Claude Lefort: Marxism, bureaucracy, totalitarianism.

A variety of left-wing thought on the outside the Cold War

Abstract

This article investigates the early work of Claude Lefort. It concentrates on the Marxist critique of the Soviet model that began in the postwar period and prolonged its effects beyond Stalin’s death. It explores the beginnings of a thought that refused the bipolar vision of the “Cold War” and found in the rejection of the Soviet regime a way to intervene in the theoretical and political debates of Marxism. The work focuses on the controversies that Lefort displays in Les Temps Modernes [ltm] and in Socialisme ou Barbarie [sob]. At first, Lefort introduces the question of the Soviet concentration camps in ltm. In a second period, around 1952, the problem was more clearly the ussr, the class and, by extension, the role of the party in revolutionary strategy. It is the era of a bifurcated controversy, with Jean Paul Sartre in ltm and with Cornelius Castoriadis in sob. Finally, around 1956, the critical focus extended to the repercussions of the xx Congress of the cpsu and the debate on the revolution and the counterrevolution in Hungary.