Looking for the Proletariat

Socialisme Ou Barbarie and the Problem of Worker Writing
Erscheinungsjahr 2014
ISBN: 978-90-04-23536-6
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, Band 71, 346 Seiten, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 231 mm, Gewicht: 544 g

Reihe: Historical Materialism Book Series

Looking for the Proletariat is a contribution to understanding the implosion of the Marxist Imaginary. The implosion is staged in terms of the first English-language history of the French revolutionary group Socialisme ou Barbarie from 1949 to 1957. It explains why Socialisme ou Barbarie was the only Marxist organization interested by worker experience and how the group’s anti-Leninist position on organization led it to privilege first-person worker narratives in order to understand worker experience and its revolutionary possibilities. Using the only first-person accounts of working-class experience in French industry of the 1950s, the book explores the disintegration of collective investment in the Marxist Imaginary that unfolded at Renault’s Billancourt factory in the aftermath of the Hungarian Revolution and the contexts that shaped it.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hastings-King, Stephen

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politische Ideologien Marxismus, Kommunismus
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politikwissenschaft Allgemein Politische Geschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Stoffe, Motive und Themen
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Kultur- und Ideengeschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

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
Index

Über Autor(innen)

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.