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Title: Obituary: Maximilien Rubel Author: Anarchist Communist Federation Date: 1996 Language: en Topics: obituary, Maximilien Rubel, Organise! Source: Retrieved on May 13, 2013 from https://web.archive.org/web/20130513234209/http://www.afed.org.uk/org/issue44/obit.html Notes: Published in Organise! Issue 44 — Autumn/Winter 1996.
Maximilien Rubel died in Paris at the age of 82 in late February. He had
originally arrived in Paris in 1931 to finish his studies in philosophy,
sociology and law that he had started in his home town of Czerlowitz,
which had been first ruled by the Austro-Hungarians, then by the
Romanians, and is now in the Ukraine. He began to frequent radical
circles and to express solidarity with the struggle for social
emancipation., particularly from 1936 when he gave support to the
efforts of the Spanish Anarchists. This activity put him in contact with
unorthodox Marxists, Anarchists and revolutionary syndicalists. His
militant activity began in earnest during the Second World War when he
wrote a number of leaflets in German (his mother tongue) distributed
among the German forces of occupation by the tiny Revolutionary
Proletarian Group in which he was active alongside Roger Bossiere, still
a militant today! The leaflets denounced both Nazism and the Western
imperialist powers. He took the double risk in this very dangerous work
of being both a Jew and a revolutionary.
A supporter of council communism, he participated in the late forties
and the fifties in the activities and the debates of that current,
scattered to the four corners of the world by Stalinism, in particular
his published correspondence with Anton Pannekoek. He began a critical
examination of the work of Marx, and indeed began to produce a Complete
Works of Marx. He ferociously denounced both capitalism and what he saw
as the false socialism of Leninism. His essay Marx-Theoretician of
Anarchism horrified both orthodox Marxists and anarchists. His critique
of the Soviet Union and its satellites directed the fire of the
Stalinists of the French Communist Party upon him. Unlike others who
started out as anti-authoritarian critics of Stalinism, he did not
change into a defender of capitalism and Cold War ‘anticommunism’. He
had contacts with the libertarian socialists of Socialisme ou Barbarie
(who in their turn had a great influence on the British group
Solidarity) and the anarchist communists of the excellent magazine Noir
et Rouge. He was closely allied to Rene Lefeuvre whose Spartacus
publishing house brought out a vast series of anarchist, council
communist and critical Marxist books and pamphlets. He remained a
convinced anti-capitalist and anti-statist right up to his death.