Occupy, Resist, Produce: Naomi Klein Takes on Argentina's Occupied Factories

An earthquake of popular revulsion drove out six governments in two weeks, but was unable to dislodge the state. Despite a heavy national legacy of murderous, military suppression of popular revolt, crowds overflowed the streets smashing the banks now empty of cash with hammers, all the while singing “que se vayan todos” – they all must go. It wasn’t one party or politician rejected, but an entire political culture. Called simply “el modelo,” the ruling elites made corruption a virtue by carrying out the Washington Consensus of neo-liberal austerity and capitalist brigandage. But it was the aftershocks of the uprising that got really interesting.

Starting at the Brukman shirt factory in Buenos Aires, an escalating series of factory occupations was launched by workers under the slogan "occupy, resist, produce." Over 200 occupations brought idle factories back to life despite police violence and capitalist obstruction. Unable to withstand the uprising and with the economy in total shambles, the Argentine government allowed for the seizure of abandoned factories by unemployed workers.

For much of The Take, we follow the travails of a proud machinist and nearly-broken family man from one factory as he and his comrades seize the plant and navigate a complex election that threatens to bring back Carlos Menem, the very politician who drove Argentina to bankruptcy. The Take ends upbeat with the occupied factory lighting up as a new workers’ cooperative with government permission to produce. But now, after the movie is over, the situation is heating up. The initial allowance of occupations had a two-year window and the two years are over. The situation is currently unstable and it appears that the governmetn will move on the cooperatives when they can get away with it. The Take is an introduction to a struggle that is just beginning and is very much ongoing.

Filmmakers Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis focused on these collective seizures and the lives of the workers transformed by the struggle as a way of showing an alternative to the horror of runaway industries under the globalization of capital. A writer with the Toronto Globe & Mail, the Guardian and The Nation, Klein is perhaps the most prominent young writer to speak in sympathy with the street rebels of the anti-capitalist movement while sharing many of their limits. Klein makes sure to include her own voiced-over rejection of workers’ government as an “old” model not even worthy of consideration and uses the occupied factories as an example of the “network” approach generally hyped by anarchists. This political myopia, which is global in its influence, plays out in The Take without even meaning to.

Respected by the community, the occupations are under the shadow of reaction as Menem launches a galling comeback in the first national election since “they all must go.”

The social movements profiled by Klein were unable to mount a national political challenge inside the voting booth or out, so many fell in with Nestor Kirschner, a house-broken Social Democrat with a populist wrap to the same old shit. In the close race, mass hatred for Menem forced him to withdraw from the run-off after he’d taken the highest vote in the general election. Kirschner became the de facto victor and after assuming the presidency promptly singed fresh agreements with the very international financiers from the IMF that wrecked Argentina to begin with. Power may be an “old” goal for the workers, but apparently the capitalists never get tired of it. Instead of “que se vayan todos,” Argentina got “que sera, sera.”

Where ten years ago, the utopian left was dreaming of Chiapas, they’ve moved on to Argentina where limited goals can still seem visionary and romantic. The Take’s implicit argument for surviving capitalism instead of overthrowing it should give those most inspired by the events in Argentina pause. A revolutionary situation lapsed because the people, and the social movements which gave voice to their highest aspirations, were unable and unwilling to seize the moment. Where the questions are loudest, The Take offers silence.

The Take succeeds in letting the world know of a great victory for workers used to losing while it ends up arguing a more dubious point. In effect, Klein remixes Maggie Thatcher’s famous quip of capitalist triumphalism, “there is no alternative,” to say in a roundabout way, there is “only” alternative. The very idea that the victims of corporate globalization can do more than carve out a space of temporary autonomy in the backwash of capitalism is beyond discussion. Apparently socialism is still a dirty word, no matter how fucked up capitalism gets. Here's to taking it all.