[3 articles]
"We Carry On Fighting. What Else is There to Do?"
Remembering Daniel Bensaîd
http://www.counterpunch.org/tariq01152010.html
By TARIQ ALI
January 15-17, 2010
The French philosopher Daniel Bensaïd, who has died aged 63 of
cancer, was one of the most gifted Marxist intellectuals of his
generation. In 1968, together with Daniel Cohn-Bendit, he helped to
form the Mouvement du 22 Mars (the 22 March Movement), the
organization that helped to detonate the uprising that shook France
in May and June of that year. Bensaïd was at his best explaining
ideas to large crowds of students and workers. He could hold an
audience spellbound, as I witnessed in his native Toulouse in 1969,
when we shared a platform at a rally of 10,000 people to support
Alain Krivine, one of the leaders of the uprising, in his
presidential campaign, standing for the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR).
Bensaïd's penetrating analysis was never presented in a patronizing
way, whatever the composition of the audience. His ideas derived from
classical Marxism Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, as was
typical in those days but his way of looking at and presenting them
was his own. His philosophical and political writings have a lyrical
ring at particularly tedious central committee meetings, he could
often be seen immersed in Proust and resist easy translation into English.
As a leader of the LCR and the Fourth International, to which it was
affiliated, Bensaïd travelled a great deal to South America,
especially Brazil, and played an important part in helping to
organize the Workers party (PT) currently in power there under
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. An imprudent sexual encounter
shortened Bensaïd's life. He contracted Aids and, for the last 16
years, was dependent on the drugs that kept him going, with fatal
side-effects: a cancer that finally killed him.
Physically, he became a shadow of his former self, but his intellect
was not affected and he produced more than a dozen books on politics
and philosophy. He wrote of his Jewishness and that of many other
comrades and how this had never led him, or most of them, to follow
the path of a blind and unthinking Zionism. He disliked identity
politics and his last two books Fragments Mécréants (An
Unbeliever's Discourse, 2005) and Eloge de la Politique Profane (In
Praise of Secular Politics, 2008) explained how this had become a
substitute for serious critical thought.
He was France's leading Marxist public intellectual, much in demand
on talk shows and writing essays and reviews in Le Monde and
Libération. At a time when a large section of the French
intelligentsia had shifted its terrain and embraced neoliberalism,
Bensaïd remained steadfast, but without a trace of dogma. Even in the
1960s he had avoided leftwing cliches and thought creatively, often
questioning the verities of the far left.
He was schooled at the lycées Bellevue and Fermat in Toulouse, but
the formative influence was that of his parents and their milieu. His
father, Haim Bensaïd, was a Sephardic Jew from a poor family in
Algeria and moved from Mascara to Oran, where he got a job as a
waiter in a cafe, but soon discovered his real vocation. He trained
as a boxer, becoming the welterweight champion of north Africa.
Daniel's mother, Marthe Starck, was a strong and energetic
Frenchwoman from a working-class family in Blois, central France. At
18 she moved to Oran. She met the boxer and fell in love. The French
colons were shocked and tried hard to persuade her not to marry a
Jew. They told her she was bound to get VD and have abnormal children.
With France occupied by the Germans and a bulk of the country's elite
in collaborationist mode with its capital at Vichy, the French
colonial administration fell into line. As a Jew, Daniel's father was
arrested, but he managed to escape from the PoW camp, and decided to
go to Toulouse, where Marthe helped him obtain false papers. Armed
with a new identity, he bought a bistro, Le Bar des Amis. Unlike his
two brothers, who were killed during the occupation, he survived,
thanks largely to his wife, who had an official Vichy certificate
stating her "non-membership of the Jewish race".
In his affecting memoir, Une Lente Impatience (2004), Daniel noted
that these barbarities had taken place on French soil only a few
decades prior to 1968. Le Bar des Amis, he wrote, was a cosmopolitan
location frequented by Spanish refugees, Italian antifascists, former
resistance fighters and a variety of workers, with the local
Communist party branch holding its meetings there too. Given his
mother's fierce republican and Jacobin views (when a relative, after
a French television program on the British monarchy, expressed doubts
about the guillotining of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, Marthe did
not speak to her for 10 years), it would have been odd if young
Bensaïd had become a monarchist.
Angered by the massacre of Algerians at the Métro Charonne in 1961
(ordered by Maurice Papon, chief of police and a former Nazi
collaborator), he joined the Union of Communist Students, but soon
became irritated by party orthodoxy and joined a left opposition
within the union organised by Henri Weber (currently a Socialist
party senator in the upper house) and Alain Krivine. The Cuban
revolution and Che Guevara's odyssey did the rest. The dissidents
were expelled from the party in 1966.
That same year, Bensaïd was admitted to the Ecole Normale Supérieure
in Saint-Cloud and moved to Paris. Here he helped found the Jeunesse
Communiste Révolutionnaire (JCR), young dissidents inspired by
Guevara and Trotsky, which later morphed into the LCR.
The last time I met him, a few years ago, in his favourite cafe in
Paris's Latin Quarter, he was in full flow. The disease had not
sapped his will to live or to think. Politics was his lifeblood. We
talked about social unrest in France and whether it would be enough
to bring about serious change. He shrugged his shoulders. "Perhaps
not in our lifetimes, but we carry on fighting. What else is there to do?"
• [Daniel Bensaïd, philosopher, born 25 March 1946; died 12 January 2010]
--
Tariq Ali's latest book, The Protocols of the Elders of Sodom and
other Essays, has just been published by Verso.
--------
Obituary: Daniel Bensaïd
An embodiment of our tradition
http://socialistworker.org/2010/01/13/embodiment-of-our-tradition
Author and socialist Gilbert Achcar pays tribute to his comrade Daniel Bensaïd.
January 13, 2010
THE FRENCH radical philosopher and political leader Daniel Bensaïd
died Tuesday morning after fighting a painful cancer for several
months at the end of close to 15 years of living with AIDS.
One of the key figures of the French student revolt of 1968, Bensaïd
was a prominent founding member of the Ligue Communiste
Révolutionnaire (LCR), along with Alain Krivine. He remained in the
leadership of this organization, an affiliate of the Trotskyist
Fourth International, until he was struck by illness.
Bensaïd continued nevertheless to play a central role as a
contributor to the political thinking of his movement, including in
the creation of the 10,000-member Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste
(NPA), represented by Olivier Besancenot, the well-known young postal
worker and occasional presidential candidate.
Daniel Bensaïd was an embodiment of the French revolutionary
tradition--one of his books published on the 200th anniversary of the
1789 French Revolution bore the title Moi la Révolution (I, the
Revolution). He was fond of radicalized Jacobinism--the legacy of
that revolution represented by Babeuf and Blanqui--which he combined
with libertarian sympathies in reference to the 1871 Paris Commune.
Yet he was deeply internationalist. He was especially involved in
developments within the radical left in Latin America through the
Fourth International, thanks to his command of Spanish and
Portuguese. He saw in Russian Bolshevism the heir of radical
Jacobinism and defended Lenin's legacy against the sweeping critical
reassessments that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union.
He was also a fierce representative of this very specific feature of
French radicalism: thorough secularism. Two of his latest books bore
titles referring to this aspect of his thinking: Fragments mécréants
(An Unbeliever's Discourse) and Eloge de la politique profane (In
Praise of Secular Politics).
His most important theoretical work, Marx l'intempestif, was
published in 1995. The book was translated into English and published
in 2002 under the title A Marx for Our Times: Adventures and
Misadventures of a Critique. It offered an unconventional reading of
Marx, clearing him of the accusation of determinism. The book
signaled Bensaïd's recognition as a public intellectual, a frequent
author of op-eds in Le Monde and Libération, and a regular guest of
intellectual radio and TV talk shows.
Bensaïd's first book was published in 1968, co-authored with Henri
Weber (afterward a Socialist Party member of Senate). Its title, Mai
68, une répétition générale (May 68: A Dress Rehearsal), spoke
volumes about the spirit of the times. After his book for the
bicentennial of the French Revolution, he published works on Walter
Benjamin and on the figure of Joan of Arc, the latter work influenced
by Charles Péguy's interpretation.
He took up this seemingly eclectic range of topics in the context of
the melancholy created by the post-1989 international political
shift, with the ideological assault on Marxism and the triumphalism
of the global neoliberal drive. One of Bensaïd's later books will
indeed be titled Le Pari mélancolique (The Melancholic Wager).
Ever since he contracted AIDS, believing that his days were numbered,
Bensaïd set out to write and publish at an impressive speed: close to
20 books of various sizes and on various topics in 15 years, from his
1995 book on Marx until his death.
At the same time, he confronted death most bravely: a revolutionary
who fought steadfastly to his very last breath.
--------
Daniel Bensaïd: An appeciation
http://www.swp.ie/index.php?page=629&dept=News&title=Daniel%0D%0A++Bensa%EFd%3A+An+appeciation
Jan 15, 2010
Daniel Bensaïd, the leading French revolutionary socialist and
political philosopher, sadly died on Tuesday 12 January after a long illness.
Bensaïd emerged as a leading figure in the French student and workers
revolt of May 1968. In his first book, written with Henri Weber, Mai
68, une répétition générale (May 68: A Dress Rehearsal), he
powerfully captures the spirit of the times; how the events of '68
sent shockwaves throughout the system, powerfully inspired millions
of people in France and around the world, and led people to conclude
that suddenly everything was possible, that society could be
radically changed.
Right from the beginning Bensaïd grasped the dynamic of the movement
and emphasised the need to build links between the student movement
and the workers' general strike. He argued for the necessity of
building a revolutionary political organisation but rejected the
conservativism of the French communist party leaving to form the
Jeunesse Communiste Révolutionnaire (JCR). The JCR would play a key
role in student movement of '68 and would later form the core of one
of the most important political forces on the French left, the Ligue
Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR), an organisation that Bensaïd would
play a leading role within for much of his life.
Yet, Bensaïd was also a profound internationalist. He was involved in
developments within the radical left in Latin America, helping to
set-up the Workers Party in Brazil, and was active in the global
anti-capitalist and anti-war movements, participating in the World
Social Forum.
Even after retiring from the leadership of LCR in the 1990s he
continued to be politically engaged. He was a powerful and vocal
advocate within the LCR for its involvement within the new
anti-capitalist party, the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste (NPA).
Eager to educate a new generation of activists, Bensaïd concentrated
on writing for the last 15 years of his life. Always lucid and
eloquent, he was one of the finest Marxist writers of his generation.
His writing displays an astonishing philosophical and literary range
and is littered with illuminating formulations. He wrote a huge
amount of material on a dazzling array of topics from the French
Revolution, Marx's Capital and the French State to feminism, ecology
and identity politics. Much of his theoretical and political work
focused on questions of strategy and on the lessons to be learnt from
historical revolutionary experiences.
Bensaïd's most important theoretical work, Marx l'intempestif, was
published in 1995. Thankfully, unlike much of his work, this book was
translated into English and published in 2002 under the title Marx
for Our Times: Adventures and Misadventures of a Critique, bringing
his work to a whole new audience. Marx for our Times is a powerful
defense and endorsement of Marxism against those who attempted to
declare its death in the aftermath of the collapse of Stalinism.
While many of the generation of '68 abandoned revolutionary politics,
Daniel Bensaïd, like the late Chris Harman, refused to despair and
continued to struggle and resist. Both his writing and his example
will continue to be an inspiration for generations of activists in
France, in Europe and around the world.
Our sympathies go out to his family, friends and comrades on their great loss.
Sinéad Kennedy
Socialist Workers Party, Ireland
.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Sixties-L" group.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
[email protected].
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/sixties-l?hl=en.
