Daniel Bensaïd archive

This year we commemorate the deaths of three leading figures of our movement. Daniel Bensaïd Marxist activist and philosopher, emerging from the May 1968 movement in France, who died too early in 2010 after a life as leader of the French section and the Fourth International. Ernest Mandel whose political activity started in resistance to the rise of Nazism, was an outstanding Marxist economist and a central leader of the Fourth International from the postwar period until his death in 1995. Léon Trotsky, leader of the Russian Revolution and of the fight against the counter-revolution, founder of the Fourth International, was assasinated by a Stalinist agent and died on 21 August 1940.

On this sad anniversary we publish an article by Daniel Bensaïd on Trotsky written in 2000.

Daniel Bensaïd has the merit of having introduced a new concept into the Marxist lexicon: bifurcation. He has, so to speak, sketched the broad outlines of what one might call a Marxism of bifurcation.

An Impatient Life by Daniel Bensaïd. Translated by David Fernbach
Foreword by Tariq Ali.Verso Books, 2013 and 2015, 392 pages.

All thinkers have their father-thinkers; none more so than Daniel Bensaïd. The figures of Charles Péguy, Walter Benjamin and Louis Auguste Blanqui recur throughout his work. In this article, Émile Carmes studies Bensaïd’s deep engagement over the years with the work of Blanqui.

Daniel Bensaïd wrote the Preface to Livio Maitan’s history of the Fourth International Per una storia della IV internazionale. La testimonia di un comunista controcorrente published in 2006.

Resistance Books and the IIRE have launched an appeal to fiund publication in English. It has almost reached the first goal of 5,000 euros, thanks to a substantial donation in the form of translation work.

To give an idea of the book, and of the person of Livio, we publish here the English translation of Daniel Bensaïd’s preface.

We hope to raise 1,000 euros more to pay for the design and promotion of the book. Details on how to make a donation can be found below.

Although the fiftieth anniversary of May 1968 provides the opportunity for new celebrations, new tributes and testimonies, for extensions of previous historiographical research, few writings take seriously the political questions raised by this event. However, ten years after the beautiful month of May, in 1978, the event was still live, and even though social setbacks were being announced and the crisis was beginning to install itself, it was still politics and not history that people were discussing with regard to May 1968. Hence the interest in plunging back into the debates of that time, with this article by Daniel Bensaïd, published in 1978 in a review of the Revolutionary Communist League, Les Cahiers de la taupe (No. 23, dated May-June 1978).[Contretemps]

In 2008, in an interview with Francis Sitel for the journal Critique communiste (No. 188) Daniel Bensaïd looked back over the strategic debates which took place in May 1968, and especially in its immediate aftermath, among the militants of what became in 1969 the Communist League. Between enthusiasm for the rise of struggles and fear of being swept away by the ebb tide of the mobilizations, between predictions about the coming revolution and reformist dead ends, it was the question of organization, of the political party, that was posed at that time in new terms for a far left that was overwhelmingly composed of students. Contretemps

This paper on the political writings of Daniel Bensaïd was given at the Historical Materialism conference in London in November 2015.

Hannah Arendt was worried that politics might disappear completely from the world. The century had seen such disasters that the question of whether ’politics still has any meaning at all’ had become unavoidable”. The issues at stake in these fears were eminently practical: ’The lack of meaning in which the whole of politics has ended up is confirmed by the dead end into which specific political questions are flocking.’

This text was the “Mémoire de maîtrise” for Daniel Bensaïd’s MA in Philosophy under the supervision of Henri Lefebvre in 1968. The original version of this text can be found at Le site de Daniel Bensaïd. It was translated by Patrick King for the online Viewpoint Magazine.