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.
Tribute to Daniel Bensaïd - a “distant comrade”
12 January 2022, by“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.”
Do you know Lefrançais?
25 March 2021, by“With Lefrançais, one is in good company. One simply feels at home.” [1]
‘What it means to be Marxist’
25 March 2021, byMarch 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.
Trotsky, a guiding light of the century
21 August 2020, byThis 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: a Marxism of bifurcation
28 June 2020, byDaniel 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 Unrepentant ’68er’s Life
19 January 2020, byAn Impatient Life by Daniel Bensaïd. Translated by David Fernbach
Foreword by Tariq Ali.Verso Books, 2013 and 2015, 392 pages.
An open history: Blanqui and Bensaïd
12 January 2020, byAll 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.
Livio Maitan: History wrinkle-free
16 November 2018, byDaniel 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.
1968 – It was just the beginning
7 June 2018, byAlthough 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]