Recuperating and (re)learning the language of autogestión in Argentina’s empresas recuperadas worker cooperatives

This article homes in on the recuperative and learning dimensions of Argentina’s empresas recuperadas por sus trabajadores worker cooperatives (ERTs, worker-recuperated enterprises). Drawing on the author’s sociological, ethnographic, and political economic work with Argentina’s ERTs since 2005, the article theorizes autogestión – the collective self-management of associated labour – from its take up by ERT movement protagonists. The article explores and theorizes how ERT workers come to practice autogestión, what they actually take back in the process of occupying and controlling the formerly capitalist workplaces that had employed them, and how their projects of cooperative production are ensconced in a ‘language of autogestión’ – recuperating and (re)learning other economic notions and practices against and beyond capitalocentric discourses. Grounded in a class-struggle Marxist perspective, the paper ultimately proposes that ERT workers collectively recuperate three overarching dimensions of productive life from capital: (1) the self-valorization of living labour, (2) cooperation in the labour process, and (3) the socialization of surpluses and wealth. These recuperations of autogestión, the article concludes, (their ‘language of autogestión’) offer evocative suggestions for envisioning less-exploitive forms of work, more socially just and democratic workplaces, and for challenging and beginning to move beyond neoliberal logics.