In the socialist New Statesman, Naomi Klein (The Shock Doctrine) and Avi Lewis note that Argentinian workers have been taking over bankrupt businesses and reopening them under “democratic worker” management, under the borrowed slogan, “Occupy, resist, produce“:
The movement in Argentina is frustrating to some on the left who feel it is not clearly anti-capitalist, those who chafe at how comfortably it exists within the market economy and see worker management as merely a new form of auto-exploitation. Others see co-operativism, the legal form chosen by the vast majority of the recovered companies, as a capitulation in itself — insisting that only full nationalisation by the state can bring worker democracy into a broader socialist project.
You have to love the left-wing rhetoric. Auto-exploitation? Anyway, I can see why anti-capitalists might be upset — there’s nothing anti-capitalist about handing over the reins of a bankrupt company to the people who can run it profitably — especially if they’re also debt-holders, owed back wages and massive pensions.