Abidor Mitchell - For a Libertarian Communism

Revolutionary Pocketbooks

Eclipse and Re-emergence of the Communist Movement

Gilles Dauv and Franois Martin

Voices of the Paris Commune

edited by Mitchell Abidor

From Crisis to Communisation

Gilles Dauv

Death to Bourgeois Society: The Propagandists of the Deed

edited by Mitchell Abidor

Maoism and the Chinese Revolution: A Critical Introduction

Elliott Liu

Anarchy and the Sex Question: Essays on Women and Emancipation, 18961926

Emma Goldman edited by Shawn P. Wilbur

For a Libertarian Communism

Daniel Gurin edited by David Berry

The Permanent Guillotine: Writings of the Sans-Culottes

edited by Mitchell Abidor

For a Libertarian Communism

Daniel Gurin

Editor: David Berry Translator: Mitchell Abidor

This edition copyright 2017 PM Press

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

ISBN: 978-1-62963-236-0

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016948151

Cover by John Yates/Stealworks

Layout by Jonathan Rowland based on work by briandesign

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

PM Press

PO Box 23912

Oakland, CA 94623

www.pmpress.org

Printed in the USA by the Employee Owners of Thomson-Shore in Dexter, Michigan. www.thomsonshore.com

CONTENTS

FOREWORD AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

David Berry

This volume contains a selection of texts by the French revolutionary activist and historian Daniel Gurin (19041988), 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: Rivire, 1959), Pour un Marxisme libertaire [For a Libertarian Marxism] (Paris: Laffont, 1969), and la recherche dun 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 Gurins 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 Gurin for permission to publish these translations.

The footnotes are Gurins 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 Gurins sources, and I am grateful to Iain McKay for his help with this. I would also like to thank Chris Reynolds, Martin OShaughnessy, and Christophe Wall-Romana for their help in tracking down the source of Gurins reference to Armand Gatti; and Danny Evans and James Yeoman for their advice regarding films about the Spanish Revolution.

Gurin 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 Gurin (the Association of the Friends of Daniel Gurin) at www.danielguerin.info.

LIST OF ACRONYMS

THE SEARCH FOR A LIBERTARIAN COMMUNISM:

DANIEL GURIN 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 Gurin1

As he once wrote of the fate suffered by anarchism, Daniel Gurin (19041988) has himself been the victim of unwarranted neglect and, in some circles at least, of undeserved discredit. For although many people know of Gurin, 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 Pacificnot to mention several autobiographical volumes. As an activist, Gurin was involved in various movements and campaigns: anticolonialism, antiracism, antimilitarism, and homosexual liberation. This is a man who counted among his personal friends Franois 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 tte tte with Ho Chi Minh. Jean-Paul Sartre