Andrés Ruggeri, ¿Qué son las empresas recuperadas? Autogestión de la clase trabajadora, Buenos Aires: Ediciones Continente, 2014, 128 pp.
Andrés Ruggeri’s ¿Qué son las empresas recuperadas? Autogestión de la clase trabajadora (What Are Worker-Recovered Enterprises? Working-Class Self-Management) examines worker-recovered enterprises (Empresas Recuperadas por sus Trabajadores – ERTs), which gained particular visibility in Argentina during the 2001 crisis, focusing on their historical development, forms of organization, and the challenges faced by workers’ self-management.
According to Ruggeri, ERTs are not a temporary phenomenon confined to the exceptional circumstances of the 2001 crisis. The recovery of enterprises by workers began before the crisis and continued after 2001, developing into an enduring movement. At the time the book was published, there were more than 300 ERTs in Argentina, involving thousands of workers.
One of the book’s key contributions is that it defines the recovered enterprise not as a particular legal or ownership form, but as a process. Faced with the closure, stripping of assets, or abandonment of a previously capitalist-run enterprise, workers struggle to preserve their jobs, recover the enterprise, and restart production under collective management. An ERT is therefore not the same thing as a cooperative. Although the vast majority of ERTs take the form of worker cooperatives, what distinguishes them is not their legal form but the process through which a capitalist enterprise is brought under collective workers’ management as a result of workers’ struggle. Likewise, legal ownership of the enterprise and workers’ effective control over production do not always coincide.
Ruggeri situates the emergence of ERTs within the context of neoliberal restructuring, deindustrialization, mass unemployment, and the systematic stripping of enterprises by their owners (vaciamiento) in Argentina. In most cases, workers do not initially take over factories with the aim of establishing an anti-capitalist project or a model of self-management. Their immediate objective is much more concrete: not to lose their jobs. Self-management emerges within this defensive struggle and becomes a practice that workers learn through the process itself.
Recovering an enterprise, however, does not mark the end of the struggle. Workers often take over enterprises depleted of capital, burdened by debt, equipped with ageing machinery, and with weakened market connections. Uncertain legal ownership, access to credit and working capital, technology, social security, and market relations are among the main challenges facing self-management. This brings one of the book’s central questions into focus: Under what conditions can workers’ self-management be sustained within a capitalist market?
Ruggeri therefore neither romanticizes recovered enterprises as perfect “islands of self-management” existing outside capitalism nor reduces them to ordinary cooperatives. The book examines different dimensions of the ERT experience, ranging from cooperativism and the solidarity economy to the labour movement; from occupation and resistance to questions of ownership and capital; and from debates over the market and “self-exploitation” to workplace democracy, technology, and relations with the state. ERTs thus provide a concrete field in which to examine the possibilities and limits of workers reorganizing the relations of work, ownership, production, and management.
The material production of the book itself also reflects its subject matter. Its interior pages were printed at Chilavert Artes Gráficas, a worker-recovered and self-managed enterprise, while different worker cooperatives and recovered enterprises were also involved in the printing of the cover, typesetting, and binding. A book examining workers’ self-management is thus itself the product of a production network made up of worker-self-managed enterprises.