Foreword

Foreword and Acknowledgments
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 www.danielGuérin.info.

List of Acronyms