The following essay by Daniel Bensaid represents a critical re-evaluation of Trotsky’s well-known pamphlet, written in 1937, Stalinism and Bolshevism. It was written for the magazine Erre, published by supporters of the Fourth International in Italy. There is a current fashion for roots and biblical genealogies: Hegel begat Marx, who begat Lenin, who begat Stalin… […]
In a ’tribune’ in Le Monde on May 3rd [1], some distinguished German intellectuals (including Jürgen Habermas, Günter Grass and Wolf Biermann), called their “French friends” to account. They exhorted them to approve the constitutional treaty. Our German friends are welcome in the French debate, but they seem ill-informed of its content. This is no […]
Dear friends and comrades of DS, Lula’s presidency has reached the halfway mark, and the November municipal elections are a good occasion for a kind of provisional balance sheet, on the threshold of a period already characterized by preparations for the 2006 campaign. Since we are unable to participate in the upcoming World Social Forum […]
Marx had the temerity to declare that philosophy would eventually wither away through the accomplishment of its own strategic development: it was now no longer merely a matter of interpreting the world, but of changing it. Today, by way of contrast, Alain Badiou proposes to reiterate the philosophical gesture par excellence; a ‘Platonic gesture’ in […]
Brazil’s Workers’ Party (PT) has, in the course of the past 20 years, developed a politics of class independence while accumulating a quantity of experiences in social struggles and municipal government, notably through ’participatory democracy’. These founding principles are being flouted in the run-up to the country’s presidential elections. The PT was born out of […]
An article by Daniel Bensaid on the response of French intellectuals to the “war on terror”. 1. Only yesterday, French intellectuals overflowed with compassion. From Bosnia to Chechnya, by way of Kosovo, on every front of the new world disorder. Their silence before the imperial crusade in Afghanistan and before the criminal policy of the […]
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Daniel Bensaïd, a central leader of the French Ligue communiste révolutionnaire (LCR), spoke on ’Leninism in the 21st century’ at the ’Marxism 2001’ event organised by the British SWP. Phil Hearse spoke to him there. International Viewpoint: Lenin made important contributions to Marxist thinking about imperialism, the national question, revolutionary strategy and socialist democracy. But […]
Tenacious and combative strikes in the public services, millions of demonstrators on the streets, broad support from public opinion: last December’s events in France were a lot more than a strike, indeed it is no exaggeration to call them an uprising by the working, producing, caring, teaching population. For the past several years political pundits […]