Biography of Daniel Guérin - Part One: Neither God nor Master.
Rhys Maxsted writes on the life and politics of French communist Daniel Guérin. First published in October 2022, this is part one of two articles.
Daniel Guérin, a self-described bisexual Anarcho-communist, may be an unfamiliar name to many nowadays but as Ian Birchall has pointed out he ‘lived a life of extraordinary political commitment, from anti-fascist and anti-colonial struggles to his pioneering advocacy of gay liberation’, and he argues that ‘Guerin’s writings and record should be a touchstone for the modern left.’ I hope in this two-part series to delve into his life and examine his contribution to the lives of oppressed and queer people around the world.
Born in 1904 to a wealthy family in France, Guérin showed great literary talent in his early years, even publishing a collection of his poems at the age of 18, future Nobel Prize winner François Mauriac claiming his poetry to be ‘an exceptional gift.’ Guérin, like many of the French elite, enrolled at the Institute of Political Sciences. He quickly grew bored though, saying ‘For me, studies are idiocies that make life hardly worth living.’ He felt unmistakably out of place among his classmates of ‘future ministers and inspectors of finance, experts in their fields, hungry to succeed and to be in charge.’ Finding himself clashing ideologically with his classmates, Guérin started reading and learning of more left-wing politics, which led him to start writing in the revolutionary syndicalist magazine La Révolution Prolétarienne.
After graduating and completing his obligatory military service in 1926, he moved from job to job until finally becoming a journalist, which led him to Beirut, at that time under France’s flimsy post-war protectorate. This was to be a turning point in his life, as Guérin had had a fairly sheltered conservative upbringing and now was witness to the hypocrisies and brutalities of French colonialism first hand. During the early 1930s he continued to travel across France’s vast colonial empire including Indochina, and was now immersing himself in the works of Marx, Trotsky, and Lenin. But as Guérin himself acknowledged, the reading alone wasn’t enough to inspire political conversion. It wasn’t until he visited villages in northern Vietnam that he felt a genuine transformation take hold: ‘Slowly but surely, the marvel inspired by landscapes and folklore gave way to political observation. I learned, at the same time, how Europeans treated indigenous peoples and how the colonised despised their yoke.’
While there he was able to help fight for the downtrodden people of Indochina by using his journalistic skills to investigate the truth in matters of law between the locals and the French authorities and businessmen. To the French, he played the part of dispassionate observer. With Vietnamese nationalist intellectuals, he assumed the more comfortable role of sympathiser and traitor to the French Republic. Upon returning to France, he declared to have ‘more or less found himself.’ Much to the dismay of his family, he moved to the working-class neighbourhood of Belleville, shedding the shell of his bourgeois upbringing, and dedicating the rest of his life to political and social issues.
Guérin was one of the earliest Marxists to make a detailed study of fascism, at a time when many on the left were still hoping that the problem would simply go away. Guérin recalled that one Socialist Party member claimed that talking about fascism would simply encourage the fascists. A couple of months after Hitler came to power, Guérin did a cycle tour around Germany, observing and studying fascism first hand while distributing communist leaflets hidden within his bicycle frame.
In 1936, Guérin published Fascism and Big Business. In it, he demolished the idea that fascism can be explained by national characteristics i.e., Italian backwardness or the German temperament – and showed that it could potentially spread to any country. He also rejected the myth that fascism was in some sense ‘anti-capitalist,’ arguing that it is ‘an instrument in the service of big capital,’ sponsored in particular by owners of heavy industry. While recognising fascism’s ideological power, he showed that this was firmly rooted in material circumstances. He concluded that the only effective way to fight fascism was by opposing it with a socialist alternative.
Upon joining the Socialist Party, Guérin aligned himself with the ‘Revolutionary Left’ led by Marceau Pivert. He and fellow activists fought in vain to stir the Party into taking more direct action and to embrace revolution over reform. Guérin played an active role as a Party and trade union militant during the great wave of factory occupations in 1936. The Revolutionary Left was a far-left faction of the Socialist Party, characterising Stalinism as the ‘syphilis of the working-class movement.’ In the aftermath of a failed fascist coup in France, the French socialists and communists joined forces to form the Popular Front alliance and won a parliamentary majority in the elections of 1936.
Guérin’s initial analysis was that the Popular Front had encouraged ‘a genuinely popular movement in the sense that it drew behind the working class a not inconsiderable layer of petty bourgeois and poor peasants’, but as it moved rightwards he became disillusioned, accusing it of abandoning those same groups. When the Socialist Party entered the government in 1936, Pivert was offered governmental office. He consulted the executive of the Revolutionary Left; Guérin was the only one to vote against.
In 1938, the Revolutionary Left was expelled from the Socialist Party and Guérin went on to be a founding member of the Workers and Peasants Socialist Party (PSOP). But a current which in 1936 could mobilise tens of thousands of supporters now only gathered together 6,000 members. In 1939, Trotsky wrote a letter to Guérin, whose revolutionary integrity he respected, urging him to persuade the PSOP to turn to the Fourth International. But it was too late and the loose organisation of the PSOP collapsed at the outbreak of war.
Guérin spent much of WW2 working with the small group of Trotskyists around the German Jewish exile Martin Monath, who produced a paper in German called Arbeiter und Soldat and attempted to organise resistance activity among the occupying soldiers. Post-war he didn’t share the West’s seemingly uncritical enthusiasm for the USA, and travelled there for two years between 1946 and 1949 to see for himself. This was a time when some, not only on the right but also on the left, were arguing that there was no class struggle in the US, but Guérin pointed to the deep-rooted class and racial divisions in American society. Already in 1950 Guérin was writing of the ‘black revolt’ in the US. His short history of American trade unionism (translated into English as A Hundred Years of Labour in the USA) remains a useful introduction to the subject. Written from a revolutionary standpoint, it is sharply critical of both governmental anti-communism and the manoeuvres of the American Communist Party.
Guérin first came into politics as an anti-colonialist, and this was to remain a constant theme in his writing and activity. Among other things, Guérin worked tirelessly in support of Algerian independence. He first met the Algerian nationalist leader Messali Hadj at the time of the Popular Front (Algerian workers participated in all the main anti-fascist demonstrations in the 1930s) and he published articles on North Africa before 1954. In the Thirties, he corresponded with the leading Vietnamese Trotskyists (later murdered by Stalinists) and in the Fifties and Sixties he campaigned actively on behalf of independence for the West Indies. Thus, we can see that Guerin was a staunch advocate of solidarity with all people that are oppressed, from indigenous people to African Americans.
In the 1960s Guerin’s sympathies shifted towards anarchism, and he edited an anthology of anarchist writings entitled No Gods, No Masters , but he emphasised that he saw anarchism as ‘but one of the branches of socialist thought’ and continued to try to act as an ‘honest broker’ between the various factions. He supported the student revolt of 1968 from the beginning, when many on the left, particularly the Communist Party, were very ambivalent in their attitude. And the Sixties also saw Guérin's sexuality come to the forefront of his political activism. I do not want to side-line his bisexuality, like many did throughout his life, so the next instalment will be dedicated fully to Guérin's involvement in queer communism, from his participation in the Homosexual Front for Revolutionary Action (FHAR) in France to how many today see him as a leading figure in, even the founder of, Queer Communism.