Libertarian Socialism

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Libertarian Socialism
Politics in Black and Red

Edited by

Alex Prichard
Lecturer in International Relations, Department of Politics, University of Exeter, UK

Ruth Kinna
Professor of Political Theory, Department of Politics, History and IR,
Loughborough University, UK

Saku Pinta
Independent Scholar

David Berry
Senior Lecturer in History, Department of Politics, History and IR,
Loughborough University, UK
© Alex Prichard, Ruth Kinna, Saku Pinta and David Berry 2012
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2012 978-0-230-28037-3

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Contents

Acknowledgements vii
Notes on Contributors viii

1 Introduction 1
Ruth Kinna and Alex Prichard

2 Freedom and Democracy: Marxism, Anarchism and the

Problem of Human Nature 17
Paul Blackledge

3 Anarchism, Individualism and Communism: William Morris’s

Critique of Anarcho-communism 35
Ruth Kinna

4 The Syndicalist Challenge in the Durham Coalfield before

1914 57
Lewis H. Mates

5 Georges Sorel’s Anarcho-Marxism 78

Renzo Llorente

6 Antonio Gramsci, Anarchism, Syndicalism and Sovversivismo 96

Carl Levy

7 Council Communist Perspectives on the Spanish Civil War

and Revolution, 1936–1939 116
Saku Pinta

8 A ‘Bohemian Freelancer’? C.L.R. James, His Early Relationship

to Anarchism and the Intellectual Origins of Autonomism 143
Christian Høgsbjerg

9 ‘White Skin, Black Masks’: Marxist and Anti-racist Roots

of Contemporary US Anarchism 167
Andrew Cornell

10 The Search for a Libertarian Communism: Daniel Guérin and

the ‘Synthesis’ of Marxism and Anarchism 187
David Berry

v
vi Contents

11 Socialisme ou Barbarie or the Partial Encounters between

Critical Marxism and Libertarianism 210
Benoît Challand
12 Beyond Black and Red: The Situationists and the Legacy
of the Workers’ Movement 232
Jean-Christophe Angaut
13 Carnival and Class: Anarchism and Councilism in Australasia
during the 1970s 251
Toby Boraman
14 Situating Hardt and Negri 275
David Bates
15 Conclusion: Towards a Libertarian Socialism for
the Twenty-First Century? 294
Saku Pinta and David Berry

Index 304
Acknowledgements

We would like to thank our contributors to the volume for their patience
and for responding so positively to editorial requests. The team at Palgrave
has shown similar patience, and we thank them for this and their helpful
advice and encouragement. We would also like to thank all the partici-
pants at the ‘Is Black and Red Dead?’ conference held at the Centre for
the Study of Social and Global Justice, University of Nottingham, UK, in
September 2009, which provided the original inspiration for this collec-
tion. Sue Simpson and Tony Burns deserve a special mention for their help
and support throughout. We would also like to acknowledge the generos-
ity of the UK Political Studies Association’s Marxist Specialist Group and the
PSA Anarchist Studies Network, who, in supporting this conference, made
it possible for some of the contributors, and many others whose excellent
papers could not be included, to meet and exchange ideas face-to-face in a
convivial environment.

vii
Contributors

Jean-Christophe Angaut has been Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the

École Normale Supérieure de Lyon since 2006. His fields of research and
teaching are nineteenth-century philosophy, political philosophy and con-
nections between socialist, communist and anarchist thought. He has pub-
lished two books on the young Bakunin’s thought: Bakounine jeune hégélien –
La philosophie et son dehors (2007) and La liberté des peuples – Bakounine
et les révolutions de 1848 (2009). He has also published articles on Marx,
Bakunin, Kropotkin, the Young Hegelian movement and the Situationists.
He is a member of the editorial committee of the French anarchist journal
Réfractions.

David Bates is a principal lecturer and Director of Politics and International

Relations in the Department of Applied Social Sciences at Canterbury Christ
Church University, UK. His interests are focused primarily in the area of rad-
ical politics, including anti-capitalist forms of thinking. He has a particular
concern with Marxist and post-Marxist approaches to socialist emanci-
pation. More recently he has been interested in the critical relationship
between Marxist and libertarian radical politics.

David Berry is Senior Lecturer in History at Loughborough University, UK.

He was awarded his DPhil in French labour history from the University
of Sussex, UK. His research area is the history of the Left and of labour
movements in twentieth-century France. He has worked mostly on the
French anarchist movement and ‘alternative Left’, and is currently work-
ing on the life and ideas of Daniel Guérin (1904–1988) and the libertarian
communist tradition from 1917 to the present. His publications include
A History of the French Anarchist Movement, 1917–1945 (2009) and (edited
jointly with Constance Bantman) New Perspectives on Anarchism, Labour and
Syndicalism: The Individual, the National and the Transnational (2010). Hav-
ing been involved for some years with the Journal of Contemporary European
Studies (formerly the Journal of Area Studies), he is currently an associate
editor and reviews editor of the journal Anarchist Studies. He is a member
of the Centre International de Recherches sur l’Anarchisme, Lausanne and
Marseille, of the Association for the Study of Modern and Contemporary
France and of the Anarchist Studies Network.

Paul Blackledge is Professor of Political Theory and UCU Branch Secre-

tary at Leeds Metropolitan University, UK. He is author of Marxism and

viii
 Notes on Contributors ix

Ethics (2012), Reflections on the Marxist Theory of History (2006) and Perry
Anderson, Marxism and the New Left (2004). He is co-editor of Virtue and
Politics (2011), Alasdair MacIntyre’s Engagement with Marxism (2008), Revolu-
tionary Aristotelianism (2008) and Historical Materialism and Social Evolution
(2002). He has written on Marxism and anarchism in The Edinburgh Critical
History of Nineteenth-Century Philosophy (2011) and in International Socialism.
He is a member of the Socialist Workers Party.

Toby Boraman is an historian for the Waitangi Tribunal in Wellington,

New Zealand. His research interests are labour history from below, (anti-
state) communism and extra-parliamentary protest of the 1960s and 1970s.
He received his PhD in 2006 from the University of Otago in Dunedin,
New Zealand, on the subjects of the New Left and anarchism in New
Zealand. Afterwards, he published a history of anarchism and anti-Bolshevik
communism in New Zealand from the 1950s to the 1980s called Rabble
Rousers and Merry Pranksters (2007). He has also published a book chapter
and articles on the subjects of the New Left and working-class resis-
tance to neoliberalism, and historical pieces on strikes and near riots in
New Zealand.

Benoît Challand is a visiting associate professor in the Department of Poli-

tics of the New School for Social Research and a lecturer at the University of
Bologna, Italy. He works in the field of political and historical sociology, with
a particular interest in Arab politics and political theory. His publications
include La Ligue Marxiste Révolutionaire, 1969–1980 (2000) and Palestinian
Civil Society and Foreign Donors (2009). He is co-author, with Chiara Bottici,
of The Myth of the Clash of Civilizations (2010) and The Politics of Imagination
(edited 2011).

Andrew Cornell is an educator, author and organiser based in Brooklyn,

New York. He holds a PhD in American studies from New York University,
New York, USA, and is completing a study of anarchism in mid-twentieth-
century USA. He is the author of Oppose and Propose! Lessons from Movement
for a New Society. His writing appears in periodicals such as the Journal for the
Study of Radicalism, Perspectives on Anarchist Theory and Left Turn magazine.
He has also contributed to the collections The University against Itself (2008)
and The Hidden 1970s: Histories of Radicalism (2010).

Christian Høgsbjerg has completed a doctoral thesis on ‘C.L.R. James in

Imperial Britain, 1932–38’ in the Department of History at the University of
York, UK, and is the editor of a special edition of C.L.R. James’s 1934 play
about the Haitian Revolution, Toussaint Louverture: The Story of the Only Suc-
cessful Slave Revolt in History (forthcoming). He is a member of the editorial
board of the journal International Socialism.
x Notes on Contributors

Ruth Kinna is Professor of Political Theory at Loughborough University,

UK. She is the author of William Morris: The Art of Socialism (2000) and
the Beginner’s Guide to Anarchism (2005, 2009). She has published numerous
articles on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century socialism, including
‘Guy Aldred: Bridging the Gap between Marxism and Anarchism’ (Journal
of Political Ideologies, 16 (1) 2011), which explores themes examined in this
collection.

Carl Levy is a professor in the Department of Politics, Goldsmiths, Uni-

versity of London, UK. He is the author of six books. His interests include
comparative European politics, history, policy-making and the history of
ideas since 1860, with particular interest in anarchism and specialising in
Italy and Italian anarchism. He is currently writing a biography of Errico
Malatesta.

Renzo Llorente teaches philosophy at Saint Louis University’s Madrid Cam-

pus, Spain. His research centres on issues in social philosophy, ethics and
Latin American philosophy, and he is the author of numerous papers in
these and other areas. His recent publications include Beyond the Pale: Exer-
cises in Provocation (2010), a chapter on Marxism in A Companion to Latin
American Philosophy (2010), ‘The Moral Framework of Peter Singer’s Animal
Liberation’ in Ethical Perspectives (2009) and ‘Sobre el humanismo especista
de Víctor Gómez Pin’, in Razonar y actuar en defensa de los animales (2008).
He is currently working on a study of the moral foundations of Marxism.

Lewis H. Mates is a tutor in history and politics at Durham University, UK.

He has published several journal articles and book chapters on aspects of
interwar British political history, and a monograph titled The Spanish Civil
War and the British Left (2007). He is currently working on two projects: mem-
bership and activism in the Labour and Conservative parties (1945–1974),
and rank-and-file movements and political change in the Durham coalfield
before 1914.

Saku Pinta is a documentary filmmaker, sheet-metal worker and inde-

pendent scholar. He completed his doctoral thesis, titled ‘Towards a Lib-
ertarian Communism: A Conceptual History of the Intersections between
Anarchisms and Marxisms’, at Loughborough University, UK in 2011. His
current research focuses on the history of the Finnish membership of the
Industrial Workers of the World (c.1905–1975) in Canada and the USA.
An essay on this topic – ‘Educate, Organize, Emancipate: The Work People’s
College and the IWW’ – is set to appear in Anarchist Pedagogies: Collective
Actions, Theories, and Critical Reflections on Education (2012).
 Notes on Contributors xi

Alex Prichard is Lecturer in International Relations at the University of

Exeter, UK. He gained his PhD from Loughborough University, UK, in 2008,
and has since held research and teaching posts at the University of Bath,
UK, and the London School of Economics, UK, and an ESRC postdoctoral
fellowship at the University of Bristol, UK. He has published articles on
anarchism and world politics in the Review of International Studies, Millen-
nium: Journal of International Studies and Anarchist Studies. He is the founder
of the PSA Anarchist Studies Network and co-editor of the new monograph
series Contemporary Anarchist Studies, published by Continuum Books. His
first monograph, Justice, Order and Anarchy: The International Political Theory
of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, was published in 2012.