Looking for the Proletariat is a contribution to understanding the implosion of the Marxist Imaginary. The implosion is staged in terms of the first English-language history of the French revolutionary group Socialisme ou Barbarie from 1949 to 1957. Stephen Hastings-King explains why Socialisme ou Barbarie was the only Marxist organisation interested by worker experience and how the group's anti-Leninist position on organisation led it to privilege first-person worker narratives in order to understand worker experience and its revolutionary possibilities.