Additional materials on Gilles Dauvé and negationism

07Jan10

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Additional materials on Gilles Dauvé, Jean Barrot, Guy Dauvé, La Vielle Taupe, Pierre Guillaume, Amadeo Bordiga, Didier Daeninckx, Not Bored and LibCom. Includes John Gray’s introduction to La Guerre Sociale‘s “La Question de l’Etat”, French wikipedia on the ultra-gauche and negationism, part of Pierre Vidal-Naquet’s A Paper Eichman, and further reading.

From John Gray’s website:

THE QUESTION OF THE STATE
« La Question de l’Etat » […] comes from the french ultra-left journal La Guerre Sociale. In the early 1980’s a number of french ultra-left groups became involved in supporting Robert Faurisson and his view that the nazi’s had not deliberately set out to commit genocide and that the gas chambers in the nazi death camps were a hoax perpetuated by the victorious allied nations to justify their own war crimes. ( In France these ideas are called negationism ). La Guerre Sociale were one of the main protagonists in this disgraceful stupidity.

The second reason is that this article was based on one written by Gilles Dauvé, and this has been used to help justify false allegations that he also supported Faurisson and his ideas. Allegations which have been made side by side with accusations that the critique of anti-fascism and democracy made by the ultra-left currents he belonged to in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s « opened the door » to negationism.

« La Question de l’Etat » is unmarked by either negationism, or by the misogyny evident in the loathsome « The Misery of Feminism », which appeared in the same issue of La Guerre Sociale. ( An english translation of this was recently published by Elephant editions ). « La Question de l’Etat » represents an interesting perspective on the state. However it is scarcely possible to ignore where it has come from.

La Guerre Sociale was a group which produced a journal of the same name from the mid-1970’s to the mid-1980’s. Its leading spirit was Dominique Blanc who had formerly been part of a grouping called the Organisation des Jeunes Travailleurs révolutionnaires which had been formed in the early 1970’s. Originally inspired by the Situationist International, the OJTR subsequently became influenced by left communism, in particular the mixture of german and italian left communist ideas developed by the milieu based around the bookshop La Vieille Taupe, from which had come the group Le Mouvement Communiste.

[…]  The following year essentially the same grouping produced the first issue of La Guerre Sociale.

Blanc contacted a number of people regarding the possibility of collaboration in La Guerre Sociale. One of them was Gilles Dauvé, who at the time still used the pen-name Jean Barrot, and who had formerly been involved with the group Le Mouvement Communiste. Dauvé did not wish to become directly involved with La Guerre Sociale, but offered two texts for possible inclusion. Before either was published he had ceased any further involvement but said they could do as they wished with the texts.

One became the basis of the article reprinted here. It was rewritten without Dauvé’s participation — « completed, drastically cut and profoundly corrected and revised » according to La Guerre Sociale, although they also stated about 70% of the result was from Dauvé’s original article [La Guerre Sociale no. 7 pp 42 & 43]. The result appeared under the title « La Question de l’Etat » in the second issue of the journal. According to La Guerre Sociale Dauvé declined to have his initials put to the published article and also reportedly stated that his views about the state were better expressed in an introduction he wrote to a collection of articles from the 30’s left communist paper Bilan. ( That introduction is available on line at that link. One part of it was translated into english, again without his involvement, under the title « Fascism/Antifascism ». The translation can be found at that link together with Dauvé’s recent comments on it ). La Guerre Sociale for their part were emphatic that they were responsible for « La Question de l’Etat » and that it represented their viewpoint.

The second article which Dauvé had given them, titled « Le totalitarisme et son mythe », was used as source material for a much longer text by La Guerre Sociale which appeared in its third issue ( 1979 ) under the title « De l’exploitation dans les camps à l’exploitation des camps ». This article was quite influential within some sections of the French ultra-left.

« De l’exploitation dans les camps à l’exploitation des camps » tackled the concentration camp system and its subsequent use for ideological purposes. It drew extensively on the work of Paul Rassinier, a lifelong pacifist and former left-oppositionist, socialist deputy and then member of the Anarchist Federation in the 1950’s, who had been imprisoned in German labour camps during the war for resistance activities. Rassinier had written a number of books after the war challenging other accounts of the concentration camps, in the course of which he moved from scepticism about the idea that there had been extermination camps as well as labour camps, and that there had been any deliberate genocide of jews, to denial of the scale of the genocide. For the ultra-left one of the points of interest in Rassiniers writings was his visceral anti-stalinism – in his account of his experiences he accused Communist Party members of collaboration in the functioning of the camps. What the Guerre Sociale article ‘failed’ to mention was Rassiniers equally obvious anti-semitism. Unlike subsequent articles by La Guerre Sociale this one largely professed a careful agnosticism regarding many of the claims of negationism – one account of this sorry episode in ultra-left history describes it as « pre-revisionist ».

However at the same time that the article was published in the journal, extracts were used on a wall poster titled « Qui est la juif ? » ( Who is the Jew ? ) which Guerre Sociale published in defence of Robert Faurisson, a then obscure professor of literature with a taste for controversy, who was being ‘persecuted’ for declaring that the gas chambers had not existed…. Faurisson’s ‘victimisation’ by opponents of his views was compared in the title of this wall poster to the victimisation of Jews. Thus began the frankly bizarre love affair between small sections of the French ultra-left and Faurisson, echoes of which have continued to reverberate ever since.

The ‘intellectual’ mentor of this coupling was Pierre Guillaume, an ex-member of Socialisme ou Barbarie and Pouvoir Ouvriere who had founded the bookshop La Vieille Taupe, which from 1965 to its closure in 1972 provided a home to the section of the ultra-left milieu referred to above. In 1978, some years after the bookshop had closed and the milieu around it had largely dispersed, Guillaume became infatuated with Faurisson and subsequently revived the name La Vieille Taupe for a publishing house devoted to negationism. Today he is the principal negationist publisher in France. However if Guillaume was the messenger, La Guerre Sociale were the prime movers in disseminating the revisionist message within the French ultra-left in the early 1980’s.

Gilles Dauvé’s involvement with Guillaume and La Guerre Sociale before they began to support Faurisson has in recent years been used to brand him, unjustly, as a negationist like them. In reality, in 1983 the disagreements between Dauvé ( by then involved with the journal La Banquise ), and La Guerre Sociale, disagreements which included a rejection of their support for Faurisson, as well as a rejection of the type of ultra-leftist activism which La Guerre Sociale stood for, became public with the appearance of the article « Le roman de nos Origines » in La Banquise no. 2. ( It can be found – in French – at that link ). Along with a lengthy critique of Guillaume and La Guerre Sociale, it contains an interesting account of the origins of these currents in the French ultra-left. Dauvé’s more recent views on the ultra-lefts involvement with Faurisson and negationism can be found here and also here.

From French wikipedia:

À la fin des années 1970, des anciens militants de l’ultragauche font de la critique bordiguiste de l’antinazisme un de leurs chevaux de bataille^[48]. Cette « convergence » avec Robert Faurisson est marquée en 1978 par la rencontre de ce dernier avec Pierre Guillaume, co-fondateur de l’ancienne librairie La Vieille Taupe, fermée en 1972^[49] et leur collaboration tout long des années 1980 pour défendre et propager des thèses négationnistes.

En avril 1977 avait paru le premier numéro de La Guerre sociale^[50], une revue animée par Dominique Blanc et issue de King-Kong International (voir : Communisme de conseils). Le soutien d’une certaine « ultragauche » à Robert Faurisson commence en juin 1979 par la diffusion par La Guerre sociale à Lyon d’un tract intitulé « Qui est le Juif ? ». Un deuxième tract est intitulé « Les chambres à gaz hitlériennes sont-elles indispensables à notre bonheur ? »^[51]. Ces textes sont repris dans « Vérité historique et Vérité politique » un livre de Serge Thion publié aux éditions de La Vieille Taupe. Toujours en juin 1979, Un texte intitulé « De l’exploitation dans les camps à l’exploitation des camps » paraît dans La Guerre sociale. Il aurait été écrit initialement par Gilles Dauvé et corrigé par Pierre Guillaume^[52]. La Jeune Taupe, revue du groupe « Pour une intervention communiste », développe également les thèmes de l’ultragauche faurissonienne à partir de 1980^[53].

Un tract, « Notre Royaume est une prison », est distribué à 60 000 exemplaires le 4 octobre 1980. Plusieurs “groupes” ont participé à la rédaction de ce tract qui s’appuie sur l’ouvrage de Serge Thion et plagie dans certaines phrases le discours de Faurisson : « Les amis du Potlatch », « Le Frondeur », le « Groupe Commune de Crondstadt », le « Groupe des travailleurs pour l’autonomie ouvrière », « La Guerre sociale », « Pour une intervention communiste » (certains de ces groupes étant par ailleurs inconnus)^[54]. À la suite de ce tract, Libération publie Le 25 octobre « la gangrène », un texte de militants de la première Vieille Taupe comme Jacques Baynac et Belà Elek qui s’en prennent à cette gangrène faurissonienne qui gagne rapidement sinon l’extrême gauche, du moins des individus dont on pourrait penser que leur passé était une garantie^[55]. Plusieurs textes collectifs dénoncent ces agissements négationnistes : une tribune publiée en octobre 1980 dans Libération par Jacques Baynac, ancien de la première Vieille Taupe et d’autres militants de l’« ultragauche »^[56] et en 1992 le texte « Les Ennemis de nos ennemis ne sont pas forcément nos amis », texte^[57] signé également par un certain nombre de militants « ultra-gauche »^[58].

———-

48 Jean-Patrick Manchette, « Alerte aux gaz ! (Contribution à la critique d’une idéologie ultra-sinistre) », Charlie hebdo, n^o 519, 22 octobre 1980 ; chronique reprise dans son livre Les yeux de la momie, pages 287-293.
49 Valérie Igounet, Histoire du négationnisme en France, Éditions du Seuil, Paris, 2000, p. 232
50 Igounet, op. cit., p. 280
51 Igounet, op. cit., p. 283
52 Igounet, op. cit., p. 284
53 Igounet, op. cit., p. 293-294
54 Igounet, op. cit., p. 289-290
55 Igounet, op. cit., p. 291
56 Valérie Igounet, op. cit., p. 291
57 En annexe dans le livre Libertaires et « ultra-gauche » contre le négationnisme (cf. bibliographie)
58 Valérie Igounet, op. cit., p. 485

Extracts from Pierre Vidal-Naquet A Paper Eichman:

2. On La Vieille Taupe and Cannibalism

La Vieille Taupe, it will be recalled, is a bookstore turned publisher of a tendency that might be characterized, for lack of a better term, as anarcho-Marxist. From Marxism it has retained neither its critical philosophy, which prevails in Marx and several of his disciples, nor the statist perversion of Lenin and Stalin, but the obsession with a total explanation of the world, whose strictly “ideological” cast is apparent. To a humanity one day reconciled with itself, which is the hope of the future, are opposed all existent regimes. Whether bourgeois-democratic, Stalino-Brezhnevian, social democratic, Maoist, third world, or fascist, all such regimes represent so many forms of capitalist domination. More specifically, La Vieille Taupe opines that there was no fundamental difference between the two opposing camps in the Second World War, and thus no particular perversity characterizing Hitlerian national socialism. It may be intuited that starting from such premises, La Vieille Taupe will be poorly equipped to appreciate the rather odd place occupied by the Jews in the history of our society since the triumph of the Christian dissidence.

Thus it was that in 1970 La Vieille Taupe published a brochure entitled Auschwitz ou le Grand Alibi, the reprint of an anonymous article which had appeared in 1960 in Programme Communiste, the organ of another Marxist sect (founded by Amadeo Bordiga). The “grand alibi” of the antifascists was the extermination of the Jews by Hitler. That crime alone establishes the distance separating the democrat from the fascist. And yet, according to the Bordigists, this is by no means the case. For the anti-Semitism of the imperialist era must be given the requisite economic and social explanation. “As a consequence of their prior history, the Jews today find themselves for the most part in the middle and petty bourgeoisie. But that class stands condemned in advance by the irresistible advance of the concentration of capital.”^[7] The reaction of the petty bourgeoisie to that condemnationlay “in sacrificing one of its segments in order to thus save ensure the existence of the others.” The German petty bourgeoisie “thus threw the Jews to the wolves in order to lighten its load and save itself.” Large capital, for its part, was “delighted by the boon; it could liquidate a section of the petty bourgeoisie with the agreement of the petty bourgeoisie.”^[8] As for demonstrating how the “petty bourgeoisie” was more threatened in 1943 than in 1932, the brochure does not choose to take up the question. But at least it attempts to account for the methodical nature of the endeavor: “In normal times, and when only a small number are at stake, capitalism can allow those it ejects from the process of production to die on their own. But this was impossible to do in the middle of a war and for millions of men: that much disorder would have issued in a general paralysis. Capitalism had to organize their death.” But with what profit? “Capitalism cannot execute a man it has sentenced if it does not extract some profit from that very punishment.” Profit will thus be sought through the exhaustion of workers, and those incapable of working will be massacred directly. But is it profitable? “German capitalism could resign itself to murder pure and simple only with difficulty . . . because it brought no revenue.”^[9] The authors of the brochure this expatiate on the famous mission of Joël Brand, who left Hungary with the blessings of Himmler, to exchange the Hungarian Jews slated for the “mill” of Auschwitz for ten thousand trucks.^[10] The authors do not for an instant appear to notice that we are then in 1944, not 1942, that Himmler had good reasons to realize that the war has been lost, and that the time has come to attempt to make use of the legendary “Jewish influence” on the Western allies. The Jews, despite such attempts, were destroyed “not as Jews but as rejects from the process of production, useless for production.”^[11]

Was it the manifestly absurd nature of that explanation that led La Vieille Taupe to an inverse explanation, one denying the genocide? I do not know, nut if mutation there was, it was a rather sudden one, for Pierre Guillaume informs us that as of 1970, “La Vieille Taupe shard in essence the theses of Paul Rassinier.”^[12] I shall return shortly to Paul Rassinier, to the two of his books repulished by La Vieille Taupe,^[13] and to several others. We shall retain only the fact that from a “materialist” explanation a path has been taken to denial pure and simple (Rassinier, Faurisson)^[14] or to a more or less methodical skepticism (Serge Thion). A formula of Serge Thion’s effectively reveals how the unfulfilled dream of a “materialist” explanation lies behind current dissatisfactions: “There were, no doubt,” he writes, “artisan-like gassings, but the question of industrial methods of extermination has not been treated in a manner responsive to all the questions appropriately raised with regard to the functioning of any other industrial enterprise, in any other context.” What is being discussed here? Technology? But large-scale gassing does not pose problems essentially different from “artisan-like” gassing. Or are we dealing with an economically based interpretation of Auschwitz? But if such is the case, Thion would be revealing that he does not understand the Nazi undertaking any more than Marvin Harris understands cannibalism. For exterminating human beings, even with industrial methods, is not, in this century, quite the same as canning peas. Even as eating human meat and eating butcher’s meat are not the same thing and are not similarly charged with the sacred. What is it that the “materialists” need and what are they dreaming of? Huge registers in which the entries are marked as living and the exits as dead? In point of fact, we are not so far, as we will see, from possessing them, once one makes the requisite effort of elementary decoding. Would they like a statistical chart showing the productivity of the gas chambers?

The quarrel over industrial rationality in fact hides a profound ignorance of what constitutes a totalitarian system. Such a system is not an organism functioning in unified manner under the leadership of its head. In Nazi Germany, for example, the Gestapo, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Ministry of Occupied Territories formed as many clans that had neither the same interests nor the same policies. The juridical and police (or deportation) apparatuses did not function at the same pace.^[15] For a long time, for example, jews condemned under common law escaped deportation. It was possible for there to be, quite normally, at Auschwitz, both hospitals and extermination installations into which healthy people disappeared. Conflicts of interest between those concerned above all with killing and those who wanted above all to exploit workers (and even Jewish ones) are attested to by documents of the period, as well as by subsequent testimony. Beyond the oppositions between various clans and strata of society, one finds, however, in those doing the speaking, a common fear in the face of reality, a common masked language.

In point of fact, the mass murder encounters, in its executants themselves, such tenacious resistances that one finds Himmler, for example, resorting on occasion to straightforward (or almost completely straightforward) language: “The following question has been put to us: what is to be done with women and children? I have taken a decision and here too I have come upon an obvious solution. I did not feel I had the right to exterminate [literally, to extirpate: auszurotten] the men – say, if you like, to kill them or to have them killed – and to allow the children to grow up and avenge themselves on our children and descendants. It was necessary to take the grave decision to make this people disappear from the Earth [dieses Volk von der Erde verschwinden zu lassen].”^[16] Himmler is there, if I may say so, at his most frank, even if a description of the actual process would be a thousand times more traumatic. But it also befalls him, even before an “informed” audience, to inject a sudden note of attenuation. Thus before the officers of the SS, on April 24, 1943: “It is with anti-Semitism as with delousing. Removing or distancing [entfernen] lice is not a matter of world-view. It is a matter of cleanliness.”^[17] In this case it is the metaphor of lice which gives its true sense to “distancing.” For does one in fact “distance” a louse? Finallt, Himmler on occasion encodes matters and even overencodes them; thus, upon receiving a report in April 1943 from the SS “Inspekteur für Statistik” R. Korherr, he informs him briefly that he hopes that it in no place makes mention of the “special treatment” (Sonderbehandlunkg) of the Jews.^[18] And one recalls that “special treatment” was already a coded term meaning extermination.^[19] All this is obvious, sadly obvious, but can one expect the “materialist” Serge Thion to have opened up Jean-Pierre Faye’s massive volume on Langages totalitaires?^[20]

Extracts from Loren Goldner’s review of Christophe Bourseiller. L’Histoire generale de “l’ultra-gauche”. Paris, Ed. Denoel, 2003:

Bourseiller presents himself as an observer “fascinated by microhistory”. He begins his book by describing the ultra-left as the “other communism”, the communism that never built Gulags or Berlin walls. But his fascination with his subject is mixed with a less edifying agenda that runs as a leitmotiv through much of the book, and then emerges as the real “lesson” toward the end. That agenda is simple and straightforward: Bourseiller wants to show that anyone with an internationalist or “Third Camp” perspective on World War II, of “turning the inter-imperialist war into civil war” on the model of the Zimmerwald left of World War I, not to mention any subsequent heir to such a view, is a forerunner or partisan of the bizarre “negationist” affair that erupted in the French ultra-left milieu in the ebb period of the 1980’s and 1990’s (5). (As a corollary to this, those with a left critique of “anti-fascism” find themselves under the same cloud.) Already in Bourseiller’s historical treatment of the left communists of the 1920’s, the “National Bolsheviks” (“linke Leute von rechts”, “left-wing people of the right”, as they have been called) who emerged in the Hamburg workers’ councils(6) are given a treatment all out of proportion to their importance for the German-Dutch ultra-left, then or later.  He also underscores some of the Italian Communist Left’s early 1920’s formulations (with which one can agree or disagree) which saw fascism as merely another face of capitalist rule,  or even as the culmination of bourgeois democracy. In so doing, he is setting the stage for his potted conclusions hundreds of pages later.  […]

Mass struggle was ebbing in France after the early 1970’s, and took as much of a toll on the ultra-left as among the gauchistes. Many small groups and publications disappeared. This ebb set the stage for the “negationist” episode, which flared up on several occasions between 1979 and 1996, and poisoned the atmosphere of a significant part of the ultra-left milieu. The convolutions of this episode, centered on the  “revisionist” (26) denial of the existence of the Nazi gas chambers and of a concerted plan to exterminate the Jews,  cannot be recounted here (27).  But it is necessary to underscore Bourseiller’s outrageous assertion (culminating many asides throughout the book) that “three-fourths of the militants who emerged from the “social-barbarian” milieu were won over to the “revisionist” theses within a few months” in 1979 (28).
At the center of the entire affair was Pierre Guillaume, the founder of the Vieille Taupe bookstore (and who today, after being repudiated by the virtual entirety of the ultra-left, continues in the same vein, increasingly frequenting circles of the far right.) Guillaume and the ultra-left elements who initially followed him  in the negationist affair seized on the theses of Robert Faurisson (29), with the idea that if they succeeded in unmasking the “myth” of the Nazi gas chambers, they would bring down the entire edifice of bourgeois ideology,  built around the triumph of democracy over fascism in World War II. None of the other internationalist currents from the war and thereafter ever felt the need to take this step, starting with the ultra-leftists who had lived through it. This included the Bordigists, whose article “Auschwitz or the Great Alibi”, while in no way denying Nazi genocide, gave a very mechanistic analysis of it. (The republication of this article as a pamphlet by La Vieille Taupe in 1979 can be seen as the public beginning of the negationist affair in the ultra-left milieu). My own sense is that, in a period of downturn of mass struggles which lasted over two decades, negationism and the serious media attention it attracted seemed to give new life and a sense of motion to small marginal coteries numbering at most a few hundred.  It also gave the ideologues of the dominant society (hence Bourseiller’s book), particularly after the events of 1989-1991, an excellent pretense to pounce on currents rejecting anti-fascism and  “democracy” with the old saw that the radical left and the radical right converge, with ex-Stalinist apologists such as Didier Daeninckx sensing an excellent opportunity to redeem themselves as demystifiers.

—

5-Cf.  V. Higounet, Histoire du negationnisme en France (Paris, 2000); also (coll.) Libertaires et ultra-gauche contre le negationnisme. (Paris 1996).
6-Cf. On National Bolshevism, cf. Jean-Pierre Faye, Langages totalitaires (Paris, 1973).

26-The word preferred by Holocaust deniers across the political spectrum.
27-Cf. V. Higounet, op. cit. .
28-Bourseiller, pp. 439-440; Escobar reply
29-His main statement is R. Faurisson, Mémoire en défense : contre ceux qui m’accusent de falsifier l’histoire : la question des chambres à gaz . This was published by La Vieille Taupe in 1980.

Further reading:

Michel Bounan: “Revision” (Chapter VII of The Art of Celine and His Times, at Not Bored)

Texts by Pierre Vidal-Naquet:

• Analyse des relais dont disposent les négationnistes (1996)
• Assassins of Memory (1987) (E)
• A Paper Eichmann (1980) – Anatomy of a Lie (E)[also at archive.org]
• De Faurisson et de Chomsky (1981)
• Les assassins de la mémoire (1987)
• Du côté des persécutés (1981)
• On Faurisson and Chomsky (1981) (E)
• Qui sont les assassins de la mémoire? (1992)
• Theses on Revisionism (1985) (E)
• Thèses sur le révisionnisme (1985)
• Un Eichmann de papier (1980) – Anatomie d’un mensonge [also at archive.org]
• Who are the Assassins of Memory? (1992) (E)

John Gray: on French Bordigists 1 and 2. See also HENSI1 on Barrot and revisionism.

Gilles Dauve (in French):

• As Jean Barrot “Bilan et contre-Bilan” (original text from which “Fascism/Anti-Fascism” is extracted), also includes Et Si Faurisson Avait Gagne…, Capital « juif », L’enjeu révisionniste.
• “Le roman de nos origines” (includes La Vieille Taupe,  L’affaire Puig Antich, La Vieille Taupe 2 et l’affaire Faurisson,  L’automne de la Guerre sociale.

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Tags: Amadeo Bordiga, Didier Daeninckx, Faurisson affair, Gilles Dauve, Guy Dauvé, holocaust denial, Holocaust negationism, Holocaust revisionism, Jean Barrot, John Gray, La Guerre Sociale, La Vielle Taupe, Libcom, negationism, Not Bored, Paul Rassinier, Pierre Guillaume, Pierre Vidal-Naque, revisionism, Robert Faurisson, Serge Thion, ultra-gauche, ultra-left