Daniel Bensaid, in this interview with Socialist Worker, reflects on the current battle of the French students and its comparisons with student movements of the past. Socialist Worker: As someone who took part in the mobilisations of May 1968, what do you think are the principal similarities and differences between those events and what’s happening […]
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You can find videos in English, Spanish and Portuguese in the Multimédia and Échos sections.
Below, you will find a link to the articles which don’t exist in French.
Screams and spit
1. “Spit on history”, John Holloway retorts. Why not? But on which history? For him, apparently, there is only one history, a one-way history, the history of oppression that even contaminates the struggle of the oppressed. As if history and memory were not themselves battlefields. As if a history of the oppressed – often an […]
Notes on recent developments in the European radical Left
The recent elections in Germany and Portugal have confirmed the emergence of a new radical Left in a number of countries across Europe. In Germany, Die Linke won 11.9 percent of the vote and 76 seats in the Bundestag. In Portugal, the Left Bloc received 9.86 percent of the vote and doubled its number of […]
“It is time to define the strategy”
The French philosopher Daniel Bensaïd, a revolutionary of ideas from the anti-capitalist left, has just published his In Praise of Profane Politics, a dense and complex work through which this thinker hopes to contribute to a counter attack by the transformative left which can take ordinary people out of a never ending crisis. In his […]
The powers of communism
In an 1843 article on “the progress of social reform on the continent,” the young Engels (not yet 23 years old) saw communism as “a necessary conclusion, which cannot he avoided to be drawn from the premises given in the general facts of modern civilisation.” This was a logical communism, then, produced by the 1830 […]
A page has been turned (the formation of the NPA)
We never saw the reference to Trotskyism as a way to shut ourselves off from others. For us, it was more like a polemical challenge. We accepted the Trotskyist tag in our conflict with the Stalinists – but without building a neurotic identity out of it or, conversely, downplaying the importance of this heritage. We […]
From the LCR to the NPA
This contribution was written as part of preparations for the January 2009 congress of the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR). The congress agenda includes the political “self-dissolution” of the LCR, to set the stage for the new challenge of the New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA). The authors of this piece belong to the generation of activists from […]
Hegemony and United Front
We publish below the summary of a contribution presented by Daniel Bensaid, in the framework of the “strategy cycle” at the summer university of the LCR which was held in Port Leucate from August 24-29, 2007 (references have been changed to English language versions where available). During the 1970s, the notion of hegemony served as […]
“We are faced with the challenge of a process of social and political reconstruction”
Interview led by Franck Gaudichaud a few weeks before the presidential election. Franck Gaudichaud: Recently the philosopher Alain Badiou, in an interview with the Italian newspaper Il Manifesto, still asserted the idea of communism as a “common sense” to be defended. However today, following the fall of the Berlin Wall, faced with the commodification of […]
First impressions off-the-cuff
This text is an introduction to an interview published in Viento Sur. It presents elements from an off-the-cuff synthesis of the French presidential election. This synthesis will require editing later, after taking a step back. A detailed analysis of the presidential results confirms the « social » character of the Besancenot vote. One should keep in mind […]