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by
Naomi Klein
April
25, 2003
In
1812, bands of British weavers and knitters raided textile mills and smashed
industrial machines with their hammers. According to the Luddites, the new
mechanized looms had eliminated thousands of jobs, broken communities, and
deserved to be destroyed. The British government disagreed and called in a
battalion of 14,000 soldiers to brutally repress the worker revolt and protect
the machines.
Fast-forward
two centuries to another textile factory, this one in Buenos Aires. At the
Brukman factory, which has been producing men’s suits for fifty years, it’s the
riot police who smash the sewing machines and the 58 workers who risk their
lives to protect them.
On
Monday, the Brukman factory was the site of the worst repression Buenos Aires
has seen in almost a year. Police had evicted the workers in the middle of the
night and turned the entire block into a military zone guarded by machine guns
and attack dogs. Unable to get into the factory and complete an outstanding
order for 3,000 pairs of dress trousers, the workers gathered a huge crowd of
supporters and announced it was time to go back to work. At 5 p.m., 50 middle
aged seamstresses in no-nonsense haircuts, sensible shoes and blue work smocks
walked up to the black police fence. Someone pushed, the fence fell, and the
Brukman women, unarmed and arm in arm, slowly walked through.
They
had only taken a few steps when the police began shooting: tear gas, water
cannons, first rubber bullets, then lead. The police even charged the Mothers
of the Plaza de Mayo, in their white headscarves embroidered with the names of
their “disappeared” children. Dozens of demonstrators were injured and police
fired tear gas into a hospital where some had taken refuge.
This
is a snapshot of Argentina less than a week before its presidential elections.
Each of the five major candidates is promising to put this crisis-ravaged
country back to work. Yet Brukman’s workers are treated as if sewing a grey
suit were a capital crime.
Why
this state Luddism, this rage at machines? Well, Brukman isn’t just any
factory, it’s a fabrica ocupada, one of almost 200 factories across the country
that have been taken over and run by their workers over the past year and a
half. For many, the factories, employing more than 10,000 nationwide and
producing everything from tractors to ice cream, are seen not just as an
economic alternative, but as a political one as well. “They are afraid of us
because we have shown that if we can manage a factory we can also manage a
country,” Brukman worker Celia Martinez said on Monday night. “That’s why this
government decided to repress us.”
At
first glance, Brukman looks like every other garment factory in the world. As
in Mexico’s hyper modern maquiladoras and Toronto’s crumbling coat factories,
Brukman is filled with women hunched over sewing machines, their eyes straining
and fingers flying over fabric and thread. What makes Brukman different are the
sounds. There is the familiar roar of machines and the hiss of steam, but there
is also Bolivian folk music, coming from a small tape deck in the back of the
room, and softly spoken voices, as older workers leaned over younger ones,
showing them new stitches. “They wouldn’t let us do that before,” Martinez
says. “They wouldn’t let us get up from our workspaces or listen to music. But
why not listen to music, to lift the spirits a bit?”
Here
in Buenos Aires, every week brings news of a new occupation: a four-star hotel
now run by its cleaning staff, a supermarket taken by its clerks, a regional
airline about to be turned into a cooperative by the pilots and attendants. In
small Trotskyist journals around the world, Argentina’s occupied factories,
where the workers have seized the means of production, are giddily hailed as
the dawn of a socialist utopia. In large business magazines like The Economist,
they are ominously described as a threat to the sacred principle of private
property. The truth lies somewhere in between.
In
Brukman, for instance, the means of production weren’t seized, they were simply
picked up after they had been abandoned by their legal owners. The factory had
been in decline for several years, debts to utility companies were piling up,
and over a period of five months, the seamstresses had seen their salaries
slashed from 100 pesos a week to a mere two pesos – not enough for bus fare.
On
December 18, the workers decided it was time to demand a travel allowance. The
owners, pleading poverty, told the workers to wait at the factory while they looked
for the money. “We waited for them until evening. We waited until night,”
Martinez says. “No one came.”
After
getting the keys from the doorman, Martinez and the other workers slept at the
factory. They have been running it every since. They have paid the outstanding
bills, attracted new clients, and without profits and management salaries to
worry about, managed to pay themselves steady salaries. All these decisions
have been made democratically, by vote in open assemblies. “I don’t know why
the owners had such a hard time,” Martinez says. “I don’t know much about
accounting but for me it’s easy: addition and subtraction.”
Brukman
has come to represent a new kind of labour movement here, one that is not based
on the power to stop working (the traditional union tactic) but on the dogged
determination to keep working no matter what. It’s a demand that is not driven
by dogmatism but by realism: in a country where 58 per cent of the population
is living in poverty, workers know that they are a pay cheque away from having
to beg and scavenge to survive. The specter that is haunting Argentina’s
occupied factories is not communism, but indigence.
But
isn’t it simple theft? After all, these workers didn’t buy the machines, the
owners did – if they want to sell them or move them to another country, surely
that’s their right. As the federal judge wrote in Brukman’s eviction order,
“Life and physical integrity have no supremacy over economic interests.”
Perhaps
unintentionally, he has summed up the naked logic of de-regulated
globalization: capital must be free to seek out the lowest wages and most
generous incentives, regardless of the toll that process takes on people and
communities.
The
workers in Argentina’s occupied factories have a different vision. Their
lawyers argue that the owners of these factories have already violated basic
market principles by failing to pay their employees and their creditors, even
while collecting huge subsidies from the state. Why can’t the state now insist
that the indebted companies’ remaining assets continue to serve the public with
steady jobs? Dozens of workers’ cooperatives have already been awarded legal
expropriation. Brukman is still fighting.
Come
to think of it, the Luddites made a similar argument in 1812. The new textile
mills put profits for a few before an entire way of life. Those textile workers
tried to fight that destructive logic by smashing the machines. The Brukman
workers have a much better plan: they want to protect the machines and smash
the logic.
Naomi Klein is a leading
anti-sweatshop activist, and author of Fences and Windows: Dispatches from
the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate? (Picador, 2002) and No
Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (Picador, 2000). Visit the No Logo
website: www.nologo.org. This article first appeared in The Globe and Mail (Canada).