Henri Simon – The last council communist

When the news spread in the week before Christmas that Henri Simon had died, people acknowledged it in disbelief: hadn’t the 102-year-old French Marxist already achieved immortality? Until recently he was present with statements, analyzes and, above all, with his magazine “Échanges et Mouvement”. On the occasion of his 100th birthday, two colleagues visited him to conduct an interview for the Swiss “Untergrund Blättle”. They found Simon in his apartment in the 11th arrondissement in Paris, stapling and bagging the latest edition of “Échanges et Mouvement” for shipping, while he spoke of it, a text about the impact of the Covid crisis on the global market to complete.

Simon is believed to have died, the last representative of authentic council communism. “Authentic” means that he worked closely with people – the Dutch group Daad en Gedachte – who in turn were still in contact with the founders of council communism, Anton Pannekoek and Henk Canne Meijer. Simon represents the organic connection of three generations of council communism over 100 years. The term, the name of a movement and organizational participation in it, was not important to him at all: he had stopped using “-isms” for a long time, at least since the 1970s.

A unusual leftist

His life path is quite unusual, even for the dazzling French left-wing radicalism. In the documentary “Henri Simon: Activism in Contradiction” (2018), which is worth seeing, Simon begins his autobiographical stories with November 1945: his entry into working life – he doesn’t mention a word about the politicization by his communist mother and his time in the Paris Resistance ! He became an employee of a large insurance company and a member of the CGT union, whose idolization of a hard work ethic soon disgusted him. In 1953 he was thrown out as a left-wing deviant.

Two years later he was significantly involved in a wildcat strike in 1955 and was a member of the left-wing Trotskyist group Socialisme ou Barbarie around Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort. No longer willing to accept Castoriadis’ authoritarian behavior, which for him was more than just a personal quirk – the distinguished intellectual’s claim to power over the proles supposedly in need of leadership shone through – Simon dared to split with a minority and founded the Information Network in 1958 et correspondances ouvrières (ICO).

The name of the group, if you want to call it that at all, was to be understood literally: It was supposed to collect information and reports about class struggles and the situation in companies, and was supposed to create a forum in which militants from companies could exchange their experiences. This is where Simon’s actual journalistic work crystallized, as he primarily wrote a chronicle of class struggles and other social conflicts. If you put his brochures, published from 1957 to 2015, side by side, you get an impressive overview of the Western and Eastern European class struggles of these decades. But on the other hand that means: no theory, no philosophizing interpretation of history! The trained Marxist, who, as every visitor to his apartment could testify, read an incredible amount, practiced asceticism.

Activist non-activism

The renunciation also applied to practice: Simon was strictly against interventionism, against the formation of a vanguard, and against any form of permanent organization. He considered the organizational criticism of the council communists – “The social revolution is not a party matter” was their battle cry against the Bolsheviks from the 1920s – consistent to the point of self-abolition: good (participatory, cooperative) activism was no longer opposed to bad (elitist, Jacobin-Bolshevik) activism. opposite, it went against all activism. When Simon took part in strikes, it was never on behalf of a group or cause; he did not speak at meetings for any group that was not directly part of the class struggle. The situationists around Guy Debord admired him and the ICO people for this nameless radicalism and yet castigated their wait-and-see attitude. Simon greeted back: for him the “Situs” were unpleasantly loud miniature Lenins.

“May ’68” heralded the end of the ICO network. It fell apart because of its own success. Suddenly 100 people showed up at their meetings instead of the usual ten or twenty, and they wanted to do politics, establish a current, and institutionalize organizational criticism, which of course triggered a dispute about “how.” Exasperated, Simon dropped out and, with companions from Italy, Holland and Great Britain, founded “Échanges et Mouvement” in 1975 and returned to the original idea of ​​a pure information network.

Theory and dreams

Now one cannot escape the theory; one starts, however unconsciously, from certain presuppositions and draws conclusions from them, which is also a “theoretical act”. That’s why there are certainly theoretical texts by Simon, the most interesting of which is “The New Movement” from 1974. Here he makes his decision for asceticism transparent. He assumes that under capitalism class struggle and society are identical. To say that we live in a society of exploitation and oppression is only half the truth (and the worse half!). Because exploitation and oppression always involve resistance to it, subversion, the undermining of the imperatives of power. First of all, fleeting zones of autonomy form there – of self-determination and self-sufficiency. Autonomy is not about the seizure of power and proletarian dictatorship, it is not even anti-state.

The more capitalism socializes – here in the sense of: the entire society submits to itself – the more the ideas of the “Old Movement” lose importance, according to which the proletariat is brought to the final battle against the state and by an external force, through a party Capital must be managed. If capital becomes total, i.e. totalitarian, it is vulnerable to attack in all possible social places. The struggles for autonomy are no longer necessarily tied to the workplace. Simon explicitly welcomed the gay and women’s movement, the eco-friendly movement, and the young squatters. Most recently he spoke out in support of the Occupy movement.

This makes it clear: he rejected theory unless it emerged organically from the struggles themselves. If capitalist society is class struggle, then theory is also part of these class struggles. “We must be careful not to believe that the collection of information about previous battles and the analysis of theories based on that information will provide blueprints for future activities,” he wrote in 1974. “What emerges from a battle is to be believed The necessity of this struggle and therefore cannot serve as a criterion for judging what will emerge from other struggles.

Simon’s asceticism, his activist non-activism, his lack of theory, which is based on clearly defined theoretical assumptions, alienated even his closest – family – environment. He didn’t drink, didn’t comment on art, theater or literature for many years (his second wife was a poet after all!) and was considered, let’s say, emotionally subdued, even by his closest comrades. In the documentary, a companion, Christiane, finally asks him why, even in May in Paris, he never spoke publicly about his dreams (which he only confessed to at the end of his life). But it was about daily politics and sober assessments of the situation, he replied. Christiane answers: “That’s why the strikes always end badly, because our activists adapt their speeches to the politics of the day.” At least the two of them laugh about it.