Socialisme ou Barbarie or the Partial Encounters between Critical Marxism and Libertarianism

Abstract

For many, the French group Socialisme ou Barbarie remains associated with the name of the political theorist and psychoanalyst Cornelius Castoriadis (1922-1997). While Castoriadis played a pivotal role in the group, it also included a number of other prominent intellectuals over the course of its publishing lifetime, such as Claude Lefort (1924-2010), Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998) and Guy Debord (1931-1994). The group’s eponymous journal, published between 1949 and 1965, was dedicated to an increasingly unorthodox Trotskyist critique and it provided an important platform for debating Marxism with other strands of the ultra-Left, some of them closely associated with Left-libertarian thinking. One line of division inside the group discussed here (though to be sure, there are many others to analyse) was based on divergent views about the model of organisation and the place to be given to ideas of spontaneous self-organisation within the working class, which was influenced by precisely this Left-libertarian thinking. These issues were particularly contentious for the group and this essay will unpack the reasons why, and why they caused so many splits within SouB.1 The primary aim of the chapter is to show that despite Castoriadis’s evident legacy of Left-libertarian thinking and his radical break with orthodox Marxist-Leninism, these splits owe most to Castoriadis’s original attachment to Trotskyist vanguardism. In the long run, as this chapter will illustrate, these ideological and organisational splits impeded any convergence between critical Marxism and Council Communism — Council Communism here understood as the closest SouB came to radical Left-libertarian thinking during its lifetime.