Suchergebnisse

An introduction to theoretical issues / Maurizio Atzeni -- Factory occupation, worker cooperatives and alternative production : lessons from Britain in the 1970s / Alan Tuckman -- Going underground : worker ownership and control at Tower Colliery / Russell Smith, Len Arthur, Molly Scott Cato and Tom Keenoy -- Workers participation in a globalized market, reflections on and from Mondragon / Joseba Azkarraga, George Cheney, Ainara Udaondo -- Democracy and solidarity : a study of Venezuelan cooperatives / Camila Piñeiro Harnecker -- From managed employees to self-managed workers : the transformations of labour at Argentina's worker-recuperated enterprises / Marcelo Vieta -- Institutional analysis and collective mobilisation in a comparative assessment of two cooperatives in India / Anita Hammer -- Self-help groups in Nairobi : welfare strategies or alternative work organizations? / Martino Ghielmi

"Current and historical examples in the labour movement worldwide have helped to debunk the myth that workers cannot run production. Workers can take control of factories, reverting many assumptions about property, management, work organisation, wages andchallenge the almost natural character of capitalist work relations. This volume uses geographically and historically diverse examples to analyse the challenges and questions that alternative forms of work present to those involved"--Provided by publisher.

What drives workers to periodically contest their surrounding reality and how do they structure their protests? Maurizio Atzeni provides an in-depth analysis of the dynamics of workers' collective action using the cases of two car manufacturing plants located in Argentina. Criticizing the use of injustice as the basis of mobilization, it argues that workers' collective resistance should be seen as a function of the development of solidarity, which is alternatively created and destroyed by the contradictions between exploitation and cooperation continuously reproduced by the capitalist labour process.

Abstract
An analysis of the current state and political horizons of working-class organisations in Argentina can be developed along two intersecting lines. In the first, we have trade unions representing workers in the formal sector, which accounts for about half of the country's working population. In the second, we have social movements, based in both the urban and rural space, representing poor and informal workers. These two lines often run parallel to one another but also intersect and merge at different points following the cycles of capital accumulation and crisis typical of a peripheral country.

This article presents a worker's account of two factory occupations in Argentina. This reconstruction, rather than focusing on the role of specific agents, allows an unveiling of the dynamics through which the clash between the employer's drive for profitability and workers' interests in defence of their salaries developed. A cycle of conflict, resistance, repression and finally workers' subordination and acceptance of flexible employment conditions can be identified. Despite the tendency of the capitalist mode of production to produce divisions among workers in the workplace and society, the article highlights the importance of direct action, solidarity and democratic organising as workers' tools to react to and transform the system.