As François Sabado explains below, our comrade Daniel Bensaïd, who had been seriously ill for several months, died this morning. After a private funeral, the NPA will organise a public tribute in the Mutalité in Paris on Sunday 24th January from 2.30pm to 6pm. The following month (on February 9th) a memorial meeting will be held in London for those who knew Bensaïd and admired his work. For more information about these meetings, or to send messages to them, please email bensaid.memorial@ecosocialism.org.
Daniel left us today, Tuesday the 12th of January 2010. Born in 1946 he gave his life to the cause of defending revolutionary Marxist ideas right to the end.
He was one of the founders of the Jeunesse Communiste Révolutionnaire (JCR – Revolutionary Communist Youth) and the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR – Revolutionary Communist League, French section of the Fourth International)
A leader of the May 68 movement, he was one of those people with a very sure feeling for political initiative. He had been one of the leaders of the 22nd March Movement. Grasping the dynamic of social movements, in particular the link between the student movement and workers’ general strike, he was also one of those who understood the necessity of building a political organisation, of accumulating the forces for building a revolutionary party.
The quality of Daniel’s intelligence was to combine theory and practice, intuition and political understanding, ideas and organisation. He could, at the same time, lead a stewarding force and write a theoretical text.
He was one of those who inspired a fight which combined principles and political boundaries with openness and a rejection of sectarianism. Daniel, his own political convictions deeply rooted in him, was always the first to want to discuss, to try to convince, to exchange opinions, and to renew his own thinking.
As a member of the daily leadership of the LCR from the end of the 1960s to the beginning of the 1990s, he played a decisive role in building a project, an orientation which combined daily activity with a revolutionary outlook. A good part of his theoretical and political work was focused on questions of strategy, and the lessons of the main historical revolutionary experiences.
Daniel was profoundly internationalist. He played a key role in the building of the LCR in the Spanish state in the Franco period. In those years he played a major role within the Fourth International, in particular following closely developments in Latin America and Brazil. He contributed largely to renewing our vision of the world and to preparing us for the upheavals of the end of the 1980s.
From the 1990s until the end, while continuing his political fight he concentrated on theoretical work: the history of political ideas; Marx’s Capital; the balance sheet of the twentieth century and its revolutions, first of all the Russian revolution; ecology; feminism; identities and the Jewish question; developing new policies for the revolutionary left faced with capitalist globalisation. He regularly attended and followed the Social Forum and the global justice movement.
Daniel ensured the historical continuity of open, non-dogmatic, revolutionary Marxism and adaptation to the changes of the new era, with the perspective of revolutionary transformation of society always in his sights.
Although seriously ill he overcame it for years, thinking, writing, working on his ideas, never refusing to travel, to speak at rallies or attend simple meetings. Daniel set himself the task of checking the solidity of our foundations and to pass them on the young generation. he put his heart and all his strength into it. His contributions, at the International Institute in Amsterdam, in the summer universities of the LCR and then of the NPA, at the Fourth International youth camp, made an impact on thousands of comrades. Transmitting the experience of the LCR to the NPA, Daniel decided to accompany the foundation of our new organisation with a relaunch of the review Contretemps and forming the “Louise Michel” society as a place for discussion and reflection of radical thought.
Daniel was all that. And in addition he was warm and convivial. He loved life.
Although many “68ers” turned their coats and abandoned the ideals of their youth, Daniel abandoned none of them; he didn’t change. He is still with us.
Translated by Penelope Duggan.
François Sabado is a member of the Executive Bureau of the Fourth International and an activist in the New Anticapitalist Party (NPA) in France. He was a long-time member of the National Leadership of the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR).
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[...] So I truly sad to hear the news that he has died. Over the years, and as a former member of the 4th International, I had read much of his writings. I will leave the final words to the obit from Socialist Resistance. [...]
From Humanite in English
Obituary: Daniel Bensaïd, Militant And Outstanding Marxist Philosopher
Marxist philosopher Daniel Bensaid died of cancer in Paris last Tuesday; he was sixty-four.
Translated Thursday 14 January 2010, by Isabelle Metral and reviewed by Henry Crapo
Co-founder of the LCR (the communist revolutionary league), then of the NPA (the new anti-capitalist party), Daniel Bensaïd contributed, through his works and his militant action, to re-open in a polemical and novel way a dynamic of protest that challenges today’s unbridled global capitalism.
Marxist philosopher Daniel Bensaid died of cancer in Paris last Tuesday; he was sixty-four. His philosophical career straddled the 20th and 21st centuries. He disappears shortly after declaring about neo-liberalism in a recent book “The old world is dying.” (Post-capitalisme. Imaginer l’après. Au Diable Vauvert pub. November 2009: Post-Capitalism: What Next?) As a matter of fact, his theoretical thought is one of the very few to have integrated –with regard to the current crisis – the point of view of praxis in his theory. It was perfectly clear to him that ecology’s slow time is not the stock exchange’s fast time (Une lente impatience: a slow impatience, April 2004) and that the economic and financial crisis reveals a historic crisis of the law of value where ‘I’ alternates with “us”.
“Beware of repetition!” – such should be the maxim of the most enlightened of his disciples. If a few cynics are still convinced that war alone can put an end to the most serious crisis that capitalism has ever known, it is clear that the extreme sophistication and dispersion of nuclear weapons today are a sufficient deterrent to suggest that the way out of the crisis can only be the global re-distribution of the balance of forces in the class-war, through major political events.
To suppose that it is possible both to promote consumption and to make consumption on that scale possible, or to reconcile the promotion of investment and the effective guarantee of big returns, he said, is tantamount to imagining “a world as unlikely as a tri-coloured rainbow”. The question today is how we can transcend and prise out trade or market relations together with the philosophical categories they imply. Because it impedes the diffusion and perfection of innovation, liberalisation (privatisation) discredits neo-liberalism’s discourse on the benefits of competition, and de-constructs the praise of the global market’s institutional constraints. What is now on the agenda is a change from the very logic of capitalism: “The new society must invent itself without any pre-existing rules, through the practical experience of millions of men and women.”
Daniel Bensaïd was an outstanding Marxist intellectual. He was one of those thinkers who, in the late 1970s, at a time when social protest was on the ebb, did not renege one bit on their radical political commitment. Better still, his works and political action have contributed for the last twenty years to re-open, in a polemical and novel way, a dynamic of protest that challenges today’s unbridled global capitalism. Since then, in his Marx, l’intempestif (Fayard pub, 1995: Marx, the untimely thinker), he has renewed the critical interpretation of Marx’s historical, economic, and scientific analyses.
Daniel Bensaïd was a former student at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Saint-Cloud, and held a chair of philosophy at the Paris VIII university; he took an active part in the May 1968 movement with the LCR. The NPA loses the subtlest theorist of anti-Stalinism. He is known for his books on Walter Benjamin, Karl Marx and for his recent analysis of postmodernism in Les Irréductibles. Eloge de la résistance à l’air du temps (The irreducible: in praise of resistance to the dominant ideology) (Textuel pub., 1999)
Daniel Bensaïd showed respect for the lessons of modesty inherent in activism since its practical implication is that no one ever acts or thinks alone. He readily conceded that no political movement, not even his own, could boast of being the exponent of the radical critique of capitalism, only to add that “it cannot be said, however, that critical Marxist thought is such a crowded field.” To be sure, the ratings for idols and gods are on the rise, and the sacred is back with a vengeance. But the urgent question, in France now, is to think out a liberal and secular political project for the future.
It is with great sadness that we learned of the passing of Daniel Bensaid. From him and his comrades we were able to learn so much. His contributions, both political and theoretical, have been very valuable, not just in France and Europe, but across the globe. We were hoping, as one of the great political generation of 1968 rebellion Trotskyists, he would be able to continue offering innovative, creative, non-sectarian, non-dogmatic and contemporary interpretations of revolutionary Marxism, inoculated against both social-liberalism and Stalinism, for the revolts around the world of the 21st century, marked as never before by the alternatives of anti-capitalist transformation or environmental catastrophe and barbarism. His works will be read and continue to give leadership and inspiration to comrades around the world. His un-timely death reminds us to redouble the struggle against HIV and for health for all.
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