05 Counter Hegemony

EVANS: COUNTER-HEGEMONY

33

Counter-Hegemony at Work: Resistance, Contradiction and Emergent Culture Inside a Worker-Occupied Hotel William Todd Evans1 Abstract This paper is an ethnographic account of the everyday practices and contradictions that characterize workers’ efforts to build an egalitarian and participatory-democratic workplace in one of Argentina’s recovered enterprises, the Bauen Hotel. I argue that despite instances of exclusion and inequality among workers, the everyday experiences of collective resistance and formal equality that permeate daily work-life within the hotel are facilitating the emergence of a workplace culture that is fundamentally distinct from that found inside a traditional capitalist enterprise. I contend that this emergent culture inside the Bauen is characterized by both a latent assumption of equality among workers as well as a shared oppositional identity between them vis-à-vis hostile external actors. My analysis joins insights from the study of workplace democracy with those from the study of social movements and culture to show how establishing egalitarian and democratic social relations in worker cooperatives can be both limited and facilitated through social movement activity. Consistent with the work of other social movement scholars, my research shows that while social structure imposes constraints on how movements construct meaning, the interaction between movement actors and social structural forces can be generative of new, oppositional cultural forms. Introduction

In 1978, ruled by military dictatorship, Argentina played host to the World Cup soccer tournament. With U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger as its invited guest of honor, the military junta used the tournament as an opportunity to project an image of national unity and 1 Direct correspondence to William Todd Evans, Department of Sociology, University of Massachusetts Amherst, 200 Hicks Way, Thompson Hall, Amherst, MA 01003 ([email protected]). I want to thank the following people at the University of Massachusetts for their support and helpful feedback on this paper at various stages of its development: Millie Thayer, Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Robert Zussman, Randall Stokes, Dan Clawson, Gerald Platt, Amy Loomis, Sofia Checa, Kathleen Hulton, Dustin Avent-Holt and Yasser Munif. I am especially grateful to Esteban Magnani and Chuchi Guichal for providing me with indispensable logistical support during my time in Buenos Aires and for sharing their insightful perspectives on the recovered enterprises.

BERKELEY JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY 34 peace on the world stage during the height of its systematic repression of the Argentine Left and anyone else it labeled as “subversive” (Taylor 1997: 113). In preparation for the event, the military government financed the construction of a number of hotels to accommodate the influx of foreign tourists. The Bauen Hotel, a 220-room hotel located in the heart of downtown Buenos Aires, was one these buildings. As a result of its connection to the military dictatorship, as well as its function as a meeting space for Argentina’s political and economic elite during the 80s and early 90s, many from the country’s marginalized classes saw the Bauen as a symbol of an oppressive and corrupt past. However, like many businesses in Argentina during the late 90s, the Bauen was not immune to the effects of economic recession and eventually filed for bankruptcy in 2000. Since its closure in December 2001 though, the Bauen has been acquiring a new kind of significance.

On March 21st, 2003, spurred by the need to survive in a

collapsed economy, a group of Bauen workers forcefully occupied the boarded-up hotel. After fending off eviction threats and refurbishing the dilapidated interior for over a year, these workers reopened the Bauen as a cooperative in August of 2004. Today, despite an ongoing conflict with the ex-owner to acquire a legal expropriation of the building, the Bauen is operating at 80 percent capacity and has been able to hire approximately 80 additional workers. The hotel functions as a regular meeting space for various political parties, trade unions, and progressive activists from Argentina and abroad; members of the Venezuelan military and current Bolivian president Evo Morales have been amongst the more notable of the Bauen’s recent guests (Magnani, personal interview 2005). Collective decision-making processes and an egalitarian ethos have formally replaced the hierarchical and authoritarian forms of organization that characterized work-life at the hotel in the past. Now, according to workers, the Bauen is operating “sin jefes o patrones” (without bosses or owners) where “everyone works, nobody orders.”1

The recovery of the Bauen has its origins in a wave of popular

resistance by Argentineans in 2001-2002 following the country’s financial collapse, itself a product of neoliberal economic “reforms” implemented in Argentina throughout the 1990s. Although the scale and intensity of this popular revolt has since dissipated, some recovered enterprises, like the Bauen, continue to struggle with former owners over the future of the enterprises. It is my general contention that this context of social movement struggle matters for the production of oppositional cultural forms inside the Bauen, most importantly its collective and horizontal decision-making processes. More specifically, I argue that the everyday experiences of collective resistance and formal equality that permeate daily work-life within the hotel are facilitating the emergence of

1 Interview with Vivica, Bauen worker, July 2, 2005.


35

a workplace culture that is fundamentally distinct from that found inside a traditional capitalist enterprise. I contend that this emergent culture inside the Bauen is characterized by both a latent assumption of equality among workers as well as a shared oppositional identity between them vis-à-vis hostile external actors. To understand theoretically the social processes behind this production of oppositional culture within the hotel, my analysis joins insights from the study of workplace democracy with those from the study of social movements and culture.

While some of the English-language literature on worker cooperatives has acknowledged the generative and sustaining influence of social movement activity on democracy within cooperatives, this work has provided neither a detailed nor a theoretically elaborated analysis of how a cooperative’s expressed commitment to equality and democracy are nurtured by existing within such a context (Fletcher 1976; Greenberg 1986; Rothschild and Whitt 1986). However, the work of social movement scholars who examine how movement actors come to produce new oppositional meanings and practices offers a number of theoretical insights that allow us to gain a more nuanced understanding of this relationship (Fantasia 1988; Taylor and Whittier 1992; Melucci 1995; Steinberg 1999; Polletta and Jasper 2001; Klatch 2002; Reger 2002; Robnett 2002; Whittier 2002; Polletta 2006). Their research shows us that some of the qualities that scholars of workplace democracy cite as important for creating egalitarian and democratic relations in cooperatives—such as a shared culture and group solidarity—can be generated and sustained through social movement activity (Gamson and Levin 1984; Rothschild and Whitt 1986). Generally speaking, these social movement scholars show how new cultural forms (collective identities, movement discourses, institutional practices) arise out of the productive tension that exists between the agency of social movement actors, on the one hand, and the social structural forces in which movement actors are embedded on the other. By bringing these scholar’s general insights to bear on the Bauen, I intend to give a “multilayered view” of how workplace democracy, and the production of oppositional culture more generally, is both facilitated and constrained through social movement activity (Whittier 2002: 289).

The Bauen workers’ effort to reconfigure social life within the

hotel is happening in two interrelated ways. On one level, there has been a formal implementation of new, horizontal decision-making and authority structures. However, on another level, there is a continuous effort by workers and activists to imbue the recovered hotel and the new forms of social interaction happening inside it with oppositional sets of meaning; that is, with particular types of meaning that represent a critique of the dominant culture (Fantasia 1988). This latter point was succinctly illustrated by Alicia2, a housekeeper for over 25 years and one of the 2 I have replaced the real names of all Bauen workers with pseudonyms.

BERKELEY JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY 36 initial participants in the occupation of the Bauen. Around the time of our conversation, Alicia discovered that a group of younger workers had made a mess in one of the Bauen’s guest bathrooms and did not clean it up. Using this example, Alicia passionately explained to me why she continues to fight for the Bauen and take it upon herself to lecture coworkers on the significance of the recovered hotel, particularly those workers who may mistreat hotel property as if they were working for a regular boss:

I like showing society that workers can work and maintain a workplace, that is my greatest… it’s my pride, it’s my pride […] I feel very proud to show these government sons of a thousand bitches and that one great whore of a mother who gave them life (estos hijos de mil putas del gobierno y toda la puta madre que los parió) that we workers can! That is my pride! That is why I struggle so much and I try to be understood [by fellow coworkers]. I don’t do it because I’m annoying or because I’m proud or nothing. I want my colleagues to understand that workers have to plow ahead, that we can, that we don’t need some […] son-of-a-thousand-bitches capitalist keeping us under his heel, trampling us and harming us and a whole lot of other things like we’ve gone through before! (Personal interview. Emphasis added)

Alicia’s remarks suggest that the process of creating a new

workplace culture in the Bauen not only requires a formal revamping of old organizational structures, but also the creation and subjective absorption of new shared meanings and ideas to govern desired forms of behavior and social interaction (Forgacs 2000). By “culture” I mean the totality of “symbolic vehicles” such as beliefs, language, and “rituals of daily life” that embody and transmit a set of meanings collectively shared by a social group (Swidler 1986: 273). Moreover, Alicia’s comments illustrate how the process of building a new workplace culture at the Bauen is shaped by the daily intervention and maintenance of individual workers.

Outside the Bauen, the worker-controlled hotel has been described as a “concrete experience in the fight against exploitation of oppressed sectors [that] continues planting seeds for new social relations” (Trigona 2005a:2). Within similar journalistic accounts, Bauen social life has been characterized as “free from bosses and managers” where all “105 employees vote to decide budgeting, staffing, and operational decisions” (Raimbeau 2005:3; Freeman 2005:2). However, as I will show, such depictions mute the internal tensions and real instances of exclusion that characterize social life and decision-making processes within the Bauen. At the same time, I argue that such external depictions are themselves integral to the process of meaning-making and cultural production occurring within the Bauen.

While the process of meaning-making and cultural production

occurring within the hotel is stimulated by the conscious, everyday efforts


37

of Bauen workers and activists, it is also a process shaped by the particular cultural and political context in which the Bauen is embedded. On the one hand, I argue that the meanings Bauen workers attribute to their actions are influenced by the social climate that exists in Argentina nationally following the country’s financial collapse and corresponding crisis of legitimacy within its political system. On the other hand, the production of oppositional cultural forms within the Bauen is both constrained and facilitated through various symbolic and material interventions made by the external actors involved in the workers’ struggle to expropriate the hotel, namely the hotel’s former owner, the local government, and sympathetic journalists on the Left. Workplace Democracy and Culture

Within capitalist societies, the democratic structure of many worker cooperatives simultaneously embodies a critique of the dominant organization of production found in most conventional enterprises, and puts forth an “outline” of what an alternative society can look like (Jackall and Levin 1984: 11). According to Robert Jackall and Henry Levin (1984), this is why cooperatives “allow social thinkers to look two ways at once” (11). Historically, however, worker cooperatives have varied in the degree in which they represent a true critique of the existing capitalist order and offer hope that a more egalitarian system of social production is possible. In fact, it has been empirically demonstrated that a good number of cooperatives begin to resemble capitalist enterprises over time. From the early 20th century “democracies of producers” in England, to the cooperative system of Mondragón, Spain, to bus cooperatives in Israel—different scholars have detailed how the egalitarian impulses of cooperative workers can be gradually undermined by various structural and cultural factors that create obstacles to building participatory-democratic workplaces (Webb 1920:29; Gamson and Levin 1984; Russell 1995; Kasmir 1996). As social theorists Sidney and Beatrice Webb (1920) pessimistically saw it, all cooperatives were inevitably doomed to degenerate into “associations of capitalists” as a consequence of the “perpetual temptation” to profit induced by competing within a market system (155, 156).

Some other scholars, however, argue that workers have agency

in establishing and protecting the egalitarian and democratic integrity of cooperatives. As they see it, the internal culture of cooperatives and the particular social, political, and economic context in which cooperatives operate are key variables in determining whether their internal organization retains a horizontal and participatory character (Gamson and Levin 1984; Greenberg 1986; Rothschild and Whitt 1986). For instance, sociologist Edward Greenberg argues that forms of worker self-management “that arise in the midst of a revolutionary upheaval [are] generally animated by the same forces that sustain the revolutionary

BERKELEY JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY 38 struggle itself” (1986: 160). Similarly, Joyce Rothschild and J. Allen Whitt argue that participatory workplaces arising within the context of a larger social movement are less likely to “displace” initial commitments to equality and democracy as the organization grows in size or confronts other potential obstacles to building a true participatory democracy (1986: 128). In short, contrary to the structural pessimism of the Webb’s and other early social theorists such as Robert Michels, the work of Rothschild and Whitt, Greenberg, and others suggests that degenerating into an oligarchic enterprise is not a structural inevitability confronting worker cooperatives (Michels 1962). Rather, as Rothschild and Whitt put it, workplace democracy is “conditional” (1986: 75). Taking this insight as a point of departure, my analysis of the Bauen brings a cultural approach to bear on understanding how participatory-democratic workplaces are created and sustained. In particular, I will examine how the presence of external conflict shapes this process.

Social movement scholars have shown how movement actors do

not construct new cultural forms out of thin-air or solely through their own volition. Meaning-making, collective identities, and the creation of new patterns of social interaction are not the willed products of movement activists or “organic intellectuals,” but emerge out of a complex of relational processes among movement actors themselves and within the larger structural and discursive environments in which they are embedded (Fantasia 1988; Taylor and Whittier 1992; Melucci 1995; Steinberg 1999; Polletta and Jasper 2001; Klatch 2002; Reger 2002; Robnett 2002; Whittier 2002; Polletta 2006). For instance, the work of Marc Steinberg on 19th century English cotton-spinners shows how the discursive material available to social movements in legitimizing their claims can be limited by the particular discourses dominating the political and economic context in which those movements exist (Steinberg 1999). As Steinberg illustrates, while spinners exhibited agency in their redefinition of appropriated ideas, particularly the labor theory of value and notion of private property, the symbolic material available for appropriation and manipulation was constrained by the dominant discourses of liberalism and political economy defining the bounds of the “hegemonic field” (1999: 762). As I will show later, this idea of discursive “limits” is particularly useful for understanding why Bauen workers characterize their efforts to recover the hotel as “apolitical” and simply about “work.” While Steinberg’s work shows that social structure imposes constraints on how movements construct meaning, it also illustrates how the interaction between movement actors and social structural forces can be generative of new, oppositional cultural forms.

In studying the effects of social conflict on group cohesion,

sociologists Georg Simmel and Lewis Coser were among the first to point out the importance of relational processes for understanding cultural production within collectivities (Simmel 1955; Coser 1956). Since then,


39

scholars studying how solidarity and collective identity emerge within social movements have given us additional insights about the interactive relationship between conflict, meaning-making, and culture (Fantasia 1988; Taylor and Whittier 1992; Melucci 1995; Klatch 2002). For instance, in his analysis of the “lived experience of class,” sociologist Rick Fantasia (1988) argues that working-class solidarity should be understood as a set of cultural practices that emerge out of a process of struggle between workers and hostile adversaries:

Cultures of solidarity are formed out of friction and opposition itself. That is, solidarity is to a considerable degree formed and intensified in interaction with the opposition itself. (14, 233)

More specifically, interaction with a hostile employer can generate new collective practices among workers, such as unions, strikes, or community support networks, which contain “active expressions of worker solidarity” or, in other terms, shared oppositional meaning (Fantasia 1988: 19). According to Fantasia, it is the social structural relationship between workers and employers within capitalist society, that is, the class struggle itself, which is generative of these new, oppositional forms of culture among the working class. Notwithstanding the real divisions and tensions that exist between workers in the Bauen, Fantasia’s work allows us to see the Bauen workers’ practices of operating the hotel on their own terms and collectively resisting attempts by authorities to shut it down as acts that are simultaneously generative of worker solidarity and “emergent in [their] embodiment of oppositional practices and meanings” (1988: 11,17).

Social movement scholars looking at the relationship between group identity formation and collective action have also focused their analysis on the interactive processes between movement actors and adversaries (Taylor and Whittier 1992; Melucci 1995; Klatch 2002). In their work on collective identity and lesbian feminist movements, sociologists Verta Taylor and Nancy Whittier (1992) point out that collective identity formation begins with a marginalized group’s appropriation and “reverse reaffirmation” of the “social, political, economic, and cultural boundaries” that have been imposed on them by more powerful groups (510). As Taylor and Whittier put it:

Boundary markers are central to the formation of collective identity because they promote a heightened awareness of a group’s commonalities and frame interaction between members of the in-group and the out-group (510).

In the case of the Bauen, workers have explicitly rejected certain

categories imposed on them by the previous management, such as the term “employee.” Within the recovered Bauen, the appropriated category “worker” has been infused with oppositional meaning. Specifically, the term is used by many workers to not only emphasize the absence of

BERKELEY JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY 40 formal hierarchy within the hotel, but also to delineate the commonalities among Bauen workers vis-à-vis the ex-owner and other hostile outside actors. As I show below in the case of inspections of the hotel by state authorities, it is the constant interaction between workers and hostile actors that continuously reinforces this collective identity among Bauen workers.

The work of social movement scholars reminds us of the importance of relational processes in understanding how movement actors make meaning and produce new cultural forms. Far from romanticizing the agency of marginalized groups, their work makes clear that there is an interactive relationship between social structure and human agency in the production of oppositional culture. With respect to workplace democracy, the insights of social movement scholars provide us with a theoretical platform on which to build an analysis of how collective decision-making processes and egalitarian relations in cooperatives can be both constrained and nurtured through social movement activity.

Researching the Bauen Hotel

My analysis of the Bauen is informed by the daily observation of life in the hotel over the course of three weeks in July 2005. While I spent the latter two weeks of this period living at the Bauen, I commuted daily to the hotel from a suburb in Greater Buenos Aires during the first week. Most of my days at the hotel were spent talking to workers, eating in the hotel’s restaurant and bar—which was often frequented by journalists and activists from Argentina and abroad—and talking with other guests and visitors to the hotel, including workers from other recovered enterprises. Observing life at the hotel over these three weeks allowed me to experience directly the day-to-day events and routines that characterize work-life in the hotel, including how the workers’ external conflict physically manifests within the hotel in the form of disruptive police inspections and visits by city officials.

In addition to observation, I also conducted interviews with 16

workers and activists affiliated with the Bauen Hotel and Argentina’s recovered enterprise movement. Most of my interviews were open-ended and lasted for one hour, while a few of them lasted from 20 minutes to over two hours. All interviews were conducted in Spanish with the aid of an interpreter, with the exception of three that were conducted in English. All interviews were digitally recorded and translated after I left the field.

I held in-depth, formal interviews with ten workers from the

Bauen Hotel. Nine of these were with workers who had participated in the initial “take” of the hotel and/or participated in the subsequent


41

occupation and refurbishing of the hotel before its reopening. Of these nine workers, one identified herself as a new worker and was not part of the legal cooperative entity. I was able to interview one other new worker, David, who did not begin working at the Bauen until after its reopening.3 In addition to these ten interviews, I interviewed four activists affiliated with various organizations that either worked closely with the Bauen’s administration council and/or worked in the hotel on a daily basis. These activists all regularly attended collective assembly meetings.

My interviewees in the Bauen were strategically selected

informants. In particular, I chose informants who were best able to help me reconstruct the hotel’s history and give me a more nuanced sense of social life within the Bauen. During my first few days in the hotel I sought out those workers who had been employees under the Bauen’s ex-owner and who had actively participated in the initial occupation of the building. While these particular workers made it a point to emphasize the egalitarian and democratic character of social life in the new Bauen, some of their remarks hinted at the existence of real tensions between groups of workers in the hotel, especially in regard to relations between older and newly hired workers. Specifically, these early interviews were often characterized by conflicting information about the extent to which newly hired workers could participate in the decision-making process. Therefore, after these interviews I actively sought out newer workers, activists, and other older workers willing to speak candidly about the tensions between those workers who initially occupied and restored the hotel and those hired later.

Outside of the Bauen, I interviewed Esteban Magnani, a journalist actively involved with the movement, and Eduardo Murúa, the president of the Movimiento Nacional de Empresas Recuperadas4 (M.N.E.R). Murúa is also a former worker at the aluminum factory, IMPA, one of the first successful examples of the recovered enterprise model in Argentina (Magnani personal interview 2003). The perspectives of Magnani and Murúa made crucial contributions to my analysis of the Bauen, especially their insights about the internal dilemmas facing other recovered enterprises.

Lastly, it is important to point out that many of my interviews with Bauen workers and activists were themselves used as “spaces” of

3 Because my paper addresses relations between the 38 or so workers who were part of occupation process and the approximately 80 or so who were not, the fact that I was only able to interview one worker who was not part of the occupation process is an obvious limitation of my data. However, I do not believe that this limitation is significant or undermines my analysis. A substantial part of my analysis relies on an interpretation of significant events that have occurred within the hotel, such as newer workers’ inclusion in assemblies, and not exclusively on my interviews with individual workers. 4 National Movement of Recovered Enterprises

BERKELEY JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY 42 meaning-making and political intervention in their struggle with the hotel’s ex-owner (Auyero 2002:179). Sociologist Javier Auyero (2002) argues that the ethnographic interview can be an opportunity for people to “insert themselves into the public narratives in which they are not usually allowed to have any presence” (176). Auyero’s insight was encapsulated by a particular incident that happened during one of my early interviews. On the day that I interviewed Stephan, an older worker, the Yurkoviches took out a quarter page advertisement in the major Argentine newspaper, La Nacion, to denounce workers’ recovery of the hotel. Referring to their efforts as “illegitimate” and the workers themselves as “invaders,” “illegitimate occupants,” and “occupiers,” the ad represents a concrete attempt to influence public perceptions of the hotel (La Nacion, 6/28/05: 3). Stephan brought my attention to this ad after his colleague, Vivica, walked into the office during our interview and asked Stephan, suspiciously, who I was and why I was at the hotel. After assuring Vivica that I was not a journalist with sinister intentions, our interview proceeded and Stephan used it as an opportunity to refute claims made in the ad and present evidence of why Marcello Yurkovich never legally owned the property (Personal interview June 20, 2005). Many of the interviews I conducted with Bauen workers were similarly used as opportunities to refute particular characterizations of the hotel made by adversaries and to offer alternative representations. This fact should inform the reader’s interpretation of the inconsistencies that exist between how some workers and activists ideally represent the Bauen, that is, as a completely egalitarian and democratic space, and some of the actual events and daily practices that characterize social relations within the hotel. Seen within this context of symbolic struggle with the hotel’s ex-owner, such idealized representations should not be read cynically as manipulations of “the truth” about social life inside the Bauen, but as acts of meaning-making deployed defensively against efforts by a more powerful adversary to delegitimize workers’ recovery of the hotel. The 90s, Argentine Social Movements, and the Crash: Situating the Bauen Hotel

Neo-liberal restructuring of Argentina’s economy accelerated during the early 1990s and began to impact workers and domestic employers by the latter half of the decade. Implemented by then-president Carlos Menem and his administration, so-called “structural adjustment” policies included the increased privatization of publicly owned industries; the shrinking of state loans to small and medium-sized companies coupled with expanded market access for imported goods; and an artificially induced “one-to-one” exchange rate between the Argentine peso and U.S. dollar. As these policies took effect throughout the country, many employers in small and medium-sized companies began to file for bankruptcy and/or attempted to offset diminishing profits through a


43

variety of cost-cutting mechanisms, such as defaulting on workers’ pensions or slashing wages. In some cases, employers simply abandoned their enterprises altogether (Pozzi 2000; Palomino 2003).

At the Bauen Hotel, owners began to lose money as tourism in

Argentina dwindled and the parity between the Argentine peso and the U.S. dollar made the hotel’s nightly rate more expensive, especially for those living in Argentina (Loren 2005; Stephan, Personal interview June 28, 2005). In 1997, Marcello Yurkovich allegedly sold the hotel to the Chilean corporation, Solari. However, some workers describe the transfer to Solari as just one of a number of elaborate schemes Yurkovich used to pressure workers into accepting cuts to their wages and pensions:

Every two years, more or less, [Yurkovich] would have it sold and the workers had to make do with 2.50 pesos. If you didn’t want to work for that you would get fired. I only got the Solari [transfer], but Vivica, Maritza and others here, they’ve been working here for seven, eight, nine years. Vivica, I think, went through four corporation changes and she’s been here for six years. She was very nervous for two years because she was going to lose her accumulated benefits. (Alicia, Personal interview, July 11, 2005)

In addition to wage cuts, many Bauen workers were simply

fired. By the time Solari declared bankruptcy and boarded up the hotel in December of 2001, only 90 workers remained out of an initial workforce of more than 200 (Joseph, Personal interview June 27, 2005). Rise of Argentina’s Social Movements

Throughout the 1990s, structural adjustment policies and the recession they induced propelled unemployed workers and poor communities throughout Argentina to develop innovative strategies of collective resistance toward the daily manifestations of poverty (Auyero 2002). For instance, poor and working class neighborhoods established popular kitchens to feed local residents, while many poor and unemployed workers organized and put pressure on state authorities to provide more jobs and relief assistance to their communities. The defining tactic of these piqueteros was the mobilization of mass picket lines across major freeways, roads, and bridges in Buenos Aires and other cities and towns throughout the country (Epstein 2003; Palomino 2003).

During the mid and late 90s, workers in some fledgling or abandoned enterprises also fought to protect their sources of income by forming cooperatives and taking over production themselves, while petitioning the state to grant them a form of legal status to operate the enterprise. In some cases workers made agreements to become shareholders of the company (Palomino 2003; Eduardo Murúa, Personal interview, July 13, 2005). However, in the latter half of the decade, some workers began to forcefully occupy their workplaces and demand full

BERKELEY JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY 44 expropriations of the enterprises. In 2000, worker-representatives from some of these and other worker-controlled enterprises met at the aluminum factory IMPA in Buenos Aires to discuss the idea of linking and consolidating these “recovered enterprises” into an organizational structure that could provide resources and logistical support to workers in other enterprises threatened with unemployment and looking for alternatives. A loose organizational entity, the Movimiento Nacional de Empresas Recuperadas (M.N.E.R.), formed out of this meeting (Magnani 2003; Eduardo Murúa, Personal interview, July 13, 2005).5

Following the financial collapse in December 2001, a reform in

the national bankruptcy law granted trustees of bankrupt enterprises the power to allow workers in such businesses to restart production. While this law allowed workers facing unemployment the option of continuing production, it did not guarantee workers any priority in purchasing the enterprise when it came up for auction, which was usually after two years (Ranis 2005; 2006). However, along with the emerging coherence of recovered enterprises into several loose support networks, such as the M.N.E.R., this tepid assistance by the state made the recovery of bankrupt or abandoned enterprises an attractive alternative for workers already unemployed or threatened with unemployment during the crisis (Palomino 2003; Magnani 2003).

To understand the explosive growth of the recovered enterprises,

and particularly the militant tone of tactics deployed by Argentine social movements in general following the crisis of late December 2001 and early 2002, it is necessary to illustrate the social and economic climate of the period. In 1992, less than 15% of the Argentine population was classified as living below the poverty line. Approximately ten years later, in June of 2002, this number had grown to 51.4% (Petras and Veltmeyer 2003: 70). James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer (2003) point out that unemployment levels during this period were as high as 60% in some suburbs, and around 30% nationally (72). They also calculate that during the first five months of 2002, the number of Argentine poor grew at a rate of 25,000 per day (70). Of the nearly 14 million people living below the poverty line in December 2001, an Observer article noted that “half belonged to the country’s large middle class only five years [before]” (Arie 2001:2). In describing the crisis, Petras and Veltmeyer argue that the rapid “downward mobility and the impoverishment of the working and middle classes [were] reminiscent of the worst years of the US Depression of the 1930s and of Weimar Germany in the 1920s” (72).

5 The M.N.E.R. is one of a few different loosely organized federations under which some of the recovered enterprises are grouped. However, it should be emphasized that these federations do not exercise any direct control over the internal decision-making processes of recovered enterprises.


45

The period of December 2001-02 was also a time of “hegemonic crisis” for Argentina’s ruling classes (Hunt 1990: 314). That is, economic collapse was coupled with such a profound popular disillusionment with the political status quo that the country’s politicians could no longer govern with the impunity they had enjoyed in the past. A decisive majority of the country’s population now held Argentina’s politicians responsible for the economic crisis, asserting that it was they who had put the country into debt with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and sold off the country’s key industrial sectors and natural resources to the highest bidder throughout the 90s. Shouting “que se vayan todos” (they all must go!), mass protests in the streets of Buenos Aires beginning on December 19th and 20th continued over the next two weeks and forcefully removed four successive presidents, with one having to flee the government house by helicopter (Magnani 2003; Petras and Veltmeyer 2003; Sitrin 2006). As Petras and Veltmeyer note, never before in Argentina’s history had a collective revolt succeeded in ousting either an “elected or dictatorial leader” (94). These mass protests were complimented by an upsurge in the creation of neighborhood assemblies, community kitchens, and other forms of popular mobilization within many of Buenos Aires’ middle and working-class districts. In short, the crisis had created a political and social climate that was receptive to new, popular proposals for alleviating the country’s socioeconomic woes (Magnani 2003; Petras and Veltmeyer 2003; Sitrin 2006). The model of recovering bankrupt enterprises through worker control was another proposal.

At the time of this research, the recovered enterprise movement

as a whole consists of approximately 170 recovered enterprises and provides a source of income for over 10,000 workers, out of a total labor force of around 18 million (Raimbeau 2005; World Bank 2005). Across Argentina, the state’s relationship to the recovered enterprises has been anything but uniform and consistent. While sympathetic and supportive in some cases, it has been hostile and repressive in others (Itzigsohn forthcoming). For example, in the province of Neuquén, the recovered ceramics factory, Zanón, has fought off several aggressive attempts by the provincial government to evict workers. However, in November 2004, the Buenos Aires city council passed legislation in favor of the definitive expropriation of 13 recovered enterprises within the city (Trigona 2005b; Dangl 2005; Ranis 2005). Sociologist Jose Itzigsohn (forthcoming) argues that such variance in the state’s behavior toward recovered enterprises can be explained by several factors. In his view, the particular composition of legislatures, the degree to which a previous owner pressures courts to issue eviction orders, or even the political philosophies of judges hearing expropriation cases, can all shape how the state engages with particular enterprises.

BERKELEY JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY 46

Taking the Bauen The initial “take”6 of the Bauen and workers’ subsequent efforts over the following year to resist eviction and restore the building is an important period for understanding some of the tensions shaping the hotel’s internal politics. Moreover, the experiences of workers during this period are pertinent to the development of a particular narrative about the hotel that informs how many workers represent the Bauen and its recent history, both to themselves and to visitors to the hotel. “This isn’t about arms and sticks”

The logistics for taking the Bauen developed out of a series of meetings between M.N.E.R. activists, including Eduardo Murúa, and a small group of Bauen workers. Murúa and his colleagues provided material support in the form of legal advice on how workers could become legally associated as a cooperative, as well as fronted the 12 pesos per-person registration fee required to do so (Alicia, Interview wit h author July 11, 2005). After organizing a group of approximately 80 people, workers forcefully entered the building on March 21st, 2003 (Freeman 2005). Although only 10 or so Bauen workers were among the large group of movement organizers, students, and community members who initially broke into the building, approximately twenty-five other workers came to participate in the occupation over the next few days and weeks. Hugo, a 60 year-old worker who was hired at the Bauen during the late 90s, was one of them:

On Sunday I got here in the afternoon. It was dark, everything covered…and it made me a little scared […] The only thing I felt was that I could eventually have a steady job, nothing else, nothing else. Because no matter how much hope and expectations you created, it was still an abandoned place. You ask [yourself] ‘What can I do here? I don’t have any money, I don’t have anything, so, what can I do here?’ It’s asking a lot. (Personal interview, July 5, 2005)

Most workers who came to the Bauen at this time were either

desperate for work, or, like Hugo, tired of working part-time jobs with no secure source of income. For this reason many workers characterize their motivations as “apolitical.” In a Christian Science Monitor article written one month after the building’s occupation, a Bauen worker collecting coin donations from passersby proclaims: “But this movement isn’t political; we are workers who are fighting because we don’t have jobs, nothing more” (Byrnes 2003: 3). Similarly, in discussing how Bauen workers still rely on the generosity of supporters, Maritza told me: 6 The expression “the take” is commonly used by workers and activists involved in recovered enterprise movement to refer to the first phase of the process of occupation: physically entering and occupying the enterprise in question.


47

The hotel is fixed about seventy to eighty percent; we still need to repair more. That is why I always ask for help whenever we [have a march] or a festival, whenever there is something. We are apolitical, we don’t favor a specific party, we receive help from everybody (Personal interview, June 25, 2005, emphasis added).

The notion that the Bauen, as well as other recovered

enterprises, are “apolitical” is a theme that permeates many workers and activists’ representations of the recovered enterprise movement as a whole (Briscoe 2002:1; Loren 2005; Sitrin 2006:4). As evidenced in my interviews, this characterization of the Bauen is used to stress that workers’ efforts to reclaim and operate the hotel are autonomous from the influence of political parties and are not governed by some larger ideological vision. As Anibal puts it: “This cooperative isn’t about arms and sticks. We are here because of work [and] we don’t go with any political party” (Personal interview, June 25, 2005. Emphasis added). As workers describe it, the year of occupation before the Bauen’s reopening in 2004 was one of intense personal hardship and uncertainty. Maritza, a worker in her 60s, described conditions inside the hotel during the first winter after the take:

Well, the winter came [and] it was very crude. It was amazing that year. Almost all of us got sick [and] we didn’t have any medicine. Each one of us gave three, five pesos to buy the medicines […] There wasn’t a heater…we [didn’t have] gas, we [didn’t have] water, nothing. We brought water in bottles that the bar next door gave to us. We cooked with that. All the candles [we had] burned out because we watched the hotel 24 hours a day so [no one] that didn’t belong to our group entered in the hotel. Things stayed like that for a year or more…I wouldn’t wish this on anybody (Personal interview, June 25, 2005).

While trying to obtain enough provisions to sustain themselves, workers began the daunting task of cleaning and refurbishing the 20-story structure. Shortly after entering the building workers were granted a limited tenancy permit by the bankruptcy judge handling their case. This permit allowed workers to legally operate the hotel’s first floor theatre and several large meeting rooms, but it restricted their use of the building beyond the first three floors. However, all of the meeting rooms were in poor condition. Lacking the resources necessary to repair them, workers traded access to these rooms in exchange for essential supplies: “The first time we rented [a meeting room] was by trade. We got toilet paper, detergent…things that were necessary to do the cleaning.” However, such bartering was not restricted to cleaning supplies: “On another occasion we traded with doctors because we needed medicines, but it was also aberrant because they gave us a bag full of free samples” (Maritza, Personal interview, June 25, 2005). During this period many workers also took up permanent residence in the hotel’s empty guest rooms: “We had about 40 rooms that people were living in” (Stephan, Personal interview,

BERKELEY JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY 48 June 28, 2005).7 Ultimately, workers ignored the parameters of their limited tenancy permit and gradually began renting out the rest of the hotel as the guest rooms were refurbished.

In addition to these forms of material deprivation, having to spend a number of hours at the Bauen put a strain on workers personal relationships outside the hotel:

Two years of resistance takes its toll on human beings. To get to this point we had to make sacrifices with our family. We had to stop certain family customs, having fixed schedules with our children. There were a lot of things […] In the beginning it was awful. (Anibal, Personal interview, June 25, 2005)

Although some of these workers have since been given vacation

time to make up for missed time with their families, others have not: “It’s been two years since I have had a day off or a vacation. I’m here continuously” (Anibal, Personal interview, June 25, 2005).

These descriptions of the hardships endured by workers and the “apolitical” motivations behind the recovery are important for a few reasons. First, they are two prominent themes within a larger “public narrative”8 about the recovered hotel that many workers and activists retell to inquisitive journalists, researchers, and other visitors to the hotel (Somers 1994). Bauen workers deploy this narrative as a means of legitimizing their efforts and asserting their identities as autonomous workers capable of running the enterprise themselves. Such assertions counter representations of Bauen workers by the Yurkovich’s as “occupiers,” “illegitimate occupants,” “ex-employees,” and “invaders” within the mainstream press (La Nacion 2005: 3). Moreover, I also argue that specifically framing the occupation of the hotel as an act that is “about jobs, not politics” is a legitimizing claim constructed from a limited set of symbolic material available to Bauen workers within post-crisis Argentina (Steinberg 1999).

As noted earlier, the financial crisis of 2001-2002 was

characterized by a widespread popular disillusionment with the Argentine political system and the politicians who many Argentines blamed for the country’s dire economic situation. In post-crisis Argentina, “politics” and “politicians” are stigmatized categories and many Argentines, especially those involved in social movement organizations, remain skeptical of 7 Although a few workers still live at the hotel, it was eventually decided after heated debate that most workers had to move out: “I tried to explain [at an assembly] how much money we lost because I couldn’t sell those rooms. Obviously it was like a civil war, but I won” (Stephan, Personal interview, June 28, 2005). 8 Margaret Somers defines public narratives as “those narratives attached to cultural and institutional formations larger than the individual, to intersubjective networks or institutions, however local or grand” (Somers 1994:619). Such stories about organizations are accessible and held in common by the members that constitute the organization.


49

politicians and political parties, both on the Right and the Left. Thus, I argue that assertions by Bauen workers that the recovery of the hotel is about “work,” and not about “politics,” are not simply expressions of the “real” motivations behind worker’s efforts reclaim the hotel. They are also meaningful constructions intended to mobilize wide support within a cultural context where the claims of social movement actors acquire greater legitimacy in the eyes of the public if they are perceived as being distanced from “politics” and political parties (Petras and Veltmeyer 2003; Sitrin 2006). Moreover, I argue that the framing of the recovery of the hotel in the benign language of needs and jobs also reflects the hegemonic parameters of capitalist discourse, shaken but still dominant in post-crisis Argentina. That is, while the Bauen may “indicate [a] revolutionary transformation in property and social relations,” as Petras and Veltmeyer (2003) put it in describing the recovered enterprises in general, I contend that workers and activists affiliated with the hotel are unable to characterize the significance of the hotel in such counter-hegemonic terms and still mobilize the broad support they need for their struggle against the ex-owner (99). It is in these ways, then, that the symbolic material available to worker’s to construct certain types of oppositional meaning around the Bauen is constrained by the larger political and cultural context in which the hotel exists (Steinberg 1999).

Second, the Bauen’s public narrative is deployed internally as a

discursive mechanism used to meaningfully orient newly hired workers at the hotel, most of whom are family members of those workers involved in the initial occupation.9 Venting frustration about those newer workers who just show up to work and leave at the end of the day, Joseph, the president of the Bauen cooperative, put it this way: “We have to bring this worker in and tell him our story. However many days, however much time it takes. We have to find a way to make this worker conscious” (Personal interview, June 27, 2005. Emphasis added). This public narrative is also reproduced through conversations between family members who work together in the hotel. David, a new worker, talks about the occupation with his grandmother, Maritza: “As a matter of fact I’m always the one who asks her how the occupation process was, how [they took] it, how they restructured it, everything. It doesn’t come from her to tell me, I ask her” (Personal interview, July 4, 2005). In short, the Bauen’s public narrative is used within the hotel to cultivate an awareness and sense of commitment in those workers who had no direct experience of the initial occupation’s hardships.

9 In the Bauen, immediate relatives of members of the coop are given preferential consideration in hiring decisions. When hiring new workers is necessary, such as after the worker’s renovated and reopened the hotel’s bar, deciding whose relative will be hired over another’s is the source of many disputes within the assemblies (Nicolas, Personal interview, June 27, 2005,) This particular practice of hiring family members is not unique to the Bauen but also characterizes hiring practices in other recovered enterprises (Palomino 2003; Itzigsohn, forthcoming).


The accounts by older workers of the hardships they endured during the initial occupation highlight the point that this group of workers have put in a different amount of physical and emotional investment in the current enterprise compared with newly hired workers. As I demonstrate below, this fact has translated into marked differences in decision-making power between the two groups. As a result, two distinct collectivities of workers have developed within the hotel, which I have been referring to as “older” and “new” workers.

This leads to my third point about the Bauen’s organizational

narrative. In addition to its external legitimizing function and its use as a tool to orient newer workers, this narrative, particularly its theme of sacrifice, is deployed to rationalize real differences in power and rewards that exist between older and newer workers. In other words, it justifies unequal distributions of decision-making power and rewards in a work environment that is formally egalitarian and participatory-democratic.

The Bauen’s New Internal Organization Since taking the Bauen, workers have attempted to restructure daily-life within the hotel in an egalitarian and participatory-democratic fashion. Such efforts are manifested in several different practices within the hotel. However, since its reopening and the subsequent hiring of approximately 80 new workers, impulses to restructure social life horizontally have been undermined by concrete instances of exclusion and flashes of authoritarian behavior. In this way, the Bauen should be understood as a “culturally unsettled” social space where old habits and worldviews coexist in tension with explicit attempts to cultivate new habits of daily conduct (Swidler 1986:278). “There is no gerente here”: Worker Assemblies and Coordinators

As in most recovered enterprises the Bauen’s main organ of decision-making is the collective assembly, which occurs at least once every 15 days. Workers point out that the assemblies are a space where all major administrative issues as well as political questions related to the Bauen’s struggle for expropriation are debated and determined by a majority vote (Nicolas, Personal interview, July 2, 2005). An administrative council comprised of an elected president, vice-president, treasurer, and “sindico”10 is the primary day-to-day decision-making entity under the assembly and is responsible for arbitrating small 10 The sindico’s main responsibility in the Bauen is to act as a liaison between the administration council and other workers in the hotel, which involves fielding complaints, grievances, and input from workers throughout the workday and bringing them before the council for resolution or to put them on the agenda of the collective assembly (Itzigsohn, forthcoming; David, Personal interview, July 4, 2005).


51

grievances that may arise between workers (Joseph, Personal interview, July 27, 2005). The administration council is also responsible for putting together the meeting agenda for each collective assembly. Smaller decisions, such as what supplies to purchase for a section of the hotel or minor problems requiring a quick resolution, are left up to sector “coordinators” (Alicia, Personal interview, July 11, 2005).

Some workers and activists identify a few problems with the

nature of deliberation and decision-making within the Bauen’s collective assemblies. David, a new worker, argues that resolving issues efficiently through the assemblies is a consistent problem:

You establish ten points [in the agenda] and [by the time] we reach the fourth or fifth point…arguments start and we never finish addressing the ten points. They are left over for the next assembly, and they get noted, and they get noted, and they become problems that are never solved. (Personal interview, July 5, 2005)

Stephan, an older worker, asserts that the administration council

has too much power over shaping the outcomes of deliberation within the assemblies:

People in the council have the time to [think and debate about issues] that [workers who are not part of the council] do not have because we are working hard. And sometimes they will [go around before an assembly], for example, and say: ‘William, if we talk in the assembly about this [issue], what about if you say No?’ And they go and talk to Juan: ‘What about if you say no?’ And they talk to someone else: ‘What about if you say no?’ And when you come to the assembly, most of the people will say ‘No’… (Personal interview, June 28, 2005)

When I brought up these complaints with Roberto, an activist

working in the hotel, he told me that there was some discussion about how to address them, but that no changes had been implemented. According to him, while possible solutions to these problems have been proposed informally—such as forming smaller collective assemblies in each sector of the hotel or finding ways to make important information about the hotel more available and transparent to workers—actually debating and deciding upon such proposals in the collective assembly is constrained by the demands of the Bauen’s fight for an expropriation. That is, instead of discussing concrete ways to resolve some of the inevitable problems associated with collectively running an enterprise, more time is spent at collective assemblies on issues related to the workers’ legal fight with the ex-owner. In addition to dynamics within the assemblies, another aspect of social life within the Bauen that can be a source of tension is the relationship between sector coordinators and other workers.


The role of coordinators is essentially to supervise work in each of the Bauen’s six sectors. However, from the perspective of many workers there is a clear distinction between a traditional boss and a coordinator. According to them, coordinators are held more accountable by virtue of the fact that they are elected, and can be recalled, by the collective assembly. According to Christina, coordinators do not do more work than anyone else: “The work is the same for everyone. Nobody works more or less than the other workers […] everyone works because we aren’t going to obey anyone’s orders” (Personal interview, July 2, 2005). Bauen workers also insist that coordinators do not engage in the type of routine surveillance that characterizes the behavior of supervisors and managers in traditional enterprises: “Before, with a boss, a lot more was demanded. With a boss it’s harder because they are always watching you and you have to be on your toes” (Antonio, Personal interview, June 28, 2005). However, while many workers insist that such an atmosphere of surveillance is now absent, old habits persist.

During one workday a few weeks before my visit to the hotel, a

reception worker decided to take a break and visit his fellow coworker, a musician playing in the hotel’s restaurant.11 After talking with his coworker for a few moments, the reception worker picked up his friend’s guitar and began to play it. About ten minutes later the lead coordinator of the reception sector reproached the worker for being out of his area and formally wrote him up, requesting that 10% of the workers’ wages for that day be deducted from his weekly salary. In the opinion of Roberto, the activist who told me about this incident, the reception coordinator involved is the most qualified person for his position. However, he is only interested in his job, not “understanding” the cooperative:

He has an old system in his head. For him a chief is somebody who looks after the workers, [making sure they’re] in their post; that they don’t do anything he doesn‘t want them to do […] What we want in here [is for] everyone [to be able to] run free around the hotel. People have to do their work, but [they] can come [to the bar] and drink a coffee [or] sit down with the musician and listen. (Roberto, Personal interview, July 10, 2005)

Roberto’s remarks illustrate one way in which Bauen workers

and activists are attempting to reconfigure social interaction within the hotel, that is, by formally removing restrictions on workers’ mobility throughout the building.

The movement of workers throughout the Bauen was highly restricted by management during the hotel’s days as a private enterprise. As a result, social interaction between workers was stifled:

11 I have changed details of this incident to protect the identities of those involved.


53 We were only compañeros when we took the elevator to go up to eat, or in the lunchroom. Today, the difference is marked […] we are always together and not just in the elevators or only during lunch hour. We are together 24 hours. We have long conversations. (Anibal, Personal interview, June 25, 2005)

The regulation of social interaction is a common feature in most

conventional enterprises and is rooted in the capitalist’s need to maximize the productivity of labor power by eliminating “all motions and energies not directed to the increase of capital” (Braverman 1974: 214). In this way, Bauen workers’ attempts to dismantle regulations on movement should be seen as a counter-hegemonic act at the level of everyday interaction. However, as Roberto’s frustration about the reception coordinator demonstrates, such formal efforts at making the Bauen a less oppressive environment run up against old commonsense conceptions about what it means to be a supervisor. Like some other coordinators in the hotel, the coordinator who reprimanded the worker playing the guitar is in his 50s and had years of experience working at the Bauen when it was a hierarchically structured enterprise. According to Roberto, the reception coordinator has no interest in whatever political significance the Bauen cooperative may have:

I’m talking to him once a week, because he gets angry if you tell him what to do. I try to talk to him. He doesn’t understand the group he works in is a team. He could come out as elected chief of that team because he has the best capacity for it. But he doesn’t have the capacity for a social movement. (Personal interview July 10, 2005)

Hugo is another coordinator whose sentiments about the

cooperative are similar to those of the reception coordinator. He is in his 60s and worked for a large North American hotel company in Buenos Aires for over 20 years before coming to the Bauen in the late 90s. Viewing the Bauen’s cooperative structure as a hindrance on the hotel’s ability to compete, Hugo also expressed frustration about the practice of collective decision-making in the workplace:

I’m used to the business that says: ‘Ok, here we need 10 [mechanics], 10 [receptionists], [and] 5 [valets].’ Human Resources [would then give] me their resume, and I would approve it […] If I was wrong, the stick would fall on me. Here it’s not like that. The one who gives their opinion is generally the one who can’t give their opinion. In a group of people the person to give their opinion has to be the one in charge of the department. Not the one who is---not to disrespect anyone---not the one who is washing clothes, the one who makes the bed, the valet, no. Maybe to have some influence they raise their hand (Personal interview, July 5, 2005. Emphasis added).

While there is no official hierarchy between workers in the

Bauen, traces of a capitalist commonsense persist. Specifically, Hugo’s remarks show that some workers still hold onto the subjective perceptions that a worker’s task and position within the hotel should determine their level of participation in decision-making processes. What is also notable

BERKELEY JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY 54 about Hugo’s remark is the personal frustration it conveys: while his particular position on workplace authority would likely go unchallenged within a conventional capitalist enterprise, such a position is no longer commonsense within the Bauen and, in some instances, openly contested.12 Indeed, Hugo’s frustration with the assemblies can be read as both an expression of authoritarian impulses, but also as an indicator of the level of participation by rank-and-file workers in the collective decision-making process.

Within the recovered Bauen, the behavior displayed by the reception coordinator as well as the views expressed by Hugo are actively discouraged. Although such behavior exists, it is stigmatized within a work environment where formal equality between workers is not only embodied within new relations of power between supervisors and rank-and-file workers, but also in efforts to remove restrictions on movement and social interaction during the workday. Such efforts are reinforced by the existence of egalitarian discourse within the hotel that is reproduced in a number of ways, including through a conscious attempt to restructure linguistic practices within the hotel.

“We Must Change the Language”

Along with efforts to replace previous organizational structures that legitimized hierarchy and unilateral power, a new vocabulary of equality has formally replaced hierarchical designators of workers’ positions. This new linguistic environment rhetorically imposes an equality of status on social relations in the hotel and is consciously deployed and maintained by some Bauen workers.

The notion that the Bauen is “without bosses” (sin jefes) and “without owners” (sin patrones) informs this effort to establish a new linguistic infrastructure. There are only “workers.” The word that Bauen workers commonly use to refer to each other is “compañero/a,” which in this context is best translated into English as “workmate.” Terms such as “empleado/a” (employee) and “jefes” (bosses), while they may still be used, are seen as illegitimate and actively discouraged within the Bauen. According to Vivica, a member of the cooperative who has worked at the Bauen for 12 years, such hierarchical labels have been replaced with new terms such as “obreros auto-gestionados” (self-managed workers) or “obreros-libres” (free-workers) (Personal interview July 12, 2005). But, as she put it, transforming the vocabulary workers use to refer to each other requires intervention:

We must change the language. The language that we use daily, the language of the common people, so that we don’t have ‘bosses’

12 I want to thank Robert Zussman for this insight.


55 (jefes)… Every 15 days we have assemblies and there is a discussion: [mocking assembly]: ‘The sector bosses (jefes de sectores)…’ And I raise my hand [to correct them]: “The responsible fellow workers (companeros)…’ And there it is, always, everyday, reaffirming the word: ‘workmate’ (companero). Everyday, always, we have to be reaffirming. (Personal interview, July 12, 2005)

Like Roberto’s efforts to talk to the reception coordinator about

his relationship with other workers in his sector, Vivica’s remarks illustrate how some workers and activists actively intervene against perceived remnants of a hierarchical past and attempt to cultivate new habits of interaction. In a Gramscian sense, their actions can be understood as attempts to construct a new type of workplace hegemony, one that is structured by commonsense conceptions of equality, cooperation, and solidarity between workers. This dominant egalitarian discourse within the hotel is also reinforced through the consistent reproduction of a particular organizational narrative about the Bauen. A core theme within this narrative is the idea that social life and decision-making in the Bauen was unequal and hierarchical before its recovery by workers, but is now completely equal and democratic. As I showed in the introduction, this theme of equality and democracy is consistently reproduced externally in many English-language journalistic articles about the Bauen. Specifically, such articles depict Bauen workers’ salaries as equal (which they are not) and/or that all workers participate in the decision-making process (Balch 2005; Dangl 2005; Freeman 2005; Raimbeau 2005; Trigona 2005a; 2006). Such representations, I argue, are instrumental in mobilizing support for the Bauen and other recovered enterprises and in motivating researchers, activists, and others to visit them. In the case of the Bauen, some workers consciously reproduce the theme of equality and democracy to such visitors. My own experiences as a researcher in the hotel are a case in point. During my first interview at the Bauen, which was with Maritza, I was told that:

Nowadays we are completely organized; we have a council where the projects are presented. That council organizes assemblies composed by all the workers and we decide everything by majority vote…Every important decision is made by gathering in an assembly. (Personal interview, June 25, 2005)

Similarly, in an early interview with the cooperative president, I

was told that “everyone, everyone” has a vote in the assemblies and that “here we are equal, and this is what motivates us” (Joseph, Personal interview, June 27, 2005). Later, during a conversation about worker assemblies, Oscar, an activist working in the hotel stressed to me:

Everyone participates and everyone is heard: that is very important. There are those who agree and disagree on things but when it comes to the concept of everyone participating, there is full consensus. It is a participatory democracy, a true democracy. There are steps, but that


is what we have come to: a democracy in which all participate (June 28, 2005).

It is my contention that many Bauen workers and activists are

aware of the fact that the collective decision-making structure of the hotel is a feature of workers’ efforts that appeals strongly to many of their allies in the struggle to expropriate the hotel, specifically on the Left. Thus, I argue that such egalitarian depictions of the Bauen aimed at visitors to the hotel are, in part, conscious attempts to mobilize legitimacy for workers’ efforts and consolidate support. At the same time, however, I also contend that such strategic depictions have consequences for equality and democracy within the hotel. Bauen workers, activists, sympathetic journalists, and curious visitors to the hotel are all participants in the consistent reproduction and solidification of an egalitarian discourse that permeates social life within the hotel. This egalitarian discourse, like the collective assembly structure, should be conceived of as a cultural artifact within the hotel that is produced and stimulated through workers’ efforts to recover the hotel and obtain a definitive expropriation. Moreover, as I argue below, it is a discursive characteristic of the recovered Bauen that has a constraining effect on concrete practices of exclusion and hierarchy within the hotel. “It’s a shame to have to leave like that”: Dilemmas of Inclusion

While the Bauen is often depicted as an all-inclusive space of equality and democracy, the question of access and inclusion in worker assemblies remains a highly contentious issue within the hotel. In discussing some of the internal contradictions that arise within recovered enterprises, M.N.E.R. president Eduardo Murúa pointed out that:

There is always a certain friction between the workers that took over the business and the new workers. The older workers feel that they have earned certain rights because of the fight they have been in for so long. (Personal interview, July 13, 2005)

The Bauen is no exception. While new workers can now attend most assemblies, this was a relatively recent development at the time of my research. “It’s been more or less seven or eight months they have participated in the assemblies” (Alicia, Personal interview, July 11, 2005). Christina, a new worker, described how this happened:

We always said that we wanted to enter the assembly and were told that we could go or we couldn’t go…we went in many times without permission and had to leave. It’s a shame to have to leave like that. But later they (members of the cooperative) started realizing how much we did for them and that we did quality work and carried ourselves well, so they let us in the assemblies. And a little while ago


57 we were given a voice and a vote [in the assemblies]. (Personal interview, July 2, 2005)

However, at the time of this research, new workers were still

excluded from certain assemblies, particularly when they are called to address sensitive issues regarding members of the cooperative. During my stay at the hotel, an assembly was to be held to debate whether to fire a member of the legal cooperative who was accused of stealing money. There was disagreement among older workers about whether or not to let new workers attend and participate in this particular assembly meeting, where evidence showing the alleged guilt of this worker was to be presented.13 At the time of my interview with Alicia, the question of whether to open up this particular assembly to new workers had not been decided upon. I asked her whether she thought new workers should attend:

Look, in my opinion, not yet; because they are not ready yet. They came in and found…we suffered cold here, not hunger---because thank god we had noodles and fried tortilla to eat. But when we came in here, this [place was a mess], there was nothing here, the bats passed us by and gave us a ride to congress and brought us back; the rats, we had so many you could throw them up in the sky, so then we suffered a lot here… (Personal interview, July 11, 2005. Emphasis added).

What is worth noting about Alicia’s remarks is that she does not

explain what she means by new workers “not being ready yet,” but instead abruptly shifts into a description of the particular hardships of the occupation endured by older workers. Alicia’s comments illustrate how a narrative of sacrifice about the initial occupation serves to justify differences in power that exist between new and older workers. One new worker, David, also invoked the sacrifice of older workers when I asked him why members of the legal cooperative enjoy greater decision-making power and other rights:

They have decision-making (rights) and they have power because some of those members were the founding members of this co-op. They’re the ones who took over the hotel, they cleaned it up again, they got it working, and because they gave the job to the other colleagues. (Personal interview, July 4, 2005)

Alicia and David’s comments both show how the experiences of older workers during the occupation of the hotel are deployed to rationalize the

13 Different details of this issue were conveyed to me in some of my interviews, but it was not brought up at all in my initial interviews with the president of the cooperative and a few other member-workers.

BERKELEY JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY 58 unequal distribution of power and rewards14 between older and new workers.

The history of exclusion of new workers from collective assemblies is a striking contradiction to the utopian images of the hotel described above. It must be noted that older workers are themselves divided over the extent to which new workers should have decision-making power within the hotel. Two reasons explain the persistent reluctance of some older workers to completely include new workers in decision-making processes. On the one hand, there is a subjective perception among some older workers that they have a greater emotional and physical investment in the recovered hotel. On the other hand, there is an anxiety about the distribution of power. That is, since new workers comprise a majority of the Bauen’s workforce, there is a perception among some older workers that giving new workers equal decision-making power could threaten the stability and survival of the hotel by allowing worker’s with bad intentions and/or no sense of investment in the hotel to have more control than those workers who were responsible for initially occupying and refurbishing the hotel (Alicia, Personal interview, July 11, 2005). The Fight for Definitive Expropriation

As the Bauen’s ongoing struggle for expropriation consistently demands investments of time and personal risk by both older and new workers, it’s becoming more difficult to sustain and justify discrepancies of power between the two. At the time of this research, the B.A.U.E.N. cooperative had a bill before the Buenos Aires city government to obtain a two-year expropriation. Ultimately, however, workers are fighting for a definitive expropriation of the building. Although Marcello Yurkovich himself died in 2003, his sons are actively opposing worker’s efforts to expropriate the building and have filed a lawsuit to retake control of the hotel. Yurkovich’s sons argue that they are the legal owners of the hotel since it was their father who received the initial loan in 1978. However, because this loan was never repaid to the state, Bauen workers argue that the hotel still belongs to the government and that, therefore, the Yurkovichs’s claim has no legitimacy. If granted an expropriation, Bauen workers have promised to repay the public loan (Loren 2005; Freeman 2005; Roberto, Personal interview, July 10, 2005). 14 Contrary to many English-language articles about the hotel, Bauen workers did not have equal salaries at the time of this research (Raimbeau 2005; Balch 2005; Trigona 2006). According to workers I spoke with, newly hired workers in the hotel made $600 pesos a month while most member workers made a salary of $800 pesos. Members of the Bauen’s administration council, the president, vice-president, and treasurer, all made a salary of $1000 pesos. Most sector coordinators earned $900 pesos (Maritza, Personal interview, June 25, 2005). Moreover, it should also be pointed out that in many other recovered enterprises salaries are equal across all workers (Palomino 2003).


59

In their fight to persuade and pressure city authorities to grant

them a definitive expropriation, Bauen workers consistently organize demonstrations and marches to the Buenos Aires City Hall and other buildings housing local officials (“Nation at a Glance” 2005). They also have to resist various state authorities and police who frequently come to the hotel to deliver eviction notices or carry out harassing safety inspections usually initiated by complaints from the Yurkovich’s. These visits occur in the midst of day-to-day operations and create a palpable tension among workers and the guests who happen to witness them. In the three-week span of this research, I witnessed two such events. During one visit the bankruptcy judge hearing the Bauen’s case came to the hotel escorted by police and other officials to inspect the hotel’s compliance with safety code regulations. Before her visit, workers received notice of the inspection, which allowed maintenance workers to hurriedly put up fire exit signs in certain parts of the building.15 When the bankruptcy judge arrived with her escort, workers from many areas of the hotel flooded the lobby, including housekeepers and maintenance workers whom I never saw in the lobby area during more “normal” periods of my visit (fieldnotes June 27, 2005).

“We are all part of the cooperative”: Emerging Identity The visit by the bankruptcy judge did not result in an eviction that day. However, the collective response by workers to the visit was a clear effort to convey to the judge that workers would not make shutting down the hotel easy for state authorities. After witnessing the visit by the bankruptcy judge, I asked several workers what they thought would happen if state authorities did attempt to forcefully evict workers from the building. David, a worker who had been at the hotel for four months at the time of my research, responded:

We won’t allow it. However much they strike us, do whatever they do with us, we won’t allow it. Luckily, every time there was an eviction attempt […] the hotel was tipped off [and] we the employees at the hotel always took measures for that. (Personal interview, July 4, 2005. Emphasis added)

Similar to David, Christina, another new worker, answered: “We

would fight […] Everyone. Nobody is going to let them do that. We are very strong” (Personal interview, July 2, 2005. Emphasis added). What is important about David and Christina’s comments is that they both convey a strong collective identity in relation to state authorities. Moreover, as I will show, both Christina and David clearly identify themselves as “new

15 Workers assert that the lack of exit signs and other possible safety hazards are not the fault of the current workers, but the ex-owner who let the Bauen decay gradually as the hotel struggled through the 90s recession.

BERKELEY JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY 60 workers” and were at times strongly critical of older workers during our conversations.

The work of social movement scholars reminds us that collective identities emerge out of relational processes (Taylor and Whittier 1992; Melucci 1995; Reger 2002; Klatch 2002; Robnett 2002). As Alberto Melucci (1995) argues, collective identities are not a necessary derivative of some shared structural or geographical location among actors, but the outcome of a process of a group’s interaction with their “external environment” that has resulted in the “formation of a ‘we’” (43). Melucci also points out that “a certain degree of emotional investment is required” in this process (43). Workers’ collective response to eviction attempts and harassing inspections such as the one described above, as well as their marches and demonstrations, are active expressions of class solidarity (Fantasia 1988). However, such responses also produce and reinforce a shared sense of “emotional investment” among both older and newer workers over the future of the hotel. As a result, such moments are facilitating the emergence of an oppositional identity that is shared by both groups of workers vis-à-vis the Bauen’s ex-owner and hostile state authorities (Fantasia 1988). I contend that this emerging collective identity can be discerned in recent events in the hotel surrounding new workers’ resistance to exclusion from collective assemblies.

“We made demands”: Internal Resistance to Exclusion At the Bauen, there is a trial period for newly hired workers, during which time they are not incorporated into the legal cooperative entity nor given decision-making power within assemblies. At the time of my research, there were approximately 38 members of the legal cooperative and around 80 new workers who were not yet incorporated into the cooperative. Of these 80 new workers, some have been working at the Bauen for over two years, while some have been working in the hotel for as little as four months. While these 80 workers are not officially incorporated into the legal cooperative, they now have the option of attending most assemblies and participating in decision-making (Alicia, Personal interview, July 11, 2005). However, as mentioned above, participation by this group of new workers in all decisions, specifically those that affect member workers, remains a contentious issue within the hotel. Based on interviews with both older and new workers, the decision to open the collective assemblies to new workers was in part a response to the latter’s assertions of equality with member workers.

Christina identifies herself as a new worker although she came to the hotel during the early days of the occupation to spend time with her husband, Rudy, who was part of the group that initially broke into the hotel. Rudy is a member of the legal cooperative and worked at the Bauen before its bankruptcy, while Christina is a non-member and began work


61

after the occupation. She described how new workers came to be allowed into the assemblies (note her use of the word “we” in discussing the actions of new workers):

We were able to enter because one day we decided to stand up (for ourselves) and say that we also want to participate and have an opinion because we work here too…We made demands […] we stated that we work a lot and sometimes more than them [those allowed in the assembly] (Personal interview, July 2, 2005. Emphasis added).

Christina’s comments suggest that some new workers’ claims

for inclusion were framed by an assumption of equality with older workers by virtue of the fact that they perform labor within in the hotel. Because they also work in the hotel, new workers should also have a direct say in decision-making. I argue that it is precisely this kind of assumption that makes the Bauen’s emergent work culture fundamentally different from a traditional capitalist workplace, where presumed inequality between rank-and-file workers and those in power is an element of workplace commonsense. New workers’ demands for inclusion in assemblies were also motivated by their involvement in the struggle for expropriation. Specifically, some newer workers began to point out the contradiction to member workers between their active participation in the fight for the cooperative and simultaneous exclusion from participating in important decisions. Alicia put it this way:

You know what happens is that in [this kind of] struggle, you cannot separate because we are all together in the struggle. We are all together in the fight, so you can’t really have people around for the struggle, and then when you have to decide something have them [not be there]…it’s kind of contradictory. Because the first thing [the newer workers] will tell you is ‘How is it that when there’s a fight we all stand together and then when decisions have to be made about the workplace we are apart?’…and sometimes you have to admit they are right (Personal interview, July 11, 2005)

While some older workers may have felt morally obliged to

open up assemblies to newer workers, putting themselves at personal risk for the sake of “the cooperative,” instrumental reasons were also a factor. Stephan, an older worker, described the dilemma:

For example, when we had to march to the legislatura, or wherever, we used them (newer workers). And we need them because [then] we’ll have more. The problem was that when [decisions were made] they were not there. [The newer workers] said ‘You use us when you need us, and then throw us away.’ [We] decided to make assemblies open [to] older and newer workers (Personal interview, June 28, 2005)


Indeed the threat of new workers refusing to participate in future collective actions was a concern of Alicia’s when considering whether they should be allowed to attend the particular assembly about the older worker accused of stealing money: “If we leave them outside of the assembly, whenever we have a march, I don’t think they’ll come” (Personal interview, July 11, 2005). These accounts of how assemblies were widened to include newly hired workers show that the Bauen’s external conflict with state authorities and the hotel’s ex-owner has a positive impact on collective decision-making processes within the hotel. The conflict creates experiences in which the collective mobilization of a majority of workers in the hotel is necessary for success. As newly hired workers are drawn into the struggle for an expropriation and increasingly invest greater amounts of physical and emotional energy into the fight over the hotel’s future, the contradiction between their continued exclusion from certain decision-making processes and their participation in collective struggle becomes more strikingly obvious and unacceptable to some in the hotel. This is one way that the Bauen workers’ resistance against external forces engenders internal resistance to exclusion and manifestations of hierarchy. The Democratic Consequences of Struggle

Esteban Magnani is an Argentine journalist and activist who works with an NGO that provides no-interest loans to recovered enterprises. In his view, one of the biggest obstacles confronting recovered enterprises is the subjective accumulation of competitive and selfish habits in workers who have spent their entire lives within capitalist workplaces:

Some people say neoliberalism is everywhere, and it’s inside workers as well. That’s one of the worst enemies and one of the most complicated enemies. The [recovered enterprises] who can’t beat this, or at least control this enemy, probably won’t be able to start producing…because this can’t be a project of one person. Democracy is embedded in the requirements (Personal interview, June 30, 2005)

According to Esteban, however, the particular nature of the

struggle to reclaim an enterprise can help combat this “complicated enemy.” Echoing Francesca Polletta’s (2002) insight that direct-democracy makes strategic sense for social movements, Magnani suggests that there is a positive correlation between the intensity of the conflict workers have endured to recover their enterprise, and the level of involvement and sense of commitment among workers involved:

I haven’t seen it very often [but] I think there is some kind of evolutionary [process] there. The factories that actually manage to recover the plants were the ones who had more solidarity and more


63 horizontality in decision-making. The whole process tends to make the [systems with the most solidarity] be the ones to actually succeed […] Because you need people, you need work, and it’s a very hard struggle […] so you need lots of commitment. The only way to have people so committed is by making them feel responsible for their own future, to feel part of the process (Personal interview).

As mentioned earlier, the question of how to meaningfully

integrate newcomers is a dilemma that confronts workers and activists in many recovered enterprises, especially those that have gone through an intense fight to get to where they are (Magnani, Personal interview, June 30, 2005 and Murúa, personal interview, July 13, 2005). However, the particular composition of the Bauen’s current workforce makes the problem even more urgent and acute for the minority group of workers who initially took the hotel:

And the struggle of the non-members is precisely that: There is a larger number of non-members than there are members [of the legal cooperative]. And well, we want to be given more importance. I think we [will become members in the future] because the need to make us members is going to become evident. (David, Personal interview, July 4, 2005. Emphasis added)

I argue that new workers’ demands for inclusion into the

assemblies are also facilitated by the egalitarian and participatory-democratic discourse that saturates social life within the Bauen. This discourse, anchored in the Bauen’s organizational narrative, provides a culturally available repository of meanings within the hotel that can be used to give legitimacy to claims against exclusion and manifestations of hierarchy. In short, the existence of this discourse makes it easier for aggrieved workers to resist instances of authoritarian and exclusionary behavior. As suggested by David’s comment and recent acts of resistance by new workers against their exclusion from assemblies, the Bauen’s ongoing struggle for expropriation will necessarily demand a further democratization of internal decision-making processes. Conclusion

Antonio, an activist with the Movimiento Nacional de Empresas Recuperadas (M.N.E.R.), characterizes the political and economic threat posed by the Bauen and other recovered enterprises this way:

We are a grain of sand. We are one of 200 companies in the whole country. The importance of this, economically, doesn’t carry a great weight in the (overall) GNP. What does have weight is the discourse that one establishes in society and [the idea that] even without an owner the endeavor can still be run. This is the central discussion. (Personal interview, June 27, 2005. Emphasis added)

M.N.E.R. president Eduardo Murúa puts it similarly when he says:


Even if we are not an important economic factor, we are important symbolically […] We (the recovered enterprises) have shown that we can work without having bosses, that it is a lie that this country needs investments to create jobs (Personal interview, July 13, 2005)

Both Antonio and Murúa’s respective comments make the argument that the Bauen and other recovered enterprises are contributing to a counter-hegemonic discourse within the wider culture about the nature of work in capitalist society and how to solve the country’s economic problems. Similar references to this symbolic significance of the Bauen and other enterprises were also made in various ways by many of the workers I interviewed at the hotel. While the Bauen and Argentina’s recovered enterprises may indeed have broadened the range of alternatives that people consider as possibilities to solving the socioeconomic problems brought on Argentina and other countries by neoliberalism, it is beyond the capacity and purpose of my research to empirically illustrate this. However, by bringing a cultural analysis to bear on the issue of how equality and democracy can be achieved and sustained within the workplace, this paper has shown that the effort to create such a potentially counter-hegemonic symbol is an active, ongoing, and contradictory process.

As Marx might put it, Bauen workers exhibit agency in imbuing the recovered hotel with their own meaning and in producing new types of social relationships, but they do not do so within conditions of their own choosing. Bauen workers’ agency occurs within limits imposed by the cultural and political context in which the hotel operates. As I have shown, meaningful characterizations of the recovered Bauen by workers as “apolitical” and about “jobs” not only reflect the reality of material deprivation spurring the recovery, but are also characterizations necessary for mobilizing widespread support and legitimacy in post-crisis (capitalist) Argentina.

Moreover, Bauen workers’ struggle to expropriate the building

encourages interventions by actors outside the hotel that influence the production of new cultural forms within the hotel in different ways. The demands of the workers’ legal case for expropriation divert worker-activist’s energies and resources away from overcoming some of the inevitable obstacles to building a participatory-democratic workplace. At the same time, consistent visits to the hotel by police and state authorities create tense moments of interaction that help forge a shared oppositional identity among both older and newer Bauen workers. As I have shown, these shared experiences facilitate the widening of collective decision-making structures by stoking claims from newer workers for inclusion into the collective assemblies.


65

However, such demands by new workers are also encouraged and given legitimacy by the egalitarian discourse that permeates daily life within the hotel. This egalitarian discourse is generated and reinforced through 1) the creation of a new non-hierarchical daily vocabulary within the hotel and 2) the repetition of an organizational narrative that stresses the egalitarian and democratic nature of life within the new Bauen. Furthermore, this internal discourse is reproduced externally by sympathetic journalists who depict the Bauen as completely egalitarian and democratic in their representations of the hotel. These external representations, I argue, are instrumental in attracting inquisitive visitors to the hotel from abroad eager to talk to Bauen workers and see a real-life experiment of participatory-democracy in the workplace. In this way, then, sympathetic interventions by journalists and visitors help reinforce the sets of egalitarian meanings that are culturally available to workers within the hotel.

But while the Bauen has been imbued strongly with egalitarian

symbols and other oppositional meaning, both by its workers and others, daily life in the hotel is fraught with concrete instances of exclusion and hierarchy. However, with the formal establishment of collective-decision making structures and an emerging sense of equality between all workers within the hotel, the Bauen workers’ ongoing fight to win a legal expropriation is creating conditions that are helping workers overcome these contradictions and produce a more participatory-democratic workplace in practice. References Arie, Sophia. 2001. “Argentina Hits Rock Bottom.” The Observer Special

Reports, December 9. Retrieved May 13, 2006 (http://observer.guardian.co.uk/economy/story/0,,615800,00.html).

Auyero, Javier. 2002. “The Judge, the Cop, and the Queen of Carnival: Ethnography, Storytelling, and the (Contested) Meanings of Protest.” Theory and Society 31, no. 2:151-187.

———. 2003. Contentious Lives: Two Argentine Women, Two Protests and the Quest for Recognition. Durham: Duke University Press.

Balch, Oliver. 2005. “Taking Care of Business.” Guardian Unlimited, June 3. Retrieved May 13, 2006 (http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,1498468,00.html).

Braverman, Harry. 1974 (1998). Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Briscoe, Ivan. 2002. “If the Clothes Fit, Wear Them.” New Internationalist, no. 352. Retrieved April 25, 2006

BERKELEY JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY 66 (http://live.newint.org/features/2002/12/01/change-

rules/index.php). Byrnes, Brian. 2003. “Frustrated Argentines Take Business Into Own

Hands.” The Christian Science Monitor, April 25. Retrieved May 13, 2006 (http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0425/p08s01-woam.html).

Coser, Lewis A. 1956. The Functions of Social Conflict. Illinois: The Free Press.

Dangl, Benjamin. 2005. “Occupy, Resist, Produce: Worker Cooperatives In Buenos Aires.” Znet, March 3. Retrieved May 13, 2006

(http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=7353). Epstein, Edward C. 2003. “The Piquetero Movement of Greater Buenos

Aires: Working Class Protest During the Current Argentine Crisis.” Canadian Journal of Latin American Studies and Caribbean Studies 28, no. 55-56:11.

Fantasia, Rick. 1988. Cultures of Solidarity: Consciousness, Action, and Contemporary American Workers. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Fletcher, Richard. 1976. “Worker Co-ops and the Co-operative Movement” in The New Worker Co-operatives, edited by Ken Coates. Nottingham: Spokesman Books.

Forgacs, David, ed. 2000. The Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916-1935. New York: New York University Press.

Freeman, Aaron. 2005. “A Visit to Argentina's Worker-Run Hotel.” Embassy: Canada’s Foreign Policy Newsweekly, September 21. Retrieved May 13, 2006 (http://www.embassymag.ca/html/index.php?display=story&full_path=/2005/september/21/hotel/).

Gamson, Zelda F., and Henry M. Levin. 1984. “Obstacles to the Survival of Democratic Workplaces,” in Robert Jackall and Henry Levin, eds. Worker Cooperatives in America. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Greenberg, Edward S. 1986. Workplace Democracy: The Political Effects of Participation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Hunt, Alan. 1990. “Rights and Social Movements: Counter-Hegemonic Strategies.” Journal of Law and Society 17, no. 3:309-328.

Itzigsohn, Jose. Forthcoming. “Inequality, Poverty, and the Labor Market in Argentina.” unpublished manuscript.

Jackall, Robert, and Henry M. Levin. 1984. “Work in America and the Cooperative Movement,” in Robert Jackall and Henry M. Levin, eds. Worker Cooperatives in America. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Kasmir, Sharryn. 1996. The Myth of Mondragón: Cooperatives, Politics, and Working-Class Life in a Basque Town . Albany, New York: State University of New York Press.

Klatch, Rebecca E. 2002. “The Development of Individual Identity and Consciousness among Movements of the Left and Right,” in


67

David S. Meyer, Nancy Whittier and Belinda Robnett, eds. Social Movements: Identity, Culture, and The State. New York: Oxford University Press.

Loren, Sammy. 2005. “Argentina’s Worker-Run Hotel Bauen.” Upside Down World, August 8. Retrieved April 25, 2007 (http://upsidedownworld.org/main/index.php?option=com_content&t ask=view&id=28&Itemid=0).

Magnani, Esteban. 2003. El Cambio Silencioso: Empressas y Fábricas Recuperadas por los Trabajadores en la Argentina. Buenos Aires: Prometeo libros. English translation: Retrieved May 4, 2007 (www.estebanmagnani.org).

Melucci, Alberto. 1995. “The Process of Collective Identity,” in Social Movements and Culture, edited by Hank Johnston and Bert Klandermans. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Michels, Robert. 1962. Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy. New York: The Free Press.

Palomino, Hector. 2003. “The Workers' Movement in Occupied Enterprises: A Survey.” Canadian Journal of Latin American Studies and Caribbean Studies 28, no. 55-56:71-96.

Petras, James, and Henry Veltmeyer. 2003. System in Crisis: The Dynamics of Free Market Capitalism Black Point, Nova Scotia: Fernwood Publishing/Zed Books.

Polletta, Francesca and James M. Jasper. 2001. “Collective Identity and Social Movements.” Annual Review of Sociology 27, 283-305.

Polletta, Francesca. 2002. Freedom is an Endless Meeting: Democracy in U.S. Social Movements. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

———. 2006. It Was Like a Fever: Storytelling in Protest and Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Pozzi, Pablo. 2000. “Popular Upheaval and Capitalist Transformation in Argentina.” Latin American Perspectives 27, no. 5:63-87.

Raimbeau, Cecile. 2005. “Argentina: The Coops' Dividend.” Le Monde Diplomatique, English edition. Retrieved November 4, 2005 (http://mondediplo.com/2005/10/13survey).

Ranis, Peter. 2005. “Argentina's Worker-Occupied Factories and Enterprises.” Socialism and Democracy 19, no. 3:93-115.

———. 2006. “’To Occupy, To Resist, To Produce’: Argentina's Worker-Managed Factories and Enterprises.” Situations: Project of the Radical Imagination 1, no. 2:57-72.

Reger, Jo. 2002. “More Than One Feminism: Organizational Structure and the Construction of Collective Identity,” in David S. Meyer, Nancy Whittier and Belinda Robnett, eds. Social Movements: Identity, Culture, and The State. New York: Oxford University Press.

Robnett, Belinda. 2002. “External Political Change, Collective Identities, and Participation in Social Movement Organizations.” in David S. Meyer, Nancy Whittier and Belinda Robnett, eds. Social


Movements: Identity, Culture, and The State. New York: Oxford University Press.

Rothschild, Joyce and J. Allen Whitt. 1986. The Cooperative Workplace: Potentials and Dilemmas of Organizational Democracy and Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Russell, Raymond. 1995. Utopia in Zion: The Israeli Experience with Worker Cooperatives. Albany: SUNY Press.

Simmel, Georg. 1955. Conflict and The Web of Group-Affiliations. Illinois: The Free Press.

Sitrin, Marina. 2006. Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina. Oakland and Scotland: AK Press.

Somers, Margaret R. 1994. “The Narrative Constitution of Identity: A Relational and Network Approach.” Theory and Society 23, no. 5:605-649.

Steinberg, Marc. 1999. “The Talk and Back Talk of Collective Action: A Dialogic Analysis of Repertoires of Discourse among Nineteenth-Century English Cotton Spinners.” The American Journal of Sociology 105, no.3:736-780.

Swidler, Ann. 1986. “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies.” American Sociological Review 51, no. 2:273-286.

Taylor, Diana. 1997. Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War.” Durham: Duke University Press.

Taylor, Verta and Nancy E. Whittier. 1992. “Collective Identity in Social Movement Communities: Lesbian Feminist Mobilization". In Steven Buechler and F. Kurt Cylke, Jr., eds. 1997. Social Movements: Perspectives and Issues. Mayfield: Mountain View.

Trigona, Marie. 2005 (a). “BAUEN Hotel: Struggle, Culture and Work.” Znet, July 3. Retrieved May 13, 2006

(http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2005-07/03trigona.cfm).

———. 2005 (b). “Another Attack on Zanón Occupied Factory.” Znet, April 24. Retrieved May 13, 2006

(http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=7717). ———.2006. “Recuperated Enterprises in Argentina: Reversing the Logic

of Capitalism.” Znet, March 27. Retrieved March 27, 2006 (http://www.zmag.org/content/print_article.cfm?itemID=9995&sectionID=42).

Webb, Sidney and Beatrice. 1920. A Constitution for the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain. Printed by Authors for the Trade Unionists of the United Kingdom.

Whittier, Nancy. 2002. “Meaning and Structure in Social Movements,” in David S. Meyer, Nancy Whittier and Belinda Robnett, eds. Social Movements: Identity, Culture, and The State. New York: Oxford University Press.

World Bank. 2005. “Data and Statistics: Labor and Employment, Argentina.” Retrieved May 9, 2007 (http://web.worldbank.org).

Documents

05 Counter Hegemony