Reposted from my LiveJournal, Social Capitalism: That's OK, isn't it?
The Take by Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein has a lot in it that's news to me. I just watched the movie on Netflix online.
There's more to Argentina than a wayward Republican governor.
The story of how Argentine workers have been trying to take control of their ruined economy has some pretty obvious parallels to the U.S.'s current problems.
It's hard to imagine U.S. workers occupying abandoned factories, and organizing to restart them and get them producing again, which is what has happened in Argentina. We don't have the social mechanism, and we don't have the ideology.
Unions = socialism = bad bad bad. That's what people think, thanks to 30 years of media-abetted Republican misrule.
Imagine what would happen if workers did try to occupy and reboot a shuttered U.S. factory. The right-wing noise machine would go wild. The workers would be called criminals. The solid 25% for Bush and Hannity would nod their heads in agreement. Imagine how the Argentine slogan would go over:
"Occupy. Resist. Produce."
The movie, which came out in 2004, ends with some victories for the workers. I haven't been following what's going on in Argentina, and I wonder where I'd look for news. (The Google, I'm sure; I'll let you know what I find.)
Certainly the movie isn't perfect, and doesn't pretend to be objective. I think I've made it pretty clear how much I admire The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein. (In the first episode of True Blood, the character Tara is first seen reading that book, so of course I liked her right away.)
The thing is, both The Take and The Shock Doctrine are full of Stuff You're Not Supposed to Know, or even think about.
The idea that workers even could accomplish what their Argentine counterparts already have is information that Americans ought to have.
What I found especially poignant was the generational divide. In one family, the older generation still had a little shrine to Evita, and still worshipped Peron. The young woman in the family said she hopes that her children don't feel the need for a god or savior; that they will feel they can solve their problems by themselves.
The idea that America could do something without a charismatic leader is going to be a new idea to a lot of people. I find it a little hard to wrap my mind around, because it's something we've never really seen here. "Without Marx or Jesus," as the old book about 1968 France says.
Other parts were enraging or amusing, depending maybe on your mood: Once some of the factories did get back on their feet, thanks to workers' managing to cooperate well enough to do it, the foremr owners wanted their abandoned property back, and used the court, elections, and any means possible to achieve that end. After all, they're the heroic John Galts who make things happen.
They made things happen, all right. Our kleptocrats don't even have the decency to leave the country, even temporarily. They get Cabinet positions instead.
We're still waiting for Obama -- who I am STILL GLAD is President, and who is MUCH BETTER THAN BUSH in so many ways -- to take more than modest steps and halfway measures. I like what David Sirota wrote recently:
...[F]or all the positive, even admirable steps Obama's America seems poised to take, the aspirations still seem too small, too unimaginative, too confined by old parameters and old conceptions of how things have always worked.
Consider the Wall Street bailouts. By simply giving banks trillions of dollars with no strings attached, our government theorizes that the problem is not the financial system, but a momentary cash drought that can be solved by temporary recapitalization. These bailouts do not aspire to change the whole industry into one dominated by many small institutions rather than a few big ones. They also don't reach for "a tightly regulated banking system, which made finance a staid, even boring business," as Paul Krugman said we once had - they envision the same get-rich-quick casino that generated huge profits and huge losses.
Maybe this is just the insecurity of somebody who was recently laid off speaking, but: We seem to be waiting for things to get back to business as usual. Of course, I hope things get better for as many people as possible, as quickly as possible. But something tells me that there is no going back to business as usual.
(Boy, this post was a lot longer than I intended!)