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Title: For a Libertarian Communism
Author: Daniel Guérin
Date: 2017
Language: en
Topics: libertarian communism, anarcho-communism, libertarian marxism, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, PM Press
Notes: Published by PM Press under the the *Revolutionary Pocketbooks* series.  Edited and introduced by David Berry. Translation by Mitchell Abidor.

Daniel Guérin

For a Libertarian Communism

Foreword and Acknowledgements by David Berry

This volume contains a selection of texts by the French revolutionary

activist and historian Daniel Guérin (1904–1988), published here in

English translation for the first time. They were written between the

1950s and 1980s and appeared in France in a series of collections:

Jeunesse du socialisme libertaire [Youth of Libertarian Socialism]

(Paris: Riviere, 1959), Pour un Marxisme libertaire [For a Libertarian

Marxism] (Paris: Laffont, 1969), and A la recherche d’un communisme

libertaire [In Search of a Libertarian Communism] (Paris: Spartacus,

1984). A further version of the collection was published after his

death: Pour le communisme libertaire [For Libertarian Communism] (Paris:

Spartacus, 2003). All of these contain slightly different selections of

texts around a common core of recurrent pieces, and the same is true of

this English edition. We have tried to choose those texts which would be

of most interest to present-day readers, but which also give a good

understanding of Guérin’s developing analysis of the failings of the

Left and of his belief that the only way forward was through some kind

of synthesis of Marxism and anarchism.

We are grateful to the Spartacus collective, to Daniel Guerrier, and to

Anne Guérin for permission to publish these translations.

The footnotes are Guérin’s except where indicated; additional

explanatory material is followed by my initials. We have tried (where

possible and practical) to provide references to English translations of

Guérin’s sources, and I am grateful to Iain McKay for his help with

this. I would also like to thank Chris Reynolds, Martin O’Shaughnessy,

and Christophe Wall-Romana for their help in tracking down the source of

Guérin’s reference to Armand Gatti; and Danny Evans and James Yeoman for

their advice regarding films about the Spanish Revolution.

Guérin was a prolific writer on an exceptionally wide range of topics,

and relatively little has been translated into English. A list of his

publications in English can be found at the end of the volume. For

further information, including a full bibliography and links to texts

available online, please visit the website of the Association des Amis

de Daniel Guérin (the Association of the Friends of Daniel Guérin) at

https://www.danielguerin.info/

.

List of Acronyms

Introduction

The Search for a Libertarian Communism: Daniel Guérin and the

“Synthesis” of Marxism and Anarchism

I have a horror of sects, of compartmentalisation, of people who are

separated by virtually nothing and who nevertheless face each other as

if across an abyss.

— Daniel Guérin[1]

As he once wrote of the fate suffered by anarchism, Daniel Guérin

(1904–1988) has himself been the victim of unwarranted neglect and, in

some circles at least, of undeserved discredit. For although many people

know of Guérin, relatively few seem aware of the breadth of his

contribution. His writings cover a vast range of subjects, from fascism

and the French Revolution to the history of the European and American

labour movements; from Marxist and anarchist theory to homosexual

liberation; from French colonialism to the Black Panthers; from Paul

Gauguin to French nuclear tests in the Pacific—not to mention several

autobiographical volumes. As an activist, Guérin was involved in various

movements and campaigns: anticolonialism, antiracism, antimilitarism,

and homosexual liberation. This is a man who counted among his personal

friends Francois Mauriac, Simone Weil, C.L.R. James, and Richard Wright,

to name but a few of the famous names which litter his autobiographies.

His youthful literary efforts provoked a letter of congratulation from

Colette; he met and corresponded with Leon Trotsky; and he had dinner

“en tête-à-tête” with Ho Chi Minh. Jean-Paul Sartre judged his

reinterpretation of the French Revolution to be “one of the only

contributions by contemporary Marxists to have enriched historical

studies.”[2] The gay liberation activist Pierre Hahn believed his own

generation of homosexuals owed more to Guérin than to any other person,

and the Martinican poet Aimé Césaire paid tribute to his work on

decolonization. Noam Chomsky considers Guérin’s writings on anarchism to

be of great importance to the development of contemporary socialist

thought.

Yet despite such assessments, and although there is widespread and

enduring interest in Guérin among activists, he has been badly neglected

by academic researchers in France and especially in the English-speaking

world. This is doubtless due to a combination of factors: Guérin never

held an academic post or any leadership position (except briefly at the

Liberation as director of the Commission du Livre, a government agency

that oversaw the book publishing industry); he was consistently

anti-Stalinist during a period when the influence of the French

Communist Party, both among intellectuals and within the labour

movement, was overwhelming; he never fit easily into ideological or

political pigeonholes and was often misunderstood and misrepresented;

and in France in the 1960s and 1970s, his bisexuality was shocking even

for many on the Left. Guérin was, in a word, a “troublemaker.” [3]

Concerned that his reinterpretation of the French Revolution, La Lutte

de classes sous la Premiere Republique, 1793–1797 (1946), had been

misunderstood, in 1947, Daniel Guérin wrote to his friend, the socialist

Marceau Pivert, that the book was to be seen as “an introduction to a

synthesis of anarchism and Marxism-Leninism I would like to write one

day.” [4] What exactly did Guérin mean by this “synthesis,” and how and

why had he come to be convinced of its necessity? For as Alex Callinicos

has commented, “genuinely innovative syntheses are rare and difficult to

arrive at. Too often attempted syntheses amount merely to banality,

incoherence, or eclecticism.” [5]

It must however be noted from the outset that Guérin had no pretensions

to being a theorist: he saw himself first and foremost as an activist

and secondly as a historian.[6] Indeed, from the day in 1930 when he

abandoned the poetry and novels of his youth, all his research and

writings were concerned more or less directly with his political

commitments.[7] His developing critique of Marxism and his later

interest in the relationship between Marxism and anarchism were

motivated by his own direct experience of active participation in

revolutionary struggles on a number of fronts; they can thus only be

clarified when studied in relation to social and political developments.

Although Guérin, in some of his autobiographical or

semi-autobiographical writings, had a tendency to divide his life into

more or less distinct “phases,” and despite the fact that his political

or ideological trajectory may seem to some to be rather protean, I would

argue that there was in fact an underlying ideological consistency—even

if changing circumstances meant that his “organisational options” (as he

put it) changed in different periods of his life. A historical

materialist all his life, he remained attached to a revolutionary

socialism with a strong ethical or moral core. Although it was many

years before he found an organisation which lived up to his

expectations, he was always at heart a libertarian communist, developing

an increasingly strong belief in the need for a “total revolution” which

would attach as much importance to issues of race, gender, and sexuality

as to workplace-based conflict. Whether specifically in his commitment

to anticolonialism or to sexual liberation, or more generally in his

emphasis on what today would be called intersectionality, Guérin was

undoubtedly ahead of his time.

Early Influences

Despite coming from the “grande bourgeoisie”—a background which he would

come to reject—Guérin owed much to the influence of his branch of the

family: humanist, liberal and cultured, both his parents had been

passionately pro-Dreyfus, both were influenced by Tolstoy’s ethical and

social ideas, and his father’s library contained The Communist Manifesto

as well as works by Benoît Malan, Proudhon, and Kropotkin.[8] The young

Daniel seems to have been particularly influenced by his father’s

pacifism and was also deeply affected by his own reading of Tolstoy’s

Diaries and Resurrection.[9] In the context of the increasingly

polarised debates of the inter-war period between the Far Right and Far

Left (“Maurras versus Marx” as he put it), he identified with the

“Marxist extreme Left” from a relatively early age.[10] His later

“discovery” of the Parisian working class and of the concrete realities

of their everyday existence (to a large extent through his homosexual

relationships with young workers) reinforced a profound “workerism”

which would stay with him for the rest of his life.[11]

The Bankruptcy of Stalinism and Social Democracy

This workerism would lead him in 1930–1931 to join the syndicalists

grouped around the veteran revolutionary Pierre Monatte: typically,

perhaps, Guérin’s first real active involvement was in the campaign for

the reunification of the two major syndicalist confederations, the CGT

(dominated at that time by the PS-SFIO, the Socialist Party) and the

CGTU (dominated by the PCF, the French Communist Party). His workerism

was also responsible for a strong attraction towards the PCF, far more

“proletarian” than the Socialist Party, despite his “visceral

anti-Stalinism” and what he saw as the Party’s “crass ideological

excesses, its inability to win over the majority of workers, and its

mechanical submission to the Kremlin’s orders.”[12] Yet Guérin was no

more impressed with the PS, which he found petty-bourgeois,

narrow-minded, dogmatically anticommunist, and obsessed with

electioneering:

The tragedy for many militants of our generation was our repugnance at

having to opt for one or the other of the two main organisations which

claimed, wrongly, to represent the working class. Stalinism and social

democracy both repelled us, each in its own way. Yet those workers who

were active politically were in one of these two parties. The smaller,

intermediate groups and the extremist sects seemed to us to be doomed to

impotence and marginalisation. The SFIO, despite the social conformism

of its leadership, at least had the advantage over the Communist Party

of enjoying a certain degree of internal democracy, and to some extent

allowed revolutionaries to express themselves; whereas the monolithic

automatism of Stalinism forbade any critics from opening their mouths

and made it very difficult for them even to stay in the party.[13]

Hence his decision to rejoin the SFIO in 1935, shortly before the

creation by Marceau Pivert of the Gauche révolutionnaire (Revolutionary

Left) tendency within the party, of which he would become a leading

member. Guérin was attracted by Pivert’s “Luxemburgist,” libertarian and

syndicalist tendencies.[14] He was consistently on the revolutionary

wing of the Gauche révolutionnaire and of its successor, the Parti

socialiste ouvrier et paysan (PSOP, or Workers’ and Peasants’ Socialist

Party, created when the GR was expelled from the SFIO in 1938), and, in

the Popular Front period, he drew a clear distinction between what he

called the “Popular Front no. 1”—an electoral alliance between social

democracy, Stalinism, and bourgeois liberalism—and the “Popular Front

no. 2”—the powerful, extra-parliamentary, working-class movement, which

came into conflict with the more moderate (and more bourgeois) Popular

Front government.[15] He viewed the “entryism” of the French Trotskyists

in these years as a welcome counterbalance to the reformism of the

majority of the Socialist Party.[16]

Indeed, in the 1930s, Guérin agreed with Trotsky’s position on many

issues: on the nature of fascism and how to stop it; on war and

revolutionary proletarian internationalism; on opposition to the

collusion between “social-patriotism” (i.e., mainstream social

democracy) and “national-communism” (i.e., the PCF) as well as any pact

with the bourgeois Radicals; and on the need to fight actively for the

liberation of Europe’s colonies. As Guérin comments after recounting in

glowing terms his sole meeting with Trotsky in Barbizon (near

Fontainebleau) in 1933: “On a theoretical level as well as on the level

of political practice, Trotsky would remain, for many of us, both a

stimulus to action and a teacher.” [17]

Ultimately, Guérin’s experience of the labour movement and of the Left

in the 1930s—as well as his research on the nature and origins of

fascism and Nazism[18]—led him to reject both social democracy and

Stalinism as effective strategies for defeating fascism and preventing

war. Indeed, the Left—“divided, ossified, negative, and narrow-minded”

in Guérin’s words—bore its share of responsibility and had made tragic

errors.[19] The SFIO was criticised by Guérin for its electoralism and

for allowing its hands to be tied by the Parti radical-socialiste, “a

bourgeois party whose corruption and bankruptcy were in large part

responsible for the fascist explosion”; for its incomprehension of the

nature of the capitalist state, which led to the impotence of Leon

Blum’s 1936 Popular Front government; for its failure to take fascism

seriously (and to aid the Spanish Republicans), despite the warnings,

until it was too late; and for its obsessive rivalry with the PCF. The

PCF was equally harshly criticised by Guérin—for what seemed to him to

be its blind obedience to the Comintern, the criminal stupidity of the

Comintern’s “third period” and for its counter-revolutionary strategy

both in Spain and in France.[20]

As for Trotsky, Guérin disagreed with him over the creation of the

Fourth International in 1938, which seemed to him premature and

divisive. More generally, Guérin was critical of what he saw as

Trotsky’s tendency continually to transpose the experiences of the

Russian Bolsheviks onto contemporary events in the West, and of his

“authoritarian rigidness.” Trotskyism, Guérin argued, represented “the

ideology of the infallible leader who, in an authoritarian fashion,

directs the policy of a fraction or of a party.” [21] What Guérin wanted

to see was “the full development of the spontaneity of the working

class.” [22] Writing in 1963, Guérin would conclude with regard to such

disputes over revolutionary tactics:

The revolutionary organisation which was lacking in June 1936 was not,

in my opinion, an authoritarian leadership emanating from a small group

or sect, but an organ for the coordination of the workers’ councils,

growing directly out of the occupied workplaces. The mistake of the

Gauche révolutionnaire was not so much that it was unable, because of

its lack of preparation, to transform itself into a revolutionary party

on the Leninist or Trotskyist model, but that it was unable ... to help

the working class to find for itself its own form of power structure to

confront the fraud that was the Popular Front no. 1.[23]

So as Guérin summarised the state of the Left in the 1930s: “Everything

made the renewal of the concepts and methods of struggle employed by the

French Left both indispensable and urgent.” [24] These debates on the

Left regarding tactics (working-class autonomy or “Popular Frontism”)

and the role of the “avant-garde” or, in syndicalist terms, the

“activist minority” (minorité agissante) would recur in the postwar

years, and Guérin’s position would vary little.

The Break from Trotskyism

Despite Guérin’s reservations about Trotskyism, his analysis of the

nature of the Vichy regime was very similar to that put forward by the

Fourth International, and he was also impressed with Trotsky’s manifesto

of May 1940, “Laguerre imperialiste et la revolution proletarienne

mondiale” [Imperialist War and the World Proletarian Revolution],

including it in a collection of Trotsky’s writings on the Second World

War he would edit in 1970.[25] He worked with the Trotskyists in the

resistance, not least because they remained true to their

internationalism and to their class politics.[26] They rejected, for

instance, what Guérin saw as the PCF’s demagogic nationalism. Guérin was

thus closely involved with the Trotskyists’ attempts to organise

extremely dangerous anti-militarist and anti-Nazi propaganda among

German soldiers. He also contributed to the activities of a group of

Trotskyist workers producing newsletters carrying reports of workplace

struggles against both French employers and the German authorities.

However, an extended study tour of the United States from 1946 to 1949,

which included visits to branches or prominent militants of the

Socialist Workers’ Party and the breakaway Workers’ Party, represented a

turning point in Guérin’s “Trotskyism.” In a 1948 letter to Marceau

Pivert, he commented on his unhappiness with the Trotskyists’ tendency

to “repeat mechanically old formulae without rethinking them, relying

lazily and uncritically on the (undeniably admirable) writings of

Trotsky.”[27] Looking back thirty years later, he would conclude: “It

was thanks to the American Trotskyists, despite their undeniable

commitment, that I ceased forever believing in the virtues of

revolutionary parties built on authoritarian, Leninist lines.”[28]

The “Mother of Us All”

Unlike many on the Left associated with postwar ideological renewal,

most of whom would focus on a revision or reinterpretation of Marxism,

often at a philosophical level (Sartre, Althusser, or Henri Lefebvre,

for example), Guérin the historian began with a return to what he saw as

the source of revolutionary theory and praxis: in 1946, he published his

study of class struggle in the First French Republic (1793–1797).[29]

The aim of the book was to “draw lessons from the greatest, longest and

deepest revolutionary experience France has ever known, lessons which

would help regenerate the revolutionary, libertarian socialism of

today,” and to “extract some ideas which would be applicable to our time

and of direct use to the contemporary reader who has yet to fully digest

the lessons of another revolution: the Russian Revolution.”[30] Applying

the concepts of permanent revolution and combined and uneven

development, inspired by Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution,

Guérin argued that the beginnings of a conflict of class interest could

already be detected within the revolutionary camp between an “embryonic”

proletariat—the bras nus (manual workers), represented by the

Enragés—and the bourgeoisie—represented by Robespierre and the Jacobin

leadership. For Guérin, the French Revolution thus represented not only

the birth of bourgeois parliamentary democracy, but also the emergence

of “a new type of democracy,” a form of working-class direct democracy

as seen, however imperfectly, in the “sections” (local popular

assemblies), precursors of the Commune of 1871 and the Soviets of 1905

and 1917.[31] In the second edition of the work (1968) he would add “the

Commune of May 1968” to that genealogy.

Similarly, this interpretation tended to emphasise the political

ambivalence of the bourgeois Jacobin leadership which “hesitated

continually between the solidarity uniting it with the popular classes

against the aristocracy and that uniting all the wealthy,

property-owning classes against those who owned little or nothing.”[32]

For Guérin, the essential lesson to be drawn from the French Revolution

was thus the conflict of class interest between the bourgeoisie and the

working classes. Bourgeois, social democratic, and Stalinist

interpretations of the Revolution—like those of Jean Jaures, Albert

Mathiez, and so many others—which tended to maintain the “cult of

Robespierre” and to reinforce the labour movement’s dependence on

bourgeois democracy, were thus to be rejected.[33]

Class Struggle in the First Republic has been described by Eric

Hobsbawm, himself a longstanding Communist Party member, as “a curious

combination of libertarian and Trotskyist ideas—not without a dash of

Rosa Luxemburg.”[34] It not only shocked many academic historians of the

Revolution—especially those with more or less close links to the PCF

(Georges Lefebvre, and especially Albert Soboul and George Rude)—but

also those politicians who, in Guérin’s words, “have been responsible

for perverting and undermining true proletarian socialism.”[35] The

fallout was intense and the ensuing debate lasted for many years;

indeed, Guérin is still today regarded with distrust by many historians

influenced by the Republican and mainstream Marxist (non-Trotskyist)

interpretations of the Revolution as a bourgeois revolution.[36] Guérin

brought that whole historiographical tradition into question. The

political significance was that the Revolutionary Terror had been used

as a parallel to justify Bolshevik repression of democratic freedoms and

repression of more leftist movements. Stalin had been compared to

Robespierre. The Jacobin tradition of patriotism and national unity in

defence of the bourgeois democratic Republic has been one of the

characteristics of the dominant tendencies within the French Left, and

therefore central to the political mythologies of the Popular Front and

the Resistance. Guérin, as Ian Birchall has put it, “was polemicizing

against the notion of a Resistance uniting all classes against the

foreign invader.”[37]

What is more, the PCF had been campaigning since 1945 for unity at the

top with the SFIO, and in the 1956 elections called for the

re-establishment of a Popular Front government. Guérin, as we have seen,

argued that alliance with the supposedly “progressive” bourgeoisie in

the struggle against fascism was a contradiction at the heart of the

Popular Front strategy. His conception of the way forward for the Left

was very different. At a time when fascism in the form of Poujadism

looked as if it might once more be a real threat, Guérin argued that

what was needed was a “genuine” Popular Front, that is, a grassroots

social movement rather than a governmental alliance, a truly popular

movement centred on the working classes that would bring together the

labour movement and all socialists who rejected both the pro-American

SFIO and the pro-Soviet PCF:

And if we succeed in building this new Popular Front, let us not repeat

the mistakes of the 1936 Popular Front, which because of its timidity

and impotence ended up driving the middle classes towards fascism,

rather than turning them away from it as had been its aim. Only a

combative Popular Front, which dares to attack big business, will be

able to halt our middle classes on the slope which leads to fascism and

to their destruction.[38]

The Developing Critique of Leninism

Guérin’s friend and translator, C.L.R. James, wrote in 1958 of the

political significance of Guérin’ s revisiting the history of the French

Revolution:

Such a book had never yet been produced and could not have been produced

in any epoch other than our own. It is impregnated with the experience

and study of the greatest event of our time: the development and then

degeneration of the Russian Revolution, and is animated implicitly by

one central concern: how can the revolutionary masses avoid the dreadful

pitfalls of bureaucratisation and the resurgence of a new oppressive

state power, and instead establish a system of direct democracy?[39]

It was in very similar terms that Guérin expressed the central question

facing the Left in a 1959 essay, “La Revolution déjacobinisée.”[40] This

is an important text in Guérin’s ideological itinerary, continuing the

political analysis he began in La Lutte de classes sous la Pemière

République and developed in La Revolution française et nous [The French

Revolution and Us] (written in 1944 but not published until 1969) and

“Quand le fascisme nous devançait” [When Fascism Was Winning]

(1955).[41]

In “La Révolution déjacobinisée,” Guérin argued that the “Jacobin”

traits in Marxism and particularly in Leninism were the result of an

incomplete understanding on Marx and Engels’ part of the class nature of

Jacobinism and the Jacobin dictatorship, to be distinguished according

to Guérin from the democratically controlled contrainte révolutionnaire

(“revolutionary coercion”) exercised by the popular sections. Thus by

applying a historical materialist analysis to the experiences of the

French revolutionary movement, Guérin came to argue, essentially, that

“authentic” socialism (contrary to what had been argued by Blanqui or

Lenin) arose spontaneously out of working-class struggle and that it was

fundamentally libertarian. Authoritarian conceptions of party

organisation and revolutionary strategy had their origins in bourgeois

or even aristocratic modes of thought.

Guérin believed that when Marx and Engels referred—rather vaguely—to a

“dictatorship of the proletariat” they envisaged it as a dictatorship

exercised by the working class as a whole, rather than by an

avant-garde. But, he continued, Marx and Engels did not adequately

differentiate their interpretation from that of the Blanquists. This

made possible Lenin’s later authoritarian conceptions: “Lenin, who saw

himself as both a ‘Jacobin’ and a ‘Marxist,’ invented the idea of the

dictatorship of a party substituting itself for the working class and

acting by proxy in its name.”[42] This, for Guérin, was where it all

started to go badly wrong: “The double experience of the French and

Russian Revolutions has taught us that this is where we touch upon the

central mechanism whereby direct democracy, the self-government of the

people, is transformed, gradually, by the introduction of the

revolutionary ‘dictatorship,’ into the reconstitution of an apparatus

for the oppression of the people.”[43]

Guérin’s leftist, class-based critique of Jacobinism thus had three

related implications for contemporary debates about political tactics

and strategy. First, it implied a rejection of “class collaboration” and

therefore of any type of alliance with the bourgeois Left (Popular

Frontism). Second, it implied that the revolutionary movement should be

uncompromising, that it should push for more radical social change and

not stop halfway (which, as Saint-Just famously remarked, was to dig

one’s own grave), rejecting the Stalinist emphasis on the unavoidability

of separate historical “stages” in the long-term revolutionary process.

Third, it implied a rejection both of the Leninist model of a

centralised, hierarchical party dominating the labour movement and of

the “substitutism” (substitution of the party for the proletariat) which

had come to characterise the Bolshevik dictatorship.

This critique clearly had its sources both in Guérin’s reinterpretation

of the French Revolution and in the social and political conditions of

the time. La Revolution franrçaise et nous was informed by Guérin’s

critique of social democratic and Stalinist strategies before, during,

and after the war. “La révolution déjacobinisée” was written at a

significant historic moment for socialists in France: after the

artificial national unity of the immediate postwar years had given way

to profound social and political conflict; as Guy Mollet’s SFIO became

increasingly identified with the defence of the bourgeois status quo and

the Western camp in the cold war; as the immensely powerful postwar PCF

reeled under the effects of the Hungarian uprising of 1956 and of the

Khrushchev revelations the same year; and as the unpopular and

politically unstable Fourth Republic collapsed in the face of a

threatened military coup. It was this situation which made renewal of

the Left so necessary. In 1959, Guérin also picked up on the results of

a survey of the attitudes of French youth towards politics, which

indicated to him two things: first, that what alienated the younger

generation from “socialism” was “bureaucrats and purges,” and second,

that, as one respondent put it, “French youth are becoming more and more

anarchist.”[44] Ever the optimist, Guérin declared:

Far from allowing ourselves to sink into doubt, inaction, and despair,

the time has come for the French Left to begin again from zero, to

rethink its problems from their very foundations .... The necessary

synthesis of the ideas of equality and liberty ... cannot and must not

be attempted, in my opinion, in the framework and to the benefit of a

bankrupt bourgeois democracy. It can and must only be done in the

framework of socialist thought, which remains, despite everything, the

only reliable value of our times. The failure of both reformism and

Stalinism imposes on us the urgent duty to find a way of reconciling

(proletarian) democracy with socialism, freedom with Revolution.[45]

From Trotskyism to New Left to Anarchism

What Guérin would thus do which was quite remarkable in post-Liberation

France was endeavour to separate Marxism from Bolshevism—his continued

friendly and supportive contacts with a number of Trotskyists

notwithstanding—and it is noteworthy that he had contact in this period

with a number of prominent non-orthodox Marxists. After 1945,

especially, he was involved (centrally or more peripherally) in a number

of circles or networks, and according to the sociologist Michel Crozier

(who, since their meeting in America, saw Guérin as something of a

mentor) Guérin self-identified in the late 1940s and early 1950s—“the

golden age of the Left intelligentsia”—as an “independent Marxist.”[46]

C.L.R. James, for instance, has already been mentioned. He and Guérin

appear to have met in the 1930s; they became good friends, Guérin

visited him while in the USA in 1949, and they corresponded over many

years. Convinced of the contemporary relevance and of the importance of

Guérin’s analysis, James even began to translate La Lutte de classes

into English, and described the book as “one of the most important

modern textbooks in ... the study of Marxism” and “one of the great

theoretical landmarks of our movement.”[47]

Similarly, Guérin had first met Karl Korsch in Berlin in 1932, and

visited him in his exile in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1947, where

according to Guérin they spent many hours together.[48] The two would

collaborate a decade later in their bibliographical researches on the

relationship between Marx and Bakunin.[49] Also during his time in the

USA in 1947, Guérin became friendly with a group of refugee Germans in

Washington, D.C., dissident Marxists, “as hospitable as they were

brilliant,” connected with the so-called Frankfurt School: Franz

Neumann, Otto Kirchheimer and Herbert Marcuse.[50]

In France, Guérin already knew the leading figures in the Socialisme ou

Barbarie group from their days in the Fourth International’s PCI

(Internationalist Communist Party) together: Guérin’s papers contain a

number of texts produced by the so-called Chaulieu-Montal Tendency in

the late 1940s.[51] It is interesting to note that the Socialisme ou

Barbarie group’s theses on the Russian Revolution feature in the list of

theories and authors discovered by the Algerian nationalist and

revolutionary, Mohammed Harbi, thanks to his first meeting with Guérin

(at a meeting of the PCI discussion group, the “Cercle Lenine”) in

1953.[52] In 1965 Guérin took part, with Castoriadis, Lefort, and Edgar

Morin, in a forum on “Marxism Today” organised by Socialisme ou Barbarie

(whose work Morin would describe a few years later as representing “an

original synthesis of Marxism and anarchism”[53]). Guérin also

contributed to Morin’s Arguments (1956–1962), an important journal

launched in response to the events of 1956 with a view to a

“reconsideration not only of Stalinist Marxism, but of the Marxist way

of thinking,”[54] and he had been centrally involved with the French

“Titoists” around Clara Malraux and the review Contemporains

(1950–1951).[55]

The present state of our knowledge of these relationships does not

enable us to be precise regarding the nature, extent or direction of any

influence which might have resulted, but the least we can say is that

Guérin was at the heart of the Left-intellectual ferment which

characterised these years, that he had an address book, as his daughter

Anne recently put it,[56] as fat as a dictionary and that he shared many

of the theoretical preoccupations of many leading Marxists in the twenty

years or so following the Second World War, be it the party-form,

bureaucracy, alienation or sexual repression.

In the mid-to-late 1950s, like other former or “critical” Trotskyists,

as well as ex-members of the FCL (the Libertarian Communist Federation,

banned in 1956[57]), Guérin belonged—though “without much conviction”—to

a series of Left-socialist organisations: the Nouvelle Gauche [New

Left], the Union de la Gauche Socialiste [Union of the Socialist Left],

and, briefly, the Parti Socialiste Unifie [Unified Socialist Party].[58]

But it was also around 1956 that Guérin “discovered” anarchism. Looking

back on a 1930 boat trip to Vietnam and the small library he had taken

with him, Guérin commented that of all the authors he had studied—Marx,

Proudhon, Georges Sorel, Hubert Lagardelle, Fernand Pelloutier, Lenin,

Trotsky, Gandhi, and many others—“Marx had, without a doubt, been

preponderant.”[59] But having become increasingly critical of Leninism,

Guérin discovered the collected works of Bakunin, a “revelation” which

rendered him forever “allergic to all versions of authoritarian

socialism, whether Jacobin, Marxist, Leninist, or Trotskyist.”[60]

Guérin would describe the following ten years or so (i.e., the mid-1950s

to the mid-1960s)—which saw the publication notably of the popular

anthology Ni Dieu ni Maître and of L’Anarchisme, which sold like

hotcakes at the Sorbonne in May 1968-as his “classical anarchist

phase.”[61] He became especially interested in Proudhon, whom he admired

as the first theorist of autogestion, or worker self-management;[62]

Bakunin, representative of revolutionary, working-class anarchism, close

to Marxism, Guérin insisted, yet remarkably prescient about the dangers

of statist communism; and Max Stirner, appreciated as a precursor of

1968 because of his determination to attack bourgeois prejudice and

puritanism.

The discovery of Bakunin coincided with the appearance of the Hungarian

workers’ committees and the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian uprising

in 1956. These events provoked Guérin into studying the councilist

tradition, which had come to be seen by many as representing a form of

revolutionary socialist direct democracy in contrast to the

Bolshevik-controlled soviets.[63] It was also during the 1950s that

Guérin, moving on from his study of the French Revolution, had begun to

research the political debates and conflicts within the First

International and more generally the relationship between Marxism and

anarchism.

Guérin and Anarchism

Guérin had had no contact with the anarchist movement before the Second

World War, other than to read E. Armand’s individualist anarchist organ

L’en dehors. [64] According to Georges Fontenis, a leading figure in the

postwar anarchist movement, Guérin began to have direct contact with the

then Anarchist Federation (FA) in 1945, when the second edition of his

Fascism and Big Business was published. The FA’s newspaper, Le

Libertaire, reviewed Guérin’s books favourably, and in the 1950s, he was

invited to galas of the FA and (from 1953) of the FCL to do book

signings. He got to know leading anarchist militants and would drop in

at the FCL’s offices on the Quai de Valmy in Paris. Fontenis described

him as being “an active sympathiser” at that point.[65] His new-found

sympathies certainly seem to have been sufficiently well-known for the

US embassy in Paris to refuse him a visa to visit his wife and daughter

in 1950 on the grounds that he was both a Trotskyist and an

anarchist.[66] The ideological stance of the FCL (“libertarian Marxism”)

and its position on the Algerian war (“critical support” for the

nationalist movement in the context of the struggle against French

bourgeois imperialism) proved doubly attractive to the anticolonialist

Guérin.[67] In part for these reasons, 1954 (the beginning of the

Algerian war of independence) represented the beginning of a

relationship, notably with Fontenis (leading light of the FCL), which as

we shall see would ultimately take Guérin into the ranks of the

“libertarian communist” movement.

In 1959, Guérin published a collection of articles entitled jeunesse du

socialisme libertaire: literally the youth—or perhaps the rise, or

invention—of libertarian socialism. This represented both a continuation

of the critique of Marxism and Leninism begun during the war, and—as far

as I am aware—Guérin’s first analysis of the nineteenth—century

anarchist tradition. Significantly, a copy of this collection has been

found with a handwritten dedication to Maximilien Rubel, “to whom this

little book owes so much.”[68] A few years later, in 1965, he would

publish both Anarchism: From Theory to Practice and the two-volume

anthology No Gods No Masters. The purpose was to “rehabilitate”

anarchism, and the anthology represented the “dossier of evidence”:

Anarchism has for many years suffered from an undeserved disrepute, from

an iniustice which has manifested itself in three ways.

Firstly, its detractors claim that it is simply a thing of the past. It

did not survive the great revolutionary tests of our time: the Russian

Revolution and the Spanish Revolution. It has no place in the modern

world, a world characterised by centralisation, by large political and

economic entities, by the idea of totalitarianism. There is nothing left

for the anarchists to do but, “by force of circumstance” as Victor Serge

put it, to “join the revolutionary Marxists.”

Secondly, the better to devalue it, those who would slander anarchism

serve up a tendentious interpretation of its doctrine. Anarchism is

essentially individualistic, particularistic, hostile to any form of

organisation. It leads to fragmentation, to the egocentric withdrawal of

small local units of administration and production. It is incapable of

centralizing or of planning. It is nostalgic for the “golden age.” It

tends to resurrect archaic social forms. It suffers from a childish

optimism; its “idealism” takes no account of the solid realities of the

material infrastructure. It is incurably petit-bourgeois; it places

itself outside of the class movement of the modern proletariat. In a

word, it is “reactionary.”

And finally, certain of its commentators take care to rescue from

oblivion and to draw attention to only its most controversial

deviations, such as terrorism, individual assassinations, propaganda by

explosives and so on.[69]

Although, as we have seen, he referred to the two books (Anarchism and

No Gods No Masters) as representing his “classical anarchist” phase, and

despite his assertion that the basics of anarchist doctrine were

relatively homogeneous, elsewhere he was very clear that both books

focussed on a particular kind of anarchism. To begin with, “the

fundamental aspect of these doctrines” was, for Guérin, that “anarchy,

is indeed, above all, synonymous with socialism. The anarchist is, first

and foremost, a socialist whose aim is to put an end to the exploitation

of man by man. Anarchism is no more than one of the branches of

socialist thought .... For Adolph Fischer, one of the Chicago martyrs,

‘every anarchist is a socialist, but every socialist is not necessarily

an anarchist.’” [70]

In Pour un Marxisme libertaire (1969), Guérin described himself as

coming from the school of “anti-Stalinist Marxism,” but as having for

some time been in the habit of “delving into the treasury of libertarian

thought.” Anarchism, he insisted, was still relevant and still very much

alive, “provided that it is first divested of a great deal of

childishness, utopianism and romanticism,”[71] He went on to comment

that because of this openness towards the contribution of anarchism, his

book, Anarchism, had been misunderstood by some, and that it did not

mean that he had become an “ecumenical” anarchist, to use Georges

Fontenis’ term.[72] In “Anarchisme et Marxisme” (written in 1973),

Guérin emphasised that his book on anarchism had focussed on “social,

constructive, collectivist or communist anarchism” because this was the

kind of anarchism which had most in common with Marxism.[73]

The reason Guérin gave for focussing on this kind of anarchism, as

opposed to insurrectionist, individualist or illegalist anarchism or

terrorism, was that it was entirely relevant to the problems faced by

contemporary revolutionaries: “libertarian visions of the future ...

invite serious consideration. It is clear that they fulfil to a very

large extent the needs of our times, and that they can contribute to the

building of our future.”[74]

But is this really “classical anarchism,” as Guérin put it, given the

insistence on “constructive anarchism, which depends on organisation, on

self-discipline, on integration, on federalist and noncoercive

centralisation”; the emphasis on experiments in workers’ control in

Algeria, Yugoslavia and Cuba; the openness to the idea that such states

could be seen as socialist and capable of reform in a libertarian

direction?[75] This was not the conclusion of English anarchist Nicolas

Walter, whose review of Ni dieu ni maftre commented that “the selection

of passages shows a consistent bias towards activism, and the more

intellectual, theoretical and philosophical approach to anarchism is

almost completely ignored .... There is a similar bias towards

revolution, and the more moderate, pragmatic and reformist approach to

anarchism is almost completely omitted as well.”[76] As for Guérin’s

L’Anarchisme, Walter detected a similar bias towards Proudhon and

Bakunin, and was surprised at the emphasis on Gramsci, “which might be

expected in a Marxist account [of the Italian workers’ councils after

the Great War] but is refreshing in an anarchist one.” Walter was also

sceptical about the attention paid to Algeria and Yugoslavia. In

summary, however, these two books were “the expression of an original

and exciting view of anarchism.”[77]

So Guérin’s two books arguably represented an original departure, and it

is worth quoting some remarks made by Patrice Spadoni who worked

alongside Guérin in different libertarian communist groups in the 1970s

and 1980s:

It has to be said that Daniel Guérin’s non-dogmatism never ceased to

amaze us. In the 1970s, a period in which there was so much

blinkeredness and sectarianism, in our own ranks as well as among the

Leninists, Daniel would often take us aback. The young libertarian

communists that we were ... turned pale with shock when he sang the

praises of a Proudhon, of whom he was saying “yes and no” while we said

“no and no”; then we would go white with horror, when he started quoting

Stirner whom we loathed-without having really read him; then we became

livid, when he began a dialogue with social-democrats; and finally, we

practically had a melt-down when he expressed respect, albeit without

agreeing with them, for the revolt of the militants associated with

Action directe.[78]

Two of these taboos are worth picking up on when considering the extent

to which Guérin’s take on anarchism was a novel one: Proudhon and

Stirner.

Proudhon and the Fundamental Importance of Self-management

Proudhon had already ceased to be an ideological reference for any

section of the French anarchist movement by at least the time of the

Great War, except for a small minority of individualists opposed to any

kind of collective ownership of the means of production. Most anarchists

referred to either Kropotkin or Bakunin. This was partly because of the

ambiguities in Proudhon’s own writings regarding property, and partly

because of the increasingly reactionary positions adopted by some of his

“Mutualist” followers after his death in 1865.

The fact that Proudhon is so central to Guérin’s “rehabilitation” of

anarchism is thus surprising and tells us something about what he was

trying to do and how it is he came to study anarchism in such depth:

whereas Proudhon had already for many years been commonly referred to as

the “pere de l’anarchie,” the “father of anarchy,” Guérin refers to him

as the “pere de l’autogestion,” the “father of self-management.” This is

the crux of the matter: Guérin was looking for a way to guarantee that

in any future revolution, control of the workplace, of the economy and

of society as a whole would remain at the base, that spontaneous forms

of democracy—like the soviets, in the beginning—would not be hijacked by

any centralised power.[79] Marx, Guérin insisted, hardly mentioned

workers’ control or self-management at all, whereas Proudhon paid it a

great deal of attention.[80] Workers’ control was, for Guérin, “without

any doubt the most original creation of anarchism, and goes right to the

heart of contemporary realities.”[81] Proudhon had been one of the first

to try to answer the question raised by other social reformers of the

early nineteenth century. As Guérin put it: “Who should manage the

economy? Private capitalism? The state? Workers’ organisations? In other

words, there were—and still are—three options: free enterprise,

nationalisation, or socialisation (i.e., self-management).”[82] From

1840 onwards, Proudhon had argued passionately for the third option,

something which set him apart from most other socialists of the time,

who, like Louis Blanc, argued for one form or another of state control

(if only on a transitional basis). Unlike Marx, Engels and others,

Guérin argued, Proudhon saw workers’ control as a concrete problem to be

raised now, rather than relegated to some distant future. As a

consequence, he thought and wrote in detail about how it might function:

“Almost all the issues which have caused such problems for present-day

experiments in self-management were already foreseen and described in

Proudhon’s writings.” [83]

Stirner the “Father of Anarchism”?

As for Stirner—generally anathema to the non-individualist wing of the

anarchist movement-the answer lies in what Guérin perceived to be

Stirner’s latent homosexuality, his concern with sexual liberation and

his determination to attack bourgeois prejudice and puritanism: “Stirner

was a precursor of May ’68.”[84] His “greatest claim to originality, his

most memorable idea, was his discovery of the “unique” individual....

Stirner became, as a consequence, the voice of all those who throw down

a challenge to normality.” [85]

What we can see here, underlying Guérin’s approving summary of the

meaning and importance of Stirner, is someone who had for many years

been forced to suffer in silence because of the endemic homophobia of

the labour movement, someone who had been forced by society’s moral

prejudices to live a near-schizoid existence, totally suppressing one

half of his personality. It was Guérin’s personal experience of and

outrage at the homophobia of many Marxists and what seemed to be

classical Marxism’s exclusive concern with materialism and class that

accounts in large part for his sympathy with Stirner.

So to the extent that Guérin insists that every anarchist is an

individualist—at the same time as being a “social” anarchist (anarchiste

societaire)—to the extent that he approves of Stirner’s emphasis on the

uniqueness of each individual, it is because he admires the

determination to resist social conformism and moral prejudice. Guérin

certainly had no truck with the precious “freedom of the individual”

which by the 1920s had already become the stock mantra of those

anarchists who rejected any attempt to produce a more ideologically and

organisationally coherent revolutionary movement or who wished to ground

their action in a realistic (or in Guérin’s words “scientific”) analysis

of social conditions.

For a “Synthesis” of Marxism and Anarchism

So having called himself a “libertarian socialist” in the late 1950s

before going through an “anarchist phase” in the 1960s, by 1968 Guérin

was advocating “libertarian Marxism,” a term he would later change to

“libertarian communism” in order not to alienate some of his new

anarchist friends (though the content remained the same). In 1969, with

Georges Fontenis and others Guérin launched the Mouvement communiste

libertaire (MCL), which attempted to bring together various groups such

as supporters of Denis Berger’s Voie communiste, former members of the

FCL and individuals such as Gabriel Cohn-Bendit who had been associated

with Socialisme ou Barbarie.[86] Guérin was responsible for the

organisation’s paper, Guerre de classes (Class War). In 1971, the MCL

merged with another group to become the Organisation communiste

libertaire (OCL). In 1980, after complex debates notably over the

question of trade union activity, Guérin-who rejected ultra-Left forms

of “spontaneisme” which condemned trade unionism as

counter-revolutionary—would ultimately join the Union des travailleurs

communistes libertaires (UTCL), created in 1978. He would remain a

member until his death in 1988.[87]

Looking back on those years, Georges Fontenis would write: “For us [the

FCL], as for Guérin, ‘libertarian Marxism’ was never to be seen as a

fusion or a marriage, but as a living synthesis very different from the

sum of its parts.”[88] How should we interpret this?

Guérin was always keen to emphasise the commonalities in Marxism and

anarchism, and underscored the fact that, in his view at least, they

shared the same roots and the same objectives. Having said that, and

despite the fact that Rubel seems to have influenced Guérin, Guérin’s

study of Marx led him to suggest that those such as Rubel who saw Marx

as a libertarian were exaggerating and/or being too selective.[89]

Reviewing the ambivalent but predominantly hostile relations between

Marx and Engels, on the one hand, and Stirner, Proudhon, and Bakunin, on

the other, Guérin concluded that the disagreements between them were

based to a great extent on misunderstanding and exaggeration on both

sides: “Each of the two movements needs the theoretical and practical

contribution of the other,” Guérin argued, and this is why he saw the

expulsion of the Bakuninists from the International Working Men’s

Association Congress at The Hague in 1872 as “a disastrous event for the

working class.” [90]

“Libertarian communism” was for Guérin an attempt to “revivify

everything that was constructive in anarchism’s contribution in the

past.” We have noted that his Anarchism focused on “social,

constructive, collectivist, or communist anarchism.”[91] Guérin was more

critical of “traditional” anarchism, with what he saw as its knee-jerk

rejection of organisation, and particularly what he considered to be its

Manichean and simplistic approach to the question of the “state” in

modern, industrial and increasingly internationalised societies. He

became interested particularly in militants such as the Spanish

anarchist Diego Abad de Santillan, whose ideas on “integrated” economic

self-management contrasted with what Guérin insisted was the naive and

backward-looking “libertarian communism” of the Spanish CNT advocated at

its 1936 Saragossa conference by Isaac Puente and inspired, Guérin

thought, by Kropotkin.[92] Such a policy seemed to Guérin to take no

account of the nature of modern consumer societies and the need for

economic planning and coordination at national and transnational level.

In this connection, Guérin also became interested in the ideas of the

Belgian collectivist socialist Cesar de Paepe—who argued against the

anarchists of the Jura Federation in favour of what he called an

“an-archic state”—on the national and transnational organisation of

public services within a libertarian framework.[93]

On the other hand, Guérin’s libertarian Marxism or communism did not

reject those aspects of Marxism which still seemed to Guérin valid and

useful: (i) the notion of alienation, much discussed since Erich Fromm’s

1941 Fear of Freedom, and which Guérin saw as being in accordance with

the anarchist emphasis on the freedom and autonomy of the individual;

(ii) the insistence that the workers shall be emancipated by the workers

themselves; (iii) the analysis of capitalist society; and (iv) the

historical materialist dialectic, which for Guérin remained

one of the guiding threads enabling us to understand the past and the

present, on condition that the method not be applied rigidly,

mechanically, or as an excuse not to fight on the false pretext that the

material conditions for a revolution are absent, as the Stalinists

claimed was the case in France in 1936, 1945 and 1968. Historical

materialism must never be reduced to a determinism; the door must always

be open to individual will and to the revolutionary spontaneity of the

masses.[94]

Indeed, following his focus on anarchism in the 1960s, Guérin returned

in the 1970s to his earlier researches on Marxism, and in his new quest

for a synthesis of the two ideologies he found a particularly fruitful

source in Rosa Luxemburg, in whom he developed a particular interest and

he played a role in the wider resurgence of interest in her ideas. She

was for Guérin the only German social democrat who stayed true to what

he called “original” Marxism, and in 1971 he published an anthology of

her critical writings on the pre-1914 SFIO, as well as an important

study of the notion of spontaneity in her work.[95] Guérin saw no

significant difference between her conception of revolutionary

working-class spontaneity and the anarchist one, nor between her

conception of the “mass strike” and the syndicalist idea of the “general

strike.” Her criticisms of Lenin in 1904 and of the Bolshevik Party in

the spring of 1918 (regarding the democratic freedoms of the working

class) seemed to him very anarchistic, as did her conception of a

socialism propelled from below by workers’ councils. She was, he argued,

“one of the links between anarchism and authentic Marxism,” and for this

reason she played an important role in the development of Guérin’s

thinking about convergences between certain forms of Marxism and certain

forms of anarchism. [96]

Guérin was convinced that a libertarian communism which represented such

a synthesis of the best of Marxism and the best of anarchism would be

much more attractive to progressive workers than “degenerate,

authoritarian Marxism or old, outdated, and fossilised anarchism.”[97]

But he was adamant that he was not a theorist, that libertarian

communism was, as yet, only an “approximation,” not a fixed dogma:

It cannot, it seems to me, be defined on paper, in absolute terms. It

cannot be an endless raking over of the past, but must rather be a

rallying point for the future. The only thing of which I am convinced is

that the future social revolution will have nothing to do with either

Muscovite despotism or anaemic social-democracy; that it will not be

authoritarian, but libertarian and rooted in self-management, or, if you

like, councilist.[98]

Conclusion

To what extent, then, can we say that Guérin succeeded in producing a

“synthesis”? Assessments by fellow revolutionaries have varied. Guérin

himself used to complain that many militants were so attached to

ideological pigeonholing and that quasi-tribal loyalties were so strong

that his purpose was frequently misunderstood, with many who identified

as anarchists criticising him for having “become a Marxist,” and vice

versa.[99] Yet Guérin was always very clear that there have been many

different Marxisms and many different anarchisms, and he also insisted

that his understanding of “libertarian communism” went beyond or

transcended (“dépasse”) both anarchism and Marxism.[100]

Nicolas Walter, in a broadly positive review of Guérin’s work, and

apparently struggling to characterise his politics, described him as “a

veteran socialist who became an anarchist” and as “a Marxist writer of a

more or less Trotskyist variety” who had gone on to attempt a synthesis

between Marxism and anarchism before finally turning to “a syndicalist

form of anarchism.”[101]

George Woodcock, in a review of Noam Chomsky’s introduction to the

Monthly Review Press edition of Guérin’s Anarchism, insisted that

“neither is an anarchist by any known criterion; they are both left-wing

Marxists”-their failing having been to focus too narrowly on the

economic, on workers’ control, on an “obsolete,” “anarchosyndicalist”

perspective.[102] Such a judgement is clearly based on a particular and

not uncontentious conception of anarchism.

The opposite conclusion was drawn by another anarchist, Miguel Chueca,

who has argued that if we look at all the major issues dividing

anarchists from Marxists—namely, according to Guérin’s Pour un Marxisme

libertaire, the post-revolutionary “withering away” of the state, the

role of minorities (or vanguards or avant-gardes) and the resort to

bourgeois democratic methods—then “the ‘synthesis’ results, in all

cases, in a choice in favour of the anarchist position.”[103] Chueca

seems to have based his conclusion on an essentialist view of anarchism

(in the singular) and of Marxism, and on an identification of Marxism

with Leninism. He appears to disregard some significant issues, such as

Guérin’s insistence on the historical materialist dialectic, and the

need for centralised (albeit “non-coercive”) economic planning.

Writing from a sympathetic but not uncritical, Trotskyist perspective,

Ian Birchall suggests that ultimately Guérin’s greatest achievement was

his practice as a militant:

Guérin’s greatness lay in his role as a mediator rather than as a

synthesist. Over six decades he had a record of willingness to cooperate

with any section of the French left that shared his fundamental goals of

proletarian self-emancipation, colonial liberation and sexual freedom.

He was a vigorous polemicist, but saw no fragment of the left, however

obscure, as beneath his attention .... He was also typically generous,

never seeking to malign his opponents, however profoundly he disagreed

with them .... He was always willing to challenge orthodoxy, whether

Marxist or anarchist .... Yet behind the varying formulations one

consistent principle remained: “The Revolution of our age will be made

from below—or not at all.”[104]

Others have embraced Guérin’s theoretical contribution and it is clear

that his ideas on a “libertarian Marxism” or “libertarian communism”

were enormously influential from the 1960s onwards, and many today

(notably, but not only, those in France close to the organisation

Alternative libertaire’[105]) see in him a precursor and are admiring of

his theoretical and practical contribution to the search for a

libertarian communism—albeit as a contribution which needed further

development in the context of the social struggles of the 1980s and

beyond. Indeed Guérin was the first to accept that he had not yet seen

the “definitive crystalisation of such an unconventional and difficult

synthesis,” which would “emerge from social struggles” with “innovative

forms which nobody today can claim to predict”: [106]

It would be pointless today to try to paper over the cracks in the more

or less crumbling and rotting edifice of socialist doctrines, to plug

away at patching together some of those fragments of traditional Marxism

and anarchism which are still useful, to launch oneself into

demonstrations of Marxian or Bakuninian erudition, to attempt to trace,

merely on paper, ingenious syntheses or tortuous reconciliations.... To

call oneself a libertarian communist today, does not mean looking

backwards, but towards the future. The libertarian communist is not an

exegete, but a militant.[107]

---

A version of this introduction was first published in Alex Prichard,

Ruth Kinna, Saku Pinta, and David Berry (eds.), Libertarian Socialism:

Politics in Black and Red (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012; 2^(nd)

edition, Oakland: PM Press, 2017).

For a Libertarian Communism

Why “Libertarian Communist”?

My education was anti-Stalinist Marxist. But for a good long while I

have been foolhardy enough to draw heavily on the treasure chest of

libertarian thought, ever relevant and alive on condition that it is

first stripped of a not insignificant number of childish, utopian, and

romantic notions as little useful as they are out of date.

Hence a misunderstanding that is all but inevitable but embittered by a

certain bad faith on the part of my opponents: the Marxists have turned

their backs on me as an anarchist, and the anarchists, because of my

Marxism, have not always wanted to view me as one of them.

A young, neophyte—and hence sectarian—Marxist even thought he saw in my

writings the assuaging of a consciousness that was “torn” between

Marxism and anarchism and tossed desperately back and forth between the

two, when in fact it is without the least such vacillation or any

concern for my personal intellectual comfort that I believe in both the

need for and the practicability of a synthesis between Marxism and

anarchism.

Recently a working-class newspaper of Trotskyist bent and, let it be

said in passing, of high quality, assured its readers that I had gone

over from Marxism to anarchism. Taking advantage of the right to respond

that was democratically afforded me, I responded to this inaccurate

statement, the fruit of a basic need to catalogue everyone, that I was

making “a contribution to the search for a synthesis between Marxism and

anarchism.” “A synthesis,” I added, “that since May ’68 has moved from

the realm of ideas to that of action.”

But I was still seeking a denomination, since in order to communicate we

all need a label. The one I had decided on ten years ago, that of

“libertarian socialist,” no longer seemed to me appropriate, for there

are many kinds of socialism, from social democratic reformism to

“revisionist communism” and an adulterated humanism. In short, the word

“socialism” belongs to the category of debased words.

[Italian students with whom I had debated Marxism and anarchism in

general and self-management in particular, provided me with the label:

these young people call themselves libertarian Marxists. In truth this

is not a discovery: the protesters of May in France, red and black flags

mixed together, were libertarian Marxists, without being aware of it or

calling themselves such.]

Hence the title of this book. Assembled here are a certain number of

texts, varied in their subject matter and the periods in which they were

written, but which all converge from various roads on the approach to a

libertarian communism.

The short book published under the title Anarchism might have created a

double misunderstanding: that I espoused all the ideas laid out in it

for information purposes, and also that I showed myself unable to draw

from this digest a synthesis of my own devising, which would be valid in

the present and the future.[108] This supposition was doubly inexact,

for I willingly effaced myself before the subject. In the present

collection I attempt to fly with my own wings. At my own risk.

[The materials presented here are followed by the date they were

written, though some retouching was done in order to bring the style and

content up to date.]

The revolution that is rising before us will be—already is—libertarian

communist.

[May 1969]

---

Note: The paragraphs in square brackets were present in the original

1969 version of this article (‘Pourquoi “marxiste libertaire”?’), but

omitted from subsequent editions.

The Rehabilitation of Anarchism

Anarchism has long been a victim of an undeserved discredit, of an

injustice that has manifested itself in three ways.

First, its defamers insist that anarchism is dead, that it has not

resisted the great revolutionary tests of our time: the Russian

Revolution and the Spanish Revolution. That it no longer has a place in

the modern world, characterized as this is by centralization,

large-scale political and economic units, and the totalitarian concept.

All that is left to the anarchists, as Victor Serge said, is, “by the

force of events to go over to revolutionary Marxism.”[109]

Second, its detractors, in order to better discredit it, propose an

absolutely tendentious vision of its doctrine. Anarchism is said to be

essentially individualist, particularist, and resistant to any form of

organization. It aims at fracturing and atomizing, at the retreat into

themselves of local units of administration and production. It is said

to be incapable of unity, centralization, and planning. It’s nostalgic

for “the Golden Age.” It aims for the reviving of outmoded forms of

society. It sins by a childish optimism; its “idealism” fails to take

into account the solid reality of the material infrastructure.

Finally, certain commentators are interested solely in wresting from

oblivion and publicizing only its most controversial deviations, like

individual assassinations and propaganda by the deed.

In revisiting the question I’m not simply trying to retrospectively

repair a triple injustice or trying to write a work of erudition. It

seems to me, in fact, that anarchism’s constructive ideas are still

alive; that they can, on condition they be reexamined and closely

scrutinized, assist contemporary socialist thought in making a new

start.

Nineteenth-century anarchism is clearly distinguishable from

twentieth-century anarchism. Nineteenth-century anarchism was

essentially doctrinal. Though Proudhon had played a more or less central

role in the revolution of 1848, and the disciples of Bakunin were not

totally foreign to the Paris Commune, these two nineteenth-century

revolutions in their essence were not libertarian revolutions, but to a

certain extent rather “Jacobin” revolutions. On the contrary, the

twentieth century is, for the anarchists, one of revolutionary practice.

They played an active role in the two Russian Revolutions and, even

more, in the Spanish Revolution.

The study of the authentic anarchist doctrine, as it was formed in the

nineteenth century, shows that anarchy is neither disorganization,

disorder, nor atomization, but the search for true organization, true

unity, true order, and true centralization, which can only reside, not

in authority, coercion, or compulsion exercised from the top down, but

in free, spontaneous, federalist association from the bottom up. As for

the study of the Russian and Spanish revolutions and the role played in

them by the anarchists, it shows that contrary to the false legend

believed by some, these great and tragic experiences show that

libertarian socialism was largely in the right against the socialism

I’ll call “authoritarian.” Throughout the world, socialist thought over

the course of the fifty years that followed the Russian Revolution, of

the thirty years that followed the Spanish Revolution, has remained

obsessed with a caricature of Marxism, bursting with its dogmas. In

particular, the internecine quarrel between Trotsky and Stalin, which is

the one best known to the advanced reader, if it contributed to wresting

Marxism-Leninism from a sterilizing conformism, did not truly cast

complete light on the Russian Revolution, because it did not

address—could not address—the heart of the problem.

For Voline, anarchist historian of the Russian Revolution, to speak of a

“betrayal” of the revolution, as Trotsky does, is insufficient as an

explanation: “How was that betrayal possible in the aftermath of so

beautiful and total a revolutionary victory? This is the real question

.... What Trotsky calls betrayal was, in fact, the ineluctable effect of

a slow degeneration due to incorrect methods .... It was the

degeneration of the revolution ... that led to Stalin, and not Stalin

who caused the revolution to degener.” Voline asks: “Could Trotsky

really ‘explain’ the drama since, along with Lenin, he himself

contributed to the disarming of the masses.”[110]

The assertion of the late, lamented Isaac Deutscher, according to which

the Trotsky-Stalin controversy would “continue and reverberate for the

rest of the century” is debatable.[111] The debate that should be

reopened and continued is perhaps less that between Lenin’s successors,

which is already outdated, but rather that between authoritarian

socialism and libertarian socialism. In recent time anarchism has come

out of the shadow to which it was relegated by its enemies.

Materials for a fresh examination of anarchism are today available to

those who are impassioned about social emancipation and in search of its

most effective forms. And also, perhaps, the materials for a synthesis,

one both possible and necessary, between the two equally fertile schools

of thought: that of Marx and Engels and that of Proudhon and Bakunin.

Ideas, it should be said, contemporary in their flowering and less

distant from each other than might be thought. Errico Malatesta, the

great Italian anarchist, observed that all the anarchist literature of

the nineteenth century “was impregnated with Marxism.”[112] And in the

other direction, the ideas of Proudhon and Bakunin contributed in no

small degree to enriching Marxism.

[1965]

Proudhon and Workers’ Self-Management

The problem is one with a certain topicality. In effect, it revolves

around the question already touched on by the social reformers of the

nineteenth century and posed with even more perplexity by the men of

today: who should manage the economy? Is it private capitalism? Is it

the state? Is it the associated workers? In other words, three options

existed and continue to exist: free enterprise, nationalization, and

socialization, i.e., self-management.

From 1848 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was the ardent advocate of the third

solution. In this he set himself apart from the socialists of his time,

supporters of at least transitional state management. Their spokesman

was Louis Blanc in his pamphlet on The Organization of Labor

(1840).[113] It was Louis Blanc who was Proudhon’s bête noire, rather

than Marx and Engels, whose Communist Manifesto, written in German in

1847, he was not aware of. Louis Blanc’s influence makes itself felt in

the Manifesto, where it was a question of “centralizing all the

instruments of production in the hands of the state.” State

centralization crops up constantly in it, like a litany: “Centralization

of credit in the hands of the state with state capital and its exclusive

monopoly.” “Centralization in the hands of the state of all means of

transport.” “The organization of industrial armies, particularly for

agriculture.”

It’s true that the authors of the Manifesto, still following Louis

Blanc, envisaged a later stage, no longer statist but clearly

libertarian, from which, the proletariat having destroyed classes and

thus class antagonism, the state would disappear and production

would—finally—be managed by the workers.

But the end of the transitional statist period was relegated to a

distant future, was more or less considered utopian and, because of

this, it was felt unnecessary to lay out the problems of workers’

self-management before its time. When one reads Marx one is surprised at

the rarity, the brevity, and the summary nature of the passages

concerning the free association of producers. On the other hand Proudhon

who, because he was of working-class origins and upbringing, considered

self-management a concrete, immediate problem, studied its functioning

in depth and in detail. This is why those of our contemporaries who

consider the problem of self-management or who try to put it into

practice gain far more from the works of Proudhon than from those of

Marx. Before trying to lay out the Proudhonian conception of workers’

self-management it is necessary to briefly recall, in contrast, his

rejection of “authoritarian” management of the economy. Since he could

not have read the Communist Manifesto and could only have had imperfect

knowledge of Marxist thought, notably through the Poverty of Philosophy,

written in French, it is principally against Louis Blanc, his compatriot

and direct adversary, that Proudhon multiplied his attacks:

The state is the patrimony, it’s the blood and the life of Louis Blanc.

Hit out at the state and Louis Blanc is a dead man.

Once the economic revolution is accomplished, must the state and the

government remain? With the economic revolution ... the state should

completely disappear.[114]

“The instruments of production and exchange should not be entrusted to

the state. Being to the workers what the hive is to bees, their

management should be entrusted to workers’ associations.”[115] Only thus

“large-scale industry which, through the alienation of popular power,

lowers the wage earner to a state worse than slavery, becomes one of the

main organs of freedom and public happiness.”[116] “We associated

producers or those on the path of association.” Proudhon proclaims in

the style of a manifesto, “have no need of the state .... Exploitation

by the state is still monarchy, still wage labor ... We no more want

government of man by man than exploitation of man by man. Socialism is

the opposite of governmentalism .... We want these associations to be

... the first nucleus of a vast federation of companies and enterprises,

united by the common bond of the democratic and social republic.”[117]

Let us now see what the workers’ self-management which Proudhon opposed

to the transitional state management dear to both Louis Blanc and Karl

Marx consisted of.

The revolution of February 1848 saw a spontaneous blossoming of workers’

productive associations born in Paris and Lyon. It was this nascent

self-management, rather than the political revolution, which was, for

the Proudhon of 1848, “the revolutionary fact.” It had not been invented

by a theoretician or preached by doctrinaires. It was not given its

initial impetus by the government. It came from the people. And Proudhon

implored the workers throughout the republic to organize in the same

way; that they draw to them, first small property, small merchants, and

small industry, then large property and large enterprises, and then the

most extensive operations (mines, canals, railroads, etc.), and in so

doing “become the masters of everything.”[118]

There’s a tendency today to only recall Proudhon’s desire, naive to be

sure, and doubtless anti-economic, to ensure the survival of small-scale

artisanal and commercial enterprise. There is certainly no lack of texts

where Proudhon takes the side of small producers. Georges Gurvitch

observed in the rich little book he dedicated to Proudhon that the

writer had entitled a postscript to his Confessions of a Revolutionary

(1851): “Apotheosis of the middle class,” and that he’d “dreamed of a

reconciliation of the proletariat and the middle class.”[119] In his

posthumous book, The Theory of Property, Proudhon made the following

clarification:

The object of workers’ associations is not to replace individual action

by collective action, as was madly believed in 1848, but rather that of

ensuring all the entrepreneurs of small and middle industry the benefit

of the discoveries, machines, improvements and procedures otherwise

unavailable to modest enterprises and fortunes.

But Proudhonian thought is ambivalent on this point. Proudhon was a

living contradiction. He railed against property, the source of

injustice and exploitation, and celebrated it to the extent that he saw

in it a guarantee of personal independence. What is more, we too often

have the tendency to confuse Proudhon with the tiny so-called

Proudhonian coterie that, according to Bakunin, formed around him in the

final years of his life. This fairly reactionary coterie was, he said,

“stillborn.”[120] Within the first International it vainly attempted to

oppose private ownership of the means of production to collectivism. And

if it did not live long it was mainly because most of its followers,

easily convinced by Bakunin’s arguments, did not hesitate to abandon

their supposedly Proudhonian concepts in favour of collectivism.

In any case, the last Mutualists, as they called themselves, only

partially rejected collective property. They only fought against it in

agriculture, given the individualism of the French farmer, but they

accepted it in transport, and in the case of industrial self-management

they called for the thing while rejecting the name.[121] If they were so

afraid of the name it was mainly because the temporary united front

formed against them by Bakunin’s collectivist disciples and certain

authoritarian Marxists, barely disguised supporters of state management

of the economy—like Lucraft at the Basel Congress[122]—did nothing to

reassure them. Marxist defamation did the rest, attributing to Proudhon

the somewhat reactionary point of view of his epigones.

In fact, Proudhon was in step with his time. As Pierre Haubtmann pointed

out in his magisterial thesis, “He has often been incorrectly presented

as hostile to the very principle of large-scale industry. There is no

doubt that at the sight of the Moloch factory—like the tentacular

state—he reflexively recoils in fear, which leads him, in reaction, to

lean towards small businesses and decentralization. But as concerns

economic life, it would be a serious error to think that he was hostile

to the principle of mass production. On the contrary, he speaks to us at

length and enthusiastically of the need for powerful workers’ productive

associations. Of their role and their grandiose future. He thus accepts

and even desires large-scale industry .... But he wants to humanize it,

to exorcise its evil power, to socialize it by handing its fate over to

a community of workers, equal, free, and responsible.”[123] Proudhon

understands it is impossible to go backwards. He is realistic enough to

see, as he writes in his Notebooks, that “small-scale industry is as

foolish as small-scale culture.”[124]

As for large-scale modern industry, demanding a significant number of

workers, he is decisively collectivist: “In the future large-scale

industry and large-scale agriculture must be born of association.”[125]

In General Idea of Revolution in the Nineteenth Century (1851) Proudhon

several times returned to this modernist and, I might say, futurist

concept: “The workers’ companies, a protest against wage labor, are

called on to play a considerable role in the near future. This role will

above all consist in the management of the great instruments of labor

and of certain tasks, which “demand’ both a great division of functions

and a great collective force.”[126]

In his Justice (1858) Proudhon waxes indignant that people have dared to

present him as an enemy of technical progress.[127] In his final work,

which appeared shortly after his death, On the Political Capacity of the

Working Class, he again confirms: “The construction of railroads should

have been entrusted to workers’ companies. If it’s a matter of

large-scale manufacturing, extractive, maritime or steel industries, it

is clear that there is place for association. No one any longer contests

this.”[128]

In my book Anarchism I already listed the essential conditions for

workers’ self-management:

• Every associated individual has an undivided share in the property of

the company.

• Every worker must assume his share of unpleasant and difficult tasks.

• He must pass through a variety of work and instruction and positions

in the company that ensure him an encyclopedic education. Proudhon

insists absolutely on “having the worker go through the series of

industrial operations to which he is connected. In this way the division

of labor can no longer be a cause of degradation for the worker; on the

contrary, it is the instrument of his education and the guarantor of his

security.”[129]

Pierre Haubtmann, commenting on Proudhon, remarked that for Marx it’s

the “automatic workshop”—we would say automation—which, through the

division of labor and the reduction of working hours, both pushed to the

extreme, will allow every man to achieve “total development.” Machinery

extending man, disalienation will enter into play, not in work, but in

leisure. Proudhon is hardly seduced by such a perspective. For him, man

is essentially a producer. He wants him to constantly be at work. We’re

at antipodes from the exuberant Right to be Lazy by Paul Lafargue.[130]

For the ferocious Puritan, for the “Saint Paul of socialism” that

Proudhon was, leisure is not far from being a synonym for lust.[131] He

expects “disalienation” from a mode of production that would give the

worker a synthetic vision of the labor process.[132]

Gurvitch, contrasting Marx and Proudhon, underlines the following

passage from Justice: “The spirit is no longer in the worker; it has

passed over to the machine. What should be the virtue of the worker has

become his degradation.” This evil can only be corrected “if the

collective forces alienated for the profit of a few exploiters are

returned to labor as a whole.”[133]

Proudhon counts on an increase in productivity under self-management,

thanks to the joy of disalienated labor.

After this digression, according to Proudhon the essential conditions of

self-management are:

• Functions are elective and the rules are submitted for the approval of

the associates.

• Remuneration is proportional to the nature of the function, the

importance of the talent, and the breadth of the responsibility. Each

associate participates in the profits in proportion to his services.

• Everyone is free to quit the association at will, to regulate his

hours, and liquidate his share.

• The associated workers select their leaders, their engineers, their

architects, and their accountants. Proudhon insists on the fact that the

proletariat is still lacking in certain abilities. It must be recognized

that “due to the insufficiency of its insights and its lack of business

expertise the working class is still incapable of managing interests as

large as those involved in commerce and large-scale industry, and

consequently falls short of achieving its destiny. Men are lacking among

the proletariat.”[134]

Hence the need to join to workers’ self-management “industrial and

commercial notables” who will initiate the workers in the disciplines of

business and who will be paid a fixed wage: “There is room for everyone

under the sun of the revolution.”[135]

Let us note in passing that this libertarian understanding of

self-management is at antipodes from the paternalistic and statist

“self-management” laid out by Louis Blanc in a decree of September 15,

1849.[136] The author of The Organization of Labor wanted to create

workers’ associations under the aegis of and sponsored by the state. He

envisioned an authoritarian division of profits: 25 percent for the

amortization of capital, 25 percent for social assistance funds, 25

percent for reserve funds; 25 percent to be shared among the workers.

Proudhon wanted nothing to do with a “self-management” of this kind. No

compromise was possible for an intransigent individual like him. The

associated workers were not “to submit to the state” but “to be the

state itself.”[137] “The association ... can do everything, reform

everything without the assistance of the authorities, conquer and force

authority itself to submit.”

Proudhon wanted “to march to government through association and not to

association through government.”[138]

He warned against the illusion that the state, as dreamed of by the

authoritarian socialists, could tolerate free self-management. How

“could it accept, alongside a centralized power, the formation of enemy

centers?” From which this warning, whose intransigence becomes

prophetic: “Nothing is doable through the initiative, spontaneity, and

independent actions of individuals and collectivities as long as they

face the colossal force with which the state is invested by

centralization.”[139]

In fact, Proudhon anticipates here the tragedy of contemporary

self-management, as experienced in both Yugoslavia and Algeria within

the framework of a dictatorial state.

In fact, it is the libertarian and not the statist concept of

self-management that prevailed at the congresses of the First

International. At the Lausanne Congress (1867) the rapporteur, the

Belgian Cesar de Paepe, having proposed making the state the owner of

the enterprises to be nationalized, Charles Longuet, at the time a

libertarian, added: “Agreed, on the condition that it be understood that

we define the state as the collective of citizens ... and also that

these services will not be administered by state functionaries but by

workers’ companies.” The debate was picked up again the following year

(1868) at the Brussels Congress and the same rapporteur was careful to

make the requested rectification: “Collective property will belong to

the entire society, but it will be conceded to workers’ associations.

The state will now be only the federation of various groups of workers.”

The proposal, thus, refined, was adopted.[140]

The optimism Proudhon demonstrated in 1848 relating to self-management

was somewhat belied by the lesson of facts. A few years later, in 1857,

he subjected the workers’ organizations still in existence to a harsh

critique. Their inspiration had been naive, illusory, and utopian. They

had paid the price for inexperience. They had fallen into particularism

and exclusivism. They had functioned like a collective managerial class

and been swept along by the ideas of hierarchy and supremacy. All the

abuses of capitalist societies “were exaggerated in these so-called

fraternal companies.” They had been torn by discord, rivalries,

defections, and betrayals. Their managers, once they had been initiated

into the business, had withdrawn “to set themselves up as bosses and

bourgeois.” Elsewhere, it was the associates who had called for the

sharing out of products. Of the several hundred workers’ associations

created in 1848, twenty remained nine years later. And Proudhon opposed

a notion of “universal” and “synthetic” self-management to that narrow

and particularist mentality. The task for the future was far more than

the “assembling into societies of a few hundred workers;” it was nothing

less than “the economic reconstituting of a nation of thirty-six million

souls.” The future workers’ associations, “instead of acting for the

profit of a few,” must work for all.[141] Self-management thus demanded

“a certain education” of the self-managers. “One is not born an

associate; one becomes one.” The most difficult task of the associations

was that of “civilizing the associates.” What they had lacked—and here

Proudhon renewed his warning of 1851—was “men issued from the working

masses who had learned at the school of the exploiters to do without

them,” It was less a matter of forming “a mass of capital” than a “fund

of men.”[142]

On the legal plane Proudhon had initially envisaged entrusting the

property of their enterprises to the workers’ associations. Now, as

Georges Gurvitch points out, he rejected his original notion “of

ownership by groups of producers.”[143] In order to do this he

distinguished, in a posthumous work, between possession and

property.[144] Property is absolutist, aristocratic, feudal, despotic;

possession is democratic, republican, egalitarian: it consists in the

usufructuary enjoyment of a non-cedable, indivisible and inalienable

concession. The producers would receive, as “allods,” like the ancient

Germans, their instruments of production. They would not be the owners.

This “higher formulation” of ownership would unite all the advantages of

property and association without any of the drawbacks. What would

succeed property would be, as Gurvitch says, federative co-property

attributed not to the state, but to all the producers, united in a vast

agricultural and industrial federation. The economic federation would

come to “counterbalance” the state, a state this time not erased from

the Proudhonian map, but transformed from top to bottom.

And Proudhon sees a revised and corrected self-management in the future:

“It’s no longer vain rhetoric that proclaims it: it’s economic and

social necessity. The moment approaches when we’ll only be able to

advance under these new conditions .... The classes ... must be resolved

into one sole association of producers.”[145]

On what bases will the exchanges between the various workers’

associations be ensured? Proudhon initially maintained that the exchange

value of all merchandise could be measured by the amount of labor

necessary for its production. The various production associations would

sell their goods at cost. The workers, paid with “labor bonds,” would

purchase merchandise at exchange posts or in social stores at cost.

This so-called Mutualist conception was a tad utopian, in any case

difficult to apply under capitalism. The People’s Bank, founded by

Proudhon in early 1849, succeeded in obtaining some 20,000 members in

six weeks, but its existence was to be brief. To be sure, the sudden

rise to power of Prince-President Louis Bonaparte had something to do

with this. But it was illusory to think that Mutualism would spread and

to exclaim as Proudhon did that “it was truly the new world, the society

of “promise’ which, grafted onto the old world, gradually transformed

it!”

It appears that Pierre Haubtmann was correct in stressing in his thesis

the illusory character of the Mutualism of the years 1846–1848. But he

perhaps attacked Proudhon too vigorously in the way that he invokes the

sins of his youth, which would quickly be corrected by his concrete and

more positive visions of workers’ self-management.

Remuneration based on the evaluation of working hours was debatable for

various reasons. Around 1880 the anarchist communists (or “libertarian

communists”) of the school of Kropotkin, Malatesta, Elisée Reclus, Carlo

Cafiero and others did not fail to criticize it. In the first place, in

their eyes it was unjust: “Three hours of Peter’s labor,” Cafiero

objected, “are often worth five hours of Paul’s.” Factors other than

duration intervene in the determination of the value of labor: the

intensity, the professional and intellectual education required, etc. We

must also take into account the worker’s family responsibilities. One

finds the same objections in the Critique of the Gotha Program, written

by Karl Marx in 1875, but hushed up by German social democracy until

1891. and which the libertarian communists thus were not aware of when

they argued against Proudhon.

What is more, maintains the school of Kropotkin, under a collectivist

regime the worker remains a wage earner, a slave to the community that

purchases and keeps an eye on the quantity of his labor. Remuneration

proportionate to the hours of labor furnished by each cannot be an

ideal, but at best a temporary expedient. We must have done with

morality based on accounting ledgers, with the philosophy of “must and

have to.”

This mode of remuneration proceeds from a watered down individualism in

contradiction with collective ownership of the means of production. It

is incapable of implementing a profound and revolutionary transformation

of man. It’s incompatible with anarchism. A new form of ownership

demands a new form of remuneration: the services rendered society cannot

be evaluated in monetary units. Needs must be placed above services. All

the products produced by the labor of all should belong to all, and each

should freely take his share. To each according to his needs; this must

be the motto of libertarian communism.[146]

But Malatesta, Kropotkin, and their friends seem to have been unaware

that Proudhon himself at least partially foresaw their objections and in

the end revised his original conception. His Theory of Property,

published posthumously, explained that it was only in his First

Memorandum on Property, that of 1840, that he supported the equality of

salaries to the equality of labor. “I had forgotten to say two things;

first that labor is measured by a composite of duration and intensity;

second, that there should not be included in the worker’s wage either

the amortization of his educational costs and the work he undertook on

his own as a non-paid apprentice, or the insurance premiums against the

risks he runs, and which are far from being the same in all

professions.”

Proudhon asserted he had “repaired” this “omission” in his subsequent

writings, where he had the unequal costs and risks paid for by the

mutual insurance cooperative societies.[147] We note here that Proudhon

in no way considered the remuneration of association members a salary,

but rather a distribution of profits, freely decided by associated

workers and those jointly responsible. If not, as Pierre Haubtmann

notes, self-management makes no sense.

The libertarian communists also reproached Proudhon’s Mutualism and the

more consistent collectivism of Bakunin for not having wanted to

prejudge the form that the remuneration of labor would take under a

socialist regime. These critics seem to lose sight of the fact that the

two founders of anarchism were careful not to prematurely imprison

society in a rigid framework. On this point they wanted to preserve the

greatest latitude for the workers’ associations. For Bakunin

collectivism had to be practiced “under varied forms and conditions,

which will be determined in each locale, in each region, and each

commune by its degree of civilization and the will of the

population.”[148]

But the libertarian communists themselves provide the justification for

this flexibility, for this refusal of premature solutions when, contrary

to their impatient expectations, they insist that in the ideal regime of

their choice “labor will produce much more than is needed for all.” In

fact, it is only when the era of abundance arrives that “bourgeois”

norms of remuneration can give way to specifically “communist” norms.

And not before this, as Marx and Lenin saw with a certain lucidity,

though not without statist prejudice.[149]

In 1884, writing the program of an anarchist International still in a

state of limbo, Malatesta admitted that communism would only be

immediately realizable in extremely limited sectors and that “for the

rest” one must “transitionally” accept collectivism. “In order to be

realizable, communism requires a great moral development of the members

of society, an elevated and profound feeling of solidarity that the

revolutionary outburst will perhaps not suffice in producing, which is

even more likely in that at the beginning the material conditions

favoring such a development will be lacking.”[150]

After Malatesta, the anarchist Fernand Pelloutier, having become a

revolutionary syndicalist, would be even more categorical: “No one

believes ... that the imminent revolution will realize pure communism.

Since it will in all likelihood break out before anarchist education has

been completed, men will not be mature enough to absolutely rule

themselves. We must take men as they are, as the old society left them

to us.”[151]

Among the norms inherited from bourgeois economics, there is one whose

maintenance under collectivism or self-management raises thorny

problems, to wit, competition. Just as in Proudhon’s eyes private

property in the products of labor constitutes a guarantee for the

producer of their personal independence, competition is “the expression

of social spontaneity,” the guarantor of the “freedom” of associations.

In addition, it constitutes, for a long time to come, an irreplaceable

stimulant without which “an immense relaxation would succeed the ardent

tension of industry.” “Remove competition ... and society, deprived of

its motive force, would stop like a pendulum whose spring is

loose.”[152] Proudhon proposed practical recipes: “Vis-a-vis society,

the workers’ company commits to always providing the products and

services requested of it at a price close to cost.... To this effect the

workers’ company forbids itself any [monopolistic] coalitions, accepts

the law of competition, and places its books and archives at the

disposal of society, which, as the sanction of its right of control,

preserves the ability to dissolve it.”[153] “Competition and association

mutually support each other .... The most deplorable error of socialism

is that of having regarded [competition] as the overturning of society.

There can be no question of destroying competition .... It’s a question

of finding its equilibrium, I would even say its organization.”[154]

This attachment to the principle of competition earned Proudhon the

sarcasm of Louis Blanc. “We are unable to understand those who imagined

some strange coupling of two opposing principles. Grafting association

onto competition is a poor idea. It means replacing eunuchs with

hermaphrodites.”[155]

Louis Blanc wanted to “arrive at a uniform price” fixed by the state and

to prevent any competition between the workshops of one industry.

Proudhon replied that prices “are only settled by competition,” that is,

by the consumer’s ability to “to do without the services of those who

overstate them.”[156]

To be sure, Proudhon did not hide the evils of competition, which he had

abundantly described in his Philosophy of Poverty. He knew it was a

source of inequality. He admitted that “in competition victory is

assured to the largest battalions.” As long as it is “anarchic” (in the

pejorative sense of the term), as it only exists for the profit of

private interests, it necessarily engenders civil war and, in the end,

oligarchy. “Competition kills competition.”[157]

But in Proudhon’s opinion the absence of competition would be no less

pernicious. He cited the example of the state-run tobacco office. This

monopoly, from the very fact that it is free of competition, is too dear

a service and its productivity is insufficient. If all industries were

subject to such a regime, the nation, according to him, would no longer

be able to balance its receipts and expenses.[158]

However the competition dreamed of by Proudhon is not the unfettered

competition of the capitalist economy, but a competition endowed with a

higher principle that “socializes” it; a competition that operates on

the basis of an honest exchange in a spirit of solidarity; a competition

which, while safeguarding individual initiative, will return the wealth

currently diverted by capitalist appropriation to the collective.[159]

It is clear that there is something utopian in this conception.

Competition and the so-called market economy inevitably produce

inequality and exploitation, even if the departure point is a situation

of perfect equality. They can only be joined to workers’ self-management

transitionally, as a necessary lesser evil while waiting for the

development within the self-managers of a mentality of “sincerity of

exchange,” as Proudhon called it[160] and above all, when society has

passed from the stage of penury to that of abundance and competition

loses its entire raison d’être.

But in this transitional period it seems desirable that competition

should be limited, as is the case today in Yugoslavia, to the sphere of

the means of consumption, where it at least has the advantage of

defending the interests of the consumer.[161]

Nevertheless, in Yugoslavia competition too often leads to excesses and

irrationalities which the authoritarian adversaries of the market

economy take pleasure in denouncing. Useful both as a stimulant to the

spirit of enterprise and as a means of struggle against the high cost of

living, it too often sustains among the Yugoslavian self-managers a

selfish and quasi-capitalist mentality from which concern for the

general interest is absent.

It should be noted that workers’ self-management in Yugoslavia is

criticized by the Cubans and the Chinese, precisely because of its

inability to reconcile competition and socialism.

Well before the authoritarian “communists” of today denounced the

coupling of self-management and competition, the libertarian communists

of the 1880s attacked the Proudhonian collectivist economy based on the

principle of struggle, where all that would be done would be

reestablishing among the competitors equality at the starting point in

order to then cast them into a battle necessarily resulting in victors

and vanquished, where the exchange of products would end by being

carried out in accordance with supply and demand, “which would mean

descending into competition, into the bourgeois world.” This language

very much resembles that of certain detractors of the Yugoslav

experience in the communist world. They think it necessary to direct at

self-management the hostility inspired in them by the competitive market

economy, as if the two notions were inseparable from each other. This

was—and I speak of him in the past tense—the case of Che Guevara, for

example, who mistrusted self-management because he thought it synonymous

with competition.[162]

Proudhon, to return to him, sees quite clearly that management by

workers’ associations can only be unitary. He insists on “the need for

centralization and unity.” I do not find in him “that provincialism

closed to the wide world” that some think they saw. He asks the

question: “Aren’t the workers’ companies for the exploitation of

large-scale industries an expression of unity? What we put in place of

government is industrial organization. What we put in place of political

centralization is economic centralization.”

For Proudhon, self-management is society finally “alive, organized;”

“the highest degree of freedom and order which humanity can achieve.”

And in a burst of enthusiasm he exclaims, “Here we are free, emancipated

from our embryonic shell. All relations have been inverted. Yesterday we

walked upside down. We are changing our existence. This, in the

nineteenth century, is the revolution.”[163]

Nevertheless, despite his concern for unity, Proudhon dreads

authoritarian planning, which is why he instinctively prefers to it

competition of solidaristic inspiration. But, in a more consistent

fashion, anarchism has since made itself the advocate for democratic and

libertarian planning, elaborated from the bottom up by the confederation

of self-managed enterprises.

It is in this way that Bakunin glimpsed the possibilities of a planning

on a worldwide scale which open up to self-management: “The workers’

cooperative associations are a new fact in history. We are witnessing

their birth and we can only sense but not determine at this time the

immense development that without any doubt will ensue and the new

political and social conditions that will arise in the future. It is

possible and even quite probable that one day, going beyond the limits

of communes, provinces, and even current states, they will provide all

of human society with a new constitution, divided not into nations, but

into industrial groups.” They will thus form “an immense economic

federation” with, at its summit, a supreme assembly. In light of “data

as broad as it is precise and detailed, of worldwide statistics, they

will combine supply and demand in order to guide, determine, and

distribute among the different countries the production of international

industry in such a way that there will no longer be, or almost no longer

be, commercial and industrial crises, forced stagnation, and any wasted

effort or capital.”[164]

The Proudhonian conception of management by workers’ associations bore

within it an ambiguity. It was not always specified if self-managed

groups would remain in competition with capitalist enterprises, if, as

is today said in Algeria, the socialist sector would co-exist with the

private sector or if, on the contrary, production as a whole would be

socialized and placed under self-management.

Bakunin, unlike his teacher Proudhon, whose ideas are hesitant on this

point, is a consistent collectivist. He clearly sees the dangers of the

coexistence of these two sectors. The workers, even associated, cannot

assemble the capital capable of fighting against big bourgeois capital.

And what is more, the danger exists that within the workers’ association

there will arise, from the contagion of the capitalist environment, “a

new class of exploiters of the labor of the proletariat.”

Self-management contains within it all the seeds of the economic

emancipation of the working masses, but it can only develop all these

seeds when “capital, industrial establishments, primary materials, and

tools ... will become the collective property of productive workers’

associations, both industrial and agricultural, freely organized and

federated among themselves.” “The social transformation can only occur

in a radical and definitive fashion by methods acting upon all of

society,” that is, by a social revolution transforming private property

into collective property. In such a social organization the workers will

collectively be their own capitalists, their own bosses. The only things

left to private property will be “those things that are truly for

personal use.”[165]

As long as the social revolution has not been accomplished Bakunin,

while admitting that productive cooperatives have the advantage of

accustoming workers to managing their own affairs, that they create the

first seeds of collective workers’ action, thought that these islands

within capitalist society could only have limited effectiveness, and he

incited workers “to occupy themselves less with cooperation than with

strikes.”[166] As Gurvitch notes, this is the opposite position from

Proudhon’s, who nourished illusions about the rapid absorption of the

capitalist economy by workers’ self-management, underestimated the

importance of unions and made too little of the right to strike.[167]

By Way of a Conclusion

Proudhon’s ideas on self-management do not form a body of homogeneous

doctrine, perfectly adjusted, free of any hesitation or ambiguity. Far

from it. Contradictions abound in it.

There is a Mutualist Proudhon who defends, exalts, and attempts to save

the independent small producer from the implacable wheel of progress and

there is a resolutely collectivist Proudhon who does not hesitate to

march with his time, with technical progress, with technology, with

large-scale industry.

There is an optimistic Proudhon who in 1848 covers in flowers the

spontaneously born workers’ associations, and there is a pessimistic

Proudhon who, a few years later, in 1857, will draw up a severe balance

sheet of the failure of these associations.

There is a dreamer Proudhon who imagines Mutualism susceptible of

partial application within the capitalist regime and who persuades

himself that the socialist sector, from its own dynamism, will spread,

and there is a Proudhon who is much more realistic, and as a result

reticent on this point.

There is, as concerns the legal status of property under

self-management, a disintegrationist Proudhon who, at first, envisages

entrusting it to the workers’ associations themselves in accordance with

the principle “the factories to the workers,” and there is an

integrationist Proudhon who will later prefer placing all producers in

one vast agricultural and industrial federation.

There is a simplistic Proudhon who proposes an extremely arguable

definition of labor value, and there is a subtler Proudhon who then

admits that the duration of labor cannot be the sole basis for this

calculation and who strives to repair what he calls his “omissions.”

There is the Proudhon who puts private property on trial, and there is a

Proudhon who praises it, just as there is a Proudhon who celebrates the

virtues of competition and there is a Proudhon who insists on its evils.

It’s only quite rarely that he succeeds in constructing a true synthesis

of contradictory notions, and this is why he hides his failures while

flattering himself only for having “balanced” the antinomies.

There is a decentralizing and federalist Proudhon, who mistrusts all

planning for fear of reviving authority, and there is a Proudhon who

does not hesitate to prescribe economic centralization and stresses the

unitary character of production.

There is a Proudhon who, by affirming the capacities of the working

class and its duty to radically separate itself from bourgeois

institutions, opens the way to modern working-class syndicalism, and

there is a Proudhon who underestimates struggles for specific demands,

haunted as he is by the formation of workers’ production cooperatives.

Here we touch on what is perhaps the most serious omission in the

Proudhonian conception of self-management. It fails to be articulated

and coordinated by an anarcho-syndicalism or a revolutionary syndicalism

of the type that made possible the admirable experience of the Spanish

collectivizations of 1936. When Proudhon alludes to “a vast agricultural

and industrial federation,” he fails to dig deeper in the syndicalist

manner into that notion which, under his pen, remains unarticulated and

vague.

There is a Proudhon who, in the first part of his militant life, was

strictly concerned with economic organization, who mistrusted everything

having to do with politics, and there is a second Proudhon who will

cease neglecting the problem of territorial administration, who will

base it on the autonomous commune,[168] though failing to connect in a

sufficiently precise and coherent manner communal power on one side and

workers’ production associations on the other.

Finally, there is a Proudhon who categorically refuses any form of

state—to the point that he issued a sectarian rejection of the

sponsoring of workers’ associations by a socialist-leaning state—and

there is also a Proudhon who no longer considers himself an anarchist

but rather a federalist, and who participates in the state.

These, briefly recalled, are some of the omissions and failings

concerning workers’ self-management in Proudhonian thought.

But alongside these weaknesses, how many lucid points of view, how many

prophetic insights! The reader of Proudhon, if he is up to date on the

concrete problems posed by the practice of self-management in Yugoslavia

[in the 1950s and the early ‘60s], and in Algeria [from independence

until Boumedienne’s coup d’état, 1962–1965], constantly finds himself on

familiar ground. Almost all the difficulties that form the drama of

contemporary self-management can be found announced and described in

Proudhon’s writings. In it they are the object of heart-rending

warnings, whether it’s on the question of the incompatibility of the

tentacular state and free self-management, or of the lack of men

prepared for self-management, or of the lack of technical cadres, or of

the unavoidability—at least during a transitional period—of a market

economy containing a certain degree of competition, and, finally, on the

difficulty of establishing total communism prematurely, which will only

be practicable when abundance reigns and the consumer will only have to

draw from the pile. On all these points Proudhon illuminates the future

with a powerful spotlight.

But even when he hesitates, when he contradicts himself, when he changes

his mind, he provides his reader with a precious lesson in relativism.

It is thrilling to witness the flowering of a creative mind ever in

movement, forever seeking, never fixed, never dogmatic, tumultuous to be

sure, sometimes allowing himself to be carried away by a quip, by

improvisation, by failure to reflect, but capable of correcting himself,

revising himself, of accepting lessons from the facts, of evolving in

the light of experience.

And in any case Proudhon had his excuses. First, in laying the

foundations for workers’ self-management, he entered a domain so virgin

and new that no one could serve as his guide. Second, the contradictions

were less in his ideas than in the object they reflected. Workers’

self-management, by its very nature, is contradictory. It is condemned

to waver between two poles: on one side the autonomy of production

groups, necessary so that each member feels truly free and

“disalienated.” On the other hand, the need for coordination in order to

have the general interest prevail over selfish ones.

This coordination, I think, can be ensured under optimal conditions by

revolutionary working-class syndicalism, which is best qualified to play

such a role, since it is the direct and authentic emanation of the

workers. But where it is lacking, where it is degenerated and

bureaucratized, where it is insufficiently structured, where it is

underestimated, tamed, regarded as a poor relation, like a fifth wheel,

the role of coordinator inevitably falls to the state, a state which, by

the force of circumstances, wants above all to perpetuate itself, to

constantly extend its remit, to infringe on any forms of autonomy, to

nibble away at freedom.

In the final analysis the most profound contradiction that rends

workers’ self-management springs from the historical backwardness of the

education of the proletariat. The capitalist regime, as well as the

unionism of immediate demands that is its corollary, did not prepare the

workers, or prepared them poorly, for their self-management functions.

For an entire period they are thus obliged to seek outside their ranks

the experts, technical cadres, accountants, etc. Where the cadres barely

exist, as in Algeria, the functioning of self-management is seriously

hindered: someone recently observed that Algerian self-management

requires two hundred thousand accountants and the country’s government

envisages the accelerated education of twenty thousand. But where these

experts exist, at least partially, their intrusion from without

subordinates self-management. “Guardianship organizations,” when they

provide technical assistance to self-managed enterprises, tend to

substitute themselves for the self-managers and to become managers in

their stead.

These serious drawbacks can only be eliminated when the fusion “of

science and the working class” dreamed of by Ferdinand Lassalle and,

after him, by Rosa Luxemburg will allow the abolition of guardianship.

As the masses gradually educate themselves the social base upon which

the guardians rest will fade away. They will only be “executive organs,”

controllable and revocable by the “conscious actions” of the

workers.[169]

Socialism is fated to remain a vain word, a demagogic and hollow option,

as long as the workers are not able to manage production for themselves,

as long as they are enslaved, or allow themselves to be enslaved, by a

parasitic bureaucracy imitating the bosses whose place they cannot wait

to take.

In countries like Yugoslavia and Algeria, where self-management still

suffers from many vices in its functioning, it at least has the

advantage of allowing the masses to do their apprenticeship both in

democracy and management, of stimulating their enthusiasm at work (on

the condition, of course, of ensuring them-which is not always the

case-equitable remuneration). It inculcates in them the sense of their

responsibilities, instead of maintaining, as is the case under the yoke

of the omnipotent state, millennial habits of passivity, submission, and

the inferiority complex left to them by a slavish past.

At the end of such an apprenticeship self-management is, in a way,

condemned to succeed. For if this is not the case socialism will have

failed in its historical mission. As Proudhon observed: “Upon the

response that will be given ... depends the entire future of the

workers. If that response is in the affirmative a new world opens before

humanity. If it is in the negative, the proletariat can give up all hope

... : In this world there is no hope for them.”[170]

[1965, in Pour un Marxisme libertaire]

Three Problems of the Revolution

Voline, libertarian historian of the Russian Revolution after having

been an actor and witness, wrote, “A fundamental problem was left to us

by the preceding revolutions: above all I mean those of 1789 and 1917.

Arising in large part against oppression, animated by a powerful surge

of freedom, and proclaiming freedom as their essential goal, why did

these revolutions descend into new dictatorships carried out by other

dominating and privileged strata, into a new slavery of the popular

masses? What would the conditions be that would allow a revolution to

avoid this sad end? Is this end due to passing factors, to errors or

mistakes that could be avoided in the future? And in the latter case,

what would be the means to eliminate the danger that threatens the

imminent revolutions?”[171]

With Voline, I think that the two great historical experiences of the

French and Russian Revolutions are indissolubly connected. Despite the

differences in periods, environment, and “class content,” the problems

they raise, the pitfalls they ran up against, were fundamentally the

same. At the very most, in the first revolution they manifested

themselves in a more embryonic form than in the later one. And so the

men of today can only hope to find the path to their future definitive

emancipation if they are able to distinguish between what was progress

and what was failure in these two experiences in order to draw the

lessons for the future.

In my opinion the basic cause for the relative failure of the two

greatest revolutions in history resides not, to borrow again from

Voline, in “historic inevitability,” or simply in the subjective

“errors” of revolutionary actors. The revolution bears within itself a

serious contradiction (a contradiction which fortunately—and we will

return to the subject—is not irremediable and is attenuated with time):

it can only arise, it can only vanquish if it issues from the depths of

the popular masses, from their irresistible spontaneous uprising; but

although the class instinct drives the popular masses to break their

chains, they are yet lacking in education and consciousness. And since,

in their formidable but tumultuous and blind drive towards liberty, they

run up against privileged, conscious, educated, organized, and tested

social classes, they can only vanquish the resistance they meet if they

succeed in obtaining in the heat of the struggle, the consciousness, the

science, the organization, and the experience they lack. But the very

fact of forging the weapons I have just listed summarily, and which

alone can ensure their superiority over the enemy, bears an immense

peril within it: that of killing the spontaneity that is the very spirit

of the revolution; that of compromising freedom through organization;

that of allowing the movement to be confiscated by an elite minority of

more educated, more conscious, more experienced militants who, to begin

with, offer themselves as guides in order, in the end, to impose

themselves as chiefs and to subject the masses to new forms of the

oppression of man by man.

For as long as socialism has been capable of reflecting on this problem,

for as long as it has been aware of this contradiction, more or less

since the beginning of the nineteenth century, socialism has not ceased

to struggle with it, to waver between the two opposing poles of freedom

and order. Every one of its thinkers and actors has laboriously and

stumblingly striven, at the price of many hesitations and

contradictions, to resolve the fundamental dilemma of the revolution.

Proudhon, in his famous Memoire sur la Propriété (1840), thought he had

found the synthesis when he optimistically wrote: “the highest

perfection of society is found in the unity of order and anarchy.” But a

quarter of a century later he melancholically noted: “These two ideas,

freedom ... and order, stand together .... They cannot be separated, nor

can one be absorbed in the other; we must resign ourselves to living

with both, with keeping them in balance .... No political force has yet

provided the true solution to the harmony of freedom and order.”[172]

Today an immense empire, constructed under the sign of “socialism” (and

of “communism”), seeks painfully, without design, and sometimes

convulsively to escape the iron shackles of an “order” founded on

coercion in order to find the road to freedom which its millions of

subjects, daily more experienced and conscious, aspire to. The problem

has been posed in an ever-more-burning fashion, and the final word has

not been spoken.

If we look at it more closely, the problem has three relatively distinct

aspects, though they are intimately connected.

• In the period of revolutionary struggle, what parts should spontaneity

and consciousness, the masses and the leaders, play?

• Once the old oppressive regime has been overthrown, what form of

political and administrative organization must be substituted for the

one just defeated?

• Finally, who should administer the economy and how should it be

administered after the abolition of private property (a problem that is

posed in all its magnitude for the proletarian revolution but which was

posed only embryonically for the French Revolution)?

On each of these three questions, the socialists of the nineteenth

century hesitated, shilly-shallied, contradicted themselves, and

confronted each other. Which socialists?

Broadly speaking, three main currents can be distinguished:

• Those I will call authoritarian, the statists and centralists, some

the heirs of the Jacobin and Blanquist tradition of the French

Revolution, others of the German (or more precisely, Prussian) tradition

of the military discipline of the State with a capital “S”[173]

• Those I will call anti-authoritarian, the libertarians, some of them

heirs of the direct democracy of 1793, of the communalist and federalist

idea, and others of Saint-Simonian apoliticism aspiring to substitute

“the administration of things” for political government.

• Finally, the so-called scientific socialists (Marx and Engels),

laboriously striving, not always coherently or successfully, and often

for purely tactical reasons (for they had to make concessions to the two

wings of the working-class movement) to reconcile the two aforementioned

currents, to find a compromise between the authoritarian and libertarian

ideas.

Let us try to briefly summarize the attempts made by these three

currents of socialist thought to resolve the three fundamental problems

of the revolution.

Spontaneity and Consciousness

The authoritarians do not have faith in the capacity of the masses to

achieve consciousness on their own and, even when they claim the

contrary, they have a panic fear of the masses. If they are to be

believed, the masses are still degraded by centuries of oppression. They

need to be guided and led. A small elite of leaders must be substituted

for them to teach them revolutionary strategy and lead them to victory.

The libertarians, on the contrary, maintain that the revolution must be

the work of the masses themselves, of their spontaneity, of their free

initiative, of their creative faculties, as unsuspected as they are

formidable. They put people on guard against the chiefs who, in the name

of greater consciousness, aspire to impose themselves on the masses in

order to then despoil them of the fruits of their victory.

As for Marx and Engels, they at times placed the accent on spontaneity

and at others on consciousness. But their synthesis remains a shaky,

uncertain, and contradictory one. It must also be said that the

libertarians do not always escape the same reproach. We find in

Proudhon, juxtaposed to the optimistic exaltation of “the political

capacity of the working classes,” pessimistic passages in which he casts

doubt on said capacity and joins the authoritarians in their suggestion

that the masses must be led from above.[174] In the same way Mikhail

Bakunin does not always succeed in ridding himself of the “48er”

conspiratorialism of his youth and, immediately after relying on the

irresistible primal instincts of the masses, he turns around and calls

for the invisible “infiltration” of the latter by conscious leaders

organized in secret societies. From which this strange back and forth:

those he accuses, at times not without basis, of authoritarianism, catch

him in the act of authoritarian Machiavellianism.

The two antagonistic tendencies of the First International mutually

condemned each other, each with a certain amount of reason, for

backstage maneuvers to ensure control of the movement.[175] We had to

wait for Rosa Luxemburg for a more or less viable synthesis to be

proposed between spontaneity and consciousness. But Trotsky compromised

this laboriously obtained equilibrium in order to take the contradiction

to its extreme. At certain moments he is “Luxemburgist.” As can be seen

in his 1905 (1907) and his History of the Russian Revolution (1930), he

has a feeling and an instinct for revolution from below; he places the

accent on the autonomous actions of the masses, but in the end, after

having brilliantly combatted them, he rallies to Lenin’s Blanquist

conception of organization[176] and, once in power, he would act in a

more authoritarian fashion than the leader of the school. Finally, in

the harsh combat of his exile, he would shelter behind a now sanctified

Lenin in order to put Stalin on trial, and this identification would

prevent him until his final day from setting free the element of

Luxemburgism within him.

The Question of Power

The authoritarians maintain that the popular masses, led by their

chiefs, must substitute for the bourgeois state their own state adorned

with the epithet “proletarian,” and that, in order to ensure the

permanence of the latter, they must push to the extreme the means of

coercion used by the former (centralization, discipline, hierarchy,

police). This schema draws from libertarians—and this for more than a

century—cries of fright and horror. What is the use, they ask, of a

revolution that would be satisfied with replacing one repressive

apparatus for another? Uncompromising enemies of the state, of every

form of state, they expect from the proletarian revolution the complete

and definitive abolition of state coercion. They want to substitute the

free federation of associated communes and bottom-up direct democracy

for the old oppressive state.

Marx and Engels sought their way between the extremes of these two

tendencies. They bore the Jacobin imprint, but on one hand contact with

Proudhon around 1844 and the influence of Moses Hess,[177] and on the

other the critique of Hegelianism and the discovery of “alienation”

rendered them somewhat libertarian. They rejected the authoritarian

statism of the Frenchman Louis Blanc as well as that of the German

Lassalle.[178] They declared themselves supporters of the abrogation of

the state. But only in the long run. The state, “the governmental

hodgepodge,” must continue in the aftermath of the revolution, but only

for a time. As soon as the material conditions are realized that will

allow for it to be done away with it will “wither away.” And while

waiting for that day, we must strive to “immediately attenuate as much

as possible its most harmful eff ects.”[179] This immediate perspective

justly worries the libertarians. The survival, even “provisional,” of

the state says nothing good to them, and they prophetically announce

that once reestablished the Leviathan will obstinately refuse to

resign.[180] The libertarians’ dogged criticism placed Marx and Engels

in an embarrassing position, and there were times when they made so many

concessions to their ideological adversaries that at a certain moment

the debate over the state between socialists seemed to have no point or

to be nothing but a simple quibble over words. Alas, this beautiful

harmony lasted but a morning.

But the Bolshevism of the twentieth century reveals that this was not a

simply verbal dispute. Marx and Engels’ transitory state becomes,

already in its embryonic form with Lenin and even more with Lenin’s

successors, a tentacular monster, which in no uncertain terms proclaims

its refusal to wither away.

The Management of the Economy

Finally, what form of property should replace private capitalism?

The authoritarians have no hesitation in responding. Since their main

defect is a lack of imagination, and since they fear the unknown, they

fall back on forms of administration and management plagiarized from the

past. The state will swoop up in its immense net all of production, all

of exchange, all of finance. “State capitalism” will survive the social

revolution. The bureaucracy, already gigantic under Napoleon, under the

King of Prussia, and under the Tsar, will no longer be satisfied under a

socialist regime with levying taxes and raising armies and increasing

the police force: it will extend its tentacles over the factories, the

mines, the banks, and the means of transport. The libertarians issue a

cry of fright. This exorbitant expansion of the powers of the state

looks to them to be the grave of liberty. Max Stirner was one of the

first to rise up against the statism of the communist society.[181]

Proudhon shouted no less loudly, and Bakunin followed him: “I detest

communism,” he declared in a speech, “because it necessarily arrives at

the centralization of property in the hands of the state, while I ...

want the organization of society and collective and social property from

the bottom up by way of free association, and not from the top down by

means of some form of authority.”[182]

But the anti-authoritarians are not unanimous in formulating their

counter-proposal. Stirner suggests a “free association” of “egoists,”

too philosophical in inspiration and also too unstable. Proudhon, more

concretely, suggests a combination—which in some ways is retrograde,

petit-bourgeois, corresponding to the already outmoded state of

small-scale industry—of small-scale commerce, of artisanal production:

private property must be safe-guarded. Small producers, remaining

independent, must offer each other mutual aid. At the very most he

accepts collective property in a certain number of sectors, which he

agrees have already been conquered by large-scale industry: transport,

mines, etc. But both Stirner and Proudhon, each in his own fashion,

leave themselves open to the blistering critique administered them—a

little unjustly, it must be said—by Marxism.

Bakunin for his part separates himself deliberately from Proudhon. For a

brief time, he constituted a united front with Marx within the First

International against his former teacher. He rejects post-Proudhonian

individualism. He learns the lessons of industrialization. He calls for

collective property. He presents himself as neither a communist nor a

Mutualist but a collectivist. Production should be managed, both on a

local basis by “the solidarization of communes” and on an occupational

basis by groups or associations of workers. Under the influence of the

Bakuninists the Basel Congress of the First International in 1869

decided that in the future society “the government will be replaced by

councils of workers’ organisations.”[183] Marx and Engels waver and

hedge. In the Communist Manifesto of 1848, inspired by Louis Blanc,

they’d adopted the easy omni-statist solution. But later, under the

influence of the Paris Commune of 1871 and the pressure of the

anarchists, they would temper this statism and speak of “the

self-government of the producers.”[184] But these hints at anarchism

would not last long and Marx and Engels would almost immediately return,

in their fight to the death with Bakunin and his disciples, to a more

authoritarian and statist phraseology.

So it is not totally without reason (though not always with total good

faith) that Bakunin accused the Marxists of concentrating all of

industrial and agricultural production in the hands of the state. In

Lenin the statist and authoritarian tendencies, super-imposed on an

anarchism they contradict and annihilate, already exist in germ, and

under Stalin, “quantity” being transformed into “quality,” they

degenerate into an oppressive state capitalism that Bakunin, in his

occasionally unfair criticism of Marx, seems to have anticipated.

This brief historical reminder is only of interest insofar as it can

assist us in orienting ourselves in the present. The lessons we will

draw from them allow us to understand, in a striking and dramatic way,

that despite many conceptions that seem today to be outmoded, childish,

or proved wrong by experience (for example their “apoliticism”, on the

essential questions the libertarians were in the right against the

authoritarians. The latter let loose rivers of insults on the former,

calling their program “a jumble of ideas from beyond the grave,”

reactionary utopias, outdated and decadent.[185] But it can be seen

today, as Voline stresses, that it is the authoritarian idea that, far

from belonging to the future, is nothing but a survival from the old,

bourgeois world, worn out and moribund.[186] If there is a utopia, it is

that of so-called state communism, whose bankruptcy is so patent that

its own beneficiaries (concerned above all with safeguarding their

interests as a privileged caste) seek today, laboriously and

stumblingly, the means to amend it and evade it.

The future belongs neither to classical capitalism nor, as the late

Merleau-Ponty tried to persuade us, to a capitalism revised and

corrected by a “neoliberalism” or by social democratic reformism.[187]

Their dual bankruptcy is no less resounding than that of state

communism. The future still belongs, more than ever belongs, to

communism, but a libertarian communism. As Kropotkin prophetically

announced in 1896, our era “will bear the effects of the reawakening of

libertarian ideas .... The next revolution will no longer be the Jacobin

revolution.”[188]

The three fundamental problems of the Revolution that we outlined above

can and must finally find their solution. We are no longer in the era of

the stammering, stumbling socialist thinkers of the nineteenth century.

The problems are no longer posed abstractly, but rather concretely.

Today we have at our disposal an abundant harvest of practical

experiences. The technique of Revolution has been immensely enriched.

The libertarian idea is no longer inscribed in the clouds, but emerges

from the facts themselves, from the most profound and authentic

aspirations, even when they are repressed, of the popular masses.

The problem of spontaneity and consciousness is easier to resolve today

than a century ago. If the masses, as a result of the oppression they

suffer, are still a bit behindhand in understanding the bankruptcy of

the capitalist system, if they are still lacking in education and

political lucidity, they have made up a large part of the historic

delay. Everywhere, in the advanced capitalist countries, as well as in

the developing countries and those subject to so-called communism, they

have made a great leap forward. They are much harder to dupe. They know

the full extent of their rights. Their knowledge of the world and their

own destiny has been considerably enriched. If the deficiencies of the

French proletariat prior to 1840, because of its inexperience and small

numbers, gave birth to Blanquism, if that of the Russian proletariat

before 1917 gave birth to Leninism, and that of the new, exhausted

proletariat broken up following the civil war of 1918–1920 and those

newly uprooted from the countryside gave birth to Stalinism, today the

laboring masses have less need to abdicate their power into the hands of

authoritarian and supposedly infallible tutors.

What is more, thanks notably to Rosa Luxemburg, the idea has penetrated

socialist thought that even if the masses are not yet completely mature,

even if the fusion of science and the working class dreamed of by

Lassalle has not yet taken place, the only way to catch up and to remedy

this deficiency is to assist the masses in doing their apprenticeship in

direct democracy from the bottom up.[189] It is in developing,

encouraging, and stimulating their free initiatives; it is in

inculcating in them the sense of their responsibilities instead of

maintaining in them, as state “communism” does (whether in power or in

opposition), the age-old habits of passivity, submission, and feeling of

inferiority passed on to them by a past of oppression. Even if this

apprenticeship is at times difficult, even if the rhythm is at times

slow, even if it cripples society with supplementary costs, even if it

can only be effected at the cost of some “disorder,” these difficulties,

these delays, these supplementary costs, these growing pains, are

infinitely less harmful than the false order, the false brilliance, the

false “efficiency” of state “communism,” which obliterate man, kill

popular initiative, and finally dishonor the very idea of

communism.[190]

As concerns the problem of the state, the lessons of the Russian

Revolution are clearly written on the wall. Liquidating the power of the

masses, as was done in the immediate aftermath of the triumph of the

Revolution; reconstructing over the ruins of the former state machine a

new oppressive apparatus even more perfected than the previous one, one

fraudulently baptized “party of the proletariat,” often by absorbing

into the new regime the “experts” of the defunct regime (still imbued

with their former authority); allowing the construction of a new

privileged class which considers its own survival as an end in itself

and which perpetuates the state that ensures that survival, is not the

model to be followed. What is more, if we take literally the Marxist

theory of the “withering away” of the state, the material conditions

that had provoked and, according to the Marxists, legitimized the

reconstruction of a state apparatus, should allow us today to do without

that cumbersome gendarme so eager to remain in place that is the state.

Industrialization, though developing unevenly in each country, is taking

giant steps throughout the world. The discovery of new sources of energy

with unlimited possibilities is enormously accelerating this evolution.

The totalitarian state engendered by poverty and which justifies itself

by this poverty, daily becomes ever more superfluous. As for the

management of the economy, all the experiments carried out, both in the

quintessential capitalist countries like the United States as well as

those in the countries subjected to state “communism,” demonstrate that

the future, at least for large sectors of the economy, no longer belongs

to gigantic production units. Gigantism, which dazzled the late Yankee

captains of industry as well as the communist Lenin, belongs to the

past. Too Big: this is the name of a book on the evils of this plague on

the American economy.[191] For his part Khrushchev, that wily boor,

finally grasped, though late and timidly, the need for industrial

decentralization. It was long believed that the sacrosanct imperatives

of the planned economy demanded state management of the economy. Today

it is realized that top-down planning, bureaucratic planning, is a

frightful source of disorder and waste and, as Merleau-Ponty said, “It

does not plan.”[192] Charles Bettelheim showed us, in a book that was

too often conformist at the time it was written, that it could only

function efficiently if it was managed from the bottom up and not from

the top down, if it emanated from the lower echelons of production and

was constantly subject to their control—while in the USSR this control

by the masses shines by its absence. Without any doubt, the future

belongs to the autonomous management of enterprises by associations of

workers. What remains to be worked out is the mechanism, delicate to be

sure, of their federation, of the harmonizing of varied interests in a

free order. From this point of view the attempt at a synthesis between

anarchism and statism promoted by the now undeservedly forgotten Belgian

socialist César de Paepe deserves exhumation.[193]

On other levels the evolution of technology and the organization of

labor open the road to a socialism from the bottom up. The most recent

research in the field of the psychology of work leads to the conclusion

that production is only “efficient” if it does not crush man, if it

associates instead of alienating him, if it appeals to his initiative,

his full cooperation, and if it transmutes his drudgery into joyful

labor, a condition that is not fully realizable either in the industrial

barracks of private capitalism or those of state capitalism. What is

more, the acceleration of the means of transport facilitates enormously

the exercise of direct democracy. For example: thanks to airplanes, in a

few hours the delegates of local branches of American labor unions—the

most modern of which, such as those of the automobile workers, are

dispersed across a whole continent—can be easily assembled.

But if we want to regenerate socialism, turned upside down by the

authoritarians, and put it back on its feet, we must act quickly. In

1896 Kropotkin forcefully said that as long as socialism has an

authoritarian and statist face it will inspire a certain mistrust in the

workers and, because of this, it will see its efforts compromised and

its later development paralyzed.[194] Private capitalism, historically

condemned, only survives today because of the arms race on the one hand

and the bankruptcy of state “communism” on the other. We cannot

ideologically defeat big business and its so-called free enterprise,

under cover of which a handful of monopolies dominate, we cannot see off

nationalism and fascism, ever ready to rise from the ashes, unless we

are capable of producing in practice a concrete substitute for state

pseudo-communism. As for the so-called socialist countries, they will

only escape their current impasse if we assist them, not in liquidating,

but in completely rebuilding their socialism. Khrushchev came crashing

down for having hesitated too long between the past and the future. The

Gomułkas, Titos, and Dubčeks—despite their good will, their desire for

de-Stalinization, and their antistatist tendencies—risk grinding to a

halt, wobbling on the tightrope where they stand in an unstable

equilibrium and, in the long run, will fail if they do not acquire the

audacity and clear-sightedness that will allow them to define the

essential bases for a libertarian communism.[195]

The Revolution of our time will be made from the bottom up—or it will

not be made at all.

[1958, in Jeunesse du Socialisme Libertaire]

The French Revolution De-Jacobinized

Today, we are surrounded by nothing but ruins. The ideologies that were

drummed into us, the political regimes that we were made to submit to or

were held up as models are all falling to pieces. As Edgar Quinet said,

we have lost all our baggage.[196]

Fascism, the ultimate and barbarous form of man’s domination of man,

collapsed a quarter century ago in a bloodbath. And the very people who

clung to it like a life raft, who had called it to the rescue against

the working class, even at the point of foreign bayonets, got skinned in

the adventure and are forced, even though they still secretly prefer it,

to offer their merchandise in a camouflaged form.

The least that can be said is that bourgeois democracy was not

reinvigorated by the crushing defeat of fascism. In any event, it had

made the latter’s bed and showed itself incapable of standing in its

way. It no longer has a doctrine or any faith in itself. It has not

succeeded in restoring its image by capturing for its benefit the fervor

of the French popular masses against Hitlerism. The Resistance lost its

raison d’être on the day its enemy disappeared. Its false unity

immediately disintegrated. Its myth was deflated. The politicians of the

postwar period were the most pitiful we have ever endured. They

themselves vaporized the overly credulous confidence of those who, for

want of anything better, turned to London against Vichy.[197] Bourgeois

democracy showed itself to be totally incapable of resolving the

problems and contradictions of the postwar period, contradictions even

more insoluble than they were before the so-called crusade undertaken to

find a solution to them. It was only able to survive at home through a

shameful and hypocritical caricature of fascist methods, and abroad

through colonial wars and even wars of aggression. It has capitulated.

Its succession is open. And the anachronistic Fifth Republic was only

able to put an ineffective band-aid on the wound, one more harmful than

the previous medicines and, what is more, ephemeral.[198]

And then Stalinism, which claimed and which many believed to be made of

sterner stuff and to be historically destined to substitute itself for

the moribund (fascist or “democratic���) forms of bourgeois domination,

collapsed in its turn in the scandal of the ignominies revealed in

Khrushchev’s secret report, in the horrors of the Hungarian repression,

and the invasion of Czechoslovakia.[199]

But a world that is collapsing is also a world being reborn. Far from

allowing ourselves to fall into doubt, inaction, confusion or despair,

the time has come for the French working-class movement to start again

from zero, to rethink the very bases of its problems, to remake, as

Quinet said, all of its baggage of ideas.

It was a concern of that order that, in the days following the

Liberation, led me to go back to the French Revolution.[200] If my

intentions were not clear enough and if as a result and through my

fault, they escaped many of my readers and opponents, a British critic

nevertheless understood: “Each generation must re-write history for

itself. If the nineteenth century in Western Europe was the century of

Liberty, the present century is that of Equality. The twin ideals of the

French Revolution, so long separated by the political ascendancy of

nineteenth-century Liberalism, are coming together again. This

rapprochement, dictated by the course of events and the direction of the

historical process itself, makes new demands on all who aspire to

describe and interpret that process. If the twin ideals which Western

civilization owes so largely to the French Revolution are to be again

reconciled in action, they must surely be also—and perhaps

first—reconciled in the description of their evolution by historians.”

And this anonymous critic found it “natural that when France is passing

through a phase of political and economic reconstruction ... she should

seek guidance from a more many-sided social interpretation of her

history.” [201]

But in my opinion, the necessary synthesis of the ideas of equality and

liberty that this critic recommended in far too vague and confused a

fashion cannot and must not be attempted within the framework and for

the benefit of a bankrupt bourgeois democracy. It can and should be

within the framework of socialist (and communist) thought, which

remains, despite it all, the sole solid value of our epoch. The dual

failures of reformism and Stalinism place before us the urgent duty of

reconciling proletarian democracy and socialism, freedom and Revolution.

And it was precisely the French Revolution that first provided us with

the material for this synthesis. For the first time in history the

antagonistic notions of freedom and coercion, of state power and the

power of the masses confronted each other, clearly if not fully, in its

immense crucible. From this fertile experience, as Kropotkin saw,

emerged the two great currents of modern socialist thought on the basis

of which we can remake our ideological “baggage” only if we finally

succeed in finding the correct synthesis.[202]

The return to the French Revolution has, until today, been relatively

fruitless, because modern revolutionaries, all of whom have nevertheless

studied it closely and passionately, have only been concerned with

superficial analogies, with formal points of resemblance with this

situation, or that political group, or some other personality of their

time. It would be quite amusing to recapitulate all these fantasies,

sometimes brilliant, sometimes simply absurd, about which historians of

the Russian Revolution like Boris Souvarine, Erich Wollenberg, and Isaac

Deutscher were right to have reservations.[203] But we would need pages

and pages to do this, and we have better things to do. If, on the other

hand, we abandon the little game of analogies and attempt to get to the

heart of the problems of the French Revolution and analyze its internal

mechanism, we could draw lessons from it which would be extremely useful

for understanding the present.

The Direct Democratization of 1793

The first thing to emphasise is that the French Revolution was the first

coherent, wide-scale, historical manifestation of a new type of

democracy. The Great Revolution was not simply, as too many republican

historians believed, the cradle of parliamentary democracy: because at

the same time that it was a bourgeois revolution it was also the embryo

of proletarian revolution, it bore within itself the seed of a new form

of revolutionary power whose features would become more distinct over

the course of the revolutions of the late nineteenth and the twentieth

centuries. The thread that runs from the Commune of 1793 to that of

1871, and from that to the soviets of 1905 and 1917, is clear.

I would here like to limit myself to briefly summarizing some of the

general features of the “direct democracy” of 1793. If we step into the

“sections,” the popular societies of the Year II,[204] we have the

feeling of a reinvigorating immersion in democracy. The periodic

self-purging of each “popular society,” each candidate mounting the

podium to offer him or herself to the scrutiny of all; the concern to

ensure the most perfect possible expression of the popular will, to

prevent its stifling by the golden-tongued or by idlers; permitting the

working people to lay down their tools without any financial sacrifice

and so to fully participate in public life; ensuring permanent control

of the representatives by the represented; and the placing of the two

sexes on a level of complete equality in deliberations.[205] ... These

are some of the features of a democracy truly propelled from the bottom

up.

The General Council of the Commune of 1793, at least until the

decapitation of its magistrates by the bourgeois central power, also

offers us a remarkable example of direct democracy. The members of the

Council were the delegates of their respective sections, constantly in

contact with them and under the control of those who gave them their

mandates, always up to date on the will of the base through the

admission of popular delegations to the sittings of the Council. At the

Commune there was no such thing as the “separation of powers” between

the executive and the legislative. The members of the Council were both

administrators and legislators. These modest sans-culottes did not

become professional politicians; they remained the men of their

professions or trades, still exercising them to the extent that their

functions on the Commune allowed this, and ready to exercise them again

at the end of their mandates.[206]

But of all these features the most admirable one is doubtless the

maturity of a direct democracy experimented with for the first time in a

relatively backward country, barely out of the night of feudalism and

absolutism, still plunged in illiteracy and age-old habits of

submission. No “anarchy,” no confusion in this unprecedented and

improvised management by the people. To convince oneself of this it is

enough to leaf through the minutes of the popular societies, of the

sittings of the general council of the Commune. There one can see the

masses, as if aware of their natural tendency to indiscipline, animated

by an ever present concern for self-discipline. They organize their

deliberations and they impose order on those who might be tempted to

provoke disorder. Even though in 1793 their experience of public life

was relatively recent, even though most of the sans-culottes, guided it

is true by educated petit-bourgeois, did not yet know how to read or

write, they already demonstrated a capacity for self-management that

even today the bourgeoisie, anxious to preserve its monopoly over public

affairs, persists against all the evidence in denying. And certain

revolutionary theoreticians, full of a sense of intellectual

superiority, sometimes also tend to underestimate this capacity of the

masses for self-government.

Direct Democracy and Vanguard

But at the same time the difficulties and contradictions of

self-management made their appearance. The lack of education and the

relative backwardness of their political consciousness were obstacles to

the masses’ full participation in public life. Not all of the people

have a sense of their true interests. While some demonstrated

extraordinary lucidity for the period, others allowed themselves to be

led astray. The revolutionary bourgeoisie took advantage of the prestige

it earned in its uncompromising struggle against the remnants of the

ancien régime to inculcate in the sans-culottes a seductive but false

ideology which in fact went against their aspirations for full equality.

If we flick through the voluminous collection of reports from the secret

agents of the Ministry of the Interior, we can see that informers

reported comments made on the streets by men of the people, the contents

of which are sometimes revolutionary, sometimes

counter-revolutionary.[207] And these remarks are all lumped together

and considered to be the expressions of the vox populi without any

attempt to discriminate among them or to analyze their obvious

contradictions.

The relative confusion of the people, notably of manual workers deprived

of education, left the field open to better educated or more conscious

minorities. This was how the Maison Commune Section, made up largely of

masons, a small core group “got it to do whatever they wanted.”[208] In

many popular societies, despite all the care taken and the concern to

ensure the most perfect functioning of democracy, factions led the dance

in one direction or the other, and they sometimes even opposed each

other.

The great lesson of 1793 is not just that direct democracy is viable, it

is also that the vanguard of a society, when it is still a minority in

relation to the mass of the country that it carries along with it,

cannot avoid, in that life-or-death battle that is a revolution,

imposing its will on the majority, first and preferentially through

persuasion, and, if persuasion fails, by force.

It was in the experience of the French Revolution that Marx and Engels

found the source for their famous notion of the “dictatorship” of the

proletariat. Unfortunately, it was never truly elaborated by its

authors. Without claiming, like Kautsky in the period when he was a

reformist, that in their work it is nothing but a Wörtchen, a little

word occasionally used but of no importance,[209] one is forced to say

that they only ever used it too briefly and too vaguely in their

writings. And when in particular they discover it in the French

Revolution the terms they employ are far from clear and are

debatable.[210] In fact, the revolutionaries of the Year II, convinced

though they were of the need for exceptional measures, for having

recourse to force, had a horror of using the word dictatorship. The

Commune of 1793, like its heir of 1871, wanted to guide and not “impose

its supremacy.” Marat himself, the sole revolutionary of his time who

called for a dictatorship, was forced to resort to careful language: he

asked for a guide and not a master. But even in this veiled form he

scandalized his brothers in arms and earned their loud protests.

Let it be understood: democracy had just issued its first cry. The

tyrant had just been overthrown and the Bastille razed. The word

“dictatorship” had a bad ring to it. It evoked the idea of a descent

once again into tyranny, into personal power. In fact, for the men of

the eighteenth century, nourished on memories of antiquity, dictatorship

had a precise and formidable meaning. They recalled—and the Encyclopedia

was there to remind them—that the Romans, “having driven out their kings

saw themselves obliged, in difficult times, to temporarily create a

dictator enjoying greater power than any enjoyed by the ancient kings.”

They recalled that later, the institution having degenerated, Sulla and

Caesar proclaimed themselves perpetual dictators and exercised absolute

sovereignty, in the latter case going as far as being suspected of

having monarchist aims. They did not want either a new monarch or a new

Caesar.

The men of 1793 had an even clearer memory of England. How could they

forget that a century earlier Oliver Cromwell had overthrown an absolute

monarch, usurped popular power, established a dictatorship, and even

attempted to have himself crowned king? They feared a new Cromwell like

the plague, and this was one of their complaints against Robespierre on

the eve of Thermidor.[211]

Finally, the rank-and-file sans-culottes, the men and women of the

popular societies, instinctively distrusted the word dictatorship, for

it would have represented only a portion of revolutionary reality: they

first of all wanted to convince, to open to everyone the doors to the

nascent democracy, and they only resorted to force when those they

wanted to convince and admit into democracy answered them with lead.

Perhaps they intuited that it is always an error to borrow words from

the enemy’s vocabulary. “The sovereignty of the people,” as Henri de

Saint-Simon pointed out, is one of those unfortunate borrowings. From

the day they administer themselves the people are the sovereigns of no

one. “The Despotism of liberty” (a phrase the men of ’93 sometimes used

in preference to “dictatorship” for it has a more collective resonance)

and “dictatorship of the proletariat” are no less antonymic. The form of

coercion that the proletarian vanguard finds itself forced to exercise

against counter-revolutionaries is of so fundamentally different a

nature from the past forms of oppression, and it is compensated for by

so advanced a degree of democracy for the formerly oppressed, that the

word dictatorship clashes with that of proletariat.

Such was the opinion of the libertarian collectivists like Bakunin, who

were of course aware that the possessing classes would not voluntarily

renounce their privileges and that they must be forced to do so, and who

were determined to “organize a revolutionary force capable of triumphing

over reaction”; but at the same time they categorically rejected any

slogan of “so-called revolutionary dictatorship, even as a revolutionary

transition,” even if it is “revolutionary in the Jacobin manner.”[212]

As for reformists, they not only reject the words “dictatorship of the

proletariat,” but also what we have just seen defined as valid, namely

the idea of revolutionary constraint or coercion. And so, for too long,

Marxist revolutionaries have not dared to express any reservations

concerning the words used, for fear of being suspected of “opportunism”

regarding their essence.[213]

The inappropriateness of the terms appears still more clearly if we go

back to the sources. The Babouvists (followers of Babeuf) were the first

to speak of revolutionary “dictatorship.”[214] Although they had the

merit of drawing a clear lesson from the bourgeoisie’s theft of the

revolution, we know that they appeared too late, at a moment when the

masses had surrendered. A minuscule and isolated minority, they doubted

the people’s capacity to lead themselves, at least in the near term, and

they called for a dictatorship, either the dictatorship of one man or

that of “hands wisely and resolutely revolutionary.”[215]

The German communist Weitling and the French revolutionary Blanqui

borrowed this concept of dictatorship from the Babouvists.[216]

Incapable of joining up with a mass movement that was still embryonic,

with a proletariat still too ignorant and demoralized to govern itself,

they believed that small, bold minorities could seize power by surprise

and establish socialism from above by means of the most rigorous

dictatorial centralization, while waiting for the people to be mature

enough to share power with their leaders. While the idealist Weitling

envisaged a personal dictatorship, that of “a new messiah,” Blanqui,

more realistic, closer to the nascent working-class movement, spoke of a

“Parisian dictatorship,” that is, a dictatorship of the Parisian

proletariat, though in his mind the proletariat was only capable of

exercising this “dictatorship” in the person of one man, through the

intermediary of its educated elite, of Blanqui and his secret

society.[217]

Marx and Engels, though opposed to the Blanquists’ minoritarian and

voluntarist concepts, in 1850 made them the concession of adopting the

famous formula,[218] going as far as identifying communism and

Blanquism.[219] There is no doubt that in the minds of the founders of

scientific socialism, revolutionary coercion seemed to be exercised by

the working class and not, as in the case of the Blanquists, by a

vanguard detached from the class.[220] But they did not differentiate

such an interpretation of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” clearly

enough from that of the Blanquists. Later Lenin, claiming to adhere both

to Jacobinism and Marxism, would invent the concept of the dictatorship

of one party substituting itself for the working class and acting in its

name.[221] And his disciples in the Urals, taking his logic to its

ultimate conclusion, frankly proclaimed, without being disavowed, that

the dictatorship of the proletariat would be a dictatorship over the

proletariat.[222]

From 1921 the German anarchist Rudolf Rocker, noting the “bankruptcy of

state ‘communism”’ in Russia would maintain that the dictatorship of one

class in and of itself is “absolutely unthinkable.” and that in reality

it is a matter of the dictatorship of one party claiming to speak in the

name of a class. And he would forcefully rise up against the illusion of

transforming the state, an organ of oppression, into an organ for the

liberation of the oppressed, baptized “dictatorship” of the proletariat.

“The state,” he wrote, “can only be what it is, the defender of

privilege and the exploitation of the masses, the creator of new classes

and monopolies. Whoever does not know the role of the state does not

grasp the essence of the current social order and is incapable of

showing humanity the new horizons of its evolution.”[223]

The Reconstituting of the State

The dual experiences of the French and Russian Revolutions teach us that

we are touching upon the central point of a mechanism at the end of

which direct democracy, people’s self-management, gradually mutates,

through the establishing of the revolutionary “dictatorship,” into the

reconstitution of an apparatus for the oppression of the people. Of

course, the process was not exactly identical in the two revolutions.

The first was that of an essentially bourgeois revolution, though

already containing the embryo of proletarian revolution. The second was

an essentially proletarian revolution, though having at the same time to

fulfill the tasks of the bourgeois revolution. In the first case it was

not the “dictatorship” from below, which had however already made an

appearance, it was the dictatorship from above, that of the bourgeois

revolutionary government, which provided the starting point for a new

oppressive apparatus. In the second case it was from the “dictatorship

from below,” that of the proletariat in arms, for whom the party almost

immediately substituted itself, that the oppressive apparatus was

finally reconstituted. But in the two cases, despite this important

difference, an analogy can be seen: the concentration of power, the

“dictatorship,” is presented as the product of necessity.[224] The

revolution is in danger from both within and without. The reconstituting

of the oppressive apparatus is invoked as indispensable for the crushing

of counter-revolution.

Was the “necessity”—the counter-revolutionary danger—really the only

reason for this abrupt turnabout? This is what most left-wing historians

claim. Georges Lefebvre assures us that the Revolution could only be

saved if the people were “organized and led by bourgeois cadres,” It was

necessary to bring together all the nation’s forces for the benefit of

the army. This could only occur by means of a strong and centralized

government. Dictatorship from below could not succeed in this, since

apart from the fact that it lacked the needed abilities, it could not

forego an overall plan and a center of execution.[225] Albert Soboul

considers that the direct democracy of the sans-culottes was, due to its

“weakness,” impracticable in the crisis through which the republic was

passing.[226] Before them, Georges Guy-Grand, minimizing the political

capacity of the popular vanguard, maintained that “the people of Paris

did not know what to do with their riots. The riots were valid means of

destroying, and destruction must sometimes be done. But demolishing

Bastilles, massacring prisoners, aiming cannons at the Convention are

not enough to make a country live. When cadres needed to be

reconstituted, when industries and the government had to be made to

function, there was no choice but to rely on the sole elements

available, which were bourgeois.”[227]

But it is not certain that the Revolution could only be saved by these

techniques and from above. A relatively effective collaboration had been

established at the base between the administration of staple goods and

the popular societies, between the government and the revolutionary

committees. The reinforcement of central power stifled and killed the

initiative from below that had been the heart of the Revolution.

Bourgeois ability was substituted for popular enthusiasm. The Revolution

lost its essential strength, its internal dynamic.

What is more, we must be wary of those who invoke the pretext of

“competence” to legitimize the exclusive and abusive use of bourgeois

expertise during a revolutionary period. First, because men of the

people are less ignorant, less incompetent than some people claim in

order to make their case. Second, because the plebeians of 1793, when

they were lacking in technical abilities, overcame that deficiency by

their sense of democracy and their higher awareness of their obligations

to the revolution. Finally, because the bourgeois technicians, reputed

to be indispensable and irreplaceable, too often profited by their

situation, which was considered impregnable, to intrigue against the

people and to even develop suspicious ties with counter-revolutionaries.

People like Carnot, Cambon, Lindet, and Barère were the agents of the

great bourgeoisie and the sworn enemies of the sans-culottes. During a

revolution a man lacking in competency but devoted body and soul to the

people’s cause, when he assumes civil or military responsibilities is

worth more than a competent individual ready to betray.

During the six months or so of the flourishing of direct democracy the

people demonstrated their creative genius; they revealed, though in a

still embryonic form, that there exist other revolutionary techniques

than those of the bourgeoisie, than one that is topdown. Certainly it is

the latter that prevailed at the time, for the bourgeoisie had a

maturity and an experience that conferred on it an enormous advantage

over the people. But Year II of the Republic, if one knows how to

decipher its message, foretells that the fertile potential of

revolutionary techniques from below will one day win out in the

proletarian revolution over the techniques inherited from the Jacobin

bourgeoisie. Albert Mathiez, accustomed, as Georges Lefebvre admits, to

“considering the Revolution from above.”[228] felt that he needed to

draw an enthusiastic parallel between the “harsh” dictatorship of Public

Safety of 1793 and that of 1920 in Russia.[229]

But even during the period when Mathiez was invoking the revolutionary

bourgeois dictatorship of 1793 in an attempt to legitimize Lenin’s

Jacobin dictatorship, the German anarchist Rudolf Rocker supported the

contrary thesis: “Referring to the French Revolution to justify the

tactics of the Bolsheviks in Russia,” he said, demonstrates “a total

misunderstanding of historical facts .... Historical experience

demonstrates the exact opposite: at every decisive moment of the French

Revolution the true initiative in action rose directly from the people.

The secret of the Revolution resides in this creative activity of the

masses.” On the other hand, it was when Robespierre deprived the popular

movement of its autonomy and made it submit to central power, when he

persecuted the authentically revolutionary tendencies and crushed the

Left opposition, that the “ebbing of the Revolution, preface to 9

Thermidor and, later, to the Napoleonic dictatorship of the sword.”

began.[230] Rocker concluded with bitterness in 1921: “In Russia they

are repeating today what occurred in France in March 1794.”

The Embryo of a Plebeian Bureaucracy

Because the Great Revolution was not only bourgeois but was also

accompanied by an embryonic proletarian revolution, one sees in it the

germ of a phenomenon that will only assume its full scope in the

degeneration of the Russian Revolution. Already, in 1793, democracy from

below gave birth to a caste of parvenus differentiating themselves from

the masses and aspiring to commandeer the popular revolution to their

profit. In the ambivalent mentality of these plebeians, revolutionary

faith and material appetites were closely intertwined. As Jaurès phrased

it, the Revolution looked to them to be “both an ideal and a

career.”[231] They served the bourgeois revolution at the same time that

they used it. Robespierre and Saint-Just, like Lenin in his time,

denounced the appetite of this nascent and already invasive bureaucracy.

A certain number of them entered into open conflict with the Committee

of Public Safety. If their attachment to bourgeois law and property

flowed from their greed, they nevertheless had individual interests to

defend against the revolutionary bourgeoisie. The latter, in fact, only

wanted to leave them as small a piece of the pie as possible, first

because that enormous budget-devouring plebs was expensive; second,

because the bourgeoisie distrusted its origins among and its links to

the people and, above all, the support from the working-class quarters

which it had obtained demagogically with a view to occupying all posts;

and finally because the bourgeoisie intended to keep the control of the

revolutionary government in the hands of its tried and tested experts.

The struggle for power that opposed the plebeians to the experts was a

sharp one and, in the end, it was settled by the guillotine. Certain

important sectors such as the Ministry of War, the secret funds,[232]

and the war industries were the stakes in this rivalry. The battle over

the war industry was particularly revealing, for it was here that two

modes of economic management confronted each other: free enterprise and

what is today called state capitalism. If the plebeians had achieved

their goals and if the war industry had been nationalized as they

demanded, a portion of the profits coveted and finally seized by the

revolutionary bourgeoisie would have gone into their pockets.

Trotsky, incompletely informed, is not totally correct when he asserts

that Stalinism “had no prehistory,” that the French Revolution knew

nothing that resembled the Soviet bureaucracy, derived from a single

revolutionary party and having its roots in the collective ownership of

the means of production.[233] I think, on the contrary, that the

Hébertist plebeians were, in more ways than one, a foreshadowing of the

Russian bureaucrats of the Stalinist era.

In the same way, once the generals of the ancien régime, traitors to the

revolution, were eliminated, there arose alongside the devoted but

incompetent sans-culotte generals a new type of young chiefs risen from

the ranks, capable but consumed by ambition and who would later be the

instruments of reaction and military dictatorship. To a certain extent,

these future Marshals of the Empire were the prefiguration of Soviet

marshals.

“Anarchy” Deduced from the French Revolution

The French Revolution had hardly ended before “theoreticians” plunged

into the analysis of its mechanisms and the search for its lessons with

passionate ardor and an often remarkable lucidity. Their attention was

concentrated essentially on two great problems: that of permanent

revolution and that of the state. What they discovered first was that

the Great Revolution, because it had been only bourgeois, had betrayed

popular aspirations and had to be continued until the complete

liberation of man. What they all deduced from this was socialism.[234]

Some of them also discovered that within the Revolution a new type of

people power, oriented from the bottom up, had made its appearance on

the historical stage and that it had finally been supplanted by a

powerfully reconstituted top-down oppressive apparatus. And they

wondered with fright how the people could avoid seeing their revolution

commandeered in the future. From this they deduced anarchism.

The first person who saw this, in 1794, was the Enragé Varlet.[235] In a

short pamphlet written right after Thermidor he wrote this prophetic

sentence: “For any reasoning being, government and revolution are

incompatible.” And he accused the “revolutionary government” of having,

in the name of public safety, established a dictatorship.[236] “This is

the conclusion,” wrote two historians of anarchism, “that the first of

the Enragés drew from 1793, and that conclusion is anarchist.”[237]

Varlet’s pamphlet contained a profound idea: a revolution led by the

masses and a strong authority (against the masses) are two incompatible

things.

The Babouvists drew this conclusion in their turn. “The rulers,” wrote

Babeuf, “only make revolutions in order to continue governing. We want

to make one to eternally ensure the people’s happiness through real

democracy.” And Buonarotti, his disciple, foreseeing the commandeering

of future revolutions by new elites added, “If there was formed within

the state a class exclusively knowledgeable about the principles of the

social art, laws, and administration, it would soon discover the secret

of creating distinctions and privileges for itself.”[238] Buonarotti

deduced from this that only the radical suppression of social

inequalities, that only communism would allow society to be rid of the

scourge of the state: “A people without property and without the vices

and crimes it engenders would not feel the need for the great number of

laws under which the civilized societies of Europe groan.”[239]

But the Babouvists were not able to draw all the consequences of this

discovery. Isolated from the masses, they contradicted themselves, as we

saw, by calling for the dictatorship of one man or of a “wise” elite,

which would later lead Proudhon to write that “the negation of

government, which shone briefly through the Enragés and the Hebertists

before being snuffed out, would have issued from Babeuf’s doctrines, if

Babeuf had been able to think through the logical consequences of his

own premise.”[240]

It is Proudhon who, in 1851, had the merit of having drawn from the

French Revolution a truly profound analysis of the problem of the state.

The author of The General Idea of Revolution in the Nineteenth Century

started with a critique of bourgeois and parliamentary democracy, of

democracy from above, and of democracy by decree.[241] He denounced its

fraudulent nature. He attacked Robespierre, an open enemy of direct

democracy. He stressed the failings of the democratic constitution of

1793, a departure point, to be sure, but a bastard compromise between

bourgeois democracy and direct democracy, which promised the people

everything and gave them nothing and which, in any case, was no sooner

promulgated than its implementation was indefinitely put off.

Getting to the heart of the problem, Proudhon declared, after Varlet,

that “in proclaiming freedom of opinion, equality before the law, the

sovereignty of the people, and the subordination of authority to the

country, the Revolution made two incompatible things of society and the

government.” He affirms “the absolute incompatibility of authority with

freedom.” And he pronounced a fiery condemnation of the state: “No

authority, no government, not even a people’s government: the Revolution

resides in this .... The government of the people will always be the

swindling of the people .... If the Revolution allows government [the

state] to survive somewhere, it will return everywhere.” And he attacks

the boldest of thinkers, the “authoritarian” socialists who, while

admitting the misdeeds of the state “still said that while government is

doubtless a scourge ... it was still a necessary evil. “This is why,” he

adds, “the most emancipatory revolutions have always ended in an act of

faith and submission to authority, why all revolutions have only served

to reconstitute tyranny.” “The people gave themselves a tyrant instead

of a protector. Everywhere and at all times the government, however

popular it was at its origin, after having shown itself to be liberal

for a certain time, gradually became exceptional and exclusive.”

He harshly condemned the centralization carried out through the decree

of December 4, 1793.[242] This centralization was understandable under

the former monarchy, but “under the pretext of a One and Indivisible

Republic, to remove from the people the right to dispose of their

forces, to call those who speak in favor of liberty and local

sovereignty ‘federalists’ who are to be proscribed, means putting the

lie to the true spirit of the French Revolution, to its most authentic

tendencies. The system of centralization that prevailed in ’93 was

nothing but a transformed feudalism. Napoleon, who put the final touches

to it, testified to this.” Later, Bakunin, a disciple of Proudhon, would

echo him: “A strange thing, that great revolution which, for the first

time in history, proclaimed the freedom, not only of the citizen, but of

man; but in making itself the heir of the monarchy it killed, it at the

same time revived the negation of all freedom: the centralization and

omnipotence of the state.”[243]

But Proudhon’s thought goes farther and deeper. He fears that the

exercise of direct democracy, that the most ingenious formulas aimed at

promoting an authentic government of the people, by the people—the

fusing of the legislative and executive powers, the election and

revocability of functionaries recruited by the people from within their

number, and permanent popular control—that this system, which may be

“irreproachable” in theory, “in practice encounters an insurmountable

difficulty.” In fact, even in this optimal hypothesis the risk remains

of the incompatibility between society and authority. “If the entire

people, as sovereigns, becomes the government, one seeks in vain where

the governed would be .... If the people, organized as the authority,

has nothing above them, I ask who is below?” There is no middle way, one

must “either work or rule.” “The people passing en masse over to the

state, the state no longer has the least reason to exist, since there no

longer exists a people: the result of the governmental equation is

zero.”

How to escape this contradiction, this “vicious circle”? Proudhon

answers that the government must be dissolved in the economic

organization. “The governmental institution ... has its raison d’être in

economic anarchy. Since the Revolution puts an end to this anarchy and

organizes the industrial forces, there is no longer a pretext for

political centralization.”

The “Jacobin” Tradition

Bakunin in turn stresses that since their thought was “nourished” by a

certain theory, which “was nothing but the Jacobin political system more

or less modified for the use of revolutionary socialists, the socialist

workers of France never wanted to understand [that] when, in the name of

the Revolution, you want to build a state, even if only a transitory

state, it is a reactionary step and you are working for despotism.”[244]

To a certain extent the disagreement between Marxists and anarchists

flows from the fact that the former do not always view the French

Revolution in the same way as the latter. Deutscher saw that within

Bolshevism there were two spirits, the Marxist and the Jacobin, a

conflict that would never be resolved, neither in Lenin nor in

Trotsky.[245] As we will see, there can be found within Bolshevism

holdovers from Jacobinism more accentuated than in the original Marxism.

But I think that Marxism itself never completely overcame an analogous

contradiction. There is within it a libertarian frame of mind as well as

a Jacobin and authoritarian frame of mind.

In my opinion, the origin of this duality can mainly be found in an at

times correct, but also at times erroneous appreciation of the real

content of the French Revolution. The Marxists see that the latter

betrayed popular aspirations because it was, objectively and in its

immediate results, a bourgeois revolution. But at the same time they are

blinded by an abusive application of the materialist concept of history,

which sometimes leads them to consider it only from the point of view

and within the limits of the bourgeois revolution. Of course they are

right to stress those relatively and inarguably progressive features of

the bourgeois revolution, but there are moments when they present these

features, which even anarchists like Bakunin and Kropotkin, if not

Proudhon, exalted in a unilateral fashion, overestimating and idealizing

them.

Because he was a Menshevik, Boris Nicolaevsky exaggeratedly stresses

this tendency of Marxism. But there is something true about his

analysis. And the German ultra-leftist of 1848, Gottschalk, was not

completely wrong in balking at the Marxist perspective of “escaping the

hell of the Middle Ages” only to “voluntarily leap into the purgatory”

of capitalism.[246] What Isaac Deutscher says of the Russian Marxists

prior to 1917—for, paradoxically, there was much “Menshevism” in these

“Bolsheviks”—is also, I think, valid to a certain extent for the

founders of Marxism: “Since they saw in capitalism an indispensable

halfway house on the road from feudalism to socialism, they stressed the

advantages of that halfway house, its progressive features, its

civilizing influence, its attractive atmosphere and so on.”[247]

If we examine the many passages in Marx and Engels concerning the French

Revolution it has to be said that sometimes they see and sometimes they

lose sight of its character as a “permanent revolution.” To be sure,

they do see the revolution from below, but only occasionally. To give an

example, Marx does not hesitate to present the humble supporters in the

working-class quarters of Jacques Roux and Varlet as the “main

representatives” of the revolutionary movement, but Engels nevertheless

writes that to the “proletariat” of 1793 “in its incapacity to help

itself, help could, at best, be brought in from without or down from

above.”[248]

And so we can already understand better what Deutscher means by Jacobin

spirit, namely the tradition of bourgeois revolution and dictatorship

from above of 1793, somewhat idealized and insufficiently differentiated

from compulsion from below. And by extension, we can understand the

tradition of Babouvist and Blanquist conspiratorialism which borrows the

dictatorial and minoritarian techniques of the bourgeois revolution in

order to put them at the service of a new revolution.

One can see why the anarchists discern in the socialism and communism of

the nineteenth century a certain “Jacobin,” “authoritarian,”

“governmentalist” tendency; a propensity towards the “cult of state

discipline” inherited from Robespierre and the Jacobins; that they

define a “bourgeois frame of mind,” “a political legacy of bourgeois

revolutionism” to which they oppose the affirmation that the “social

revolutions of our day have nothing or almost nothing to imitate in the

revolutionary methods of the Jacobins of 1793.”[249]

Marx and Engels deserve this reproach far less than other authoritarian

and statist socialist currents of the nineteenth century. But they had

some difficulty in freeing themselves of the Jacobin tradition. For

example, they were slow in ridding themselves of the Jacobin myth of the

“rigorous centralization offered as a model by the France of 1793.” They

finally rejected it, under the pressure of the anarchists, but not

before having stumbled, hesitated, and modified their analysis and, even

after all these corrective measures, they still went down the wrong

road.[250] This wavering would allow Lenin to forget the anti-centralist

passages in their writings—notably a clarification by Engels in

1885[251]—and to retain only “the facts cited by Engels concerning the

centralized French Republic from 1792 to 1799,” and to baptize Marx a

“centralist.”[252]

Indeed, the Jacobin hold was much stronger on the Russian Bolsheviks

than it was on the founders of Marxism. And in large part this deviation

has its origin in an occasionally incorrect and one-sided interpretation

of the French Revolution. Lenin, it is true, clearly saw its permanent

revolution aspects. He demonstrated that the popular movement, which he

incorrectly called a “bourgeois democratic revolution,” was far from

reaching its objectives in 1794, and that it would only succeed in doing

so in 1871.[253] If total victory was not won at the end of the

eighteenth century, it was because “the material bases for socialism”

were still lacking.[254] The bourgeois regime is only progressive in

relation to the autocracy that precedes it, as the final form of

domination and “the most fitting arena for the struggle of the

proletariat against the bourgeoisie.”[255] Only the proletariat is

capable of pushing the revolution to its final end, “for it goes much

further than the democratic revolution.”[256]

But Lenin long rejected the concept of permanent revolution and

maintained that the Russian proletariat, after the conquest of power,

had to voluntarily limit itself to the bourgeois democratic regime. This

is why he often tends to overestimate the heritage of the French

Revolution, affirming that it will remain “perhaps for all time the

model for certain revolutionary methods,” and that the historians of the

proletariat should see in Jacobinism “one of the culminating points that

the oppressed class reached in the struggle for its emancipation, [one

of the] best examples of democratic revolution.”[257] This is why he

idealized Danton[258] and did not hesitate to proclaim himself

“Jacobin.”[259] This is why, with much exaggeration, he attributes to

bourgeois revolutionaries radical measures against the capitalists and

claimed to act, like them, with “Jacobin inflexibility.”[260]

Lenin’s Jacobin attitudes brought him a sharp reply from Trotsky in

1904. For the latter, who had not yet become a Bolshevik, Jacobinism “is

the maximum degree of radicalism that bourgeois society can provide.”

Modern revolutionaries must protect themselves from Jacobinism as much

as from reformism. Jacobinism and proletarian socialism are “two molds,

two doctrines, two tactics, two psychologies separated by an abyss.” If

both are intransigent, their intransigence is qualitatively different.

The attempt to introduce Jacobin methods into the proletarian

revolutions of the twentieth century is nothing but opportunism. Just

like reformism, it is the expression of “a tendency to tie the

proletariat to an ideology, a tactic, and finally a psychology foreign

and hostile to its class interests.”[261]

Towards a Synthesis

In conclusion, the French Revolution was the source of two great

currents of socialist thought which, across the twentieth century, have

lasted until today: an authoritarian Jacobin current and a libertarian

current. One, of a “bourgeois disposition,” oriented from the top down,

is above all concerned with revolutionary effectiveness and claims to be

taking account of “necessities.” The other, of an essentially

proletarian spirit, is oriented from the bottom up, and places the

safeguarding of freedom to the fore. Between these two currents numerous

more or less shaky compromises have already been elaborated.

Bakunin’s anarchist collectivism attempted to reconcile Proudhon and

Marx. Within the First International, Marxism sought a middle way

between Blanqui and Bakunin. The Commune of 1871 was an empirical

synthesis of Jacobinism and federalism. Lenin himself, in State and

Revolution, was tom between anarchism and state “communism,” between

mass spontaneity and Jacobin iron discipline. Yet the real synthesis of

these two currents is still to be effected. As H.E. Kaminski wrote, it

is not only necessary, it is inevitable: “History itself constructs its

compromises.”[262] The degeneration of the Russian Revolution and the

collapse and historical bankruptcy of Stalinism places it more than ever

on the agenda. It alone will allow us to remake our “baggage of ideas”

and to forever prevent our revolutions being commandeered by new

Jacobins utilizing tanks, in comparison with which the guillotine of

1793 will look like a toy.

[1956, in Jeunesse du Socialisme Libertaire]

Two Indictments of Communism

Two books that appeared simultaneously, those of Tito’s prisoner Milovan

Djilas and Michel Collinet,[263] have led us to rethink the ideological

foundations of Bolshevism. Even though produced by two men of different

temperaments and origins and using quite divergent methods, they reach

more or less the same conclusions and present more or less the same

qualities, as well as the same defects.

One of their merits is to demonstrate that the Blanquist concept of the

party formulated by Lenin from 1901 contained at least in germ the

totalitarian communism of the Stalinist era. Djilas and Collinet stress

that the ideological monopoly of the leadership of the party, in this

case Lenin himself, claiming to embody the objective aspirations of

society,[264] was in fact an idealist conception of history that would

later result in the total monopolization of the bureaucratic apparatus

over that society.[265]

Where the two writers diverge is on the historical excuse of

“necessity.” Djilas, still incompletely freed of the authoritarian

concepts he was brought up on, believes that the success of the

revolution, which had to defend its very existence and the indispensable

industrialization of the USSR, required the establishment of a tyranny.

Collinet, on the contrary, condemns Lenin for having made a virtue of

necessity, and does not think totalitarian dictatorship necessarily

flowed from the tragic circumstances of the Civil War.[266]

While establishing a direct connection between Leninism and Stalinism,

the two authors stress, correctly, that under no circumstances can the

two regimes be confused and that differences of an important nature

distinguish them, and not simple “nuances,” as Collinet once lets slip.

Forms that were still revolutionary during Lenin’s time were transformed

into reactionary ones under Stalin.

Collinet and Djilas, in the most solid part of their work, provide both

brilliant and implacable descriptions of the privileged “new class,” of

the feudal bureaucracy that seized power in the USSR. For Collinet

today’s Russian society realizes “the most perfect absorption of society

by the state that history has ever seen,” and for Djilas modern history

has never recorded a regime oppressing the masses in so brutal,

inhumane, and illegal a fashion. The methods it employed constitute “one

of the most shameful pages of human history.” And in a flight of

inspiration, he opposes the idealism, devotion, and spirit of sacrifice

of communism of its early days to the intolerance, corruption,

stagnation, and intellectual decadence of contemporary communism. The

analysis of the “new class,” of the way it exploits the working class

and its poor economic management, is more acute in Djilas than it is in

Collinet: Djilas—and this is the main interest of his book—is a witness

who lived the evil from within.

The two authors are in agreement in denouncing the thirst for and

obsession with power of the communist oligarchs, as well as in

stigmatizing the transformation of Marxism into a dogmatism, into an

essentially sterile and conservative scholasticism.

Both Collinet and Djilas reproach Trotsky, not without reason and almost

in the same terms, for having shown himself incapable, despite the great

merit of his indictment of Stalinism, of defining sociologically and

fully exposing the meaning of contemporary communism. Why? Because he

lacked perspective, according to Djilas; because he persisted until his

death in not questioning Leninist ideas of organization according to

Collinet. There is probably something of the truth in both of these

explanations.

But to my mind both books are marred by a certain number of errors I

would like to point out. In the first place, they both show a total lack

of understanding of the concept of “permanent revolution.” Collinet

makes the mistake of considering Marx’s famous text of March 1850 an

unimportant accident in the history of Marxist thought, an ephemeral

“Blanquist” crisis from which the author quickly recovered.[267] He and

Djilas draw erroneous conclusions from a correct observation, which is

that the “permanent revolution” is more acutely manifested in backward

countries where it is easier to directly leap over the capitalist stage

from feudalism to socialism. But they are wrong in concluding that

revolutionary Marxism is only applicable to underdeveloped countries and

that it has no chance in highly industrialized nations. Maintaining, for

example, as Djilas does, that in a country like Germany only reformism

can carry the day means forgetting that from 1918 to 1933 the German

proletariat was on the brink of victory on several occasions and that

without the errors caused by its being a satellite of Moscow, it would

probably have abolished the most advanced capitalism of Europe. In May

’68 did we not see the working-class revolt in France a hair’s breadth

from overthrowing an advanced capitalism?

What is more, the two books insist insufficiently upon the relatively

progressive aspects of communism in power, although both mention some of

them. Collinet accepts that the national bourgeoisies have been

eliminated, the poor peasants liberated from the yoke of big landowners

and usurers, and that industrialization has been carried out; Djilas

that the collective ownership of the means of production has allowed for

the realization of rapid progress in certain sectors of the economy. But

the Yugoslav contradicts himself by claiming against all evidence that

no great scientific discoveries have been made under the Soviet regime

and that in this domain the USSR probably trails tsarist Russia. And in

the final conclusions of these two books the progressive aspect is

forgotten and the balance sheet presented is too negative.

In the same way, concerning the possibilities for the evolution of the

post-Stalinist regime the two authors demonstrate a pessimism that in my

eyes is excessive. To be sure, they are right in maintaining that the

Khrushchev regime was that of a conservative pragmatism lacking in

ideas. They are also right in stressing the relatively narrow limits of

de-Stalinization and in being skeptical about the democratization and

the decentralization of the regime, be it in Russia itself, Yugoslavia,

or Poland. But at times when reading them it seems that “dialectical”

evolution is blocked, that it forbids all hope. And yet, in other

passages the two authors admit that the break with the Stalinist past is

profound, that something has truly changed, that the domination of the

“new class” has been shaken, that liberation is on the march, and that

the release of popular discontent is irreversible. But they conclude

that the outcome will be irremediable ruin and the collapse of

“communism” without indicating with what the “monster” will be replaced.

An ambiguity all the more worrisome in that one senses in their analysis

a singular indulgence towards Western bourgeois democracy, considered

the sole alternative to “communist tyranny.”

It seems that for both Collinet and Djilas the Russian regime alone is

responsible for the Cold War and the division of the world into two

blocs. The capitalist and imperialist character of the Western

democracies is blurred. For Collinet financial capitalism is a “mythical

monster,” and even Djilas who has spent time in the U.S., contests the

idea that the Western governments are controlled by a handful of

monopolists. Collinet claims with a straight face that there exist

Western democracies “untainted by any vestiges of imperialism,” and

Djilas that the United States tend towards an increasingly statist

regime. The dangers that American big business and its claim to world

leadership present are conjured away. Collinet goes even further when he

attacks the Bandung Accords which, according to him, are “nothing but a

weapon against the Western democracies,” and when he presents Mossadegh

and Nasser as instruments in the service of Russian expansionism.[268]

The impact of the indictment of Stalinist totalitarianism and the

executioners of the Hungarian people is considerably weakened by the

blank check issued the aggressors of Suez and Western colonialism.

Why do Collinet and Djilas both go off the rails at the end of their

analysis? In my opinion the real reason for their error is their

inability to find a third way outside of those of Stalinism and

bourgeois democracy. And the source of this inability is the refusal to

rally to libertarian Marxist ideas.

They make only vague and insufficient allusions to the great conflict

between authoritarian socialism and anarchist socialism that so deeply

divided the working-class movement of the nineteenth century. They seem

to be ignorant of the fact that the totalitarian communism they denounce

was condemned a century before them in prophetic terms by Proudhon and

Bakunin. For Collinet and even more for Djilas authority directly

exercised by the proletariat in the absence of any state coercion is an

“illusion” and a “utopia.” And yet the two authors occasionally

contradict themselves and express unconscious libertarian aspirations.

Collinet lets slip that “the logic of democracy was not the Jacobin

state, even animated by good intentions, but the state, withering away

and transferring its functions to the entire social body.” And Djilas,

after having denounced the Jacobin-style intolerance of contemporary

communists, exalts “man’s imperishable aspiration for freedom,” and

announces as imminent the moment when industrialization will render

communism “superfluous.” Analyzing the demands of the underground

opposition currently maturing in the USSR, Collinet—who is more precise

than Djilas on this matter although, alas, he does not go as far as he

should—says that “they do not appear to be demanding Western

parliamentarism; rather their essence is the independence of the people

and their economic and cultural organizations in relation to the party

and state apparatuses.”

If Collinet and Djilas had more clearly deduced these libertarian

conclusions from their analyses they would have avoided getting bogged

down, due to their failure to clearly glimpse a third way, in a

pro-Western Menshevism that deprives their argument of much of its force

and persuasive power. None of this, of course, justifies the prison

sentence inflicted on the Yugoslav, which does no honor to Tito’s

regime.

The lesson: a revolutionary socialist who frees himself of

Marxist-Leninist Jacobinism is in great danger of falling into

petitbourgeois and counter-revolutionary ideologies. There is only one

healthy and certain way to “de-Jacobinize,” to distance oneself from

authoritarian socialism, and that is to go over to libertarian Marxism,

the only reliable value of our time, the only socialism that has

remained young, the only authentic socialism.

[1957, in Jeunesse du socialisme libertaire]

May, a Continuity, a Renewal

With the exception of that by Cohn-Bendit, what is striking about some

of the countless books written a tad too hastily about May ’68 is the

relative absence of references or insufficient references to the

revolutionary past.[269] The books in which this omission can be found

were written in general by young people. The young were the initiators

of May and feel a legitimate pride in it. Through May, many discovered

the Revolution, a Revolution that not all of them knew beforehand from

books, or only knew it poorly due to the falsified versions that had

been presented to them. From which a strange point of view develops

which leads them to believe that in France everything began with May

’68, that May was an absolutely original creation without any direct

ties to French working-class and revolutionary traditions.

Claude Lefort displayed an illusion of this kind when in an article in

Le Monde,[270] he boldly asserted that “with the May movement ...

something new is being announced ... an opposition that does not yet

know what to call itself, but which challenges the power structure in

such a way that it cannot be confused with the movements of the past.”

It is true that Lefort in this case was carried away by the ardor of a

polemic against the various Trotskyist groups he reproaches, not without

reason, with seeking to recuperate and monopolize the May movement at

the risk of fossilizing it. But in making his case he exaggeratedly tips

the balance in a direction opposite to that of the Trotskyist tradition,

and I do not share his opinion that May is so radically different from

the movements of the past.

To be sure, what is new, what is absolutely novel in May is that we

witnessed the first act of an extended social revolution whose detonator

was constituted not by workers, as in the past, but for the first time

by students. Nevertheless, this peculiarity of May only concerns the

first two weeks of the famous month, when it was the students who built

the barricades and held the streets. The second phase of the “May

revolution,” the far more important one, that which more profoundly

shook the political power and the bosses, which gave rise to the alarm

of the property-owning class and the flight of their capital, was a

revolution of the working class in the style and at the level of the

great social crises of the past.

One wonders whether the reason certain people tend to overestimate the

originality of the May revolution is that it arose during a historical

stage when the Revolution had been emptied of all content in France;

when it had been betrayed, perverted, erased from the map by two

powerful political steam-rollers, two sterilizers of critical thinking:

Stalinism and Gaullism. If May looked boldly anti-establishment, if it

seemed to bring into question all established values and authorities as

Claude Lefort seems to think, is it not because Stalinism for the last

forty years and Gaullism for the past ten had caused the French to lose

the habit of radical contestation, of libertarian protest? A habit, a

taste, a tradition that had been theirs for almost 150 years.

Let us take the time to travel into our past and rediscover the

countless May ‘68s of our national and social history.

For my part, scratching and digging behind the misleading façade

constructed by bourgeois historians, I attempted to revive the mass

movement of the revolution of 1793, extraordinary and unbelievable

because it occurred in a France still more or less plunged in the

darkness of absolutism, aristocracy, and clericalism. I followed step by

step the bold incursions in the direction of the revolutions of the

future dared by the sans-culotte vanguard, so far in advance of its

time: the practice of direct democracy, the omnipotence of the power of

the street. I compared, and how could one not, the Enragés of 1793 and

those of 1968 by stressing this phrase of Jacque Roux, precursor of

Daniel Cohn-Bendit: “Only the young are capable of the degree of ardor

necessary to make a revolution.”

When I had to describe the burst of vitality, of good sense, of good

humor, more good-natured than cruel, that cast the people into the great

adventure of de-Christianization in 1793 and led to the overturning of

idols, I gave the chapter dedicated to this subject an expression

borrowed from May ’68: “All power to the imagination.” For what we have

here is the same creative genius.

All the social revolutions in France that followed that of 1793 and were

born of its traditions were, like their predecessor, an exuberant

festival of recovered freedom and an enormous collective release.

To a certain extent that was the case with the general strike in Paris

in 1840, at the very moment when the idea of socialism was born in

people’s minds. This general strike is too little known, for here, too,

the bourgeois historians, with the exception of Octave Festy, were no

doubt superficial and negligent by design.

And what should we say about the tumultuous, fertile revolution of 1848,

which bred so many ideas that emerged over several months from a popular

crucible in turmoil, when so many public meetings and vast assemblies of

the people where held, when so many newspapers, pamphlets, and tracts

were born.

The libertarian explosion that was the Commune of 1871, the direct heir

of that of 1793, was of the same kind. It is often hidden from us, or

relegated to second place, by authors who have their eyes almost

exclusively fixed on its civil war aspects. But during the short span of

time when revolutionary Paris was able to blossom during a relative

respite before it was subjected to the fatal aggression of the

Versaillais, what a flowering, what an overflowing of joy and liberty!

Armand Gatti, in the beautiful text he wrote in May ’68 to comment on

the projection of slides on the walls, perfectly grasped the parallels

between “May ’68” and the Commune.[271] Likewise, it would be giving a

one-sided vision of the May revolution to reduce it to a series of

street battles and to minimize the general contestation and the direct

democracy. The confrontation with the CRS was the price that had to be

paid to open the festival of freedom at the Sorbonne.[272]

The same libertarian impulse can be found in the great strike that

followed the end of World War I in France just fifty years ago, combined

with the mutinies of French sailors refusing to go to war with the

Russian soviets. Do people know that on June 8, 1919, Toulon was the

theater of a genuine insurrection, where sailors, soldiers, and workers

fought shoulder to shoulder in the streets, stones in hand, against the

gendarmes?[273]

For my part, I was fortunate enough, along with millions of other

militants, to live through June ’36, the immediate precursor to the

workers’ May ’68. And along with all of them I can testify that France,

paralyzed by the general strike and the factory occupations, and with

the power of the masses master of the country, was on a par with the

workers’ uprising we lived through a year ago. Like the preceding

explosions, the “revolution” of 1936 was an impressive festival of

popular joy. Parades of millions of demonstrators filled the streets,

just as on May 13, 1968. And in the factories, of which the workers had

become masters, we participated in an immense popular festival, an

enormous Bastille Day, one far more spontaneous than the one celebrated

every year by the bourgeois republican tradition.[274]

Having participated in many debates in the lecture halls of the occupied

university buildings in May, I can attest to the fact that the

passionate and vibrant crowds that squeezed into them, far from turning

their backs on the revolutionary past, were eager to find a continuity

in it, to quench their thirst at that eternal spring of libertarian

energy, which many of them had just discovered.

The rebirth of anarchism during May ’68 might have seemed surprising.

But looked at more closely, the French working class, and by extension

the French people, has always retained an anarchist—or rather

anarcho-syndicalist—substratum. Contrary to appearances, the CGT’s

tradition of class struggle and direct action which flourished from 1895

to 1914 never died. Many militants, and even leaders, who have since

become Stalinist “Communists,” have not completely succeeded in killing

within themselves a repressed nostalgia for anarcho-syndicalism. The

union split of 1921, the creation of the CGTU and then its

Bolshevization did not cause the old syndicalist ferment to vanish from

the consciousness of the workers.[275]

The general strikes of 1936 and 1968, both of which were accompanied by

a wave of occupations, were spontaneous mass mobilizations of the rank

and file, and were authentically anarcho-syndicalist.

Despite the maneuvers of counter-revolutionary bureaucrats like Georges

Séguy,[276] the CGT of today in large measure remains, deep in its

heart, anarcho-syndicalist, and that is what infuriates the

aforementioned individual.

Finally, if anarchism was rediscovered in May, or rather entered into

symbiosis with Marxism, there is no need to go far to find the cause: it

is quite simply because at the moment that it blooms every social

revolution can only be libertarian.

Only afterwards do the recuperators, the leaders who lay their paws on

the Revolution, disfigure it and stifle it.

The revolution of May was aware of this danger. Up till now it has not

succumbed. But beware!

[1969, in Pour un Marxisme libertaire]

Self-Management in Revolutionary Spain, 1936–1937

Self-management in revolutionary Spain is relatively little known. Even

within the Republican camp it was more or less passed over in silence or

disparaged. The horrible civil war submerged it, and still submerges it

today in people’s memories. It is not mentioned at all in the film To

Die in Madrid.[277] And yet, it was perhaps the most positive legacy of

the Spanish Revolution: the attempt at an original form of socialist

economy.

In the wake of the revolution of July 19, 1936, the swift popular

response to the Francoist coup d’état, many agricultural estates and

factories had been abandoned by their owners. Agricultural day laborers

were the first to decide to continue cultivating the land. Their social

consciousness seems to have been even higher than that of the urban

workers. They spontaneously organized themselves into collectives. In

August a union conference was held in Barcelona representing several

hundred thousand agricultural workers and small farmers. The legal

blessing only occurred shortly afterwards: on October 7, 1936, the

central Republican government nationalized the lands of “persons

involved in the fascist rebellion.”

The agricultural collectives gave themselves dual management, both union

and communal, with the communalist spirit predominating. At general

assemblies peasants elected a management committee of eleven members in

each village. Aside from the secretary, all of the members continued to

work with their hands. Labor was mandatory for all healthy men between

eighteen and sixty. The peasants were divided into groups of ten or

more, with a delegate at their head. Each group was assigned a zone of

cultivation or a function in accordance with the age of its members and

the nature of the task. Every evening the management committee received

the delegates of the groups. They frequently invited the residents to a

general assembly of the neighborhood for an account of their activity.

Everything was held in common, except personal savings, and livestock

and fowl destined for family consumption. The artisans, hairdressers,

and cobblers were grouped in collectives. The sheep of the community,

for example, were distributed in groups of three to four hundred,

entrusted to two shepherds and methodically distributed across the

mountain.

Wage labor and, partially at least, money were abolished. Each worker or

family received in remuneration for his labor a bond denominated in

pesetas that could only be exchanged for consumer goods in communal

stores, often located in churches or their out-buildings. The unused sum

was credited to the individual’s reserve account. It was possible to

withdraw pocket money from this sum in limited amounts. Rent,

electricity, medical care, pharmaceutical products, and old age

assistance were free, as was school, which was often located in a former

convent and mandatory for all children below fourteen, for whom manual

labor was prohibited.

Membership in the collective was voluntary. No pressure was exercised on

small landowners. They could, if they wished, participate in common

tasks and place their products in the communal stores. They were

admitted to general assemblies, benefiting from most of the advantages

of the community. They were only prevented from owning more land than

they could cultivate and one condition was posed: that their person or

property not disturb the collective order. In most socialized villages

the number of individuals who stood on their own, peasants or merchants,

grew ever smaller.

The communal collectives were united in cantonal federations, above

which were provincial federations. The land of a cantonal federation

formed one holding, without boundary markings. Solidarity between

villages was pushed to the extreme. Compensation funds allowed for the

assisting of the least favored collectives.

From One Province to Another

Rural socialization varied in importance from one province to another.

In Catalonia, a land of small and mid-sized property, where farmers had

strong individualist traditions, it was reduced to a few tiny islands,

the peasant union confederation wisely preferring to first convince

landowners by the exemplary success of a few pilot collectives.

On the other hand, in Aragon more than three quarters of the lands were

socialized. The passage of a Catalan militia, the famous Durruti Column,

en route for the north to fight the Francoists, and the subsequent

creation of a revolutionary power issued from the rank and file, the

only one of its kind in Republican Spain, stimulated the creative

initiative of the agricultural workers. Around 450 collectives were

formed, bringing together 600,000 members. In the province of Levante

(its capital Valencia), the richest in Spain, some 600 collectives

arose. They took in 43 percent of all localities, 50 percent of citrus

production and 70 percent of its distribution. In Castile 300

collectives were formed with 100,000 members on the initiative of 1,000

volunteers sent as experts in self-management by Levante. Socialization

also touched Extremadura and a portion of Andalucía. There were a few

attempts at it in Asturias, but they were quickly repressed.

It should be noted that this socialism from the base was not, as some

believe, the work of the anarchists alone. According to Gustave Leval’s

testimony, those engaged in self-management were often “anarchists

without knowing it.”[278] Among the latter provinces enumerated above,

it was the socialist, Catholic, and in Asturias even Communist peasants

who took the initiative in self-management.

When it was not sabotaged by its enemies or hindered by the war,

agricultural self-management was an unquestionable success. The land was

united into one holding and cultivated over great expanses according to

a general plan and the directives of agronomists. Small landowners

integrated their plots with those of the community. Socialization

demonstrated its superiority both over large absentee landholdings,

which left a part of the land unplanted, and over smallholdings,

cultivated with the use of rudimentary techniques, inadequate seeding,

and without fertilizer. Production increased by 30–50 percent. The

amount of cultivated land increased, working methods were improved, and

human, animal, and mechanical energy used more rationally. Farming was

diversified, irrigation developed, the countryside partially reforested,

nurseries opened, pigsties constructed, rural technical schools created,

pilot farms set up, livestock selected and increased, and auxiliary

industries set in motion, etc.

In Levante, the initiatives taken for the marketing of agricultural

goods deserve mention. The war having caused a temporary closing of

foreign markets and of the part of the internal market controlled by

Franco, the oranges were dried; and wherever a greater quantity than

previously was obtained, essence was extracted from the peel and orange

honey, orange wine, medical alcohol, and pulp for the saving of blood

from slaughterhouses for use to feed fowl was produced. Factories

concentrated orange juice. When the peasant federation succeeded in

reestablishing relations with French ports it ensured the marketing of

agricultural goods through its warehouses, its trucks, its cargos, and

its sales outlets in France.

These successes were due, for the most part, to the people’s initiative

and intelligence. Though a majority were illiterate, the peasants

demonstrated a socialist consciousness, practical common sense, and a

spirit of solidarity and sacrifice that inspired admiration in foreign

visitors. Fenner Brockway of the Independent Labour Party, after a visit

to the collective of Segorbe, testified to this: “The mood of the

peasants, their enthusiasm, the way in which they made their

contributions to the common effort, their pride in it, all of this is

admirable.”

The Sabotage of Self-management

However, there was no lack of difficulties. Credit and foreign commerce,

by the will of the bourgeois Republican government, remained in the

hands of the private sector. To be sure, the state controlled the banks,

but it avoided putting them at the service of self-management. Lacking

circulating funds, many collectives lived on what they had seized at the

time of the July 1936 revolution. Afterwards they had to resort to

makeshift methods, like seizing jewelry and precious objects belonging

to the churches, convents, Francoists, etc. Self-management also

suffered from a lack of agricultural machinery and, to a lesser degree,

a lack of technical cadres.

But the most serious obstacle was the hostility, at first hidden and

then open, of the various political general staffs of Republican Spain.

Even a party of the Far Left such as the Workers’ Party of Marxist

Unification (POUM) was not always well disposed towards the

collectives.[279] This authentically popular movement, the herald of a

new order, spontaneous and improvised, and jealous of its autonomy,

offended the machine of the Republican state as much as it did private

capitalism. It united against it both the property-owning class and the

apparatuses of the parties of the Left in power. Self-management was

accused of breaking the “unity of the front” between the working class

and the petit bourgeoisie and thus of playing into the hands of the

Francoist enemy. Which did not prevent the detractors from refusing

weapons to the revolutionary vanguard, reduced, in Aragon, to

confronting the fascist machineguns barehanded, and then to be attacked

for “inertia.”

On the radio the new Catalonian minister of the economy, Comorera, a

Stalinist, incited peasants not to join the collectives, suggested to

the small landowners that they combat them, and at the same time took

resupplying from the hands of the workers’ unions and favored private

commerce. Thus encouraged from above, the dark forces of reaction

increasingly sabotaged the experiment in self-management.

In the end, the government coalition, after the crushing of the

“Barcelona Commune” in May 1937 and the outlawing of the POUM, did not

hesitate to liquidate agricultural self-management by any means

necessary. A decree dated August 10, 1937, pronounced the dissolution of

the revolutionary authority in Aragon on the pretext that it “remained

outside the centralizing current.” One of its main inspirations, Joaquin

Ascaso, was indicted for “sale of jewelry” destined, in reality, for

procuring funds for the collectives. Immediately afterwards, the nth

Division of Commandant Lister (a Stalinist), supported by tanks, went

into action against the collectives. The leaders were arrested, their

offices occupied and then shut down, the management committees

dissolved, the communal stores robbed, the furniture smashed, and the

flocks dispersed. Around 30 percent of the collectives of Aragon were

completely destroyed.

In Levante, in Castile, in the provinces of Huesca and Teruel, armed

attacks of the same kind were perpetrated—by Republicans—against

agricultural self-management. It survived—barely—in certain regions that

had not yet fallen into the hands of the Francoists, notably in Levante.

Industrial Self-management

In Catalonia, the most industrialized region of Spain, self-management

also demonstrated its worth in industry. Workers whose employers had

fled spontaneously set to keeping their factories working. In October

1936 a union congress was held in Barcelona representing 600,000 workers

with the object of socializing industry. The workers’ initiative was

ratified by a decree of the Generalitat, the Catalan government, on

October 24, 1936. Two sectors were created, one socialist, the other

private. The socialized factories were those with more than a hundred

workers (those with between fifty and a hundred could be socialized at

the request of three quarters of the workers), those whose owners had

been declared “seditious” by a popular tribunal or who had abandoned its

running, and finally those whose importance to the national economy

justified their being removed from the private sector (in fact, a number

of enterprises in debt were socialized).

The socialized factories were led by a management committee with between

five and thirteen members, representing the various services, elected by

the workers in a general assembly, with a two-year term, half of them to

be renewed every year. The committee selected a director to whom it

delegated all or part of its powers. In the key factories the selection

of the director had to be approved by the regulatory body. In addition,

a government inspector was placed on every management committee.

The management committee could be revoked either by the general assembly

or by a general council of the branch of industry (composed of four

representatives of the management committees, eight from the workers’

unions, and four technicians named by the regulatory body). This general

council planned the work and determined the distribution of profits. Its

decisions were legally binding.

In those enterprises that remained in private hands, an elected workers’

committee controlled the working conditions “in close collaboration with

the employer.”

The decree of October 24, 1936, was a compromise between the aspiration

for autonomous management and the tendency towards state oversight and

planning, as well as a transition between capitalism and socialism. It

was written by an anarchist minister and accepted by the CNT (National

Confederation of Labor), the anarchist union, because the

anarcho-syndicalists participated in the Catalan government.

In practice, despite the considerable powers granted the general

councils of the branches of industry, worker self-management risked

leading to a selfish particularism, each production unit concerned only

about its own interests. This was remedied by the creation of a central

equalization fund, allowing for the equitable distribution of resources.

In this way the surplus of the Barcelona bus company was transferred to

the less profitable tram company.

Exchanges occurred between industrial and peasant collectives, the

former exchanging underwear or clothing for the olive oil of the latter.

In the suburbs of Barcelona, in the commune of Hospitalitet, on whose

borders farmers were involved in the planting of crops, the agricultural

and industrial (metals, textile, etc.) self-managed organizations joined

together in one communal authority elected by the people, which ensured

the provisioning of the city.

Outside of Catalonia, notably in Levante, industrial self-management was

experimented with in a few locations. This was the case in Alcoy, near

Alicante, where 20,000 textile workers and steel workers managed the

socialized factories and created consumer cooperatives, as well as in

Clastellón de la Plana, where the steel factories were integrated into

larger units under the impetus of a technical commission in daily

contact with each of its management committees.

But like agricultural self-management, industrial self-management faced

the hostility of the administrative bureaucracy, the authoritarian

socialists, and the Communists. The central Republican government

refused it any credits, even when the Catalan minister of the economy,

the anarchist Fabregas, offered the billions on deposit in the savings

banks as a guarantee for the advances to self-management. When he was

replaced in 1937 by Comorera the latter deprived the self-managed

factories of the primary material they lavished on the private sector.

It also neglected to ensure the deliveries ordered by the Catalan

administration to the socialized enterprises.

Industrial Self-management Dismantled

Later, the central government used the pretext of the needs of national

defense to seize control of the war industries. By a decree of August

23, 1937, it suspended the application of the Catalan socialization

decree of October 1936 in the steel and mining industries, said to be

“contrary to the spirit of the constitution.” The former supervisors and

the directors removed under self-management or, more precisely, who had

not wanted to accept posts as technicians in self-managed enterprises,

resumed their posts, with revenge in their hearts.

Catalan industrial self-management nevertheless survived in other

branches until the crushing of Republican Spain in 1939. But industry

having lost its main outlets and lacking in primary materials the

factories that did not work for national defense were only able to

operate with severely reduced staff and hours.

In short, Spanish self-management, hardly born, was restrained within

the strict framework of a war fought with classic military methods in

the name (or under cover) of which the republic clipped the wings of its

vanguard and compromised with internal reaction. Despite the unfavorable

conditions under which it took place and the brevity of its existence,

which prohibits an evaluation and accounting of its results, the

experiment opened new perspectives for socialism, for an authentic

socialism, animated from the bottom up, the direct emanation of the

workers of the country and the cities.[280]

[1984, in À la recherche d’un communisme libertaire]

Libertarian Communism, the Only Real Communism

It is time to outline a synthesis of all my work and attempt to sketch a

program, at the risk of seeing myself accused of engaging in

“metapolitics.”

It would be futile to engage in a sort of replastering of an edifice of

cracked and worm-eaten socialist doctrines, to struggle to patch

together some of the surviving solid fragments of traditional Marxism

and anarchism, to indulge in Marxist or Bakuninist scholarship, to seek

to trace, merely on paper, tortuous connections.

If in this book we have often turned to the past it was of course not,

as the reader will have understood, to dwell on it self-indulgently. To

learn from it, to draw from it, yes, for previous experience is rich in

teachings, but with an eye to the future.

The libertarian communism of our time, which blossomed in the French May

’68, goes far beyond communism and anarchism.

Calling oneself a libertarian communist today does not mean looking

backwards, but rather drafting a sketch of the future. Libertarian

communists are not exegetes, they are militants. They understand that it

is incumbent upon them to change the future, no more, no less. History

has backed them against the wall. The hour of the socialist revolution

has rung everywhere. Like the moon landing, it has entered the realm of

the immediate and the possible. The precise definition of the forms of a

socialist society no longer belong to the realm of utopia. The only

people lacking in realism are those who close their eyes to these

truths.

What will be the guiding lines that we are going to follow to accomplish

the Revolution which, as Gracchus Babeuf said, will be the final one?

To start with, before going into action, libertarian communists assess

the exact nature of objective conditions; they attempt to evaluate

accurately the balance of power in every situation. Here the method

elaborated by Karl Marx and which has not aged, namely historical and

dialectical materialism, remains the surest of compasses, an

inexhaustible mine of models and guideposts. On condition, however, that

it be treated as Marx did himself, that is, without doctrinal rigidity,

and that it avoid mechanistic inflexibility; on condition that,

sheltering beneath its wing, one does not eternally invent poor pretexts

and pseudo-objective reasons to excuse oneself from pushing things to

the limit, to sow confusion, to miss the revolutionary opportunity every

time it presents itself.

Libertarian communism is a communism that rejects determinism and

fatalism, which gives space to individual will, intuition, imagination,

the rapidity of reflexes, the profound instinct of the large masses, who

are wiser at moments of crisis than the reasonings of the “elite,” who

believe in the element of surprise and provocation, in the value of

audacity, who do not allow themselves to be encumbered and paralyzed by

a weighty, supposedly “scientific” ideological apparatus, who do not

prevaricate or bluff, who avoid both adventurism and fear of the

unknown.

Libertarian communists have learned from experience how to set about

things: they hold in contempt the impotent shambles of disorganization

as much as the bureaucratic ball and chain of over-organization.

Libertarian communists, faithful on this point to both Marx and Bakunin,

reject the fetishism of the single, monolithic, and totalitarian party,

just as they avoid the traps of a fraudulent and demobilizing

electoralism.

Libertarian communists are, in their essence, internationalists. They

consider the global struggles of the exploited as a whole. But they

nonetheless take into account the specificity and the original forms of

socialism in each country. They only conceive internationalism to be

proletarian if it is inspired from the bottom up, on a level of complete

equality, without any form of subordination to a “big brother” who

thinks himself stronger and cleverer.

Libertarian communists never sacrifice the revolutionary struggle to the

diplomatic imperatives of the so-called socialist empires and, like Che

Guevara, do not hesitate to send them both packing if their aberrant

fratricidal quarrels cause mortal harm to the cause of universal

socialism.

When the moment of the revolutionary test of strength arrives,

libertarian communists will attack at both the center and the periphery,

in the political and administrative fields as well as the economic. On

the one hand, they will deal mercilessly, with all their might, and if

necessary by means of armed struggle, with the bourgeois state and the

entire complex machinery of power, be it at the level of the capital,

the regions, the departments, or the municipalities; they will never

make the mistake, on the pretext of “apoliticism,” of neglecting,

underestimating, or abstaining from dismantling the citadels, the

political centers, from which the enemy’s resistance is directed. But at

the same time, combining the economic and political struggles, they will

at their workplaces take control of all posts held by the bosses and

wrest the means of production from those who monopolize them, in order

to hand them over to their real, rightful owners: the self-managing

workers and technicians.

Once that revolution is victoriously and completely accomplished,

libertarian communists do not smash the state in order to reestablish it

in another even more oppressive form through the colossal expansion of

its capacities. Rather, they want the transmission of all power to a

confederation of federations, that is, to a confederation of communes,

themselves federated in regions, a confederation of revolutionary

workers’ unions preexisting the revolution or, failing that, the

confederation of workers’ councils born of the revolution, which does

not exclude the eventuality of a merger of the latter two. Elected for a

short mandate and not eligible for reelection, the delegates to these

various bodies are controllable and revocable at all times.

Libertarian communists shun any particularist atomization into small

units, communes, and workers’ councils, and aspire to a federalist

coordination, one which is both close-knit and freely consented to.

Rejecting bureaucratic and authoritarian planning, they believe in the

need for coherent and democratic planning, inspired from the bottom up.

Because they are of their time, libertarian communists want to wrest the

media, automation, and computers from the maleficent monopolists and

place them at the service of liberation.

Hardened authoritarians and sceptics maintain that the imperatives of

contemporary technology are incompatible with a libertarian communist

society. On the contrary, the libertarian communists intend to unleash a

new technological revolution, this time oriented towards both higher

productivity and a shorter work day, towards decentralization,

decongestion, de-bureaucratization, dis-alienation, and a return to

nature. They condemn the degrading mentality of the so-called consumer

society while preparing to raise consumption to its highest level ever.

Libertarian communists carry out this gigantic overturning at the price

of the least possible disorder, neither too slowly nor too soon. They

know that a wave of the magic wand cannot instantly effect the most

profound social transformation of all time. They do not lose sight of

the fact that with the hominid distorted by millennia of oppression,

obscurantism, and egoism, time will be needed to form a socialist man or

socialist woman. They agree to transitions while refusing to see them

perpetuated. And so it is that while assigning as the ultimate goal, to

be reached by stages, the withering away of competition, the free

provision of public and social services, the disappearance of money, and

the distribution of abundance according to the needs of each; that while

aiming at association within self-management of agriculturalists and

artisans, at the cooperative reorganization of commerce, it is not their

plan to abolish overnight competition and the laws of the marketplace,

remuneration according to labor accomplished, small farming, and

artisanal and commercial property.

They do not think superfluous the temporary assistance of active

minorities who are more educated and conscious, whatever name they might

give themselves, minorities whose contribution is unavoidable in

bringing the rearguard to full socialist maturity, but who will not stay

on stage one day longer than necessary and will merge as quickly as

possible into the egalitarian association of producers.

The libertarian communists do not offer us yet another “groupuscule.”

For them the guiding lines that we have just laid out coincide with the

basic class instinct of the working class.

In my opinion—and long, arduous, and painful experience has demonstrated

this—apart from libertarian communism there is no real communism.

[1969, in Pour un Marxisme libertaire]

Appendices

Appendix I: The Libertarian Communist Platform of 1971In 1969, Guérin

had helped launch the Mouvement Communiste Libertaire (Libertarian

Communist Movement), and two years later the MCL merged with a number of

other groups to create the Organisation Communiste Libertaire

(Libertarian Communist Organization). This was the OCL’s manifesto. [DB]

I—Individual and collective revolts punctuate the history of humanity,

which is a succession of exploitative societies. In every era thinkers

have arrived at an idea that calls their society into question. But it

was with the advent of modern capitalist society that the division of

society into two fundamental, antagonistic classes clearly appeared, and

it is through class struggle, the motor of the evolution of capitalist

society, that the road was constructed that leads from revolt to the

achieving of revolutionary consciousness.

Today, because it has changed form, class struggle is sometimes denied

by those who insist on either the bourgeoisification and integration of

the working class, or the birth of a new working class that will

supposedly insert itself naturally, as it were, into the decision-making

centers of capitalist society. In fact, the old social strata are

disappearing, the polarization into two fundamental classes is growing

more acute, and there is always some spot in the world where the class

war is being reignited.

Whatever the ideological forms it assumes, the capitalist mode of

production is, globally, a unity. Whether it be in the form which, based

originally on “liberalism,” is headed towards state monopoly capitalism,

or that of state bureaucratic capitalism, capitalism cannot but increase

the exploitation of labor in order to attempt to escape the mortal

crisis threatening it. Massacres, the general collapse of living

conditions, as well as the exploitation and alienation peculiar to this

or that human group (women, the young, racial or sexual minorities,

etc.) are manifestations that cannot be separated from the division of

society into two classes: that which disposes of wealth and the lives of

workers, and creates and perpetuates the superstructures (customs, moral

values, law, culture in general), and that which produces wealth.

The proletariat can today be defined broadly as follows: those who, at

one level or another, create surplus value or contribute to its

realization. Added to the proletariat are those who, belonging to

non-proletarian strata, rally to proletarian objectives (such as

intellectuals and students).

II—Class struggle and revolution are not purely objective processes, are

not the results of mechanical necessities independent of the activities

of the exploited. The class struggle is not simply a phenomenon to be

observed: it is the driver that constantly modifies the situation and

the facts of capitalist society. Revolution is its conclusion. It is the

exploited taking into its hands the instruments of production and

exchange, of weapons, and the destruction of the centers and means of

state power.

To be sure, the class struggle is punctuated with difficulties,

failures, and bloody defeats, but proletarian action periodically

reemerges, more powerful and more extensive.

• In the first instance it manifests itself at the level of direct

confrontation in the workplace. It also manifests itself at the level of

problems of daily life, in struggles against the oppression of women,

the young, and minorities; in the questioning of education, culture,

art, and values. But these struggles must never be separated from the

class struggle. Attacking the state and the superstructures also means

attacking capitalist domination. Fighting for better working conditions

or wage increases means carrying on the same struggle. But it is clear

that posing the problem of lifestyle, rather than just that of wage

levels, gives the struggle a more radical aspect when this means the

development of a mass movement demanding a whole new conception of life

rather than merely quantitative improvements.

• Historical analysis makes clear a profound tendency, expressed by the

workers through their direct struggles against capital and the state,

towards self-organization, and the structures of classless society

appear embryonically in the forms assumed by revolutionary action. The

tendency towards autonomous action can be seen in the course of the most

everyday struggles: wildcat strikes, expropriations, various forms of

direct action opposed to bureaucratic leadership, action committees,

rank-and-file committees, etc. With the demand for power at workers’

general assemblies and the insistence on the revocability of delegates,

it is true self-management that is on the agenda.

For us there is no historic and formal break between the proletariat

rising to power and its struggles to achieve this, rather a continuous

and dialectical development of self-management techniques, starting from

the class struggle and ending with the victory of the proletariat and

the establishment of a classless society.

A specifically proletarian mode of organization, “council power,” arose

during revolutionary periods like the Paris Commune (1871), Makhnovist

Ukraine (1918–1921), the Italian workers’ councils (1918–1922), the

Bavarian council republic (1918–1919), the Budapest Commune (1919), the

Kronstadt Commune (1921), the Spanish Revolution (1936–1937), the

Hungarian revolt (1956), the Czech revolt (1968), and May ’68.

The power of the councils, achieving generalized self-management in all

realms of human activity, can only be defined through historical

practice itself, and any attempt at a definition of the new world can

only be an approximation, a proposal, an investigation.

The appearance and generalization of direct forms of workers’ power

implies that the revolutionary process is already quite advanced.

Nevertheless, it should be presumed that at this stage bourgeois power

is still far from being totally liquidated. And so a provisional dual

power is established between the revolutionary and socialist structures

put in place by the working classes and, on the other hand, the

counter-revolutionary forces.

During this period the class struggle, far from being attenuated,

reaches its climax, and it is here that the words class war take on all

their sharpness: the future of the revolution depends on the outcome of

this war. Nevertheless, it would be dangerous to view the process in

accordance with well-defined norms. Indeed, the nature of state power

(i.e., counter-revolutionary power) in its fight against the councils

can take on different forms. What is fundamental is that council power

is antagonistic to all state power, since it expresses itself within

society itself through general assemblies, whose delegates in the

various organizations that have been established are nothing but its

expression and can be recalled at any time.

At this point authority and society are no longer separate, the maximal

conditions having been realized for the satisfaction of the needs,

tendencies, and aspirations of individuals and social groups, humanity

escaping from its condition as object to become the creative subject of

its own life.

And so it is obvious that the revolution cannot be made through

intermediaries: it is the product of the spontaneous movement of the

masses and not of a general staff of specialists or a so-called vanguard

that is alone conscious and charged with the leadership and direction of

struggles. When the word “spontaneous” is used here its use should not

at all be interpreted as adherence to a so-called spontaneist idea

privileging mass spontaneity at the expense of revolutionary

consciousness, which is its indispensable complement and which surpasses

it. In other words, an incorrect use of the notion of spontaneity would

consist in likening it to a “disordered,” “instinctive” activity that

would be incapable of engendering revolutionary consciousness, as was

claimed by Kautsky and later by Lenin in his What Is to Be Done?

It is no less obvious that the revolution cannot be a simple political

and economic restructuring of the old society. Instead, by all at once

overturning all realms through the smashing of capitalist production

relations and the state, it is not only political and economic, but also

at every moment cultural, and it is in this sense that we can utilize

the idea of total revolution.

III—The real vanguard is not this or that group that proclaims itself

the historic consciousness of the proletariat. It is, in fact, those

militant workers who are at the forefront of offensive combat, and those

who maintain a certain degree of consciousness even in periods of

retreat.

The revolutionary organization is a place for meetings, exchanges,

information, and reflection which enable the development of

revolutionary theory and practice, which are nothing but two aspects of

one movement. It brings together militants who recognize each other at

the same level of reflection, activity, and cohesion. It can on no

account substitute itself for the proletarian movement itself or impose

a leadership on it or claim to be its fully achieved consciousness.

On the other hand, it must strive to synthesize the experiences of

struggle, helping to acquire the greatest possible degree of

revolutionary consciousness and the greatest possible coherence in that

consciousness, which is to be seen not as a goal or as existing in the

abstract, but as a process.

In summary, the revolutionary organization’s role is to support the

proletarian vanguard and to assist in the self-organization of the

proletariat by playing—either collectively or through the intervention

of militants—the role of propagator, catalyst, and revealer, and by

allowing the revolutionaries that compose it coordinated and convergent

interventions in the areas of information, propaganda, and support for

exemplary actions.

A consequence of this conception of the revolutionary organization is

its mission to disappear not through a mechanical decision, but when it

no longer corresponds to the functions that justify it. It will then

dissolve in the classless society.

Revolutionary praxis is carried out within the masses, and theoretical

elaboration only has meaning if it is always connected to the struggles

of the proletariat. In this way revolutionary theory is the opposite of

ideological verbiage papering over the absence of any truly proletarian

praxis.

What this means is that the purpose of the revolutionary organization is

to bring together militants in agreement with the above and

independently of any Marxist, anarchist, councilist, or libertarian

communist label, the label serving to cover in fact the top-down and

elitist understanding of the vanguard that is of course found among

Leninists, but also among so-called anarchists.

The revolutionary organization does not exclusively invoke any

particular theoretician or any preexisting organization, though

recognizing the positive contributions of those who systematized,

refined, and spread the ideas drawn from the mass movement. Rather it

positions itself as heir of the various manifestations of the

anti-authoritarian workers current of the First International, a current

which is historically known under the name of communist anarchism or

libertarian communism, a current which the so-called anarchist currents

have, unfortunately, often grossly caricatured.

The revolutionary organization is self-managed. In its structures and

functioning it must prefigure the non-bureaucratic society that will see

the distinction between order-givers and order-followers disappear and

that will establish delegation solely for technical tasks and with the

corrective of permanent recall.

Technical knowledge and competencies of all kinds must be as widespread

as possible to ensure an effective rotation of tasks. Discussion and the

elaboration of ideas must thus be the task of all militants and, even

more than the indispensable organizational norms, which can always be

revised, it is the level of coherence and the consciousness of

responsibilities reached by all concerned that is the best antidote to

any bureaucratic deviation.

---

(This platform was discussed and adopted during a meeting held in

Marseille on July 11, 1971. It had been called by the Mouvement

Communiste Libertaire [MCL, Libertarian Communist Movement], founded by

groups and individuals most of whom had come out of the former

Federation Communiste Libertaire [FCL, Libertarian Communist

Federation], the Jeunesse Anarchiste Communiste [JAC, Communist

Anarchist Youth], and the Union des Groupes Anarchistes-Communistes

[UGAC, Union of Communist-Anarchist Groups] in the wake of May 1968 and

within the framework of the fusion of several local groups of the

Organisation révolutionnaire Anarchiste [ORA, Anarchist Revolutionary

Organization]. I actively participated in the discussion concerning its

final version on the basis of a draft proposed by Georges Fontenis.[281]

It was published in November 1971 in Guerre de Classes [Class War],

newspaper of the Organisation Communiste Libertaire [OCL, Libertarian

Communist Organization].)

[In À la recherche d’un communisme libertaire, 1984]

Appendix II: The 1989 “Call for a Libertarian Alternative”

Since the winter of 1986–1987, struggles have followed one after the

other. They demand to be given a combative and innovative expression.

The signatories of this appeal address all those women and men who think

that under current social and political circumstances a new

revolutionary alternative must be established. In our eyes, the creation

of a revolutionary movement capable of building on and taking forward

the newly revived struggles requires us to take two complementary paths:

• The formation of a new organization for a libertarian communism, which

is what this appeal is proposing;

• The emergence of a vast and necessarily pluralist, anti-capitalist,

self-management movement, to which organized libertarians will

immediately contribute and where they will be active alongside other

political tendencies.

We have entered a period of agitation and struggle that lays bare the

inability of the Left and the union leaderships to respond to the

aspirations of the population.

The “Socialist” Party (PS) manages capitalism, espouses its logic, and

abandons any wish to transform society, even social democratic

reformism. It opposes the interests of all popular strata. Under cover

of “entering modernity” it wants to implement a political and social

consensus with the Right and between the different classes. An electoral

machine above all, the PS is a party of notables and technocrats where

everything is decided at the summit, without any real democracy.

The French “Communist” Party (PCF) has not had a revolutionary

perspective for some time. Its leadership makes use of social

discontent, but the only model for society it has to offer is a still

terribly bureaucratic USSR. It has a completely undemocratic

organizational framework and imposes an unbearable grip on huge swaths

of the union and social movements.

The union movement is confronted with the reemergence of struggles, but

also with aspirations for self-organization that are being vigorously

expressed. The chasm has never been so wide between unionized and

non-unionized workers, between on the one hand union organizations that

choose and self-manage their own battles, and on the other hand the

fossilized union apparatuses which are often tied to the PS or the PCF.

The revolutionary, alternative, and ecological Left, with all its

variants, does not propose a credible and attractive alternative. The

top-down and centralized errors and myths inherited from Leninism

continue to weigh heavily on some. On others, it is the strong

temptation to integrate into institutional electoral politics and to

constitute a “radical reformist axis” due to the repeated abandonment by

social democracy of its project once it reaches power.

The balance sheet of the libertarian movement, such as it exists today,

is no more positive and a debate over this point is necessary. For

various reasons, we have not succeeded in putting forward a contemporary

alternative. And many errors continue, here and there, to tarnish our

image: divisions, disorganization, a certain sectarianism, sometimes an

unreasoning cult of spontaneity, as well as the retreat into initiatives

that have the merit of testifying to an ethical refusal of an alienating

society, but which are nevertheless far too ideological and fail to

provide the means of acting on social reality.

The signatories of this appeal affirm that there is room for a new

libertarian struggle, one which is non-dogmatic, non-sectarian, and

attentive to what is happening and what is changing in society. A

struggle which is open and at the same time organized to be effective. A

coherent, well-defined message, but one that is nevertheless not carved

in stone, that is forever the object of reflection and renewal.

It is the aspirations expressed in the struggles for equality,

self-organization, and the rejection of the neoliberal logic that lead

us to this conclusion. It is also the road left open by the collapse of

yesterday’s dominant models: social democracy, Leninism, and Stalinism.

Many militants would be open to the ideas of a resolutely

anti-capitalist and libertarian current if it were able to engage with

contemporary problems.

Finally, many anarchists and other anti-authoritarians have

distinguished themselves, some very actively, in the recent battles in

the union movement, in the student movement, in the fight against racism

and for equality, and in support of the struggles of the Kanak

people.[282] Many among them feel the movement is in need of

modernization in order to pursue and strengthen their struggles, going

beyond the structures and divisions within libertarianism that have most

often been inherited from the past.

We propose to base ourselves on these practices in order to organize

together a libertarian alternative that responds to the challenges of

our time.

This perspective rests on a statement of fact: none of the current

libertarian groups is capable of sufficiently representing this

alternative. This objective statement in no way questions the value of

the work of the various existing organizations. We do not reject them.

On the contrary, we invite all organizations, local groups, reviews, and

individuals to follow the process, to express themselves and participate

in it. Their various experiences must not be rejected and forgotten. A

new organization will be all the more rich if it were to succeed in

bringing together and capitalizing on the many contributions that

preceded it. But we have to do things differently if we are to respond

to a new situation. The best way forward seems to us to be one that

would take social and militant practice as its starting point as an

element of a process under the control of rank-and-file individuals and

collectives speaking from their experience, beyond the traditional

divisions.

The initiative we are putting forward is therefore the work of a

collective of individual signatories and we invite everyone to join in

this process.

A contemporary affirmation of a libertarian communism is possible,

elaborated on the basis of our social practice and an analysis of

society that takes into account its profound economic, sociological, and

cultural transformations:

• An aggressive, resolutely anti-capitalist, class struggle orientation

in the conditions of today’s society.

• A strategy of counter-powers where workers, the young, and the

unemployed organize themselves and impose profound transformations

through their autonomous struggles. This is a strategy that we oppose to

that of change through institutional methods, the actions of parties and

office-holders, and the illusion of political reformism. Basing

ourselves on these struggles we can today defend a resolutely extra- and

anti-parliamentary struggle without imprisoning ourselves in purely

ideological campaigns.

• A self-management perspective and a combative strategy with revolution

as its goal is practicable now: this libertarian struggle will base

itself in social movements and the practice of its militants, practices

that are broad-based, inclusive, and carried out without sectarianism.

Practices that imply not only the self-management of struggles but also

involvement in trade union activity in all of today’s organizations

(i.e., as much in the CFDT, the CGT, the FEN, and even FO as in the CNT

and the independent unions).[283] But also a class-based approach

outside as well as inside the workplace, in all aspects of life and

society. Struggles against the patriarchal order. Against racism and for

equality. Against imperialism, dictatorships, and apartheid. Against

militarism. Against nuclear energy and for the defense of the

environment. Struggles both of young people in education and those who

are either unemployed or in casualized employment.

This libertarian affirmation anchored in present-day realities is very

much within the lineage of one of the major currents in the history of

the workers’ movement.

We are referring—without dogmatism, without wishing to produce a naive

apologia, and thus not without a critical spirit, but with a total

independence of mind—to the anti-authoritarians of the First

International, to the revolutionary syndicalists, to the

anarcho-syndicalists, to the libertarian communists or

anarchistcommunists, without neglecting the contribution of council

communism, trade unionism, self-management currents, feminism, and

ecology. Without losing sight of the fact that it is the struggles of

the workers themselves, the social movements of yesterday and today that

sustain our reflections.

Bringing all of this heritage to bear on contemporary issues implies

syntheses and much modernization on the way to a new political current

facing towards the future.

We do not fetishize organization, but in order to elaborate and defend

this struggle, organization is a necessity.

An organization means: the pooling of resources, experiences, different

focuses, and political education; a place for debate for the elaboration

of collective analyses; a means of quickly circulating information and

of coordination; the search for a strategy which engages with

present-day realities; a platform that expresses our identity.

We must seek a form of self-management of organization that is both

democratic and federalist; that does not lead to confusion; that

organizes convergences without denying differences; that offers a

collective framework without hindering the free speech and activity of

all. A self-managed organization, where the main orientations are

decided democratically by all, by consensus or, if not, by vote. An

effective organization with the necessary structures and means. An

organization aimed at international practices and an international

dimension at a time when Europe is in preparation.[284] It has always

been the case that the anti-capitalist struggle cannot be contained

within the narrow framework of each state.

We must also stress that we are not proposing a sect that will have no

other end than its own growth. We must create a form of activism where

commitment will not be all-consuming and alienating.

One of the assets of a new organization could be the publishing of a new

type of press capable of reaching a broader public, which would be the

expression of a current and an organization, certainly, but also an open

tribune: a press self-managed by the militants; a a portion of its

columns as a permanent forum, open and pluralistic, where the militants

of social movements and of revolutionary, libertarian, and

self-management currents could express themselves.

---

(This Appeal was signed in May 1989 by around a hundred libertarians,

political, trade union and social movement activists, members of various

organizations and of none.)

[In Pour le communisme libertaire, 2003]

Bibliography

English translations of works by Daniel Guérin

(in chronological order of first publication)

Fascism and Big Business (New York: Pioneer Press, 1939; Monad Press &

Pathfinder Press for Anchor Foundation, 1973; Pathfinder Press, 1994);

1939 edition translated by Frances and Mason Merrill, introduced by

Dwight Macdonald.

Negroes on the March: A Frenchman’s Report on the American Negro

Struggle (New York: George L. Weissman, 1956); translated and edited by

Duncan Ferguson.

The West Indies and Their Future (London: Dennis Dobson, 1961);

translated by Austryn Whainhouse.

‘The Czechoslovak Working Class in the Resistance Movement’ in Ken

Coates (ed.), London Bulletin no. 9 (April 1969), pp. 15–18.

‘The Czechoslovak Working Class in the Resistance Movement’ in Ken

Coates (ed.), Czechoslovakia and Socialism (Nottingham: Bertrand Russell

Peace Foundation, 1969), pp. 79–89.

Anarchism: From Theory to Practice (New York: Monthly Review Press,

1970); translated by Mary Klopper, introduced by Noam Chomsky.

Class Struggle in the First French Republic: Bourgeois and Bras Nus,

i793- 1795 (London: Pluto, 1977); translated by Ian Paterson.

The Writings of a Savage: Paul Gauguin, ed. Daniel Guérin (New York:

Viking Press, 1978); translated by Eleanor Levieyx, introduced by Wayne

Andersen.

100 Years of Labor in the USA (London: Ink Links, 1979); translated by

Alan Adler.

Anarchism and Marxism (Sanday, Orkney: Cienfuegos Press, 1981); from a

talk given in New York on 6 November 1973, with an introduction by

Guérin.

‘Lutte Ouvriere/Daniel Guérin: Trotsky and the Second World War’ in

Revolutionary History vol. 1, no. 3 (1988), available online at

http://www.revolutionaryhistory.co.uk/rho103fdglt.html

.

‘Marxism and Anarchism’ in David Goodway (ed.), For Anarchism: History,

Theory and Practice (London: Routledge [History Workshop Series], 1989),

pp. 109–26; translated by David Goodway. The Brown Plague: Travels in

Late Weimar and Early Nazi Germany (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,

1994); translated and introduced by Robert Schwartzwald.

‘A Libertarian Marx?’ in Discussion Bulletin [Industrial Union Caucus in

Education, USA] no. 86(November-December1997), pp. 3–5.

No Gods No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism (Edinburgh: AK Press,

1998, 2^(nd) edition 2005), 2 vols., translated by Paul Sharkey.

About the Author

Daniel Guérin (1904–1988) was a prominent member of the French left for

half a century, and arguably one of the most original and most

interesting. One of the first on the left to attach central importance

to the struggle against colonialism, he became one of the best-known

figures in anticolonial campaigns throughout the 1950s and ‘6os. He was

also one of the first in France to warn of the rising dangers of

fascism, publishing The Brown Plague in 1933 and Fascism and Big

Business in 1936. He met Leon Trotsky in 1933 and would work with the

Trotskyist resistance during the war; a respected member of the Fourth

International during the 1940s, he was a close, personal friend of

Michel Raptis (alias Pablo) until his death. His controversial,

libertarian Marxist interpretation of the French Revolution, Class

Struggle in the First Republic, 1793–1797 (1945, 2^(nd) ed. 1968) was

judged by his friend C.L.R. James to be “one of the great theoretical

landmarks of our movement” and by Sartre to be “one of the only

contributions by contemporary Marxists to have enriched historical

studies.” Increasingly critical of what he saw as the authoritarianism

inherent in Leninism, he influenced a generation of activists with his

“rehabilitation” of anarchism through his Anarchism and the anthology No

Gods No Masters, before playing a role in the resurgence of interest in

Rosa Luxemburg and becoming better known for his attempts to promote a

“synthesis” of Marxism and anarchism. He was also regarded by 1968 as

the grandfather of the gay liberation movement in France and in the

1970s as a leading light in antimilitarist campaigns. His writings have

been repeatedly republished both in French and in translation.

About the Editor

David Berry has a BA in French and German from Oxford University, an MA

in French Studies from the University of Sussex, and a DPhil in history,

also from Sussex. He is currently a senior lecturer in politics and

history at Loughborough University, UK. His publications include A

History of the French Anarchist Movement, 1917–1945 (AK Press, 2009);

New Perspectives on Anarchism, Labour and Syndicalism: The Individual,

the National and the Transnational (Cambridge Scholars Publishing,

2010), coedited with Constance Bantman; Libertarian Socialism: Politics

in Black and Red (PM Press, 2011), coedited with Alex Prichard, Ruth

Kinna, and Saku Pinta; and several journal articles and book chapters on

Daniel Guérin. He is currently preparing a biography of Guérin to be

published by PM Press.

About the Translator

Mitchell Abidor is the principal French translator for the Marxists

Internet Archive. PM Press’s collections of his translations include

Anarchists Never Surrender: Essays, Polemics, and Correspondence on

Anarchism, 1908–1938 by Victor Serge; Voices of the Paris Commune; and

Death to Bourgeois Society: The Propagandists of the Deed. His other

published translations include The Great Anger: Ultra-Revolutionary

Writing in France from the Atheist Priest to the Bonnot Gang;

Communards: The Paris Commune of 1871 as Told by Those Who Fought for

It; and A Socialist History of the French Revolution by Jean Jaures.

[1] Daniel Guérin, Front populaire, Révolution manquée. Témoignage

militant (Aries: Editions Actes Sud, 1977), p. 29. All translations in

this introduction are the present author’s, unless stated otherwise.

[2] In Questions de méthode, quoted in Ian Birchall, ‘Sartre’s Encounter

with Daniel Guérin’, Sartre Studies International vol. 2, no. 1 (1996),

p. 46.

[3] See Louis Janover, ‘Daniel Guérin, le trouble-fetê’ in L’Homme et la

société no. 94 (1989), thematic issue on ‘Dissonances dans la

Revolution’, pp. 83–93.

[4] Letter to Marceau Pivert, 18 November 1947, Bibliotheque de

Documentation Internationale Contemporaine (hereafter BDIC), Fonds

Guérin, F” e. Res 688/10/2. La Lutte de classes sous la Premiere

Republique, 1793–1797 [Class Struggle under the First Republic] (Paris:

Gallimard, 1946; new edition 1968), 2 vols.

[5] Alex Callinicos (ed.), Marxist Theory (Oxford University Press,

1989), p. 108.

[6] Daniel Guérin, A la recherche d’un communisme libertaire (Paris:

Spartacus, 1984), pp. 10–1.

[7] See D. Berry, ‘Metamorphosis: The Making of Daniel Guérin,

1904–1930’ in Modern & Contemporary France vol. 22, no. 3 (2014), pp.

32I-42, and ‘From Son of the Bourgeoisie to Servant of the Revolution:

The Roots of Daniel Guérin’s Revolutionary Socialism’ in Moving the

Social-journal of Social History and the History of Social Movements no.

51 (2014), pp. 283–311.

[8] On Malon, see K. Steven Vincent, Between Marxism and Anarchism:

Benoit Malon and French Reformist Socialism (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1992). On Proudhon and Kropotkin, see Iain McKay’s

edited anthologies, both of which have useful introductions: Property Is

Theft! A Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Reader (Oakland: AK Press, 2011) and

Direct Struggle Against Capital: A Peter Kropotkin Anthology (Oakland:

AK Press, 2014).

[9] Cf. Alexandre Christoyannopoulos, ‘Leo Tolstoy on the State: A

Detailed Picture of Tolstoy’s Denunciation of State Violence and

Deception’, in Anarchist Studies vol. 16, no. 1 (Spring 2008), pp.

20–47.

[10] Daniel Guérin, Autobiographie de jeunesse, d’une dissidence

sexuelle au socialisme (Paris: Belfond, 1972), pp. 126–7. Charles

Maurras was the leader of the right-wing, nationalist and royalist

movement, Action française.

[11] For more detail, see D. Berry, “‘Workers of the World, Embrace!”

Daniel Guérin, the Labour Movement and Homosexuality’ in Left History

vol. 9, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 2004), pp. 11–43. See also Peter Sedgwick,

‘Out of Hiding: The Comradeships of Daniel Guérin’, Salmagundi vol. 58,

no. 9 (June 1982), pp. 197–220.

[12] Guérin, A la recherche, p. 9; Guérin, Front populaire, p. 23.

[13] Guérin, Front populaire, p. 147.

[14] See Thierry Hohl, ‘Daniel Guérin, ‘pivertiste’. Un parcours dans la

Gauche révolutionnaire de la STIO (1935–1938)’ in Dissidences 2 (2007),

pp. 133–49, and Jacques Kergoat, Marceau Pivert, ‘socialiste de gauche’

(Paris: Les Editions de l’Atelier/Editions Ouvrieres, 1994).

‘Luxembourgisme’ was an identifiable current on the French left opposed

to both Bolshevism and social democracy from around 1928–31. See Alain

Guillerm’s preface to the third edition of Rosa Luxembourg, Marxisme et

Dictature: La democratie selon Unine et Luxembourg (Paris: Spartacus,

1974).

[15] Guérin’s Front populaire is a classic ‘revolutionist’

interpretation of the Popular Front experience.

[16] What has since become known as ‘entryism’ (‘entrisme’ in French)

was originally referred to as ‘the French turn’ (‘le tournant

frarn;ais’). This was the new tactic proposed by Trotsky in 1934 in

response to the growing fascist threat across Europe, and the first

instance of it was the suggestion in June of that year that the French

Trotskyists enter the PS in order to contribute to the development of a

more radical current within the party. See Daniel Bensald, Les

trotskysmes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2002), pp. 31–2

and Alex Callinicos, Trotskyism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Press, 1990), pp. 18–9.

[17] Guérin, Front populaire, p. 104. Guérin’s Fascisme et grand capital

(Paris: Gallimard, 1936) was inspired by Trotsky.

[18] Guérin, La Peste brune a passe par Iii (Paris: Librairie du

Travail, 1933), translated as The Brown Plague: Travels in Late Weimar

and Early Nazi Germany (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994);

Fascisme et grand capital (Paris: Gallimard, 1936), trans. Fascism and

Big Business (New York: Monad Press, 1973). Fascism has been criticised

by some for tending towards reductionism: see Claude Lefort, ‘L’analyse

Marxiste et le fascisme’, Les Temps modernes 2 (November 1945), pp.

357–62. Guérin defended himself vigorously against such criticisms, and

many regard his analysis as fundamentally correct: see for example Alain

Bihr’s introduction to the 1999 edition of Fascisme et grand capital

(Paris: Editions Syllepse and Phenix Editions), pp. 7–14.

[19] Guérin, ‘Quand le fascisme nous devançait’, in La Peste brune

(Paris: Spartacus, 1996), pp. 21–2.

[20] Ibid., p. 25.

[21] Guérin, Front populaire, pp. 150, 156–7, 365.

[22] Ibid., p. 157.

[23] Ibid., p. 213.

[24] Ibid., p. 23.

[25] See Jean van Heijenoort, ‘Manifeste: La France sous Hitler et

Pétain’, in Rodolphe Prager (ed.), Les congres de la quatrième

internationale (manifestes, theses, resolutions) (Paris: La Breche,

1981) vol. II, pp. 35–44; L. Trotsky, ‘La guerre imperialiste et la

revolution proletarienne mondiale’ in D. Guérin (ed.), Sur la deuxieme

guerre mondiale (Brussels: Editions la Taupe, 1970), pp. 187–245. An

English-language version of the manifesto is available on the Marxists

Internet Archive at

document/fi/1938-1949/emergconf/fi-emergo2.htm https://www.marxists.org/history/etoV document/fi/1938-1949/emergconf/fi-emergo2.htm

.

[26] Interview with Pierre Andre Boutang in Guérin, television

documentary by Jean-Jose Marchand (1985; broadcast on FR3, 4 & 11

September 1989). For more details, see D. Berry, ‘“Like a Wisp of Straw

Amidst the Raging Elements”: Daniel Guérin in the Second World War’, in

Hanna Diamond and Simon Kitson (eds.), Vichy, Resistance, Liberation:

New Perspectives on Wartime France (Festschrift in Honour of H.R.

Kedward) (Oxford: Berg, 2005), pp.143–54.

[27] Letter to Marceau Pivert, 2 Januaury 1948, BDIC, Fonds Guérin, F°Δ

Rés 688/9/1.

[28] Daniel Guérin, Le Feu du Sang. Autobiographie politique et chamelle

(Paris: Editions Grasset & Fasquelle, 1977), p. 149. On Guérin’s tour of

the U.S., see ibid., pp. 143–219. Guérin’s researches led to the

publication of the two-volume Ou va le peuple americain? (Paris:

Julliard, 1950–51). Sections of this would be published separately as

Decolonisation du Noir americain (Paris: Minuit, 1963), Le Mouvement

ouvrier aux Etats-Unis (Paris: Maspero, 1968), La concentration

economique aux Etats-Unis (Paris: Anthropos, 1971)—which included a

33pp. preface by the Trotskyist economist Ernest Mandel—and De l’Oncle

Tom aux Pantheres: Le drame des Noirs americains (Paris: UGE, 1973).

Translations: Negroes on the March: A Frenchman’s Report on the American

Negro Struggle, trans. Duncan Ferguson (New York: George L. Weissman,

1956), and 100 Years of Labour in the USA, trans. Alan Adler (London:

Ink Links, 1979). For a discussion of Guérin’s analysis, see also Larry

Portis, ‘Daniel Guérin et les Etats-Unis: l’optimisme et l‘intelligence’

in Agone 29–30 (2003), pp. 277–89.

[29] Guérin, La Lutte de classes sous la Pemiere Republique, 1793–1797,

2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1946; 2^(nd) edition 1968). See also Denis

Berger, ‘La revolution plurielle (pour Daniel Guérin)’ in E. Balibar,

J.-S. Beek, D. Bensald et al., Permanences de la Revolution. Pour un

autre bicentenaire (Paris: La Breche, 1989), pp. 195–208; David Berry,

‘Daniel Guérin a la Liberation. De l’historien de la Revolution au

militant révolutionnaire: un toumant ideologique’, Agone 29–30 (2003),

pp. 257–73; Michel Lequenne, ‘Daniel Guérin, l’homme de 93 et le

probleme de Robespierre’, Critique communiste 130–1 (May 1993), pp.

31–4; Julia Guseva, ‘La Terreur pendant la Revolution et

l‘interpretation de D. Guérin’, Dissidences 2 (2007), pp. 77–88;

Jean-Numa Ducange, ‘Comment Daniel Guérin utilise-t-il l’reuvre de Karl

Kautsky sur la Revolution française dans La Lutte de classes sous la

premiere Republique, et pourquoi?’, ibid., pp. 89-m. Norah Carlin,

‘Daniel Guérin and the working class in the French Revolution’,

International Socialism 47 (1990), pp. 197–223, discusses changes made

by Guérin to La Lutte de classes for the 1968 edition.

[30] Guérin, La Revolution française et nous (Paris: Maspero, 1976), pp.

7–8. Note that the reference to ‘libertarian socialism’ is in the

preface to La Revolution française et nous, written thirty years after

the main text and after Guérin had moved closer to anarchism.

[31] Cf. Murray Bookchin’s comments on the sections in ‘The Forms of

Freedom’ (1968) in Post-Scarcity Anarchism (Montreal: Black Rose Books,

1971), p.165.

[32] Guérin, La Lutte de classes (1968), vol. I, p. 31.

[33] Ibid., p. 58.

[34] E.J. Hobsbawm, Echoes of the Marseillaise: Two Centuries Look Back

on the French Revolution (London: Verso, 1990), p. 53.

[35] Guérin, La Revolutionfrançaise et nous, p. 7.

[36] For an overview, see Olivier Betoume and Aglaia I. Hartig, Penser

l’histoire de la Revolution. Deux siecles de passionfrançaise (Paris: La

Decouverte, 1989), esp. pp. 110–4. For a recent reassessment of the

long-running dispute between Guérin and G. Lefebvre, see Antonio de

Francesco, ‘Daniel Guérin et Georges Lefebvre, une rencontre

improbable’, La Revolutionfrançaise,

http://lrf.revues.org/index162.html

, date accessed 28 March 2011.

[37] Ian Birchall, ‘Sartre’s Encounter with Daniel Guérin’, Sartre

Studies International vol. 2, no. 1 (1996), p. 46.

[38] Guérin, ‘Faisons le point’, Le Liberateur politique et social pour

la nouvelle gauche (12 February 1956). A populist, reactionary and

xenophobic anti-taxation movement of small shopkeepers, founded by

Pierre Poujade in 1953, ‘Poujadisme’ had “more than a hint of fascism”

as Rod Kedward has put it—see La Vie en Bleu. France and the French

since 1900 (London: Penguin, 2006), p. 376. It was as a representative

of Poujade’s party that Jean-Marie Le Pen was elected to the National

Assembly in 1956.

[39] C.L.R. James, ‘L’actualite de la Revolution française’,

Perspectives socialistes: Revue bimensuelle de ‘Union de la Gauche

Socialiste 4 (15 February 1958), pp. 20–1.

[40] Guérin, ‘La Revolution déjacobinisée’, in ]eunesse du socialisme

libertaire (Paris: Riviere, 1959), pp. 27–63. See ‘The French Revolution

De-Jacobinized’ in the present collection.

[41] La Revolution française et nous was originally intended as the

preface to La Lutte de classes. ‘Quand le fascisme nous devançait’ was

originally commissioned for a special issue of Les Temps Modernes on the

state of the left, but was then rejected by Sartre for being too

critical of the PCF, according to a letter from Guérin to C.L.R. James,

10 August 1955. BDIC, Fonds Guérin, F°Δ 721/60/5.

[42] Guérin, ‘La Revolution déjacobinisée’, p. 43.

[43] Ibid., pp. 43–4.

[44] Guérin, ‘Preface’, in Jeunesse du socialisme libertaire, pp. 7–8.

[45] Guérin, ‘La Revolution déjacobinisée’, 30–1.

[46] Michel Crozier, Ma Belle Epoque. Memoires.1947–1969 (Paris: Fayard,

2002), pp. 79 er 86.

[47] Guérin, Le Feu du sang, p. 218; Kent Worcester, C.LR. James. A

Political Biography (Albany: SUNY, 1996), p. 201; James, letter to

Guérin, 24 May 1956, BDIC, Fonds Guérin, F°Δ 721/57/2.

[48] Guérin, Le Feu du sang, p. 189. In his account of these meetings,

Guérin refers positively to the collection La Contre-revolution

bureaucratique (Paris: UGE, 1973), which contained texts by Korsch,

Pannekoek, Ruhle and others taken from International Council

Correspondence, Living Marxism and International Socialism. The

councilists had previously republished in translation an article of

Guérin’s from the French syndicalist journal Revolution proletarienne:

‘Fascist Corporatism’, in International Council Correspondence vol. 3,

no. 2 (February 1937), pp. 14–26. (I am grateful to Saku Pinta for

bringing this to my attention.) On Korsch, see Douglas Kellner (ed.),

Karl Korsch: Revolutionary Theory (Austin: University of Texas Press,

1977), which includes a lengthy biographical study.

[49] Guérin/Korsch correspondence, April-June 1954. Karl Korsch Papers,

Intemationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis (hereafter USG), Boxes

1–24.

[50] Guérin, Le Feu du sang, p. 156.

[51] Guérin Papers, USG, Box 1, Folder 14. Pierre Chaulieu and Claude

Montal were the pseudonyms of Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort

respectively.

[52] The list also included James Guillaume’s history of the IWMA,

Victor Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary, Voline’s The Unknown

Revolution, Makhno, and the many publications of the Spartacus group

created by Rene Lefeuvre. Mohammed Harbi, Une Vie debout. Memoires

politiques, Tome I: 1945–1962 (Paris: La Decouverte, 2001), pp. 109–12.

Harbi incorrectly describes the Cercle Lenine as being connected to the

PCF; see La Verite, 1 January 1954. On the different analyses of the

nature of the USSR, see Marcel van der Linden, Western Marxism and the

Soviet Union. A Survey of Critical Theories and Debates Since 1917

(Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2007); on Castoriadis and Lefort, see pp.

116–8.

[53] Edgar Morin, ‘L’Anarchisme en 1968, Magazine litteraire 19 (1968),

available at

https://www.theyliewedie.org/ressources/biblio/fr/Morin_Edgar_-_L'anarchisme_en_1968.html

, accessed 13 April 2021.

[54] See Edgar Morin, ‘La refome de pensee’, in Arguments, 1956–1962

(Toulouse: Privat, 1983), vol. I, p. ix.

[55] For an explanation of why Yugoslavia’s break with the Soviet bloc

in 1948 was so important to the extreme left in the west, see the

semi-autobiographical account in chapter 5, ‘Les “annees yougoslaves”’,

of Le Trotskisme. Une histoire sansfard (Paris: Editions Syllepse, 2005)

by Guenn’s friend and comrade Michel Lequenne.

[56] Anne Guérin, ‘Les ruptures de Daniel Guérin. Notice biographique’,

in Daniel Guérin, De l’Oncle Tom aux Pantheres noires (Pantin: Les bons

caracteres, 2010), p. 9.

[57] On the FCL, see Georges Fontenis, Changer le monde: Histoire du

mouvement communiste libertaire, 1945–1997 (Paris: Alternative

libertaire, 2000) and, for a more critical view, Philippe Dubacq,

Anarchisme et Marxisme au travers de la Federation communiste libertaire

(1945–1956), Noir et Rouge 23 (1991).

[58] Guérin, Le Feu du sang, p. 233.

[59] Guérin, A la recherche, p. 9.

[60] Ibid., p. 9.

[61] Ibid., p. 10. L’Anarchisme, de la doctrine a la pratique (Paris:

Gallimard, 1965); Ni Dieu ni Maftre, anthologie de l’anarchisme

(Lausanne: La Cite-Lausanne, 1965). Both have been republished several

times since, and L’Anarchisme has been translated into more than 20

languages. They have been published in English as Anarchism: From Theory

to Practice (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970), with an introduction

by Noam Chomsky, and No Gods No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism

(Edinburgh: AK Press, 1998).

[62] This is not uncontentious-indeed Ernest Mandel takes issue with

Guérin over this question in his anthology Controle ouvrier, conseils

ouvriers, autogestion (Paris: Maspero, 1970), p. 7.

[63] See Guérin’s 1969 article, ‘Conseils ouvriers et syndicalisme rev

olutionnaire. L’exemple hongrois, 1956’ in A la recherche, pp. 111–5;

the same piece was republished as ‘Syndicalisme révolutionnaire et

conseillisme’ in Pour le communisme libertaire, pp. 155–62.

[64] Letters to the author, 12 and 26 February 1986. L'en dehors

appeared weekly, 1922–39, and used to campaign for complete sexual

freedom, regarding homosexuality as an entirely valid form of ‘free

love’. See Richard D. Sonn, Sex, Violence, and the Avant-Garde:

Anarchism in Interwar France (University Park: Pennsylvania State

University Press, 2010).

[65] Georges Fontenis, ‘Le long parcours de Daniel Guérin vers le

communisme libertaire’, special number of Alternative Libertaire on

Guérin (1998), p. 37.

[66] Guérin, Le Feu du sang, p. 228.

[67] It is also noteworthy that Guérin would include a section on

decolonisation in his Anarchism and found material from Proudhon and

Bakunin which supported the FCL’s position. See Sylvain Pattieu, Les

camarades des freres: Trotskistes et libertaires dans la guerre d’Algene

(Paris: Syllepse, 2002); Sidi Mohammed Barkat (ed.), Des Franfais contre

la terreur d’état (Algerie 1954–1962) (Paris: Editions Reflex, 2002);

Sylvain Boulouque, Les anarchistes franfais face aux guerres coloniales

(1945–1962) (Lyon: Atelier de creation libertaire, 2003).

[68] According to a note by the editors in Guérin, Pour le communisme

libertaire (Paris: Spartacus, 2003), p. 5. Rubel (1905–96) had had links

with the councilist movement and would publish the short text, ‘Marx

theoricien de l’anarchisme’ [Marx, theoretician of anarchism] in his

Marx, critique du Marxisme [Marx, critic of Marxism] (Paris: Editions

Payot, 1974; new edition 2000), a collection of articles previously

published between 1957 and 1973· The text has since been published as a

booklet, Marx theoricien de l’anarchisme (Saint-Denis: Vent du ch’min,

1983; Geneva: Editions Entremonde, 2010). His argument in brief was that

‘under the name communism, Marx developed a theory of anarchism; and

further, that in fact it was he who was the first to provide a rational

basis for the anarchist utopia and to put forward a project for

achieving it: Marxists Internet Archive,

https://www.marxists.org/archive/rubel/1973/marx-anarchism.htm

, accessed 29 March 2011.

[69] Preface of 1970 to Guérin (ed.), Ni Vieu ni Maftre. Antholoqie de

l’anarchisme (Paris: La Decouverte, 1999), vol. I, pp. 6–7. See pp. 41–3

in this volume.

[70] L’Anarchisme, p. 21.

[71] Daniel Guérin, Pour un Marxisme libertaire (Paris: Robert Laffont,

1969), p. 7.

[72] Georges Fontenis, ‘Le long parcours’, p. 38.

[73] ‘Anarchisme et Marxisme’, p. 237, in L’Anarchisme (1981 edition),

pp. 229–52. For an English-language version, see the booklet Anarchism &

Marxism (Sanday, Orkney: Cienfuegos Press, 1981), or ‘Marxism and

Anarchism’, in David Goodway (ed.), For Anarchism: History, Theory and

Practice (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 109–26.

[74] L’Anarchisme, pp. 13–4.

[75] Anarchism, p. 153.

[76] Nicolas Walter, ‘Daniel Guérin’s Anarchism’, Anarchy vol. 8, no. 94

(1968), p. 378.

[77] Ibid., p. 381.

[78] Patrice Spadoni, ‘La synthese entre l’anarchisme et le Marxisme:

“Un point de ralliement vers l’avenir”’, Alternative Libertaire special

number (2000), p. 43. Guérin, Proudhon oui et non (Paris: Gallimard,

1978),

[79] See his ‘1917–1921, de l’autogestion a la bureaucratie sovietique’,

in De la Revolution d’octobre a l‘empire eclate: 70 ans de reflexions

sur la nature de l’URSS (Paris: Alternative libertaire/UTCL, n.d.);

‘Proudhon et l’autogestion ouvriere’ in L'Actualité de Proudhon

(Bruxelles: Universite libre de Bruxelles, 1967), pp. 67–87; ‘L’Espagne

libertaire’, editorial introduction to part of Autogestion et

socialisme, special issue on ‘Les anarchistes et l’autogestion’ nos.

18/19 (janvier-avril 1972), pp. 81–2; ‘L’autogestion contemporaine’,

Nair et rouge nos. 31/32 (octobre 1965-fevrier 1966), pp. 16–24.

[80] See similarly critical remarks about Marxism’s neglect of this

issue by Castoriadis in an interview for a special issue of the UTCL’s

magazine on the usefulness (or otherwise) of Marxism for libertarian

communists: ‘Marx aujourd’hui. Entretien avec Cornelius Castoriadis’

Lutter! no. 5 (May 1983), pp. 15–8. Guérin’s article on ‘Marx et Engels

militants’ appeared in the same issue, pp. 19–20.

[81] L’Anarchisme, p. 16.

[82] ‘Proudhon pere de l’autogestion’ (1965) in Proudhon oui et non

(Paris: Gallimard, 1978), p. 165.

[83] Ibid., p. 191.

[84] Guérin, Ni Dieu ni Maltre, vol. I, p. 12. Guérin began his

anthology of anarchist texts with the ‘precursor’ Stirner; he also added

an appendix on Stirner to the 1981 edition of L’Anarchisme. See also D.

Guérin, Homosexualite et Revolution (Saint-Denis: Le Vent du ch’min,

1983), p. 12, and ‘Stirner, “Pere de l’anarchisme”?’, La Rue 26 (ler et

2eme trimestre 1979), pp. 76–89. Guérin also believed Proudhon to have

been a repressed homosexual: see ‘Proudhon et l’amour “unisexual”’ in

Arcadie nos. 133/134 (janvier/ fevner 1965).

[85] ‘Stirner, “Pere de l’anarchisme”?’, p. 83.

[86] See Fontenis, Changer le monde, pp. r61-2 and 255–6.

[87] The UTCL’s manifesto, adopted at its Fourth Congress in 1986, was

republished (with a dedication to Guérin) by the UTCL’s successor

organisation, Alternative Libertaire: Un projet de societe communiste

libertaire (Paris: Alternative libertaire, 2002). See also Theo Rival,

Syndicalistes et libertaires: Une histoire de /‘Union des travailleurs

communistes libertaires (1974–1991) (Paris: Editions d’Altemative

libertaire, 2013).

[88] Fontenis, Changer le monde, p. Bo, note i. See also David Berry,

‘Change the world without taking power? The libertarian communist

tradition in France today’, journal of Contemporary European Studies

vol. 16, no. 1 (Spring 2008), pp. 111–30.

[89] Guérin, ‘Anarchisme et Marxisme’, in L’Anarchisme (1981), p. 250.

[90] Ibid., p. 248.

[91] Ibid., p. 237.

[92] On Abad de Santillan, see the section on ‘L’Espagne libertaire’, in

Les anarchistes et l’autogestion, special issue on ‘Autogestion et

socialisme’ nos. 18–19 (1972), pp. 81–117, including an introduction by

Guérin.

[93] See Guérin, Ni Dieu ni Maltre, vol. I, pp. 268–91.

[94] Guérin, ‘Anarchisme et Marxisme’, in L’Anarchisme (1981), p. 252.

[95] Rosa Luxemburg, Le socialisme en France, 1898–1912 (Paris: Belfond,

1971), with an introduction by Guérin, pp. 7–48; Rosa Luxemburg et la

spontaniite révolutionnaire (Paris: Flammarion, 1971). Typically for

Guérin, the second half of the latter volume brings together a number of

texts representing different opinions on the subject. The following year

he took part in a debate with Gilbert Badia, Michael Lowy, Madeleine

Reberioux, Denis Vidal-Naquet and others on the contemporary relevance

of Luxemburg’s ideas. Gilbert Badia et al., ‘Rosa Luxemburg et nous:

Debat’, Politique aujourd’hui: Recherches et pratiques socialistes dans

le monde (1972), pp. 77–106. Looking back at the revival of interest in

Luxemburg in the 1960s and 70s, Lowy recently commented: ‘There seems to

be a hidden connection between the rediscovery of Rosa Luxemburg and

eras of heightened contestation.’ Lowy, ‘Rosa Luxemburg, un Marxisme

pour le XXIe siecle’, p. 59, Contretemps 8 (2010), pp. 59–63. This is a

special issue devoted to Luxemburg’s continuing relevance to

revolutionary politics.

[96] Guérin, ‘Anarchisme et Marxisme’, p. 233. As the co-editor (with

Jean-Jacques Lebel) of a collection entitled ‘Changer la Vie’ for the

publisher Pierre Belfond, Guérin took the opportunity to republish

Trotsky’s Our Political Tasks (1904), in which the young Trotsky was

very critical of Lenin’s ‘Jacobinism’ and of what he called the

‘dictatorship over the proletariat’: Leon Trotsky, Nos tiiches

politiques (Paris: Belfond, 1970). Luxemburg’s ‘Organizational Questions

of Russian Social Democracy’ is also included in the volume as an

appendix. It is noteworthy that the English-language version of Our

Political Tasks, produced in the 1970s by the Trotskyist New Park

Publications, omits the sections in which Trotsky was most critical of

Lenin. (Unfortunately, the Marxists Internet Archive have used the same

partial translation.)

[97] Guérin, ‘Anarchisme et Marxisme’, p. 252.

[98] Guérin, A la recherche, pp. 10–1.

[99] Guérin, ‘Pourquoi communiste libertaire?’, in A la recherche, p.

17.

[100] Guérin, ‘Un communisme libertaire, pour quoi?’, A la recherche,

pp. 123–5. Cf. Bookchin’s remark that ‘the problem is not to “abandon”

Marxism, or to “annul” it, but to transcend it dialectically’: Murray

Bookchin, ‘Listen, Marxist.” in Post-Scarcity Anarchism (Montreal: Black

Rose Books, 1971), p. 177.

[101] Nicolas Walter, ‘Daniel Guérin’s Anarchism’, Anarchy vol. 8, no.

94 (1968), pp. 376–82. Guérin was not entirely unknown to English

readers at the time. Freedom had published a translation of a 1966

interview on 30 September 1967.

[102] George Woodcock, ‘Chomsky’s Anarchism’ in Freedom, 16 November

1974. pp. 4–5.

[103] Miguel Chueca, ‘Anarchisme et Marxisme. La tentative de Daniel

Guérin d’unir les deux philosophies et ‘l’anarchisme’ de Marx vu par

Maximilien Rubel’ in Refractions no. 7, available at

refractions7/chueca1.htm http://www.plusloin.org/refractions/ refractions7/chueca1.htm

(accessed 29 August 2006).

[104] Ian Birchall, ‘Daniel Guérin’s Dialogue with Leninism’ in

Revolutionary History vol. 9, no. 2 (2006), pp. 194–5.

[105] See Irene Pereira, Un nouvel esprit contestataire. La grammaire

pragmatiste du syndicalisme d’action directe libertaire (Unpublished

PhD, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, 2009;

supervised by Luc Boltanski); Patrice Spadoni, ‘Daniel Guérin ou le

projet d’une synthese entre l’anarchisme et le Marxisme’ in Philippe

Corcuff and Michael Lowy (eds.), Changer le monde sans prendre le

pouvoir? Nouveaux libertaires, nouveaux communistes, special issue of

Contretemps, no. 6 (February 2003), pp. 118–26; Olivier Besancenot and

Michael Lowy, Affinites rillolutionnaires: Nos etoiles rouges et

noires-Pour une solidarite entre marxistes et libertaires (Paris:

Editions Mille et Une Nuits, 2014). Guérin’s daughter Anne has claimed

recently that Guérin was the ‘Maitre a penser’ of both Daniel

Cohn-Bendit and the Trotskyist Alain Krivine-Biographical preface to

Daniel Guérin, De l’Oncle Tom aux Pantheres noires (Pantin: Les Bons

caracteres, 2010), p. 8. See also Christophe Bourseiller’s comment that

“the politics of the Mouvement communiste libertaire derived largely

from the theoretical reflexion of Daniel Guérin.” Histoire generale de

“l‘ultra-gauche” (Paris: Editions Denoel, 2003), p. 484. In 1986 Guérin

also contributed to the UTCL’s ‘Projet communiste libertaire’, which was

republished by Alternative Libertaire in 1993 and again in 2002: Un

projet de societe communiste libertaire (Paris: Alternative Libertaire,

2002). The ‘Appel pour une alternative libertaire’ of 1989 (which

ultimately led to the creation of AL) was also co-written by Guérin: see

Guérin, Pour le communisme libertaire (Paris: Spartacus, 2003), pp.

181–6.

[106] Guérin, A la recherche, p. 10.

[107] Guérin, ‘Un communisme libertaire, pour quoi?’, in A la recherche,

p. 123.

[108] Guérin is referring to L’Anarchisme, de la doctrine à la pratique

first published in 1965 by Gallimard. It was published in English as

Anarchism: From Theory to Practice (Monthly Review Press, 1970), with an

Introduction by Noam Chomsky. [DB]

[109] Serge’s preface to Joaquin Maurin, Révolution et Contre-Revolution

en Espagne (Rieder, 1937).

[110] See Voline’s The Unknown Revolution, 1917–1921 (Book 2, Part V,

Ch. 7), first published in French in 1947. Voline was the pseudonym of

Vsevolod Mikhailovich Eikhenbaum (1882–1945), a prominent Russian

anarchist who took part in both the Russian and Ukrainian revolutions

before being forced into exile by the Bolsheviks. [DB]

[111] See Deutscher’s biography of Trotsky, The Prophet Armed, The

Prophet Unarmed and The Prophet Outcast (first published 1954–63).

[112] Malatesta, polemic of 1897 quoted by Luigi Fabbri, Dittoturae

Rivoluzione (1921).

[113] Louis Blanc (1811–1882) was a leading socialist reformer who

popularised the demand, “From each according to their abilities, to each

according to their needs.” A member of the republican provisional

government installed after the revolution of February 1848, he would

later be a member of parliament under the Third Republic, sitting with

the extreme left. In 1848, he famously pushed for the creation of

cooperative workshops, to be financed at least initially by the state,

in order to provide employment and promote cooperativism within a

framework of economic regulation. [DB]

[114] Idee generale de la Revolution au XiXeme siecle (1851; 1926

edition), pp. 363–4. [These quotes are from the first article in a

polemic between Proudhon and Blanc entitled ‘Resistance to the

Revolution’, extracts in Property Is Theft! A Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

Anthology (Oakland: AK Press, 2011). —DB]

[115] Idee generale de la Revolution au XiXeme siecle (1851; 1926

edition), pp. 277–8, 329. [‘General Idea of the Revolution in the

Nineteenth Century’, Property Is Theft!, pp. 583–4, 595 —DB]

[116] Idee generale de la Revolution au XiXeme siecle (1851; 1926

edition), pp. 280. [Ibid., Property Is Theft!, p. 585 —DB]

[117] ‘Election Manifesto’, Le Peuple, 8 November 1848. [‘Election

Manifesto of Le Peuple’, Property Is Theft!, pp. 376–8.]

[118] Ibid., p. 375.

[119] Georges Gurvitch, Proudhon (PUF, 1965).

[120] Theorie de la propriete (A.Lacroix, Verboeckhoven & Cie, 1866), p.

183.

[121] Archives Bakounine (Champ Libre, 1973–83), ed. Arthur Lehning,

vol. I, p. 241.

[122] James Guillaume, Le Collectivisme de /‘Internationale (Neuchatel,

1904), p. 12.

[123] Benjamin Lucraft, 1809–1897, was a craftsman from London, a

leading Chartist and a member of the committee of the International

Working Men’s Association. As a delegate to the Basel congress (1869),

he argued not only for land nationalisation, but for the large-scale

cultivation of the land by the state on behalf of the people. [DB]

[124] Pierre Haubtmann, P J. Proudhon, genese d’un antitheiste

(unpublished doc toral thesis), pp. 994–5. [Haubtmann also published

several books on Proudhon’s life and work. —DB]

[125] Carnets, vol. III, p. 114.

[126] Ibid. [See K. Steven Vincent, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the Rise

of French Republican Socialism (New York/Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1984), p. 156—DB]

[127] Idee generale de la Revolution au XiXeme siecle (1851; 1926

edition), p. 175 ; ‘General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth

Century’, Property Is Theft!, p. 558. [DB]

[128] De la justice dans la Revolution et dans l’Eglise (Marcel Riviere,

1858), vol. III, pp. 459–93, quoted in Georges Gurvitch, Proudhon et

Mane une confrontation (Centre de documentation universitaire, 1964), p.

93.

[129] De la capacite politique, pp. 171 & 190. [Quotation from “The

Political Capacity of the Working Classes.” Property Is Theft!, p. 748;

also seep. 759 —DB]

[130] Idee generale, pp. 277–83 & 329. [“General Idea of the

Revolution”, Property Is Theft!, pp. 583–6 —DB]

[131] Paul Lafargue, Le Droit a la Paresse (first published 1880).

[132] See my study, ‘Proudhon et l’amour unisexuel’ in Essai sur la

revolution sexuel/e apres Reich et Kinsey (Belfond, 1963).

[133] See K. Marx, Poverty of Philosophy and Haubtmann, P J. Proudhon,

genese d’un antitheiste, pp. 998–9.

[134] De la justice, vol. III, p. 91; Gurvitch, Proudhon et Marx.

[135] De la justice, vol. III, p. 115.

[136] Idee generate, p. 283. [General Idea of the Revolution (London:

Pluto Press, 1989), p. 224 — DB]

[137] Proudhon, Les Confessions d’un révolutionnaire pour servir a

l’histoire de la revo — lution de Fevrier (1848) (Marcel Riviere, 1929

edition), pp. 257–60.

[138] ‘Manifeste de la democratie anarchiste’ [Manifesto of anarchist

democ racy] in Le Peup/e, 22, 26 & 31 March 1848.

[139] Carnets, vol. III, pp. 211 & 312.

[140] De la capacite politique (Marcel Riviere, 1924 edition), pp. 329 &

403.

[141] Jacques Freymond (ed.), La Premiere Internationale (Droz, 1962),

vol. I, pp. 151 & 365–465.

[142] ‘Conclusion’ in Manuel du speculateur a la Bourse (Garnier, 1857).

[143] Extracts from the conclusion of the Stock Exchange Speculator’s

Manual (1857) can be found in Property Is Theft!, pp. 610–7. [DB]

[144] Gurvitch, Proudhon et Marx, pp. 46 & 108.

[145] Theorie de la propriete.

[146] Ibid.

[147] Malatesta, Programme et organisation de L’Association

internationale des travailleurs (Florence, 1884); Kropotkine, La

Conquete du pain (Stock, 1890); Kropotkine, Ulnarchie, sa philosophie,

son ideal (Stock, 1896), pp. 27–8 & 31; Kropotkine, La Science moderne

et l!Zlnarchie (Stock, 1913), pp. 82–3 & 103. [“Program and Organisation

of the International Working Men’s Association”, The Method of Freedom:

An Errico Malatesta Reader (Oakland: AK Press, 2014); Kropotkin, The

Conquest of Bread (Oakland: AK Press, 2006), “Anarchy: Its Philosophy

and Ideal” and “modern Science and Anarchism” are contained in edited

form in the Kropotkin anthology, Anarchism: A Collection of

Revolutionary Writings (New York: Dover Press, 2002)].

[148] Theorie de la propriete, p. 22.

[149] Bakounine, Œuvres (Stock, 1895–1913), vol. VI, p. 401.

[150] Marx, Lettre sur le programme de Gotha; Lenine, L’Etat et la

Revolution (1917).

[151] Malatesta, Programme et organisation de l'Association

internationale des travailleurs. [Method of Freedom, pp. 47–8 —DB]

[152] Femand Pelloutier, ‘L’anarchisme et les syndicats ouvriers’, in

Les Temps nouveaux, 2 November 1895. [‘Anarchism and the Workers’ Union’

in No Gods No Masters (Oakland: AK Press, 2005), pp. 409–15 —DB]

[153] Philosophie de la misere, in Œuvres completes (A. Lacroix,

Verboeckhoven & Cie, 1867), vol. I, p. 225.

[154] Idee generate de la Revolution au Xixeme siecle, p. 281. [Property

Is Theft!, p. 585—DB]

[155] Philosophie de la misere, in Œuvres completes (A. Lacroix,

Verboeckhoven & Cie, 1867), vol. I, p. 208.

[156] Ibid., p. 210.

[157] Ibid.

[158] Ibid., pp. 209, 211 & 234.

[159] Philosophie de la misere, vol. I, pp. 186 & 215.

[160] Ibid., pp. 209 & 217.

[161] Ibid., vol. II, p. 414.

[162] Albert Meister, Socialisme et Autogestion, l‘experience yougoslave

(Seuil, 1964), p.334.

[163] Cf. Ernest Germain, ‘La loi de la valeur, l’autogestion et les

investissements dans l’economie des Etats ouvriers’, in Quatrieme

Internationale, February-March 1964.

[164] Idee generale, pp. 202–3, 301–2, 342, 420, 428.

[165] ‘Programme et statuts de la Fratemite révolutionnaire’ (1865) in

Max Nettlau, Michel Bakounine (London: 1896), vol. I, p. 224.

[166] Bakounine, Œuvres, vol. V. pp. 216–8; Archives Bakounine, vol. i,

2^(nd) Part, article from Al Rubicone, 3 January 1872.

[167] In Archives, vol. I, 2^(nd) Part, p. 73.

[168] Gurvitch, Proudhon et Marx, p. 113. 57. De la justice, vol. I, p.

320; Contradictions politiques (1862), p. 237 & 245–6.

[169] Rosa Luxemburg, ‘Masse et chefs’ [‘Geknickte Hoffnungen’, 1903],

in Marxisme contre dictature (Spartacus, 1974), pp. 36–7.

[170] Proudhon, Manuel du speculateur, ‘Conclusion’.

[171] La Revolution Inconnue, 1917–1921 (1969 edn.), p. 19. In The Ego

and Its Own (1845), Max Stirner had already announced as the “principle

of Revolution” this pessimistic axiom: “Always there is only a new

master set in the old one’s place, and the overturning is a-building up

.... Since the master rises again as state, the servant appears again as

subject.” [English translation by Steven T. Byington (1907) —DB].

[172] In De la capacite politique des classes ouvrieres (MarcelRiviere

edn., 1924), p. 200.

[173] Louis-Auguste Blanqui (1805–1881), although from a bourgeois

background, was a hugely influential revolutionary socialist republican

and was involved in various attempted insurrections from an early age.

‘Blanquism’ is characterised by a lack of faith in working-class

movements and by the belief that bourgeois society could only be

destroyed by a violent coup effected by a small group of revolutionaries

who would then introduce a new and more just social order. [DB]

[174] Proudhon in De la capacite, pp. 88 & 119.

[175] Cf. Karl Marx, L’alliance de la democratie socialiste et I’

association internationale des travailleurs. Rapport et documents

publies par ordre du congres international de La Haye (London: A.

Darson; Hamburg: 0. Meissner, 1873).

[176] See his Terrorism and Communism (1920).

[177] An early socialist who met Marx and Engels in the 1840s, Hess

(1812–1875) envisaged the realisation of the ideals of freedom and

equality through the achievement of communism. [DB]

[178] A contradictory figure in early German socialism, Ferdinand

Lassalle (1825–1864) was a republican and democrat, and insisted on the

necessary role of the state in socialism. [DB]

[179] In Engels’ 1891 preface to the first French edition of Marx, La

Guerre civile en France (Bibliotheque d’etudes socialistes, 1901).

[180] Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651) is, among other things, an

apologia for despotism.

[181] See The Ego and Its Own.

[182] Speech to the 1868 Bern congress of the Ligue de la paix et de la

liberte, in Memoire de la Federationjurassienne (Sonvillier, 1873), p.

28.

[183] Oscar Testut, L’Internationale (1871), p. 154.

[184] Marx in The Civil War in France.

[185] See the end of ch. 6 in Plekhanov, Anarchisme et Socialisme, force

et violence (Librairie de l’Humanite, 1923), as well as the preface by

Eleanor Marx-Aveling.

[186] Voline, op. cit., pp. 218 and 229.

[187] The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) was a prominent

member of the left intelligentsia in the postwar years. Influenced by

Marx, he was a member of the editorial committee of Sartre’s review Les

Temps modernes (until the two fell out in 1952); he also played a

leading role in the Union des Forces Democratiques created in 1958 by

various elements of the non-communist left to oppose General Charles de

Gaulle’s attempt to become president of a reformed Republic. [DB]

[188] Kropotkin, L’Anarchie, sa philosophie, son ideal (Stock, 1896), p.

51.

[189] Cf. the 1904 text by Rosa Luxemburg reproduced as an appendix to

the French translation of Trotsky, Nos taches politiques (Belfond, 1970

[1904]). [This is a reference to Luxemburg’s ‘Organizational Questions

of the Russian Social Democracy’, available on the Marxists Internet

Archive at

https://www.Marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1904/questions-rscl/index.

htm https://www.Marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1904/questions-rscl/index.

htm

; Guérin, with the anarchist artist Jean-Jacques Lebel, was the editor

of the series in which Trotsky’s Our Political Tasks, a critique of

Lenin and Leninism, was published. —DB]

[190] “Socialism” in the 1969 version published in D. Guérin, Pour un

Marxisme libertaire (Laffont, 1969). [MA & DB]

[191] Morris Ernst, Too Big (New York, 1940).

[192] ‘Reforme ou maladie senile du communisme’, L’Express, 23 November

1956.

[193] Cesar de Paepe, ‘De l‘organisation des services publics dans la

societe future’, 1874, in Ni dieu ni maftre, anthologie de l’anarchisme,

1969 edition, p. 317. [Now available in a slightly abridged translation

in No Gods No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism (Oakland: AK Press,

2005) —DB] Cf. G.D.H. Cole, A History of Socialist Thought (London:

Macmillan, 1958), vol. II, pp. 204–7.

[194] Kropotkin, op. cit., pp. 31–3.

[195] The so-called Gomułka’s thaw was a short period in 1956 when,

encouraged by Khrushchev’s famous speech to the Twentieth Congress of

the Soviet Communist Party denouncing Stalin, the Polish Communist

leader initiated a certain liberalization under the banner of a “Polish

road to socialism.” Tito’s split with Stalin in 1948 and the adoption of

the principle of self-management as the basis of a democratic socialist

economy in 1950 meant that Yugoslavia was seen by many anti-Stalinist

socialists in the west as a beacon of hope (which is why Yugoslavian

self-management was discussed, albeit critically, in Guérin’s 1965 book,

Anarchism: From Theory to Practice). Alexander Dubček was the figurehead

of the “Prague Spring” of 1968 whose aim was “socialism with a human

face.” All these attempts were crushed. [DB]

[196] “Nous avons perdu nos bagages.” Edgar Quinet, La Revolution

(Editions Lacroix, Vanoeckhoven & Cie, 1869 [1865]), vol. I, p. 8.

[Quinet was a prominent republican writer and historian. —DB]

[197] ‘Vichy’ is shorthand for the quasi-fascist, collaborationist

‘French State’ created in 1940 under Marshal Petain with its capital in

the southern spa town of Vichy (the northern half of the country,

including Paris, having been occupied by German forces). [DB]

[198] France’s postwar Fourth Republic (1946–1958) was notorious for its

political instability and inability to resolve the Algerian war of

independence; it finally collapsed in 1958 under pressure from a

generals’ putsch in Algiers, and General Charles de Gaulle was made head

of the government (and later president). The Fifth Republic, which he

created, saw a reduction in the powers of parliament, a reinforced

executive and the creation of a semi-presidential regime, widely

perceived at the time on the left (including by Guérin) as being

Bonapartist or quasi-fascist. Today there are still widespread calls for

its democratization or even for the creation of a Sixth Republic. [DB]

[199] The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the Prague Spring of 1968

were both crushed by Soviet bloc tanks. Both events led to a haemorrhage

of members from Western Communist Parties. [DB]

[200] La lutte de classes sous la Premiere Republique, 1793–1797 (Paris:

Gallimard, 1946; revised edition 1968), 2 vols.

[201] Times Literary Supplement, 15 November 1947. [Guérin’s text

incorrectly gave the year of publication as 1946. He also failed to

notice that the author’s name was given in the contents page: Professor

David Thomson. —DB]

[202] See Kropotkin’s The Great French Revolution, 1789–1793, first

published as La Grande Revolution, 1789–1793 (Paris: Stock, 1909). Most

historians of socialist thought have failed to emphasise adequately the

fact that these currents of thought were not simply born in the minds of

the nineteenth-century ideologists (themselves the heirs of the

philosophes of the eighteenth century), but from the lived experience of

class struggles, in particular that of 1793. This gap is particularly

evident in the chapter on the French Revolution with which the late

lamented G.D.H. Cole opened his monumental history of socialist thought

(A History of Socialist Thought, vol. I, 1953, pp. 11–2).

[203] Boris Souvarine, Staline (Editions Champs Libre, 1977 [1935]), p.

265; Erich Wollenberg, The Red Army (London, 1970), pp. 78–80; Isaac

Deutscher, Staline (Gallimard, 1953), p. 7.

[204] As part of a broader move to do away with everything related to

the prerevolutionary regime and the reactionary influence of the

Catholic Church, a new Republican calendar, with months named after

seasonal aspects of the natural world, was instituted. ‘Year I’ began

after the declaration of the Republic in 1792. The calendar was later

abolished by Napoleon, but taken up again very briefly during the Paris

Commune of 1871. [DB]

[205] See, amongst others, Marc-Antoine Jullien in the “Societe

populaire” of La Rochelle, 5 March 1793, in Edouard Lockroy, Une mission

en Vendee, 1793 (Paris: Paul Ollendorf editeur, 1893), pp. 245–8, quoted

in Daniel Guérin, La lutte de classes, vol. I, pp. 177–8.

[206] See Paul Sainte-Claire Deville, La Commune de l‘an II (Paris:

Pion, 1946).

[207] Pierre Caron, Paris pendant la Terreur (Paris: Alphonse Picard,

1910–1964), 6 vols.

[208] In Pierre Caron, Paris pendant la Terreur, vol. 6 (“observer”

Boucheseiche, 29 March 1794).

[209] Karl Kautsky, Die Diktatur des Proletariats (Vienna 1918);

published as The Dictatorship of the Proletariat in 1919 (National

Labour Press) [DB]. See also his Materialistische Geschichtsauffassung

(1927), vol. II, p. 469. Cf. Lenin’s The Proletarian Revolution and the

Renegade Kautsky (1918).

[210] Thus in his critique of the Erfurt Programme, Engels wrote that

the democratic republic was “the specific form for the dictatorship of

the proletariat, as the Great French Revolution has already shown.” ‘A

Critique of the Draft Social-Democratic Program of 1891’, Marx-Engels

Complete Works, vol. 27. p. 217.

[211] When Saint-Just proposed the concentration of power in the hands

of Robespierre, the idea of a personal dictatorship caused a furore

among his colleagues, and Robert Lindet exclaimed: “We did not make the

Revolution in order to benefit one individual.” In Armand Montier,

Robert Lindet (1899), p. 249. [Thermidor was a month in the

revolutionary calendar, and 9 Thermidor Year II was the date of the

overthrow of Robespierre and the Jacobins; “Thermidor” has thus come to

be shorthand for counterrevolution. —DB]

[212] Bakunin, article in L'Egalite (26 June 1869) reproduced as an

appendix in Memoire de la Federationjurassienne (Sonvillier, 1873);

Œuvres (Stock), vol. IV, p. 344; ‘Programme de l‘Organisation

révolutionnaire des Freres intemationaux’, in Ul.lliance internationale

de la democratie socialiste et l’Association internationale des

travailleurs (London & Hamburg, 1873). It is true that Bakunin, when

under the influence of the Blanquists, would occasionally use the word

“dictatorship”, but he would always pull himself back immediately:

“dictatorship, but not one sanctioned by the officer’s sash,

governmental title or legal institution, and all the more powerful for

having none of the accoutrements of power” (Letter to Albert Richard,

1870, in Richard, Bakounine et l’Internationale a Lyon. Cf. also Fritz

Brupbacher, ‘Soixante ans d’heresie’ in Socialisme et Liberte (Editions

de la Baconniere Boudry, 1955), p. 259.

[213] They shook with fear at the thought of contradicting Lenin, for

whom anyone who did not understand the necessity of dictatorship had

understood nothing about the Revolution and could therefore not be a

true revolutionary. See his ‘Contribution a l’histoire de la dictature’

(1920), in V.I. Lenin, De l’Etat (Paris: Bureau d’editions, 1935).

[214] Gracchus Babeuf (1760–1797), guillotined for his part in the

Conspiracy of the Equals, was widely influential in the nineteenth

century and is regarded as a precursor of revolutionary socialism. See

Ian Birchall, The Spectre of Babeuf (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016).

[DB]

[215] Philippe Buonarotti, Conspiration pour /‘egaliti, dite de Babeuf

(Librairie romantique, 1828), vol. I, pp. 93, 134, 139, 140. [History of

Babeuj’s ‘Conspiracy of Equals’ —DB]

[216] Wilhelm Weitling (1808–1871), a Prussian tailor, lived in Paris

from 1837 to 1841 and was influenced by Charles Fourier, Robert Owen,

Etienne Cabet and early millenarian Christian movements. A member of the

communist League of the Just, he was admired by many leading

revolutionaries of the time, including Marx and Bakunin. [DB]

[217] Kautsky, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat; Preface by V.P.

Volguine in Albert Soboul, Pierre Angrand and Jean Dauty (eds.), Textes

choisis de Blanqui (Paris: Editions sociales, 1955), pp. 20 and 41;

Maurice Dommanget, Les idees politiques et sociales d’Auguste Blanqui

(Paris: Librairie Marcel Riviere, 1957), pp. 170–3.

[218] Cf. Les Cahiers du bolchevisme, 14 March 1933, p. 451.

[219] Marx, La Lutte de classes en France [1850] (Ed. Schleicher, 1900),

p.147. [“The proletariat rallies more and more around revolutionary

socialism, around communism, for which the bourgeoisie has itself

invented the name of Blanqui. This socialism is the declaration of the

permanence of the revolution, the class dictatorship of the proletariat

as the necessary transit point to the abolition of class distinctions

generally” –Marxists Internet Archive. DB]

[220] Maximilien Rubel, Karl Marx, pages choisies pour une ethique

socialiste (Paris: Marcel Riviere, 1948), pp. 224–5.

[221] A reference to Lenin’s comment: “A Jacobin who wholly identifies

himself with the organisation of the proletariat—a proletariat conscious

of its class interests—is a revolutionary Social Democrat.” (Collected

Works 7: p. 383) Rosa Luxemburg challenges this claim in her

‘Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy’, while

Kropotkin stressed the fundamentally bourgeois nature and role of the

Jacobins in La Science Moderne et l’Anarchie (Paris, 1913) and The Great

French Revolution, 2789–1793 (1909). [DB]

[222] Cf. Leon Trotski, Nos taches politiques [1904], notably the final

chapter entitled ‘Dictature sur le proletariat’.

[223] Der Bankrott des russischen Staatskommunismus (Berlin, 1921), pp.

28–31; published in French as Les soviets trahis par les bolcheviks

(Spartacus, 1973, new edition 1998). [This text, whose title means “The

Bankruptcy of Russian State-Communism”, does not seem to have been

translated into English. DB]

[224] Cf. Proudhon, Idee generate de la Revolution (1851) in Œuvres

completes (Paris: Riviere, 1926), pp. 121–6; Deutscher, Staline, pp.

8–9.

[225] Georges Lefebvre, Annales historiques ... April-June 1947, p.175.

[226] Albert Soboul, ‘Robespierre and the Popular Movement of 1793–1794’

in Past and Present (May 1954), p. 60.

[227] Georges Guy-Grand, La Democratie et l’apres-guerre (Paris: Gamier,

1920), p.230.

[228] Georges Lefebvre, Etudes sur la Revolutionjranfaise (Paris: PUF,

1954), p. 21.

[229] Albert Mathiez, L’Humanite, 19 August 1920; quoted in Guy-Grand,

op. cit., p. 225.

[230] Der Bankrott, op. cit.

[231] Jean Jaures (1859–1914), a schoolteacher and university lecturer

turned politician, was one of the principal figures in the history of

French socialism. Initially a left-wing republican, he was instrumental

in creating and became the leader of the French Socialist Party (opposed

to the Socialist Party of France led by the self-proclaimed Marxist

Jules Guesde), and in 1904 he founded the newspaper L’Humanite (which

from 1920 would be the paper of the French Communist Party). In 1905,

the two socialist parties merged to create the Unified Socialist Party,

French Section of the Workers’ International (PSU-SFIO). Because of his

outspoken pacifism, Jaures was assassinated by a nationalist in 1914

shortly before the outbreak of war. [DB]

[232] The Ministry of War used the fonds secrets (secret funds) to fund

intelligence activities. [DB]

[233] Trotsky, Staline (Paris: UGE, 1979 [1948]), pp. 485, 556–60.

[234] The expression “permanent revolution” can be found in the writings

of Bakunin as well as in those of Blanqui and Marx. [See also Proudhon’s

‘Toast to the Revolution’, 17 October 1848: “From this it follows that

revolution is always in history and that, strictly speaking, there are

not several revolutions, but only one permanent revolution.” In Property

Is Theft!, p. 359—DB]

[235] Jean-François Varlet (1764–1837) was a supporter of the

sans-culotte Hebert and was imprisoned more than once for his

insurrectionism. [DB]

[236] Varlet, L’Explosion, 15 Vendemiaire, Year III.

[237] Alain Sergent and Claude Harmel, Histoire de l’Anarchie (Le

Portulan, 1949), p. 82. (Republished by Editions Champ Libre in 1984.)

[238] Born into the Italian nobility, Philippe Buonarroti (1761–1837)

went to France in 1793 and was granted French citizenship for his

services to the Revolution. He met Babeuf in prison after Thermidor and

became a follower. Buonarotti’s History of Babeuf’s ‘Conspiracy of

Equals’ (1828) was very influential. [DB]

[239] Babeuf, Tribun du peuple, II, 294, 13 April 1796; Buonarroti, op.

cit., pp. 264–6.

[240] Proudhon, Idee genirale, p. 195·

[241] Ibid., pp. 177–236.

[242] The decree of 14 Frimaire, Year II (by the revolutionary calendar)

strengthened the power of the central authorities in Paris (especially

the Committee of Public Safety and the Committee of General Security)

and reduced those of local authorities. [MA & DB]

[243] Bakunin, Œuvres, vol. I, p. 11.

[244] Bakunin, Œuvres, vol. II, pp. 108 and 232. It was the same for the

German socialists: Rudolf Rocker emphasised (in his Johann Most, Berlin,

1924, p. 53) how Wilhelm Liebknecht, the co-founder with August Bebel of

the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany, was “influenced by the

ideas of the old communist Jacobins.”

[245] Trotski, op. cit., p. 95

[246] Boris Nicolaevsky, Karl Marx (Paris: Gallimard, 1937), pp. 146 and

158. [Nicolaevsky (1887–1966) was a Marxist revolutionary and member of

the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. A prominent Menshevik

intellectual, he was deported from the USSR in 1922 and settled for a

time in Amsterdam where he became director of the International

Institute for Social History. His Karl Marx: Man and Fighter was first

published in German in 1933 and translated into English in 1936. —DB]

[247] Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography (Oxford University Press,

1967), p. 30. Cf. also John Maynard, Russia in Flux: Before October (New

York: Macmillan, 1955), p. 118.

[248] Marx in ch. 6 of The Holy Family (1845), available on the Marxists

Internet Archive at

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holyfamily/

; Engels, Anti-Duhring, translation from Marxists Internet Archive:

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch23.htm

.

[249] Proudhon, Idee generale, pp. 254–323; Bakunin, Œuvres, vol. II,

pp. 108, 228, 296, 361–2; vol. VI, p. 257.

[250] Engels, Karl Marx devant lesjures de Cologne (Ed. Costes, 1939),

p. 247 and note; Marx, Le Dix-Huit Brumaire de Louis-Bonaparte (Ed.

Scleicher freres, 1900), pp. 342–4; Marx, La Guerre civile, pp. 16, 46,

49; Engels, Critique du programme d’Erjurt, op. cit.

[251] See the note by Engels in the 1885 edition of Marx’s address of

the Central Committee to the Communist League’ where Marx proclaimed

that workers “must not only strive for a single and indivisible German

republic, but also within this republic for the most determined

centralisation of power in the hands of the state authority.” Engels

noted that “this passage is based on a misunderstanding” and that it was

now “a well-known fact that throughout the whole [Great French]

revolution ... the whole administration of the departments,

arrondissements and communes consisted of authorities elected by the

respective constituents themselves, and that these authorities acted

with complete freedom within general state laws [and] that precisely

this provincial and local self-government ... became the most powerful

lever of the revolution.” (The Marx-Engels Reader [New York: WW. Norton

0-’ Co, 1978), pp. 509–10) [DB]

[252] Lenin, State and Revolution (1917).

[253] Lenine, Pages choisies (Bureau d’edition, 1926–7), vol. II, pp.

372–3.

[254] Lenine, Œuvres, (First edition), vol. XX, p. 640.

[255] Lenin, Pages choisies, vol. II, p. 93.

[256] Lenin, Pages choisies, vol. II, pp. 115–6.

[257] Lenin, Pages choisies, vol. II, p. 296; Œuvres, vol. XX, p. 640.

[258] Lenin, Pages choisies, vol. III, p. 339.

[259] Lenin, Œuvres, vol. XX, p. 640; Pages choisies, vol. I, p. 192.

[260] Lenin, Œuvres, vol. XXI, pp. 213, 227, 232.

[261] Trotsky, Nos taches politiques, p. 66.

[262] H.-E. Kaminski, Bakounine, La vie d’un révolutionnaire (Paris:

Aubier, 1938), p. 17. [Republished by Editions La Table Ronde, 2003.

Hanns-Erich Kaminski (1899–1963) was a socialist journalist originally

from Eastern Prussia. He published a book about Italian fascism and

campaigned for an alliance of the German Socialist and Communist Parties

in the face of the Nazi threat. Having immigrated to Paris in 1933, he

moved closer to anarchosyndicalist circles and visited Barcelona in

1936. It was this experience which led to a book about the Spanish

Revolution (Ceux de Barcelone, 1937) and the biography ofBakunin. In

1940 he immigrated to Argentina. —DB]

[263] Milovan Djilas, The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System

(Thames & Hudson, 1957); Michel Collinet, Du Bolchevisme: evolution et

variations du Mandsmeteninisme (Le Livre Contemporain, 1957). [Djilas, a

former Yugoslav Partisan and Communist leader and at one point touted to

succeed Tito as president, became increasingly critical of the

Yugoslavian system and was imprisoned in 1956. The New Class had been

finished before his arrest and was published in the USA in 1957, which

led to his being sentenced to a further seven years’ imprisonment.

Eventually released in 1966, he remained a dissident in Belgrade until

his death in 1995. Collinet (1904–1977) was also a former Communist

turned dissident, and then became a member of the Socialist Party’s

Revolutionary Left faction and, later, the Workers’ and Peasants’

Socialist Party alongside Guérin. He was active in the Resistance during

the Second World War, and remained a member of the Socialist Party after

the Liberation. —DB]

[264] It is regrettable that neither Collinet nor Djilas quote the

remarkable pages (pp. 157, 205) that, well before them, Valine, in his

Revolution inconnue, dedicated to the Bolsheviks’ claim to

infallibility.

[265] Nevertheless, Collinet and Djilas both exaggerate Lenin’s dogmatic

rigidity and underestimate his surprising intellectual flexibility and

his ability to revise his positions in light of facts, aptitudes that on

every occasion disconcerted his dull lieutenants and in a large measure

compensated for the failing for which he is criticized.

[266] Collinet here joins Valine without stating so (op. cit., pp.

180–2).

[267] Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League, London,

March 1850. [DB]

[268] The Bandung Conference of 1955 brought together twenty-nine Asian

and African countries, mostly former colonies, with the aim of promoting

economic and cultural cooperation and opposing colonialism and

neo-colonialism. Mohammad Mosaddegh was the democratically elected prime

minister of Iran who was removed from power in a coup organised by

British and US intelligence agencies in 1953. Gamal Abdel Nasser led the

overthrow of the Egyptian monarchy in 1952 and nationalized the Suez

Canal in 1956, which led to invasion by Britain, France, and Israel.

[DB]

[269] Le Gauchisme, remede a la maladie senile du communisme (Paris:

Seuil, 1969). [In fact, the book-published in English as Obsolete

Communism: The Left-Wing Alternative (Oakland: AK Press, 2001)-was

coauthored by Daniel and his elder brother Gabriel. Daniel was

associated with the anarchist group Noir et Rouge and was extremely

critical of the Anarchist Federation; he became the figurehead of the

revolutionary students’ movement of May 1968. Gabriel was a member of

the French Communist Party, but left it in 1956 and was associated with

the Socialisme ou Barbarie group around Cornelius Castoriadis, as well

as with other libertarian Marxist networks. DB]

[270] Le Monde, April 5, 1969.

[271] This seems to refer to Gatti’s experimental play Les 13 soleils de

la rue St. Blaise, produced by the Theatre de l‘Est Parisien. The

award-winning poet, dramatist, and filmmaker Annand Gatti was born in

1924, the son of an Italian anarchist, and would take part in the armed

resistance to Nazism. After the war he worked as a journalist for many

years before he produced his first literary work and directed his first

film. [DB]

[272] The CRS (Compagnies Republicaine de Securite) are the French riot

police, created in 1944. [DB]

[273] Cf. ‘Les Mutineries de la mer Noire’, Les Cahiers de Mai (July

1969).

[274] Commonly known in the English-speaking world as Bastille Day, 14

July has been the official French national celebration day since 1880,

and marks not only the popular storming of the Bastille fortress, a

symbol of absolutist monarchism, on 14 July 1789, but also the ‘Festival

of Federation’ of 14 July 1790, which was organized by the supporters of

constitutional monarchy and was intended to promote national unity in

order to prevent any rolling back of constitutional changes and any

further social conflict leading to more radical reforms. [DB]

[275] The Confederation Generale du Travail (General Labour

Confederation) was the first national trade union organisation in

France, and before the First World War was strongly influenced by

anarchism, leading to the militant practice dubbed ‘revolutionary

syndicalism’. Increasingly moderate during and after the Great War, the

movement split in the 1920s, with a Communist-dominated minority

creating the CGTU (Unitary CGT). [DB]

[276] Georges Seguy had been a Communist Party (PCF) member since the

1940s and was general secretary of the CGT (which since the Liberation

of 1945 had been dominated by the PCF) from 1967 to 1982. [DB]

[277] A 1962 documentary by Frédéric Rossif. English-language films in

which the collectivizations do feature include Ken Loach’s Land and

Freedom (1995); see also Mark Littlewood, Ethel MacDonald: An

Anarchist’s Story (2007),

http://www.spanishcivilwarfilm.com

. [DB]

[278] Gaston Leval, Espagne libertaire 36–39 (Editions du

Cercle/Editions de la Tete de feuilles, 1971). [Published in English as

Collectives in the Spanish Revolution (London: Freedom Press, 1975) —DB]

[279] The POUM was formed by Andreu Nin and Joaquin Maurin in 1935 and

was affiliated internationally to the so-called London Bureau alongside

the ILP (Independent Labour Party) in Britain and the PSOP (Workers’ and

Peasants’ Socialist Party) in France (of which Guérin was a prominent

member at the time). [DB]

[280] See Sam Dolgoff, Anarchist Collectives: Workers’ Self-management

in the Spanish Revolution, 1936–39 (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1975);

Frank Mintz, Anarchism and Workers’ Self-management in Revolutionary

Spain (Oakland: AK Press, 2012). [DB]

[281] Georges Fontenis (1920–2010) was one of the leading figures in the

postwar revolutionary movement in France. He played an important role in

the reconstruction and reform of the French anarchist movement (notably

through the creation of the FCL), and in supporting those fighting for

Algerian independence in the 1950s and 1960s. A prominent activist in

May ’68, he would go on to help (re)create a libertarian communist

movement in the 1970s. He was also in later life one of the pillars of

the Free Thought (La Libre Pensee) movement. Having joined the Union of

Libertarian Communist Workers (UTCL) in 1980, he would subsequently

become a member of Alternative Libertaire, and would remain a member

until his death at the age of ninety. [DB]

[282] The Kanak are the indigenous people of New Caledonia (a French

colonial possession in the Pacific). [DB]

[283] As the editors of Pour le communisme libertaire (the 2003

Spartacus edition of the collection of articles on which the present

volume is based) point out, the reference to the various trade union

federations and confederations should be updated: “As much in the CGT

and the FSU, even in FO, and perhaps the CFDT, as in the CNT and the SUD

unions.” The CNT (Confederation Nationale du Travail, or National Labour

Confederation) was founded in 1946 and modelled on the Spanish CNT. The

manifesto’s general point is clear: the important thing is to fight for

revolutionary practices in all the union organizations. [DB]

[284] This text was written a few years after the Single European Act of

1986, which paved the way for the creation of a single market and single

currency, but before their actual creation and the emergence of the

European Union. [DB]