Workers’ Self-Management in Argentina: Contesting Neo-Liberalism by Occupying Companies, Creating Cooperatives, and Recuperating Autogestión (Historical Materialism Book Series, 199)

Book info: Workers’ Self-Management in Argentina: Contesting Neo-Liberalism by Occupying Companies, Creating Cooperatives, and Recuperating Autogestión (Historical Materialism Book Series, 199) (Hardcover, 680 pages) – Brill, 2019. Language: English.

In Workers Self-Management in Argentina, Marcelo Vieta homes in on the emergence and consolidation of Argentinas empresas recuperadas por sus trabajadores (ERTs, worker-recuperated enterprises), a workers occupy movement that surged at the turn-of-the-millennium in the thick of the countrys neo-liberal crisis. Since then, around 400 companies have been taken over and converted to cooperatives by almost 16,000 workers. Grounded in class-struggle Marxism and a critical sociology of work, the book situates the ERT movement in Argentinas long tradition of working-class activism and the broader history of workers responses to capitalist crisis. Beginning with the voices of the movements protagonists, Vieta ultimately develops a compelling social theory of autogestin a politically prefigurative and ethically infused notion of workers self-management that unleashes radical social change for work organisations, surrounding communities, and beyond. Workers Self-Management in Argentina received an Honorable Mention from the . . Editorial Reviews Review This tome is certainly a valuable contribution to any scholar of workplace democracy and organizational democracy; yet also for practitioners or students of the international cooperative movement, working class history buffs and those searching for theoretical and practical examples of a post-capitalist imaginary that seeks to move beyond a system of wage labor and to a notion of social solidarity. Workers Self-Management in Argentina is a welcome addition to the surprisingly sparse empirical discourse on self-management and economic democracy. This is the most detailed analysis of the recent experiences in Argentina that this reviewer has encountered (there is a larger literature in Spanish).
Jerome Warren, in: Marx and Philosophy Review of Books []

"Workers self-management in Argentina provides a powerful contribution to literature surrounding labour movements, democracy in the context of industrial relations, and resistance to neoliberalism in the organisational environment. I would recommend the book to scholars in any of these relative disciplines. Furthermore, Vieta provides a key example of the way that ethnography and qualitative study particular in the field of industrial relations can bring the experiences of workers to the forefront of knowledge production in a way beneficial to wider elements of the discipline."
Catherine Spellman, in: British Journal of Industrial Relations []

"Marcelo Vietas recent Workers Self-Management in Argentina is the first comprehensive English-language review of the largest movement in the world of worker-led conversions of capitalist businesses into cooperatives (p. xv). [...] The book is a welcome contribution to the study of the phenomenon of workplace democracy that should interest a wide range of readers. In fact, it is actually quite unfair to call this book Workers Self-Management in Argentina, as its scope is far broader than reviewing this concept in the context of Argentina. In fact, Marcelo Vieta has written two books with this entry: firstly, an analysis of Marxist and other socialist theories on worker-self management, and secondly, an application of this theoretical lens to the Argentine case, with a social history of Argentina thrown in for good measure. There is ultimately something for everyone in this book."
Jerome Warren, in: British Journal of Industrial Relations [] About the Author Marcelo Vieta, Ph.D. (2012), York University, is Assistant Professor of Workplace and Organisational Learning and the Social Economy at the University of Toronto. He has published widely on critical theory, workers control and self-management, and on the social economy and social movements in Italy, Canada, Argentina, and Latin American.