Sean Herlihy
Texas Southern University, U.S.A.

ABSTRACT:

In Nicaragua , Cuba , and Argentina working people won more workers’ control when opposing elites deadlocked. Fieldwork in these countries involved 160 interviews, and 54 worksite observations over a period of 22 over months between 1990 and 2005. Workers’ control movements offer self-sufficient, popular, internally democratic challenges to neo-liberal privatization. They exploit spaces between bureaucratic and capitalist elites to win concessions from leftist and democratic governments. During the Triumph of Nicaraguan Revolution, a gap in authority between fleeing Somocista and incoming Sandinista administrators left workers and peasants to carry on production by themselves for several months. Sandinista leaders, although sympathetic to worker participation, wanted to centralize agriculture, but peasants and Contras pressured them to distribute land to individuals and cooperatives. With the fall of the Sandinistas, country people again used the hiatus between governments – this time outgoing Sandinista and incoming pro-capitalist Chamorro administrations – to occupy land. Chamorro’s government tried to privatize industries to capitalists, but, workers took over some of the privatized enterprises themselves. In Cuba , crises after the Soviet collapse produced conflicting tendencies within the state apparatus. When state farms left lands uncultivated, rural people took them over, both by wheedling and by force. The government relinquished titles to 50,000 individuals and established cooperatives with more workers control. In Argentina eighteen years of neoliberal restructuring collapsed in 2001. Peronist legislators, and union leaders, paralyzed the Radical Party presidency of Fernando De la Rúa. The economic collapse, enterprise failures, and deadlocked elites provided an opening for a popular uprising and 10,000 workers taking over or “recuperated” almost 200 enterprises. Capitalists and bureaucrats are usually stronger than working people, but workers have opportunities to win more control of production when conflicting elites balance each other, with the weaker party usually being working peoples’ best ally.

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