across and beyond the far left: the case of gilles dauvé

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

Chamsy el-Ojeili and Dylan Taylor

Sociology, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

Email: [email protected]; [email protected]

Abstract

This paper explores the work of French ultra-Leftist Gilles Dauvé. Situating

his contribution against a discussion of Left communism as a unified

intellectual-political current, the paper 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 continues to

solidify this position, in particular criticising the confluence of liberal

democratic thought with anti-fascism. In a third moment, 1999- , Dauvé

engages in important rethinkings and clarifications, and further underscores

communism as communization. In the conclusion to the paper, we underscore

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.

Keywords

Marxism, Dauvé, Far-Left, Social and Political Theory, Anarchism,

communization

mailto:[email protected]

Draft - Across and Beyond the Far-Left – el-Ojeili and Taylor

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Introduction

From the late 1990s, and especially following the consolidation of the alternative

globalization movement, a fast thickening commentary has emerged around the

reinvigoration of the radical Left. The multiple challenges to neo-liberal

globalization, the 2007 financial crisis and its aftermath, Latin American Left

electoral victories, the formation of a harder parliamentary Left in a number of

countries (Greece and Spain, for instance) – all of this has found expression in the

world of ideas, with a minor publishing boom in works on socialism and anarchism,

with the popular visibility of communist thinkers (most notably, Žižek , Badiou,

Negri), and with a refocusing of critique around capitalism and issues of class and

inequality. It is fair to say that there is a rather widespread sense that, at the least,

“the experience of defeat is beginning to be superseded” (Kouvelakis, 2008, 37). The

present article touches upon one part of this new structure of feeling, the apparent

revival of Left communist ideas and emphases. We begin by setting out the co-

ordinates of unity of this Left communist current. This mapping exercise provides

the essential background to the remainder of the article, where we turn to look

closely at one figure within this tradition, the French thinker Gilles Dauvé (aka Jean

Barrot; 1947- ). Dauvé has received relatively scant academic attention, though, in

recent years, scholarly references to his work have been growing.1 We seek to

address this neglect by setting out his work and arguing its relevance, as a

distinctive, synthetic Marxian project, as of interest to those within the field of the

history of emancipatory ideas, as of renewed relevance in the face of the

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


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aforementioned rise of a “new global Left” (Santos, 2006), and as crucial to the

contemporary “communization literature”.

Treating the writings currently available in English, we begin with Dauvé’s early

work, 1969-1979, of historical excavation and interpretation, which sought to bring

together council communist, Bordigist, and situationist contentions into a unified

communist perspective. We then explore a second moment in his work – 1980 to the

end of the 1990s – concurrent with and marked by the so-called “crisis of the Marxist

imaginary”. Next, we examine a third moment in his work, again comprehensible in

terms of a changing social climate, from the close of the 1990s to the present, a

moment marked by the wearing out of “the end of history”, of “happy

globalization”, and by the growth of this newer Left we have spoken of. Here, Dauvé

engages in some important reconsiderations and clarifications, and he seeks to draw

up a balance-sheet of Left results and prospects. Finally, we consider his influence on

the development of communization literature – a vital contemporary strain of far-

Left thought. Dauvé’s unique intellectual odyssey should, we conclude, matter to us,

in a period of creative Left reinvention and experimentation, where we are called

upon to draw from the wide range of experience and wisdom bequeathed to us by

our multiple socialist traditions (Badiou, 2012; Beilharz, 2009).

Considerations on Left Communism

Gilles Dauvé’s thought originates in Left communism, an intellectual-political

formation that constructively blends elements of Marxism and anarchism. This Left

communist current contains a wealth of different sub-traditions – including anarcho-

communists and anarcho-syndicalists, council communists and Bordigists,


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situationists and impossibilists.2 When faced with such variety it can be easier to

define Left communism negatively as a rejection of what might be called “socialist

orthodoxy”. This term designates both the electoral road followed by social

democrats in the West that ended in “social capitalism”, and the Leninist

revolutionary conquest of power pursued in the periphery and semi-periphery that

terminated in “state capitalism”. This socialist orthodoxy, for Left communists,

remained trapped within the horizons of capitalism (the law of value, money,

private property, class) and was inappropriately statist, substitutionist, and

authoritarian.

In seeking to move beyond socialist orthodoxy, Left communism pursued alternate

lines of political thought, from which four broad themes can be extracted:

i) Party and organization: Left communists frequently distinguished

themselves from what they saw to be Lenin’s substitutionist strictures

in What is to be Done?3 Rosa Luxemburg’s early insistence on the

leading role of working class self-organization was, for instance, often

seen to offer a more productive line of argumentation. While holding a

critical view of the party, Left communists often formed party-like

structures to undertake agitation, propaganda, education and other

types of political intervention.

ii) Communist consciousness: in attempting to escape socialist orthodoxy,

Left communists frequently underscored communist consciousness as

deriving, above all, from material conditions, which might imply

nothing more than “revolutionary waiting” from the communist

intellectual; for others, such consciousness is to be created through

2 For some sense of the variety and complexity of sub-traditions 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 suffers from insufficient contextual considerations.


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education and/or the formation of a communist counter-culture within

the shell of the old society.

iii) Knowledge, power and communism: Left communists rejected a socialist

orthodoxy that emphasized the completeness of Marxism, Necessity,

science, and prioritized communist intellectuals over the mass of

people. In response a wholly other set of emphases (will, morality,

instinct) were sometimes introduced, along with a new attentiveness to

culture (everyday life, art, sexuality, ideology, media, consumption)

and various efforts at theoretical borrowings or re-readings (for

instance, Hegel).

iv) State, democracy, post-capitalist life: in rejecting socialist orthodoxy (as

statist and substitutionist) Left communists often turned to the

potential found in popular forms of self-organization – workers’

councils, revolutionary unions, federated communes of locality, which

were seen to embody direct democracy and to offer a critique in action

of alienated notions of representation.

While Left communism is a complex body of thought that evades easy explication,

the four broad themes above provide a means of orientating our discussion of Dauvé.

A quick listing of some of the central figures found within three initial generations of

Left communism offers a sense of just how varied this tradition is. Here we might

include such diverse thinkers as Henriette Roland Holst (1869-1952), Herman Gorter

(1863-1927), Gustav Landauer (1870-1919), Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919), Anton

Pannekoek (1873-1960), Rudolph Rocker (1873-1958), and Otto Ruhle (1874-1943),

Karl Korsch (1886-1961), Amadeo Bordiga (1889-1970), Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979),

C. L. R. James (1901-1989), Paul Mattick (1904-1981), Maximillian Rubel (1905-1996),

Murray Bookchin (1921-2006), Cornelius Castoriadis (1922-1997), Guy Debord (1931-

1994), Antonio Negri (1933-), and Jacques Camatte (1935-).


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Dauvé belongs to a subsequent, fourth late-New Left generation of Left

communists—one that includes Takis Fotopoulos (1940- ), Harry Cleaver (1944- ),

John Holloway (1947- ), Michael Albert (1947-), and Franco Berardi (1948- ). This

generation was politicized in the 1960s or ‘70s, persisted through a long period of

defeat and neo-liberal restoration, and is at the forefront of the apparent

contemporary re-opening of Left communist history. Dauvé is one of the lesser

known (at least in academic circles) thinkers of this generation, yet his pioneering,

synthetic work, we contend, has much to offer students of left thought and action.

Syntheses on the Far-Left – Early Work, 1969-1979

In Dauvé’s early work, between 1969 and 1979, we see him taking stock of, and

attempting to synthesize, elements of the historic far-Left. Along the way he

develops a critique of both social democracy and Leninism. In particular, Dauvé

attempts a critical combination of the German and Italian Lefts, with emphases

drawn from more recent Left groups such as Socialism or Barbarism (SoB) and the

Situationist International (SI).

The history of the German Left, argues Dauvé in a work co-authored with Denis

Authier (Barrot and Authier, 1976), remains a vital source for communist thought. In

step with the first problematic outlined in the preceding section, a critical position is

assumed against substitutionist organizational structures. Crucial here is the

rejection of trade unionism and the critique of parliament and the party form, as well

as opposition against what Pannekoek called the “deadly power of nationalism”

(Barrot and Authier, 1976). Unions are charged with facilitating the integration and

management of the working class within capitalism. The party form is scorned as a

“mediation” standing between the proletariat and communism (Barrot and Martin,

1974, 9). Any position external to popular organizational forms risks distorting or

betraying the vital impulse driving communist struggles.


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The German Left presents a break with the heritage of the “official Marxism” of

socialist-orthodoxy, which is seen to perpetuate the logics of capitalist development.

German social democracy, for instance, is considered to be confined to the

“planification” of private property (Barrot and Authier, 1976; Barrot and Martin,

1974). At this point, Dauvé reads the statism of Marxist orthodoxy as the expression

of a particular phase of capitalism, a position informed by contemporary interest in

the so-called “sixth unpublished chapter of Capital” in which Marx makes a

distinction between phases of formal and real subsumption. In the period of formal

subsumption, the state fulfilled certain progressive functions, but in the subsequent

moment of “real subsumption”, which is equated with the generalization of large-

scale industry at some point after 1871, the state becomes unvaryingly counter-

revolutionary (Barrot, 1972). We will return to these notions later in our discussion

of communization.

The anti-parliamentary and anti-trade unionist significations of the German Left are

deemed crucially important in opposition to what Dauvé calls “Kauskyism-

Leninism” (Barrot, 1977). We see, here, Dauvé developing the Left communist

critique of substitutionism. Leninism, he argues, is a “by-product of Kautskyism”

(Barrot, 1977, 1), denying working class power and prioritizing the party in the

achievement of socialism. The deep meaning of Bolshevism, Dauvé charges, is a

“complete fusion with state capital, administered by a totalitarian bureaucracy”

(Barrot, 1977, 3), Leninism is understood as a technique for enclosing the masses and

an ideology justifying bureaucracy and maintaining capitalism. This Kautskyism-

Leninism is explained as characteristic of a period of the working class movement

when the historical conditions for communism were not yet ripe, in which the

capitalist mode of production had not yet fully encompassed the entire globe

(Barrot, 1977). In these circumstances, the Bolsheviks found themselves forced to

fulfil the tasks of the bourgeois revolution (Barrot, 1977; Barrot and Martin, 1974).


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The outcome of this, Dauvé argues, was “state capitalism” (Barrot, 1973), a

designation of Soviet society commonly made by the non-Bolshivek Left.4 Against

the Kautskyist-Leninist worship and elevation, in short, “fetishization” of the party,

which denies the working class capacity for original creation, Dauvé champions the

persistent feature of the German Left – its insistence, after Marx, on communism as

working class self-emancipation (Barrot, 1977; Barrot and Authier, 1976).

If the German Left is crucially important, as the modern centre of the revolutionary

wave 1917-21, Dauvé is, nevertheless, critical of that Left under the influence of a

second tradition, the Italian Left, associated with the name Amadeo Bordiga.

Bordiga, the first head of the Italian Communist Party, is a tremendously important

but still marginal figure in the history of communism. Bordiga took a strongly

materialist line on revolutionary action and consciousness, held to an abstentionist

position on electoral participation, developed a radical critique of democracy, and,

later, articulated a critical line on the Bolshevization of the International, as well as

an analysis of the capitalist character of the social formation emerging from the

Russian Revolution (see Bordiga, 1977; Buick, 1987; Cammett, 1967; Craver, 1966;

Davidson, 1977; Fiori, 1970; ICC, 1992; van der Linden, 2007).5

In this Bordigist vein, Dauvé rejects the German Left’s tendency to fetishize

democracy and the council form. On the issue of democracy, Dauvé follows Bordiga

(1922) in his critique of the individualist premises of democracy, on the fetishism of

majorities (as against the often crucial role of active minorities), and in the latter’s

assertion that democracy and dictatorship mix and intermingle, that democracy and

fascism were similarly destructive, as forms of the management of capital (Barrot,

4 See Fernandez (1997) and van der Linden (2007) for further analysis of the various analyses here. 5 For Bordiga’s writings in English, see N + 1 Historical Archives of the “Italian” Communist Left. See also ICC (1992).


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1972; Barrot, 1973; Barrot and Martin, 1974, 120). Democracy is read by Dauvé as an

important weapon of capital, as a “screen used parallel to the most savage

dictatorship” (Barrot, 1972). We will return shortly to this controversial assertion. In

similarly Bordigist fashion, democracy is opposed to the communist re-

establishment of “the human community” (Barrot and Martin, 1974, 8), Dauvé

insisting upon the communal, anti-individualist premises of communism.

Communism, here, is designated anti-political, as the end of politics, neither

dictatorial nor democratic, but communal, communism signifying the rediscovery of

community, against a world of commodities that has become an autonomous force

(Barrot and Martin, 1974, 51).

Read from our current historical vantage point, Dauvé’s argument might be read

here as leaning towards an ‘end of politics’ argument persistently raised in the post-

1970s liberal onslaught against socialist ideas. Chantal Mouffe (2013), for example,

has, in response to this end of politics line, argued that conflict is an inescapable

feature of social life—politics is the negotiation of conflicts, and to believe that

politics can be transcended is not only naïve but dangerous. Dauvé was not,

however, blind to the inevitability of conflict in any properly hypothesised

communist society: ‘Communism organizes its material life on the basis of the

confrontation and interplay of needs – which does not exclude conflicts and even

some form of violence. Men will not turn into angels: why should they?’ (Barrot and

Martin, 1974, 34).

Very crucially bound up with this critique of democracy and the underscoring of

communism as communal being is Dauvé’s already mentioned opposition to the

German Left’s fetishization of the council form and the tendency to equate socialism

with workers’ self-management (Barrot and Martin, 1974). Here, Dauvé contends

that communism is not a continuation of capitalism in a more efficient, rational form,

not a problem of organization – “workers’ power” – but a matter of the

transformation of society, underscoring (once more following Bordiga) the importance


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of content over form (Barrot and Martin, 1974, 47-50). A crucial part of this critique is

Dauvé’s argument about the necessity of moving beyond the glorification of the

proletarian condition – workerism – and, instead, seeking its destruction (Barrot,

1972; Barrot and Martin, 1974; Dauvé, 2004). Here, Dauvé is critical of Pannekoek,

and later of council communists, such as the Group of International Communists

(GIK), who posited a communism in which value continued to function (Barrot and

Martin, 1974). In these ways, the German Left and their descendants, Dauvé argues,

shared too much ground with Lenin.

Drawing, in related fashion, on Bordiga’s critique of “really existing socialism” as a

bourgeois revolution marked by wage-labour, market exchange, money (Buick, 1987;

Camatte, 1974), and influenced by Bordiga’s radical materialism –that communism is

not a programme but a product of real needs and living conditions (Barrot and

Martin, 1974, 17, 40) - Dauvé is, nevertheless, critical of the fetishism of the party

form within the Italian Left. Bordiga held that the party was the future “social brain”

of the communist society, and was thus essential in the transition from capitalism

(Buick, 1987, 128; Bordiga, 1977). Bordiga’s major failing here, for Dauvé, was his

inability to break from the Kautskyist-Leninist programme on organization (Barrot

and Martin, 1974, 129).

The third central tradition that Dauvé draws from is the work of the Situationist

International. On the one hand, Dauvé is highly critical of aspects of the SI. In

particular, he rejects the SI’s SoB-influenced councilism (Barrot, 1991 [1979]).6 He

also takes issue with the idealism of the notion of spectacle – that it “falls short” of

Marx and Engels on ideology, being bereft of an analysis of capital (or the state, for

Later, Dauvé is to emphasize the SI as standing at the “crux of a contradiction”, with its opposed slogans of “down with work!” and “power to the workers!” (Troploin, 2000).


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that matter), remaining at the level of circulation (consumption) and consciousness,

rather than production (value). And, finally, Dauvé denounces the tendency of

certain situationist emphases towards a “reformism of everyday life” (Barrot, 1991

[1979, 25]). This criticism is directed, above all, at the wing of situationist thought

most clearly expressed by Vaneigem (1983), where the SI overestimate the

possibilities of living otherwise within the capitalist present, a moralistic and

ultimately fruitless appeal to an impossible communist “art of living”, to radical

subjectivity and desire (Barrot, 1991 [1979]; La Banquise, 1983a; Troploin, 2000). On

the other hand, the SI are important in what Dauvé later glosses as their “unitary

critique” of all social relations, insisting on the transformation of everyday life as a

whole (La Banquise, 1983a; Troploin, 2000).

A last note, here – to which we will return – is that the vision of communism

emerging from this work is one centred on what Dauvé calls “communization”. Set

against social democracy and Leninism, and against the workerist ideology of the

councilist Left, communization signifies the immediate, communal self-movement of

workers against exchange value and the state, the destruction rather than

management of capital and the violent struggle against the state (Barrot and Martin,

1974, 7, 13, 105).

4. The Crisis of Marxism, 1980-1999

We want to move, next, to consider a second moment in Dauvé’s work, running

between 1980 and the later part of the 1990s, and coinciding with what has been

called “the crisis of Marxism”. This moment coincides, that is, with “the

demoralization and retreat” of French Marxism, the wider diminishing of the anti-


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systemic movements, the reinvigoration of liberalism and the neo-liberal counter-

movement, expressed in ascendant themes of human rights and anti-totalitarianism,

and in the general “suspension” of utopianism (Anderson, 2004; Badiou, 2007; 2008;

2010; Keucheyan, 2013; Wallerstein, 1990). In this period, Dauvé continues his work

of synthesis and explication, attached to small Left groups and periodicals La

Banquise (“ice-flow”), 1983-1986, and Le Brise Glace (“ice-breaker”), 1988-1990.

First, in this period, we see Dauvé further developing his unique communist

synthesis of far-Left thought—with particular emphasis upon German and Italian

Left traditions. The currents feeding into this synthesis are treated with great lucidity

and economy in a lengthy 1983 piece in La Banquise, “The Story of Our Origins” (La

Banquise, 1983a). Here Bordiga and the Italian Left are praised for showing “that the

proletariat was more than just a producer who fights to end his poverty”, for its anti-

market, anti-money orientation to socialism, and for getting “back in touch with

utopia”. The German-Dutch Left are, meanwhile, commended for articulating

themes of proletarian autonomy, and for rejecting parliament, trade unionism, and

national fronts. And the Invariance group and the SI are lauded for identifying the

capitalist invasion of the totality of life after World War II, and for their expression of

communism as the transformation of the whole of life. Elsewhere, Dauvé continues

his critique of democracy and of the anti-fascist distinction between democracy and

dictatorship (Barrot 1992 [1982]; Dauvé, 1997; 1998; Le Brise-Glace, 1989). Here,

notably, Dauvé criticizes the extension of human rights discourse, drawing on

Marx’s critique of the language of rights (for instance, in On the Jewish Question) and

the Bordigist emphasis on anti-individualism and anti-democracy, and on

communism as “the human community”.

In a more situationist vein, a co-written text from 1983, For a World Without Moral

Order, sees Dauvé and his fellow authors attempt a “revolutionary anthropology”,

calling for a movement beyond all moral barriers, and for unlimited variation in

sexuality and sensuality (La Banquise, 1983b). This is variously set against


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humanism, rights discourse, a “hands off” ethic of privatization, the

commodification of sexuality, obsessive sexual self-examination, and the

fetishization of the body (La Banquise, 1983b). We see, here, Dauvé exploring the

outer-reaches of the Left communist problematic of knowledge, power and

communism—everyday life, instincts, sexuality, are seen to provide possible

avenues through which to pursue deep social change.

A contentious line of thought opened by Dauvé and his associates in this period

explored the dialectical interplay of fascism and democracy.7 Dauvé, in a Bordigist

vein, rejects the distinction between democracy and dictatorship (Barrot, 1992

[1982]). The argument runs that dictatorship and democracy are but two forms of the

management of Capital, that Capital turns inevitably to dictatorship periodically

(dictatorship as a tendency of Capital), that democracy, in a number of cases

(including Italy and Germany), prepared the way for fascism, and that the camps

belong to the capitalist world – that Auschwitz needs to be put back into history, as

one among many “normal” massacres of capitalism (Barrot, 1992 [1982]; Dauvé ,

1997; 1998; Dauvé and Nesic, 2007; Le Brise-Glace, 1989)—other instances we could

point to being the massacres of indigenous peoples in the primitive stage of

accumulation in the Americas, or the bloody liquidation of communists in Indonesia

in the 1970s.. Anti-fascism, it is argued, mystifies these realities, setting up instead a

false choice between democracy and dictatorship. ‘Democracy’ is a cloak used to

shroud the systemic violence of capitalist relations of production. It also screens-off

the overt violence carried out in the periphery and semi-periphery as conducted in

accord with the material interests (and foreign policy initiatives) of Western

countries. Both democracy and fascism are violent, but one is more overt than the

other. One engages in spectacular violence that seeks to intimidate, the other is

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) and Vidal-Naquet, 1992; Barrot (1992 [1982]); Dauvé (1997; 1998); Dauvé and Nesic (2007); Le Brise-Glace (1989). .


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latent, slow, structural violence, whose existence within the democratic society is

completely disavowed. The two forms are, moreover, frequently intimately tied

together – for instance, the democratic route to fascism or the complicity of

democratic nations in fascistic violence elsewhere. The anti-fascism of the nouveaux

philosophes (prominent figures in this school being Bernard-Henri Lévy and André

Glucksmann), for example, can be seen as complicit in obfuscating the

interconnectedness of democracy and dictatorship. The horrific legacy of fascism

and the spectre of its return is used as what Žižek (2002) calls a ‘prohibition on

thinking’ beyond liberal democracy. For such reasons, Dauvé provocatively

suggests, anti-fascism is the “worst product” of fascism (Barrot, 1992 [1982], 9).

While the equation of democracy and dictatorship may appear needlessly

provocative at first blush, to pursue such lines of thought in a period of liberal

triumphalism is to fight to keep alternative paths open. It is to acknowledge that we

do not live in the best of all possible worlds. Dauvé eludes, here, the shallow

equivalence of communism → totalitarianism fascism. The contentious nature of

Dauvé’s work in this period can be read as indicative of the problems faced by a

radical Left trying to find its bearings in a time of retreat (see Badiou, 2001).

In sum, through arguing for Democracy’s confluence with fascism, Dauvé attempts

to open a line of attack against triumphal liberal democratic parliamentarianism.

Further, with his call for a “revolutionary anthropology,” Dauvé searches for the

subjective basis on which the Left might find purchase for ongoing struggles. While

the results of his thought in this period are not always convincing, Dauvé’s work

here is notable for having kept the space for communist thought open and, as will be

shown in the communization section below, provides influential themes for later

writers and activists.

5. A New Global Left, Alternative Globalization.


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We identify a third major period in Dauvé’s work, which opens at the end of the

1990s and runs until the present, a period marked by the return of a more assertive

Left politics, the formation of what Santos (2006) has called a new global Left. This is

reflected in Dauvé’s work – much of which takes place under the umbrella of the

small group Troploin (“to go too far”) – by an increasing output, and in some

important reconsiderations and clarifications.

In terms of reconsiderations, Dauvé seeks to distance himself from Marxist

determinism. Here, Dauvé (2002; 2011) particularly takes aim at the notion of laws of

history, at progressivism, and at the tendency for Marxism to become an ideology of

development: for instance, “Marx’s late vision remained hampered by capitalist

pictures of the future” (Dauvé, 2014a). One expression of this re-orientation is that

Dauvé (2002) questions his previous explanation of the state capitalist path of the

Soviet Union as a case of “unripe historical conditions” – the contention that because

of underdevelopment, the Bolsheviks were forced to undertake the tasks of the

bourgeois revolution. Dauvé also pauses over his earlier Bordigist-materialist belief

in the relatively straightforward connection between impoverishment, crisis, and

revolutionary action, and explicitly warns of the dangers of catastrophist, capitalist

decadence modes of theorizing (Dauvé and Nesic, 2007; Troploin, 2011). And,

significantly for the previously discussed controversy around democracy and

dictatorship, Dauvé, while still holding to his resolute critique of democracy (Dauvé,

2008; Dauvé and Nesic, 2007), also says “Nobody can seriously equate democracy

and dictatorship, nor democracy and fascism” (Dauvé and Nesic, 2007), and he

admits that “No big capitalist reform is pre-determined” (Troploin, 2007).

Dauvé also appears to reach out towards other traditions in light of their influence

within anti-globalization. First, there appears to be a softening towards anarchism,


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although Dauvé (2002; 2011) criticizes anarchism, rather one-sidedly, as tending to

emphasize history as an eternal struggle between freedom and authority, rather than

focussing on class and exploitation (Dauvé, 2005; Dauvé and Nesic, 2007). Second,

Dauvé appears to integrate Italy in the 1970s and elements of Italian autonomism

into his thinking, declaring Italy in the 1970s the most advanced of the rebellions in

the period, in that, here – in the radical questioning of work, combined with a

thoroughgoing critique of parties and unions – we find tendencies seeking to

supersede rather than preserve and glorify the proletarian condition, even if this

questioning often ended up confined to the limiting problematic of “autonomy”

(Dauvé, 2014b; Dauvé and Nesic, 2007; Troploin, 2011; 2012).

Regarding shifts in capitalism, Dauvé emphasizes – against the Italian autonomists

and their tendency to discover breaks and shifts at every turn, a tendency expressed

more recently in Hardt and Negri’s trilogy (immaterial labour, the multitude,

Empire, bio-power, for example) – the continuities, despite changes issuing from

Capital’s counter-offensive over the past three to four decades. That is, Dauvé

acknowledges the “wearing out” of certain elements of post-war capitalism in the

period 1968-1977 – declining productivity gains, consumer saturation, growing

refusal, falling profits – and certain transformations after the mid-1970s –

unemployment, diversified consumption, privatization, the casualization and

decomposition of the working class, the blurring of separations between industry,

banking, trade, and insurance, for example (Dauvé and Nesic, 2002; Troploin, 2007).

However, the essentials of capitalism have remained in place: service workers were a

majority even in Marx’s day, and productive work is still at the centre of capitalism;

the technologically deterministic and globalization-centred interpretations of today

miss the extent to which these shifts are, above all, comprehensible as part of a

bourgeois counteroffensive (Dauvé, 2005; 2011; Troploin, 2007). Dauvé also insists,

against the autonomist-influenced John Holloway and others, that the state is not


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withering away and must be violently confronted rather than bypassed (Dauvé and

Nesic, 2007).

The really significant changes of the past few decades, Dauvé contends, are largely

ideological. First, we have seen the disappearance of classism and worker identity,

with no symbolic replacement for the figure of the worker yet emerging (Dauvé,

2005). Part of this entails the “fall of work as an idol”, a positive transformation, for

Dauvé (2005). However, this is intimately bound up, too, with a second major

ideological change, what Dauvé calls the arrival of a “dreamless capitalism”

(Troploin, 2007). What we have, today, Dauvé charges, is a loss of faith in the future,

of an utterly different world, along with the collapse of tradition and the old

unifying ideologies (industrialism, third worldism, say), fragmentation into multiple

demands and “archaic conservatisms” around region, religion, and ethnicity (Dauvé,

2005; Dauvé and Nesic, 2002; Dauvé, Nesic, and Carasso, 2001; Troploin, 2007).

Dauvé’s balance-sheet of the present, overall, has a very pessimistic cast to it:

“capitalism and barbarism: that’s our near future” (Dauvé, Nesic, and Carasso, 2001);

“More digging for the old mole…” (Troploin, 2007).

This, despite Dauvé’s acknowledgment of an increase in contestation today,

following the rise of the alternative globalization movement (Troploin, 2007).

Dauvé’s main criticism of this more recent Left political activity is, as previously

indicated, that it remains defensive and confined within the problematic of

“autonomy” ( Dauvé , 2002; 2008; 2014b; Dauvé and Nesic, 2007; Troploin, 2007;

2011; 2012). On this score, Dauvé contends that we are at a point of consensus today

about the value of autonomy – peer assessment in education, power-sharing,

horizontalism, education and empowerment, and so on – visible from the


18

spontaneism of councilist groups in the 1960s to contemporary counter-hegemonic

organizations such as Indymedia (Dauvé, 2014b).

There is value here in following Dauvé’s critique of autonomy in combination with

his recognition as to the need to confront the state: autonomous spaces, in core

states, tend to be tenuous occupations of areas temporarily evacuated by capitalist

enterprise. 8 While functioning as a performative critique of capitalism, and offering

interesting, examples of alternative organizational forms, the glorification of

autonomism when not linked to a wider movement capable of challenging state

power becomes a rather limited exercise. In turning to the periphery/semi-periphery,

the Zapatistas may offer an example of a successful autonomous community

(Holloway, 2010), but their success was possible due to the Mexican state’s tenuous

hold on power in rural Chiapas and pre-existing, deep, communal ties among the

indigenous population. The extent to which autonomous spaces can be developed

and held long-term, let alone form the basis for ongoing communist struggles, in

developed capitalist economies overseen by strong states is highly debatable.

6. Dauvé and Communization

While Autonomy/self-organizing is indispensable, it is not enough for Dauvé (2014b)

when measured against his re-stated vision of socialism as communization. This is

worth some discussion, as this term has been taken up, more recently, in academic

(Mansoor, Marcus, and Saulding, 2012; Noys (ed.), 2012; 2013; Smith, 2013) and Left

activist circles (Cunningham, 2009; Endnotes, 2008a; Sic, 2011). Communization has,

in addition, been associated with discussions of the political significance of Occupy

and with the work of the journal Tiqqun and the notorious French group the Invisible

Committee, authors of the very influential tract, The Coming Insurrection, as well as

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


19

spawning an international journal for communization, Sic, and an eponymous

journal from the Endnotes group.

Dauvé is positioned as a central figure in the development of the communization

current. For instance, Endnotes (2008b) devoted their inaugural 2008 issue to the

debate conducted between Dauvé/Dauvé & Nesic/Troploin and Théorie

Communiste as to ‘how to theorise the history and actuality of class struggle and

revolution in the capitalist epoch’. And in Benjamin Noys’ (2012) edited collection

Communization and its Discontents, Dauvé is a frequent point of reference.

The notion of communization is, as mentioned, used from the mid-1970s by Dauvé,

and is taken from French neo-Bordigist circles. As an idea, communization stems

from the synthesis between German and Italian Lefts and situationism (Barrot and

Martin, 1974; Dauvé and Martin, 1997; Dauvé and Nesic, 2007; Troploin, 2007; 2011).

Dauvé himself deployed the term in the text, “Capitalism and Communism,”

arguing “communism is not as an ideal to be realized: it already exists, not as a

society, but as an effort, a task to prepare for” (Barrot & Martin, 1974, p. 17). This

notion of the immediacy of communism within struggle, and the assertion that

communization “will tend to break all separation” (ibid, p. 36), appears along with

other themes from Dauvé’s work throughout contemporary communization

literature. Dauvé is a vital living connection between Left communism and the

communization current.

In what follows we briefly explore some of these links. As argued by Troploin (2011),

“a revolution is only communist if it changes all social relationships into communist

relationships.” This process begins at the very start of a revolutionary sequence. It

aims to destroy wage-labour, the proletariat itself as proletariat, and the state all-at-

once (see also Théorie Communiste, 2011, Noys 2012). Communism is an activity

rather than a set of institutions or a singular event (Troploin, 2011)


20

An important starting point here, echoing the third theme of Left communism

mentioned above, concerns the role of theory. As Dauvé has long argued, any group

of “revolutionary workers must try to find a theoretical basis for its action” (Dauvé

and Martin, 1997, p. 67)—a sentiment continued in contemporary communization

literature (see Endnotes, 2012, Théorie Communiste, 2011, B.L., 2011).

A leading theoretical emphasis, here, already touched upon earlier, draws upon

Marx’s distinction between “formal” and ”real” stages of subsumption. The shift

from formal to real subsumption (in which capital subsumes existing forms of

production) can be used for historical periodization. That the contemporary period is

that of real subsumption requires the generation of new forms of struggle.

Affirmations of workers and “workers power” are to be abandoned (Noys, 2012) in

favour of other terrains: “Capital has invaded life… to such an extent that our

objective can only be the social fabric” (Barrot & Martin, 1974, p. 13).

What would such an objective entail? Communization involves overcoming the

separation real subsumption has imposed upon human relations. As Dauvé has long

argued, communism involves “the destruction of enterprises as separate units and

therefore of the law of value: not in order to socialize profit, but to circulate goods…

without the mediation of value” (emphasis in original, ibid, p. 35). Communization

overcomes the isolation characterizing different spheres of social life, “in short, it

will tend to break all separations” (ibid, p. 36). As argued by Leon de Mattis (2011, p.

26), communization will “get rid of all the mediations which, at present, serve

society by linking individuals among them: money, the state, value, classes, etc.”

The rejection of mediation within social life extends to a rejection of any mediating

bodies within the field of struggles (see, for instance, The Invisible Committee, 2015).

Such an impulse corresponds with the Left communist critique/rejection of the party,

unions and parliamentary structures, as carried forward by Dauvé, in favour of the

immediacy of workers’ self-emancipation. In the contemporary communization


21

literature attention is frequently turned toward riots, occupations, and insurrections

as expressions of this impulse (The Invisible Committee, 2009, Endnotes, 2013).

“Democracy” is also often denounced as a form of mediation. As explored above,

Dauvé has long been critical of democracy’s historical record in relation to fascism.9

More recently he has argued that “Democracy is not to be denounced or smashed,

but superseded” (Dauvé, 2008, np.). Communism opposes democracy, he asserts,

because “communism is anti-state.” Further, communism is argued to be the means

by which “fraternal social relations” (fluid organization) can be realized. Democracy

imposes procedures and institutions that block such relations (ibid, np.). Like Dauvé,

The Invisible Committee does not restrict their critique of democracy to the state

form. They denounce the exercise of “direct democracy” within General Assemblies

(à la Occupy) as a practice for “worriers” who are concerned a situation might get

out of hand: “If democrats must structure the situation… it because they have no

trust in it. And if they don’t trust the situation, that is because at bottom they don’t

trust themselves” (emphasis in original, The Invisible Committee, 2015, p. 64, see also

de Mattis, 2011). Democracy, it is argued, obstructs the immediate fluid dimension of

struggles, sapping them of strength.

This emphasis upon immediacy, the rejection of mediating structures, means

communization has no program: “Communization has little positive advice to give

us about particular, immediate practice in the here and now…. What advice it can

give is primarily negative: the social forms implicated in the reproduction of class

relations will not be instruments of the revolution, since they are part of what has to

be abolished” (Endnotes, 2012, p. 28). There is, then, no plan for a “transitional

period” on the way to communism. Rather, communization produces communism

through struggle.

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


22

Thus the celebration of prefigurative forms of politics is viewed with suspicion: real

subsumption is such that “communist enclaves” cannot be constructed in the here

and now. As argued by Endnotes, communism has no positive existence prior to a

revolutionary situation (Endnotes, 2012). There is, in this, a continuation of Dauvé’s

critique of autonomy as explored above. While often characterised as advocating

prefigurative politics (Noys, 2012), The Invisible Committee (2015) argue there is no

point in trying to carve out an isolated territory in the pursuit of some imagined

autonomy. Rather, struggles must link with one another, overflowing immediate

territorial boundaries.

How might action be approached? Answer: let your instincts lead. In step with

Troploin’s (2011) call for an “anthropological revolution,” The Invisible Committee

(2009, p. 16) proclaim “it’s with an entire anthropology that we are at war. With the

very idea of man.” The restricted, calculating, rational, homo economicus, is

confronted by a different order of human: homo communitas, instinctual, feeling,

joyful. Again, The Invisible Committee (2015, p. 16): “strategic intelligence comes

from the heart and not the brain”. Insurrection is intuitive, it spreads by resonance,

like music it has a rhythm (ibid).

To fall in step with others is to have an “encounter.” The encounter, the instinctive

coming together of those in revolt, drives communization (ibid). It is an activity and

not a program, a coming together in immediate struggles rather than in

organizations (parties, unions…)—that it is an intensity of feeling—indicates the

importance of the dimension of everyday life for communization. Attentiveness as to

how we organise the realm of the everyday, when transferred to insurrection, should

be enough, contend The Invisible Committee (ibid), to dissolve “the sterile

distinction between spontaneity and organization.” To not intuit the organization

inherent to “spontaneous” actions is to be blind to the real force immanent in life,

which can only be perceived in motion (ibid).


23

Such an emphasis upon the subjective dimension of revolt—“either you get it you

don’t”—indicates a paradoxical elitist streak running through the communization

literature. There is an invisible vanguard, on the cutting edge of insurrection, who

are the true bearers of revolution. The rest of us are left at an organizational impasse.

What of the capacity of populist movements for carrying forward change (Laclau,

2007)? The “silent majority” never appears. There are only those who revolt and the

forces they oppose. As suggested by Toscano (2012), there is here a fatal neglect of a

more Gramscian approach of building communist capacities and an alternative

culture before the revolution

To continue with Toscano (2012), the theoretical coherence and purity that

characterizes most communization literature is seen to render it practically

irrelevant—there is a “debilitating” lack of strategic reflection. We are left with

voluntarism and a tragic fatalism, with no revolutionary practice ever measuring up

to the pure reality of enacted communization. This latter charge is the one most

applicable to Dauvé who admits his “nothing but revolution” attitude on this

question (Dauvé and Nesic, 2007). The absence of a theory of transition stands out as

a particular problem here—we are left with “a valorization of only fleeting moments

of revolt” (Noys, 2012, p. 14). Perhaps one of the biggest problems faced here is the

absence of a nuanced account of the state. The practical readings of the state

provided by Gramsci or, more latterly, Poulantzas (1980) are absent.

Faced with such critiques, what are we to make of the communization literature and,

by extension, Dauvé? When read alongside renewed considerations of the role “a

party of the Left” (Bosteels, 2011, Dean, 2012) might play, the current of thought

running from Left communism, through Dauvé, and into the communization

literature provides an important check. To seek to develop an enduring political

organizational form whilst simultaneously maintaining a sensitivity to the

chequered history of the party (and other mediating bodies and processes), is, today,

vital. Struggle must take account of ‘the full social fabric’, be wary of mediation, be


24

attuned to the nuances and encounters of everyday life. Such is the “common sense”

of the early-twenty first century Left. The separation of the party from ”the people,”

the hollowing out of the Soviets, the bureaucratization of ”socialist orthodoxy,” its

complicity with capital, its containment within parliamentary channels in the core—

these are perhaps the Left failures of the twentieth century. To agree with such an

assessment, to seriously engage in the lines of critique offered by the communization

literature, should not preclude the reconsiderations of the role of the party today;

rather, it creates a productive tension. The position of openness, of ontological

uncertainty, that comes with embracing this tension is, we suggest, some inoculation

against the viruses that infected so many within the ranks of yesterdays’ Left.

7. Concluding Comments

A final word or two is in order as to why Gilles Dauvé might matter to those within

the critical Human Sciences. First, Dauvé’s is stimulating on purely history of ideas

grounds. Dauvé, that is, has engaged in novel synthesizing work, playing a leading

role in forging a unique Marxian current, built from important but still relatively

neglected traditions across the far-Left, most notably the German/Dutch Left and the

Bordigist tradition. This synthesis, second, has certain affinities – for instance,

popular self-emancipation, rejection of state and capital – with the rather

surprisingly popular communist positions developed more recently by Hardt and

Negri and by Alain Badiou, despite emerging from quite different places. At another

level, third, Dauvé’s trajectory can be interpreted as running parallel to that of the

European Left more generally – through the flowering of imaginative and

emancipatory Leftist currents in the 1960s and ‘70s, to the retreat of utopia of the

1980s and much of the 1990s, to a reinvigoration of the Left from the late 1990s, after


25

“the end of history” and “happy globalization” (Outhwaite and Ray, 2005, 19). The

recent – admittedly rather modest – awakening of interest in his work is, we believe,

some signal of the emerging new global Left. This global Left has important

resonances with an older far-Left to which Dauvé belongs, which unsettled the

historical divide between Marxism and anarchism, which attempted to chart an

alternative socialist path from both social democracy and Leninism, and which

sought a socialism that would emerge from below, distant from parliamentary and

vanguard party politics (Pinta and Berry, 2012). All of this, we think, makes Gilles

Dauvé, this figure of that vanishing anthropological type, the far-Left, “extremist”

pamphleteer, worthy of serious attention from those working in the history of ideas,

from Marxist, anarchist, and autonomist scholars. Dauvé has persistently sought to

help shed light on our neglected communist traditions, and the tradition he has been

instrumental in forging is equally worthy of illumination.

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Author Bio: Chamsy el-Ojeili is Senior Lecturer in Sociology, Victoria University of

Wellington, New Zealand. He has published in journals such as Capital and Class,

http://libcom.org/library/libertarian-marxist-tendency-map


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Sociological Inquiry, Thesis Eleven, and Critical Sociology, and is, most recently, author

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Sociology (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

Dylan Taylor is a Teaching Fellow in Sociology, Victoria University of Wellington,

New Zealand. He has recently completed his PhD, Claiming the Century: The Promise

of Social Movements and Democracy in the Twenty-First Century, through the University

of Auckland, New Zealand. Dylan is also the editor of Counterfutures: Left thought and

practice, Aotearoa.

across and beyond the far left: the case of gilles dauvé

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