Proletarian Experience (1952)

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ProletarianExperience(1952)
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Proletarian Experience (1952)

Claude Lefort September 26, 2013
Socialisme ou Barbarie no. 11 (novembre-dcembre 1952).
Factories Near Mont de Cengle (Paul Czanne, 1870)
There is no phrase from Marx more often repeated: The history of all societies to
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date has been the history of class struggle.1 These words have lost none of their
explosive potential. People are continuously providing practical commentaries,
charlatans have obscured their meaning, replacing them with more reassuring
truths. Yet must we still say that history is de ned entirely around class struggle,
that history today is de ned entirely by the struggles of the proletariat against the
class that exploits it, and that historical creativity and the creativity of the
proletariat are today one and the same? On these points, there is no ambiguity in
Marx. He wrote: Of all the instruments of production the greatest productive
power is the proletariat itself.2 But rather than subordinate everything to this
productive power and interpret the development of society as a whole in terms
shaped by that of the revolutionary class, pseudo-Marxists of all kinds have tried to
base the conception of history on less moveable grounds. They have converted the
theory of class struggle into a purely economic science and claim to have derived
its laws in the image of those of classical physics, deducing a superstructure and
thereby con ating class comportment3 with ideological phenomena. Taking an
expression from Capital, they say that the proletariat and bourgeoisie are
personi cations of economic categories, the former of wage labor and the latter
of capital. The struggle between them is the mere re ection of an objective
con ict, the nature of which is tied to a given period as a function of the
development of productive forces and existing relations of production. Because
this con ict results from the development of productive forces, history is
essentially reduced to it, and is in the process unwittingly transformed into a
particular episode in the evolution of nature. Simultaneously, the role of class and
of human beings is vacated. To be sure, this theory does not dispense entirely with
interest in the development of the proletariat, but restricts it to objective
characteristics to extension, density, and concentration. In the best scenario,
these characteristics are then brought into relation with large-scale proletarian
actions. This theoretical viewpoint monitors the natural evolution of a proletariat
that it casts as an unconscious and undifferentiated mass. The permanent struggle
against exploitation, revolutionary actions and ideological phenomena that
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accompany them, are not the real history of the class. They are mere expressions of
an economic function.
Not only did Marx distance himself from this theory, there is an explicit critique of
it in the philosophical work of his youth. According to Marx, attempts to grasp
social development in itself, independently of concrete human beings and the
relations they establish amongst themselves be they of cooperation or of con ict
are expressions of the alienation inherent in capitalist society. Because they are
made strangers to their work, because their social situation is imposed on them
independently of their will, people are inclined to grasp human activity in general
on the model of physics and to grasp society as a being in-itself.
Marxs critique did not destroy this tendency any more than he eliminated
alienation by revealing it. On the contrary, this tendency developed out of other
aspects of Marx in the form of a so-called economic materialism that, with time,
came to play a speci c role in the mysti cation of the workers movement. Its
duplication of the social division within the proletariat between the worker elite
associated with the intelligentsia and the masses fed into a command ideology the
bureaucratic character of which is fully revealed in Stalinism. By converting the
proletariat into a mass governed by laws and its agency into an economic function,
this tendency justi es the reduction of workers to the status of executants within
their own organizations, which have become instruments of worker exploitation.
The proletariat is the real response to this economic pseudo-materialism. Its
response is elaborated through its practical existence. Anyone who looks at its
history can see that the proletariat has not merely reacted to de nite, external
economic factors (degree of exploitation, standard of living, mode of
concentration), but that it has really acted. The proletariat has intervened in a
revolutionary manner based not on some schema provided by the objective
situation, but on its total, cumulative experience. While it would be absurd to
interpret the history of the workers movement without continuous reference to
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the economic structure of society as a whole at the time, to reduce workers to that
structure is to condemn oneself to ignore three-quarters of its concrete class
comportment. Who would try to deduce a centurys worth of transformations in
worker mentalits4, methods of struggle and forms of organization on the basis of
purely economic processes?
Following Marx, it is essential to af rm that the working class is not merely an
economic category, but the greatest of productive forces. We must show how this
is the case both against critics and mysti ers and for the development of
revolutionary theory. But we must also recognize that this topic was only broached
in Marx and that its expression through his conception of the proletariat remained
conceptually unclear. He was often content with abstract claims about the role of
changes of consciousness in class formation without explaining what they meant.
At the same time, in the interest of showing the necessity of fundamental
revolution, he often depicted the working class in terms so dark that they lead one
to wonder how workers could possibly acquire consciousness of their situation and
their role in the management of Humanity. Marx argues that capitalism has
transformed the worker into a machine and robbed it of every human physical and
moral characteristic and that capitalism has removed from work all semblance of
individual interaction. The result has been a loss of humanity. However,
according to Marx, because it is subhuman, because it is totally alienated and an
accumulation of all social distress, the proletariats revolt against its fate can
emancipate all of humanity. (It requires a classfor which humanity is entirely
lost and which can only reconquer itself by conquering all of humanity or the
proletariat of the present day alone, totally excluded from all personal activity, is
able to realize its total personal activity and no longer recognize limits on the
appropriation of the totality of collective forces.5 ). At the same time, it is clear
that proletarian revolution is not a liberatory explosion followed by the instant
transformation of all society (Marx directed much sarcasm at this anarchist
navet). Rather, proletarian revolution is when the exploited class assumes the
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management of all of society. But how could the proletariat successfully take on
the innumerable social, political, economic, and cultural tasks that a successful
revolution would bring if the night before it had been radically excluded from
social life? One response could be: the class undergoes a metamorphosis through
revolution. But even as there is an acceleration of historical processes in a
revolutionary period, one that upsets existing relations amongst men and
establishes communication that links each to society as a whole, phenomena
which are required for the extraordinary maturation of the class that revolution
brings, nonetheless it would be absurd, sociologically speaking, to see the class as
born of revolution. Its maturation is only possible due to prior experience that it
interprets and puts into a positive practice.
Marxs characterizations of the total alienation of the proletariat are linked to the
idea that the overthrow of the bourgeoisie is the necessary and suf cient condition
for the victory of socialism. In these cases, he is preoccupied with the destruction
of the old order and opposes to it communist society, like a positive is opposed to a
negative. These points show that Marx was necessarily dependent on a particular
historical situation. The unfolding of subsequent decades requires us to think
otherwise about the passage from the old order into a post-revolutionary society.
The problem of revolution has become that of the proletariats capacity to manage
all of society. This requires us to think about the development of this capacity
within capitalist society.
There is no lack of indications in Marx of the material that would be required to
outline another conception of the proletariat. For example, Marx writes that
communism is the actual movement of overthrowing the existing society that is
presupposed by it. From a certain viewpoint, this indicates continuities that would
link social forces in the existing capitalist stage to the future of humanity. More
explicitly, Marx highlights the originality of the proletariat, which already
represents the dissolution of all classes,6 he says, because, it is not linked to any
particular interest, because it absorbs aspects of previous social classes and
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recombines them in a unique manner, and because it has no necessary link with
the soil or, by extension, with any nation. What is more, while Marx insists
correctly on the negative, alienated character of proletarian work, he also shows
that this same situation puts the proletariat in a universal situation because of
technological development which has enabled an interchangeability of tasks and a
rationalization of production virtually without limits. This enables us to see the
creative function of the proletariat within Industry, which he calls the open book
of human forces.7 In this, the proletariat appears, not as subhuman, but as the
producer of social life in its entirety. The proletariat fabricates the objects thanks
to which human life continues in all domains because there is no one who does not
owe his conditions of existence to industrial production. If the proletariat is the
universal producer, it must somehow also be a depository of social and cultural
progress.
In other places, Marx describes the development of the bourgeoisie and proletariat
in much the same terms, as if the classes belong together not only because of their
places in production, but also because of their mode of evolution and the relations
they establish between people. For example, he writes: The diverse individuals
only constitute a class when they support a struggle against another class. The rest
of the time, they confront each other in competition. At the same time, the class
becomes autonomous relative to individuals, so that they nd their predestined
conditions of existence.8 However, when he concretely describes the evolution of
the proletariat and bourgeoisie he differentiates them radically. Essentially, the
bourgeoisie compose a class because those who constitute it have a common
economic function. Common interests and horizons describe their common
conditions of existence for them. Independently of the politics each adopts, the
bourgeoisie constitutes a homogeneous group with a xed structure. Their
commonalities of interest explain the ease with which the class can develop a
specialized fraction to undertake its politics. Bourgeois politics are expressions and
interpretations of these shared dispositions. This characteristic of the bourgeoisie
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is equally evident in the process of its historical development: Because they were
in opposition to existing conditions and the division of labor that resulted from
them, the conditions of existence for isolated bourgeois became the conditions
common to all of them.9 In other words, the identity of their economic situation
within feudalism uni ed them and gave them a class aspect, imposing on them
from the beginning a simple association by resemblance. This is what Marx means
by the expression the runaway serfs were already half-bourgeois. There was no
continuity that linked serf and bourgeois. Rather, the latter simply legalized the
formers already-extant mode of life. As a group, the bourgeoisie insinuated itself
into feudal society, and its focus was broadening its own mode of production.
When this mode of production encountered the limits of the existing conditions,
there was no contradiction; existing conditions merely impeded its development.
Marx does not say, but enables one to say: From the beginning the bourgeoisie is
what it will become, an exploiting class. Of course, it was initially underprivileged,
but it already contained within itself all the characteristics that its history would
simply develop.
The development of the proletariat is completely different. Reduced solely to its
economic function, it represents a determinate social category. But this category
does not yet posses a class direction. Its direction [sens de classe] is constituted by
its original comportment: the struggle against all forms of class in the society
which it confronts as adversarial strata. This does not mean that the role of class in
production should be neglected; on the contrary, we will see that the role workers
play in society, and those they will be called upon to play in becoming its masters,
are directly rooted in their roles as producers. But the essential point is that their
role does not give them the ability to act, but only an increasingly strong capacity
to manage. The bourgeoisie is continually confronted with the results of its work:
that is what gives it objectivity. The proletariat is raised up through its work
without ever being concerned with its results. Both the objects it produces and the
sequence of operations required to produce them are taken from it. While there is a
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progress in technical skill, this progress will only acquire a value in the future. In
the present, it is inscribed in the negative image of an exploitative society. (The
technical capabilities of the contemporary American proletariat have no common
measure with that of the French proletariat of 1848, but both the former and the
latter are equally without economic power.) It is true that workers, like the
bourgeoisie, have similar interests imposed on them by their common working
conditions for example, they have an interest in full employment and higher
wages. But these interests are of a different order than their most fundamental
interest, which is to not be workers. It appears that workers seek higher wages in
the same way as bourgeois seek pro ts, just as it appears both offer commodities
on the market the latter capital, the former labor-power. In fact, the bourgeoisie
constitutes itself through this comportment as author of its class: it builds the
system of production that is the source of its own social structure. For its part,
while the proletariat seems only to react to conditions that are imposed on it, it is
being matured by its exploiters. Even if the workers are points of departure for
radical opposition to the system of exploitation itself, they nonetheless play an
integral part in the dialectic of capital. In confrontation with the bourgeoisie, the
proletariat only af rms itself as an autonomous class when it contests bourgeois
power, which is to say its mode of production, or, more concretely, exploitation
itself. Its revolutionary attitude constitutes its class attitude. Proletarian class
direction is not developed through an accumulation of economic attributes, but
rather through their radical denial in order to institute a new social order. From
this follows that the proletariat, unlike the bourgeoisie, cannot cast off their chains
as individuals because the ful llment of their destiny cannot be located in what
they already virtually are, but only through the abolition of the proletarian
condition itself.10 Marx notes that the bourgeoisie are only of their class as
members or as average individuals (that is, as passively determined by their
economic situation) while the workers, forming a revolutionary community,11
are properly individuals to the extent they dominate their situation and immediate
relations to production.
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If it is true that no class can ever be reduced solely to an economic function and
that a description of concrete social relations within the bourgeoisie are a
necessary component of a comprehension of that class, then it is even more true
that the proletariat requires a speci c approach that would enable access to its
subjective development. Despite some reservations concerning what is entailed by

this term, it summarizes better than any other the dominant trait of the
proletariat. The proletariat is subjective to the extent that its comportments are
not the simple result of the conditions of its existence: its conditions of existence
require of it a continuous struggle for transformation, thus a continuous distance
from its immediate fate. The progress of this struggle, sense of distance and the
development of the ideological content that enables them comprise an experience
across which the class constitutes itself.
To paraphrase Marx again, one must avoid above all xing the relation of the
proletariat to the individual as an abstraction. One must search for how its social
structure emerges from the situations of determinate individuals because it is true,
according to Marx, that in society it is the proletariat which represents a fortiori an
eminently social force within the present historical stage as the group which
produces collective life.
The indications that we nd in Marx of an orientation toward the concrete analysis
of the social relations constitutive of the working class have not been developed by
the Marxist movement. The fundamental questions for us have not been directly
broached how do men, placed in the conditions of industrial work, come to
appropriate that work? how do they build links between speci c relations amongst
themselves, and how do they perceive and fashion relations with the rest of
society? and, in a singular manner, how do they compose the shared experience
which makes of them a historical force? For the most part they have been left aside
in favor of a more abstract conception, the object of which is, for example,
capitalist Society (considered in its generality). The forces which comprise it are
placed on the same level. So it was for Lenin, for whom the proletariat was an
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entity whose historical meaning had been established once and for all and which
was, with some exceptions, treated as an adversary by virtue of its external
characteristics. An excessive interest was accorded to the study of forces of
production, which were con ated with class struggle itself, as if the essential
problem were to measure the pressure that one mass exerted on an opposing mass.
For us, this does not at all mean that we reject the objective analysis of the
structure and institutions of the social totality, nor do we imagine, for example,
that the only true knowledge that can be given has to be elaborated by the
proletarians themselves as a function of their rootedness in the class. This
workerist theory of knowledge which, it must be said in passing, reduces the
work of Marx to nothing, must be rejected for two reasons: rst, because all
knowledge claims objectivity (even as it may be conscious of being socially and
psychologically conditioned); second, because the aspiration to practical and
ideological universality belongs to the very nature of the proletariat, which would
identify itself with society as a whole. But the fact remains that objective analysis,
even carried out with the greatest rigor, as it was done in Marxs Capital, remains
incomplete because it is constrained to be only interested in the results of social
life or in the xed forms into which it is integrated (for example technical
development or the concentration of capital) and to ignore the human experience
that corresponds to more or less external material processes (for example, the
relations of men to their work in the steam age or the age of electricity, in the age
of competitive capitalism and in that of state monopoly capitalism). In a sense
there is no way to separate material forms and human experience because the
former is determined by the conditions in which they are made, and these
conditions, which are the result of social evolution, are the work of human beings.
But from a practical viewpoint, objective analysis is subordinated to concrete
analysis because it is not conditions that are revolutionary, but human beings, and
the ultimate question is how to know about the ways that human beings
appropriate and transform their situation.
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The urgency of and interest in concrete analysis comes from another direction as
well. Holding close to Marx, we have underlined the role of producers in the social
lives of workers. It must be said, however, that the same could be said in a general
way of any class that has played any role in the history of work. But the role of the
proletariat in production is unlike that of any other class from the past. Its role is
speci c to modern industrial society and can only be indirectly compared with
other social forms which have preceded it. The idea fashionable today amongst
many sociologists, for example, that the most archaic forms of primitive societies
are closer to feudal Europe of the Middle Ages than the latter is to the capitalism to
which it gave way, does not pay adequate attention to the role of classes and their
relations. There is a double relation in any society, one amongst men and another
between men and the objects they transform, but with industrial society the
second relation took on a new signi cance. Now there is a sphere of industrial
production governed by laws that are to a certain extent autonomous. Of course
they are situated in a total social sphere because the relations between classes are
constituted through the relations of production, but not strictly so because the
technical developments and processes of rationalization which have been
characteristic of capitalism since its origins have had impacts that go beyond class
struggle. To take a banal example, the industrial usage of steam or electricity entail
a series of consequences on the division of labor, on the distribution of rms
that are relatively independent of the general form of social relations. Of course,
rationalization and technical development are not realities in themselves: there is
so little to them that they can be interpreted as defenses erected by capitalists
whose pro ts are continuously threatened by proletarian resistance of
exploitation. Nonetheless, even if the motivations of Capital are suf cient to
explain these origins, they still cannot account for the content of technological
development. The deeper explanation for the apparent autonomy in the logic of
technological development is that it is not the work of capitalist management
alone: it is also an expression of proletarian work. The action of the proletariat, in
fact, does not only take the form of a resistance (forcing employers to constantly
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improve their methods of operation), but also of continuous assimilation of

progress, and even more, active collaboration in it. It is because workers are able to
adapt to the rhythm and form of continuous evolution that this evolution has been
able to occur. More basically, because workers carry within themselves responses
to the myriad problems posed within production in its detail they make possible
the appearance of the systematic response that one calls technological innovation.
Explicit rationalization is the gathering, interpretation, and integration from a
class perspective of the multiple, dispersed, fragmented, and anonymous
innovations of men engaged in the concrete processes of production.
From our viewpoint, this last remark is fundamental because it places the
emphasis on experience that unfolds at the point of production and on the
perceptions of workers. This does not entail a separation of this particular social
relation from those of the global society that shape it, but rather recognition of its
speci city. In other words, if we say that industrial structure determines social
structure, which is the means by which it acquires permanence, so that any society
regardless of the class characteristics models itself on certain of its
characteristics, then we must understand the situation into which it places those
who are integrated out of necessity that is, the situation of the proletariat.
So what is a concrete analysis of the proletariat? We will try to de ne it by
enumerating some possibilities and determining their respective interests.
The rst approach would be to describe the economic situation in which the class
nds itself and the in uences that situation has on its structure. At the limit, it
would require a total social and economic analysis. In a more restricted sense, we
would want to talk about working conditions and those of the lives of workers, the
modi cations that have accompanied its concentration and differentiation,
changes in methods of exploitation (intensity of work, length of the work day,
wages and labor markets and so forth). This is the most objective approach in that
it is focused on the apparent (but nonetheless essential) class characteristics. Any
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social group can be studied in this way, and anyone can devote a study to it
independently of any revolutionary commitments whatsoever.12 There is nothing
speci cally proletarian about such work, even as one can say that it is or would be
inspired by political forms opposed to the interests of the exploiting class.
A second approach, the inverse of the rst, would typically be labeled more
subjective. It would focus on all expressions of proletarian consciousness, or on

what one ordinarily refers to as ideology. For example, primitive Marxism,
anarchism, reformism, Bolshevism, and Stalinism represent stages in the
development of proletarian consciousness. It is important to understand the
meaning of their succession, to understand why large numbers of workers have
rallied around them at different historical stages and why these forms continue to
signify in the present context. In other words, it is important to understand what
the proletariat is trying to say by way of these intermediaries. While we make no
claim for its originality many examples can be found in Marxist literature (in
Lenins critiques of anarchism or reformism, for example) this type of analysis
could be taken quite far: the contemporary decline enables an appreciation of the
transformations of doctrines despite the super cial appearances of continuities
(that of Stalinism from 1928-1952 or that of reformism over the past century).
However, whatever its interest, this approach remains abstract and incomplete. It
remains external, using information that can be gathered through publications
(the programs and larger statements of the movement in which one might be
interested) that do not necessarily impose a proletarian viewpoint. And it allows
what is arguably most fundamental about worker experience to escape. It is only
concerned with explicit experience, in what is expressed and put into the form of
programs or articles without being preoccupied with whether or how these ideas
re ect the thoughts and intentions of the workers in whose name they speak.
While there is always a gap that separates what is experienced from what is
elaborated, it acquires a particular ampli cation in the case of the proletariat. This
ampli cation follows from the fact that the working class is not only dominated,
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but is also alienated, totally excluded from economic power and by virtue of that
excluded from being able to represent any status at all. This does not mean that
ideologies have no relation to the class experience of working people, but the
transformation into a system of thought presupposes a break with and anticipation
of that experience which allows non-proletarian factors to exercise their in uence
and make the relation indirect. Here we encounter once again the basic difference
between the proletariat and bourgeoisie noted earlier. For the latter, the theory of
liberalism of a given period is a simple idealization and/or rationalization of its
interests: the programs of its political parties express the status of certain strata of
their organizations. For the proletariat, Bolshevism, although to some extent a
rationalization of the workers condition, was also an interpretation of it
elaborated by a fraction of the worker avant-garde13 associated with an
intelligentsia that was relatively separated from the class. In other words, there are
two reasons for the deformation of worker expression: that it is the work of a
minority external to the real life of the working class or which is constrained to
adopt a relation of exteriority to it; and that it is utopian, not in a pejorative sense,
but in the sense that it is a project that would establish a situation all the premises
of which are not given in the present. Of course, the various ideologies of the
workers movement represent certain kinds of relations to workers, which the
workers recognize as their own, but only represent them in a derivative form.
A third approach would be more speci cally historical. It would consist in research
into a continuity linking the great manifestations of the workers movement since
it came into being, to demonstrate that revolutions and, more generally, diverse
forms of worker resistance and organization (associations, unions, political parties,
committees formed during strikes or in the context of particular con icts) are part
of a progressive experience and to show how this experience is linked to the
evolution of economic and political forms within capitalist society.
Finally there is a fourth approach, one that we see as the most concrete. Rather
than examining the situation of the proletariat from the outside, this approach
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seeks to reconstruct the proletariats relations to its work and to society from the
inside and show how its capacities for invention and power of organization
manifest in everyday life.
Prior to any explicit re ection, to any interpretation of their lot or their role,
workers have spontaneous comportments with respect to industrial work,
exploitation, the organization of production, and social life both inside and outside
the factory. By any account, this is the comportment that most completely
manifests in their personalities. At this level, the distinction between subjective
and objective loses its meaning: this comportment includes ideologies which it
constitutes with a certain degree of rationalization, just as it presupposes
economic conditions. This comportment performs their ongoing integration and
elaboration.
As we have said, such an approach has yet to be really explored. No doubt there are
valuable lessons in the analysis of the 19th century English working class from
Capital; however, to the extent that Marxs preoccupation was to describe the
working conditions and lives of workers, he operated within the rst approach
outlined earlier. Since Marx, there are only literary documents attempting to
describe the worker personality. Over the past few years and primarily from the
United States, a worker sociology has appeared that claims to do concrete
analyses of social relations within production and to isolate their practical
intentions. This sociology is the work of management. Enlightened capitalists
discovered that material rationalization had its limits, that human-objects had
speci c reactions one had to account for if one wanted to get the most out of them
that is, to get them to submit to the most ef cient forms of exploitation. This
admirable discovery pressed into service a Taylorized form of humanism and made
lots of money both for pseudo-psychoanalysts, who were called upon to liberate
workers from their resentment as a harmful obstacle to productivity, and for
pseudo-sociologists, who carried out studies of worker attitudes toward their work
and their comrades in order to help implement the newest notions of social
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adaptation. The misfortune of this sociology is that it cannot get to the proletarian
personality by de nition and is condemned to remain outside by virtue of its class
perspective, seeing nothing but the personality of the producing worker, a simple
executant irreducibly linked to the capitalist system of exploitation. The concepts
used in these analyses, like social adaptation, have for workers a meaning opposite
to that of the researchers (for the latter, there can only be adaptation to existing
conditions: for workers, adaptation implies a lack of adaptation for exploitation).
The results generated are worthless. This failure shows the presuppositions that
would shape a real concrete analysis of proletarian experience. It is fundamental
that the work be recognized by workers as a moment of their own experience, an
opportunity to formalize, condense and confront types of knowledge usually
implicit, more felt than thought, and fragmentary. The distance that separates a
sociology shaped by revolutionary aspirations from the industrial sociology we
have referred to is that which separates the work of time-motion men from the
collective determination of production norms in the context of worker
management. To the workers, an industrial sociologist looks like a time-motion
man trying to measure his psychological durations and the cooperative
dimensions of his social adaptation. In contrast, what we are proposing
presupposes that the workers are engaged in a progressive experience that would
tend to explode the framework of exploitation itself. The work would only be
meaningful for those who participate in that experience themselves. Chief
amongst those people are the workers.
In this respect, the radical originality of the proletariat emerges once again. This
class can only be known by itself, on the condition that whomever inquires about it
acknowledges the value of proletarian experience, orients himself through their
situation and makes his own their social and historical class horizons, and on the
condition that he breaks with the immediately given, that is, with the framework of
exploitation. This sort of work could go quite otherwise with any other social
group. American researchers have studied with considerable success the Midwest
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petite bourgeoisie as if they were studying the Papou on the island of Alor.
Whatever complexities were encountered (we are still discussing the relation of an
observer to what is being studied) along with the necessity for the analyst to go
beyond the simple analysis of institutions in order to constitute something of the
meanings they have for concrete human beings, it is nonetheless possible to
acquire a certain understanding of the group being studied without sharing their
norms and accepting their values. This is because the petit bourgeois, like the
Papous, have an objective social existence which, for better or worse, tends to
perpetuate itself in the same form, one which is solidly linked to conditions in the
present. As we have emphasized throughout, the proletariat is only de ned in
appearance by its condition as the collectivity of executants within capitalist
production. Its actual social life is hidden: it is at once symmetrical with existing
conditions and in stark contradiction to the system that determines those
conditions (the system of capitalist exploitation itself). This opens onto a role that
is different from that which contemporary society imposes on it at every point.
The concrete approach that we see as required by the very nature of the proletariat
entails that we collect and interpret testimonies written by workers. By testimonies
we mean especially narratives that recount individual lives, or, better, experiences
in contemporary industry, made by the interested parties that can provide insights
into their social lives. Let us indicate some of the questions that we think are the
most interesting that can be posed by reading these testimonies, questions which
have been shaped in signi cant measure by documents that already exist14:
We would like to know abouta) the relations of a worker to his work his function
within the factory, level of technical knowledge, and understanding of the
production process. For example, does he know where the piece comes from that
he works on? His professional experience has he worked in other factories, in
other branches of industrial production, etc.? His interest in production what
types of initiative can he bring to his work, is he curious about technical and
technological developments? Does he have a spontaneous sense of the
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transformations that could be brought to the structure of production and rhythms

of work, to the context and conditions that shape life in the factory? Does he have
in general a critical attitude toward managerial efforts at rationalization? How
does he welcome attempts at modernization?
b) Relations with other workers and elements from different social strata within
the enterprise (differences in attitudes toward other workers, toward foremen,
managers, engineers and executives), and understanding of the division of labor.
What do hierarchies of function and wage represent? Would he prefer to do some
of his work at a machine and some in an of ce? How does he accommodate his role
as simple executant? Does he understand the social structure in the factory as
necessary or at least as something that goes without saying? Are there
tendencies toward co-operation, competition or isolation? Preference for working
as an individual or in a team? How are relations amongst individuals divided up?
Personal relations, the formation of small groups and the basis on which they are
established? How important are these small groups for individuals? If these are
different from social relations that take shape in of ces, how are these perceived
and evaluated? What importance does he attribute to the social physiognomy of
the factory? Does he know about other factories and how does he compare them?
Does he have exact knowledge of the wage levels attached to other functions
throughout the enterprise? Does he compare pay stubs with other workers? Etc.
c) Life outside the factory and knowledge about what is happening in the wider
social world. Impact of life inside the factory on life outside of it how his work
materially and psychologically in uences his personal and family life, for example?
Which milieu does he frequent outside the factory? To what extent are these
patterns imposed on him by his work, or by the neighborhood in which he lives?
What are the characteristics of his family life, relations with his children and how
he educates them, his extra-professional activities? How does he occupy his leisure
time? Does he have predilections for particular types of distraction? To what
extent does he use mass media: books, newspapers, radio, cinema? What are his
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attitudes about them? What are his tastes not merely what newspaper does he
read, but what does he read rst? What interests him (accounts of political or
social events, technological developments, bourgeois scandals)? Etc.
d) Links to properly proletarian history and traditions: knowledge of the history of
the workers movement and familiarity with it; participation in particular social or
political struggles and the memories they have left with him; knowledge of workers
in other countries; attitudes toward the future independently of any particular
political estimation, etc.
Whatever the interest of these questions, it is nonetheless important to ask about
the weight attributed to individual testimonies. We know that we will be able to
gather a relatively limited number of texts: on what basis can one generalize from
them? A testimony is by de nition particular: that of a 20- or 50-year-old worker
who works in a small plant or large facility, a developed militant, someone with
extensive trade-union and political experience, one with rigid opinions without
bene t of any particular training or experience in particular without resorting to
arti ce, how can one discount these differences of situation and derive from such
differently motivated narratives lessons of universal import? On this point,
critique is largely justi ed, and it seems clear that the results it would be possible
to obtain would necessarily be limited. At the same time, it would be equally
arti cial to deny all value to these texts. First, no matter how signi cant the
differences amongst them, all these texts are situated within a single frame: the
situation of the proletariat. This allows us to see much more than the speci city of
a particular life in the reading of these texts. Two workers in very different
situations have in common that both have endured one or another form of work
and exploitation that is essentially the same and absorbs three-quarters of their
personal existence. Their wages might be very different, their living situations and
family lives may not be comparable, but it remains the case that they are
profoundly identical both in their roles as producers or machine operators, and in
their alienation. Every worker knows this: it is what enables that sense of
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familiarity and complicity (even when the individuals do not know each other)
which is evident at a glance for a bourgeois who nds himself in a working-class
neighborhood. It is not absurd to look amongst these particular characteristics for
those with a more general signi cation, given that they all have resemblances
which are suf cient to distinguish them from those of any other social group. To
this it must be added that this approach to testimonies would be susceptible to
critique if we were interested in gathering and correlating opinions because these
would necessarily be of a great diversity but as we have said, we are interested in
worker attitudes. These attitudes are sometimes expressed in the form of opinions,
and are often dis gured by them, but they are in every case deeper and more
simple. This would present a considerable obstacle were we to try to use a limited
number of texts to infer the proletarian view of the USSR or of wage hierarchies in
general. But it is a much simpler matter to isolate worker attitudes toward
bureaucracy spontaneously developed from inside the production process. Finally,
we should note that no other mode of knowledge would allow us to respond to the
problems we have posed. Even if we had available the materials required for a vast
statistically-based investigation (the data for which would be gathered by
numerous comrades who would pose thousands of questions to other workers in
various factories, given that we have already excluded any investigation carried out
by researchers from outside the working class), the results would be useless,
because results based on responses gathered from anonymous respondents that
could only be correlated numerically would be without interest. Only responses
attributed to concrete individuals can be brought into relation with each other;
their convergences and divergences enable the isolation of meaning and invoke
systems of living and thinking that can be interpreted. For all these reasons,
individual narratives are invaluable.
This does not mean that we would use this approach to de ne what the proletariat
is in its reality after having rejected all representations that have been made of its
situation as perceived through the distorting prism of bourgeois society or the
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political parties that purport to speak in its name. A worker testimony, no matter
how evocative, symbolic or spontaneous it may be, remains conditioned by the
situation of its author. We are not referring here to the deformations that can arise
in the particular interpretations given by an author, but rather to those which
testimony necessarily imposes on the author. To tell a story is not to act within it.
Telling a story even entails a break with action in ways that transform its meaning.
For example, writing an account of a strike is not the same as participating in that
strike simply because as a participant, one does not yet know the outcome of ones
actions, and the distance entailed by re ection allows for judgments about that
which, in real time, is not xed as to meaning. In fact, there is in this case
something much more than a separation of opinion: there is a change of attitude,
that is, a transformation in the mode of reacting to situations in which one nds
oneself. In addition, a narrative puts the individual in an unnaturally isolated
position. Workers typically act out of solidarity with the other people who are
caught up in the same situation; without even talking about open social struggles,
there is the ongoing everyday struggle within the production process to resist
exploitation, a struggle hidden but continuous and shared amongst comrades. The
attitudes most characteristic of a worker toward his work or toward other social
strata are not found in him, as would be the case with the bourgeois or the
bureaucrat who see their own actions determined by their individual interests.
Rather, the worker shares in collective responses. The critique of a worker narrative
must make visible within individual responses that aspect which leans on
collective comportments; however, in the nal analysis, these registers do not
entirely overlap in a narrative, with the result that we can only derive an
incomplete knowledge from them. To nish and this critique connects back to
the rst at a deeper level the historical context in which these narratives are
published must be clari ed. There is no eternal proletariat that speaks, but a
certain type of worker who occupies a de nite historical position, situated in a
time characterized by a signi cant retreat of worker forces all over the world as the
struggle between two types of exploitative society little by little reduces to silence
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all other social manifestations, as a function of its tendency to develop into both
an overt con ict and a bureaucratic uni cation of the world. The attitude of the
proletariat (even the attitude that we are searching for which transcends to some
extent this particular historical conjuncture) is not the same in a period in which
the class works with an anticipation of emancipation in the short term, on the one
hand, and one in which it is condemned to momentary contemplation of blocked
horizons and to maintain a historical silence, on the other.
It is enough to say that the approach that we characterize as concrete remains
abstract in many respects given that the three aspects of the proletariat (practical,
collective, historical) only emerge indirectly and are thereby deformed. In fact, the
concrete proletariat is not an object of knowledge: it works, it struggles and it
transforms itself. One cannot catch up with it at the level of theory, but only at the
level of practice by participating in its history. But this last remark is abstract
because it does not take into account the role of knowledge in history itself, as a
mode of integration along with work and struggle. It is a fact as manifest as others
that workers pose questions about their condition and the possibilities for
transforming it. One can only multiply theoretical perspectives, which are
necessarily abstract, even at moments of their convergence, and postulate that
progress in the clari cation of worker experience will advance that experience. So
it is not by way of a standard formula that we say that the four approaches we
criticized in succession are in fact complementary. This is not to say that their
results can be usefully added together, but rather that their convergence across
different paths communicates, in a more or less comprehensive manner, the same
reality that we have called proletarian experience, for lack of a better term. For
example, we think that the critique of the evolution of the workers movement, of
its forms of organization and struggle, the critique of ideologies, and the
description of worker attitudes necessarily all con rm one another. Because the
positions that expressed themselves in systematic and rational ways in the history
of the workers movement and the organizations and movements that have
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followed one another all coexist, in a sense, as the interpretations and possible
accomplishments of the proletariat today. Beneath (so to speak) the reformist,
anarchist, or Stalinist movements, there is a projection amongst the workers,
proceeding directly from the relation to production, a projection concerning their
fate which makes these elaborations possible and contains them at the same time.
There is a similar relation to forms of struggle that seem to be associated with
phases of worker history (1848, 1870 or 1917) but which express types of relations
between workers that continue to exist and even to manifest themselves (in the
form of a wildcat strike without any organization, for example). This is not to say
that the proletariat contains by its nature all the moments of its history and all
possible ideological expressions of its condition. Following on what we have been
saying, the material and theoretical evolution of the proletariat has led it to be as it
is and the ways in which the past has come to be condensed in its comportment
today have opened whole new elds of possibilities and re ections. In analyzing
worker attitudes, what is essential is not to lose sight of the fact that the
knowledge obtained through it is limited and that, more profoundly and
comprehensively than is the case with other forms of knowledge, while this does
not undermine its validity, it must be connected back with the workers or risk
becoming unintelligible.
Now that we have enumerated a series of questions that concrete analysis should
enable us to answer or to pose better, we will turn to how concrete analysis might
reorganize and contribute to a deepening of revolutionary theory, after rst
formulating some reservations. The following seem to us the main problems: (1)
Under what form does the worker appropriate social life? (2) How does the worker
integrate himself into his class? That is, what are the relations that unify people
who share this condition and to what extent do these relations constitute a
delimited and stable community in society? (3) What are his perceptions of other
social strata, his communication with society globally, his sensitivity to
institutions and to events that do not directly concern him or his everyday life? (4)
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In what ways does he submit materially and ideologically to the pressures brought
by the dominant class and what are his tendencies to escape from his own class?
(5) Finally, what is his awareness of the history of the workers movement? To what
extent does he feel integrated with the past of the class and what are his capacities
to act with a sense of class tradition?
How could these problems be broached and what would be the interest in doing so?
Take for example the appropriation of social life. The initial approach would be to
detail the skills and technical capabilities of the worker: there is no doubt about
the need for information that directly concerns his professional aptitudes. But
research should also be done into how technical curiosity appears outside of the
workplace, in leisure activities ( in all the forms of bricolage, or in the interest
accorded to scienti c and technical publications, for example) and should clarify
the understandings of technology and the industrial organization of work that the
worker has, as well as his awareness of everything that touches the administration
of things more generally. Without losing interest in an evaluation of the cultural
level of the worker (in the narrow sense that the bourgeoisie typically gives the
term extent of literary, scienti c and artistic knowledge), one would describe the
eld of information to which he is open: newspapers, radio, cinema. At the same
time, we would want to know whether the proletarian has a speci c way of
envisioning events and outcomes and which interest him (whether he hears about
them in the course of everyday life or reads about them in a newspaper, whether
these are of a political order or, as the expression goes, entertainments). The
essential would be to determine whether there is a class mentalit and how it
differs from a bourgeois mentalit.
We merely provide some indications on this point: developing them here would
run us ahead of the testimonies themselves, and these texts allow not only for an
interpretation but also the reconsideration of the extent and order of the questions
involved in our approach to research. The revolutionary interest of such research is
evident. In short, this would be a way to know whether the proletariat has or has
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not submitted to the cultural domination of the bourgeoisie and whether its
alienation has robbed it of an original perspective on society. The answer to this
question could either enable one to conclude that any revolution is doomed to
failure because the overthrow of the State would only bring back a cultural
hodgepodge of the previous society, or it could allow one to perceive the direction
in which a new culture may develop in the scattered and often unconscious
elements that already exist.
Again, we must emphasize, against the all too predictable accusations of bad faith,
that this inquiry into the social life of the proletariat will not study the class from
the outside and will not reveal its nature to those who do not know it. It is a
response to a series of questions posed explicitly by the worker avant-garde and
implicitly by the working class more generally in a situation where a series of
revolutionary defeats and the domination of a worker bureaucracy have
undermined the con dence of the proletariat in its capacities for creativity and in
its own emancipation. Still dominated by the bourgeoisie on this point, workers do
not believe that they have any knowledge of their own. They see themselves as the
pariahs of bourgeois culture.
In fact, their creativity is such that there is no need for it to show itself according
to bourgeois norms; their culture does not exist as an order separated from their
social lives, it does not take the form of the production of ideas. Proletarian culture
exists as a certain power in the organization of things and an adaptation to
progress, as a certain understanding of human relations, a disposition toward
social community. As individuals, workers have only a confused sense of this:
because it is impossible for them to give their culture objective content in a society
based on exploitation, they have come to doubt it and to believe in the reality of
bourgeois culture alone.
Lets take a second example: how to describe the integration of the proletarian into
the class? In this case, the question is knowing how, within the factory, the worker
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perceives those who share his work, as well as the representatives of all other
social strata; of knowing the nature and meaning of the relations he has with his
coworkers; whether he has different attitudes toward workers of different
professional grades (Professional, O.S., or semi-skilled, and manoeuvre, or
unskilled); whether these relations of camaraderie extend beyond the factory;
whether he tends to seek out work that require cooperation. If he has always
worked in a factory, in what situation he began to do so; whether he has considered
the possibility of doing something different or whether the chance has ever
presented itself to change trades? It would be good to know whether he frequents
milieus that are not working-class and what he thinks of them, in particular
whether he has interactions with the peasant milieu and how he evaluates it. It
would be necessary to juxtapose this information with responses concerning quite
different topics. For example, one might use the familiarity of the individual with
the traditions of the workers movement, the acuity of memories associated with
episodes of social struggle, the interest that he takes in this struggle independently
of the judgment he might make of it (a condemnation of a struggle inspired by
revolutionary pessimism and an enthusiastic narrative of the events of 1936 of
1944 can often be found together). Or one might locate a tendency to the history
and, more particularly, the future of the proletariat, noting his reactions to foreign
proletarians, particularly to a relatively well-off proletariat like that in the United
States. In other words, look for everything in the workers personal life that might
show the effects and sense of belonging to the working class and also attempts at
escape from from the condition of being a worker (attitudes about children, the
education they receive and projects oriented toward the future are particularly
signi cant in this respect.)
From a revolutionary viewpoint, this kind of information would have the interest
of showing the manner in which a worker is joined with the class and whether his
belonging to his group is or is not different from that of a petit-bourgeois or a
bourgeois to his group. Does the worker link his fate to all levels of his social
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existence and, consciously or not, to that of his class? Can one con rm concretely
classic, but too-often abstract, phrases class consciousness or class attitude, and
the idea from Marx that, unlike the bourgeois, the proletarian is not only a member
of his class, but an individual within a community and conscious of only being able
to go beyond that by acting collectively?
Socialisme ou Barbarie would like to solicit testimonies from workers and publish
them at the same time as it accords an important place to all forms of analysis
concerning proletarian experience. In this issue the reader will nd the beginning
of such a testimony, one that leaves aside several of the points we have outlined.15
Other such texts could broach these points in ways that go beyond those
envisioned in this issue. In fact, it is impossible to impose an exact framework. If
we have seemed to do so in the course of our explanations, and if we have
produced nothing but a questionnaire, then this work would not be valuable: a
question imposed from the outside might be an irritant for the subject being
questioned, shaping an arti cial response or, in any case, imprinting upon it a
character that it would not otherwise have had. Our research directions would be
brought to bear even on narratives that we provoke: we must be attentive to all
forms of expression that might advance concrete analysis. As for the rest, the
problem is not the form taken by a document, but its interpretation. Who will work
out the relationships understood as signi cant between such and such responses?
Who will reveal from beneath the explicit content of a document the intentions
and attitudes that inspired it, and juxtapose the testimonies? The comrades of
Socialisme ou Barbarie? But would this not run counter to their intentions, given
that they propose a kind of research that would enable workers to re ect upon
their experience? This problem cannot be resolved arti cially, particularly not at
this rst step in the work. In any case, the interpretation, from wherever it comes,
will remain contemporary with the text being interpreted. It can only impress if it
is judged to be accurate by the reader, someone who is able to nd another
meaning in the materials we submit to him. We hope it will be possible to connect
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the authors with texts in a collective critique of the documents. For the moment,
our goal is to gather these materials: in this, we count on the active support of
those sympathetic with this journal.
Translated by Stephen Hastings-King

1. Translators Note: This article originally appeared in Socialisme ou Barbarie
no. 11, dated July, 1952. It was reprinted in the collection Elments dune
critique de la bureaucratie (Paris: Droz, 1971). A scan of the original can be

consulted at the Projet de scannerisation de la revue Socialisme ou Barbarie. In
composing this text, Lefort used Loeuvre completes de Karl Marx published in
Paris by Alfred Costes between 1948 and 1953. For reasons of consistency in
terminology and tone, I have translated quotations directly from the French
and left the original pagination. Socialisme ou Barbarie operated in Paris from
1948-1966. This essay is part of the turn to the sociologically oriented
approach to the working class fundamental for the groups revolutionary
project, in particular from 1953 through 1957. My thanks to Kelly Grotke.
2. Marx, La misre de la philosophie, Costes ed, 135.
3. Translators Note: I retain the phenomenological term comportment
throughout this piece. The term refers to the structure of behaviors or

attitudes toward an environment or situation. It is symmetrical with the
emphasis on overall historical direction that one encounters in this essay as
well.
4. Translators Note: I left this in French. It is associated with the Annales School
of French history. There is no good English equivalent: I have seen cognitive

toolbox used. The term worldview used in translations of Wilhelm Diltheys
hermeneutics is logically closer, even as the social-history oriented
methodologies pioneered by the Annales School made ofmentalit a quite
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different category that refers to a more material orientation toward a

historically-speci c world.
5. Idologie allemande, 242.
6. Cf. The Communist Manifesto.
7. Economie politique et Philosophie, 34.
8. Idologie allemande, 223.
9. Ibid., 229
10. Ibid,, p. 229.
11. Ibid., p. 230.
12. I am thinking of the work by Georges Duveau, La vie ouvrire sous le Second
Empire (Paris: Gallimard, 1946).

13. Translator Note: The worker avant-garde is the center of Socialisme ou
Barbaries construction of revolutionary theory. I kept the term avant-garde

in favor of vanguard an alternate possibility for rendering the term in
English in order to avoid confusion with Lenins Vanguard Party.
14. Paul Romano, The American Worker, translated in Socialisme ou Barbarie
no. 1, and Eric Albert, Tmoignage in Les Temps Modernes, juillet 1952.
15. G. Vivier, La vie en usine in Socialisme ou Barbarie no. 11.
Claude Lefort was a philosopher and a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie.
Issue 3: Workers Inquiry
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3/21/2016

Proletarian Experience (1952)

Socialisme ou Barbarie no. 11 (novembre-dcembre 1952).

Factories Near Mont de Cengle (Paul Czanne, 1870)

subjective development. Despite some reservations concerning what is entailed by

improve their methods of operation), but also of continuous assimilation of

subjective. It would focus on all expressions of proletarian consciousness, or on

transformations that could be brought to the structure of production and rhythms

Translated by Stephen Hastings-King

critique de la bureaucratie (Paris: Droz, 1971). A scan of the original can be

throughout this piece. The term refers to the structure of behaviors or

of French history. There is no good English equivalent: I have seen cognitive

different category that refers to a more material orientation toward a

Empire (Paris: Gallimard, 1946).

Barbaries construction of revolutionary theory. I kept the term avant-garde

Claude Lefort was a philosopher and a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie.

Issue 3: Workers Inquiry

Issue 3: Workers Inquiry

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