Anarchy 94/Daniel Guerin's anarchism
Daniel Guerin’s
anarchism
Daniel Guérin. L’ANARCHISME. De la doctrine à Paction. Collection “Idées”, No. 89. (Paris: NRF-Gallimard. 3 francs.)
After the two disappointing anthologies of anarchist writings from the United States which were reviewed two years ago (anarchy 70, it is pleasant to come to Ni dieu ni maître, a “historical anthology of the anarchist movement” which was published in France in 1965. We are told that it was produced “by the staff of Editions de Delphes with the help of Daniel Guérin”; the staff of the Nataf who are connected with the excellent anarchist monthly, Noir et Rouge, and Guérin is a veteran socialist who became an anarchist.[1] Quite simply, they show how the job should be done: the book is very large (nearly 700 pages), very well produced,[2] very expensive (about 3½ guineas), and very valuable.
Ni dieu ni maître was published to commemorate the centenary of Proudhon Proudhon’s death in 1865, and it covers the century from the appearance of What is Property? (in which Proudhon became the first person to call himself an anarchist) in 1840 to the defeat of militant anarchism in Spain in 1939. After a short preface and a not on the Proudhone centenary by Guérin, there are more than 150 passages divided into ten sections: Proudhon and the 1848 Revolution; Bakunin and the First International; Stirner Max Stirner; the Jura Federation and the anarchist congresses; Kropotkin; Malatesta; the French movement from the 1871 Commune to the rise of syndicalism; Makhno and the Ukrainian movement during the Russian Revolution and Civil War. The passages included, says Guérin, are “either unpublished or unobtainable, or kept in the dark by a conspiracy of silence”. They are also unmistakably anarchist—
It is, however, possible to quarrel with the selection of passages and with the general approach to the movement. Proudhon may have been the first writer who accepted the name of anarchist, but he was hardly the first who was one. If Godwin is to be excluded because he was only a philosophical anarchist and was not involved in any kind of movement, there should still surely be room for some of those contemporaries and predecessors of Proudhon who were concerned with the practical as well as theoretical applications of anarchism—
Similarly, the only individualist anarchist quoted is Max Stirner, but he was hardy the only one, and he too was very much a philosophical anarchist—
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- ↑ Guérin was born in 1904, and during the 1930s was a leader of the “Revolutionary Left” in the Socialist Party and, when it was expelled, of the “Workers and Peasants Socialist Party”}}, a Troskyoid group which collapsed after the fall of France. He was an important Marxist writer of a more or less Trotskyist variety—
on the French Revolution, Fascism, colonialism and racialism— but for a time he attempted a synthesis between Marxism and anarchism, and he finally turned to a syndicalist form of anarchism. He is also a well-known poet and dramatist, and was one of the “121” who signed the famous of the 121 manifesto against the Algerian war in 1960. - ↑ Special mention should be made of the beautiful design of the book by G. Nataf (based on the ingenious use of sans-serif Helvetica type in a variety of sizes and measures) and of the fine printing by Ganguin and Laubscher of Montreaux, Switzerland. There are incidentally fifteen pages of well chosen illustrations, mostly portraits of anarchist leaders.
- ↑ A translation of The False Principles of Our Education (1842) has recently been published in the United States—
see the review by S. E. Parker in anarchy 92— and it is included in the paperback edition of Max Stirner’s works which has just appeared in Germany— Der Einzige und sien Eigentum, und andere Schriften, edited by Hans G. Helms, and published by Carl Hanser, Munich, at 7.80 Dm.
