ArtSeen
Occupy, Resist, Produce!
Workers in Chicago’s New Era Windows and Thessaloniki’s Vio.Met, are soon to begin production under worker control!
Workers in both U.S. and Greek workplaces had heard about the process of the recuperation of workplaces in Argentina. Later they met with workers from Argentina who had successfully taken back their workplaces, and when faced with the closure of their shops—decided to follow a similar path.
Hundreds of workplaces around the world have begun following the lead of the recuperated workplace movement in Argentina. These are workplaces “recuperated,” taken back through occupation, to be run horizontally in the hands of the workers, without bosses or hierarchy.
After almost a decade of recuperations, many in Argentina began to speak of living sin patron. Literally meaning without a boss, this phrase has now come to mean a new form of value production, not just living without hierarchy. It is about creating a new way of living and producing. It refers to a more general way of life that is horizontal, where people look to one another and decide together, creating new social relationships, while also directly taking on the question of production. This production can be in a workplace, but also can mean various forms of autonomous productive projects, such as taking over land to build farms and schools.
These new values and forms of value production are breaking with (and creating something different from) capitalist market relations, yet they simultaneously exist within the overall framework of capitalism and are pushing (and moving) the boundaries of the limits of capitalist production value—not merely residing within it. What is being created and put forward is not a small group dropping out of society so as to have a “better” factory or grow crops on the land; rather it is thinking beyond the traditional concept of work and together creating new relationships, sustaining themselves, while under capitalism, but often with the agenda of going against and beyond capitalism.
Now imagine this happening everywhere, that together, with those around us, we rethink what work and production could mean, questioning not only how we work together in a given workplace, but whether this is the appropriate form or work at all. What if we rethink all of our productive capacities together, based on these principles of solidarity, horizontalism and then together create a truly alternative value with the alternative values?
Contributor
Marina SitrinMARINA SITRIN is the author of Everyday Revolutions: Horizontalism and Autonomy in Argentina (Zed), and the forthcoming They Can't Represent Us! Reinventing Democracy from Greece to Occupy (Verso).
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES

Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind
By Joseph PeschelNOV 2020 | Books
Rumaan Alam, a Brooklynite himself, begins his third novel, Leave the World Behind (2020), as if it were a domestic comedy of manners about a Brooklyn family on vacation in Long Island. Alam transforms the story, with its serious and witty commentary on social class and race relations, into a psychological thrillera dystopian tale about the end of the world.

Our World is Burning
By Olivia GilmoreSEPT 2020 | ArtSeen
Over 30 artists focus their attention on human crises in the Arab world and the global ecological emergency at large, while the exhibition itself sparks outrage for its partnership with the Qatari-state-run MATHAF: the Arab Museum of Modern Art.
Susan Bee: Anywhere Out of the World: New Paintings, 2017–2020
By Yínká ElújọbaNOV 2020 | ArtSeen
Susan Bee is creating new mythologies to help grapple with a collapsing universe. In Anywhere Out of the World she embraces archetypes and iconic images to reinterpret societal and personal struggles.

Nicolás Guagnini: Asociación Psicoanalítica Argentina
By Israel LundOCT 2019 | ArtSeen
Nicolás Guagninis exhibition Asociación Psicoanalítica Argentina at Bortolami was a twisted riddle, a psychoanalytical conundrum. Supplemented by a performance titled Analysis, the show was dense with signs and possible signifiers that warped interpretative norms.