[Reader-list] argentina

[Rana Dasgupta]

I've been writing about Argentina in the last few weeks and wanted to share
some of the incredible news that is coming out of there that some of you may
have not come across.  We have all heard about the crisis that peaked in
December 2001 when the Argentinian peso lost 2/3 of its value and the banks
stopped all withdrawals, and when mass protests led to the fall of the
government.  The situation was extraordinary in the extent to which a
putatively democratic system that had been a capitalist poster-child until
very recently lost all legitimacy, in the eyes not only of the poor, but
also the middle classes, whose savings had been almost wiped out.  This, and
the continued desperate economic situation, has created an environment in
which intense debate is going on as to alternative political and economic
structures, and much of this debate is taking off into experiments with
local assemblies, worker-run companies, etc.  It is worth looking at how
some of this experimentation is playing out.

there is a huge amount of writing about this (notably, by the international
socialist press that sees Argentina as something of a crucible of future
revolutions...) and i will just post links here.  I think the following two
paragraphs from Naomi Klein's piece give a sense of what is happening,
however:

"In the past year, between 130 and 150 factories, bankrupt and abandoned by
their owners, have been taken over by their workers and turned into
cooperatives or collectives. At tractor plants, supermarkets, printing
houses, aluminium factories and pizza parlours, decisions about company
policy are now made in open assemblies, and profits are split equally among
the
workers.

"In recent months, the "fabricas tomadas" (literally, "taken factories")
have begun to network among themselves and are beginning to plan an informal
"solidarity economy": garment workers from an occupied factory, for example,
sew sheets for an occupied health clinic; a supermarket in Rosario, turned
into a workers' cooperative, sells pasta from an occupied pasta factory;
occupied bakeries are building ovens with tiles from an occupied ceramic
plant. "I feel like the dictatorship is finally ending," one asamblista told
me when I first arrived in Buenos Aires. "It's like I've been locked in my
house for 25 years and now I am finally outside.""

Naomi Klein, 'Out of the Ordinary' (parts 1 & 2)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,3605,880651,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4591063,00.html

Total crisis of capitalism in Argentina: The only way out: the struggle for
workers' democracy
http://www.marxist.com/Latinam/argentina_only_way0202.html

Argentine Left Debates Strategy as Mass Protests Continue
http://www.socialistaction.org/news/200202/left.html

Diary of a revolution
http://www.guardian.co.uk/argentina/story/0,11439,880919,00.html

Do Cry for Argentina
http://www.jubilee2000uk.org/worldnews/lamerica/argentina070602.htm

R