The Take

What Americans should do

Great example to follow democratizing the work place and this shows how to do it.

The movie is interesting. I bought it used and had a difficult time playing it on my laptop, because the disc was dirty and scratched.

Scripted by activist-author Naomi Klein ("No Logo") and directed by Avi Lewis, "The Take" is a probing look at the ugly underside of globalization and its discontents, as well as a compelling portrait of blue-collar pride and self-esteem. We get to know the workers and their families, hearing about the hardships so many have endured since an ill-advised International Monetary Fund bailout plunged Argentina deeper into debt and disarray. Urgent and damning in its implications, "The Take" is a David and Goliath story with real-world reverberations.

The Take is a must see movie for anyone interested in social justice, co-ops, anarcho-syndicalism, the plight of the working class, the IMF or World Bank, capitalism, or South American culture. Well made, this documentary has great pacing, clear and concise information, and a lot of heart.

I like the story that this film tells about the workers of the closed factories trying to bring Argentina back from the brink by getting back to work. I believe that recuperation is a fair way to settle owed wages, satisfy the other creditors and provide productive work. I think its a shame that the politicians would do anything but fully support the workers' endeavors in getting the economy moving again.Despite this, the film is ruined by half-baked ideas about the IMF and the Multi-nationals causing the ruin of the Argentine economy. The IMF is the only organization in the world that continued to provide hard currency to the Argentine government after the economic crisis. The Multinational corporations only did what they could to try to mitigate their losses caused by the collapse by getting the hell out of Dodge.The true culprits in the plot are the corrupt politicians and the nefarious bigwigs running the local enterprises like Forja San Martin. (Am I the only one who noticed that the film includes no examples of Multinationals abandoning a factory?) Argentina had crappy fiscal and monetary policies, including bloated subsidies to companies like Zanon (before the take-over), and a pegged currency. The references to IMF policy prescriptions (El Modelo) never mention that Argentina ignored the most basic reforms that are supposed to ensure stability and solvency of the government and support economic development while helping those hurt by the attendant dislocations that development will cause (i.e.: job loss, etc.) I don't know why they were so timid about calling out these scoundrels, other than that they'd have to pass up taking cheaps shots at the IMF, Multinational corporations, and other globalization bogeymen.I would have appreciated this film much more if it were more honest about the true circumstances that lead to the sad state of affairs that it documents. I would have rated it at least four stars had it done so.12-28-2008:If you disagree with my review, I'd appreciate some feedback in a comment. Since I posted this review, I've only gotten "unhelpful" votes, but no constructive feedback. It's rather frustrating, as I feel I gave this film and its argument quite a bit of thought and additional research before giving it a marginally unfavorable rating.

I'm a fan of Naomi Klein, so I had no worries about this being a great insightful documentary. I bought it to watch with my dad and grandfather..An eye-opening movement!!!!

Wish we could do what these people did to revive and re-open manufacturing the U.S.

Just saw this film a short while ago, and was floored at how good it was. The documentary does very nicely at showing individual stories on how Argentinians are suffering from their economic crisis and their feeling of helplessness with their current political system and their unique ways of dealing with these problems. And yet it balances these stories with larger scoped contexts of a given factory that they follow closely and how that fits in the larger context of how similar events are happening all over the country, and how it related to the election that was happening at the time the film was shot. Film was nicely edited both stylistically and in pacing and guides you to a climax that didn't have to rely on "borrowed" footage like many other documentaries do, but uses pretty much all its own 16 member crew's footage that wasn't in any way tame or irrelavent as a result.I think it's very relavent for many democracies now, especially us who've been disappointed in our erosion of democracy here in the States. We see both clearly a vision of where we could be headed, and also strongly the message that a democracy depends very much on a grass roots efforts by its citizens to make it work and that we as citizens of one shouldn't be thinking that "someone else will deal with it.". I highly recommend these folks' work. They put their heart and soul into it and you can tell.Also included are two shorts that discuss how the movie was made behind the scenes, and one that appears to be dedicated to a subplot that was likely cut from the main film that goes in fairly deep to the events around a protestor who had been killed in one of these protests.

This film does not, anywhere, say that co-ops are new. Nor does it say people should break the law by occupying and taking over a shuttered factory. Most of all, it doesn't pretend to be "objective", and neither does it need to. Two previous reviews seem to suggest that it does, but I respectfully suggest the reviewers haven't been paying attention.Co-ops in and of themselves are nothing new. But co-ops formed from what used to be a capitalist-owned enterprise are very new indeed--they're only as old as this millennium. Anyone who thinks otherwise hasn't been paying attention. Global capitalism lays waste whole countries and abandons its own enterprises, and workers can take those enterprises back on their own terms--legally, democratically, and without a boss.That's what this film is about. Instead of having to build a new co-op from the ground up (and having to raise a daunting amount of start-up capital for even a small enterprise), the workers re-organize an existing workplace on their own lines. They do so by taking possession of abandoned factories, organizing their own supply chain, training new workers themselves, and restarting the production equipment--and, where necessary, taking the old boss to court. This is not about starting a co-op from scratch, but about overthrowing the old boss and democratizing a former capitalist workplace. The critical element is that of overthrow. THAT is what is radical here.Those who claim this process is illegal, with all due respect, haven't been paying very close attention to the film either. In fact, the workers who took back their factories DO take the course of law--they take their case to judges (who often decide against them), and they go to the legislatures, locally and federally, to get their co-op expropriations made legal when the judges rule against them. And (spoiler alert) they win--LEGALLY. Which is also radical, because overthrows used to require violence, even warfare, in order to succeed. Now, they can do it using democracy and rule of law. Politicians and judges, too, must become co-operators in the process, instead of merely property of the old-order capitalists--or gatekeepers on their behalf. What's not radical about that?Yes, it's half true that there is nothing in capitalist ideology to rule out co-ops...but that is because capitalist ideology is a chameleon, much like fascist ideology. It is whatever the capitalists say it is; it has never been codified in a manifesto as, say, communism has. It utterly ignores the notion of collective, democratic enterprise, when it isn't pooh-poohing it as communist. Or, when ignoring and pooh-poohing no longer work, it brutally quashes the uprising in totalitarian style by calling out the private rent-a-cops (or annexing the state police to do the same job, by essentially buying politicians, as we see the IMF do in the film).That all may change, however, if many more capitalists who are used to taking the money and running suddenly find themselves on the receiving end of a legal takeover like that of Zanon, Brukman or Forja San Martin. Or, for that matter, if the capitalists' candidates become so discredited that they no longer win elections and find themselves facing mass protests if they try to push their luck, as Carlos Menem did. It can happen anywhere, not just in Argentina! Remember, capitalism is global now--but so is the resistance. And the resistance, if this film is any indication, is making a much more convincing case for itself now. It is turning the master's tools against the master's house. That too, is radical.Whether the resistance gains the upper hand globally remains to be seen, but this is an excellent documentary of the early stages of the process in one country, and the fact that it doesn't pretend to be "objective" is not a failing. The filmmakers, I humbly submit, could hardly document this process very well if they were not intimately involved in it themselves. It requires courage, commitment, connection and trust to make a documentary of this calibre. You cannot just barge in with a camera crew and a studied air of neutrality and expect to get a half-decent interview from an activist who risks his/her life for what s/he is doing. Interviewing a smug capitalist or politician, even if he's hostile to your point of view, is actually comparatively easy, and Klein and Lewis have done so with several of them (so much for claims that they have no capitalist voices in here--they do, and what they say will make you cringe!) But getting the person on the street to talk is a lot harder--s/he doesn't have a PR person to pencil you in for an interview! You have to gain that humble, powerless person's trust, and that means getting involved.Having briefly studied and worked in the mug's game of "regular" journalism myself, I found it disillusioning and corporatistic. I'm deeply skeptical of it now. So I'm all for those who try something new--and are brave enough to get in there and inhale some tear gas not just with activists but AS activists. This is a necessary process, so that the other side of the story, the one that doesn't favor capitalism, can finally be told and told well. I don't think the mainstream media, for all their "objectivity" and "neutrality", have done nearly enough justice to that other side. If Klein and Lewis, who originally made this film for the CBC, are guilty of bias, then it's a refreshing new kind--one that doesn't favor the establishment, as the old mainstream journalism covertly did. Radical journalism subverting the "mainstream"? Yes. It will wake up your tired old tube and shake up your tired old sensibilities. "The Take" certainly does.

I enjoyed this documentary very much as it was high quality and examined a topic that is difficult to examine without delving into various alternative information sources. I was incensed, however, with the one-sidedness of the documentary and the fact that it takes a prototypical anti-globalization tone. Lewis and Klein are intelligent individuals and are highly respected in the anti-globalization movement; they can't make the claim, in my opinion, to be objective and any more insightful than typical journalists however. They didn't give much background on the myriad of economic crises that Argentina has experienced during the past century; or its multiple forays into military dictatorship and how that history undoubtedly contributed to the economic dysfunction that has become indicative of Argentina in the past decade or two.Lewis and Klein should have provided better explanations about a lot of things that went on in Argentina rather than spewing the "Globalization is awful" diatribe that has become characteristic of leftist movements in the past decade or so. There is more to be explored, analyzed and explained if people are really going to start thinking differently and using alternative models of development. I honestly expected more of Lewis and Klein - something beyond one-sidedness; I expected a lot more analysis, discussion and explanation from intellectuals of their calibre. That being said, it's hard to include a great deal of analysis and different views in a short documentary, perhaps they were simply trying to share the story of the people in the film.The movie does a good job of telling the story of several Argentineans struggling in an economy that's teetering on the brink of absolute ruin. The movie is effective in communicating the hardships faced by many of the featured individuals, as well as how empowered they feel by the actions they take to improve their lot. The story telling is good, however, in that the viewer really comes to understand the struggles, efforts and goals of the individuals who are basically case-studied in the film.