A Socialisme Ou Barbarie Anthology

Socialisme ou Barbarie (1948-67) was a tiny revolutionary group whose journal of the same name helped inspire France's May '68 student-worker rebellion and influenced generations of radicals worldwide. This Anthology restores the collective nature of the group's adventure, where manual and intellectual workers creatively, and not without profound disagreements, reflected and acted together in anticipation of a nonhierarchical, self-governing society. The group radically reoriented critical revolutionary theory by showing how social change emerges through ordinary people's everyday lives and struggles. In a world divided into two competing 'bureaucratic-capitalist' camps, the autonomous grassroots response to 'rationalised' forms of outside control (State-corporation-trade union-political party) would be workers' management - a conclusion stunningly confirmed, against traditional Left expectations, by the workers' revolts of 1953 and 1956 in the East and by increasingly widespread challenges to established organizational forms in the 1960s in the West. These texts not only examine the overall crisis of systems of domination but explore their creative contestation in the workplace, in changing relations between the sexes and between generations, and in movements for national liberation (China, Algeria), to bring out 'the positive content of socialism' while remaining clear-eyed about how bureaucratisation may be reintroduced into emancipatory struggles. To the French Editors' selections are added S. ou B. articles on American and British workers' struggles. The present volume commences the Soubtrans Project, an online multilingual collective effort to translate an ever-growing number of S. ou B. texts.