Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina, and: Sin Patrón: Stories from Argentina's Worker-Run Factories (review)

In 2001, after years of decline brought on by mismanagement and something resembling outright theft, Argentina's economy collapsed. Middle-class Argentineans, furious that their bank accounts had been frozen, their jobs erased, and their sense of security destroyed, took to the streets in protest. As four national governments fell in two weeks, neighborhood assemblies formed, meeting on street corners to plan and discuss. Some assemblies developed projects to collectively meet their needs for food, shelter, and culture, and a movement grew to reclaim closed factories and reopen them as worker-run cooperatives, known today as "recuperated workplaces."

Wrapped up in the aftermath of September 11, many Americans barely noticed this upheaval. In America and around the world, however, antiglobalization and antipoverty activists were watching very closely, and since 2001, they have been working to support Argentineans and share with the wider world the stories of these movements, which were "not demanding something new, but creating it" (Sitrin, 10). These two books were written or edited by activists involved in the movements in Argentina and should be seen as a part of that effort.

Sin Patrón: Stories from Argentina's Worker-Run Factories was written by the Argentinean lavaca journalism collective and includes a foreword by Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis, producers of a documentary, The Take (2004), which tells some of the same stories of recuperated workplaces presented in Sin Patrón. After an introduction by lavaca, the bulk of the book consists of sections focusing on individual factories and the detailed stories of their struggles, including successes and failures. Each factory's story is unique, with different material conditions, levels of engagement with the legal system, external influences, and internal structures. Sin Patrón attempts to consolidate these stories into a single, albeit diverse, narrative of workers trying to regain a collective identity. The protagonists of this book are trying to assert their identities as "workers" in a new world which attempts to rob them of even that.

Sin Patrón (which is translated here as "without bosses") is framed in the foreword as a book which "zooms in to the stories of individual struggles, told almost entirely through the testimony of the workers themselves" (10), but it is often unclear who is actually speaking in the chapters which follow. While presumably based largely on interviews (and direct observation—while filming The Take Klein and Lewis "ran into lavaca members wherever the workers' struggles led—the courts, the legislature, the streets, the factory floor" [10]), the majority of the stories are told in the third person, with moderate use of direct quotations. It is unfortunate that the authors, also identifying themselves as workers in a collectively run endeavor, do not seem to find a balance between the polemic language of propaganda and a flat, disembodied tone of straight journalism. Sin Patrón oscillates between the two, never allowing the voices of the narrators to come through clearly.

Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina is far more clearly an oral history book. After an introduction and a thoughtful explanation of the approach to translation, the book consists entirely of transcribed, edited interviews. The first-hand accounts are not, however, presented as unmediated. In fact, Sitrin goes out of her way to remind the reader that "while it may appear that you are looking through a transparent window at the person speaking, this is a window that [she has] constructed" through her choice of interviewees, actions as an interviewer, and selection of passages for inclusion in the published book (17). Noting that since 2001 there has been "a growing body of Spanish literature analyzing the social movements of the last decade in Argentina," Sitrin writes that...