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L’Histoire générale de ‘L’Ultra-Gauche’ CHRISTOPHE BOURSEILLER Paris: Denoël, 2003
Reviewed by LOREN GOLDNER
One might be a bit suspicious of any author, such as Christophe Bourseiller, who publishes twenty-five books, some of 500 pages and more, in fifteen years. But logorrhoea by itself does not necessarily mean falsehood. Bourseiller’s 1999 biography of Guy Debord already showed that historical accuracy is not the author’s strong suit. People mentioned there, as in the book at hand, have said often enough that everything Bourseiller wrote specifically about them was false, casting serious doubt on the rest. Before turning his hand to writing books, Bourseiller tried a number of venues in the media, including a stint at the pulp weekly Paris-Match. He is neither of the far Left or ultra Left.1 Once again, these are not automatic disqualifications, and serious and useful books about the revolutionary Left have often been written by people who are only observers: one need only think of Burnett Bolleton’s The Spanish Revolution. Nonetheless, the appearance of Bourseiller’s book in France unleashed a furore, and gave rise to a series of reviews taking apart his treatment of various currents,2 to the point that there has been talk of assembling the ‘counter-book’ that would be required to correct all his mistakes and falsifications. Others have accused him of doing the work of the police in abundantly publishing names of living people linked to obscure organisations still in existence or only recently defunct. All of this is unfortunate, since Bourseiller’s book, obviously intended to be a coffee- table conversation piece for the ‘with it’ crowd among the French middle-class moderate Left, is the only one in existence, in any language, that attempts to treat the history of the ultra Left in its entirety. Unless it is definitively and widely discredited, it stands a chance of also becoming a work of reference for young militants who heretofore have never heard of Anton Pannekoek, Karl Korsch, Herman Gorter, Amadeo Bordiga,
1 Despite the inadequacies of the term ‘ultra Left’ (as explained momentarily) this review will keep the distinction (more clear in French) between ‘gauchisme’/‘extrême gauche’, or far Left, which since 1968 has referred primarily to Trotskyists and Maoists, and ‘ultra-gauche’, or ultra-left currents, for which Trotskyism and Maoism are the ‘left wing of capital’. 2 Two quite useful reviews are in A Contretemps. See Gomez and Sommermeyr 2004, and particularly Escobar 2004, a former member of Socialisme ou Barbarie, who takes apart Bourseiller’s assertion that ‘three-fourths’ of the ex-members of that group were won over to the sordid ‘negationist’ theses (cf. below). The Bordigist critique is in Le Prolétaire 2004.
Historical Materialism, volume 14:1 (299–310) © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2006 Also available online – www.brill.nl HIMA 14,1_f15_298-310I 3/29/06 3:33 PM Page 300
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Otto Rühle, Paul Mattick, Maximilien Rubel, Daniel Guérin, Grandizo Munis, Guy Debord or the early Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort3 and who, for that reason, associate ‘Marxism’ with the defunct Soviet bloc or the still-existing ‘workers’ states’ (as Trotskyists gamely call them) China, North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba. At first glance, prior to a careful reading, L’Histoire générale de L’Ultra-Gauche might seem a superficial telephone directory of a (still) little-known tradition, but, like a telephone directory, perhaps useful for its references and its bibliography (unfortunately, for readers lacking French, almost entirely in that language). But a closer look shows Bourseiller to be anything but an innocent voyeur. His first distortion is the loose use of the term ‘ultra Left’, which originated as an epithet of derision going back at least to Lenin’s 1921 pamphlet Left-Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder. The more appropriate and less demagogic term, which has been revived with the historical recovery of various defeated currents and their theoreticians (most of them from the 1920s), beginning in 1968 and above all since 1989–1991, is ‘left communism’ (though that term, in turn, would be rejected by the former members of Socialism or Barbarism, or the situationists, or anarchists, or councilists, or libertarian communists, who appear in Bourseiller’s book). The most concise, brief definition, whatever the ultimate term used, is quite simply: self-declared revolutionary currents that situate themselves to the left of Trotskyism (about which more in a moment). This is a better definition than ‘anti-Leninist’, as there are left communists who insist they are Leninists. But, before getting into a critique of Bourseiller, it is necessary to delineate the historical currents he is discussing, and distorting. The two historical groups to which the term ‘left-communist’ unequivocally applied, and which, in contrast to all their various libertarian successors (with the single important exception of Spanish anarchism) actually constituted mass-based currents with tens of thousands of working-class members, were the German-Dutch council- communist Left and the Italian communist Left of the 1910s and 1920s. (The latter group is widely known as Bordigist, in spite of its own best efforts to reject the label as reflecting a cult of personality and as a transgression of revolutionary anonymity.) Complications, of course, begin immediately, since neither of these currents accepts any assimilation to a term including the other: the German-Dutch Left, and their successors the council communists, consider the Bordigists to be authoritarian Leninists, and the Bordigists, in turn, hurl the epithets from Lenin’s Left-Wing Communism at the German-Dutch Left, deriding them as everything from Proudhonists to syndicalists to anarchists to anti-Marxists. Be that as it may, what both the German-Dutch and Italian Lefts have in common is a questioning of the generalisation of the Russian revolutionary model to Western
3 A wide variety of texts of these figures are available online at