[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 Labor 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 criticized by some for tending towards reductionism: see Claude Lefort, ‘L’analyze 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 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 Amid 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 Honor 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 Decolonization 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 Labor 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 utilize-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 rencounter 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 Crosier, 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 analyzes 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 19681, Magazine litteraire 19 (1968), available at www.magazine-litteraire.com/archives/ar_anar.htm, accessed 6 October 2002.

[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 decolonization 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, www.Marxists.org/archive/rubeV1973fmarx-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 organization, 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 coeditor (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 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 popularized 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 Bakunin (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 nationalization, 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 (Center 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, Program et organization de L’Association internationale des travailleurs (Florence, 1884); Kropotkin, La Conquete du pain (Stock, 1890); Kropotkin, Ulnarchie, sa philosophie, son ideal (Stock, 1896), pp. 27–8 & 31; Kropotkin, La Science moderne et l!Zlnarchie (Stock, 1913), pp. 82–3 & 103. [“Program and Organization 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] Bakunin, Œuvres (Stock, 1895–1913), vol. VI, p. 401.

[150] Marx, Lettre sur le program de Gotha; Lenine, L’Etat et la Revolution (1917).

[151] Malatesta, Program et organization 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] ‘Program et statuts de la Fratemite révolutionnaire’ (1865) in Max Nettlau, Michel Bakunin (London: 1896), vol. I, p. 224.

[166] Bakunin, Œuvres, vol. V. pp. 216–8; Archives Bakunin, 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 characterized 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 realization 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 noncommunist 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; 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‘organization 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 hemorrhage 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 emphasize 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, among 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 Labor 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 Program, 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 furor 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; ‘Program de l‘Organization 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 accouterments of power” (Letter to Albert Richard, 1870, in Richard, Bakunin 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 Specter 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 organization 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 emphasized (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 program 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 centralization 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, Bakunin, 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 neocolonialism. Mohammad Mosaddegh was the democratically elected prime minister of Iran who was removed from power in a coup organized 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. Blaize, produced by the Theater 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 Labor Confederation) was the first national trade union organization 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 Labor 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] In 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 Organization Communiste Libertaire (Libertarian Communist Organization). This was the OCL’s manifesto. [DB]

[282] 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]

[283] The Kanak are the indigenous people of New Caledonia (a French colonial possession in the Pacific). [DB]

[284] 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 Labor Confederation) was founded in 1946 and modeled 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]

[285] 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]