“C’est possible”. L’autogestione, la LIP e la sinistra

Abstract

In the summer of 1973, the historical LIP factory of Besançon is occupied and, for several months, managed by the workers themselves. This concretizes the worker’s self-management, an old-standing aspiration in the French worker’s movement, among those who was searching for an anti-authoritarian and anti-bureaucratic socialist model. This paper aims to delineate, passing through the LIP affair, the route of self-management’s ideas and practices inside the French left: from the first reflections of the 1950s and 1960s, to the great expectations of the post ’68, and finally to the decline of workers’ self-management as an idea of an alternative society.

Keywords

• alternative
• left
• lip
• self-management
• socialism