If They Touch One of Us, They Touch All of Us: Cooperativism as a Counterlogic to Neoliberal Capitalism

Through an ethnographic examination of the BAUEN, a workers' cooperative and part of the recuperated businesses movement, this article considers the emergence of a logic of cooperativism in Argentina in recent years. In analyzing this idea of cooperativism, I distinguish three different but interrelated aspects: formal cooperativism, affective cooperativism or compañerismo, and community outreach and support. I show how this logic of cooperativism relies upon a discourse of corruption to delegitimize the cultural conceptions implicit in neoliberalism as applied in Argentina and opens a space for the emergence of new and revitalized conceptions of work and the citizen.