Libertarian Socialism: Politics in Black And
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Libertarian Socialism October 9, 2012 7:35 MAC/LNSM Page-i 9780230280373_01_prexii October 9, 2012 7:35 MAC/LNSM Page-ii 9780230280373_01_prexii 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 October 9, 2012 7:35 MAC/LNSM Page-iii 9780230280373_01_prexii © Alex Prichard, Ruth Kinna, Saku Pinta and David Berry 2012 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2012 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–0–230–28037–3 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10987654321 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne October 9, 2012 7:35 MAC/LNSM Page-iv 9780230280373_01_prexii 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 October 9, 2012 7:35 MAC/LNSM Page-v 9780230280373_01_prexii 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 October 9, 2012 7:35 MAC/LNSM Page-vi 9780230280373_01_prexii 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 October 9, 2012 7:35 MAC/LNSM Page-vii 9780230280373_01_prexii 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 October 9, 2012 7:35 MAC/LNSM Page-viii 9780230280373_01_prexii 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).