http://lavaca.org/seccion/actualidad/1/1593.shtml
Sin Patrón
Stories from Argentina's worker-run factories
Preface, Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein

There were many popular responses to the crisis, from neighbourhood assemblies and barter clubs to resurgent leftwing parties and mass movements of the unemployed, but we spent most of our year in Argentina with workers in "recovered companies." Almost entirely under the media radar, workers in Argentina have been responding to rampant unemployment and capital flight by taking over traditional businesses that have gone bankrupt and are reopening them under democratic, worker management. It's an old idea reclaimed and retrofitted for a brutal new time. The principles are so simple, so elementally fair, that they seem more self-evident than radical when articulated by one of the workers in this book: "We formed the cooperative with the criteria of equal wages, making basic decisions by assembly; we are against the separation of manual and intellectual work, we want a rotation of positions and, above all, the ability to recall our elected leaders."

Tags: Autonomism, Empire, Argentina, Democracy