The Take

I saw the movie The Take last night. This last year or two has seen a huge number of lefty documentary type films, but not many of them are incredibly uplifting, but this one is.

It's about how workers from shut down factories in Argentina are expropriating the factories from their owners, cleaning them up and then beginning production again, running the factories as democratic cooperatives owned by the workers themselves. The "Recovered Factory" movement in Argentina is now 200 factories strong (at the time of the film anyway) and they're forming trade networks with one another and helping each other fight the owners and politicians trying to shut down the factories.

One of the key themes in the movie is the tension between electoral politics and the movement. Most are ambivalent, if not downright hostile, to both the "left" and "right" candidates in the Presidential campaign documented in the film and view electoral politics as a corrupt, empty spectacle and a distraction. The workers sees themselves as the agents of change and see themselves as building a new type of economy and a new type of world, in opposition to the world built on "the model" imposed by the IMF. Of course, politics do matter: on several occassions, the film shows how the courts and the legislature step in to either halt or advance the efforts of the cooperatives. But the political system in these examples is really just providing a more or less hospitable environment for the workers, who are really the ones pushing change forward.

In one scene, a worker at one of the cooperatives says that he supports Menen, the right-wing candidate, in the election. This really isn't so surprising though, if you think about it. Workplace democracy is not something that is a part of the dominant public discourse in "capitalist democracies," so why should this guy connect his actions at work with the political sphere? When the workers talk about what they're doing, they talk about how they value working together, being productive, having a fair distribution of earnings and sharing in responsible management. These are not radical values. In fact, if you listen carefully, pro-capitalist politicians and pundits invoke these values all the time to justify capitalism. The only difference is that the worker cooperatives, unlike capitalist workplaces, actually embody these values, and that's what makes them radical.

Anyway, I highly recommend the movie. I managed to catch the very last showing of it in the Twin Cities (that's currently scheduled, at least), but I'm sure it'll be available on DVD sometime soon.