As legend goes, the Phoenix bird,
consumed in flames, rose from its own ashes to fly away stronger than ever.
We’ve spent three weeks in Buenos Aires studying Argentina’s recent version of
this legend. In December 2001, the Argentine people themselves, exercising
their own economic power, leaped onto history’s stage to enact a creative
scenario only rarely performed under capitalism and never beyond its second act.
As prosperity has returned to Argentina, this ongoing performance has become a
side show -- a very loud one -- but first-world nations will ignore it at
their peril. For what happens when neo-liberal globalization, invented in the
boardrooms and in Washington, hits home in a global economic crisis that will
dwarf 1929? By improvising on a scenario that is still poorly understood,
Argentina may have already pioneered a way out of that crisis. This is the
first in a series on the upsurge of democratic, economically viable
alternatives to capitalism in Argentina, Brazil and Venezuela. Our next article
will treat the current status of Argentina’s solution to its crisis.
Argentina was neo-liberalism’s
“poster boy.” In 1991, after dictators had run up a huge debt, Argentina
obediently imposed the usual IMF/World Bank “structural adjustment.” Up to the
mid-1990s it seemed to prosper by obeying “Washington consensus” imperatives
designed to help transnationals: lower tarrifs, privatize public goods, raise
interest rates. Argentina’s market was thereby opened to international
competition, supposedly bringing lower prices and higher quality. In her case,
however, it brought one of the swiftest implosions of a country’s economy the
world has seen. December 2001 saw devaluation of Argentina’s peso, previously
pegged 1-to-1 to the US dollar, to a third of its former value. Overnight the
purchasing power of all savings dropped by two thirds. The middle class was
wiped out. But instead of turning on each other, or rallying behind a new
Peron who would again co-opt them for conservative ends, ordinary Argentines
have at least set an example of true collective autonomy, economic creativity
and citizenly solidarity.
Holding the 1-to-1 exchange rate
throughout the 1990s had overvalued Argentina’s exports for buyers on the world
market and made its imports relatively cheap. Thus invited to compete,
transnationals vigorously accepted. Large national industries lost business
and many small ones folded due either to competition or to high interest rates.
From 1997 to December 2001 a process began of borrowing from government, banks,
and finally from employees. With mounting debts and interest rates, and
declining cash flow, owners could foresee a point at which bankruptcy was
inevitable. They first stopped paying retirement, then health, then wages,
until workers had no bus fare to work. Unemployment rose to 25% as state
employees lost jobs; production was reduced; crisis set in.
Instead of looking after their
workforces, the wealthy secretly readied bank accounts for massive capital
flight. At the most propitious moment shop doors were locked and machines
sold. When bankruptcy inspectors arrived, they found only debt on the books
and few assets to sell. Sympathtic and sometimes corrupt judges granted
shelter from creditors, including workers, and validated the throwing of entire
workforces out of work. Big capital simply fled. For a few nights in
mid-December heavily guarded convoys of Brinks trucks literally took the
country’s money to the port for transfer to off-shore tax havens. This flight
effected, banks closed to prevent a further run by the middle class. Meanwhile,
President De la Rua’s economics minister announced even greater spending cuts
that would further deepen unemployment: it was too much.
On the night of December 19-20,
after thousands could not withdraw savings, capitalinos (residents of Buenos
Aires) took to the streets to bang pots and pans. There were massive marches
on Congress and the presidential palace. The police shot 31, shocking the
nation. De la Rúa resigned on December 21. It was a sharp reminder of the
brutality to which Argentina’s ruling class could descend. This is the same
elite whose military during the dictatorship of 1976-1983 had “disappeared”
30,000 mostly intellectuals and labor leaders (i.e. tortured and killed them
without trace, by dropping their bodies into the sea from planes). This
paroxysm of selfishness displayed by Argentina’s owners and investors and
defended by police and courts, demonstrated the level of Argentine capitalists’
loyalty to their workers who had generated their wealth and to the nation that
had protected it.
The steady degeneration of
enterprises had not gone unnoticed by workers. Having been asked to patiently
bear lowered wages, only to witness the wealthy saving themselves first, the
people were angry. Consider the grammar of that last phrase. Its subject is
neither a collection of self-interested atoms nor a super-organism with a head
running things from the top. Even before December 2001 the Phoenix scenario
had been practiced in several enterprises. Perhaps nowhere else in the two
years following that fateful December was the struggle between new economic
forms and neo-liberal globalization so directly engaged.
A bailout was expected. A 50% peso
devaluation in March 2002 slashed savings and living standards. The economy
was screaming. When will the bailout come? There was none. As distinct from
the $40 billion bailout of Mexico in 1995, and the $70 billion bailout of the
Asian crisis in 1997, the United States did not organize a bailout among the
world’s bankers. Why? José Luis Coraggio, a
specialist in popular economics and the rector of General Sarmiento National
University in Buenos Aires, angrily explained in mid-2002: "The leadership
in Washington that dominates IMF policy is responsible for this economic
catastrophe. We are to be made an example of because Argentina has no strategic
importance, no major oil reserves, no illegal drugs, and we do not flood the
U.S. with immigrants. Our political class bankrupted the country in the 1990s
by implementing Washington’s neoliberal economic prescriptions. Now we are told
that the only solution is to turn over the bits and pieces that remain of our
national economy to foreign lenders and to slash government social spending
even further to get ‘rescue financing’ from the IMF."
The Argentine political class and
economic elite, and their American and international banker friends --
despite having professed concern and commitment -- had all betrayed the
Argentine people. So what does a country do when it suddenly has no money and
no leaders it can trust?
Abandoned, the Argentine people had
only themselves. But that, it turns out, was enough. For they had the basics:
resources, factories and machines, land, and above all, willing labor. Alone,
but now collectively, Argentines set to work. Following are the chief forms of
social and solidarity economy that they proceeded to create in 2002 and 2003
without money:
----The pot-banging
protest was turned into a permanent, directed civic movement known as the
“self-convened neighborhood assemblies.” They spread over the country with 60
to 80 in the capital -- a lose network often linked through websites. The
assemblies debated and organized solutions.
----In what was
Latin America’s most prosperous republic, 50% of Argentinians fell below the
poverty line in 2002, and
an estimated 8 of the nation’s 37 million people did not eat every day. So a
massive movement of community gardens called huertas, sprang up in
public parks, school yards and open spaces. Often linked to public restaurants
or comedores by bonds of solidarity, around 45,000 huertas fed
over 2.5 million people into 2003.
----To circulate
the necessities of life without money some 5000 local barter networks were
created under the Solidarity Barter Network (RTS) and Ecovale, allowing
millions to avoid destitution. Independent of the peso, swap shops, barter,
and other forms of social money flourished.
----Entrepreneurship
having died for want of effective demand and credit, associations offering
microcredit came forward, filling the void with micro-savings.
----Perhaps most
important of all, workers seized scores of factories across the country: 17 in
Buenos Aires province and 3 in the capital itself by mid-2002, a movement that
reached over 200 “recuperated” enterprises at its peak.
IMPA, for 4 years a self-managed co-op making aluminum wrapping, opened its
space to a cultural center and barter club.
In sum,
Caraggio said: “Activists long committed to the co-op movement as part of a
dynamic of modifying society, have suddenly found fertile terrain in which to
launch their projects.”
At first the anger of the people
was directed principally at the political class as a whole. The middle class,
having been financially ruined, rallied around the slogan “que se vayan todos”
-- “throw out all the politicians.” The unemployed, called “cartoneros” or
recyclers of cardboard, had long challenged privileges of the nation’s
capitalists. But something new is now afoot. The recuperated enterprises are
the only part of the solidarity economy that survives in full health in early
2006. The cartoneros doubts about the structure of capitalism have now also
penetrated these owner-workers due to their radicalizing struggle to keep their
self-managed workplaces. They had started out unpolitical, just trying to
protect their jobs. But, having run their enterprises successfully against
capitalist opposition and government ambivalence, many now join in questioning
the system as such.
We will devote our next article to
the status of the struggle of the recuperated firms in 2006 and its prospects
for helping deal with the crisis that is staring us in the face.