The Social Justice Institute will host a documentary screening of The Take, a documentary about workers in Buenos Aires, Argentina, who defied their employer and their government to create something better.
John Flores, co-director and academic coordinator of the Social Justice Institute, associate professor of history and author of The Mexican Revolution in Chicago (University of Illinois Press 2018), will offer remarks about Argentina. Nishani Frazier, author of Harambee City: The Congress of Racial Equality in Cleveland and the Rise of Black Power Populism (University of Arkansas Press 2017) sill offer a commentary on the film and share her research about alternative economic models.
The event, titled “Alternative Economics: Community Development from Buenos Aires to Cleveland,” will be held Friday, Sept. 20, from 6 to 8:30 p.m. in the Tinkham Veale University Center Senior Classroom.
The event is free and open to the community. Light refreshments will be provided. RSVP to socialjustice@case.edu.
View a list of events hosted by the Social Justice Institute.
About the event
The capitalist economy is failing working-class communities across the globe. Unemployment, exploitative wages, and impoverishing healthcare models have pushed people to the edge.
In the wake of a catastrophic economic crisis in 2001, thousands of Argentinians hit the streets. They demanded the recall of their president, asserted their right to shape the national economy, and called for the creation of “Factories without Bosses!” Within the next few years, some 10,000 workers occupied more than 150 companies and began running them as worker-owned cooperatives.
During the 1960s, African-American communities in New York, Los Angeles, Cleveland and other cities rose up in rebellion. The U.S. government acknowledged the challenges engendering “social and economic decay in our major cities” but offered no course for radical social transformation. But in Cleveland, members of the Congress of Racial Equality and the Hough Area Development Corporation advocated concrete plans for community development that the historian Nishani Frazier explains were driven by a “stream of black nationalism” that “encapsulated socialist elements of wealth sharing that [would force] the American economic system to open its doors to more citizens.”