Self Managed Enterprise. Worker Recuperated cooperatives in Argentina and Latin America

VIETA, MARCELO; HERAS, ANA INÉS

The Handobook of Diverse Economies

ELGAR

Lugar: Northampton; Año: 2020; p. 48 - 56

This chapter discusses self-managed enterprises in Latin America with a focus on Argentina, analyzing how they emerge, their implications for community economies, and their role in la economía de los trabajadores (the workers? economy). We home in on Argentina?s empresas recuperadas por sus trabajadores (ERTs, worker-recuperated enterprises) as a specific illustration of the Latin American experience in self-managed enterprises. We particularly address how ERT protagonists transform capitalist and hierarchical firms into cooperative and horizontalized enterprises, become self-managed workers forging associated labour, and produce and share wealth rather than extracting surpluses for private gain. It is in these respects that we have conceptualized their contributions to taking back the economy (Gibson-Graham, 2008). Further contextualizing ERTs? contributions in the last 20 years, we also identify three key forms of praxis threaded through their experiments in self-management: horizontalización (horizontalization), autogestión (self-management), and territorialización (territorialization). These concepts have been revived as bottom-up responses to neoliberal logics in recent decades, both in ERTs and self-managed enterprises more broadly, and in many other anti-systemic social movements in the region, such as Indigenous and campesino (peasant) land occupations, neighbourhood organizations defending community or public property, and popular education schools, amongst others.