For a Libertarian Communism

Daniel Guérin addressed himself to younger people “alienated from ideologies and ‘isms’ shorn of any meaning by an earlier generation” and particularly from “socialism, which has so often been betrayed by those who claimed to speak in its name, and which now provokes an understandable scepticism.” In this collection of essays, written between the 1950s and 1980s and published here for the first time in English, Guérin not only provides a critique of the socialist and communist parties of his day, he analyzes some of the most fundamental and pressing questions with which all radicals must engage. He does this by revisiting and drawing lessons from the history of the movement from the French revolution, through the conflicts between anarchists and Marxists, to the social revolution of 1968. These are not just abstract theoretical reflections, but are informed by the experiences of a lifetime of revolutionary commitments.

Daniel Guérin was a prominent member of the French left for half a century. He published The Brown Plague in 1933 and Fascism and Big Business in 1936. His controversial, libertarian Marxist interpretation of the French Revolution, Class Struggle in the First Republic, 1793–1797 was judged by his friend C.L.R. James to be “one of the great theoretical landmarks of our movement”. Mitchell Abidor is the principal French translator for the Marxists Internet Archive. His translations include Anarchists Never Surrender, Voices of the Paris Commune, and Death to Bourgeois Society. David Berry is currently a senior lecturer in politics and history at Loughborough University, UK. His publications include A History of the French Anarchist Movement, 1917–1945, New Perspectives on Anarchism, Labour and Syndicalism, and Libertarian Socialism. He is currently preparing a biography of Guérin.