Castoriadis before Castoriadis: How did Paul Cardan become Cornelius Castoriadis?

Cornelius Castoriadis had a history, and a prehistory. The great autonomist was also the key activist and organizer of Socialisme ou Barbarie, that relatively obscure but long-loved journal which nevertheless exerted an intellectual and romantic influence well beyond its print life of almost two decades in small print runs: 1948 to 1967 – a year short of the Big One – but the journal became a legend, in every possible sense. Socialisme ou Barbarie had a long afterlife. In its earlier days Socialisme ou Barbarie of course included figures such as Claude Lefort, and occasional interlocutors like the Dutch council communist Anton Pannekoek, the latter for a moment in 1953. In this context there was some good-humoured barbing, to the effect that maybe Castoriadis, too, wanted to be Lenin. Certainly there were sustained debates over labour, workerism and leadership, prefiguration and example. And there were serious engagements with figures such as Raya Dunayevskaya and CLR James, to which we shall return. There was no shortage of a will to proletarian philosophy or perhaps identity here, only a notable absence of actually existing proletarians among these peripatetic intellectuals and revolutionaries. ¹

It seems to me that there remains a great deal of interest in these pages and debates. Some of this interest will likely remain beyond resolution. Is it at all possible, for example, that Marxism and Revolutionary Theory, which sets out to skewer Marx, was some sort of samizdat autocritique of and by Castoriadis? It remains less than entirely clear what the historic status of this text was, or exactly why Castoriadis chose to include this text of Cardan in his magnum opus on the imaginary. Who was Paul Cardan, or Marc Coudray? Were these only noms des plumes, or do they suggest something else, something more elusive, more games of doubling? Doubtless there is a respectable MLA-type literature on the politics and psyche of the pseudonym. And there is also, always, a kind of common-sense logic here, which would insist that Castoriadis was always, ever, only just Castoriadis. All the same, as he was wont to insist, much of human activity was given to naming; and the key spectre here may be less that of communism than that of psychoanalysis.

How did Cardan become Castoriadis? With the stroke of a pen. As to his real identity, it is also possible that we did not know him at all. Nikos Papastergiadis, for example, shows us another Castoriadis in his brilliant documenta 13 (9/6/2012). It is tempting at the least to imagine that the Castoriadis we came to know, after the big books, was the same person and personality as before, under, behind or alongside all those pseudonyms. We expect there to be a red thread, or two, which might hold the life together – the opposition to bureaucracy; the imperative of autonomy.

These issues are not new, but they may be submerged in the avalanche of enthusiasm for the later work of Castoriadis. Some earlier work is also worth remembering. There was in English the pioneering work of Allen Binstock, in his 1971 Wisconsin MA on Socialisme ou Barbarie, and the later essay that followed by Andre Liebich in the magazine Our Generation in 1977. Then there was the leading work by Brian Singer in the Canadian Journal of Social and Political Theory in 1979. The French-speaking element of Canadian culture mattered, as did the republication of various works of Castoriadis in the series 10/18. Then there was the vital work of Dick Howard, in, for example, Telos and substantiated in the book The Marxian Legacy (1978). We also have some important moments of actual collaboration, as in the text of Facing Reality, whose most prominent hand was that of James. For our purposes, in this brief memorandum, two other sources become especially useful. These are the record of a 1995 talk by Castoriadis on James, and the spellbinding work by Stephen Hastings-King on Socialisme ou Barbarie and the project of worker writing. A much less important work, but one that also comes into play here for me, is the doctoral research I myself conducted into Trotskyism across the period 1978 to 1984. This work mimics the logical structure of Das Kapital, to follow the expansion of Trotskyism out from Trotsky through to Deutscher, Mandel, and James and Dunayevskaya, some of the most prominent of Trotsky’s intellectual followers. There is only one passing reference to Castoriadis in the book that followed, Trotsky, Trotskyism and the Transition to Socialism (Beilharz, 2018 [1987]). I then defined Castoriadis out of the frame of Trotskyism. For me, he was no longer part of that problem-complex, but had shifted outside of it. This still seems to be a sound judgement. What it leaves out of consideration is what came before. For there was indeed some serious alignment between the Johnson-Forest Tendency, James and Dunayevskaya and Socialisme ou Barbarie in the later 1950s.

Who was Johnson, or CLR James? CLR James emerges from this labyrinth as a key figure. Who was he? Aka JR Johnson, he – like Castoriadis – had serious reasons to be using pseudonyms, mainly to do with passports, visas, and personal security. These were still years when radicals had party affiliations and party names. The charismatic autodidact hailed from Trinidad, lived out his later life in London, but at this earlier vital point had chosen himself in Detroit. There is an astonishing spread, range, and vitality of voice to his work, which includes World Revolution 1917–1936 (1937); The Black Jacobins (1938); The Invading Socialist Society (1948); Notes on Dialectics (1948); a personal favourite of mine, American Civilization (1950); State Capitalism and World Revolution (1950); Every Cook Can Govern on Athens (1950); and his most famous hit for six out of the oval, Beyond a Boundary (1963). There are endless writings on pan-Africanism, the ‘Negro Question’ in the Fourth International, and various later volumes and collections released by the avant-garde London press of the 1970s and 1980s, Allison and Busby.

James was to develop an aura that almost put him beyond criticism. He became a kind of left hero for his times, steering into postcolonial waters, exuding good spirit and good vibes with a touch that bordered on the evangelical. No mean feat across the years of left defeat in the margins, overshadowed by the Cold War. There was also a kind of magic to his thinking, of the kind later to be revived by Negri and Hardt, whose classic work Empire (2000) in a sense continues the extravagant idea of the Invading Socialist Society, where, following that clue from Engels, the fantasy is that socialism is entirely immanent in the process of capitalist development. Revolution comes from within, from the belly of the beast, and so is almost always just around the corner. This was an extreme kind of automatic or magical Marxism. In the period of the later 1950s the form this magic took was in the fascination with Hegelian dialectics. Dunayevskaya carried this on, viewing the world through Hegel and then through the texts of Marx, as some kind of ideal political prophesy. Even Castoriadis was apparently touched by this Hegel mania, though his famous connection with Hegel was historicist: Weltgeschichte ist Weltgericht. Castoriadis, of course, came to read Hegel, Marx and Bolshevism through world history, not the other way around.

Who was Dunayevskaya, or Freddie Forest? Born in the Ukraine, Raya Dunayevskaya (Spiegel) was Trotsky’s secretary in the period of his Mexican exile. She shifted to the USA, and thence to the CPUSA, only then to discover the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. Hers was a first translation, in mimeograph. Taking Marx’s Capital seriously meant also developing the theory of Soviet state capitalism, against the US Workers Party and its standpoint of bureaucratic collectivism; a sideline, here, connecting to Castoriadis, for whom the issue of naming would be bureaucratic state capitalism, rather than state capitalism. Dunayevskaya edited News and Letters for many years out of Detroit, publishing there her idiosyncratic mix of Hegelian dialectics through to Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks, this heady mix used as a prism to read daily or industrial politics, the machinations of which were taken to manifest these philosophical dialectics. Her leading works, all books of great sophistication and good libertarian politics themselves, included the classic Marxism and Freedom (1958); Philosophy and Revolution (1973); and Rosa Luxemburg (1985).

There were other actors here, too, including Grace Lee and James Boggs, Paul Romano, author of The American Worker, Marty Glaberman and many others. Both James and Dunayevskaya were to develop direct relations with Castoriadis. Socialisme ou Barbarie developed a direct line of correspondence and translation, as is apparent in the recent Socialisme ou Barbarie Anthology (2007). Here we see a great deal more than the later intellectual heroes, Castoriadis and Lefort, alone at work. We see Lyotard, writing on Algeria; film and book reviews, and reports on various labour struggles elsewhere. Romano’s American Worker, and Mothé’s workers at Renault in Billancourt, are held up as the figures of authentic labour experience. This is a sympathy that evokes Marx’s early, and never to be delivered workers’ survey, and that likely finds its peak literary expression in Ranciere’s Proletarian Nights (Ranciere, 2012). Little wonder that Socialisme ou Barbarie gathered an aura like that of Woodstock. As Hastings-King was later to put it, these were revolutionaries searching for the proletariat. Yet the aura of the romance of labour was of significant power. As Castoriadis was later reputed to have said, ‘if all the people who later claimed to be supporters were, we would have taken power somewhere around 1957’.

What were their sources? Castoriadis, or Cardan, used materials from the Manchester Guardian and News and Letters or Correspondence for his Socialisme ou Barbarie reportage. There were some connections with bourgeois sociology, in the form of sociologie du travail, exemplified in the work of Touraine, Mallet, Crozier. Like News and Letters, every sign of labour militancy here was read as a manifestation of class struggle. Even Hungary 1956 was read as proof of the immanent politics of the team. Socialisme ou Barbarie singularized ’56, as an expression of working-class demand, rather than, as in say Fehér and Heller, as primarily anti-Stalinist, or as in Arendt, as representing the desire for a new republic. Here, rather, it all revolved around the proletariat, or the Proletariat. The ‘Hungarian Source’ was made to be a source for this particular way of thinking, per Socialisme ou Barbarie. The prime philosophical expression of this projection of workerist desire was made manifest less in Castoriadis than in Lefort. In his classic text, ‘The Proletarian Experience’ (1952), it is Marx’s proletariat, the philosophical category rather than the sweating, sensual, suffering figures even of Romano’s or, say, Salgado’s world, who are summoned up to stand in for the category. As Hastings-King has it of Lefort, ‘His theoretical framework was also shot through with problems of uncontrolled identification/projection’ (Hasting-King, 2014: 133). Here, to shoot this back at Cardan, the issue may have been less that Marx was too Marxist, as is claimed in Marxism and Revolutionary Theory, than that Socialisme ou Barbarie themselves were too mythologically Marxist. To put it differently, all the problems left unresolved by Lukács in History and Class Consciousness now come home to roost, this time with a vengeance. If the proletariat already knows, by virtue of their hard-won experience, why do they need radical philosophers to write books for them, or at all?

James was coming to the conclusion that maybe the point was to step aside, or write about Melville or cricket. Castoriadis, or Cardan, had meantime contributed a modest passage to that book, Facing Reality. Unacknowledged, it disappeared into the book just as the labour of the proletarian disappears into the commodity.

What did Castoriadis have to say about James? On 4/4/1992, Castoriadis gave a talk to the CLR James Society of Harvard and Wellesley; immaculate revolutionary credentials (Castoriadis, in Cudjoe and Cain, 1995). It covered Athenian democracy, a topic whose enthusiasm James shared, the present, and some comments on Stalinism and Trotskyism, all this held together by their common enthusiasm for the self-activity of the workers. Post-Trotskyism signalled the shared paths of Johnson-Forest and Socialisme ou Barbarie. They marched together, so to speak, and then parted ways already in 1958. The divisive issue was the nature of the Soviet Union, Castoriadis insisting on his own nomenclature, totalitarian state capitalism, rather than state capitalism, the preferred designation of James and especially Dunayevskaya, for whom it was especially important to derive the analysis of the USSR from the categories of Das Kapital. There were nevertheless important moments of liaison. Castoriadis travelled to London to meet with James in 1954 or 1955. James in turn travelled to Paris in 1955 and 1956 to meet with Socialisme ou Barbarie. Castoriadis met James under the cover of darkness in the Bois de Boulogne. It all feels a bit like Casablanca; no wonder there was a sense of romance here. Socialisme ou Barbarie in result translated The American Worker, and Grace Lee’s A Woman’s Place. Grace Lee (Ria Stone) had earlier stayed in Paris for eight months across the winter of 1947–8. Dunayevskaya had seen Castoriadis as a soulmate and great possible recruit; at 25, she claimed, Castoriadis had already best shown his revolutionary credentials, for he had translated Hegel’s Logic into French. Contrasting Castoriadis favourably with Germain/Mandel, she also claimed that his group was overwhelmingly proletarian (Dunayevskaya, in Cudjoe and Cain, 1995). This latter was, of course, something of an exaggeration. There seems to have been only one proletarian in Socialisme ou Barbarie, Mothé/Gautrat. Or was that two?

Enter Stephen Hastings-King. As essayed by Chamsy el-Ojeili in these pages, Hastings-King’s great achievement is to enter this labyrinth from the perspective of worker writing, implicitly from concerns regarding the romance of labour and authenticity (el-Ojeili, 2016). Hastings-King sets out from the problematic of syndicalism, the worker militant as bricoleur, the romance of radical intellectual enthusiasm for the wildcat strike, the slowdown, the pursuit of no work and jouissance in factory work in these postwar years of part-Fordism in France. Hastings-King argues that the Detroit Correspondence experience became a model for Socialisme ou Barbarie. The connection is fascinating. Detroit and Paris were centres of very different kinds of avant-garde cultures, one perhaps more industrial, the other more cultural (though the distinctions should not be overplayed, but may rather be differences of emphasis; the aesthetic culture of Detroit was also cutting edge).

There is no such strong connection, so much as occasional relations meantime, between Socialisme ou Barbarie and, for example, Italian Workerism. The strongest single connection may have been in the work of Danielo Montaldi, who among other things translated Mothe’s Diary into Italian. Other radicals like Alquati were engaged in parallel projects at Fiat around 1961.The Italian tradition, as has been shown by Steve Wright, may be the closest approximation to what after Ben Anderson might be called not print capitalism but print communism (Wright, 2020). But the strategic orientations of the Italians differed, whatever the sympathies and connections may have been. They were less urgently anti Soviet than anti PCI, opposed fundamentally to the reformism which would result in the mainstream dream of the Historic Compromise into the 1970s. More, Detroit and Paris were umbilically connected in their moment by the transition out of Trotskyism, which had no strong parallel to the traditions of Italian workerism. There was more Bordiga than Trotsky in Italy, than in Paris or Detroit.

Who was Socialisme ou Barbarie’s Worker, then? Daniel Mothé was Socialisme ou Barbarie’s ‘metallo/prolo’. The figure of the metalworker had an iconic status for labour movement radicals, though this could easily also call out jokes about pantomime proletarians, or the attitude that was prolier than thou. Hope in the proles would run through from young Marx to Lukács to Orwell, in different ways. Mothé was The Worker for Socialisme ou Barbarie, or as Hastings-King has it, he occupied the worker writing position in the group’s narrative. He was, so to say, the local equivalent of Romano (also a pseudonym) and The American Worker. A difference between the two cultures, in Detroit and Paris, was that the Americans saw this proletarian writing as beyond, or outside bourgeois culture, where Socialisme ou Barbarie still viewed it as alienated, placed firmly inside the dominant culture. James was deeply workerist. For James, militants like himself, and like themselves, had no purpose. As he wrote in Notes on Dialectics, ‘The proletariat will decide. The thing is to tell the proletariat to decide’ (James, 1980: 181). If capitalism is the problem, and the proletariat is the solution, then who needs intellectuals? For Socialisme ou Barbarie, in comparison, theory remained central, and it could not ever just be the expression of proletarian experience. This is what lay Cardan, or later Castoriadis, open to the period jokey barb that he still wanted to play Lenin. Something had yet to be added, whether political economy, philosophy or later psychoanalysis.

Hastings-King suggests an interpretative triangle for making sense of this aspect of Socialisme ou Barbarie, consisting of Romano’s American Worker, Lefort’s ‘Proletarian Experience’, and the worker newspaper writing project (Hastings-King, 2014: 235). This combination results, in this way of thinking, in a composite Socialisme ou Barbarie construction of the worker: part empirical worker; part proletarian; part imagined double of the Marxist theorist. This suggests that while Mothé/Gautrat is one double, there are also other kinds of doubling going on here between the intellectual leaders and the worker or the figure of the worker (Hastings-King, 2014: 249).

Hastings-King closes his book, and it is also necessarily incomplete, with a passage addressing the question of the psychoanalysis of the revolutionary personality:

Piera Aulagnier characterized investment in forms of radical opposition to the existing order as the rationalization of alienation. It enables a sense of distance from a present in which one has an ambiguous sense of place. This ambiguity is attributed to a social order that is framed as irrational […] One transfers one’s hopes for oneself, which find no coherent outlet in the present, to an alternate future order. A break in this frame leads to accommodation of some kind. (Hastings-King, 2014: 325)

This was not a loss of faith, Hastings-King concludes; but something had changed. ‘The world they inhabited had slowly disappeared.’ And so has ours, perhaps. Every form of rationality may also have its own irrationality. Each form of radicalism will have its own limits and contradictions. And so we continue; for every form of reconciliation also drives us onwards, and even psychoanalysis cannot finally satisfy us. We are bound to need more; and not everything is given to slow disappearance. Not altogether everything has changed since we were young. If we, or our forebears, are no longer looking for the proletariat, there will nevertheless remain other values and norms to seek out and to live by. Then the possible continuities may live on to match the ruptures in history, as well as in personal life. Repetition may override revolution; and incompletion will necessarily remain, alongside radical desire.