If They Touch One of Us, They Touch All of Us: Cooperativism As a Counterlogic to Neoliberal Capitalism (Report‪)‬

At first glance it could be any large Buenos Aires hotel early on a Sunday morning. A few guests bustle around with their suitcases, the phone rings sporadically behind the reception desk, and sparsely scattered groups of people in the adjoining restaurant sit sleepily sipping the small, espresso-sized cups of coffee that are the standard fare in any porteno cafe. Slowly, though, a rising sense of tension begins to infiltrate the air. A barely perceptible disturbance registers somewhere near the entrance. In its wake, movement quickens, as individuals, in ones and twos at first, begin to make their way quickly back and forth across the lobby, calling out to others who scurry off in varying directions. Within a short while, a crowd of people has gathered in front of the main doors. The sound of drums begins to penetrate the walls, and glimpses of tattered homemade banners bearing the emblems of leftist political parties, neighborhood associations, and piquetero groups filter through the dark windows, reflected in the strengthening morning sun. For this is no ordinary hotel, but the Hotel Bauen, a once-bankrupt enterprise taken over by its former workers in defense of their source of labor. Controlled and operated by a workers' cooperative, the current Hotel Bauen is the object of an intense legal and political struggle, as the former owners along with their political and economic allies dispute the cooperative's right to manage the hotel. This early Sunday morning in June 2005, a new attempt to have the hotel shut down takes the form of a pair of young police officers who arrive to place a mandatory closure notice on the front door. Within the hour, and in spite of being only shortly past daybreak on a weekend, hundreds of people have rallied in front of the hotel in a show of solidarity for the BAUEN Cooperative and for the worker-controlled recuperated businesses movement.1 This show of solidarity with the BAUEN did not emerge spontaneously or in isolation. In this article, I examine how a logic of cooperativism has been steadily established across diverse sectors of Argentine society in recent years. In examining the history and development of cooperativism in Argentina and its emergence in this case, I argue that this recent manifestation of cooperativism has consolidated as a specific challenge to the ideas of the citizen and labor as advanced by the politics of neoliberalism applied in Argentina. I draw on my fieldwork in Buenos Aires from 20042006 and focus specifically on the Hotel Bauen as a key site for the exploration of this idea and its development and practice within the recuperated businesses movement. The geographic centrality and functional nature of the hotel, the networks of solidarity cultivated by the cooperative, and their prolonged struggle for legal definition have made the hotel and cooperative an important symbolic referent and location for the expression of social protest. Here, I show how the logic of cooperativism deployed within and across the recuperated businesses movement works to recreate the notion of the worker as a collective and independent political actor, based on an ethics of solidarity and collaboration. In this way, I see the recuperated businesses movement as enacting a kind of cultural politics that works to "resignify and transform dominant cultural conceptions" and serves as a "crucial arena for understanding how th(e) perhaps precarious yet vital entanglement to the cultural and the political occurs in practice" (Alvarez, Dagnino, and Escobar 1998:13, 5). Furthermore, I show how this resignification relies upon a discourse of corruption that delegitimizes the cultural program of the ruling elite and opens a space for the emergence of new and revitalized conceptions of work and the citizen.