Remarks

This text and the following one [Trans.: i.e., “The Proletariat and Organization, II,” which is not included in the present edition] were written during the summer of 1958 and circulated within the S. ou B. group in the autumn of the same year. The references to Claude Lefort’s text, around which the comrades who left the group were united, are given later. I do not have anything of great import to add to the description of circumstances surrounding this scission furnished in the following text, for otherwise I would have to go into detail about the history of the group from its beginnings, a task that does not strike me as particularly urgent today. On the antecedents to this whole discussion, see also “Postface to The Revolutionary Party and Proletarian Leadership,” L’Expérience du mouvement ouvrier, 1: Comment lutter (10/18, 1974), pp. 163–78. [Trans.: see volume 1 of the present edition for excerpts from this postface.]

As for problems of a substantial nature, I still support the ideas formulated in the preceding text although I now consider them inadequate and incomplete. I do not think that it would be very useful to add many comments to this discussion of the year 1958, for it could only be enriched by going beyond the very terrain on which it took place. This terrain was very narrow indeed, almost exclusively sociological, rational, and operative. Questions such as “who agitates,” “why,” and “how” were barely broached at all, by either side; neither were the questions raised that do in fact arise at the level of groups of militants (such groups are far from constituting rational and transparent working collectives). These psychic and “psychological” factors, however, determine the actual functioning and the reality of such groups and organizations as much as general sociological factors, and much more than their “programs” and “bylaws.”

One can find a brief — and partially inaccurate — description of the 1958 scission (as well as an exposition of a point of view opposed to that formulated in “The Working Class & Organization”) in the pamphlet Henri Simon published after his break with Informations et Correspondence Ouvrières. Simon had helped found ICO after his departure from S. ou B. and his separation from Claude Lefort. The pamphlet is entitled, I.C.O.: Un point de vue, and it is available through the author, 34 rue St. Sebastien, Paris 75011. [Trans.: Photocopies can still be obtained from him at this address.] One should not be surprised if I say that the conclusion I have drawn after reading it is that the evolution of ICO and Simon’s final break with it were determined in large part by the presence of problems whose existence and importance he refused to recognize in 1958.