top
Global Justice
Global Justice
Indybay
Indybay
Indybay
Regions
Indybay Regions North Coast Central Valley North Bay East Bay South Bay San Francisco Peninsula Santa Cruz IMC - Independent Media Center for the Monterey Bay Area North Coast Central Valley North Bay East Bay South Bay San Francisco Peninsula Santa Cruz IMC - Independent Media Center for the Monterey Bay Area California United States International Americas Haiti Iraq Palestine Afghanistan
Topics
Newswire
Features
From the Open-Publishing Calendar
From the Open-Publishing Newswire
Indybay Feature

Starting Over: Argentines are Reinventing their Economy

by amigo de Argentina anarquista
STARTING OVER: ARGENTINES ARE REINVENTING THEIR ECONOMY FROM THE RUINS OF CORPORATE CAPITALISM
Sleeping on the floor of the factory in order to keep her
job was not exactly what Alva Sotelo had in mind when
she started working as a seamstress at the Brukman
Factory in Buenos Aires. Like most people, she figured
her job would give her enough money to feed herself and
her children, and that at the end of the day, she could go
home and forget about it.

For a while, that was true. Though the work was tedious
and the workers had orders from the boss not to talk to
each other while they worked the machines and
hand-stitched the cloth all day long, they did get a
15-minute lunch break. And Alva was earning 100 pesos
a week.

Then everything changed. By December of last year,
Argentina found that the International Monetary Fund
(IMF) recipe it had followed had gone sour. Loans to
prop up an overvalued peso, multinational privatizations
of Argentine companies that stripped the country of
control over its own industry and dumped thousands of
people from their jobs, combined with political
corruption, had created a national mess: an external debt
of $132 billion, a 22 percent unemployment rate, and a
middle class suddenly slipping into poverty. Businesses
were going bankrupt, and people throughout the country
were sifting through garbage for food.

On December 19th and 20th, the country finally
exploded. Hordes of hungry families ransacked and
looted grocery stores. Thousands of members of the
middle class who had lost their money to a bank freeze
defied President Fernando de la Rua's state of siege and
filled the streets of Buenos Aires banging pots and
chanting, "Get rid of de La Rua! Get rid of them all."
Street battles left 29 dead and toppled four presidents in
succession. What had once been the world's seventh
richest nation found itself in total economic, political,
and social collapse.

Throughout all this, Alva Sotelo was just trying to hold
onto her job and her salary. By December, she and her
fellow workers' pay had fallen to only five pesos a week.
The Brukman brothers, who owned the factory, agreed
to meet with the workers. But, according to Alva, the
owners never showed up. She and her fellow workers
began sleeping at the factory because they kept hoping
their employers would come back and pay their salaries.
"At first, we were waiting for someone to tell us what to
do," she says.

Eventually, the workers at Brukman realized that wasn't
going to happen-the owners had effectively abandoned
the debt-ridden factory. The workers began, slowly, to
run the factory themselves. They elected a six-member
commission to coordinate the work. They paid off the
company's debts with factory profits. They paid their
salaries by dividing the remaining profits equally among
themselves. The Brukman brothers-who claim they were
locked out by the workers-wanted to sell the factory and
use the profits to pay the workers, a proposal the workers
rejected. Alva and her 50 or so fellow workers continue
to sleep in shifts at the factory. But now they are
bringing home around 50 pesos a week, and they laugh
and talk to each other while they work. "We've actually
discovered that we get more done when we communicate
with each other," she says.

Alva Sotelo is one of many people in Argentina who
have been forced by the collapse of the economy into
creating alternatives. The result is new-found solidarity
and empowerment and an opportunity to create new
models that transcend the old individualist capitalist
one. "Solidarity solutions" are sprouting up all over
Argentina: streetcorner soup kitchens organized by
neighborhood assemblies, food donations replacing
money as the price of entrance to cultural events,
neighbors buying food together, community food
gardens. The most notable changes have been the
explosion of worker cooperatives, the rise of
neighborhood assemblies, and the proliferation of barter
clubs.

Solidarity solutions

Worker-owned cooperatives are not a new phenomenon
in Argentina. There are about 100 legal cooperatives in
the country, some of which date back to the Peron years.
They include printing presses and meat packing plants,
and range in size from eight employees to over a
thousand.

But the current crisis has caused a "dizzying increase" in
workers taking control of bankrupt companies, says Jose
Abelli of the Confederacion Latino-Americana de
Cooperativas y Mutuales de Trabajadores. Roughly 10
businesses a month are now being taken over by workers.
Though the workers at Brukman eventually want to be
"state-owned, but under worker control" most of the
cooperatives share a model similar to Brukman's: the
"directors" of the company are elected by the workers
themselves, and the profits are split among the workers,
or "associates." In some companies, everyone earns the
same amount of money. In others, the highest-paid
associate makes no more than four times the amount of
the lowest-paid associate.

Once workers take control of a company, they can use
legal channels to apply for cooperative status. Owner
attempts to evict the workers are often unsuccessful
either because they are legally challenged or because
members of local neighborhood assemblies show up en
masse to support the workers and nonviolently prevent
the eviction.

These assemblies, born in early January from "the pot
and pan uprisings" (cacerolazos) of December, are
another powerful force for innovation within a
collapsing system. Breaking through the fear of activism
instilled by the brutal military dictatorship, roughly 200
groups of neighbors throughout Buenos Aires have
rejected traditional party divisions and opted for direct
democracy and a "politics without politicians." They are
sending delegates to an inter-neighborhood assembly,
publishing newsletters, requesting donations from local
merchants for streetcorner community kitchens, and
organizing demonstrations. In addition to confronting
the practical needs of the neighborhood, the assemblies
have become improvisational think tanks where people
trade political, social, and economic ideas to create a new
vision for the country.

"In December ," says assembly member Hugo Perez, "we
dissolved the trance we had been in of 'Don't get
involved.' We woke up and claimed the street, and once
we had it, we didn't want to give it up." Many of these
middle-class professionals have lost their jobs. Some
have had their utilities cut off because of lack of
payment, and some worry about how and what they are
going to eat. Pro-government forces have attacked and
threatened neighborhood assembly members. Suddenly
their own situation does not seem so different from the
struggles of the working-class unemployed who have
been protesting by blocking roads. A new slogan is
chanted at demonstrations: "Potbanger and roadblocker,
it's the same fight!"

Abundant social "money"

Social distinctions also blur at the barter clubs
proliferating throughout the country. With 400,000
participants and 800 nodes, the barter system now
accounts for $400-600 million worth of business. The
nodes operate with slips of paper called credits, earned
by trade in goods or services.

At one club in an office building in Alto Palermo, a posh
Buenos Aires neighborhood filled with upscale cafés and
multiplex cinemas, carefully made-up and coiffed
women from the neighborhood rub shoulders with
indigenous women with long braids who come in from
the provinces. Hundreds of people mill around tables
stacked with clothes, books, artwork, and food, while
Tarot readers, manicurists, and hair dressers ply their
trades. In rooms off to the side, doctors, dentists,
psychologists, and masseuses attend to clients on the
spot in makeshift offices.

Buenos Aires is teeming with psychologists, many of
whom live and practice in this neighborhood. So it is not
surprising to find that this club is filled with mental
health professionals, who are either using the barter
system to find new patients or supplementing their
income trading artwork and other goods. The barter
economy is not only an invention born of necessity.
Many of them say it is also an unexpected tool of
psychological health.

"It gets people out of their houses and interacting with
one another," says Nilda Cañon, who with fellow
psychologist Alicia Aguirre sees patients on site. Social
economist and barter promoter Heloisa Primavera says
the barter economy creates "social money" that fosters
community rather than the isolation of traditional
consumerism. "It's also a tool for replacing scarcity
thinking with abundance thinking."

How far can this thinking go? At least one Argentine
writer has suggested that the country could use barter
with other countries as a way to free itself from the leash
of the IMF and the external debt. When an entire people
wake from the trance of political passivity, as the
Argentines did last December, it seems that anything is
possible.

Economists are concerned about the contagion of
collapse spreading from Argentina to other countries.
But the contagion that spreads may be of a different sort:
the contagion of people working together to think
differently and create alternatives to a global economic
model that for many is no longer working. A recent
cartoon in a Buenos Aires newspaper summed it up:
"Doctor," says a patient at a doctor's office, "I think I'm
suffering from a solidarity worm."

By Lisa Garrigues
(Published in YES magazine, Fall 2002)
Add Your Comments
Listed below are the latest comments about this post.
These comments are submitted anonymously by website visitors.
TITLE
AUTHOR
DATE
José Larralde
Wed, Oct 23, 2002 12:02PM
José Larralde
Wed, Oct 23, 2002 12:02PM
We are 100% volunteer and depend on your participation to sustain our efforts!

Donate

$110.00 donated
in the past month

Get Involved

If you'd like to help with maintaining or developing the website, contact us.

Publish

Publish your stories and upcoming events on Indybay.

IMC Network