This is a CTP of initiative: ICA/MOI (Argentina)
This CTP analized the creation of the MOI Self-Management Cooperatives Federation and constitutes the formal step of a social transformative movement, created in the early 1990s, to that of an organization of a second-degree cooperative organization. From this perspective, the creation of the Federation clearly represents a CTP, an important leap in the representativeness and scope of the MOI, as well as an increase in its influence in the interaction with public organisms. The federation's begin allows the MOI to continue its activity in the promotion of public policies of habitat from a space in which are found not only housing cooperatives, but also labor cooperatives.
"Today, the basic nucleus is called the Cooperatives Self-management Federation, and the objects there are create and management housing cooperatives and a cooperative of work, which is the one that builds the works of the housing cooperatives. In addition, there are two or three objectives more linked to this notion of integrality that was built in the third stage."
This TCP was identified in the interviews and fieldwork, in which the Federation is currently developing itself as the fundamental representative figure of the MOI. Thus, at the end of 2008 the MOI was formalized in the Federation of Self-Managed Cooperatives. That is the temporary structure of the national organization.
"The fourth stage of the MOI was, more or less, the one we are going through since 2007, which has to do with a process of nationalization, with a process of being part of the development of experiences of self-management cooperatives in different parts of the country. In October 2008, we held the Constituent Assembly of the "Federation of Self-managed Cooperatives MOI", with the aim of nuclear cooperative processes, that are developed in the movement to have a tool for organizing and defending our cooperatives."
Currently the Federation includes labor cooperatives and housing cooperatives, integrating different areas. From there different lines of work are developed (Work and construction, architecture, education, etc.). The Federation is open to the inclusion of cooperative experiences that share the criteria of Self-Management, Mutual Assistance and Collective Property, throughout our Argentina.
"Today we are moving from the conscious reflection and systematization of our practices to the formulation of organizational political agreements at the national level with the aim of formalizing what we have been doing in practice for several years."
There were two driving forces behind this process: 1 - the need for organizational growth to channel the strength of popular organizations is its own capacity for quantitative and qualitative development, in terms of struggle, management, organization and proposal; 2 - collective awareness of the obligation to socialize practices and proposals, sharing the exercise of solidarity.
The Federation of Self-managed Cooperatives is the product of the combination of two main institutions: Occupants and Tenants Movement and the Central of argentine Workers. Therefore, all the organizations, governments or institutions linked to them joined in the creation phase of the Federation.
In the province of Buenos Aires, the access tool is the Fuerza Solidaria (Solidarity Strength) program, a trust of the Banco Provincia, which enables cooperative groups, made up of families with a certain purchasing power (not those with more critical conditions) to apply for 5-year loans, At an interest rate of 8%, and with caps in the amounts of 200 thousand dollars. These links with the Buenos Aires Estate in turn materialize locally in the cities of Merlo, San Martín, La Plata, Avellaneda, Malvinas Argentinas, some of the locations of this phase of the process.
In general, for the execution of housing projects, resources from the National State and the Provincial States are being managed before the Housing Institute. For the Federation, it is essential to advance in the creation of regulatory frameworks in provincial legislative areas in which fronts were opened to fight for the popular self-managed habitat.
An example of this is the province of Santa Fe, in which, in addition to being linked to the provincial government, intervention projects were established with the Universidad Nacional del Litoral, one of the two most important Mesopotamian institutions. Based on this link, a seminar on self-management was carried out at the Faculty of Architecture of the Universidad Nacional del Litoral in 2008 to promote cooperative organization processes and to replicate multisectoral areas of dialogue with the Housing Commission of the provincial Legislature. The institutions with which the Federation of Self-managed Cooperatives was linked and extended their relations are the expression of the stage that is being transited.
In 2008 in Argentina, the progressive government was consolidated and this implied the possibility for the social movements to accede to a place of greater protagonism. Numerous transformative organizations approached the State those only five years before considered them conflicting actors. In that scenario, the members of the MOI reflected on the role that cooperatives must play in building a more just and more inclusive society as they propose. In 2008, the MOI carried out a series of cooperative workshops, from which came a set of questions and problematic nuclei that were the lines of intervention and action of the Federation.
"We proposed to problematize everything we did: Self-management in the organization, what is self-management organization? In the productive, what is the productive model? What normative frameworks should be generated, promoted and implemented as state policies? In education, what is the liberating educational conception? In the cultural sphere, which defines and characterizes the incorporation and practice of the anti-system, anti-capitalist self-management culture?"
In October 2008, the Constituent Assembly of the "Federation of Self-managed Cooperatives MOI" was held, with the aim of nuclear cooperative processes that are developed in the movement, to have a tool for organizing and defending our cooperatives.
"Today we move from the conscious reflection and systematization of our practices to the formulation of organizational political agreements at the national level with the aim of formalizing what we have been doing in practice for several years, building until we reach the Federation, which became the objective Principal to organize ourselves."
For an organization with more than 25 years of experience, the MOI reached the largest institutional framework. This allowed the MOI to leave the ambit of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires and to encrease the claim, the impulse, the struggle for Self-management as a humanly integral and dis-alienating conception of structural transformation of the society.
The Federation can be understood as the consolidation of an institution explicitly created with the aim of transforming society in an innovative way. The MOI proposal is openly a call to create new ways of relating people to the material; To think of housing as something beyond a good, a mere commodity. For cooperativism, housing is a fundamental human right that must be understood from a different logic to that posited by economic theories
"We seek to construct a transformation against the logic of capital, against the logic of profit; against vertical authoritarianism, against the delegative and welfare cultures; Against the patronal culture, consciously internalized in the owners of capital, appropriators of the means of production, in the exploiters and many times in our own people, in our own town. And in this last reflection we may find the most profound and consequently the most complex and essential challenge of our struggle: Cultural Change."
For the members of the MOI, this change implies a change in practices, attitudes, and consciousness. It is a countercultural change, against the individualistic, selfish, privatizing, consumeristic, fragmented and split of our everyday culture.
"From the Federation we seek to consolidate the Movement, strengthen identities and belongings, clarify, consciously and collectively socialize our structuring axes. Identities, belongings and axes that are clearly expressed in the Letter or Manifesto of Principles on which we will interact reflexively to appropriate us with the greatest understanding and conviction. Only from such convictions and certain sharing, we can promote the proposals and practices of our Movement to fight nationally with and from our regional, the installation of Self-management.”
The creation of the Federation of Self-managed Cooperatives allowed the MOI to formalize and consolidate its objectives, extending them to other actors with shorter trajectories. For the MOI, housing and the Federation especially, are channels to organize the struggle for a culture of solidarity, integration, is the space that allows social and political intervention to propose a different society.
Creating a Federation was a fact anticipated and especially pursued by the Movement of Occupants and Tenants. It was a process of progressive growth that led from the creation of the grassroots organization to the formation of a second degree organization. For the cooperative movement, inter-institutional organization is fundamental, since it implies national and regional spaces for collective growth.
The logic of development had to do with the common sense historically built in the organization: the normative and programmatic frameworks of the self-managed habitat production policies must be supported previously in the transit through concrete experiences. For this reason, the MOI anticipated the need to establish a federation that could nucleate a set of cooperative housing experiences that shared interests but were disjointed.
The creation of the Federation generated great learning in the MOI, especially at the level of political management of the objectives to a greater. From the development of the organization at the national level, it was thought about the need to create a work space that articulates the communication in the regional, between the same regional and at the national level. The generation of this space was discussed in several national plenaries and little by little is being shaped.
At present, the Federation has scope in all Argentina:
"We have been traveling in localities of Patagonia are constructed in urban centers of dominant tourist stamp, and consequently crossed socioespacialmente by dynamics of strong real estate bias of expulsive character with the popular sectors that the bad inhabit: San Martin de los Andes, in Neuquén; San Carlos de Bariloche and recently El Bolsón, in Río Negro, and Ushuaia, in Tierra del Fuego."
In all these cities, the MOI was able to sign agreements with the respective local and provincial governments to develop pilot experiences that would provide an experiential basis for promoting sectoral policies. Each regional is generating the tools it needs for its local development, but in turn a strategy of national scope is planned among all.
At the moment the MOI develops a web from a collaborative process, and publishes in paper and of virtual form, the Informant (newspaper of the organization) also is planned and executed in a collective way.
"We think as fundamental to continue developing the articulation of this space at the national level, mainly because it brings us closer to the geographical distances and allows us to think and to make visible a movement of national scope."
The main learning around the creation of the Federation was the claim of Self-management as the main transforming strategy. Within the framework of a non-corporate, non-competitive, social and collaborative logic, the key is grassroots organizations. From there the learning process is explored in the manifestations of the institution.
"We think of habitat as a means of use, not of profitable exchange. Self-management logic also implies a participatory logic that is antagonistic to the logic of business production, where habitat is a business. Self-managed production does not exist without the full participation of each human being consciously and collectively articulated. Habitat thrives and what you do is what you love. Housing is born in a collective space."
At present, the MOI and the Federation continue to fight for the creation of a Habitat National Act as an innovative tool for transforming society.
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