How could we cope if capitalism failed? Ask 26 Greek factory workers. By Aditya Chakrabortty
Where the state has collapsed, the market
has come up short and the boss class has literally fled, these 26 workers
are attempting to fill the gaps. These are people who have been failed by
capitalism; now they reject capitalism itself as a failure.
You could call the men and women at Viome factory workers, but that wouldn’t be the half of it. Try instead: some of the bravest people I’ve ever met. Or: organisers of one of the most startling social experiments in contemporary Europe. And: a daily lesson from Greece to Brexit Britain, both in how we work and how we do politics. At the height of the Greek crash in 2011, staff at Viome clocked in to confront an existential quandary. The owners of their parent company had gone bust and abandoned the site, in the second city of Thessaloniki. From here, the script practically wrote itself: their plant, which manufactured chemicals for the construction industry, would be shut. There would be immediate layoffs, and dozens of families would be plunged into poverty. And seeing as Greece was in the midst of the greatest economic depression ever seen in the EU, the workers’ chances of getting another job were close to nil.
So they decided to
occupy their own plant. Not only that, they turned it upside down. I spent a couple of days there a few
weeks back, while reporting for Vice News Tonight on HBO, and it now looks like
just an ordinary factory. Behind the facade, it has become the political
equivalent of a Tardis: the more you look inside, the bigger the implications
get. For a start, no one is
boss. There is no hierarchy, and everyone is on the same wage. Factories
traditionally work according to a production-line model, where each person does
one- or two-minute tasks all day, every day: you fit the screen, I fix the
protector, she boxes up the iPhone. Here, everyone gathers at 7am for a
mud-black Greek coffee and a chat about what needs to be done. Only then are
the day’s tasks divvied up. And, yes, they each take turns to clean the
toilets.
Let that sink in. A
bunch of middle-aged men and women who have spent their entire careers on the
wrong end of barked orders about what to do and when to do it have seized
ownership of their own workplace and their own working lives. They became their
own bosses. And they immediately align themselves to principles of the purest
equality possible. “Before, I was doing
only one thing and had no idea what the others were doing,” is how Dimitris
Koumatsioulis remembers the factory when he started in 2004. And now? “We’re
all united. We have forgotten the concept of ‘I’ and can function collectively
as ‘we’.”
The other massive
change that has taken place is between the factory and its neighbours. When the
workers “recuperated” their workplace (to use the local term), they could only
do so with the help of Thessaloniki locals. Whenever representatives of the
former owners came to requisition their equipment, as a court had given them
permission to do, hundreds of residents would form a human chain in front of
the plant (I contacted lawyers for Viome for comment but, despite assurances,
no statement was forthcoming).
When the workers
consulted the local community about what they should start to produce, one
request was to stop making building chemicals. They now largely
manufacture soap and eco-friendly household detergents: cleaner, greener and
easier on their neighbours’ noses… read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jul/18/cope-capitalism-failed-factory-workers-greek-workplace-controlMore posts on Greece
