Selected and incisively introduced by former members of now “mythical” Socialisme ou Barbarie (S. ou B.), this anthology assembles texts deemed “most revealing of the theoretical development of the group” (Blanchard, p. 20), illuminating the collective, creative, and conflictual “adventure” of participants, 1949-1967 – beyond the dominant image of S. ou B. as merely Castoriadis, Lefort, and early Lyotard. In addition to these well-chosen texts, the English translator, David Ames Curtis – whose tireless, rigorous decades-long labour of love has brought more and more of Castoriadis’s work to Anglo audiences – has included articles on American and British workers’ struggles, as well as his own very useful introduction and additional notes.

Emerging from the Fourth International, initially as the Chaulieu-Montal (Castoriadis-Lefort) Tendency, the break with Trotskyism is glossed by Blanchard as “an inaugural emancipatory gesture” (p. 13). The group’s overriding concerns with the analysis of the Soviet Union and the newly-established “socialist” bloc, the degeneration of socialist parties and unions, and the post-War transformations in the West are captured by the title of Part One, “bureaucratic society”. All of these concerns are foregrounded in an editorial drafted by Castoriadis for issue 1 of the review, where the crucial shift from Marx’s time is summarized as the “appearance of the bureaucracy as a new social stratum tending to replace the traditional bourgeoisie in the period of declining capitalism” (p. 47). With this, a new primary societal division and antagonism opens up – that between directors and executants. The old workers’ organizations have become “direct agents of the bosses and of the capitalist state” or, in Russia, of “bureaucratic capitalism” (p. 45). Already here, Castoriadis is emphasizing socialism as autonomy, against Leninism, and suggesting an emancipatory focus that reaches beyond the realm of production, to visualize domination in “social life in general” (p. 59). Another text by Castoriadis on Russia as a class society, and a close-to-the-ground report by Benno Sternberg on class struggles in East Germany round out this section.

S. ou B.’s commitment to workers’ autonomy and its attempted break from the vanguardist assumptions of Leninism are showcased in Part Two, “The World of Work”, beginning with an excerpt from Paul Romano’s The American Worker, serialized in the review from issue one. As Blanchard says in the French editor’s preface, S. ou B.’s “England was the United States” (p. 15), and the group’s long-standing collaboration with the Johnson-Forest Tendency (including CLR James, Raya Dunayevskaya, Grace Lee (Boggs), and Romano), then Correspondence, was crucial. Articles in this section – including the work of the group’s Jacques Gautrat (“Daniel Mothé”), a worker at Renault – describe the isolation, alienation, parcelization, and general harshness of Fordist working life. Centrally, though, they also demonstrate the resistance (to bosses and to the trade union bureaucracies), creativity, and solidarity found among blue collar workers. Vital here is, the “astonishing capacities for self-organization” (Anon, p. 150) of workers., Also crucial are the contradictions of shopfloor life, where, as Gautrat emphasises, the attempt to deprive workers of initiative is irrational and inefficient, and it is only through rule breaking, “improvisational coping” (p. 175), that the factory works. Lefort attempts to theorize this, in his well-known 1952 contribution, “Proletarian Experience”, accenting the need for access to workers’ “subjective development” (p. 109), and contesting Marxian objectivism in favour of an inside-out approach that truly prioritises the working class capacity for invention and self-organization in everyday life.

S. ou B.’s peak as an organization was reached at the height of the Hungarian Revolution, the group boasting about 100 members and the review printed in runs of around 1000 copies. Part Three deals with the revolts against Stalinism. Here, Alberto Masó explores the revolt in Berlin 1953, and Lefort and various authors focus on Hungary. Again, the emphasis is on the opposition to bureaucracy and workers’ self-directing activities. This is theorized further in another contribution from Lefort, which in his characteristically subtle, delicate style, prefigures his later concerns with totalitarianism as a particular, peculiar form and dynamic, viewing “really existing socialism” as “an entirely new society” (p. 200), the bureaucracy as importantly different from the bourgeoisie (the State repudiating “the bureaucrat qua individual” (p. 205)), suggesting that the ties between the dominant class and the proletariat are of a new type, the enslavement to Capital more complete, and the collapsing of various domains of social life distinctive.

Part Four is wholly devoted to Castoriadis’s 1957 landmark essay “On the Content of Socialism”, which Enrique Escobar views as a turning point for the author and the group, in its challenge to Marxist verities. Here, Castoriadis insists that socialism arises from extant tendencies of struggle and is equivalent to “autonomy, people’s conscious direction of their own lives” (p. 251), or the self-organization of all activities. The council is prioritised as the form best suited to express this autonomy, implying direct rather than representative democracy. Such an emphasis on autonomy and self-organization, hand in glove with the rejection of Leninism, though, issued in a variety of positions within the group on the question of organization, and these differences, says Escobar, obscured the questions raised by “On the Content”, culminating in a first major scission in 1958. In Part Five, the most compelling section for me, these organizational disagreements, which troubled S. ou B. from start to finish, are illuminated through five fascinating texts.

In his 1949 “The Revolutionary Party (Resolution)”, Castoriadis insists on the need for a revolutionary party to coordinate and provide leadership for revolutionary struggle. However, firmly rejecting Lenin’s strictures in What is to be Done?, that party “can never exercise power”, the prerogative instead of “mass soviet bodies” (p. 306). By contrast, in a text from 1952, Lefort warns that a party will inevitably tend to impose itself as the sole form of leadership, insisting that the review is merely a site of discussion and elaboration, a tool, as it were, as a specialized revolutionary organization would reintroduce the bureaucratism S. ou B. sought to fight. This long-running dealignment came to a crucial head in 1958-9, as new members entered the organization, provoking Lefort, Henri Simon, and others to leave and establish Informations et Liaisons Ouvrieres. Lefort’s “Organization and Party” from 1958 charges that the group has broken from its declared objective of autonomy and has reintroduced Leninist and Trotskyist models. The necessity of organization for revolution, for Lefort, was built on proletarian experience not the mythology of the party – a position close to that arrived at by council communist Anton Pannekoek, in an earlier exchange with Castoriadis. Castoriadis’s response, “Proletariat and Organization”, from the following year, is one of his sharpest and most eloquent (though significant parts of the full text are missing here), carefully defending the role of emancipatory organizations and revolutionary theory, while seeking to avoid Leninist substitutionism and prioritize the creative, collective struggles of ordinary people.

From 1959, Castoriadis and others broke with Marxism, the group splitting again in 1963, and disbanding and suspending the review in 1967. In the third subsection of Part Five, a lone text is included, “The Suspension of Publication of Socialisme ou Barbarie”, which might have been better situated in Part Seven. The text broaches familiar elements of Castoriadis’s later and more pessimistic musings about the prospects for autonomy, amidst a situation in which radical political conflict had become increasingly “masked, stifled, deflected, and sometimes even nonexistent” (p. 341). Class changes, depoliticization, privatization, “people’s immense capacity for deluding themselves” (p. 343), a readership that had remained largely “passive consumers of ideas” (p. 341) – a drift, in short, into what Castoriadis would later call heteronomy – all of this had shaped the faltering and degeneration of the organization, and it required fundamental ideological reconstruction and the re-emergence of a new kind of social movement.

A further source of creative, though less damaging disagreement within the group is visible in Part Six, “The Third World”, which deals with a set of questions raised by the advance of Third Worldism and by the Algerian situation. Firmly refusing Third Worldism and certain aspects of the ultimately bureaucratic direction of national liberationism, members of S. ou B. were left free to come to their own conclusions about giving aid to the FLN (National Liberation Front (Algeria)), and the texts selected here were written by two figures determined to give more nuanced, appreciative attention to such struggles, Pierre Souyri (in an analysis of struggle and bureaucracy in China, in argument with the thinkers of Les Temps Moderne) and Jean-Francois Lyotard. Lyotard’s thoughtful pieces on Algeria recognize the likely bureaucratic direction of an FLN victory, but insist on the need to valorise the emancipatory elements at work in the struggle – the break with all old, established institutions, the appearance of a “new collectivity”, the “intensity” (p. 367) and democratic quality of political debate that suggests a “new relation to culture” (p. 357).

The final section, “Modern Capitalism and the Break with Marxism”, focuses on the renewed analysis of transformations in the West and ideological shifts after the second major split of 1963, in which Lyotard, Souyri, Masó, and Guillaume left to form Workers’ Power and take charge of the bulletin of the same name. The centrepiece of this section is Castoriadis’s 1964 “Recommencing the Revolution”, rather than his more extensive 1960-2 text, “Modern Capitalism and Revolution”. Here, Castoriadis emphasizes the transformations in advanced capitalism, which augur “the ruination of classical Marxism as a system of thought and action as it was formulated, developed, and maintained between 1847 and 1939” (p. 396). Gone is the primary proletariat-bourgeoisie antagonism, the contradiction between forces and relations of production, classic crises of overproduction, working class growth, and hopes in an objective ripening of conditions bringing socialism. With the decline of the workers’ movement and a new air-conditioned nightmare of consumption, privatization, withdrawal, dehumanization, and apathy, a new movement and new revolutionary theory are required. This central text is accompanied by Mothé’s satirical fiction focussing on transformations of management style towards greater co-optation, Diesbach’s exploration of relations between directors and executants in an office setting (expressing a shift from a more industrial labour-centred focus), and a piece by a participant in the free speech movement in the US, examining new forms of struggle for autonomy that had become increasingly important for the group.  

The lively, vivid texts of the Anthology undoubtedly represent an important contribution, offering a more complete portrait than previously discernible to non-French readers of this “highly heterogeneous and contentious collective” (Curtis, p. 31), and suggestive of the debts owed to the collective by its most well-known thinkers. The prefaces to sections by former members and David Ames Curtis’s introduction provide crucial contextual detail that make the work accessible to newcomers, and the Table of Contents of all 40 issues of the review, along with brief contributors’ biographies in appendices are very helpful for those more familiar with the group. Inevitably, there will be some disappointments for S. ou B. enthusiasts – mouth-watering texts left out, some of the necessary trimming, especially to Castoriadis’s key texts (which are, in any case, available in English in full in the three volumes of Castoriadis’s Political and Social Writings, edited and translated by Curtis), perhaps some more reflection from former members of the group on their “militant experience”. It is hard, as well, given the pioneering, daring work here, not to wonder about how participants might apprehend the transformations that followed the demise of S. ou B., which have surely ushered in a world as new and in need of theoretical and emancipatory attention as the one they encountered 1949-67.