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Title: Why “Libertarian Communist”? Author: Daniel Guérin Date: May 1969 Language: en Topics: libertarian communism Source: Chapter from *For a Libertarian Communism*
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romantic notions as little useful as they are out of date.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.[1] 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
[1] 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]