Self-managed enterprise: worker-recuperated cooperatives in Argentina and Latin America

This chapter discusses self-managed enterprises in Latin America with a focus on Argentina, analysing how they emerge, their implications for community economies, and their role in la econom'a de los trabajadores (the workers’ economy). The authors particularly address how empresas recuperadas por sus trabajadores (ERTs, worker-recuperated enterprises) transform capitalist and hierarchical firms into cooperative and horizontalized enterprises; how their self-managed workers rely on and further forge associated labour; and how these firms produce and share wealth rather than extracting surpluses for private gain. It is in these respects that the authors conceptualize these workers’ contributions to community economies and taking back the economy by and for workers. Further contextualizing ERTs’ contributions in the last 20 years, they finally identify three key forms of praxis threaded throughout these experiments in self-management: horizontalizaci—n (horizontalization), autogesti—n (self-management) and territorializaci—n (territorialization).