Donald Reid, Opening the Gates: The Lip Affair, 1968–1981, London: Verso, 2018, 512 pp. ISBN: 978-1-78663-540-2.
Donald Reid’s Opening the Gates: The Lip Affair, 1968–1981 provides a comprehensive history of the experience of the LIP watch factory, one of the most significant workers’ struggles in post-1968 France. In 1973, faced with the threat of mass layoffs and the liquidation of the factory, LIP workers occupied their workplace, restarted production, sold watches, and used the proceeds to pay their own wages. Reid approaches this process not simply as a strike or factory occupation, but as a broader social struggle in which workers gained greater control over production, decision-making, and relations of authority in the workplace.
The book does not limit the LIP experience to the famous occupation of 1973. Beginning with the radicalisation of workers at the factory in 1968, it follows the 1973 struggle, the reopening of the factory in 1974, the second bankruptcy and occupation in 1976, the reorganisation of production and sales from 1977 onwards, and the process that eventually led to the formation of a cooperative, tracing the experience through to 1981. In Reid’s account, LIP therefore emerges not as a single moment of resistance but as a long-term experience in which workers’ control, workplace democracy, and the idea of self-management were tested in different forms.
One of the most striking aspects of the experience is the forms of democratic organisation based on general assemblies, commissions, and the direct participation of rank-and-file workers. Major decisions were discussed in general assemblies, while workers carried out a wide range of activities—from production and sales to security and communications—through commissions they established themselves. The Lip Unité bulletin produced during the struggle also functioned not merely as an instrument of external propaganda, but as a means of strengthening collective knowledge and participation by sharing discussions from the general assemblies and reports on the activities of the commissions.
Reid also avoids presenting LIP as a homogeneous and conflict-free workers’ community. In particular, he devotes considerable attention to the transformation experienced by women workers during the struggle and to gender inequalities within the workers’ collective itself. While the struggle enabled some women to speak in general assemblies and mass meetings in ways they had never done before, male-dominated trade-union leadership and inequalities in opportunities to speak did not disappear entirely. The LIP experience thus shows that workplace democracy involved questioning not only the boss–worker relationship but also power relations among workers themselves.
Another important contribution of the book is that it makes visible the limits of self-management. In 1973, Charles Piaget and other leading workers were openly sceptical about the viability of an isolated workers’ cooperative within a capitalist economy; at that stage, they regarded restarting production more as a means of sustaining the struggle than as an attempt to establish a permanent self-managed enterprise. Nevertheless, developments after 1976 eventually led the workers towards forming a cooperative. Reid also examines the contradictions that emerged at this stage between democratic management and the re-emergence of managerial roles, collective responsibility and self-exploitation, and market imperatives and the aims of self-management.
From this perspective, Opening the Gates is an important study that examines, through a historical case, both the transformative potential of workers’ control and self-management and the limits they encounter within capitalist market and state structures. The LIP experience demonstrates how an occupation could develop into the continuation of production under workers’ control, the creation of democratic decision-making mechanisms, and eventually cooperativisation, while at the same time revealing why self-management at the level of a single enterprise does not provide a permanent or contradiction-free solution. In this respect, the book is a key source for the history of workers’ control and workplace democracy in Europe.