Papers
DownloadAutogestión and the Worker-Recuperated Enterprises in Argentina: The Potential for Reconstituting Work and Recomposing Life
Paper presented at the 2008 Anarchist Studies Network conference, "Re-imagining Revolution," in the panel: “‘¡Autogestión ya!’ The promises and challenges of self-management in Argentina’s worker-recuperated enterprises,” Saturday, Sept. 6, 2008.
The Argentine worker-recuperated enterprises (empresas recuperdas por sus trabajadores, or ERT) are direct, diverse, and mostly non-union aligned responses by roughly 10,000 urban-based workers to recent socio-economic crises. Over ten years since the first workplace occupations and their recoveries as self-managed workers' cooperatives, this latest wave of workers’ struggle in Argentina has shown promising alternatives to capital-labour relations and the neoliberal enclosures of life.
But why were almost 200 failing, closed, or bankrupted small- and medium-sized businesses spanning the entire urban economic base subsequently occupied and reopened as self-managed workplaces by former employees in Argentina since at least 1997? Why do most ERTs decide to reorganize themselves as workers’ cooperatives? Why do many of them also decide to open up the shop floor to the diverse communities surrounding them, symbolically and practically tearing down factory walls by sharing their workplaces with community centres and dining halls, free clinics, popular education programmes, alternative radio and media centres, and art studios? Finally, why Argentina?
To begin to answer these questions, I first explore some of Argentina’s key socio-economic and historical conjunctures motivating workspace occupations and the formation of self-managed workers’ cooperatives. Second, I begin to theorize the concept of autogestión (self-management) as it tends to be practiced by Argentina’s ERTs. Third, I sketch out some of the ERTs’ most common micro-economic and organizational successes and challenges, exploring how the struggle to reconstitute a once capitalist workplace as a self-managed workers’ coop interplays with an ERT’s reconstituted labour processes. I conclude by appraising the future possibilities of ERTs for social transformation in Argentina by mapping out four “social innovations” being spearheaded by the phenomenon.
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‘The Bloggy Way of Doing Things’: Reassessing the Blog Via Social Interactional and Social Constructivist Approaches
(2008, May). Parts of this extended essay first appeared as “‘The Bloggy Way of Doing Things’: An Assessment of Blogs through the Social Interactions of Bloggers,” in proceedings of the 4th annual conference of Chinese Internet Communication, (Wuhan, China: Huazhong University of Science and Technology, October 12-14, 2007).
Blogs are, like all communication technologies, two-folded: The evolution of blogs into elegant and easy-to-use and -administer sites for self-publishing and network-building has been guided as much by the technologies that undergird them as it has by the life-world needs, desires, meanings, and social practices that bloggers mediate through them. In order to understand this two-foldedness, this article draws out a social constructivist and social interactional theory of the blog and the sociality that it mediates—“the bloggy way of doing things”—and explores the ways that bloggers are immanently (re)inventing blogging technologies via their very social and self-presentational practices.
After presenting a brief history of the “blogosphere” and key debates concerning its social and political significance in Part 1 of the article, Part 2 maps out how the possibilities of a micropolitics of the blog first occurs in the very acts of bloggers “creatively appropriating” and collaboratively co-inventing the key structural aspects of blogging technologies. Part 3 uses a social interactional perspective to reassess some of the most salient blogging practices addressed in the literature to date. Having closely influenced the blog’s technological design, these practices include: experimenting with online self-presentation and self-expression, engaging in asynchronous textual conversations, exploring multimedia-based self-publishing, and extending social networks and desires for sociability onto the spaces of the life-world opened up by the virtualized, digitized, flexible, and accessible technologies of the blog.
Worker-Recovered Enterprises as Workers' Cooperatives: The Conjunctures, Challenges, and Innovations of Self-Management in Argentina
Co-authored with Andrés Ruggeri. (2007). In Darryl Reed & JJ McMurtry (Eds.), Co-operatives in a Global Economy: The Challenges and Innovations of Co-operation Across Borders (pp. 178-225). Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
This chapter examines this phenomenon of ERTs in Latin American countries, with a special emphasis on the case of Argentina. Based on our ongoing quantitative and qualitative political economic and ethnographic work over the past five years with over 70 ERTs across all economic sectors and regions, we highlight two particular characteristics that are often overlooked or downplayed by studies that examine worker-recovered enterprises in Argentina. First, workers’ initial actions involving the seizure of control of their deteriorating or failed companies from former owners, their occupation of them for weeks or months, and eventually their putting them into operation once again under autogestión (self-management), arise out of fear and anger rather than a preconceived predilection for workers’ control or working-class revolt. That is, most ERTs originate as direct responses to their worker-protagonists’ deep worries about becoming structurally unemployed. To begin to understand these two characteristics, we first briefly look to the historical and political conjunctures from which ERTs emerge and in which they find themselves. We then explore some of the distinguishing features of Argentina’s ERTs as workers’ co-operatives. To illustrate how these features play out in practice, we map out some of the innovations impelled by ERT workers’ desire to self-manage that they adopt in order to defend their jobs and workspaces, as well as several of the challenges faced by these experiments in self-management. Lastly, we examine some of the connections with the wider ERT phenomenon in South America. As we emphasize throughout, ERT’s innovations and challenges shape their very organizational structures and co-operative practices and in some ways distinguish them from other workers’ co-operatives in other conjunctures.
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On the Crises of Capitalism, Argentina’s Worker-Recuperated Enterprises, and the Possibilities for Another World: An interview with Eduardo Murúa
Murúa, E., Moore, J., & Vieta, M. (2006, Jun. 3). Unpublished interview with Eduardo Murúa.
Eduardo Murúa, former president of Argentina’s now-fractured National Movement of Recuperated Enterprises (Movimiento Nacional de Empresas Recuperadas, or MNER), has been a key figure in articulating the path to self-management for the country’s empresas recuperadas por sus trabajadores (worker-recuperated enterprises, or ERT). His voice was – and continues to be – central in the debates and experiments focusing on how workers in Argentina could occupy and recuperate failing or bankrupted capitalist firms, resist repression from former owners wishing to reclaim their lost assets or from the state, and how these firms were to be re-opened as workers’ cooperatives. Independent journalist Jennifer Moore conducted the following interview on June 3, 2006 while Murúa was in the southern Ontario region as an invited guest speaker for the Canadian Association for Studies in Co-operation’s national conference.
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On the Political Theory of Maurice Merleau-Ponty
My response to Kheya Bag's paper, delivered at the Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture Society, Congress 2006, May 27, 2006
For French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, politics was a sensual practice, perceptually experienced, ambiguously lived, and intersubjectively worked out. Throughout her paper, Kheya Bag points to the centrality of communication in Merleau Ponty’s phenomenological ways of looking at radicalized life. This lived, dialogical, spontaneous, and embodied politics is, as Bag quotes Marx and Engles, a “material activity” grounded in the “language of real life.” The source of Merleau-Ponty’s political becoming, and the grounding for his political philosophy, was the French Resistance during WWII, as was the case with many French intellectuals who lived through this period. As Martin Jay (1973) writes, what he learned from this period of his life was that “men were immersed in the ambiguities of history” and that there was “no pure freedom above the fray” (365).
For Merleau-Ponty (1962), class is an open concept, an already-always, intersubjective, and embodied becoming. We can say that for Merleau-Ponty, class consciousness is a provisional sketch of the Being of a collective politics. It emerges out of the oppressions or exploitations that are understood intersubjectively from the lived conditions in the “atmosphere of my[, or our,] present,” as Merleau-Ponty writes (442). In his famous last chapter on “Freedom” in Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty further described the becoming of class-consciousness as emerging out of the “pressure felt from any quarter of the social horizon beyond ideologies and various occupations " (445).
Herbert Marcuse's Critique of Technological Rationality: An Exegetical Reading
(2006, March). Unpublished paper.
In this paper I set out to exegetically work through Marcuse’s dialectically enfolded and historically-materialist concept of “technological rationality” as it is presented in his 1964 book, One-Dimensional Man. In the process, I first outline what Marcuse means by “technological rationality” and clarify how he situates the concept within his broader critique of the ideology and practices of advanced industrial society. Second, I sketch out Marcuse’s complex dialectical sojourns that diagnose how we have become “preconditioned” to think one-dimensionally (Marcuse, 1964, p. 8) and how this technologically rationalized preconditioning both differs from its roots in “pre-technological rationality” and yet is presupposed by this genealogical inheritance. And lastly, I attempt to articulate how Marcuse’s “post-technological rationality” envisions civilizational change not only depending on redirecting the goals and ends of technological systems but, more vitally, on transforming the very rationality that permeates technology’s logic and advanced industrial society’s technological base.
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Online Gaming and the Interactional Self: Identity Play in Situated Practice
Co-authored with Florence Chee & Richard Smith. (2006). In J. P. Williams, S. Q. Hendricks & W. K. Winkler (Eds.)., Gaming as Culture: Essays on Reality, Identity, and Experience in Fantasy Games, (pp.154-174). Jefferson, NC: McFarland Publishing.
In this paper we interpret ethnographic data from EverQuest and its social spaces using the sociological phenomenology of Alfred Schutz (Schutz 1962; 1970) (Schutz & Luckmann, 1973). We argue that the interplay between the everyday, situated lives of online interactive gamers and their activities in games such as EverQuest are much more enmeshed and certainly not the root cause for dysfunction as has been suggested by some. Indeed, using the work of Schutz for phenomenological clarification, we argue here that games are no more “addictive” and “disconnecting” than other sites of play, games, or other social activities. Rather, they are ways of re-enchanting life and sometimes of sustaining meaningful community experiences.
Rethinking Life Online: The Interactional Self as a Theory for Internet-Mediated Communication
(2005, Spring/Fall). Iowa Journal of Communication, 37 (1), pp. 27-57.
Grounded in the philosophies of experience of Martin Heidegger, George Herbert Mead, and Alfred Schutz, this paper presents and emerging concept called the interactional self to illustrate how there are no clear phenomenological distinctions between the so-called “virtual world” and the dichotomously positioned “real world.” Instead, after presenting the two most predominant narrative trajectories that looked at Internet-mediated communication from this real/virtual split, the paper then explores how social interactional and phenomenological approaches can help the Internet researcher come to understand that a more nuanced reality is present in online social settings. Ultimately, the paper shows how the philosophies of experience of Heidegger, Mead, and Schutz can help the Internet researcher better conceptualize the tight intermingling of the online with the offline in Internet-mediated social settings. Such philosophies allow the communication researcher to delve more deeply into users’ phenomenologically-rooted use-contexts, performative practices, and intersubjective life-world experiences in Internet-mediated sociability.
Interactions Through the Screen: The Interactional Self as a Theory for Internet-Mediated Communication
(2004). Master of Arts Thesis, School of Communication, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby/Vancouver, BC, Canada.
This thesis presents an emerging concept called the interactional self to illustrate how, contrary to theories of “cyberspace” and “cyberselves,” there tend not to be sharp socio-phenomenological distinctions between “virtual” and offline sociability within one’s life-world. As such, using aspects of the philosophies of experience of Heidegger, Mead, Schutz, and Husserl as foundations, this thesis argues that social interactions online, for most, are extensions of and not apart from their everyday, situated life-worlds.
After briefly introducing the path towards our contemporary “will-to-virtuality” and various utopian and dystopian visions of “cyberspace,” an alternative conceptual picture of the interactional self is gradually revealed using the metaphor of a portrait painted on a “social-world canvas.” In this painting, the ontology of Heidegger’s Dasein supplies the first brushes for outlining the early sketches of the interactional self, showing that online, as in offline settings, we encounter the world and others from the position of beings deeply engaged in practical daily acts and “interpretative understandings.” These brushes are then dipped into Mead’s intertactionist colours and Schutz’s socio-phenomenological textures, eventually filling in the portrait. Illustrated via a case study of blogging practices, Mead’s theory of the “generalized other” highlights the notion that the interactional self does not concretely distinguish between offline and online social settings but instead, as in more traditional “off the network” situations, uses Internet-mediated communication for performative practices that afford self-expression and maintain social cohesion. Schutz’s phenomenology of the life-world gives further perspective to the interactional self, showing that online sociability should not be viewed as being apart from the “intersubjective” intersection of life-worlds rooted in everyday life. With some help from Husserl’s phenomenology, Schutz is subsequently relied on for understanding online textual embodiment, spatial extensions, community, role-playing, and fantasy, adding yet more socio-historical shadings to interactions online.
Ultimately, the picture that emerges is framed within the following four concluding hypotheses: 1) The interactional self encounters social acts, online and off, as part of its greater life-world, practicing performative and group-enforcing self-management through 2) varying and interlinked dimensions of sociability and 3) pragmatic yet meaningful uses of the communicational tools at hand in 4) contextually relevant degrees of self-disclosure.
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(De)formación en línea: acerca de las desventajas de la educación virtual
Co-authored with Laureano Ralón & María Lucía Vásquez de Prada. (2004, March). Comunicar: Scientific Journal of Media Education. 12(22), pp. 171-176.
En la medida en que la «aldea global» continúe organizándose de acuerdo a los principios de eficiencia y practicalidad dictados por la mano invisible del mercado, el cambio hacia lo virtual será progresivo y cada vez más presente en el ocio, el trabajo, la educación y en otros muchos entornos. Esta tendencia, iniciada con la llegada de Internet, fue recibida con aplausos en el nombre del progreso, pero poco se ha dicho de sus desventajas. Este trabajo examina las desventajas del formato on-line en el campo de la educación en general, y al ámbito universitario en particular.
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Seen by: What's Really Going on with the Blogosphere?
(2003, December). digest: Innovations in New Media, 2(3), pp. 10-17.
While blogs have arguably been in existence in their current form since late 1997 or early 1998, a new definition of blogs has been bandied about recently. According to this revamped definition, blogs are multimedia-enabled and easy-to-use websites that, via their chronological structure and archival capabilities, act as personalized and interlinked filters of the Web, creating a new online “public sphere” that has returned the Web to “the people”. This new “public sphere” made up of millions of blogs is known as the “blogosphere.” While there is no doubt that many influential blogs exist, recent studies are suggesting that using blogs as vehicles for democratization and community-building might be the exception rather than the norm. In addition, these studies are finding that many abandon blogs shortly after starting one and, of those who stick with it, most write about personal, not political, topics.
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The Day After the World Stood Still: Immediate Reflections on 9/11
Originally published in the online daily www.mybc.com on Sept. 12, 2001
We cannot completely express how we feel today, the day after the world stood still. It is in moments like these that our faith in humanity is shaken, that a collective fear and anger is stirred, as we ask ourselves the significance of a God in the face of uncertainty.... Today, the day after the world stood still, “over there” has come “over here” as the rest of the world’s daily palpitations of fear and uncertainty now beat loud within the North American heart. We are beginning to remember again what fear is.... Who will help us now? Which god should we ask for consolation? Who or what will protect us now? Technology? Money? The marketplace? Our investments? Our governments? Our friends? Our houses? Our families? Our mother? Whom do we seek? Where are we going? These are some of the questions we are asking ourselves today, the day after the world stood still.
