Daniel Bensaïd and "The Last Generation of October"

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No.12 Winter 2016

Daniel Bensaïd and “the last generation of
October”
Written by Darren Roso
Capitalism is blatantly failing a new, young generation of workers and students, shattering
their hopes and dreams, as the Nuit Debout, (“rise up at night”) and struggles in France
ISSUES over the labour code show. Yet, against this rage and distress, the radical left has been in
disarray, putting into peril decades of accumulated experience and effort that thousands
No.1 Spring 2010 have put into revolutionary projects before the dissolution of the Revolutionary Communist
League (LCR) and launch of the New Anticapitalist Party (NPA) in 2009. A labour of
No.2 Autumn 2011 memory is in order, as it is useful to return to the political experience of revolutionaries who
have gone before us.
No.3 Spring 2011
Seven years on, it is clear that the NPA project has failed to achieve its initial goal of
No.4 Winter 2012
building a broader and larger force for the reorganisation of the radical left. The organisation
No.5 Summer 2013 and the leadership that made up the LCR has been thrown into pieces, the NPA has
suffered a number of splits, with many leading members going to build inside the Left Front.
No.6 Winter 2013 The launch of the NPA was initially hopeful, signing 9,123 members: three times that of the
LCR. Today, the figure is nowhere near that, and many have the sense that a great political
No.7 Summer 2014
waste has taken place.
No.8 Winter 2014
This essay will demonstrate the political trajectory of Daniel Bensaïd in light of this failure,
No.9 Summer 2015 sticking to his melancholic ethic that “because we have tried, we have a right to start again”.
This is useful to do in the pages of the Marxist Left Review, because Bensaïd did not give
No.10 Winter 2015 up on revolutionary politics and had a strong theoretical Marxism, unlike other proponents
of the broad party like Murray Smith and the Socialist Alliance in Australia, who have rightly
No.11 Summer
been criticised in this journal.[1] He embodied the political experience of “the last generation
2016 of October”. This generation’s political experience was modest. Their foundational
experiences came from the May ’68 rebellion and the “fire last time”. They built no mass
No.12 Winter 2016
parties and enjoyed years of legality.[2] They were “revolutionaries without a revolution”.
No.13 Summer The LCR was an important organisation to come from the May ’68 events. Therefore it is
2017 worth looking at the way a leading representative of this generation faced up to the
problems of revolutionary politics.
The LCR had its roots in the student movement and the Pierre Frank-aligned Trotskyist
tradition in France. Their leading members had built an organisation prior to the eruption of
May ’68, embodied in the Revolutionary Communist Youth. The LCR experienced a high
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point in the mid-1970s with the launch of a daily paper; it was able to withstand the dark
years of François Mitterrand’s presidency, it played a role in the strikes against the Juppe
plan of 1995 and grew substantially in the 2000s out of the popular presidential campaigns
of the LCR’s Olivier Besancenot in 2002 and 2007. Combined with the decades of
accumulated experience that the LCR had built, a vibrant intellectual culture existed, of
which Daniel Bensaïd was only one representative, expressed through the journals Critique
Communiste and Contretemps.
To learn from the development of his political thought is to set off from an immediate
problem he worried about in his last months, and a more general perspective sketched out
in the early 1990s. Before his death in 2010 “he worried about…the loss of the party’s
political substance. We debated it at the time the NPA was launched. He worried that “the
extension of the surface could lead to a loss of substance”, wrote François Sabado, an NPA
leader, in Daniel Bensaïd, l’intempestif, a collection of essays written about Bensaïd’s life
and politics.[3] Olivier Besancenot summed up the second problem, with regard to
Bensaïd’s general perspective:
I recognise that Daniel was not the most enthusiastic [about the launch of the NPA],
because while he saw the advantage and the necessity of constructing something
new, he also saw the dangers and everything we could lose. We all knew it, no one
was completely enthusiastic, but everyone saw as well that there was an objective
problem. That started with Daniel and it was his fault for the most part since it is he
who had brought forward the formula of the beginning of the 1990s: “new period, new
program, new party”. According to him, there were new historical co-ordinates that
pushed towards building something new. We needed a new party as a new strategic
hypothesis not only from the new but, also, with the heritage and experience of the
old… Today, we are within this interval, between the “already more” and the “not yet”
and we don’t know how long it will continue. What Daniel predicted in the 1990s is
probably longer than we thought.[4]
The essence of political comprehension is to understand what objective problems faced

different radicals and how they represented them, in order to decipher their responses to
them and judge accordingly. Necessarily this is an intellectual reconstruction. Without
undertaking an intellectual reconstruction, there is no use setting ourselves to work on the
texts, words, battles and thought of other revolutionaries, even if the texts and the militants’
own memories of different battles can differ. Nevertheless, such an operation makes
judgement and comprehension possible when trying to describe the thought and
interventions of another revolutionary. This means dealing with the problem of imputation,
allowing us to single out what is objectively decisive beyond the arbitrary connections we
may make, in order to elicit what was possible in a given historical context.
The early years of Daniel Bensaïd’s political engagement

The formative political experience of Bensaïd’s early years was the battle within the French
Communist Party (PCF), culminating in his expulsion during the mid-1960s.
This battle revealed the growing tensions within the PCF during the long post-war boom. It
was one of the most significant ruptures to take place within the party, a foundational
moment for the anti-Stalinist left to rally students around them, before the upheavals of May
2 of 26 2/20/17 1:36 PM
’68. LCR leader Alain Krivine wrote of this battle in his memoirs. “For the first time an
organisation controlled by the party entered, as such, into conflict with the leadership of the
PCF”.[5] This was essential to the generation that went on to form the League.
It signalled the emergence of an authentic left opposition inside the PCF. The crisis could
attain this dimension because the Union of Communist Students was based in a definite
social milieu: students who were more impacted by changes in the air of the times. The
party apparatus found it quite difficult to control the organisation.[6]
A mass party at the time, the PCF had its fingers in every social pie, with a real anchorage
in the working class and society. The party had a prestige, at once both real and imagined,
based on the legacy of the Popular Front of the 1930s and the Resistance against Nazi
occupation. The orthodoxy of the Party was stifling but formative. Figures of Bensaïd’s
generation were politicised in the party, not just on the university campuses, schooling them
in class politics. A political culture existed that made the language of class and Marxism –
even if it was bureaucratically deformed – both accessible and popular. Entering into a
clash with the leadership of this party was not something to be undertaken lightly.
The crisis of Stalinism, the Hungarian revolt of 1956 and the PCF’s ambivalent attitude to
the Algerian war of independence formed a combustible mix for youthful rebellion. Once
challenges were raised, the undemocratic nature of the PCF was on display for all to see.
The crisis itself lasted for five years, until the expulsion of hundreds of militants.
The Union of Communist Students was heterogeneous. There was a political battle at its
heart between four different currents. The majority tendency was made up of the “Italian
capitulators”, so called because they were close to the politics of the intellectual Lucio Magri
and some Italian Communist Party leaders. They argued for a liberal opening up of the
party, an open left reformism. The second tendency was the Maoists. They argued that the
leadership was on a reformist path. This tendency had names like Étienne Balibar, from
Louis Althusser’s circle, and Benny Levy, who went on to lead the short-lived Proletarian
Left, a Maoist organisation that was supported by notable public intellectuals like Michel
Foucault, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. The third tendency was the upholders
of orthodoxy, fighting tooth and nail for the leadership of the party to keep things under
control. Last was the Left Opposition, led by Alain Krivine and Henri Weber, which had a
stronghold at the Sorbonne, with about 500 members led by undercover Trotskyists doing
an entrist job in the PCF. This was impressive. Both Krivine and Weber were members of
the Fourth International – Krivine being mentored by Pierre Frank. They were able to build
up a base amongst students in the PCF.
This experience was a moment of intense politicisation for everyone involved and formed
those who would become, some years later, key leaders of the events of May ’68. Such was
the case for Daniel Bensaïd. He began political life by setting up a Young Communist group
at high school in the early 1960s the day after police had murdered nine trade unionists at
the Charonne metro station in Paris.
Not long after his entry into the PCF, heresy was in the air. As with all things social and
historical, a damn good heresy tells you a lot about the state of a party and its outside
world. Heresy was sometimes hidden and at others open. “From the first meetings, I heard
myself ask in a pale and hesitant voice the sacrilegious questions: ‘What about Hungary?
3 of 26 2/20/17 1:36 PM
And Budapest? What does the Party say about all this?’”[7]
Bensaïd began life in the PCF in Toulouse, far away from the tumultuous clashes in Paris.
In Toulouse, some were suspicious of the Parisians because the “Parisians could speak
well, but the cowl doesn’t make the monk, or the Bolshevik”.[8] As the crisis of the Union of
Communist Students was reaching its height in 1965, they sent two delegates to the
congress of Communist Students, to get a clearer perspective on events. Their delegates
returned, won to the left opposition. Expulsion was near. Eventually, they were excluded
from the PCF between December 1965, the date of the presidential election where
Mitterrand faced off against De Gaulle, and the congress of Communist Students in April
1966 where the exclusion was formalised.
The political battle waged by these students of the left opposition was a foundational
moment for a specific current of French Trotskyism. Clearly it wasn’t on a scale like the
Tours Congress when the French Communist Party was formed. Nevertheless, it was
experienced as a historic moment. It led to the birth of the JCR (Revolutionary Communist
Youth).
Today it is hard to imagine what this renegade adventure meant. The PCF polled 20-25
percent in the elections. It was the party of the working class. Next to this party, the JCR
with its few hundred members was microscopic. And they were young! Alain Krivine was
the oldest, at the age of 27 years.
The JCR had about 300 members coming out of the youth radicalisation, but was not
a fully formed project. Rather, it was produced by the force of circumstance and the
particular brutality of the Stalinist leadership in France.[9]
Bensaïd was taken into the leadership of the JCR. Of eight members on the central
committee, seven were members of the Fourth International. Bensaïd was not. If you draw
his political portrait at this moment, he is not a Trotskyist. He was not one of the entrist
figures, like Alain Krivine, Henri Weber and Gerard Verbizier, members of the Fourth
International’s French section, the Internationalist Communist Party led by Pierre Frank. It is
more correct to see Bensaïd as a revolutionary Marxist who looked to the symbolic image of
Che Guevara. He did not spontaneously look toward the Fourth International, not even after
the foundation of the JCR. Within the JCR, he was closest to a vague tendency led by
Janette Habel, a Guevarist tendency. For Bensaïd, Che was the image of revolutionary
fervour in the face of the timidity of reformist bureaucrats. His slogan “The duty of every
revolutionary is to make the revolution” captured this sentiment.
Before May ’68 the JCR genuinely believed that there was no future outside the PCF.
Consequently, their perspective was to go outside of the CP, get stronger, go back into it
and win it. This was not without a whiff of utopianism, but we should remember that, before
May ’68, it seemed like no organisation had a real future outside of the PCF.
The events of May ’68, combining a student uprising with the largest general strike in the
country’s history, produced a break with this early perspective. It led to the unification of the
JCR and the Internationalist Communist Party, consummated in 1969 and baptised as the
Communist League (LC). For the Fourth International, this meant a break with entrism; until
then they were burrowed down in the PCF. It also represented a passing of the baton, as
4 of 26 2/20/17 1:36 PM
the leadership of the League went to the youth who came from the JCR, with the exception
of Pierre Frank.
This is a particularity of the League in the French landscape. The young leadership had no
long established and experienced apparatus. They did not have a long history of party
building. They built their own tradition basically from scratch as they constructed their
organisation and created an apparatus. It also reflects the fact that the French section of the
Fourth International enjoyed a formal continuity, being “a name through the history,” but not
a material and human continuity of leadership, a legacy of splits in 1952 and 1965.
Nevertheless, the foundation of the League integrated three component parts. Firstly, the
LC held onto the continuity – even if it was formal – of continental Trotskyism, staking out
independent space in an atmosphere of Stalinism and Maoism, shortly after the Cultural
Revolution in China. Secondly, the experience of being inside the PCF, in terms of its cell
structures, party discipline and the centrality of the working class, gave the LC a certain
party-building seriousness, sensitive to internal party democracy, with a very liberal internal
regime. And lastly, coming out of the youth radicalisation, they had to hold onto the gains
they made during the events of May ’68.
May ’68 and its traces

As May ’68 erupted, the Maoists, who also came out of the crisis of the communist
students, were larger than the JCR. But the JCR came out of the struggles stronger than
the Maoists, proving better placed to withstand the political challenges ahead of them.
The JCR’s activity during May ’68 is a concrete lesson for any organisation based in the
university and high school student milieu. Their militant barricade action, their student
voluntarism, lit the fuse leading to the explosive general strike. They led a mass student
movement, held daily meetings and put all their strength into recruiting and explaining, and
were conscious of the fact that the outcome of the general strike did not depend on
students. The JCR was utterly marginal with regard to the workers’ movement, and they
could not give a concrete political solution to the dynamic of the strike movement beyond
general sloganeering. They recruited around 1,000 members from May ’68. Bensaïd was
fully part of the debates in the student movement, along with Daniel Cohn-Bendit and the
Maoists. “We said between ourselves that we didn’t know where it will go but we knew
where it wouldn’t go. We pushed to the limit without knowing where it was going but we
knew that the conditions hadn’t come together to make a revolution,” Krivine
reminisced.[10]
The subsequent debates about party-building were decisive for the later trajectory of the
LC. Their argument for an organisation went against the grain for those with illusions in
spontaneity. Many students rejected new parties; therefore “we went totally against the
majority of the movement to found an organisation”, eventually adhering to the Fourth
International.
Not all was rosy in these early moments, as the ultra-left turn at the ninth world congress of
the Fourth International attests. The Fourth International believed that the era of patient
propagandism was over, opening the space for international combat. This tragically and
irresponsibly led to support for armed struggle in Latin America, of which Bensaïd was a
5 of 26 2/20/17 1:36 PM
partisan.[11] The early period of the LC, in the immediate aftermath of 1968, was one of
impatient gauchisme, “hurried Leninism”. If we look at the organisation in social terms, we
see that it is very young, with an average age of 20. The year the LC was formed, 70
percent of the militants were still either high school or university students, 20 percent were
teachers and 10 percent wage workers. This did change. As early as 1971, students were
no longer a majority, with a quarter of the organisation being teachers and other categories
of wage workers. Florence Johsua, who has researched the sociological history of the LCR,
explained:
It is necessary to pay close attention to the particular social situation of most JCR
militants when the May-June events of 68 struck: high-school or university students,
the problem of their professional integration didn’t pose itself yet, and especially as
the French economy is still close to full-employment. The May 68 movement thus
opened…ten years of enthusiastic activity… In particular, amongst the young
militants of the JCR, dreaming of replaying October 1917 and rocked by the tale of
the assault on Moncada, the events of May opened a euphoric phase: they are
convinced that power has shaken and many live from that moment onwards as if “the
revolution is knocking at the door”. From now on it is a matter of days, months and
their role as revolutionary militants is to push this along as quickly as possible. The
political and social agitation of the years after 1968, in particular the first half of the
1970s, leaves little room for doubt: the world will change from top to bottom.[12]
The early years of “hurried Leninism” were ones of audacious, spectacular and symbolic
actions. This was buttressed theoretically in Bensaïd’s The Notion of Revolutionary Crisis in
Lenin, and May ’68: A Great Dress Rehearsal. They rested on the texts of the first congress
of the Comintern, with an emphasis on the strict delimitation of the revolutionary party.
Though not strictly speaking a foquist, Bensaïd saw Che Guevara as an antidote to the
Maoists, and fought for a frenzied subjectivism, against the Althusserian dissolution of the
subject. The theoretical expression of this gauchisme was to be found in his militarist vision
of the party.[13] Building the party meant first and foremost building a party that could clash
with the capitalist state, without worrying too much about the mediations involved in the
development of class consciousness.
This was comprehensible as a result of the contradictory nature of May ’68 and of the JCR
in the face of it. The JCR had argued that the student movement could unleash a
radicalisation of the workers’ movement by going above and beyond the reformist
leadership through their combative actions. In reality, this hardly took place. Rather, “the
greatest general strike in France’s history – following the repression of the students at the
barricades – did not become a real convergence between the students and workers, within
the framework of the construction of a revolutionary party”.[14]
Here the social make-up of the JCR and then the LC made for some objective difficulties.
They were outside the class in any meaningful sense. Their attempts to link up with the
working class clashed with the refusal of the traditional trade unions and the PCF to let the
“ultra-leftists” near the occupied factories, a reality they could not side-step. But they
understood the centrality of the working class.[15] In 1969 they set up cells to sell the newly
established paper Rouge at the factory gates, to take the organisation out of the student
milieu. They “put a map on the wall and dissolved the student sections”. But their “effort was
6 of 26 2/20/17 1:36 PM
enormous and results were few”.[16]
We witness the politics of impatience in these early years. The objective problem that they
faced – revolutionary students disconnected from a workers’ movement that had just
unleashed a huge general strike – over-determined their practice. This practice could
oscillate between two poles, and both neglected the mediations through which class
consciousness could crystallise: a theorised defeatism and a substitutionalist impatience.
Both perspectives are shortcuts that cannot wrestle hegemony away from the reformist
forces. Sabado, Besancenot and Michaloux captured this moment:
If politics is the anticipation of means and roads to change an existing situation by

modifying the relations of force, an active and democratic instrument is necessary to
debate the mediations to this objective. The generation of 1968 had a tendency to
think that…the right “initiatives in action” could accelerate things. These initiatives
proved to be substitutionalist in relation to the mass movement, notably in the domain
of the service d’ordre and self-defence.[17]
A pivotal moment of these early years was 21 June 1973, when the League organised an
armed attack on a meeting of New Order, the fascist precursor of the National Front. Michel
Recanati, Bensaïd and Charles Michaloux led this action, with an estimated 5,000 people at
the rally.[18] The action led to a thoroughgoing reorientation of the League, being described
by Bensaïd as a traumatism, with the banning of the League in 1973.
A year earlier the Socialist Party and the Communist Party had signed onto a Common
Program for the left, in an attempt to channel the horizons of the left. Within a day or so the
League put out a denunciation and critical analysis of its content, since it was a strategy to
manage capitalism. Nevertheless, the signing of the Common Program had led to a debate
in the League about how to orient to this new development. The militants of the LC began to
realise the limitations of their early orientation of impatiently forcing the pace of things.
The LC’s banning in 1973 saw them come into greater contact with the socialists and the
communists because of the defence campaign. Bensaïd endorsed the Communist Party’s
denunciation of the ban. This was a step forward in comparison with the way the
communists had responded to the murder in February 1972 of Pierre Overney, a Maoist
militant who was killed by a guard at Renault-Billancourt, when they refused to send their
members to his funeral. The support campaign for the LC, on the other hand, raised the
question of unity and the united front. We should be careful about throwing around the term
“united front”, since we are dealing with an organisation of about 2,300 at this moment, but
nevertheless, with the foundation of the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR), there was
a break with the early period of impatience.
The foundation of the Revolutionary Communist League:

some critical notes on perspectives
The LCR was founded at the end of 1974. Without deploying the condescension of
posterity, and remembering the context of the time, a critical discussion must be undertaken
about the perspectives that underpinned the League.
After the LC was legally dissolved by the state in 1973 and the LCR was formed, Daniel
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Bensaïd was one of the theoreticians of the political line that the League adopted: less
substitutionalist and more focused on how the party could be built in relation to the
development of class consciousness. This “change of political perspective coincided with
the first turn towards the united front of the LCR, accepted at the first congress of the
organisation in December 1974, accounting for the limits of its implantation in the factories.
The LCR’s central problem became the conquest, in opposition to the reformists, of what
the tenth congress of the Fourth International – which had been held in 1974 – had called
the ‘large workers’ vanguard’”.[19]
They believed that there was, since May ’68, what they called a large workers’ vanguard,
breaking with the reformism of both the socialists and the Stalinists – a layer of the working
class that they wanted to influence. In the years of impatience, the League thought it could
agitate for strike committees and workers’ self-defence to relate to this layer, in a
substitutionalist manner. With the foundation of the LCR, an orientation focusing on the
workplaces took shape, with an emphasis on the united front and the workers’ government.
This was a decisive shift and it is very present in Bensaïd’s writings on the Comintern during
the mid-1970s.
Their aim was to win hegemony over the large workers’ vanguard. Their priority was
winning young and radicalised workers. It “is only in winning to our organisation and its
periphery these young cadres, in forming authentic mass leaders from these young
radicalized workers that we can durably implant our hegemony in the large workers’
vanguard as a whole”.[20] Through this process it would be possible to win the older and
more established workers of the vanguard. This would enable putting a fight for an
anti-bureaucratic socialism on the agenda.
Above all, our fundamental preoccupation is the development of our penetration into
the workplaces, with the goal, in this phase of revolutionary preparation, of getting
into the debate inside the workers’ movement on a certain number of key elements of
the transition program (self-organisation, workers’ control and active strikes,
anti-militarism, unity of the working class: men and women; French and immigrants),
and to accumulate a certain number of formative experiences – today isolated but
which can be generalized during a revolutionary crisis.[21]
The project of Rouge going daily was a step towards relating to this small layer in the
working class, as was their decision to send about 300 members into industry, of which they
lost over a hundred. Underpinning all of these moves was an incorrect but wholly
understandable perspective. De facto, they worked with an implicit building project that was
“always based on the hypothesis of the acceleration of class struggle, [the coming of a]
revolutionary crisis/situation and a rapid breakthrough of the organisation” expressed in the
move towards the daily paper.[22] The catastrophist economic vision that followed the 1973
economic crisis fed into this perspective. The Portuguese revolution seemed to confirm it,
and the militants of the League placed their bets on the rapid development of a similar
revolutionary process in Spain faced with the twilight of Francoism. The Fourth International
proclaimed that a European revolution was imminent in a matter of years.
Since the break with the PCF, the League – in its various forms – had grown from strength
to strength. It grew solidly until 1977 reaching a membership of about 3,600. With the
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launch of the daily paper, they expected to continue to grow. Sociologically too, the
organisation was changing. In 1969, 10 percent of the organisation was made up of wage
workers. By 1976, the figure had reached 51 percent.[23] Then in 1979 it reached 60
percent. These wage workers were in rail, the postal service, health and metal works.
The expectations that Bensaïd and the League had in the 1970s now appear wildly wrong.
At the time they didn’t seem so wild. Not since the 1920s had serious organisations
independent of the Stalinists and socialists been thrown up. And the workers’ movement
was combative. This all met with the deepest economic crisis since the post-war boom. It
really seemed that the workers’ movement was going through a political recomposition that
would render justice to the anti-Stalinist left.
This party building project failed. If the goal was to build “new, mass revolutionary workers’
organisations capable, like the early communist parties, of challenging the reformist
organisations for political leadership of workers in Europe”, then one has to conclude that
their projects did not achieve their goal.[24] This must be kept in mind.
The perspective for this party-building project, of winning hegemony over the large workers’
vanguard, had flaws. It is crucial to understand these flaws if we are to understand the
pitfalls of the transitional program. The LCR held that “the period that we have experienced
for some years is marked by the massive emergence of a new generation of workers and
militants becoming durably conscious of the necessity for a total struggle against
capitalism”. According to them, this new generation of militants wasn’t formed under the
hegemony of the Stalinist or social democratic parties. These militants had broken with
bureaucratic practice and were able to take independent initiative. This was a “practical
rupture”. Nevertheless a Marxist revolutionary core didn’t lead these militants. Therefore,
the League spoke of three factors that made up the conjuncture – the rise in mass struggle,
discrediting of the reformists and the weakness of the revolutionaries – in which this
vanguard of the class emerged. Consequently, “[o]ur approach therefore aims to engage in
campaigns, engage in actions that impose and systematically propose unity in action with
reformists in a perspective of an anti-capitalist united workers’ front”.[25]
In these objective conditions, the League set out its program of intervention. It centred on
the united front and transitional demands. It would take into account the objective situation
on the one hand, and the level of class consciousness on the other. The transitional
problematic aimed through slogans and actions to reduce the lag between the objective
conditions and class consciousness, linking the day-to-day struggle with broader agitation
for the insurrectional general strike.
But revolutionary groups faced limitations. In the aftermath of World War One, the
competition between reformists and revolutionaries was concrete, with mass communist
parties developing in parts of Europe. This fact gave a transitional method real weight. The
same couldn’t be said about the upheaval of the 1970s, when groups were much smaller
and weaker compared to their reformist or Stalinist rivals.
The objective limitation revolutionary groups faced was conducive to political idealism that
fetishised programmatic demands.[26] This is a pitfall of propagandism that sought to
expose the betrayals of the reformists for shielding workers from correct socialist ideas. But
revolutionary politics isn’t just about correct ideas. Being based on the confrontation of class
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forces, it is first and foremost about struggle. It is only through struggle that the masses
change their ideas. Through this struggle a united front tactic can emerge, being a tactic
and not a principle. For the LCR, being weak compared with the forces of official reformism,
the united front approach often meant nothing more than propaganda for unity, without any
real, practical substance, an impotent injunction from the sidelines demanding that the
reformist forces act, unite and challenge capitalism.
Here we can draw a political lesson. Small groups should understand their own forces and
their role in reality in order to act accordingly. Messing around with a confused notion of a
united front “can only undermine sober assessments of political situations and the tactics
appropriate for organisations that fall well short of being revolutionary parties [leading to hot
air or a softness on reformists]. The main asset of such groups is not their weight in society
but the clarity of their analysis, particularly as a guide to political action that is necessarily
on a very modest scale”.[27]
Behind the united front and transitional program, the perspective based on the large
workers’ vanguard was a misjudgement. It confused a “genuine radicalisation of struggles
for a qualitative change in the relationship of forces within the working class movement”.[28]
This reality created difficulties for the anti-Stalinist left to break out, and as Charles Post
explained, “[t]he ultimate limit for the party building projects in the 1970s was the reduced
size and relative political and organisational weakness of the militant minorities of workers
in capitalist Europe… The weakness of this independent layer of worker leaders doomed all
of the attempts to recompose the workers’ movements in Europe and launch new
revolutionary organisations in the 1970s”.[29]
With the signing of the common program, “[f]or the first time since May ’68, a political
perspective – certainly reformist – but credible for workers, existed,” the LCR’s political
bureau wrote. It was difficult for the far left to build an independent pole beyond the
reformist horizon of the left government. In later years, Alain Krivine pointed to the
weakness of the LCR in that it remained isolated:
As the Union of the Left grew in strength from 1972 to 1977, the far-left in general,
and the League in particular remained relatively isolated. Admittedly, in 1977, at the
municipal elections, the revolutionary left led a dynamic joint campaign… But in a
general way, the criticisms formulated against the Common Program remained hardly
audible; they could only reach an already convinced minority. For the popular layers,
the Union of the Left represented a hope, that of sweeping away the right. The
dominant sentiment was to give the left parties a chance.[30]
The balance of forces between revolutionaries and reformists was in the latter’s favour as
the prospect of left government materialised. Within this dynamic, the LCR hoped the 1978
legislative elections would see the left win a stunning victory, because of the strong but
withering scent of ’68, the balance of class forces and the economic crisis. In fact, they
based their campaign upon what would happen after the election, as if a left victory was
certain, “rather than doing what we have to do today”. Bensaïd himself “spent two months
writing a big book, a program, on the city, women, planning…” – a plan, once the left won,
for how to counterpose themselves to a left in the national assembly.[31] But the left lost the
elections.
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The political perspective of the certainty of a left victory at the 1978 elections was bound up
with Rouge going daily. The LCR had grown until 1977 but had begun to lose members
from 1978, ending up in what is called a “crisis of militancy”. The day of the electoral defeat
in 1978, “we knew the daily paper was put into question”. The failure of an exciting but
untenable project “demoralised comrades”. And 1978 itself was a “defeat, a frustration. We
felt that we were unable to play a role to avoid the defeat, we were outside, only able to
make propaganda” about unity and defeating the right, since the aspiration for left rule was
seen as a positive development.[32] He thought these slogans were correct but didn’t
express whether the organisation was able to play a decisive role or to pull it off concretely.
This added to the frustration of militants.
Meanwhile, and despite the qualms about breaking the unity between the PCF and the
socialists, the Socialist Party was experiencing a rapid renovation and was soon able to
overtake the PCF in terms of votes. The LCR had to come to grips with the new party,
revamped at the Epinay Congress in 1971. They didn’t have a clear characterisation of the
new party. In the context of calls for unity – between the communists and socialists – to
think that the Socialist Party of Mitterrand had anything to do with the SFIO of the 1930s
could be disastrous, particularly as sections of the far left saw it as a place to do another
entrist job. It would take time for the LCR to concretely come to grips with the new socialist
party.
Confronting the Mitterrand debacle

They thought that if the reformists were to win, it would improve the relations of class forces
and lead to a gain in confidence for the working class, after two decades of the right in
power. In light of workers looking to an electoral and political solution to their grievances,
the LCR was opposed to the communists and socialists splitting, a thorny question since
France had two mass left parties competing for support. Unity between these two parties
was a bureaucratic unity from above, and relying on Trotsky’s arguments to his forces in the
Communist League grouped around La vérité in the 1930s, the LCR wanted to position
themselves as fighters for unity when the socialists and communists were divided. They
also emphasised unity from below to challenge this bureaucratic unity from on high. On the
other hand, when the two parties did collaborate, they emphasised the function of this unity,
with a perspective towards the left government. Bensaïd explained what the LCR did in the
lead up to the elections:
[W]e devoted enormous time and energy to detailed propaganda in order to prepare
and arm the workers on the programmatic questions under discussion. We did not
pose the question of unity first and foremost in terms of unity between the parties, but
in terms of the sovereign self-organisation of the workers in order to settle the
differences and strike together against the bourgeoisie: inter-union meetings and
sovereign assemblies in the factories, united action committees.[33]
This positioning formed a part of their insurrectionary vision. At the time it was thought that
once the right was beaten electorally, a situation would open that could be used for a more
audacious, insurrectionary strategy, pushing the government further to the left and
benefitting from working class radicalisation against this government. The Popular Front
and Chilean references were abundant.
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The coming to power of Francois Mitterrand in 1981 shook this overblown and formalistic
vision. Mitterrand won a smashing victory. In December 1981, the LCR held its fifth
congress. Bensaïd ruled out class stability:
A unanimous accord has been reached at the congress regarding the perspectives
that follow from this victory: we do not face a stabilization of the institutions of the fifth
Republic and the beginning of an era of social democratic stability. The electoral
victory of parties with allegiance of the working class has created an unprecedented
situation. The new majority has the presidency of the Republic and an absolute
majority in the national assembly, without needing an alliance with the bourgeois
parties. Therefore, it has no pretext or alibi to avoid the demands of the working
class, who expect that the electoral change will now be turned into a real social
transformation facing the crisis. The horizon is therefore that of major confrontations
between the classes, whose consequences go well beyond the French situation. The
government…is without a doubt a bourgeois government. But the workers are looking
at it for now as their government, whilst the bourgeoisie…has no confidence in it. Not
that it doubts the loyalty of the PS and the PC vis-à-vis the established order, but
because it is not sure about its ability to whip the workers’ movement into line like
during the Popular Front in 1936 or the Liberation in 1944.[34]
The socialists and communists had a majority in the government. This was unprecedented.
The left had the presidency, a majority in the national assembly, controlled general councils
and large municipalities. Therefore, workers who had faced austerity expected this
government to deliver.
The LCR had no illusions that this government would break with capitalism and that the
government would not be able to satisfy the problems of the working class, but they
propagandised as if it could. Nevertheless, they were prepared to go through the
experience of left government with the working class and learn the lessons alongside them,
guarding their right to criticism. This logically intersected with the “turn to workers” agreed
on at the LCR’s fourth congress in 1980, obliging members to get jobs in industry.
For Bensaïd, revolutionary strategy involved the insurrectionary general strike. This has an
important history in the League, as it founded a revolutionary identity, “because the struggle
for political power is a key element in a problematic of the emancipation of the proletariat”.
Antoine Artous – who wrote much alongside Bensaïd in the 1970s and 1980s – explained
that “it is not only to insist on the necessity of the struggle for political power – Marx already
did that – but on a ‘project for the overthrow of bourgeois political power’, that is to say a
strategic hypothesis that illuminates a tactic and that defines the profile of a revolutionary
organisation in the struggle for power”.[35] The insurrectionary general strike gave a
revolutionary meaning to their daily practice. But it was nothing more than a propaganda
utensil.
The stage seemed set for a possible “débordement” (in ordinary English, “spill-over,” but in
political terms, an “outflanking and overtaking”) of the reformist parties, with mass ruptures
within them allowing the revolutionaries to take the lead – as it was classically sketched in
Trotsky’s Transitional Program – since a powerful social movement against the left in
government was hoped for. Resting on an outdated analogy of the Popular Front of the
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1930s, the fifth congress of the LCR looked towards the prospect of a confrontation
between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, leading in time to a revolutionary situation in
France, although it was not possible to foresee its rhythm, profundity or duration. The
elections resulted in a government that claimed to govern in the interests of the workers.
However, if this government was to administer austerity during a crisis, the conflict between
the austerity policy of the new government and the hopes of the electoral majority of the
workers’ parties among the workers would become sharp, made more urgent by the feeling
of their own power.
The LCR’s general perspective did not accord with reality and the years following
Mitterrand’s victory did not see the expected social upheaval, even after his tournant de la
rigueur of 1983. The workers’ movement didn’t experience a deeper radicalisation from
where the radical left could take things further. The working class remained acquiescent,
faced with austerity and falling real wages, as a consequence of the defensive position the
working class was in when Mitterrand came to power:
If we examine the real shifts in workers’ struggles, the 1976 to 1981 period shows no
radicalisation of the class. Quite the opposite. The number of working days lost
through disputes (per thousand employees) fell sharply between 1976 and 1981 from
292 to less than 95; and the drop was still more marked in heavy industry and the
service industries (from 477 to less than 171, and from 159 to less than 46,
respectively)…the major defeat of the steelworkers after the large-scale struggles of
December 1978 to March 1979 weakened whole sections of the working class and
reinforced a sense of impotence… [This] indicates that the working class was on the
defensive, while some of the more advanced workers were looking for a political
solution, although primarily within the existing framework.[36]
The lack of a generalised workers’ response disoriented the LCR. Crucially, as the last
wave of radicalisation kicked off by May ’68 was being exhausted, there was no decisive
social shock able to put the equilibrium of nation states and the post-war political landscape
into question. No hoped for revolutionary situation materialised, meaning revolution wasn’t
an actuality but an abstract idea that would hopefully become concrete again in the future.
Revolutionary strategy had flown into the realms of abstraction and revolutionaries had to
go against the grain. Faced with the sordid 1980s, the preceding political experience of the
LCR was coming to a close, the strategic question was being eclipsed.[37]
Going against the grain of history

In the 1980s Bensaïd began to accept the deep historical turn underway, between 1983 and
1986. He outlined this in his Contribution to a necessary debate on the political situation
and our party building project, published in Critique Communiste, from 1986. He outlined
this discussion in his lectures at the Fourth International cadre schools. At this moment,
coming to grips with the collapse of previous hopes and the rapid decline of the
revolutionary left, Bensaïd recognised that the LCR was at a “limit point”.
The previous period of the LCR was one that worked upon the hypothesis that the class
struggle would accelerate, reaching a revolutionary crisis in time, upon which the
organisation could make a rapid breakthrough. They thought they were living through an
epoch of the “actuality of revolution”. The adventure of Rouge going daily expressed this
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perspective. Crucially, in the 1986 contribution, Bensaïd speaks of the collapse of a project
that hasn’t been replaced, which was based on the “débordement of the traditional parties
unmasked by the exercise of power leading to an organisational ‘breakthrough’ beyond the
electoral victory of the left. The end of Rouge daily in January 1979, two years after its
launch, was an expression of the failure of this, still over optimistic perspective”.[38]
Bensaïd himself said in a cadre school lecture:
[T]his project was never really replaced. We are in a new situation, we have to
redefine what we want. If not…everything is mixed, you have no common
background, no flexibility in tactics, if you don’t have a clear project, which unifies at
least your cadres in the party…we need to redefine now…that could imply a big
change in the way of working… [This] also changes the way you organise materially,
use the militants we have. If you think you will have a revolutionary crisis quick, you
can burn your militants, it is not so important, a lot will come quick. But if you have to
build a long-term party, as a consequence each one is gold… To care, take care,
discuss when there are problems, not just a working militant force that comes and
goes like that. It is a permanent struggle to keep them, and even the ex-militants, not
to become enemies just because they are gone.[39]
This is a significant shift to building a durable revolutionary project for the long term. Lenin
was the symbol of this continuity, to maintain a political tradition, accumulation of
experiences, even if it “can appear routine build a long-term independent organisation, in a
minority, with big risks of sectarianism,” lacking concrete links with real processes and
movements. Lucidly, but quite late, settling accounts with the previous period, he saw that
“[w]e need a new definition of a new stage in party-building now. It will be the challenge of
the coming years”.[40]
Take this lesson from Bensaïd. He was capable of sharp re-orientation when the political
situation shifts, while holding onto the best acquisitions of his political current, one of which
was learning political sobriety the hard way.
This reorientation was not without overheads. Resisting the defeats in the 1980s (and early
1990s) was also due to activists being involved in campaigns and their trade union
struggles, perhaps to the detriment of party building. This led to a loosening up of their
organisation, “there had certainly been a movementist and trade unionist tendency of the
League in the 1980s”.[41] From the mid-1990s the LCR tried to correct this kind of
movementism with a heavier emphasis on “the political field,” while they also began to
recruit again.
This shift towards “politics” was threatened by electoralism. The rectification crystallised in
the successful Besancenot campaign of 2002, but it always risked oscillating between the
social movements and electoral politics, opening the door to a divorce between economics
and politics. Bensaïd didn’t reduce politics to electoralism, and pointed to the problems
small revolutionary groups face:
[In] the framework of a weakening in workers’ resistance, the usefulness of the mass
social movements seemed more obvious than that of a political organisation like ours,
which could appear at a certain point just as a network and a forum for discussing
ideas… [T]here is always a tension between the building of a political party and
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intervention in united fronts, between the risk of a sectarian response and that of
dilution of your political profile. One can’t resist that double temptation by a magic
formula, you have to work your way though it concretely in each case.[42]
The shifts of the 1980s accompanied the so-called “crisis of the workers’ movement”. Until
the mid-1980s, the fetishisation of the transitional program was linked to the idea that the
workers’ movement retained its fundamental references from the October Revolution.
Within this framework, it was believed that a live debate with common reference points
existed between the radical left and reformism. The twelfth congress of the Fourth
International finally “stressed that the crisis of the international revolutionary leadership
could no longer be posed in the same terms as the 1930s. It was no longer a matter of
providing alternative leadership to an international working class movement bathed in the
revolutionary culture of the period opened up by the Russian Revolution. A lot of water had
flowed under the bridge since that time”. This was a settling of accounts with an old
“propagandist” vision within the post-war Trotskyist movement where the “program
becomes the ‘conscious’ expression of an ‘unconscious’ historical process and de facto
functions like a norm. Its use is above all to gauge the way in which currents breaking with
Stalinism and social democracy move towards this norm”. The “crisis of the workers’
movement” meant a crisis in its fundamental reference points, shaking the sharp contours
of the debate between reform and revolution. Bensaïd wrote about the consequences of
this crisis:
[The culture opened by the Russian Revolution] had been destroyed during the long
night of Stalinism and by social-democracy’s embrace of capitalist order. A worldwide
renewal of trade unionism and working class politics was now on the agenda. It was
therefore a matter of plunging into the uneven and prolonged process of
rebuilding.[43]
The time for the slow impatience of rebuilding was at hand.
Leading up to the New Anticapitalist Party

Let’s keep in mind that during the 1990s Bensaïd stood down from the official leadership of
the LCR, and his core work was of a theoretical order. But he was always an absent
presence in the leadership discussions until the launch of the New Anticapitalist Party, and
gave many cadre school educationals.
Bensaïd’s general perspective, that remained from the late 1980s until his death, was the
need to rebuild a revolutionary, strategic horizon that had broken down. His perspective was
developed in the context of deep social and political defeat, which meant he thought a
revolutionary project had to be reconstructed over the long term.
The NPA was the culmination of two decades of debate, experience and party-building
opened by the turn of the 1990s, when the slogan of a “new period, new party, new
program” was announced. Bensaïd was central to the writing of the LCR’s manifesto, À la
gauche du possible, that summed up some of these problems. Since the LCR was a small
organisation, they thought it was unlikely they would seriously break out and grow without
left wing ruptures inside the PCF. As time wore on, serious left wing ruptures in the PCF did
not take place. Since then, the terms of the question of going beyond a small organisation
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evolved. They had a lot of trial and error, for example, with electoral accords with Lutte
Ouvrière (LO), the other major Trotskyist group, and other experiences of unity with
dissidents from LO and Socialisme par en bas, the International Socialist Tendency group.
For Bensaïd, these weren’t just tactical manoeuvres. “We cannot divorce politics from
history. It is therefore necessary to defend a vision that facilitates the fixing of theoretical
objectives, that does not crumble into the back and forth of the electoral game,” he wrote, at
the time when the LCR was dissolving itself into the NPA.[44]
What would become the NPA was born of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of
Stalinism. Contrary to what some orthodox Trotskyists expected, the fall of the Stalinist
regimes did not lead to the rebirth of democratic socialism in the East; “the ghosts of
Bukharin and Trotsky didn’t come out on placards, they didn’t represent references for the
new political generations in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Memory too had been
defeated.”[45]
From the years 1989 to 1991, the idea that they had entered a new period had arisen, and
old demarcations that justified the building of currents or political organisations no longer
operated in the same way. This didn’t mean old references became null and void, but it
necessitated thinking through a programmatic reconstruction and a new political project, in
its content as well as in its organised forms. This was the challenge to rebuild the social
subjects of emancipation, being made up of small resistances and partial victories. It was
also a “political challenge, where we have to redefine a strategic horizon that has broken
down”:
Therefore the problem was posed from 1989-1991. The winter strikes of 1995 began
to give us a glimpse of the possibility of militant crews, unionists, campaign groups
throwing themselves into a perspective of this kind. But this possibility was cut short.
It was quickly aborted by the victory – a deferred effect of the 1995 strikes and
Chirac’s dissolution of the national assembly – of the left in 1997. This electoral
victory channelled a good part of the energy liberated by the winter 1995 strikes and
the winter mobilisations against the Pasqua-Debré laws. The unions have
been…neutralised in the name of governmental realism and the politics of the lesser
evil.[46]
Let’s pause at 1997 for a moment, with Bensaïd’s critique of Lutte Ouvrière, in a letter
destined for Arlette Laguiller, presidential candidate of the group.[47] In the 1995
presidential elections, Laguiller received over five percent of the vote, the first time a
revolutionary candidate went beyond that mark, with only three percent difference with the
PCF. While “there is a long way from a vote to mobilisation…it doesn’t prevent this result
being revelatory of a significant repudiation of the major parties and of a radical current in
popular opinion. It implies a sufficient public credibility to actively intervene into the public
debate, formulate arguments, seek out alliances”. Rather than actively intervening in the
mass demonstrations against the Pasqua-Debré laws or the demonstration at Strasbourg
against the National Front, “on nearly all the key questions of the moment [Lutte Ouvrière
put forward] at best an impotent abstention, at worst a sectarian rumination”.[48]
It was useful to rehash some banal but forgotten points: that “the politics and tasks of an
organisation are dictated by the situation itself (and not only through the evaluation of
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available forces or their level of consciousness), that an effective revolutionary party will not
be built through the simple individual recruitment of militants independent of collective
experiences on a mass scale, that the communists worthy of this name try to propose a
politics for the whole of the workers’ movement and that there is no struggle, whether ‘great
or small’, where their activity isn’t needed”.[49]
It is useful to return to this episode for three reasons.
Firstly, Bensaïd didn’t downplay the importance of mass struggles outside of parliament, nor
did he reduce politics to an electoralist back-and-forth. He did not fall into the reformist trap
of separating politics from economics, where politics is seen as electoral campaigning and
economics as strike action, even if it was a real pressure in his political current. Secondly, in
light of his argument for a new party, the sectarian inability of LO to intervene after their
electoral success was a “fantastic waste” for the whole revolutionary project, because “a
new force or a new party is necessary today. It will have to be pluralist and democratic to
rally historical currents, trajectories, different cultures, but that the new challenges of the
international situation and the renewal of social movements could bring closer. Not only
could Lutte Ouvrière be a component part, but a motor element”.[50] But as a whole, LO
could not be counted on for a durable recomposition of the revolutionary left with the LCR.
Thirdly, the LCR didn’t want to miss this kind of opportunity after Besancenot’s electoral
success in 2002 and 2007. They wanted to use his success as a spring-board towards
rebuilding a revolutionary project in France.
The 2002 Besancenot campaign wasn’t just about electoral results. The LCR, “which hardly
counted more than 1,500 militants the day before the election, during the campaign and
months that followed, experienced an important militant dynamic, that resulted in a quasi-
doubling of their numbers”.[51] This rapid growth was a qualitative step forward. “Under the
impact of this sudden influx of new members, the LCR was profoundly renewed and
rejuvenated. It also became much less homogenised socially and ideologically.”[52] The
LCR outpolled the PCF, with 4.25 percent of the vote. The result demonstrated that the LCR
was more firmly established in the political landscape and could help to confirm its
credibility in the social movements.
This moment of renewal solidified the problem of overture and continuity. The LCR’s
generation of vieux soixante-huitards had met – via the Besancenot campaign, among other
things – with a new-found interest of young workers and students, “a condition, certainly
insufficient, but necessary for the construction of a new political force,” tied to the long-term
project of reconstructing the left. Behind the 2002 presidential campaign, the obvious
background was the Zapatista uprising in January 1994, the great strikes of 1995, the
anti-capitalist movement erupting in Seattle, and the struggle of the youth from 1998
onwards against the fascist National Front. It was towards the end of the 1990s that the
debate about a new party began to ramp up.
In the midst of this development Bensaïd saw a moment of resistance and reconstruction –
“the path will be long,” as the prophet Jeremiah said. “What is certain is that the forces that
will rise again, gain confidence, invent new paths, won’t be straight from the continuation of
the currents of the workers’ movement born of the First World War and the Russian
Revolution. Upon new foundational events, new alignments, new regroupments, new
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dividing lines will appear again. We are barely at the threshold of this necessary
reorganisation”, he wrote in a document destined for the fourteenth congress of the LCR,
held in June 2000.
Towards the end of the 1990s and 2000s, it was clear that the self-sufficiency of the social
movements was not enough – whether it were the strikes, the “sans” movements, quartiers
populaires (“popular neighbourhoods”) or the anti-capitalist movement. To believe the social
movement is enough to win emancipation is to fall into the “social illusion” that
counterposed the purity of social action to the mess of political engagement. A combative
left was necessary to reach beyond the pitfalls of the social movement, a project that didn’t
fall into the traps of electoralism. It was seen as the logical next step in the situation they
were in.
On the agenda, therefore, at the threshold of the twenty-first century – before Besancenot’s
2002 results – was the need for a new party that could rally a new generation of activists. It
was “a potential party, to transform into a real party. A party to give the social movement a
political response.”[53] This perspective was coupled with a prophetic vision of the French
political landscape, penned when the plural left government had a former Trotskyist, Lionel
Jospin, sitting as prime minister:
The left, all of the left in its diversity, with its grandeurs and its miseries is the product
of an epoch. All of its history, its memory, and its collective culture are today being
challenged. In its current state, it will be incapable of confronting the historical shocks
that lie ahead. For that, it doesn’t have the theory, the program, the militants or the
leadership formed in the rude school of struggles and events.[54]
The times are out of whack, where the rhythms of political action, social mobilisation and
reflection do not coincide. Therein lies a clash, in that revolutionaries have not been able to
resolve the contradiction between the long time necessary to accumulate experiences, to
reflect, to patiently discuss to achieve clarity, and the immediate, necessary, urgency of
action. Bensaid drew a parallel between doing an apprenticeship and engaging in
revolutionary politics, because both demand a “slow impatience”.[55] Revolutionary politics
is an apprenticeship in patience and slowness. It is open-ended. And both patient and
impatient at the same time. It combines patient building work and an impatient thirst for
human liberation, actively intervening to change the world.
Inescapable contradictions lurk here. Any period that witnesses revolution on its horizon will
have to overcome the weight of the century’s past defeats. In other words, what would it
take, and how long will it take, for the past that weighs like a nightmare on the living to be
overcome through conscious political praxis? No easy answers exist to this question. In a
late interview, Bensaïd discussed the core political problem of the 1980s, “when the idea of
emancipation disappeared”. He acknowledged the resistance against neoliberalism, none of
which faced the problem of political power head on. Nevertheless he thought, “The
dominant element of the era remains the historic defeat of the 1980s. We are not yet out of
it. It is a race against time which is not won. It is clear that at the moment the renaissance of
the radical left does not compensate for the decline of the traditional left.”[56]
At a moment that the radical left began to take a step forward again, without compensating
for the decline of the traditional left – whether the trade union movement, Stalinist
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communist party type or the social-liberal stripes – and the crisis of political representation,
three dangers demanded clarity among revolutionary ranks: of a first order, the dividing
lines between reform and revolution, of a second, electoralism weighing down any new
project that ends up tailing official reformist parties and lastly a third, organisational laxity.
Bensaïd was neither a sectarian nor an opportunist. His strong Marxist foundation permitted
him to be open and flexible, situating political tactics in an overall strategy, the means to
reaching the goal of overthrowing bourgeois political rule. His vision of a new party was an
attempt to “synthesise the best traditions of the workers’ movement and revolutionary
movements while being fuelled by the experiences of the present, a party with contours and
strategic hypotheses without an a priori delimitation”.[57] In other words, “the NPA is a party
of revolutionary transformation, but without finalised strategic delimitations. Many questions
must remain open.”[58] In the context where the NPA is the product of the LCR – the motor
force behind its construction lacking significant partners – dissolving, this postulate is open
to a wide range of concrete interpretations.
If it means that history creatively produces novelty to learn from and respond to, then there
isn’t much to argue about. But if this position assumes that the distinction between reform
and revolution is an outdated concept, meaning that it can be left out of day-to-day political
choices, then it is problematic. The distinction between reform and revolution is more
relevant than ever, compared even with the Russian Revolution, because of the weight of
the trade union bureaucracy, the continuity of parliamentary-reformist parties
(notwithstanding their degree of internal crisis, collapse or loss of links to the workers’
movement), the way in which the bourgeois-representative state fashions out a specific
political field as an illusory incarnation of the general will. In Western Europe, reformism is
and has been the dominant current on the left and in the working class movement. Holding
fast to this distinction should not lead to a sectarian inability to work alongside reformist
forces in the struggle against austerity. But it is necessary for revolutionaries – even
“revolutionaries without a revolution” – to understand the “sharp political differences that
separate them from their reformist or semi-revolutionary temporary allies”,[59] lest they
want to neuter their ability to intervene effectively, tailing their foes, which will result in
broken illusions, because “apparatuses are determined not by ideology but by social logics”.
An organisation must put its ideas to the test of practice. But without the ability to translate
them into relations of force, correct ideas aren't enough. They cannot be shifted by
whispering in the ears of their leaders but only by modifying the real balance of forces”
between reformists and revolutionaries.[60] This is why the “return of the strategic question”
means assessing the way a revolutionary, strategic horizon regulates day-to-day politics,
where the radical left finds itself in a different and more unfavourable context compared to
when Lenin, Luxemburg and Kautsky set the terms of the debate. Accepting that
communism is a regulating strategic hypothesis implies – beyond a diverse range of
concrete historical circumstances – that revolutionaries need discipline and coherence,
organisational regularity to analyse and debate out political orientation to quickly changing
conditions, rather than laxity.
Regularity and discipline are necessary for a membership to be cohered around a strong
theoretical foundation, something Bensaïd’s later refoundation of Marxist theory aimed
towards. It is one thing to have general ideas that are open and undogmatic that can attract
high quality intellectuals to a party project. But it is a must to give theoretical and historical
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depth an organised form to wage battle, so that an activist membership can assess daily
problems from within an open, but rigorous theoretical and historical framework. He argued
for Marxist theory, destined to become strategy, and recognised the contradictions that
confronted a watering down of program: “we have enough experience to know that in a
compromise, we can cede on programmatic clarity in exchange for a gain in social surface,
in view of action and common experimentation. But to sweeten the content of a program
without winning in a capacity for action, to mix up pluralism with eclecticism, has often
resulted in organisations that aren’t larger and stronger, but much narrower and more
confused.”[61]
Bensaïd was aware of these problems, as his inquietude in the lead up to the NPA attests.
He wanted the NPA to preserve relations with the Fourth International, but he did
acquiesce. He also accepted that the old LCR wouldn’t intervene as an organised fraction,
in a bid not to stand in the way of the NPA’s momentum; but he recognised the risks
involved.
In the lead up to the NPA project, he fought for a politics of the oppressed and a League
that was strong enough to withstand social-liberal pressure and maintain an intransigent
independence vis-à-vis social democracy. He was opposed to weakening a left of struggle,
meaning he saw the tension between institutional respectability and the struggle of the
oppressed. While the electoral success of Besancenot shook things up a little bit from
above, “the determinant condition for our project remains the ownership of politics ‘from
below’. We must learn how to use the play of images without becoming dependent on it,
without giving in to the media’s co-optation, and without being taken in by the illusion
according to which televisual second life will replace life – otherwise said, the real
struggle.”[62] Only a strong political foundation could withstand the pressures of getting lost
in the succession of electoral contests without a revolutionary perspective, in order to move
from defensive resistance onto the political offensive, with a vision to overthrow bourgeois
political rule. In a debate hosted by Critique Communiste as a result of the victory against
the European Constitutional Treaty, Bensaïd set some solid contours for founding a new
project:
The perspective of a “new force” remains an algebraic formula for now (this was true
for us before 1989-91 and is even truer since). Translating it into practice cannot be
mechanically deduced from formulae as vague and general as “the broad party” or
“regroupment”. We are only at the start of a process of reconstruction. What counts in
the approach to this is our programmatic compass and strategic aim. This is one
condition that will allow us to discover the organisational mediations we need and to
take calculated risks. That way we avoid throwing ourselves headlong into some
impatient adventure and dissolving ourselves into the first ephemeral combination
that comes along… But, in every case, reference to a common programmatic
background, far from being something that obstructs future reconstruction, is on the
contrary its precondition. Strategic and tactical questions can then be prioritised so
that we are not torn apart because of this or that electoral outcome. We can
distinguish the political base on which organising open theoretical debate makes
sense. We can assess which compromises allow us to forge ahead and which to pull
us back. We can adjust to forms of organisational existence (whether to be a
tendency in a shared party, part of a front, etc.), depending on our allies and how
20 of 26 2/20/17 1:36 PM
their dynamic fluctuates (from right to left or left to right).[63]
We should learn from this. Especially in circles where the radical left is on the defensive and
has not broken with the spiral of defeats, because it underlines the need to pay attention to
questions of political substance, theory, organisation and leadership, within a long-term
perspective of reconstruction.
Conclusion
Reaching a conclusion, it is worth letting Bensaïd speak at length. He passed on before
deep political crises tore the NPA project into rambling pieces, and it would be an abuse of
political writing to say what he would have done, where he would have lined up, whether he
had a magic wand to steer the party through tumultuous times had he not died so early. His
legacy is a contested one. What we can do now is look back on his lucidity. He was
prepared to take risks to confront historical contradictions that revolutionaries cannot
escape, but must confront head-on:
In light of this disastrous situation, we assume our responsibilities. We are indeed

conscious of the difficulties. Starting with that of taking on the construction of a new
party, if this is not from the cold, then at least in a defensive context and not from the
impetuous growth of the social movements. There is certainly resistance and
important struggles, but most end in defeats. The other great difficulty is the absence
of significant partners on a national scale. Some have responded to our proposition
with silence or discarded it with a fear that it was a simple manoeuvre to renovate the
League. They are short-sighted. Rather than hiding away in distrust and in fear, they
should be happy that the League is taking this initiative instead of timidly contenting
itself with managing its (small) electoral capital. And, rather than whining for no
reason, they should engage quickly in a discussion about fundamentals: a new party,
on what program? To do what? With what alliances in view? And what guarantees for
democratic functioning?… If we do it, it is because we come from a historical current
that has for a long-time posed this question, that has had to carry for great lengths, in
adversity, the heavy baggage of exile, and that sees the possibilities of a conjuncture.
We have inherited a vision of history that doesn’t give way to the post-modern cult of
politics in crumbs, of a shrunken present, without a past or future, of a false realism of
the “here and now”, sacrificing strategy to tactics, the goal to the movement, and that
ends by building castles in the sky… Without a doubt it is much simpler to cautiously
administer a simple reinforcement of the League, but it would fall short of the
obligations of the situation. It is possible that we will not achieve our objective, or that
we will only partially secure it. Except in rare circumstances, one doesn’t multiply
militant forces like famous Biblical bread. And in setting ourselves to work on the
task, we know that the path will be long.[64]
Bensaïd’s life was one of intransigent combat against the enemy class combined with a
self-reflective attitude regarding political practice. This is a political ethic that the
revolutionary left can positively learn from. His “slow impatience” is needed on the left today,
a position that should be constantly rehashed, because the politics of impatience tend to
resurface, for we are always forced to place absolute practical energy into relative political
certitudes. There are times when what is necessary and what is possible are out of whack,
21 of 26 2/20/17 1:36 PM
and what can be achieved is limited, necessitating concrete analysis rather than launching
into all sorts of empty possibilities, as the pot-house politician tends to do. This doesn’t
imply acquiescence, but through analysing the situation and intervening, one can hope to
strengthen revolutionary forces both quantitatively and qualitatively, taking the next step
forward without stumbling, crucial when labouring for the uncertain, forever in the shadow of
the melancholic wager.
References:
Armstrong, Mick 2014, “A critique of Murray Smith’s writings on broad left parties”,
Marxist Left Review 7, Summer.
Armstrong, Mick 2016, “The broad left party question after Syriza”, Marxist Left Review
11, Summer.
Bensaïd, Daniel 1980 “The Roots of the Crisis”, International Socialism 2, Summer.
Bensaïd, Daniel 1982, “La Ligue communiste révolutionnaire (LCR) a tenu son Ve
congrès”, Inprecor, 116.
Bensaïd, Daniel 1997, “À Arlette, À propos d’un incroyable gâchis”.
Bensaïd, Daniel 1998, Lionel qu’as-tu fait de notre victoire?, Albin Michel.
Bensaïd, Daniel 2007, “The return of strategy”, International Socialism 113, Winter.
Bensaïd, Daniel 2008, Penser Agir, 2008, Lignes.
Bensaïd, Daniel 2009, “It is time to define strategy”, International Viewpoint.
Bensaïd, Daniel 2010, “Who Are the Trotskyists?”, Socialist Resistance.
Bensaïd, Daniel 2013, An Impatient Life, Verso Press.
Cahiers critiques de philosophie 15, Daniel Bensaïd, le militant philosophe, Hermann,

2016.
Fournier, Jacques 1983, “The Ligue Communist Revolutionnaire and the Mitterrand
government”, International Socialism 21, Autumn.
Johsua, Florence 2015, Anticapitalistes, une sociologie historique de l’engagement,

Éditions la découverte.
Krivine, Alain 2006, Ça te passera avec l’âge, Flammarion.
Kuhn, Rick 2011, “Revolutionary strategy and the united front”, Marxist Left Review 3,
Spring.
Palheta, Ugo, Daniel Bensaïd and Julien Salingue 2016, Stratégie et parti, Les Prairies
Ordinaires.
22 of 26 2/20/17 1:36 PM
Post, Charles 2013, “What is left of Leninism?”, Socialist Register.
Revolutionary Communist League (LCR), 1975 Une Chance Historique Pour La

Révolution, Cahier Rouge.
Sabado, François 2012 (ed), Daniel Bensaïd, l’intempestif, La découverte.
Salles, Jean-Paul 2005, La Ligue communiste révolutionnaire (1968-1981) Instrument du

Grand Soir ou lieu d’apprentissage?
Notes:
[1] See Armstrong 2014 for a critique of Murray Smith; Armstrong 2016.
[2] With the exception of the 1968 events and the dissolution following the 1973 anti-fascist
demonstration against New Order.
[3] Sabado 2012, p166.
[4] Cahiers Critiques 2016, interview with Besancenot, p205.
[5] Krivine 2006, p61.
[6] Outside of the PCF and the different Trotskyist currents – PCI, LO and the Lambertists –
were also the Maoists and the “centrist” grouping, the PSU, founded in 1960 by former
Trotskyists, claiming a membership of about 10,000 before the May ’68 events. In 1972
some of its members would split away and join the League.
[7] Bensaïd 2013, p34.
[8] Bensaïd 2013, p37.
[9] Bensaïd 2010, p76.
[10] Cahiers Critiques 2016, interview with Krivine, p187.
[11] Unfortunately, due to space I cannot discuss Bensaïd’s engagements in the Argentine
and Spanish underground, or his later work in Mexico or Brazil.
[12] Johsua 2015, p44.
[13] Fabio Mascaro Querido wrote: “In the French League, Daniel Bensaïd was one of the
principle proponents through the theoretical formulation of the ‘substitutionalist’, where
minority violence was part of a vanguardist necessity…despite the fact that this ‘ultra-leftist
manifesto’, as Bensaïd would later say, had been criticised (by those like Gerard Filoche
and/or Pierre Rousset), he incarnated the majority position within the League at that time.”
Courtesy of Fabio’s unpublished notes.
[14] Fabio’s unpublished notes.
23 of 26 2/20/17 1:36 PM
[15] On May 17, Alain Krivine led a group of students to the Boulogne-Billancourt Renault
factory.
[16] Bensaïd lecture to Amsterdam party school; Salles 2005, p117.
[17] Charles Michaloux, Francois Sabado, Olivier Besancenot, “Combattre et penser”, in

Sabado 2012, p11.
[18] There were leading dissenters against the action in their ranks. Henri Weber and
Janette Habel saw this kind of action as a mask for political impotence and lack of
implantation in the working class.
[19] Roso and Mascaro Querido, 2015.
[20] LCR 1975.
[21] LCR 1975; Salles 2005, p154.
[22] Bensaïd’s lectures to the Amsterdam cadre school 1983/4.
[23] Johsua 2015, p44.
[24] Post 2013, p187.
[25] LCR 1975, p36.
[26] The programmatic document Oui, le socialisme! that Bensaïd organised, was a
manifesto predicated on the victory of the left parties in 1978, without knowing what would
actually be the outcome of the elections!
[27] Kuhn 2011.
[28] Bensaïd 2010, p85.
[29] Post 2013, p87.
[30] Krivine 2006, pp186-187.
[31] Bensaïd lectures to Amsterdam cadre school 1983/4.
[33] Bensaïd 1980.
[34] Bensaïd 1982.
[35] Quoted from Johsua 2015, p106.
[36] Fournier 1983, p117-134.
[37] Bensaïd was a main force behind the lectures and texts titled Strategy and Party, given
to the cadre school in 1986 then compiled in 1987. In this set of texts, Bensaïd thinks
through the strategic lessons of two decades of party-building, alongside reflections on the
revolutions of the twentieth century, Marx and Lenin. With these lectures and notes, he
24 of 26 2/20/17 1:36 PM
“hoped to keep the lessons of the 1960s to the 1980s alive until a new crisis would make
them somewhat more topical again – as a way of assessing the present without losing the
memory of the past”.
[38] Fabio Mascaro Querido’s unpublished materials.
[39] Bensaïd lectures to Amsterdam cadre school, 1983/4.
[41] Daniel Bensaïd and Pierre Rousset 2007, “Un étrange bilan”, http://www.europe-
solidaire.org/spip.php?article6460.
[42] Daniel Bensaïd, interview with Phil Hearse, “Leninism in the 21st century”, International
Viewpoint online magazine, IV, 335, November 2001, https://www.marxists.org/archive
/bensaid/2001/11/leninism.htm.
[43] Bensaïd 2010, pp91-92.
[44] Bensaïd 2008.
[45] Bensaïd 2008.
[46] Bensaïd 2008, p281.
[47] Thanks to Alain Krivine who pointed me towards this letter.
[48] Bensaïd 1997.
[49] Bensaïd 1997.
[50] Bensaïd 1997.
[51] Johsua 2015, p76.
[52] Johsua 2015, p76.
[53] Bensaïd 1999, “Ouverture et continuité”, preparation for a congress of 2000.
[54] Bensaïd 1998, p273.
[55] Bensaïd 1998, p277.
[56] Bensaïd 2009.
[57] Palheta et al 2016, p52.
[58] Sabado 2012, p166.
[59] Armstrong 2016.
[60] Bensaïd 2007.
[61] Bensaïd 2008, p300.
25 of 26 2/20/17 1:36 PM
[62] Bensaïd 2008, p304.
[63] Bensaïd 2007.
[64] Bensaïd 2008, pp290-291.
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Daniel Bensaïd and "The Last Generation of October"

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Daniel Bensaïd and “the last generation of October” http://marxistleftreview.org/index.php/no-12-winter-2016/133-dani...

No.12 Winter 2016

The essence of political comprehension is to understand what objective problems faced

The early years of Daniel Bensaïd’s political engagement

May ’68 and its traces

enormous and results were few”.[16]

If politics is the anticipation of means and roads to change an existing situation by

The foundation of the Revolutionary Communist League:

Confronting the Mitterrand debacle

Going against the grain of history

The time for the slow impatience of rebuilding was at hand.

Leading up to the New Anticapitalist Party

It is useful to return to this episode for three reasons.

their dynamic fluctuates (from right to left or left to right).[63]

In light of this disastrous situation, we assume our responsibilities. We are indeed

Bensaïd, Daniel 1997, “À Arlette, À propos d’un incroyable gâchis”.

Bensaïd, Daniel 2008, Penser Agir, 2008, Lignes.

Bensaïd, Daniel 2009, “It is time to define strategy”, International Viewpoint.

Bensaïd, Daniel 2010, “Who Are the Trotskyists?”, Socialist Resistance.

Bensaïd, Daniel 2013, An Impatient Life, Verso Press.

Cahiers critiques de philosophie 15, Daniel Bensaïd, le militant philosophe, Hermann,

Johsua, Florence 2015, Anticapitalistes, une sociologie historique de l’engagement,

Krivine, Alain 2006, Ça te passera avec l’âge, Flammarion.

Post, Charles 2013, “What is left of Leninism?”, Socialist Register.

Revolutionary Communist League (LCR), 1975 Une Chance Historique Pour La

Sabado, François 2012 (ed), Daniel Bensaïd, l’intempestif, La découverte.

Salles, Jean-Paul 2005, La Ligue communiste révolutionnaire (1968-1981) Instrument du

[3] Sabado 2012, p166.

[4] Cahiers Critiques 2016, interview with Besancenot, p205.

[5] Krivine 2006, p61.

[7] Bensaïd 2013, p34.

[8] Bensaïd 2013, p37.

[9] Bensaïd 2010, p76.

[10] Cahiers Critiques 2016, interview with Krivine, p187.

[12] Johsua 2015, p44.

[14] Fabio’s unpublished notes.

[16] Bensaïd lecture to Amsterdam party school; Salles 2005, p117.

[17] Charles Michaloux, Francois Sabado, Olivier Besancenot, “Combattre et penser”, in

[19] Roso and Mascaro Querido, 2015.

[20] LCR 1975.

[21] LCR 1975; Salles 2005, p154.

[22] Bensaïd’s lectures to the Amsterdam cadre school 1983/4.

[23] Johsua 2015, p44.

[24] Post 2013, p187.

[25] LCR 1975, p36.

[27] Kuhn 2011.

[28] Bensaïd 2010, p85.

[29] Post 2013, p87.

[30] Krivine 2006, pp186-187.

[31] Bensaïd lectures to Amsterdam cadre school 1983/4.

[32] Bensaïd lectures to Amsterdam cadre school 1983/4.

[33] Bensaïd 1980.

[34] Bensaïd 1982.

[35] Quoted from Johsua 2015, p106.

[36] Fournier 1983, p117-134.

[38] Fabio Mascaro Querido’s unpublished materials.

[39] Bensaïd lectures to Amsterdam cadre school, 1983/4.

[40] Bensaïd lectures to Amsterdam cadre school 1983/4.

[43] Bensaïd 2010, pp91-92.

[44] Bensaïd 2008.

[45] Bensaïd 2008.

[46] Bensaïd 2008, p281.

[47] Thanks to Alain Krivine who pointed me towards this letter.