Workers' autonomy, today: Workers' autonomy, today

Abstract

The following article reconstruct the experience of struggle of the workers of Cerámica Zanón on the way to the current workers' self-management, under the name of FASINPAT (factory without bosses). We try to show how it is possible that, in collective instances, the workers establish their own rules and regulations, their own political definitions, and achieve a certain control of the work process, moving towards a questioning of the levers of social power in the current capitalist system. This process of building workers' autonomy is slow and contradictory: it incorporates tools such as factory occupation into the repertoire of struggle and at the same time establishes the legality that sustains it; it initiates the start-up of production under egalitarian criteria while the state intervenes by regulating its activity and resignifies the original idea of "recovered factories", among other aspects that are developed chronologically. Finally, the current challenges of this workers' experience are discussed: the extension of the model to other factories, the continuity of the workers' political participation in parliament, and their survival in an adverse political and economic context.