Obituary: Michel Roger aka Olivier – Historian and Activist of the Communist Left

Michel Roger Obituary

Michel Roger, (born March 5, 1948), also known as Michel Olivier, historian of the left communist movement and militant in several organisations of the communist left since the late 60s, died July 3rd, 2024. He made essential contributions to the communist left movement with his books researching and detailing unknown aspects its history.

It is often overlooked in current discussions in the wider Left, but from the very beginning the communist left has had a long history of dissent against Stalinism, and it is furthermore distinct from Trotskyism and anarchism. It was briefly a mass movement in some countries (e.g. in Germany ca. 1920 with the successful formation of the Communist Workers Party, KAPD, Kommunistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands) that was denounced by Lenin in his pamphlet “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder.

Starting with the second congress of the Communist International in 1920, this left wing of the movement began to be expelled and started to lead an increasingly isolated parallel existence distinct from “official” communism.

It survived as a tendency in small circles over the following decades, until popular interest in revolutionary theory, practice and history resurged in the late 60s and early 70s.

Broadly speaking, the historical communist left had two main sub-currents, the more “councilist” – and anti-Leninist – German-Dutch tendency, which puts the self-organisation of the working class at its centre, and the Italian Bordigist tendency, which puts the theory of invariance of the communist programme and a kind of super-Leninist view of the party as the center of its organising.

Michel Roger joined the group that was organised around the paper Revolution Internationale which had formed in 1968 early on. This group would, in 1975, merge into the French section and one of the main constituents of the International Communist Current (ICC), which was founded in that year. Revolution Internationale became the French paper of the ICC.

Roger belonged to this organisation until 2002. He was a member of the Executive Secretariat and later delegate to the International Secretariat.

Initially the ICC was more of the councilist persuasion. As the revolutionary wave of the late 60s/early 70s ebbed away, different revolutionary groups plunged into different crises.

The Bordigist current of the International Communist Party was ravaged by splits in 1973 and 1982. These and the internal shake-ups of the ICC in 1995 and in 2001 are hard to grasp for the outside spectator and we won’t go into the details here. They often involved much mud-slinging and sometimes grotesque public insults.

However these internal crises need to be mentioned in passing because Michel Roger became a member of the Internal Faction of the ICC and then was expelled from the ICC along with everybody else in the Faction in 2002.

This faction continued an organised existence outside of the ICC, but still regarded itself as “internal” until they went on to found the International Group of the Communist Left who still publish the journal Revolution or War in several languages.

Over the following years, he got closer to the Internationalist Communist Tendency (ICT) until he essentially set up their French presence by establishing the publishing arm Editions Prométée and the journal Bilan et Perspectives and eventually, in the autumn of 2023, when already ill from cancer, nominally set up the Groupe révolutionnaire internationaliste as an affiliated group.

Both through Editions Prométée and through the independent publishing house Editions ni patrie ni frontières, he made essential contributions to the history of the communist left.

He published a number of books detailing several previously fairly unknown phases of the history of the communist left. The key volumes in this are

– Les années terribles (La Gauche communiste italienne dans l’émigration, 1926-1945);

– Envers et contre tout (Des oppositionnels de gauche jusqu’à l’Union communiste, 1924-1939)

– L’enfer continue, La Gauche communiste de France parmi les révolutionnaires (1944-1952);

He presented the first one of these already as a thesis in social sciences in 1981, but it wasn’t until 2012 when npnf published it in book form. The account goes into deep detail of the Italian left in exile in the years of fascism and war. Envers et contre tout looks at the related history of the Left opposition in France in the pre-war period. L’enfer continue features a detailed introduction about the GCF (written as Michel Leroux), but is otherwise mainly an anthology of documents of the Gauche communiste de France.

These books fill important blank spaces about some of the more obscure sections of the communist left. Other books that Roger (co-)published and often furnished with knowledgeable introductions inlude an anthology of Marc Chirik’s writings, a translation of Arturo Peregalli and Sandro Saggioro Amadeo Bordiga La defaite et les années obscures and anthologies of writings by Onorato Damen.

For the French translation of Christian Riechers Gramsci et le marxisme italien face aux idéologies de l’époque he wrote an introduction which reveals certain interesting aspects of limitations of the current left communists. Referring to Gramsci’s idea of ‘cultural hegemony’, he opines that if the proletariat has to build alliances this should be in the social struggles, not the cultural terrain. The cultural terrain, according to Roger, is that of the dominant class, which controls the media and can rely on its experts in all fields.

He correctly points out the use that all sorts of mainstream leftists and even protagonist of the radical “new” right can get out of Gramsci’s ‘hegemony’ ideas. However I think there is a danger of throwing out the baby with the bathwater by giving up the whole cultural terrain to the bourgeoisie.

Surely the idea of a real communism has to be imaginable, plausible and desirable for the proletariat (and its individual constituents) to create it. This – in our opinion – would include combatting the ideas of postmodernism, cultural relativism and identity politics on the cultural as well as social plane.

How else than by working on different realms are we going to “demolish the reactionary rhetoric disseminated by the identitarian trends in vogue in American universities and now in European anti-globalisation and radical circles”, as Roger demands in the same preface?

One obvious battlefield is the writing on history, to which Michel Roger has made important contributions with his books, articles and publishing.

Christoph Fringeli

Obituaries

• Obituary by Juan for the IGCL https://www.igcl.org/Comrade-Olivier-Has-Passed-Away
• Obituary by the ICT https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2024-07-17/in-memory-of-olivier
• Homage by Yves Coleman (Ni patrie ni frontières) https://npnf.eu/spip.php?article1170

Selected bibliography

• – Les années terribles (La Gauche communiste italienne dans l’émigration, 1926-1945);
• – Envers et contre tout (Des oppositionnels de gauche jusqu’à l’Union communiste, 1924-1939)
• – L’enfer continue, La Gauche communiste de France parmi les révolutionnaires (1944-1952);
• – L’anarchisme d’Etat – La Commune de Barcelone – Rapport d’Helmut Rüdiger. Editions Ni patrie ni frontières, Paris 2015 (introduction)

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