Matilde Adorno, Michel Camadessus, Bill Clinton
“The Take, made by the anticapitalist journalists Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein, tells the inspirational story of the growing band of factory workers in Argentina who are occupying the factories that were closed by the economic crisis and running them as co-operatives. Lewis and Klein’s tendency to put their own political spin on the story notwithstanding, it’s a fascinating portrait of a people who refuse to be forced to their knees along with their foundering country.” Wendy Ide, Times Online
“After Argentina’s economic meltdown in the late 1990s, groups of unpaid and unemployed factory workers decided to take matters into their own hands. Since the amount they were owed in wages roughly corresponded to the value of their employers’ material assets, the workers thought it fair to take control of the factories and resume production without permission. The bosses call it thievery, the factory workers call it “expropriation”, and a political solution seems unlikely since the frontrunner in the general election is the very man responsible for Argentina’s crisis in the first place: former president Carlos Menem.
Klein and director Avi Lewis conduct their study at ground level, focusing on a group of Buenos Aires men fighting to reopen their auto parts forge. To fully gauge the success of these initiatives, you’d need a degree in economics, a more rigorous debate, and probably a further decade’s worth of investigation, but this is at least a glimmer of a solution to global capitalism’s ills, and who knows how valuable that might prove to be? As one worker ominously declares: “We are where the rest of the world is going.” Steve Rose, Guardian
…a stirring, idealistic documentary…
New York Times, 22 September 2004
…Lewis and Klein have done something extraordinary…
The New Yorker, 22 September 2004