Marcelo Vieta, PhD

More Endorsements and Praise

In Workers’ Self-Management in Argentina, Marcelo Vieta provides the most comprehensive account to date of worker recuperated enterprises, former capitalist workplaces that were occupied by their workers and reinvented as cooperatives. Based on nearly two decades of research, Vieta details the emergence, experience, and consolidation of these businesses across Argentina, offering not only rich empirical description, but also a compelling theoretical lens to understand cooperative self-determination and self-management. Blending case studies with an analysis of trends and common experiences, Vieta takes readers into the social world of people who transformed themselves from managed employees to self-managed workers, offering an up-close look at how they have socialized production, challenged private property, blurred the boundaries between work and community, and experienced subjective transformations in the process.

~ Katherine Sobering is Assistant Professor of Sociology and faculty affiliate in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of North Texas. She is the co-author of The Ambivalent State: Police-Criminal Collusion at the Urban Margins (Oxford University Press, 2019) and the soon-to-be-published The People’s Hotel: Working for Justice in Argentina (Duke University Press).

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[T]his book...is of profound relevance to the political-economic conditions [of the pandemic] which we have suddenly entered, conditions marked by widespread business closures and soaring unemployment. ... Among the many qualities of Vieta’s book that makes it an important engagement with the political economy of the working class is its refusal to romanticize. For example, he sustains a critical analysis of the ways in which co-operatives, while containing radical elements, remain constrained within, or disciplined by, a capitalist system. ... Even so, while privileging the voices of workers themselves, Vieta convincingly argues for a reading of the ERTs as a prefigurative force, an instantiation of workers’ capacity to wrest control of production, to organize our work lives collectively, to disrupt the labour-capital relation, and to reconnect production to the wider communities in which production is embedded. Vieta shows what ERT protagonists recuperate through autogestión: their labour power, their surplus, and, vitally, their dignity and creativity. As an argument for workers’ potential, under specific social conditions, to generate radically alternative arrangements of work and life—amid deep capitalist crisis in Argentina—this book’s importance at the present conjuncture is difficult to overstate: it shows, through example, what the working class can do to rethink and remake relations of production in the face of profound capitalist crisis. Workers’ Self-Management in Argentina is rich in insights, warnings, and inspiration for creating non-capitalist futures, or a labour commons.

~ Greig de Peuter is Associate Professor of Communication Studies, Wilfrid Laurier University. He is the co-author of New Media Unions: Organizing Digital Journalists (Routledge, 2020) and Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games (University of Minnesota Press, 2009).

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Marcelo Vieta’s Workers’ Self-Management in Argentina is one of the most important books on contemporary labour and democracy. The volume masterfully revisits and extends theory on autogestión (loosely translated as self-management in English) and places it in richly detailed historical, economic, and social contexts. The book employs three in-depth case studies of “worker recuperated” firms in today’s Argentina and at the same time beautifully integrates those with an analysis of work and economy in Argentina especially over the past two decades. The comparisons of lessons from the experiences of workers in those firms for other national contexts gives the analysis an expansiveness seldom found in case-based studies of worklife and labour arrangements. Vieta’s longitudinal study and insightful commentary provide must reading for anyone interested in the intricacies of and possibilities for democratic revival from the shop floor and board rooms to communities and the global economy.

~ George Cheney is Professor of Communication, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. He is the author of Values at Work:Employee Participation Meets Market Pressure at Mondragon (Cornell University Press, 2002) and co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Alternative Organization (Routledge, 2014).

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Marcelo Vieta’s book ranges far beyond the bounds of its Argentine analysis.  It is thoroughly researched and grounded in “class-struggle Marxist” theory and reflects a prolonged and deep understanding of and commitment to global working-class enterprise autonomy struggles.  In this Vieta provides a powerful and meaningful critique and alternative to neo-liberal capitalism.

~ Peter Ranis is Professor Emeritus in Political Science, Graduate Center, City University of New York. He is the author of Cooperatives Confronting Capitalism: Challenging the Neo-liberal Economy (Zed Books, 2016) and Argentine Workers: Peronism and Contemporary Class Consciousness (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992).

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I was consistently impressed by Vieta’s impeccable scholarship and deeply-thought argumentation. Theoretically, this work is oriented around the perspective of class-struggle Marxism, but is also informed by a deep knowledge of the history and practices of trades unionism, cooperativism, and social and solidarity economics in Argentina, Latin America and internationally. The work situates empresas recuperadas (ERTs) within the history of the Argentine class-composition and workers movements. It shows how the ERT practice of “occupy, resist, produce” generated a series of “radical social innovations” affecting economic activities, political formations and trans-individual subject formation. From this study Vieta draws important conclusions about the circumstances in which the potential for self-directed worker activities is actualized in ways that point beyond the existing system of production relations. I want to reiterate how impressed I am by this work. It is a major contribution to scholarship on the global worker of the twenty first century.

~ Nick Dyer-Witheford is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at University of Western Ontario. He is the author of Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High Technology Capitalism (University of Illinois, 1999) and Cyber-Proletariat: Global Labour in the Digital Vortex (Pluto Press, 2015).

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About the Author

Marcelo Vieta is Associate Professor in the Program in Adult Education and Community Development in the Department of Leadership, Higher and Adult Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto (OISE/UT). Vieta’s research, teaching, and activist interests are in workplace and organizational learning and social change; the sociology of work; social and solidarity economy initiatives; critical community development; the worldwide cooperative movement, with a focus on worker cooperatives; worker- and community-recuperated enterprises (formerly capitalist firms or public-sector interests that are converted to workers' or community self-management); critical theory; and the philosophy of technology.

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