Title:
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The politics of value-creation : struggles for self-determination and social rersponsibility in the empresas recuperadas
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This thesis presents a theoretical and ethnographically grounded analysis of the empresas
recuperadas (ERs), worker cooperatives established during Argentina's 2001 socio-economic
crisis, to explore whether cooperatives can be transfonnative modes of social production. It
develops Marx's analyses of alienation and the labour process to identify and explain the
widely different experiences of individual ERs.
Responding to the effects of neoliberal restructuring, thousands of workers revived
bankrupt or abandoned companies across Argentina, often using assembly-based decisionmaking.
The literature often adopts a postmodern approach, which sees the ERs as achieving
autonomy through new social relations from below. A wider literature promotes cooperatives
as part of a social economy, which reinvigorates profitability through new social relations of
solidarity. Despite differences, uniting these positions is their failure to recognise limits, that
is, their erasure of alienation. By focusing on relations in production, they overlook their
embeddedness within relations of production, depoliticising the labour process as a valuecreating
process and denying the possibilities for self-realisation.
To recapture these possibilities and explore the limits, the thesis proposes the concept
of the politics of value-creation, which it defines as the dynamic social embeddedness of
purposive economic action. Exploring this idea through the lens of cooperatives will show that
the socialisation of relations in production tends to increase workers' subjective awareness of
relations of production - and that this is central to understanding their transformative
potentials.
Through eight case studies, the concept of the politics of value-creation develops into
an expanded theorisation of capital to explore how struggles over the material and valuecreating
dimensions of production interacted with wider changes in state-society relations.
Conceiving class as workers' experiences and response to capital highlights how social
sUbjectivities also shaped and were shaped by their linkages to state and civil society, within
the changing institutional field of Argentina. Analysis of this particular context shows that
cooperatives can contain new elements and reshape the detennining limits of the system even
as they reproduce its contradictions.
The thesis explores the transfonnative institutionality of Peronism as a decentralised
form of state power and social movement, which historically has blurred the boundaries
between state and society. It examines the emergence of the ERs as a political force organised
by a Peronist leadership that consciously sought to reshape institutional frontiers.
The concept of the politics of value-creation theorises how these wider dynamics
affected variation in the labour processes. It identifies two divergent dynamics of class -
conceived as 'capital-centred' and 'worker-centred' socialisation - and shows the particular
ways in which they interacted with changing institutional contexts. Analysis shows that the
financial management of many ERs reproduced individualising elements of the state. Yet the
most innovative cases sought to overcome this through changes in their accounting and the
state's regulatory apparatuses, towards building new kinds of societal control.
The thesis concludes that only by understanding the socially objective limits of
cooperatives can we also see their potentials. It develops the idea of a self-regulating society to
provide a critique of the social economy as the internal socialisation of capitalism as an
objective economic system and as an institutional response to the creation of new human
needs.
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