Looking for The Proletariat
Socialisme ou Barbarie and the Problem of Worker Writing
Description
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.
Author Bios
Stephen Hastings-King, Ph.D. (1999) in Modern European History from Cornell University. He lives by a salt marsh in Essex, Massachusetts where he makes constraints, works with prepared piano and writes entertainments of various kinds.
More Info
Publication date: December 22, 2015
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Where Things Start
2. Rethinking Revolutionary Theory
3. Frame: On Claude Lefort’s ‘L’Expérience Prolétarienne’
4. Working-Class Politics at Renault Billancourt
5. Looking for the Working Class
6. Reading Daniel Mothé
Postface
Bibliography
Inde
