Cornelius Castoriadis, political and social writings Book

Have the apparent material success of capitalism and the bureaucratization of our lives destroyed any prospect for revolutionary transformations? Are the totalitarian regimes of the East equally adept at keeping their populations in line? Forty years ago, Cornelius Castoriadis (born 1922), recognized today as one of Europe’s foremost political and social thinkers, began to provide encouraging answers to such questions. He had come to Paris at the end of World War II from his native Greece, where he was persecuted by both fascists and Stalinists during the Occupation. Breaking with Trotskyism in 1949 over the issue of bureaucracy, he founded a revolutionary group and journal called Socialisme ou Barbarie. The journal, which influenced the participants in the May 1968 student and worker rebellion in France, is now acknowledged as one of the most important sources for the development of a non-Communist French Left. This collection is the first in English of Castoriadis’s main political and social essays written between 1946 and 1960. It contains the basic texts that defined Socialisme ou Barbarie’s critique of bureaucratic capitalism, both in its fragmented (Western) and totalitarian (Eastern) forms, running the gamut from the irrational and counterproductive organization of the capitalist workplace at the shop-floor level to the international competition between the United States and Russia for world supremacy. The keys to this critique are workers’ management and the exercise of individual and collective autonomy. Castoriadis analyzes the rise of bureaucracy both in capitalist institutions and in the social movements and organizations originally designed to combat those institutions. At the same time, however, he provides a positive perspective on how to overcome bureaucratization, based upon people’s actual struggles to establish a nonbureaucratic society. Also available from Minnesota is Volume 2, 1955–1960: From the Workers’ Struggle Against Bureaucracy to Revolution in the Age of Modern Capitalism.