Daniel Bensaïd archive

Gramsci is often considered as the main Marxist thinker to have paid particular attention to the specificities of the revolution in the West. His thinking on this question is indeed indispensable to any consideration of strategy, but it cannot be separated from the discussions initiated by Lenin and Trotsky in the Communist International (Comintern) of the 1920s.

This essay by Daniel Bensaïd remains one of the sharpest engagements with Lenin’s political thought from within the revolutionary Marxist tradition. Bensaïd identifies Lenin’s enduring contribution not as an organisational technique or a party model, but as a philosophy of political time: an understanding of history as fractured, uneven, and shot through with crises that open and close with brutal speed.

Expanded and revised version of the contribution presented at the Bensaïd Seminar organised in Amsterdam by the Fourth International on 3, 14 and 15 January 2012, at the premises of the International Institute for Research and Education (IIRE)

The late Daniel Bensaïd (1946–2010) on the silence of academics and his dissent as an anti-Zionist.

In 1964 Herbert Marcuse asked in One-Dimensional Man whether it was still possible to ‘break the vicious circle of domination’. In other words, he questioned whether revolution was still possible in developed capitalist countries, where ‘the pure form of domination’ had taken shape. The working class, now linked to the system of needs ‘but not to its negation’,ii seemed bound to lose all its subversive capacity in the ‘affluent society [1]’. [2]

Daniel Bensaïd was without a doubt the most creative and innovative Marxist to come of age in the post-1968 period. Barely any other militant of his period had been able to weave deep theoretical intervention with illuminating aesthetic form in order to wage political struggle.

This reflection on Daniel Bensaïd’s work was made at a seminar organized in 2012 in the International Institute of Research and Education in Amsterdam.

“Daniel Bensaïd was a man who calmly persisted in the conviction that while circumstances might change, while counter-revolutionary forces might become far more vigorous, all this was in no way a reason not to continue.”

“With Lefrançais, one is in good company. One simply feels at home.” [3]

March 25, 2021 would have been the 75th birthday of our comrade Daniel Bensaïd. We publish here a translation of an interview with Éric Hazan, first published in 2007.