Looking For The Proletariat: Socialisme Ou Barbarie And The Problem Of Worker Writing

Stephen Hastings-King

ISBN 10: 1608464822 / ISBN 13: 9781608464821

Published by Haymarket Books, US, 2015

About this Item

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. Stephen Hastings-King explains why Socialisme ou Barbarie was the only Marxist organisation interested by worker experience and how the group's anti-Leninist position on organisation led it to privilege first-person worker narratives in order to understand worker experience and its revolutionary possibilities.

Seller Inventory # LU-9781608464821

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Looking For The Proletariat: Socialisme Ou Barbarie And The Problem Of Worker Writing
• Publisher: Haymarket Books, US
• Publication Date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1608464822
• ISBN 13: 9781608464821
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: New
• Weight: 509 grams

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Author

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.