Monsieur Dupont is the pen name of two 21st century libertarian communist writers in Britain.
For some time one of them had been a member of the British Anarchist Federation, the Manchester-based communist group Subversion and the rank and file organisation the Communication Workers Group. They had both been employed by Royal Mail as postmen and from this experience they developed a common understanding of class struggle through a six year long correspondence. One of them now writes as frére dupont.
Their writing is informed by anarchist, situationist and Marxist politics, and they are declaredly anti-leninist and anti-organisational. They link their ideas on economic determination of social form to two theoretical precedents, the communists Paul Mattick and Sam Moss.
The situation at present, they argued, is characterised by the failure of propaganda and recruiting organisations to either convey ideas outside of the milieu or recruit a mass membership, and that even at the most basic level revolutionary consciousness has not addressed this circumstance. The motivation for their intervention was to strike against ’milieu patriotism’, and the ’reduced political language’ of political activists. They had become increasingly frustrated with the failures of leftist organisations, which they perceived as unconsciously promoting bourgeois structures and ideologies. By contrast they wished to re-connect ideas to lived experience of capitalist conditions, thereby breaking the hold of ’specialists’ of revolutionary theory particularly where these experiences contradicted received organisational responses. Their intervention coincided with a growing discontent within the anarchist milieu at the role of ’activists’ and their writing continues to have a small influence within what has become known as the anti-politics milieu.