Gilles Dauvé

Gilles Dauvé (pen name Jean Barrot; born 1947) is a French political theorist associated with left communism and the contemporary tendency of communization.

Biography

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 movement associated with Amadeo Bordiga (and its heretical journal Invariance), German-Dutch council communism, and the French perspectives associated with Socialisme ou Barbarie and the Situationist International.[1] He has focused on theoretical discussions of economic issues concerning the controversial failure of Second International Marxism (including both Social Democracy and Leninist "Communism"), the global revolutionary upsurge of the 1960s and its subsequent dissolution, and on developments in global capitalist accumulation and class struggle.

Among English-speaking communists and anarchists, Dauvé is best known for his 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, Berkeley, California. An essay from the first pamphlet, and the whole of the second article, were reprinted by Unpopular Books in London as What is Communism (1983) and What is Situationism respectively, in 1987. The first pamphlet was reprinted with a new foreword in 1997 by Antagonism (London). It includes Dauvé's own translations of two of his articles and one by François Martin, both originally published in Le Mouvement Communiste at the Wayback Machine (archived October 28, 2009) (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 revise Bordiga's theory of communization by drawing on council communist and Situationist traditions.

Dauvé also participated in the journal La Banquise, which he edited with Karl Nesic and others from 1983 to 1986. This 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. It also developed the theory of society's real subsumption into capital. The editors describe their aims and influences in The Story of Our Origins at the Wayback Machine (archived October 28, 2009) (La Banquise, 2, 1983).

More recently, Dauvé, along with Nesic and others, has published the irregular journal Troploin, featuring 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 have been translated into English by Dauvé himself and are archived on the Troploin website, .

Bibliography

In english

In french

Quotes of Gilles Dauvé's article

Here are some quotes from the article "Letter on animal liberation", written by Gilles Dauvé in 2009:

(1) page 5 line 6: "Animals that kill usually have far more social relationships than those they prey upon."

(2) page 5 line 18: "Our critique of capitalism is precisely that value production turns everything, whether meat or poetry, into commodity, and that it's no use asking for more love poems and less hamburgers."

(3) page 6 line 11 : "Nature awareness, ecological worries and reactions to animal abuse are not signs of mankind at last getting conscious of its impact on the rest of the planet, but of the necessity for capital to think globally, and to take all past and present into account, from Maya temples to whales and genes. Everything it dominates has to be controlled and classifed in order to be managed. What is marketable must be protected. Capital owns the world and no owner can afford to be too careless about his possessions."

(4) page 7 line 3: "It's no coincidence that an acute sensibility to the condition of animals comes up at the same time as industrialised food and concentration camp style farming."

(5) page 8 line 25: "Managers try to make the workplace safer and less destructive (= more productive) of a precious capital: labour. Animal exploitation duplicates this process. It tends to experiment less on animals in order to get more from them, painfully if it must, painlessly if it can".

(6): Préambule: "As neither of us is Politically Correct, "man" here means man + woman, and "mankind" means humankind."

Source: http://troploin0.free.fr/biblio/animal/ ou http://libcom.org/files/Gilles Dauvé- Letter on animal liberation.pdf

See also

References

  1. ↑ "The text surveys the Italian and German lefts, Socialisme Ou Barbarie and the Situationist International and describes the theoretical development of the French ultra-left."Re-collecting our past - La Banquise
  2. ↑ "ECLIPSE & RE-EMERGENCE OF THE COMMUNIST MOVEMENT by Jean Barrot and Francois Martin". www.reocities.com.
  3. ↑ "Eclipse and Re-Emergence of the Communist Movement". libcom.org.

Bibliography

Online archives