Daniel Bensaïd archive

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.

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.