This book, the first English-language history of the French revolutionary group Socialism ou Barbarie, focuses on the period of 1949 to 1957 when the influence of the group began to wane. Hastings-King explains why Socialisme ou Barbarie's anti-Leninist position on organization led it to privilege first person narratives in order to understand worker experience and its revolutionary possibilities.

Looking for the Proletariat draws on these narratives the only first-person accounts of the working-class experience in French industry during the 1950s to explore the disintegration of collective investment in the Marxist Imaginary that unfolded at Renault's Billancourt factory in the aftermath of the Hungarian Revolution.