Across and Beyond the Far Left: The Case of Gilles Dauvé

Abstract

This essay explores the work of French ultraleftist Gilles Dauvé. Situating his contribution against a discussion of left communism as a unified intellectual-political current, it identifies and discusses three crucial moments in Dauvé’s work. A first moment, 1969–1979, sees Dauvé attempting to critically draw together council communist, Bordigist, and situationist contentions into a unified and unique communist perspective. During a second moment, coincident with the crisis of Marxism, Dauvé continued to solidify this position, in particular criticizing the confluence of liberal-democratic thought with antifascism. In a third moment, 1999–present, Dauvé has engaged in important rethinking and clarification, further underscoring communism as communization. The essay’s conclusion underscores the importance of Dauvé’s singular intellectual journey in terms of its novel synthetic quality, its resonance with contemporary discussions of the appearance of a new global Left, and its important contribution to the communization current.

Key Words:

• Anarchism
• Communization
• Gilles Dauvé
• Marxism
• Social and Political Theory

Notes

1 See, for instance, Bustinduy (2014), Garland (2010), Nasioka (2014), Mansoor, Marcus, and Spaulding (2012), Noys (2012, 2013), and Smith (2013).

2 For some sense of the variety and complexity of subtraditions in left communism, see Wright's (2005) mapping of the Marxist side of this family tree.

3 The approach to Lenin pursued by most left-communist thinkers can generally be seen as following what Lars T. Lih (2006) terms the “textbook interpretation”—one that misreads fundamental aspects of Lenin's work due to issues of translation (at least in the case of Anglophone readers) and that suffers from insufficient contextual considerations.

4 See Fernandez (1997) and van der Linden (2007) for further details on these various analyses.

5 For Bordiga's writings in English, see the “Historical archives of ‘Italian’ communist Left,” N+1 website, accessed 15 August 2012, http://www.quinterna.org/lingue/english/historical_en/0_historical_archives.htm. See also ICC (1992).

6 Later, Dauvé emphasizes the SI as standing at the “crux of a contradiction,” with its opposed slogans of “Down with work!” and “Power to the workers!” (Dauvé 2000).

7 Here Dauvé and his associates found themselves embroiled in a scandal around Holocaust revisionism, or negationism. For more on this, see Vidal-Naquet (1992), Finkielkraut (1998), Barrot (1992), Dauvé (1997, 1998), Le Brise-Glace (2009), and Troploin (2009).

8 His position sets Dauvé against anarchists such as Hakim Bey (2011, 69–71), who argues for Temporary Autonomous Zones, encampments of “guerrilla ontologists” who “strike and run away” and never engage with the state.

9 See also the issue on communization in SIC, no. 1 (November 2011), http://sicjournal.org/issue-2-2 2011).

10 Echoes of this position can be found in the work of the Invisible Committee (2009).