The American journal Correspondence and the French journal Socialisme ou Barbarie both aimed to give primacy to workers’ experience of exploitation over its theoretical analysis. This article shows that this primacy was conceived and practised in different ways within these groups: by postulating a harmony between experience and theory; by seeking a political direction in experience, and in theory its conditions of possibility; or finally by aspiring to a pure restitution of experience. Each of these articulations leads to aporias, highlighted by the authors themselves when they debate each other's positions.