ABSTRACT
Ever since the second half of the 20th century, the Argentinean automotive industry has been among those industrial sectors which most thoroughly express the specific form under which capital accumulation develops locally. In spite of a relative modernization during the 1990s, locally operating automotive capitals still feed their valorization process by the appropriation of agrarian ground-rent, as well as by the extraction of extraordinary surplus value from the workers they employ.
During the 1990s, as ground-rent stagnated, this latter source gained protagonism, and the confrontation over the deepening or the limitation of overexploitation turned the major axis around which the struggle between buyers and sellers of labor power revolved. It was not until 2007 that an increased mass of ground-rent allowed a recovery of real wages, under the form of a process of unions revitalization. Still, this recovery was permanently questioned by the persistence of precarious and flexible conditions in the sell and use of labor power. Thus, capitals in the automotive industry consolidated the conditions for overexploitation during the expansive phase, and they enhanced their position to appropriate part of the value of labor power as soon as the alternative sources of extraordinary social wealth proved insufficient for their fluent accumulation. A renewed phase of contraction, opened in 2015, has started to enact such potentiality.
KEYWORDS: Automotive industry; Capital accumulation; Political forms; Union struggle; Labor relations.
DOWNLOAD PDF (IN SPANISH)