Across the United States, a new generation of workers—dubbed Generation U—is rewriting the rules of class struggle. More than 500 Starbucks cafés have unionized despite relentless corporate retaliation. Amazon workers in Staten Island, New York, defeated one of the world’s richest corporations to form the first union in the company’s history. Teachers, nurses, and warehouse workers have been walking out in numbers not seen in decades. These workers aren’t just fighting for better wages—they’re challenging the fundamental power dynamics of capitalism itself.
Yet, as many examples show, unions alone cannot overcome the structural obstacles that workers face. We need a revolutionary strategy that transforms workplace struggles into challenges to capitalist rule. One great example comes from the workers of Zanon, Argentina’s occupied ceramics factory, which has operated under workers’ control for over two decades. Their story—of clandestine organizing, militant union takeovers, factory occupation, and community solidarity—provides a living blueprint for how today’s labor movement can fight to win.
The Crucible of Struggle: Zanon under Dictatorship and Neoliberalism
As explained in the book Zanon: Militant Factory without Bosses: The Role of the Trotskyists, Zanon Ceramics was born in blood. Established in 1976 under Argentina’s brutal military dictatorship, the factory’s labor regime mirrored the junta’s repressive apparatus: 16-hour shifts, armed guards patrolling production lines, and instant dismissal for any whisper of dissent. When Argentina transitioned to civilian rule in 1983, the repression became economic rather than military, as neoliberal reforms decimated the country’s industrial base throughout the 1990s.
By 1998, unemployment had reached 25 percent in Neuquén Province, where Zanon operated. Management used this crisis to demand layoffs and wage cuts, even threatening to close the factory itself—a tactic familiar to U.S. workers today. But unlike most workplaces, Zanon had within its ranks revolutionary Trotskyists like Raúl Godoy, a militant from the Socialist Workers’ Party (PTS), a sister organization of Left Voice, who understood that defensive battles needed to be transformed into an offensive class war.
Early organizing at the factory took forms that would resonate with any activist in today’s service sector unions: quiet political discussions during smoke breaks, soccer matches that doubled as organizing meetings, and careful relationship building to identify class-conscious workers. As Godoy later reflected, this period constituted their “school of war”—they were not yet in open battle but were making essential preparations for the revolutionary struggles to come.
Taking the Union Back: Assemblies vs. the Bureaucracy
Having threatened to close the factory and leave hundreds of families homeless, the bosses treated workers as disposable, promoted labor precarization, and banned any kind of independent organizing. While they were a key enemy, workers also realized through their struggle that they had to fight their own union bureaucracies, which wanted to dismantle any previous organization and persecute the workers on the company owner’s orders. This became a key fight: to reclaim the union itself and ensure that it served the workers.
The first major breakthrough against the bureaucratic union leadership came in 1998, when the Lista Marrón (Brown List)—a rank-and-file slate led by leftist militants—won control of Zanon’s internal union committee. This meant that the shop stewards now came from the rank and file and represented workers’ interests instead of the union bureaucracy’s. The assembly became the main organizer, the body through which all the major decisions were made. Their platform implemented three revolutionary principles of labor organization.
First, all major decisions would be made in open assemblies where every worker had an equal voice—no backroom deals between bureaucrats and management. Second, all union representatives would be subject to immediate recall by the membership—no career union officials accumulating power. Third, no union official would earn more than a rank-and-file worker—eliminating the material basis for a labor bureaucracy.
To read more about the Social Statute of the Sindicato de Obreros y Empleados Ceramistas de Neuquén (SOECN—Ceramic Workers’ Union of Neuquén).
This democratic structure was tested in 2000 after the entirely preventable death of Daniel Ferrás, a young worker crushed by malfunctioning equipment. When union bureaucrats tried to negotiate a toothless “safety committee” with management, the rank and file erupted. Drawing on their assembly-based organization, they launched a nine-day strike that halted production, winning every demand, including direct worker oversight of safety conditions. The victory proved something essential: truly democratic unions don’t just negotiate better contracts—they transform the balance of class power.
Occupation and Workers’ Control: A Factory without Bosses
When Argentina’s economy collapsed in December 2001—sparking mass uprisings that toppled five presidents in three weeks—Zanon’s owners abandoned the factory. The workers faced a choice: join the growing ranks of the unemployed or take control of production themselves. On March 2, 2002, they chose the latter.
The occupied factory became a laboratory of workers’ democracy. Production decisions were made at weekly assemblies where every worker had an equal vote. Departments elected rotating delegates to coordinate operations, all subject to immediate recall. They implemented a pay structure in which the highest wage never exceeded the lowest by more than 20 percent—a stark contrast to the 300:1 CEO-to-worker pay ratio common in U.S. corporations.
But Zanon’s workers understood that their struggle couldn’t stop at the factory gates. They donated tiles to build schools and hospitals in impoverished neighborhoods. They provided jobs to unemployed workers from the piquetero movement. When the provincial government sent police to evict them, thousands of community members formed human barricades to defend the plant. As one worker explained, “We’re not just making tiles—we’re building a new way of living.” The impact of the Zanon workers’ struggle was so strong that even inmates from the prison next to the Zanon factory joined the workers’ cause, skipping meals to collect and deliver food to the workers during tense moments with the police, reflecting broad support for their struggle.
The Limits of Resistance under Capitalism
Despite these achievements, Zanon’s workers confronted capitalism’s relentless counteroffensive. Banks refused loans, courts denied legal recognition, and suppliers demanded cash payments. The state periodically threatened violent eviction, retreating only when met with mass mobilization.
These contradictions forced difficult strategic questions. Some anarchist and autonomist currents argued that spreading worker-run enterprises could gradually replace capitalism—a perspective popularized in the U.S. by academics like Richard Wolff. But the PTS militants in Zanon offered a different analysis: that workers’ control under capitalism remains inherently unstable, constantly sabotaged by market pressures and state repression.
Their conclusion was revolutionary rather than reformist: workplace occupations must be seen as battlefronts in a larger war to seize state power and reorganize the entire economy. This meant building alliances with other occupied factories, leftist students, and unemployed workers’ movements—exactly the kind of class-wide solidarity that’s often missing in today’s U.S. labor struggles.
The Role of Trotskyists in Zanon’s Organizing
As Godoy explains in this documentary, he drew inspiration as an organizer at Zanon from the Teamsters’ Trotskyist strikes in Minneapolis in 1934. They organized assemblies, unleashed truly rank-and-file organizing, went on strike, convened women’s committees, had their own press, established safety committees, and pursued other initiatives.
Zanon’s struggle carries forward this “red thread”—a guiding line of continuity of class struggle traditions linking the battles of the 1970s to the present. The red thread played a crucial role in Zanon’s development. While the occupation and workers’ control of the factory were part of a broader process, the programmatic contribution from revolutionary militants was decisive. This perspective connected the experiences of the working class at Zanon not only to local realities but also to the international struggle and history.
Unlike the union bureaucracy, which had consistently preserved its own historical memory from before, during, and after the military dictatorship, revolutionary forces worked to recover and reassert the lessons of past struggles. The same continuity is maintained by the bourgeoisie, which never forgets its own methods and strategies.
It proved essential to reclaim these threads of history and connect them to current struggles—without sectarianism or prejudice. It provided a political program, a tradition, and a living history drawn from the experience of the working class itself, shaping the course of Zanon’s struggle.
Zanon and Parliamentary Revolutionism
The PTS Trotskyists did not restrict their struggle to the factory floor or the picket line; they also fought on the electoral battlefield, though under circumstances very different from those we are accustomed to today. Through the Left Front, they ran worker-candidates on a revolutionary program, appropriating bourgeois elections as megaphones for class struggle. These aren’t career politicians climbing the ladder of state electoral seats but militants answerable to the base. They are worker-elected representatives who, in that capacity, earn only an average worker’s wage, and when they retire from politics, they return to the factory floor at Zanon. This is not what we usually see nowadays—no illusion of “changing the system through itself,” just using elected positions to speak out against the violence of the capitalist state and echo workers’ demands.
When Zanon’s militants took over Neuquén’s provincial parliament, they did not bargain with boss parties; they condemned them. They exposed how Argentina’s traditional politicians—from Peronists to conservatives—served imperialism, privatizing natural resources and crushing strikes. Their elections were not about winning seats but about building power: mobilizing behind occupied factories, fighting police repression, and demonstrating that even in the belly of the beast, revolutionaries could refuse to play its game. As for today’s socialists rubbing elbows with the Democratic Party, Zanon’s lesson is clear: genuine working-class representation entails repudiating the logic of bourgeois politics, not cleansing it of progressive platitudes. Electoral platforms are merely another battleground, usable only when they serve as a weapon to eliminate the system entirely.
The Same Problems across Borders
Many of the problems workers at Zanon faced are those facing Gen U today. Various unions and their leaderships do not hold meetings and debates in the workplace, preventing workers from getting involved in the union’s orientation and the fights that must be carried out. In many cases union leaderships themselves can even directly contradict and betray the stance of the rank and file they purport to serve.
Today, unions like the AFL-CIO employ business unionist approaches, in which a layer of union officials run organizations in a top-down manner with little rank-and-file input, treating members as if they were customers “paying” for a service through membership dues (hence the term “business unionism”). While they give the appearance of collective worker organizing, they use bureaucratic measures to prevent workers from engaging in more combative actions that could pose a threat to capitalism. Meanwhile, unions like SEIU adopt more liberal approaches, rightly championing issues like anti-racism and gender equality to draw more people into union struggles while avoiding actual confrontations with the ruling class and capitalism.
And regardless of the approach used, U.S. labor leaders’ support for imperialism often remains the same. We’ve covered this extensively, but there is good reason to call the largest union federation in the U.S. the “AFL-CIA.” From helping to build strikes against leftist governments in the postwar period to maintaining connections to organizations like the shady National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which is known for meddling in democratic processes around the world, today’s union leadership has become increasingly tied to the imperialist state apparatus. In this context, it is no surprise that the leadership has remained largely silent on the ongoing genocide in Palestine. As Amazon Labor Union (ALU) founder Chris Smalls recently noted on Democracy Now!,
<blockquote>U.S. labor unions in America have been very complicit, if not participated, in this genocide. For the last 21 months, U.S. labor unions have been shipping arms to Israel every 15 hours. I’ve publicly called them out. The longshoremen has blood on their hands, and the AFL-CIO has blood on their hands, as well. They have passed zero resolutions since October 7, and half a million Palestinians are dead because of this. And as a U.S. labor leader and a U.S. taxpaying citizen, the Palestinian movement and liberation and resistance always included trade unions, since the first Nakba.<blockquote>
Today, we even see so-called progressive labor bureaucrats pushing policies that divide and atomize the working class in other ways. Labor leaders like Shawn Fain go around celebrating tariffs in an attempt to cozy up to Donald Trump, when such tariffs serve only as “another way to impose U.S. imperial interests in its trade war with China and to extract further concessions from its semi-colonial neighbors like Mexico.” In reality, Trump’s tariffs are not in the interests of U.S. workers or the global working class; they serve only to divide sectors of workers in the U.S. against workers internationally. Politicians like Fain think the capitalist state can somehow take our side, but this will never be the case, and it’s part of why unions today are so weak. Through these processes, we see examples of how the labor bureaucracy serves as part of what Gramsci called the “integral state”: the capitalist state’s extension of its influence across society to ensure ruling-class hegemony.
This is why proposals put forward by labor pundits like Eric Blanc in his new work We Are the Union are so misguided. Pundits like Blanc see the state as a neutral arbiter that can be weaponized by workers and labor leaders to “help” workers organize. But Blanc fails to recognize that the capitalist state can never fairly arbitrate class struggle, nor can it act in the interests of the working class. Meanwhile, the bureaucratic machinery of mainstream unions functions as part of the integral state apparatus, containing and derailing working-class militancy.
Lessons for Generation U
The Zanon experience offers today’s militant workers an indispensable strategic compass: First, democratize the unions. The bureaucratic stranglehold that has derailed so many strikes isn’t inevitable—it can be broken through rank-and-file movements that impose assembly-based decision-making, recallable leaders, and equal pay for union officials.
Second, connect workplace and community struggles. Just as Zanon workers supported unemployed movements and donated products to social needs, today’s unions must join fights for housing, against police violence, and in solidarity with Palestine—seeing these not as distractions from “bread and butter” issues but as essential to building working-class power.
Third, develop revolutionary leadership. The patient work of PTS militants in Zanon—their daily political education and their insistence on linking immediate demands to socialist politics—shows how anti-capitalist consciousness is built in practice. This stands in stark contrast to the dead-end politics proposed by figures like Eric Blanc, who urges working within the Democratic Party despite its role in strikebreaking and imperialist war.
Most importantly, Zanon reminds us that the crises of capitalism—from economic collapse to ecological disaster—won’t be solved through better contracts or lobbying efforts. As the factory’s workers still proclaim 20 years after their occupation: “Resistance is not enough—we must revolutionize everything.” For Generation U, facing down some of the most powerful corporations in history, this revolutionary perspective isn’t just inspiring—it’s the only path to victory.
The ceramic tiles from Zanon now adorn schools, hospitals, and union halls across Argentina. But their real legacy isn’t in the products they’ve made. It’s in the living proof that when workers dare to fight — not just for better conditions but for a new world — no power on earth can stop them. As workers at Amazon and Starbucks organize and walk out, this remains the most urgent lesson: that in the aftermath of capitalism’s failures, workers can build the foundations of socialism.
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