La toma

I don't wanna read all that stuff. I would if I had plenty of time and energy and no stress about a hundred other things. But I can't right now, so I can just hope my free rider abilities are sharp.
So this morning we watched 'The Take'. I felt like crying most of the time. I'm probably never going to be a cold-blooded scientist. I'll always have a weakness for people's individual stories and a slightly activist rage. It's about a factory in Argentina being taken over by the workers in order to be transformed into a cooperative, where they would all have equal pay and run the business through participatory democracy. It wasn't the first time this kind of grass-roots movement re-opened factories. Several Argentinian businesses were revived by the workers and now the owners who closed and sell them wanted back in. There were many conditions related to the political environment, the economic pressures and globalization that led to such situations. I think now that Naomi Klein did have a point there, as much as I laugh at activists.
The problem I actually have with activists is that many of them have nice jobs and can afford fair-trade coffee and they are these lucky individuals who have the choice. But I wonder how many of them have actually been on the field, how many know personally people in need for whom they fight. Environmentalists can be just the same. Urban hippies don't impress me much. It's the people who go out into the world, the real one, that I'd wanna learn from.