Looking for The Proletariat: Socialisme ou Barbarie and the Problem of Worker Writing

Historical Materialism #71

by Stephen Hastings-King

This book, the first English-language history of the French revolutionary group Socialism ou Barbarie, focuses on the period of 1949 to 1957 when the influence of the group began to wane. Hastings-King explains why Socialisme ou Barbarie’s anti-Leninist position on organization led it to privilege first person narratives in order to understand worker experience and its revolutionary possibilities.

Looking for the Proletariat draws on these narratives—the only first-person accounts of the working-class experience in French industry during the 1950s—to explore the disintegration of collective investment in the Marxist Imaginary that unfolded at Renault’s Billancourt factory in the aftermath of the Hungarian Revolution.

Genres: Nonfiction

345 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

Reviews

[Jake · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was disappointed by this book, although perhaps that is more my fault than the author’s. I was hoping to read a historical account and analysis of Socialisme ou barbarie and its relationship to the working class. Despite its fairly large influence, there are few, if any, such accounts of the group in English. This book is definitely not that, it’s more of a literary analysis of some of the group’s writings through the lens of Husserl, Bourdieu and the later Castoriadis, a lens i find either useless or indecipherable, with some historical context and background provided. Nonetheless, there’s enough analysis and history about this group that you won’t find many other places in English to make it worth reading, if you’re interested in the history of far-left groups and ideas.

[Sam Whitehill · Rating 4 out of 5]

The pessimistic conclusion of this book- that the working class failure to reappropriate the “Marxist Imaginary” from cynical Stalinist union bureaucrats foreclosed revolutionary potential- helps explain the poetic language of the May 68 revolts. When Marxist language was reduced to meaningless slogans, new slogans were needed!