the
house of a neighbour after it had been burnt down, running a bakery, a
clothes workshop, a dining hall. All of this is part of the struggle to take
their lives in their own hands, without waiting for the state or capital to
solve their problems, because they know that that will not happen. The
piqueteros of Solana are unemployed, but they do not think of that as a bad
thing. They do not want to go back to being exploited. They like to think of
themselves not as unemployed workers but as autonomous workers. 

The terrible economic crisis, which has lasted now for more than four years
and which has seen the peso drop in the last year from being equal to the
dollar to being worth less than 30 US cents, has brought great poverty to
the country, but the piqueteros of Solano do not want to restore capitalism
but to create something new. As another woman in the meeting put it, "desde
esa miseria absoluta en que nos han sumergido, y de ese arrebato de la
dignidad que intentaron hacer con todos los trabajadores, lo que estamos
haciendo es construir  desde esa miseria, las bases tal vez, y tal vez suena
muy alto, las bases de una nueva sociedad. De una sociedad que va naciendo y
que pueda crecer con dignidad desde abajo. Desde la miseria pero digna,
libre, independiente."
["from this absolute poverty in which they have submerged us, from this
taking away of our dignity that they tried to impose on all the workers,
what we are doing is building from this poverty the bases perhaps - and
perhaps it sounds very fancy - the bases of a new society. Of a society
which is being born and which can grow with dignity from below. From
poverty, but with dignity, free, independent."]

And it is not just the piqueteros in Solana. The whole country is in uproarOn the 19th and 20th of December last year, the people took to the streets
in spontaneous protest against the government's policies, banging saucepans
and marching to the centre of Buenos Aires. Despite using police repression,
the president fell. The continuing cacerolazos brought forced the substitute
president out after about a week. The people formed neighbourhood councils
(asambleas barriales) in the different neighbourhoods of Buenos Aires and
the other big cities. In recent months the neighbourhood councils have moved
beyond discussing and protesting to more direct forms of action, occupying
houses, abandoned hospitals and banks, using them as meeting places,
cultural centres, places for the homeless to stay, organising alternative
schools and cheap health care. In Rosario, when a big supermarket closed
down a year ago, the workers first picketed the door for their wages, then
occupied the building, turning it into a cultural centre and meeting place
for the left, then opening a popular supermarket where they sell, among
other things, the pasta produced in a nearby factory occupied by the workers
(one of very many occupied factories) - and the next stage is to open a
theatre in the basement. And everywhere the same determination to build from
the ruins of the crisis the basis for a new society, everywhere the feeling
that they are developing a new way of thinking about politics, an
oppositional politics which has nothing to do with parties or the state.

Argentina is not far from Greece, Buenos Aires is close to Athens. In terms
of the living standards of people until a few years ago, in terms of the
political culture of protest, in terms of the experience of military
dictatorships, in terms of what could happen - in many ways, Argentina is
not on the other side of the globe but very close. The International
Monetary Fund is trying to use Argentina as an example of what will happen
to countries that do not behave, that do not accept the instructions of the
IMF. But Argentina is turning into an example of another kind, an example of
dignity, an example of how to reject the dictates of capital.

But where can the Argentinian revolt go? There are basically two ways of
thinking about it. The traditional left see the elections as the way
forward. With a left government, they argue, different policies could be
followed and open repression of the movement could be prevented. The other
view is that the elections are not relevant, that, even if the left won
(very unlikely), that would mean handing control of the movement to the
politicians. The struggle, then, is not to win the elections, but to
strengthen and develop all the autonomous struggles that are taking place.
The struggles can be seen as fissures, as cracks in capitalist domination,
as spaces where people, out of necessity and out of choice, are saying very
clearly "No, here no, here capital does not rule, here we are building a
different sociality, a different way of doing things". In this latter
perspective, what is happening in Argentina is important not just for
Argentina. It is important because the fissures of domination in Argentina
are part of a whole world full of cracks and breaks. When the zapatistas
rose up in Chiapas in 1994, saying =A1Ya basta! Enough!, they provided
inspiration for struggle against capitalism throughout the world. With the
Argentinian revolt, zapatismo establishes itself in the cities on a scale
which has never been seen before.   

"=A1Que se vayan todos!" is the great slogan of the Argentinian uprising. "Out
with them all!" Since December of last year, politicians have been afraid to
show themselves in the streets, because they are chased by the people. But
the anger is not just turned against the politicians, but also against their
capitalist cronies, and against the banks, which were allowed by the
government to swallow up the savings that people had deposited with them.
The more the slogan is extended, the more it acquires a deeper meaning.
Capital dominates by threatening all the time that it will go away, and by
carrying out its threat. It was not like that in feudalism. The feudal lord
punished his serfs if they did not behave, but he did not go away and leave
them. With capital it is different. The capitalist threatens all the time
"if you do not behave, I shall go away and leave you". And often capital
does go away, leaving millions without work, whole regions in poverty, whole
generations living under the constant threat or reality of unemployment,
with all the poverty and isolation that it involves. We all live with that
threat or that reality: it shapes our lives.

But imagine. Imagine if the next time that capital says "do what I say or I
shall fire you and go away", or "do what I say or I shall close the
factory", or (to the government) "reorganise education in the way that I say
or I shall go to another country", imagine if we could say "fine, if you
want to go, then go. We do not need you. Now we can build other social
relations, now we can do things that seem to us to be important. Go, all of
you! =A1Que se vayan todos!" Imagine if the next time that capital carried out
its threat and left us unemployed, we could say "Good, don't come back, we
have better things to do!" Imagine, how difficult but how exciting! What a
dream! That is what the struggle in Argentina is about. This is why it is
the struggle of all of us.

----------
From: Newdem-AT-aol.com
To: aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
Subject: Re: AUT: The Economist: Under Workers' Control
Date: Thu, Nov 14, 2002, 11:15 AM


James Petras has a number of articles on Argentina and workers' control on
his site, 

http://www.rebelion.org/petrasenglish.htm 

Dave Stratman 
Editor, New Democracy 
newdemocracyworld.org <newdemocracyworld.org> 
5 Burr Street 
Boston, MA 02130 
617-524-4073 

--MS_Mac_OE_3120122027_1606931_MIME_Part

HTML VERSION:

James Petras has a number of articles on Argentina and workers' control on his site,

http://www.rebelion.org/petrasenglish.htm

Dave Stratman
Editor, New Democracy
newdemocracyworld.org <newdemocracyworld.org>
5 Burr Street
Boston, MA 02130
617-524-4073