ABSTRACT
Since the late 1990s, attempts at workers' self-management in companies have proliferated throughout the Argentine territory - in all sectors of the productive economy and services - and attracted enormous popular solidarity and the attention of researchers and activists. The commonly called 'worker-recovered enterprises' (empresas recuperadas por los trabajadores, in Spanish (ERT)) are companies abandoned by capitalists which have gone bankrupt, and workers attempt to take them over and self-manage them, with a primary objective of preserving jobs. In the Argentine context, an absence of that type of non-capitalist logic at the level of the national economy makes the task even more difficult. The practices of equality and collective management in ERTs constantly clash with the needs of the market, as well as with the values and ideas that workers have internalized from the capitalist culture in which they were born and have lived all their lives.
