Abstract

The article discusses some of the material and ideological transformations of work in the Western Democracy and critically analyzes the neoliberal valorization of this activity, assumed as the main field of human self-realization. The article will then focus on some collective, recovering strategies able to reconvert, regenerate and share human and non-human resources that would otherwise be condemned to remain mere waste by the imbalances due to global market competition. The phenomenon of worker-recovered enterprises represents a collective reaction against the overproduction of (human and non-human) waste in neoliberal capitalism: the recovered enterprises are an innovative and democratic model of workers’ participation in the social organization of their companies. The article will focus on some of the main features of the Italian work-recovered enterprises and it will briefly compare them with the Argentina’s examples of enterprises’ cooperative recovery.