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an imprint of Urtext
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CASTORIADIS, LEFORT, LYOTARD, et al.



Socialisme ou Barbarie:
An Anthology

PAPERBACK 488 PAGES

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ISBN: 978-1912475-13-1

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SOCIALISME OU BARBARIE (1948–67) was a revolutionary group whose journal of the same name helped inspire France's May '68 student-worker rebellion and influenced generations of radicals worldwide. This Anthology, for the first time in print in the English language, restores the collective nature of the group's adventure, where manual and intellectual workers creatively, and not without profound disagreements, reflected and acted together in anticipation of a non-hierarchical, self-governing society.

The group radically reoriented critical revolutionary theory by affirming how social change emerges through ordinary people's everyday lives and struggles. In a world divided into two competing bureaucratic-capitalist camps, the autonomous grassroots response to rationalized forms of outside control (State-corporation-trade union-political party) would be workers' management – a conclusion stunningly confirmed, against traditional Left expectations, by the workers' revolts of 1953 and 1956 in the East, and by increasingly widespread challenges to established organizational forms in the 1960s in the West.

These texts not only examine the overall crisis of systems of domination, but explore their creative contestation in the workplace, in changing relations between the sexes and between generations, and in movements for national liberation (China, Algeria), to bring out "the positive content of socialism" while remaining clear-eyed about how bureaucratization may be reintroduced into emancipatory struggles.

TABLE OF CONTENTS


PART ONE: BUREAUCRATIC SOCIETY

  • Socialism or Barbarism

  • The Relations of Production in Russia
    Pierre Chaulieu (Cornelius Castoriadis)

  • Stalinism in East Germany  
    Hugo Bell (Benno Sternberg)

PART TWO: THE WORLD OF WORK

  • The American Worker
    Paul Romano

  • Proletarian Experience: Editorial

  • Wildcat Strikes in the American Automobile Industry

  • The English Dockers’ Strikes

  • Automation Strikes in England
    Pierre Chaulieu (Cornelius Castoriadis)

  • The Factory and Workers’ Management  
    Daniel Mothé (Jacques Gautrat)

PART THREE: THE CRISIS OF THE BUREAUCRATIC SYSTEM

  • The Meaning of the June 1953 Revolt in East Germany
    Albert Véga (Alberto Masó)

  • Totalitarianism Without Stalin
    Claude Lefort

  • The Hungarian Insurrection
    Claude Lefort

  • Documents, Narratives, and Texts on the Hungarian Revolution

The Workers’ Councils of the Hungarian Revolution
by Pannonicus

The Re-Stalinization of Hungary
by Jean Amair

A Student’s Narrative

PART FOUR: THE CONTENT OF SOCIALISM

  • On the Content of Socialism
    Pierre Chaulieu (Cornelius Castoriadis)

PART FIVE: ORGANIZATION

  • The Revolutionary Party (Resolution)

  • The Proletariat and the Problem of Revolutionary Leadership
    Claude Montal (Claude Lefort)

  • Organization and Party
    Claude Lefort

  • Proletariat and Organization
    Paul Cardan (Cornelius Castoriadis)

  • The Suspension of Publication of Socialisme ou Barbarie

PART SIX: THE THIRD WORLD (ALGERIA & CHINA)

  • Algerian Contradictions Exposed
    François Laborde (Jean-François Lyotard)

  • The Social Content of the Algerian Struggle
    Jean-François Lyotard

  • In Algeria, A New Wave
    Jean-François Lyotard

  • The Class Struggle in Bureaucratic China
    Pierre Brune (Pierre Souyri)

PART SEVEN: MODERN CAPITALISM AND THE BREAK WITH MARXISM

  • Recommencing the Revolution

  • From Mr. First to Mr. Next, the Big Chiefs of Industrial Relations
    Daniel Mothé (Jacques Gautrat)

  • Hierarchy and Collective Management
    S. Chatel (Sébastien de Diesbach)

  • The Free Speech Movement and Civil Rights
    Jack Weinberg

APPENDICES

  • Tables of Contents of Socialisme ou Barbarie

  • List of Pseudonyms

  • Authors’ Biographies

  • Abbreviations of Castoriadis Volumes
Mark