Gilles Dauvé (pen name Jean Barrot; born 1947) is a French ultra-left political theorist, school teacher, and translator, associated with the development of communization theory.
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.
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 (Paris: Champ Libre, 1972).
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 (La Banquise, 2, 1983).