(Nearly) unknown fighter for us has died at age 90. Read his bio. He did his bit, we do our bit.

[ConsAreLiars]

Georges Fontenis: passing away of an international figure in libertarian communism

One of the last personalities of the anarchist movement from the 1940s and '50s has left us with the death of Georges Fontenis in Tours on 9th August 2010 at the age of 90. He will remain in the memory of the workers' movement as an untiring fighter for libertarian communism, a supporter of the Algerian independists, a syndicalist with the École Émancipée, one of the leading figures of May 1968 in Tours and a pillar of the Freethought movement and in particular the Indre-et-Loire branch of the Libre-Pensée federation. Until the very end he was also a member of Alternative Libertaire.

Born into a modest working-class family in the Parisian suburb of Lilas, Georges Fontenis became an active anarchist militant as a result of June 1936 and the enthusiasm over the Spanish Revolution. A member of the clandestine CGT under the Occupation, this young teacher in the 19th arrondissement of Paris was to become, after the Liberation, one of the most outspoken militants of the Fédération Anarchiste (FA). In 1946 he was elected general secretary of that organization and became a pole of resistance to the Stalinist hegemony in the workers' movement of the time.

In 1946-50, Georges Fontenis, who was very close to the exiled Spaniards of the CNT-FAI, was one of the promoters of the French CNT (CNT-F), an alternative to the Stalinized CGT and the atlanticist CGT-FO. After the collapse of the CNT-F in 1950, he joined the Fédération de l’Éducation nationale (FEN) and was active within its revolutionary syndicalist tendency, the École Émancipée.

Georges Fontenis went on to become one of the leading players in the struggles which affected the anarchist organization in 1951-53 and which led to the FA changing into the Fédération Communiste Libertaire (FCL). This would leave him with a badly damaged reputation. He later explained everything in his memoirs, first published in 1990. Republished in 2008 by Alternative Libertaire under the title "Changer le monde" (Changing the world), these memoirs constitute a vital font of information for historians of anarchism, but also a political appraisal of this period, one that is not entirely free of self-criticism.

At the outbreak of the Algerian insurrection of Toussaint Rouge in 1954, the FCL dedicated itself to supporting the independentists and Georges Fontenis together with his comrades established one of the largest networks of "couriers". But it was not its covert actions which were responsible for the FCL being dismantled by the forces of repression, it was its open propaganda. Arrested for questioning by the intelligence services (DST) after several months on the run, Georges Fontenis spent almost a year in prison and was finally banned from teaching within the state schools system in the Paris region. This period was the subject of a documentary in 2001, called "Une résistance oubliée (1954-1957), des libertaires dans la guerre d’Algérie" (A forgotten resistance: libertarians in the Algerian War).

More at: http://www.anarkismo.net/article/17292

A lot of this bio is about factions, but the greater message is just about "which side are you on?" when it come to those who work and that which owns.

It is not not about any kind of -ism. This is about someone who did what he could to fight against the masters and oppression and exploitation, regardless of the lingo and mapping framework he used to describe that reality.

He was on our side. Semantic parsing, argumentative nit-picking and purity tests aside, he was on our side. One more lost. But if you watch GritTV and DemocracyNow! and FSTV, there are many more unknown heroes carrying on that same work.

(edit, because it's always something)

[Ken Burch]

1. I wish I'd known of this man while he lived.

Thanks for posting this. We need to follow the example of people like Georges Fontenis, who fought for his cause with flexibility but without compromise for decades.

[ConsAreLiars]

5. Indeed.

There are many like him, here in the US and around the planet, who never will get a bio or even a mention on corporate media, not even an honest obit. For obvious class-interested staying-in-power-over-the-ignorant-rubes reasons.

[MH1]

2. "libertarian communism"?

sounds like a contradiction in terms to me.

And I thought anarchism was about getting rid of government completely. I do not consider anarchists "friends" politically.

I confess I didn't understand the article very well; my knowledge of the relevant historical events is probably not what it should be. But words do matter and I can't see the 'isms' he claimed as being positive, except to the extent they are less bad than what he was fighting against.

[ConsAreLiars]

3. My comments after the excerpted segment were an attempt to clarify why thinking/labeling "-isms"

is both unrealistic and dangerously divisive.

Doing that puts each small sunset of "us" in a separate small box as well as "them" and 'divides and conquers.' Using a self-description like "libertarian communism" only makes sense, and very good sense at that, when one stops buying into the fictions and either-or-but-not-both-or-neither mind-fucking being done by the corporate media.

And we in the US need to find the facts about the "people's history" of the world through our own efforts. A couple of starting points regarding this guy's work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Civil_War and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_resistance .

Back in the day, I had the good fortune to work in a couple of collectives (both surviving today, the one I can claim 'founder' rank is thriving) in which the initiators had the good sense to realize it was more a matter of "which side" than whatever overall theoretical/ideological one might think best explained things, Collective decisions reached consensus despite the great range of outlooks by those committed to working toward helping those projects proceed and succeed.

In my case, the best work I ever did was was as what might be called an M/L-worker-powerist, whatever that might mean, with a worker-powerist anarchist (the first thing we published was a Mother Jones bio), and a rather privileged-class experienced but totally good hearted and kind person who would make anyone she spent time with better people, and, as the collective grew, more wanting to serve the same goals even more sorts of "overviews or ideologies became included. It was that diversity that made it survive and thrive.

Beware labels.

(edit small typo)

[Spider Jerusalem]

6. Not a contradiction in terms except in that 'libertarian' has been hijacked by Ayn Rand cultists.

Left libertarianism = anarcho-syndicalism. Noam Chomsky is a left libertarian you may have heard of.

[MH1]

8. Communism requires authoritarianism

if you say otherwise please show me the society that has maintained communism without authoritarianism for any length of time.

last I heard, libertarianism is pretty much the opposite of authoritarianism.

[Spider Jerusalem]

9. You're confusing communism with Marxism-Leninism, Stalinism and Maoism

which strictly speaking aren't communism. The idea that communism 'requires authoritarianism' is possibly true given human nature, but then libertarianism would as well (show me an example of a successful society organised along libertarian principles, anywhere, with no authority at all. You can't; there isn't one.)

[hfojvt]

4. he was not fighting on our side

it appears that he was in the People's Judean Front - our mortal anemones - or something.

[ConsAreLiars]

7. Well, given the alternative of the Judean People's Front at that time,

no one can say he was wrong.