Daniel Guerin (1904-1988) was a libertarian communist active in French radical politics from the 1930s onward. He was an anti-fascist, anti-colonialist, and an advocate of sexual liberation. Coming from a Marxist perspective, in the late 1950s he developed an interest in anarchism which culminated in his 1965 publication. Anarchism: From Theory to Practice (English translation, with a forward by Noam Chomsky (Selection 55), published in 1970), and his 1969 anthology of anarchist writings, Ni Dieu Ni Maitre (English edition: No Gods, No Masters, San Francisco, AK Press, 1998). Thefollowing excerpts are from his contemporaneous essay, “Twin Brothers—Enemy Brothers,” translated by Paul Sharkey and reprinted in Guerin's A la Recherche d’un Communisme Libertaire (In Search of Libertarian Communism, Paris: Spartacus, 1984).
ROUGHLY SPEAKING, THERE ARE TWO LEVELS at which anarchism remains relevant.
For a start, a good century ago, it discerned and denounced in prophetic fashion the risks of authoritarian deviation by dictatorial Marxism, rooted in an all powerful State run by a minority claiming a monopoly on knowledge of the processes of history.
Then, in place of this travesty of communism against which it sounded the alert in good time, it proposed another one which 1 shall describe as libertarian, rooted in contrary notions, driven from the grassroots up and not from the top down, and looking to the creative initiative of the individual and the spontaneous participation of the broad masses.
Today the blemishes of the first type of “socialism” are sensible even in those countries which have afforded them the status of dogmas. In the realm of production, it has been noticed that it provides a very mediocre return. And in order to correct its excesses, they have been reverting, as in Yugoslavia, unwittingly and in an unspoken way to the Proudhon school |of worker self-management].
What has anarchism to offer us in terms of things of service to the construction of the future society?
For one thing, anarchism, ever since Proudhon, has acted as the advocate ofla-bour combination, what we today describe as self-management.
Libertarians do not want to see the economy run by private capitalism. Similarly they reject State control, for the proletarian revolution would, as they see it, be empty of all content if the workers were to fall under the sway of new tyrants—the bureaucrats.
Self-management is labour democracy in the factory. The worker wears two hats: he is simultaneously the producer, confined to his specialization, and co-manager of the firm. He thus ceases to be alienated. He is freed from wage slavery. He receives his aliquot portion of the firm’s profits.
But the aim is not to introduce some sort of collective mastery, imbued with a selfish mentality. All of the self-managing ventures would have to be in fellowship and interdependent. Serving the common interest should be their sole concern. They would have to abide by some overall plan. And that planning would not be bureaucratic, as it is under State communism, but driven from below and regulated in concert by the delegates from the various production units.
Another of anarchism’s constructive factors is federalism.
The idea of federation did not sprout from the head of some theoretician. Proudhon merely deduced it from the experience of the French Revolution, when it had germinated spontaneously. In fact, in the vacuum created by the collapse of the old, absolutist State, the municipalities had attempted, through federation, to rebuild national unity from below. The Feast of Federation on 14 July 1790 had marked a voluntary unity—a unity all the more solid than the one imposed by the whim of the Prince.
Proudhonian federalism is unity without constraint, which is to say, a freely embraced pact (susceptible to revocation at any moment) between various grassroots groupings, in economic as well as administrative matters. This pyramidal federation which is secured locally, regionally and nationally, indeed internationally, weaves interconnections between both the self-managed ventures and the autonomous communes...
A third element that anarchism later added to the previous two and which rounded off the edifice is revolutionary syndicalism. If the solidarity and interdependence of the self-managing ventures are to be ensured, and if life is to be breathed into the communes as the basic administrative units, there will have to be an organization emanating directly from the working class, embracing and marshalling its various activities, and itself structured along federative lines: this was the role allotted to the trade unions—in capitalist society, they would be straightforward agencies pressing demands and challenges; in the socialist society, to this elementary function as workers’ advocate is added a role—for which they must be prepared in advance —as coordinator, articulator, stimulator and educator. to powerful labour unionism, provided of course that it has first been debureaucratized, a vital overall unity could be guaranteed without need of recourse to statist procedures. In anarcho-syndicalist Catalonia in 1936, the municipality, which is to say the township, and the local union oftrade unions were as one. The CNT tended to be synonymous with the Republic.
Only in the event of the corruption and bureaucratization of the trade unions proving to be beyond remedy would it be necessary to start all over again and the requisite coordination of self-managing enterprises should be handled by an agency of a whole new sort: a federation ofworkers’ councils sprouting from the strike committees which embrace unionized and non-unionized alike...
Anarchism prizes the individual over all else. It proposes to build a free society, starting from the free individual. Here the federalist principle comes into it again. The individual is free to seek or not to seek association, and is at all times free to withdraw from association. Such a compact is, in anarchists’ eyes, sturdier and more promising than Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s supposed social contract in which libertarians see nothing but imposition and social constraint.
The individual is not a means, but rather the ultimate end of society. The anarchist aims to help the individual towards full self-realization, to cultivate and draw out all of his creative potential. Society ultimately benefits as much as the individual, for it is no longer made up of passive, slavish beings, yes-men, but becomes a sum of free forces, an amalgam of individual energies.
From this postulate offreedom flows the whole of anarchist humanism, and its repudiation of religious authority as well as puritanism in morals. In the latter regard. where sexual freedom is concerned, the anarchists—long before Freud, rationalists of the Rene Guyon school, existentialists and situationists—were in the forefront.
By taking a bath in anarchism, today’s Marxism can emerge regenerated and cleansed of its blemishes.
World History
