Recorded Fragments

Twelve reflections on the 20th century with Daniel Bensaïd

Daniel Bensaïd

• Publisher: Resistance Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780902869554
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Recorded Fragments - Twelve reflections on the 20th century with Daniel Bensaïd

These interviews with Daniel Bensaïd were a project broadcast on the radio station 'Fréquence Paris Plurielle' (106.3 FM).

During recording sessions in 2007 and 2008, Daniel Bensaïd proposed further interviews on twelve events associated with key dates of the workers' movement.In these, he gives his insight into events such as the October Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, the assassination of Lumumba, the 1973 coup in Chile, the fall of the Berlin Wall.

These twelve events - milestones of the 'short twentieth century' - are necessarily a biased and partial choice. In the interviews, one hears, or rather one reads in this book, some of the main analyses that structure Daniel Bensaïd's thinking, but also that of part of the radical left at the very beginning of the 21st century.

1

Preface: Against a discourse of fatalism

Michael Löwy

Daniel Bensaïd was one of the most creative, imaginative and sharpest minds in the contemporary history of Marxism, in France and beyond. He had the gift of combining fidelity to our Great Ancestors – Marx, Lenin, Trotsky – with an extraordinary open-mindedness and boundless curiosity, which made him read with profit the memoirs of Chateaubriand and the biography of Joan of Arc, the sociology of Max Weber and the political philosophy of Hannah Arendt. All his writings are driven by the irreducible force of indignation, an indignation which, he wrote in Les irréductibles (2001), is a beginning: ‘[It is] a way of getting up and going. One becomes indignant, one rebels, and then one sees.’

We got a lot closer during the 1980s. I probably contributed to his discovery of Walter Benjamin, and he made me read Charles Péguy. We shared an attraction for Auguste Blanqui, about whom we wrote an article together. Admittedly, we still had some ‘disputes’, for example about Rosa Luxemburg, whom I preferred to Lenin... But our ‘elective affinity’ was visible enough for our Brazilian comrades to publish two volumes (in 2000 and 2017) of our mixed writings.

It is true that these recorded fragments do not have the literary brilliance of his writings, where each word was cut and chiselled like a diamond. They have, in exchange, the direct, spontaneous, refreshing style of oral interventions. Their publication is therefore a significant and welcome contribution to the rich collection of his work. In his answers to the questions asked by his friends we find some certainties, but also many question marks: for example, was the social revolution on the agenda in May 1968? This capacity for doubt is to Daniel’s credit!

These interviews concern the ‘short twentieth century’ (Eric Hobsbawm) from the Russian Revolution to the fall of the Berlin Wall, including the German Revolution, the Spanish Revolution, Fascism, Stalingrad, the Cold War, the tragedy of Greek communism, the Algerian Revolution, May 68, feminism, the Black movement, Lumumba and African independence, the Cuban Revolution and Guevarism, Allende’s Chile and Miguel Enriquez’s MIR, the Mitterrand years. No doubt ecology is missing, but it is true that the question was not put to him.

Of course, this excursion into twentieth-century history is the work of an activist, far removed from any pretension of ‘scientific’ or academic historiography. It is the expression of a thinker who does not compromise in his fidelity to the ideals of communism, and to the revolutionary legacy of the October Revolution. He defines himself as belonging to a generation for whom 1917 ‘was still something that stirred’. In fact, the spirit of the Red October runs like a thread of that colour through all these talks, and illuminates, like a distant but ever-present light, each of his words.

Certainly, he acknowledges that the Bolsheviks of the Leninist years (1917-23) made mistakes: Lenin refused to discuss laws or a civil code, while the terrifying violence of the Chekist terror was being exercised without legal limitations. After the end of the civil war and the victory of the Reds, many exceptional measures could be suspended; however, there was on the contrary a hardening of the authoritarianism of the regime, with the opening of political prison camps in 1923. The same is true for Leon Trotsky, head of the Red Army: his book Terrorism and Communism (1920) is ‘a frightening text in many ways’.

However, Bensaïd opposes, with the last of his energies, the conformist discourse which assimilates Bolshevism and Stalinism, proclaiming, in a kind of parody of biblical genealogies, that ‘Rousseau begat Marx, who begat Lenin, who begat Stalin’. In fact, Daniel rightly argues, a world separates the October revolutionaries from the Stalinist counter-revolution (which exterminated them all).

An uncompromising revolutionary, an inveterate opponent of reformism, Daniel is no less opposed to sectarianism, which he criticizes even among those he admires the most: for example, in the tone of Leon Trotsky’s attacks on the Spanish POUM or Victor Serge. And he acknowledges that his own current has been unjust towards Salvador Allende: compared to today’s reformists he was ‘a giant of the class struggle’!

It goes without saying that in a set of improvised and spontaneous radio conversations of this type, certain approximations or gaps are inevitable. Several concern the exchange on Rosa Luxemburg, to which I, as a ‘Luxemburgist’, am particularly sensitive ...

According to my friend Daniel, Rosa Luxemburg and her Spartacist friends broke with social democracy too late, after the Russian October Revolution of 1917 and the German Revolution of November 1918. But that is not quite right – what does ‘too late’ mean? Before 1914, neither Lenin nor anyone else proposed to the German left to break with the SPD. In fact, before the Great War, Lenin believed in the orthodox Marxism of Karl Kautsky, with whom Luxemburg had broken as early as 1909. In January 1916, Karl Liebknecht was expelled from the Social Democratic group in Parliament. The Spartacus League was formed, initially under the name of the International Group, in a clandestine meeting in the same month. It had its own leadership, publications, etc. In April 1917, the ‘centrist’ wing of the SPD broke up and formed the USPD, the Independent Social Democratic Party, to which the Spartacists adhered. In January 1919, the Spartacists founded the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), and in January 1920 the majority of the USPD joined the KPD. In short, the story is a little more complex, and in any case the Spartacists were out of the SPD-majority long before the October Revolution.

Bensaïd mentions Rosa Luxemburg’s criticism (in 1918) of the Bolsheviks, but mentions, above all, her proposal to elect a new Constituent Assembly. However, Rosa’s most important criticisms concern the absence of democracy and essential freedoms (freedom of expression, organization, etc.), including in the soviets, which could lead to their bureaucratization. Another curious shortcoming : our friend quotes the famous pamphlet Junius of 1915 (The Crisis of German Social Democracy) of Rosa Luxemburg, but only as a document breaking with the Second International – forgetting to mention the watchword, so decisive for revolutionary Marxism, of ‘socialism or barbarism’, that appeared there for the first time.

In spite of these shortcomings – there are undoubtedly others – the whole of this panorama of the century is no less extraordinarily coherent and crossed by a powerful visionary breath. The fighting and critical spirit of the speaker gives these fragments an undeniable moral and political power.

The name of Walter Benjamin is not mentioned in these interviews, but his spirit haunts the whole.

For example, Bensaïd ruthlessly denounces the wretched fatalistic conception of history, typical of a ‘vision of victors’. For this story of a fait accompli, everything that happened was inevitable and necessary. This conformist discourse of fatality denounces the constitutive perversity of the revolutionary project, inevitably destined for totalitarianism: above all one must not try to change the world! Let us leave things as they are...

Now, observes Daniel, history is made of bifurcations, nothing – Stalinism, Nazism – was played out in advance, opportunities were missed. The future cannot be predicted, it depends on our own actions.

This wager on praxis is not blissful optimism. On the contrary: Daniel Bensaïd, like Walter Benjamin, is a revolutionary pessimist. Benjamin asserted in his essay on surrealism (1929) that the revolutionary must be able to ‘organize pessimism’. Daniel does not speak of pessimism, but he explains that his revolutionary gamble is a pari mélancolique – title of one of his most beautiful books. Why melancholy? Because of the recurrence of defeat: were not most of the great revolutionaries of the past – Emiliano Zapata, Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, Che Guevara, Miguel Enriquez – defeated, assassinated? Was not the fall of the Wall in 1989 the end of the cycle opened in 1917?

It was here that Daniel parted ways with his friend and mentor, Ernest Mandel who – when he saw in 1990 the joyful crowds in East Berlin shouting ‘we are the people’ – believed in a new revolution in Germany. Eternal optimist, the historic leader of the Fourth International proclaimed: this closes a parenthesis, we are returning to the great era of Rosa Luxemburg. But, Daniel comments soberly, there are no parentheses in history... The unification of Germany will simply be a victory for capitalism.

Turning a melancholic look back on the twentieth century, Daniel notes the defeat of the great hopes of emancipation at the beginning of this century. In 1900, the socialists believed in a century of peace, freedom, social justice... At the end of the century, we must acknowledge our historic defeat, a social, political and moral defeat (Stalinism).

However, and this is essential, this melancholy in no way leads to fatalistic resignation. More than ever, shortly before his death, Daniel Bensaïd believed in the future of the revolutionary gamble. Of course, we are entering a new era, but we are not starting from scratch: we are starting again from the middle. And we are preparing for the next forks in the road, which are bound to appear...

2

Some memories of the recording sessions

Pierre Barron, Marion Druart,

Guillaume Garel, Gwenn Sanchez

In the beginning we are four friends.

Two of us host every week the political and social news programme Les oreilles loin du front, on Fréquence Paris Plurielle (FPP, 106.3 FM), one of the last community radio stations in Paris. The other two are members of the LCR and activists in the same cell (local branch) as Daniel Bensaïd. They debate with him on numerous occasions and listen to his speeches. But above all they remember those meetings in the twentieth arrondissement of Paris, which became rituals at the end of the year, during which Daniel told a somewhat embellished story of the JCR which became the LCR. It was a bit like Uncle Daniel telling nice stories, it was militant and intimate at the same time.

The idea came up to do a series of radio interviews with Daniel, which would not be directly related to political news or the publication of one of his books. We decided on a somewhat particular format: 12 dates introduced by one of us, Daniel would give his talk without us necessarily asking questions or prompting. The duration of each episode would be more or less 20 minutes.

Daniel immediately accepted our proposal, and left us free to choose the events and subjects we would submit to him to evoke a twentieth century seen from his window. The recording would be done in two stages, the first session in 2007, the second almost six months later in 2008.

If certain themes were unavoidable (October 1917, May 68, the fall of the Wall in 1989, ...), the subjects and issues that we chose corresponded to the questions posed by the activists that we were.

Thus, around the figure of Rosa Luxemburg we spoke of anti-militarism, surely because the first Gulf War deeply marked our youthful commitment, particularly through opposition to French intervention. It was also because the second Gulf War was barely over, if at all. Today, one would no doubt question other aspects of Luxemburg’s thinking, for example its criticism of bourgeois democracy, in a period of declining public freedoms in the liberal democracies we are living in.

In the same way, we approached antifascism through the Spanish War. We were then at the time of Le Pen père and we think of the threat of the extreme right as the heir to collaboration and the OAS, in its methods and its policy. Today, at the time of Bolsonaro, Orban and other Marine Le Pens, we would certainly pose the question of the fascist threat differently, as Ugo Palheta does (see his text in this book).

The choice of questioning the Algerian war of independence echoes a series of programmes that we made with guests such as Maurice Rajsfus, Jean-Luc Einaudi, René Vautier and especially the arrival of young historians who renewed the historiography of colonial wars (Sylvie Thénault, Tramor Quéméneur, ...). And then the history of the struggles for the emancipation of the colonized peoples is also the political history of Daniel and his generation. These questions have since become increasingly important: thinking about colonization and post-colonialism means thinking about the society in which we live, from the management of working-class neighbourhoods to the repeated outbursts against populations designated as Muslim.

We can still evoke the episode devoted to the second wave of the feminist movement: during the first session, a first recording took place. But we had considered Daniel’s words as disembodied, too often confined to listing the successive positions of the LCR on the subject. We had discussed it all together and agreed to take up this issue again during the second session.

Recording the interviews

We record at home. We push the furniture around a bit. Fold out the living room table to place the microphones and a mixer. At the first recording session, which had to be delayed due to health problems, Daniel’s thin face shocks us. We are saddened to see him so weakened.

But once the microphones are plugged in, speech takes its rightful place. Despite the fatigue, there is a crazy energy in his words. One of his concerns each time is to think about the possible bifurcations of the story, not to read the events in the sole light of the story written by the victors. One gets the impression that when he talks about Germany in 1918, France in 1968 or Chile in 1973, history is still treading on his heels.

Daniel only has a sheet of paper with a few notes for almost two hours of recording. And then, above all, we are impressed by his ability to get back on track to conclude at the end of the agreed twenty minutes, despite the many detours in his reasoning.

We were rather proud of ourselves but also a little deferential, happy to attend a private lesson. The atmosphere was warm, Daniel had kept his talkativeness and his taste for broadcasting, and we laughed several times even if we remained very concentrated during the takes. Bet...