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Title: Towards an Extraparliamentary Opposition
Author: Daniel Guérin
Date: May 1968
Language: en
Topics: black liberation, anti-racism, racism, May 1968, France, France 1968
Source: Retrieved on 2020-08-07 from https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4815-daniel-guerin-towards-an-extraparliamentary-opposition

Daniel Guérin

Towards an Extraparliamentary Opposition

Daniel Guérin (1904–1988), was a French libertarian-communist perhaps

best known for his controversial 1960s attempt to synthesize Marxism and

anarchism. Here, translated into English for the first time, is the text

of his speech about anti-racist struggle in both the US and France.

Introduction

Daniel Guérin (1904–1988), the French libertarian-communist, is perhaps

best known for his controversial 1960s attempt to synthesize Marxism and

anarchism. His life-long militant anti-racism and championing of

homosexuality against the ‘anti-sexual terrorism’ of the puritanical

bourgeoisie, however, remain less remarked upon. Largely unfamiliar as a

Leftist figure outside of France, Guérin’s forty-two-book bibliography

is an accompaniment to a mass of materials documenting his involvement

in major global movements across most of the twentieth century. In this

way, Guérin’s published work and carefully preserved archive are portals

into the historical aspirations of proletarian internationalism as such.

But the vast majority of Guérin’s writings have not been translated.

Among these is Guérin’s brochure, ‘Cuba-Paris,’ which includes a short

speech entitled, ‘Vers une opposition extraparlementaire’ (Towards an

Extraparliamentary Opposition), translated below.

Self-published in May of 1968, ‘Cuba-Paris’ contains three short texts

on Guérin’s participation in the Havana Cultural Congress of 1968 and

two that discuss the state of anti-racism in France. ‘Towards an

Extraparliamentary Opposition,’ the fourth of these texts, demands

attention in our current political moment. Presented as his introductory

remarks to a meeting organized by ‘Friends of S.N.C.C.’ [Student

Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] in Paris, this short speech bears

witness to a broader conversation between Guérin and former S.N.C.C.

executive secretary James Forman. As the transcription of speech, it

documents an important occasion in which around two thousand French

militants gazed into the ideological and practical world of Black Power.

Alongside Guérin, Aimé Césaire also spoke in support of S.N.C.C., though

researchers have never located a text corresponding to the Martiniquan’s

speech at the Mutualité. Photos of the event also bear witness to

Jean-Paul Sartre’s attendance, as anti-racist French intellectuals

mobilizes for US Black activists in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.’s

assassination earlier that month. In his rousing account of the burdens

of contemporary French proletarian life, and the necessity to struggle

against French xenophobia, Guérin warns the Left not to avoid or

displace its own problems through a focus on racism in the US. Calling

for an understanding of the ‘difference of degree’ between the US and

secondary imperialist countries like France, he explores similarities

between questions of misery and revolt on both sides of the Atlantic,

attempting to dispel any notion that France is lacking in exploitation,

oppression, or racism.

The call for such a reckoning within French society is timely, as today

prominent leaders continue to deny the existence of racist state

violence, claiming that both critical notions of race and structural

racism are imitative concepts imported from US academia, and more

recently, from the Movement for Black Lives. Police brutality

perpetuated on young Black and Arab men in France, however, is factually

indisputable. In the wake of the US uprising, the murder of Adama

Traoré, killed by police in 2016 using the same technique employed to

murder George Floyd, has been brought, along with his family’s four-year

long struggle for justice, back into the limelight. But these

similarities have not generated a mass shift in the white French

imagination as has been seen in the US in recent weeks. While

commentators have suggested that the speech Guérin later called,

‘Towards an Extraparliamentary Opposition,’ anticipated the uprisings of

May ’68, his engagement with US Black revolutionaries and his plea ‘to

destroy…a system of white power’ proper to France seem to have also

foreseen our current moment: one in which French anti-racist militants

confront the obdurate and hypocritical manifestations of a latter-day

imperial color-blindness, which shines down on civil society like a dead

star.

Towards an Extraparliamentary Opposition

Daniel Guérin’s address at the meeting organized by ‘Friends of S.N.C.C.

(Black Power)’ at the Maison de la Mutualité (Paris), April 29, 1968.

My dear comrades,[1]

During a recent press conference, I thought that I should ask James

Forman a question that is not a trick question, but the sort of question

that we ask of a friend in order to gather from him an answer that we

ourselves have already deduced. I asked him if it was correct to say

that Black Power was intent on boycotting the presidential and general

elections in the United States. His response was categorical: yes. And

Forman added that, for Black Americans, the struggle no longer passes

through the electoral field, which has faded into the background, but is

happening in the streets. According to him, Rap Brown had already said

in New York last September that ‘Black people do not expect anything

from the 1968 elections.’

Moreover, other representatives of Black Power showed me, a few months

ago, that the multiplication of Black activist groups throughout the

United States presents certain advantages that aren’t offered by an

overly centralized revolutionary movement. Namely, preserving the

spontaneity of the struggle, its direct relation to the masses.

In this way, Black Americans have themselves discovered the fundamental

rules of revolutionary action as they were elaborated in Europe in the

middle of the nineteenth century: on the one hand, subordinate electoral

and parliamentary action to direct action, such as armed struggle; on

the other hand, preserve autonomy and consequently the spontaneity of

mass organizations, those which we call communes, soviets, or councils.

These elementary principals, alas, have been, more or less, long

forgotten within the context of our movements today. We should thank our

Black American friends for reminding us of them, and with such powerful

conviction!

I am coming to a point that, to me, seems essential. It is our duty—need

I say it—to take up the defense of Black Americans, to demonstrate our

solidarity, as you are doing here, tonight. It is our duty, of course,

as it is our duty to support heroic Vietnam in its struggle. But I think

that we should be wary of ourselves. It would be a great error to

concentrate our action on Black Americans, on Vietnam, simply in order

to give ourselves a good conscience, in order to perform a diversion, in

order to create an alibi that would allow us to dispense with the

struggle here, against the enemy that is proper to our country.

On this point, I am certain that our Black Americans friends will agree.

They know what they have to do; they do not need us to advise them. And

our solidarity, even if it is not negligible from their perspective, is

in no way the condition of their victory.

Furthermore, once we have, as we do tonight, the honor and good fortune

to have with us one of their spokespersons of the highest authority, we

can dispense with saying about them what they themselves are much better

at saying.

On the other hand, we are, it seems to me, in a position to learn a

great lesson that you are able to teach us, dear comrades of Black

Power, teachings that are applicable in our country and within our own

struggles.

First of all, if we wished to be properly accountable to you, our most

immediate task would be to commit ourselves entirely to the struggle

against racial discrimination, which is as economic as it is human, and

which comes down brutally upon people of color in France. I will give

two small examples taken from personal experience: when I found myself,

a few years ago, functioning as the cultural consultant for the Théâtre

des Nations, we had reserved a number of rooms in a hotel on the Left

Bank for an African theater troupe. But the owner of the hotel, no

doubt, had not understood that it was a Black troupe and, when the

artists arrived, he told them that the reserved rooms were no longer

available. The organization that I was part of only had power over

public matters and didn’t react.

The second example: The court case for the Guadeloupian patriots began

on February 19 at the Court of Justice. For this occasion, Caribbean

students had organized a street demonstration, with instructions to

arrive in a dispersed manner until we were near the Court. When, with my

friend Michel Leiris, we crossed the Saint Michel Bridge, coming from

the square of the same name, a barrier composed of C.R.S. [French

National Police] was sorting people into groups: everyone who was white

was allowed to cross the barricade; every person of color was held back.

The instructions given to the police were simply racist, since a number

of whites, whom they let go through with such courtesy, had come to

demonstrate with the Caribbean students.

Therefore, my dear Black American friends, we must commit ourselves, in

France, to the struggle against our bourgeoisie, our capitalism, our

neo-imperialism, with an energy that, without reaching your level of

intensity, resembles the struggle that you have created in the US. And

when I say ‘neo-imperialism,’ it is not an empty formulation: it wasn’t

very long ago that repressive French forces shed blood in Martinique, in

Djibouti, and in Guadeloupe.

The world is one, the revolution is one. You have taken the lid off over

there. It is up to us take a lid off here. How could we better help you

in your struggle, dear brothers, than by ceasing to be, here in France,

a milquetoast Left, in rabbit’s skin[2] (as we used to say in my

childhood), in a state of ‘peaceful coexistence,’ as we say today, a

divided Left, more prodigious in words than in acts and with no

international weight. How could we better give you our support, than in

wresting from the class enemy, here in this country, the control over

our destiny, a destiny that, in the final analysis, is identified with

yours, is it not?

One can certainly object that the situations there and here are not the

same, that your hell, dear Black American friends, cannot be compared to

the ... purgatory in which our oppressors hold us. No comparison,

certainly between the economic exploitation within a white country that

subjugates those of other colors and condemns— in the name of

epidemiology—the entirety of a population to be confined to ghettos,

after their names, languages, religions, ancestral cultures, and

personalities have been pillaged, making them strangers to themselves

and pariahs in their own country, and that constantly exposes them to

violence and to death.

But despite the difference of degree, the society in which we live, and

to whose subjections we are a bit too accustomed, is no less terrible or

unjust. Yes, dear Black American friends, in this country there are also

resounding wounds, unbearable excesses, odious crimes. There is an

enormous gap between the rich and the poor, between those who possess

the means of production and those who work for a wage, between those who

govern and those who are governed, between the financially privileged

and the ordinary people ruined by taxes, between the just and the

corrupt. The France that welcomes you today, dear Forman, is it not the

same territory where the Moroccan leftist leader Mehdi Ben Barka was

arrested and then vanished, with the participation of official French

services?

Having finished that digression, I return to my indictment. Among us, in

France, there are old people, silent and invisible, who finish their

days miserably in the midst of an insolent array of luxury. Beneath the

façade of beautiful Paris there exists—extensively—sordid streets and

innumerable slums.

Among us, here, there is an alienated youth, misunderstood and treated

with indifference. Among us, here, women await their true emancipation,

and buckle under the quadruple burden of motherhood, breadwinning,

housework, and illegal abortions. Here, there is the accelerated rhythm

of factory work that drains and shortens lifespans. There is the shame

of most of our hospitals and our universities, poorly equipped and

overwhelmed, the scandal of non-socialized healthcare and rapacious

pharmaceutical corporatization, the vileness of our prison system. There

is the ludicrous squandering of our resources for the atomic bomb and

for greatness.

There is the disgraceful treatment that we reserve for foreigners, their

hyper-exploitation, their segregation into ...semi-ghettos, the egotism,

the chauvinism, the racism that so many French people exhibit. There is

the burden of the high cost of living, work that mechanization and

excessive concentration cut into more and more ominously.

Finally, in a nutshell, the worker’s condition is far from being

abolished in this country, Forman, where we have welcomed you. Despite

appearances, the words of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels hold at base a

truth, the knowledge that, in the revolution, the workers have nothing

to lose but their chains, and a whole world to win.

Certainly, the means of our struggle should not necessarily be exactly

the same as those that you have put into practice, dear Black American

friends, and I would not at all like to suggest tonight that the

training of sharpshooters is, for the moment, the order of the day for

us here [Shouts of: “Yes, yes, it is!”].

But your will to destroy, to burn, as you say—and as you do—a system of

white power that can no longer be tolerated, should reestablish within

us a desire for our own deliverance. It is time, it is high time that we

make heard in this country the great voice that discontented students on

the other side of the Rhine call—with our own revolutionary students—an

extraparliamentary opposition. It is high time that with you, and like

you, comrades of S.N.C.C., we obliterate the old world in order to build

another—viable and livable.

[1] Many thanks to Miranda Davidson for her valuable suggestions on the

introduction. Many thanks to Sebastian Budgen, whose forthcoming article

on Guérin in Salvage offered solutions to some of the trickier

expressions through his translation of excerpts of this text. Many

thanks to Marc Kohlbry and Diane Brown for their feedback and

proofreading, especially of the translation.

[2] “En peau de lapin,” refers to the low quality of rabbit fur compared

to mink, and thus suggests a phony or counterfeit version of something.