Marcelo Vieta, Workers’ Self-Management in Argentina: Contesting Neo-Liberalism by Occupying Companies, Creating Cooperatives, and Recuperating Autogestión, Leiden: Brill, 2020, 644 pp. ISBN: 978-90-04-26896-8.
Marcelo Vieta’s Workers’ Self-Management in Argentina: Contesting Neo-Liberalism by Occupying Companies, Creating Cooperatives, and Recuperating Autogestión provides a comprehensive examination of the emergence, development, and consolidation of Argentina’s worker-recuperated enterprises (empresas recuperadas por sus trabajadores – ERTs) from the perspective of workers’ control and self-management. Based on nearly two decades of research, the study situates the workplace occupations, worker recuperations of enterprises, their conversion into cooperatives, and the establishment of workers’ self-management that accelerated particularly around the economic and social crisis of 2001 within a longer history of class struggle. According to the figures presented by Vieta, approximately 400 enterprises in Argentina were taken over by some 16,000 workers and reorganised as cooperatives.
The book does not regard these experiences simply as defensive responses to unemployment and business closures produced by the neoliberal crisis. Bringing together class-struggle Marxism and the critical sociology of work, Vieta situates the ERT movement both within Argentina’s long history of working-class struggle and within the broader historical responses developed by workers to capitalist crises. While occupying workplaces and restarting production constitute the beginning of this process, the central issue expands towards questions of how workers organise production without bosses and traditional management structures, how they make decisions, and how they develop new collective labour relations.
At the centre of the book, therefore, lies a process of transformation extending from occupation to recuperation, from recuperation to cooperativisation, and from cooperativisation to self-management. Workers do not merely reactivate enterprises threatened with closure; they must also reorganise the division of labour, managerial hierarchies, wage and income relations, decision-making mechanisms, and everyday working practices. ERTs are thus approached as experiences that go beyond a change in the legal form of ownership, challenging the divisions between boss and worker and between manager and employee within the capitalist firm, while testing different forms of workplace democracy in practice.
In Vieta’s analysis, this process also emerges as an experience that transforms workers themselves and their relations with one another. The transition from the position of wage employees to trabajadores autogestionados—self-managed workers who assume collective responsibility for the enterprise—is not simply a change in management structure. Workers’ capacities to make decisions, assume responsibility, coordinate production, and solve collective problems develop through the processes of struggle and self-management. In this respect, the book makes it possible to understand workers’ self-management not as the application of pre-existing democratic skills, but also as a social practice learned and produced through struggle.
One of the book’s most important theoretical contributions is its development of the concept of autogestión. Vieta uses the concept in a broader sense than the straightforward English term “self-management” and, drawing on the experiences of the movement’s protagonists themselves, develops a social theory of autogestión. Here, self-management does not simply mean workers managing an enterprise themselves; it is understood as a politically prefigurative and ethical practice oriented towards constructing different relations of work and life within existing social relations. The effects of this transformation can extend beyond the boundaries of the workplace to the relationships that enterprises establish with surrounding neighbourhoods, communities, social movements, and solidarity networks.
This approach also makes it possible to examine the limits and contradictions of worker-recuperated enterprises. Although workers can substantially transform capitalist management relations within the enterprise, they must continue to operate within capitalist markets, legal frameworks, financial constraints, and broader economic relations. The conversion of an enterprise into a cooperative therefore does not in itself mean an exit from capitalist social relations. One of the book’s important questions emerges precisely here: will workers’ self-management remain an alternative form of management confined within the boundaries of the enterprise, or can it develop broader democratic and solidaristic economic relations through connections with other worker-recuperated enterprises, communities, and social movements?
From this perspective, Workers’ Self-Management in Argentina is a major study that examines workers’ control and self-management both as concrete workplace practices and within a broader perspective of social transformation. The book approaches Argentina’s worker-recuperated enterprises not simply as unusual businesses that emerged during an economic crisis, but as experiences in which workers recuperate the means of production, reorganise labour relations, learn collective management, and attempt to construct different social relations in practice. Vieta’s approach to autogestión provides a powerful theoretical framework for thinking about the possibilities of workers’ self-management beyond the level of the “bossless enterprise”, through the connections between workplace democracy, the transformation of worker subjectivity, community relations, and the prefigurative construction of social relations beyond capitalism.