Gilles Dauvé

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Gilles Dauvé (pen name Jean Barrot; born 1947) is a French political theorist associated with left communism.

In collaboration with other left communists such as François Martin and Karl Nesic, Dauvé has attempted to fuse, critique, and develop different left communist currents, most notably the Italian current associated with Amadeo Bordiga (and its heretical journal Invariance), German-Dutch council communism, and the French currents associated with Socialisme ou Barbarie and the Situationist International. Dauvé has written extensively on how these neglected theoretical currents can help us to understand the failure of Second International Marxism (including both Social Democracy and Leninist "Communism"), the global revolutionary upsurge of the 1960s and its subsequent dissolution, and more recent developments in the global situation of capitalist accumulation and class struggle.

Among English-speaking communists and anarchists, Dauvé is best-known for the texts Eclipse and Re-emergence of the Communist Movement, first published by Black & Red Press (Detroit, Michigan) in 1974 and Critique of the Situationist International, first published in Red Eye, Berkley, California. An essay from the first pamphlet, and the second text were reprinted in London by Unpopular Books as What is Communism (1983) and What is Situationism (1987). The texts of Eclipse were reprinted with a new foreword in 1997 by Antagonism (London). It includes Dauvé's translations of two of his own articles and one by François Martin, both originally published in Le Mouvement Communiste (Paris: Champ Libre, 1972). These articles develop Bordiga's critique of Second International productivism in light of Marx's writings on formal and real subsumption and the global uprisings of 1968, and they revise Bordiga's theory of communization by drawing on council communist and Situationist traditions.

Dauvé is also known for the journal La Banquise, which he edited with Karl Nesic and others from 1983 to 1986. This journal sought to develop the new communist program suggested in Le Mouvement Communiste through a critical appraisal of post-1968 radical politics, including Situationist, and autonomist experiments. The journal also developed the theory of society's real subsumption into capital. La Banquise describe their aims and influences in The Story of Our Origins (La Banquise, 2, 1983).

More recently, Dauvé, along with Nesic and others, has set up the irregular journal Troploin, publishing articles on the collapse of both Leninist and Keynesian regimes of accumulation and the transition to "globalized" neoliberal expansion, the Middle Eastern conflicts, September 11 and the rhetoric and logic of the War on Terrorism. Many of these have been translated into English and are archived on their website, [1].

[edit] Selected works in English

• Eclipse and Re-emergence of the Communist Movement
• Critique of the Situationist International, 1979
• The Story of Our Origins
• The Perplexities of the Middle Eastern Conflict
• Grey September (on the issues raised after September 11, 2001, with Carasso and Nesic)
• Back to the Situationist International

[edit] Bibliography

• Communisme et Question Russe, (1972), Futur Anterieur (includes the essay 'Capitalisme et communisme' translated in Ecilpse and re-emergence of the Communist Movement

[edit] Online archives

• Troploin (website archiving most recent pieces by former La Banquise editors Dauvé and Nesic, mostly in French but some in English and German)
• Gilles Dauvé Library (Libcom.org archive of Dauvé best-known English texts)
• Jean Barrot (John Gray's archive of earlier French, English, Italian, and German pieces)