17 July 2014 Daniel Bensaïd’s widely reviewed memoir An Impatient Life is a chronicle of his radical and revolutionary yearnings. It chronicles a life learning the political importance of ‘active waiting, an urgent impatience, an endurance and a perseverance that are the opposite of passive waiting for a miracle.’ One review in the Independent summed […]

31 March 2014 In her review of Daniel Bensaïd’s An Impatient Life, Jane Shallice kicks off addressing the obvious question: “Why should you read this book? Written by a French Trotskyist, who died in 2010, and of whom few have heard and even fewer knew?” Because there is much to learn from Bensaïd, compellingly retorts […]

29 January 2014 Dougal McNeill wrote a very enthusiastic review of Daniel Bensaïd’s An Impatient Life for the International Socialist Organization (Aotearoa). He calls the book “a beautiful testament to a richly productive and dignified life” that illuminates Bensaïd’s life-long commitment to revolutionary struggle, from post-68 Paris as a leader of the Ligue communiste to […]

Let us start, like Dante, in the middle. At age twenty-two, Daniel Bensaïd (1946-2010), a French-Algerian-Jewish philosophy student, vaulted eagerly onto the world stage of the international youth radicalization of 1968. His political stardom came by way of a leading role in the actions igniting the largest general strike in the history of France. At […]

By Mark L. Thomas Daniel Bensaid was a leading figure and theoretician in the French Ligue Communiste Revolutionaire (LCR, now part of the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste, the NPA) and the Fourth International, the main “orthodox” Trotskyist current, for more than four decades until his death in 2010. The great strength of his memoir, first published […]

By Dougal McNeill This absorbing, affecting memoir is a beautiful testament to a richly productive and dignified life. Daniel Bensaïd spent over forty years as a partisan of the revolutionary left in France, writing, campaigning, organising and agitating. Drawn into Communist politics as a young man and then radicalised, along with a significant section of […]

By Tariq Ali Successful revolutions always try to reproduce themselves. They usually fail. Napoleon carried the Enlightenment on the end of a bayonet, but English reaction, Spanish nationalism and Russian absolutism, finally defeated him. The triumphant Bolsheviks, disgusted by social-democratic capitulation at the advent of the First World War, orchestrated a split within the working […]