Gilles Dauvé

Among English-speaking communists and anarchists, Dauvé is best known for his Eclipse and Re-emergence of the Communist Movement, first published by Black & Red Press (Detroit, Michigan) in 1974 and Critique of the Situationist International, first published in Red Eye, Berkeley, California. An essay from the first pamphlet, and the whole of the second article, were reprinted by Unpopular Books in London as What is Communism (1983) and What is Situationism respectively, in 1987. The first pamphlet was reprinted with a new foreword in 1997 by Antagonism (London). It includes Dauvé's own translations of two of his articles and one by François Martin, both originally published in Le Mouvement Communiste at the Wayback Machine (archived October 28, 2009) (Paris: Champ Libre, 1972). These articles develop Bordiga's critique of Second International productivism in light of Marx's writings on formal and real subsumption and the global uprisings of 1968, and theory of communization by drawing on council communist and Situationist traditions.

Dauvé also participated in the journal La Banquise, which he edited with Karl Nesic and others from 1983 to 1986. This sought to develop the new communist program suggested in Le Mouvement Communiste through a critical appraisal of post-1968 radical politics, including Situationist and autonomist experiments. It also developed the theory of society's real subsumption into capital. The editors describe their aims and influences in The Story of Our Origins at the Wayback Machine (archived October 28, 2009) (La Banquise, 2, 1983).

In collaboration with other left communists such as François Martin and Karl Nesic, Dauvé has attempted to fuse, critique, and develop different left communist currents, most notably the Italian movement associated with Amadeo Bordiga (and its heretical journal Invariance), German-Dutch council communism, and the French perspectives associated with Socialisme ou Barbarie and the Situationist International. He has focused on theoretical discussions of economic issues concerning the controversial failure of Second International, Marxism (including both Social Democracy and Leninist Communism), the global revolutionary upsurge of the 1960s and its subsequent dissolution, and on developments in global capitalist accumulation and class struggle.

Gilles Dauvé (pen name Jean Barrot; born 1947) is a French political theorist, school teacher, and translator associated with left communism and the contemporary tendency of communization.