Visa källa för La Vieille Taupe

https://libcom.org/files/Banquse_recollecting.pdf

When Socialisme ou Barbarie rejected « traditional » revolutionary theory for good,
a minority left it and regrouped around the journal Pouvoir Ouvrier. Pouvoir Ouvrier
wanted to retain the good aspects of Socialisme ou Barbarie, while ignoring the
common thread linking the origins of Socialisme ou Barbarie to its subsequent
deviations. Pouvoir Ouvrier fell short of the German Left on many points : trade
unions, the party, imperialism and the national question, etc. In fact different ultraleft
tendencies coexisted within it, united only on the questions of the capitalist
nature of Russia and worker's management. At its head was Vega, a former
member of the Italian left who had joined Socialisme ou Barbarie shortly after its
foundation. But this ex-« Bordigist » brought nothing of Bordigism to Socialisme ou
Barbarie, having found in the Italian left only a purer Leninism than that of the
Trotskyists, and supplementing this with the theses on state capitalism and workers
management.

A duplicated monthly magazine with a thousand readers, Pouvoir Ouvrier acted as if
it were read by 100,000 proletarians each week. In depth articles were rare. Often
these were by Pierre Souyri, under the pseudonym Brune, who had been the author
of two essential texts on China published in Socialisme ou Barbarie.
In 1965, Pierre Guillaume, a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie and then of Pouvoir
Ouvrier, founded the bookshop la Vieille Taupe, in the rue des Fossés-Saint-Jacques
in Paris. Around it a current of reflection and activity came together which was as
interested in the Situationist International, which for a while maintained relations
with the bookshop, as it was in the Italian left, at that time known almost entirely
through the filter of the International Communist Party (PCI). Pierre Guillaume took
part, for example, in the English edition of the Situationist International text on the
Watts riots. Pouvoir Ouvrier, undoubtedly feeling vulnerable, to the point of fearing
that this (second) current could threaten the unity and life of the group, organised
an absurd disciplinary hearing in September 1967, at the end of which Pierre
Guillaume and Jacques Baynac were excluded for « fractional work »... A good halfdozen
of the other members resigned. They formed themselves into an informal
group which everyone called « La Vieille Taupe ».

From its start, the bookshop refused a doctrinal label. It was not a local section of
Pouvoir Ouvrier (while Pierre Guillaume was still a member), nor its bookshop. At a
time when it was difficult to obtain the essential revolutionary texts, very few being
available for sale, many out of print etc., it wanted to facilitate access to them. In
1965 the mere fact of selecting texts by Marx, Bakunin, the Situationist
International, Programme Communiste (the organ of the PCI) and texts by the
ultra-left took on a theoretical and political meaning. In its way la Vieille Taupe took
part in the theoretical synthesis which is indispensable at all times. It went beyond
the sects without simply taking in everything « to the left of the Communist Party »,
like the bookseller and publisher Maspero (who at one time even refused to sell
Voix Ouvrière, the [Trotskyist] ancestor of today's Lutte Ouvrière, because it
appeared too hostile to left wing parties and trade unions !)

In 1967, at a time when the Communist Party was more concerned to publish
Thorez and Stalin, the bookshop bought up the considerable remainders of the
material published by Costes, the only real French publisher of Marx before the war.
At the start of 1968, when the Communist Party's Editions Sociales version of
Capital was out of print, the only place where the three volumes could be obtained
was La Vieille Taupe. The bookshop distributed the unsold stock of Socialisme ou
Barbarie, but also that of Cahiers Spartacus which had published many titles after
the war, about the whole of the workers movement from the extreme left to the
extreme right. Thousands of copies of texts by Luxemburg, Prudhommeaux etc.,
which had been gathering dust in a cellar in the town hall of the Vth district were once again offered to the public.
La Vieille Taupe did not deny the need for coherence. It only considered that it
could not be reached starting from just one of the radical currents of that period (all
of them one-sided), nor just by starting to listen to workers (like Informations et
Correspondances Ouvrières), nor just by studying the forms which modern
capitalism had taken (as Souyri, who kept away from the unrest provoked by the
split in Pouvoir Ouvrier, would have wished). Instead it would involve a theoretical
appropriation of all of the currents of the communist left (and thus also of the
historical ground on which they had come into being), and of the Situationist
International, as well as a reflection on communism and, in particular, on the
contribution of Marx.

The small heterogeneous group which had come out of Pouvoir Ouvrier had little or
no « public » activities in the months preceding May 68. Mainly, it collectively read
Capital and started to assimilate the components of the communist left, as well as
of the Situationist International. La Vieille Taupe was not a group; rather it was the
crossing point of various threads, with a dominant anti-Leninism, which was thrown
into a new perplexity by the arrival of Invariance.

It would be absurd to claim that the existence of this small regroupment played a
decisive part in May 68 or afterwards. What occurred there under privileged
conditions (because we were able to benefit from the experiences handed down by
various groups which had already sorted through a mass of ideas and facts), also,
of course, occurred elsewhere – often in confusion, sometimes perhaps with greater
clarity. What's important is that the process of theoretical maturation, without
which the shockwave of 1968 would have gone less far, related to the following
points : communism, the function of democracy and proletarian spontaneity, and
not to the string of non-problems that was conveyed, even by part of the ultra-left
(consciousness, leadership, management, authority, etc). May 68 was not a
revolution (!), but what this movement actually was would not have existed without
that maturation.

----

The refusal to form a group, delimiting an interior and an exterior, allowed those
who met at La Vieille Taupe to move towards a common coherence which others
only possessed on paper. Within this theoretical and practical community, a certain
dynamic was at work, which put everyone on an equal footing while integrating
abilities and various nuances of opinion. This collectivity, which for convenience, we
will call La Vieille Taupe, advanced step by step, each time associating those who
approved of the particular action being undertaken, without them having to agree
on a « programme » or a « platform ». But of course, if somebody proposed such
and such action to this or that person, it was because they thought they had more
in common with them than just a desire for action. La Vieille Taupe didn't try to
make a name for itself : our acts were our signature. Common activity was based
on a consensus which was often experienced as inspiring : there were things to be
done and said, and people often understood one another very quickly. The absence
of voting, and of legalism, gave the feeling of an activity close to what one could
consider as communist. Psychology, the discussion of states of feeling and the
influence of character and emotional « problems » , were rejected.

This form of organisation encouraged irresponsibility. A questionable text might be
distributed, a harmful initiative taken, without people coming to any necessary
reservations or rectifications, because the group didn't have a definite existence.
The most active individual, Pierre Guillaume, was thus the least controlled by the
common activity. As for the absence of psychology, if we think of this with
melancholy when we see what a soup so many among us now swim in, and when
we see the extent to which disturbed behaviour became important in the
subsequent evolution, and in the splits which punctuated it, we should also not
forget that this refusal was in part a blindness which sometimes led us to tolerate
behaviour we would no longer put up with today.

If the absence of formalism stopped us succumbing to the diseases of sects :
doctrinal sclerosis and the organisation of organisation, the lack of clearly defined
perspectives, which we might have agreed on after a more formal discussion, had
the disadvantage of hindering a critique of our activities, for this could not be based
on any formulated agreement. It's true that this effort of formulation would have
inevitably deprived us of the support of part of the elements which circulated
around La Vieille Taupe. And it is not certain that this would have been a good
thing : we would perhaps have gained in precision, but a creative profusion would
have been lost, which only later bore fruit, in our heads, and in those of others.
Nevertheless, this vagueness facilitated a Stalinophobic mania which came close to
making anti-Stalinism a requirement in the same way that antifascism was for
others (if it was against the Communist Party and the USSR, it could not be bad...).
Its necessary to say again that hostility to the Communist Party, like hostility to
NATO, can be anti-revolutionary. For the communist movement there is no
« enemy number one of the peoples of the world ».

It ended up that La Vieille Taupe devoted much energy to placing « banana skins »
under the feet of Stalinists in order to throw them off balance, and that it devoted much effort to scandalous acts, attacks on a single terrain : that of ideology, which
the enemy had controlled for far too long without being seriously threatened. A
violent action that doesn't include within itself its meaning (comprehensible to those
with whom you have something in common, and to whom you address yourself)
plays the enemies game. Writing « Too many murderers (massacreurs) decorate
this wall with flowers » on the mur des Fédérés [a memorial to the dead of the Paris
commune in Père Lachaise cemetery, which was itself the site of the final resistance
and subsequent massacre of the communards on the 28th May 1871. The memorial
was used as a place of annual pilgrimage for the French Communist Party -
translators note], is an act which contains within itself its impact, and whose
significance cannot be misunderstood except through bad faith or from an obvious
lack of interest in the issue. But a violent attack which doesn't inscribe within itself
a possible clarification will be given its meaning by the political powers, or by the
media, and from the outside.

If a blow aimed at representations, (for example, the myth which the Communist
party maintains about itself), is addressed to radicals, it can retain its meaning, and
encourage the silent majority. But if it attempts to address everyone, and change
public opinion about the Communist Party, it will simultaneously fail to reach both
general and minority consciousness. Yet La Vieille Taupe practised scandal without
being able to discuss it, except on rare occasions, and to little effect.
In France, 1972 was a turning point. The year saw the apogee of leftism and the
last important occurrence of the anti-statist, anti-political and anti-repressive
demonstrations which had appeared in 1968. The funeral of Overnay was the climax
after which everything fell apart. It was a large anti-Communist Party gathering :
Overney, a maoist militant, had been shot at the gates of Renault by the employers
private police, and Marchais [general secretary of the Communist Party] had not
been able to restrain this heartfelt cry : « We are not going to start again as in 68
… ». The leftist stewards could hardly contain this enormous demonstration, shot
through with a riotous atmosphere, but unable to set goals for itself. We saw one of
our number, his voice competing with the megaphones, recapture the slogan of the
demonstration from the Trotskyist stewards : « Marchais, bastard, the people will
have your hide », before the underlings intervened with a cry of « no anticommunism
». In its violence, this slogan nonetheless showed the limits of the
demonstration. Within leftism, one part of Maoism developed an anti-trade union
and anti-Communist Party line, but within a logic that was antifascist, populist and
democratic.

Coming after a theoretical breakthrough in the work of revolutionaries, the
demonstration was interpreted as a sign of the appearance (finally) of a radical
current beyond leftism. A series of groups were born at this time : in particular
Négation in Paris and Intervention communiste (which was to become Théorie
communiste) in Aix. La Vieille Taupe prepared to publish several texts, one of which
was En quoi la perspective communiste réapparaît by François Martin, developed
from several texts from 1968 and afterwards. Continuing the discussions which had
followed Overney's funeral, at which a Vieille Taupe leaflet had been well received,
a number of workers who for a long time had taken part in our activities criticized
the lack of follow up to our action, and called for the creation of a more coherent
group. The leaflets, the theoretical texts such as those by Denis Authier (preface to
Trotsky's Report of the Siberian Delegation, for Spartacus), by Gilles Dauvé, under
the name Jean Barrot, and by Pierre Guillaume, and the informal contacts, were no
longer enough they said. Thus Mouvement Communiste saw the light of day, with a
bulletin of the same name, of which François Martin's text formed the first issue,
and Capitalism and Communism the second. Five hundred copies of each were
published (a further 1000 copies of No 2 almost immediately afterwards), and they
were distributed in a few days, the greater part by direct contact, notably at
workplaces (Renault). We had the impression of moving forward.

The theoretical clarification, and the confluence between groups in several
countries, had created belief in the birth of a movement, few in number, but
coherent, able to make itself known, and to maintain a minimum of active relations
with the proletarian experience. Perhaps we were right about the clarification taking
place, but we were certainly wrong about the formation of centres capable of
reflection and even of action. Overnay's funeral was one of the illusions of May, of
which it formed the last gasp, and by no means the sign of a renewal. Even those
who had pushed for the formation of Mouvement Communiste dissociated
themselves from it almost at once. The links established with Négation did not last.
Our links with the more modern countries cooled and the only close contacts we
maintained were in Italy and Spain. The global proletarian activity had facilitated
the encounter and accumulation of points of view which were often in sympathy,
but it was not strong enough to impose a synthesis which would have provided a
better grasp of the present : we did not get beyond an understanding of the past.
In these conditions, the book Le Mouvement Communiste (Champ Libre, 1972),
which came out at the same time, could not be satisfactory. It was a text by Gilles
Dauvé, not of La Vieille Taupe or the group Mouvement Communiste, which had
hardly discussed or improved it. As the forward to the Portuguese edition (1975)
has already put it, the work was an inadequate theorization, as partial, in its way,
as most texts at that time. Re-reading Marx in the footsteps of Invariance and
Bordiga, the book neglected to include Marx himself in its global critique. Its
concern to describe objective « laws » made it forget real relations. « Value » no
longer seemed to be the expression of social relations, but tended to personify
itself, and become a subject of history like the « communist movement » , whereas
value and communist movement are only theoretical constructions which approach
reality. The book constructed an integrated model of contradictions instead of
illuminating them on the basis of practise. On closing the book, one might believe in
the existence of a proletarian movement automatically set in motion by the
« obsolescence » of value. Today it seems to us that the link between capitalism
and communism, and between Capital and proletariat, is far from being as clear as
we put it then. Communist transformation was presented as a series of measures to
be taken. While we said that it was a question of a movement, we didn't show in
detail the subversive effects of such immediate measures. Abstract analysis of the
real conditions, and idealism.

The Scandinavian split in the [Bordigist] PCI in 1971 triggered the departure of part
of the members of the French section. The crisis of militancy, endemic within all
political groups, did not orient these ex-militants towards revolutionary action
(which would it would first have been necessary to define). It propelled them
towards a search for « life » in which they got lost. Their evolution conformed to a
process we often saw at work in our ranks : a kind of « life-cycle of the
revolutionary ». On the basis of an instinctive rejection of established society,
people pass from existential revolt to organised activity for revolution, through a
series of breaks which lead more and more to the left. They make a critique of everything, of all forms of existence and proletarian intervention, of the whole of
the revolutionary or pseudo-revolutionary past, glorified and deformed, until a limit
point is reached where the critique of everything also includes revolution and
proletariat which they end up rejecting as myths, unless, that is, they theorize them
as nothing more than abstract identities, philosophical concepts out of reach of
human action.

Invariance had obviously played a part in the crisis of the PCI, but its own
evolution, reflecting the quasi-general disarray, only contributed to a lack of
progress by some, and to a take-off into hyperspace by others. Camatte, in taking
up Marx's phrase well summarized the contradiction of the proletariat : « a class of
capitalist society that is not of capitalist society » (Series III, 1979, pp. 55-56). But
he resolved this contradiction in a strange manner : first the class is the partycommunity,
then the party is the class-community, and thus a universal class, and
finally it is humanity. Camatte had initially relocated the failing class in the
« party ». Instead of going on from there to what it is that creates the proletariat,
its experience, and its contradictions, Invariance then relocated the party into being
the whole of humanity. The metaphysics of humanity replaced that of the party. But
it always remained a matter of a mediation between revolution and the activity of
men, because what it was in their practice which could generate a revolution was
poorly discerned.

Invariance translated into its own language capitalist omnipresence. Camatte so
well understood the absorption of the world by this impersonal monster that he
succumbed to its fascination, to the point of seeing it everywhere. If Capital
swallows everything, then proletarians in their turn make themselves into cannibals,
and their struggle nourishes Capital with their flesh. Invariance showed how
structuralism expressed the strength of a system which in eternalising itself denied
history. In its turn, incapable of seeing in barbarism anything other than barbarism,
it no longer distinguished anything more than a totality within which all previous
distinctions (classes, production/circulation, etc.) had been erased.
The second and third series of Invariance theorised a visible reality which we run up
against painfully : the omnipresence of Capital. According to Invariance, against a
totalitarian being which occupies the entire social terrain, another subterranean, but
equally omnipresent, reality would oppose itself : the uprising of life.
Traditional revolutionary thought avoided speculation about the survival of Capital
by assigning it to external causes (social democracy, imperialism, etc). Invariance
resorted to an interiorization : Capital survives because it has entered into us. The
economic « death crisis » is replaced by a revolt of our nature which has been
scorned by Capital.

For Invariance, apart from this human nature, this something within us which
refuses to submit itself, Capital absorbs everything. This is to forget that absorption
must enter through the real relations between humans. The opposition is not
between an activity, that is capitalised through and through, and human nature : if
there is an opposition, it is necessarily within capitalist activity itself, precisely
because it is set in motion by proletarians. It is this very activity that is
contradictory and perhaps offers an exit. The solution lies in the social relation, not
elsewhere.

« The worker himself is a Capital, a commodity… » (Marx), but he is not these
things passively. Invariance understood that Capital does not proceed by itself, but
through our own action. But Camatte concluded from this that Capital had therefore
triumphed for good : it had made itself us, it incorporated us. However it is
precisely through this activity which it imposes on us that Capital is contradictory.
As Lefort said in the article previously cited, proletarians are in a situation of
universality.

With regard to Camatte who believes that the revolutionary movement, in the
sense we give these words, is dead, and who believes that the new reality of Capital
has removed any validity from the concepts of proletariat and revolution, we should
not take refuge in an attitude of rigid contempt. Revolutionaries at the end of the
19th century justifiably affirmed, against « revisionism » , that nothing essential had
changed since 1848. In 1914 however, (i.e. too late), they realised that all the
same something had indeed changed : the labour movement had become an
instrument of Capital. Revolutionaries should have recognised then that revisionism
was the expression of real problems which their refutation by itself had neglected.
Camatte formerly provided many elements for revolutionary theory in our time.
Today he poses a real question badly. His wandering illustrates the ambiguity of the
period.

Castoriadis and Camatte saw in Capital something which devours everything, and
concluded by invalidating the concepts differentiating the parts of Capital, to leave
in place, in the work of one, a bureaucratic pyramid, in the work of the other, an
indefinable totality which simultaneously integrates the human being and yet
doesn't succeed in this. These are the thinkers of the new face of Capital, of the
end of the labour movement and the absence of the revolutionary movement :
because the latter does not display the characteristics which one might have
imagined in the 1960s, they have cut themselves adrift from the moorings.
A group like the Organisation des Jeunes Travailleurs révolutionnaires, who notably
published Militancy - highest stage of alienation in 1972, went against this trend of
« every man for himself ». Initially marked by the Situationist International, they
became acquainted with the communist left, and effected a convergence with La
Vieille Taupe.

Mouvement Communiste had not achieved a satisfactory collective functioning, any
more than La Vieille Taupe had. It became an organ for publishing texts by Gilles
Dauvé, amended by a few people. After difficult discussions with Négation and
others about what we could agree to do, and a polemic about a memorial meeting
for Leon Blum which we had disrupted, we realised there was a crisis in our ranks.
The fourth issue of Mouvement Communiste « Révolutionnaire ? » (1973) contained
some valid remarks, together with others which were distorted, on the subject of
subversive action and the community. But it especially testified to a revealing
displacement in the centre of interest : it no longer considered the proletarians, but
the revolutionaries. Its hardly surprising that this text proposed no real remedy for
what was not a disease but the state of the movement.
A « milieu » had aimed at constituting itself around a communist ideology, with its
own slogans (« abolition of wage labour » , « crisis of value » ) in place of those of
the leftists. Noting that it no longer performed the role of a meeting place, and
instead entertained a clientele like any other bookstore, the bookshop La Vieille Taupe closed at the end of 1972.
« All the elements of revolutionary theory exist in the marketplace, but not
their instructions for use.
This is not the province of a bookshop.
Revolutionary theory cannot exist apart from the establishment of practical
links in order to act and this action can no longer principally be the
affirmation and dissemination of revolutionary theory.
(…) La Vieille Taupe must disappear. »
(Bail à céder, [Lease for sale] La Vieille Taupe poster, 15th December 1972)
Before 1968 there were groups unable to distribute their theory beyond a circle of
initiates. This was the reason for existence of the bookshop. In 1972, revolutionary
ideas circulated, amongst other reasons because society needed revolutionary
theory to understand and adjust its contradictions. But any collective revolutionary
effort was, and remained, extremely fragile.

Failing to politicise workplace conflicts, after 1968 leftism had not succeeded in its
passage from the factories to the corridors of power, and had withdrawn into
struggles outside work, struggles around everyday life (typical was the Maoist
group Vive La Révolution (VLR) and its journal Ce que nous voulons : Tout ! What
do we want : Everything!). After 1972, politics declined and the various neoreformisms
of everyday life flourished. Compared to leftist specialists in power,
these movements, in one sense, posed real problems. But each became bogged
down in its own speciality. By comparison the « communist » milieu had a global
point of view to oppose to theirs which seemed like their opposite : more like a
political discourse, a more distinctive point of view, but unlike the others absolutely
ineffective. All partial critique was false, but the global critique lacked any point of
application.

----

The pirate Monde Diplomatique

The death of Baader and his comrades (1977) and the reactions which it provoked,
notably in the press, gave two or three of us the idea of producing a fake Monde
Diplomatique. The initiative brought together over a few days some energies which
were momentarily isolated, and others who were then organised elsewhere. The
main part of it was written and produced by the people who today produce La
Banquise, with the assistance of members and friends of la Guerre Sociale, and
some others. Part of the texts were reproduced in 1978 in Issue 2 of la Guerre
Sociale.

It was a reaction to the spectacular reinforcement of the State in a period of crisis,
which not only revealed its means of policing, but also gathered behind it nearly the
whole of the media and of the political and intellectual forces. Far more than in the
guise of the police state that was so much denounced, the counterrevolution
appeared in the form of organised consensus. In West Germany, as elsewhere, the
police operation functioned thanks to the conformism maintained by social inertia,
and thanks to the guardians of the monopoly of speech : intellectuals, journalists,
politicians, professors, experts, etc., who applied themselves to exacerbating and
managing a popular hysteria which was undoubtedly without precedent in Europe
since the last world war. The only discordant voices differed in calling for a « true »
democracy, as if this hysterical consensus was not precisely a product of
democracy.

Social inertia is made possible not by the « passivity » of the workers who continue
no less to conduct struggles, but by respect for the limitations necessary for the
normal functioning of capitalism and its democracy. It is obvious that an active
communist movement would have found other forms of action, that were offensive
in other ways, instead of, or in addition to, this détournement of the media. We by
no means sought to turn its own weapons against the press. Confronting the
journalistic servility which is plain to see in the media, we didn't call for a « true »
journalism which was less respectful of power.

We had chosen le Monde Diplomatique both for reasons of convenience – its
periodicity, and because the readership of this organ – left and liberal intellectuals,
was precisely who we particularly wanted to attack. The technique of the forgery
simultaneously made it possible for us to make our positions known (distribution
through bookshops and by hand), and to attack the media through a process
analogous to sabotage in the sphere of production.

Deprived of the means of effectively attacking the State, for example through a
demonstration, or through any other more virulent act, we intervened in the
domain of ideas, and within a limited milieu. The fake Monde Diplomatique did what
the press is supposed to do in times of crisis, and which it evidently does not do : it
exercised a critical spirit at a critical moment for power. To this end we employed
irony and concealment : a powerful weapon, but a weapon of the weak who cannot
conduct a frontal attack. We did what democracy did not do, but against it.
We produced 2000 copies. A few hundred were sent to journalists and personalities,

creating a certain shock in the enemy ranks. We know for certain that those in
charge of the principle media it aimed at (Le Monde) were rather inconvenienced by
it. The other copies were distributed very quickly in the anti-establishment milieu.
Despite what was imagined by journalists, in good or bad faith, the achievement of
such a fake, which cost us 4,500 francs in all, is within the reach of anyone who
gives themselves the means. The strength of social inertia and the weight of
received ideas are the real brakes on action that breaks out of the usual political
framework, not the material difficulties.

Some readers or recipients took a while before realising that it was a hoax. Should
we conclude from this that the texts were not clear enough ? Rather it proves the
destructuring character of such an action, which shakes up the established
frameworks of thought. And beyond that ? The entire issue contained nothing of a
democratic protest, communism and the revolution were there. But the nature of
such activity contains its own limitations.

The production had been carried out in a pleasant and efficient atmosphere,
bringing into contact people who had been separated for a long time, or who did not
know one another. The network of contacts which had been woven around La
Vieille Taupe had been reactivated. We wondered what to do next. Meetings over
following weeks led to nothing. It was a successfully conducted limited action, but
that was all. We had confirmed that the work undertaken in and around La Vieille
Taupe had left sufficient traces in people that they could on occasion form an
effective force of action. But there was no question of organising this reserve of
energies. Organisation is the organisation of tasks and no other task appeared
sufficiently urgent to weld these energies together. However one of the key
sentences of the fake was the last : Now, let us speak of something else.

----

La Vieille Taupe 2 and the Faurisson Affair

The texts in the pirate Monde Diplomatique displayed a flaw of which we only later
saw the implications. Although it repeatedly asserted that the question was of little
importance, and despite the fact that it centred its critique on the spectacular and
democratic consensus, the fake Monde Diplomatique resolved the question of
whether Baader had been killed or had killed himself : it appeared to it that there
was no doubt that the truth was literally the reverse of what the media said, and
that it was extremely likely the prisoners of Stammheim had been killed by others
than themselves.

The paradox of a forgery aiming at a truth ! It was a mistake to dwell on « literal »
truth. Just as the « truth » of our Monde Diplomatique was not its title, even though
this was written in black on white, in the same way the truth of the death of Baader
was not the identity of the finger which pulled the trigger on the gun. It is literally
true that this finger certainly had to possess one identity rather than another. In
the same way, it is surely true that the gas chambers had to exist – or not. But for
a revolutionary, the identity of the finger that killed Baader, just like the existence
or non-existence of the gas chambers, is no more than a truth devoid of meaning,
about as useful as the proverbial knife without a blade for which the handle is
missing. Yet it was the problem of this truth which tore a little further apart a
French revolutionary current which was already well dispersed.

1979 : to my right, a « little professor » from Lyon who for some years had been
proclaiming the following « good news for humanity » : the gas chambers in the
Nazi concentration camps never existed, they were no more than sinister prisoners
gossip, taken up as war propaganda and appointed as official truth by those
forces – in particular Zionism and Stalinism – whose interests converged on this
point. It was the same for the genocide of Jews, which « in the strict sense » had
no reality. On the first point the crackpot developed an argument that was
sometimes convincing, at least at first sight. He showed how fragile some
« proofs » of official history really are.

To my left, the representatives of the corporation of historians who, after having for
a long time opposed the deepest silence to the little professor, declared in Le
Monde : « it is not necessary to ask how such a mass murder was possible
technically. It was technically possible because it took place (…) there is not, there
cannot be a debate over the question of the gas chambers ». Then, having put
forward these ethical premises, the corporation more or less entered the debate
and applied themselves to showing, sometimes in a convincing way, that the little
professor was not as rigorous as he claimed and on occasion was even a forger.
Neither adversary spared themselves any considerations as to the motivations of
their enemy, whether they located these in psychopathology or in the petty minded
need to defend a nice little earner, not to speak of the shadowy ulterior political
motives which both camps readily lent themselves to.

All this took place in the middle of an antifascist clamour from all those who had the
floor and intended to hang on to it : politicians of every tendency merged together – from democrats in good standing to ex-Vichyists and ex-OAS, passing
from Stalinists and journalists in search of a scoop through to the guardians of
memory, without forgetting those people who consider it important to communicate
their opinion on every digestive disorder of Western good conscience : the
intellectuals.

The Faurisson affair occurred in France after two others which, at first sight, it
greatly resembled. First of all there had been a particularly unsavoury journalistic
« coup » : someone had gone to gather the senile ramblings of a former Vichy
Commissioner for Jewish Affairs, Darquier de Pellepoix, now retired to Spain. Then,
with a great fanfare, the European media had launched onto television screens a
series produced in the United States devoted to the tragic destiny of a Jewish family
during the Second World War. It was not the first time that the alarming spectre
had been brought out : was Nazism raising its head again ? But thanks to the crisis,
this question had more troubling resonances : around it could concentrate the
irrational fears which haunt men when they identify their own futures with the
extremely uncertain future of a world which oppresses them. We thus had the
uncommon sight of the highest government authorities discussing the urgent
necessity of purchasing a television « series ». The first screening of Holocaust was
a moment of great national harmony. To listen to some everyday conversations,
the duty of any democrat that evening was to be in front of his TV.
The attention of newspaper readers was drawn to Faurisson for the first time,
courtesy of Le Matin, which undoubtedly wished to mount an operation of the same
kind which L'Express had successfully conducted with Darquier de Pellepoix.
Knowing the circumstances in which an interview was extracted from the little
professor and the way they then doctored and presented the interview in question,
we might have been shocked if we had been interested in that sort of thing (codes
of ethics), and if we still had any illusions about the profession of journalist.
The socialist newspaper announced that in Lyon, a teacher was supporting Darquier
de Pellepoix. Moreover, Jean-Pierre Pierre-Bloch, a frenzied antiracist, had told Le
Matin that Darquier's « theory » was the same as that of the « falsifier Rassinier ».
What's more Faurisson also claimed to follow Rassinier. Rassinier being dead – and
what Le Matin had not thought to publish – Faurisson having declared that Darquier
was the very kind of man he had fought all his life, the little professor of Lyon found
himself alone against all. On one side the bad guy, on the other side the good guys.
Everything was thus in place for one of those affairs which can only leave indifferent
those who know what the society of the spectacle is. We were about to witness one
of those events created from nothing in order to give breadth to the background
noise, so that not for an instant is there any break in the incidental music which is
the raison d'être of the media, the flow of pseudo-information which prevents the
proletarian from thinking.

However, a number of people, who nearly all had in common that they were in
favour of the abolition of wage labour (among them Pierre Guillaume, Jean-Pierre
Carasso, Hervé Denès and Christine Martineau) thought it would be helpful to write
to Libération in order to affirm that Rassinier, who Bloch had made a spiritual
ancestor of Darquier, far from having been a Nazi had been a left-wing extremist, a
member of the Resistance deported to Buchenwald, and that he was still a socialist
and a pacifist when he formulated the theories which now earned him a comparison
with a Vichy Commissioner for Jewish Affairs.

What were revolutionaries doing in this mess ? Some of those who today write La
Banquise appended their signatures to this letter which appeared under the title
« Do You Know Rassinier ? ». Today we consider that adding those signatures was
a fundamental error, for several reasons, the principal one being that this letter
aimed, above all, to prepare « the debate ».

Indeed, what was the debate about ? The official version and current public opinion
affirm that the Nazis deliberately massacred Jews. « Revisionists » of the Faurisson
type retort that the deportees died of hunger and disease, etc. Instead of dipping a
toe into this debate as we did, and instead of losing themselves in it as some other
revolutionaries did, we would all have been better advised to respond :

« This debate is false. We will no more become specialists in Zyklon B than in 1977
we claimed to have conducted the autopsy on Baader. A very large number (which
we will let you determine) of Jews, and Baader and his comrades, were killed by the
German State and the world capitalist system. »

From the start, the interest of revolutionaries in the concentration camps (and thus
in Rassinier) formed part of an attempt to critically analyse the war of 1939-45. [Note 1] Understanding how Nazi atrocities had been used, and even exaggerated, in order to justify the war and its aftermath, helped us to better understand the false
opposition between democracy and fascism. It was for this reason that we had
republished an article from Programme Communiste : « Auschwitz ou le grand
alibi », in 1971 and 1974. Today in 1983 after a four year campaign by the second
Vieille Taupe, which had been created for this purpose by Pierre Guillaume, those
who once read the works published by the bookshop la Vieille Taupe, which had
closed in 1972, are still unaware of what Vieille Taupe 2 thinks about 1939-45, or
about fascism. For four years, the only question for Vieille Taupe 2 has been
gassings and the right to speak about them.

As we have said, those who met at the bookshop la Vieille Taupe considered that
their actions and their writings were their signature; la Vieille Taupe was a link and
a meeting place – everything except a signature. Pierre Guillaume revived it in the
exclusive form of a signature which, whether he wanted it or not, drew all its
interest from a past activity which had nothing to do with its present activities. In
saying this, we are not putting ourselves forward as the supercilious heirs of an
activity of which he had been the principal organiser. Quite simply, out of fidelity
with what we once had in common with him, it is necessary for us to oppose the
Pierre Guillaume of today to that of former times.

While Rassinier's The Lie of Ulysses is an interesting document, and while it stands
out from the majority of writings on concentration camps, and from the excesses
displayed by some of them, this doesn't make it an exceptional work. Everything
that some have wished to see in it could have been brought out from other
Note 1

However it is incorrect to write, as Pierre Guillaume has : « Briefly, since 1970, Vieille Taupe has shared the
essential theories of Paul Rassinier. » (text sent to Libération quoted in Serge Thion, Historical Truth or Political
Truth, la Vieille Taupe, 1980, p. 139). Or that « The Lie of Ulysses was unanimously accepted by Vieille Taupe
which recognised its radical importance at all levels. » (Pierre Guillaume, preface to Rassinier, Ulysses betrayed by
his own, la VT, 1980). The second assertion is very exaggerated. As for the first, Rassinier's « theories » were very
little known, and still recently few of those who defended him had read anything other than The Lie of Ulysses and
The Drama of the European Jews. Even today who has read «The Persons Responsible for the Second World
War » ?
accounts, for example that of the Russian deportee Martchenko, (My Testimony, La
Seuil, 1970). Far more than the book itself, it is the reactions it provoked which are
revealing.

Rassinier's interest lies above all in his refusal of war propaganda. When he leaves
behind his hostility to brainwashing and begins to explain the war and the Jewish
question, he is entirely off his head : not through errors of fact (we haven't
attempted to check his sources), but above all through his angle of approach to
these problems. The fact that his work might disturb people changes nothing. The
Moonies also disturb people and unite a large Union Sacrée in opposition to them.
Does this make them interesting ?

To deal with the massacre of Jews during the war by devoting a hundred pages to
statistical calculations (one third of The Drama of the European Jews, 1964) in
order to determine whether 1,600,000 or 6,000,000 Jews died, is to peer at things
through the wrong end of the spyglass, and continues the Nuremberg Trials
through contesting them. A new and profound book on this subject would be
documented, but it would leave to one side the false problem of quantification.
Everything has been said when it has been shown how the figure of six million, at
the very least doubtful, has developed into dogma. One says nothing when one
elaborates rival statistics for oneself, just as unverifiable for non-specialist readers
as those one criticises.

Most of the documents and files which we have consulted were supplied to us by
Vieille Taupe 2. They show that Rassinier was inclined towards, and supported
throughout, by a pacifist, socialist (SFIO) and humanist current, in the line of those
state employed teachers of the IIIrd Republic such as Dommanget, who were
freethinkers and opponents of war. When war came, in 1914, as in 1939, they
generally accepted, if not justified, it. But outside periods of war they maintained
the anti-militarist tradition and sometimes declared themselves to be libertarians.
After the scandal over The Lie of Ulysses around 1950-51, this current, which had
received Rassinier's critique of brainwashing favourably, faded away. Rassinier then
buried himself in the Jewish question and the gas chambers and disengaged from
the left of the SFIO, which was engaged in other struggles (against the war in
Algeria). He now rubbed shoulders more comfortably with the extreme right than
with the former pacifists and socialists, who in general gave into the cold war. For la
Vieille Taupe 2, « Rassinier unshakeably remained until his death a socialist,
pacifist, antiracist, internationalist (…) » (Pierre Guillaume, forward to Ulysses
betrayed by his own, p. 179). Rassinier was a socialist, in the sense that he
remained for twenty years in the SFIO and even represented it in the Chamber of
Deputies. His pacifism excluded internationalism, which among other things
presupposes breaking with the « workers parties », and this explains why he agreed
to travel alongside the extreme right.

Considering that « warmongering had passed from the right to the left », that
« Resistancialism was being maintained there » (rough draft of a letter to Bauchet,
1964), and entirely preoccupied by peace, he first and foremost reserved his blows
for the left. For him, as for antifascism, there existed a favoured enemy, but for him
this was the left, and in particular the Communist Party, not fascism. He judged the
right to be less dangerous – and this shocks left intellectuals – in much the same
way that around 1950 Sartre preferred the USSR to the USA. He did not share the
ideas of Bardèche, the editor of Défense de l'Occident [Défense de l'Occident
(Defence of the West) and Rivarol were right-wing journals - translator], but all the
same Bardèche was a « good man (…) more a poet than an editor » (letter of
Rassinier to Faurrison, 3rd January 1967); he found Défense de l'Occident or Rivarol
less harmful than l'Humanité [the Communist Party newspaper - translator].
Rassinier did not merely become a « revolutionary without revolution » writing
wherever he could make his « scientific » studies known. From the start of his postwar
activity Rassinier followed a precise political line : « Peace above all » – which
was in no way revolutionary. He ended up by placing his pacifism at the service of
the Western camp in the Cold War, and more particularly, of the extreme-right.
In the issue of Rivarol for 1st January 1964 Rassinier set out his viewpoint as
follows : obsessed by the desire to justify the reparations that Germany paid to the
State of Israel, the international Zionist movement « brought the reinforcement of
the gas chambers and the six million dead » to all of Khrushchev's attacks on
Europe. In so doing, the Zionist movement will not fail to bring about that « not
only the horses of Cossacks come to water themselves in the waters of the Rhine,
but that their tanks are filled up on their way to the Sahara and that their planes
stopover on their way to drop their bombs on the United States. »
The supposedly anti-racist Rassinier, who understandably found the Stalinist
discourse of l'Humanité disgusting, was not embarrassed in 1963-4 to write in a rag
like Rivarol in which columns of the most indecent racism were spread out at
length.

By forcibly incorporating the Sudeten Germans in 1918 into Czechoslovakia
« whose culture and civilization were several centuries behind them, the
Allies insulted them : a little like that insult which is offered today to those
white Rhodesians who, under the cover of democracy and anti-racism, the
universal conscience would like to place under the domination of negroes ».
Rassinier, The Persons Responsible for the Second World War.

If it means to make Rassinier better known Vieille Taupe 2 should republish The
Persons Responsible for the Second World War. In this book the Second World War
becomes the work of a conspiracy of arms dealers, dominated by the Freemasons
and Jews, supposedly influential even in the SFIO. It would be necessary to cite
thirty long quotes in order to give the full extent of the abjectly anti-Semitic
character of this work. The Allies blame everything on Hitler. Rassinier begins by
sharing out the responsibility before making it weigh especially heavily on the Allies.
From our point of view it is just as absurd to say that Hitler wanted war (the point
of view of the Nuremburg trials) as that he didn't want war (the point of view of
Rassinier). For revolutionary theory, the outbreak of a modern war has little to do
with the will, good or bad, of statesmen.

« The Jews » enable Rassinier to turn to his own account a well known view of the
world : that old tradition, entirely foreign to revolutionary critique, which explains
world politics through the schemes of an international network of financiers and
arms dealers which pulls all the strings. Rassinier joined those who identified this
network with the trans-national Jewish « community », opposing « international
capitalism » to national industry and labour.
Admittedly, one can separate an authors opinions from his work, but when it is a
question of anti-Semitic indulgence or prejudice in the work of someone who studies the Jewish question and the concentration camps, which rather a lot of Jews
entered, one may fear that the author is no more objective than advocates of the
official version of history.

Why does Vieille Taupe 2 present a distorted image of Rassinier ? Why do his ideas
need to be accompanied by the image of an anti-racist man of the left ? The original
Vieille Taupe had indicated the fundamental aspects of Bordiga without denying his
Leninism, or hiding the fact that he had always approved of the repression at
Kronstadt, for example. We did not need to tidy up his biography. The strength of
the communist ideas he held was enough to separate the valid positions from the
erroneous opinions in his work. If Vieille Taupe 2 dresses Rassinier up in the mask
of an anti-racist and internationalist, this is because all of its activity has as its
objective to influence the media. Its goal is that Rassinier and Faurisson are
acknowledged and accepted in the forum of ideas. It is therefore necessary to make
Rassinier presentable; so his biography will be given a face-lift. This is an enormous
regression compared to what the Situationist International or the original Vieille
Taupe had said : when they spoke of subversive elements in certain « unused
books », they gave them a universal range by setting them within a critical theory.
There is nothing like this in the activity of Vieille Taupe 2, which merely publishes
Rassinier and Faurisson. It thus becomes necessary for it to exaggerate the
subversive, and even the merely acceptable, where there is none.

At the end of 1978 when the Faurisson affair erupted, the question of the
concentration camps had been discussed amongst us for several years.
In 1977 a draft text had been given to la Guerre Sociale by Gilles Dauvé. Modified
with the direct or indirect collaboration of quite a lot of people, and thus of Pierre
Guillaume, it appeared in 1979 in the third issue of la Guerre Sociale. The way in
which we had intended to speak of Faurisson became instead the desire to do
something for him : he had been attacked because of his heretical ideas on the Nazi
camps and after having been denounced by Libération; as for Faurisson himself, he
set his misadventures within a much larger context, against all official propaganda,
by stating that the campaign against Baader had disgusted him. Serge Quadruppani
addressed a letter (unpublished) to Libération. Pierre Guillaume wrote the letter
which Libération published on January 22nd 1979, which we spoke of above. (quoted
in Thion, Historical Truth and Political Truth, pp 128-130). This letter, written to
protest against the assimilation of Rassinier with Darquier de Pellepoix, gave just as
false a picture of Rassinier as the one it claimed to criticise.

Without even talking about its very questionable content, it was a serious mistake
to enter, even slightly, what was and always would be a journalistic and political
scandal, and nothing more. We did not have to enter the arena of public opinion.
Expressing the interests of a movement in its entirety, in the form of a manifesto
for example, is neither to remain in an ivory tower, nor to project oneself into a
cause while forgetting everything else. But the signatures added to this letter only
encouraged some of the more clear sighted, those for example who identified with
the Guerre Sociale article on the camps, to look at things from an angle of attack
which no longer had anything to do with revolutionary theory, and either to become
more interested in what interested Faurisson, like Pierre Guillaume, or to poorly
distinguish between their ideas and those of Faurisson, like the « infantrymen » of
la Guerre Sociale.

Meeting Faurisson should have opened our eyes to the difference in nature between
his research and our activity. During 1979, dealing with Pierre Guillaume, we
argued with him and we criticised him, but without ourselves understanding the
roots of the affair, and thus without trying to make him understand : that
revolutionaries cannot support Faurisson. That's not to say that we could have
prevented him from reviving Vieille Taupe for such a waste of energy. But in any
event our responsibility is great, because we were among those who knew Pierre
best.

The idea that : « We who are revolutionaries in any case intend to support him (...)
because Faurisson is being attacked for having sought for and spread the truth »,
presented in the Guerre Sociale leaflet Who is the Jew ?, was false when the leaflet
was distributed (1979). At that time we neither understood this clearly, nor stated it
clearly (the leaflet is quoted in Mise au Point, pp 98-99)
Firstly, we don't have to support Faurisson because we have no more in common
with him than with those who persecute him. The problem with Faurisson is
obvious : society distinguishes between murder and involuntary death. It pursues
the assassin and resigns itself to workplace and traffic accidents, the « natural »
consequences of a way of life. But from the point of view of the human species, the
important thing is to avoid massacres and suffering, whether it is a matter of
murder or of the kind of violent death that is considered normal. The death of a
child strangled by a « sadist » excites the imagination more than the death of
thousands of others from hunger. The prosecutors at Nuremberg reduced the
deaths in the concentration camps to the first example : they made them a crime.
The lawyers for the accused at Nuremberg reduced them to the second example :
they made them an accident. To try to prove that the Nazis killed without wanting
to or without wanting to systematically, is to adopt the point of view of the defence
lawyers at Nuremberg.

Analysing the 1939-45 war is not what interests Faurisson. His « passion for the
truth » takes the gas chambers as its object. That's up to him. But this selflimitation
leads to the same result as the antifascist campaign which presents the
Nazis as monsters with sole responsibility for the war. For Faurisson explores a
minor point, and trains the spotlight on this point, just like the other experts, thus
obscuring what surrounds this point and might explain it. By helping to focus
attention on the gas chambers, he dramatises them even more and reinforces the
myth. A great obscurity continues to reign over the whole question of Nazism and
1939-45, which this focus helps to sustain. It is only by leaving aside the gas
chambers that one might consider them seriously and hold the only discourse that
is possible on this question :

« Faurisson is attacked and persecuted for having affirmed that the gas chambers
are no more than a tall tale by prisoners. We are not experts and we don't want to
become experts, therefore we won't enter into this discussion. But those who
believe that by removing the gas chambers from Nazism, one might weaken the
horror which it inspires, only reveal their grand-guignolesque view of what it is that
makes human life truly horrible. They attach the horror to images instead of seeing
it where it actually is : in the relations between men. In their conception, the fact
that a crude tall story was imposed on millions of poor wretches would be less
serious than the existence of a particular technique for extermination. Yet, if the
gas chambers were nothing more than a sinister rumour among prisoners, it would be necessary to admit that in order for such an enormous tall story to be imposed
with such force on so many people, these people must have been thrown into a
radical dispossession of themselves. However, the fact that this dispossession
indeed exists is a massive fact which no-one thinks of discussing.

« Whether or not the Nazi gas chambers had a concrete existence matters very
little to us. They exist today, as at the very least they existed to the deportees, that
is to say as an image derived from a horrible reality. It is not necessary to have
anti-Semitic ulterior motives in order to discuss the possibility that this image did
not correspond, or corresponded only partially, to reality. Our task is to subject to
critique the part which this image plays in anti-fascist ideology, and critique that
ideology itself. In doing this, when this discussion and these critiques will lead to us
being characterised as Nazi's, we will have verified the totalitarian mentality of
those who wish us ill. But what qualifies us in our own eyes to undertake this task
of deconstructing an ideology, is precisely that we are not dispassionate fanatics for
truth – assuming such a type really exists. We believe it's possible to speak because
we recognise that the gas chambers have a basic level of existence : in the eyes of
millions of deportees they embody the real horror of what they experienced. « The
gas chambers, if they were not the means, would at least be the metaphor » (Y.
Chotard).This appalling image which has come down to us hardly gives us any
information about the real functioning of the camps. But it tells us very well the
feelings which they inspired in men. »

That is all there is to say on the question of the gas chambers. As for the question
of the camps, it is the analysis of 1939-45 which allows us to situate and
understand them. It is certainly not the camps which enable us to understand
Nazism. Just as in the same way it isn't the « Gulag » which explains the USSR, but
the understanding of the history and nature of the USSR which explains the Gulag.
The massacre of the Jews made it possible for democracy to save the costs of a
critique of Nazism. Apart from the work of specialists there is no real attempt at
understanding Nazism as a whole. The standard image of Nazism held by most
people concentrates on the worst horrors, both real and imagined. This impression
is formed according to a process which is simultaneously spontaneous and
organised, popular and state-controlled. The article « The Horror is Human » in the
first issue of La Banquise analyses the process of projecting the horror of the
present onto the past.

Faurisson affirms that he is driven by a passion for the truth. But the truth is only
true through a social relation, as when one speaks of a « true » behaviour, of an
attitude that is appropriate to a situation, or of a reaction which moves things
forward. Truth never lies in the raw fact, or in an inert thing or an isolated thought,
it emerges from the process of setting into relation (mise en rapport). It is
constructed by the gaze which falls upon it (see « Truth and Public Opinion » in this
issue). The truth about the camps undoubtedly includes the intentions of those who
ordered their construction, but it lies especially in the conditions which produced
them and in their operation. The truth of the camps is not the dimensions of the
buildings, the cost of the materials, the number of deportees, the proportion of
Poles, etc., or more exactly these figures are only data which do not form the
truth : they become it through what is bound to be an organisation of the facts. The
controversy over the number of Jewish victims of Nazism distances us from the
truth of the camps.

Whether Faurisson wants it or not, he also organises the facts according to his point
of view. However, this point of view makes him absolutely indefensible.
Faurisson searches for the authentic. An authentic document doesn't necessarily
(and doesn't often) speak the truth, we only know whether or not it comes from the
source from which it (or that one) says that it comes. Authenticity means to remain
faithful to ones own code. An authentic being only exists in relation to norms, or to
a restrictive code. Truth, a social relation, is potentially universal, and falls within
the range of human activity. In this way the « truth is revolutionary ». The truth
does not lie in the work of Faurisson.

« (...) the number of Jews exterminated by the Nazis (or victims of
« genocide ») is happily equal to zero » Faurisson quoted in Thion.
Faurisson's detractors treat him as Nazi or a madman. But quite simply, he plays
with words. This denial of genocide only makes sense if one gives the word the
significance which the most narrow-minded antifascism gives it. In this sense to say
that the Nazis perpetrated genocide against the Jews would mean that for a long
time they had wanted and planned the deaths of millions of Jews and that they then
organised this by exceptional methods. This is the meaning which one finds in the
Robert, a dictionary published after the Nuremberg trials : « Methodical destruction
of an ethnic group ». Faurisson speaks the same false language as the
« exterminationists ». He also makes massacre a question of intentions. He is on
their terrain, and not on that of a revolutionary historical, or even of a merely
serious, critique. Even liberal historians can see that the truth of the camps and the
genocide does not lie in a history of intentions.

There was a massacre of a large number of Jews because they were Jews. And in
our eyes, if words have meaning, there was genocide, whatever the exact number
of deaths. In the same way France committed a massacre at Setif and in
Constantinois in 1945 which killed between 4500 and 45000 Algerians. And there
was a genocide of Red Indians.

We do not wish to discuss with people who deny massacres and racial persecution
by twisting words, but rather with those who try to explain them, something which
neither the revisionists nor the exterminationists do. Faurisson is neither usable nor
supportable because he reinforces a confusion which revolutionary theory is
precisely there to dispel.

In a text published by Libération on March 7th 1979, Pierre Guillaume wrote two
sentences which could have summarised very well our position on the content of
this affair : « The anti-Nazism without Nazi's which reigns over the world is an
outlet for a confused society which cannot manage to face its own problems. One
doesn't fight against the inexorable mechanisms of real oppression with
stereotypical representations (images d'Épinal) ». If this text had contained only
this, we would simply have observed that its publication in Libération went against
our principles : that is to say we don't defend our basic positions in the newspapers.
Unfortunately it contained something else. Shortly after the publication of this
article Pierre Guillaume explained why he had considered it useful to send his prose
to the central organ of neo-reformism.

After having explained the persecutions which had befallen Faurisson, Pierre
Guillaume continued : « it became vital for the development of the situation to
obtain support and thus to obtain the agreement of everyone over the same text,
without concession or second thoughts. This text therefore had to include the
famous sentence which seemed to render Faurisson indefensible : « Hitler never
ordered the execution of a single Jew merely because he was Jewish » by showing
that this sentence was strictly true, even if Hitler did not give a damn about what
became of the Jews in practise »

This sentence indeed rendered Faurisson indefensible.

As to whether it's really true that on « the level of strictly scientific history » « Hitler
never ordered the execution of a single Jew merely because he was Jewish »,
having examined Faurisson's scientific work more closely, we are no longer so sure.
But even if it were true, this truth appears so severe, so restricted, that it is
reduced to nothing. When Pierre Guillaume adds : « even if Hitler didn't give a
damn about what happened to the Jews », he himself shows the inanity of this
alleged truth.

A member of Herouth might say : « Begin never ordered or accepted that anyone
was killed at Sabra and Chatila because of his Palestinian sympathies. » Faurisson
would agree : where are the authentic documents proving the contrary ? The truth
is that one is always responsible for one's allies, and that even if it did not want it,
the Israeli army at least created the conditions favourable to this massacre (even
without speaking of the fact that it allowed the murderers to continue). The Israeli
board of inquiry itself recognised that the State had an « indirect » responsibility.
One could multiply sentences of this kind : Guy Mollet [Socialist Prime Minister at
the time of the struggle for independence in Algeria - translator] never ordered or
accepted that anyone was killed or tortured merely because it was suspected that
he belonged to the FLN. Stalin never ordered. . .
It is strictly false to assert that Hitler didn't give a damn about [ie. was indifferent
to – translator] the fate of the Jews. He wasn't organising their collective massacre
from 1919 onwards, but he did plenty in order that rather a lot of them died, and it
is not really to be the victim of antifascist propaganda to think that he did not
mourn their fate. Is it necessary to find written orders by Guy Mollet himself in
order to associate him with the Algerian torture ? Undoubtedly he did not give a
damn what happened to the militants of the FLN who fell into the hands of the
paratroopers during the battle of Algiers. In order to be anti-Stalinist is it necessary
to find orders written by Stalin proving that he was directly implicated in the politics
of his State ? In reality, revolutionary critique doesn't need the individual culpability
of heads of State, and it is the same for their innocence. What determines our
attitude towards them is not their good or bad will. What makes them enemies is
the fact that they are heads of State. But Vieille Taupe 2 would seek to
demonstrate that the Nazis, and particularly Hitler, were not « guilty » of everything
attributed to them. To assert the opposite of the official version of something is not
the same as to criticise it.

How does Faurisson claim to defend the indefensible ? Here are the explanations
which he gives in Thion's book :

« Hitler never ordered nor admitted that anyone was to be killed because of
his race or his religion »

« Explanation of this sentence : »

« Hitler and the Nazis said: "the Allies and the Jews want our annihilation,
but it is they who will be annihilated." »

« Similarly, the Allies and the Jews said: "Hitler and the Nazis want our
annihilation, but it is they who will be annihilated." »

« For one side as for the other, what mattered first was to win the war, at
the same time against the military and against the civilians (men, women,
the old, children all together). »

It is here that we disengaged from him. Hic Jacet Lepus. [Here is the crux of the
problem].

Hitler and the Nazis on one side, the Allies and the Jews on the other : delimiting
the sides involved in this way is historically false and it ought to be odious to
anyone who isn't anti-Semitic; The Nazis – a political party in power within a
State – and Hitler – the head of that party and of that State – form an easily
defined whole. But, unless one thinks, like the pre-war anti-Semites, that the Jews
manipulated the democratic regimes, it is false to present the Jews as a belligerent
entity. Faurisson clarifies in a footnote : « On September 5th 1939, Chaim
Weizmann, president of the World Jewish Congress, declared war on Germany. »
Apart from the fact that on the historical level this is a fiction, we would point out
that Weizmann was not at all, like Hitler or Roosevelt, a Head of State capable of
mobilising armies and citizens. Faurisson continues : « For Hitler, the Jews were
representatives of a hostile, belligerent nation. » It must be noted that on this point
Faurisson shares Hitler's point of view.

In its special issue devoted to the Jews on the 17th February 1939, Je Suis Partout,
the organ of French fascists and anti-Semites, wrote :

« The Jews – we believe we have demonstrated it sufficiently – constitute
despite their dispersion a perfectly homogenous nation, more coherent from
the racial point of view than all other human groupings. For this reason they
are subject to the great laws which govern the relations between the
different human communities of the world. However the life of a nation is
made up of the alternatives between peace and war. (...) »
« The French people are at peace with Germany. The Jewish people are at
war with Germany. »

« It does not matter who started it. Let's note that the Jewish nation has a
PERSONAL disagreement to settle with the Reich and that it endeavours to
settle it victoriously by mobilising under its standards the greatest possible
number of allies. »

Making racial criteria the sign of membership of a nation which one is fighting, is a
racist politics. To consider that this nation defined by racist politics really exists, is
to adopt a racist point of view. Reducing the deaths of Jews during the Second World War to a banal act of war, is to conceal racism as a fundamental component of Nazi ideology and politics.

Certainly, « one doesn't fight against the inexorable mechanisms of real oppression
with stereotypical representations ». But what are Faurisson and Vieille Taupe 2
doing ? To the dominant stereotypical image, outlined at Nuremberg and coloured
by the projection of modern horror, they oppose another stereotypical image : that
of a war between the Jews and the Nazis. This conception, which they share with
the anti-Semitic right, is no more false than that which turns an imperialist war into
a crusade against Absolute Evil. But it is no less false. Those who see in the birth of
the « myth » of genocide the work of a Jewish conspiracy think according to the
same pattern as those who see behind Faurisson's work the hand of a neo-Nazi
international. Both of them have a policeman's conception of history.
Pierre Guillaume's intentions are of little importance. It must be noted that far from
making it possible for our basic positions to be expressed by drawing on the work of
Faurisson, his activity only resulted in giving ultra-left support to this Lyonnais
crackpot.

At the beginning of 1980, having decided to put things in writing, J-P Carasso, G
Dauvé, C Martineau and S Quadruppani each wrote to Pierre Guillaume expressing
their profound disagreement with him. A belated attempt to straighten things up
regarding Vieille Taupe 2, but at least, we dipped a toe into it.
Faurisson, we wrote, only violated a taboo without taking it apart, and he remained
on the terrain of myth. One doesn't refute religion, and one doesn't seek to
« convince » its followers, rather one shows its function and its operation. In the
same way one would not refute an advertisement, something which is neither true
nor false : its intention is not to demonstrate, but to associate, in the same way
that a myth does, and is both elaborate and vivid in its variants. Thus it is absurd, if
one wishes to deconstruct, to seek to prove that the myth lies.
« Working-class people (…) are drawing upon beliefs which, though rarely
considered, are still in most cases firmly there. These beliefs, some of the basic
Christian doctrines, they hold but do not examine. Nor do they often think that they
have much relevance to the day-to-day business of living » (Richard Hoggart, The
Uses of Literacy, Penguin, 1958, pp. 115-16). This truth obviously applies to all
classes. The same person who shows immense common sense in his own life, will
everyday swallow without discussion the worst improbabilities about Jesus, or
Stalin, or the gas chambers, etc.

Pierre Guillaume's response, a few months later, can be summarised as : I'm
sticking to my guns. Since then he has always pursued this course.
Roughly speaking, everyone more or less believes in the gas chambers. But doubt
about them is not some miraculous lever that might enable one to raise the world
or its ideology. It may be that doubt about them is growing. So what ? To believe
that one could intervene in order that the abandoning of this belief was not
achieved smoothly, and that this might force people to reflect on the mechanisms
of ideology, is a delusion close to delirium. Why would the gas chambers form the
providential grain of sand, capable of jamming the mechanism of antifascist
ideology ? There is no such grain of sand. To be convinced of this it is only
necessary to see to what extent the Faurisson affair was specifically French.
The principal function of horrific mythology is to blind people to the fundamental
unity of the modern world. Concentrationist mythology derived from the Second
World War is only part of this set of representations of barbarism, against which the
only recourse is supposedly democracy. But concentrationist mythology and the
imagery of the gas chambers are by no means the cornerstone of the dominant
ideology. They play a role of unequal importance according to country. In the
United States, an Arthur Butz, both « revisionist » and anti-Semitic, can teach in a
small university, without his theories sparking off the journalistic and political
hysteria of a « Faurisson affair ». In Britain, a former officer in the special services
could organise a fake concentration camp in which people could pay to be treated
badly, whereas in France such an enterprise would have been impossible, there
would have been a mobilisation of organisations and the intervention of the law.
As Pierre Guillaume had showed in his post-face to Kautsky's Three Sources of
Marxism (Spartacus, 1969), there is no consciousness outside of a practise within
which this consciousness has a function. The Leninist ambition to « make (people)
become conscious » is ideological : it is only used to give the donor of
consciousness power over those to whom he brings it. It wouldn't occur to us to
appeal for communism through a leaflet. Even during a revolutionary period one
would not « appeal », one would express what one was doing. Public opinion is the
opposite of this : it develops a passionate interest in what it does not do, in what it
cannot change.

When the revolutionary horizon appears to be blocked, revolutionaries readily cling
to miraculous solutions. Vieille Taupe 2 believes in a certain number of « principles»
that are supposed to be subversive : truth, honesty, scientific probity, the accuracy
of information. It fights in the name of the ideal of the media as against their real
use. It appeals to a moral code against the violation of that code. However
experience teaches us that any morality is made to be transgressed, and that any
code of ethics is fixed according to inevitable and foreseen lapses. In the fake
Monde Diplomatique, we didn't reproach the press for playing its role badly. On the
contrary we noted that it fulfilled it. The revolutionary movement does not appeal to
an idea of justice against breaches of that idea. It demonstrates that the university,
the school, the army, the law, the press, art, etc. etc., can only play the role of
guarantors of social order. Vieille Taupe 2 went from this to demanding that the
journalist produce the true duty of the journalist. There is no difference between
this demand and democratic campaigns for « true » information, for a press that is
« free from power and money », for « access to culture by all », etc.
The important thing is not the fact that people believe or not in the existence of gas
chambers, but the reasons why they value this belief so highly. It is not a matter of
setting about the truth or falsity of this belief, but of the historic causes which make
it a taboo.

The Faurisson affair had harmful effects within society as well as in the work of
those who criticised it. At a time when the « Jewish community » was about to
constitute just one more ghetto, one more « identity », at a time when the
revolutionary movement had the task of affirming the human species against the
crystallization of « communities » whether they be homosexual, Arab or Jewish. . .
at this very moment the harmful influence of Faurisson exerted itself in the revolutionary ranks. Vieille Taupe 2 started looking for Jewish sounding names to sign its letters and petitions. However, to speak of « Jews » as a banal reality,
whereas this is the first notion to be criticised, a notion whose questioning
undermines anti-Semitism and Zionism at the same time, here was a practise which
Faurisson helped reinforce among those who found him interesting.
The conception of the Second World War as an « irreconcilable war between Hitler
and the Jews » proceeds, following the example of Hitler or Begin, through the
forced integration of everyone born to Jewish parents into the « Jewish » bloc, by
commanding that person to conform, for good or bad fortune, to a community of
« Jewish » destiny which falls into the category of myth. Speaking of « the Jews » is
to justify the claims and practises of both the Third Reich and the State of Israel in
imposing their law on any individual who cannot prove their non-membership of this
« community ».

Just as much as the bombing in the rue Copernic or the shooting in the Rue des
Rosiers, the Faurisson scandal achieved the opposite of what revolutionaries might
wish for : it froze « persons born of Jewish parents » into a defensive hysteria.
Amongst other things, it is because of Faurisson that today people still seek an
identity according to criteria which resemble the racial laws of the Third Reich like
two peas in a pod.

----

The spring of la Guerre Sociale

The Organisation of Young Revolutionary Workers (OJTR) had disappeared at about
the same time as Mouvement Communiste. At the beginning of 1974 the OJTR
organised a national meeting which was a failure. Fortunately this did not prevent it
from publishing A World Without Money (3 booklets, 1975-6), in which for the first
time, perhaps, and unlike utopian and anarchist writings, the concrete mechanism
of a communist revolution was envisaged.

The author of this text, Dominique Blanc, then organised King Kong International
(1976). Typical of the period, the editorial, a synthesis of essential communist
positions, stood in sharp contrast to other minor articles, and to a text on LIP which
produced no critique of this rescue operation of a company by its employees. It is
never enough to indicate the profoundly proletarian causes of social acts, it is still
necessary to speak of what effects they lead to. In the LIP affair, as in many other
cases, capitalism succeeded in penetrating inside the workers' action and made it a
capitalist enterprise (in both senses of the word) which also, by virtue of the
national and international impact it experienced, had an anti-revolutionary
function. [Note 1]

With the second issue the journal changed its name to la Guerre Sociale (Issue 1
1977). A text on the abolition of wage labour, distributed in large quantities on May
1st 1977, was rerun as an editorial. It coexisted with at least two deeply erroneous
texts, one on automation and one on the refusal of work, which was one-sidedly
interpreted as proof that Capital was at death's door. The clarification in issue 2 did
not develop matters.

Among the past and present participants in la Guerre Sociale, some had taken part
in Vieille Taupe and le Mouvement Communiste. In addition, Gilles Dauvé
contributed to Guerre Sociale by giving the first versions, subsequently modified, of
the texts on the State (published in issue 2) and on the camps (issue 3, 1979).
Reading la Guerre Sociale and La Banquise will clearly show the connections and
convergences between them. In addition to the matters we speak of below (and
which are not trivial), La Banquise addresses two criticisms to Guerre Sociale :
firstly, Guerre Sociale does not get to the bottom of the analysis of demand
struggles; secondly, it has poorly broken away from propaganda.
If Guerre Social is tempted by triumphalism (the articles already mentioned in Issue
1, the articles on Denain-Longwy on Issue 2), this is probably more than a sign of
excessive optimism. The critique of the workers' movement, including wildcat
movements, has not been carried to its conclusion. Guerre Sociale wrote in its
fourth issue (1982) :

« It seems to us that, regardless of the forms of organisation, whether trade
unionist or autonomous, the proletariat also expresses itself in its elementary
struggle of resistance to exploitation. Even if in this way, it does not appear
Note 1 See the issue of Négation devoted to LIP. revolutionary. »

This is a theory that is, at the very least questionable, and requires discussion. (See
our positions on the definition of the proletariat). Elementary resistance is a
condition of the communist movement, but it is only a condition. We don't applaud
all workers' struggle (which can be or become anti-proletarian), nor even all class
struggle (which can be reformist or even end up by imprisoning proletarians still
further within capitalism).

One cannot make a dead end of this issue. No regroupment will be made solely on
the basis of an understanding of communism and the revolution. Still it is necessary
to agree about what there is between now and a revolution; about what the
proletariat does and does not do.

In its first issues Guerre Sociale preferred to publish minor texts at the expense of
others that were more fundamental (on the Situationist International for example),
which were reserved for a more limited distribution. Guerre Sociale often lagged
behind A World Without Money. The text on the crisis (issue 3) left to one side the
main elements of a previous duplicated analysis by Dominique Blanc on the subject.
Guerre Sociale produced too much simplification, and too much propaganda.
« It was a conference, that is to say of education and popularisation. I would
have liked that this conference while teaching me something, would also
have taught you something. This criteria of discovery is the only one which
appears valid to me when I write. » (letter of Antonin Artaud to André
Rolland de Renéville, 11th January 1933).

At the end of 1979, after issue 3, Dominique Blanc sent a circular letter to the
members of the group and to a series of people who had collaborated with him in
the past, as well as those he knew among the editors of the fake Monde
Diplomatique. Guerre Sociale, he said, was undergoing the consequences of the
general passivity. It was in crisis and he wondered whether it was necessary to give
it up or continue it. A correspondence followed. The future editors of La Banquise
recognised the importance of the existence of a journal like la Guerre Sociale but
addressed to it the criticisms summarised above.

In the spring of 1980, a meeting took place in Paris, the minutes of which were
written shortly afterwards by the Lyons members of Guerre Sociale. No minute are
impartial, and ours would have been different, but these are honest and we
reproduce them in an annexe.

The meeting had proceeded in a general climate of goodwill, honest critique and a
refusal of polemic. Those who today produce La Banquise had the feeling that we
perhaps were entering a new period during which a revolutionary regroupment was
going to take place. In the following weeks texts were written and dispatched to all
the participants :

 a text by Gilles Dauvé on the concentration camps and their myth
(subsequently published in two issues of La Frondeur; some pages were
incorporated in « The Horror is Human » in the first issue of La Banquise).
This text lapsed too much into mass psychology but initiated a critique of
Rassinier and Faurisson;
 another text by him on « Proletariat and Communism » taking up former
manuscripts;
 a text by Jean-Pierre Carasso and Serge Quadruppani, which after
modification became « For a World Without Moral Order » in the first issue of
La Banquise;
 a text by Gilles Dauvé on war, part of which became « War and Fear » (Issue
1 of La Banquise, an extract of which would be published in Indolencia, in
Barcelona, and would be presented in error as having emanated from Guerre
Sociale).

Commitments seemed to have been honoured. But...
Dominique Blanc firstly considered that « Proletariat and Communism » threw the
proletariat out of the window, then some time after, declared that the text on
morals was closer to the positions held by Bruckner (a modernist intellectual) than
of Guerre Sociale, that this mush of « immoralist moralism was worth nothing and
explained nothing » and he finished by characterising it as « Vaneigemist wanking »
(in other words sub-Situationist). His criticisms were expressed with a less and less
controlled aggression and left little room for argument. The text on morals did
indeed contain some very erroneous passages which have since been corrected
(amongst other things an uncritical presentation of the myth of the « recalcitrant »,
and even a half-identification of the recalcitrant with the revolutionary) but draft
texts did not deserve such fury.

In addition, disagreements were further aggravated by the Faurisson affair. By
mutual agreement between Pierre Guillaume and us it had not been discussed at
the meeting, since we were still awaiting (March 1980) Pierre's answers to our
criticisms. Shortly afterwards, since Pierre continued with fine energy along the
path he had taken, we considered that it was impossible to conceal our
disagreements with him any longer. Believing in preparing the future and not
wasting it, we brought all of it to the attention of those who had taken part in the
March meeting. Pierre reacted with a new letter which we also circulated. We
wanted to lance the abscess. It was nearly impossible for us to believe that Vieille
Taupe 2 would persist for long in its aberrations. We thought that on the whole the
members of Guerre Sociale would agree with us on the content of our disagreement
with Pierre, would make this known to him and that he would find himself up
against the wall.

But Dominique Blanc, while holding Pierre to be wrong on the question of
intervening in the media, concentrated all of his energy on criticising our attitude
and declared that Pierre's was more « sympathetic » than ours. To our great
astonishment, he hardly drew any conclusion about the content (should one
support Faurisson ?) but declared Rassinier more subversive and Pierre more
sympathetic than us.

He chose to take what, for us, was a call for an essential discussion and a warning,
as an indictment, made against Pierre by people who were equally guilty of the
things for which they reproached him (letters to the press, errors that were indeed
open to criticism). Dominique Blanc had rightly reproached one of his comrades for
having attempted to get the Nouvel Observateur to mention Guerre Sociale. Then
what is to be said about a systematic publicity campaign for Faurisson ?

Imagine a group publishing an article against democracy, one of whose most
eminent members, without whom the article could not have been produced, then
stands as a candidate in an election ? This was the unacceptable confusion which
Pierre created by taking part in a revolutionary grouping while conducting a
campaign for the democratization of the media in favour of Faurisson. Here lay an
ambiguity that needed be resolved. Dominique Blanc refused to do so. As a result
the following autumn Guerre Sociale joined Vieille Taupe 2 in the confusionist
activism in defence of Faurisson.

The critique of « human rights » today forms part of minimum revolutionary
positions, for us, as without doubt for Guerre Sociale. How can a group then allow
itself to be more and more openly drawn into a campaign for human rights ? And
why exactly should the human in question be Faurisson ?

An agreement had been entered into in March. We had the impression that we had
fulfilled it. We were alone in this view. Whatever the disagreements with Guerre
Sociale, they did not justify an attitude which can be summarized as follows :
Guerre Sociale deliberately chose not to associate with people which it
characterised as sub-Situationist intellectuals or as drifting dangerously towards
Camattism. The text on morals, amended, is in issue 1, the ideas on the proletariat
are in issues 1 and 2. Everyone can judge for themselves the verdict passed on us
by Dominique Blanc.

There undoubtedly exist between us important disagreements, as much over the
conception of the proletariat as over the critique of moeurs. These disagreements
would most probably have prevented a close collaboration, at any rate in the same
journal. But there was an opportunity to discuss essential subjects and Dominique
Blanc's attitude prevented that.

In the circular letter which put a full stop to our relations with Guerre Sociale and its
network of correspondents we included these lines which summarize our feelings
about this episode : « That the whims of an individual and the « obscure settling of
emotional accounts » still have so such importance demonstrates the weakness of
the revolutionary current. In the whole of this sad business this is what troubles us
most. » As long as the revolutionary current is weak, confrontations of personality
and character will retain their importance. Sometimes it is necessary to produce a
little psychology in order not to have to do so later on. But in particular, it is
necessary to find a mode of relations between individuals and groups which
marginalises paralysing emotional behaviour. The gathering together of some
individuals in La Banquise is not an end in itself. We are open to any relations with
groups and individuals, but it is necessary that these relations are conducted on
terms which show that from the start we have a minimum in common. There are
rules of behaviour to be found between revolutionaries. After having characterised
us as Vaneigemist wankers and declared us to be less subversive than Rassinier,
Dominique Blanc appeared astonished that we thereafter refused any discussion
with him. He has just written us a letter of abuse concerning the first issue of La
Banquise. To this letter [Note 2] as to those which preceded it we will not be replying.
Everyone knows those leftists who patiently draw themselves up to heap insults on
their interlocutors before boldly returning to the argument. We don't practise this
kind of angelism, not (or not only) out of self-esteem, but because one can only
Note 2

Like the whole of the documents relative to the questions tackled by La Banquise, it goes without saying that
this letter is at the disposal of anyone interested in it.
discuss effectively with those people with whom one at least has a common
language. To insults, we could only reply with insults, and we also do not want to
sink into that sort of petty sub-Situationist game.

After the very friendly meeting in March 1980, with only one exception, the friends
and members of Guerre Sociale to whom the texts and the copies of the
correspondence with Pierre Guillaume and Dominique Blanc had been sent,
expressed no reaction. Nothing. Why did they play the white zombies we know
them not to be. In its exposition of what had occurred between issues 3 and 4
Guerre Sociale makes the following allusion to this wasted spring : « Instead of
growing in size, we managed to damage some of our relationships and even those
with whom a more remote and more occasional collaboration might have been
possible » (issue 4, 1982, p. 43). The reader of la Guerre Sociale would learn no
more.

La Banquise, like any consistent revolutionary journal, works for its own
disappearance. Our activity only makes sense in terms of a movement which one
day will encompass all of the energies expressed here or there in the form of
groups or journals. We have nothing to do with the great family of the ultra-left. On
the other hand, we know that a sudden appearance by the proletariat will soon
settle the differences which separate us from the other segments of the
revolutionary movement. While waiting, we will continue to seek among ourselves,
and with those we meet, a coherence that is never given from the start, but can
only be reached by clarifying points of disagreement as far as is possible, and
working though them. The original Vieille Taupe, le Mouvement Communiste,
Guerre Sociale and those who today produce La Banquise have all made errors. The
most serious of them would be to leave these errors in the dark.