On the Take

When the Forja auto plant in suburban Buenos Aires closed down after Argentina went bankrupt in December 2001, even the pigeons deserted the factory. "There were always so many pigeons in here," says a tearful laid-off worker named Freddy as he revisits the factory with his old colleagues two years after they lost their jobs. This incursion into the defunct factory is the first step in the workers' 'Take' – taking back the company – and the most poignant moment of "The Take," Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein's documentary about the National Movement of Recovered Companies (MNER) in Argentina. A year later, Freddy and his buddies at Forja would be back on the shop floor, forging parts again – their bosses nowhere to be seen.

Klein, the author of "No Logo," the bible of the Seattle-Genoa global justice movement, and Lewis, host of the TV show "Counterspin," made "The Take" in response to their opponents' persistent question: "We know what you're against, but what are you for?" When they heard about worker-run factories in Argentina filling the vacuum left by corrupt managers, the husband-wife team found something concrete that they were for: democracy in the work place.

Expropriated companies (the legal term for businesses that are stolen, or stolen back by the workers) nearly always become more productive than they were under the old managers. The Zanon ceramics factory in the southern city of Neuquen now produces more tiles and employs more people than it did under the old management structure. Brukman, a garment factory in downtown Buenos Aires, fought off eviction, paid overdue gas and electricity bills and resumed production even though they couldn't legally issue receipts for the suits they made. According to the solidarity group Workers Without Bosses – who are making an appeal on behalf of the Brukman seamstresses for machine parts and instruction manuals – there are now about 200 worker-run factories in Argentina, employing around 10,000 people.

"The movement isn't exploding, but it is undergoing stable growth," Lewis said in a Q&A after a screening of "The Take" in New York, where it had an initial run last week. "There were halcyon visions of a shadow economy developing. But it's not an alternative economy, and it's not necessarily how we should proceed in this country. It's not a one-size-fits-all solution."

So instead of propogating a factory-takeover system, the documentary focusses on small, usually emotive details of the workers' struggles. We see Forja workers doing target practice with slingshots and marbles in preparation for a forced eviction; the women of Brukman – with the whole community behind them – repelled by teargas and water cannons when they try to force their way back into the factory; and lots of moody shots of derelict buildings.

Because Klein and Lewis focused on the human-interest approach, a lot of details are fustratingly absent: Did the workers have to raise capital to restart their machines? How exactly do worker-run companies gather the expertise to start trading? Was there any hint of Animal Farm-type power-grabs in the nascent worker collectives? Perhaps the biggest unanswered question though is exactly how the Forja workers, and others, secured legal expropriation of their factories – the most important part of a take. The movie doesn't show how the workers afforded lawyers, and under what precedent – if any – they made their case for expropriation. But we do see the Forja workers weeping when the decision finally goes their way on appeal.

This focus is deliberate, Klein told me in an interview. "We didn't want to make a lecture. A film should grab people emotionally and from there get them to read a dissertation on bankruptcy law," Klein said. "We aren't constitutionally capable of writing a manifesto. Even if I could write one, I really don't think I'd want to. I'm not hungering for ideology."

A polemic may not have been appropriate since workers at Forja, Zanon and Brukman reclaimed their factories more through pragmatism than ideology: without social security and jobs in Argentina, what else was there to do? When Freddy attends an MNER meeting for the first time, there is a vague sense of something potentially radical going on in Argentina. But he doesn't make a speech about workers of the world uniting; he tells everyone how hard it has been supporting his family since he was laid off (again, weeping).