'Preliminary materials for a balance sheet of the twentieth century'. 218pp, 2008. Gilles Dauvé (pen name Jean Barrot; born 1947) is a French political theorist associated with left communism. 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 current associated with Amadeo Bordiga (and its heretical journal Invariance), German-Dutch council communism, and the French currents associated with Socialisme ou Barbarie and the Situationist International. Dauvé has written extensively on how these neglected theoretical currents can help us to understand the failure of Second International Marxism (including both Social Democracy and Leninist "Communism"), the global revolutionary upsurge of the 1960s and its subsequent dissolution, and more recent developments in the global situation of capitalist accumulation and class struggle. Among English-speaking communists and anarchists, Dauvé is best-known for the texts 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, Berkley, California. An essay from the first pamphlet, and the second text were reprinted in London by Unpopular Books as What is Communism (1983) and What is Situationism (1987). The texts of Eclipse were reprinted with a new foreword in 1997 by Antagonism (London). It includes Dauvé's translations of two of his own articles and one by François Martin, both originally published in Le Mouvement Communiste (Paris: Champ Libre, 1972). These articles develop Bordiga's critique of Second International productivism in light of Marx's writings on formal and real subsumption and the global uprisings of 1968, and they revise Bordiga's theory of communization by drawing on council communist and Situationist traditions.