Definitions and Background
The first international gathering on “The Workers' Economy” in 2007 brought together over 300 participants which included researchers, workers, and social organization protagonists from over fifteen countries from the Americas, Europe and Africa. The 2007 participants almost unanimously felt that the debates and exchanges engaged in then successfully brought together two broad groups, radical academics and workers and their organizations. At this first gathering, most of the participants felt that these two groups were able to fruitfully engage in mutual reflection and discussion on the broad theme of the workers' economy. Usually, the interests of these two heterogeneous groups tend to run on separate tracks—the theoretical advancements of academe seldom dialogue with or get nourished by the concrete practices of workers' organizations and their struggles, and vice versa. Tellingly, most participants at the first forum agreed that a similar gathering should be organized in the near future.

The current global capitalist crisis adds new urgencies to the issues we discussed in 2007. This discussion should not simply be centred on understanding the origins of the crisis or attempting to “correctly” define the hegemonic system that nurtures it. Nor should it only be about assessing this system's negative impacts on the worlds' people or just about discussing the role of work organizations in the context of a new political and economic paradigm. To be sure, these are important topics to think through. But more than just delineating or defining our current conjuncture and the impacts of its institutional framework, the main purpose of convening a second gathering on the worker's economy is to collectively think through the potential for the creation of political and economic alternatives to the current system in crisis. Moreover, the 2009 gathering seeks to begin this collective thinking from the actual organizational experiences of workers, both in the area of self-management and from the myriad daily struggles against forms of exploitation old and new.

Here is where, for us, 2009's forum begins to take on new meaning. What conclusions can be drawn from the social, political, and economic practices that have already been developed by self-managed workers for conceiving a workers' economy as an alternative to the economy of capital? How should union organizations undertake the struggle for the defense of workers' rights and interests in a global system that has not only radically restructured itself in the past few decades, but that has begun to show its limits within that very restructuring? Is it possible to propose new strategies and tactics for local and global struggles against capital on the basis of the minoritarian experiences of self-management and a workers' economy? How would proposals for and struggles towards a new social and economic model incorporate the experiences of the immense masses of unpaid and precarious workers? How would they include the heterogeneous group of marginalized people that suffer under poor living conditions, a group whose numbers have multiplied exponentially over the last few decades of neoliberalism and crises?

Perhaps it begins with transforming this new global economic crisis into an opportunity for thinking through and perhaps even advancing the goal of achieving an economic system self-managed by workers and those living on the margins. Perhaps this current crisis is an opportunity do so on the basis of the concrete experiences of the past and present, experiences that have actually materialized into real self-managed organizational and economic options. Indeed, our current conjuncture may be an opportunity to recuperate and reinvent alternative theoretical, conceptual, and political frameworks from which to think about a different economic project.

These are some of the issues we invite you to consider with us at this year's gathering. We would like to welcome all who have thought about the problems, challenges, and possibilities of achieving an alternative economic reality, including academics committed to social transformation and individuals and organizations actually practicing alternative forms of social organization, politics, and self-management. We do so with the hopes of stimulating the much needed debates and discussions that must be had by those thinking about and practicing alternatives to exploitative and alienating economic life in these hard times, both within Argentina and throughout the rest of the world. As in 2007, we hope that these debates will be broad, accessible, and inclusive. We therefore welcome to the gathering, in particular, the participation of socially committed intellectuals of all stripes, grassroots social and political organizations, unions and their members, protagonists of worker-recuperated enterprises and those practicing other forms of self-managed production, and members of all types of collectives engaged in social, economic, and political struggle and alternative forms of life.

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