“When the Koreans came, everything collapsed like a tower”. Contribution to the History from Below of the Passenger Automobile Factory in Żerań

Abstract

The article is based on co-research (conricerca) conducted in the Żerań Car Factory. I had seventeen conversations about the reality of factory life and the worldview of the workers. In this text, I present, elaborate and thematically divide conversational fragments on the political transition in Poland between 1980 and 200. The main goal is to present the workers’ own narrations about the end of so-called real socialism and its consequences on the history of the factory. A large section of the text is devoted to the factory takeover by the Korean concern Daewoo. This fact was crucial for the car plant and for workers, whose situation was fundamentally changed by it. This can be seen in the many conversational fragments presented. The methodology used – conricerca – was invented by operaist thinkers and used to conduct research on the Italian working class in the xx century. Its main goal is to conduct research together with the representatives of the working class, thus treating them as subjects and not objects. Its intent is that researchers try to overcome the binary opposition between themselves and those under examination.