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A Socialisme ou Barbarie Anthology: Autonomy, Critique, and Revolution in the Age of Bureaucratic Capitalism translated from the French and edited anonymously as a public service NOTICE The present volume is offered to readers as a public service in the hopes of encouraging reflection and action aimed at deepening, and realizing, the project of individual and collective autonomy on a worldwide basis in all its manifestations. Neither any website that would make the electronic version available nor any other distributor who may come forward in any medium is currently authorized to accept any financial remuneration for this service. David Ames Curtis (DAC)—who prepared the “beta” translation—and “the anonymous Translator/Editor” (T/E)—who has taken over this translation project when obstruction from former Socialisme ou Barbarie members Helen Arnold and Daniel Blanchard made the project untenable as a print publication that would respect the negotiated terms of signed contracts and agreements—will thus not receive, nor will DAC or T/E accept, any monetary payment or other compensation for their labor as a result of this free circulation of ideas.1 It is recommended that each user contact, by electronic mail or by other means, at least ten (10) persons or organizations, urging them to obtain a copy of the book or offering these persons or organizations gift copies. It is further recommended that each of these persons or organizations in turn make ten (10) additional contacts under the same terms and circumstances, and so on and so forth, for the purpose of furthering this nonhierarchical and disinterested “pyramid scheme” designed to spread knowledge of the group Socialisme ou Barbarie without hindrance. 1David Ames Curtis may be contacted at [email protected]. It may be possible to persuade him to publish a list of errata, in view of making the present translation a more definitive version as the Soubtrans Project www.soubtrans.org develops. Helen Arnold, Daniel Blanchard, Enrique Escobar, Daniel Ferrand, Georges Petit, and Jacques Signorelli have participated in the selection of the articles as well as the drafting of the introductory texts. The main writer of the introductory text for each part has signed his or her work, but all of these texts have been discussed at length among these participants. Sébastien de Diesbach and Claude Lefort participated in a few meetings and offered useful advice about certain parts. A Socialisme ou Barbarie Anthology: Autonomy, Critique, and Revolution in the Age of Bureaucratic Capitalism Jean Amair, Hugo Bell, Cornelius Castoriadis, S. Chatel, Claude Lefort, Jean-François Lyotard, Daniel Mothé, Panonicus, Paul Romano, Albert Véga, Jack Weinberg La Bussière (FRANCE): Acratie, 2007 CONTENTS French Editors’ Preface viii Translator/Editor’s Introduction, David Ames Curtis xvii PART 1: BUREAUCRATIC SOCIETY 1 Socialism or Barbarism (no. 1) 5 The Relations of Production in Russia Pierre Chaulieu [Cornelius Castoriadis] (no. 2) 30 Stalinism in East Germany Hugo Bell [Benno Sternberg] (nos. 7-8) 54 PART 2: THE WORLD OF WORK 65 The American Worker, Paul Romano (no. 5/6) 67 Proletarian Experience: Editorial (no. 11) 79 Wildcat Strikes in the American Automobile Industry (no. 18) 95 The English Dockers’ Strikes (no. 18) 110 Automation Strikes in England, Pierre Chaulieu [Cornelius Castoriadis] (no. 19) 130 The Factory and Workers’ Management Daniel Mothé [Jacques Gautrat] (no. 22) 148 PART 3: THE CRISIS OF THE BUREAUCRATIC SYSTEM (1953-1957) 170 The Meaning of the June 1953 Revolt in East Germany Albert Véga [Albert Masó] (no. 13) 172 Totalitarianism Without Stalin, Claude Lefort (no. 19) 178 The Hungarian Insurrection, Claude Lefort (no. 20) 201 Documents, Narratives, and Texts on the Hungarian Revolution (no. 21) 224 The Workers’ Councils of the Hungarian Revolution, Pannonicus 224 The Re-Stalinization of Hungary, Jean Amair 229 A Student’s Narrative 232 vi PART 4: THE CONTENT OF SOCIALISM 234 On the Content of Socialism, Pierre Chaulieu [Cornelius Castoriadis] (no. 22) 237 PART 5: ORGANIZATION 293 The Revolutionary Party (Resolution) 295 The Proletariat and the Problem of Revolutionary Leadership, Claude Montal [Claude Lefort] (no. 10) 300 Organization and Party, Claude Montal [Claude Lefort] (no. 26) 309 Proletariat and Organization, Paul Cardan [Cornelius Castoriadis] (nos. 27-28) 319 The Suspension of Publication of Socialisme ou Barbarie 336 PART 6: THE THIRD WORLD (ALGERIA AND CHINA) 343 Algerian Contradictions Exposed, François Laborde [Jean-François Lyotard ] (no. 24) 346 The Social Content of the Algerian Struggle Jean-François Lyotard (no. 29) 354 In Algeria, A New Wave Jean-François Lyotard (no. 32) 364 The Class Struggle in Bureaucratic China Pierre Brune [Pierre Souyri] (no. 24) 373 PART 7: MODERN CAPITALISM AND THE BREAK WITH MARXISM 396 Recommencing the Revolution (no. 35) 398 From Mr. First to Mr. Next, the Big Chiefs of Industrial Relations, Daniel Mothé [Jacques Gautrat] (no. 40) 427 Hierarchy and Collective Management S. Chatel (nos. 37-38) 445 vii The Free Speech Movement and Civil Rights Jack Weinberg (no. 40) 459 ANNEXES Socialisme ou Barbarie, Tables of Contents 467 List of Pseudonyms 480 Authors’ Biographies 480 Abbreviations of Castoriadis Volumes 489 French Editors’ Preface* For anyone who participated in the group Socialisme ou Barbarie at any moment in its long—nearly 20-year—history (from 1949 to 1967), seeing it described today, in various places, as “legendary,” “famous,” or “mythical” stirs up strangely ironic feelings. The irony stems from the fact that, throughout its existence, this group—and the review of the same name, of which it published forty issues—remained invisible, or nearly so, and yet now, once dead, it has become mythical. A bitter irony: invisible or mythical, what is denied it is reality—its reality; for, mythical, it remains unrecognized; or worse: it becomes unrecognizable. Thus, to this irony is joined a strange impression: through this legendary aura, anyone who really knew this now-defunct group and journal no longer recognizes the deceased. What has happened is that the S. ou B. group, though almost unknown during its lifetime, has been reconstructed after its death as the virtual point of origin wherefrom the trajectories of Claude Lefort, Cornelius Castoriadis, and Jean-François Lyotard—who appeared in the Parisian intellectual firmament in the course of 1970s—are said to have diverged. Yet, rather than appeared, it would be fitting to say that they then became visible, the firmament’s configuration having wholly changed at that point in time. The group and its stars remained invisible so long as the left-wing, Marxist or anarchist, critique of the USSR, of Communist parties, and of their various subsidiary operations was subject, in the press, in publishing, and in the University, to the same censorship and to the same sorts of intimidation as in the factories. Only in the course of the 1950s and 1960s did the truth about the regimes of the Eastern-bloc countries little by little start to come out. Soon, though, that truth became so widespread that it rendered untenable any defense of those regimes and vain the intimidation and blackmail of being called reactionary. The intelligentsia rediscovered “democracy” and “human rights” and, in the 1970s, saw itself seized with a new mission: the denunciation of Communist totalitarianism. And so, this intelligentsia acknowledged its predecessors, including, among others, Lefort, Lyotard, and Castoriadis, who were, moreover—for those who retained some scruples—highly unlikely to be suspected of being reactionaries. Thus did the S. ou B. group find itself, years after its dissolution, suffused with a glory and a legend that were as blinding as to its reality as the darkness to which it had been confined when it was alive. This legend is deceptive on two key points. First of all, the group was not exclusively preoccupied with the critique of so-called Communist regimes; it was just as concerned with that of so-called liberal Western societies, and it never stopped working out a unitary critique of the two regime-types. In the second place, it was not a coterie of intellectuals but, instead, a group of revolutionaries for whom theoretical work was *Préface, Socialisme ou Barbarie—Anthologie, pp. 7-14. French Editors’ Preface ix meaningful only with a view to action on the social and political level. And it was precisely because they considered themselves revolutionaries that they could not be satisfied with denouncing what was going on elsewhere but had to fight right here. True, the reality of the group, especially its ambitions, is such that the reader of today who becomes aware of it through the texts brought together here will experience this same sense of strangeness and, undoubtedly too, irony. That is because this reality belongs to a now seemingly quite bygone period in the intellectual, political, and anthropological history of the workers’ movement. It carries on a tradition that dates back at least to Marx, who, in a logic considered absolutely necessary, connected theoretical analysis, militant activity, and the genuinely historical action of the masses. And it is this tradition that, in the minds of the twenty or so persons who founded the group in 1949, legitimates the exorbitant and—in the view of disenchanted people today—the odious or ridiculous ambition to work for the construction of an organization whose goal would be nothing less than worldwide proletarian revolution. In fact, the group’s origin dates back to 1946, when the “Chaulieu-Montal” (Castoriadis and Lefort) Tendency was set up within the Trotskyist Fourth International. We will lay out the circumstances of the group’s birth in the Introduction to Part 1 of the present collection. Let us state here only that, at the end of World War II, it no longer appeared tenable to support the Trotskyist thesis that made of the USSR a “degenerated workers’ State”—that is to say, the necessarily ephemeral product of a momentary balance between the forces of the proletarian revolution and those of counterrevolution.
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