Raúl Zibechi, Autonomías y emancipaciones: América Latina en movimiento, Lima: Programa Democracia y Transformación Global / Fondo Editorial de la Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, 2007, 314 pp. ISBN: 978-9972-834-25-7.
Raúl Zibechi’s Autonomías y emancipaciones: América Latina en movimiento examines the social movements that emerged in Latin America in response to neoliberal transformations through the lens of autonomy, self-organisation, and social transformation from below. Exploring diverse experiences ranging from the Zapatistas and Brazil’s Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST) to Indigenous movements, Argentina’s piqueteros, and worker-recuperated factories, Zibechi focuses not only on the seizure of state power or institutional reforms as paths to social transformation, but on the capacity of movements to create new social relations through their own everyday practices.
One of the book’s central concepts is autonomy. According to Zibechi, a significant part of Latin America’s new social movements seeks to create material and social spaces relatively independent of states and political parties, increasingly organising their own lives, education, production, and forms of organisation. This process also involves an effort to move away from hierarchical forms of organisation, reduce the separation between those who govern and those who are governed, and develop horizontal relations. Rather than being a programme to be realised in the future, the new society begins to take shape within the relations that movements create in the present.
This approach also extends to production and labour relations. Zibechi emphasises that changing the ownership of the means of production is not sufficient in itself to create emancipatory relations. He stresses the importance of transforming land, factories, and other spaces of production into spaces where production takes place without bosses or foremen and where an egalitarian, horizontal, and less hierarchical division of labour is developed. Self-management, therefore, is not simply a matter of changing the ownership or legal status of an enterprise, but also of transforming the social and technical relations within the production process.
One of the chapters most directly concerned with workers’ self-management is entitled “Fábricas recuperadas: de la supervivencia a la autogestión”. Zibechi regards the recuperated factories of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay as a distinctive response developed by workers to workplace closures resulting from neoliberalism and deindustrialisation. As workers reactivate closed enterprises and continue production without bosses, they must collectively address problems involving ownership, working capital, raw materials, marketing, and technical knowledge. Factory occupations that initially emerge from the need to survive and preserve jobs thus become experimental spaces for workers’ self-management.
The following chapter, “Zanón. Otro mundo es posible: cerámicas Zanón,” offers one of the most detailed examples of this transformation. The Zanón workers occupied the factory and restarted production under workers’ control, adopted equal pay, and organised different functions—from production and sales to purchasing and administration—through collective committees. Coordinators elected within different sections serve on a rotating basis and receive the same wages as other workers, while key decisions are made in section meetings and general assemblies. Removing management from the exclusive control of a separate managerial stratum allows workers’ control to become embedded in the everyday organisation of production.
For Zibechi, the significance of Zanón also extends beyond the boundaries of the factory. The relationships developed by the enterprise, organised as FaSinPat, with neighbourhoods, organisations of unemployed workers, Mapuche communities, and various social organisations are presented as an example of reconnecting production with social purposes. In this way, workers’ self-management becomes part of a broader process of social autonomy and solidarity: the issue is not merely operating a capitalist enterprise without bosses, but also reconstructing the relationship between production and community. In this respect, Autonomías y emancipaciones is an important work that situates worker-recuperated factories within the broader Latin American experiences of transformation from below, autonomy, and emancipation.