Benoît Challand

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-Francois 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 analyze) was based on divergent views about the model of organization and the place to be given to ideas of spontaneous self-organization 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.[824] 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 organizational 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.

Though little space is formally dedicated to anarchism in this chapter, the analysis touches on the themes explored in this book by examining the tensions (organizational and ideological) that arise between a Leninist-inspired form of political militancy (critical Trotskyism) and a libertarian communist view of workers’ organizations (Council Communism). The Council Communist position was elaborated by intellectuals such as Anton Pannekoek (1873–1960) and discussed and published by SouB. Over the course of its existence, SouB engaged in dialogue with very different political groups of the ultra-Left, but the articulations and fault-lines that emerged in the debate between Castoriadis and Pannekoek, the so-called Chaulieu-Pannekoek correspondence of 1953–1954 (Chaulieu being an alias for Castoriadis), forcefully illustrates the problems of synthesis which this collection examines. Castoriadis’s own philosophy also moved from a critical Marxist-Leninist framework to a libertarian Marxist one in the 1960s and eventually became anti-Marxist in position from the 1970s onwards. At each stage Castoriadis refused a closer collaboration with Left-libertarian thinking and it is the purpose of this paper to explain why.

To this end, there are two main reasons for reinterpreting key episodes in SouB’s activity in the light of the tension between Marxist and Left-libertarian schools of thought. First, Council Communism represented an important historical attempt to straddle the Marxism — anarchism divide.[825] Though Council Communism does not have the same centrality to anarchism as, say, federalism, there are historical overlaps between the two movements: both adopted an oppositional position to the orthodox Marxism of the Second International and there were important mutual contacts in German syndicalism. Council Communists tried to develop new means to accommodate centralism within a syndicalist framework and the fact that they are sometimes referred to as libertarian communists illustrates this bridging role they occupy in the history of socialism. The debate turned on the key question of workers’ self-management and the role of the vanguard in revolutionary organizations. Ultimately, within SouB at least, it was the latter that won out.

In the context of SouB’s editorial development, this tension can be seen in the difficult relationship of Castoriadis and Lefort, two of the group’s towering figures. It is well known that the strain between these two individuals, which grew over the years and led to Lefort’s departure from SouB in 1958 (after a first brief resignation in 1952), contributed to the consolidation of the positions adopted by SouB, which were originally influenced by critical Trotskyism.[826] Other militants within the group, such as Henri Simon, who were equally sympathetic to the idea of workers’ self-management, played an important role in disclosing more detailed information about the failed merger of critical Marxism and libertarian communism.[827] But the theoretical roots of this tension are perfectly illustrated in the disagreement between Castoriadis and Pannekoek and their debates about the form that revolutionary movements should take — an exchange that assumes a central place in this analysis.

However, this intellectual and ideological tension within the group is best explained by the severe political exigencies of the cold war, anti-communist movements and the need for organizational and intellectual fortitude in the face of huge opposition. The intransigence of Castoriadis’s position and the conflict within the group can be seen as a direct response to these conditions. However, alongside this public orthodoxy, Castoriadis was also developing a radical version of critical Marxism, one which was to be hugely significant in terms of the development of socialist thought in the second half of the twentieth century. Influencing situationist writers such as Guy Debord and the autonomist tradition more widely, the contrast between these two faces of SouB is a historical puzzle worth investigating because it shows us that ideology and organization matter as much as, if not more than, theory.

Castoriadis is now known, in large part, as the philosopher of autonomy and the question of ‘auto-institution.’ The intellectual puzzle here is to understand how he married these ideas with a Leninist view of the revolutionary vanguard (based on democratic centralism) and why he kept Left-libertarian ideas at arm’s length when active in SouB. Ultimately it was Castoriadis’s inability to reform SouB or to abandon notions of the vanguard which ultimately consigned him to the Marxist-Leninist side of the debate. Ironically, it was only after SouB eventually dissolved that Castoriadis’s ideas developed along increasingly Left-libertarian lines, in particular in his criticism of the Marxists’ economism and their failure to grasp the significance of political change and the constitutive role of the social imaginary in the political process.[828]

The first substantive part of the paper will reflect on the historical conditions that made the contribution of SouB so important in the French intellectual scene and how these conditions structured the range of possible positions SouB could take. Like many groups born in the shadow of the Fourth International and the cold war, SouB experienced many splits and the paper will explore why this was the case by underlining the inherently critical nature of Trotskyism and the usefulness that this line of thinking might have had in the battle against Stalinism. The second section of the paper turns to developments and debates inside SouB and looks at Castoriadis and the internal form of the group to try explain other reasons for the failed synergies with more Left-libertarian trains of thought. The third section explores the Chaulieu-Pannekoek correspondence, using it to illustrate the interplay between ideological tensions and historical-organizational issues. Central to this discussion is the immediate post-1945 context and the period following the Hungarian crisis of 1956, as the notion of workers’ self-management became very important in the evolution of critical Marxism. The fourth part of the paper returns to wider debates, Castoriadis’s intellectual evolution in his final years and the demise of SouB. The conclusion will reflect on the significance of SouB for our understanding of the historiography of the Left in general. It is, without question, a singular but highly significant marker in this regard.

The shadows of Trotskyism

The political context of the origins of SouB illustrates how two different generations of activists were recruited to this small Paris-based militant group.[829] While the Fourth International gave qualified support to the USSR in the second half of the 1940s, a small dissident group emerged inside the Parti Communiste Internationaliste (PCI), the French section of the Fourth International, refusing to support the USSR and adopting a new reading of the nature of the Soviet Union. This minority group was called the ‘Chaulieu-Montal tendency’ after two of its leaders, Chaulieu being the militant name of Cornelius Castoriadis and Montal that of Claude Lefort. It crystallized in 1946 and 1947 and, after the support given by the PCI to Yugoslavia in August 1948, it turned from a tendency into a new movement named after its mouthpiece Socialisme ou Barbarie (a phrase taken from Rosa Luxemburg’s writings) whose first issue was published in March 1949.[830]

The main contribution of SouB at its inception was its slightly modified Trotskyist critique of the USSR which it defined as a form of state bureaucratic capitalism, premised not on the exploitation of the propertyless by owners of the means of production, but on the control of a subordinate labor class of executants by a class of directors. As the manifesto printed in the first issue of Socialisme ou Barbarie put it:

… [the] management of production by the workers themselves assumes an additional importance in modern society. The entire evolution of the modern economy tends to replace the old opposition between owners and the propertyless with a new opposition between directors and executants in the productive process. If the proletariat does not immediately abolish, together with the private ownership of the means of production, the management of production as a specific function permanently carried out by a particular social stratum, it will only have cleared the ground for the emergence of a new exploiting stratum, which will arise out of the ‘managers’ of production and out of the bureaucracies dominating economic and political life.[831]

This analysis was a radical break with the traditional economistic focus of Marxism-Leninism. In the course of its 16-year history, from 1949 to 1965, SouB attracted many adherents and experienced a good deal of dissatisfaction within its ranks too. Members had a variety of different motives for leaving the organization. For the sake of our argument, at least two different generations of militants involved in SouB need to be distinguished.[832] The first generation, that of Chaulieu and Montal, can be identified on the basis of what French historian Jean-Francois Sirinelli termed the élément fondateur.[833] In the case of this first generation of SouB, this founding event was the Second World War and the role Stalin played in defeating Hitler. Other key militants included Henri Simon, Daniel Mothe (the pseudonym of Jacques Gautrat, who worked in close connection with the workers of the Renault factories), Claude Lefort and Maurice Rajfus. For many of this generation the expectation of an imminent Third World War justified a radical break with the Fourth International and gave a sense of urgency to the action they thought needed to be undertaken. With the onset of the cold war and as the outbreak of a Third World War appeared to be increasingly unlikely, a second generation of militants joined SouB. For them, the élément fondateur took multiple forms: the 1953 East German rebellion, the Algerian war, the series of strikes in France in the summer of 1955 and the Budapest uprising of 1956. All these events gave further credence to SouB’s call for more workers’ self-management.[834] Among this second generation, J.-F. Lyotard (1924–1998), Pierre Souyri (1925–1979) and Guy Debord (1931–1994) were its most famous members.

This second series of founding events (in particular the 1953 and 1956 revolts) ushered in a more libertarian approach to Left-wing organization that was increasingly critical of Leninism and argued for a stronger role for workers’ councils. Contrary to the Leninist idea of a ‘consciousness inculcated from without,’ SouB maintained in its columns that revolutionary ideals and self-organization should stem instead from within the workers’ community. As SouB gradually began to be described by some as anti-Marxist,[835] and as some of its members (Claude Lefort in particular) contributed to the discussion of anti-totalitarianism in the 1970s, it is worth remembering that a certain radical Left critique of Stalinism became an asset in the cold war battle against communism in general.

In this difficult political and social context of the post-1945 period, the Trotskyist critique of the Soviet Union regained prominence. In general, radical Marxists either supported ‘progressive’ forces in the name of ‘socialism in one country,’ or criticized Stalin’s autocratic style of governing. But this was a difficult issue for many Left-wing activists and intellectuals.[836] In a context defined by international tension and the nascent cold war, the image that ‘Trotskyism cuts both ways’ encapsulates the critical potential of this ideology in breaching the hegemonic influence of Stalinist parties while dividing further radical groups. On the one hand, Trotskyism emerged as a powerful critique of Stalinism and of the bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet Union, appealing to radical leftists unhappy with the path that the leader of ‘socialism in one country’ had imposed. On the other hand, Trotskyism remained committed to Leninist ideas of the vanguard and structured party-organization premised on democratic centralism and the limitation on pluralist ideological debates.[837]

As it turned out, the new contradictions within the different Trotskyist traditions (bureaucratic degeneration, permanent arms revolution, managerial society, entrism and so on) proved too much and paved the way to historical splits. These splits illustrate both the centrifugal and centripetal forces inside Trotskyism, since creating splits has always been a way to gain new militants (entrism), while on the other hand, the defense of some of these concepts was a means to preserve ideological purity and exclude other militants.[838] We have here a first indication of the way in which the organizational priorities and logics of SouB might have frustrated the interchange between less orthodox Marxist and libertarian ideas. In essence, doctrinal adherence to Trotskyism constrained as much as it enabled this new generation of Left-wing thinkers, but the ideological influence of Leninism hamstrung organizational development by demanding democratic centralism, or vanguardism.

The context for the continued adherence to doctrinal purity and democratic centralism can also be explained by reference to the post-1945 anti-communist struggle across the world. Even within the Trotskyist movement the split became pronounced with what Hannah Arendt called ‘ex-communists’ and ‘former communists’ and their differentiated role in organizing splits in the ultra-Left. ‘Former communists’ were those who did not have a leading position in a Communist Party and who were mostly fellow travelers, like Picasso or Sartre. When they left the orbit of the Communist Party, their life moved on and was not centrally determined by this previous affiliation. ‘Ex-communists,’ on the other hand, included those who had been much more engaged in the formal hierarchies of a Communist Party, for whom ‘communism … remained the chief issue of their life’ once they left it.[839] Communism remained central because this group decided to fight communist ideology using their insider’s knowledge. James Burnham (1905–1987), author of the Managerial Revolution and an influential conservative intellectual during the cold war,[840] and Arthur Koestler (1905–1983), the ex-leader of the German Communist Party (KPD) and later author of bestselling novels against the totalitarian Gulag, are two prime examples of the trajectories of ‘ex-communists’ Arendt describes.

It is notable that among the ex-communists, Trotskyists featured prominently. They did so for two reasons. First, many Trotskyists became Trotskyists because of their disillusionment with either the Moscow trials of the 1930s or with Stalin’s inaction in the face of Fascism, or because of the post-1945 silence of communist parties in the face of Soviet repression during the popular uprisings in Central and Eastern Europe between 1953 and 1968. Second, their intellectual equipment as Trotskyists was built precisely around the criticism of the Soviet Union and was informed by a deep knowledge of the nature of its bureaucratic degeneration. It is therefore no surprise that so many ex-Trotskyists were recruited to the anti-Soviet battle of the post-1945 period. Trotskyism was both the chief method of radical critique of the trajectory of the Soviet Union and a tool in the armory of the capitalist West against all that was worth preserving in the Soviet experiment.

Thus, many ex- and former Trotskyists voluntarily embraced anti-communism. In the USA in particular the list of Trotskyist ‘defectors’ is impressive and significant: Irving Kristol, Sidney Hook, Sol Levitas, Melvin Lasky and James Burnham (who became active in the powerful secretly funded CIA-front, the Congress for Cultural Freedom [CCF]).[841] In Europe, it was rather ex-communists that featured on the list of important anti-communist ideologues: people like Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone and Boris Souvarine all had a formal role in their communist parties (Germany, Italy and France respectively) but none of them were Trotskyists, while people like Raymond Aron (Claude Lefort’s PhD mentor), Francois Furet (to quote two influential French intellectuals in the battle against communists) were only ‘former communists’ in Arendt’s classification.[842]

The point to be made here is that while US ex-Trotskyists joined the anti-communist battle,[843] dozens of other small splinter groups inspired by Trotskyism arguably made an indirect contribution to anti-communism in Europe by constantly splitting the ultra-Left political spectrum. This climate also made any intersections between Trotskyism and anarchism even more remote — despite sharing key ideological positions as described in other chapters of this volume. Small Trotskyist factions contributed to hindering the emergence of broad Left alliances, since their declared enemies were less the bourgeois camp than orthodox communist factions and reformist socialist parties. This intellectual and historical context is vital for understanding the debates that took place within SouB.

Ideological coherence or innovation?

Cornelius Castoriadis, the leading force of SouB, perfectly illustrates the ambiguous relation between Trotskyism and anti-communism. Castoriadis, who grew up in Athens, was active in the Greek Trotskyist party and fled his homeland for Paris at the end of 1945 where he joined the PCI, created a year earlier. Despite his very active militancy in the PCI and then as founder of SouB, he managed to work from 1949 until 1970 at the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC, soon to become the OECD), an institution working initially for the distribution of the Marshall Plan aid, and which played an essential role in the anti-communist battle through the so-called ‘counterpart’ funds.[844] One wonders how he managed to remain unnoticed inside an institution working to promote capitalism and becoming, in parallel, the leader of a revolutionary group. The fact is he did, and although he frequently used the benefits of being an international civil servant by secretly using much of his salary for the publication of Socialisme ou Barbarie,[845] Castoriadis took significant measures to hide his true identity. For example, until his naturalization as a French citizen in 1970, he only signed his political texts with one of his pseudonyms (the most frequent ones being Chaulieu, Cardan or Coudray).[846] Moreover, he never took part in the public events organized by SouB. And finally, he applied for French citizenship only in 1968 when all his formal political activities were over, because this type of administrative practice generally required a police inquiry into the private life of the applicant and would have jeopardized his cover.[847]

This digression on anti-communism and on the prominent role of Trotskyism in the postwar context served to highlight how external sponsors could have generated splits (for example, by providing financial means to create new organizations). In the case of SouB there is no evidence of such instrumentalisation. One therefore needs to turn to their internal discussions and their organizational debates to understand why splits happened. Alternative explanations could be found in organizational issues (group dynamics) or in a quest for theoretical improvement, and the innate tension in such a radical group looking to develop the ultimate theoretical innovation that would give it the edge over competing groups. The historian Gottraux provides a useful starting point for such analysis. He notes that:

SouB remained trapped between the need to overtly showcase its originality and its ‘purity’ on the one hand, and on the other hand, its desire to be open towards other groupings, albeit not in a very successful manner and by provoking disarray at times. In its attempts to open up, SouB finally adopted a line which aimed at maximizing profits and minimizing the costs: the group never departed a single second from its ideological coherence even as it declared itself ready to discuss with others.[848]

This duality illustrates perfectly the political exigencies of the period, but it overlooks the internal discord over the outward image SouB presented. Two examples are worth discussing. The first relates to the modality of the group’s organization. For most of its life the subtitle of Socialisme ou Barbarie was Organe de critique et d’orientation révolutionnaire. So beyond the critical dimension of SouB’s writings, the publication was also meant to orientate its readers on how to become a revolutionary organization. Its first issue and its first programmatic article are rather clear on this objective:

Presenting ourselves today, by means of this review, before the avantgarde of the manual and intellectual workers, we know we are alone in responding in a systematic way to the fundamental problems confronting the contemporary revolutionary movement: we believe we are alone in taking up and pursuing the Marxist analysis of the modern economy; in placing the problem of the historic development of the workers’ movement and its meaning on a scientific footing; in providing a definition of Stalinism and of the ‘workers’’ bureaucracy in general; in characterizing the Third World War; and, lastly, in proposing a revolutionary perspective, taking into account the original elements created by our epoch.[849]

It is this way, SouB remained dedicated to the Leninist idea of a vanguard party whose role was to help the working class in their autonomous organization (‘autonomous’ here in the sense of independent from any bureaucratic Bolshevik party), geared towards the abolition of private ownership and the realization of a socialist society, even if it criticized some of Lenin’s ideas, such as inculcating revolutionary ‘consciousness’ from without.[850] For example, Lefort, wrote an early vitriolic piece against Trotsky, criticizing him for being one of the main instigators of the bureaucratic degeneration of the Bolshevik party by virtue of his authoritarian leanings.[851] He was also the first to oppose the idea of an organized vanguard and ‘placed the systematic support for workers’ control at the center of his considerations.[852] He argued that the greatest risk for this vanguard in a post-revolutionary order is to fall into the same authoritarian and bureaucratic trap as that which it seeks to replace — a reading akin to anarchism. Van der Linden suggests that:

Castoriadis saw a dual task for the revolutionary socialists: On the one hand they should help build independent workers’ organizations and papers, similar to those starting to come to the fore at Renault and at other firms; at the same time there would have to be a co-ordination of the various resistance committees and a national workers’ paper. On the other hand the revolutionaries, now spread out all over the country and in numerous groups (the ‘diffused vanguard’), would have to be brought together in one organization — a new type of party, based on experiences since 1917.[853]

For the first ten years of SouB this organizational debate between what Michels would have termed the ‘iron law of oligarchy’ and the need for a revolutionary party vanguard created tensions between the majority vanguardists spearheaded by Castoriadis and a minority critical grouping under Lefort. Lefort eventually decided to leave SouB for a few months in 1952, when it became clear that the vanguardists were the majority.[854] This issue, coupled with a growing unhappiness with the Marxist vision of history,[855] led Lefort to leave the movement definitively in 1958, along with Henri Simon, who, in addition, supported the need for truly autonomous working classes. Lefort, who never described himself as an anarchist,[856] Simon and a few others went on to create the new publication called Informations et Liaisons Ouvrières (ILO, soon becoming Informations et Correspondance Ouvrières), providing a ‘forum for workers themselves to chronicle their struggles and express their pre-occupations.’[857] This autonomist line of argument was never taken up within SouB, forcing the split.

The Chaulieu-Pannekoek correspondence

Two Dutch Council Communist militants, who had attended many of SouB’s meetings in the 1950s, mapped these splits in their published observations. Their accounts help clarify the range of positions within SouB and establish the extent to which members tried to straddle a Leninist-libertarian divide. This report, published in a Dutch militant journal, speaks of three currents within SouB: a ‘Right wing’ inspired by Leninism, the ‘Center’ around Castoriadis, and the ‘Left’ around Lefort.[858] This is significant as it highlights that the majority (Center-Right) were committed to the necessity of organizing the vanguard party along increasingly centralist lines while the ‘Left’ members’ arguments were gradually marginalized and eventually excluded. Their report is worth quoting at length:

It is not the left wing which completed the break, but the right and center, which deliberately steered for it. So deliberately, that the break came before the congress where left, center and right were to discuss their differences of opinion. This congress was to take place in Paris on Saturday, 27 and Sunday, 28 September 1958. […] Both right and left had prepared a text which would serve as a point of departure for the discussion. Both of these texts […] naturally had an entirely different character; one could clearly discern the fundamental differences which had existed between the two currents for a long time: but there was nothing which indicated that the existing situation, in which the left and right worked in a single group, would shortly come to an end. [… The] differences were in no way brought to a head in the bulletin, which had been compiled by a member of the left wing. […] The debate on both texts, which started on Thursday, 18 September, consequently had a vehement but at the same time friendly character. On Wednesday, 24 September something unexpected happened. The center published a sequel to its text, which especially concerned the position and presentation of the left. The accent of this second paper was extremely sharp. The left were accused of propounding their theory ‘while knowing better,’ and of ‘knowingly misleading the workers.’ Its behavior was even described as ‘dishonest,’ while the criticism of the right and the center by the left, was turned into a downright caricature. Under these circumstances the preparatory meeting of Thursday, 25 September lost every semblance of geniality. The left expected that, at the very least, certain statements, like those concerning ‘deceit’ and ‘deception’ would be dropped immediately because upholding them would naturally make any discussion impossible. The most important spokesman of the center refused. He declared that it was not his habit to be swayed by his emotions and that he had calmly considered every word and did not wish to take back a single word or sentence. At that the comrades of the left stood up and left the room. On Friday, 26 September they met separately and took the decision that they would not be present at the congress, which started on the 27^th. Thus came the breakup.[859]

So by accusing the Left of deceit, the ‘Center-Right’ managed to evict the group around Simon and Lefort, thereby destroying the potential for SouB to engage in a dialogue with the Dutch councilists. But throughout its history SouB had tried to open communication with different critical communist organizations. Anton Pannekoek, another councilist, was one of these interlocutors. Not only was he an influential theoretician of workers’ councils, he also had historical experience as an activist in Germany and with the Second International before 1914. His best-known book is De Arbeidersraden (Workers’ Councils), published in 1941 under the pseudonym P. Aartsz.[860] Like other Council Communists (such as Otto Ruehle, Karl Korsch or Paul Mattick), Pannekoek opposed the diktats of the Third International and evaluated anarchism sympathetically. In the interwar period, the Council Communists broke with social democracy and Bolshevism, while maintaining the necessity of organizing the revolution by the direct control of the working class over the means of production.[861] In that sense the councilists remained Marxists and distanced themselves from the anarchist preference for federalism as a means of organization. One sentence by Pannekoek illustrates this new orientation: ‘socialism is self-direction of production, self-direction of the class-struggle, by means of workers’ council.’[862]

From 1953 onwards the theme of workers’ councils featured in some of Socialisme ou Barbarie’s articles and the group’s internal debates. The debate surrounding whether these workers’ councils or the vanguard party were the correct revolutionary form also featured in the exchange of letters between Anton Pannekoek and Pierre Chaulieu (one of Castoriadis’s aliases), which has since generated many conflicting interpretations about the nature of the Russian Revolution and about theorizing the organization of the revolutionary movement.[863]

The substance of the debate revolves around the issue of how to organize the revolutionary movement. Castoriadis argued for an organized vanguard, while Pannekoek refused this ‘Bolshevik conception of the party.’ The divergence also dealt with the nature of the 1917 Revolution. Castoriadis defended the idea that it was a true proletarian revolution, while Pannekoek saw in the Soviet revolution only a bourgeois revolution. In other words the disagreements could not be greater between the two authors. Castoriadis, who felt that the ideological priority for SouB should be focused elsewhere, managed to put an end to this debate, albeit only temporarily as the polemics resumed in the early 1970s.

The exchanges and debate range from the first months of 1953 to 1974.[864] The starting point came when Cajo Brendel, a militant of the Dutch Spartacus group brought issues 1–11 of Socialisme ou Barbarie from Paris to show to Pannekoek. The first exchange of letters at the end of October 1953 was between the two Dutch militants. This was followed a few weeks later by a letter from Pannekoek to Castoriadis, who replied personally in early 1954. The letter from Pannekoek, with Chaulieu’s reply, was published in Socialisme ou Barbarie in the April-June 1954 issue (issue 14). The Dutch leader sent a second and third letter in August and September 1954, but these were not published. Castoriadis replied only to the second letter (August), but in the early months of 1955 Cajo Brendel states that SouB promised to publish the end of the correspondence between Pannekoek and Castoriadis.[865] This was never done.

The exchange between Pannekoek and Castoriadis is significant not only because of the content of their debate but also because of the way in which SouB handled the publication of the correspondence. Some accused Castoriadis of deliberately hiding the second letter from his companions, while in issue 15–16 (October-December 1954) SouB stated that Chaulieu had clearly shown the limits of Pannekoek’s arguments and that there was therefore no need to continue the dialogue. Pannekoek wrote in the second letter that it was not meant to be published, and Castoriadis used this as a justification for not doing so. Yet Pannekoek’s caution was probably more a caveat, because the text needed some editing and he was actually quite willing to continue the debate.[866] In private exchanges between Pannekoek and Brendel, both disagreed with SouB’s claim that Chaulieu had won the argument,[867] and both would have liked the dialogue to go on. Pannekoek even went on to say, in the October 1953 letter, that ‘[t]here remain some divergences [between me and SouB]. They have not set themselves free of the Bolshevik virus with which they have been infected by Trotsky. The virus of the revolutionary party’s vanguardism which must lead the revolution. On this subject, we are much ahead here in Holland.’[868]

While Pannekoek makes Castoriadis look like an old Leninist, and compared to Debord he looks like an old-fashioned second internationalist (an economist), the truth of the matter is that by this time Castoriadis had already begun to move decidedly beyond an orthodox Marxism and neither is the case. Unfortunately, it was his position within SouB and the principles that that movement originally sought to defend, with him as its figurehead, which made the interchange with both Lefts impossible. Furthermore, Castoriadis did not want to get involved in a long and protracted debate about revolutionary forms and the priority of self-organization as he had by this time become engrossed in the analysis of the fundamental transformations underway within modern capitalism.

Indeed, Castoriadis began to express a deep dissatisfaction with all revolutionary organizations. Two influential articles published in 1960 and 1961 dealt with ‘Le mouvement révolutionnaire sous le capitalisme moderne.’[869] Castoriadis here analyzed the classical Marxist theme of political alienation but considered the depoliticization of Western societies as a ‘co-substantial part of modernization’ and due to the increasing bureaucratization of social life.[870] He concluded that mainstream Marxism fails to fully grasp social change when it concentrates its attention on economic factors, thus tending to overlook the political transformation of advanced capitalist societies, the irrationality of bureaucratic management,[871] and the increasing role of so-called ‘technocrats’ and ‘experts’ leading to the gradual apathy of Western societies now living in abundance.[872] These transformations and the false trail taken by mainstream Marxism makes it, so Castoriadis argues, even more difficult for a revolutionary movement to exist and perform its task since political processes are not only economic but also social, cultural and psychological. Buried in this theoretical debate, the last thing he wanted was to be distracted by an argument about organization.

All Castoriadis’s themes influenced the subsequent generation of militants and in particular the groups that emerged in 1968 and in the 1970s: a generation keen to chant libertarian slogans, to dispute the political apathy and alienation of capitalist society, and to suggest more libertarian strategies to disrupt the dominant bourgeois order and break the Stalinist hegemony on the Left. Their view was that the proletariat no longer existed as it had done in the nineteenth century and that they were part of a transformed ‘society of the spectacle.’ It is no coincidence that in 1960–1961, precisely when Castoriadis made his diagnosis of working-class and revolutionary movements at a time of full employment and rapid economic growth, Guy Debord was active in the ranks of SouB. Debord took these themes to another level, that of spontaneist theory, but the intellectual filiations of Debord’s ideas as part of this ultra-Left milieu that also gradually became anti-Marxist, is undisputed. Debord’s new critique of the société du spectacle, discussed elsewhere in this volume, remains a frame of analysis in part based on intersections of red and black ideas. As in Castoriadis’s 1960 and 1961 reflexions, his brand of Marxist thinking should not simply be reduced to economic and political features alone, but also explores the imaginary dimension of capitalist domination, interlinked with the continuing centrality of workers’ councils in the Internationale Situationniste. It was the organizational imperatives of a movement originally influenced by Trotskyism that alienated Debord as much as it had done Pannekoek. Thus, in the last ten years of its existence, SouB was less a melting pot of new ideas than a springboard for their development outside of its organization.

Castoriadis’ ultimate control and later evolution

Castoriadis’s attempts to recapture the organizational purity of the original Leninist organizations exhibits the confluence of ideology and context, but the central role played by Castoriadis himself goes a long way to explaining the successes and failures of the group. For example, recruitment took place only by personal co-optation, limiting the capacity of the movement to expand and transform. Gottraux, on the basis of interviews and analysis of internal documents, has demonstrated that Castoriadis was what we might now call a ‘control freak,’ constantly steering the course of the debates and imposing his personal will on the rest of the group. Castoriadis admitted that his status as international civil servant gave him a privileged amount of free time to write his militant texts. Gottraux also notes that in all the available minutes it turns out that Castoriadis never missed any of SouB’s meetings.[873]

The most prominent example of Castoriadis’s central (and centralizing) role comes from the internal scission in 1958. In the tormented context of the dying days of the Fourth Republic, strong disagreements emerged inside SouB regarding the nature of De Gaulle’s election and which interpretation to give to the PCF’s ambiguous stance vis-à-vis what has been dubbed ‘De Gaulle’s permanent coup d’état’. Castoriadis, and with him the Center and the Right wing (as discussed above), invoked ‘collective discipline,’ and managed thus to silence the Left minority, as we have seen from the Dutch militants’ reports. Lefort saw in this attitude of Castoriadis an ‘avatar of democratic centralism’[874] and decided to leave the organization in September 1958. In this context, Gottraux also observed that the minority Left had made contact with Pannekoek and the Dutch council movement, illustrating that they felt at odds and uneasy with the ways in which Castoriadis wanted to reform the organization.[875]

In fact, some SouB positions were also premised on councilist ideas. For example, the possibility of revoking some of the rotating representation in leading committees (like the Comité Responsable) or the importance of the workers controlling and organizing the means of production and of self-organization.[876] The problem was that the substance and influence of Pannekoek’s ideas and the idea of workers’ councils did not trickle down into the organizational life of SouB itself. In theory, Castoriadis promoted autonomy and criticized the bureaucratic degeneration of many Marxist organizations, but in reality, the rhythm of life and the range of ideas discussed inside SouB were animated almost solely by Castoriadis. For example Castoriadis remarked during the strikes in the Renault factory in 1955 and 1956: ‘We have to be alert, decide who must attend the TO [Tribune Ouvrière] meetings. These comrades must decide in advance the critiques to be made and hand in texts to TO.’[877]

It is not a coincidence that most of those who were militants and have since become influential intellectuals (such as Lefort, Debord and Lyotard) all decided to leave the organization because of disagreements with Castoriadis. There could only be one leader and one organizational form for SouB.[878] But intellectually, again, Gottraux notes that Lefort’s criticisms in the late 1950s seems to have been taken on board by Castoriadis in his reading of the events surrounding May 1968,[879] as much as Lefort also seems to acknowledge that Henri Simon was right on certain issues ten years after discussions inside ILO.[880] In certain texts from the post-SouB period, Castoriadis seems to have continued some of the dialogues that took place under the banner of SouB.[881] Despite a form of historical revisionism, it can even be argued that Castoriadis took inspiration from Pannekoek, as his 1976 reappraisal of the Hungarian revolt in Telos suggests. The ‘Hungarian Source’[882] can be read at different levels. In part it is a vitriolic text against Ernest Mandel, the leader of the Fourth International (United Secretariat), and classical Marxism.[883] But above all, it is a cornerstone of Castoriadis’s new philosophy and political theory in which autonomy becomes paramount in his elaboration of social consciousness, developed in later philosophical works, and in particular around the theme of the social imaginary.[884]

In this text, Castoriadis defines the autonomy of a society as its capacity for ‘auto-institution’ (a distinct phrase of Castoriadis’s that does not derive directly from the anarchist idea of self-organization).[885] The process of autoinstitution implies the capacity of societies to openly ‘call into question their own institution, their representation of the world, their social imaginary significations.’[886] Closure and openness are the key for Castoriadis’s understanding of autonomy, envisaged as a radical project. Here, closure means the fact that it is not possible for a given society to choose the ways and means in which it reflects on itself, implying a form of heteronomy — that is, the law of others imposed on this particular society. Openness, on the other hand, is important not only in terms of a given society choosing its institutional setting but also on an ‘informational and cognitive’ level, in choosing the vocabulary or symbolic repertoires to express an autonomous political project.[887]

While people who remained faithful to historical materialism failed to see what was still Marxist in this new theory,[888] Castoriadis maintained that, beyond his commitment to a revolutionary praxis, at the heart of his new theoretical elaboration was the classical Marxist theme of alienation, but one also attuned to a more socially constructed and language-mediated vision of the political, one far from the strictures of historical determinism.[889] It could even be claimed that some of Pannekoek’s arguments, developed in the non-published correspondence, seem to have been integrated into Castoriadis’s theory of the spontaneous capacity of society (with the difference that back in the 1950s the central actor was the working class) for self-organization. With a historical sleight of hand, Castoriadis here argues that the Hungarian revolution is fundamentally different from the previous forms of communes or council revolutions. Being of a new kind, it puts the previous communist revolts in a situation of damnatio memoriae — or removal from remembrance — thus realizing a form of historical revisionism. This is very different from the views he expressed in the 1950s, when he argued the need for intellectuals and a revolutionary vanguard. Echoing Pannekoek, Castoriadis now states that:

If the opposite of spontaneity (that is, of self-activity and self-organization) is hetero-organization (that is, organization by politicians, theoreticians, professional revolutionaries, etc.) then, clearly, the opposite of spontaneity is counter-revolution, or the conservation of the existing order. The revolution is exactly that: self-organization of the people.[890]

It is as if, 22 years later, Castoriadis has turned on his head. When going back to Pannekoek’s second and third letters, one cannot but be struck by the parallel between the Dutch councilist’s ideas and the ‘new’ Castoriadis:

What I am claiming is that the result of the often violent struggle is not determined by accidental circumstances, but by what is vital in the workers’ thought, as the basis of a solid consciousness acquired through experience. […] We cannot beat them [the communist parties] by following their methods. It is possible only if we follow our own methods. The true form of action for a struggling class lies in the strength of arguments, based on the fundamental principle of autonomy of decision. […] The main condition for the conquest of freedom for the working class is that the concepts of self-government and the self-management of the means of production both need to be rooted in the consciousness of the masses.[891]

There are certainly areas of convergence between the two authors, even if more than 20 years had passed since the writing of these lines by Pannekoek. Castoriadis had also distanced himself from a stage-based vision of class struggle, because he went through its anti-Marxist period, the liquidation of historical materialism and of a rigid theory of economy as the basis of historical transformation. He remains, though, a Castoriadis dedicated to the same refined commitment to understanding how new hierarchical structures ‘replaced the traditional twofold division of capitalist society into two main classes.’[892] Whether this is enough to be still considered a Marxist remains a matter for debate.

Conclusion: Legacy beyond the organization

SouB eventually evolved into an ultra-Left anti-Marxist movement.[893] Its influence, overall, is certainly more important for the intellectual and academic scene than the practical, political level, where its impact has remained minimal (although this is true of almost all ultra-Left organizations). That SouB achieved the notoriety and influence that it did is significant given it had such a very low number of militants, ranging from between 20 members in 1951 and 87 a decade later.[894] However, its publications influenced the work of many other French intellectual journals, and numerous French, British and US intellectuals cut their teeth in revolutionary politics while members of the group, before moving on.[895]

There are both typical and idiosyncratic elements to the story of the evolution of SouB, but neither is visible enough without the context we have given here. Ideology is not enough. As we have shown, Trotskyism in general had serious problems despite its compelling ideological critique of Stalinism, its demand for the internationalization of political struggle, and its reading of the Soviet Union as a bureaucratic degeneration, or state capitalism. The ideological commitment to democratic centralism and a revolutionary vanguard nevertheless prohibited a fuller integration with wider Left-libertarian strands of thinking. While SouB often provided a platform for opening new avenues for political participation on the far-Left, at other times it split the political spectrum further.

We have argued that despite the substantial distancing of SouB from Trotskyism, it kept the indirect mark of its intellectual origins, in particular Castoriadis’s strict (if critical) following of party discipline in the context of the ideological battles of the cold war. The need to keep a sense of intellectual purity and originality, in order to ward off detractors and to sustain the movement into the future, generated a series of splits detrimental to mutual borrowings. Intellectual cross-fertilization took place only when members were not bound by the group’s inner working logic or the power struggles between dominant and more passive figures. We have noted how Lefort and Castoriadis parted company over the group’s inner organization and over their mutual philosophy of history. Yet, as individuals, they continued their dialogue on politics and theory. There was disagreement on certain topics, but on many subtle elements it is as if Lefort and Castoriadis kept developing mutual borrowings into their own independent lines of thinking.

Castoriadis’s later reflections on society are caught in a battle against heteronomy on the part of an externally instituted political, social and cognitive order — a view that echoes Lefort’s simultaneous work and writings against totalitarianism.[896] Both authors converge in their form of mild historical revisionism about what revolution is or should be.[897] So while SouB as a formal institution prevented creative borrowings, SouB as an informal community of intellectuals has allowed for profound and long-lasting borrowings and generated deep processes of cross-fertilization of political ideas. This denotes the presence of strong personal ties and intellectual affinities despite the stark ideological differences which ought to be considered as the engine of subsequent theoretical innovation. Socialisme ou Barbarie is a case study of mid- to late twentieth-century socialism in its own right. Its lasting legacy, however, is intellectual, not organizational.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for their comments and David Berry for his assistance with the translations. Thanks to Sara Farris, Jérémie Barthas, Paul Mattick Jr. and Chiara Bottici for sharing some ideas during the writing of this chapter. All have helped to push me into rethinking in more depth what ‘Red and Black’ means. I obviously bear sole responsibility for remaining errors.