Reluctant Revolutionaries: The Birth and Evolution of Argentina’s Recovered Business Movement

Part ethnographic study, part history, and part theory driven analysis, Reluctant Revolutionaries: the Birth and Evolution of Argentina's Recovered Business Movement covers the first decade of Argentina's Recovered Business Movement. Beginning and expanding rapidly in the years following the country's 2001 economic crisis, a wave of worker-led factory and business takeovers swept the country. Workers seized hundreds of shuttered workplaces, locking out their bosses and starting their own democratic cooperatives rather than accept mass unemployment. With detailed firsthand reporting and participants' personal reflections, this text provides a window into a crucially important period in Argentina's labor history. John Baldridge's meticulously researched and documented account fills an important gap in the English language literature regarding this remarkable social movement. The book offers scholars of labor studies, social movements, political economy, and other social sciences detailed insights into the social conflicts, compromises, resolutions, and changes that came with such a dynamic and evolving worker-led phenomenon, and it proposes some new economic imaginaries for consideration. Drawing on his own participant observation between 2006 and 2008, Baldridge considers the causes and consequences of the recovered business movement from multiple vantage points-political economic, practical, legal, and personal-as he argues that the impacts of the movement will likely be long lasting, if not revolutionary. From the "nuts and bolts" of how the new worker cooperatives functioned, to the radical transformation of factory spaces into community spaces, to the more internal transformations felt by the people involved, Reluctant Revolutionaries contains much that ought to be preserved for posterity, and it should be on any radical reader's bookshelf.

Pagina's: 456, Paperback, Independently published