La Guerre Sociale

La Guerre Sociale was an ultra-left journal appearing in France from 1977 to 1985. It attracted controversy over its support for negationism.

The leading spirit was Dominique Blanc. He had previously been involved in the Organisation des Jeunes Travailleurs Révolutionnaires (OJTR) during the early 1970s. Originally inspired by the Situationist International, the OJTR was later influenced by left communism. A milieu had developed around the bookshop La Vieille Taupe which sought to reconcile the views of the German and Italian left communists. The group Le Mouvement Communiste had emerged from these circles.

In 1972 OJTR published the text Militantisme, stade suprême de l'aliénation. They also produced texts under the name Quatre Millions de Jeune Travailleurs, taking the name from a 1971 youth publication of the Parti Socialiste Unifié - a French Socialist Party. During 1974 OJTR organised a national conference but disappeared shortly afterwards. However the text Un Monde Sans Argent emerged from the remains of the group. It was published as three pamphlets by the 'Les Amis de 4 Millions de Jeunes Travailleur' between 1975-76.

By 1976 Dominique Blanc had published a journal called King Kong International with former members of the OJTR, Le Mouvement Communiste and the milieu around La Vieille Taupe. The following year essentially the same grouping produced the first issue of La Guerre Sociale.

The text 'De l'exploitation dans les camps à l'exploitation des camps' appeared in GS#3 in 1979. This tackled the concentration camp system and its subsequent ideological use. It made extensive use of the work of Paul Rassinier, a lifelong pacifist whose political trajectory had taken him through being a left-oppositionist, socialist deputy and by the 1950s a member of the Anarchist Federation. He had been interned in German labour camps during the war for his resistance activities. He subsequently wrote several books challenging other accounts of the concentration camps. In the course of this he moved from scepticism about the existence of extermination camps as opposed to labour camps, to denial of the scale of the holocaust. Although GS appreciated the visceral anti-Stalinism in Rassinier's writings, such as his accusations that Communist Party members collaborated in the functioning of the camps, they 'failed' to mention that Rassinier was equally antisemitic.

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