Socialisme ou Barbarie (French for 'Socialism or Barbarism') was a French-based radical libertarian socialist group of the post-World War II period whose name comes from a phrase which was misattributed to Friedrich Engels by Rosa Luxemburg in the Junius Pamphlet, but which probably was most likely first used by Karl Kautsky.[1][2] It existed from 1948 until 1967.[3] The animating personality was Cornelius Castoriadis, also known as Pierre Chaulieu or Paul Cardan.[4]Socialisme ou Barbarie (S. ou B.) is also the name of the group's journal.
The group originated in the TrotskyistFourth International, where Castoriadis and Claude Lefort constituted a Chaulieu–Montal tendency in the French Parti Communiste Internationaliste in 1946. In 1948, they experienced their "final disenchantment with Trotskyism",[5] leading them to break away to form Socialisme ou Barbarie, whose journal began appearing in March 1949. Castoriadis later said of this period that "the main audience of the group and of the journal was formed by groups of the old, radical left: Bordigists, council communists, some anarchists and some offspring of the German 'left' of the 1920s."[6]
They developed parallel to, and were in dialogue with, the Johnson–Forest Tendency, which developed as a body of ideas within American Trotskyist organisations. One faction of this group later formed Facing Reality. The early days also brought debate with Anton Pannekoek and an influx of ex-Bordigists into the group.
The group was composed of both intellectuals and workers, and agreed with the idea that the main enemies of society were the bureaucracies which governed modern capitalism. They documented and analysed the struggle against that bureaucracy in the group's journal. The thirteenth issue (January–March 1954), as an example, was devoted to the East German revolt of June 1953 and the strikes which erupted amongst several sectors of French workers that summer. Following from the belief that what the working class was addressing in their daily struggles was the real content of socialism, the intellectuals encouraged the workers in the group to report on every aspect of their working lives.
Socialisme ou Barbarie was critical of Leninism, rejecting the idea of a revolutionary party,[7] and placing an emphasis on the importance of workers' councils. While some members left to form other groups, those remaining became more and more critical of Marxism over time. Jean Laplanche, one of the group's founding members, recalls the early days of the organization:
the atmosphere soon became impossible. Castoriadis exerted hegemony over the journal (he wrote the main articles) and his central idea in the mid-1950s was that a third world war was inevitable. This was very hard for people in the group to stand: to continue our lives, while thinking there would be an atomic explosion in a few years' time. It was an apocalyptic vision.[8]
The Hungarian Revolution and other events of the mid-1950s led to a further influx into the group. By this time, they were proposing the fundamental point as
the necessity for capitalism on the one hand to reduce workers to simple executors of tasks, and on the other hand, in its impossibility to continue functioning if it succeeds in so doing. Capitalism needs to achieve mutually incompatible objectives: the participation and the exclusion of the worker in production — as of all citizens in relation to politics.[9]
This became characterised as a distinction between the dirigeant and exécutant in French, usually translated as order-givers and order-takers. This perspective enabled the group to extend its understanding to the new forms of social conflict emerging outside the realm of production as such. That was also the case for the 1960-1961 Winter General Strike in Wallonia.
After the May 1958 crisis and an influx of new meeting attendees, disagreements on the organisational role of a political group led to the departure of some prominent members including Claude Lefort and Henri Simon to form Informations et Liaison Ouvrières.[10]
By 1960, the group had grown to around 100 members and had developed new international links, primarily in the emergence of a sister organisation in Britain called Solidarity.
In the early 1960s, disputes within the group around Castoriadis' increasing rejection of Marxism led to the departure of the group around the Pouvoir Ouvrier journal. The main Socialisme ou Barbarie journal continued publishing until a final edition in 1965, after which the group became dormant and announced its indefinite suspension in June 1967.[3] An attempt by Castoriadis to revive it during the May 1968 events failed.
The Situationist International was influenced by Socialisme ou Barbarie through Guy Debord (who was a member of both), as too was Socialisme ou Barbarie influenced by Debord and the situationists.[11] The Italian social movement of Autonomia were also influenced, but less directly.
Various reprints, Union Génerale d'Éditions, 10/18 series, 7 Vols., 3 in 2 books, Paris, 1973 to 1979; Political and Social Writings, David Ames Curtis (editor, transl.), 3 Vols., Minneapolis, 1988, 1993.
Benno Sternberg (as Hugo Bell, Sarel, Barois), member from 1949 to 1967. He died in 1971. As Benno Sarel: La classe ouvrière en Allemagne orientale, Éditions Ouvrières, Paris 1958 (Turin, 1959; Munich, 1975).
Translated for SouB: Paul Romano and Ria Stone: The American Worker, Bewick, Detroit, 1947.
Source: Andrea Gabler: Arbeitsanalyse und Selbstbestimmung. Zur Bedeutung und Aktualität von “Socialisme ou Barbarie“, Göttingen, 2006. This is a dissertation for the Doktor (Ph. D.) in social sciences from the Georg-August-Universität at Göttingen. Her many biographies are in Anhang C, pp.210– 223.
Texts
The forty issues of Socialisme ou barbarie have been digitised and there have been numerous reprints of SouB articles under the name of their authors, especially of Castoriadis' texts.
A Socialisme ou Barbarie Anthology: Autonomy, Critique, and Revolution in the Age of Bureaucratic Capitalism. London: Eris: 2018. A complete translation of the 2007 Acratie Anthologie, plus additional translations of Socialisme ou Barbarie texts dealing with American and British workers' struggle.
The Situationist International (SI) was an international organization of social revolutionaries made up of avant-garde artists, intellectuals, and political theorists. It was prominent in Europe from its formation in 1957 to its dissolution in 1972. The intellectual foundations of the Situationist International were derived primarily from libertarian Marxism and the avant-garde art movements of the early 20th century, particularly Dada and Surrealism. Overall, situationist theory represented an attempt to synthesize this diverse field of theoretical disciplines into a modern and comprehensive critique of mid-20th century advanced capitalism.
Guy-Ernest Debord was a French Marxist theorist, philosopher, filmmaker, critic of work, member of the Letterist International, founder of a Letterist faction, and founding member of the Situationist International. He was also briefly a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie.
Christopher Agamemnon Pallis was an Anglo-Greek neurologist and libertarian socialist intellectual. Under the pen-names Martin Grainger and Maurice Brinton, he wrote and translated for the British group Solidarity from 1960 until the early 1980s. As a neurologist, he produced the accepted criteria for brainstem death, and wrote the entry on death for Encyclopædia Britannica.
Pierre Guillaume was a French political activist and publisher. He was the founder of the Paris book shop La Vieille Taupe in 1965 and later the Holocaust denying publishing house of the same name. A former member of Socialisme ou Barbarie, he moved to Pouvoir Ouvrier with Jean-François Lyotard and Pierre Souyri.
Claude Lefort was a French philosopher and activist.
The Internationalist Communist Party was a Trotskyist political party in France. It was the name taken by the French Section of the Fourth International from its foundation until a name change in the late 1960s.
Monade were a French post-rock band which was initially a side project of Lætitia Sadier, a founding member of Stereolab. In 2009, Sadier retired the project name and began performing under her own name.
Gilles Dauvé is a French ultra-left political theorist, school teacher, and translator, associated with the development of communization theory.
Jean Maitron was a French historian specialist of the labour movement. A pioneer of such historical studies in France, he introduced it to University and gave it its archives base, by creating in 1949 the Centre d'histoire du syndicalisme in the Sorbonne, which received important archives from activists such as Paul Delesalle, Émile Armand, Pierre Monatte, and others. He was the Center's secretary until 1969.
20th-century French philosophy is a strand of contemporary philosophy generally associated with post-World War II French thinkers, although it is directly influenced by previous philosophical movements.
The spectacle is a central notion in the Situationist theory, developed by Guy Debord in his 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle. In the general sense, the spectacle refers to "the autocratic reign of the market economy which had acceded to an irresponsible sovereignty, and the totality of new techniques of government which accompanied this reign." It also exists in a more limited sense, where spectacle means the mass media, which are "its most glaring superficial manifestation."
La Guerre Sociale was an ultra-left journal appearing in France from 1977 to 1985. It attracted controversy over its support for negationism.
This is a list of articles in continental philosophy.
Émile Poulat, was until 1954 a Catholic priest, associated with the Prêtres Ouvriers movement, and thereafter a French historian and sociologist. Director of Studies at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, he was also director of research at CNRS and historian of the contemporary church. He was a founding member of the Group of Sociology of Religion, director and member of the editorial boards of several journals including Politica Hermetica. His research concentrated on the conflict between Catholic culture and modern culture in the history of contemporary Catholicism.
Socialism or Barbarism is a 2001 book about globalism, U.S. socialism and capitalist systems by Hungarian Marxist philosopher and economist István Mészáros.
Solidarity was a small libertarian socialist organisation from 1960 to 1992 in the United Kingdom. It published a magazine of the same name. Solidarity was close to council communism in its prescriptions and was known for its emphasis on workers' self-organisation and for its radical anti-Leninism.
Cornelius Castoriadis was a Greek-French philosopher, social critic, economist, psychoanalyst, author of The Imaginary Institution of Society, and co-founder of the Socialisme ou Barbarie group.
Daniel Marc Cohn-Bendit is a French-German politician. He was a student leader during the unrest of May 1968 in France and was also known during that time as Dany le Rouge. He was co-president of the group European Greens–European Free Alliance in the European Parliament. He co-chairs the Spinelli Group, a European parliament inter-group aiming at relaunching the federalist project in Europe. He was a recipient of the European Parliament's European Initiative Prize in 2016. Cohn-Bendit's 1970s writings on sexuality between adults and children later proved controversial in 2001 and 2013.
Western Marxism is a current of Marxist theory that arose from Western and Central Europe in the aftermath of the 1917 October Revolution in Russia and the ascent of Leninism. The term denotes a loose collection of theorists who advanced an interpretation of Marxism distinct from classical and Orthodox Marxism and the Marxism-Leninism of the Soviet Union.
Communist Action was a Marxist organisation in Spain founded in exile in 1964, during the Francoist State. The organisation produced a newspaper entitled Acción Comunista. Among its members were Carlos Semprún and José Antonio Ubierna. In 1970 AC came in contact with workerist organizations like UHP and CRAS. In 1976 some of its members, especially in Catalonia, joined the POUM.
References
Cornelius Castoriadis (translated by Bart Grahl and David Pugh) (1975). "An Interview". Telos (23).
Philippe Gottraux. Socialisme ou Barbarie, un engagement politique et intellectuel dans la France de l'après guerre. Lausanne: Payot, 1997.
Stephen Hastings-King. Looking for the Proletariat: Socialisme ou Barbarie and the Problem of Worker Writing. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2014. Paperback ed. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books: 2015.
How the Situationist International became what it was, PhD thesis, Australian National University, 2017. Substantial discussion of the relationship between Socialisme ou Barbarie and the Situationist International.
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