Daniel Bensaïd: From the Actuality of the Revolution to the Melancholic Wager (Historical Materialism Book) 9004314946, 9789004314948

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Daniel Bensaïd: From the Actuality of the Revolution to the Melancholic Wager

Historical Materialism Book Series Editorial Board Loren Balhorn (Berlin) David Broder (Rome) Sebastian Budgen (Paris) Steve Edwards (London) Juan Grigera (London) Marcel van der Linden (Amsterdam) Peter Thomas (London) Gavin Walker (Montréal)

volume 303

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/hm

Daniel Bensaïd: From the Actuality of the Revolution to the Melancholic Wager By

Darren Roso

leiden | boston

The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov lc record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2023045810

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill‑typeface. issn 1570-1522 isbn 978-90-04-31494-8 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-68702-8 (e-book) doi 10.1163/9789004687028 Copyright 2024 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Brill Wageningen Academic, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau and V&R unipress. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill nv via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Foreword vii Foreword: The Power of Indignation xi Acknowledgements xiii Introduction: Fitting the Bow for the Renewal of Marxism 1

part 1 Bensaïd Encounters Lenin in the Early Years 1

Bensaïd Encounters Lenin

19

2

Revolution and Power 79

3

The Dark Years of Readjustment 134

part 2 New Inventions and Illuminations 4

History Has Two Faces 175

5

Marx from Beneath the Ruins 253

6

Ready to Roll the Dice? 385

part 3 Open-ended Conjunctural Judgements 7

The Return of the Social Question 443

8

Who Is the Judge? 476

9

Smile of the Frightful Hobgoblin 509

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contents

part 4 Bensaïd and His Contemporaries 10

Althusser: Trapped in Stalin’s Glass Jar 591

11

Negri: The Dissolution of Politics into Violence 618

12

Badiou: A Distant Companion 638

13

Derrida: Fellow Marrano 668

part 5 Strategic Thinking to Break the Reproduction of Fetishism and Domination 14

Praising the Profane 683

15

Commodity Fetishism 747 Conclusion: Pointing Towards Spaces of Liberation 797 Appendix: Daniel Bensaïd’s Melancholic Wager – Jury D’habilitation 2005 (by Way of an Introduction) 803 Michael Löwy References 806 Index 818

Foreword In many ways, this book is an event. Not only because it will allow the Anglophone public to discover the thought of Daniel Bensaïd, in its full wealth and complexity, but also because it is the first work of this magnitude and rigour that gives a rightful place to an author who is too little known – including in France. This place is singular, above all in our time: it is the place of a Marxist theoretician and political militant, for whom Marxism and revolution are just two names and component parts of a single historical impetus, forever unfinished and never arrested. Interrupted by his premature death, the trajectory of such thought continues, and this beautiful book must be read as the proof of his lasting fecundity. Whether or not we share all of Daniel Bensaïd’s political choices – the history of which Darren Roso reconstructs from the political context of the 1960s until 2010 – the actuality of his démarche imposes itself on all those who want to get rid of capitalism, before it destroys the human species and the planet. This actuality consists in thinking of history as a series of bifurcations that are never fatal but forever aleatory, changing the circumstances for the human action that results from them without ever dissolving into them. Above all, it also consists of tackling politics as a strategic art, tying thought to action and history to the contemporary moment, without ever confusing or severing them. Such an approach is more relevant than ever: the crisis of the left in general and the radical lefts in particular, right across the world, shows us the extent to which the renovation of theoretically informed and politically offensive strategic reflection is absolutely urgent. This construction site is colossal. Just as hostile to the political dogmatisation of Marxism as its academic sterilisation, and refusing the division of revolutionary labour between licensed theoreticians and zealous practicians, Daniel Bensaïd is one of the rare Marxists of our time to have carried the flame of a political Marxism, that is to say, politically involved and acting politically, taking on the risk of error and impasse. In these darkening times – dark times for both capitalism as well as the alternatives to the system – and the fact that Marxism has hardly been tied to concrete social and political struggles for many decades now, we can consider that Daniel Bensaïd was firmly part of a tradition of great militant theoreticians – like Rosa Luxemburg and Antonio Gramsci, to mention only a couple of names – even though the conditions of political intervention have of course radically changed. It is pedestrian to repeat that the historical circumstances of the moment are unfavourable to Marxism and revolution, to this mutual activation of thought

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and intervention of which Daniel Bensaïd was a tireless partisan. In fact, lacking the construction of a mass project of the abolition of capitalism into a credible alternative has left a place to a many-sided and aggravated crisis of capitalism. The hope for its possible overthrow threatens to sink into the mounting chaos of forever growing inequalities, into war-like spasms and the collision of imperialisms, in the repression of migrants, the unemployed, political and trade-union militants, in the ransacking of the environment, etc. Like a shadow, racist and identitarian tensions have accompanied the retreat of solidarity, the spirit of critique and the class struggle, the latter being the condition and the soil of critique, in action as in ideas. Therefore, it is quite logical that this immeasurable crisis, affecting every dimension of collective and individual life, has degraded the tools for its overall comprehension and has reached its way to every social and political alternative – even the most consensual, the most banal redistributive alternative – while the different components of the workers’ movement have been disintegrating, in part under the weight of their own contradictions, and has durably scattered their emancipatory forces. We must remember that from the 1970s, while the post-modern discourse was being utilised to aestheticise the impotence of rebellious flight, neo-conservative ideology – a merciless, brutal doctrine of class war – fully equipped with a vision of the whole and a global strategy, was impermeable to the rising scepticism on the left. Such a picture could lead us to judge all emancipatory combat obsolete. But this misses the essential point: the role of contradictions, which Daniel Bensaïd continually put himself to work on, in exploring historical continuities and contemporary transformations, the broken time of politics and the untimely contretemps of critique. Because these contradictions are an essential, constituting part of a world in a state of constant political fermentation. They traverse social relations but also all of the exploited and dominated of the world, which witness the contradiction between their potential and the alienation they are subject to, between time stolen and the will to live a better life, between a forced consent and bitter resistance: this dialectic is not just a philosophical view; it is the condition of existence of the overwhelming majority (who are not merely crushed, but who can and do resist). It is here that a living Marxism is concerned, as it cultivates a dialectical attention to the real: to know how to detect in defeat not the conditions for tomorrow’s inevitable victory, but the possibles lodged at the heart of the necessary instability of a capitalism that, more than ever, needs threats and terror to continue, living on from a consensus extorted by force. Our humanity, perched upon a tinderbox ready to explode, like no previous generation has seen, faces the imminence of a new episode of the long-term economic crisis

foreword

ix

of contemporary capitalism, deeper than the preceding one, and which, needless to say, never flips over to emancipatory politics of its own accord. Because the critical consciousness of the key questions as well as the political organisation of popular struggles are still necessary, alone capable of reorienting the historical course and engaging in the long and difficult task of the concerted and democratic abolition of capitalism. Central to Daniel Bensaïd’s thought, the analysis of historical bifurcations makes itself heard out of the unprecedented intersection that has become our present, the place where all the dangers but also – before it is too late – all that is possible intermingle. Why is Marxism indispensable for a present that certainly was not Marx’s? Among other reasons, because this political contradiction – if we follow it analytically – leads us straight to the heart of the social relations of capitalism, to that point where the wage worker, selling his or her labour power, makes capitalist accumulation possible all the while trying to resist the conditions that are imposed on him or her by this very process. If this resistance can sometimes remain silent – individual or indeed individualistic – it is from this place that the refusal of a mode of production based on class domination and the exploitation of the other’s labour, the annihilation of human abilities, and the crushing of each woman and man’s potential, can emerge. And it is at this point that communism presents itself as the only thoroughgoing political, social, and economic alternative. Within this framework, without a doubt, we can say that Daniel Bensaïd was one of the greatest Marxists of our time, for having never abandoned the idea of a critique of political economy as the quintessential theoretical and militant site, where the possibility of overall comprehension (which does not efface specificity) simultaneously interacts with the possibility of a social and political struggle, fulfilling no pre-written script and obeying no overbearing authority. Relentlessly dismantling the received ideas of Marx and Marxism, polemically going head-to-head with all the doctrines of the definitive victory of capitalism as well as of its tranquil disappearance, Daniel Bensaïd maintained and above all brought to life the articulation of a – forever unfinished – theoretical labour and militant intervention – equally ongoing and uncertain. The wager of engagement has its sights on a world to win, this world upon which we rest our feet, being our world. To conclude this preface, three remarks will suffice to spell out the reasons for which one must read Darren Roso’s beautiful book, not as a mournful homage to a figure of the past but as the most faithful manner of prolonging the effort of a thinker who is, in so many ways, contemporary. The first point is that despite a gloomy political outlook, neither the social struggles, nor the political movements that fight, nor radical political contest-

x

foreword

ation have disappeared. And the interest in Marx and Marxism, as subaltern as it is, is inseparably effect and cause of these local and partial movements that have not renounced perspectives involving the totality of social relations or abandoned the common values of emancipation. The renewal of interest that takes shape will only last and have an effect if the militant researchers and editors continue their courageous work. The publication of this book is heartening proof of this. The second point concerns the history of socialism and the political movements that more or less claim the mantel of Marxism for themselves. Daniel Bensaïd never deserted Marx but neither did he forget the most important political debates in the workers’ movement; a remembrance of these political debates was a condition of going forward into the future. This history is not principally one of defeat; it does not reduce itself to the history of the defeated, of those without a voice and the dispossessed. It is a multiple history, conflictual, made of incessant struggles, with victories and defeats threaded through each other. It matters to appropriate this history. The third remark is that political Marxism, conceived as such, can come to life today only on the dual condition of being forever adjusted to the circumstances of our time, that is to say to its contradictions and to the spaces of intervention that they open up. And this adjustment is not, cannot be, the making of pure thought; it can only be the result of a collective labour, itself situated at the meeting point of analysis and collective practical, social, and political experiences. One of the watchwords of Daniel Bensaïd’s work – like the Marxism to which he lays claim – is democracy. It is, for sure, on the condition of bringing to life and expanding democratic organisations, anticipating from the present the true democracy to come, exceeding without disowning the parliamentary forms in crisis, and on the related condition of a collective intellectual elaboration that Marxism today can exist and be made to exist, or to at least outline the social and political commons that alone can put an end to the capitalist rule of value. Lastly, this book, so attentive to Daniel Bensaïd’s journey and thought, succeeds in restoring his delicate attention to circumstances and their dialectic, his quality of incessant questioning, acute intelligence, immense culture, generosity, and restless combativity. All of these qualities are required more than ever by the revolution of our time, in the middle of the present’s labyrinth, with the ransacking that is under way, but also of revolts and rage. Because it is now quite clear that only our cultivated and organised rage, while constantly being questioned, will reap fruit. Isabelle Garo

Foreword: The Power of Indignation Daniel Bensaïd will be sooner or later recognised as one of the most inventive and brilliant renovators of revolutionary Marxist theory in our times. Firmly rooted in classical Marxism, and even in classical Trotskyism, he was able to move beyond, to new areas, new problems, new ideas, new illuminations. He was also a remarkably gifted writer. If his books can be read with such pleasure, it is because they are written with the sharp pen of a true author, one who has the gift of the trait: a trait that can be murderous, ironical, enraged or poetical, but which always goes straight to its aim. This literary style, specific to the author and impossible to imitate, was not gratuitous, but at the service of an idea, of a message, of an appeal: refuse compliance, refuse resignation, refuse reconciliation with the winners. His philosophical thought was not an academic exercise: from one end to the other, it was filled with the burning stream of indignation – a stream, as he wrote, which cannot be dissolved into the tepid waters of consensual resignation. From this resulted his scorn for those he called ‘Homo resignatus’, the intellectuals or politicians that one recognises from afar by their toad-like impassiveness towards the pitiless established order. For Bensaïd, ‘indignation is a beginning. A way to stand up and start moving. First comes indignation, then rebellion, then we shall see’. Among all of Bensaïd’s ‘heretical’ contributions to the renewal of Marxism and revolutionary theory, the most important, in my eyes, is his radical break with the positivist, determinist and fatalist ideology of inevitable Progress that so heavily weighed on ‘orthodox’ Marxism, particularly in France. His re-reading of Marx, with the help of Auguste Blanqui and Walter Benjamin, led him to understand history as a series of crossroads and bifurcations; a field of possibilities whose issue is unpredictable. Class struggle is central in the historical process, but its result is uncertain, and implies an element of contingency. In Le Pari mélancolique (The Melancholic Wager, 1997) – which may be his most beautiful book – he seizes a concept of seventeenth-century philosopher Blaise Pascal to argue that emancipatory action is ‘a work for the uncertain’, implying a wager on the future. Re-discovering the Marxist interpretation of Pascal by Lucien Goldmann, he defines socialist commitment as a ‘rational wager on the historical process’, a wager on which one’s whole existence is grounded, ‘running the risk of losing everything’. Revolution ceases to be considered as the necessary product of the laws of history, or of the economic contradictions of capital, in order to become a strategic hypothesis, and an ethical horizon, ‘without which the will renounces, the spirit of resistance gives up,

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foreword: the power of indignation

fidelity is broken, and tradition is lost’. The revolutionary is therefore a human being that doubts, an individual that puts an absolute energy at the service of relative certainties. In other terms, someone that tries, obstinately, to practice that imperative requirement called for by Walter Benjamin in his last writing, the Theses ‘On the concept of history’ (1940): to brush history against the grain. Darren Roso’s book is certainly the most extended, profound and systematic account of Daniel Bensaïd’s ideas written until now. It will be a necessary reference for any further study and a most welcome contribution to introducing his thought to the English-speaking public, where he still remains relatively unknown. Roso distinguishes two periods in Bensaïd’s writings: the first, from the mid1960s until 1988; and the second, from 1989 to his death in 2010. Roso emphasises the continuity between both: there is no sharp break. In both periods, Bensaïd tries to develop a political strategy responsive to crisis and able to defeat the capitalist class. I agree with this assessment, but I would emphasise more the change which began in 1988–89: it is during the following years that he would make his most decisive contributions to a renewed Marxist reflection, by including (and re-interpreting) the insights and ‘profane illuminations’ of Walter Benjamin, Charles Péguy, Auguste Blanqui and many others. These creative innovations are very intelligently discussed in Roso’s book, particularly in the chapters dealing with Bensaïd’s reading of Benjamin – ‘History Has Two Faces’ – or of Pascal’s wager (‘Ready to Throw the Dice?’). The political and historical context, the early enthusiastic expectations after May ’68, the disappointments of the 1980s and 1990s, and the ups and downs of the Revolutionary Communist Ligue are taken into account and related very concretely to the evolution of Bensaïd’s theoretical reflections. I like the way Roso summarises one of the guiding threads throughout the life work of Bensaïd with a well-known Latin phrase by the Roman senator Cato: ‘victrix causa diis placuit sed victa Catoni’ (the cause of the winners pleased the Gods, the cause of the defeated pleased Cato) … The cause of the defeated Spartacus, Joan of Arc, Auguste Blanqui, Leon Trotsky and Che Guevara pleased Daniel Bensaïd. Michael Löwy

Acknowledgements This book wouldn’t have been written were it not for the help of many people. They either opened a door to the project, engaged in hours of discussion, read all or parts of the manuscript, had suggestions and gave the project hope, contributed through their own articles, works and instruction, collected or pointed to necessary paths of research. Sebastian Budgen who tirelessly encouraged and supported this project with friendship and attention since meeting at Chez Prune; the late Sophie Oudin-Bensaïd who was extremely generous with her time and resources in the effort to secure Daniel’s legacy (and anyone involved in the project to compile Bensaïd’s writings for public access); Michael Löwy, without whom this project would not have begun in the first place; Antoine Artous who participated in hours and hours of discussion about the theoretical-political issues of post-68 French Marxism; Tom Bramble, Gerard Filoche, Isabelle Garo, Alain Krivine, Fabio Mascaro Querido, Gilbert Achcar, Andrew Ryder, Félix Boggio Éwanjé-Épée, Stella Magliani-Belkacem, Josep Maria Antentas, Stathis Kouvelakis, Henri Maler, John Marot, Ugo Palheta, Charlie Post, Catherine Samary, Enzo Traverso, Edwy Plenel, Jaime Pastor, Frieder Otto Wolf, Rick Kuhn, Mick Armstrong, Tom O’Lincoln, Sandra Bloodworth and Andy Blunden. I would also like to thank the many members of Socialist Alternative who have contributed to a unique intellectual culture committed to rebuilding the Australian left, with particularly thanks to Liz Walsh and Ben Hillier. As for the patience of those close to me, Juliette Claire Wehling Wrathall, Caterine Spagnolo and Jessica Roso deserve so much; Fabio Risi and David Wrathall also. I acknowledge the Traditional Owners and Custodians of the land upon which I work, the Peoples of the Kulin Nation. I pay my respects to their Elders past and present. Sovereignty was never ceded; resistance continues. Earlier versions of some of the arguments and content have appeared in oral presentations (Historical Materialism, Marxism Conferences Australia, the Paris-8 Bensaïd colloque of 2019 and the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy), journal articles and edited volumes. This materials includes: 1. ‘Daniel Bensaïd, une politique de l’opprimé. De l’actualité de la révolution au pari mélancolique’ (co-written alongside Fabio Mascaro Querido), Revueperiode, 2015, available at http://revueperiode.net/daniel‑bensaid​ ‑une‑politique‑de‑lopprime‑de‑lactualite‑de‑la‑revolution‑au‑pari‑mela ncolique/#identifier_0_2025. 2. ‘Daniel Bensaïd and “the last generation of October” ’, Marxist Left Review 12, Winter Issue 2016, available at https://marxistleftreview.org/articles/​ daniel‑bensaid‑and‑the‑last‑generation‑of‑october/.

xiv 3.

4. 5. 6.

acknowledgements

‘Confronting the Triple Crisis of the Radical Left: The Workers’ Movement, Strategy and the “Crisis of Marxism”’, Historical Materialism 26 (1) (2018): 37–67. ‘Introduction to “Strategy and Politics”’, Historical Materialism 28 (3) (2020): 197–229. ‘Bensaïd lecteur de Marx: inventer l’inconnu dans les hiéroglyphes de la modernité’, Contretemps/Révolution Permanente Dimanche, 2020. ‘Daniel Bensaïd (1946–2010)’, in Handbook of Marxism and Post-Marxism, edited by Alex Callinicos, Stathis Kouvelakis and Lucia Pradella, New York: Routledge, 2020.

introduction

Fitting the Bow for the Renewal of Marxism Marxist … I’m undecided. Because the adjective became an orthodoxy when Marxism was captured by the apparatuses of parties and states. Certainly, today there is a kind of rehabilitation of Marxism, a new trend … but one risks falling into an academic Marxology … I prefer to call myself a ‘revolutionary Marxist’, or quite simply, a ‘revolutionary’ because having both terms is redundant. Marx is one of the best tools to take on the practical question of changing the world. The best test of the actuality of Marx is capital itself; from the class struggle, the tycoon Ernest-Antoine Seillière.1

∵ Daniel Bensaïd, whose early death has left a silence to which we must lend an ear, was one of the most creative, elegant and daring militants post-war Marxism has had at its side. He had a tenacious fortitude against capitalism. This combined a literary style rich in imagery with an acute grasp of political struggle to produce a militant able to inspire, educate and deliberate. This work will explore the status of his contribution to French Marxism and radical politics; beyond mere exploration, it will argue that Bensaïd made an innovation for Marxist theory, in dialogue with the political conjuncture and the adventure of French philosophy.2 Bensaïd’s contribution to Marxist theory was coterminous with the trajectory of the Ligue communiste révolutionnaire, one of the largest radical left organisations to emerge from the 1960s upheavals, in which he played a leading part. Since we never begin on a blank slate, but ‘always restart from the middle’, it is now the time to continue the dialogue with Bensaïd’s liberatory Marxism, to take up the results of the May ’68 generation and go forward to meet the new in our present conjuncture.3

1 Bensaïd 1998, interview with Jean-Louis Peyroux, La meilleure preuve de l’actualité de Marx, c’est le capital lui-même. 2 See Badiou 2012. 3 Hegel 1969, p. 68.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2024 | doi:10.1163/9789004687028_002

2

introduction

Bensaïd was a prolific writer, yet his contribution remains relatively unknown or under-appreciated in the English-speaking world. In the interval between the release of his autobiography and death, he published some 16 works. Of the many works he left behind, only a few have been translated into English. Some of his key works like Walter Benjamin, sentinelle messianique (1990), La discordance des temps (1995) and Le pari mélancolique (1997) are yet to appear in English. As a consequence, this book takes on the task of drawing out the guiding threads of Bensaïd’s thought through his texts, to display the ‘the rhythm of the thought as it develops’, which is more important than ‘single causal affirmations and isolated aphorisms’.4 The task of this book is to deepen the transmission, across language, established political traditions and generations, of the positive part of his revolutionary thought to a new generation of militants. This project seeks to complement Bensaïd’s autobiography, taking seriously what he said in his Mémoire d’habilitation when he asked, ‘What unity can we give to an itinerary full of false leads and retrogressions … connected to a militant’ life that is subject to the uncertainties of encounters, challenges and bifurcations? Surprised, he realised that ‘I was more single minded than I’d imagined’, as certain problems never seemed to leave.5 Bensaïd’s singlemindedness will be the object of our study: the need to overthrow the capitalist mode of production and inaugurate a humanity beyond bourgeois cycles of domination. Human liberation can only be a reality if ‘each man and woman [as] a unique being … contributes to the enrichment of the species’, as a whole.6

1

The Unavoidable Responsibilities of Singular Conjunctures

In the context of the defeats of the Arab uprisings and the fragmentation of the radical left in Europe, many revolutionaries have to deal with the twin problems of political defeat and a slow impatience [une lente impatience]. This is a singular conjuncture that Marxists in different quarters face. The radical left has not yet recovered from its breakup at the end of the 1970s. Moments of relative rejuvenation have taken place in the 1990s and 2000s ‘without the sky turning crimson’, but, in recent years, the Marxist left has near universally collapsed or

4 Quoted from Thomas 2009, p. 129. 5 Bensaïd 2001d, p. 8. 6 Bensaïd 2010d.

fitting the bow for the renewal of marxism

3

fragmented.7 In this context, we have a responsibility to carve out a new possible Marxist tradition that has its sights on political practice. The paradox of our conjuncture is that Marx is more relevant than ever, and capitalism itself makes this so. Marx thought with his time, he also thought against and beyond his time, in an untimely manner. His wrestling, theoretically and practically, with the intricate enemy – the impersonal power of capital – brings him into our present. Without a doubt, Marx’s research programme remains robust. However, the discordance between theory and practice threatens the renewal of living Marxisms. Marxisms are subjected to a double standard of judgement because of the exigency to unify theory and practice. Bensaïd knew well that a Marxist research project will only have a future if, ‘instead of looking for refuge in the academic’s pen’, it ‘establishes a tight relation with the renewed practice of the social movements and with the resistance to imperial globalization’.8 Marxism is not a singular doctrine. It is crisis-prone and invites controversy. Indeed this ‘crisis began as soon as the name of Marx was burdened with its doctrinaire suffix’. This ‘recurrent crisis did not presage a simple disappearance, but rather a branching, a rhizomatic extension, a pluralising. In response to the challenges of the era, opposing tendencies have not stopped disputing the legacy ever since’.9 In a concise image of thought Bensaïd wrote: ‘If it is possible to speak of “Marxism” in the singular, this should rather be viewed as an archipelago of controversies, conjectures, refutations and experiences, whose history it relates by elucidating the mysteries and prodigies of capital’.10 All ideas about Marxism as a homogenous doctrine are empty abstractions unable to grasp the plurality of its concrete forms. However, every tradition is a singular collective. Bensaïd often referred to Ernst Bloch’s claim that there were ‘cold’ and ‘warm’ currents of Marxism. These were ‘not simply different readings or interpretations, but, rather, theoretical constructions that sometimes underpin antagonistic politics’.11 The contents of Marxism are not owned by any single authority or tradition; dogmatic relations to Marx and Marxism need to be overturned, which is a condition of possibility for articulating a liberatory Marxism that is alive to the present and able to draw from Marx’s critique of modern bourgeois societies in which the capitalist mode of production dominates. Bensaïd read Marx as a decipherer of bourgeois modernity, arguing ‘Marx

7 8 9 10 11

Bensaïd 2002, p. xxi. Bensaïd 2002, p. xv. Bensaïd 2013, p. 207. Bensaïd 2013, p. 301. Bensaïd 2006c.

4

introduction

was the first to pierce the secret of the great modern pyramid, that of Capital, and to decipher its hieroglyphs’.12 Bensaïd’s specific dialogue with Marx the decipherer of bourgeois modernity was supported by his commitment to the warm currents of Marxism. In a critical manner, Bensaïd remained a Marxist, as he explained: I say [whether I remained a Marxist or not] yes and no, because to use the adjective as such is ambiguous. I hesitate to use it. But Marxist in the way of a critical fidelity to Marx’s theory, yes! I continue to believe in the foundations of the theory, which is obviously dated (I have written enough on Marx to say that this is not a pious relation of defence and quote-mongering) but where one nevertheless finds the most worked out categories of a critique of the modernity of capital, of the commodification of the world in which we live. There are utensils that we must rework, debate, but we cannot leave aside.13 What matters is what we do with Marx. It is difficult to take steps forward if our task is to guard the faith. Heritage and tradition are not static. We need an active relationship to heritage and tradition, the contents of which can change and transform when the present poses new problems and we seek to deal with them. And the present does not cease to pose new problems – that can even astonish us – making heritage and tradition not only problematic, but objects to be transformed and reconfigured. For Walter Benjamin, Marxists must pay heed to the transformation that he describes as follows: ‘As flowers turn toward the sun, what has been strives to turn – by dint of a secret heliotropism – toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history’.14 If Benjamin’s statement is apt, then ‘In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it’.15 Thus, every generation rewrites and redefines tradition in order to confront the key problems of the political constellation they face. The last word is never said on the question of tradition; tradition entails a concrete and open possibility of creation, with new articulations and images of thought. One homogenous answer to all of the above does not exist. Either way, this fact makes the notion of a real or authentic Marxist tradition suspect. Only the standpoint of God may uncover Marxism’s authentic genealogy without contradiction, and tradition 12 13 14 15

Bensaïd 2001g. Bensaïd 2004c. Benjamin 1968, p. 257. Ibid.

fitting the bow for the renewal of marxism

5

will remain an empty abstraction if it avoids the challenges of an unfinished and singular present. We are situated in the contradiction between the authenticity of an abstract tradition and a singular concrete conjuncture that could redraw the lines of the tradition we know. Bensaïd never claimed to restore the authenticity of a disfigured Marx, and certainly not to re-establish his hidden truths as revelation would. Rather, he reached out to Marx from the present. This involved waking his image from a dogmatic slumber, of illuminating his presence through concepts. By resisting the abstraction of one homogenous Marxist doctrine, the inverse danger can appear – that of an eclectic and polite coexistence of academic Marx(isms) without ideological and practical stakes related to the truths of class struggles. Faced with this challenge, Bensaïd fought for a non-relativist pluralism, implying that not all interpretations are equal; some are without a grasp of the text, some lack a critical method of procedure and others fail to register the crux of the matter they face. To search for a unity within the plurality of interpretation is legitimate, even if Bensaïd is not afraid of an unfaithful fidelity to the text. To avoid the pitfall of eclectic relativism, we must seek to retie the links between theory and practice that have been in scission for so long. For Bensaïd, the foundation of this threat resides in the discordance between the uneven rhythms of intellectual rejuvenation and the delays or accelerations in social mobilisation. On this point Bensaïd established a responsibility for intellectual militants, whereby anchorage in a collective experience is a principle of reality and responsibility. Given that the research programme of Marx ‘is far from having exhausted its potential’, we cannot deny the rhythms of intellectual rejuvenation in a passive expectation of resurgence in struggle.16 But neither should we work towards an intellectual rejuvenation without the perspective to tie it to class struggles. It will not develop onesidedly. Yet, to change the world, it is necessary – now and always – to interpret it. Navigation is an art form moving between theoria and praxis; the dichotomy between theory and practice is one of tension; the relationship between the two is not direct, but it is real.

2

Politics as a Strategic Art

Whatever theoretical forms emerge from a rejuvenation of Marxism need to be tested by political practice, because the horizon of a creative Marxism is

16

Bensaïd 2002.

6

introduction

opened and closed by political practice, political events and the materialities of history. What political forms revolutionary dual power may take in the epoch of European construction, globalisation and the metamorphoses of spaces and rhythms of politics remains unknown. To discover it, a new cycle of struggles and experiences is necessary and we must be attentive to the real movement that abolishes the present state of things. New forms of struggle emerge when the oppressed fight back against degradation. Herein lies the innovative force of the event. After all, no one had planned the 1848 uprisings, the Paris Commune or Russia’s February Revolution, but they invented the unknown and we learnt from them. These experiences develop our strategic knowledge. As Bensaïd wrote: In politics there can only be one kind of strategic knowledge: a conditional, hypothetical kind of knowledge, ‘a strategic hypothesis’ drawn from past experiences and serving as a plumb line, in the absence of which action disperses without attaining any results. The necessity of a hypothesis in no way prevents us from knowing that future experiences will always have their share of unprecedented, unexpected aspects, obliging us to correct it constantly. Renouncing any claim to dogmatic knowledge is thus not a sufficient reason to start from scratch and ignore the past, as long as we guard against the conformism that always threatens tradition (even revolutionary tradition).17 A strategic compass is necessary; Bensaïd made every effort to develop a revolutionary political perspective to abolish capitalist domination. Without a revolutionary political perspective, there can be no revolution in the relations of property and power. We do not know at what hour these new experiences will come and we must be ready, as they may come at an unexpected hour, in unforeseen forms. Our time is a time out of joint, where an order breaks down without another having taken form yet. We can rule out any guarantee that this unknown will be the flash of a magnificent sunrise proceeding from nothingness, making it a miracle. We must be active in our vigilance, be on the lookout for an untimely possibility where the circle of the commodity’s repetition can be broken, ‘the point at which one’s partisan position intersects a certain configuration of objective spirit, making possible the irruption of the new, its breakthrough and actual advent’,18 because all turning back will

17 18

Bensaïd 2005, p. 180. Kouvelakis 2003, pp. 97–8.

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become impossible on the road to obscurity and catastrophe without the arrest of barbarism. Signalling the alarm to stop is possible. But it is not inevitable. It is nevertheless necessary because we have entered a longue durée crisis of civilisation where the reduction of the world to the measure of the commodity is more and more irrational and miserable. This calls for a political alternative because, ‘the crisis of capitalism is so profound – and the threat it poses to the future of humanity and the planet so grave – that there is an urgent need for an alternative equal to the stakes involved’.19 For Bensaïd, there ‘is a historical crisis, a crisis in civilisation, a stretched and prolonged crisis which drags on and on’, in which, ‘our ill-fitting world is bursting at the seams’, ‘pregnant with unseen barbarities’.20 The notion of warding off disaster is decisive for Bensaïd, tying together resistance and the event: To ward off disaster, it’s not enough to resist for the sake of resistance, it’s not enough to wager on the possibility of a redemptive event. We must seek both to understand the logic of history and to be ready for the surprise of the event. We must remain open to the contingency of the latter without losing the thread of the former. Such is precisely the challenge of political action. For history doesn’t proceed in a vacuum, and when things take a turn for the better this never happens in an empty stretch of time, but always ‘in time that is infinitely full, filled with struggles’.21 In our conjuncture, where faith in empty stretches of time no longer holds, a revival of creative Marxism that is linked to revolutionary practice is sorely needed going ‘forward to meet the new that [is] in the process of being born’.22 In a world of insurgent counter-revolution and a politically cemented capitalist class – where chaos and catastrophe seem to triumph – a revolutionary compass is needed that allows us to retain a confidence in political judgement, to grasp the dynamics of the system on a world scale, and to reach back into the revolutionary traditions of the past without falling into sectarian eschatology. These lines are not simply a prescription for what is needed today; they serve as an entry point into Bensaïd’s contribution to revolutionary politics, theory and organisation. This book will divide the life and work of Bensaïd into two periods, cognisant that there was no sharp break between the two. The first period ranges from 19 20 21 22

Bensaïd 2006c. Bensaïd 2010a, p. 140. Bensaïd 2010a, pp. 142–3. Bensaïd 2013, p. 73.

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the mid-1960s until 1988 and the second between 1989 until his death. He had accumulated much practical experience in Europe and the Central and Southern Americas before he embarked upon his second period, ‘the dual result of political changes in the world and personal changes in circumstances’.23 One thread of continuity was Bensaïd’s commitment to radical politics understood in strategic terms. This strategic art of political struggle includes within itself a necessary theoretical moment, where theory becomes an art of conflict; the notion of historical crisis is strategic. Bensaïd’s central political argument was that we cannot escape from the imprisonment of capital and its reproduction without the intervention of strategic categories of revolutionary crisis and revolutionary situation, where everyday routine and labour discipline break down. We inherit Bensaïd’s concern to tie strategic categories to the revolutionary event since politics is an art of the present. It treats history politically, by thinking though ‘conjunctures and the moments of strategic intervention’.24 Strategy orders political priorities, areas of intervention, slogans and political alliances. Strategic hypotheses ‘determine an ensemble of political tasks’.25 ‘The notion of revolutionary strategy articulates a plurality of times and spaces’, combining ‘history and the event, the act and the process, the seizure of power and the “permanent revolution”’: The strategic space is a site of force and a back-and-forth of relations. The space of state domination is the space where strategies are deployed. It determines the sites to secure, targets to shoot for and centres of decision to be involved in.26 These problems concern the modern bourgeois societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails. Revolutionary politics would be impossible without them. Within the complex of strategic notions, Bensaïd carved out an independent path that points a way through the antinomy between eternal resistance and a faith in the pure contingency of the event. Alone, the former’s action disperses without solid results and the latter awaits a miracle. The former cannot break the rule of capital and the latter does not allow for a preevental politics, necessary to win hegemony. Caught between both antinomic poles, the categories of mediation and representation are key constitutive ele23 24 25 26

Bensaïd 2001d, p. 7. Bensaïd 2001e, p. 61. Bensaïd 2011a, p. 82. Bensaïd 2011a, p. 77.

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ments of a politics of liberation. In the last decade of Bensaïd’s life, these problems were attaining greater urgency. Europe was caught in a regressive spiral with its ruling classes attacking social welfare in the name of competition. ‘The outcome of this test of force will be decisive for the future’, he wrote. Within this test of force, outlining a ‘revolutionary strategy for the twenty-first century, after the defeats and disappointments of the twentieth century’, was vital. While he recognised the futility of claiming to hold all the answers before new experiences, Bensaïd wrote up a thumbnail sketch: The strategic question it not reduced … to the final assault on power … Daily displays of resistance, social and political alliances, are integral parts of a long-term struggle for cultural hegemony and for a different society … Strategic thought is a thought of crises and historical discontinuities, a comprehension of the bond between the event and its historical conditions … it is certain that these struggles will take place and the future of humanity will depend on them … There has never been a major revolutionary situation without a major crisis of social relations, without a loss of legitimacy of the powers in place, without an upheaval of the reciprocal relations between the classes, and without the emergence of antagonistic forms of dual power, of which one must win out. And the dominant classes have never accepted their expropriation peacefully … [Lastly] [i]f the emancipation of the workers must be the act of the workers themselves, it is in the struggles of today that the contours and principles of tomorrow’s world are invented.27 The passage sets out Bensaïd’s political hopes and perspectives, and his commitment to the self-activity of the working class; I now return to the two moments of Bensaïd’s life work, outlining how I organise this book.

3

Bensaïd’s Oeuvre

Bensaïd’s first period contains works such as La notion de crise révolutionnaire chez Lénine (1968), La révolution et le pouvoir (1976), and Stratégie et parti (1986) where Bensaïd focuses on a ‘Leninist’ strategy for the working class to seize political power against the capitalist state. He firstly embarked upon a period of ‘hasty Leninism’, then settled his accounts with this legacy coinciding with

27

Bensaïd 2003a, pp. 182–3.

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the foundation of the Ligue communiste révolutionnaire. In his autobiography, he states that the 1970s were years more fertile in political polemics than theoretical reflection, and ‘more occupied by the strategies for political power than the critique of political economy’. It seemed that the general strike of May 1968, the national liberation struggles in the third world and the uprisings against the bureaucratic regimes placed revolution front and centre on the concrete order of the day. The three sectors of the world revolution would converge, as Ernest Mandel proclaimed. For a period, it really seemed possible, everything seemed possible. But this possibility withdrew from the world, leaving only traces of itself in the traumatic ruins of defeat. The shattered hope that this perspective suffered laid the basis for his second period, witnessing a re-engagement with Marx through Walter Benjamin and Antonio Gramsci – among many other sites of revolutionary thinking like Charles Péguy and Auguste Blanqui – in order to lay the basis for a renovation of revolutionary thought and a re-foundation of Marxist theory. Traversing the references of revolutionary thought just mentioned, Bensaïd argued for the ‘German way of doing science’, placing the subversive theoretical thread that has its roots in Spinoza (a cosmopolitan Dutchman) and runs from Goethe to Hegel at the core of a living Marxism. The second period of Bensaïd’s interventions are structured around three intersecting threads. The first is an investigation of Marx without the ‘isms’, where Bensaïd was convinced that the future would be made with or against Marx but certainly ‘not without him’, involving a return to Marx, not merely the secondary commentaries (though they were indeed present). The key works in this thread are Marx l’intempestif (1995), La discordance des temps (1995), Le sourire du Spectre (2000), and his later works in the 2000s on Marx.28 Bensaïd reflected on the critique of political economy, the heritage of German classical philosophy, the role of political struggle and the new way of writing history effective in Marx’s work. The second thread is that of ‘messianic reason’, or strategy. Bensaïd recounts that this thread ‘follows the question of the relation between history and structure, event and historicity, temporality and politics, which wraps itself around the figure of Walter Benjamin’.29 In this thread, Bensaïd opens a discussion about the event, crisis and historical rhythms. The present is the central category of this work; the present is the time par excellence of politics, the time of action and decision where the meaning of the past and the future interact in permanence, as he wrote:

28 29

The English title Marx for Our Times does not capture the work’s untimely nature, neither does it evoke the Nietzschean sense of the term of ‘untimely mediations’. Bensaïd 2001d, p. 7.

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The present of action, the elusive now-time, becomes the temporal category of strategy, the decisive moment where everything is set into motion and cards are constantly reshuffled.30 Here, Bensaïd embarked upon an independent path (to other popular radical theorists like Alain Badiou) in the context of the philosophical approaches to the event and history, theory and practice. Résistances. Essai de taupologie générale (2001) is a synthesis of this work. Problems of event and history were among the last thread of this period, which is tied to debates about politics and militancy and their relation to contemporary debates. He covered questions like the relation between the social movement and politics, the time-space of political democracy, political judgement, action in the form of the melancholic wager, the critique of post-modernism and critical encounters with his contemporaries. Within these themes are contained the recurrent issues of women’s, racial and lbgtiq liberation, ecology, the nation and Europe as well as the metamorphoses of imperialism and war. Le pari mélancolique (1997) – one of his most elegant interventions – and Éloge de la politique profane (2008) are the substantial works in this latter category. Bensaïd reflected on the track record of Trotskyism in the twentieth century. For Bensaïd, without the Left Opposition and the political currents that emerged from it, an understanding of the last century would have been impossible, caught between the dichotomy of totalitarianism and liberalism. The Left Opposition transmitted the great debates of the workers’ movement and they made the century intelligible. Trotskyists formed a persecuted minority born of the great defeats of the past century. They were a minority that had the courage to go against the grain of the victors. ‘Trotskyism’s stormy history ultimately revolves around a single major question: how to remain “revolutionaries without a revolution”’, Bensaïd wrote.31 The ‘history of Trotskyism is one of an eminently political refusal to give up, relinquish and disarm’, deploying ‘a wealth of courage and intelligence to stay on course’, to unwind ‘their Ariadne’s thread through the labyrinth of a sombre era’, in order to rescue the vanquished.32 Alas, the reality that most currents with historical roots to the Left Opposition have remained marginal has meant that the practical verification of theoretical disputes has been very partial:

30 31 32

Bensaïd 2001d, p. 34. Bensaïd 2010a, p. 17. Ibid.

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Spending such a prolonged period on the margins (Trotsky hadn’t expected the movement would be in the political wilderness for so long) can create an ideal environment for small group pathologies. Routine swimming against the tide often gives rise to sectarianism. There was a terrible imbalance in the relationship between theoretical work and opportunities for testing theory in practice; this led to an exacerbation of doctrinal squabbles and a dogmatic fetishisation of the written word. Just as there are people of the book, there is a communism of the book.33 This puts the argument developed in this study into an inescapable contradiction. I claim Bensaïd renovated Marxist theory; yet Marxist theory can only attain its final form if in the grip of the practices of mass and revolutionary movements. Revolutions invoke the paradox of ‘an imperative that is simultaneously impossible and necessary given the threats hanging over the future of humankind’.34 The same positioning needs to be adjusted to the need for a theoretical renaissance: it is necessary and needs to be done without final guarantees revolutionary practical experiences may yield.

4

Bensaïd’s Renovation of Marxism in Tragic Conditions

Bensaïd’s renovation of Marxism took place against the backdrop of Fourth International Trotskyism and the weight of Stalinism in France. Internationally, it was in the context of crisis on the revolutionary left and the ascendency of neoliberalism. The Eastern Bloc collapsed and the ideological legitimacy of an emancipatory project was buried under its rubble. In this conjuncture, Bensaïd reflected deeply on the tragic wager to act within the divorce between the necessary and the possible – the necessity of changing the world is more pressing than ever, but its concrete possibility is too often out of reach. When the necessary and the possible stand opposed, the wager becomes tragic and melancholic. Within this tension, subversive and revolutionary struggle grapples with the ‘too early’ and the ‘too late’ of revolutionary change. In the crevices of this crooked dialectic, he published over 30 works, where his contribution to Marxist literature flourished and he made a lasting theoretical contribution.

33 34

Bensaïd 2010a, p. 16. Bensaïd 2010a, p. 17.

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Bensaïd asked us not to give way to despondency in the face of defeat, to preserve our strength and flexibility, to begin anew over and over again in approaching an extremely difficult task of changing the world, because the path is longer than we imagine and its destination is quite uncertain. In this latter period, ‘At the beginning of the 1990s, onset of the illness that would take his life drove him to specify his priorities, privileging what he described as a work of “transmitting” a creative and fruitful Marxism’ and to pass it on to the young generation.35 In this sense, Bensaïd was a passeur. He recognised that it is not simply that we continue, but rather how we continue. Bensaïd’s contribution took place within certain confines, in a certain measure and up to a certain point because, as Antonio Labriola reminded us, ‘ideas do not fall from heaven, and nothing comes to us in a dream’, but it was nevertheless a renovation.36 His renovation is inseparable from the ‘last great wave of insurgency against the system in the late 1960s and early 1970s’, that unfortunately ‘failed to break through’ on a scale like the October Revolution. The system was restructured through crises that disorganised many of the forces involved in that insurgency just as defeat demoralised the left.37 When dealing with theoretical renovations, establishing a rigid schema that they must fit into is unhelpful. Theoretical renovations can appear at moments of crisis and defeat, and in moments of upsurge and triumph. The various comparisons of Gramsci, writing after the defeats of the Italian workers’ movement from prison, Lenin plunging into Hegel’s Logic to reinvigorate Marxist theory facing the collapse of the Second International, Walter Benjamin’s pathbreaking tract on the concept of history while being tragically isolated upon the signing of the Hitler-Stalin pact, and Tony Cliff’s systematisation of the ‘statecapitalist’ analysis of Russia (faced with the orthodoxy of the Fourth International) in the aftermath of World War Two teach us that Marxist theory must renovate itself in the face of singular and new situations. If it did not do that, it would cease to be a creative body of thought. A renovation in Marxist theory is an open and concrete question that can outstrip the practical day-to-day demands of an organisation or the workers’ movement at a given point in time. Additionally, a renovation situates itself between two contradictory poles, ‘the scrupulous endeavour to keep “within the bounds of Marxism”’ and the determination to uphold independence of thought at all costs. It is necessary to work within this contradiction. It is here that Bensaïd’s interpretation of Marx, to use Rosa Luxemburg’s words, ‘offers 35 36 37

Michaloux, Sabado, and Besancenot 2012, p. 13. Labriola 2010, p. 71. Harman 2010, p. 351.

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us glimpses into an entirely new world, which opens us to endless perspectives of independent activity, which wing our spirits for bold flights into unexplored regions’.38 Lastly, a renovation is not a radical emergence of something new tabula rasa. It is also a reaching back into the archaeology of a tradition lost or forgotten that is able to answer the questions of our singular present. In this sense it is also a recovery. Such a creative Marxism allows us ‘to see in the novelty of a situation what connects it with former developments’,39 and to remain open-minded dogmatists, as Bensaïd would say. This simply means being critical in the face of illusory novelty, because the word can often exceed the thing, where the old is repacked in the ‘new’: But the historical dialectic of old and new is subtler than any binary or Manichean opposition between old and new, including in the methodological sense. Yes, let the new flourish; do not give in to routine and habit; stay open to surprise and astonishment. This is all useful advice. But how, by what standard, can we evaluate the new if we lose all memory of the old? Novelty, like antiquity, is always a relative notion.40 Bensaïd recognised that ‘the intensity of the sentiment of novelty is often proportional to the loss of memory’.41 He made the relevant observation that, ‘The rhetoric of novelty is no guarantee against falling back into the oldest, and most hackneyed, ways of thinking’, because ‘many of the “novelties” our epoch indulges in are no more than fashionable effects … which recycle old utopian themes from the 19th century and the workers’ movement in its infancy’.42 Bensaïd thought these clarifications were necessary because We have begun the dangerous transition from one epoch to another and we are in midstream. We must simultaneously transmit and defend our theoretical tradition, even if it is threatened by conformism, while at the same time boldly analysing these new times. At the risk of appearing shocking, I would like to face this test with a spirit I would describe as ‘open dogmatism’. ‘Dogmatism’, because, if that word gets a bad press … in all matters of theory, resistance to voguish ideas has its virtues. The challenge of versatile impressions and the effects of fashion demands

38 39 40 41 42

Luxemburg 2010, p. 75. Lukács 2009, p. 85. Bensaïd 2005, p. 190. Bensaïd 2008b, p. 128. Bensaïd 2007a.

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that serious refutations are made before a paradigm is changed. ‘Open’, because we should not religiously conserve a doctrinaire discourse, but rather enrich and transform a world view by testing it against new realities.43 Yet history is inconceivable without novelty and situations that do not conform to abstract models and historical analogy. The truth is always concrete and the concrete develops. It is a permanently creative movement requiring self-reflective political practice when working for the uncertain. It is captured in the metaphor of the mole that borrows away beneath the surface textures of empty historical time; thus I end this introduction with some of Bensaïd’s words, to which I shall return in the conclusion: And with events. The mole prepares the way of their coming. With a measured impatience. With an urgent patience. For the mole is a prophetic animal.44 From Hegel to Marx, from the ‘Age of Extremes’ to the ‘Age of Catastrophes’, with geopolitical rivalries spilling over to war and the effects of climate collapse now visible, revolutionary politics takes shape around the figure of the mole, on a vastly altered and dangerous terrain. This is the problem, not the solution. Though Marxist critique and politics are necessary conditions of possibility for revolutionary transformation, answers and solutions to the travails of the mole will come from the creative and liberatory activity of millions of people in struggle. Struggle educates for those who listen. To study Bensaïd’s life and work is to witness how he responded to the travails of the mole and the liberatory practices of mass struggle. In the collective school of militancy Bensaïd did not respond to this problem alone, yet to witness his responses yields a unique perspective from which to judge theory and practice. This study does not take account of Bensaïd’s static conclusions in order to judge them a posteriori correct or erroneous, only to hold fast to this judgement. That would be too easy and condescending. We must tie judgement to comprehension in order to produce an exposition. If we did the former and nothing more, we would turn a moment into a fossilised abstraction, remaining a lifeless fetish, taking the part for the whole, detaching a moment from its concrete development. The key is

43 44

Bensaïd 2010a, pp. 107–8. Bensaïd 2010a, p. 143.

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to demonstrate the path toward his conclusions and the function they played within the rhythm of the whole. This interrogation allows us to keep Marxism alive for another day, which is a living task for our present. Let our adventure begin.

part 1 Bensaïd Encounters Lenin in the Early Years

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chapter 1

Bensaïd Encounters Lenin Daniel Bensaïd, trained by sensibility to interrogate the philosophical side of politics, yet remaining by trade a revolutionary setting word-work within a strategic field of debate, never managed to fulfil his hope of writing a book about Lenin akin to Marx the Untimely; if Bensaïd’s work on Lenin has a missing part, from his youthful ’68 writings, through diverse considerations and presentations, Lenin remained the invariable constant of Bensaïd’s militant life, who Bensaïd would return to over and over again. His many returns to Lenin produced their continuities and changes of perspective, yet all of his returns to Lenin developed the consequences of one fundamental problem: how the existing system of modern bourgeois domination can enter into an open political crisis making it vulnerable to revolutionary transformation. From his La notion de crise révolutionnaire chez Lénine, a Master’s thesis inspired by Henri Lefebvre in confrontation with the so-called structuralist readings of Lenin, unto his alignment of Lenin’s politics to contretemps, Bensaïd’s interpretation of Lenin revealed a remarkable filament of continuity around the notion of revolutionary crisis, because it was Lenin who spoke the language of an open political crisis of the system of domination. Lenin’s strategic thought, condensing the notion of revolutionary crisis, alone has the potential to break the vicious cycle of capital’s eternal repetition and commodity fetishism, with its illusory faith in bourgeois historicism and decadence. Therefore, despite the missing book on Lenin, it is possible to reconstruct Bensaïd’s fragmented writings into a quasi-coherent whole around the concept of revolutionary crisis. Bensaïd cuts against the grain of a-theoretical and a-political readings of Lenin, and while he was no objectivist historian, his writings were empirically grounded and historically astute, while approaching many different themes which cannot be subsumed under some mystical form of ‘Leninism’, a term he eventually vetoed out of a decent political lexicon. Throughout this chapter I will present the different themes of Bensaïd’s Lenin by reconstructing the various insights he came to: the alignment of politics to contretemps, politics as a strategic art, Lenin’s ‘revolution in the revolution’, the separation between the party and class and the role of organisation as a ‘strategic operator’, a mediator between theory and political practice, the distinctive approach Bensaïd reads into Lenin’s conception of political consciousness, hegemony and the state, the appropriation of conscious historical experience, democracy and finally

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2024 | doi:10.1163/9789004687028_003

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Lenin’s relation to Second International theorists and Kautsky, the pope of Marxism disgracefully dethroned because of his spineless attitude to the First World War and the November Revolution. Through the twists and turns of his time in and expulsion from the pcf, the founding of the jcr, then May ’68 and its aftermath, the neoliberal downturn and renewed upturn of struggle after the 1995 mass strikes, Bensaïd assembled an anti-determinist Lenin that persisted within the general contours of an initial hurried Leninism to a Lenin attuned to the exigencies of a slow impatience. While every reading of Lenin is guilty of some crime in our pluralist world of différance, where nobody is innocent because they happen to read Lenin inside their own historical coordinates, Bensaïd’s specific difference consisted in the fact that he combined the French conjuncture of philosophy and fidelity to the general strike of May ’68, with a strategic-political approach to revolutionary organisation (materialised in the Ligues) that sought to answer how patient political work over the long term could interleave with the unforeseeable crises of modern bourgeois domination. Historical context and political project shaped Bensaïd’s militant intellectual efforts to understand and present Lenin, who was and remained the key link in the chain of strategic thought’s development. My order of presentation will follow Bensaïd’s relation to Lenin chronologically and historically, through which I will integrate the more central themes as they develop across his work. Schematically, the first period of hasty Leninism prioritised the revolutionary crisis, but it was voluntaristic; the second period turned towards a more mature concept of class consciousness, while the third period consciously aligned Lenin’s politics to contretemps and gave this conception depth. Every moment was part of the Ligue’s development and Bensaïd’s role within it. Over the course of its evolution the Ligue developed a distinctive approach to politics, emphasising the strategic moment of emancipation, and this orientation to politics remains a great asset today. Critique Communiste, the Ligue’s theoretical organ, hosted many articles dedicated to strategic debate, and engaged critical currents of the cfdt and leftreformists from the European Communist parties. Antoine Artous wrote of it that ‘from this vantage point [the strategic debates], it is surely one of the “best” reviews of the time, and not only on the far-left’.1

1 Artous 2006, p. 156.

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21

There Was Life before ’68

Bensaïd began political life by setting up a Young Communist group while still in high school during the early 1960s, the day after police murdered nine trade unionists at the Charonne metro station in Paris. Yet not long after his entry into the party, heresy was near. As with all things social and historical, a good heresy reveals a lot about the state of a party and the outside world. Heresy is sometimes hidden and at other times open. Bensaïd recounted: ‘From the first meetings, I heard myself ask in a pale and hesitant voice the sacrilegious questions: “What about Hungary? And Budapest? What does the Party say about all this?”’2 Bensaïd often said that ‘we were not born in 1968, we are not hostages to this imaginary birth’, rather ‘the years 1964–66 were years of political and intellectual definition’.3 As the dust still settled from Algerian liberation, the war in Vietnam raged and the Cuban Revolution ignited hope throughout the globe, the student-led battle within the French Communist Party (pcf) constituted a formative political experience for the young Bensaïd. But Bensaïd’s party life was in Toulouse, far away from the tumultuous clashes in Paris; indeed, in Toulouse there were suspicions about the Parisians: the Parisians ‘could speak well, but the cowl doesn’t make the monk, or the Bolshevik’.4 As the crisis of the Union of Communist Students was reaching its height in 1965, the Toulousians 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, becoming a reality between December 1965 – date of the presidential election opposing Mitterrand to De Gaulle – and the congress of Communist Students in April 1966, where the exclusion was formalised.5 Tensions had grown within the pcf during the long post-war boom and led to a deep party rupture, propelling the new anti-Stalinist left forward to rally students around them prior to the May ’68 events. As Alain Krivine, who became very close to Bensaïd, wrote of the 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’.6 The Union of Communist Students, based in the

2 3 4 5 6

Bensaïd 2013, p. 34. Bensaïd 2010b, p. 10. Bensaïd 2013, p. 37. Bensaïd 2010b, p. 11. Krivine 2006, p. 61.

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student social milieu impacted by the changes in the spirit of the time, cut a new left opposition within the pcf that the bureaucratic party apparatus found quite difficult to control.7 The pcf was the party of the working class at the time, able to mobilise its own reconstructed myth about the Resistance and Liberation. It regularly polled between 20–25 percent electorally, and had a deep anchorage in the working class and French social life. The prestige of the Popular Front and the anti-Nazi struggle was at once both real and imagined. Millions of workers learnt their Principles of Leninism within the orthodoxy of the pcf that was stifling and dogmatic but formative, and Bensaïd’s politicisation in the party, beyond the university campuses, schooled him in class politics. The pcf provided a political culture making the language of class and Marxism – however bureaucratically deformed – accessible and popular. Entering into a clash with the leadership of this party was not something to be undertaken with a light heart. Yet the crisis of Stalinism, the Hungarian revolt of 1956 and the pcf’s ambivalent attitude to the Algerian war of independence combined to produce youthful rebellion. Once challenges were raised against the bureaucratic apparatus, the undemocratic nature of the pcf was revealed for all. The crisis itself lasted for five years, until the expulsion of hundreds of its activists. The Union of Communist Students was heterogeneous, involving a political conflict 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 grouped 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 grouped the upholders of orthodoxy, fighting tooth and nail for the leadership of the party to keep things under control. Last came the Left Opposition, led by Alain Krivine and Henri Weber, who had a stronghold at the Sorbonne, with about 500 members led by Trotskyists doing entrist work in the pcf. Krivine and Weber were members of the Fourth International – Krivine 7 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 Ligue.

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being mentored by Pierre Frank. They were able to build up a base among students in the pcf. The political battle waged by the student-led left opposition was a foundational moment for a specific current of French Trotskyism. Clearly it was not on a scale like the Tours Congress when the sfio voted to become communist, yet it was experienced as a historic moment leading to the foundation of the Jeunesse communiste révolutionnaire (jcr). The experience of rupture with the pcf shaped the sensibilities, theoretical approaches and organisational habits of the generation that went on to become the agitators of May ’68 and form the Ligue(s). It was a moment of intense politicisation for everyone involved, although next to the pcf, the jcr was young and microscopic. The jcr had about 300 members from this youth radicalisation, but it remained an unformed project, the product of the force of circumstance and the particular brutality of the Stalinist leadership in France rather than a fully formed and programmatic project.8 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. He was not a Trotskyist at this time, nor was he 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. Bensaïd was instead 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, Bensaïd was closest to a vague Guevarist tendency led by Janette Habel. For Bensaïd, Che was the symbol of revolutionary fervour in the face of the timidity of reformist bureaucrats. Che’s slogan ‘The duty of every revolutionary is to make the revolution’ captured Bensaïd’s sentiment. Before May ’68 the jcr thought there was no future outside the pcf. Consequently, their perspective was to go outside of the pcf, get stronger, then go back into it and win it. This was utopian, but the problem was real: before May ’68, it seemed like no organisation had an actual future outside the fortress of the party. 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, leading to the unification of the jcr and the Internationalist Communist Party, effectuated in 1969 and effecting the birth of the Ligue communiste (lc). For the Fourth International, this meant a break with entrism; until then they were burrowed down quite far in the pcf. The unification also

8 Bensaïd 2010b, p. 76.

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represented a passing of the baton, as the leadership of the Ligue went to the youth who came from the jcr, with the exception of Pierre Frank. The Ligue was particular in this sense, as the young leadership had no long-established and experienced apparatus, neither did they have a long history of party building. They built their own tradition from scratch as they constructed the 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 Ligue 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 partybuilding seriousness, sensitive to internal party democracy, with a very liberal and tolerant internal regime. Lastly, coming out of the youth radicalisation, they had to hold onto the gains they made during the events of May ’68.

2

May ’68: A Great Dress Rehearsal

The upsurge of May ’68 shook the radical left. Outlawed, hidden in Marguerite Duras’s apartment, Bensaïd and Henri Weber, in their memorable Mai 1968: une répétition générale, wrote: Through the May days we have glimpsed the possibility of a revolution of a new type … However, it was only one component part of a generalised revolutionary surge that is taking the bourgeoisie by the throat.9 The national-liberation struggles, the Italian Hot Autumn and the West German student movement had announced the imminence of radical change. There was a historic chance for a social revolution, as so many debates among the re-invigorated radical left attested to. Bensaïd played a leading role in the student movement at Nanterre; the intersection of the student uprising and the largest general strike in French history opened up a period of ‘hasty Leninism’. 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

9 Bensaïd and Weber 1968, p. 223. ‘Rue d’Ulm’ is the name for the group around Althusser.

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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 marginal 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 Ligue communiste took seriously the idea that May ’68 was a Great Dress Rehearsal, a February Revolution, a prelude to a new October. Bensaïd’s and Weber’s Mai 1968: une répétition générale was concerned with the debates among the different forces that were expelled from the Union of Communist Students in 1965. It was addressed to the barricade fighters of May and was sharply polemical in tone. A new generation of revolutionary militants was being formed: a new vanguard had emerged in response to the crisis in higher education and the imperialist slaughters in Vietnam and Algeria; the new vanguard was made up of students and younger workers; while the students did not have the social power of the working class, they nevertheless could play a decisive role through direct action and violent confrontation, playing a catalytic role in setting mass struggle alight. This was a means to bringing about a worker-student alliance. The intervention summarised the experience of the jcr, from the crisis of the Union of Communist Students, to the student leadership of May. Though the jcr was marginal, it was embarked upon a project of going beyond this marginality.11 In their struggle against the reformist leaders of the pcf and the trade unions, ideological contestation – an outright refusal of the system – was paramount. During the May events, the pcf did not suffer a thoroughgoing crisis within its ranks sufficient to shake the rank and file from its apparatus. This presented a problem for small groups in opposition to the party. How could they go

10 11

Cahiers Critiques, interview with Krivine 2016, p. 187. Bensaïd and Weber 1968, p. 53.

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beyond the bureaucracy? How could they challenge the pcf? What were they to do about the cgt’s weight among the industrial working class? In this context, anti-Stalinist ideas played a cohering role.12 In essence, this was a battle of quarantined students to win a significant layer of leading worker-activists to their ranks. 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, however. 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 was still close to fullemployment. 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.13 The early years of hurried Leninism were ones of audacious, spectacular and symbolic actions. This was reinforced theoretically in Bensaïd’s La notion de crise révolutionnaire chez Lénine and Mai 1968: une répétition générale. 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, to which I return below. To build the party meant first

12 13

Bensaïd and Weber 1968, p. 174. Johsua 2015, p. 44.

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and foremost building an organisation that could clash with the capitalist state, without worrying too much about the mediations involved in the development of class consciousness. Bensaïd’s hasty Leninism was 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: the worker-student convergence did not materialise into a revolutionary party. The social make-up of the jcr and then the lc made for some objective difficulties. The students were outside the class in any meaningful sense. On 17 May, Alain Krivine led a group of students to the Boulogne-Billancourt Renault factory, yet 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. 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. As Bensaïd recounted, they ‘put a map on the wall and dissolved the student sections’. But their ‘effort was enormous and results were few’.14 This objective problem the jcr/lc faced over-determined a practice that would oscillate between two poles: a theorised defeatism and a substitutionalist impatience. Both perspectives were shortcuts that could not wrestle hegemony away from the reformist forces.

3

Writing a Master’s Thesis under Lefebvre

Bensaïd penned La notion de crise révolutionnaire chez Lénine, supervised by Henri Lefebvre, the same year that the general strike rocked France, condensing a multiplicity of contradictions immanent to its social formation. Faced with Lefebvre, the great heretical figure of French Marxism, Bensaïd was a shy but attentive reader, and as Michel Lequenne wrote of Lefebvre, ‘he had no more attentive readers, even students, than the Trotskyists’.15 In fact, Lenin’s notion of revolutionary crisis had an undeniable, though central presence in Lefebvre’s own critique of everyday life, as he wrote ‘Only days of revolution, those days “which are equivalent to twenty ordinary years” (Lenin), allow everyday life to pursue history and perhaps briefly to catch up with it. Such days occur

14 15

Bensaïd lecture to Amsterdam party school; Salles 2005, p. 117. Lequenne 1978, p. 215.

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when people will not and cannot go on living as they did before: the everyday as it has been established is no longer enough, and it affords them no satisfaction’, the revolutionary crisis breaks down the everyday boundaries of modern bourgeois existence so that life can be lived historically, i.e. the world can be transformed.16 A conflict between two poles of Marx-Lenin interpretation can be read throughout Bensaïd’s notion of revolutionary crisis in Lenin: between Lefebvre’s open and adventurous approach to materialism, and a highAlthusserianism of which Bensaïd was quite sceptical. Lefebvre and Althusser came to politics at Stalinism’s extreme and distanced themselves to various degrees after the so-called de-Stalinisation upon the death of Stalin, though it is ‘hard to imagine two more different temperaments’, Lefebvre the nomadic adventurer who ‘listens, changes, betrays, a disloyal investigator of the new’, and Althusser, the man of the École Normale Supérieure, who ‘decrees, repeats and fixes the Tables of the Law, in the rigorous concern for doctrinal purity’.17 If Bensaïd attentively read Althusser’s work in his early years of intellectual and political formation, at the end of the study (undertaken alongside Antoine Artous), Bensaïd concluded that he was not an Althusserian. This was decisive. For Bensaïd, ‘The effort to subsume history under structure seemed to make the revolution unthinkable, if not impossible’.18 In these conditions, Artous and Bensaïd thought Althusserian Marxism justified a compromise between theoretical critique and political accommodation vis-à-vis the French Communist Party. In any case, Bensaïd’s theoretical tastes were much broader, including among others Guattari, Sartre, Marcuse, Korsch, Lukács, Reich, Guerin, Lefebvre and Mandel. This goes some way to explain why La notion de crise révolutionnaire chez Lénine was not a re-edition of Althusser’s Contradiction and Overdetermination, despite certain thematic crossovers, and why Bensaïd turned to Lefebvre. Lefebvre had already published Pour connaître la pensée de Lénine nearly a decade earlier, and, against the readings of Lenin that imputed an idealist elitism to him, Lefebvre showed how Lenin developed a form of Marxism qualitatively distinct from Luxemburg and also the orthodox centrism of Kautsky by developing Marx’s thought in an unprecedented situation. Lenin was fashionable at the time. Althusser could call a conference on Lenin and philosophy. Of the jcr’s founders, Bensaïd was not alone in turning to Lenin. Artous, who like Bensaïd was also from Toulouse and joined him as an

16 17 18

Lefebvre 2014, p. 297. Labica 2016, p. 328. Bensaïd 2001d, p. 1.

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oppositional delegate at the Congress of Communist Students in 1966, had himself written a Master’s thesis (1969) on Lenin and the question of the party. As for Lefebvre, Lenin’s thought could only be understood if it was tied to his political and revolutionary activity, for Lenin’s philosophy was tied to the primacy of politics while his political positions had a philosophical content. Bensaïd would ‘go for Lenin and the crisis’.19 The content was a direct response to the efforts that were made to subsume history into structures, making a revolution, and a transition from the capitalist mode of production to a communist mode, unthinkable and impossible. Bensaïd never wavered from this preoccupation. Thirty years later in his Mémoire d’habilitation (2001) he posed the same problem, albeit in a novel philosophical lexicon: ‘How is it possible to find the passage, the narrow gate through which the untimely Messiah or the smiling spectre could burst in? How could the relation between the revolutionary event and its historical determinations be articulated?’20 Upon looking back on the Master’s thesis, Bensaïd wrote of the context and continuity the notion of revolutionary crisis provided: Written in the fire of the event [1968] this Master’s thesis provided the material for polemics during the passionate debates of autumn 1968 and 1969, during which the different currents of the extra-parliamentary left tried to define their fidelity to the event. I was surprised to find that, more than thirty years later – in the context of liberal restoration – the philosophical discussions of resistance and the event led me back to the same questions of the strategic notion of crisis. It is even the central theme of Résistances. Essai de taupologie générale.21 As Bensaïd hints at in the above, La notion de crise révolutionnaire chez Lénine was a product of the early period of hurried Leninism and the basis for a subsequent intervention written alongside Sami Naïr: A propos de la question de l’organisation: Lénine et Rosa Luxemburg (1968). Though Naïr was probably responsible for the harsh attacks on Rosa Luxemburg present in the text, they polemicised on two fronts: against the illusions of spontaneity, emphasising the necessity of a revolutionary party; and against the immobile structures of the Althusserian school, emphasising the ‘political subject’. These documents established the key concepts of Bensaïd’s strategic thought – revolutionary crisis and the distinction between the party and class. They were interventions 19 20 21

Bensaïd 2001d, p. 2. Bensaïd 2001d, p. 3. Bensaïd 2001d, p. 7.

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anticipating the coming Mannheim Congress (April 1969) at which the Ligue communiste was formed. May ’68 had witnessed the proliferation of illusory beliefs in social spontaneity among the student movement and the youth and, because of this, the debate about building a revolutionary organisation was live at the founding congress of the Ligue communiste. It was a decisive debate. As Bensaïd later recalled, ‘It permitted us to create an organisation, which resisted the retreat after 1968, and survived the test of subsequent defeats’.22 Bensaïd’s early interrogations of Lenin unquestionably set out life-long lines of militant research, and despite their juvenile ‘ultra-Bolshevism’, they posed the relation between history and structure, historicity and event, equilibrium and crisis, object and project, class and party, the social and the political. Furthermore, behind the texts, interventions, demonstrations and debates stood Bensaïd’s intuition into the ‘politically favourable moment’, an intuition that was not systematised later on, but continually problematised in Bensaïd’s strategic approach to history and Lenin. Towards the end of his life, Bensaïd said of this intuition, ‘We were in a hurry, yep. But I would say that behind that – and we were not at all conscious of it at the time – there was certainly a political intuition that was not at all false, which went beyond juvenile impatience, which was the idea of a politically favourable moment’ [D.R. my italics added].23 The categorical political imperative to seize the favourable moment, where the inevitable can be betrayed, was a great political lesson. A chance is real and exists, but it must be seized politically, implying the primacy of politics, where history is treated from its key political and strategic moments. This primacy of politics exists within both periods of Bensaïd’s life and relation to Lenin. The favourable moments that slip from our hands can often explain the conundrums of our present. He said in the same interview that: Today, with hindsight, I am tempted to say that the fact that this chance wasn’t seized, is surely what we pay for today: in particular the way in which the relations of force [between classes] have deteriorated. Putting 22

23

Bensaïd 2001j, Leninism in the 21st century, interview with Phil Hearse. In his autobiography, Bensaïd wrote, ‘This original idea [of the specificity of politics] of politics pervades Lenin’s thought from start to finish, from the early polemics against the populists, or the “legal Marxism” of Struve, to those of 1921 against the corporatism of the Worker’s Opposition. From 1968 on, it served us as the plumb-line against Maoist neo-populism and the diverse variants of ouvriérisme. It determined our understanding of the specific role that the student movement could play in a particular conjuncture … Against the false humility of a populism devoted to “serving the people”, this then was our own golden rule’. Bensaïd 2013, p. 88. Bensaïd 2010b, p. 14.

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it concretely: in 1968 in Poland or Czechoslovakia, for example, the possibility existed to overthrow the bureaucratic regimes benefiting a democratic socialism – and not to the benefit of a liberal counter-reform like the 1980s. Unless we think that history is written in advance, we must recognize the existence of that moment.24 Situated within the politically favourable moment, whose corollary was Lenin’s notion of crisis, Bensaïd’s thesis had many strengths. Not only did it actually clarify the role and function that the breakdown of political forms of domination have within Lenin’s life-work as a whole, providing an anti-determinist and anti-scientistic representation of Marxism, but it put politics in command. The political specificity Bensaïd underlined was aligned to the specificity of a proletarian revolution as opposed to its bourgeois forms. Many features intersect around the nodal point of the primacy of politics: the subjects and objects of crises, the independent political role of working-class struggle and the polemic against artisanal-economism, the resolution of national crises, a LukácsianHegelian-ontological conception of class in itself and for itself, the political field as algebraic as opposed to arithmetic, crises as tests of truth where theory becomes the art of conflict in the realm of practice, the party as a mediator of the differences between revolutionary situations and crises, and theory that can break the (Althusserian) split between science and ideology, the role of dreams in history, education through mass and explosive class struggles, politics as strategy rather than description, and the inability of concrete political logics to be reduced to abstract structural laws. Throughout the thesis, a ‘dispositive thus takes shape that combines the category of the present, as the specific time of political action, and the representation of the crisis, as the nub of clashing temporalities. It is from this relationship that the possibility of the structure being overthrown arises as an event’.25 As early as the thesis, revolutionary politics was a question of rhythms. Bensaïd sought to elucidate a true concept of the revolutionary crisis, as grounded theoretically and beyond the literalist interpretations of Lenin’s words on the revolutionary situation. Though Bensaïd’s effort was an initial, partial and early inquiry into the concept, the act of posing the problem in terms of its objective and subjective aspects means that it could transcend a historicist reading of Lenin (that confined him to Russian conditions) that would make the concept of revolutionary crisis inapplicable to the so-called

24 25

Bensaïd 2010b, p. 15. Bensaïd 2013, p. 257.

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West. Bensaïd’s search for the concept expanded Lenin’s thought temporally across history and spatially beyond the East, and the conceptual character of his interpretation of Lenin in fact liberates the latter’s politics in general. If the first move Bensaïd made was to destabilise the objectivist character of a revolutionary situation and its definition by putting forward the decisive intervention of revolutionary mass action and the party, Bensaïd did not fall into a subjectivist trap in the text, since he immediately clarified the object of the crisis, where he underscored the exactness with which Lenin grasped The Development of Capitalist in Russia. In a certain sense, Bensaïd’s reading of Lenin’s The Development of Capitalism in Russia functioned as an antidote, however conscious or not he was of it, to the further confusions inherent in the Althusserian distinction between a social formation and a mode of production, because Bensaïd focused on Lenin’s attention to Russia’s historical specificity and the function this had within Lenin’s strategic thought. Bensaïd’s position, no doubt, was unstable. On the one hand, via Poulantzas, Bensaïd reproduced the distinction, driving a wedge between the logic of the capitalist mode of production and concretely empirical history, but on the other, Bensaïd’s use of Lenin’s study shows his attention to Lenin’s devotion ‘to careful research … from these early works, he delineates the arguments that will anchor all the strategic and tactical manoeuvres of his political practice’, which resolved the apparent conceptual ambiguity.26 Lenin’s early work provided the certainties grounding political strategy: ‘Russian revolutionaries will fight against a capitalist social formation (even if feudal remnants survive in the countryside)’.27 In this way, Bensaïd showed the continuity in Lenin’s thought about the objective development of capitalism in Russia, within which development was uneven. Recognition of unevenness, of course, could be traced back to Lenin’s own work and Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution, but Lefebvre himself had constantly stressed the centrality of the concept, and it undoubtedly had its place within Althusser’s Contradiction and Overdetermination (Althusser may have had Trotsky’s History in mind when he wrote the essay). But for Lefebvre, Lenin introduced the notion of uneven development and its specific function was to make the critique of evolutionist and linear notions of development more precise and particularised.28 Uneven development was the norm, not the exception, since ‘uneven development remains the prime law of the modern world, and there is much to learn

26 27 28

Bensaïd 2014. Ibid. Lefebvre 2014, p. 609.

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and to be said about it’.29 Bensaïd did go on to learn and reflect on such unevenness and its implications, but for the present Master’s thesis, he focused on the consequences of Lenin’s recognition that the crisis he was working towards was that of the capitalist system itself, and that ‘the struggle against feudalism and autocracy was only a springboard for the anti-capitalist struggle, which remained the principle objective’.30 The resolution of the crisis lay with the subject that takes hold of the deconstruction and reconstruction of the social formation. Lenin’s chief accomplishment in relation to the subject was his accurate determination of the theoretical subject of the coming revolution while also giving it a practical form able to confront the state as a strategic target to resolve the revolutionary crisis. Again, the sharp distinction between abstract theory and concrete empirical history had the potential to drive another wedge between an imaginary subject in theory as against real history, but this was overcome with Bensaïd’s emphasis on political intervention based on workingclass political independence. Bensaïd’s grasp of Lenin’s approach to the subject was concentrated and precise: Lenin looked to the working class, declared ‘the autonomy of the proletariat as the only class capable of resolving the contradictions of society as a whole’, and unswervingly affirmed ‘the independent role of the proletariat in its alliances and political initiatives’.31 From at least 1894, Lenin affirmed the materiality of the contradiction between capital and labour, and Bensaïd drew out Lenin’s principle thesis that Russia was a society in which the capitalist mode of production was dominant and the way to end exploitation ran through proletarian class struggle. Bensaïd constantly returned to Lenin’s materialist class analysis of Russia that grounded the class struggle in action, a necessary and realistic background to an antideterminist and interventionist set of politics, but Bensaïd’s stress was on Lenin’s ‘militant energy on making sure that the political subject will be equal to its task. He tirelessly attempts to bring the proletarian vanguard within the Social-Democratic Party’.32 Lenin’s unifying approach to struggles set about turning the class struggle into a political struggle – he took nothing for granted. Bensaïd’s attention to the way Lenin’s political interventions shaped the class struggle, where an organised form intersected with the most advanced and politicised layer of workers, was the key to Bensaïd’s reflection on the sub29 30 31 32

Lefebvre 2014, p. 297. Bensaïd 2014. Ibid. Ibid.

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ject of the crisis. No matter the weaknesses of the thesis as a whole, here Bensaïd produced the insightful effects of Lenin: ‘Lenin always defends the same – theoretically justified – concept of the party, whether it is against the Mensheviks after 1904, against the partisans of the organisation as process, against the liquidationists after 1907. The party is the instrument through which the conscious elements of the proletariat reach the level of political consciousness and prepare for the confrontation with the centralised bourgeois state, the key support of the capitalist social formation’.33 Here, Bensaïd drew out two sides of Lenin’s practice: on the one side, Lenin intervened ideologically to shape the politics of the subject in formation, and on the other side, the partyform creatively learns from struggle, as Bensaïd wrote ‘the vessel of a collective will, expressed through a theory that continually renews itself in relation to a political programme of class struggle’.34 The crux of Bensaïd’s reflection was the recognition that the movement of workers towards power necessitated, and further contributed to, Lenin’s own organised attempts to shape and lead the class struggle in history. Political intervention condenses and resolves the contradiction between the theoretical-revolutionary role of the proletariat and the practical-historical development of class struggle. Bensaïd had broken with vestiges of determinism, and his reading of capitalism, history and strategy should be seen as a sustained polemic against all forms of idealist-deterministobjectivist politics. Bensaïd ruled out the twin defective attitudes to the class struggle that undercut the primacy of political intervention: faith in the linear a-political development of working-class self-emancipation and the scientistic illusion that Marxist theory, without class struggle, is the truth. This dual rejection would also shape the way Bensaïd thought about Marx. History and class struggle is patterned by crises that reveal the truth of situations, and Bensaïd’s preferred Lenin is he of the Collapse of the Second International: ‘The experience of war, like the experience of any crisis in history, of any great calamity and any sudden turn in human life, stuns and breaks some people, but enlightens and tempers others’.35 ‘In respect to theory’, the revolutionary crisis breaks apart the terms ‘truth’ and ‘ideology’ whereby it acts ‘as a practical vehicle of truth, marking the ruptural point between a long-winded science and a truth liberated from its silence’.36 That is to say: ‘The revolutionary crisis is the moment of truth for the

33 34 35 36

Ibid. Ibid. Lenin 1915, The Collapse of the Second International. Lenin 2011a, p. 216. Bensaïd 2014.

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party-organisation, when the latter tends to correspond with the class which remains its hidden truth; the same goes for the revolutionary crisis in relation to theory, a suspended moment that allows this hidden truth to suddenly irrupt into the realm of practice’.37 The ‘revolutionary crisis therefore constitutes the point of rupture where the proletariat erupts unto the stage of history, and “the masses take into their own hands their own destiny”, and play the leading role’.38 Bensaïd quoted Lenin, ‘For it is the great significance of all crises that they make manifest what has been hidden; they cast aside all that is relative, superficial, and trivial; they sweep away the political litter and reveal the real mainsprings of the class struggle’.39 The crisis appears as the moment par excellence where theory becomes the art of conflict, where the split between ideology and truth is overcome. Bensaïd quoted Lenin to illuminate the point: History as a whole, and the history of revolutions in particular, is always richer in content, more varied, more multiform, more lively and ingenious than is imagined by even the best parties, the most class-conscious vanguards of the most advanced classes. This can readily be understood, because even the finest of vanguards express the class consciousness, will, passion and imagination of tens of thousands, whereas at moments of great upsurge and the exertion of all human capacities, revolutions are made by the class consciousness, will, passion and imagination of tens of millions, spurred on by a most acute struggle of classes.40 If the division between science and ideology cannot be overcome, there is no room for the struggle to educate. Without the historical education of classes in struggle, the key aspect of Lenin’s revolutionary politics that the real education of the masses takes place through their independent political and revolution-

37

38 39 40

In his memoirs, Bensaïd wrote that the ‘attempts to articulate event to the structure still presupposed the hypothetical mediation of an ungraspable subject. Time itself tended in this way to become a kind of secular god, or subjectivity without subject, the providential agent of any metamorphosis, which laughingly pulled the strings of the historical puppet. Faced with this difficulty, I sought support from Gustave Guillame, who saw the present as “the image by which a bit of the future is constantly resolved into a bit of the past”. I drew from this the adventurous conclusion that the revolutionary crisis is also, in its way, the form in which the double determination of past and future is resolved in the present’. Bensaïd 2013, p. 82. Bensaïd 2014. Lenin, Lessons of the Crisis. Lenin 2011b, p. 213. Lenin 1920, ‘Left-Wing’ Communism, an Infantile Disorder. Lenin 2011c, pp. 95–6.

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ary struggle is missed. But for Lenin, ‘Only struggle discloses to [the exploited class] the magnitude of its own power, widens its horizon, enhances its abilities, clarifies its mind, and forges its will’.41 The political education of the masses accords with the specific temporality of the crisis, whereby they learn more in the course of struggle filled days than what years of parliamentary routine could offer. The emergence of a latent process connects to the metaphor of the old mole, dear to Bensaïd’s mole-ology. From the mole-ology, society can be viewed from two angles, a descriptive angle and a strategic angle (from the tunnels of the mole). The descriptive ‘notes down and records social phenomena, it compares the demands of classes and the electoral results of parties’, but ‘the second is of a strategic order’, searching beyond pure appearances in order to uncover their deep decisive conflicts. He quoted André Glucksmann saying, ‘the statistic finds its key in the class struggle, not the inverse’.42 The revolutionary crisis demonstrated the difference between politics as arithmetic and politics as algebra. Lenin’s politics were algebraic because ‘politics is not a matter of arithmetic but of algebra, a superior form of mathematics rather than an elementary one’. This distinction never left Bensaïd’s appreciation of Lenin: ‘This algebraic understanding of the class struggle, alone leads to strategy, it is characteristic of the political field’.43 Bensaïd had refined and built upon the specificity of Lenin’s politics. Thirty years later, Bensaïd said of the thesis: This elaboration underpinned an idea of politics – conceived under the formula of Lenin – as algebra, not arithmetic, as a practice and a language irreducible to the immediate social determinations: its ‘necessity’ is ‘of another order’, ‘much more complex’ than those of the social demands tied to the relation of exploitation. It is, in contrast to what the vulgar Marxists of the Rabotchaïa Mysl imagined, a terrain where politics ‘does not obediently follow the economy’; where, contrary to what those at the Rabotchéié Diélo think, we cannot deduce from the economic struggles the objectives of the party. The division into class, Lenin wrote of the student struggles, is certainly ‘the deepest foundation of political groupings: certainly, it is what ultimately determines these groupings, but this ultimately, it is the political struggle alone that establishes it’. It is why ‘the most vigorous expression, the most complete, and the best outline of the political class struggle, is the struggle of parties’. Therein lies, repeated 41 42 43

Lenin 1925, Lecture on the 1905 Revolution. Lenin 2011d, p. 241. Bensaïd 2014. Ibid.

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many times, the idea according to which politics is not a reflection of the social, but its translation into a syntax and grammar specific to the conflict.44 During the revolutionary crisis, the party ‘begins to identify with the class, because it is then that the latter reaches the level of political struggle’. The party was the instrument through which the ‘revolutionary class maintains its presence’, ‘as a permanent threat to the bourgeois State’.45 It is through the revolutionary crisis that the political field is opened to the class in its mass character, qualitatively transforming political life. In Bensaïd’s reading of Lenin, the most important task was the overthrow of the bourgeois State, ‘the cornerstone of the capitalist social formation’. ‘This fundamental objective’, Bensaïd tells us, ‘also situates the party in the political sphere: as much as the relations of production, the State is what is ultimately at stake in the political struggle’. Importantly, in this struggle, ‘there is no continuous path from the in-itself to the for-itself, from unconsciousness to consciousness’.46 It is in the specificity of the political field that a class can become what it is. For both the early and the mature Bensaïd, politics could not be regarded as a fatalistic reflection of economic structures. If politics were the reflection of an economic structure, then it could not be conceived of as a field of struggle in its specificity. This point was decisive because it is on the political terrain, ‘the strategic space of the proletariat’, ‘understood as the class that can overthrow the capitalist system’, that the fate of the socialist revolution is decided: ‘it was of a political order and could only be resolved by a political subject’.47 The odd mixture between Lenin, Lukács and Poulantzas allowed Bensaïd to draw out the specificity of the political field in the transition between different modes of production, because ‘We can juxtapose structural models [different modes of production – capitalism to communism] but we cannot deduce the one from the other … without making a detour through politics’.48 If the crisis of capitalism can remain permanent and repeat itself over and over, then to grasp the way out, one needs a political road. The movement from one mode of production to another could not be subordinated to a structural logic that erased politics. Nowhere in Bensaïd’s thesis does one find a subordination to a Hegelian and structuralist set of politics, despite the reliance on Lukács. It

44 45 46 47 48

Bensaïd 2001d. Bensaïd 2014. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

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could even be said that Hegel is the grand absence in Bensaïd’s thesis, a fact that reinforces the notion of the specificity of politics it defends. Political specificity does not follow linear and Hegelian time. From this angle, and making a critical appraisal of his thesis, Bensaïd drew out the challenge to structuralism. He said, ‘the category of the present as a specific time of political action and the notion of crisis as a nodal point of discordant temporalities where the possibility of the event can emerge’ had furnished the possibility of thinking politics and revolutionary change.49 Bensaïd relied on Gustave Guillaume to assign the present as an ‘operational time’, the time of the subject: [T]he present is the point of overlap and fusion of the past and the future, ‘the image by which, without end, a bit of the future is resolved into a bit of the past’. The revolutionary crisis is also, like so, the present where the double determination of history meshes.50 Thus, the concern for the present as a specific time of political action existed in the early phase of Bensaïd’s engagement with Lenin; the key point in the thesis was to make a detour through politics where the present was the point of overlap and fusion between the past and future. After the discovery of Walter Benjamin, Bensaïd’s concern with the temporality of politics deepened and he carried out more thoroughgoing reflections on the question. After encountering Benjamin, Bensaïd argued for the primacy of the political moment over the abstraction of historical logic. The detour through politics was crucial because a workers’ revolution is unlike previous revolutionary movements in history since the labouring classes are in an absolutely subaltern position. Therefore, [T]he political field … is the strategic space where the working class goes beyond the capitalist system. The political structures concentrate and reproduce all forms of enslavement of the proletariat, which is the first class dominated in all spheres (economic, political and ideological). On the contrary, at the time of the political revolutions, the bourgeoisie had already attained economic power.51

49 50

51

Bensaïd 2001d. Bensaïd 2014. He wrote in his memoirs, ‘A dispositive thus takes shape that combines the category of the present, as the specific time of political action, and the representation of the crisis, as the nub of clashing temporalities. It is from this relationship that the possibility of the structure being overthrow arises as an event’: Bensaïd 2013, p. 83. Ibid.

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The goal of the bourgeois revolutions was to place political power at the service of capital accumulation, whereas the proletarian revolution ‘characterises itself by the accession of politics to the commanding post’.52 The debate over the structural difference between a proletarian revolution and a bourgeois revolution featured in the post-war French left. Some currents rejected ‘Leninism’ on the basis that the structural framework of the proletarian revolution had changed. Lucien Goldmann, Mallet and Gorz were part of this trend called ‘revolutionary reformism’. The new element that made this trend possible was the so-called ‘new working class’, capable of permanently occupying positions of economic and social power at the heart of capitalist society, suddenly finding itself ‘in a situation analogous to that of the bourgeoisie before 1789’. A political project of the gradual transformation of society hence becomes possible: the schema of the socialist revolution finds itself in proximity to that of the bourgeois revolutions; the seizure of political power is only the ‘natural’ result of a long economic-cultural build-up of power … of the ‘new working class’.53 Lenin’s problematic was tied to the fact that the working class is dominated completely: economically, ideologically and politically. Lenin attempted to forge a weapon to confront this reality. The new ‘revolutionary reformist’ current quoted above rejected this problem, replacing it with a perspective of gradual working-class self-control and a decentralised political and cultural organisation. In this replacement, Artous and Bensaïd wrote, ‘the decisive place of the political struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat is thus relativised to the benefit of the multiple forms in which this progressive taking of power is expressed’.54 Bensaïd explored the dynamics of crisis as the test of truth for organisation, theory and social formation. In relation to the organisation, long periods of legal parliamentarism, stability and the absorption of the contradictions of an alienated capitalist society into the party and the bureaucratic apparatus contributed to opportunism, which was ‘at the root of all failures, all betrayals by the working-class parties, and all reformist ideologies. May ’68 in France was an illustration of the way in which bourgeois ideology and pcf ideology are mutually connected, through the passive acceptance of an established order

52 53 54

Ibid. Artous and Bensaïd 1976, p. 3. Artous and Bensaïd 1976, p. 4.

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seen as unchangeable’.55 Though Bensaïd endorsed Lenin’s ‘merger formula’ of the workers’ movement and socialism, he gave it a turn where ‘the Party forms a bridge between the embryonic consciousness of the proletariat and the theoretical role with which the latter is invested’, the party therefore ‘incarnates’ the consciousness of the class and holds together the schism between the theoretical understanding of the working class’s role in history and ‘the everyday questions of working class life’.56 On Bensaïd’s account the party is a project, a subject mediating the object, and he followed Bachelard’s and Sartre’s philosophy of the project to show the expansive and experimental character of the mediation; it was all joined to an impatient reading of History and Class Consciousness and therefore produced an ultra-left account of the party and class: the whole problem was to seize the becoming of a historical subjectivity, and at this time the form finally found of revolutionary subjectivity was (his own reading at the time) the ‘Leninist party’. That this was integrated into an antidogmatic account of theory, where imagination and dreams had the potential to explore the possible within history unfettered by Theory mitigated against the shortcomings of the thesis. Bensaïd critically returned to his early reflections: On the search for this creative subjectivity, I drew wholesale on psychoanalysis, epistemology and linguistics – debatable analogies, comparing the relationship between history and event in the way that Bachelard combined wave and particle. The Freudian topology of Beyond the Pleasure Principle served as an argument against the dialectic of the in-itself and the for-itself, according to which the full ‘for-itself’ consciousness of the party emerged from the unconscious depths of the ‘in-itself’ class. For good measure, I borrowed the Freudian formula popularised by Lacan, ‘Wo es war, da soll ich werden’, to describe the movement of selftransformation or self-emancipation leading the alienated proletariat towards its own truth. The party was thus distinguished both from the Id boiling with impulses and from the Ego with its tyrannical censorship. It was identified with the effort through which the proletariat, taking consciousness of its latent class being, tore itself away from an ectoplasmic immediacy.57

55 56 57

Bensaïd 2014. Ibid. Bensaïd 2013, pp. 253–4.

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There are difficulties in Bensaïd’s early reading of Lenin: there is no real sense of the unevenness of class consciousness and its development, and Bensaïd failed to track the historical relation that Lenin’s attempts to shape the political subject had to the different layers of Marxist intellectuals, worker intelligentsia, active minority of labour leaders in order to attain a clearer sense of the class composition of the vanguard in relation to the party. The philosophical and psychoanalytic references, though interesting in themselves, did not resolve the issues at stake. The party was required to unify the local struggles into a clash with the state apparatus, since artisanal or corporative economic struggles were not enough to resolve a national crisis. This implied the distinction between party and class. Bensaïd’s early writings on Lenin had defended the idea that Lenin’s theory of revolution is only coherent in the context of mass workers’ struggles (and those of other oppressed groups), the possibility of workers winning hegemony over other non-working-class layers of society, raising the possibility of the capitalist state-form being shattered and replaced with new forms of working-class representation beyond parliament, from which the new form of sovereign power can crush bourgeois resistance. The problem with Bensaïd’s early work was that it led straight to a purely voluntaristic clash with the capitalist state where the party substitutes for the class. Faced with the impersonal immobility of structures, everything became dependent on the subject in turn. There was no mediation between a so-called theoretical subject (that is in reality absent) and the practical subject. The revolutionary crisis was expected to fuse the two together in an epiphany. There is no real mediation between subject and object in this argument, only a philosophical and quasi-idealist one. There is no sense of the concrete development of class consciousness through the practical experience of class struggle that is able to raise itself to a moment where the capitalist state can be broken. Bensaïd himself acknowledged this returning to the text in the second half of the 1970s: Obviously, we were missing – whatever our general theoretical referents were – the practical comprehension of the intermediary stages in the maturation of this class consciousness, the articulation of different levels of consciousness and organisation, the attentive ear to the phenomena of recomposition in the workers’ movement.58

58

Artous and Bensaïd 1976, p. 10.

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Furthermore, in the collection Bensaïd wrote for an lcr cadre-building course in the late 1980s he pointed out that his early understanding of Lenin was onesided and that, ‘Comrade Mandel indeed insisted more on the uneven development of class consciousness; from where the importance of transitional demands and worker’s control came’. Unsurprisingly, ‘On the whole, we only reluctantly accepted this, as a risk of gradualism’, he wrote.59 The conception of strategy expressed in the thesis was a reductive approach to revolution focused on the relation of the state to the party; furthermore, this shaped the internal relations of the organisation, since it was structured to prepare the confrontation with the state in the revolution to come. Without exercising the condescension of posterity, Bensaïd’s substitutionalist and ultra-left vision of the party meant that he saw the party as a direct antagonist of the capitalist state – irrespective of the concrete conditions at work and the need to patiently win over a majority of the working class through a struggle for hegemony. Bensaïd also thought that official reformism – particularly that of the Socialist Party – was dead and buried. This underestimated the potential for reformism to reinvent itself and initiate action that could side-line revolutionaries. Bensaïd’s politics of impatience risked sliding into Guevarist militarism under French conditions. Of the Mannheim Congress, for example, he later said, ‘In ’68 we were fully absorbed by internal debate, of the entry of the jcr into the Fourth …. The lc was Guevarist [and] affiliated to the Fourth International just 15 days before the World Congress in 1969’.60 Bensaïd acknowledged the limitations of the politics of impatience and voluntarism when he said that ‘a critical review of that period is necessary … we had a tendency to fetishise the party as the direct and immediate adversary of the state (inspired by a questionable reading of Poulantzas), and gave our “Leninism” a slightly “militarist” twist (“ultra-left” if you prefer). In this you can see the influence of Guevara … our interpretation partially created a sort of “Leninism [pressé]”, criticised by Regis Debray in his book A Critique of Arms’.61 Furthermore, the early role Bensaïd played in the Argentinian section of the fi attested to this risk. The Argentinian section of the fi was one of the most significant in Latin America, but it was split between a majority that supported armed struggle (led by Roberto Santucho and tied to the continental fi, with Livio Maitan overseeing Latin American work) and a minority that fought for a more traditional approach to workplace activism and politics (led by Nahuel Moreno and tied to the American swp). Joseph Hansen’s later refutation of 59 60 61

Bensaïd 1987, p. 86. Bensaïd 2005 interview with Bensaïd, quoted in Weisz and Löwy 2006. Bensaïd 2001j, Leninism in the 21st century, interview with Phil Hearse.

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the majority line, in his The Leninist Strategy of Party Building: The Debate on Guerrilla Warfare in Latin America (1979), remains one of the greatest examples of political lucidity ever written on these debates, being an argument against armed voluntarism. Bensaïd and the French delegation at the Ninth World Congress supported the disastrous policy of armed struggle (Bensaïd was tasked with defending the majority line in Argentina). His text ib-30 (1972), an internal document written for the Ligue, showed that this position had an impact on his thinking in France. Ex post facto Bensaïd’s criticism of this moment runs, ‘the prt’s understanding of the Argentinian revolution as a national war of liberation led to privileging the construction of the army (the erp, People’s Revolutionary Army) to the detriment of self-organisation in workplaces and neighbourhoods’.62 In other words, it was not an adequate strategy for mass working-class self-emancipation; instead, the unrealised possibility – in conditions of unstable bourgeois democracies in Latin America, which Hansen and Moreno underestimated – of a conjunction of participation in the democratic openings to pursue conventional mass forms of working-class organisation and the efforts to build armed working-class self-defence played into the hands of the coup plotters from Argentina to Chile. Nevertheless, the notion of revolutionary crisis as a strategic concept to think a politics of the oppressed was won in Bensaïd’s early period. There was no turning back, no break away, epistemological rupture or political discontinuity, that would alienate Bensaïd from this problematic. Instead, throughout the course of his subsequent political life and reading of Lenin, the notion was enriched with many folds, finding traces of continuity in Bensaïd’s reflection on temporality and the primacy of the present within the elaboration of a historical semantics grounded on crisis, and after the 1990s with the philosophical category of the event. Bensaïd provided an alternative to Hegelian-ontological and structuralist approaches to the crisis, by articulating a radically immanent concept of the political as the moment where historical possibility emerges and must be seized strategically.

4

Reorientation towards the United Front and Hegemony

Bensaïd’s relation to Lenin underwent three significant shifts by the middle of the 1970s that expanded his conception of political thought: the role of class consciousness, as mentioned above, came to the fore in a more concrete man-

62

Bensaïd 2007a.

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ner, as did a more developed concept of hegemony and a more precise grasp of diversified experiences of revolutionary struggles in history and the present that provided the grounds for a united front strategy for revolution in the West. As Artous wrote, Bensaïd’s relation to Lenin could not be reduced so the ‘ultraLeninism’ of the post-68 period: but continued when the Ligue, throughout the 1970s, began not only a turn to a politics of the united front, but readjusted its vision of the revolutionary process. And in two ways. Firstly, a return to the revolutionary experiences of the 1920–1930s which put into question the use of the Russian Revolution as a model, making way for a more prolonged vision of the revolutionary processes (German Revolution, Spanish Revolution …), all the while retaining the idea of revolutionary crisis. Secondly, through engaging with the debates over strategy with other contemporary far-left organisations, like Lotta Continua in Italy and, above all in Latin America, notably with the erp-prt … and the Chilean mir.63 Bensaïd was one theoretician (among others) of the turn towards a more elaborate conception of politics that was less substitutionalist, and attuned to the different forms of class consciousness, its development and relation to partybuilding. The change of perspective can be dated to the formation of the Ligue communiste révolutionnaire (lcr) in 1974, after the dissolution of the Ligue communiste in 1973. The early ‘ultra-Leninist’ period had therefore concluded by the mid-1970s. The defeated Portuguese Revolution (Bensaïd had co-authored Portugal: la révolution en marche with Michael Löwy and CharlesAndré Udry), the Transition in the Spanish State (Bensaïd played a role in the building of the Liga Comunista Revolucionaria) and the rise of the Common Programme for the Left in France demonstrated that reformism could repackage itself and aspire to a new hegemony for stable capitalist rule. The mass politics of reformism continued to be a problem, which necessitated an update in Bensaïd’s strategic framework, away from the French street theatre and the armed tragedy of the early period. The change of perspective dovetailed with the turn towards the united front within the lcr on account of its limited industrial implantation. The central problem for the lcr became the winning over of the workers’ vanguard, away from organised reformism. The correction was made in relation to the early period, expressed in this turn to the united front and the perspective of a workers’ government (the turn took place just

63

Artous and Sitel 2013, À propos du livre “Daniel Bensaïd, l’intempestif”.

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before the lcr’s organisational highpoint). In Bensaïd’s relation to Lenin, the 1970s provide an extension of the concept of revolution in the West while conserving the concept of revolutionary crisis. Bensaïd’s essays from the 1970s recuperated the depth of strategic debate within what he called the ‘unfinished heritage of the Third International’. This unfinished heritage set the framework for a revolutionary strategy in the industrialised capitalist countries of Western Europe. As Bensaïd argued (1976) in reference to Karl Radek’s pamphlet The Development of the World Revolution and the Communist Parties’ Tactics in the Struggle for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (1919): the working class needed a strategy and tactics that allowed for a prolonged struggle for power, using all possible weapons, an orientation going beyond illusions in a rapid victory. Bensaïd therefore reflected on the complexities involved in constructing a new hegemony that could be built prior to the revolutionary crisis and rupture, with a focus on the capitalist states at the socalled centre of the world system. While in Bensaïd’s co-written article with Sami Naïr (for Partisans in 1969) the emphasis was placed on the role of the party, this was by no means absent from La révolution et le pouvoir and the other interventions from the 1970s. With Bensaïd’s attention shifted to the forms of domination and the construction of class consciousness against the reformist leaderships, Bensaïd’s strategic conception became more concrete, more nuanced, more attuned to the challenges facing the extra-parliamentary left. The shift of emphasis could also be seen in his attention to the first four congresses of the Third International, in a certain sense, in the way he saw the strategic difficulties (all proportions guarded) facing the lcr in the mid-1970s corresponding to those of the early years of the Third: after an ultra-left period that followed the October Revolution (compare it to the post-68 euphoria), the third and fourth congresses, decisive as they were for the development of a concept of revolution in the West, marked the turn towards the united front policy. The united front policy became Bensaïd’s touchstone for organising the proletariat subjectively for the seizure and exercise of power. In addition, the proletariat’s ability to win hegemony by proposing a social and political alternative to a historical crisis was further consolidated in Bensaïd’s work, becoming the centre of his political strategy, two points of which are worth emphasising. First, a new set of concepts pertaining to strategy developed, but the collective elaboration of the strategic debate for the advanced countries was stifled by Stalinism, hence the project remained unfinished. Second, the theorisation of the Russian Revolution, and the lessons to be drawn elsewhere, trailed behind political practice. Bensaïd wrote, ‘Lenin’s work, on the whole, formulates a revolutionary set of politics, all the texts between April and October 1917 give an extraordinary lesson in strategy.

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But the whole alternative to reformist practice becomes explicit only through the thread of experience and debates … The elements of [Lenin’s] strategic rupture existed, steeled in the history of Bolshevism, but they are not systematised’.64 Bensaïd’s newfound reflection found conclusions in Hégémonie, autogestion et dictature du proletariat (1977), and Eurocommunisme, austromarxisme et bolchevisme (1977) which were all polemics against new forms of Eurocommunism and the critical currents of the Socialist Party. In comparison to Mai 1968: une répétition générale, his early work on Lenin and organisational proposals, the works of the latter half of the 1970s correspond to a change in his perspective of the revolutionary process, towards a more prolonged and mature, but no less revolutionary, strategic concept of emancipation. I will not dwell on this context and detail from La révolution et le pouvoir here, for I discuss it in the next chapter; however, I shall remain with the development of Bensaïd’s problematic as it pertains to the respective differences between bourgeois and proletarian politics and their relation to Lenin. Bensaïd deepened, further deployed and set to work the originality and specificity of proletarian politics, by effectively taking Marx’s distinction in the Communist Manifesto that ‘the preceding classes that got the upper hand sought to fortify their already acquired status by subjecting society at large to their conditions of appropriation. The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive forces of society, except by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation, and thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation’.65 Bensaïd merged the originality of the proletarian revolution with a reflection on Lenin’s breakthrough for politics. In his Master’s thesis, Bensaïd had already drawn out the specificity of a proletarian revolution in relation to bourgeois forms and by extension assessed proletarian strategy as opposed to bourgeois strategy in the crisis. He had come to the conclusion that bourgeois economic domination is primary, taking precedence over the forms of bourgeois political domination (whether a democratic republic or a military dictatorship). For bourgeois domination, the reproduction of the capital relation comes first, while the political structures – the State – of the capitalist mode of production concentrate and reproduce the forms of exploitation of the proletariat. Where the bourgeoisie puts political power in the service of economic power, for the proletariat the political terrain is the ‘strategic space’ that it must intervene in, to liberate itself. It is more than economism, because it involves ‘a

64 65

Bensaïd 2017, p. 169. Marx and Engels 2010, p. 495.

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rationality, needs, and objectives that are of a different order: the order of politics’.66 The order of politics results in decision and rupture at points of historical crisis. Though the date of any onset of crisis is unpredictable, the outcome of crisis depends on decision. Bensaïd wrote, the ‘antagonistic forces are on alert and observing each other. From now on, those who know how to choose their weapons and proper terrain will prevail. Assessing the situation to see if the ruptural moment has been reached, setting the date of the insurrection; these are the final actions and decisive experiences that force the organisation to prove its own cohesion and its unity’.67 Bensaïd subsequently maintained every single one of these points, and in the 1970s interventions, they were set into new polemics to further clarify the relation Bensaïd established between the specificity of a proletarian revolution and Lenin’s contribution to political organisation. Only in a proletarian revolution is a theory of the party and the construction of class consciousness central. The proletarian revolution displaces traditional modes of bourgeois political thought precisely because it displaces the ways in which the formation and unification of the proletariat takes place. This was a novelty for revolutionary thought, and Bensaïd wrote about the way Lenin developed this point: Contrary to what the modern critiques of Marxism say of its economistic theory, of its silence on the question of the State, the strength of Lenin resides precisely in the fact that he was able to establish – through the theory of the party – the specificity of politics conceived from the point of view of the working class. His theory of organisation (the party) is at the centre of a conceptual network that structures this new appreciation of the political field: class consciousness, relations of force, alliances and the moment (revolutionary crisis). It is with him that the long term – time – breaks into politics so that it can be formulated strategically. The proletarian struggle is no longer a pilgrimage to the horizon of history, or an abstract dialectic of means and ends, but a rhythmic battle in which tactics (initiative, decision) is for the first time incorporated not as an empirical fragmentation of battle, but the permanent actualisation of a plan – the translation of a project and will. It is therefore with Lenin that Marxism really takes a step forward as a political theory.68

66 67 68

Bensaïd 2014. Ibid. Bensaïd 1977, p. 164.

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Revolutionary organisation politicises the proletariat, while the political terrain is a movement of relations of class force providing it with a framework within which it operates. The struggle of parties is a political struggle between classes, yet parties are not the linear and simple outgrowth of economic relations or the abstract logic of structures. Bensaïd often quoted Lenin’s formulation: ‘The division into classes is certainly, in the last resort, the most profound basis for political groupings’, but this last resort is ‘established only by political struggle’. For the capitalist class, economic domination is the most important aspect of its rule, not the form in which political domination is exercised. This is the reverse of what the proletariat requires: the question of political power conditions any possibility of its economic and ideological emancipation. The seizure of political power in the hands of the proletariat is the condition of possibility for its self-liberation. To remain at the economic struggle remains imprisoned in the terrain of bourgeois society. Bensaïd drew out what this meant for both Lenin (and Trotsky): By way of different paths, Lenin and Trotsky developed a convergent understanding of politics. This is what permitted – beyond their disagreements – the decisive convergence in 1917 over the crucial questions of the soviets and insurrection. The first untapped the novel ideas of political strategy and the relations of the proletariat to the State: through a theory of political organisation and class independence. The second came to adjacent conclusions through an analysis of the dialectic of international revolution with his thesis of the permanent revolution and uneven and combined development. Each of them came together over a new definition of the revolutionary dialectic between the vanguard and the masses in the self-organised movement of the class. It is from this encounter that the Bolshevik tradition takes its point of departure, breaking with the evolutionary and empiricist worldview – ‘outside of time’ – of the Second International.69 These revolutionary breakthroughs – of the party, and the theory of uneven and combined development – were intimately tied to the specific structure of a proletarian revolution.

69

Bensaïd 1977, pp. 165–6.

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Bensaïd Aligns Lenin to Contretemps

If one focuses on the written text as opposed to the oral, which is deceitful yet reliable in all matters of political militancy, then it can be said that Bensaïd came to the most coherent and elaborate alignment of politics to time and contretemps throughout the 1980s. This was the decade traces of his Walter Benjamin encounter met with an appraisal of Lenin’s politics conceived of as a mastery of conflicting historical times. Bensaïd’s alignment of Lenin’s politics to contretemps also coincided with a more extensive set of reflections in two directions: the first direction being the shift in the political conjuncture, namely the neoliberal downturn and the associated balance sheet of the whole preceding sequence back to May ’68; the second direction being the development of Marx and Engels’s ideas on the party, the Second International at its key strategic moments of confrontation as well as the relation Lenin had to Kautsky. Bensaïd’s alignment of politics to contretemps produced a whole apparatus of concepts and a set of theses that discerned Lenin’s political specificity in relation to Marx and the Second International, which Bensaïd refined over the course of the next two decades. Chronologically behind this point, as I discuss above, Bensaïd had already centred the notion of revolutionary crisis and developed it past a substitutionalist and idealist reading of Lenin to make room for an expansive and conscious development of class political consciousness within the framework of a superior materiality, but from the 1980s onwards, Bensaïd was forced to think with Lenin while conscious of an absent centre: the failure of the May ’68 upsurge and subsequent class struggle to ‘take’ in a revolutionary combination to produce a real rupture in history; the presence of the absent (revolutionary) centre is the reason why contretemps is such a foundational political category. After establishing the fact of the alignment of politics to contretemps, I will explore Bensaïd’s reflection on Lenin’s ‘revolution in the revolution’. The fact and concept of contretemps gave an expansive, yet dense, substance to Bensaïd’s politics at a moment when the strategic debate was being eclipsed by the neoliberal downturn. The animating conviction that inspired his early exploration of Lenin, that of a conscious struggle for political power of the oppressed, remained relevant and in need of actualisation. He prepared and delivered cadre-training presentations on Marxism and Socialist Parties (1984) as well as Strategy and Party. As early as 1984, Bensaïd made use of the English term counter-time to align politics to the tempo of struggle and criticise a notion of linear time that placed primacy on electoralist and parliamentarist advance to the detriment of the fuller and more expansive arenas of class struggles through revolutionary political struggle, mass strikes, street demonstrations,

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occupations and riots. Linear time and the faith in progress completely miss the historical fact that the mass action of workers and the oppressed is infinitely more significant than parliamentary activity at all times and in all conditions. The most important methods of struggle of the working classes against the capitalist classes, i.e. against its state power, is above all mass action in its different forms. Recognition of this fact requires a concept of politics attuned to the discordance of these movements (a term Bensaïd later developed) and the rhythms of struggle within history. The very notion of contretemps attained meaning for Bensaïd because of the political contradictions that the Fourth International Trotskyists faced with the emergence of the 1960s radicalisation and the politically favourable moment that was presented but missed. The failures of the Italian and the German sections of the Fourth International to relate adequately to the youth radicalisations were examples of the centrality of contretemps, where he said: ‘when you have an opportunity, it is a problem of time. In one or two years, you can lose an opportunity, which has consequences for ten or twenty years’.70 Bensaïd’s (political) concept of history developed to meet the challenges posed by this problem of time, which is further evidenced by the presence of Benjamin’s Theses On the Concept of History in Strategy and Party conjoined to the notion of historical bifurcation, the forks in the road that upset all political concepts of history that remain flat and empty reflections of the objective development of capitalism and its repetitive electoral cycles. Of course, moving forwards in time Bensaïd will bring these innovations and acquisitions together into a synthesis without closure, in his work on history, Marx and conjunctural interventions, but they matter at this point for a reader intent on developing the ‘party-strategist’ side of Bensaïd’s interpretation of Lenin.

6

Strategy and Party: Strategic Principles within an Aleatory History

Strategy and Party gives us insight into the material fold and texture of Lenin’s principled contribution to the political, the depth Bensaïd held in hand within an aleatory history. These folds and textures are not less present because of the absent revolutionary centre mentioned above; in fact they are more present because of the part political principles, organised as such, have within the aleatory yet material constitution of revolutionary transformations in history. Without an organised force consciously handling the folds and textures that

70

Bensaïd 1984 lectures to the Amsterdam Party School.

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Lenin’s political breakthroughs produced, no rupture with the linear and repetitive time of capital, and the reified common sense of bourgeois society can be consolidated to build another, communist mode of production. The combination of revolutionary principle and an emergent aleatory materialism (we see the early symptoms of this in Strategy and Party) requires us to delve deeper into Bensaïd’s expanded reflection on strategy and the party before Lenin, first on the strategic debates in the Second International, then on the history of the vanguard party from Marx and Engels onwards. The concept of strategy is historically variable, but for Bensaïd it encompassed the political act that inaugurates a socialist revolution, a project to overthrow bourgeois power that begins the more expansive process of economic, social and cultural transformations of everyday life. The central strategic point being the conquest of political power, Bensaïd resumed the constant irreducibility of a bourgeois and proletarian revolution citing the need for strategy as a consequence of this irreducibility (distinct from the invocation of class consciousness). The notion of strategy was hardly developed through the course of the bourgeois revolutions, yet it is foundational because of the radical novelty of the proletarian revolution. In the above section, I already explained that the proletariat must emancipation itself from economic, political, ideological and cultural domination to make itself into a contender for power so as to reorganise society. But the aleatory encounter is more fundamental to proletarian revolution and therefore to strategy than bourgeois revolutionary prehistory: the capitalist mode of production developed in the interstices of feudal society and gained terrain, where the bourgeoisie built its economic, political and cultural positions before coming to political power. The bourgeois seizure of political power was the peak of a favourable balance of forces that had developed in favour of the bourgeoisie as already developed throughout feudalism. Though there was nothing automatic about bourgeois revolution and consolidation, the aleatory grade of its struggles was less than the proletarian. That no communist mode of production exists, nor does it develop in the fissures of capitalist society means it is the first form of revolution in history that requires a conscious strategic project because it is the most aleatory of revolutions. It calls forth the genuinely new that has never yet existed in history: social liberation and the conscious organisation and regulation of social life. Only a conscious effort, materialised in a strategic project, can rise to the challenge of this new form of emancipation. Bensaïd asks his readership, his audience, to grasp the novelty this problematic represents. Bensaïd’s problematic is directly in line with that of Marx in the Eighteenth Brumaire: if one reads Marx’s opening paragraphs in reverse, he says that a new language, lexicon and politics that creates something that has never yet existed in his-

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tory, throughout a period of revolutionary crisis, must liberate itself from the dead weight of ideological and religious history that was a structural feature of bourgeois revolutions, yet remains a structural feature of any revolutionary situation that fails to bring communism into being. The aleatory nature of a proletarian revolution is why, where the revolution is an absent centre, a principle and conviction of the actuality of revolution is necessary.

7

The Spectrum of Strategic Thought in the West

A connoisseur of the history of strategic debates within classical Marxism and beyond, Bensaïd’s return to the Second International further concretised the role that the notion of revolutionary crisis had within his oeuvre, but also sketched the spectrum of possible strategic approaches to political time. In the following I outline this spectrum as it existed in the Second International (reconstructed by Bensaïd), and develop on it, before moving to the party as a ‘strategic operator’. Four currents materialised in confrontation within the belle epoque of the Second International, when the German spd in particular gained ground electorally and built its mass organisations before the outbreak of the First World War: a revisionist oriented ‘socialism outside of time’, a centrist-Kautskyan ‘passive radicalism’, a left-wing (Luxemburg and Pannekoek), and lastly Lenin, who, according to Bensaïd, inaugurated a ‘revolution in the revolution’ against each of the other three currents. From right to left, this spectrum progressively aligned politics to the real materiality and temporality of class and oppressed struggles in history. The first orientation of timeless revisionism brought together a series of homogenous-pragmatist-empiricist ideas, conceptions and theses about politics, history, the state and the capitalist economy. With Benjamin in the mind’s eye, Bensaïd explained that the first idea of a timeless socialism was that of a forward march of the labour movement, in which history supposedly progressed inevitably towards science and reason and civilisation. The state was taken to be the expression of consciousness and culture, and instead of being ‘an apparatus of oppression to destroy’, it was seen to be a civilisational victory in need of further development and democratisation.71 The view of the state’s civilising role had its German particularities in terms of the extant political traditions, and it effectively gave liberal cover to colonial brutality. Further-

71

Bensaïd 2016, p. 62.

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more, according to the revisionist view, the capitalist economy ought to continue to develop of its own accord. The timeless socialism of the revisionists therefore had no real place, nor use for strategy, for they could neither see the use of principles within history, because they took principles to be utopianidealist impositions on policymaking and class collaboration. The revisionist wing discarded the final goal of communism, and because of this, the movement became everything; it produced a concept of politics entirely deficient in targets, time constraints, ruptures of continuity and changes of rhythm. Yet, as Bensaïd explained, ‘the time of strategy is precisely the opposite of a uniform durée’ that is homogenous and empty (with the obligatory Benjamin reference); it is rather made of sudden changes, turns, confrontations and opportunities that need to be seized.72 Bensaïd’s reading of the revisionist wing drew out the conflict between Lenin’s concept of history, politics and the party, and theirs, and then showed the conditions for the subsequent Kautskyanrevisionist rapprochement. For the revisionists who had faith in progress, wars and revolutions disturb the normal course of development, and their politics is about returning to a time of capitalist ascendence in order to enact policy in ‘normal’ conditions of class struggle. For Lenin, on the contrary, wars were the grounds upon which class struggle had to be fought, a condition for opening any potential revolutionary situation. Bensaïd approached the Lenin-Kautsky relation to discern why and how Lenin, who was a champion of attentive reading able to mercilessly gauge the political lapses of his opponents, failed to see the impasses of works he celebrated, like Kautsky’s The Road to Power. Lenin was in agreement with theses texts, Bensaïd claims. This was not, nor should it be, the main point at issue, however. The main point at issue is to draw out the internal consistency, the conceptual apparatus and the coherence of Kautsky’s centrist ‘passive radicalism’, which often draws nearer the revisionist right in times of crisis, mass struggle and revolution. Bensaïd did not produce a literalist account of Kautsky’s work, but drew out its theoretical and political structure. He drew out its structure in the following way: Kautsky’s revolution is not made, neither is it prepared. It happens, an objective fact of history. The main problem is to win public power. The whole strategy revolves around the ‘war of position’, without serious confrontation, until finally the general strike could intervene in the last instance. The path to power is effectively guaranteed by history, and because of this guarantee, Kautsky produced an abstract logic capable of reconciling

72

Ibid.

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‘consistent reformism with formal orthodoxy’.73 Neither provoke the enemy through offensive class struggle and the preparation of revolution, nor collaborate with the enemy through bourgeois governmental participation, these were the two poles of the theoretical and political structure of Kautsky’s thinking; they fit into a system that took victory to be inevitable, to result from the electoral majority and the growth of the proletariat. If Kautsky polemicised against making revolution, he also had a specific conception of the state and power, encompassing two components: power and strategy. First, power revolved around the displacement of forces within the state apparatus where the dictatorship of the proletariat qua political problematic rules out the destruction of the state, swerving instead to the terrain of a parliamentarist majority, dominance within the state and hegemony of the party that represents the proletariat. Second, as part of this political problematic, Kautsky introduced the distinction between the war of position and the war of annihilation, adapted from the military thinker Hans Delbrück (Kautsky’s proposal was distinct from Gramsci’s in that Kautsky’s main concern was never having to actually take up decisive battle) where there is a permanent weakening of the enemy, advance of the proletarian party through its mass organisation and elections, and perhaps a struggle to defend democracy. Bensaïd’s account of Kautsky dovetails with that of Alan Shandro, who writes that for Kautsky the state was ‘the strategic nodal point of class struggle’.74 Short of the ambiguities, ‘the logic of Kautsky’s Marxism carried the imperative of a decisive shift of power in the state … the theoretical axis around which this strategy is conceived is the working-class seizure of state power, a Social Democratic majority in a parliament that has become the effective master of the state apparatus. This is what Kautsky meant by the decisive battle, the revolution – and it is revolution in this sense which he counterposes to Bernstein’s “organic evolutionism”’.75 Though Bensaïd himself did not present Kautsky’s pre-war writings in Strategy and Party, a survey of them provides ample evidence that despite Kautsky’s strengths and weaknesses, he had a unilateral conception of history as pertaining to German conditions, a parliamentarist notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat and a profound mistrust of mass actions. The whole structure of this theoretical and political approach can be systematised from his early pre-Erfurt writings, the Erfurt years, his correspondence with Franz Mehring, Parliamentarism and Democracy (1893), the

73 74 75

Bensaïd 2016, p. 67. Shandro 2014, p. 55. Shandro 2014, p. 56.

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Bernstein affairs, The Social Revolution (1902), his writings on the Paris Commune and the Third Republic (1904) and finally, The Road to Power (1909) itself, which constituted Kautsky’s mature pre-war statement on the fight for political power. This was all put to the test in the mass strike debates, which brought together the realities of preparing revolution, mass and disruptive class struggle, and the orientations towards the state – Pannekoek was the first to say the state needed to be destroyed in the mass strike debate. The debate split the left bloc when faced with the Prussian suffrage campaign. Kautsky, Luxemburg and Pannekoek were at the forefront of this debate, which was a significant turning-point in the history of the Second International, a rich moment from the pre-war years because it showed the lines of division between the centre and the left with Germany’s revolutionary storm on the near horizon. Bensaïd often presented the mass strike debates as a key moment of confrontation that sharpened the political lines among the left wing of the Second International. Indeed, the mass strikes, unplanned and uncontrolled and outside the existing framework of parliamentary struggle, made the extraparliamentary road to revolution conceivable. The mass strikes showed how history could experience leaps and masses could transform the course of history through the process of struggle. The working class moved. There, speculation stopped. The mass struggle from below threw up forms of organisation that contained answers (eventually materialised in the strike committees, workers’ councils and soviets) to the question of the struggle for power. If Marx and Engels had argued that revolutionary struggle was necessary not only to make a communist revolution, but to begin to rid society of the muck of ages, then the pattern of working-class activity and organisation throughout the mass strikes revealed the lever with which the working class could overthrow the old world and fit itself to rule. In context, Bensaïd saw Luxemburg’s work as a creative use of Marxist theory as opposed to Kautsky’s wooden and anti-revolutionary Marxist verbiage. Luxemburg was open to the experiences of mass struggles, out of which a new theory of working-class consciousness, politics and revolution could be developed. With the mass strike as a concrete tactic, Luxemburg fought to abolish the semi-absolutist regime, after which ‘the revolution would be propelled beyond this first turning point towards the conquest of power by the proletariat. Her slogan of a republic … tied together all the great struggles of the day with a final aim’, in a process of permanent revolution in German conditions.76

76

Frölich 2010, p. 171.

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The mass strike put class consciousness at the centre of a revolutionary politics. To appreciate the radical innovation that Luxemburg made with regard to the mass strike, and its role in a theory of revolution, we have to keep in mind that it was only after the deaths of Marx and Engels that workers’ parties achieved a prolonged period of institutional stability in a parliamentary regime. Bureaucratic phenomena in the labour movement had consequences for workingclass self-emancipation because it created a new challenge for revolutionary practice, and here the mass strike fits into a theory of revolution, being a form of struggle, which makes liberation possible; in essence it is a process through which the working class can become politically independent and not remain subaltern, doomed to tail other more conservative social forces in the narrow realm of trade-union activism. Bensaïd was attentive to the fact that Luxemburg was perhaps more sensitive to the bureaucratisation of the German Social Democratic Party, because she was directly confronted with the contradiction of how a revolutionary organisation can grow in the conditions of capitalist society without being corrupted by this society. Corrupted not in the vulgar sense, but integrated through the formation of a bureaucracy, subjected to the dangers of parliamentarian, rightward shifts of the parliamentary deputies and trade-union officials. Luxemburg saw workers’ spontaneity of general strikes and eruptions of struggle as a counterweight to such bureaucratisation; in many ways, Luxemburg’s understanding of reformism in the West was far superior to Lenin’s (who mistakenly upheld the notion of a labour aristocracy). Contrast Luxemburg’s vision to Kautsky’s, who got dragged along by the needs of the trade-union bureaucracy and the party executive, and in the process gave up on working-class initiative, mass action and revolution, debasing and deforming Marxism. We need to displace the question from what Kautsky said to what his words socially represented. The struggle for universal suffrage in Prussia tested Kautsky; for the first time in its history, the party mobilised a political offensive against the semi-absolutist government propped up by the rotten Prussian Junker class. The workers’ movement entered into mass struggle in opposition to the lack of reform to the unequal class nature of voting in Prussia. But the party executive and the trade-union leadership put a brake on the resistance. They wanted to keep the economic struggles local and beat an orderly retreat from the possibilities opened up by the suffrage campaign, so they could prepare for the upcoming Reichstag elections. This was a classic case of winding up a dynamic campaign that had real potential by channelling it into electioneering. Kautsky failed the test of this historical epoch; his polemic with Luxemburg over the mass strike – a means to wind down the struggle, so as to channel it into the upcoming Reichstag elections – was a way to dis-

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tance himself from her unpopular image within the trade-union bureaucracy. The concepts Kautsky mobilised in his polemics, like the distinction between the East and the West, the war of attrition and war of overthrow, should be related to a social layer hostile to working-class liberation. The principal role this social layer now played for Kautsky was clear in his letter to Riazanov, in which he wrote: It irritated me that my influence among the trade unionists is paralysed by the fact that I have been identified with Rosa. It seems to me that in order to develop good relations between the Marxists and the trade unionists it is important to show that on this point there is a great distance between Rosa and me. This is for me the most important question.77 Kautsky shows that if Marxism is reduced to whispering in the ears of these structures, it debases itself and ends up powerless before capital. Kautsky blunted class antagonism with Marxist language. Kautsky’s great knowledge of Marx and Engels’s work was tragically subsumed by the needs of a social layer hostile to working-class self-emancipation. Kautsky appropriated concepts to suit this bureaucratic end. This became known as centrism, which was antirevolutionary in practice. Bureaucratisation was the key block to the development of a revolutionary tactic in German Social Democracy. Revolutionary Marxists needed to address this reality. Those who could not confront bureaucracy and organised reformism could not pave the way forward politically. Paving a way forward had to include a coherent theory of revolution, and it had to orient, not to whispering in the ears of sections of the trade-union bureaucracy, but to the advanced and militant activist base of the workers’ movement where it existed. Above all, it had to build an organised challenge to layers hostile to workers’ selfemancipation. Thus, Luxemburg’s and Pannekoek’s writings on the mass strike, and the concrete debate of 1910 revealed the crucial fact about revolutionary orientation that without an orientation to militant and advanced rank-and-file activists moving into struggle, without an orientation to militant minorities in their struggle against capital and the forces of official reformism, then Marxist theory easily slips into a vague and conciliatory sermon dragging behind other social forces. That was what became of Kautsky’s Marxism. On the other hand, Luxemburg’s vision of the mass strike was irreconcilable with social forces hostile to workers’ liberation.

77

Quoted in Laschitza 1969, p. 246, as quoted in Waldenberg 1980, p. 673.

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The Prussian suffrage struggle was untimely, taking place before Social Democrats had secured a stronger electoral victory in 1912. Untimeliness posed a number of problems: would the movement be forced into parliamentary channels? Could class consciousness develop outside of parliament? Should the untimely possibilities opened in struggle be seized upon? The focus on parliamentary fortunes subsumed the struggle for democratic rights and social revolution into a linear temporality by forcing class consciousness back into the parliamentary arena. In practice, to reiterate, Kautsky ‘gave theoretical cover to those in the Party and unions who anxiously watched the impetuous mass movement grow, wishing only to put the brakes on it and lead it as quickly as possible back onto the good old parliamentary and trade union routine’.78 The prioritisation of parliament over mass struggle forced Kautsky’s social democratic politics into a linear march through electoral institutions, cut off from the possibilities emerging outside that arena. His politics were aligned to unilinear time, not the discordance of times. This was inevitably a poor conception of politics. Kautsky’s logic as based on a centrist tactic focusing on building up the workers’ political party became an end in itself, opposed to the right’s coalition policy and the left’s mass strike orientation. In the final instance, the mass strike debate concerns the meaning of politics and the centrality of mass struggles to political education, the relationship between abstract verbiage and concrete practice, and the impasse of not being able to ‘prepare’ revolution through active intervention. The mass strike debate shows the limits of a passive and dogmatic attitude towards struggle. In Marx, the Untimely, Bensaïd gives a fuller picture of his critique of Kautsky’s ‘passive radicalism’: The Kautskyist orthodoxy of the Second International unilaterally developed this interpretation. Here revolutions partake of an organic, quasinatural maturation of the social process. In a sense, they make themselves, without needing to be made. Reduced to the role of educator, the Party’s task is to awaken the consciousness of the masses, transmitting the lessons of experience and overseeing the swelling pile of electoral votes and trade-union enrolments [Kautsky thought revolution would ‘come on time’ – D.R.] … the socialist movement is no longer a school of struggle, subject to the rhythms and risks of the conflict, but a school of patience and discipline where the proletariat learns to march at the same pace,

78

Luxemburg quoted from Weber 1983, p. 123.

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and to foil untimely provocations. Social contradictions, all too real, are resolved neither by education nor by theory.79

8

Vanishing Moments and Breaks in Gradualness

After the 1980s, no decisive change of content took place within Bensaïd’s reading of Lenin, though development and refinement indeed did, as he further detailed the role of broken time for politics, while his work on Marx and Benjamin further processed the new writing of history that folded back into his interpretation of Lenin. Bensaïd’s writings on Lenin throughout the 1980s and beyond had achieved two things: he integrated the political lessons of the post-68 period and developed his principal thesis about Lenin. First, Bensaïd specified the fact that the bourgeois state cannot be destroyed outside of time under any conditions. To content oneself with this imperative outside of time would be to repeat the mistakes of an ultra-left voluntarism discussed above. If the question of power was posed in permanence, it would depend on the political will of the party alone to choose the accumulation of military forces over other avenues like the trade unions and parliament, displacing electoralist gradualism for a militaristic and ultra-left one akin to a theory of the offensive. This form of ultra-leftism, so present in the early Bensaïd, is the other pole of contradiction of a disgust with parliamentary careerism and opportunism. Lenin’s notion of revolutionary crisis however is irreducible to, and completely counterposed to, the theories of the offensive that developed in the early years of the Third International, for it remains the key strategic notion illuminating the fact that there are particular and relatively exceptional circumstances where ‘the state becomes vulnerable and destructible … There is a rhythm to the class struggle, ruptures and discontinuities, to think in terms of crisis’.80 Second, Bensaïd posited Lenin’s specificity in relation to the lefts of the Second International, even after the mass strike debate, which eventually materialised in a ‘qualitative step forward, in the sense of a coherent systematisation under the shock of 1914’.81 Pannekoek had expressed an evolutionist, idealist and non-dialectical conception of the stages of development through which the proletariat develops, from infancy and adolescence to the adulthood of councils, while Luxemburg grasped the possibilities opened by the mass

79 80 81

Bensaïd 2002, p. 29. Bensaïd 2016, p. 71. Ibid.

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strike, ‘but without integrating it into a perspective of the whole struggle for the destruction of the state, the emergence of a situation of dual power and the establishment of a revolutionary power. The manner in which she waged her fight within German social-democracy, and whether or not to take it to its ultimate organizational conclusions, was probably linked to that approach’, Bensaïd wrote.82 Bensaïd was convinced that Luxemburg did not have a strategic view of the fight for power in her polemics against Kautsky, ‘no clear view of how the general strike could be combined with insurrection’, and ‘no concept of real power’, ‘she doesn’t have the perspective of developing the general strike towards dual power’, ‘she has no strategic alternative social democracy. She has points of polemic, but not a total break with the perspective of the majority of social democracy’.83 By contrast to Luxemburg, Bensaïd draws out how Lenin took a qualitative step forward, a dialectical leap, between the years 1914 and 1916, where he brought together a critique of the Second International, an elaboration of imperialism, and on the question of the state carried out a profound rupture with the Kautskyan problematic of The Road to Power, all of which included Lenin’s return to Hegel’s Science of Logic. According to Bensaïd, the trauma of 1914 led to a leap in Lenin’s strategic thinking, coherently bringing together a diverse set of theoretical reflections that allowed for a further systematisation of the notion of revolutionary crisis which acted as a kind of guiding thread throughout 1917. The state and the role of Hegel were important moments in Lenin’s reflection. I will take each in their turn thematically instead of chronologically within Bensaïd’s work. To begin with Hegel, Lenin’s renewed encounter with the Logic attained more presence in Bensaïd’s interpretation as time went on, partly owing to the latter’s own reading of Hegel throughout the 1980s. Lenin’s philosophical notebooks and engagement with Hegel had no place, for instance, in Bensaïd’s Master’s thesis, which was an indication of a certain distance from Lefebvre’s own views, but Hegel subsequently came to the forefront in Bensaïd’s reflections on Lenin, and Bensaïd was supported by Michael Löwy’s From the ‘Logic’ of Hegel to the Finland Station in Petrograd. Bensaïd was correct to insist on Lenin’s method. This is a central point, for despite the fact that Bensaïd did not clarify in a philologically precise manner the steps that led Lenin towards and through Hegel’s works, nor of the theoretical relation Lenin had to Kautskyan and Plekhanovite materialism in method, clarifying the differ-

82 83

Ibid. Bensaïd 2017, The Marxist concept of the party, audio file, https://www.iire.org/node/563.

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ences where they do and do not exist is a necessary operation of thought, because doing so elucidates the relation Marx’s materialism has to bourgeois materialism. The problem revolves around capturing the break Lenin made in method against the Second International ideologues and many explanations with their different, conflicting and convergent answers from Korsch, to Timpanaro, Althusser, Lefebvre, Colletti, Raya Dunayevskaya, Anderson have been proposed. As for Bensaïd, he constantly referred back to Löwy’s study, and three points are worth making about it: first, Löwy writes that prior to reading the Logic, Lenin had clung to the Holy Family, which was symptomatic of Lenin’s early attachment to English and French materialism in method. Marx and Engels had themselves taken communism to be the logical continuation of English and French (bourgeois) materialism and would go on to break with this metaphysical materialism of bodies. Second, Löwy situates Lenin’s early defence of the bourgeois character of the Russian revolution within the philosophical continuum running from Kautsky to Plekhanov. Third, Löwy shows how Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks evidenced a profound change in Lenin’s appreciation, absorption and comprehension of the Marxist dialectic, and as a result Löwy grasped the methodological limits of the dominant pre-dialectical character of Second International Marxism (in the realm of method) and the way Lenin superseded them. The question of method is irreducible to history and politics, even to the presence or not of the materialist dialectic within the historical and political writings of Second International Marxism, and yet it is woven through them. Bensaïd never systematically presented Lenin’s relation to Hegel’s dialectic, his thinking about the question could be said to be situated between Löwy’s essay and Kouvelakis’s Lenin as Reader of Hegel, but Bensaïd did explore the relation of dialectic and revolution, which was pertinent to his understanding of Lenin, the materialist dialectic and politics. One reason for the lack of systematicity (in relation to Lenin) is perhaps that Bensaïd thought that if the materialist dialectic was a condition of possibility for a strategic thought, then it was not at all a science in general, but an authentic politics of the concrete situation and the conjuncture. Bensaïd made a series of moves in relation to the dialectic and revolution: he posited, against Kautskyan-centrism and Bernsteinian revisionism, the intimate bond between the dialectic and revolution, the way a dialectical thought of the totality is the ground and condition of strategic politics, the irreconcilability of antagonisms within a dialecticalrevolutionary thought (which finds its destination in the reasoned wager), the tendential and open character of dialectical laws, the immanent nature of dialectical thought as a logic of specificity and the way it deconstructs the antinomies of bourgeois common sense, therefore becoming an art of conflict

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more than a closed and finished, general and formalisable, science. The aleatory and the possible have a central place in the dialectic’s relation to revolution. Rather than a tranquil historical evolution without the aleatory or possibility, it was necessary to know how to grasp ‘in flight the precious “vanishing moments” that Hegel spoke of, and of which Lenin said in his Notebooks, that they constituted “an excellent definition of the dialectic”: critical moments, favourable conjunctures, moments of decision and truth’, where the strategic blade of dialectical thought pierces through.84

9

A Politics for Those outside the State Machine

In relation to Lenin’s break with the Kautskyan problematic of The Road to Power, Bensaïd (1986) more or less followed Marian Sawer’s The Genesis of State and Revolution (1977), to which I return below. It may be said that Bensaïd’s account remained one-sided because he paid no attention to Lenin’s pronouncements on Germany; instead he was focused, understandably, on Russia.85 The absence produced confusion, however, since there is an indication that (after the Magdeburg Congress) Lenin’s conception of the state and revolution, and the tasks of the proletariat, as pertaining to Germany involved shifts of nuance as well as continuities with the problematic in The Road to Power. Lenin thought the bourgeois state in Germany needed to be smashed, while simultaneously thinking parliament in the bourgeois state could bring about socialism. Reporting from the Magdeburg Congress, Lenin spoke of the need to smash the German state to smithereens, he identified the contours of a revolutionary crisis and also pointed to the historical novelties that the proletarian struggle in the context of imperialist war would bring. Lenin summarised his class struggle problematic thus: Two worlds of ideas: on the one hand, the point of view of the proletarian class struggle, which in certain historical periods can proceed on the basis of bourgeois legality, but which leads inevitably to a denouement, an open collision, to the dilemma: either ‘smash’ the bourgeois state ‘to smithereens’ or be defeated and strangled. On the other hand, the point of view of the reformist, the petty bourgeois who cannot see the wood for the trees, who cannot, through the tinsel of constitutional legality,

84 85

Bensaïd 2007b. See also Lars Lih, The Tasks of Our Times: Kautsky’s Road to Power in Germany and Russia.

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see the fierce class struggle, who forgets in the backwoods of some diminutive state the great historical problems of the present day.86 I raise this problem to interrogate Bensaïd’s claim that Lenin accepted Kautsky’s general framework in The Road to Power prior to the war, because it ensures the principle of historical specification is followed instead of getting bogged down in ideological abstractions. It matters to understand how and why Lenin’s political ideas could develop further, while Kautsky’s remained behind the historical tasks of the day and stagnate.87 This is especially vital because The Road to Power had, on the one hand, announced a socialist revolution in Western Europe and anti-colonial struggles in the dependent countries, while on the other hand, the whole problem of political power was reduced to a nebulous shift in the balance of power in the state. This was a theoretical distortion, as Bukharin later argued at the Fourth Congress of the Comintern: At the beginning of the War, we too held that Kautskyism had suddenly abandoned its own theory. That’s what we thought and that’s what we wrote. But it is not true. Today, we can quite confidently say that our statements were wrong. Quite the contrary: the so-called betrayal of the Social Democrats and Kautskyists was based on the theory that they had advanced even before the War. What did they say regarding the state and the conquest of political power by the proletariat? They presented things as if it was a matter of some object that could be handed over by one class to another. That was Kautsky’s conception … [This] is true regarding the dictatorship of the proletariat. Even in his debate with the revisionists, Kautsky never developed this concept. He devoted hardly a word during the controversy to this most important of problems. He said roughly: this question will be worked out by future generations. That is how he presented the matter.88 Lenin commented on Kautsky’s presentation of the political rule of the proletariat upon rereading The Road to Power (1917): ‘That’s all? of what it consists, not a word’, that is, Kautsky completely evaded the question of the state.89 Prior to the outbreak of the war, and reflecting on the mass strike debate, Lenin expected Kautsky to shift from a ‘strategy of attrition’ to the ‘strategy of overthrow’, for, 86 87 88 89

Lenin 1910, Two Worlds. Lenin 2010, pp. 307–8. This section owes much to John Marot (personal communication). Bukharin from Riddell 2011a, p. 482. Quoted from Lars Lih 2018, p. 135.

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as Lenin wrote, ‘Kautsky stated plainly and definitely that this transition was inevitable if the political crisis developed further’.90 In line with his report on the Magdeburg Congress, Lenin expected a switch to the offensive when German conditions permitted. The distinction between attrition and overthrow was fundamental, despite the fact that Lenin did not adequately grasp that Kautsky had used the distinction to adapt to the reformist bureaucracy of the party and trade unions in the West. In practice, in the conditions of a feudal and absolutist Tsarist state, Lenin built an organisation of revolutionary workers who were independent of liberal reformism and could confront the repressive state apparatus in a switch to a strategy of overthrow which also aimed at the Duma. Following from this and returning to themes above, for Bensaïd, it was logical that Lenin sided with Kautsky against Luxemburg on the mass strike debate. ‘There is a logical connection between this practical position and his approval of the theses of The Road to Power, which shows just how far his own thinking had gone on the eve of the war. He still basically upheld the distinction between East and West, so dear to Kautsky, and therefore the distinction between “Russian” general strikes and “Western” general strikes’, which was one reason, Bensaïd claimed, as to why 4 August 1914 caught Lenin off-guard and ‘why he decided to substantially readjust his views’.91 In Germany there was a greater degree of democratisation within the Wilhelmine authoritarian state, though revolutionary struggle still required the dual experiences of the October and November Revolutions to clarify the relation between parliament, the bourgeois state apparatus, institutions of workers’ power and insurrection in the revolutionary transformation of society. Before these experiences, Marxists in the Second International (Lenin included) were under the illusion that in the West parliaments ran the capitalist state; therefore, revolutionary struggle was needed to break up the authoritarian obstacles (the state was answerable to the Kaiser, not the Reichstag, while representation in the Prussian three-class system was heavily weighted in favour of the Junker class) and organisation of power that stood in the way of universal and equal suffrage, thus opening the prospect for a parliamentary road to socialism. The bourgeois-capitalist nature of the state in the West and the dominant role of parliament (so they thought) provided the means to further democratise the capitalist state. They could win a parliamentary majority and take over the state. This illusion was behind the latest developments of imperialism that shaped the competing states and hollowed out the parlia-

90 91

Lenin 1911, The Historical Meaning of the Inner Party Struggle in Russia. Lenin 2010, p. 383. Bensaïd 2016, p. 68.

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mentary arm; it was also behind Marx’s own insights into politics, the state and revolution. In this sense, Lenin’s State and Revolution was not a novelty, but because the Second International had deformed Marx’s politics to the extent that an excavation was required, it took on the character of a novel breakthrough. As I have argued (on the basis of and beyond Bensaïd’s own writings), Lenin, like Luxemburg, was far more adjusted to the dynamics of extra-parliamentary mass struggle than Kautsky. The dynamic of mass struggle is central to the development of political class consciousness. Vitally, Bensaïd distinguishes Lenin from Kautsky’s pedantic-parliamentarist approach to class consciousness. Mass struggle also allows for historical and political learning, which was so necessary for Lenin: the parliamentary road to socialism vanished for the historical mirage it actually was in the Russian and German Revolutions, the formation and role of the Soviet, and the recognition from East to West that parliaments do not run the modern bourgeois state. The ineffaceable historical truth that socialism can only be achieved with the materialisation of a completely different form of state power, transcending the boundaries of East and West despite any persistent historical specificity in their respective countries, was won through revolutionary experience. Kautskyism, in the last instance, was a sign of the negation of this hard-won truth. With this appreciation, it may be easier to understand how Bensaïd spoke of the interplay of discontinuity and change in Lenin’s thought and establish the precise relation Lenin had to the Kautskyan problematic while also integrating the breakthrough Lenin made in State and Revolution for politics. Bensaïd thought that Lenin’s ideas on the state converged with those of Kautsky, because of the difference between the Russian struggle against Tsarism, and the tasks facing socialists in Wilhelmine Germany, but Lenin’s convergence with the ideologist of the Second International ended with the war. One difficulty on the state question, following from Sawer’s essay, was that throughout the debate over the state between Kautsky and Pannekoek in 1912, Lenin’s position ‘can at best be described as inattentive. Lenin certainly was aware of the Pannekoek and Kautsky articles in 1912, but he does not appear to have actually read the Pannekoek article until early 1917’.92 Whereas Bukharin had drawn the conclusion about the need to smash the state, Lenin, who initially saw this as a gradual slide into anarchism, read Marx’s political texts anew, and came to the conclusion that this was indeed Marx’s view though it had been systematically ignored and distorted in the Kautskyan problematic of The Road

92

Sawer 1977, p. 211.

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to Power reduced as it was to a shift in the balance of power within the state. It took time for Lenin to understand the extent of this theoretical distortion. The specific contribution to clarifying the tasks of the proletarian revolution faced with the bourgeois state apparatus was the role of soviets as an alternative form of power, a clarification that superseded even the Lefts like Pannekoek at the time. The theoretical side of the question is important to stress, however. As Sawer insisted, Lenin’s ‘theoretical leap’ as pertaining to the state and revolution preceded the outbreak of the February Revolution. It therefore was ‘in no way connected with the re-emergence of a soviet moment in Russia’, i.e. it was not a passive reflex of history, but a concrete theorisation intersecting with it.93 This is all background to Bensaïd’s contemporary problem: to think the breakthrough Marx made for politics in a more adequate manner. Bensaïd combined a Marx who had already discovered the historical fact and significance of the politics of the oppressed, who indeed directed his attention to ‘the constitution of nonstate political bodies that prepare the way for the necessary withering away of the state as a separate body’, along with a Lenin who thought politics as strategy, giving the most coherent answer to the ‘vital, urgent question … of politics from below, politics for those who are excluded and cut off from the state politics of the ruling class’.94 Marx’s politics of the oppressed and Lenin’s strategic thought effectively meet in one of Marx’s major contributions to the revolutionary theory of his time: the dictatorship of the proletariat as the touchstone of Marxism. The notion combines various elements of Marx’s politics, as mediated by Lenin, into a coherent whole: the class specific nature of democracy, the relationship between states and global capitalism, the institutional function of reformism and revolutionary power, the role class consciousness and mass struggles have for the dynamics of power, the structure and subtleties of proletarian revolution, relations between philosophy and revolution, the materialist theory of class struggle, the relationship between class and different forms of oppression as well as the role of revolutionary parties and the historical extinction of the alienated and bureaucratic state. ‘As paradoxical as it may seem, for Lenin the dictatorship of the proletariat’, Bensaïd wrote, ‘is not at all incompatible with the withering-away of the state, it is in fact the first stage of it’.95 As articulated above, Bensaïd’s principal thesis about Lenin was that a ‘new synthesis’ turning around the key strategic notion of the revolutionary crisis materialised during the war. From 1915, and throughout 1917, Lenin holds 93 94 95

Sawer 1977, p. 219. Bensaïd 2007f., p. 149. Bensaïd 2020, p. 36.

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together the elements of a political crisis of the system of domination, and the consequences of this dispositive of thought finds its effects in the new ideas (against traditional Social Democracy) of politics, the party and political action he provided. Bensaïd underscored two facts of the revolutionary crisis: revolutionary crises are a crisis of the totality [ensemble] of social relations while also being a national crisis where the state as a system of domination is upset in the framework of a global chain of competitive nation states. Far from being an abstract, purely theoretical reflection, Bensaïd drew out a historical and global view of the crises of state: The state as a system of domination is shaken. If one looks at the overall pattern of long waves of the economy in the 19th and 20th centuries, one can note that with every major reversal of the trend there was a genuine crisis of the state system of the central capitalist states, sometimes even a shift of the imperialist epicentre: with 1848 came the extension of the revolutionary wave throughout the European continent; with 1870, the Franco-Prussian war and the Paris Commune; with 1914, the European war, the Russian revolution, the rise of US hegemony and the reshaping of the entire central European state system; with 1937, World War Two and a new reshaping of Central Europe then the partition of Germany. Without being mechanical, one should note that each major turn induced a radical overhaul of the European state system.96 Bensaïd’s later writings on Lenin depart from the Master’s thesis with their more concrete emphasis on dual power. No doubt he saw dual power as the decisive factor in crises where the proletariat may become a candidate for power, but it was not as prominent, in a reflected and concrete way, in the early writings. At stake here is that Bensaïd did not move away from the fundamental problem of dual power in later life; he rather deepened it. And for good reason: if a revolutionary crisis is a national crisis, it involves the confrontation of irreconcilable powers that are the effects of a national crisis. Dual power emerges in practice only when instruments and organs of sovereignty emerge and begin to fulfil the functions the bourgeois state is no longer capable of. And, their ‘point of departure is unforeseeable, as well as the forms of organisation’, Bensaïd wrote.97

96 97

Bensaïd 2016, pp. 73–4. Bensaïd 2016, p. 74.

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On the problematic of dual power, Bensaïd extended the fundamental breakthrough Lenin made for politics, especially in opposition to the Kautskyist tradition. Bensaïd’s logic runs as follows: a revolutionary crisis can only be solved through conscious intervention, or else it would end in defeat. The party, as a consequence, must be capable of resolving the crisis therefore it is ‘the central piece of a strategic apparatus of the proletarian revolution’, beyond being either a simple pedagogue or a reflection of social movements.98 Bensaïd’s strategic framework is therefore irreducible to Kautskyan-centrist conceptions as well as revolutionary syndicalist ones. We are talking now about a specificity associated with Lenin’s name, and Bensaïd has just identified wherein this specificity lies. Bensaïd wrote: a revolutionary strategy concentrated on the idea of a national crisis implies a conception of the party radically opposed to Kautsky’s. Its point is precisely to prepare the revolution. One cannot decide the beginning and course of a revolution, but to orient it and determine its outcome, you must have prepared it. In this perspective the party acts in permanence. It constructs. It acts politically and socially. It is not a pure and simple record of the organic force and maturity of class consciousness. It takes initiatives, tries to codify relationships of forces, strikes the necessary alliances. It carries out politics. Its politics include defending firmly the independence of the working class and posing the problem of which alliances can help change the situation.99 Bensaïd took his stand without ambiguity: thinking strategically puts a primacy on interventionist practice, decision and initiative, based on working-class independence, a position that materially leads to another form of power, namely dual power. Education is one dimension of an interventionist party that is able to wage battle as part of a social revolution that is, in the last instance, decided with the full experience of force: the October insurrection. Bensaïd wrote of October: The choice of the moment was based on a judgment of the political legitimacy of the action in the entire mass movement, not just the evolution of the relationship of forces in the Congress of Soviets, but also the whole trend of developments in the trade unions, city councils, and regiments

98 99

Bensaïd 2016, p. 75. Bensaïd 2016, p. 76.

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from July to October. All this was analysed and known in minute detail, but there still remained to seize the strategic moment, the opportunity that could tip the balance and would perhaps never recur.100 To think the political, in actuality, is to think the strategic moments through to their conclusions and consequences; short of this, political conceptions are impoverished; they are not oriented to their effects in real history.

10

The Party as a Strategic Operator

Bensaïd wrote that the strategic question emerged casually in Marx’s and Engels’s work by virtue of their dual concept of the party, the ‘ephemeral’ and ‘historical’ one. In line with his critique of the ‘sociological wager’, the party form (in Marx and Engels) was above all a theoretical consciousness which regrouped in different contexts (acting as a scout of the historical march and instructor of the proletariat as proclaimed by the Communist Manifesto) rather than a definition of a specific strategic project with permanence (concretely embodied in a party-form that fights rival currents in the labour movement). We find this distinction already in his cadre-training courses on strategy during the 1980s. Bensaïd saw Marx and Engels’s intermittent and sporadic conception of the party as inferior to Lenin’s argument for a party-strategist organised as a permanent necessity – beyond the ebbs and flows of the class struggle – that could continually regroup the most conscious sectors of workers and intellectuals and draw wider layers around them. Bensaïd’s conception of politics and the party had three layers. First, there is a distinction between the party and the class. The political consciousness of the working class comes from outside the narrow sphere of economic struggle, and the interventionist party is the bearer of political consciousness and theory. For Bensaïd, class consciousness does not develop naturally without political intervention. Second, in the post-war period, revolutionary currents were in a minority faced with the solid bureaucracies in the workers’ movement: reformist parties had won positions of serious influence within the bourgeois state or had ties with Stalinist Russia. Revolutionaries had to confront these material forces in order to build an independent organisation. Third, Bensaïd rejected what he called a ‘minoritarian fatalism’.101 ‘Minoritarian fatalism’ is the belief

100 101

Bensaïd 2016, p. 75. Bensaïd 2016, p. 167.

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that the working class will inevitably accept revolutionary ideas and inevitably obey its revolutionary destiny, without clear, concerted and wilful political intervention. To give up the fight for political consciousness and theoretical clarity – in the struggle to win over worker (or student) activists – was also to fall into a reassuring sociological objectivism: as the working class grows sociologically, its class consciousness will mature on time; consciousness will inevitably do what reality asks of it. In opposition to this sociological objectivism, the time to intervene, the discordant times of intervention were central features of Bensaïd’s framework. Bensaïd saw the political superiority of Lenin on this point (against the young Trotsky) for his dogged battle against conciliatory tendencies within the Russian left.102 It is important to pay particular attention to Bensaïd’s critique of the pre-1917 Trotsky. Often, the difference between Lenin and Trotsky is presented in the broader terms of permanent revolution prior to the revolution. But such differences were only relative, a minor and marginal feature of the polemics between them. For Bensaïd, the key difference was Trotsky’s conciliatory policy attempting to unify Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. The key difference is that of organisation. Trotsky was sociologically fatalistic and believed that, over time, the historical struggles of the working class would ‘overcome the differences between the two wings of the party – Menshevik and Bolshevik. History will oblige both factions to unify’, a perspective that Trotsky worked towards.103 At times, Trotsky came closer to the Bolsheviks, at others he was closer to the Mensheviks, ‘but all that is secondary’, because ‘the party is the overall movement of the working class and that will overcome conjunctural differences’.104 Bensaïd here sharpens the distinction between vestiges of Trotsky’s determinist politics against Lenin’s anti-determinist conception, as he wrote (I quote at length): Trotsky does not have the idea of a delimited party to select people to struggle for power. On the question of the party in the Russian Revolution, he has the classical view of Kautsky. That appears in the polemics where he says: ‘we are losing time in polemics, day-to-day questions, etc.’ and ‘we are not Jacobins’. Trotsky says we have a new concept of the party, not a conspiratorial one. The characteristic of the proletarian revolution is that it is done by the masses and not by a small minority. When the masses 102 103 104

Bensaïd 2016, p. 168. Bensaïd 1984, Marxism and socialist parties, from Marx to Lenin, audio file, https://www​ .iire.org/audio‑s‑daniel‑bensaid. Ibid.

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enter into action, it will overcome the secondary differences between the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks. Until the Russian Revolution of 1917, Trotsky does not have a concept of a Leninist party. It is the main difference between Lenin and Trotsky. The main difference when they enter the process of the Russian Revolution in 1917 is that Trotsky has a clearer view on the dynamics of the revolution thanks to permanent revolution and the necessity to come to socialism – or has to come to socialism. But he does not have the organisational tools or party to fight for that. Trotsky’s organisation is a secondary grouplet. Lenin has maybe a more confused view at the beginning on the general trend of the revolution, but he has the organisational mediation at the beginning to correct this position and put it into practice. That is mainly the result of continuity in the concept of the party with the delimitation and selection of cadres. In some way, Luxemburg and Trotsky are part of the tradition of the Second International on the question of organisation with differences on theoretical questions. They have a revolutionary stand in the Second International, but they more or less share its organisational conception. They do not have, at that time, a Leninist conception of the party.105 As I have reiterated, according to Bensaïd, the party is at the centre of the conditions of possibility of the social revolution owing to the specific conditions of the proletarian revolution for three determining reasons: it modifies the balance of forces prior to a revolutionary crisis, it shifts the levels of consciousness within the working class and materialises the accumulation of experiences and their memorisation by an activist layer implanted in the masses. This is Bensaïd’s political problematic and any historical, philological or theoretical debate about Lenin needs to clarify these terms and their political primacy in history and articulation in the present as an authentic image of thought. Bensaïd distinguished this problematic from really existing forms of Kautskyan ‘passive radicalism’ and revisionist socialisms ‘outside of time’, because these are the three limit points when it comes to the interventionist party. Without clarity as to Lenin’s specific political problematic, thought slides it into a problematic hostile to revolutionary thought. Furthermore, though I will develop this in the chapters on Benjamin and Marx, Bensaïd’s Lenin rests upon a concept of history that is materialist in its grasp of historical crises and possibility as well as the primacy of politics. This is why Bensaïd could further develop a Lenin-inspired revolutionary concep-

105

Ibid.

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tion of politics in confrontation with the Kautskyan problematic. The one thing Lenin knew about Kautsky (see Dead Chauvinism and Living Socialism) was that he vacillated at key junctures of crisis; it is not enough to present the relation in empiricist, a-political and a-theoretical terms, as Lars Lih did when he wrote, ‘The intensity of Lenin’s feelings about Kautsky after 1914 reminds one of a disappointed lover – and perhaps that is the best way to look at it. Lenin hated Kautsky because he loved his books’.106 Perhaps we leave the love-making speculations to Lih alone. Yet faced with this dubious love-hate speculation, Bensaïd had already shown how the Kautskyan political problematic produced a conception of the party characterised by a mistrust of mass struggles, ‘Because the party, for Kautsky, is before all an educator and pedagogue, a stockpile of science’.107 Three points come together in Kautsky’s problematic: first, that socialism and the class struggle emerge in parallel, therefore ‘socialism is not the product of the collective experience of the workers’ movement, but a doctrine in the strict sense, of an intellectual origin’; second, that these two processes are separate, with socialist consciousness being the product of a deep scientific understanding independent of practice and third, that the bearers of this scientific consciousness are the intellectuals who are invested with the pedagogical mission of transmitting socialist consciousness to the proletariat.108 Bensaïd also highlighted that, though Lenin cited and defended Kautsky’s passages, Lenin did ‘not exactly say the same thing [as Kautsky had]. Between them, there is a small difference that has … its importance’.109 The elucidation of this small but important difference is perhaps Bensaïd’s enduring contribution to thinking about Lenin. Not only does Bensaïd see Lenin as breaking with a stageist and evolutionist conception of class consciousness, as well as tearing political initiative away from the bourgeoisie, he actually carried through a revolution in the conception of political activity itself. Lenin thought through just how the proletariat could grasp the political problems that concerned society as a whole, therefore experiencing a ‘leap in political consciousness’, being involved in a directly political practice.110 Bensaïd’s primacy on the decisive role of the ‘political event’ is incompatible, a leap beyond the limits of, all forms of sociologically determinist, economistic and electoralist modalities of political consciousness. If the contradiction between wage-labour and capital is determ-

106 107 108 109 110

Lih 2011, p. 128. Bensaïd 2016, p. 154. Bensaïd 2016, pp. 154–5. Bensaïd 2016, p. 155. Bensaïd 2016, p. 159.

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inant in the last instance, the effects of this contradiction can explode there where it is least expected. Bensaïd later wrote of this idea: In an original way for the time, Lenin was opposed to [the] reduction of politics to the social. Like a psychoanalyst attentive to the ‘displacements’ and ‘condensations’ at work in the neurotic, he understood that economic and social contradictions didn’t express themselves directly, but under a specific form, deformed and transformed, of politics. It is why the party had the particular task, of listening, of making sense of the political field in an often-unexpected way in which the contradictions manifest themselves (the student struggle, the Dreyfus affair, the electoral question, an international incident). Their untimely eruption into an unexpected point is a symptom. It condenses and reveals an overall latent crisis of social relations. It is the miracle from which – quite different from the ordinary diverse fact – constitutes, properly speaking, the political event.111 In Strategy and Politics: From Marx to the Third International, Bensaïd sketched a similar thought, however more nuanced after his reading of Lars Lih’s Lenin Rediscovered: Against the economism that predominated in early Russian socialism, he insisted very early on the necessity of an ‘ample political campaign of denunciation’. Thus, affirming the primacy of politics against the corporative limits of a narrow vision of class interests. It was his leitmotiv of which we encounter the logic again in the polemics against the Worker’s Opposition in 1921. In order to confront Tsarist despotism at the level of the state organisation of its domination, local economic struggles don’t suffice, ‘a party for all of Russia’ is necessary. His critique of spontaneity (stikhiinost, in Russian, means disorganisation rather than spontaneity) thus seems to come close to Kautsky’s reticence vis-à-vis makeshift mobs: ‘it is fully possible and historically much more likely that the autocracy will fall under the pressure of one of those stikhiinyi explosions or unexpected political complications that constantly threaten it from all sides. But no political party, unless it falls into adventurism, can base its activity solely on the expectation of such explosions and complications. We must travel along our own path, carrying out our systematic work without devi-

111

Bensaïd 2017, p. 45.

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ation, and the less we base our calculations on unexpected occurrences, the greater the possibility that no ‘historical turning-point’ will catch us flat-footed’.112 Because Bensaïd’s starting point was the generalised crisis of social relations and the reciprocal relations of struggle among the classes of modern societies, his concept of political contradiction did not fall into the economistic (and impoverished) contradiction between bosses and workers in the corporatist sphere alone. Economism, of this sort, is a form of political reductionism. Bensaïd rejected political reductionism, and therefore was able to situate political knowledge in the class struggle, as a knowledge of the totality of relations of classes of social life. According to Bensaïd, the proletariat wins knowledge through the experience of political life, of the struggles between classes and the political events of an epoch. The party is a vehicle of this political experience, ‘a point of mediation, in a temporality that is no longer the “empty and homogenous” time of progress and social-democratic electoral patience, but a full time, knotted, tuned to the struggle and cut through with crisis, it lays down the unity of strategy and tactics … The party is therefore the thread of continuity in class consciousness’.113 The party is interventionist, a product and producer of revolution; therefore, it unifies the masses around a strategic project that is ‘beyond the discontinuity of experiences’, able to resolve history’s web of crises, conflicts and fractures.114 Bensaïd has prioritised political knowledge produced by the class struggle, which is practical insofar as it arises experientially from politics and the associated confrontations with modern bourgeois state power. Practice tests what has been learnt through the political experience of classes in struggle. This primacy on political experience (materialised in the revolutionary party) is the reason why Bensaïd opposed crude workerism and political reductionism. Political reductionism is singularly unable to overcome the bourgeois institutionalisation and domestication of the class struggle. Bensaïd’s form of politics, therefore, gives full recognition to the fact, as Ellen Meiksins Wood has shown, that ‘Even in more developed capitalist societies, mass militancy tends to emerge in response to “extra-economic” compulsion, particularly in the form of oppressive action by the state, and also varies in proportion to the state’s involvement in conflicts over the terms and conditions of work’.115 Wood’s insight is import112 113 114 115

Bensaïd 2011a, p. 66. Bensaïd 2016, p. 162. Ibid. Wood 2016, p. 46.

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ant, because ‘if capital in its mounting crises demands, and obtains, the state’s complicity in its anti-social purposes, that state may increasingly become the prime target of resistance in the advanced capitalist countries, as it has been in every successful modern revolution’.116 As for Bensaïd, he captured this point by situating it within Marx’s critique of political economy: The class struggle is not reduced to the antagonism between the worker and his boss. It confronts the proletariat with ‘the whole capitalist class’ on the level of the process of capitalist production as a whole which is the object of study in Volume Three of Capital. This, moreover, is why it is perfectly logical for Marx’s unfinished chapter on class to come precisely at this point and not in Volume One on the process of production or Volume Two on the process of circulation. As a political party, revolutionary social democracy thus represents the working class, not just in its relations with a group of employers, but also with ‘all the classes of contemporary society and with the state as an organised force’.117

11

Revolutionary Politics beyond the Distinction between East and West

Throughout this chapter I have explored Bensaïd’s specific relation to Lenin, though I have by no means exhausted the association. Bensaïd drew out a conceptual problematic that bears upon strategic thought despite having not produced an empirical and historical breakthrough for thinking Lenin’s contribution to the political. But what of it? Why is it valuable, if at all? The questions convey the specific contributions activist, strategic and philosophical readings of Lenin have to offer, and they can be summarised in some concluding remarks. If it is true that history unfolds through bifurcations and contretemps, the terrain where struggle is aleatory, then the principle of working-class political independence that Lenin fought for is integral to Bensaïd’s interpretation and is the opposite of a dogmatic and sectarian formula, precisely because it posits proletarian power. The entirety of Bensaïd’s political materialism develops in relation to the experiences of real-time class struggle, for experiences are the starting point and the end point for the theory of materialist politics –

116 117

Wood 2016, p. 47. Bensaïd 2007f., 151.

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that is why Bensaïd’s reading of Lenin constantly moves back and forth from his own specific contribution to politics and the historical experiences of the 1848 revolutions, the Paris Commune, the Russian Revolution and the West European wave of revolutions of 1918–23 from Germany to Italy, the Chinese Revolution of 1925–27, the Spanish Revolution of 1936, the failures of the French Popular Front government, the anti-fascist people’s liberation struggles during World War Two, the rebellion that swept the globe from Argentina and Chile, France, Italy, Spain and Portugal after 1968, through to the Latin American revolts of the early 2000s. Of course, historical experience has not yet exhausted its materials. Bensaïd’s Lenin wager took seriously the argument for workers’ power in the so-called advanced capitalist countries, and today it can be said that the distinction between the East and the West is not useful, if by that we mean the distinction between backward agrarian economies and states where the capitalist mode of production dominates their social formations. The capitalist mode of production has consolidated itself throughout the concrete societies of the globe, albeit in an uneven and combined way, with specific state forms and class structures. Faced with this situation, revolutionary political thought, as a study of the past – and comprehension of the present – is infinitely concrete. The proletariat develops over time and social space, its struggles are differentiated with their own ebbs and flows, intensities, temporalities and geographies, and a Lenin-inspired politics and theory is open to the real complexities of class struggle, necessary because capitalism is the most dynamic, elastic and self-transformative system of social relations the world has ever known, going through periods of crisis and restructuring that change state forms, states’ relations to their subjects and such restructuring opens the way for revolutionary crises and imperialist war. No situation is completely hopeless for capital and interventionist politics needs to rise to the challenge of this fact. Yet the dynamic logic of capitalism itself is the precondition for understanding the conditions of possibility for workers’ power. Certainly, capital is today very well organised. The dictatorship of capital has the backing of the tradeunion bureaucracies, stable and non-stable parties that absorb working-class support and institutionalise it, non-governmental organisations exerting moral and ideological pressure while also taking up social welfare, and obviously repression. But the history of capitalism moves through phases. Sometimes capitalism has the means to persuade the mass of people to accept its mechanics and keep them content. At other times, it binds the mass of ordinary people to it through repression, without ideological legitimacy. But the constant disquiet of capitalism does not permit long-term contentment for those it exploits. If a proletarian revolution in the advanced capitalist countries is the absent

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centre for Bensaïdian political thought, since it is true the proletariat has never taken power in an advanced and consolidated modern society in which the capitalist mode of production dominates – this means there is the aleatory task of fighting for something genuinely creative and new in history that breaks the repetition of capitalist society. Bensaïd’s Lenin provides a concrete political grasp of the present moment and its possibilities, contrasting with the atrophied political imaginaries that have declined to backward-looking electoralist realism. Bensaïd’s Marxism is about carrying the class confrontation to its logical and political conclusion, whereas an atrophied left is defined by justifying passivity in the name of realism, degrading socialism and becoming a think tank for opportunistic parliamentary squabbles, turning the materialist dialectic into sophistic wandering. Without Lenin’s wager, workers’ power is transformed into winning a parliamentary majority in the indefinite future. This fetishism of the parliamentary majority is a repudiation of the dictatorship of the proletariat, Marxism and revolution as such. Bensaïd seriously thought the bourgeoisie needed to be socially put out of existence, once and for all, and Lenin was his medium for coming to terms with the potentialities and realities of proletarian power. That meant ousting the bourgeoisie from its apparatus of power and forcing it to obey the will of the subaltern democratic majority that takes the apparatus of power into its own hands. Such an act would be a concrete step forward for human liberation, filled with the joy in which the chains of subjugation wither away and an end will be put to all forms of oppression, with the long-standing disgrace of exploitation consigned to oblivion. Lenin grasped capitalism’s dynamism and drew the necessary political conclusions from it. When capitalism moves, it cannot but lead to deep class struggles, wars and revolutions, and history unfolds charged with the points at which strategic intervention can alter the aleatory combinations of the lived world. In the final instance, Bensaïd gives us a Lenin who problematises revolutionary thought so as to build an interventionist politics that is conceptually grounded and historically concrete: I don’t imagine that the revolutions in the twenty-first century will be simple repetitions of October 1917 or of the Hamburg Commune: in contrast, the political problematic that consists in tying the crisis as a strategic hypothesis with the molecular work, over the long term, is for me the true Leninist theoretical revolution in relation to Marx in whom strategic thought remained embryonic … What Lenin introduced with the problematic of the party, which remains for me fundamental, is the relationship between the movement of consciousness to a strategic hypothesis –

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a hypothesis, not an instruction manual – that in turn makes the moment of the event with the period [of crisis, wars and revolutions] interrelated. The party, in the strategic sense, is the operator or the mediation between these two temporalities, of the event and of history, of necessity and contingency. That didn’t exist before Lenin and we can truly speak of his revolution within the Revolution. If we exclude all of these categories from strategic thought, we are imprisoned in the iron cage of [capital’s] reproduction.118 Though Bensaïd ruled out the possibility that a purely proletarian movement could develop its own autonomous ideology, because the merely economisticspontaneous development of the proletariat ends by being subordinated to bourgeois ideology, he extended the very notion of political struggle to those outside of the state machine. The revolutionary crisis and political struggle of parties provide a still compelling answer to ‘the puzzle of proletarian revolutions and their repeated tragedies’: How can a class which is physically and morally stunted in its daily life by the involuntary servitude of forced labour transform itself into the universal subject of human emancipation?119 As was Bensaïd’s Leninist problematic, it remains ours.

118 119

Bensaïd 2006, Pensée stratégique et utopie, interview with Fabien Ollier. Bensaïd 2007f., p. 149.

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Revolution and Power Foucault said somewhere that in terms of philosophy, one must opt for a critical thought of present reality, a form of thought asking after the nature of our reality, an ‘ontology’ of the present. This is a challenge and a task, perhaps even the greatest problem of our time, and without politics and intervention, the present cannot be thought, let alone understood; to that extent, a politicisation of the present seems superior to an ontology of the present, and Bensaïd was committed to such a politicisation. Throughout the 1970s, revolution toppled dictatorships, seemed imminent, or was drowned in blood. Where revolutionary prospects existed, they intersected with a plurality of struggles against different forms of domination, throwing the entire institutional framework of modern bourgeois society into question from the family to the prison. Bensaïd intervened into this situation with a theoretically informed Marxism attuned to the nature of the political present, shaping the strategic debates about how to overthrow capitalism. In the process and alongside the Ligue, Bensaïd developed a singular conception of revolutionary thought that was irreducible to academic Marxism or philosophy, yet remained committed to a high intellectual quality and the politicisation of history. Throughout the debates over political perspectives of the 1970s, Bensaïd produced a novel conception of Marxism and philosophy aligned to the question of power, simultaneously plural and singular, involving its theoretical and strategic components. Bensaïd’s articulation of Marxism, philosophy and strategy was a concrete answer to the historic impasse of French Stalinism, though it remained undeveloped in works like La révolution et le pouvoir; Stalinism severed the relation of theory and practice, or better put, matched ideology to a bourgeoisified bureaucratic practice, stifling the traditions of proletarian self-emancipation from below. To return to Bensaïd’s interventions of the 1970s is therefore to ask how he came to terms with the nature of his political present, the themes that mattered in the context of political confrontation, and above all it provides an account of the development of European Marxism in its theoretical and strategic dimensions, a precondition for any understanding of revolutionary theory’s real development unto the present, and the extent to which it has and has not advanced. Provisionally it can be said that development in strategic thought has hardly gone forward since La révolution et le pouvoir, though the exploration of Marx’s theory and its implications has indeed advanced. Within

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2024 | doi:10.1163/9789004687028_004

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Bensaïd’s own thinking after the 1970s there is a differential rhythm between the rectifications and leaps his theoretical framework experienced and the non-development of strategic thought for the advanced capitalist countries. In the last instance, Bensaïd’s thought at this time was situated between a sense of the historical chance presented to revolutionary politics and the slow recognition and appreciation of the so-called crisis of Marxism. Throughout this chapter I will write about the development of the Ligue in the French context, Bensaïd’s perspectives and grasp of the dynamics of the Spanish Transition and the Portuguese Revolution, La révolution et le pouvoir’s contribution to politics and its relation to the symbiotic philosophical camps of Althusser’s scientism and the irrationalism of desiring subjects, Bensaïd’s turn to Gramsci, the early sketch of a critique of politics as based on a historical account of the bourgeois revolutions and their relation to the traditions of workers’ democracy from below, the different critiques of Stalinism and Bensaïd’s polemics against Poulantzas and Eurocommunist thinkers over strategy

1

The Ligue in the French Landscape

The Ligue matured throughout the 1970s after fits and starts. It grew numerically, altered sociologically, carried out a political turn that consolidated its post-68 gains without collapsing as the Maoists had, built Critique Communiste under the direction of Henri Weber, related to the women’s liberation movement and set up Rouge as a daily. Two difficulties almost immediately made themselves felt in the French landscape: the signing of the Common Programme of the Left by the pcf and the Socialist Party in 1972 that attempted to mould and institutionalise hopes for change within safe and official mechanisms, and then in 1973 the state legally dissolved the Ligue communiste after it valiantly organised an armed attack on a meeting of New Order, a fascist groupuscule, precursor of the National Front. Shortly after the signing of the Common Programme the Ligue published a denunciation of it, and critically analysed its content. If the programme aimed at the management of a new phase of capitalist development, then the Ligue would subject it to revolutionary critique. There were difficulties though: on the one hand, across the world left-wing parties and trade unions were proposing packages (the Meidner Plan in Sweden and the Accord in Australia) that would entrench neoliberal capital under the guise of working-class advance; on the other hand, it seemed that if the Common Programme was enacted, it could constitute a confrontation with capital and therefore was a key link in the

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political chain of class struggle. There was nevertheless no unanimity within the Ligue about what the new development meant at the time and how to orient to it. The early disagreements within the Ligue revolved around whether it was principled or not to vote for Mitterrand, key because the pact involved the Socialist Party putting up its own candidate for president with pcf backing. As it turned out, Mitterrand lost the 1974 election against Giscard by probably the closest margin in French history. The Ligue had to come to grips with the new Socialist Party, revamped at the Epinay Congress in 1971. They did not have a clear characterisation of it, and 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 Trotskyist left saw the party as a place to carry out a policy of entrism. It would take time for the lcr to concretely come to grips with the new Socialist Party. Disagreements aside, the fact was that the Common Programme forced the Ligue to realise the limitations of its early voluntaristic orientation. This fact would intersect with the fallout of the attack on New Order’s meeting on 21 June 1973, for the defence campaign of the Ligue brought them into closer contact with socialists and communists. The defence campaign raised questions of unity and joint work as the pcf denounced the ban on the Ligue, a shift away from their sectarian line when the Maoist Pierre Overney was murdered at Renault-Billancourt by a security guard. Then, the pcf refused to send its members to Overney’s funeral. The combination of reorientation from above by the party of the Liberation and the newly refurbished Socialist Party, as well as the dynamic defence campaign on the ground after the trauma of dissolution, pushed along the shift taking place within Bensaïd’s political perspectives. It is important to underline what failed to ‘take’ in the French context, namely the slide into militarism akin to Italy and West Germany. This was no foregone conclusion, at least in Bensaïd’s politics, for he had developed a certain logic prior to the New Order attack. As he reported in Rouge of the third congress (1972) of the Ligue, at which the group followed the ert’s execution of the fiat director general Oberdan Sallustro step-by-step, the first congress of the Ligue adhered to the fi to mark a halt in the post-May demobilisation, the second showed the responsibilities of the group, and the third congress posed the problem of power, which required an answer, and Bensaïd’s was effectively the reintroduction of minority violence into the class struggle. I mentioned in the previous chapter, but further detail here, that prior to the New Order attack, Bensaïd campaigned for a militarist-substitutionalist politics in the Ligue. Of course, the orientation should be situated against the violence of the French state. After having backed the Vichy regime, it mercilessly tried to suppress rebellion in Indochina and

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Algeria, and in the metropolis, riot police murdered striking workers. For most of the time between 1939 and 1962, France was at war. Nevertheless, as Barry Sheppard pointed out, in Bensaïd’s (co-written alongside others) infamous Is the Question of Power Raised? Let’s Raise it! – an internal bulletin destined for the Third Congress of the Ligue – the goal was ‘none other than to propose guerrilla warfare for France, along the lines of the erp in Argentina’, which included ‘“minority actions”, including in some cases “minority violence” that would draw in other groups to the left of the communist parties and social democrats, and which in turn would galvanize the working class into action’.1 In the infamous text, Bensaïd argued that: … the reintroduction of violence into the class struggle partly goes through focused initiatives and a bit of voluntarism from the vanguard. Thus, as we make systematic propaganda for self-defence as a form of organisation of the masses in struggle, we don’t hesitate to resort to violent initiatives when their relation to mass work can be clearly established … It is necessary to understand and systematise the dialectic of minority/mass violence. In particular, to make the bond between the initiatives taken against the yellow unions (cft), the antifascist activities (palais des Sports, etc.), and a more systematic renewal of antimilitarist activities … to say that we must conceive of all these activities … as a permanent and essential axis of our activity, must result in a series of organisational consequences.2 Bensaïd’s intervention was geared to ‘prepare the organisation for its future tasks’ that the revolution would put on the agenda. These were military tasks in particular. The ‘revolutionary organisation must be the political and military vanguard of the struggle without which propaganda of [workers’] self-defence

1 Sheppard 2014. 2 Bensaïd, Artous, Allies, and Creus 1972. In his memoirs Bensaïd wrote, ‘Under the stimulus of the impending death agony of Francoism, inspired by the winegrowers’ revolt and in solidarity with the distant Argentinian guerrilla, Paul Allies, Antoine Artous, Armand Creus and myself published a contribution to the preparatory debates of the third congress of the Ligue in spring 1972, under the title: “Is the question of power raised? Let’s raise it!” This aroused the indignation of some and the enthusiasm of others. The “bi-30” (internal bulletin no. 30) became a kind of manifesto of ultra-leftism in our ranks. Whatever its failings in political sense, it made up in terms of formal logic. In 1969, the 9th World Congress had adopted an orientation of armed struggle for Latin America. In Chile under the Popular Unity government, threats of coup d’état were direct. In Spain, Francoism was still hanging on. Italy was in permanent effervescence, from “creeping Mays” to “hot autumns” ’. Bensaïd 2013, pp. 107–8.

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and militias remain hollow’. Opposing this argument, Gerard Filoche’s tendency argued that this was a militarist course that would lead the organisation to forgetting the central role of the working class. Bensaïd’s and Filoche’s respective views, one from Toulouse and the other from Rouen, were polar opposites in the Ligue. Instead of this militarist course, Filoche proposed to focus on the workplaces and the universities. For another minority tendency, the leaders of the Ligue only cared about a fraction of the working class: the self-labelled vanguard, while ‘neglecting it in its majority, that is still heavily influenced by the traditional parties – the ps and pc. They reproached the majority with refusing to apply the strategy of the workers’ united front’.3 Pierre Rousset and Janette Habel, from the majority current, had also criticised the infamous text as ultraleft, but played a more balancing role between the two poles of the Ligue, led by Filoche and Bensaïd. After the lc was legally dissolved by the state in 1973 and the lcr was formed, Bensaïd was one of the theoreticians of the new political line that the Ligue 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”’.4 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. 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, very present in Bensaïd’s writings on the Comintern during the mid-1970s, as he unearthed the debates from the first four congresses of the Comintern and revisited the German and Spanish Revolutions for these corrections. The recovered Ligue’s aim was to win hegemony within the large workers’ vanguard. Their priority was winning young and radicalised workers. As the Ligue’s manifesto stated, it ‘is only in winning to our organisation and its periphery these young cadres, in forming authentic mass leaders from these young radicalised workers that we can durably implant our hegemony in the large

3 Salles 2005, pp. 234–5. 4 Roso and Mascaro Querido 2015.

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workers’ vanguard as a whole’.5 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, the Ligue’s fundamental preoccupation was the development of an implantation in the workplaces with the goal, in what they took to be a phase of revolutionary preparation, of getting into the debate inside the workers’ movement on a certain number of key elements of the transition programme (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 – which were then isolated, but which could be generalised during a revolutionary crisis.6 The project of Rouge going daily was a step towards relating to this small layer in the working class, as was the Ligue’s 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, as Bensaïd recounted, ‘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.7 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 Ligue placed their bets on the rapid development of a similar revolutionary process in the Spanish State faced with the twilight of Francoism. The Fourth International proclaimed that a European revolution was imminent. Since the break with the pcf, the Ligue – in its various forms – had grown from strength to strength. It grew solidly until 1977 reaching a membership of about 3,600.8 With the 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.9 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 Ligue had in the 1970s now appear wild, but at the time this was not so. Not since the 1920s had serious organisations independent of the Stalin-

5 6 7 8 9

lcr 1975. lcr 1975. Salles 2005, p. 154. Bensaïd’s lectures to the Amsterdam cadre school 1983/84. See Salles 2005. The figure is based on Filoche’s estimate. Johsua 2015, p. 44.

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ists 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. Eventually the partybuilding hypothesis 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.10 The perspective for this party-building project, too, of winning hegemony among the large workers’ vanguard, had its own flaws. 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’. These militants had broken with bureaucratic practice and were able to take independent initiative. This was a ‘practical rupture’ with the hegemony of the Stalinist and Social Democratic parties. Nevertheless, a Marxist revolutionary core did not lead these militants, but this was a necessity. Therefore, the Ligue 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, the Ligue argued that ‘[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’.11 In these objective conditions, the Ligue set out its programme 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 could not 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 a political idealism that fetish-

10 11

Post 2013, p. 187. lcr 1975, p. 36.

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ised programmatic demands.12 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 is not just about correct ideas. Based on the confrontation of class forces, it is first and foremost about the materialities of struggle. Only through struggle can the masses of workers change their ideas. Through this struggle a united front tactic can emerge, being a tactic and not a principle. For the lcr, which was very 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 ineffective injunction from the sidelines demanding that the reformist forces act, unite and challenge capitalism. One can draw a political lesson here. 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’.13 Behind the united front and transitional programme, 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’.14 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’.15 With the signing of the common programme, ‘[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 his later years, Alain Krivine pointed to the isolation and weakness of the lcr:

12

13 14 15

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. Kuhn 2011. Bensaïd 2010a, p. 85. Post 2013, p. 187.

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As the Union of the Left grew in strength from 1972 to 1977, the farleft in general, and the Ligue 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.16 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 already a certainty, ‘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.17 But the left lost the elections. 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 government was seen as a positive development.18 Bensaïd thought these slogans were correct but did not express whether the organisation was able to play a decisive role or to pull it off concretely. This added to the militants’ frustration.

16 17 18

Krivine 2006, pp. 186–7. Bensaïd lectures to Amsterdam cadre school 1983/84. Bensaïd lectures to Amsterdam cadre school 1983/84.

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Perspectives and Dynamics

The Portuguese Revolution and the Pinochet coup in Chile, and expectations for the Spanish and Italian Communist parties and the Union of the Left in France, overdetermined debates over strategy. Bensaïd had expected a synchronised revolutionary crisis in Spain and Portugal. Within the framework of this perspective, Bensaïd wrote Portugal: La Revolution en marche alongside Charles-André Udry and Michael Löwy – alias Carlos Rossi. Not a history of the revolution, the book was instead an initial balance sheet of the first 16 months of the process, put into comparison with other revolutionary experiences from Chile and Spain, the goal of which was to open a debate on the European Left about how socialism could be won in Portugal. This book left its traces: in Nicos Poulantzas’s interview with Henri Weber in Critique Communiste, he aimed his fire at exactly this book, and some years later Gerard Filoche would go on to write his own tome on the revolution, which should be read as an attempt to settle accounts with Bensaïd’s book. In Bensaïd’s own intellectual-political itinerary, Portugual: La Revolution en marche, written by mid-1975, preceded and shaped concerns in La révolution et le pouvoir, because he was able to draw lessons from the detailed study. On the ground in Portugal itself, Bensaïd’s book aligned with the Internationalist Ligue communiste that had a presence in Lisbon and Porto. Portugal in revolution raised questions about the role of nato’s imperialist alliance, the liberation struggles throughout the former Portuguese colonies from Africa to Asia, and how ‘through the experience of the Portuguese working class … [the revolution] modifies the relations of force between classes in Europe and may converge in an explosive way with the rise of the Spanish revolution’.19 The democracy of workers’ councils remained the crux of the book. Because the book was written in very close proximity to Bensaïd’s review of Poulantzas’s Crisis of the Dictatorships, it is demonstrative of a fundamental strategic divergence between the two (which I will come to below). The Portuguese Revolution remained perhaps the most significant reference point in their respective divergences, to which Bensaïd did return when responding to Poulantzas’s arguments against the Ligue’s orientation to workers’ power. The exposure of the political divergences between the various currents of Social Democratic, Stalinist, Maoist and others of the workers’ movement was reason for writing the book, and the Portuguese Revolution directly posed the question of power. As the authors wrote, ‘the Portuguese experience acts as a powerful

19

Bensaïd, Rossi, and Udry 1975, p. 7.

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confession of every political current and force in Europe and across the world’, more so than May ’68 and the Italian Hot Autumn.20 ‘In sixteen months’, the collective authors wrote, ‘the evolution of the situation in Portugal has constituted a powerful piece of clarification and political education for the whole of the European vanguard. But lacking a clear and revolutionary leadership recognised in Portugal itself, this clarification and this education risks being carried out at the expense of the Portuguese masses themselves’.21 Throughout the revolution two difficulties faced revolutionaries: they could make unjustifiable concessions to the military or surrender to Social Democracy. Here was the book’s strength: it unashamedly defended workers’ democracy. Though the struggle was open and its outcome unclear, Bensaïd’s orientation insisted that throughout the revolution, organs of workers’ councils remained the political line of division demarcating a genuine commitment to socialism from below as opposed to Social Democracy and Stalinism. This put a primacy on working-class struggle. Though Bensaïd drew out the concrete experiences of the revolutionary process, the goal was to shape the strategic debate in France if also in Portugal, and his political logic ran as follows: there were two tendencies in the Portuguese situation, one that aimed at restoring bourgeois parliamentary democracy and another that moved in the direction of workers’ democracy. These were incompatible, and for ‘the first time since May 1968, the central themes in relation to bourgeois democracy and workers’ democracy have been debated publicly in large sections of the working class’.22 Bensaïd was writing before the revolution wilted, before the possibilities for socialism opened by the revolution ended in a paltry Social Democratic election, therefore he was confined to outlining a political task irreducible to a fatalistic unfolding of history. Importantly, the authors carried their argument for dual power against the Socialist Party and the Portuguese Communist Party, but their stress on the superior democratic content of workers’ democracy and workers’ councils was specifically meant to ‘open an alternative to the social democratic offensive’.23 To grasp this political and historical problem at its foundation is essential.

20 21 22 23

Bensaïd, Rossi, and Udry 1975, p. 273. Bensaïd, Rossi, and Udry 1975, p. 278. Bensaïd, Rossi, and Udry 1975, p. 271. Bensaïd, Rossi, and Udry 1975, p. 272.

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La révolution et le pouvoir

The Ligue took the distinction between revolutionary and academic Marxism seriously without impoverishing its thought or practice. Michel Lequenne had captured the distinction and fought for it in what remains (aside from Wolfgang Fritz Haug’s) one of the most incisive responses to Perry Anderson’s Considerations on Western Marxism. Revolutionary Marxism is far from academic Marxism in its methods and its preoccupations, precisely because it is accountable to the dual exigency of theoretical coherence and political practice. What theory writes must be true while its practice must accord with the material truths of class struggle. Bensaïd’s La révolution et le pouvoir wilfully assumed the distinction as well as the dual exigency of theory and practice, which gave it a style and tone unlike traditional philosophical discourses or academic treatises. Despite any limitations, it merits slow attention for what it discloses about the specific relation of Marxism and philosophy upheld by the inheritors of the Left Opposition. Bensaïd’s revolutionary Marxism was designed to take a step forward in relation to the historic obstacles French Stalinism placed in the way of revolutionary theory, and on the role of intellectuals. Before ’68, Marxist intellectuals played a particular role in France. The stranglehold of the pcf over the workers’ movement meant it claimed for itself the monopoly on ideological contestation. Only well-known intellectuals could escape from the orthodoxy, oscillating between courageous insubordination (‘Manifesto of the 121’) and sermons of allegiance – under the pretext that the pcf was synonymous with the working class. Of this predicament, Bensaïd wrote in ‘France at the end of the 1920s, the Bolshevisation of the Communist Party had coincided with its Stalinisation. The result of this … [was that the intellectuals were] imprisoned in their unhappy conscience, kept at the edges of the proletariat and haunted by their fate as potential traitors’.24 There was a twofold durable consequence: On the one hand, hardly any authentic militant communist intellectuals exist in France: the party has had its decorative personalities, its servile minds (from Aragon to Althusser), it has never had its Lenin, its Trotsky, its Rosa or its Gramsci. On the other hand, the intellectuals have remained compagnons de route … otherwise said, they have hardly been torn from their university and academic functions.25

24 25

Bensaïd 1976, p. 15. Bensaïd 1976, p. 16.

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The pcf held the intellectuals at a distance from politics. Althusser could develop his masked theoretical practice while the Stalinoid pcf bureaucrats dominated politics (I will return to this theme in the chapters on Marx and on Althusser). This specifically Stalinist divorce between theory and practice remained foreign to the revolutionary Marxism of Bensaïd. Much of his life’s work attempted to overcome this divorce between theory and politics. At the time of writing La révolution et le pouvoir, Bensaïd essentially thought that overcoming the divorce between theory and practice could not be achieved by the master thinkers of the academic left who themselves were divided ‘into an Althusserian current, explicitly in the service of the pcf, and the desiring drifters’.26 La révolution et le pouvoir was Bensaïd’s first full-length contribution to revolutionary thought relating the question of Marxism and philosophy to the strategic question. The book should be read at three uneven levels: first, what it reveals about Bensaïd’s strategic framework at the time; second, the role of a materialist critique where (anti-Stalinist) politics and history take precedence over philosophy; third, the continuity that exists between La révolution et le pouvoir and later works like Éloge, specifically about Bensaïd’s perspective of ‘socialism from below’. At the first level of Bensaïd’s strategic framework, La révolution et le pouvoir coincided with the lcr’s highpoint as an organisation and Bensaïd’s previous settling of accounts with gauchisme. At the second level of reading La révolution et le pouvoir was a synthesis of the strategic debates that took place on the far left during the 1970s and a defence of an open, politically engaged Marxism. A section of intellectuals began moving rapidly to the Right, in open opposition to Marx and revolutionary politics, and Bensaïd reclaimed Marx’s heritage against this. Bensaïd waged a polemic against André Glucksmann’s valorisation of the pleb, the ‘scientism’ of Althusser and the new philosophies of desire, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Francois Fourquet, Pierre Clastres and, to a lesser extent, Felix Guattari. The latter were called ‘ultra-left intransigents’ constituting (to Bensaïd’s mind) a conservative pole in gestation within the universities. Glucksmann was the central figure of attack because his ‘profession of anti-power faith’ was seen as a rightward retreat from the terrain of politics onto philosophy. But, according to Bensaïd, ‘to abandon the terrain of the struggle for power is to desert politics. Glucksmann wants to abandon politics, but politics won’t leave him as easily’.27 Bensaïd challenged political strategies in which ‘power isn’t to be won

26 27

Bensaïd 1976, pp. 19–21. Bensaïd 1976, p. 18.

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… [but] only be dissolved’.28 The intervention, therefore, was opposed to the bourgeois institutionalisation of May ’68 and the theoretical justifications for it. This posed questions for Bensaïd: Was May ’68 a festival or was it combat? Under the cobblestones does one find the beach or the general strike? The festival had two sides for Bensaïd. On the one hand revolutions are festivals of the oppressed (without the festival, was Mayakovsky possible?) yet on the other hand: [T]he festival opens alternatively myth, ritual and spectacle. The grand unified festival of May is therefore loaded with two socially distinct processes, antagonistic to the end. Initially, this division existed within a limited layer of the May activists, opposing the revolution to revolt, organisation to improvisation, and strategy to the immediate moment. Today, spontaneism only secretes its theoretical substratum. It’s not surprising that spontaneism sets up a system of the libido, desire, drives … [as] founders of values.29 Bensaïd followed a series of strategies that were integral to his intellectualpolitical itinerary: he criticised the Maoist-inspired anti-power discourse and provided a coherent solution to them, deconstructed the ‘terror of the Concept’ that blamed Marx’s theory for the historical development of totalitarianism, defended the open and joyful character of Trotskyism as an alternative to the Stalinist deformations that took root from the mid-1920s onwards, insisted on the primacy of politics and history as opposed to the master thinkers’ (Althusserians and desiring drifters) primacy of philosophy to the detriment of politics. Bensaïd’s critique of the ‘desiring drifters’ and the Althusserian currents did not break new ground for the Ligue. It solidified a developing position against these respective currents of thought. In relation to the ‘desiring drifters’, AntiOedipus was an intellectual event, with far reaching consequences. The Ligue’s theorists saw it as a new form of irrationalism; Brossat and Péju wrote in their article Un apolitisme nommé Désir that it was ‘a huge war machine against the “ideal militant” of revolutionary politics, Marxism, Leninism’.30 Deleuze and Guattari’s book represented a break between a part of the radicalised intelligentsia educated by ’68 and the struggle for socialism; between this intelligentsia and the workers movement. According to Bensaïd’s reading, the beautiful 28 29 30

Bensaïd 1976, p. 43. Bensaïd 1976, p. 14. Brossat and Péju 1975, p. 75.

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souls of this intelligentsia wanted immediate, personal liberation from the May events, but had grown tired of the existing organisations to satisfy their own desires. The explosion of the Maoist Proletarian Left had a great impact. The ‘desiring drifters’ adopted an ultra-left discourse that spoke of the growing institutionalisation of the working class, eschewing history and politics. By putting the theory of power front and centre alongside the analysis of Stalinism, the dominant institutions of capitalist society in the relation to the state apparatuses, Bensaïd developed a case for revolutionary socialism. La révolution et le pouvoir’s aggressive polemical style grates the habitual sensibilities of a polite exchange of ideas, yet it was held together coherently by Bensaïd’s project of laying the groundwork of a revolutionary orientation. Aside from the problem of power, Bensaïd put a primacy on the lessons of the most recent experience of class struggle (Portugal and Chile) but also carried out a materialist critique of words, a necessity that flowed from his argument for a socialism based on workers’ councils and dual power as opposed to Social Democracy and Stalinism. For Bensaïd, the Russian Revolution produced a new form of power able to break with the mystifications of bourgeois democracy. Throughout the whole book, Bensaïd cleared away the confusion of words, their abuse even, to reach the centrality of class struggle and historical development. This was a necessity for Bensaïd’s revolutionary orientation: a project for the overthrow of capitalism, based on the conscious and collective democratic control over social life needs to destroy the abstract and ideological sloganeering of the Stalinists and Social-Democratic reformists. Instead of talking about a socialist project that confronts capitalist anarchy, the Stalinists and Social-Democratic reformists made the confrontation between two abstractions: democracy and dictatorship. These ideological discourses were caught between the rule of two abstractions, and they were profoundly hypocritical. Social Democratic reformism had its share of totalitarian measures, while the Stalinists could be sycophants of bourgeois parliamentarism. Faced with these ideological discourses, Bensaïd clarified the kind of socialism worth fighting for. To this end he merged a class struggle materialism to the legacy of the Left Opposition. In effect, the wager of the work was that there could be no socialism without workers’ revolution involving dual power and workers’ councils; from this wager followed critiques of other ‘socialisms from above’. Bensaïd wrote, ‘We must clear the fog of words and get to the bottom of things: to the root of class antagonism and follow the historical development of it. This is necessary and this is urgent’.31 On the one hand, the Communist

31

Bensaïd 1976, p. 14.

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Parties hoped to increase their presence in the electoral life of the countries they were operating in. This inclined them to a further entrenched reformism, but ‘this did not rule out tactical turns to adapt to the concrete conditions of class struggle and competition with other organisations of the workers movement’.32 On the other hand, within the Socialist Party itself, the Left current (c.e.r.e.s) within the party had increased in strength, at the ’74 Congress it had won about a quarter of the vote and had a majority in 13 federations. Weber suggested that for the ps, in its effort to overtake the pc as the first party of France, there was no verbal radicalism the party would disown.33 The Left within the ps around Chevenement had a mix of autogestionnaire ideology, it borrowed from the tradition of the Italian left of the 1960s and Gramsci, pursued a strategy of ‘anti-capitalist structural reforms’, but it remained electoralist, avoiding the problem of dual power and revolutionary crisis.34 In France, the pcf and the ps were symmetrical – during the Union of the Left period: the pcf gave the ps working-class credentials, while the ps gave the pcf democratic ones. On a strategic plane, the book challenged the reformist’s respect for bourgeois state power as a neutral instrument (with the Chilean tragedy in the background); it challenged the figures who saw power in terms of the libido and desire, without concretely historicising power as tied to the division of labour, capitalist relations of production and the integral state. Bensaïd used Gramsci to integrate the plurality of power relations into his argument about the modern bourgeois state. Against a vulgar conception of the modern bourgeois state as a simple epiphenomenon, he saw the state as dialectically tied to the general development of social relationships, with power playing a productive role: ‘We note that power isn’t a result, an outcome, but an active element’.35 ‘Power is not only the technical and repressive extension of society, it structures and organises it through a network of complex institutions’.36 An apparatus of hegemony, the state combined coercion and consent. Gramsci saw the state as ‘a strategic construction, ramified, full of traps and snares’.37 These strategic constructions linked the state to institutions involved as they are in strategies of domination. Bensaïd’s book opens with what was to become quite a controversial statement on the nature of modern bourgeois state power:

32 33 34 35 36 37

Vincent 1975, p. 19. Weber 1975, p. 24. Ibid. Bensaïd 1976, p. 42. Bensaïd 1976, pp. 26–7. Bensaïd 1976, p. 93.

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The first proletarian revolution gave its response to the problem of the state. Its degeneration has left us with the problem of power. The state must be destroyed and its machinery broken. Power must be pulled apart in its institutions and its underground anchorages. How can the struggle through which the proletariat constitutes itself as a ruling class contribute to this process, despite the apparent contradiction? We must once more take up the analysis of the crystallisations of power within capitalist society, trace their resurgence within the bureaucratic counter-revolution, and look in the struggle of the exploited classes for the tendencies that can enable the socialisation and withering away of power to win out over the statification of society.38 Bensaïd’s chapter ‘history placed into quarantine’ confronted the antinomy of neo-positivist, rationalist-reformist forms of Marxism and the irrational, desiring drifters who wanted to dissolve power and the state. The former discourse justified the pcf’s practice while the latter was ‘deliberately a-political’, and underpinned ‘a social practice in gestation’.39 The first means of putting history into quarantine involved suppressing class consciousness in the name of scientific reason, the political goal of which was to occupy the bourgeois state apparatus. Bensaïd’s discussion is significant if one wants to understand his critique of ‘scientism’, which essentially had two parts to its polemic: a political critique of pcf reformism that sought to democratise the bourgeois state apparatus (Pierre Juquin was in Bensaïd’s line of sight) and a theoretical critique of Althusser. Bensaïd basically claimed that reformist politics produces nothing new, it has no coherent theoretical framework (it is made up of a set of tactical manoeuvres) and lacks historical memory. The reformism of the pcf only reproduced the old Social Democratic line of Vandervelde that Lenin had already criticised. To occupy the bourgeois state apparatus from within or smash it? That was the problem. Neo-positivist, scientific rationality had a specific place within this reformist approach: it pursued the transformation of the state from within, and without a perspective for the withering away of the state, it hoped to replace the government of the people through the administration of things. The Stalinist authors of the Traite d’economie marxiste thought it was possible ‘to occupy the state apparatus as it is, seize the economic means of production and neutralise its repressive functions’.40 Furthermore, as Bensaïd wrote, ‘the

38 39 40

Bensaïd 1976, p. 7. Bensaïd 1976, p. 22. Bensaïd 1976, p. 25.

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key word is the democratisation of the state apparatus and its diverse attributes: one must democratise the police, democratise the army, democratise the school, the family’.41 For the most part, these pcf authors were concerned with pacific and parliamentary roads to power transforming rather than smashing the state. Though reformism’s vocabulary can modernise itself, it has no fear of repetition. It is the ultimate art of regurgitation, of harking back. Bensaïd wrote that, having ‘no need of memory, it does not hesitate to pass many times over its own footsteps’.42 Bensaïd drew on Lenin and Gramsci to clarify a revolutionary attitude towards the state: ‘all previous revolutions perfected the state machine, whereas it must be broken, smashed’, the state machine is a special power of repression and this can only take place through a ‘violent revolution’. As for Gramsci, he ‘spoke more precisely about the state as a hegemonic apparatus armed with coercion; he defined its equation: State = coercion + consent’.43 The integral state combining coercion and consent remained to be smashed. Survival, not literalist fidelity to the texts of classical Marxism, was at stake in La révolution et le pouvoir. Only three years before, Pinochet’s coup in Chile had destroyed the workers’ movement and the left, gutting lives. The revolution was half made. The pacifist road to socialism defended by the Communist Party and Allende dug the revolution’s own grave. Bensaïd’s clarity rests, not only with hindsight, but in his distinction between smashing the bourgeois state apparatus as opposed to the active adhesion to and co-operation with its mechanical machinations. Bensaïd wrote, ‘this “concern for the state”, antithetical to revolutionary theory, does not make for the simple renunciation of destroying it; it comes with a reversal: the adhesion (or acquiescence) to the ruling society and its hierarchical order’.44 The democratisation of the bourgeois state apparatus becomes mere tinkering with the hardcore of the existing social relations and their structures; it reinforces their machinery. To the question as to why workers accept reformist ideas, Bensaïd ruled out the notion that they were simply duped or manipulated by the ruling class. Instead, reformist consciousness is rooted in the proletariat’s conditions of existence based on the alienation of labour and commodity fetishism as well as the contradictory ways in which it is organised to defend its own interests under capitalism. At this point, it becomes easier to discern Bensaïd’s critique of scientism at the theoretical level. As was said above, no reformist theory as such exists. Yet a systematisation into a worldview emanating from its empiricist-pragmatism 41 42 43 44

Ibid. Bensaïd 1976, p. 26. Bensaïd 1976, p. 27. Bensaïd 1976, p. 28.

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does exist, and in the context of the time, Bensaïd called this scientism. Pragmatic reformism is scientistic, on Bensaïd’s reading, and is distinct from revolutionary strategy. The latter is a theory that becomes practical in constant dialogue with the revolutionary organisation of the class, therefore class consciousness is integral to it; the former bourgeoisified practice is scientistic, thus suppressing the pivotal role of class consciousness, as Bensaïd wrote: Contemporary reformism is steeped in scientism. It is a matter of rolling out the picnic blanket for the bourgeoisie, on its own terrain. It is no longer the proletariat that indicts capitalist oppression and exploitation. It is Science that judges and condemns. Under its impartial eye, the protagonists are equal … This sovereign Science is doubly useful. On the one hand, it accuses the bourgeoisie for the eyes of its own intelligentsia. On the other, it fabricates excuses for all the reformist abdications and betrayals … Therefore, the revolution is inescapable and it is Science that announces it; Lenin was only a spokesman … The scientific inescapability is quite reassuring … Acting scientifically, the reformists are at peace with their conscience.45 In the charged polemic of La révolution et le pouvoir, aside from Pierre Juquin’s now largely forgotten Le sens du reel, Althusser was characterised as the leading spokesperson of this ‘Stalinian neo-positivism’.46 Heated polemic against Althusser featured in the compilation of essays Contre Althusser, which Bensaïd contributed to, in 1974 appearing in the Rouge Collection. Jean-Marie Vincent, Alain Brossat and Ernest Mandel featured in it too. On the whole, the Trotskyists of the lcr aimed their fire at Althusser.47 For Bensaïd, Althusser effectively justified the split between mental and manual labour in the 1960s while posing as an innovator of Marxism – scientifically speaking. Althusser’s intervention in 1964, titled ‘Student Problems’, written, Bensaïd claimed, ‘in the Party’s service (always)’, was representative of the merger between scientism and the 45 46 47

Ibid. Bensaïd 1976, p. 33. Callinicos 1976, pp. 124–5. Across the channel, Callinicos wrote of the collection: ‘Vincent’s collection of essays by members of the Revolutionary Communist League, a French Trotskyist group, is very disappointing. Beyond quite an effective analysis of Althusser’s relation to Stalinism, the collection reveals very little of theoretical value and is a mixture of flaccid polemic, sloppy argumentation and dogmatic reassertion of the greyest of Trotskyist orthodoxies (“the Fourth International had theoretically posed and resolved the majority of questions raised allusively by Althusser in the theoretical and political domain”). With enemies like that Althusser has little need of friends’.

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pcf’s line.48 Bensaïd’s criticism came from the debates in the Union of Communist Students, and was highly politicised. Bensaïd drew the link between the pcf’s effective defence of the institutions of bourgeois society, like the university, and Althusser’s hierarchical sense of Marxism. As Warren Montag has written, Bensaïd’s treatment of ‘Student Problems’ (as well as Rancière’s) ‘helped identify a more important reason for the silence that surrounds the essay in so much work on Althusser’.49 Althusser’s ‘Student Problems’, so Bensaïd wrote, was about settling accounts with the ‘theoretical deviations’ of the living student movement.50 Bensaïd outlined how Althusser mobilised a discourse centred around the necessity for the technical division of labour in modern society (of which capitalist society was only one mode), and the necessity of the university hierarchy of knowledge within the technical division. Those with scientific knowledge are to ‘defend the temple of science against all profanation’ (like student revolts) and all this was written just four years prior to May ’68.51 Because of this, for Bensaïd, and this was a position he never shifted on, Marxism had to have been mutilated by decades of Stalinism in France for Althusser to appear as an innovator who split ‘“true science” from “pure ideology”, in full light, without shadows or ambiguities, a clean incision under the theoretical scalpel of the master’.52 Bensaïd asked: who was the judge of this break? For Althusser, the validity of the cause of communism was founded on science, in the belief in the scientific apprehension of social formations flowing from historical materialism and philosophy coming from dialectical materialism. Such a move gave intellectuals their intellectual revenge by way of the ‘right to say the last word on the struggle of classes in light of the Concept’.53 Bensaïd dissented against two principle Althusserian lines of argument: the character of the attack on humanism (as it appeared in Althusser’s Response to John Lewis) and the division of Marxism into science and philosophy. One must pay attention to the way Bensaïd understood Althusser’s division of the latter terms. With Althusser’s distinction between historical and dialectical materialism, Bensaïd claimed that Althusser ‘remained more faithful than at first sight to his writings of 1964 and in particular to Stalin’s brochure Dialectical and His-

48 49 50 51 52 53

Bensaïd 1976, p. 33. Montag 2011, p. 8. Bensaïd 1976, p. 33. Bensaïd 1976, p. 34. Ibid. Bensaïd 1976, p. 35.

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torical Materialism that inspired them’.54 Bensaïd recognised that Gramsci had already criticised forms of these partitions in his Prison Notebooks on Bukharin. Consequently, such ‘a displacement of Marxism opens the road to a fetishisation of science, that is to say a pure reason that, in the context of Stalinist reaction, transforms itself rapidly into state reason, opposed to class consciousness’.55 This intersects with Bensaïd’s comments regarding Althusser’s phrase that history is a process without subject or end. History has a motor, the class struggle, but no subject. For Bensaïd, the proposition was ‘certainly fundamental but incomplete’.56 To leave the statement incomplete meant that it did not take into account the problem of class consciousness, of its constitution, of its differentiations, of its expressions, leaving no space for concrete politics. Bensaïd operated with a different problematic, writing: Yet revolutionary Marxism is not cut into science and philosophy. It is theory, that is to say, a guide for action, that constantly verifies itself according to the practice (politics!) that grounds it. The whole of this theory and of this practice sets out a strategy that aims toward the goal of the conquest of power and of socialist construction; and as this theory is not a geometric figure in the realm of pure ideas, it is the product of the collective activity of a conscious vanguard, group, organisation or party and there is little importance whether one does or doesn’t give to it the name ‘subject’ of history. The important point is that the ‘motor’ of history which Althusser speaks does not suffice to take into account the subjective role of the vanguard and of its responsibilities.57 Althusser’s interpretation of Marxism was a neo-positivist and scientistic one, according to La révolution et le pouvoir. For Bensaïd, Althusser’s theoretical straitjacket did not permit him to carry out a historical balance sheet of Stalinism; history did not matter much for Marxist theory because, according to the Althusser of For Marx, to understand history was not historical, no more ‘than the knowledge of sugar is sweet’. Yet for Bensaïd, who always underlined the irreducible specificity of a workers’ revolution, the necessity of collective and democratic class consciousness was to be understood politically and historically, not simply philosophically. One glimpses, in the pages of La révolution et le pouvoir, an argument Bensaïd later developed against Althusser, namely 54 55 56 57

Ibid. Bensaïd 1976, pp. 35–6. Bensaïd 1976, p. 35. Bensaïd 1976, p. 36.

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that the latter remained on the terrain of philosophical primacy, not the political or the historical. Althusser more or less ascribed the role of the Marxist in philosophy as the vanguard fighter for materialism against idealism, one who would occupy the most advanced posts within the enemy’s idealist philosophical framework to undercut it from within. Though critical of the traditional idealist philosopher, and on the lookout for a new practice of philosophy, it reduced itself to a perpetual fight between idealism and materialism, without an articulation to strategic thought. Aside from the primacy of politics, two fundamental divides separated Bensaïd and Althusser: firstly, as mentioned above, the former never accepted a sharp distinction between science and philosophy, while the latter developed it in works like How to Be a Marxist in Philosophy. Bensaïd’s refusal to apply a divide between science and philosophy to Marxism was pivotal to his conception of Althusser’s scientism as well as the rejection of the ‘epistemological break’. The only sense in which the class struggle of the proletariat is scientific (not in the positivist sense of the term), according to Bensaïd, is that it requires the full exposition of the social relations of society to approximate the most conscious collective action. Furthermore, Althusser and Bensaïd had incompatible conceptions of the role and function of the dictatorship of the proletariat in Marxism. Althusser expressed the intimate bond a Marxian practice of philosophy has to the dictatorship of the proletariat, though this remained at the conceptual, scientific, level. Throughout the subsequent debates over the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, according to Artous, ‘The Althusserians said that the concept of the dictatorship was a scientific concept … but Daniel argued that the concept is a strategic one’.58 Althusser’s perpetual fight was shackled by the bourgeoisified practice of the pcf and therefore was only able to put the strategic question (the dictatorship of the proletariat) forward on the scientific and conceptual plane, and this was often obfuscated. The debate over the abandonment of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ by the pcf in 1976 also clarified the meaning of certain strategic concepts in Bensaïd’s anti-determinist and interventionist politics. Stalinism had turned the dictatorship of the proletariat into a totalitarian term, draining it of emancipatory content, but beyond the words, a strategic problem remained. The theoretical controversy concerning the state was therefore a strategic debate about the content of a workers’ revolution and the practice of parties that represented the working class. Narrowly, the debate between Balibar and BuciGlucksmann was revealing in this respect. Bensaïd’s engagement with Balibar’s

58

Personal interview with Antoine Artous.

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intervention in the pages of L’Humanité and the debate between BuciGlucksmann and Balibar in Dialectiques was instructive because the latter went as far as one could go within the pcf in defending the notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat while the theory and practice of this concept were so evidently out of joint. Balibar wanted to sever the dialectical bond between the dictatorship of the proletariat and the practice of parties, which was another move of treating the concept in scientistic-theoreticist terms I wrote of above in relation to Althusser. In this sense, Buci-Glucksmann was right against Balibar, recognising that the dictatorship of the proletariat, as a theoretical concept, has strategic implications for daily political practice. By dropping the concept, the pcf simply re-established the logical coherence between its reformist means and ends. By contrast, Balibar ended up trying to cut the cord between theory and strategy. Was the dictatorship of the proletariat a scientific term or a strategic term? One returns to this question. For Balibar, it was a scientific term. For Bensaïd, it was a strategic term. To insist on the concept’s scientific rigour, rather than its strategic implications, was to give up the dialectical bond between the means and ends of a workers’ revolution: In short, if the dictatorship of the proletariat is the goal of the struggle for proletarian emancipation, the means are in relation to this goal; if it is the horizon for them, it orients the roads that lead to it. Balibar responds that such a necessary bond doesn’t exist. The concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat poses a question of principle, it is a conceptual retort to the bourgeois nature of every state; without for all that determining the course of revolutionary strategy: ‘I believe that Lenin’s positions on the dictatorship of the proletariat have never been fundamentally thought in terms of a particular revolutionary strategy …’. Balibar thus intends to cut the thread tying theory and strategy: must we see in this the theoreticist mark of the Althusserian school, or the more tactical concern of not consistently leading the debate over the abandonment of the concept and the polemic against its strategic implications in the cp?59 In Bensaïd’s theoretical-political nexus, class consciousness was key to strategy. This undercut the theoreticist and scientistic versions of Marxism criticised in earlier sections of the chapter, but also stands against the irrationalist forms of new libertarian politics. Unlike theoreticism, Marxism was a theory tied to

59

Bensaïd and Artous 1977, p. 70.

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practical verification, the totality of which aims for the conquest of power and socialist construction, thus forming the basis of strategy. Returning to Bensaïd’s polemic against Althusser, it needs to be said that Althusser was never a straightforward Stalinist in theory, was committed to the critique of orthodox materialism of the pcf and Stalinian Marxism, yet he never emancipated himself from Stalinism politically. Stalinism remained an obstacle to the further elaboration of Althusser’s Marxism. Althusser combined a scholastic fight for materialism (undoubtedly opening pathways in need of exploration) against idealism, but without articulating this to a strategic approach to politics emancipated from its Stalinist straitjacket. This was the crux of Bensaïd’s argument that Althusser was scientistic, though it must be said that La révolution et le pouvoir failed to drill very deep into Althusser’s philosophical material. Again, the reasons were political and Althusser himself masked his approach with traditional Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist language, making it much more difficult to untangle any genuine theoretical insight from its politically deformed presentation. Despite the shallow critique of Althusser in La révolution et le pouvoir, Bensaïd touched upon a real problem: whether it is enough to intervene into the philosophical conjuncture to win further credentials for materialism, and even defend the dictatorship of the proletariat at the scientific-conceptual level, or whether a step further needed to be taken by aligning materialism to strategic intervention beyond the traditional role of the philosopher and Stalinised-bourgeoisified practice in politics. I come to a more detailed discussion of Bensaïd’s relation to Althusser below, but it must now be acknowledged that over time Bensaïd came to appreciate the greater depth of Althusser’s theoretical project, without ever disavowing his critique of the Stalinist straitjacket and the ‘scientistic’ residues it left. Undoubtedly, La révolution et le pouvoir had insights into Althusser’s project, but it was limited at the theoretical level. Against the scientistic trends of Stalinian Marxism, Bensaïd drew out the other pole of contradiction that took the form of ‘pleasure [ jouissance] without the subject or end’ supposed to dissolve the state. According to Bensaïd, the new ideology of desire (as opposed to a dialectic of needs) was being born in the student-academic realm after May ’68 and it was the Other of Althusser’s scientism. As a point of fact, many of its representative authors came from the Trotskyist tradition, as Bensaïd wrote: Their biographies … have a common trajectory: Francois Lyotard, veteran of the group ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’, produced by the Trotskyist movement; Felix Guattari, militant in the 50s of the Fourth International … with Lucien Sebag; Francois Fourquet, old militant of the left opposition

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in the u.e.c. in the 60s, then, in a passing way, of the Jeunesse communiste Révolutionnaire; Guy Hocquenghem, militant of the Jeunesse communist Révolutionnaire from 1966 to 1968 … This isn’t a simple coincidence. All broke with the reformism of the pcf prior to 1968. All were anti-Althusserians at a time when Althusserianism was a university fashion. All experienced May ’68 as a rupture.60 Added to the list was Deleuze, impacted (better put: assailed) by the infiltration of the spirit of ’68 into the university and André Glucksmann. Deleuze and Guattari had published Anti-Oedipus in 1973 and A Thousand Plateaus in 1980. As Isabelle Garo wrote, in a certain spirit of La révolution et le pouvoir’s interrogation, Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘opposition to the capitalist order abandons the themes of ideology, alienation and class struggle for that of desire … it is a question of replacing an analysis in terms of determinate historical contradictions, that of Marx’s, with one in terms of parallel, generalised, and almost interchangeable lines of flight’.61 For Deleuze, the concept of ‘desire’ was a means to displace that of ‘need’ and this conceptual rearrangement was part of a broader current of ‘desiring drifters’, mentioned above. Bensaïd was sceptical about this new role of ‘desire’. He argued that it did away with the dialectic of needs as they formed part of the specific contradictions of capitalist class society, but also saw it as a drift towards a-politicism. This was a common position in the Ligue at the time, even if it was debated throughout the pages of Critique Communiste. It is important to pay attention to some of these criticisms, especially Jean Marie Vincent’s. He stressed the need to confront theorists like Deleuze as ‘partisans of a theory whose claims to validity can be interrogated’; he also stressed that Marxist theorists did not need to be trapped by the discourse of desire. One key claim Vincent made about Anti-Oedipus was that it could not grasp the specificity of the social relation of capital. This resulted in a reconstruction of history that is simultaneously historicist and arbitrary: ‘historicist because [their reconstruction] refers us to principles of explanation (and the organisation of empirical material) that are too simplistic, and arbitrary because it conceals the complex relation that forms between the … individual and society’, presented as abrupt oppositions.62 Vincent laid stress on the contradictions of social relations and essentially disagreed with the implications of Anti-Oedipus, writing: ‘everything happens as if the social rela-

60 61 62

Bensaïd 1976, p. 37. Garo 2009, pp. 610–11. Vincent 1975, p. 86.

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tion of production was not itself a determinant of desiring production’.63 This error led to a mystification whereby the specific ways in which the capitalist social relation dominates inter-subjectivity, manners of interaction and action remained opaque and impenetrable. This mystification risked doing away with social contradictions and class confrontations (it should be noted that Bensaïd never gave a settled theoretical account of his relation to Deleuze). A confrontation between Nietzsche and Marx stood in the background of Bensaïd’s critique of this so-called irrationalism. According to Bensaïd, the doctrines of these writers were not at all homogenous, but they shared a common problematic. They had given up on a historical explanation of events despite the presence of history in their philosophy. History’s intelligibility was put into quarantine in favour of a philosophy of desire and the libidinal. Philosophical concepts and abstractions supplanted concrete historical specificity, a retreat from history and politics into metaphysics. The dialectic of historical needs was replaced by desire. In terms of the antinomy Bensaïd reconstructed with Althusser as the other pole, the irrational urge of desire against power and the state replaced Science. Bensaïd summed the problematic, writing: At the beginning was power, authority and repression: such is the basic premise. History, taken too seriously is only ever the backdrop of an untiring coming and going, of flux and reflux. Across centuries and societies, it is always the same battle of which flows against that which stagnates and congeals, of difference and plurality against identity and normative unity. The mediaeval cities, capital, the state: many manifestations of the same libidinal flow that accumulates, congeals, before dissolving and draining anew. The bank, power, these are the detained and accumulated libidinal energies whose confiscation generates the scarcity and split in society.64 According to Bensaïd, this worldview was a mysticism that grounded itself on the aftermath of the failed hopes of May ’68. The days after a lost revolution are fertile for mystical escapes that leave the concrete terrain of human history. They junk the profane for myth. In the days after the failed 1905 revolution, a form of mysticism even took root in the Bolshevik party, as Bensaïd explained: ‘[H]istory, escaping from the rationality that was presupposed of it, is put into quarantine. And since humans are incapable of responding to its enigmas, it is necessary to consult other sphinxes’.65 The days after a failed upheaval are 63 64 65

Ibid. Bensaïd 1976, p. 38. Bensaïd 1976, p. 44.

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also fertile ground for populism, merging with the desertion of concrete history. After being deceived by the emancipatory capacities of the working class, the populist retreats into the people (abstraction of all abstractions) then the plebe. After having been so deceived, the populists developed rancour against the workers’ movement, whose traces could be found in Lyotard and Glucksmann. Going back to the people there is no longer a working class and a middle class but the oppressed in equality before the power that dominates them. History is no longer intelligible from this vantage point. If Althusser reassured his readers that there was no subject, the irrational suppressors of history responded that there were only impulses and instincts – desires to consume. These trends of thought were symmetrical, ‘For the reformists, it is all-powerful Science that dictates the truth against ideology. For the drifters, it is Desire that generates the Truth against morals’.66 Between the two there is no place for the autonomous action of the working class and class consciousness. The scientists wanted to administer the state and the desiring drifters wanted to dissolve its historical nature into the abstraction of power. For the latter category, ‘power isn’t to be won, as all the militant revolutionaries of the planet believe, it is only to be dissolved’.67 Neither pole could solve the question of La révolution et le pouvoir adequately. At stake throughout all of this presentation was the status of Marx’s materialist concept of history, and one vantage point from which it can be judged (albeit partially) was Bensaïd’s reading of Pierre Clastres’s pathbreaking Society Against the State, written in a spirit of genuine confrontation. Bensaïd’s interrogation of Clastres’s thesis, which posed the nature of political power in stateless societies, raised problems that remain for an archaeology of (state) power – conceptually James Scott’s Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States does not break new ground as compared to Clastres’s work. The issues raised for a materialist conception of history remain, too. No doubt empirical inquiry into pre-class and stateless societies has developed, but conceptualising the historical relation between the stateless and state-ified, political power and economics, class and power, obedience and authority, and history itself is open and Bensaïd raised some worthwhile points as he dealt with Clastres’s critique of mechanical Marxism. Mechanical Marxism often adopts a (capitalist-inspired) dualism between economics and politics that serves a reductionist reading of the base and superstructure metaphor, within which the state is a superstructural epiphenome-

66 67

Bensaïd 1976, p. 48. Bensaïd 1976, p. 43.

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non placed atop of an economic foundation. For Clastres, this was inadequate because ‘the political relation of power precedes and founds the economic relation of exploitation. Alienation is political before it is economic; power precedes labor; the economic derives from the political; the emergence of the State determines the advent of classes’.68 There was a ‘Political break [coupure]’ that Clastres took to be decisive, not the transformation of the economy.69 ‘The true revolution in man’s protohistory is not the Neolithic, since it may very well leave the previously existing social organisation intact; it is the political revolution, that mysterious emergence … of the thing we know by the name of the State’.70 There was no economic dynamic of accumulation that gave rise to the state, and Clastres often referred to the origin of the birth of political power and the state as mysterious. The origin of state power interests a materialist inquiry into history because, in the final instance, the disappearance and withering away of the state and classes is a future project, without anything mysterious about it. If the origin and end of the state were mysterious, if the past political break between stateless and state-ified society were a mystery, this may destabilise the strategic and political – the rational – nature of the disappearance, a position Bensaïd rejected. Bensaïd raised two points for Clastres, each of which presented a critique of technological determinism and mechanical (Stalinised) Marxism. Bensaïd first noted that even in Clastres’s presentation, there was an area ‘that seems to escape, at least in part, society’s control; the demographic domain … where there is a “machine” that operates according to its own mechanics, perhaps, which would place it beyond the social group’.71 Furthermore, Clastres says, ‘In fact, it is very probable that a basic condition for the existence of primitive societies is their relatively small demographic size’.72 The fact ran against the grain of Clastres’s entire thesis, and Bensaïd drew it into a Marxist problematic, since it could be said to be ‘a form of development of the productive forces’.73 Bensaïd’s logic runs as follows: the numerical growth of a human group makes possible and perhaps requires ‘a new social organisation (division) of labour and a new use of space, that is to say the natural resources that also enter into the composition of the productive forces. In other words, it is possible to account for the rupture in the harmony within primitive societies

68 69 70 71 72 73

Clastres 1989, p. 198. Clastres 1989, p. 202. Ibid. Clastres 1989, p. 212. Clastres 1989, p. 213. Bensaïd 1976, p. 41.

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in terms of the contradictory articulation of the productive forces and production relations without needing the intervention of the original authoritarian act of a sovereign libido’.74 Thus put, Bensaïd conceptually reduced the mysterious, irrational and idealist grade of trying to come to terms with the original emergence of political power and the state. Secondly, as I already mentioned above, Bensaïd argued that power is productive, meaning that Clastres’s thesis that political power shapes and accelerates class divisions and exploitation actually can be drawn upon in a materialist method because such a method is non-schematic and non-economistic. The state is not a simple reflection of social relations, but neither is it mysterious.

4

The Bourgeois State and Forms of Revolution

Bensaïd’s approach to the modern capitalist state and the bourgeois revolutions details the dual function of the capitalist state in its capacity to unify and divide, the historical rupture of this form of rule as against previous nonbourgeois forms, and the limits of bourgeois political thought. In terms of the bourgeois revolutions themselves, Bensaïd was most interested in the struggle from below and the constitution of the army and the nation. I will take each in their turn, but suffice it to say, all of these lines of interrogation were further elaborated – whether it be the writing on bourgeois revolution, the role of the nation-state and sovereignty, and bourgeois political thought – in his later writings. Above I showed how Bensaïd approached Clastres’s positing of the mysterious origins of the coercive political state; here, the object of study is the modern bourgeois state. Bensaïd incorporated three core elements into his approach to the bourgeois state as derived from Marx, Engels and Gramsci: from Marx’s On the Jewish Question, the profound social dislocation of modern bourgeois society with its attendant split between the public and private life; Engels’s Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State provided an approach to the ‘critique of the genesis and function of the modern bourgeois state’;75 and from Gramsci – as the discussion of the integral state demonstrates – the logic of the state’s coercion and consent. For Bensaïd, the bourgeois state politically assembles a capitalist class that is divided through internal competition. It unifies the capitalist class politically

74 75

Ibid. Bensaïd 1976, p. 61.

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against the exploited classes, is relatively autonomous from this or that section of capital, and such relative autonomy provides for its exceptional forms of rule in periods of social crisis. Through the institutions of the bourgeois state, it makes alliances with certain sections of the middle class and other layers of society. The bourgeois state has the function of dividing, atomising and isolating citizens. When Gramsci spoke of the bourgeois state being founded on coercion and consent, he evoked the logic whereby the individual free worker is torn from the old family ties or village, finds themselves faced with an autonomous state institution dominating them while resting on the authority of the abstract general will. As Bensaïd explained, the development of capitalism created further divisions because: The growth of capitalism dissolved the old bonds of the worker to the land, to clan and to tribe. Creating a labour market, where the workers come to sell their labour power ‘freely’, and a custodian State of ‘national sovereignty’, it introduced a profound and multiform dislocation of social relations. This is the great fissure and dismemberment of the social body: the division between private and public, sanctioned by law; the division between the producer and the consumer; between the workplace and the family; scholarly division between the youth and the ‘active’ life of adults; the division of the asylum between the normal and the pathological.76 Each individual under capitalist democracy is split between an abstract atom that can vote and a concrete living human being placed within class relations. Capitalism separates the state from civil society – a problem that classical bourgeois political theory tried to grapple with. It does not limit itself to separating the state and civil society; it compartmentalises the sphere of political power in order to hide its roots. Therein lies one of its principal innovations in relation to social formations that came before it, in which the authoritarian and hierarchical political functions of social relations were open and transparent. Bensaïd drew upon Marx’s very early critique of bourgeois politics from On the Jewish Question, for it was Marx who ‘had the extraordinary lucidity to grasp, from very early on’, the specificity of bourgeois political power as it involved the dualism between the political community where its members are considered abstractly, and civil society where labour takes place and its members are simple particulars. By drawing from Marx’s critique, Bensaïd passionately fought for a form of revolutionary politics able to change life, overcome this

76

Bensaïd 1976, pp. 57–8.

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bourgeois split between public and private life, and produce a historical reconciliation between the individual and society. Bensaïd’s discussion of the institutional mechanisms of the state was directed at those who believed it possible to vivre autrement et toute de suite. The discussion laid the groundwork for understanding how political struggle is at the centre of a concrete disappearance of the state and the overcoming of the most fundamental historical divisions it is founded on. To understand the genesis and function of the bourgeois state, Bensaïd referred to the analysis produced by Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, all the while acknowledging the newest discoveries in anthropological and ethnological research. These were, in a sense, besides Bensaïd’s point. Engels was able to, according to Bensaïd, ‘make a negative … sort of inventory of the state functions which would only assume a definite institutional form as the political power as a separate sphere would emerge’, therefore he uncovered a number of traits characteristic of the bourgeois state: not only the appearance of a force of specialised coercion, developing with the rise of class antagonism, but also a territorial demarcation of power heralding the nation and the consolidation of the domestic family.77 Bensaïd’s combination of the early Marx and Engels’s Origins provided his account with a true conception of the elements of the modern bourgeois state, the way it depoliticises social life and is a strategic construction of bourgeois power. Bensaïd drew from Engels ‘the whole of the process through which the silhouette of the modern state emerges’.78 Territorial demarcation and an alienated public force are two key components of this. Bensaïd’s presentation is functional for a revolutionary politics (which must in the final instance confront the repressive character of the state), but it lacked an articulation to the critique of political economy of Capital. Without the historically specific relation of the modern bourgeois state and Capital, Bensaïd risked putting forward a transhistorical and nationally restricted account of the bourgeois state. The combination of the young Marx’s critique of politics (when he did not have a scientific critique of political economy) and the mature Engels’s historical account of the state, without the mediation of Capital, was a gap in Bensaïd’s presentation. The state has a place within Capital that speaks to the specificity of the bourgeois state, like the section on the working-day or the process of primitive accumulation of capital. But more importantly, the lacking specificity in Bensaïd’s presentation is an obstacle, despite its merits, for three reasons:

77 78

Bensaïd 1976, p. 61. Bensaïd 1976, p. 62.

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first, it fails to bring a critique of politics into a coherent theoretical relation to Marx’s mature critique of political economy; second, its unit of analysis is the singular state, not the plurality of states within the reproduction of capitalist society as a whole; third, it does not adequately respect the primacy of a logical order of presentation over the historical genesis as it pertains to the logic of the bourgeois state immanent to the logic of modern bourgeois societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails. Bensaïd would, however, go on to develop along many of these lines in later years; in La révolution et le pouvoir itself, there was also an attention to the uneven and combined foundations of nation-states where Bensaïd relied on Ernest Mandel’s Marxist Economic Theory. The capitalist mode of production’s separation of the state and civil society poses ‘the question of representation and the delegation of power. It inaugurates the debate about democracy in terms that it is not able to resolve’.79 At this moment in La révolution et le pouvoir, Bensaïd put his finger on the insights and limits of the thinkers of the modern bourgeois state, focusing on Rousseau. Rousseau saw the insurmountable contradictions in his time for bourgeois democracy. Bensaïd wrote: [I]n an insightful way, Rousseau saw and denounced the dangers and mechanisms of the delegation of power; quite correctly he saw democracy hollow out of its content, becoming formal and abstract; he saw the forfeiture of popular sovereignty. Against this dispossession of power, he defended and demanded the principles of direct democracy (permanent control and possible revocability), as soviet democracy would put them into practice.80 The problems that Rousseau saw were inescapable for the growing capitalist class. They continued to haunt its political power. According to Bensaïd, Rousseau had the merit of embedding himself in the contradictions of the time, even if some years later the French Revolution will make this contradiction enter – still theoretical in Rousseau – into the order of conflict and social confrontation. To practically establish his direct democracy, Rousseau was obliged to turn to the past, in particular invoking Geneva as a model city; or yet turned to the

79 80

Bensaïd 1976, p. 63. Bensaïd 1976, pp. 63–4.

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experimental democratic efforts in the sense of the Constitutional Project for Corsica which only held out for a few months before the rising power of metropolitan capitalism.81 Bensaïd explained how Rousseau hit against the definite historical horizon of his time and therefore could only blame the ‘vices and virtues of human nature’, yet he opened the way for utopian solutions to the democratic impasse. In later chapters I will give further detail to Bensaïd’s investigation of the aporias of classical bourgeois political thought, where he worked through other authors like Spinoza, Hobbes and Hegel. The interrogation of classical bourgeois political thought goes hand in hand with a materialist critique of the bourgeois state. In the previous chapter on Lenin, I spoke of the irreducible differences between bourgeois revolutions and proletarian revolutions, underlining the greater aleatory grade of the proletarian form. While bourgeoisies differ and forms of bourgeois revolution were diverse, a set of themes in their dynamic interested Bensaïd: the movements from below of the proto-proletarian layers within their egalitarian and democratic tendencies and the conflict between the universal ideals of the bourgeois revolutions and their particularistic and realistic outcomes. Additionally, for Bensaïd, ‘the bourgeois revolution introduces, centrally, two strategic questions that one finds at the centre of the proletarian revolution. The question of the army and that of the nation’.82 Bensaïd approached the bourgeois revolution from two angles: from below and from the point of view of strategy. His range of reference included Engels’s The Peasants War in Germany and Ernst Bloch’s Thomas Münzer for the German Reformation, Boris Porshnev’s Les soulèvements populaires en France au xviie siècle and Daniel Guerin’s Bourgeois et bras-nus 1793–1795 on the French Revolution, Trotsky’s Where is Britain Going? and Lutaud’s Les Niveleurs, Cromwell et la République for the English Revolution. Bensaïd’s whole operation of drawing out the dynamics of these bourgeois revolutions was to perceive with clarity the realities of permanent revolution and dual power, or rather, how permanent revolution and forms of dual power could be reconstructed and thought through. Though Bensaïd’s discussion of the bourgeois revolutions was not an empirical, nor a conceptual breakthrough, and it perhaps even looks outdated in the face of the most recent work and debates about the bourgeois revolution from the political Marxists and Davidson’s landmark How Revolu-

81 82

Bensaïd 1976, p. 64. Bensaïd 1976, p. 69.

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tionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions?, Bensaïd’s presentation contributed to an understanding of history revolving around the strategic questions of the proletarian revolution, constructed through a rereading of the dynamics making up the bourgeois revolutions. The drawback of Bensaïd’s approach is that it is liable to becoming a-historical, if he reads too much into the bourgeois revolutionary process from the field of vision opened by the proletarian revolution. In relation to the three revolutionary periods, Bensaïd suggested that for the bourgeoisie to come to a point where it may win political power, the development of capitalist relations of production must be ‘already advanced’.83 A relatively strong bourgeoisie, Bensaïd explained, and an urban ‘free proletariat’ accompanying it in the social trends of the anti-feudal struggle could be found among the followers of Münzer, the Levellers and the Enragés. In Germany, Bensaïd paid attention to the development of the textile workshops in Zwickau, mining, contract labour in the context of the decline of the guilds and the division of the city districts into rich and poor. In France, following Porshnev, Bensaïd pointed out the fact that, of the urban social movements, the majority of popular uprisings of the sixteenth century came from the plebeian struggle against this or that exploitative group; drawing on Porshnev, Bensaïd noted that ‘The plebeians did not yet form the pre-proletariat, but a disparate mass with roots in all the groups of feudal society and who, step-by-step, fuse to become a real unity. The absence, or the loss of all property, and physical wage labour in the town represents the common trait’.84 The egalitarianism of the English Revolution embodied in the Levellers, Overton’s call for suffrage and proportional representation featured in the Putney Debates, as well as the refusal of or an ending of the delegation of power, took Bensaïd’s focus, partly because it brought to the surface the democratic breakthrough the Levellers had made, but also their historical limits. With clarity, Bensaïd reworked the irreducibility of the English Revolution’s bourgeoisie and the proletariat, stating that ‘when Overton was writing, the social core for a new democracy, the industrial proletariat, was not yet consolidated’.85 The Levellers could fight against a system of political representation that dispossessed the many of the right to vote, but they were not able to oppose another form of democracy (council democracy like that which emerged in Europe from 1917 and 1920). The essence of Bensaïd’s historical juxtaposition between the Levellers’ call for suffrage and proletarian

83 84 85

Bensaïd 1976, p. 65. Quoted from Bensaïd 1976, p. 66. Bensaïd 1976, p. 68.

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democracy results from the movement of real living bodies and classes producing a genuine historical breakthrough for democracy, a resolution to the impasses of even the most radical bourgeois forms of revolution; where the bourgeois hero, Cromwell, needed to awaken the passions of the masses for the bourgeois revolution to attain its needed thickness, in all of those cases where the subaltern elements tended to cross the limits of bourgeois society, Cromwell hounded them ruthlessly. By contrast, the proletarian revolution needs to constantly exceed the bounds of a degenerate bourgeois society. The bourgeois revolutions also raised the question of the army. Bensaïd explained that it was not only the body of oppression that the bourgeoisie needed; as a force, the army corresponds to the bourgeois representative state. Throughout the bourgeois revolution the army had a dual function, being an expression of the ‘national will’ (concealing class antagonisms) and as an instrument of repression. Bensaïd drew from Gramsci’s reading of Machiavelli and Trotsky’s presentation of Cromwell to show the specific bourgeois character of the modern army. These historical points resonated with the contemporary Armed Forces movement in the Portuguese revolution, as well as the ‘appel des cents’ in France, a rank-and-file movement of conscripts the Ligue was actively involved with. For Bensaïd, the army has a political centrality within the bourgeois state despite being a different layer compared to parliamentary democracy and the internal centralisation of the military hierarchy is limited, the structures of which mirror bourgeois society and are woven into it; the military machine is the backbone of the bourgeois state. A revolutionary socialist movement would need ‘all the powers of the proletariat’, to begin the process of ‘the disappearance of the army as a separate body’.86 Bensaïd’s efforts to establish the theoretical-strategic contours of revolution were autonomous from the reformist wings of the workers’ movement. One key divide, between the revolutionary and reformist confrontation, revolved around the nation-state, more or less a legacy of the bourgeois revolutions and national independence struggles. While specifying an intransigent defence of the self-determination of oppressed nations, and (following Trotsky) relating the national question to a particular social content, Bensaïd defended the idea that ‘the socialist revolution could not remain satisfied with the transformation of the nation such as it is today. It will be necessary to unmake it’.87 This perspective was a coherent response to socialist reformism which oscillated between the two poles of bourgeois ideology, each of which preserve the unity

86 87

Bensaïd 1976, p. 79. Bensaïd 1976, p. 89.

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of the nation and the integrity of its territory, namely ‘modernist regionalism’ and ‘muscular Jacobinism’.88 The Irish, Basque, Catalan and Corsican questions interleaved through Bensaïd’s presentation of this argument, shaped by a theoretical commitment to Trotsky’s notion of uneven and combined development. The bourgeois state, the nation and its institutions, objects of Bensaïd’s discussion, set out the contours of a polemic against ‘Popular Frontist’ illusions, as well as generic illusions that the state was a neutral object that could be handed over from one class to another. Such illusions rest upon the faith in the national bourgeoisie, and instead of unifying the working class around a project of unmaking the bourgeois nation state, they divide it.

5

The Leviathan State and the Plurality of Powers

In the aftermath of 1968, a plurality of resistances began to be recognised by the Left as movements against the education system, women’s and gay oppression, the prison system, and psychiatric institutions emerged. Think of the Asylums Information Group, Women’s Liberation Movement, and the Prison Information Group. These movements posed anew the theoretical relationship between the social institutions of the family, the schooling system and law to the capitalist division of labour. Bensaïd articulated these movements and institutions to the bourgeois state and the reproduction of capitalist relations of production. Criticising institutions, practices and discourses was on the agenda for the liberation of children, women, and other oppressed social layers. It was a new phenomenon that Marxists had to respond to, because, ‘in general, the critical analysis of these institutions has not overcome their own fragmented horizon’.89 Often critical work stops at a description of forms of oppression without situating them historically and results only in a call to resist confinement and indoctrination. Bensaïd instead insisted: [W]e think it is decisive to focus on the entrenchment of institutions in the division of labour that form the basis for them. The cult of labour, understood first and foremost as waged labour, induces a reciprocal depreciation of all non-productive activity. New social, sexual and age categories are the result of this. An infantilisation of childhood, a reinforcement of the subordination of women in domestic labour, the sphere

88 89

Bensaïd 1976, p. 86. Bensaïd 1976, p. 95.

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now entangled with the reproduction of labour power. The result is a new urban landscape whose rhythm accords with the workplaces (factories) and power (monuments), structured by the separation of the workplace and the site of rejuvenation. The result is a suppression of all that is taken as individual into the private sphere … This great social schizophrenia, this fragmentation of the individual.90 In order to approach these questions theoretically Bensaïd quoted Gramsci, for whom, ‘In the East, the State was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous; in the West, there was a proper relation between State and civil society, and when the state tottered, a sturdy structure of civil society was immediately revealed. The State was just a forward trench; behind it stood a succession of sturdy fortresses and emplacements’.91 Gramsci conceptualised the state in its full complexity, ‘not a simple gendarme or “night-watchman” but a strategic construction, ramified, full of snares and hunting traps’.92 To understand the functioning of these fortresses and emplacements is to understand the ensemble of the mechanisms of the capitalist state and consequently to ‘refuse the split between the base and superstructure, which suggests a division between the state and civil society, in order to grasp the relations of capitalist production in their ensemble’.93 The above-mentioned institutions were not neutral but functional parts of the production and reproduction of the capitalist mode of production. To understand their specificity and relation to the capitalist mode of production as a totality allows for a strategic link between each specific revolt and the class struggle. Bensaïd wanted to understand the multiple forms of domination that irrigated the social body in order to develop this articulation. Though Artous penned the following lines, (Bensaïd signed off on them and presumably agreed): Nothing justifies opposing this question to the Marxist ‘tradition’. On the contrary, it increasingly appears that the whole of these institutions developed alongside the movement of the constitution of the bourgeoisie and the development of its state. The bourgeois State, the State par excellence, is constructed as a foreign body, separated from ‘civil society’ … In conjunction to this emergence of political power, institutions multiplied, also as separate bodies, places of the imprisonment of such and such 90 91 92 93

Bensaïd 1976, p. 96. Bensaïd 1976, p. 93. Ibid. Ibid.

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social activity and/or category of individuals, places of imprisonment and the apprenticeship of the specific conditions of the ‘socialisation’ of the individual in the bourgeois world, instruments of the massive normalisation of the social body.94 In terms of power, the different ways in which the bureaucratic states recovered and reorganised after the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the Prague Spring and May ’68 made for a favourable terrain for the problem of power to transform into questions of the pluralities of powers, a retreat away from the problem of the state as the organised force of society. This inevitably raises Bensaïd’s relation to Foucault, because Foucault’s critique of the Leviathan state was a way to think the plurality of subversive challenges to institutions; Foucault was the only coherent author to theorise (in opposition to Stalinised Marxism) a set of radical, subversive practices. Foucault’s relational conception of power could go in one of three directions. In an interview with Christian Laval, destined for but unpublished by Rouge (the lcr’s daily at the time), Foucault explained how his relational analysis of power was important but underdeveloped in his work. Foucault was sure that power was not like a cake that everyone could take a piece from or which could be taken as a whole. The first direction was to say Foucault’s conception of power was anti-Leninist and anti-Marxist, as Jean Marie-Brohm did in a 1976 article that appeared in the journal Quel Corps? With this position Foucault could be swept under the carpet. The second direction could take Foucault’s argument to pluralise power relations and forget the question of the state, scattering the revolution into fragments, in the name of a struggle against binary forms of struggle and the dialectic of class struggle. This point would dissolve the problem of the state into the plurality of powers (a direction that would more or less characterise John Holloway’s Change the World Without Taking Power). As for Foucault himself, which could be taken as the third option, he challenged the assumption that he ignored the state or that the state did not exist as such. In the same interview with Rouge, he said, ‘we cannot understand a social relation of force from the state, as being a primal bastion of it, but to understand the state as an institutional crystallisation of a multiplicity of relations of force that run through the economy, fundamentally, but also through a series of other institutions, the family, sexual relations, and so forth’.95

94 95

Artous and Bensaïd 1976, p. 24. Foucault 1977.

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This was consistent with what Foucault wrote in The History of Sexuality: he did not simply retreat from the problem of the state. He wrote, ‘Are there no great radical ruptures, massive binary divisions, then? Occasionally, yes’. There is a plurality of resistances which exist ‘in the strategic field of power relations’. This did not mean they forever remained subaltern to domination, ‘an underside that is in the end always passive, doomed to perpetual defeat’. This relational conception of power dovetailed with Foucault’s strategic understanding of class. Foucault explained his strategic understanding of class in The Punitive Society using the examples of the sans-culottes and peasants. It was also captured in his statement that, ‘Sociologists are rekindling endless discussions in order to understand what a class is and what it is made of. But, until now, no one addressed or went deeper into the question of understanding what struggle is. What do we mean by struggle when we talk about class struggle? What I would like to discuss in Marx is not the question of the sociology of classes, but rather the strategic method with regard to struggle’. In his autobiography, Bensaïd would claim Foucault’s proximity to Marx on exactly this question, while the strategic dimension of class struggle was key to Bensaïd’s anti-positivistic Marxism.

6

Defining Stalinism

As is clear, Bensaïd’s project of human liberation ran into the problem of Stalinism. After the Khrushchev speech, the Hungarian Revolt, the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the Prague Spring, and the 1963 split between the bureaucracies in Russia and China, critical currents began to emerge out of the official Stalinised movement. I will treat Bensaïd’s critique of the three ‘Left’ critics of Stalinism – Althusser, Nicos Poulantzas and the historian Charles Bettelheim. The strength of his discussion of Stalinism was his recognition of the specificity of a critique of Stalinism with its roots in the Left Opposition; this was also his weakness, for throughout the entire polemic against the three, Bensaïd defended a theoretically inadequate concept (straight from Trotsky) of a bureaucratically degenerated workers’ state in the ussr. The question of who had the monopoly of a ‘Left’ critique of Stalinism came to the foreground, and it determined the shape and content of a project’s positive perspective for workers’ liberation. Between the new trinity, Althusser, Bettelheim and Poulantzas, and Bensaïd, the political stakes of the moment concerned the confrontation between Maoism and Fourth International Trotskyism. This constellation makes for a rank of difficulties: Bettelheim’s Class Struggles in the ussr and, where they approached the concept, Althusser and Poulantzas were right to a certain point, to say that the ussr was a state-

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capitalist regime, not a bureaucratically degenerated workers’ state. Bensaïd was unsound to act the Fourth International epigone, defending an outdated concept unnecessarily and dogmatically. But the Maoist critique was a fetter for the further development of a political alternative to Stalinism as such, because not only did it produce a voluntaristic idealism, the Chinese Revolution and the Cultural Revolution remained its reference points and the break with Stalinism remained ideological; the Maoist authors remained subordinate to Stalinism politically because they rejected permanent revolution in its international dimension and failed to see that much of what Trotsky wrote of political strategies in the West in the 1920s and 1930s and about international revolution and the defence of working-class self-emancipation was rich and resourceful. Bettelheim, Poulantzas and Althusser, Maoist-inspired political thinkers they were, could only make sense of Trotsky as an economistic ultra-left. Bensaïd polemicised against any illusion that Althusser’s criticism of Stalinism was worthwhile. Bensaïd simply did not compromise with Althusser’s thesis that there existed a ‘Stalinian deviation’ as opposed to a historically existing, concrete and politically oppressive Stalinism. Althusser effectively lumped the Trotskyist critiques of the ussr in with the bourgeois ones and claimed that it was necessary to get to the root of the matter. But, Bensaïd lamented, Althusser did not even touch the root, it was too deep for him; instead he produced an Althusserian-speak, content to remain at the surface of things, on ‘the terrain of theoretical speculation, the “concrete of thought” ’.96 On Bensaïd’s interpretation, Althusser’s attitude to Stalinism was politically repressive, in that it deigned to suppress the memory of the Left Opposition and take it to the Trotskyists, and it was factually dubious and historically shallow. Althusser’s explanation for the Stalinian deviation was ideological: at the beginning of the 1930s there was a deviation of the general line of the Third International. Bensaïd wrote, ‘it is a little imprecise for a time in which … the scales of history weigh on every year. This line is founded on the economism-humanism pair which, according to Althusser, already characterised the Second International’, which had exacted its posthumous revenge.97 According to Bensaïd, Althusser had not adequately studied the concrete content of Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed, yet said that the (Trotskyist) notion of Stalinism was ‘not theoretically different to that of the personality cult’.98 In place of the historically

96 97 98

Bensaïd 1976, p. 198. Ibid. Quoted from Bensaïd 1976, p. 199.

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concrete and materialistic notion of Stalinism, Althusser’s Stalinian deviation amounted to an idealism. Bensaïd clarified, additionally, that: It isn’t a matter of returning to the comfortable arguments of authority by reproaching Althusser of having been a Stalinist and for having therefore consequently discrediting himself for good. To do so is exactly the Stalinist procedure that consists in dating the ideological perversions to early infancy and of not recognising the right to make mistakes … What we reproach him for is of remaining a Stalinian, through his method and the content of his discourse. Through the method, to the extent that he hones himself against John Lewis, but only refers to his possible interlocutors through allusion and amalgam. There is a bad faith here that cannot be concealed: the Bolshevik party decapitated, its Central Committee assassinated, 40,000 cadres liquidated in the 1936 purges, did all share, in different degrees, the same erroneous couple humanism-economism? A massacre for ideological infractions?99 In Bensaïd’s words, Althusser’s proposal that Stalinism represented a ‘theoretical deviation’ amounted to the verbal trickery of a charlatan.100 The formula effectively gave up the non-essentials to save the essentials of Stalinism. For Althusser, there was a Stalinian deviation that had a theoretical origin, but the history of the ussr and the Third International cannot be reduced to the deviation. In Althusser’s Reply to John Lewis the theoretical balance sheet of Stalin had the positives outweighing the negatives; Stalin himself, according to Althusser, could not be reduced to the theoretical deviation and even less could the Third International of the 1930s be linked to Stalinism. Althusser insisted that Stalin had other historical merits: in an unveiled critique of Trotsky’s permanent revolution and the international dimension of it, Althusser claimed Stalin’s merit was to abandon the miraculous idea of an imminent world revolution and to build socialism in one country. Stalin supposedly drew the necessary implications of this fundamentally correct (according to Althusser) line, built up heavy industry to compete with the West and withstand the imperialist siege. For Althusser, ‘in spite of the deformations, caricatures and tragedies for which this period is responsible, it must be recalled that millions of Communists also learned, even if Stalin “taught” them in dogmatic form, that there existed Principles of Leninism’.101 99 100 101

Bensaïd 1976, pp. 199–200. Bensaïd 1974, p. 299. Althusser 2008, p. 130.

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Bensaïd explained that Althusser ‘preferred to remain on the terrain of methodological speculation, at a prudent distance from the facts’.102 Rather than going into the social contradictions of the construction of socialism in determined historical conditions, ‘he gave Stalinism an essentially ideological explanation, analogous to that which was advanced by his disciple Poulantzas in Fascism and Dictatorship’.103 At a prudent distance from concrete history, Althusser’s ideological explanation postulated a deviationist discourse, but what and where were the norms of history? It was not adequate to talk of a ‘theoretical deviation’ when it came to grasping the ‘defacement of socialism, the conservative and reactionary orientation to the workers’ movement that had its part in crushing the Chinese Communist Party, the abandonment of Spain and the liquidation of the poum, the Moscow trials, the betrayal of the Greek Revolution (the pure and simple sale of it to Churchill), the crushing of Budapest in 1956 and the armed invasion of Prague in 1968’.104 According to Bensaïd, Poulantzas was much bolder than Althusser. He reached the threshold of the contradictions inherent in this critique of Stalinism. The foundation of Poulantzas’s critique remained the idea that Stalinism was a theoretical deviation and not a political and historical rupture. Instead of comprehending the contradictions of socialist construction in a determined historical situation, Poulantzas gave an ideological explanation in Fascism and Dictatorship, though he made a genuine attempt to enter the thickets of history. Bensaïd reviewed Poulantzas’s work Fascism and Dictatorship for the Critique de l’économie politique in 1973. Bensaïd saw the book as a concrete and historical application of the conceptual apparatus found in Poulantzas’s previous work Political Power and Social Classes. This ‘essay therefore represents, for Poulantzas’ method, the test of practice. How to grasp the real movement of class struggle from the point of view of historical materialism defined as a “science of history”’, after maintaining his distance from historicism?105 For Bensaïd, the attempt, evidently inspired by some of Althusser’s work, was ‘totally debatable’.106 But ‘the contradictions that are inherent in it appear yet more acute in its application to the [historical – D.R.] object chosen by Poulantzas’.107 The fact that Poulantzas tried to use certain methodological postulates of the Althusserian School on the terrain of concrete analysis greatly

102 103 104 105 106 107

Bensaïd 1974, p. 297. Bensaïd 1976, p. 198. Bensaïd 1976, p. 201. Bensaïd 1973. Ibid. Ibid.

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interested Bensaïd, for it opened the possibility of a fruitful and concrete debate. Poulantzas departed from ‘an ossified theory in order to return to practice, in order to confront the movement of the class struggle’. Poulantzas was imprisoned within the Stalinist distinction between historical materialism, as a science of history, and dialectical materialism, the philosophical method. In this schema, so Bensaïd thought, history leaves the stage; between the objective weight of structures and theoretical discourse, ‘there is no longer a place for political responsibility’.108 Though Poulantzas was attracted to Althusser’s neopositivist definition of a science of history, history had a strong gravitational pull, repulsing him from the Althusserian problematic. Still, not approaching history from the point of view of ‘theory and practice, he remained prisoner of the academic shackles of Althusser. However, he already contributed to exploding them: Althusser’s mechanical thought couldn’t bear a visit from concrete history – even at a distance’.109 Poulantzas occupied a position with far-reaching consequence: he oscillated ‘between an awkward formalisation of politics and the political demands of real history that led him far from Althusser’.110 The distinction between a theoretical mode of production and the concrete reality of a social formation played its role in this regard: ‘nevertheless it will be necessary to signal that these – theoretically established – crises and states of exception, often present themselves in concrete reality in a combined way’. However, the structuralist reading of Marxism to which ‘Althusser gave an academic cover’, was made to the detriment of the dialectical totality. The structure, ‘this is the static, dismembered totality, in which revolutionary subjectivity has been removed. Poulantzas, despite some visible efforts to overcome the Althusserian heritage remains dependent upon it’.111 I focus here on Bensaïd’s interpretation of Poulantzas’s thesis that economism led to the defeats of the workers’ movement in the face of fascism, because it shows the political limitations of the critique, which folds back on Bensaïd’s criticism of Althusser mentioned above. Bensaïd’s polemic on this question revolved around the following problem: Poulantzas described the rise of fascism. In denying the existence of an alternative revolutionary line to Stalinism in the ussr and in the Comin-

108 109 110 111

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

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tern, after 1923, he is driven to implicitly accept the inevitability of fascism’s rise. Just as inevitable was the reconstitution of a bourgeoisie in the ussr.112 In searching for the reasons for fascism’s triumph over the workers’ movement, Poulantzas put forward the thesis that the defeat was the result of an economism of the leaders in the face of fascism’s emergence and victory. ‘According to him, the central idea that explains the defeat of the workers’ movement faced with fascism was the economism of its leadership’.113 As Bensaïd summarised, the economism of the Stalinised International awaited the unavoidable final crisis while Trotsky’s economism was expressed in his constant expectation for an imminent revolution, ‘that Poulantzas hastily imputed to the theory of permanent revolution’.114 To be able to paint Stalin and Trotsky with the same brush of economism means to leave out a discussion of the political battles that took place in the ussr after the death of Lenin. In this way, ‘the struggle against economism gave Poulantzas a convenient cover to avoid engaging in the political and ideological acrobatics’ that were more difficult to justify. Bensaïd claimed that this was a form of ideologism. Behind this ideologism lurked the ‘autonomy of superstructures that result from structuralism’s breaking apart of the dialectical totality’.115 Poulantzas’s aim was to show how the periodisation of the ussr and the Comintern cannot be grasped in their relation to the class struggle in the ussr unless one refers to the general line which gradually became dominant there, namely economism. Like Althusser and Bettelheim, Poulantzas’s critique of the Comintern and the ussr cannot be separated from the Maoist separation from the Soviet bloc: ‘Mao introduced new and crucially important elements into Marxist-Leninist theory and practice’, Poulantzas remarked.116 Mao’s principle of putting ‘politics in command’ and the Maoist critique of the ussr as a state capitalist regime featured in his treatment of the ussr and the Comintern.117 In

112 113 114 115 116 117

Ibid. Bensaïd 1976, p. 206. Ibid. Ibid. Poulantzas 1974, p. 228. Poulantzas 1974, p. 223. Poulantzas claimed that ‘During the period after the Sixth Congress (1928), a particularly close relation was established between Comintern policies and the ussr; although a relation had existed from the very foundation of the Comintern. Before 1928, however, this relation was more or less indirect and not an immediate one. The necessary link via which it was basically established was a general line characterized by economism, the lack of a mass line and the abandonment of proletarian international-

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Poulantzas’s statement about the internal developments of the ussr – necessary to establish a relation between the Comintern and the ussr – he held that during the whole of this period, there was a desperate struggle in the ussr between the ‘two roads’ (i.e. the socialist and capitalist roads: there is no alternative to these two). I say between two roads and not between two lines since there were not ‘two’ lines in the ussr and the Comintern, the various ‘oppositions’ being in the last analysis located (to unequal degrees) on the same ground as the official line.118 On Bensaïd’s interpretation, these passages were ‘a little short’: ‘was it necessary or not to deduce from this that the capitalist road was inevitable’? Or, in the ‘absence of a revolutionary alternative, according to Poulantzas, is it only a theoretical blunder, a failure of an intellectual order’?119 As is clear, Bensaïd’s polemic against Poulantzas was a defence of the Trotskyist analysis of the Comintern, whereas Poulantzas made his bet with a Maoist explanation. Poulantzas saw the degeneration of the Comintern as a linear result of economism. It was a gradual and progressive process. The general line, being economist and the absence of a mass line, dominated the Comintern, ordering its left and right turns. Yet, for Bensaïd, this ideologism was not sufficient to explain the historical reality of the period: As a consequence, Poulantzas treats the different congresses of the Comintern from an ideological viewpoint without situating them in relation to the political battles that had indeed existed within them … On each crucial problem (the German Revolution, the Chinese question, priorities and planning in the ussr, the Anglo-Russian Committee) the positions that existed were present and clashed. This is no a posteriori interpretation. The texts and the documents testify to it: the platform of the Left Opposition, Trotsky’s The Communist International after Lenin, his articles on the rise of Nazism in Germany against the disastrous line of the ‘Third Period’ … In the case of Germany, Trotsky’s articles, following the rise of fascism and, despite the disastrous results

118 119

ism. This was the line which progressively came to dominate both Bolshevik party policy within the ussr and the policies of the national communist parties’. Poulantzas 1974, p. 230. Bensaïd 1976, p. 207.

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of the Comintern’s politics, at every step proposes an alternative political response and combated from the beginning the crazy line of social fascism.120 In Poulantzas, ‘the general line of economism blurs the significance of Stalinist political zigzags’.121 The consolidation of Stalin’s regime liquidated the Old Bolsheviks, those who made the revolution. Yet Poulantzas’s critique emphasised the ‘reconstitution of the “Soviet bourgeoisie”’ governed by the ‘general line which had much wider effects: i.e. by economism, the lack of a mass line’. For Bensaïd this was a circular explanation: the circularity of cause and effect is not necessarily the dialectic! Here, Poulantzas oscillates between the idea according to which a false line opened the road to the bourgeoisie … and the idea according to which the false line was quasi-irresistible on the foundation of the reconstitution of the bourgeoisie lodged in the State apparatus. Which would logically result in a critique of the desperate attempt that the October revolution represented!122 ‘So’, Poulantzas said, ‘this general line was neither a simple error nor a mere accident: it was linked to the class struggle in the ussr’. He held that it was the result of bourgeois ideology’s persistence during the transitional period. The ‘line appears increasingly to have been one of the principal effects of this process of reconstitution and of the growing weight of the “Soviet bourgeoisie” in the class struggle in the ussr’.123 In Bensaïd’s eyes, this was an explanation of a historical process that entailed a strong dose of conspiracy. Marx had explained that the bourgeoisie defined itself as a class as a result of its place in the relations of production, the possession of the means of production and the servitude of wage-labourers. How could a bourgeoisie that took refuge in the state acquire its strength, its ideology, Bensaïd asked? Poulantzas ‘says nothing of the very real reconstitution of an agrarian bourgeoisie through the enrichment of the Kulaks, neither of the fact that this process was brutally broken by forced collectivization’.124 In these developments were social processes whose foundation is intelligible within the organisation of production,

120 121 122 123 124

Bensaïd 1976, p. 208. Ibid. Bensaïd 1976, p. 209. Poulantzas 1974, p. 231. Bensaïd 1976, p. 209.

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and not on the basis of a thesis that makes the state apparatus the framework of a class that only has its roots in the superstructures, institutions and not in the relations of production. This meant that Poulantzas touched on a crucial problem that he avoided: Either the October Revolution was in fact a proletarian revolution, and hence, if one speaks of the reconstitution of the bourgeoisie, it is necessary to say when and how it won power back. Through what struggles and not through progressive encroachments. Or we make a frontal attack on the analysis of October in seeing from its outset a specific bourgeois revolution in which the intelligentsia would have used the working class as a stepping-stone … Poulantzas seems to lean towards the first hypothesis, but without indicating the moment in which the bourgeoisie won back power … Without saying it, Poulantzas seems to lean, towards dating this bourgeois seizure of power around 1928.125 Many concrete developments preceded Poulantzas’s turning point in 1928 with regard to working-class internationalism. The political triumph of ‘socialism in one country’ opened the road to this definitive rupture. This problem ‘was the object of a pitched battle between the Left Opposition and Stalin and Bukharin. This battle is known in detail as is its outcome; and it proves that the rupture with internationalism didn’t coincide with 1928: it is anterior to it’.126 The axis of this problematic revolved around whether one could follow a reading of the Comintern from the vantage point of the Left Opposition, as opposed to a Maoist reading. Poulantzas explicitly criticised the explanation given by Trotsky of the bureaucratic zigzags of Stalinist politics – Trotsky was inconsistent. Poulantzas saw two contradictory ideas at work in Trotsky: the idea that opportunist zigzags took place from 1928 to 1935 and the idea that nothing essential happened after 1928. If one were to interpret the Comintern – as Poulantzas did – in light of a general economist line, one would certainly see a contradiction in Trotsky’s position. However, as Bensaïd stated: contrary to what Poulantzas suggested, there is no contradiction there. After 1928, the Left Opposition was defeated politically and repressed physically. Thermidor triumphed; the bureaucracy consolidated its power. But, as a bureaucracy, it remained dependant on the social equi-

125 126

Bensaïd 1976, p. 210. Ibid.

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librium that accounted for its opportunist oscillations. There is in fact an important change in 1928, but beyond, a continuity of bureaucratic politics.127 From another angle, the entirety of this debate revolved around the class nature of the ussr. Poulantzas grasped that the role of the bureaucracy was key to the (orthodox) Trotskyist explanation: ‘the kind of line which governed both the ussr’s internal policy and the world Communist movement cannot be related to any sort of bureaucracy’. Poulantzas’s second critique of Trotsky – another theoretical incapacity – was his inability to distinguish between periods. He was a ‘prisoner of a homogenous conception of time, marked by the omnipresence of the imminent revolution’, in which Trotsky was ‘unaware of the ebbs and flows of the global revolution’.128 There is indeed a real problem that faces the permanent revolution in time and space. Nevertheless, Bensaïd claimed: it is impossible to treat it through a pithy affirmation, moreover if one thinks of Trotsky’s analysis of 1905, his History of the Russian Revolution, texts like The Communist International After Lenin, Europe and America, his writings on France and Germany, or yet the text titled The ‘Third Period’ of the Comintern’s Mistakes, in which he specifically critiques the mechanical conception of the notion of radicalisation that the Comintern used.129 Today, these debates seem arcane, yet at the time it was recognised to be a theoretical battle whose importance is contemporary and practical. In effect, what Poulantzas denies through his superficial critique of Trotsky, is the historical existence of a revolutionary alternative to Stalinism. And the continuation of this negation is in fact a blind tailism in relation to the ideological and political currents born of the decomposition of Stalinism.130 I shall end Bensaïd’s criticism of Poulantzas with one further quotation from Bensaïd: 127 128 129 130

Bensaïd 1976, p. 211. Ibid. Bensaïd 1976, p. 212. Ibid.

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Thus, for Poulantzas, ‘the analysis of what happened in the ussr … must be founded on the historical experience of the Chinese Revolution and the principles produced by Mao’. In the case where Poulantzas will have maintained such an appreciation after the latest impacts of the Cultural Revolution, it would interest us to know how the Maoism of Mao provides a thread of intelligibility of Stalinism and the history of the ussr. The analysis of the texts produced since 1956 rather encourage us to see in them a confused and empirical awareness of the historical realities that can no longer be ignored. The theoretical poverty of Maoism does not prevent us from seeing that there has been a revolutionary leadership in the Chinese, but that is another debate that we are ready to take up.131 Bensaïd’s critique of Bettelheim was equally consistent with what he had to say about Althusser and Poulantzas, but Bettelheim had carried out a far more extensive study of the ussr than either of the above authors. Bensaïd’s argumentation against Bettelheim reveals the contradictory character of Maoistinspired criticisms of the ussr: on the one hand, Bettelheim said that where the proletariat has no political power there can be no talk of a workers’ state, while on the other hand, he had praised Stalin’s authority and commitment to building socialism in one country. From one angle, Bensaïd was wrong to say Bettelheim’s error was to methodologically establish a strict correspondence between social relations of production and political relations and from another angle, Bensaïd was backwards-looking when he insisted on locating a point when the old and former capitalist relations were re-established. This meant Bensaïd did not see the qualitatively new breakthrough that the state-capitalist regime in the ussr signified for the accumulation of capital in competition with the West. Bettelheim, however, may have been working with a quasicorrect scientific category (state capitalism) but he, and here Bensaïd is right, underestimated the social and political rupture the revolutionary conquest of state power by the proletariat represented and how socialist democracy differs from the capitalist state. This slip permitted Bettelheim to skip over a critique of the Maoist experience in China, grounded an idealist theory of historical change that paid little heed to the development of the material prerequisites of socialist transformation. But the main point Bensaïd drove home was that Bettelheim’s position could combine the contradiction between a state-

131

Bensaïd 1973, À Propos de “Fascisme et dictature” Poulantzas, la politique de l’ambiguïté.

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capitalist thesis in the ussr with Stalin-apologetics, all the while ignoring the political battle the Left Opposition against the rise of the Stalinist bureaucracy. With an emphasis on the political side of the problem, Bensaïd was not so dogmatic a defender of Trotsky’s analysis of the degenerated workers’ state: to avoid a formalist debate over the ussr, clarity about the political tasks was necessary. Those with a state-capitalist, or another, analysis of the ussr could agree on the political tasks facing workers in the Eastern bloc. Bensaïd read into the East Berlin uprising of ’53, the uprisings in Poland and Hungary of ’56, Czechoslovakia in ’68 and Poland in ’70 a confirmation of the need for a political revolution in the ussr that could restore the proletariat’s political power through an anti-bureaucratic revolution. Though Bensaïd’s idea that these events followed Trotsky’s predictions in the Transitional Program was one-sided, the emphasis on the working class’s autonomous struggle remained far superior to the Maoists who had displaced revolutionary politics away from the working class towards the Chinese model of revolutionary change and thus compromised politically with Stalinism, even if they produced a quasiadequate concept of state capitalism.

7

Bensaïd and Poulantzas: Strategy in the West

I shall further detail Bensaïd’s critique of Poulantzas’s strategic proposals. It goes without saying that La révolution et le pouvoir and Bensaïd’s associated writings were part of a collective project of intervention into the strategic debates, and should be compared to others of the time, like those of Henri Weber (editor of Rouge and Critique Communiste), Ernest Mandel (intellectual leader of the fi), Chris Harman (leading figure in the British Socialist Workers’ Party), Jean-Marie Vincent (who joined the Ligue after belonging to the Unified Socialist Party) and even Antonio Negri in Italy. The unfinished task was to reformulate and defend, at least at the ideological level, the veracity of revolutionary strategy. Weber had returned to the problem of Eurocommunism in his critical interviews with leaders from the Italian Communist Party, and Poulantzas and his volume of Kautsky’s, Luxemburg’s and Pannekoek’s writings in Socialisme: la voie occidentale. Introduction au débat sur la grève de masse (1983) formed the basis for further strategic elaboration. Mandel’s intervention in the lcr’s theoretical journal, Revolutionary Strategy in Europe (1976) and his book From Stalinism to Eurocommunism: The Bitter Fruits of ‘Socialism in One Country’ (1978) had set out to define a revolutionary orientation in Europe. Across the channel, Hallas (between 1974 and 1975) wrote his

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series on the Comintern and the united-front tactics, material published as The Comintern (1985). Vincent’s Les marxistes et la politique (1975) (co-edited with Évelyne Pisier-Kouchner and François Châtelet) – a compilation of texts from the Second and Third Internationals – clearly shows the difficulties involved in the 1970s debates: ‘In Western Europe these discussions [from the classical period] haven’t ended … The principle of the class struggle and the defence of the working class is proclaimed by everyone, as well as the final necessity for revolution. The adopted means are diverse’.132 Antagonistic strategic debate lies within this diversity; these writings show that learning to think strategically takes place through the school of often rude polemic. Bensaïd’s writings seemed to be moving with the tide of history, optimistic and hopeful for a recomposition of the workers’ movement. His early theoretical work was overdetermined by an overall expectation of an imminent breakthrough of the radical left; it was marked by a confidence that the historical moment would deliver justice to the faithful participants of the Left Opposition. Bensaïd claimed at the time that the revolutionary Left was at the threshold of a new fundamental recomposition of the international workers’ movement, in which he thought the programmatic attainments of the 1920s could be tied to a mass revolutionary practice in the post-68 period. This was an inaccurate appraisal of the historical moment. However, the spirit of interventions like La révolution et le pouvoir remained more or less constant in Bensaïd’s subsequent writings – the argument for initiative and struggle that could lead to a recomposition of the workers’ movement remained a problem to solve. Bensaïd’s strategic writings on Portugal, and his argument for dual power did not put forward a frontal attack on the bourgeois state seen as a besieged fortress in an oversimplified way. This fact has been thoroughly demonstrated by Ludivine Bantigny in her excavation of the debate between Poulantzas and members of the lcr. Bensaïd was one figure of the Ligue – along with Antoine Artous, Michael Löwy, Jean-Marie Vincent and Henri Weber – who took Poulantzas seriously when developing strategic thought (beyond the debates over the ussr). The engagement was critical and productive. However, the lcr did not see Poulantzas’s Eurocommunist positions, or his proposals, as novelties. Bantigny writes that ‘whereas Poulantzas criticized the revolutionary tradition for postulating its own “absolute externality” with regard to the state, these lcr theorists held that no such claim had ever really been made. The workers’ movement has relentlessly worked to penetrate state institutions, “breaking and entering” in order to make its demands and thus a class point

132

Vincent, Pisier-Kouchner and Châtelet 1975, p. 16.

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of view prevail therein’.133 The lcr’s practice, for example the campaign for trade-union rights in the barracks, and the Fourth International’s position on the Portuguese Revolution, which aimed at deepening the fractures within the Armed Forces’ Movement through the forging of links between soldiers’ committees and workers, cannot be said to be absolutely exterior to the state in the manner Poulantzas claimed. Bensaïd thought Poulantzas was confused when he argued that, in the conditions of the advanced West, the problem of dual power had been relegated to the distant past, and then deduced from this historical argument that it was now necessary to enter the state apparatus, and to do political work within its institutions. This was an example of eliding a basic distinction between strategy and tactics, because concretely, revolutionaries like Lenin and Luxemburg were positively for intervention in a wide range of representative institutions, even the most rancid. Revolutionary agitation within institutions has been a useful tactic to reinforce the autonomy of the workers’ movement with respect to the state without it being confused with strategies for political power.134 Bensaïd’s criticism of Poulantzas flows from his generally negative attitude towards the policy of the Popular Front. For Bensaïd, the Popular Front was a legacy of Stalinism that subordinated independent working-class interests to bourgeois hegemony. The idea that thinking through revolution in the West begins with the policy of the Popular Front, or that the Popular Front can be read back into the early left wing of the Second and the pre-Stalinist Third International is an illusion. Bensaïd’s writings on strategy demonstrate that the zigzag between the sectarian line of the ‘Third Period’ and the Popular Front policy’s line of subordination to bourgeois institutions and allies was a dead-end product of Stalinism. This pertains to Bensaïd’s critique of Poulantzas because Poulantzas’s proposals in practice led straight towards a rerun of the Popular Front experiences. Bensaïd was acutely aware of Poulantzas’s impasse on this point. In a review of Poulantzas’s The Crisis of the Dictatorships, Bensaïd pointed out that class struggle not only arrived late in the book (on page 57 out of a total of 137) but that workers’ struggles are presented as a secondary effect of contradictions among the capitalist class, rather than being the result of an uneven economic development that overturned social relationships. Bensaïd wrote of Poulantzas, ‘this fundamental methodological error is not innocent … he speaks of a “conjunctural convergence” between the interests of the internal bourgeoisie and those of the popular masses’.135 133 134 135

Bantigny 2019, p. 116. Bensaïd 2016, p. 108. Bensaïd 1975, pp. 125–8.

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Against Poulantzas, Bensaïd made the case for the primacy of social struggles, because Poulantzas’s ‘erroneous orientation opens the road to other fatal consequences of a strategic order’, because on the strategic level Poulantzas prioritised ‘the contradiction within the bourgeoisie’, over the antagonism between capital and wage labour.136 The consequence was that Poulantzas ended up justifying tactical alliances with the internal bourgeoisie, in order to overthrow the dictatorships. Bensaïd wrote that it was ‘interesting to note that this is the exact justification given by the Spanish Communist Party for the Spanish “democratic junta” whose platform includes only democratic propositions, and not a single social demand for workers!’137 Bensaïd’s critique of Poulantzas’s Popular Frontist proposals were tied to his alternative: the centrality of working-class struggle, building upon workers’ politicisation and confidence through their own self-activity while removing all illusions in the bourgeois-representative state. Suffice to say, for Bensaïd, Poulantzas was a personification of the Popular Frontist policy, which meant embodying a road that leads nowhere but defeat.

8

Eurocommunism, Kautskyism and Austro-Marxism

Weber’s Socialisme. La Voie occidentale, a set of translations of the mass strike debate in German Social Democracy, captured the contours of this divergence (this complements my previous chapter’s discussion of the mass strike). In his introduction, Weber argued that most of the themes which Eurocommunism employed were adopted term-for-term from Kautsky’s polemic against Luxemburg and Pannekoek – the opposition between East and West; war of overthrow and war of position; dual-power strategy and a strategy of commitment to the state; parliamentary democracy and direct democracy. Weber pointed out that, in this debate, ‘Kautsky rids the problematic of dual power based on the organisation – outside the bourgeois state – of a workers’ counter-state, called upon to destroy the bourgeois state and replaces it with a problematic of struggle within the framework of the state, tied to the social movements, with the aim of transforming the class content of it from within’.138 However, Bensaïd’s discussion went further than the mass strike debates and the parallels between Kautsky and Eurocommunism, in particular in relation to the workers’ government. La révolution et le pouvoir did not neglect the workers’ government, 136 137 138

Ibid. Ibid. Weber 1983, p. 37.

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as debated during the Fourth Congress of the Comintern. It was tied to the united front and expressed ‘the contradictions between the aspirations of the masses and the projects of their reformist leadership’.139 The workers’ government played a strategic role: ‘if the construction of soviet power remains the goal to reach, soviets don’t always exist; it is in such conditions that a formula proposing a government of workers’ parties can play a transitory role and help with the unification and becoming conscious of the class’.140 Gramsci’s prison writings and the Left Opposition reflected on the workers’ government. They did so in explicit opposition to Popular Frontist policies. As discussed in the previous chapter on Lenin, the modern bourgeois representative state models a specific field of political struggle. The political party is at the centre of a conceptual network that structures this political field, which includes class consciousness, the relations of force, alliances and the revolutionary crisis. Though there always remained a contradiction between the argument for soviets, and the approach of calling on the French Left to form unity governments, this contradiction cannot be understood outside of this conceptual network. Backing away from the strategic implications of the dictatorship of the proletariat led to a modern, more-or-less sophisticated version of what Kautsky and the Austro-Marxists had already proposed of trying to combine workers’ self-organisation and socialisation with a form of bourgeois, liberal democracy. Bensaïd excavated Max Adler to demonstrate that the ideas of the Eurocommunists were neither newer nor more radical than these precursors. Against the Austro-Marxists and their later avatars, Bensaïd endorsed Lenin’s rejection of any compromise of mixed democracy that amounted to safeguarding the dictatorship of the dominant class of capital. He believed that Lenin was strategically correct to reject any attempt to subordinate forms of soviet democracy, be they committees or councils, to parliamentary forms of representative democracy. In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, the polemics against Kautsky and the Austro-Marxists were strategic. Which power would win in a revolutionary crisis? The reformists tried to save the bourgeois state by tolerating soviet forms, so long as these forms were subordinated to the sovereignty of parliamentary institutions and the bourgeois state. Bensaïd effectively dissented against this operation of political reduction.

139 140

Bensaïd 1976, p. 317. Ibid.

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133

Conclusion

This chapter has focused on Bensaïd’s polemics on the axis of strategic thought. All polemics reveal the limitations of those who intervene and those against whom one intervenes, in a kind of reciprocal recognition of exchange. Whatever the theoretical-philosophical-political limitations of Bensaïd’s writings of the 1970s, Bensaïd pushed the strategic question – conceptually – to its thresholds of thought, forward to eventually open a space for deepened theoretical reflection that could be joined to the memories of strategic limit points of the workers’ movement of the twentieth century. With the close of the 1970s, the strategic question would soon be eclipsed.

chapter 3

The Dark Years of Readjustment A political and organisational consolidation is on the agenda, or, as the comrades from the Spanish State say, the restoration of a militant ideology after the years of ‘desencanto’ (disenchantment). This restoration is only possible by combining effective initiatives, a profound theoretical rearmament and a will to be outward looking, for both action and debate.1

∵ Bensaïd’s political and theoretical perspectives transformed throughout the 1980s, marked by the collapse of the previous cycle of class struggle opened by May ’68, the neoliberal downturn, the crisis of Marxism and the revolutions across Eastern Europe. If the decade opened with great hopes for insurgency, based on a perspective committed to the actuality of revolution, it ended with a defence of the left of the possible. Bensaïd’s work nevertheless took a qualitative leap forward towards the end of the 1980s. This chapter focuses specifically on Bensaïd’s written output though it articulates the relationship between intellectual reconstruction – with all of its specific concepts, themes, trends, breaks, encounters and continuities – and the historical situation – the balance of forces between parties and classes, the everyday debates from local meetings to international congresses. Bensaïd’s writings from this time were devoted to a perspective able to take revolutionary politics forward in the new and difficult conditions; from his writings one can grasp the changing stakes of the political conjuncture. The 1980s witnessed the failure of Bensaïd’s political perspectives and the need to update them. Bensaïd pioneered the attempt to face new realities, and the result of this was a turn to the patient long-term project of revolutionary reconstruction. At stake is Bensaïd’s political perspectives and the way they moved into the scope of his theoretical work. He composed his political perspectives in the context of the Fourth International’s attempt to make good on

1 Bensaïd 1986.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2024 | doi:10.1163/9789004687028_005

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the legacy of the Left Opposition and Trotskyism in a situation just shy of the final bankruptcy of the Stalinist state-capitalist economies. The 1980s present somewhat of an enigma for writing about Bensaïd, because he was engaged in an intense threefold process of coming to grips with, reading and discovering. If we exclude Moi la Révolution. Remembrances d’une bicentenaire indigne, he wrote three substantial works, L’anti-Rocard, Stratégie et parti and Mai si! in the 1980s. L’anti-Rocard was a polemic against the utopian gaffes of reformist thought embodied in the Rocard dynamic that took off from the legislative elections in March 1978. In ideological and political terms, Rocard’s utopianism and logical inconsistency hastened the neoliberal counter-offensive, part of the generalised ideological disorientation of the Left. Stratégie et parti is a compilation from a cadre-building course of the Ligue that Bensaïd gave in 1986, a synthesis of how his generation understood the problems raised by the October Revolution, the Comintern and Lenin at a time when it was apparent that revolutionary hopes had been extinguished in the context of Mitterrand’s turn to austerity and global neoliberalism. The talks were an exploration of the party building projects from Marx and Engels onwards and the strategic debates that animated them. Mai si!, by contrast, was written alongside Alain Krivine and focused on the stunted possibilities of May ’68. It was a book written against the political conformism that reduced the May events to a cultural revolution without radical political effect and against the economic orthodoxy of Mitterrand and the repentant figures who climbed the social ladder using ’68 as a professional launching pad while giving up on liberatory perspectives. Before interrogating these three works, it is first necessary to answer what is meant by the three senses of coming to grips with, reading and discovering.

1

Coming to Grips, Reading and Discovering

Bensaïd dated the onset of a downturn to the second half of the 1970s; by then, any prospect of a West European Revolution, with the Portuguese and Spanish Revolutions harmonised, no longer held. The West European revolutionary left had undergone a profound crisis that paralysed it, provoking many splits. In a sense, May ’68 ended with the closure of the Portuguese Revolution, the Moncloa Pact, the Historic Compromise in Italy and Mitterrand’s election and subsequent turn to austerity. West European capitalist institutions had stabilised, as had reformist parties of the Left. Furthermore, the beginning of the 1980s signalled a radical change from the previous decade. As Bensaïd recounted, the international working-class movement had ‘been thrown onto the

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defensive on nearly every front. This reversal opened the way for major social movement defeats – such as the defeat of the British miners’ strike in 1984, the failure of the Italian movement in defence of wage indexation in 1985, and trade union defeats in the USA and Japan during the same period’.2 In France, Mitterrand’s 1981 electoral victory took place in conditions very different to the immediate post-68 period. The turn to austerity consolidated the Socialist Party’s adaptation of neo-liberalism, demonstrating that Mitterrand was not a counter-tendency to Reagan and Thatcher in the Anglophone world. In the 1980s, the Western Europe’s workers’ movement entered a decade of closure; the open door of emancipatory possibility had shut, the neoliberal counterreforms took their place, and crisis began to hit the French steel, textiles and shipbuilding industries. The Ligue was compelled to overturn the strategic conceptions it had worked with since May ’68. After the May events, the Ligue held that the Union of the Left and the prospects of an electoral victory of the pcf and ps would spark a mass mobilisation from below. Such a mobilisation was supposed to create the conditions for mass ruptures in these parties, which would allow revolutionaries to outflank them, taking the lead of mass movements. After Mitterrand’s election, however, an expected mass social movement did not eventuate, and as Artous and Sitel write, ‘After five socialist governments and two governments of cohabitation with the right, the severe lesson was being pushed to its limits, it was granted that the workers’ movement was not only a victim of a “crisis of leadership”, but indeed a crisis of its fundamental referents, of a profound modification of its relations with capitalism on the one side, and with the workers and the popular classes on the other’.3 Bensaïd captured the new situation in an anecdote, where he recalled: A meeting organised by the Ligue at the Mutualité left me with the bitterest memory of all my rhetorical performances. A public meeting is a kind of dialogue between the speaker and the hall. Far from addressing a silent mass, the speaker distinguishes faces, interprets mimicry or silence, meets glances in which approval or perplexity can be read. As I got into the byways of our argument, I felt a veil of incomprehension fall over the assembly. Recalcitrant question marks seemed to light up and blink over their heads. For the first time since 1968, there was no connection. This was a confirming sign that the wind had turned. We were no longer borne

2 Bensaïd 2010a, p. 88. 3 Artous and Sitel 2014, p. 11.

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forward by the breeze of the age. For the first time, our spoiled generation, fed on progressive myths of the post war period and promised a flight from one success to the next, had to learn to rub against the grain of history. This, and not the reverse, is the general condition of revolutionary struggle.4 On the ideological and superstructural levels, the New Philosophers, the socalled crisis of Marxism, and the campaigns against totalitarianism put revolutionary theory onto the defensive. As Deleuze said of them, ‘The hatred of 68, resentment of 68 … The revolution has to be deemed impossible, in general and at all times’. The themes in vogue were tears, tissues and goodbyes: a farewell to proletariat, a farewell to the revolution (‘we loved you so much’!), and a farewell to the event as an unfurling of the possible. It was all about the ‘negation of all politics’.5 André Gorz had published his Farewell to the Proletariat in 1980. The paradigms of Rawlsian justice and Habermasian communication took precedence over production and class antagonism. The strategic debates about emancipation hit ground zero. Political philosophy became the new fashion to the detriment of the social question because the class struggle was deemed implicit totalitarianism. Liberal ethics took the place of the primacy of politics and Marx was expected to conform to bourgeois political philosophy. Outside of France, within the boundaries of Eastern Europe emerging from the Cold War, the 1980s was a decade when the bureaucratic command economies began to suffer from revolutionary upheavals, beginning with the Polish workers’ uprising (forming the independent trade union Solidarnosc) and ending in the fall of the Berlin Wall and the implosion of the Soviet Union. Breakthroughs were taking shape in Central and Southern America, too. Bensaïd engaged in Brazil and Mexico as a leading figure of the Fourth International. Joao Machado wrote of the experience: the contribution of Daniel was very important. He insisted on the many particularities of the situation: The formation of the pt bucked the trend in the landscape of the international left. Not only was it contemporary with the neoliberal counter-offensive in Europe and North America, but it

4 Bensaïd 2013, pp. 211, 213. 5 Bensaïd 2008a, p. 155.

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was followed very soon by the first signs of deindustrialisation in certain Latin American countries.6 Bensaïd participated in the reorientation of the Fourth International and the Ligue in the context of the downturn in Western Europe and the renaissance of the workers’ movement in Brazil. Bensaïd waged a battle over the very possibility of the revolutionary transformation of society, though in the terms set by the concrete conjuncture. To come to grips with the situation meant also defending a revolutionary perspective. Bensaïd held onto the notion that one could not build a revolutionary organisation without the conviction that a revolutionary crisis – not just sporadic outbursts of protests, riots and isolated strikes – was possible in the advanced countries. In Bensaïd’s constellation of problems and duties, which inaugurated the period of slow impatience, Bensaïd read seriously to lay the basis for a creative renovation of Marxism. Reading combined with the coming to grips with the new situation. Reading is not a simple practice. As Bensaïd well knew, whether hermeneutic or materialist, heterodox reading is multi-layered and complex, always situated in a historical context that is not transparent to its participants, in which one has to wager on an interpretation. Bensaïd recognised the responsibility of reading seriously, of reading Marx anew. Not only were there new things to discover about Marx, but Bensaïd also practised as if the moment an interpretation about Marx attained the graces of sovereign authority, Marx, the object of inquiry, had probably been conceptually murdered. Throughout the decade, Bensaïd felt the need to step back, to patiently return to Marx. Bensaïd returned to the textures of Marx’s words, a necessary detour back to a comprehension of the present. Bensaïd explained, With a group of students, I dedicated the 1980s to the genesis of Capital. Not in order to look for a lost Marx, but to discover a possible Marx, buried under the scab of official mythology. To invest in his heritage without an instruction manual, to move in his multiple legacies, to revisit different interpretations of which he is the subject, some legitimate, others fruitfully illegitimate and others in outright contradiction.7 Bensaïd’s research could be called a Holzweg der Holzwege insofar as it proceeded without a plan or preordained end, though it assumed the depth of

6 Machado 2012, p. 122. 7 Bensaïd 2001d, p. 8.

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philosophical, theoretical, political and cultural heritage. Three paths intermingled as Bensaïd went off the beaten track: An ‘inventory of heritage and its plurality; the path of the Marrano and messianic reason; and finally a Marx liberated from his doctrinaire shackles that have held him captive for far too long’.8 Bensaïd accumulated much raw materials by the end of the 1980s from his reading of Capital, the Grundrisse and Theories of Surplus-Value; though he initially had no intention of publishing this raw material, Edwy Plenel encouraged him to consult Olivier Bétourné, editorial director at Fayard, to do so, in which would become Marx For Our Times and La discordance des temps: Essais sur les crises, les classes, l’histoire.9 Throughout Bensaïd’s reading, intended to open a future for Marx, he encountered and discovered the traces of other heretics. The encounter with Walter Benjamin’s trace was decisive. If the time of Benjamin’s writing was the clock’s turn to the mid-night of the century, Bensaïd’s time was one in which the greyness of dusk had melancholia about it. In their specific ways, both had their share of regression and catastrophe, the former the march to war and genocide, the latter to the obscure disaster. His encounter with Benjamin transformed Bensaïd’s reading of Marx and Lenin. As Löwy wrote, ‘without a doubt it comes as an encounter that marked him very profoundly … (the same thing happened to me earlier)’.10 Bensaïd’s encounter with Benjamin perhaps depended on his theoretical anxiety, at a time when the confident certainties of initial commitments had been put to a severe test. Faced with the collapse of former perspectives, we needed an aleatory materialism, allied with the subtleties of messianic reason … The Benjamin trail steadily revealed a landscape of thought (Blanqui, Péguy, Sorel, Proust) that was disconcerting for an orthodox Marxist … The point was, in parallel with a rereading of Marx, to rediscover the categories that would make it possible to face a major crisis of historical time.11

8 9 10 11

Bensaïd 2013, p. 208. My translation here. Bensaïd 2013, p. 294. Löwy 2005b. Bensaïd 2013, pp. 285–7.

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Against Rocard’s Neoliberal Logic

Specifically, Bensaïd’s L’anti-Rocard is a polemic against the conjunction of social-liberalism (the French for an Anglophone neo-liberalism) and neoreformism in the Socialist Party. Written before Mitterrand’s election, Bensaïd’s polemic expected a revolutionary response to the class-collaborationist policies of the Socialist Party. According to Bensaïd, Rocard ‘represented a point of unstable equilibrium in the parallelogram of forces, at the intersection of key social interests and historical currents of the workers’ movement’, to the benefit of capital. The conditions facilitated the production of technocratic ideologies in the middle classes. Just as Proudhonism in the nineteenth century was the ideological expression of the traditional petty-bourgeois artisans who feared falling into the ranks of the working class, ‘Rocardism presented itself as a rejuvenated ideology of the new technocratic and functionary petty bourgeoisie’. It had ‘one foot in austerity and the other in self-management’, defending the ‘introduction of authority and “self-management” at the same time’.12 Rocard’s combination of self-management and technocratic authority was marketable in the post-68 crack up and redefinition of the workers’ movement. It appealed to Jaurèsian corporative themes, pcf preoccupations with decentralisation and mixed democracy (after the abandonment of the dictatorship of the proletariat), while the positions of ‘self-management and social experimentation threw a bone to the libertarians, anarcho-capitalists and neoliberals’.13 After the municipal elections of 1977, the catch cry of the Communist Party and the Socialists was patience. These elections saw the Union of the Left succeed and set them up for the forthcoming legislative elections in ’78. The Union of the Left did not denounce the Giscard government nor inaugurate a determined struggle against austerity and the Barre Plan to open a greater horizon for the workers’ movement. Giscard was left free to manoeuvre; the Socialist Party and the Communist Party let the combative workers’ movement waste time. As the legislative elections approached, Bensaïd noted that realism and responsibility reigned within their ranks, ‘in a society where the state is not only the guarantor of but part of the economy, where the parliamentary parties are not only the changing alliances of pressure groups but alternative administrative apparatuses, the pc like the ps were seized by the sinister logic of numbers and technocratic credibility’.14

12 13 14

Bensaïd 1980a, pp. 5–7. Bensaïd 1980a, p. 6. Bensaïd 1980a, p. 14.

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Bensaïd’s retrospective judgment of L’anti-Rocard was that it made an effort to criticise the neoliberal logic of Rocard’s second Left. Mitterrand was able to reject Rocard’s actions at the Metz Congress (where Rocard had challenged Mitterrand for leadership). Bensaïd’s intervention was one of the last he wrote in the context of the strategic polemics of the 1970s, with its disputes about the state, Eurocommunism, market democracy and hegemony.15 Bensaïd’s critique followed three lines of argumentation: a description of the emergence of the new ideology, a confrontation with Rocard in terms of a Marxist analysis of the state and, lastly, a dispute over the Rocardians’ strategic thought and their convergence with Eurocommunism. In Bensaïd’s reading, Rocard propagated a set of ideological assumptions. He began with the consumer of commodities, not the producer exploited by capital; he abused the theoretical language of political economy, failing to grasp the transformations of the capitalist mode of production (since the Second World War) that have their basis in the fundamental laws of capitalism – law of value, the tendency for the rate of profit to fall and its equalisation; Rocard furthermore focused exclusively on parliamentary representation, which Bensaïd called the model sphere for consumers, of citizens detached from producers; in the last instance, Rocard called for a renewed class collaboration and consensus, to stabilise class relations. Bensaïd wrote at a time when the strategic debate was closing. Yet, his challenge to Rocard’s division of the French workers’ movement into two cultures, one a statist culture (a legacy of Jacobinism and Stalinism) and the other an autonomist and decentralised tradition, retains a validity because it shows that strategic concepts and cultures are void if left in themselves. According to Rocard, the statist culture had its roots in the Jacobin and Napoleon administrations, namely their authoritarian territorial and linguistic unification; the statist tradition was nationalist and associated with the republican bourgeoisie. For Bensaïd, it was injudicious to superimpose this statism onto the French labour movement, especially after the Paris Commune and the traditions of anarcho-syndicalism. Bensaïd wrote, ‘Why not tell the cruel truth: that the political leadership, corrupted to the bone by parliamentary politics has progressively subjected the working class to ministerial interests and the Union sacrée, though not without battles and conflicts’.16 The decentralised culture was articulated by the Socialist Party and the cfdt, it insisted on the self-determination of workers, autonomy, decentralisation and experimentation – the institutionalisation of local administration. Rocard wanted

15 16

Bensaïd 2013, pp. 180–1. Bensaïd 1980a, p. 36.

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self-management in fragments at the local level while leaving critical decisions to parliament and the president, of which Bensaïd wrote, … That the French workers’ movement has been permeated by the culture of the ruling class, by its Jacobin and positivist ideology is without a doubt. But it is necessary to also say that, each in their own way, the reformist leadership of Social Democracy and the Stalinists have been active agents of this culture and this ideology within the workers’ movement. Only an authentically revolutionary politics is able to give birth to another social organisation, another form of power, by consequence an alternative culture in a broader sense.17 Bensaïd insisted on the self-activity of workers’ struggle against the bourgeois renovations of the workers’ movement. He had already criticised parliamentarian ideologies of autogestion in the mid-1970s in a review of Rosanvallon’s L’Age de autogestion,18 an important book because Rosanvallon was the chief editor of cfdt Today; the book was an insight into the thinking of a section of the French trade union bureaucracy. Rosanvallon had attacked Marx for his so-called lack of politics (this charge was central to the crisis of Marxism in France), attacking Marxism because Stalin suffocated forms of direct democracy to the benefit of the bureaucratic state. Bensaïd disagreed with Rosanvallon’s genealogical, idealist and ideological approach, but he also challenged the idea that autogestion was a term that went beyond the divide between reform and revolution. Rosanvallon tied this to a strategy of appropriating the means of power, but this had no concrete revolutionary substance; it was simply a cover for a strategic and political retreat. According to Bensaïd, no political notion has an intrinsic strategic value. Instead, its content is defined by the way it fits into a concrete political field, and the problem of the capitalist state, its function, forms of dual power and revolutionary rupture, each in the context of workers’ self-activity.

3

Perspectives of the Ligue

Bensaïd’s polemic against Rocard’s neo-reformism articulated an alternative strategic argument, much of which was already present and explicit in Ben-

17 18

Bensaïd 1980a, p. 38. Bensaïd 1976.

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saïd’s disputes over revolutionary strategy throughout the 1970s; the polemic was transitional in the sense that shortly after, the cycle of strategic polemics closed. Bensaïd based his argument on the revolutionary conquest of power; this was the only way a strategic discussion could resolve the classic binary between reform and revolution without engineering a third way. If one thinks of the future based on past experience, Bensaïd supposed that the twentieth century showed that two strategic hypotheses were viable, the insurrectional general strike and the prolonged people’s war.19 According to Bensaïd, the insurrectional general strike pertained to societies in which capitalism had developed, presupposing decades of autonomous working-class self-activity; elements of it featured in the Paris Commune, Russian Revolutions, German Revolution of 1918–23, Italian factory occupations, the Spanish Revolution of 1936, the Chilean and Portuguese Revolutions. Bensaïd did not ‘exclude all possibility of an electoral victory for the workers’ parties, or more simply, that an electoral victory occupies an essential place in the concatenation of a revolutionary process’.20 On the other hand, Bensaïd was quite clear that ‘it would be criminal to renounce – under this pretext – all preparation for the violent confrontation, which all the experiences from the past have shown that it was, if not inevitable, at least the most probable’.21 At the turn of the 1980s, Bensaïd held that: the new wave of mass radicalisation, since the end of the 1960s, brings back in force the major tendencies of the classical revolutionary crises. Under more or less developed forms the aspiration to construct councils, committees, workers’ and housing commissions is manifest … that which has become body and flesh … is the actuality of the socialist revolution. It is above all the Leninist concept of revolutionary crisis, without which, the taking of power by the proletariat – an exploited class that is dominated ideologically – becomes strictly unthinkable. Without the sudden metamorphoses of millions of workers, who at that moment break the infernal cycle of their submission to capitalism and alienation, the ability of the proletariat to establish itself as a dominant class, to emerge from nothing to become everything, becomes a practically insoluble question. This is why any retraction of the revolutionary crisis sooner or later leads to the replacement of a revolutionary perspective by a gradual and

19 20 21

Bensaïd 1980a, p. 157. Bensaïd 1980a, p. 159. Ibid.

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electoral process of partial conquests – sacrificing the goal to the movement – disarming the workers in the face of the inevitable convulsions of the class struggle. The strategic perspective of the insurrectional general strike is inseparable from this idea of revolutionary crisis, conceived not as a providential moment where the contradictions resolve themselves by themselves, but as the culmination of a long preparatory work consciously orientated to this test of truth.22 For Bensaïd, revolutionary strategy involved the insurrectionary general strike, which had an important history in the Ligue; the notion founded a revolutionary identity. Artous 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’.23 The insurrectionary general strike gave a revolutionary meaning to their daily practice. But it was nothing more than a propaganda device. Bensaïd held two ideas together, a perspective about the political situation in France and a general strategic argument that may or may not be valid independent of the initial political perspective. However, their subsequent disarticulation raised a series of interrelated issues: expectations for a revolutionary crisis may not be able to answer new political problems, the workers’ movement may undergo different forms of recomposition, revolutionary organisations may remain small and ineffective, and how revolutionaries could modify the relations between themselves and reformists in favour of revolutionaries. In terms of Bensaïd’s complex of strategic concepts, the dilemma is real because dual power will never emerge ex nihilo the moment a social-political crisis transpires without accumulating prior experiences and the elevation of working-class consciousness. May ’68 had demonstrated this. If working-class self-organisation is to defend its autonomy from trade-union bureaucrats and reformist politicians, it must be consciously developed. If the Ligue’s turn to the united front and the expectations for a revolutionary situation on the near-immediate horizon held together at the beginning of the 1980s, the latter perspective suffered a shock in the aftermath of Mitterrand’s election. As already mentioned, the Ligue thought that if Mitterrand were to win the general elections, it would improve the relations of class forces and lead

22 23

Bensaïd 1980a, p. 160. Quoted from Johsua 2015, p. 106.

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to a gain in confidence for the working class, after two decades of the right in power. With workers looking to an electoral and political solution to their grievances, the Ligue was opposed to the Communists and Socialists splitting, the 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 Ligue communiste grouped around La vérité in the 1930s, the Ligue positioned themselves as fighters for unity when the Socialists and Communists were divided. They also emphasised unity from below to challenge this bureaucratic unity from above. On the other hand, when the two parties did collaborate, the Ligue emphasised the function of this unity, with a perspective towards the left government. Bensaïd explained what the Ligue 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.24 This positioning formed a part of their insurrectionary perspective, mentioned above. 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. Mitterrand had won a smashing victory. In December 1981, the Ligue 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 stabilisation 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

24

Bensaïd 1980b.

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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 1944.25 The Socialists and Communists had a majority in the government, which 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 raise their living standards. While the Ligue 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, they propagandised as if it could. Nevertheless, the Ligue was 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 Ligue’s fourth congress in 1980, obliging members to get jobs in industry (an industrial turn). The stage seemed set for a possible débordement (in ordinary English, ‘spillover’, 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 Programme – since a powerful social movement against the Left in government was expected. Resting on an outdated analogy with the Popular Front of the 1930s, the fifth congress of the Ligue 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

25

Bensaïd 1982.

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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 Ligue’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 did not experience a deeper radicalisation from where the radical Left could take things further. The working class remained more acquiescent than expected, faced with austerity and falling real wages, 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 159to 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.26 The lack of a generalised workers’ response disoriented the Ligue. Crucially, as the last wave of radicalisation kicked off by May ’68 was becoming 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 was not an actuality but an abstract idea that might 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 Ligue was coming to a close.

26

Fournier 1983, pp. 117–34.

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Bensaïd and Harman on the Crisis of the European Revolutionary Left

By the late 1970s the symptoms of a generalised crisis of the European revolutionary Left had already appeared; Chris Harman, the British Marxist, wrote perhaps one of the most insightful and far-sighted contributions (The Crisis of the European Revolutionary Left) which made the crisis intelligible, seeking to provide the cure. For Harman, the expectations that were raised as a result of the workers’ movement and the growth of the revolutionary left from the late 60s to the mid-70s, ‘look absurd in retrospect’ and ‘the failure of these expectations to find fulfilment that led straight into the crisis of the revolutionary left’. By the mid-1970s, ‘Institutions aimed at tying workers to bourgeois society had to a very large extent filled the void, and the revolutionary left began to find the going hard’.27 According to Harman, by 1975–76 the revolutionary Left was already marginalised. After this point, ‘workers were prepared to see their struggles restricted within the limits prescribed by the reformists’. In short, the reformists revitalised their forces and the mood of the working-class changed. Harman concluded, ‘Revolutionary patience is the order of the day’, because ‘[t]he only way out of such situations is to wait for the class itself to move’ again.28 Bensaïd responded to Harman’s intervention in turn. This debate asked the essential question: is the crisis of the extreme left to be seen as primarily the product of a conjuncture of downturn in the workers’ movement? Bensaïd’s central thesis was that ‘the various tendencies represented by the extreme left organisations, which had broken away to the left of the traditional reformist parties, are, in a number of variant forms, the refraction of fundamental tendencies within the international working-class movement’, and that their crisis stems from, ‘a radical change in the political conjuncture on a European and world scale, compared with their phase of initial growth’: With the development of the economic crisis, the context of trade union struggles changed. The need for an alternative political solution made itself much more sharply felt at the same time as the main organisations of the working-class movement moved into the front line to save the system. It was in this context that the extreme left organisations lost the initiative they had won in the previous years. Unable to act as alternative leaderships most of the organisations either adopted a stageist and real27 28

Harman 1979. Ibid.

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istic perspective of waiting for a necessary reformist experience to overspill its limits, or else took up an ultra-left sectarian position. We consider that in this changed situation, the extreme left organisations have come up against a double problem; firstly a problem of programme followed by a problem of social implantation.29 Bensaïd denied the reality of the downturn, writing: So has there been a downturn in working-class combativity since the mid-seventies? There is no serious evidence to suggest such a thing. 1975 was marked by the revolutionary explosion in Portugal, 1976 by the most massive working-class upsurge in Europe, in Spain, and an absolute record for days lost in strikes … Overall the level of working-class struggle has stabilized at a level which is clearly higher than in the sixties.30 Bensaïd’s perspective was impatient and misrecognised the developing situation. Bensaïd argued that, within the working class, ‘the differentiations which had appeared are remaining and developing with the emergence of oppositional tendencies in the unions’, and the significant tendency of distrust among the working class at an electoral level. The significant recomposition of the European workers’ movement was still ahead of them. In response to Harman’s question, ‘why the European working class accepted reformist measures’, Bensaïd argued that: The proletariat in these countries accepted (in its majority) solutions based on class collaboration, not because it was broken and on the retreat, but because it didn’t possess any other tools to face the crisis than the traditional organisations, because after thirty years of growth and partial gains, it was still deeply steeped in reformist illusions, because there is still no alternative revolutionary leadership, and no network of conscious militants in the factories and unions who could provide the framework of an alternative leadership.31 According to Bensaïd, the main determinant factor in the situation was subjective and programmatic, because there was a ‘gap between militancy and consciousness’; the problems were entirely subjective: 29 30 31

Bensaïd 1980b. Ibid. Ibid.

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We are taking into account the objective changes in the situation, and the fluctuations in the conjuncture, but we say that in the last analysis subjective causes remain determinant in the crisis of the extreme left. We do not believe it has been crushed by the situation and by the irresistible rise of the reformist parties.32 For Bensaïd, the crisis of the far Left could not be ‘interpreted mechanistically’, ‘Either they mark the beginning of a downturn, or they are the expression of a phase of political maturation in the working class before a new offensive’. Where Harman pushed towards downturn, Bensaïd claimed that ‘Essentially the assaults in Europe are still ahead of us, and we do not believe that a gradual deterioration of the social relations of forces is possible after thirty years of uninterrupted growth and accumulation of new and intact forces on the side of the working class’.33 According to Bensaïd, the relations between reformists and revolutionaries were on the threshold of a recomposition, a perspective based in the Ligue’s expectations in the context of Mitterrand’s victory. For Harman, reformism had won this round of upheaval and stabilised, implying that revolutionary Marxists had no option but to dig in for a slow but impatient rebuilding.34 Harman wrote, in words that could be taken from Bensaïd years later, that: [R]evolutionary patience must not be confused with sectarian passivity. It means seizing every opportunity to intervene in struggle, using those opportunities to test the organisation, to draw to it the best new activists, to build its reputations within the class, and to slowly move towards the necessary party.35

5

Dubious Methodological Assumptions: Are There Really Gaps and Delays in History?

Bensaïd would radically alter his perspectives from the mid- to late 1980s; the collapse of these perspectives also made him cautious of normative notions of historical development grounded on so-called gaps and delays between the militancy of the working class and its consciousness. Bensaïd articulated 32 33 34 35

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Harman 1979.

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another modality of historical temporality to deal with the presence of an absence (the absence of revolution) with his move away from the notion of gaps and delays, because these words were invoked to handle the absence of revolution. Bensaïd made an explicit critique of Mandel, who spoke about gaps or delays in history. Bensaïd described Mandel’s notion of a gap or a delay by setting out from Trotsky’s formula in the Transitional Programme that ‘the crisis of humanity’ is reduced to the crisis of its revolutionary leadership, Mandel often had recourse, in taking into account of an unexpected turn of events, to the notion of delay. The objective conditions of the revolution will be nearly always ripe, indeed overripe. Lacking only is the ‘subjective factor’, absent or at least considerably behind in relation to the right moment of history.36 Mandel’s normative conception of historical development proposed a delay between the material conditions and consciousness; consciousness is supposed to follow behind material reality and, at some point, catch up with it. For Bensaïd, this was to make a slip in the presuppositions of historical knowledge and politics because ‘the notion of “delay” … presupposes a debatable normative conception of historical development … Moreover, it introduces a problematic relation … between the ‘objective conditions’ and the ‘subjective conditions’ of revolutionary action. If the objective conditions are as promising as is claimed, how can we explain the fact that the subjective factor is so unreliable in most of its incarnations’?37 In this situation, paranoia regarding betrayal can take root alongside an exacerbated voluntarism; the normative concept of history is more consolation than a deconstruction of illusions.

6

Alteration of Perspectives in the 1980s

To grasp Bensaïd’s breakthrough in Marxist theory, one needs to be attentive to the rupture with normative conceptions of historical development and the transformation of Bensaïd’s political perspectives throughout the 1980s. By the mid-1980s, Bensaïd began to accept that a deep historical turn was underway, which was part of a rectification the Ligue collectively undertook.

36 37

Bensaïd 2010a, p. 163. Ibid.

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Florence Johsua captured the crisis that developed within the Ligue at this time, which came to understand Mitterrand’s victory as a defeat. For Johsua, 1984 should be singled out when noting the change in perspective the Ligue experienced: At the sixth congress of the organisation, in January 1984, the theses advanced the idea of an error in the analysis of the 1981 events and of its necessary ‘rectification, from a re-evaluation of the context of the May 10 victory’, are adopted by a majority of delegates. The years 1983–4 appear thus as transitional years … Nevertheless, at the centre of the congress debates, the question of the re-evaluation of the political period thus acquired a legitimacy and an actuality throughout the organisation. The different contributions published at the end of 1983 in the lcr’s journal, Critique Communiste reflect, through their diversity and their contradictions, the image of a disorientated organisation. The first text presented by the outgoing majority began by sketching the framework in which this preparatory debate had unfolded: ‘A situation where many doubts assail worker militants, where bitterness and disarray is spreading among the workers’, recognising that ‘things have not happened as [they had] foreseen’.38 Bensaïd outlined iterations of these difficulties in his Contribution to a necessary debate on the political situation and our party-building project, published in Critique Communiste in 1986 and 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 Ligue was at a limit point. The previous period of the Ligue oriented with the hypothesis that the class struggle would accelerate, reaching a revolutionary crisis in time, the context in which the organisation could make a rapid breakthrough (the latter assumption was part of the structure of the normative expectation of a revolutionary crisis that would come on time). The Ligue thought they were living through an epoch of the ‘actuality of revolution’. Crucially, in the 1986 contribution, Bensaïd spoke of the collapse of a project that hadn’t yet been replaced; the project worked with the expectation of 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,

38

Johsua 2015, p. 48.

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was an expression of the failure of this, still over-optimistic perspective’.39 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.40 Bensaïd made a significant shift to building a revolutionary project over the long term. His conception of Lenin’s politics changed emphasis; Lenin became the symbol of continuity, of maintaining a political tradition with its accumulation of experiences, even if it ‘can appear routine to build a long-term independent organisation, in the 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’.41 Bensaïd’s shift of perspective in the 1980s accompanied the so-called crisis of the workers’ movement. Again, this relates to the fetishisation of Trotsky’s transitional program; the fetishisation structured the belief that the workers’ movement had retained its essential reference points from the October Revolution; the assumption, then, was that there still existed a live debate with common reference points between the revolutionary Left and the reformist parties of Social Democracy and communism. However, 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 in the 1930s.

39 40 41

Fabio Mascaro Querido’s unpublished materials. Published with permission. Bensaïd lectures to Amsterdam cadre school, 1983/4. Bensaïd lectures to Amsterdam cadre school 1983/4.

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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. Since that time, a lot of water had flowed under the bridge’.42 The Fourth International’s shift was a settling of accounts with an old ‘propagandist’ vision within the post-war Trotskyist movement. In the former vision, the ‘programme becomes the “conscious” expression of an “unconscious” historical process and de facto functions like a norm. Its use is above all to gauge how 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 alternative to the perspective based on Trotsky’s transitional programme was a commitment to rebuilding trade unionism and working-class politics, which was to be an uneven process of building over the long term. According to Bensaïd, the uneven recomposition and transformation would accompany class struggles, and the effects of new experiences produced by these struggles embodied in organisations and radical cultures. This was a new perspective for renovating the workers’ movement at a political and union level. In another sense, throughout the 1980s, revolutionary Marxists found themselves embarked on a situation of transition in the workers’ movement, ‘a situation of the “no longer” and of the “not yet”, between a historical cycle that was finishing and a new one that was just beginning’. There are four elements one may resume from Bensaïd’s perspective within this transition. First of all, there is the commitment to building resistance in partial struggles, working through the memory of the workers’ movement, defended and practised by a revolutionary organisation made of cadres with a strategic perspective of the working class taking power; second, there is a recognition of the historical crisis of the workers’ movement, in which a cycle of class struggle and historical culture

42 43

Bensaïd 2010a, pp. 91–2. Ibid.

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of the workers’ movement was coming to an end, hence the situation of ‘no longer’ and ‘not yet’, from which Bensaïd drew out the need to pay attention to the details of patient rebuilding; third, Bensaïd thought that the starting point for rebuilding was quite different to that which faced socialists in the late nineteenth century, because of the small size of revolutionary cadres which faced off against the powerful bureaucracies of the labour movement; last, Bensaïd made the case for a theoretical rearmament, which involved elaboration and outward looking debate, each of which could flow back into a revolutionary organisation. As is clear, Bensaïd was capable of sharp re-orientation when the political situation shifted, holding onto the best acquisitions of his political current. Resisting the defeats in the 1980s (and early 1990s) was also due to activists involved in campaigns and their trade union struggles, perhaps to the detriment of party building. This participation perhaps led to a loosening up of their organisation, ‘there had certainly been a movementist and trade unionist tendency of the Ligue in the 1980s’.44 From the mid-1990s, the Ligue tried to correct this kind of movementism with a greater emphasis on ‘the political field’. At the same time, they also began to recruit again. Electoralism threatened this shift toward politics. 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 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.45

44 45

Daniel Bensaïd and Pierre Rousset 2007, Un étrange bilan. Daniel Bensaïd, Leninism in the 21st century, interview with Phil Hearse.

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A Critical Return to May ’68

When Bensaïd returned to the May events some twenty years later, he asked a simple question: why did May–June 1968 constitute a singular event? Bensaïd wrote, in Mai si! (alongside Krivine), ‘In the turmoil of history, what merits elevation to the dignity of the event? The great “bifurcations” Blanqui responded to, without a doubt, the only chapter that open to hope: the slight irruption of the possible glimpsed in the chronological routine of the real’.46 The Benjaminian messianic took shape in Bensaïd’s writings, which was a political reading of history counterposed to a utopia that emphasised the opening of ‘the narrow gate through which the possible can enter at any moment’; this political messianism, to be presented in the next chapter, read history from the vantage point of the possible(s) instead of the surrender to the real, ‘it is the liberty of unaccomplished facts opposed to the dictatorship of fait accompli’.47 Bensaïd’s return to the May events shows, for the first time explicitly in this work, the symptoms, themes and references that would become more central to Bensaïd’s subsequent oeuvre – references to Walter Benjamin, Charles Péguy, Auguste Blanqui. In the largest general strike of France’s history, the encounter between the student movement and the workers’ movement constituted the singularity of the event. Bensaïd and Krivine evoked the image of the general strike: We must evoke the spirit of the general strike, its liberations, its transfigurations and metamorphoses. A general strike is something quite different to a sum of local strikes, different to a great day of action that continues and prolongs itself for a month. Suddenly, the iron circle of exploitation, of submission to the clock, of subordination to the machine is broken. The idols of daily order collapse: the fetishism of the commodity, the fetishism of money and the fetishism of the state. Relations between people retake precedence over relations between things of which they were held captive. We must not look elsewhere for the source of this rediscovery of speech, communication, sociability, experienced in astonishment and enchantment. We have often described the night of the tenth of May, rue Gay-Lussac, where, without too much commotion, the residents watched their cars burn, some even giving up their keys to make things easier. We have told stories of smokers, accepting in calm the privation of tobacco …48 46 47 48

Bensaïd and Krivine 1988, p. 11. Bensaïd and Krivine 1988, p. 61. Bensaïd and Krivine 1988, p. 14.

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Bensaïd related the May events to the mass strike, elucidating the openings and limits of the May events. As mentioned in the chapter on Lenin, Bensaïd was a close reader of the mass strike debates in German Social Democracy and Luxemburg’s pamphlet on it. In general, the mass strike – considered a decisive political problem of class struggle – related to the May ’68 events and their political consequences. Just as large-scale strike movements developed in Europe between 1902 and 1905 (Russian Empire, Italy, Germany and Belgium), the Belgian strikes of 1960–61, the explosion of struggle in Turin of 1962 and the anti-fascist riots of Genoa in 1960, the Asturias struggles of 1962–67 and the 1965 struggles in Greece heralded May ’68. Bensaïd, on many occasions, returned to the May events, making them politically intelligible, discerning just how the past attains meaning in the present, a means of remaining on the lookout for open possibilities of class struggle in the future. Comparison with Luxemburg’s mass strike and May ’68 provided an opportunity to think through the political limits of the latter, which also opened another way of posing the role mass strikes might have in advanced capitalist countries. In the ’68 events, no national confederation of the unions called for a general strike and none put forward the slogan for a prolonged general strike. The call for a protracted general strike was rare in the French workers’ movement: 1 May 1906 for the eight-hour day, May 1920, 12 February 1934 against the fascist threat, in November 1938, during the Liberation for the insurrectional strike and in November 1947. Bensaïd and Krivine pointed out that: In each of these cases, the strike takes on a political function. That’s the crux of the matter. All throughout May and June, the union leadership and the left-wing parties upheld a strict division of labour. The strike must remain a large protest movement under the direction of the unions while the parties concoct political solutions on the institutional and parliamentary terrain. A call for a general strike would become at the same time directly and explicitly political.49 A significant problem of May ’68 was that concerning the massive size of the movement, occasions where the rank and file went beyond the bureaucratic leaderships of the cgt and the pcf were sparse. Bensaïd and Krivine argued, ‘One of the decisive characteristics of 1968 is there – in the gap between the enormity, the depth, “the tranquil force”, of the mobilization on the one hand

49

Bensaïd and Krivine 1988, p. 24.

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and the limits of its content and its forms of organisation on the other’.50 No major ruptures or fractures took place throughout the May–June events, the most important effects were delayed, with the radicalisation in the cfdt, differentiations in the pcf and the cgt, the formation and consolidation of the far-left that is more and more implanted in the workplaces.51 The small revolutionary groups recruited worker militants. But, contrary to what was to happen a year later in Italy, the worker-student dialogue ‘remained the exception’.52 While the French bourgeoisie was fragile, no forms of dual power emerged and not much moved in the military, strike committees and experiences of workers’ control remained the exceptions; in subjective terms, there was no network of working-class militants implanted and capable of a conscious, political and decided struggle against the bureaucratic leaders. From the May–June ’68 events, according to Bensaïd, the most advanced layer of workers to emerge remained superficially politicised and did not form workplace organisations comparable to the Italian council delegates or the shop stewards in Britain. The workers’ combativity and the confidence won in ’68 were more easily channelled (from 1972, with the signing of the Common Programme) into an electoral perspective of class collaboration. Bensaïd claimed that the singular event of May–June 1968 constituted a pre-revolutionary situation, neither a cultural revolution nor a revolutionary situation; on the far-left, there was a debate between the Maoists and the Trotskyists about the nature of the event, namely whether or not it was a revolutionary or a pre-revolutionary situation. For Bensaïd and Krivine, the question was difficult to answer because there were no exact quantities and measurements that could answer it, and the situation was in development such that it was unable to be captured by a static answer. However, Bensaïd and Krivine were reluctant to call it a revolutionary situation because they did not think that workers’ spontaneity or the class combativity of a few weeks or months could overcome the hitherto existing weaknesses; instead, they described it as a pre-revolutionary situation; many camps attacked this description as too halfhearted and moderate. Accordingly, Bensaïd and Krivine wrote: Some spoke of an ‘objectively revolutionary situation’. And subjectively? A curious logic separates object and subject off from each other. If the situation was so clearly revolutionary, how does one explain that the ‘subjective factor’ didn’t develop out of it profoundly changed? That May ’68 50 51 52

Bensaïd and Krivine 1988, pp. 26–7. Bensaïd and Krivine 1988, pp. 42–3. Bensaïd and Krivine 1988, p. 43.

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didn’t result in a successful revolution or the birth of a revolutionary mass party at the very least? Questioning the limits of their growth, the same revolutionary organisations, ourselves included (while the shortfalls were attributable to their own errors) didn’t fail to point to certain limits … in the ‘objective situation’. A fatal dialectic! The defect is in the root. A critical situation can be characterized by a series of elements, as Lenin does, without which one disembodies the totality. This, the ‘subjective factor’, was lacking in 1968, but not in the sense of a missing piece to be juxtaposed to other pieces of the puzzle. Its absence rebounded on the whole: on the terms of the crisis at the top, on the forms of mobilization from below and on the trajectory of the intermediate layers. In addition, it is necessary to be precise about what this missing piece consisted of exactly. We said at the time: the lack of a revolutionary party. It was clearly true. But it was only half of a response, because it isolated one factor from other determinations. Hence the conclusion that it was enough to find the spare part to fill the void – as soon as possible. This is the implicit and explicit foundation of an unrestrained voluntarism and ultra-leftism after ’68. Excessive activism and symbolic actions were supposed to overcome the lack of a revolutionary party that merits the name, as quickly as possible. The weakness of the organized revolutionary forces at the beginning of the movement can be attributed to the harmful effects of Stalinism and Social Democracy. But, so as not to fall into fanatical idealism, it also expressed, in a deformed way, a more general state of the working-class, of its combative layers and of its natural vanguards in the workplaces and the unions. The political vanguard of the working class implies a ground which is made of daily struggles and accumulated experiences.53 The reconstruction of the ‘ground’ of politics was perhaps the decisive question to emerge from the ’68 events and then the downturn.

8

The Crisis of Marxism

If the events of May–June seemed to put the actuality of revolution onto the agenda for the advanced capitalist countries, after some decades of the anticolonial struggle actualising it in the global south, the late 1970s reversed the prospects. They led to the so-called crisis of Marxism. The crisis of Marxism

53

Bensaïd and Krivine 1988, pp. 42–3.

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(which Bensaïd thought was a problematic notion if written in the singular) transpired in a historical-political situation in which the three sectors of the global revolution, symbolised by the world capitals of the process – Paris in the advanced West, Da Nang in the anti-colonial South and Prague in the bureaucratically controlled East – failed to combine in an internationalist encounter. For Bensaïd and Krivine, before the defeats, the three fronts of the global revolution took steps forward at nearly the same pace. They were about to join up, in the great festival of resuscitated internationalism. The egalitarian and democratic dream, justice and liberty finally reconciled: that was for tomorrow, perhaps even for today. At the ‘tribunal of history’, the verdict was imminent.54 Bensaïd recollected, in his Une lente impatience, how the crisis was threefold: a theoretical crisis of Marxism, a strategic crisis of the revolutionary project, and a crisis of the social subject capable of winning universal emancipation. These three elements combined with an ideological offensive against Marxism. In the 1980s, however, Bensaïd made the case that the ideological offensive, despite its trite, banal and hollow nature, would not simply be overcome when the next wave of social struggle emerged. Instead, Bensaïd operated under the assumption that struggles and liberatory practices would inevitably emerge, conditioning the ideological struggle; however, the depth of the traumas was such that the mere contextual re-emergence of class struggles would not alone be enough to rectify the traumas. At stake was a mutation in the international workers’ movement and the actuality and possibility of the socialist revolution in the advanced capitalist countries, into which three elements of negativity had set in: The Stalinist regimes deformed ideas of a liberated society, the Cambodian and Iranian struggles disarticulated the bond between national liberation and social revolution and in the advanced West, the revolutionary working class did not prove its capabilities through victory. Bensaïd raised five questions that traversed the so-called crisis of Marxism: first, was the working class still a revolutionary subject capable of taking power and consolidating it? Second, what was the role of the modern bourgeois state and its relationship to society. Could the state wither away? Third, what kinds of strategic orientations were needed, and what would the conditions of possibility for the revolutionary conquest of power be? Fourth, how relevant was ‘Leninism’? Fifth, what were the new geopolitical dynamics of imperialist rivalry, and how could international-

54

Bensaïd and Krivine 1988, p. 67.

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ist class solidarities be maintained beyond national boundaries? According to Bensaïd, answering these questions was necessary to build an organisation in a period of defeat and reconfiguration and featured in his subsequent research.

9

The Collapse of the Stalinist Economies: Take the Alka Seltzer or Pop the Champagne?

Bensaïd had a major part in writing A la gauche du possible, a manifesto of the Ligue making an effort to reorient a revolutionary project in the conditions opened by the collapse of the Stalinist regimes. Written at the time of the tenth congress of the Ligue, held from 20–23 February in Saint-Denis and three years after the last conference of January 1989, it came to terms with the contours of a new given reality. The Sandinistas lost electoral ground in Nicaragua, the Berlin Wall had fallen, revolution hit Czechoslovakia and Romania, and Germany was reunified; the ussr collapsed, the United States invaded Iraq, there was war in the Balkans and the Maastricht Treaty was signed. As Bensaïd wrote, the century was at a turning point that would affect politics from left to right: it was just as urgent to know how to gain altitude, to evaluate the mutations underway without ceding to the fruitless temptation of tabula rasa. The collapse of the Stalinian imposture offers us the right and the chance to recommence. But we never set out again from zero. Therefore, at the threshold of new uncertain battles, we wanted to make an inventory of our baggage.55 ‘We have never confused the emancipatory movements of people in the world with military successes and the expansion of the so-called “socialist camp” … From Budapest to Berlin, from Prague to Warsaw, we have always taken the side of the workers and peoples against those of State interests and its bureaucratic priesthood’.56 The Ligue was in a good position to go forward. However, once the Eastern European bureaucratic regimes collapsed, should one have gotten out the champagne or called for some Alka Seltzer?57 Did the collapse of the

55 56 57

Ligue communiste révolutionnaire 1991, p. 6. Bensaïd had a key role in writing this manifesto. Ligue communiste révolutionnaire 1991, p. 11. According to the testimony of Gerard Filoche, both he and Bensaïd ransacked the vocabularies of every language represented at the Congress, to find the words for Alka-Seltzer

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bureaucratic regimes mean that a popular revolutionary workers’ movement would take off where the Stalinist reaction left off?58 Bensaïd himself said in an interview: I was convinced at that moment [fall of the Berlin wall] that the scenario according to which we were to see the soviet culture or the culture of the German workers’ councils re-emerge … – after a long parenthesis, a historical parenthesis – this scenario was no longer in touch with current reality. That had been the traditional one of the currents of the Left Opposition, or Trotskyists and some of our intellectual references. I remember a meeting given by Ernest Mandel, in January 1990, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, at the Mutualité. For Ernest it was the end of the grand parenthesis. He said: voilà the Leipzig demonstrations in Germany, ‘we are the people’, we come back to Rosa Luxemburg … If one looks at what was then debated in the Soviet Union: nobody spoke about Bukharin or Trotsky … That comes from afar … this memory has been broken, there is a discontinuity. It was rottener than we had imagined, particularly in the ussr … In East Germany, perhaps, we were less surprised, because, finally, one had seen the fall over very quickly … For us, the passage in some weeks from the slogan ‘we are the people’ – meaning that there is a ‘we’ and ‘them’, ‘them’ being the apparatus, the Stasi, the bureaucracy, call it what you wish but it was to install a form of antagonism … – to ‘we are one people’, the slogan for German reunification, meaning the overthrow of the bureaucracy in Germany to make way for the reunification of greater capitalist Germany.59

58

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and champagne, throwing them into the battle of erudition. Between these two figures it was always a matter of Rennes versus Toulouse via the Parisian metropolis. Budgen 2010. Budgen explained Bensaïd’s response to the fall of the bureaucratic regimes: ‘The collapse of the Stalinist states, starting with the dismantling of the Berlin Wall in 1989, caught Daniel in a sober and perturbed state of mind. He was quite at odds with Mandel’s confident predictions of the imminent uprising of the East German proletariat to sweep away the remnants of the bureaucracy and protect the conquests of the deformed workers’ state, thereby reactivating the dormant militant traditions of the German Revolution of 1918–23. After two decades of hopeful examination of the oriental horizon for the sparks of proletarian revolution, the reality of the collapse was deflationary, not to say shabby’. Bensaïd 2009, interview 17 April 2009 with Marcel Trillat and Maurice Failevic. He said in his autobiography of the event: ‘In January 1990, Ernest Mandel spoke at the Mutualité for a Ligue meeting on the events in Germany. After the long parenthesis of Stalinism, he essentially said, the revolution was starting up again at the point where it had halted with the murder of Rosa Luxemburg. The citizens’ committees of Dresden and Berlin linked up with the tradition of the workers’ councils of Saxony and Bavaria … These lit-

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This explains the binary pairs of champagne or Alka Seltzer. The collapse of Stalinism was necessary, opening up a new field of political possibilities for the class struggle. But, at the same time, the effacement of the Stalinist regimes did not automatically lead to a renewed politics of working-class self-emancipation, while it deconstructed whole sectors of the left. This twofold understanding of the crisis of the Stalinist states was the basis for the argument, that Bensaïd put forward, that it was necessary to accept that a bifurcation had taken place and a new cycle of political struggles needed to be had to renew a revolutionary tradition in the workers’ movement. Bensaïd explained that ‘the brutal crisis of the bureaucratic regime was inscribed for a long time in the logic of their contradictions’.60 However, ‘we thought that their fall would lead to an open struggle between two options: either capitalist restoration or a new popular revolution resuming its origins’. The latter option would rekindle the socialist revolution in the East. The Hungarian uprisings in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, up to the Solidarnosc experience in 1981 ‘indicated the possibility of it’. The fall of the bureaucratic regimes made clear that such an optimistic ‘dynamic was broken’ by repression, social and political regression, in turn breaking up memory, atomising the working class, with words – like socialism – being emptied of any meaning: In these conditions, the overthrow of the dictators of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union signify a liberation from a tyrannical yoke and the end of a historical cycle opened by the October Revolution. The reported failure of Stalinism rebounds on the socialist project itself and throws its viability into doubt. It will be necessary to accumulate new experiences and reinvent a language. This is a long apprenticeship.61 For Bensaïd, this was possible because class struggles and resistance emerge due to vital necessities of life, against injustice and humiliation, There is no less reason to revolt than there was a century or twenty years ago. To transform revolt into creative revolution, project and will

60 61

erary flights left many militants perplexed. They exchanged incredulous and dumbstruck glances. Glued to his principle of hope, his mythology, refusing to bury the world of yesterday and reconsider the commitment of a lifetime, Mandel’s speech no longer held up. The words floated and burst like bubbles above a perplexed audience. This sorry meeting subsequently appeared as the sign of an impending demise’. Bensaïd 2013, p. 264. Ligue communiste révolutionnaire 1991, p. 13. Ligue communiste révolutionnaire 1991, pp. 14–15.

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are needed. There are many who remain convinced that actually existing capitalism is driving to new disasters. Many also, after the debacle of really inexistent socialism, are those who doubt that another world will be possible. Time is necessary to learn again to imagine, not a perfect world … but simply projects for a society worth living in.62

10

From the Actuality of Revolution to the Left of the Possible

The narrative arc of this chapter has tracked the transition from the actuality of revolution to the left of the possible, names for two distinct perspectives adequate to their own specific conjunctures; the chapter has gone back and forth to work through the complexities of such a transition. The left of the possible, hardly an abandonment of the revolutionary project, opened for the call for a new party for a new period, a call pioneered by Bensaïd. The content of the left of the possible effectively held onto the hope for a revolutionary transformation of society notwithstanding the diagnosis of a multifaceted and overlapping set of crises: historical crisis of the workers’ movement, the crisis of socialist models, the crisis of strategy, the crisis of theory and the crisis of practice. These crises needed resolving to reconstruct a revolutionary project. As Bensaïd wrote, ‘the project of social transformation that has inspired the workers’ movement for over a century is going through a major crisis. How could we deny it?’ Furthermore, ‘there is indeed a general crisis of the workers’ movement, but in this crisis … not everyone bears the same responsibility’. For currents with their roots in the Left Opposition, there was ‘their [Stalinists and reformists – D.R.] crisis and ours’.63 Bensaïd’s response to the situation produced another reading of history, away from the normative notion of historical development, instead attuned to the bifurcations making up the materiality of historical change. Contrary to certain Trotskyist beliefs, ‘history doesn’t know parentheses. It moves through bifurcations’.64 To claim history knows parentheses is to suggest that Stalinism was a temporary interlude that strayed from history’s normative development. Hence, once Stalinism was over, history would develop where it left off, setting a rendezvous with the programme of the Fourth International, where History would deliver justice to the most intransigent opponents of Stalinism. According to Bensaïd, lacking a substantial socialist force, ‘able to revive in the short 62 63 64

Ligue communiste révolutionnaire 1991, pp. 27–8. Ligue communiste révolutionnaire 1991, p. 30. Ibid.

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term with the revolutionary tradition’, this normative hypothesis had to be set aside; it was null. There was, as a result, a deeper dimension to the problem of Stalinism: one cannot undo the pervasive corpse of Stalinism, close the episode and set off again on good footing. Before and after, words and ideas will no longer be the same. The dead continue to weigh on the living.65 With this weight of the past, the Ligue had to ‘return to these questions, on the dynamism of capital, on the nature of the bureaucratic societies’.66 Most vitally, Bensaïd insisted on the fact that the ‘bureaucratic counterfeits never constituted for us a model of society’. However, he argued, there were elements of further theoretical elaboration that needed attending to, so as to make concrete progress in the situation: To rebuild a revolutionary project, the effects of the past seventy years require rethinking without taboos, but without a tabula rasa, the relationships between the plan and commodity mechanisms, between the plan and self-management, between political democracy and social democracy, the transformation of work and production, the social relations between the sexes, the relations of society to nature, the condition of the individual and the status of law. Such a project is a guide for action and a permanent construction site. The demands for liberation aren’t born in theories or the dreams of some few people, but from the everyday struggle. Our communism isn’t the chimera of an ideal city or the end of history, but the movement always recommenced of human emancipation, the battle for the end of exploitation and oppression, for the end of forced labour, to overcome the mutilating division between producer and citizen, for the disappearance of the authoritarian state and for the abolition of the domination of one sex over another. It combines the development of individual abundance with collective practice. This is a radical humanism … that is to say, it incorporates the shared pleasure of every manifestation of life and human creation, to the suppression of every alienation in the face of money, power and religion.67

65 66 67

Ibid. Ligue communiste révolutionnaire 1991, p. 31. Ligue communiste révolutionnaire 1991, pp. 32–3.

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What about the strategies to change the world? For most of the twentiethcentury Stalinist and Social Democratic parties had a plan, a strategy, to implement their version of socialism. It was socialism from above, as Hal Draper would say. In France, the polemics around the Common Programme of the Left was one of the last moments of this reformist project. Until then – beyond their rivalry – the Stalinists and Social Democrats spoke a common language. It was a language of elections to take over the principle economic levers of society and nationalise the large industries. For the other soul of socialism, to retain the words of Hal Draper – which, Bensaïd was intrinsically a part of – the rebirth of a strategic project for the revolutionary left after the fall of the Stalinist regime remained conditioned by the enigma of the socialist revolution: how can an exploited majority of workers, how can women who are doubly exploited and excluded from the public sphere, radically break free of their condition of subordination to seize political and economic power, without delegating this power to an enlightened minority or bureaucratic elite? How could the majority begin a process of social and cultural transformation? Answers to these questions could come only from new historical experiences, the struggles to found liberated societies. Experience, far from needing to conform to pre-established models and dogmas, was instead the decisive materiality from which revolutionary strategy in the new millennium could be discovered, elucidated and constructed. No doubt, on Bensaïd’s argument, any novelty would continue to combine the heritage of the first half of the century, that of the Russian and German Revolutions, the Italian workers’ councils and the Spanish Civil War and those of the post-war period, from the French May and the Portuguese Revolution, from which the subversive tendencies of modern bourgeois societies can be read: generalised social self-organisation, aspiration towards control and self-management, the women’s liberation movement and the ecologist dimension. To reiterate the argument in Bensaïd’s own words: A chapter is closing, the book continues … With the disappearance of the bureaucratic dictatorships, our struggle against Stalinism changes its objective. It maintains a function, that of taking the lessons from this experience for future and daily practice. In the international workers’ movement and its revolutionary currents, quarrels are overcome and others lose their importance. The lines of division, yesterday, insurmountable, fade away. Others will appear. The dilapidation and the discreditation of the old apparatuses urgently pose the need for a new force of resistance and social transformation. It is the moment to rally and reconstruct. We don’t set out from nothing. To wipe the slate clean, as some have advocated, the Tours Congress, the Popular Front, May 68, in order

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to depart from zero, would be to add confusion to confusion. We remain for our part more than ever convinced that the capitalist system cannot be transformed gradually, that the consequent struggle for radical reforms drives to a point of rupture, and that there will be no socialism without revolution. But we will be ready to go through the experience loyal to a common and democratic party with all those who – not sharing these conclusions – will be determined to struggle for an intransigent defence of the exploited and oppressed, for their united and independent organisation from the interests of the bourgeoisie, for a perspective of socialisme autogestionnaire. We will be ready to, together, build a party that takes the lessons from the double negative experience of Stalinism and social democracy, contributing to the autonomous organisation of workers, women, and the youth. Such a convergence doesn’t imply complete agreement, neither on the interpretation of the past, nor on a worldview. It’s viability rests on a common comprehension of great events underway and the tasks that flow from them. It will enrich itself with new definitions on the basis of common experiences in action.68 Bensaïd’s experimental openness to discovery had a theoretical and interpretative dimension; again, there is another response to the so-called crisis of Marxism. As mentioned in passing above and will be made explicit in the chapter on Marx below, Bensaïd rejected the notion of a crisis of Marxism in the singular, precisely because Marxism isn’t ‘a truth revealed, nor a religious dogma, but a guide to action. It has known many interpretations, enrichments and developments’.69 Marx’s critical theory remains as present as its object: the capitalist mode of production, the object of inquiry for Marx, just as the unconscious was Freud’s object of inquiry. Marx’s practice of critique is not grounded on an idealist and metaphysical superiority of ‘Western reason’, but on a historicalpresent backdrop, namely the present universalisation of commodity relations, remaining a principle of intelligibility of their contradictions. Better than any other theory until now, it allows – if not to resolve – then at least to pose the question relating to the bureaucratic degeneration of the first socialist revolutions. Its function isn’t to predict or prophesise the future … but to grasp the tendencies of the present and to orientate ourselves in it.70 68 69 70

Ligue communiste révolutionnaire 1991, pp. 88–9. Ligue communiste révolutionnaire 1991, p. 37. Ibid.

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The collapse of the Eastern European bureaucratic-state capitalist regimes, far from signalling the death of Marxism (which turns Marxism into a state ideology) is in fact the condition of liberation for Marxist theory. For Bensaïd, ‘the collapse of this cult must allow a reopening of the great projects of reflection and give life to theory, beyond the obstacles, apologetic readings and official interpretations’. Crucially, in this endeavour, ‘without bearing responsibility for the crimes perpetrated in its name’, theoretical reflection must purge the traces of religiosity that has been used to legitimise them.71 With the proclamations about the crisis of Marxist theory came the interrogations about the crisis of practice: ‘even in the imperialist metropolis, a culture of the workers’ movement collapses without for the moment being replaced, to the point that the “farewell to the proletariat” sometimes expresses the contagious resignation before the eternal return of capital and the infernal round of its commodities’.72 Class consciousness was weakened as a result of past defeats and betrayals, yet the class struggle remained, as did the exploited classes. However, The effects of the new organisation of labour, the privatisation of everyday life, cultural atomisation, impede the capacity of the exploited to act collectively and to develop a consciousness of their historical interests. It is time to definitively let go of the religious representations that make the Proletariat the grand subject of the great narrative of History. A class organizes itself from its struggles and foundational experiences around the trade unions, its mutual societies, its associations, its parties, the women’s liberation movement. The class is not a homogenous subject. The instruments produced by the great past cycles (Russian Revolution, the world wars, the Popular Front, the Resistance and Liberation, and even 68) are exhausted without being relieved. They have left a workers’ movement weakened, divided and forgetful, grappling with a doubtful past, whereas the right is going on the offensive on the terrain of memory and national myths.73 Bensaïd’s argument attacked historical fetishes, which essentially were ideological and idealist, having no place in a materialist reconstruction of a Marxism based on class struggles. Key to the critique of fetishisms was the role of class struggles, in their plurality, which shapes and develops class consciousness through mobilisation, collectivity, solidarity, challenging the submission and 71 72 73

Ligue communiste révolutionnaire 1991, p. 38. Ligue communiste révolutionnaire 1991, p. 39. Ibid.

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despotism of the workplace and the relatively autonomous state machine. As Bensaïd wrote, the ‘social, political, and trade union unification of the class, beyond its stubborn differences, constitutes a permanent construction site, a strategic task that dictates tactics and alliances [my italics – D.R.]’.74 Furthermore, in relation to the dynamism of the capitalist mode of production, ‘social classes change, differentiate themselves and transform. They are in permanent movement. They don’t stop for a fixed image that symbolised them yesterday’.75 The working class was still in constant development, a decisive factor of the social whole: The weight of the industrial working class has declined in relative terms in relation to the total active population. But it still represents the most important social group. And above all, one part of a waged proletariat is still growing (in transport, commerce and services) representing two thirds of the active population. Only a restrictive and workerist vision of the proletariat can today conclude on its decline, if not its disappearance.76 With the close of the 1980s, the slow impatience was at hand for Bensaïd. These years made it clear that revolutionary expectations were of a past. A past and not the past (what Chris Harman called the fire last time). The task of the day was to go against the current without ceding to the centrifugal pressures of neoliberal realities. The collapse of the Eastern bloc reinforced these neoliberal realities. At the turn of the 1990s, ‘Daniel took the conclusion from it under the form of an eloquent triptych: “New period, new programme, new party” ’.77 Indeed, 74 75 76 77

Bensaïd and Krivine 1988, p. 103. Ligue communiste révolutionnaire 1991, pp. 82–4. Ibid. Before the npa’s construction, he took the time out to demonstrate the continuity from the lcr to the npa. Speaking of some texts he compiled in the lead up to the npa he said: ‘The idea is to demonstrate a continuity. The first text of this collection dates from 1991 and had the theme of What Has Become of the Left’s Dreams? After the fall of the Berlin Wall. It already points out the diagnostic of the crisis of the left on the question of war and the European problem. In an organisation as small as the lcr, we have always thought that our sublation [dépassement – the original French] would proceed through ruptures to the left, notably in the pcf. But it has become disillusioned. Since then, the terms of the question of our dépassement have evolved. We have had a lot of trial and error, for example in the electoral accords with Lutte Ouvrière (lo). These aren’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

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Daniel remained obsessed with the importance of the moment: we must not leave the analysis of this balance sheet to those who sing the virtues of the market and rally to it. It was necessary to save the ideas of socialism, of communism, the very idea of revolution from the historical debacles of Stalinism.78 Bensaïd revealed himself to be of immense revolutionary value in this singular political conjuncture, since, according to Johsua, he stood up with a threefold task, to continue to resist the zeitgeist; to act as a passeur for the young generations; to put the concept of revolution back on the drawing board. Not one task to the detriment of the others. Each conditioned the other. But if it was necessary to privilege one of them, it was the last [revolution]. Because, if the very idea of revolution was really dead, the others would soon follow.79 The close of this chapter opens onto Bensaïd’s philosophical turn, to the themes already mentioned from Bensaïd’s discovery and reading; the philosophical turn can be dated to the beginning in 1989, when he began a renewed sequence of publishing his ideas. I end this chapter with Garo’s suggestions. The classical thesis of the unity of theory and practice is a typical slogan of Marxism. In the abstract, this slogan does not solve anything. As a formula it can turn out to be a ‘vain truism’, merely a goal that Marxists aim for, when realising this unity is the difficulty, because the unification of theory and practice can only take place in a singular and concrete situation: In this sense, if to concretely unify theory and practice always consists in connecting a conjuncture to its perspectives of possible and necessary transformation, it is indeed this Marxist labour of Sisyphus that Daniel Bensaïd was dedicated to, and that – without ever disarming – through the course of a prolonged period of political retreat and social defeat. It is this constant effort, rooted in a singular time, that his most philo-

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forth of the electoral game. At the same time, it is also a case of materialising a collective memory. That seems to me to be useful, at the moment of dissolution, to show this trajectory’. Bensaïd 2008, Karl Marx, la Commune et le Nouveau parti anticapitaliste interview with Stéphane Alliès. Michaloux, Sabado and Besancenot 2012, p. 14. Johsua 2010, p. 56.

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sophical work is supported by the insistent vocabulary of ‘contretemps’, ‘discordance of times’, ‘the untimely’ and ‘the wager’, the ‘slow impatience’ and ‘broken time’.80

80

Garo 2010, p. 39.

part 2 New Inventions and Illuminations

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History Has Two Faces There are those in life who manage not to fall into nihilism but give their autonomy a content without disavowing it. Bensaïd consciously and deliberately took on the responsibility for renovating Marxist theory once he recognised that a slow revolutionary impatience was unavoidable. A renovation endlessly in specific terms and conditions is an opening of unperceived content more than a surface decoration and rearrangement; an effort to give voice to new regimes of meaning, it sculpts its proper names to provide them with other images of thought, requiring other profane illuminations. Bensaïd is the example of the truth that revolutionary theory can be liberated and experience a leap forward at the time of the obscure disaster; or, it may be more accurate to state that Bensaïd developed a form of thinking in excess of theory. He adjusted it to the overdetermining contradiction motivating his endeavours between the historical materiality of a possible revolutionary event and the slow impatience, an open process requiring political vigilance and perspective. If the conditions were ripe for new materialities of the aleatory, then Bensaïd answered the need with a messianic reason, subtle, strategic, political, paradoxically profane. This chapter focuses on Bensaïd’s philosophical writings on history and memory. These writings conjoin a subterranean materialism of the aleatory with a commitment to the non-Jewish Judaic universalist anticipation of redemption and Jubilee. At the threshold of the 1990s, Bensaïd adjusted his priorities for personal and political reasons. A set of elements had come together, encouraging Bensaïd’s turn to literary illumination. Sophie Bensaïd said that ‘there is indeed a turn in Daniel, but it began before 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall, earlier than his illness. We had long discussions, in the summer of 1988, about his desire to “take a few steps back”’ from his immediate political entanglement.1 There was the sense of a need to take more time for Bensaïd’s own self, a recognition that despite the insoluble bond of solidarities perhaps the making of a unique contribution to revolutionary culture comes when relinquishing the hitherto immediate adventure of political enmeshment. According to Sophie Bensaïd, the two events, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the discovery of his ill-

1 Bensaïd 2016, p. 176.

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ness (hiv/aids), ‘matured that which was already embryonic, latent’.2 Bensaïd discovered his disease in 1990, before which he had already published Moi la Révolution; his book on Walter Benjamin was just about to be complete the same year and published. Bensaïd withdrew from his official leadership positions in the Ligue and the Fourth International at about this time. There is no absolute break in Bensaïd’s thinking and politics, rather a making explicit of what had an implicit presence. His preoccupations turned towards playing the role of a ‘passeur’, transmitting a post-Mandelite renewal of thinking to another generation of radicals. Heritage and philosophical critique are at stake in Bensaïd’s project. Heritage, one’s relation, positive or negative, to the traditions of classical and Trotskyist Marxism, became a task to open for the present. To be attentive to the traces and textures of heritage meant to assume the responsibility of articulating what remained of value from the past to meet the new in gestation; heritage passes on the old to confront the unknown for a conjuncture that is singularly one’s own. In this sense, Bensaïd’s practice was not reducible to a sterile defence of a conservatising tradition threatening the proper names of the revolutionary project. The conservatising tradition and their self-appointed sovereign-legislators quote the proper names as if their words guarantee the ends of their desires and promises, a form of consolation through worship, worshipping the idols of the dead, a dogmatic practice of thought. Quite opposed to this conservative practice, Bensaïd read to transform the proper names of the revolutionary project; he was absorbed in a multifaceted method of philosophical critique. Since Bensaïd was no longer constrained by the urgency of daily politics he was able to engage the specific rhythms of theory, systematically constructing a non-system of thought. Bensaïd freely confronted the antagonism between the systematic and critical non-system of philosophy to show how and why revolutionary theory could be complicated and developed, on point and applied, in the tense relation to a political practice open to error, struggles and the moving relations of truth. The antagonism, non-identity and contradiction between theory and politics is the terrain upon which Bensaïd thought and voiced his concepts. The combination of a commitment to heritage and the constituent dialectic of theory and politics created the experimental conditions of possibility for the elaboration of Marxism. Bensaïd took a detour through Benjamin to reach Marx, conceptually conjoining Marx and Benjamin. The term of choice and interrogation was that of possibility. In the previous chapter, I showed how Bensaïd put forward the left

2 Ibid.

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of the possible; the detour through Benjamin to Marx systematically developed the notion of the possible on a Marxian terrain. Thus, it is a theoretical residue of the change from the actuality of revolution to the left of the possible. On this decisive point, Schérer wrote of Bensaïd’s specificity in the following way: ‘Bensaïd sets up … a conceptual connection, around the definition of a “political” reality through which, “the category of the present, inextricably involves necessity and possibility”’.3 The messianic content of Bensaïd’s thought is to be grasped, articulated and communicated as a reading of history that is political, informed by a systematic philosophical critique reminding his readers of the modalities of historical possibility; the thinking aligns itself to strategy, a requirement since history encompasses moving horizons of the possible and the actualisation or non-actualisation of any possibilities. The stakes of history are the stakes of possibilities and their fates. Benjamin resonated with Bensaïd because he was a thinker who cogitated images that went against the grain of fait accompli. Unlike the artisan who must work with the fibres of their gathered timber, who knows its structures to practice an excellent poiesis on pain of ruin if she neglects the grain, Bensaïd’s Benjamin-Marx conjunction goes against the grain to disclose a practice [praxis] of possible liberation. Bensaïd practised a form of presentation attentive to the other possible ways of speaking and writing about the content of history. Alert to the systematically scientific dimension of revolutionary culture, Bensaïd nonetheless worked with a form of Judaic hermeneutics, albeit as a materialist. Bensaïd managed to interpret and reimagine another mode of language and reference which, as Kouvelakis has explained, constitutes ‘a kind of new grammar for theory, which marks considerable renewal and even, in many ways, a rupture with the intellectual universe, the common sense in theoretical matters of the revolutionary left, including his own political current’.4 Bensaïd took seriously the content of history as a sort of unconscious that needed the sentences and words to voice its experiential trauma and crisis; he searched for words and sentences welcoming any authentic novelty of history, its new experiences with openness without the lasting effects of trauma. This was all the more necessary because language forms part of social and political practice, though one is often bound by the linguistic forms of past practices. Bensaïd committed to re-finding the words that could still mean something once the Messiah had become aphasic since the messianic suddenly recognised itself as a mute life. The destruction of words and their meaning could be overcome if the messianic content of his-

3 Schérer 2010, p. 159. 4 Kouvelakis 2010, p. 62.

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tory were to ‘awaken from the nightmares of the century, rediscover the world, stand up and walk, re-find the words that still have meaning’.5 Throughout the history of Marxism, every generation, from Marx and Engels onwards, has had to find an adequate voice for the content of history. It is on the terrain of the content of history, made of an unabated dialogue, that one discerns the meaning of Bensaïd’s messianism. Bensaïd thought of the materialist conception of history under the conditions set by Benjamin’s preparatory materials for the Theses on the Concept of History. Benjamin’s conditions had three components. Historical time is not continuous, the working class has the power of negativity, and the concept of history makes the tradition of the oppressed gone past relevant to the present. All three moments think the materialities of history that have broken with normative illusions in Progress. The sense of Benjamin’s breakthrough in the Theses is clear from Löwy’s description of the Theses: ‘one of the most radical, path-breaking and seminal documents of revolutionary thought since Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach”’.6 Bensaïd reconstructed the materialist conception of history and the reconstruction should be read in the context of two tendencies, one philosophical and the other more specifically Marxist. In the superstructural tendencies of philosophy, authors like Badiou, Balibar, Rancière and Françoise Proust wrote their philosophies of resistance and event, a kind of new radicalism that emerged in the context of the obscure disaster. On Bensaïd’s interpretation, these authors tended to separate the event and historicity, history and structure, theory and practice, temporality and politics. All of these separations, so Bensaïd thought, tended towards a non-political ‘posture of aesthetic resistance’.7 As for the Marxist tendencies, Bensaïd’s Benjaminian turn could be read from the script featuring other criticisms of historicism running from Marx’s Capital to Lukács and Korsch (an acquaintance of Benjamin through Brecht who influenced Benjamin), Adorno and Althusser. This chapter thematises the Roman god of doors, thresholds and transitions, Janus. A door (threshold or transition) was a limen in the Roman world, neither in one single time (or place) nor the other. Bensaïd’s trilogy on history, Moi, la Révolution, Walter Benjamin, sentinelle messianique and Jeanne de guerre lasse, essays in historical philosophy, relate to the limen in a twofold way. As a critique of historical reason, the trilogy ‘was a kind of necessary transition, before renewing on a new basis the question of Marx and the thou-

5 Bensaïd 2010c, p. 242. 6 Löwy 2013, pp. 159–60. 7 Bensaïd 2001d, p. 16.

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sand [and one] Marxism’s’.8 Furthermore, it was an approach to the content of history where politics attained primacy over history. In the philosophicaltheoretical-ideological conjuncture, the key to Bensaïd’s historical philosophy was his exploration of the present and its political conflicts because – consistent with the nature of the limen – whether one gazes upon the past or the present, it is not clear where the boundary between them is, history being like Janus. Without a fixed distinction between past and present, writing happens in one and the other though it remains to be seen if there is a nothingness between the present and other times or an integration. The primacy of politics over history is an attempted resolution to the Janus-like nature of history. This chapter will be structured around the three works of Bensaïd’s historical trilogy, drawing out the present and the past of a broken history thought in terms of possibility, the primacy of politics, the tradition of the oppressed and their subterranean correspondences and resonances, their elective affinities.

1

Moi, la Révolution

An object of contestation, the French Revolution has been commemorated, pacified and refound because a ‘wilder enthusiasm was never seen’, as Nietzsche wrote.9 Bensaïd’s Moi, la Révolution was untimely in its commitment to the wild and enthusiastic indignation of the French Revolution. At the bicentenary of the French Revolution, historical revisionism reshaped much of the terrain of debate, reconfiguring the object of memory in liberal historiographical contours. As Garo has remarked, the anti-communist and anti-totalitarian interventions formed a new ideological apparatus by displacing the Marxist historians of the French Revolution who had until then built a solid presence in the universities. The revisionists like Furet reinterpreted the French Revolution, showing it to be a ‘proto-totalitarian’ event, opening the door to despotism, rereading Marx in such a way that led to a ‘rehabilitation of liberal historiography and the counter-revolutionary tradition itself, something unthinkable a few years earlier’.10 Furet and Mitterrand thought the French Revolution could be commemorated without the remembrance of the emancipatory political content of its wild enthusiasm. In many ways, the bicentenary of 1789 was pivotal, shaping references to the French Revolution. The liberal intervention into the ideological8 9 10

Bensaïd 2013, p. 270. Nietzsche 1956, p. 187. Garo 2011, p. 72.

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political field accompanied by the onslaught of the anti-totalitarian Left had a twofold purpose of purging the French body politic of radical democracy: the repression of the Revolution as a universal model of emancipatory struggle because it remained an untrustworthy source of political instability, and the proclamation, now that the official Left was integrated into the institutions of the Fifth Republic, that the two centuries of ongoing political instability and class struggle opened by 1789 had finally come to a close. They announced an end to history as it was lived and experienced since 1789.11 Bensaïd’s pamphlet cut through the consensus of the bicentenary. The bicentenary was a commemoration of a Republic of the centre in which the continuity of a modern and stable liberal-democratic regime would hold. But as Foucault already noted, practices of commemoration are invariably the intensifiers of power; power rituals tell histories and its stories of recollection. Foucault wrote, ‘It seems to me that we can understand the discourse of the historian to be a sort of ceremony, oral or written, that must in reality produce a justification of power and a reinforcement of that power’.12 Beneath the surface discourse and its ideological rituals of power aligned to the stabilisation of the Fifth Republic, Bensaïd listened to the enraged and haunting voice of the indignant Revolution. With feminine vocals, the indignant Revolution refound her repressed rights as best a sans-culotte who felt cheated and betrayed could. Bensaïd had this voice address Mitterrand, a dissensus, a disruption, speaking from her subversive nature. As a work of historical philosophy, Bensaïd opposed the voice and gaze of the defeated to the positivist stories of history conforming to bourgeois state and institutional representations since the mid-nineteenth century. The dissensus opened by the voice of the indignant Revolution reminded all that the Revolution was unfinished and not reducible to an object of commemoration at the state’s arbitrary volition. The indignant Revolution alone decides on her historical apparitions, coming forward when she is least expected to demand her unfinished rights. Representations of the French Revolution enunciate the presence of an absence. If the memory of the indignant Revolution resurfaces, it does so at an untimely present. Bensaïd’s philosophical history made sense of the revolutionary reference by drawing out a related set of themes about the real and the possible, by rehabilitating the revolutionary content of the event, examining the role of memory, untimeliness and utopia, and the relations between morality, right and politics. For Bensaïd, the French Revolution illuminates the

11 12

Artous 2010, pp. 32–3. Foucault 2004, p. 66.

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oppressed past with which he entered into dialogue; the illumination of the oppressed past is made of an event that is, to use Péguy’s phrase, a ‘victorious defeat’.13 More specifically, the event may have overthrown the ancien régime but the hopes and promises it imagined remain in abeyance, unsatisfied and defeated. Were the French Revolution triumphant without qualification, no more debate and discordance would be necessary. According to Bensaïd, indignant Revolution ventriloquising, ‘I, who was, in the depths of my soul a constant source of contention – let us say, civil war – an eternal dissident in dissidence’, could not be closed off by the centrist, geometric and pseudo-objectivist moralities of the juste milieu.14 The moralists of the Revolution decided to exclude interrogations about the right the indignant Revolution had to speak about its existence, opting instead for a lesson they took from the Revolution, that of the ‘great French reconciliation’.15 Between thinking the untimely presence of the indignant Revolution and liberal Republican reconciliation Bensaïd chose the untimely presence of an absence. Bensaïd distinguished between a critical remembrance faithful to the unfulfilled hopes of the oppressed past and the ideological practice of commemoration. As I mentioned earlier, commemoration featured as part of the ideology of power, Progress and positivism. Bensaïd referred to Auguste Comte, for whom commemoration was destined to ‘develop in the current generation a deep sentiment of continuity’.16 The relationship to Progress was decisive; Bensaïd criticised the organic spirit of continuity because the purpose of the organic spirit was – as the Irish opponent of the French Revolution, Edmund Burke, knew so well – to ensure no bourgeois revolution could destabilise an existing bourgeois society. The ideologists of Progress grant a representation of revolution procuring settlement without ruptures, from 1789 until the bicentenary. Bensaïd voiced the discontinuities against the continuities: I, the Revolution … From Turgot to Jules Ferry! Attribute to me in toto the monarchy and the Convention, Empire and Commune, the Revolution and the Counter-Revolution! It is to dissolve me into my opposite, so as to better lose my trace. It is to make me continuous, linear and flat, while I am all eruption, interruption and bifurcation. It is to make me monotonous like a clock, while I am all rhythm and beats …17

13 14 15 16 17

Bensaïd 1989, p. 25. Bensaïd 1989, p. 10. Bensaïd 1989, p. 12. Bensaïd 2008, p. 131. Bensaïd 1989, p. 15.

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This retraction of discontinuities, this swallowing up of ruptures does not deceive. I’ve known for a long time these false alignments … these fabricated harmonies. In the great picture of triumphant Progress the defeated no longer exist … I know this philosophy of history, where the past exists only in order to better justify and magnify the present.18 Critical remembrance criticises the ideology of Progress while raising doubts about the sense of any final judgement. According to the indignant Revolution, certain historical cases were never to be closed, like those of Jesus and Joan of Arc. Bensaïd thought, in the field of these open historical cases, about the meaning of defeat and judgment in history; over two centuries of doubts and certitudes, illusions and failures, adventures and misadventures, the ventriloquising Revolution reflected on the three unsettled rights of the revolution and their present meaning: private property, slavery and racism, and women’s combativity and exclusion. Engels already observed how the plebeians attributed meaning to the demands of bourgeois natural right that reversed it, attributing a meaning able to threaten or point beyond private property, class power and exploitation. But the plebeian attribution of meaning ironically became the motive for the upsurge and development of a revolution ending with bourgeois exploitation and its sanction. Bensaïd explored this enigma of the bourgeois revolution Engels had already identified, pointing to the mystery of the revolution, differentiating between the upward curve from 1789–93 and the descent from the middle of 1794 and Prairial 1795 to show how the real message of the revolution could be deciphered from the ‘apparently flat few months where everything happened at the peak where the ascension became a sudden plummet’.19 To solve the message, Bensaïd followed the trajectory of natural right, wherein the upsurge of the revolution explored the limits of natural right in its wish to be universal, holding fast to natural right as a simple idea: It is always like that, the greatest revolutions … have not been pushed forward by way of extraordinary ideas and it is most intelligent to go forward with the simplest of ideas. But, in ordinary times, simple ideas roam like phantom dreams. When a simple idea takes shape, there is a revolution.20

18 19 20

Bensaïd 1989, p. 16. Bensaïd 1989, p. 33. Bensaïd 1989, p. 35.

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Fichte had also been a defender of natural right, to whom the indignant Revolution momentarily deferred, ‘In taking my defence, Fichte argued better than I could myself, that every being claims at birth the equal rights inherent in human nature; that the first wail, the primal cry is also the first proclamation of human rights’, and ‘each owns from birth the inalienable right of rising against the state and of contradicting its grounds’. Natural right, and Fichte’s defence of it, negated the caricatures natural right had endured: Beyond climates and borders, race and sex, I felt a calling for general emancipation. This was my simple idea. I took it seriously, as one should always take ideas and as one takes them happily at the age of twenty: if natural right was indeed natural right, it was valuable for everyone everywhere. One doesn’t compromise with these principles.21 At its most radical phase in the metropolis, the French Revolution produced the deontic rights to life and insurrection. These two historical creations were the subversive surface any regressive fold would have to cover over if it were to soothe the social whole; they were antagonistic to the dominance of private property in the Third Estate and any political constitutions sanctioning the oppression of one part of society by another. In 1789 equality concerned political and civil rights, not social rights to work, education and existence. Abbé Sieyès distinguished between the natural rights of citizens and political rights – natural rights being passive and political rights being active – meaning everyone had the passive right to protect their person, property and liberty. Still, not everyone had the active right to the formation of public powers. The distinction folded over the antagonisms between property owners and the propertyless in the Third Estate itself; in this context, by August 1789, the language of natural right transformed into an absolute right to life. The right to life clashed with article 17 of the Declaration (property is an inviolable and sacred right), about which Marat proclaimed: While nature abundantly offers to men that which nourishes them, clothes them, all is fine, peace will reign on the earth. But when one lacks all, he has a right to tear from another the superfluous which he’s filled with. What am I saying? He has a right to tear from him what is necessary and rather than dying of hunger, he has a right to slay him and devour his quivering flesh.22 21 22

Ibid. Quoted from Bensaïd 1989, p. 42.

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Marat affirmed the absolute right to life because the ‘first inalienable human right is that of existing, and it is not true that property is never in opposition to the people’s subsistence’.23 The affirmation was a surprise made by the upward curve of the revolution. The radical constitution of 1793 was also a surprise invention Bensaïd underlined, which many historians of Progress would like to bracket off. A particle belonging to the universal emancipatory hopes of the revolution, the 1793 constitution defended the right to insurrection, I thought that I’d reached the gate. The Constitution announced the protection of citizens against the oppression of those who govern them. The common good became the first goal. Insurrection was recognized as the most sacred of rights and the most vital of duties. Popular sovereignty was henceforth considered inalienable. We still had to wait seven more months before the abolition of slavery, but it was already written that everyone can engage his services, his time, but can neither sell himself nor be sold. Robespierre wanted to promote the right to work and assistance to the rank of natural right.24 Insurgents on the streets of Paris demanded this radical constitution again and again, for example, in 1830. Slavery accompanied the changing struggles over property, though in globalising modern bourgeois societies and their background geopolitical enmeshments it remained another barrier to the revolution’s victory. Bensaïd wrote, ‘Slavery and the colonies was an open wound, bloody, shameful, that which one would have liked to hide. The crosscheck par excellence of my proclaimed universality’.25 Furet buried away the injury in his 500-page history from Turgot to Ferry, with Toussaint Louverture having a tiny paragraph barely to his name. For the indignant Revolution, slavery and the colonies could uncover the subservience of the Revolution to statist realism. When the Convention proclaimed the Republic, it did nothing to abolish slavery. But, on the night of 22 August 1791, the black revolt had already begun with another slave uprising at Le Cap. The Convention sent its commissioners Sonthonax and Polverel to Saint Domingue. Unawares of the most recent goings-on in the metropolis, these legislative representatives did not know of the Parisian insurrection, the overthrow of the monarchy, and the Republic’s proclamation, and they hardly expected to find a

23 24 25

Bensaïd 1989, p. 44. Bensaïd 1989, p. 46. Bensaïd 1989, p. 50.

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continuation of the continent’s civil war taking place throughout the Caribbean. Bensaïd wrote, ‘and yet it was from the encounter between the black entrance onto the stage, the emergency of the war and the convictions of certain men like Sonthonax that abolition emerged’.26 Sonthonax sought to win the Black struggle against slavery to the Republican cause to counter the white property owners (who had offered themselves to England in the context of the renewed war to protect their lucrative plantation trade). The indignant Revolution said of Sonthonax, ‘he was bold enough to alone declare – on 29 August 1793 – the abolition of slavery’.27 Modern racism, still so present in the French body politic, haunts the French Revolution’s call for universal emancipation, an effect of the triumphant defeat of the indignant Revolution and the passing over of Revolution to Republic and Thermidor. Already, Robespierre denounced those factions who opted to arm the black struggle ‘to destroy the colonies’, Robespierre effectively defending the colonies, ‘It was far from courageous: the colonies are going to fall into oblivion! Possessiveness smelt its new wealth, its new owner and its state reason. The time had already come for the repression against the Enragés, the shutdown of the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women … Robespierre had no more to say on the question. This was his last word. It is remarkable’.28 On the racial, abolitionist and colonial matters, Bensaïd expressed an intermingling of openings and closures emerging from the relationship between the metropolitan and colonial revolutions, in their relations to property, race, warfare and counter-revolution. Prior to the Revolution, radical Enlightenment thinkers like Diderot had already drew the connection between race and sex oppressions, on the basis of property relations (a colonist’s slave was likened – though not to be conflated with – a woman as a property of her husband); in the context of Revolution, abolition itself was a last gasp compromise before the declining curve of Revolution into Thermidor; while the French struggle against Toussaint and Dessalines was the first modern Republican colonial war, Toussaint remained caught in an attempt to reconcile white property and black freedom, which reached a crisis point with the execution of Moise; Leclerc and the French colonial forces set about a war of extermination at a time when many of the colonial troops were breaking ranks to join the rebels; once the Republic and Empire settled with Haiti, French colonialism renovated struggles in Africa and Asia, with Tocqueville, the so-called father of modern liberal democracy, a supporter of the occupation of Algeria. None of this however 26 27 28

Bensaïd 1989, pp. 56–7. Bensaïd 1989, p. 57. Bensaïd 1989, p. 58.

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could extinguish the universal emancipatory hopes made of the encounter between the black slave revolt and ever deepening struggles from below in Paris. The indignant Revolution asked Mitterrand if his official bicentenary was forgetting anyone. Why is it then, that in your Pantheon of names, ‘there is not one woman, not one’? Bensaïd wrote of the role of women in the revolution, [W]e were present from the first to last day, from the Bastille to the insurrection of 1 Prairial Year iii. The deputies voted for the Rights of Man and Citizen; but this was still only on paper. We had to go on foot to Versailles, put it under the nose of the King and refuse to lift the siege until he’d ratified it!29 The indignant Revolution reminded her reader: ‘we had a double reason to go to the end, to the extreme limit, until the last taste of hope and courage. All through the terrible winter of Year iii the police reports confirmed it: women are everywhere … Rebels, untamed, defying Thermidor’.30 The indignant Revolution thought it was her hour when natural right sounded the bell, however, ‘we had the right to mount the assault on the Bastille, to march on Versailles to take the King by the collar, but not the right to vote’. ‘I, the Revolution, never voted under the revolution and was never eligible’. Yet, ‘since we were denied the right to vote, we looked to other avenues and other means to impose our citizenship and our belonging to the sovereign body of the people’.31 What were these other roads? What was the impact on the revolution? The indignant Revolution said of herself: In the first months of 1793 the agitation of women grew in intensity. Its curve followed that of my own ascension. Or perhaps, it was I who followed their example. Or much simpler, we formed a unity … the foundation on the 10th of May of the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women scarcely preceded the insurrection and fall of the Gironde by some few weeks.32 In addition to the role of women was the ‘morality’ of revolution. Revolutions may indeed have their own moralities, but they cannot be moralised nor hol29 30 31 32

Bensaïd 1989, p. 70. Ibid. Bensaïd 1989, p. 79. Ibid.

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lowed out of the primacy of politics when coming to terms with their world disclosing character and meaning in the name of the universal. After having settled accounts with the ideological machine of commemoration and recollecting those who were excluded from the official story, Bensaïd turned to those who moralised the Revolution. The ideological writers of history had appropriated morality and right to counterpose 1789 and the limited Rights of Man and Citizen, which were palatable to liberal prejudice, against the deepening of the Revolution of 1793, the Terror and the rights of concretely living individuals. In response to the moralists, the indignant Revolution said of its relation to the Terror: The Terror, I had my part in it. The war also. But I am not all war. Neither wholly terror. And they are not all of me. Each of us rests in an embrace, though are separate from the other.33 The indignant Revolution asked for a mediated approach to the revolutionary process – foreign to positivist, moralist and objectivist ideological discourses – that could grasp how it was simultaneously the actor and victim of the Terror. To assert the point, Bensaïd posed the recollective rationality in dialectical terms: One always returns to Pascal’s dialectic, to the reciprocal understanding of the universe and thought … mediated and immediate, that one cannot understand the parts without understanding the whole, no more than one cannot understand the whole without understanding the parts. We always come back to Pascal, the first French dialectician, before Rousseau, dialectician of contradiction; and Blanqui, dialectician through his antipositivism; and Mallarmé, dialectician through illumination.34 The dialectical recollection of the Revolution made it possible to come to terms with the passage from the dynastic wars to the national wars mentioned above in relation to Haiti, through which the new modernising bourgeois state appropriated violence for use abroad and domestically, transforming ‘social violence into state monopoly, the power of rebellion into a power of submission’.35 The bourgeois modernising French state’s appropriation of violence came from the Terror and Republic without confusing the Revolution with such Republican 33 34 35

Bensaïd 1989, p. 181. Bensaïd 1989, p. 206. Bensaïd 1989, p. 208.

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Terror. The indignant Revolution continued its fidelity to natural right always ‘on the side of the oppressed and exploited, without concession to the reason and the unreason of the state, always on the side of the universal interest against the particular, beyond borders and race … [where] I have learnt the most’.36 In this sense, Bensaïd recollected a split throughout the French Revolution between Revolution and Republic; Revolution took up the challenge of a genuine universality while the Republic resigned itself to a fragmented society of particularity and state rationality; by contrast, the Revolution took the labour of the negative seriously by siding with rebellions and resistances tending towards genuine universality. Bensaïd’s Péguyist recollection of history understood the event from within the event, the hopes and passions of the oppressed throughout its duration, a move that made visible the paradox of the French Revolution. According to Bensaïd, the revolutionary process was in excess of its result. As Bensaïd said to Artous about the book, ‘a bourgeois revolution is a paradox in terms: it unravels the tensions of the ancien régime, but to do so it needs to mobilise social forces that are not bourgeois’.37 The French Revolution was more than the bourgeoisie and its representatives coming to power and the revolution embodied the permanent revolution partly because it came into the world too early and too late, as all revolutions tend in fact to do. One cannot, therefore, judge the French Revolution by its result alone; the indignant Revolution claimed: Bourgeois therefore? Undoubtedly through my leading and motor forces … By my results and consequences, certainly … But in politics as in morals, it is not only the result that counts. The result is what is left once the tree is pruned of possibilities: a poor bare trunk, smooth, foolishly entitled and a little indecent.38 Was the Revolution simply the replacement of the aristocracy by the bourgeoisie? Certainly, ‘this is one way of looking at it. A little narrow, a little closed and a little dead. Not wrong, but limited. A sequence, portion and specimen of the truth’.39 Read in the terms of its deadening partiality, the Revolution was simply the bourgeoisie replacing the aristocracy. Yet, on the other reading alive to the living, it believed in principles and historical invention:

36 37 38 39

Bensaïd 1989, p. 216. Bensaïd and Artous 1989. Bensaïd 1989, p. 117. Ibid.

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My principles, you know them. Regarding invention, it is in the turbulence of Year ii, in the peasant struggles and the uprisings of the sansculotte. Not a model with a master key, not a laid-out agenda, but a fumbling and collective creation, wherefrom emerged the expropriation of hoarders and speculators, war profiteers and monopolists of national goods; the blockage and popular control of prices, the progressive income tax on the rich, the regulation of exterior trade and a radical agrarian reform. Pushing further, Babeuf envisaged a planned distribution of subsistence. Buonarroti even imagined the impartial and universal allocation of work.40 This process and not simply its final result is what gave the Revolution its personality and charm, continuous and discontinuous, random and necessary, universal and singular, potential and real, finished and permanent at the same time. Yet, rare are those who, ‘love me for what I am … who have truly tried to understand me’. For Bensaïd, the study of Revolution was not an exact objective science and he dissented against Furet’s claim that ‘It is time, after two centuries of civil war, to affirm that the French Revolution is finished and finally consider it as an object of science’.41 Bensaïd centred his recollection of the French Revolution on a reading of the real and the possible, and not on an abstractly formal account of the forces and relations of production. On this terrain, the problem of the real and the possible becomes a question of taking sides, looking at the potentialities that point to the future, not reducible to an objectivist science. The aleatory and complex materialities of history could not be captured by a reductive schema. Instead, Bensaïd explained: From a Marxist point of view, we can rehabilitate the plenitude and the complexity of the event. No one was forced to build the first barricade or throw the first stone but neither was one in an arbitrary historical terrain. We must overcome, which is today commonplace – including in the scientific worldview – a mechanistic interpretation of history … to an interpretation of probability that includes the aleatory.42 Though the conflict between the forces and relations of production opens up new historical possibilities, Bensaïd argued ‘I continue to believe that it 40 41 42

Bensaïd 1989, p. 145. Bensaïd 1989, p. 237. Bensaïd and Artous 1989.

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rendered the revolutionary event possible or probable, but not necessarily necessary’.43 Revolutions are not made through inevitable evolution, nor by the imposition of abstract volition; Bensaïd’s approach involved the combination of a concrete assessment with the political analysis because the development of contradictions in their concrete situations are resolved by politics, which is ‘the form taken between the aleatory and the probable’.44 The point of raising the voice of the indignant Revolution was none other than to adopt a welcoming regard on history, as she said: ‘I was and always remain ready to conflagrate in an encounter, to lift off with an unknown event, to venture into an abundant bifurcation’.45

2

Walter Benjamin: sentinelle messianique

Earlier, I mentioned that Bensaïd’s thought was in excess of theory; this means that his work on Benjamin articulated an assemblage of metaphors inclusive of but not reducible to empirical perception and theoretical inference, with which he opened the space of possibility for language to meet the unknown opening in history. Bensaïd mobilised metaphor to think thresholds despite the fact that metaphors can enlighten or blind and therefore must be handled carefully because they are pre-theoretical. Bensaïd’s works on the philosophy of history do not amount to a greater depth of empirical knowledge or the truth or falsity of theoretical claims within an already constituted doctrinal system of Marxism, because they instead develop a metaphorical set of notions for expressing historical bifurcation. At this point, Bensaïd’s subterranean Judaic messianism finds its full expression; he does so through a political reading of Benjamin. Bensaïd’s metaphorical assemblage accompanies his trek through a labyrinthine history, with its memories, uncertainties, perplexities of the present, truths, unsettled cases, language, history and politics, and Bensaïd asks his reader to be on the lookout for those moments of history where the revolutionary bifurcation becomes possible. Bensaïd is thus engaged in the construction of an image of the unknowable Messiah – certainly not to worship a new idol – to develop a messianic approach to the content of history joined by the images of eternal recurrence, melancholic constellations, twin stars, elective affinities and bifurcations able to open those narrow paths of history yet to be explored. 43 44 45

Ibid. Ibid. Bensaïd 1989, p. 243.

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Bensaïd achieves the metaphorical assemblage through a commentary that reads Benjamin as developing a messianic reason inclusive of a principle of hope oriented to historical intelligibility, in place of beatitude (the blessedness of the religious). Bensaïd’s metaphorical construction – in excess of empirical perception and theoretical argumentation – spoke to the impasse experienced by a classical form of Marxism in whom Mandel, as Enzo Traverso remarked, was ‘the incarnation of a classical Marxism that gave the impression until the 1970s of possessing the keys to decipher the world and who appeared completely thrown off course by this latest turn of history’.46 The messianic metaphorical assemblage served the need to construct an image of thought of the content of an uncertain transition; it revealed a strategic form of thought drawing political lines of demarcation to keep the door of human liberation open. Mandel probably found Bensaïd’s turn to Benjamin incomprehensible, which points to a divergence worth detailing. To invoke Benjamin, reading him as a political thinker, revolutionary, Marxist and quasi-Trotskyist was nevertheless to criticise philosophies of historical progress defended by Mandel. This amounts to criticising Mandel’s normative conception of the twentieth century. As Löwy writes, Mandel was ‘too much of a (proud) heir to the Aufklärung, a follower of the French Enlightenment and its optimistic philosophy of historical progress, to perceive these events [the Holocaust] as civilizational breaks, as central landmarks of the twentieth century, and as arguments for a general critique – in the spirit of the Frankfurt School – of the whole modern, industrial civilization. He did not understand them as a challenge to the idea of progress inherent in a certain “classical” interpretation of Marxism nor as a major turning point in human history, requiring a different interpretation of our century’.47 Löwy’s judgement corroborated with Bensaïd’s, for whom Mandel had been ‘A man of the Enlightenment, confident in the liberating virtues of the productive forces, the emancipating powers of science and the historical logic of progress … He wielded with virtuosity a historical dialectic tinged with positivism and sociological objectivism’.48 Bensaïd’s metaphorical intervention can be seen from another angle insofar as Mandel’s formal dialectic – which spirited away ‘the political difficulties of the present conjuncture into the meaning of universal history’ – required a

46 47 48

Traverso 2010, pp. 11–12, his preface to the second edition of Bensaïd’s Walter Benjamin: sentinelle messianique. Löwy 1999, p. 25. Bensaïd 2013, p. 260.

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form of rhetorical trickery (Bensaïd’s words).49 Bensaïd’s metaphorical assemblage was not only a means to think again about the century and its catastrophes, it was also a way of breaking through the relationship between rhetorical sophism and the faith in the meaning of universal history as articulated by certain of Mandel’s normative-objectivist formulations. As the previous chapter on The Dark Years of Readjustment has shown, any idea ‘that history worked patiently towards the credibility of Marxism’ had collapsed together with the idea that the fall of the Soviet state capitalist economies would finally ‘deliver justice to the first opponents of the Stalinist regime’. Bensaïd explained the extent to which the presuppositions of the common sense understanding of history led to disorientation, even among the genealogies of the Left Opposition: Founded on the representation of ‘homogenous and empty’, time, its normative philosophy of history underlay the complementary attitude of the Social Democrats and the Stalinists in the face of Nazism’s rise … Through a cruel ruse of reason, this philosophy of solace extended its ravages into the ranks of the anti-Stalinist opposition (Trotskyists, libertarians and councillists), trying to reduce the Stalinist terror to a ‘deviation’, and sometimes as an ‘interlude’, instead of seeing it as an unprecedented catastrophe in its own right, a bifurcation to an unexplored landscape after which nothing will ever be as before. In the depths of hopelessness, they hedged their bets on the ‘meaning of history’, which will indeed finish by reclaiming its rights as history will finish by rendering justice to its faithful offspring. Historical temporality is thus grasped ‘as continuity and succession, movement and cumulation’, that is to say, as a sequential temporality where the problem of failure is reduced to a double origin, political-strategic error and the lag of class consciousness behind the conditions that objectively mature.50 Messianic reason is the outcome of Bensaïd’s turn to a left of the possible; it entails a profane ethic and a notion of non-mechanical time. The entire metaphor of the messianic makes visible the contours of the practice of the possible, always in the grip of the tension between abstract and real possibility, showing how theory might relate to practice, that the universal is part of the singular and the singular cannot be thought without reference to

49 50

Ibid. Bensaïd 2000h.

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the universal, and necessity is no longer invested with teleological idealism. Above all, Benjamin wrote as the world was on the threshold of new catastrophe and barbarism; though he was a marginal figure and outside the official Left, Benjamin saw the menace approach. At the threshold of disaster, in the depths of despair, he opposed the weak spark of messianic redemption to the heavy mechanics of progress. This opposition broke with the illusions in progress that stifled the Stalinists and Social Democrats. This breakthrough took place at the junction between Jewish mysticism and revolutionary Marxism. Benjamin’s thought is valuable for an age of catastrophe, supposing values can remain. Was the combination of Jewish mysticism and revolutionary Marxism an eclectic mélange of two irreconcilable trends or did a hidden elective affinity exist between them? Benjamin said, ‘the philosophical bond between the two aspects of my research … will be brought about by the revolution much more than by myself’. This revolution was no longer Marx’s locomotive of history but a battle for the oppressed of the past, in the name of generations defeated, pulling the emergency brake to stop humanity’s rush toward catastrophe. This was at odds with Second International orthodoxy. In the Arcades Project, Benjamin staked out his own project: It may be considered one of the methodological objectives of this work to show what a historical materialism would be like which has annihilated within itself the idea of progress. Just here, historical materialism has every reason to distinguish itself from bourgeois habits of mind.51 Benjamin was always in the wrong place at the wrong time; he was precarious and without a stable university post. When the German Revolution was unfolding, he was aloof, elsewhere. When he turned to revolutionary Marxism around 1924, influenced by History and Class Consciousness via the mediation of Asja Lācis, Stalinist counter-revolution and its arrogant bureaucracy was cementing its grip. Upon his trip to Moscow, he left in tears. He witnessed the bureaucratic state confiscating politics from the working class. It confiscated a genuine politics from below for the political dictates of the state from above. Benjamin understood the threat of fascism very early on and, as Bensaïd wrote: from 1926 he read Capital and Where Is Britain Going? In 1927 he passionately debated with Brecht about the conflict between Trotsky and

51

Benjamin 2002, p. 460.

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Stalin and anti-Semitism in the ussr. His trip to Moscow illuminated the battles underway between ‘socialism in one country’ and the ‘uninterrupted revolution’. In 1931 he discovered, ‘with great enthusiasm’ the History of the Russian Revolution and My Life.52 From Benjamin’s precarious station he watched on, facing the great defeats of the twentieth century, the work of Stalinism and Nazism. He opposed the Popular Fronts, holding that the fallen martyrs did not fall for their own cause, ‘but in the name of compromise’. As Stalin and Hitler made their rapprochement, Benjamin declared ‘a solitary war without mercy, a long-lasting war … of a Marrano communism’, with his Theses on the Concept of History.53 Stalinism and Nazism could not be seen as detours or regimes that deviated from the capitalist norm – they ‘irredeemably broke the confidence in the straight line of historical progress’. In a word, Benjamin sliced through the ‘monumental architectures of universal history’ that were hypostatic and abstract, because ‘the rhythmic history of the possible does not let itself be reduced to a system’.54 For Benjamin, history could not be conceived of chronologically, despite appearances. This is why his Arcades Project uses montage because, ‘I have nothing to say, only to show’, and the best way to show is through citation, ‘to write history, is to “cite” it’. The outcome of writing is a construction. In Benjamin’s case, a construction of citations, ‘adequate to dialectical images’.55 Benjamin wanted to give us a picture of the whole from a crystallised singular moment through the use of citation, ‘he wanted to express the whole through the detail, the general through the particular’.56 This thought was one of ‘minuscule resistance … working obscurely in the pockets of the broken totality’. He carried the principle of montage into history. That is, ‘to assemble large-scale constructions out of the smallest and most precisely cut components. Indeed, to discover in the analysis of the small individual moment the crystal of the total event’.57 Benjamin, therefore, breaks with a historicist and positivist method. ‘Instinctively’, he crossed paths with the ‘German science’ of Marx, Goethe, and Hegel, who were hidden by the ruse of ‘positive science’; and Benjamin’s anti-positivism required the theological: ‘I have never been able to think and

52 53 54 55 56 57

Bensaïd 2010c, p. 34. Bensaïd 2010c, p. 36. Bensaïd 2010c, p. 37. Bensaïd 2010c, p. 40. Bensaïd 2010c, p. 38. Ibid.

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research otherwise than, if I dare say so, in a theological way – namely in accordance with the Talmudic theory of 49 levels of meaning in each passage of the Torah’.58 Language does not issue forth truth. It proposes only a constellation of meanings to be deciphered for their truths. For Bensaïd, ‘this very idea of historical citation implies tearing meaning from its context in order to transform it’. Ultimately, this style of writing does not renounce the whole, ‘it does not abandon itself to the chaos of fragments, to the disintegration of aphorisms’, it is, rather, ‘convinced that there is still order in this chaos. But it is never immediate’.59 Benjamin’s method of citation was not a flight into aesthetics but a philosophical battle against abstract and statist reason. It was the rejection of the Popular Front in philosophy. For Bensaïd, ‘it expressed an emergency strategy at the heart of catastrophe’.60 Bensaïd’s relation to Benjamin, as his favourite citation from the Arcades Project shows, positioned itself as political, but it was committed to redemption and a specific practice of reading that had an intimate bond to the concept of history. The primacy of politics helped by a Judaic-Marxism worked through the reconciliation of memory and history. Redemption is at the core of Bensaïd’s political project. The deconstruction, subversion and splitting of the hierarchies of meaning, practised in opposition to the dogmatic texts of Stalinism, Social Democracy and bourgeois thought, is a reading practice rupturing with the sens unique of the text, committed to the redemption of the oppressed past, the political primacy of the present and the plurality of meaningful layers inhabiting words and sentences. The only way to respect writing, according to Bensaïd, is to read carefully for the plurality of meanings, albeit without sacrificing the truth values of the word. As is clear, this is a deconstructive, Talmudic-hermeneutic operation positioned at the intersection between hermeneutic reading and the materialist approach of pioneers like Spinoza. The effects of Bensaïd’s Benjaminian operation can be judged in the context of politics and his systematic reconstruction of Marx’s theory, because these are the sites in which metaphorical meanings have their results in the materialities of struggles and the objects of science. Crucially, Bensaïd mobilised Benjamin’s Talmudic approach to deconstruct the ‘philosophical popular front’ exemplified by Georges Politzer, ‘who subordinated Marxism to classical rationalism’.61

58 59 60 61

Quoted from Bensaïd 2010c, p. 39. Bensaïd 2010c, p. 41. Ibid. Bensaïd 2010c, p. 41.

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Bensaïd’s Messiah enters into confrontation with authoritarian Utopia, and the Messiah’s content is profane, because ‘history does nothing’. The material of the messianic comes from the fallen and defeated past, and Bensaïd reminds his reader that ‘we have been expected on this earth’. Memory is resurrected because the oppressed of the bygone – in their prisons, mass graves, disappearances and deportations – can have their defeat continued into a bad infinity of repetition; alternatively, Bensaïd writes, ‘it is up to us’, history perhaps may take another turn wherein the eternal recurrence of the defeated past is interrupted and ‘history – why not? – changes meaning’.62 Against the authoritarian Utopia, the profane messianic ‘does not come from the future. It brings with it nothing certain’.63 The Messiah is a metaphor recollecting the truth that the present has its possibilities which are not to be deferred. They ought to be grasped. Bensaïd writes, it is ‘opposed to the monumental fetish of positive Science, of universal History, of state Reason, it is the uneasy insomniac of messianic reason and its strategic calculations’.64 Moreover, Bensaïd explored the genealogy of sentinelles messianique, redeeming the fallen past while defending an interventionist political vigilance. For Bensaïd, history and memory exist in the tension of permanent dialogue. To navigate the tension between them, Bensaïd calls for ‘a politics of the present time, where the dance of the virtual wins out over the stamping out of the real, where the occasion of “perhaps” breaks the circle of eternal return, where the sharp sickle of Messianic reason crosses the hammer of critical materialism’.65 In this sense, Bensaïd’s interventionist politics of messianic reason is vigilant in its lookout for rebellion and ready to confront catastrophe. To reiterate, this form of activism recognises that ‘politics attains primacy over history’. The brief formula is often overlooked but has decisive consequences when taken seriously. In effect, it eliminates a deterministic conception of history or a secularised form of Predestination to a Paradise found. If politics takes primacy over history, the result of struggle is never given in advance. The present is not the simple link in the temporal chain that would necessarily result from the past and prepare an equally necessary future. It is a moment, entirely political, of decision between many possibilities that may even appear undecidable. From here, we see the meaning of the event. This event is not a miracle that comes from nowhere (from the ‘void’). It is embedded in a field of historically determined possibility. This is why the concept of ‘crisis’ (instead of the ‘void’) is an 62 63 64 65

Ibid. Bensaïd 2010c, p. 42. Ibid. Bensaïd 2010c, p. 275.

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essential strategic notion that articulates the necessary and the contingent, historical conditions and unpredictable events, etc. As Gramsci underlined well: we can only foresee the struggle, not its outcome, an argument pertaining to an anti-State politics of liberation. It is a strategic thought of the present, ‘the possibility of interrupting the course of time, of forking off into other unexplored pathways, the readiness to see a surge of the Messiah’ when no-one dares to do so any longer.66

3

Bensaïd’s Commentary: Über den Begriff der Geschichte

Bensaïd began his commentary on the Theses on the Concept of History by showing Benjamin’s suicide as inscribed in the catastrophes of his time. Bensaïd followed the example of Artaud’s defence of van Gogh’s sanity, in which van Gogh is the symbol of a lucid painter genius in a time of bad faith, making him a sane victim of the insanity of his time. On Bensaïd’s and Artaud’s reading, pertaining to the Benjamin connection, the comparison could be read in the terms of de Beauvoir too: in heartbreak and joy van Gogh and Benjamin freed their hands ‘ready to stretch out toward a new future’ because they conceptualised and imagined the contents of new possibilities.67 This is why Benjamin’s Theses was conducive to commentary. Benjamin’s format also made it conducive to a fragmented treatment being ‘at the same time theoretical and polemical … political, saturated with meaning’, and a ‘farewell and inaugural’ text. It ‘bequeaths to our present the burden of heritage’.68 Bensaïd’s relation to heritage should not be read as Heideggerian but in Benjaminian terms. Heritage relates to the interventionist vigilance of messianic reason, not the repetition of a primordial event as in Heidegger’s notion of historicity (a fascist concept of the Event), because it remains faithful to the oppressed past and concrete historical transformation towards liberation. The vigilance makes relevant the ‘figure of the old Jewish mystic’, where one must be ready for a messianic arrival at any hour; the Messiah arrives ‘to reveal the sheaf of possibles implicit in every precious moment’.69 Because the messianic is a metaphor, the messianic does not exist as such. Like Blanchot’s beggar who asks the Messiah the time he shall arrive, the metaphor is intended to cultivate a specific practice of political hope, making explicit 66 67 68 69

Bensaïd 2010c, p. 43. De Beauvoir 1976, p. 30. Bensaïd 2010c, pp. 47–8. Bensaïd and Petit 1999, p. 59.

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possibilities of the given through politics, criticising historical fetishisms that are obstacles to the actual becoming of such possibilities. The burden of heritage thus becomes an ally in the actualisation of political possibility. Bensaïd’s reading of Benjamin remains attached to, against some of Scholem’s and Adorno’s tendencies to minimise it, the political content of Benjamin’s project. Bensaïd deconstructs a certain idea of historical materialism first establishing that ‘historical materialism’ was far from being just ‘a strange coquetry or a regrettable misunderstanding’, on Benjamin’s part, but instead was an object of critical reflection.70 Indeed, ‘Benjamin acknowledges in Marx a critique of historical reason and a new representation of time as a social relation’.71 The move immediately points in the direction of a historical thinking in rupture with those like Plekhanov who claimed ‘We, indeed, know our way and are seated in that historical train which at full speed takes us to our goal’.72 To think temporality along messianic lines, but also in alliance with Marx, deconstructs a homogenous temporality implicit in the historicist and positivist notion of ‘historical materialism’. A critical temporality emerges from the deconstruction, making ‘it possible to conceptualise anachronisms and contretemps, as well as the disquieting contemporaneity of possibilities none of which pertains to the past of the other’.73 For Bensaïd, Benjamin’s first thesis opposed a mechanical history that was reduced to disenchanted clockwork. In 1939, positivist ‘historical materialism’ was far from being innocent, ‘it had become a doctrine and orthodoxy’, a secular form of fatalism or another version of religious fetish.74 This is theology ‘abandoned to religiosity’, where historical materialism – in this positivist, Stalinian and scientistic form – cannot escape religious fetish. It maintained the religious fetish in the belief in disenchanted historical mechanics, where events are repetitive in the Newtonian conception of time and the continuous course of history. This religious fetish left no place to rebellion, for it mechanically believed that history would automatically lead to socialism. Political subjectivities were dissolved into the object. In this context, a new alliance between theology and historical materialism was necessary to Benjamin. If they remain separated, the former remained a physical disgrace and the latter remained mechanically unyielding. ‘Decapitat-

70 71 72 73 74

Bensaïd and Petit 1999, p. 57. Ibid. Quoted from Leslie 2000, p. 174. Bensaïd and Petit 1999, p. 57. Bensaïd 2010c, p. 49.

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ing philosophy, positivism serves as a refuge for shameful atheists and materialists, prostrated before the stubbornness of accomplished facts’, but what does a fact prove?75 What does the fact of victory prove? Does it have the power of truth? Why worship the facts? According to Bensaïd: In 1939, this historical machinery endowing victory with a truth-value and the power to deliver a verdict reifying the facts is no longer incarnated by Comte and his epigones, but by Stalin. The ‘ready-made dictator’, nourished by the failures of the revolution, celebrated his 1934 ‘Congress of the Victors’. He founded the legal principle that the winners are always right and raised state reason to the dignity of the sciences of sciences.76 To create another bond between historical materialism and theology meant breaking with a history reduced to the monuments of the victors, blank pages of history and the silence of memory. If one were to adhere to this conception of history, one would be acquitted of one’s debt to the oppressed past. This is why theology is critical: it is not ‘a goal in itself; its aim is not the ineffable contemplation of eternal verities, nor, even less, reflection on the nature of the divine Being … it is in the service of the struggle of the oppressed’.77 For Bensaïd, ‘a theology that gives back life and meaning to dead and speechless time’, was necessary, one ‘that retrieves from the dreary chronological succession of the past, present and future, the important issues of Creation, Revelation and Redemption’.78 Two concepts become fundamental for this project: remembrance and messianic redemption. The organic bond between historical materialism and theology ‘resides in remembrance [remémoration] as active memory, distinct from mere recollection [souvenir], which is only “the frozen memory”. The revolution is restoration as well as redemption’.79 Too often, historians lack this work of resurrection. Instead of digging away ‘in the field of ruins and the debris in the name of salvation, they toil in the tracks of the victors’.80 Yet, if the puppet of history in Benjamin’s first thesis is to regain a passionate spirit, it must rework historical materialism and theology. ‘The hunchback’s back would recover’, together, theology and Marxism would be unassailable. Benjamin did

75 76 77 78 79 80

Bensaïd 2010c, p. 50. Ibid. Löwy 2005a, p. 27. Bensaïd 2010c, p. 50. Bensaïd 2010c, p. 51. Ibid.

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not think one could write history with ‘immediately theological concepts’, yet remembrance implied the bond between history and theology. With the positivist historical method of Stalinian Marxism and Social Democracy, ‘historical materialism is always supposed to win’, in the face of fascism. As Löwy wrote, for ‘this mechanical materialism, the development of the productive forces, economic progress, the “laws of history” lead necessarily to the last crisis of capitalism and the victory of the proletariat (Communist version) or to the reforms that will gradually transform society (Social Democratic version)’.81 Bensaïd also took up Althusser, albeit in passing, who ‘(explicitly laying claim to the Durkheim’s heritage) and the “process without a subject” finishes by throwing history, the event, and the turbulences of the possible – in a word politics – out of the window’ of his theoretical edifice.82 Benjamin declared war on this version of Marxism that bowed down before fait accompli. August Blanqui’s critique of positivism sums up the force of the fait accompli, Because things followed this course, it seems that they could not have followed any other. The accomplished fact has an irresistible power. It is as if it is fated. The spirit … is overwhelmed by it and does not dare to revolt (to resist). It has no foundation. It could base itself only on a vacuum (on nothing). What a terrible force for the fatalists of history, admirers of this accomplished fact! All the atrocities of the victor, its long series of crimes are coldly transformed into a regular, inescapable evolution, like that of nature.83 In this conception of historical materialism, the defeats of the past are forgotten and legitimised, which is why, for Blanqui, ‘it is a crime to glorify the past, to justify it by alleged immutable laws, to call upon the dignity of history which demands respect or even indulgence for the horrors of times gone by’.84 For Benjamin, another bond between historical materialism and theology was possible because, ‘theology and politics have in common the idea of Jetztzeit (now-time), a category of the crisis, of action, of bifurcation, of the possible and quite simply of the event’.85 Their relation must get beneath the layers of fait

81 82 83 84 85

Löwy 2005a, p. 25. Bensaïd 2009, text from his personal documents Walter Benjamin, thèses sur le concept d’histoire. Blanqui 1869. Ibid. Bensaïd 2009, text from his personal documents Walter Benjamin, thèses sur le concept d’histoire.

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accompli through remembrance and conceive the Revolution as a restoration and redemption, where, ‘Paradise Lost and the Promised Land meet’ – on the condition that all will be saved and memorial vigilance will not lose sight of anything or anyone. Bensaïd explains that one should not confuse memory and the past. In the present, do the oppressed belong to our memory or the past? If they belong to the past and not to the present, why should one have anything to do with them? If one did that, they would continue in the silence of oblivion; this is a nihilistic and complicit silence. Memory refuses to let the past be forgotten to oblivion, it saves the past from nihilistic silence, for it is active and immerses itself in a body lost, to give the past a chance to break with the triumphal parade of domination. Bensaïd suggests that: To forget nothing will condemn us to die of insomnia. To forget everything will condemn us to the infinite servitude of the slave without memory. What can we forget and what must we ‘remember’ [remémorer – D.R.]?86 In the present, the past has assigned its messianic duty – to resurrect the lost rendezvous, dashed hopes and defeats. In a certain sense, to be part of a present is already to be bound by the contract with the past. The past has never left one’s present; one owes it. One is obliged to it. ‘We are never finished with it. It conceals a people of captive and dormant potentialities, that only the kiss of the present can awake and deliver’.87 If one seizes the temporality of the present, one uncovers some secrets of the past. Suddenly and unexpectedly, ‘precious moments of deliverance and liberation’ can put breath back into the potentialities that were thought lost. The defeated gone by call us, expect us. From the thousands executed of Spartacus’s insurgent slave army (which unified Thracian, Gaul and Germani) to modern Indonesia’s killing fields, Argentina’s lost generation, the Egyptian martyrs and Mexico’s stolen students, there is an echo of those who have been silenced in the voices to which we lend our ears today. One cannot easily default on this debt to the past. Blanqui said, ‘how many icy corpses creep in the space of the night, expecting the hour of destruction, which will be at the same time, that of resurrection’!88 Where will the next ‘renovating conflagration’ break? Where will a new outbreak of mass struggle erupt? For Bensaïd, ‘we can always save the defeated from their forever recommenced defeats and their eternal torment’. In the conflicts of our present, 86 87 88

Bensaïd 2010c, p. 274. Bensaïd 2010c, p. 53. Quoted from Bensaïd 2010c, p. 53.

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somehow, one must awake the past to life. This entails a dialectical move: ‘for a part of the past to be touched by the present moment there must be no continuity between them’. Bensaïd made explicit, about Benjamin’s second thesis, the importance of burrowing through present temporality to reach its secrets. Here, ‘Benjamin meets with the deep rebellion against the despotic chains of mechanical temporality, from Baudelaire to Proust, from Nietzsche to Bergson’.89 On this point, redemption attains its key: redemption of the past in the tacit pact between the generations gone past and one’s singular present. As with every other generation, one’s singular present has its own weak messianic force that has been conferred on it, ‘this fragile messianic power, on which the past claims an inalienable right’.90 I take a detour through Löwy’s discussion of redemption to supplement that of Bensaïd’s because redemption is a key theological concept in the Theses, implying ‘reparation for the despair and desolation of the past’.91 Benjamin moves it from the experience of an individual to ‘collective reparation on the terrain of history’.92 For Löwy, Benjamin found ‘unexpected support’ in the work of the German philosopher Hermann Lotze (1817–1881) who is cited in The Arcades Project. The extracts of Lotze in The Arcades Project hold that, there is no progress if the souls that have suffered are not entitled to happiness and fulfilment/completion. Lotze rejects, then, the conceptions of history that are contemptuous of the demands of past ages and that regard the travails of past generations as irrevocably wasted … We find these ideas almost word for word in Thesis ii, which conceives redemption from the very first as historical remembrance of the victims of the past.93

89 90 91 92 93

Ibid. Bensaïd 2010c, p. 54. Löwy 2005a, p. 30. Ibid. Ibid. For Löwy, another passage from Horkheimer’s book Dawn and Decline (1934) helps to shed light on the problem of redemption. He said: ‘When you are at your lowest ebb, exposed to an eternity of torment inflicted upon you by other human beings, you cherish, as a dream of deliverance, the idea that a being will come who will stand in the light and bring truth and justice for you. You do not even need this to happen in your lifetime, nor in the lifetime of those who are torturing you to death, but one day, whenever it comes, all will nonetheless be repaired … It is bitter to be misunderstood and to die in obscurity. It is to the honour of historical research that it projects light into that obscurity’.

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Redemption is not confined to historical research, which would relegate redemption to the contemplative standpoint of immanent facticity (as opposed to transcendence). The contemplation of the past in its facticity without transcendence does not enact the obligation to abolish the relations of domination in the present. For ‘redemption to take place, there must be reparation – in Hebrew tikkun – for the suffering and grief inflicted on the defeated generations and the accomplishment of the objectives they struggled for and failed to attain’.94 This is a certain messianic strategic practice, where the ‘only possible Messiah is a collective one: it is humanity itself or, more precisely … oppressed humanity’. Messianic strategic practice invokes collective emancipation, which strives to exert the small portion of messianic power that each generation possesses. Redemption is only a possibility, ‘which one has to know how to grasp’ strategically. Contrasted to messianic practice, positivist historicism is arrogant, ‘laying on the past the possessive eye of God’. For the historical materialist, ‘to collect things fallen … is an act of love, because “the world is present in each of its objects, and this according to a certain order”. We must, therefore, begin by preciously assembling a magnificent mosaic from the trash and ruins of history’.95 This leaves their contingency untouched, ready to overturn meaning in new constellations. Benjamin wants a history that leaves nothing out, ‘excludes no detail, no event, however insignificant, and for which nothing is “lost” ’: In the telling of the story … from the memorial register, the chronicler is an affectionate chiffonier and collector. He gathers and collects, without selecting the facts on the sole criteria of their historical grandeur. He saves the scattered members of aborted revolutions. For that, it is necessary that nothing will be negligible, that nothing will be excluded from the beggar’s feast, that everything will be cited.96 By way of an example, in Egypt’s revolutionary time, street art, one day drawn onto the walls, another taken down by the state, shows how these traces uncover these relations. There was once a picture of a red fist. It was taken in May of 2011 while the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces was in power. The fist is strong. It is clenching a cross and a crescent signifying the unity achieved between Muslim and Christian revolutionaries to bring down Mubarak. The

94 95 96

Löwy 2005a, p. 32. Bensaïd 2010c, pp. 55–6. Bensaïd 2010c, p. 55.

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fist is so strong that it is smashing its way through a tank. This expresses the fact that the military’s manipulation of the country could be broken if sectarian lines are overcome. This clenched fist signifies that the revolution was never a just contest between secular Arab dictators and Islamism but about breaking authoritarian-military rule in neoliberal conditions. The massacre at Maspero showed us how this unity was feared by the military generals. As sectarian hordes rose with the counter-revolution, this dream of unity leaves its trace. This dream can only be found in the ruins that cemented bourgeois order. Unity is still a dream to be realised. In the thesis, Benjamin tore out Hegel’s quote, saying, ‘Secure at first food and clothing, and the kingdom of God will come to you of itself’, and for Bensaïd this was ‘a profession of materialist faith, introduced by the Hegelian notion of labour (feed yourself and clothe yourself first) engaged in the affirmation of the omnipresent class struggle, which is a struggle for things’.97 Authentic refinement, authentic sophistication and authentic elegance ‘takes place within the struggle itself. They are values resuscitated, reignited by action’, overcoming the old dualism between the ‘ugly and material as opposed to refined and spiritual’, which can only be resolved through class struggles. It is not necessarily the goals of the struggle, but, ‘on the contrary, refinement is immanent in the struggle’.98 The late Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s writing evokes the meaning of Benjamin’s thesis: In such times [of radical mass upheaval] … the rage for politics roared along like a tidal wave, out of control. Each person felt as though she, he could not be truly alive without being political, without debating political questions. In truth, it was as though they could stay alive even without rice. Even schoolteachers, who had all along lived ‘neutrally’, were infected by the rage for politics – and, so far as they were able, they influenced their pupils with the politics to which they had attached themselves. Each struggled to claim new members for his party. And schools proved to be fertile battlefields for their struggles. Politics! Politics! No different from rice under the Japanese Occupation.99 The becoming political in struggle – political subjectivisation – is an intellectual-spiritual [geistig] experience where each step forward in struggle and

97 98 99

Bensaïd 2010c, p. 57. Ibid. Quoted from Ali 2006.

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solidarity disturbs the provisional victories of the ruling class to forge a fighting spirit. But they themselves are constantly threatened. A fighting spirit is always filled with ‘confidence, courage, ruse and humour’. Anyone who has witnessed a militant strike would say so. In the fourth thesis Benjamin invoked the image of the sun that rises in the sky of history. Bensaïd saw this image as an invitation to a non-linear temporality, made of ‘attractions and gravitational correspondences, and constellations, the magnetic sun of the present calls to it, in order to give colour and vigour back to it, the pulse of flowers past’.100 Bensaïd criticises historicism because, in its illusory and relativistic pursuit for how things really were, historicism as a positive science of history reveals the tenacity of its esprit propriétaire, but, ‘In reality, for the historical materialist, every image of the past would be irredeemably lost if it was not reanimated by the present’.101 That the past is a problem for the present has implications for thinking chronologically: The mighty return of the past to the present denies the supposed ordering of chronology. Thus, a Copernican Revolution is carried out after which the past is no longer, in the trail of time, a short-lived trace, an unresponsive, ‘before’ – immobile and bygone. It remains a ‘once ago, and formerly’, that gravitates around the present, that waits around the now, always ready to tamper with it.102 After all, the living take themselves to be breathing at the midday of history. One prepares a festival for the past, inviting the dead to attend. Historical materialism breaks with a bankrupt historical method that (falsely) supposes one can escape the present to return objectively to the past. Can we really expect to escape from the knot between our present and the past? Can the relation be disentangled? In a society dominated by class, history can never be approached without choosing with whom one empathises – the dominant or the dominated? By contrast, a classless present may perhaps cite the past freely. For historical materialism, ‘the critical knowledge of the present is the condition of the effective knowledge of the past’. For the historians who do not take up a critical-radical-revolutionary attitude towards the present, they look toward the past with the eyes of the victors, ‘a depressive genealogy, not of defeat but of domination’. Benjamin, however, wanted the enormous

100 101 102

Bensaïd 2010c, p. 58. Bensaïd 2010c, p. 59. Ibid.

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energies of history that ‘are bound up in the “once upon a time” of classical historiography’ to be liberated. This means rupturing with the ‘history that showed things “as they really were”’. Moreover, ‘to read into the future is difficult, but to see purely into the past is more difficult still. I say purely, that is, without involving in this retrospective glance anything that has taken place in the meantime’.103 The ideal of authentic purity is impossible. The historicist historian has the belief that they are able to grasp history’s essence to ‘possess once and for all the documented truth of history, guaranteed by the supposed permanence of the past in its being’.104 This is not what the historical materialist aims to do nor can do for, ‘authentic knowledge consists of grasping in flight the fragments of this truth’, as ‘truth manifests itself suddenly, in a play of eclipses and apparitions, in the burning friction of meaning’. There are ‘hours and minutes of truth. Precious revelations and fleeting encounters. Emergency and danger sharpen the historical intelligence’.105 In this sense, Benjamin tried to interrogate the connection between presence of mind and dialectics. What is decisive ‘is that the dialectician cannot look on history as anything other than a constellation of dangers which he is always, as he follows its development in his thought, on the point of averting’.106 What is the historical subject of this danger? Only a conscious social subject can confront this danger with lucidity and vivacity reaching back and holding fast to an image of the past. An image of the past ‘attain[s] legibility only at a particular time. And, indeed, this acceding “to legibility” constitutes a specific critical point in the movement at their interior’.107 He does not believe in the notion of a ‘timeless truth’. Does this connect truth and event to our present? Benjamin noted: It is the present that polarizes the event into fore-and after-history … The fore-and after-history of a historical phenomenon show up in the phenomenon itself on the strength of its dialectical presentation. What is more: every dialectically presented historical circumstance polarizes itself and becomes a force field in which the confrontation between its fore-history and after-history is played out. It becomes such a field insofar as the present instant interpenetrates it. And thus the historical evidence polarizes into fore- and after-history always new, never in the same way.

103 104 105 106 107

Benjamin 2002, p. 470. Bensaïd 2010c, p. 60. Ibid. Benjamin 2002, p. 470. Benjamin 2002, p. 462.

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And it does so at a distance from its own existence, in the present instant itself – like a line which, divided according to the Apollonian section, experiences its partition from outside itself.108 This raises the problem of tradition and the need to wrench it from the ruling classes and conservative bureaucrats in the labour movement. Bensaïd described the process: To rip tradition from the conformism that incessantly tries to take possession of it – reducing it to instrumental slavery and transforming it into stone – is the revolutionary task par excellence. This is not a question of tabula rasa. The danger is conformism, the routine perpetuation of the victors and the capital punishment of plentiful tradition. Tasked with warding off these dangers, the Revolution is a matter of conservation as well as innovation.109 If the personages of modern bourgeois societies continue their domination, one can expect routine exploitation and oppression to continue. This is a catastrophe in permanence. As Bensaïd pointed out, it was the negative of the revolution in permanence. The concept of progress ‘must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are “status quo” is the catastrophe … hell is not something that awaits us, but this life here and now’. At the juncture of the image of eternal recurrence Benjamin and Blanqui were Bensaïd’s twin stars: Benjamin (1923, 1927, 1937, 1939 …) shares with Blanqui (1830, 1839, 1848, 1871 …) the infernal vision of the eternal return of defeats. With more clarity than most political leaders, he saw the Popular Fronts as the latest avatars of wasted revolutionary opportunities. Paris, definitively provincialised, had lost is place as the revolutionary capital. Baudelaire’s defeated spleen is the feeling that corresponds to permanent catastrophe, the negative of the permanent revolution.110 According to Bensaïd, this ‘permanent catastrophe’ lays the foundation for classical melancholy, because it is at odds with a faith in progress. Bensaïd introduces melancholy, a theme developed upon in later writings (Le pari mél-

108 109 110

Benjamin 2002, p. 470. Bensaïd 2010c, p. 61. Bensaïd 2010c, p. 63.

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ancolique). Melancholy is ‘the lucid germ of modernity’s catastrophe’.111 The continuation of the present was the catastrophe throughout the 1930s when Benjamin was writing because neither Nazism nor Stalinism were historical detours, roads taken that deviated from the norm of modern bourgeois societies. They were not anomalies. Between socialism and barbarism, the latter is just as – if not more – likely than the former, and ‘in history, monstrosity is never an anachronism’. The doctrine of continuous progress like ‘a flight of stairs one climbs and never comes down’, is a make-believe linear conception of time compatible with the uniform accumulation of capital. Normative conceptions of history dull historical sensibilities, share in the banality of optimism, put vigilance to sleep and teach ‘confidence in tomorrow’. Against this ‘powerful drug’, Bensaïd argues that Benjamin reverses the perspective, switches the exception and the rule. The real ‘state of exception’ is the messianic interruption, the revolutionary brake. The fundamental concept of historical materialism is not that of progress, but that of ‘actualisation’ [italics – D.R.]. Actualisation of potentialities. Bifurcation of the present. Decision.112 The dialectical concept of historical time implies a redefinition of its fundamental concepts: ‘Catastrophe – having missed the opportunity; critical moment – the status quo threatens to continue; progress – the first revolutionary measure’.113 According to Bensaïd, Angelus Novus ‘contradicts the blissful idea of progress’, with an open mouth mixing terror and incapacity as it looks on at the piles of debris. This temporal path – one long storm we call progress – is an ‘uninterrupted catastrophe’: The Angel would love to wait, to wake the dead and piece together what has been destroyed. But the storm blowing from Paradise Lost (Eden, Malcolm Lowry’s Garden of Love) is so strong, that the Angel can no longer close its wings; hence the terror of eyes wide open and the open mouth in mute protest. It doesn’t move forward. It is pushed towards to the future, with its back facing it, whereas the ruins pile up towards the sky.114

111 112 113 114

Bensaïd 2010c, p. 65. Bensaïd 2010c, p. 69. Quoted from ibid. Bensaïd 2009, text from his personal documents Walter Benjamin, thèses sur le concept d’histoire.

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For Bensaïd, the coming of the Messiah can arrest the permanent catastrophe. The ‘messianic concept’ expresses the tension and anxiety about what is merely possible. Without the least nostalgia for a hidden God, or the slightest temptation to piety, Benjamin opposes to the fetishism of history its profane politicisation. Every instant is witness to a confrontation between the rational and irrational, between possibilities that attain effective history and those that are provisionally or definitively eliminated. The politician’s belief in progress, a religious fetish, welcomed disaster and cannot arrest the permanent catastrophe. ‘This myth, the politicians’ faith in their “mass base”, and their servile attachment to an uncontrolled apparatus are three interdependent elements of bureaucratic culture’.115 Against the fetishistic belief in Progress with its bureaucratic auxiliaries, Bensaïd argued that one must look for the potentialities and contingencies in a situation without a faith in an illusory-mechanical ideology, uphold the conscious responsibility of the vanguard against the sheep-like and demagogic cult of the mass, and authentic democracy must fight against the uncontrolled bureaucratic apparatus. These three cardinal sins of the workers’ movements’ bureaucratisation are common to Social Democracy and Stalinism, and on Bensaïd’s word, vigilant opposition to them was a condition for remaining political without ‘disappointment and indifference’.116 The political problems of orthodox Social Democracy could not be separated from their culture and worldview [Weltanschauung]. They believed themselves to be swimming with the current of history, a ‘comfortable certitude that history led the ballroom to its necessary grand finale and that all this procedure and all of this advance is ruled behind the scenes by the hardworking cogs of technology’. This historicist Marxism pioneered a cult of labour, a ‘proletarian version of the protestant ethic’, with the idea that labour liberates. Bensaïd writes how this idea belonged to: A ‘vulgar Marxism’, that extended beyond the case of Social Democracy. How, in 1939, passing through the former Social Democracy, not to detect the critique of the Stalinist productivism let loose, the forced collectivisation, the accelerated industrialisation, the new hierarchy of work and the reinforcement of the state? Evading the question of fetishism and alienation, ‘vulgar communism’, mesmerised by accumulation without adjectives, loses sight of purpose and quality: how do the products of this work

115 116

Bensaïd 2010c, p. 73. Bensaïd 2010c, p. 74.

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serve the worker? It only considered positive sales on the balance sheet of progress and not the regressions and irremediable injuries inflicted on nature.117 Benjamin’s attack on Social Democracy became explicit, but ‘the first objection is that of conformism, the original and secret vice’. By making technological development the criteria of Progress, they fashioned an objectivist conception of nature that broke with the humanised nature of the utopian socialists. Labour aims to exploit nature gratis. In citing Saint-Simon, as Bensaïd suggests: Benjamin evoked all of these potential creations of the imagination, where reconciliation with humanised nature is a humanity naturalised. This illustrates a labour that, far from looting nature, will be in a position to wake the potential creations that lie dormant within it. Here, the aesthetic and poetic imagination replaces the poor imagination of technocracy … A philosophical and ecological caution that is profoundly faithful to Marx.118 For Bensaïd, the criterion of progress is at odds with the Protestant cult of labour. Nature is a social category, but it is not reducible to its being as a social category. The ‘torment of matter’ stubbornly persists in it. By virtue of being a social category, ‘nature’ was subject to a Benjaminian primacy of politics – just as history. This means that social and political conflict cannot be divorced from nature. Bensaïd shows the divergence between Nietzsche and Benjamin in relation to thesis seven, pertaining to monumental and antiquated history. Essentially, for Bensaïd, the foundational distinction between the two was their relation to myth: Nietzsche’s myth (or eternal recurrence) is an ‘anti-history’ while Benjamin’s politicisation of history is an anti-myth (though Benjamin recognises the metaphor of eternal recurrence).119 Benjamin recognised Nietzsche’s critique of historical reason, namely that ‘We need history, but we need it differently from the spoiled lazy-bones in the garden of knowledge’, challenging triumphant-monumental historical Reason. The kind of ‘lazy’ history Nietzsche speaks of is a ‘school of resignation’, where ‘that which is necessarily had to happen’, leading to cynicism. By contrast, history should be taken as an active object. Yet, as Bensaïd explains, the relation to history ought to be political, 117 118 119

Bensaïd 2010c, p. 77. Bensaïd 2010c, p. 78. Bensaïd 2010c, p. 80.

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and Benjamin proposed to save history, ‘to wake up the potentialities that slumber within it’, achieved through politicisation as an anti-myth. Through doing so, Benjamin ‘did not make the present a place of judgement but redemption’, Bensaïd writes:120 History is no longer a hypostatised and ventriloquist knowledge, a positive automaton, but only the matter of a political knowledge, that of the fighting and oppressed class. The subject of knowledge is the class, not sociologically inert, but determined by a relation of oppression and revolt, with a thirst for vengeance that breathes life into it. Theory and practice come together into a single partisan subjectivity, poles apart from historical ‘objectivity’ that the Stalinists and Social Democrats use as a beating stick.121 For Benjamin, redemption accomplishes ‘its work of liberation’ in the name of generations defeated, not the petty-bourgeois ideal of the comforts of future generations. Reformists only see struggle as it pertains to a cheerful finale and not as a wrath that fans the fire of struggle in the name of the past.

4

The Empty Time of Abstract Perfectionism

Bensaïd endorsed Benjamin’s thirteenth thesis, criticising Social Democratic theory and practice. Benjamin had referred to Dietzgen’s assertion that the Social Democratic cause became clearer by the day while the people became all the wiser, which captured the dogma by brief quotation. The dogma held together the idea of humanity’s unlimited perfectibility and continuous progress, but it was not an adequate representation of ‘the authentic real’. Bensaïd wrote: It is an organic progress, unlimited and continuous. The progress of humanity itself, rising level by level, from childhood to adolescence to become an adult, according to the inflexible law of three stages … heteronomous and normative, this progress has the pace … of a tortoise. It does not implant itself in the immanent potentialities of the movement of reality itself. It does not interrogate or criticise its own criteria.122 120 121 122

Bensaïd 2010c, pp. 78–9. Bensaïd 2010c, p. 80. Bensaïd 2010c, p. 82.

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Bensaïd centred his critique on the ‘substance’ of the Social Democratic notion of time, which was homogenous and empty. Implicit in the substance is – now at the level of the authentic real of history – a separation between form and content that immanently emerges from the dogmatic approaches to historical development. The dogmatic conception is a stranger to the rhythms of the event, while also being indifferent and lifeless in relation to the authentic real concrete of history. This conception of Progress is a formal scheme that is applied externally to the concrete content of the organic whole, which loses hold on the living nature of concrete reality. It instead means, as Hegel wrote: The instrument of this monotonous formalism is no more difficult to handle than the palette of a painter which contains only two colors, perhaps red and green, the former for coloring the surface when we require a historical piece, the latter when we require a landscape … The monochromatic nature of the schema and its lifeless determinations, together with this absolute identity and the transition from one to the other, are each and every one the result of the same lifeless intellect and external cognition.123 The alienation of form and content arises from the quantitative and substantialist notion of time to the detriment of quality and the relational conception. Hegel recognised the pitfalls of this conception of time, saying that: As for time: One might presume that time, as the counterpart to space, would constitute the material of the other division of pure mathematics, but time is the existing concept itself. The principle of magnitude, or the principle of the conceptless difference, and the principle of equality, or that of abstract, lifeless unity, are incapable of dealing with that pure restlessness of life and its absolute difference. Only as something paralyzed, in fact, as the [quantitative] one, does this negativity thereby become the second material of this cognizing, which, itself being an external activity, reduces what is selfmoving to ‘stuff’ simply in order now to have in that ‘stuff’ an indifferent, external, lifeless content.124 According to Bensaïd, Benjamin – ever the vigilant sentinel – ‘scented the danger’ of the empty temporality.125 The unlimited perfectibility and the myth 123 124 125

Hegel 2018, p. 32. Hegel 2018, p. 28. Ibid.

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of eternal recurrence were the two elements of the empty temporality. Against these two ideological elements of empty time, ‘only the “dialectical concept of historical time”’ provided a relational-rational-conceptual response.126 As Bensaïd takes Benjamin’s point, this is a messianic reason that can accept genuine and creative novelty in history in rupture with the modernist historical illusions of an infinite repeatability of the same present. Benjamin’s rupture relates to Marx. In Bensaïd’s thinking, as I will explore in the next chapter, Marx reconstructed the complex articulation of organic temporality (as did Proust), which is a ‘lost time that must be searched after’.127 Bensaïd’s reading of Benjamin, on this point, was opposed not only to the Social Democratic dogmatisms, but also to Nietzschean and Bergsonian conceptions of time; Nietzsche had proposed a ‘mythological temporality’ while Bergson produced a ‘psychological temporality’, each of which – if I read Bensaïd and Benjamin appropriately – were inferior to the dialectical conception of historical time because they were unable to grasp historical novelty. Bensaïd’s and Benjamin’s response to bourgeois temporality is also distinct from the traditional Romantic reaction and the position of Bergson (and Heidegger). The Romantics rebelled in the name of a natural and sacred time that was lost or forgotten against time that was disenchanted. History had no place. It opposed a secret time of the individual that was re-enchanted to a social time that was irreparably disenchanted. In the history of empty time, from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the development of market relations began to erode natural and sacred human relations. In its place a new despotism emerged, the anonymous despotism of the clock, ‘quantifiable and measurable’. Newton gave theoretical expression to this new form of time, where ‘Absolute, true and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature flows equably without regard to anything external’, and ‘Absolute space, in its own nature, without regard to anything external, remains always similar and immovable’. This is an impersonal and reified form of time. But what is time and space? Hegel had a philosophical response, writing ‘Space and time are generally taken to be poles apart: space is there, and then we also have time. Philosophy calls this “also” in question’.128 Time and space are moments of a concrete relational unity of nature and movement that feature in Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature. For Newtonian mechanics, space and time are inert and separated substances. For Hegel, they do not endure ‘a forced separation making them inert and disjointed’, rather they remain relationally tied, 126 127 128

Ibid. Ibid. Quoted from Tombazos 2014, p. 33.

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hence the plausibility of ‘ceding ground to win some time’. As Bensaïd argued, ‘time is always the truth of space, in the sense that the first transforms into the second’.129 The substantialist and representational notion take space and time ‘as empty and to be filled with matter from the outside. In this way, material things are, on the one hand, to be taken as indifferent to space and time, and, on the other hand, to be taken at the same time as essentially spatial and temporal’. But space and time are never empty recipients; instead, they are moments of objectivity in movement, of the objective dialectic of the real. ‘ “Excuse me Newton, there is no empty space”, neither of time’, Bensaïd wisecracked.130 This brings us back to Marx’s critique of political economy (I will discuss it further in the next chapter on Marx). Stavros Tombazos claimed that ‘every economy is an economy of time’, and this is an excellent proposition. Capital reduces the relation between human beings to a carcass of time. And, Bensaïd asked, what is this time? A measure already and always given like in Kant and Newton? A time immanent to the movement of capital, that punctuates its cycles and pulsations? A single time or an articulation of different temporalities – linear, cyclical and organic? Bensaïd wanted to do two things with these questions. Firstly, he wanted to articulate an immanent temporality from which the event could emerge (in contrast to a reified and linear arithmetic of history with its absolute laws and substantialist temporality) entailing the instability and discontinuity of discordant time. In this immanent discordance of time, in which ‘the periodicity of crisis is necessary and determined. Their eruption, their modality and their continuation’, are determined by the reproduction of capitalism as a whole. Secondly, Bensaïd was demonstrating that the event could contain both determinism and chance. By definition, the event could not be deduced from deterministic historical laws: ‘The critical point’ – the messianic event – determined and aleatory, the economic crisis is tied only algebraically to the political event of the revolutionary crisis. It calls for a new conception of causality that is nonmechanical that reduces but does not eliminate the element of chance. It is born of generalised exchange and reproduction for exchange.131 Bensaïd makes explicit the consequences that Benjamin’s move has for understanding revolutionary processes. Revolution can be understood with a dialect129 130 131

Bensaïd 2010c, p. 208. Bensaïd 2010c, p. 203. Bensaïd 2010c, p. 215.

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ical concept of time and in ‘liberating the explosive force of dialectical time against the hollow formalism of logical time, the Revolution is no longer the locomotive of history, obediently following the rails of destiny, but rather an interruption, “pulling the fire alarm”’.132 The Messiah is a prisoner of empty and mechanical time, because it is forever captive in the mechanisms inferring the future from the past without ever stopping at the present. The Messiah can only be freed from this empty time ‘by a new time, where the present, simultaneously arrest and becoming, guards all of its chances’.

5

History Is an Object of Re-construction

Benjamin’s fourteenth thesis is witness to the ‘dialectical reversal’, in which history is taken to be an object of a construction. The dialectical reversal does not passively fill the gaps of a slow chronology; instead, being a construction, it ‘defines gravitations, correspondences and intensity’, of a time full of knots and webs.133 Now-time ‘recognises, greets and communicates with itself beyond the inertia of the epoch’, it is a recognition of moments that communicate beyond the epoch, like Rome and Robespierre.134 These are also the historical moments, [p]recious instants of Breton, the strategic moments of Lenin, where the intermissions of destiny and the great bifurcations are decided. Nowtime calls upon the past and revives it. The inaugural novelty of the French Revolution announced itself as Rome reincarnate … For Robespierre, Rome tore itself from monumental ossification and became actual.135 The tiger’s leap into the past within the contours of modern bourgeois domination is an alienated and false awakening of the past, because it is the aestheticisation of politics, which is the terrain of the fascists, leaping into the past to fortify present exploitation and oppression, securing its rule with nationalistic myths of the past (obviously a decisive political point for Benjamin). The freedom of this leap into the past was a ‘captive liberty, within a closed arena under the sovereign watch of the ruling class’, in other words, a ‘sham liberty. The sigh 132 133 134 135

Bensaïd 2010c, p. 83. Bensaïd 2010c, p. 84. Ibid. Ibid.

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of enslaved freedom’.136 In the alienated conditions of capital, historical myth is mobilised for the continuation of the present catastrophe, beckoning no genuine novelty. If history is taken to be an object of construction, the emergence of a new structure in concrete history can be thought. In the form of a Messianic eruption, the dialectical leap into the past arrests the recurrent catastrophe and its purpose is to welcome the authentic novelty of structures in concrete history, ‘which is in the process of being born in becoming and decline’. Yet, ‘all that is original is an unfinished restoration of revelation, a passing crystallisation of possibility’. Now-time’s fullness and plenitude can triumph over the hollow evolutionism of the chronicler. For Bensaïd, the event explodes the structure. An authentic novelty does not follow from the linear line of development but is an origin and a new beginning; it is not a genetic origin, but the beginning of a new (structural) whole.137 Successful revolutions of authentic novelty, from which a new whole emerges, rupture with the old form of temporality by introducing a new organisation of time. The French Revolution introduced a new calendar and ‘against the mathematical neutrality of the clock, the calendar guards the memory of a sacred time, charged with meaning’. The hours of the clock have a measured regularity, whereas the calendar is cut through with interruptions – think of 25 January in Egypt. No mathematical measure can account for these events written onto our calendars and we cannot take stock of their significance by counting the number of days that have elapsed since. For the Péguy of Clio, the concept of time that the ideology of progress adheres to is ‘precisely the time of the savings bank and the great credit establishments … it is the time of interest accumulated by a capital … a truly homogenous time, since it translates, transports into homogenous calculations … [and] transposes into a homogenous (mathematical) language the countless varieties of anxieties and fortunes’.138 This is the time of progress, ‘made in the image and likeness of space’, that reduces itself to an ‘absolute, infinite’ line. As I explored above, throughout the Theses, Benjamin sets up a contrast between the objectivist-positivist historian and the dialectical conception of historical time. For the objectivist-positivist, the past is an eternal and fixed image; for the dialectical conception, the past is an unforgettable and unique kind of experience where the present explodes its homogeneity. To explode the homogeneity of an epoch opens one to its potentialities that conflict with 136 137 138

Ibid. Bensaïd 2010c, p. 87. Quoted from Löwy 2005a, p. 95.

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the unified hegemony of the dominant classes, because it is in the present that its unique possibilities may be seized, where moments of precious revelation spring forward out of the past. For the objectivist, the past is the past, ‘definitively finished, definitively classified and ordered, where every link is obediently placed in the arrangement of time’. The illusion of this way of writing history is that it imagines that ‘to revive an epoch’, one must ‘forget what they have known after it’, thus ensuring it remains antiquated and unrelated to the present.139 According to Bensaïd, objectivist history is like elementary arithmetic because it is purely quantitative; its method proceeds by addition. The objectivist adds some facts to some facts; it disavows theoretical presuppositions while promising to build a theory from its accumulated facts. Bensaïd writes that the objectivist ‘piles up a mass of fruit to fill the unquenchable appetite of homogenous and empty time, a fictional fullness, purely quantitative, which is vainly sought after’. The immensity of the void is highlighted and ‘without ever exhausting it, he [the objectivist – D.R.] heaps and adds up the mass of facts’. But facts are abstractions, Bensaïd explaining what Benjamin was trying to show, namely that ‘the intimidating mass of facts can nourish the edifying recital of universal history’, but ‘It does not suffice to give birth to meaning. To do so, a historiography complying with a constructive principle rather than a cumulative one is necessary’.140 With Benjamin, Bensaïd was thinking against historicism; Bensaïd made the criticism of historicism explicit by working through Benjamin with two arguments that were also decisive for Bensaïd’s reading of Marx. Firstly, historical logic is not chronological and secondly a theoretical order is not empirical order. For Bensaïd, the fact Benjamin wrote about this before the release of Marx’s Grundrisse throughout the world in 1953 meant that Benjamin was ‘in advance of the Marxology of his time’.141 In fact, Benjamin’s advance on Marxology can only be understood by understanding his encounter with Korsch’s Karl Marx manuscript, the most advanced work on Marx written in the interwar period. I shall make Bensaïd’s fleeting comment about Marxology more precise by stating that the theoretical event materialised in Benjamin’s Theses and the Arcades Project should be understood not in teleological terms because the unfinished form of Benjamin’s work was not inscribed in the origin of the work itself. The Theses was not generated by the Arcades Project according to the principles of genesis or descent. Instead, the theoretical event needs to be understood in relation to Korsch’s writing on Marx. Benjamin’s materialist 139 140 141

Bensaïd 2010c, p. 89. Bensaïd 2010c, p. 91. Ibid.

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writing of history, following from the constructive principle owed its content partly to Korsch, who explored the primacy of logical order over empirical order in Karl Marx; Benjamin relied on Korsch’s presentation of the primacy of logical order and conceptual construction. Korsch and Benjamin criticised historicism, the ideological conception of history. Their concepts approximate each other in content. We know Benjamin was a reader of Capital volume one and had access to the Korsch edition. Benjamin was probably aware of the arguments in the Introduction where Korsch outlined that ‘The dialectic may be compared with the modern “axiomatic” method of the mathematical sciences, in so far as this method uses an apparently logical-constructive [logisch konstruktiven] procedure to deduce from certain simple principles the results already arrived at through detailed research’.142 Korsch was thinking about the form representation can take, in which the dialectical mode of representation [dialektischen Darstellungsweise] follows a constructive method. Korsch explained that the principles in Capital were not to be understood in historicist terms, nor in metaphysical terms, which would turn the ‘new principle into a general philosophical theory of history that would be imposed from the outside upon the actual pattern of historical events’.143 The logical-constructive principle was a means of seizing the innermost dynamics of a specific modern bourgeois present and its object of inquiry, the capitalist mode of production. Korsch continued, ‘The same can be said of Marx’s conception of history as he himself said of his theory of value; that it was not meant to be a dogmatic principle but merely an original and more useful approach to the real, sensuous, practical world that presents itself to the active and reflective subject’.144 This is why, ‘the conclusions arrived at in Part 8 on Primitive Accumulation, was not intended as anything more than an historical outline of the origins and development of capitalism in Western Europe’.145 Retelling the historical narrative of the origins and development of Western capitalism would follow an ‘additive’ method; projecting them elsewhere turns the additive method into a metaphysics, a philosophy of history. Benjamin’s constructive principle relates to the dialectical image because it is the form of the historical object that exhibits ‘a genuine synthesis’. The dialectical image is an antidote to historical apologia that ‘is meant to cover up the revolutionary moments in the occurrence of history’. Historical apologia ‘seeks the establishment of a continuity’. Historical materialism, on the other 142 143 144 145

Korsch 1932. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

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hand, ‘blasts the epoch out of the reified “continuity of history” also exploding the homogeneity of the epoch, interspersing it with ruins – that is, with the present’. Benjamin thought that the monadological structure of the object of history demands that it ‘be blasted out of the continuum of historical succession’.146 In a very rich but difficult passage he wrote: This structure first comes to light in the extracted object itself. And it does so in the form of the historical confrontation that makes up the interior (and, as it were, the bowels) of the historical object, and into which all the forces and interests of history enter on a reduced scale. It is owing to this monadological structure that the historical object finds represented in its interior its own fore-history and after-history.147 Benjamin articulated five theses about historical materialism’s specific notion of history, namely that knowledge rescues the historical object, there is a distinction between historical images and stories (stories being the domain of historicism), dialectical processes are monadological, requiring an immanent critique of the notion of progress and lastly that historical materialism is an experientially based dialectical mode of subjectivity. The historical object is constituted by blasting apart historical continuity. ‘In fact, an object of history cannot be targeted at all within the continuous elapse of history’. Historical narration has often been arbitrary; it has ‘simply picked out an object from this continuous succession’. It is arbitrary and foundationless and ‘its first thought was then always to reinsert the object into the continuum’.

6

Constellations

For the materialist, one cannot choose objects in an arbitrary fashion. A materialist method is otherwise, since ‘it does not fasten on them [i.e. objects] but rather springs them loose from the order of succession’. As mentioned above, this relates to the set of dangers the materialist is faced with. A materialist method is a reaction to ‘a constellation of dangers, which threatens both the burden of tradition and those who receive it. It is this constellation of dangers which the materialist presentation of history comes to engage’.148 Against the dangers, it must prove its presence of mind, Benjamin wrote: 146 147 148

Benjamin 2002, p. 475. Ibid. Ibid.

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To thinking belongs the movement as well as the arrest of thoughts. Where thinking comes to a standstill in a constellation saturated with tensions – there the dialectical image appears. It is the caesura in the movement of thought. Its position is naturally not an arbitrary one. It is to be found, in a word, where the tension between dialectical opposites is greatest. Hence, the object constructed in the materialist presentation of history is itself the dialectical image. The latter is identical with the historical object; it justifies its violent expulsion from the continuum of the historical process.149 The movement of ideas belongs to thought and not facts, the only place in which the concrete can be reconstructed in an image. Here, Benjamin affirms the active side of idealism. This is an important theoretical point. For Benjamin, it was ‘necessary to be able to recognise the sign of a messianic zero hour’, immanent within the becoming of concrete histories. The messianic zero hour is the revolutionary chance, ‘which comes as a chance in the combat for the oppressed past, a chance to rescue, that resolves the enigma of immobile structures’. The sign of this revolutionary chance where thinking suddenly halts in a constellation overflowing with tensions, is a decisive strategic moment. Destiny, fate and doom break down and the possible makes its interruption. Messianism is secularised through the political tensions of this concrete present. This is captured in Benjamin’s point that ‘Such a presentation of history has a goal to pass, as Engels put it, “beyond the sphere of thought” ’.150 Bensaïd drew the conclusion that one should be ‘ready to pounce’ on the surprising upsurges of possibility, because ‘in Messianic time, the surprise is always possible’, and [i]n hours of doubt, at the limits of historical reason, the dizziness of the two infinities forever await us, against which the fragile now-time struggles heroically, the Jetztzeit, the splinter of messianic time, which collects and abstracts in its tiny point in the history of humanity.151 Benjamin also queried the notion of a historical qualification, or what confers an evental [événementielle] character to historical facts. The historical qualification is retrospective. As Bensaïd noted, the theorist is the selector and

149 150 151

Ibid. Ibid. Bensaïd 2010c, p. 93.

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definer of the most significant facts, which can be accomplished by the historicist or the dialectical imagination. On this site of demarcation, Benjamin’s constellation is pivotal, because it is dialectically constructive, producing a re-presentation of history cutting against the historicist apprehension and presentation of history. Bensaïd explained how Benjamin developed a mode of historical presentation grander than a mechanical causality: Benjamin’s historian breaks the illusory continuum of history to seize the constellation, the far away relations of attraction and gravitation in which his epoch makes contact with the past. He founded a concept of the present in which the fragments and splinters of Messianic time are lodged, like so many connections and secret affinities with twin galaxies. The historical movement obeys, not a mechanical causality, but these ‘strange attractors’, who put a little bit of order in the chaos.152 It could be said that the entirety of Benjamin’s Theses was about anti-historicist redemption and remembrance to open the liberation of the future without foretelling it. Benjamin’s last passage is certainly one of the most fascinating of the Theses, because of the ban on telling the future. Why was it so important that remembrance was exercised while it was forbidden to look into the future? If one dictates the course of the future, one plays the role of God; the idealist philosophers, historicists and authoritarian thinkers need to foretell the future to control it. By telling the future, one blocks the coming of the Messiah. On the other hand, in remembrance – as vital as it is – there is risk involved, because the past is ‘not only the trail of a comet’ but the object of present experience. Remembrance is a necessary risk opposed to foreclosing the future because to ‘predict, is an abuse of confidence and a public lie’. As Bensaïd writes, it was necessary to remain on the lookout, because: ‘Eternity infinitely and imperturbably acts out the same performance’. To escape from it we must break the vicious circle. The Jews did not cede ground to its dizziness. For them, like Angelus Novus they had their back turned to the future and for all that, it did not become the black hole of eternity. Every second, every tiny grain of time, is a narrow gate through which the Messiah can enter.153

152 153

Bensaïd 2010c, p. 94. Bensaïd 2010c, p. 96.

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Every minute, every second for Blanqui also. Every second, repeated Benjamin, because ‘every spark, every splinter … carries its charge of hope, offers its bifurcation and holds its part of potential’. In this sense, the mole is a profane Messiah. Bensaïd thinks that Benjamin’s every second confers a messianic opportunity on each ‘now’; Benjamin’s messianic thought articulates a suspended present without transition, but instead is made of forks and bifurcations. Bensaïd called this a ‘strategic present for those who stand still on the threshold of time’, because the presence of mind, so central to strategic thought, implies an art of contretemps and time; the temporal modalities of the present are interlaced with counter-temporalities, clashing temporalities, all of which make history something other than a one-way street. Of great consequence, Bensaïd sees Benjamin’s critique of historical reason as moving from a ‘ “time of necessity to a time of possibilities”: a secret history, whose messianic potentialities subvert the fatality of appearances, and where each present instant and every commemorated expectation is laden with a particular meaning’.154 The messianic metaphor carries much in the way of a transition from a necessity that finds its resolution in a pre-ordained End, or a necessity that remains at the level of a new facticity of appearances, which might be a political defeat, thus the fait accompli is the immanent effect of such a defeat against which a critique of historical reason enters into a relation of negativity; the time of possibilities facilitates a perspective ‘backwards’ and ‘forwards’ without the exigency of a one-way street.

7

Anti-Heidegger

Benjamin’s messianic critique of historical reason was the antipode of Heidegger’s ‘ontological critique’. Bensaïd made this demarcation unequivocal because he refused to ontologise politics, philosophy and history. Elsewhere, in Marx, the Untimely, Bensaïd wrote, ‘Lukacs and Heidegger? No: Benjamin against Heidegger’. For, Heidegger ‘ontologises and resacralises; Marx secularises and deontologises’, in which Marx’s social critique involved a revolution in the conception of time since he deciphered the profane rhythms of everyday time. ‘Convinced that there is no other time than ours, the time of labour and effort, agony and love, he thinks the conceptual organisation of this meagre ‘ontic’ time, and plunges headlong into the cycles, turnovers, and non-linear trajectories in which time and motion are mutually determined. If Capital can

154

Ibid.

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be read as an “ontology of social being”, it is solely as a rigorously negative ontology’.155 Between Heidegger’s and Benjamin’s critique of historical reason: Marx – why refuse to admit it? – was a pioneer of this critique of historical reason – an enormous undertaking in which mystical critique and profane critique, romantic critique and revolutionary critique, sometimes coincided and mingled, while continuing their contest. Between the two stood various intermediaries, whose ambiguities have been endlessly debated by posterity: the Blanqui of L’éternité par les astres (1871); the Nietzsche of Untimely Meditations (1871); the Péguy of Clio (1913); the Sorel of Illusions du progrès (1908). Ushered in with the disaster of August of 1914, the ‘era of wars and revolutions’ was to allow less and less space for those who straddled two worlds. The critique of historical reason was to become the stake of a fight to the death.156 Marx wrote about a history ‘whose strategic potential is formed and coalesces in the present of the struggle’. Benjamin complements Marx’s project because, to treat history politically means to conceive of it from the standpoint ‘of its strategic moments and points of intervention’. Bensaïd claimed that the ‘presence of mind’ is the political quality – an art of the present – through which: Summoning the past to appear contradicts the postulate of an irreversible, unalterable time. Critical history cannot cancel what was; but it can redistribute the meaning of it. Bringing the past back into play can, however, take one of two routes: either ontological, with Heidegger and the temporality that is temporalised on the basis of the future; or political, with Benjamin and the messianic possibility that is conjugated in the present … In Benjamin, political (strategic) anticipation appears as the precise negation of this ontological anticipation … Benjamin cuts back the overgrowth of madness and myth in order to uncover the traces of a past that awaits salvation. Messianic anticipation is never the passive certainty of an advent foretold, but akin to the concentration of a hunter on the lookout for the sudden emergence of what is possible … The Benjaminian categories of time are triply organised in the present: present of the past; present of the future; present of the present. Every past is reborn in the present-becoming-past. Every present fades in the future-

155 156

Bensaïd 2002, pp. 82–3. Bensaïd 2010c, p. 81.

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becoming-present. In the constellation of eras and events, the present indefinitely appeals to another present, in a discontinuous interplay of echoes and resonances. In the ‘dialectical concept of historical time’, the present of the past responds to the present of the future, memory to expectation: ‘we are expected’. To anticipate this present laden with messianic debts is the political task par excellence.157 Bensaïd’s anti-Heideggerian move effectively conjoins Benjamin’s politicised history with Marx’s critique of political economy and the consequences Marx’s critique has for grasping historical temporalities. Indeed, Heidegger’s notion of the ecstatic present and the moment of vision – much of which he owes to the Christian thinkers – needs to be read as an alternative to a concrete and ontic politicisation of history. Heidegger’s is no less political, instead its moment of vision is about restoring the primordial deep past, culminating in the unity of a Volk. Historicity becomes the link in the chain of an authoritarian-fascist notion of vision.

8

A Twice-Made Péguyist

Bensaïd’s reading of Péguy made his Marxism unique, as can be seen from the hints above. Péguy formed part of the dissident constellation of thinkers who wrote in opposition to the positivist ideology dominant in the French workers’ movement at the beginning of the twentieth century. Blanqui, Sorel, BernardLazare joined Péguy in the constellation. For Bensaïd, the constellation wasn’t a coherent alternative of thought; instead, it pointed to nodes of resistance to positivism. Responding to Péguy’s new popularity Bensaïd said: The regained relevance of Péguy is to be found in his critique of historical reason, from the post-humorous homage to Bernard-Lazare to Clio, passing through Situations and M. Laudet. He constantly searches for a new historical temporality, not reducible to the ‘homogenous and empty’ time of classical mechanics (his formulas on this subject are exactly the same as Benjamin’s, who was influenced by him). Searching for a nonlinear notion of time, where the event retains its full surprising power … This approach proves fruitful for thinking the current crisis of historical reason and of political engagement on the condition of not asking more

157

Bensaïd 2002, p. 85.

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from it than it can give … the affinity [between Benjamin and Péguy] rests on a common rejection of positivism and an alienating form of historical religiosity. It is a strong point. The other strong point is his spirit of dissidence, heresy and non-compromise … Péguy kept a libertarian, anti-state and anti-bureaucratic side, in perfect resonance with the libertarian messianism of Bernard-Lazare. He is not on the side of the established order and its institutions but on the side of indignation and permanent rebellion.158 Through Bensaïd’s reading of Benjamin he encountered Péguy for a second time; in their declared affinity, a universe of thought opened an unprecedented passage for a critical re-reading of Marx. In the history of French socialism, ‘a subterranean, heretical, marginalised and repressed current’ remained obscured and alienated from the two dominant trends from the end of the nineteenth century onwards: ‘tendencies represented by the rival and complementary couples Jaurès and Guesde, Blum and Cachin, Mollet and Thorez, Mitterrand and Marchais’.159 The heretical anti-positivist tradition is a repressed third pole and far more radical than these two currents. Could the hidden tradition be rediscovered? It was not a question of forgetting the limitations of each of these writers: the putschist temptations in Blanqui, the nationalist temptation of Péguy and Bernard Lazare, and Sorel’s brief engagement with l’Action française. Bensaïd and Löwy argued that these ambiguities shed light one each figure, without legitimising fascism’s and Petainism’s attempts to snatch Sorel and Péguy for their own purposes. They could do that only through a ‘formidable falsification of their thought’. These socialist dissidents could be read critically by Marxists and could contribute to enriching Marxism and ridding it of a few weak points. What was it that was useful in their work? Here, a brief summary based on Bensaïd’s and Löwy’s study: – The rejection of positivism, of scientism and mechanical determinism; – The critique of the ideology of ‘progress’, of an evolutionist philosophy of history and its linear temporality; – The acute perception of the damages caused by ‘modernity’; – The irreconcilable opposition to capitalism considered as intrinsically unjust; – A rebel’s sensibility leading to the rejection of reformism, parliamentary cretinism and the accommodations of ordinary politics;

158 159

Bensaïd and Petit 1999, pp. 54–5. Bensaïd and Löwy 2006.

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– An anti-authoritarian and anti-statist tendency; – A romantic, critical sensibility towards a commodified modernity, attracted to the communal forms of the past; – A ‘prophetic’ style, in the Biblical sense of the term, proceeding by conditional anticipations and calls to action so as to ward of the danger of catastrophe; – A ‘mystical’ and intransigent perspective (profane and secular) of politics, as action inspired by faith, passion, morals – in opposition to a shabby horizon bound up with routine-like politics; – An ‘open’, non-linear, non-cumulative conception of events, leaving the place to alternatives, to bifurcations and ruptures. Bensaïd said of himself that he was a Péguyist because he was a Marxist. Bensaïd’s sustained presentation of Péguy is evident in the essay titled L’inglorieux vertical Péguy. ‘All along his work’, Bensaïd wrote, ‘with the ruminating stubbornness of which he was capable, the precious material for a critique of historical reason’ is present.160 Bensaïd wrote of how Péguy revolted against the modernity of the commodity, ‘which is an anti-memory, a wrecking of tradition’. The organic is thrown into oblivion to the benefit of simple mechanics, of ‘the irrevocability of mechanics’. Modernity is invoked in the name of arrogance, as in the notions of ‘the modern era, modern science, the modern state, the modern school, they say the same: modern religion’. The ‘strategic knot of modernity’s discourse is the unilateral and abstract cult of continuous progress, which reduces all history of thought to linear and unitary movement, to a continuous movement of accumulation’. For Péguy, politics should be conceived of as ‘the negative of modernity’. The spirit of modernity reveals a new religiosity that constitutes a ‘lost demythologisation, a false exit from theology’. Founded on forgetfulness, ‘it requires “the total abolition” of memory … there indeed resides the intrinsic vice of modernity’,161 which remains sacred: The modern world, the modern spirit, secular, positivist and atheistic, democratic, political and parliamentary, modern ways, modern science, modern man, all take themselves to be released from God; and in reality, for those who look beyond appearances, for those who want to go beyond formulas, never has man been as plagued by God.162

160 161 162

Bensaïd 1995, pp. 187–8. Bensaïd 1995, p. 199. Ibid.

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Bensaïd also drew on Péguy’s concept of culture. Culture, for Péguy, is not conceivable as part of a chronological succession because a culture is not the order of a series. By contrast, culture is about breakthroughs, achievements and events. In the terms of the events of culture, ‘everything which is done is done and can only undo itself or be lost’. For example, the great metaphysical works are ‘languages of creation, “and as such they are irreplaceable” ’: In the matter of record, on the linear band … we can always do better, overcome the previous record and the previous owner, but in the case of culture, to surpass Plato or Spinoza, Pascal or Mallarmé loses all meaning. The variations of reception can be expressed better or … a change in the readers or listeners, but not a progress in the works themselves. To the master proposal of indefinite, linear progress, eternally pursued and continuously growing, perpetually obtained and acquired, eternally consolidated, Péguy opposed the ‘proposition of resonances’, the fragile echo of correspondences between epochs, events and memorial eruptions.163 Péguy’s critique of progress led to the critique of the historian’s method as practised outside of its object. In Clio, he said that a (vulgar) historian’s proof is ‘crude and formal, superficial and solid, for after all, one must be fair to everyone’. He rejected the idea of a last historical judgement, the idea of the famous tribunal of history, of a total and definitive look at the past. Looking at history remains a fragmentary endeavour, because there is a complete incompatibility between the real event and the historical event. After the real event, the historian can only keep the ashes. As Bensaïd writes, the event ‘is of the order of an eruption and insurrection, the order of a calendar that celebrates and not the clock that is content to count. It cracks open linear homogeneity, fills up spatial emptiness, and denies the abstraction of modern temporality’. It arrives and yet it may not have been. As in Clio, Péguy wrote: My friend, you will experience the same mysterious sensation, the same tremor, before any genuine foundation, however small, whatever its dimensions. A foundation … is an operation whereby one creates, inaugurates … The action is the same, always solemn: an entry, an inauguration, a beginning … a temporal taking of the veil – the veil of time … Something new [comes] into being, something incontestably new, irrevocably new,

163

Bensaïd 2007, Notes on Péguy, found in his personal archives.

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du nouveau. You pass from the point where there was nothing to the point where something is done, and you pass irreversibly, irrevocably. What will the end be? … that is my secret … It is my intervention, my subterranean presence, the anxiety and dread proper to me, which invariably accompany a genuine consideration of me. That is the source of the emotion, of the awareness, and it cannot be confused with any other. It is mine … it is literally man participating in creation.164 The style used in this passage is similar to Moi, la Révolution. In its novelty and its broken knowledge, the historical event is the antithesis of a funeral. An untimely accomplice of present inconsistencies, it is life that ‘exceptionally, extraordinarily, mysteriously, resuscitates the dead’. But, as Bensaïd points out, there is an event and an event. There is the event that exceeds its content and overflows it from all sides, the revolutionary event and the republican event. And there is ‘the event without content’, which one would today say is only ever a spectacle or a disaster disguised as an event … The important thing to learn is to look at history from the point of view of the event, to weigh and compare not only the realities that have happened, which are within reach of no matter who, but also the unaccomplished ‘eventualities’, the evental eventualities. The important thing is to deploy reason in the dimension of the possible instead of adjusting it to measure that which is.165 Bensaïd continued Péguy’s argument to explore the realm of concrete possibility. Just as history does nothing, neither in itself does time. Péguy understood that the critique of historical reason went together with a critique of the mechanical temporality specific to it, positing instead ‘that historical temporality is full of rhythms, distensions and knots, periods and epochs’. Péguy’s understanding of a humanity that becomes in history has an affinity with Hegel’s too. There is a natural and organic method, the terms in which Péguy thought a humanity in becoming: Natural, it proceeds naturally according to a method, according to a natural rhythm. Organic, it proceeds organically, according to an organic

164 165

Péguy 2001, p. 87. Bensaïd 1995, p. 192.

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rhythm … I don’t employ the comparison of vegetation by chance – organic, historical … historicity is therefore vegetal and not mechanical.166 Humanity in becoming is like a living tree structure. For Bensaïd, ‘in Hegelian logic, mechanics is only an inferior form of movement that culminates in the complexity of life’,167 and a living history can be conceived as: Full of branch lines and bifurcations, the tree structure is therefore the mode of historical vitality. Its temporality is not spread out but broken, rhapsodic, made of contractions and stretches: There are periods of time that are great and seem small, that are long and appear short; and there are times that are short and that seem long, that appear great; it is a question of grandeur.168 Furthermore, in his history without empty progress, Péguy categorically refused historical alibis that let human beings suspend their responsibilities; responsibility is not reducible to any grand narrative of history and the imperative to decide is always present, even if uncertain. This was in his socialist and militant period, and when Péguy speaks of freedom and risk, or the assuming of risk for freedom’s sake, he is very close to Pascal: The risk must be preserved, integrally … everything comes back to risk, a gamble … a total risk; man must make his choice in absolute freedom. There must therefore, in the last analysis, be a risk; one always comes back to the bet … on the razor edge of freedom … if you were spared any of man’s miseries the gamble would be a sham, there would be nothing to stake … Really, liberty, man’s freedom, must be infinitely precious. It plays such an essential part in your mystique.169 Péguy attracted Bensaïd for another reason, namely because Péguy thought the socialist revolution without any claim towards historical closure: It is the effect of a singular unintelligence to imagine that the social revolution will be a conclusion, a closure of humanity in the bland bliss 166 167 168 169

Bensaïd 1995, p. 189. Bensaïd 1995, p. 190. Ibid. Péguy 2001, p. 157.

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of dead calm. It is the effect of a naïve and poor ambition, idiotic and sly to want to close humanity off with the social revolution. To make a convent of humanity will be the most dreadful effect of religious archaism. Far from socialism being definitive, it is preliminary, prior, necessary, indispensable but not sufficient. It is before the threshold [my italics – D.R.]. It is not the end of humanity. It is not even the beginning of it.170 Péguy’s perspective of social revolution is a beginning, before the threshold, and in a libertarian perspective he wrote ‘My revolution will suppress all authority. Without which it will not be definitive, it wouldn’t be the revolution’.

9

The Transition to Strategic Thought

Bensaïd reflected on Georges Sorel in his discussion of the revolution. This is an important moment in his reflections on strategy because, for Bensaïd, the revolution is both a decisive act and a process of permanent subversion. The most difficult problem – and one we have constantly encountered in each chapter – is the passage from capitalist routine to a state in which workers freely associate without masters. This question is decisive, and Sorel concerned himself with the formation of a new consciousness, but ‘he thought in terms of hegemony and reform, not that of rupture’; therefore, the problem for Sorel was the conquest of new rights, not power. He wanted a kind of ‘moral and juridical dual power, to resolve itself gradually without the final confrontation’. For Sorel, the collective subject of this confrontation was mobilised through myth. It was necessary to know what kind of myths, in different times, have been able to overthrow existing situations. Sorel’s myth of the general strike condensed this will to transformation. According to Bensaïd, the distinction between myth and utopia is decisive in this context because: Utopia can always sell itself in fragments; myth does not divide itself against itself or trade itself off. As an expression of a will and not a description of a future state, the myth is an anti-utopia. However, it still belongs, alongside utopia, to a pre-strategic and pre-political imagination. The dif-

170

Bensaïd 1995, p. 189.

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ference is that it does not escape into an undetermined future state. It remains keyed ‘into the present’ … in the now-time where strategic reason can still take flight.171 Bensaïd is articulating a transition from utopia and myth to political strategy. Keyed into the present, strategic reason simultaneously prepares a collective will over the long term and organises a rupture. Neither utopia nor myth can facilitate this strategic project. Only a profane politics is capable of doing so. In another sense, Bensaïd’s critical concept of history has to handle two antimonies. The first antinomy is between eternal return of defeat and the eternal recommencement of revolt. Defeat cannot be conceptualised without revolt and revolt makes no sense if it is not revolt against some kind of submission. As long as class society exists this antinomy is insoluble. The second, to which Benjamin, beyond Sorel, points us is, ‘the belief in progress, in an infinite perfectibility … and the idea of eternal return are complementary pairs. These are insoluble antinomies in the face of which we must develop the dialectical concept of time’.172 For Bensaïd, evental history can break the antinomies, which requires Pascal’s wager or Mallarmé’s throw of the dice (every thought emits a throw of the dice). Fundamentally, Bensaïd’s evental history is about awakening: Each epoch does not content itself with dreaming of the following, it also tries to wake up from the nightmares of the past generations. Each is assigned a portion of messianic power … the dialectical reversal is the ‘moment of possible knowledge’, [‘by way of the dialectics of awakening and not: to be lulled, through exhaustion, into “dream” or “mythology” ’! – Benjamin] the privileged moment of disorder and shock, of the return to reality, and also an ‘authentic adieu to an epoch’ and a way of taking leave from the past. The Arcades is a historical dream-key of the nineteenth century, in the service of a strategy of awakening, the very opposite of the progressive pedagogy of consciousness, of a gradual enlightenment, of a proletarian Aufklärung (so dear to the Second International and the Stalinised Third).173 A disorientated awakening ‘takes the form of an event’, because ‘eternity alone is pure and the event is its secret wound, “its contrary interior” through which 171 172 173

Bensaïd 2010c, p. 108. Quoted from Bensaïd 2010c, p. 121. Bensaïd 2010c, p. 119.

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all that is temporal is rotten, historically spoiled’. Everything marked by time is perishable because ‘to age, is to become and to pass’. All that exists deserves to perish, as Goethe would say. In this awakening interior to the event: the present assembles its forces. It holds in its closed fist the two sides of duration. It ties together the past and the future. Because nothing is as ‘mysterious as these moments of profound conversion, upheaval, renovation and profound recommencement. This is the very secret of the event, of bifurcation’.174 Origin and bifurcation become problematic. For Benjamin, the Arcades Project was a search for origins: ‘Search, like Proust, for origins that are not a beginning, a commencement’ to be forgotten. The origin is a ‘principle of permanent renewal’. Here, Bensaïd grasped the manner in which the event is enigmatic, because it is origin and bifurcation at the same time; events open epochs and end others. Two perspectives about the event are always possible and necessary to pose. As Bensaïd asked: was the French Revolution the end of the classic bourgeois revolutions or the beginning of modern revolutions? Was the Commune the last form of proletarian revolution of the nineteenth century, or did it inaugurate the finally found form of emancipation for the twentieth century? Was May ’68 the ‘last tremble, where, in a retrospective illusion the revolutionary cycles end, or first sign of the crises to come in the twenty-first century?’175 The materialist reconstruction of events and the perspective behind and beyond them, and of political activity and deliberation is situated at these points of bifurcation.

10

Reading and the Messianic Wait

Bensaïd developed a Marrano Marxism. The second part of Bensaïd’s work on Benjamin introduced the Marrano into his notion of heretical Marxism. These were Jews who were forced to convert to Catholicism during the fifteenth century, primarily from the Iberian Peninsula. The Marrano was a Jew who converted to Catholicism but secretly upheld parts of the Jewish faith and practice; it was a principled duplicity. Many of them sought refuge in other parts of Europe, like Holland. They were faithful in their infidelity. Rejected by an authorit-

174 175

Bensaïd 2010c, p. 120. Bensaïd 2010c, p. 124.

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arian Catholicism and branded as heretics in the orthodox Jewish community, they remained faithful to a nascent universalist reason. Bensaïd’s principal figures were Uriel da Costa and Spinoza. Their crime was to be torn between the prophetic singularity of an elected people and the disenchanted universality of reason, occupying a position of tension between the particularism of the Judaic tradition of the elected people and the universalism of Christianity. Bensaïd’s passion for language is apparent in this section, which raises tensions about the nature of sealed tradition and the space of interpretation. Finally, he made his way through the notion of prophecy and ended with Benjamin’s consolidation of a profane Messianism. Bensaïd’s core theme pertains to knotted language: Language would be absolutely clear if one word always followed another in direct logical order along the inflexible axis of time. History would be clear if the facts followed each other in an irreversible causality on a chronological gradient of time. But history mumbles, stammers and repeats itself. It is a stutterer. Like Moses … At a crossroads of signs, between the first writings of Scripture and a Messianic advent, there is little more one can do but to decipher and carry out the indefatigable work of reading and decrypting.176 Nostalgia for the past and the promise of the future fold the Scripture and the coming of the Messiah over each other, bent and ambiguous in their relation to history. So, why did Moses stutter? The stage is set for a quarrel between the creator and the created, through the encounter between humans and the divine and the realisation of their discord. It was possible that humans would proclaim their own sovereignty through an act of parricide. At the heart of this discord, Moses was the assigned messenger to lay down the Law. Who was he laying down the law to? In the birth of the Jewish people: Modern by its religion, affirming itself as a nation through its Law, yet however, from its origins without a territory and obliged to live through history and time for lack of an ability to live on land and space. Historical through and through. And anxious to deny this temporal precariousness by ruminating on its illusion of eternity … Chased from the Garden of Eden, humanity is first condemned to history … History in its incertitude is a place of agony and damnation. Hence Moses declares himself

176

Bensaïd 2010c, p. 129.

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the historical messenger for a homeless people … From then on, faith is grounded in memory. That which awakes it is a liberator.177 This entry into history was not fully consolidated; it was a false entry through which prophecy remained the form of an emergent historical discourse. Banning prediction and spells, the bond of the true prophet to the future is complex, its ‘perception takes the form of a “preventative certitude”’. If people change their ways, another future – still undetermined – is possible. If they don’t change their ways, catastrophe will mount. The preventative certitude of the prophet fascinates Bensaïd because it is unlike the Greek oracle who announces a future that is destined and fated. Unlike the Greek oracle, the language of the prophet retains open possibility and freedom. This language is not utopian, ‘it is from the past that it draws it legitimacy and defiance, forever in the present, the state, the sect, the institutional withering away of principles and the gnawing corruption of foundations’. Without prediction, in preventative certitude, it intervenes into the tense knot of logic and history, of language and freedom. The freedom of man, which makes history conceivable and not a simple continuation or the strict fulfilment of a script, results from logical-grammatical categories: what is announced must be. But not necessarily! A determinism takes shape where the final cause becomes uncertain and where the end loses itself in the possible.178 Another Judaic banishment resulted from the fact that this people did not have a territory: the banishment from History. History is arrested in the Scripture. As Bensaïd wrote, all that remains are written documents founding ‘Judaism in its fetishistic relation’ with the written word. This fetishism is encapsulated in the command, ‘you will add nothing to the word that I give to you and you will take nothing away from it’. Enunciated is a terrific fear of the written word, in which ‘Every word of God proves true; he is a shield for those who take refuge in him’. For Bensaïd, this raised a problem. If the word of God was sealed in the Book, if none could add nor subtract, and all was the truth, then what did it mean to interpret? To interpret the book means rebelling against God, an act of ‘revolt and sacrilege’. Authority could not be questioned by mortals

177 178

Bensaïd 2010c, pp. 130–1. Bensaïd 2010c, p. 132.

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Here the ultimate punishment: condemned to explore the horizon of language, immobile in its structure, knowing that they will remain mute and indecipherable until the suspended movement of history has rendered them meaning and life. It is the lot of the messianic wait.179 The present was the union between this glorious past and an uncertain but promised future. A constant tension pervaded this wait. It was said that ‘At the arrival of the Messiah, the hidden faces of the Torah will shine and the just will contemplate them … One day will come, declared the legend, where God will rearrange the lettering of today to form other words, from where other phrases will be born “that will say a different thing” ’. What is to be done in the silent anticipation, in the play of this sealed Book and the signs of things to come? In the tension is the conflict between the dead written word and the lived spoken word, in which ‘the written law becomes dogma. Whereas the living word assembles, unites and surmounts barriers and ceaselessly corrects and nuances, the dogmatic law freezes and divides. The terror of the written word generates sects’.180 Should not the living word guard from freezing into a dead dogma? Here, I suggest we read Bensaïd’s turn to Judaic thought in light of Ivan Segré’s wonderful formulation, woven from Althusser’s argument that a philosopher ‘is a person who fights in theory’: ‘the bourgeois theoreticians of the name “Jew” and the worker theoreticians of the name “Jew” are in conflict. The former judge the “revolution” anti-Semitic, the latter judge it as “Jewish”’.181 Revolution, as this book has explored, is a politics whose finality is the disappearance of servitude and domination, therefore universalist, opening an audience to the Galatian Epistle (3:28): ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one … we … were in bondage under the elements of the world’, and ‘when the fullness of time has come … thou art no more a servant’. There is a split between the bourgeois and worker theoretician of Judaism. The first is counterrevolutionary, its method is literal, consisting of ‘subjecting rational immanence to the transcendence of the Mosaic Law, and the Commandment; the second is revolutionary in its method and lays claim to a dialectical method’.182 The latter method was expressed in Marx’s The Class Struggle in France where he compared the workers’ fight for liberation to the exodus.

179 180 181 182

Bensaïd 2010c, p. 134. Bensaïd 2010c, p. 137. Segré 2014, p. 24. Segré 2014, p. 31.

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On this point, the Kabbalist hermeneutics sparked Bensaïd’s imagination because it was a creative expression that tried to break the reigns of mediaeval Jewish rationalism. These groups freed up interpretation of the Torah – it was a movement of mystics – ‘in the Kabbalah of Luria every word had six thousand uses … demanding an interpretative reading, free and subversive, the openness to meaning carried in germ the ceaseless conflict between the mystic and the orthodoxy of institutionalised authority. The principle of dissidence flowed from the polysemy of the text’.183 Each of these creative challenges remained on the terrain of faithful discourse. The search for different word ordering was intended to make sense of suffering. Yet, knowledge of history was excluded. To go beyond this, Bensaïd followed Isaac Deutscher’s The Non-Jewish Jew, since in the nineteenth century, History took the place of Faith. With Heine and Moses Hess, ‘a branch of Jewish culture returned to the path of historicity’. With this development came a number of ‘non-Jewish Jews’ including Marx, Freud, Luxemburg and Trotsky, who were ‘simultaneously inside and outside their community’. They were ‘non-believers, yet actively optimistic, determinists, yet not mechanical, bound by the invisible threads of messianic reason’. The return to history has a major implication, ‘exclusion becomes a beastly suffering. The exploration of words no longer suffices. They no longer give birth to a way out’.184 Liberation is not a linguistic but a historical and practical act.

11

The Marranos and the Transformations of Messianism

Bensaïd takes his readers on a journey through the metamorphoses of Messianism from theology to philosophy and finally to a politics of the present, which is why the return to history was vital. According to Bensaïd, the metamorphoses culminated in Benjamin: With Benjamin, Messianism accomplishes its transformations. Formerly a messenger of the future – loaded with dreadful divine promises – overthrown by the rational insurrection of Spinoza, restored but gentrified and antiquated, turned [into] consolation for difficult times … Keyed in, in expectation. Firmly in the present. Secularised. Politically overcoming its theological and philosophical prehistory.185 183 184 185

Bensaïd 2010c, p. 138. Bensaïd 2010c, p. 140. Bensaïd 2010c, p. 169.

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Spinoza was a lucid and methodical heretic. Uriel was a scandalous heretic; his suicide was ‘a scandalous end to a scandalous life’. Why could they play these roles, for Bensaïd? In the years between Uriel’s suicide in 1640 and Spinoza’s Treatise of 1670, ‘a great fracture took place … Time lost its rhythms. The future its promises … Theology had to yield to philosophy. Only the work of “messianic suffering” remained … without a truce’.186 This fracture in historical time raised a series of questions. What if a negative Messianism was needed that systematically transgressed the Law? What if the Torah was accomplished only in its desecration? What if the Marranos were heroic traitors announcing a modern liberty? Uriel and Spinoza were emblems of this subversion because they did not see the Torah as a product of divine invention. For both of them, it was made by historically situated human beings. As a result of his heresy, Uriel was forced to lie on the floor to be trampled at a synagogue in Amsterdam. Spinoza had his books banned and was constantly under threat. In Spinoza and Other Heretics, Yovel demonstrated how ‘the idea of immanence took shape in a marginal and hybrid historical group – the Marranos – and then [was – D.R.] crystallized and powerfully systematized in Spinoza’.187 Perhaps the general Marrano experience made it possible for Spinoza to put forward the idea of immanence. He systematised the idea that there is only one single reality, which is called nature or God. He argued for a radically monistic substance. It is immanent; in this one single reality, God is self-causing. God does not stand outside of nature, but acts as ‘the principle of nature unfolding its immanent necessities’. The traditional notion of a transcendent creator outside of reality was overturned. The journey to a political messianism would be inconceivable without Spinoza’s radical idea of immanence. In the Ethics, Spinoza argued, ‘Nothing in the universe is contingent, but all things are conditioned to exist and operate in a particular manner by the necessity of the divine nature … But God cannot be called a thing contingent … all things are conditioned by the necessity of the divine nature, not only to exist, but also to exist and operate in a particular manner, and there is nothing that is contingent’.188 In this perfect causality, what remains of freedom? Does freedom consist in accomplishing an imposed bondage? Is this a liberty in chains? For Spinoza, true freedom existed within the chains of the love of God. It is not the freedom of caprice but autonomous beatitude. It is not indifference, nor the abstract freedom to be aloof from one’s present but the contrary, 186 187 188

Bensaïd 2010c, p. 146. Yovel 1991, p. xi. Quoted from Bensaïd 2010c, p. 151.

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a thing is free, which exists and acts solely by the necessity of its own nature. Thus God understands Himself and all things freely, because it follows solely from the necessity of His nature, that He should understand all things. You see I do not place freedom in free decision, but in free necessity.189 Free necessity seems a contradiction in terms. It could be read, instead, as the aspiration toward a union between the subject and object (prior to Kant’s transcendental turn). For Spinoza, so Bensaïd claims, the aspiration towards autonomy necessitated an anchorage in the present that was ‘liberated from the mirages of the future’. This was the outcome of his attitude towards hope, whereby hope is ‘nothing but an inconsistent pleasure, arising from the image of something future or past, whereof we do not yet know the outcome’. Spinoza’s act of putting the present at the centre of a new temporality led him to ‘turn his back on a consolatory and compensatory Messianism’. This was a necessary step forward toward a political Messianism. According to Bensaïd, Spinoza’s radical immanence and his broken body – between particularism and universalism – led him to demystify the principle of election, sacrosanct in his time. Its ‘secularisation constituted a great “betrayal”, principally of all the patriotic autarchies, up to and including Zionist restoration’. Being a radical deconstruction of myths, fetishes and religiosity, Spinoza’s betrayal was ‘the Jewish anti-Zionism of the atheist Jew’. His radical materialism put into question miracles and prophets. Beyond Spinoza, Bensaïd offered a moving reflection on Franz Rosenzweig and Carlo Michelstaedter, which cannot be separated from Spinoza’s reflections on free necessity. Carlo had shot himself in the head at the age of 23, hours after having completed his work Persuasion and Rhetoric in 1910 and as World War One approached. He ‘gravely obeyed its logic’, by killing himself because ‘one cannot escape its gravity, the weight of its destiny, being sucked forward to the black hole of becoming … where the world without a subject annihilates itself’. In a certain sense, Michelstaedter’s suicide was the degree zero of an exhausted Messianism, in desperation without a future. What about the Messianic wait? In order to wait, one must live. The secret of the wait ‘is that the countdown has already begun, but in not knowing how long, it is impossible to predict the end of it’.190 Carlo renounced the Messianic wait, but there is another path. What if we see it in the following terms, following Rosenzweig:

189 190

Spinoza 1966. Bensaïd 2010c, p. 159.

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In love with the future, the wait is a joy. A pleasure multiplied by anticipation. A stir, from the first rendezvous, encounter and discovery. Deprived of tomorrow’s surprises it will be no more than an inert anticipation, empty within, hollow.191 Rosenzweig paves another path (it is still in need of politics). His work on historical time opposed the teleological ideologies of progress. In doing so, he articulated a new vision of historical temporality that oriented itself toward religion. In this sense, he is different to Benjamin, yet his rebellion against the empty ideology of progress was shared with Benjamin.192 Written with Rosenzweig’s pen, ‘the present is the precious moment of love’. Love only knows the present, lives only in the present and aspires only to the present, ‘always recommenced’. This also involves an impatient messianism. For Bensaïd, impatient messianism and the slow revolutionary impatience are a match: Without the desire to make the Messiah arrive before his time, the future is not a future but only a past drawn out to an infinite length.193

191 192

193

Bensaïd 2010c, p. 160. To understand Rosenzweig’s critique, it is useful to draw on Löwy’s review of Moses’s L’Ange de l’histoire. Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Scholem. He wrote: ‘The point of departure for these three Jewish thinkers is the violent traumatism of World War One, tragic contradiction of the idea of continuous and linear progress. However, the end of the belief in the Enlightenment philosophy of history does not signify the abolition of the idea of hope: over the rubble of historical Reason, utopia resurged through the category of Redemption. We move from a time of necessity to a time of possibles, an aleatory time open at every moment to the unpredictable eruption of the new … For Franz Rosenzweig, the murderous clash of nationalisms during the Great War signified not only the catastrophic failure of Hegelian philosophy, but of all Western thought […] His correspondence with the Protestant theologian (of a Jewish origin) Eugen Rosenstock during the war is one of the most earthshattering episodes of Christian-Jewish dialogue of the 20th century. It resulted in the writing of his major work, The Star of Redemption, that situated the Jewish people outside of the history of nations, in a parallel history, a meta-history, founded on a qualitative and liturgic temporality. In this Jewish conception of time, every moment is unique and can act as the stepping-stone to eternity. Contrary to historical utopia, situated as a far away and impossible goal to attain, Redemption proceeds from the sudden unpredictability of absolute novelty, of the intrusion of absolute otherness in a progression without end. It is a sort of “messianic impatience” that defines, for Rosenzweig, the properly human relation to the future. Before being a religious belief, this impatience constituted the very essence of hope. It always demanded that the end of history could be anticipated, that it can occur at any moment, maybe even tomorrow’. Bensaïd 2010c, p. 162.

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We accelerate the coming of the Messiah for one reason: in every present, we are situated between the ‘not yet’ of Redemption and the ‘no longer’ of Creation. The past of class society is a past of social domination. But a step beyond Rosenzweig’s position to the political messianism of the slow impatience must be taken. A political messianism is situated between the ‘not yet’ of human liberations and the ‘no longer’ of the emergence of class societies and alienated states. To wait in patience for the Messiah is not to wait on God with the faith that this abstraction shall resolve disorder into order. Neither is it to wait on the laws of History, another abstraction with a secularised feint. A political Messianism is something else entirely, where ‘all depends on human beings … this is the foundation of an emancipatory and democratic political Messianism’. The liberated entry into politics is an offence to God. It assumes history is not a closed eternity. There is an unpredictable plenitude within it. The condition of Messianism is ‘the possibility of suspending the grip of things and their constraining necessity. But, for Rabbi Yehoshua, “that which is an object of contempt for men”, the oppressed in general, have lost in alienation the means of reconquering themselves … They need the mediation of praxis’ or else the messianic myth of a social revolution combining ‘revolt and tradition, justice and freedom’ becomes a Utopia. The synthesis the messianic myth contains is liable to become a consolation without the practical means for the realisation of liberation in concrete histories, which is why it must be focused on concretely secular politics.194

12

Bensaïd as an Anti-utopian

Utopia, for Bensaïd, is a belief projected into the void. It allows Caesar to rest in tranquillity; indeterminate desire takes the place of determined will. By contrast, active messianism is concrete, political and vigilant, involved in the neverending task of secularisation, deconstructing scientific religiosity, disenchanting the myths of modernity. Bensaïd tried to clarify the confusion between utopianism, prophecy and messianism. Utopia wants a beyond that is nonpractical, whereas prophecy is a message of this world. The prophet sounds the alarm. The prophet is not a utopian but prepares critique and challenges tradition. The prophet hectors the present but does not predict; the prophet only tells of a probable catastrophe, the price paid for infidelity or inaction. Their time is discontinuous, hatched with exiles and restorations, reversible

194

Bensaïd 2010c, p. 173.

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and foreign to all prediction of a future already decided. Bensaïd’s reflections on utopia are illuminating because his reading of politics prioritises the present, cutting against a utopia which is the dream of a world that is radically different ‘without yet having figured out the enigmas of its transformation’. The crucial point about utopia was ‘How, in the eternity of the everyday, in the rotation of the commodity around itself, in the continual renewal of capital, to still be able to conceive of this march to the future’.195 Bensaïd thought the historical moment was one in which ‘the alliance between the utopian heritage and the revolutionary project is broken’. If the transition to revolutionary politics is not made, a utopia falls into an insoluble antinomy between libertarian and authoritarian visions. Authoritarian utopias search for a harmonious social organisation managed by a dominant bureaucracy or technocracy, ‘from Plato’s Republic banishing the poets … utopias of order that subordinate property to the reinforcement of the state’. Inversely, a libertarian utopia ‘evokes a kind of collective festival where private property and the division of labour are abolished but where work is an obligation for all toward the community’. But why was the link between utopianism and revolutionary politics broken? The break invokes the crucial difference between the two, which is that revolution has ‘come back down to earth, put back on its feet just as the Hegelian dialectic’, and thus, utopia is ‘transformed into political project’.196 Bensaïd registered a sublation of authoritarian and libertarian utopias. However, there is still a tension between utopia and concrete possibility. Only when ‘the possible actualises itself in revolutionary fermentation’ does utopia, ‘as a “non-practical sentiment of the possible”’, fade away.197 Utopia fades away before the practical sense of the real. This is why Bensaïd looks to the messianic strategy: For messianic reason, the future is not the place of an immobile Promised Land, but the shifting horizon where possibility actualises itself … Utopia conjures up the future, messianism sets out from the present. The former prefigures the future. The latter says what is necessary. It remains to make the necessary become possible. This is the task of politics.198

195 196 197 198

Bensaïd 2010c, p. 230. Bensaïd 2010c, p. 234. Bensaïd 2010c, p. 232. Bensaïd 2010c, p. 238.

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Bensaïd compared Bloch and Benjamin to illustrate the difference between utopia and politics. For Bensaïd, ‘the works of Ernst Bloch and Walter Benjamin seem to aim at a common target through parallel routes’. Both tie the promise of future liberation to the redemption of the oppressed past and recognise a debt to the defeated. However, ‘central to the work of Bloch, the category of utopia disappears in Benjamin, to the benefit of the Messiah’. Was this a simple substitution of terms? ‘Certainly not’, Bensaïd wrote. He took up this difference in his essay Bloch, Benjamin et le sens du virtuel.199 For Bensaïd, Benjamin rearranged temporal order. This is clear from his treatment of Bloch: While Bloch focuses his attention on the emancipatory potential of the daydream, Benjamin, above all, looks to awaken the world from its nightmares inhabited by the fetishes of capital. A world enchanted by the dance of commodities, and given to catastrophe rather than the peaceful road of progress, can no longer dream. It is destined to nightmares. The revolution is the privileged moment of awakening, the renascent awakening of Proust or the insurrectional awakening of Blanqui, and not a banal dream.200 For Bensaïd, ‘Utopia – a concept central to Bloch’s work – does not appear in Benjamin’s writings. Certainly not: at this point, we will note that there is a radical difference in context between the two themes’. The first of Bloch’s key works – the Spirit of Utopia (1918) – was a contemporary of History and Class

199

200

It should be read alongside Ernest Mandel’s Anticipation and Hope as Categories of Historical Materialism. Though I do not claim that Bensaïd’s text was a direct response to Mandel, it is significant that he explored the differences between Bloch and Benjamin. In Mandel’s work, the category of ‘concrete utopia’ functioned in the following way: ‘A specific vision of the socialism of the future – we obviously prefer this expression to the formula ‘concrete utopia’, because we are convinced that the realisation of such a socialist vision is really possible – has today become an absolute precondition for a practicalrevolutionary political activity in the developed countries of the West … The hope for the realisation of such a project already inspires hundreds of thousands of revolutionaries today. It enables them to avoid resignation or self-destructive despair about the catastrophes towards which the bourgeois world is heading. That same hope will, in the long run, inspire masses of people on an ever broader scale, and make a decisive contribution to the breakthrough to world socialism’. Mandel made explicit use of Bloch in his text. It is indeed a beautiful and illuminating text. However, it suffers from a faith in ‘the breakthrough to world socialism’, ‘in the long run’. Is this not the faith in time that Bensaïd so severely criticized using Benjaminian concepts? Perhaps, but Mandel’s text did demonstrate the either/or logic between socialism and barbarism. Bensaïd 1995, p. 217.

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Consciousness, while the second, The Principle of Hope (1954–57), was an artefact of the traumas of war and the lost revolutions of their time of another order. According to the early Bloch, utopia ‘is the point of inscription of a moral in the practical horizon of politics’. The revolutionary project becomes ‘a premonition constitutive of the goal, a knowledge of the goal’. Utopia ‘emerges here as a modality of knowledge’, it is a knowledge that explores the future. Crucially, ‘it is the dialectical anticipation of what will subsequently be called real possibility (reale Möglichkeit)’. This is a dialectical anticipation of the possible. This opened a critique of positivist Marxism: In the context of the First World War, this rehabilitation of utopia was charged with a critical and polemical significance amidst the dominant Marxist orthodoxy of pre-1914 Social Democracy. From the famous opposition between scientific socialism and utopian socialism, the majority of the theoreticians of the Second International had developed a positivist Marxism, vowing to explain the laws of the real and educate the proletarians. As for the revolution, it will only be the result of the economic laws that have reached maturity. But, to change the world, Marx did not urge waiting for favourable conditions but ‘to produce them’. However, he who hunts down fetishism in production so well sometimes seems to give in to the cult of the productive forces. A powerful means of disenchantment, his materialism can thus give birth to new fetishes.201 Bloch fused the subterranean thread linking the contemporary revolutionary aspirations to the old heretical rebellions of the past. ‘In this vision of the world, the French Revolution was a “breakthrough in the history of heresy” ’, in which its revolutionary values contain a utopian excess that reach beyond the bounds of capitalism. He saw utopia as a form of de-alienation. Utopia seemed to be ‘the first antidote of alienation’ but also a libertarian defiance of the authoritarian state. In the mutilations of daily life where objects and things dominate, ‘that which sprouts and dreams in the darkness of experience’ can provide a utopian antidote to alienation. In the Principle of Hope, written after the deep defeats of the 1930s and the Holocaust and Hiroshima, Bloch’s Spirit of Utopia ‘became the principal critique of the illusions in Progress’. There is not ‘a shapeless confidence in the future’s promises, but a hope stretched out like an arc to the targets’ of the possible. Bloch ‘searches for traces in “daydreams”’, because

201

Bensaïd 1995, p. 209.

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everybody’s lives are ‘pervaded by daydreams’. Of course, daydreams contain an ‘enervating escapism’ but they also contain something that ‘is not content just to accept the bad which exists, does not accept renunciation. This other part has the practice of hope at its core, and is teachable’. Thinking, for Bloch, always ‘means venturing beyond’. Bensaïd pointed out that ‘a static thought and nondialectical one was incapable of exploring this utopian potential … The virtualities of a thought orientated to the future have remained blocked by the contemplative attitude of dominant philosophy’. Bloch’s ‘utopian quest therefore leads to the demand for a future oriented philosophy, a form of thought finally capable of giving a philosophical dimension to hope situated in the world’.202 For Bloch, the author of What Is to Be Done? exemplified the form of thought necessary for a political project. Lenin asked: a person ‘completely devoid of all capability of dreaming in this way’, who is ‘not able to hasten ahead now and again to view in his imagination as a unified and completed picture the work which is only now beginning to take shape in his hands’, how could this person be motivated to change the world? Rather, ‘“In our movement”, Lenin writes, “there are unfortunately precious few dreams of this kind. And those people are chiefly responsible for this who boast how sober they are and how close they stand to the concrete, and those are the representatives of legitimate criticism and the illegitimate politics of trotting behind” ’.203 By contrast, breaking with the contemplative attitude ‘liberated the explosive potentialities of “wishful images” in relating them to the political horizon of their accomplishment’. We can better answer the questions: Where are we going? What are we waiting for? What awaits us? The dominant category in the work of Bloch is the future: ‘the past comes only later and the authentic present is not yet here … the blossoming of “wishful images” manifests the aspiration to an authentic present’. For Benjamin, on the contrary, ‘every present is charged with a redemptive mission’, the present is the key category, not the future. Bensaïd explains that ‘Benjamin excludes the category of utopia from his writings to make way for the uncertain coming of the Messiah. This is not a simple change in vocabulary’.204 According to Bensaïd, Benjamin produces an anti-utopia, where Jetztzeit is the seam between the past and the future: a faint moment of freedom, it is our remedy against the domination of the past and against those of the future. This foundational moment is 202 203 204

Bensaïd 1995, pp. 211–12. Ibid. Bensaïd 1995, p. 216.

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that of a beginning in permanence. Not that of the futural-ahead, that of the now.205 To reiterate, though now in the divergence between Bloch and Benjamin, Bensaïd retained the present as the key strategic category of the messianic evental politics, associated with Benjamin’s cosmic conception of history, working through attractions and gravitations: ‘In this gravitational history, past and future are under the condition of the present’. The present is not determined by the past or future, according to a linear ‘order of a causal chain’. The ‘future no longer retrospectively clarifies the present and past, according to the unified meaning of a final cause. The present becomes the central temporal category’. The present, the fleeting moment, the now, is the point at which the past and the future constantly start over. It is only the present that can order and arrange the ray of the ‘perhaps’: The ‘now-time’ or present moment ( Jetztzeit) is this point of suture between past and future, which incessantly negates itself. Evanescent moment of freedom, it is our recourse against the domination of the past and the future. This time of origin is that of a permanent beginning. Not a before, but a now. ‘It is a reconciliation of the beginning and end: every now is a beginning, every now is an end. The return to the origin is a return to the present. The present has become the central value of the temporal triad’. Thus, Benjamin finds a third way between the linear and the historicist conception of a homogeneous universal History oriented in the inexorable direction of progress, and a fragmented history, reduced to chaotic splinters equidistant to God. He discovers it in a gravitational representation, where attractions and correspondences across epochs and actors are knotted together, and where the present, occupying the central place of a fallen God, exercises a resurrective power on the past and a prophetic power on the future. This solution sheds light on the reason why Benjamin claims a new alliance between historical materialism and theology.206

205 206

Ibid. Ibid.

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Jeanne de guerre lasse

The last work of Bensaïd’s historical trilogy, Jeanne de guerre lasse, is dedicated to the war-weary Joan of Arc, perhaps one of his most surprising and arresting works. Why would a Marxist write a book on Joan of Arc? Whatever one thinks of the subject matter, Bensaïd’s Jeanne de guerre lasse rips tradition from the conformism that threatens it. What were his reasons for embarking upon this book? Our entry point into the subject matter is through José Carlos Mariátegui – an admirer of Gramsci and the Surrealists, a leading revolutionary theoretician in Latin America in the interwar period, who thought Joan of Arc had become a haunting spectre who speaks in many languages in periods of trouble and incertitude. On 6 February in Lima, he wrote: The past dies and is reborn in every generation … In these times shaken by powerful currents of the irrational and unconscious, it is logical that the human spirit feels itself closer to Joan of Arc, better even to understand her and appreciate her. Joan of Arc has returned to us littered with the swell of our own storm.207 Bensaïd’s work was multifaceted and intimately bound up with his historical and physical present. Heresy, resistance, the tradition of the defeated and historical judgement formed one aspect of the book. Behind this dimension was the nature of epochal transition, a time shaken by powerful currents of the irrational (fascism). An old tradition was dying; a new was struggling to be born. The time was generative of communitarianism, identity politics and political myth. In context, Joan of Arc was an unclassifiable image, oscillating between legend and history. She invites antagonistic interpretations because she was born into the turbulence of a time of transition. She babbled a popular-national sentiment in a dynastic period where the nation did not make sense. She was condemned as a woman for denying her ‘femininity’ and cutting her hair. There were many representations of Joan of Arc, and Bensaïd did not propose a narrative of her actual essence beyond the representation. Bensaïd said of the work: I am not an erudite historian, I have tried to do serious research, but also to circulate Joan of Arc in the play of mirrors and literary images,

207

Quoted from Bensaïd 2009d.

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on the basis of the idea of a time of transition where a moral edifice, religious representation, and political power are in the process of breaking down, one doesn’t know what will result from it, this is typically the case for the beginning of the Fifteenth Century to the great discoveries, of Reformation and the appearance of the modern state. And today, we have the impression of being in a new epoch of transition where the values upon which we have lived, the solid representations of the world are in the process again of being shocked by the scientific revolutions, by the re-adjustments of the planet and there is this moment of incertitude of values which is a common trait.208 For Bensaïd, Joan of Arc had a universal scope like that of Antigone. Furthermore, her trial, like that of Socrates and of Christ, is the archetype for all trials in heresy, both political and religious. A trial is a wonderful disclosure of societies and sects. Who is the judge and who has the last word? Additionally, the point of transition that she occupied raised a presentist question for Bensaïd: maybe his time was approaching the threshold of a rare and uncertain transition, the limen? Obviously, the historical context was radically different, at stake was the conjuncture and the elective affinities that were possible in it. Yet, Bensaïd asked about the nature of the transition and the conjuncture with a deep sense of incertitude. With the transformations of global imperialism and the yearning for new revolutionary experiences, he voiced through Joan of Arc: I have the intuition of changing times. I sense them coming … The problem is of knowing how to get out of an exhausted order. The autumn of the Middle Ages finished with the Renaissance and the great discoveries. It remains to know if you can still come out of your cage and discover new worlds, if you are still capable of experiences and new beginnings.209 The end of history was announced, ‘as once before the end of time … But refusing to rest at its end, history fights back. The old wounds ooze once again. Anew, pain and convulsions foreshadow monstrous births’. Nobody can predict the movement of the negative. This proximity allows us to hear Joan speak of a time of wars and unbelievable faiths, judgements of God and unforgiving trials, of faith and heresy, of right and force and of the tyranny of signs.

208 209

Bensaïd 1991. Bensaïd 1991, p. 177.

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Rather than searching for an unknowable historical truth, ‘her voice invites us to circulate in the labyrinth of her images’. The transformations and contestations of her representation remain a great barometer of national passions. Her memory was the subject matter of a battle, refracting the balance of forces in the battle. Who decides on her reality? Who decides what contours her image takes? It is well known that in modern bourgeois societies the struggle over memory reveals the contest between the Right and Left. And the ancient Greek and Roman worlds had already imposed forms of damnatio memoriae, by which certain memories were banned to save the social world from civil strife, Who decides memory and omission? Everything is there. For omission is never absolute. It is always selective. It eliminates one side. It conserves the other. In the case of memory … [there is in memory – D.R.] absolutely no blank pages. There are the winners and losers of memory. Who decides?210 To reconcile on memory is not an option for the Left. Any kind of peaceful and mutual accord can only benefit those who dominate the terrain of memory. For Joan: Between the state and its victim, between the Church and its heretic, the game is never equal. When the Chilean, Argentinian and Uruguayan generals give amnesty to torturers and prisoners, the balance is not equal.211 To demand a right to omission, a principle of tranquillity, is a right of the victors. ‘The right to memory, which is a principle of justice, is the right of the defeated’. These are two rights that contradict each other. In the latter, the right of the victims is primary. The ‘right to memory is a right of reparation’. This is why Bensaïd struggled for Joan of Arc’s memory: I don’t claim a new Joan. Classified. Certified. Authenticated. Woman and heretic, betrayed and burnt, Joan belongs to the great fraternity of the defeated. To abandon her to the victors would eternalise her torment. Caught in glacial history, she waits for the thaw of memory. Who knows how to kiss her with the present, who will awake her from her nightmare?212

210 211 212

Bensaïd 1991, p. 131. Ibid. Bensaïd 1991, p. 268.

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Clearly, Bensaïd is engaged in a work of Benjaminian memory; Joan of Arc was already defeated twice over. She was condemned. Then she was canonised. Turned into the patron saint of France, she was burnt not as myth has it by the English, but formally and legally by the Church, a curious state of affairs that then witnessed a saint take the place of a witch by 1920. As a mirror ‘in which every epoch is reflected’, Joan’s image reflects the burning issues of the time. In the long list of images there was: The despised Joan of Voltaire and the freethinkers. The anti-clerical Joan, judged and burnt by the priests, of Leo Taxil and the freemasons. The Communard Joan of Clovis Hugues. The socialist and republican Joan of the first Péguy. The pre-protestant Joan of Bernard Shaw. The Joan brimming with life of Joseph Delteil and Joan the resistant of Aragon. Brecht’s holy proletarian Joan of the abattoir … The actuality of Joan is also the irresolvable dispute between these multiple legends of Joan which often say more about the spirit of the time than about Joan herself.213 What did the Joan of Bensaïd reflect? Already in 1988, the French presidential elections saw the breakthrough of the National Front, scoring 14.39 per cent of the vote. The composition of the vote was ‘clearly popular’ breaking through in areas where the Communist Party had been traditionally strong. With these results, Le Pen wanted to ‘translate his electoral influence onto the social terrain’. There were social factors that contributed to his rise: crisis, unemployment and social frustration. There were also political factors like the decline of French imperialism and the future entry into the Maastricht Treaty. Bensaïd described: All that was repressed and banned in the old tradition of the French Right since the Resistance has re-emerged. Today the taboos are lifted, transgressions are permitted and it is symptomatic that this rise of the National Front has coincided with the latest colonial war in New Caledonia. French imperialism is no longer in an economic position … to play a role that meets its desires. The horizon of entry into Europe in 1992 is accentuating this troubling political identity and I believe that the Le Pen phenomenon is not a transient phenomenon … it is one of the political problems of the years to come.214

213 214

Bensaïd 2009e. Bensaïd 1988.

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In these new conditions, Bensaïd did not abandon Joan of Arc’s eternal youth and mystery to Le Pen. On the terrain of memory, Bensaïd explained that Le Pen ‘disputes every inch. Of course, he appropriates Joan. But also 1st May, the Resistance and Algeria … One has the past that one merits. But to forget it costs dearly. In this great memorial vacuum, fantasies and phantoms are returning in force … The smile of modernity also has its hidden face’. With Le Pen disputing every inch of memory, the traditional Left was in disarray and on the defensive, ‘sick and shameful of its memory’ from the point of view of each traditional referent, The Left’s memory is in bad shape. Widespread amnesia. Too many promises unfilled … with corpses left in the closet. One does not even drink to forget anymore; one manages. The Great Revolution? Liquidated in the apotheosis of the bicentennial. The Commune? The latest utopian lark of the archaic proletariat. The Russian Revolution? Buried with the Stalinist counter-revolution. The Resistance? Not too clean when we look at it much closer. There are no other founding events. There is no longer a birth. There are no longer any reference points.215

14

Joan’s Resistant Conviction

Joan of Arc spoke to Bensaïd because of her determined convictions. At the age of 19, she found herself before 200 theologians and clergymen, frankly defying them, foiling with agility their perverse theological traps. Bensaïd drew out the sense of insubordination she demonstrated at her trial, against the temporal power of the Church. Though her free interpretation of faith postulated a direct communication with God, a religious notion, the story can throw light on political convictions and resistance. Josep María Antentas points out that ‘the figure of Joan of Arc is primarily an emblem of the act of resistance. She embodies a “strange principle of universal resistance”’. This is an essential feature of Bensaïd’s presentation of her. Hers is a hurried resistance, yet insubordinate to the temporal Church that judged her, which takes on a far more important dimension in a world of uncertain transition. Resistance is a principle amidst an old world that is dying and a new one struggling to be born. Where the old and new combine, the experience of heresy can be universal, because ‘One is always the heretic of someone’.

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Quoted from Antentas 2015, p. 75.

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Joan’s time was one ‘full of this quarrel between the visible Church and the invisible Church’. To invoke the invisible Church – or God’s voice – made one a heretic in the face of the visible Church. Before the tribunal of God, Joan was a heretic who deviated from her objective destiny; she ‘sought to raise up a people. But others were only thinking about consolidating a state’. In this sense, ‘Heresy also has its rhythms and momentum’.216 In political terms, the rhythms and movement of heresy are bound up with revolutionary transformation and bloody counter-revolution. Above all, it is tied to defeat. Facing the charge of heresy, Joan said, ‘I defended myself. Right until the exhaustion of the soul’, because ‘to cede a little, is to capitulate a lot’. Joan of Arc gave inspiration to resistance and conviction. She trusted herself against God. Against the torment of eternal damnation, she glimpsed the correct relation between heresy and politics, and the trials of each. A rebel against the temporal Church, ‘could you be certain that you were faithful to God, Joan’? Joan wagered. She chose. She resisted, ‘despite the temporal and spiritual authorities, in defiance of theological verdicts. Disobedient to the University and the Church’.217 Joan was compelled to ‘decide at every step, according to uncertain criteria’. Bensaïd said to Joan, ‘between the King and bishops, abandoned by all, you disturbed their game, but still you carried on’. Combining resistance

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Antentas 2015 wrote that: ‘Joan was formally accused of heresy, relapse and witchcraft. As the author reminds us, her trial dovetailed with the longstanding Inquisitorial tradition against heresy, dating from the previous centuries, and it occurred at the early stages of the witch hunts, whose peak was reached more than one century after Joan’s execution, between 1560 and 1660. The 12th, 13th and 14th centuries had witnessed the birth of spontaneous millenarist movements, and especially popular religious heresies that had a social agenda opposed to the feudal order; these heresies reinterpreted the religious tradition and mistrusted the ecclesiastical structure, as they believed that it did not embody God’s will owing to its corruption. women played a very important role in the heretical movements, in clear contrast to their marginalization in the official Church. This is the case, for instance, of Jeanne Daubenton, the spearhead behind the Brethren of the Free Spirit, and Marguerite de Porette, from the Beguine community, a movement of devout laywomen living in communities, who was burned in 1310, accused of heresy. The witch hunts and the development of the legal doctrines on witchcraft emerged during the 15th century in the midst of a crisis in the old feudal order. It was a continuation of the persecution of heretics from the previous centuries, but in a different context characterized by the emergence of capitalism and the crisis in the old feudal order. Unlike the persecution for heresy, the witch hunts mainly affected women and were a core factor in women’s loss of social power at the dawn of capitalism’. In his memoirs, Bensaïd drew parallels between the expulsion from the pt of Heloisa Helena and Joan of Arc – that furnish us a good example of political resistance – in saying, ‘Faced with the bureaucratic tribunal of cynical reason, Heloisa only listened to her own inner voice’. Bensaïd 2013, p. 229.

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and heresy, Bensaïd’s interpretation of Joan of Arc contained within it a disconcerting uncertainty: was it possible to have principles without a fixed point? The present from which Bensaïd read and interpreted Joan was one that had ended in an obscure disaster, physically and politically. The short twentieth century was on its last legs. As was Bensaïd. He drew an essential lesson: No defeat, no debacle, no disaster proves the unworthiness of a cause. No victory, no success, no triumph, prove its justice. Many defeats finish by making a victory. Many victories, a defeat.218 The twentieth century had experienced the greatest revolution humankind had ever seen fall to defeat. It witnessed the death-camps and the killing fields. Barbarism was the norm, not the exception. By any measure, it was the most brutal century humanity has experienced thus far. Beginning with a faith in the future of humanity, a humanity that would finally be emancipated, it ended with the collapse of the very idea of universal human liberation. This was why Bensaïd could look back on Joan of Arc. Her tenacity made her representation worth fighting for, because she did not resign herself to the ordinary course of the temporal Church. She knew how to defy it with an unshakable conviction. Like the temporal Church, modern capitalism aspires to rid the world of conviction – in Bensaïd’s case the conviction of being a communist – to reduce politics to a play of pragmatism. One is here obliged to wager on human liberation and fight with conviction.

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Marx from Beneath the Ruins This chapter explores Bensaïd’s direct writings on Marx. His interpretation of Marx rested on his trilogy, including Marx l’intempestif, La discordance des temps, Le Sourire du spectre, but, over the next decade, he wrote many other direct works on Marx, as prefaces to Marx’s texts like Les Crises du capitalisme, or Inventer l’inconnu. His key work on Marx in the 2000s is Marx, mode d’emploi, a pedagogic text. Some general remarks about Bensaïd’s relation to Marx are in order before I present his reconstruction of French Marxism and his theoretical interpretation of Marx. First, Bensaïd wanted to maintain the coherence of Marx’s thought as an open totality. One could not separate Marx the philosopher from Marx the historian, from Marx the economist and Marx the political theorist. Nor could one hold up the young Marx in order to bury the old or vice versa. For Bensaïd, the threads weaving together the ensemble of Marx’s life and work were his revolutionary politics and critique of political economy. The coherence of the whole is not a closed system but forms the guiding thread of an oeuvre. Second, the history of Marx(isms) is a history of crisis and decomposition. But one must be precise about the nature of a crisis of a Marxism. This allows us to understand the conditions for its resolution. In the 1980s Bensaïd asked, is Marxism in crisis? Crisis in relation to what Golden Age? In relation to the wide diffusion of Stalinist vulgarity? In relation to the recognition of an academic Marxism in the 1960s? To speak of the crisis of Marxism might innocently postulate a normality and pathology of theory. Is this a nostalgia for orthodoxy? Perhaps it is in the nature of Marxist theory to be in a state of permanent dissatisfaction, of critique and self-critique? Writing after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, he argued: Crisis of Marxism or crisis of ‘Marxisms’? Between ‘Marxism’ erected into state reason, the Marxism apologetic of ‘real socialism’, and antiStalinist Marxism, between the ideology of the oppressor and theory of the oppressed, there cannot be the same crisis. The crisis in theory refers back to a crisis of a practice, where we must search for a source of renovation and recommencement. As long as capital calls the shots, the response to the crisis of theory can only come from revolutionary practice itself and if need be from the heterodoxy of a Marrano communism. No theoretical

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crisis resolves itself through an eclectic or pragmatic renunciation of theory but by the effort of theory on itself.1 Practice without theory and theory without practice are equally one-sided – if theoretical renovation is not to reduce itself to a play of words, it must have a perspective to tie itself to creative and collective practice. There are, thus, two sides of Bensaïd’s relation to Marx: upholding collective practice as a principle of reality that allows one to update theory where need be, and the work of interpretation against ossified authority to produce a theory permitting a dialogue with practices if they are not disintegrate into the incoherent fragments of reified experience. Third, a theory can only be abandoned if it is refuted by a crucial experience and replaced by another theory that is completer and more elegant. But, if Marxist theory is good theory insofar as it explains capitalism’s structures and dynamics, for this theory to be overcome presupposes a radical change and rupture of the theory’s object. As long as the object of Marxist theory – the capitalist mode of production – continues and generalises itself across the globe, we cannot do without Marx. Fourth, there is a specificity between French and German post-war approaches to Marx that needs some reflection. Bensaïd approached his reading of Marx philosophically and politically. While it is rigorous in its attention to Marx’s word, it remains the outcome of a training in the French moment of philosophy tied to revolutionary political reconstruction. This is why to read any of Bensaïd’s studies on Marx is to take up the pathways of creative philosophical innovations and their relations to Marxism. The reading is also political, because Bensaïd thought through the possible revolutionary effects of his interpretation of Marx. By contrast, for example, the German post-war reading of Marx was, or became, much more attentive to philological matters – through the mega.2 – to the detriment of philosophical creativity and even revolutionary politics.

1

Bensaïd’s Reconstruction of French Marxism

Before surveying Bensaïd’s thematic and theoretical reading of Marx, it is worth drawing on his balance sheet of Marxism in France. This allows for reflection

1 Bensaïd 2010c, p. 269.

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on the political and intellectual conjuncture that ‘Marxisms’ faced in the 1980s– 90s. The main thesis he pursued is that French Marxism was impoverished by the experience of Stalinism. He made three claims about the dominant French tradition: first, as mentioned already, there was a radical divorce between theory and practice; second, as noted in relation to the crisis of Marxism, there was never a Golden Age of Marxism in France; third, one of the great disadvantages of the native tradition was the near non-existence of German science – the dialectic. Bensaïd’s assessment of these limits allows us to see how he conceived of rectifying this poverty. Before the First World War, Marxism was received in France via hearsay and vulgarities. The reception was a victim of positivist ideology’s dominance. Capital was indeed translated into French under Marx’s supervision, but Marx and Engels’s works were slow and partial in their diffusion in France. Garo wrote that: If, besides the translation of Capital, the first translations of Marx and Engels’s works began from the 1880s, it concerned only the texts judged canonical, for example, Wages, Price and Profit, together with the texts devoted to France; whereas Engels’s Anti-Dühring served as an abbreviated teaching of dialectical and historical materialism … This work of translation and even more so the works translated, are largely tied to the contemporary structure of the French workers’ movement. When it was founded, the Communist Party coming from the Tours Congress built itself on rigidly doctrinaire positions and its dominant tendency was antiintellectualist: it was unconcerned with the question of translation and the diffusion of Marx and Engels’s work, and before all applied itself to the edition of Lenin’s works, the more immediate bearer of contemporary challenges in the context of the moment … A real effort of translation and diffusion was undertaken only by the Communist Party in the 1930s, associating itself with the publication of Lenin’s, then Stalin’s priority works, tied to the process of Bolshevisation of the pcf initiated in the 1920s … Added to this is the lack of many translations of non-Francophone Marxist authors … that the master work of Georg Lukács, Ontology of Social Being, is still not available in French is evidence of it, without speaking of the wealth of secondary literature, in German, in Italian, in English, etcetera, which remains unknown … In such conditions, it is hardly surprising that in France, references to Marx have long remained and remain at times imprecise … [However, – D.R.] the massive lack of knowledge of the work doesn’t prevent the cardinal importance acquired by the person of Marx in France … In these conditions, Marx’s thought is often

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evoked in a pithy and schematising way, without a precise recourse to the texts.2 The contradiction between the prestige around Marx cultivated by the pcf and the lack of a direct knowledge of Marx shaped the French reading of Marx and the relations between Marxism and philosophy. Bensaïd explained that there ‘was no one of the stature of Labriola, no discussion comparable with the great controversies of Russian, German or Austrian socialism’. The French section of the socialist movement did not produce a Luxemburg, Gramsci, Lukács, Korsch or Grossman: In both the Second and Third Internationals the link between theory and practice was always very precarious. No great theoretical controversies, no schools of thought, an almost total drought and sterility of Marxism torn between literature and activism.3 The French workers’ movement made a poor contribution to the theoretical debates. Of the great theoretical debates in the Second International – the contemporary forms of capital accumulation and the characteristics of modern imperialism, the strategic questions of the paths to power and organisational questions on unions and the party – the French did not make any outstanding contributions. Paul Lafargue’s work in the early 1900s on economic determinism and Marx’s historical method was a symbol of the poor and positivistic interpretation of Marx. According to Bensaïd, Lafargue ‘contributed to a durable misunderstanding that characterised the poverty of “French Marxism” from Guesdist socialism to the vulgar materialism of the Stalinist Communist Party, obstinately refractory towards the dialectic and “German science”’.4 The detachment of theory from practice went further into the past than the emergence of a Bolshevised pcf. One could point back to the successive partial revolutions after 1789 to the formation of the Third Republic when a ‘deep gulf was then created between, on the one hand, a militant workers’ movement, hardened by the memory of June 1848 and the Commune, distrustful of institutions and intellectuals, and, on the other, a progressive, socialist-inclined intelligentsia sucked in by university careers or parliamentary promotion’.5 This 2 3 4 5

Garo 2011, pp. 28–9. Bensaïd 2011d. Ibid. Ibid.

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detachment could have been overcome were it not for the rise and consolidation of Stalinism. In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, the surrealists and the group of philosophers – including Politzer, Nizan and Lefebvre – were attracted to the young Communist Party. But ‘the birth or rebirth of militant Marxism was suffocated in embryo by the forced Bolshevisation of the young Communist Party and the Stalinisation of the International’.6 Bensaïd pointed out that: The work of Georges Politzer testifies to this missed rendezvous. A comparison of his Critiques des fondements de la psychologie of 1925 with his articles of the 1930s on Diderot and Descartes, or with his Principes élémentaires de philosophie, is enough to show the extent of the disaster. From an explorer of living Marxism, on the path to a constructive meeting with psychoanalysis, he became a craftsman of the ‘popular front’ in philosophy; faced with the rise of irrationality, he set himself to dig the static and derisory trenches of the Enlightenment and Cartesian rationality. More broadly, the triumph in Moscow of the needs of the state over class consciousness, allowed communist intellectuals to find, through selected texts of Engels or Lenin, traces of the good old positivism. In Paris, they did not want to know that, in the 1857 crisis, Marx ‘by sheer chance’ plunged into Hegel’s Logic before settling down to the slow process of producing Capital. Nor that Lenin, under the blow of August 1914, found nothing more urgent than to plunge himself onto the same Logic, to seek a second breath of Marxism different from the orthodoxy of German Social Democracy. Hegel did make a discreet entrance into the universities with Kojève’s lectures on Phenomenologie de I’Esprit, but, as far as French thinking is concerned, he has remained basically a ‘dead dog’.7 Throughout the Resistance, the Communist Party won prestige and talented intellectuals, but this did not alleviate the detachment of theory from revolutionary practice because the party ‘had a bluntly utilitarian conception of intellectuals’. However, things were slightly more complicated, as Garo points out: inside the Communist organisation, a specialised intellectual sector was organised very early, even if massive adhesion of intellectuals primarily dates from the Liberation and even if it is only from the middle of the

6 Ibid. 7 Ibid.

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1960s that the proportion of university titles would grow steadily among the leadership. Groups for Marxist reflection were founded at its margins, especially at the turn of the 1930s, at the very moment where Maurice Thorez affirmed the importance of cultural and theoretical work. Academics, students and artists were then small in number. But, as a result, a press system, journals and publishing houses, contributed to the implantation of an authentic Marxist popular culture and the formation of communist cadres, going through the effective parallel schooling system that were the Party’s training schools. It is therefore impossible to think that the theoretical and cultural questions were neglected … It remains no less the case that theoretical elaboration itself tended to remain in a subaltern position, oscillating between disconnection from or submission to the militant tasks of the hour.8 Accompanying these contradictory social and political obstacles, during the 1960s, crucial elements of Marx’s work remained unavailable in French – for example the Grundrisse. Grossman and Rosdolsky were not translated. In fact, Bensaïd could even suggest that the success of certain figures like Althusser was in direct proportion to the ‘lack of knowledge of Marxism in France’. Bensaïd pursued a strong claim against the grain, informed by a Trotskyist reconstruction of Marxism’s history. In these conditions, and contrary to the popular belief, ‘What is considered today as the Golden Age of French Marxism was thus a terrible misunderstanding’.9 This so-called Golden Age is situated in the 1960s with Althusser’s work, ‘In any case this is where its international reputation comes from … It was not in fact a renaissance of militant Marxism but the establishment of a “scientistic” Marxism, fitted meekly into the framework of triumphal structuralism’.10 The long boom strengthened an illusion of the immobility of structures with only a few dissidents like Castoriadis and Lefort denouncing ‘this form of “refreezing” of thought by the radical eviction of any subjectivity’. In this atmosphere, Althusser seemed to ‘emancipate theory from the fussy protection of politics’, by giving Marxism scientific credentials. This intervention must be seen as part of a broader problem developing for French Marxists in and around the Communist Party. The alliance between theory and politics was a serious question and did not stand still. Yet, Althusser’s theoretical work was not able to surmount the problems it identified; it could never reform the pcf from within. Bensaïd thought it was decisive that the place 8 9 10

Garo 2011, p. 32. Bensaïd 2011d. Ibid.

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‘accorded to theory by the French Communist Party’ was variable and was affected by the weight of rationalism in its intellectual tradition. It was also the case that the leadership of the pcf was hardly concerned with theorising their political practice or having it subjected to any form of critique. In the context of an attempted political reformation, Althusser gave Marxism an academic and scientific dignity, its recognition: From now on, ‘theoretical practice’ became in itself ‘its own criterion’, the validity of theoretical practice was to be found in theory itself, dispensing with the traditional Marxist notion of the confirmation of theory in social and political practice. For the communist students of the time, in conflict with the authority of the Party, this emancipation of theory gave the signal for a new freedom of thought.11 With the accelerated growth of the university system, Althusser’s intervention was ‘a godsend’, because one could serve an all-powerful scientism without guilt in the face of the Communist Party, having, ‘both the technocratic power of this science and the good conscience of the cause’. There was, so Bensaïd thought, an implication of this trade-off: If the Althusserian proposition of the ‘epistemological break’ in Marx introduced a new freedom, this freedom had its price. A theory emancipated from politics? Certainly. But to such a point that it locked itself into the closed frame of its own ‘theoretical practice’, at a respectful distance from practice itself. In this armed peace between theory and practice, politics remained in the politician hands of the party leadership.12 In effect, this amounted to leaving the politics to the Stalinist bureaucrats while the theoreticians could play with words. At the same time, the Stalinian hegemony pushed into the background figures like Goldmann and Lefebvre. The former was not of French origin and the latter was a philosophical Germanist. Goldmann’s life was dedicated to defending the Marxist method. From 1945 into the 1960s, he stood up against structuralist machinery and the onslaught of Stalinist Marxism, whether dogmatic or revisionist. To do so, he drew on the early work of Georg Lukács. As for Lefebvre, he was, ‘for young militants enthusiastically throwing themselves into the adventure of Marxism,

11 12

Ibid. Ibid.

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a reviving and to a certain extent pernicious source’. Challenging Althusser’s sacred ‘epistemological break’, Lefebvre wrote: Marxism has its own categories. It changes in the light of the historical and social conditions. It develops through objective contradictions, of which some the most important from this point of view, are its contradictions.13 In fact, within Lefebvre’s Marxism there were many themes that Bensaïd would hold dear to throughout his life, like the search for a demythologised conception of history and the notion that ‘the theory of history turns into strategy’. Relating to the second point, Lefebvre said that ‘The notion of strategy overcomes the oppositions and distinctions usually used in analysing the facts: causality and finality, chance and determinism’.14 Lefebvre’s limitation was that he rehabilitated a critical place for philosophical discourse, ‘without being able to find the ground for a new practice’. This was also the tragedy of Goldmann, in that his struggle for the Marxist method took place in isolation from the working class. To provisionally conclude on Bensaïd’s short reconstruction of French Marxism; not long before the release of Bensaïd’s works on Marx, he argued that Marxist theory in France suffered above all from ‘the absence of dialectical thought … It is undoubtedly not by chance that those producing original work come from a foreign culture (L. Goldmann, Michael Löwy, R. Fausto)’. In conjunction with this, even though there was a much greater knowledge of Marx and far more research carried out in different disciplines, ‘the break between theory and practice is deeper than ever, and this has necessarily a cost’.15

2

The Status of Philosophical Critique

Only recently has Bensaïd’s text on the status of Marxist theory been recovered from among his personal writings.16 It permits us to go into his attempt to

13 14 15 16

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Bensaïd 2000i, ‘Chauds, froids’. The text is dated 19 February, the time given from his computer. Antoine Artous’s introduction is useful. Artous wrote: ‘this is a text that goes in circles … For Daniel, it was necessary to illuminate this eleventh thesis with “the radical novelty of the second”, according to which the question of the “objective truth” of a human

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answer the question: if Marx wrote that philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways and that the point is to change it, what was the nature of this only? What is the status of Marxist theory? Is philosophy now decreed over? Bensaïd explored this only and refused to accept any interpretation that would dissolve philosophy into positive science or pragmatic politics. For many, whether ‘in the form of an Aufhebung, abolition, or realisation in scientific becoming or political becoming, the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach seems to definitively grant philosophy’s leave’.17 This formula leaves much to be interpreted, however. Philosophers have hitherto only? Does this mean that philosophers have been at odds with each other over ‘interpretations without practical tests’? Have they been too content to merely interpret the world? If a fracture between thought and practice exists, then philosophy cannot reach outside of the categories of its own speculative circle. Marx’s Theses therefore want to bid farewell to ‘this speculative philosophy’.18 However, where is the line between the announced abolition of philosophy and positivism? For

17 18

thought is not a “question of theory but is a practical question”. However, he refuses two possible readings. The one makes practice a simple empirical-pragmatic given, the other refers the sole immanence of the praxis of a revolutionary subject that brings into the open the truth of the historical process. There are thus permanent tensions in the history of Marxism which, we know it, has been dominated by the positivist orthodoxies of the Second International, then the Stalinised Third International. In his usual manner, Daniel makes his way through the horizon of a great many authors that have been against this petrification, notably Gramsci, Lukács, Korsch, Della Volpe, Althusser … The list is long, the authors are diverse … I would just like to make one remark that seems to me important because it explains the approach well. Against positivist petrification, Daniel does not counter-pose a discourse of Marxist humanism or the self-transparency of a revolutionary praxis; in short, a philosophy of the subject. The long return to Louis Althusser is in this regard important. The author is strongly criticised for his “theoreticism”. But Daniel equally explains that he “under-estimated that which could be liberating in the immanence of a history as a process without a subject or end, and in the pluralisation of historical temporalities”. Better yet, he underlines that Karl Korsch made a distinction between commodity fetishism and alienation in the young texts, along the way criticising Franz Jakubowski who “returns to alienation”. For more details, reference should be made to his posthumous work Le Spectacle, stade ultime du fétichisme de la marchandise. Furthermore, the analysis of fetishism is a good example of the double demarcation on the status of theory that he developed upon returning to Althusser. While refusing empiricism, he criticised … his “theoreticism,” meaning his sole reference to ‘theoretical practice’ as a foundation for scientific discourse. For Daniel, and correctly, the construction of a theoretical problematic is also rooted in the “logic of the thing”; in the way it is embedded in the objectivity of a historically situated social relation’. Ibid. Ibid.

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Engels, philosophy comes to an end with Hegel, because he showed the way out of the labyrinth of systems to real positive knowledge of the world. Thereafter, does Marxism lack its own philosophical foundation after Marx’s Theses? Is philosophy dissolved into positive knowledge? Is this what Marx even intended? The Second International ossified the teaching that philosophy was dissolved into positive knowledge. Even the early Lenin was in agreement by saying, ‘From the point of view of Marx and Engels, philosophy has no right to a separate independent existence, and its material is dissolved among the various branches of positive knowledge’.19 A farewell to philosophy through the welcome of positive knowledge. Yet, according to Bensaïd, it ‘remains to be known what begins with this end’. Marx’s clash with the Young Hegelians – and speculative philosophy – was a clash with the theology of the concept. The Hegelian School could not be overcome through speculative criticism and its ‘idealist crotchets’. Engels thought, ‘It was decided mercilessly to sacrifice every idealist fancy which could not be brought into harmony with the facts conceived in their own and not in a fantastic interconnection’. Perhaps the end of philosophy did not ‘signify for Marx the advent of a triumphant positive science but only a new road, in becoming science and politics, united in critical revolutionary theory’?20 In responding to the call to overthrow speculative philosophy within the tension between positive science and German science, theory and practice, Bensaïd noted: The eleventh thesis speaks to the radical novelty of the second: ‘The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question’. Unilateral and limited, thought without practice is nothing more than its own phantom. It is no longer even thought. This reminder to theory, namely of the practical imperative, is strictly revolutionary. Rather than cutting the eleventh thesis into four, by asking if it leaves something that still resembles philosophy, we must listen to the declaration of the overthrow of the apparatus of knowledge.21 The negation of philosophy raises two problems that seem opposed: philosophy’s extinction into a dominant science and its dissolution into politics. 19 20 21

Quoted from ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

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‘More than once’, these opposites have ‘finished by conjoining’, often at the hands of the Stalinists. By contrast, within the warm current of Marxism, Bensaïd explained: Labriola already preferred to speak of ‘critical communism’ rather than ‘scientific socialism’. According to him, historical materialism constituted a new reflective and critical social science. Threatened with congealing into a new ideology, it must in particular protect itself from all confusion with positivist sociology … The label ‘Marxist’ covers interpretations that are not only distinct but opposed. The original warm inspiration finds its continuation in the Lukácsian critique of reification, in the Benjaminian critique of historical reason, in Gramsci’s ruthless notes on the Popular Manual of sociology.22 For the cold currents of Marxism, their common denominator resides in the absolute legitimacy of a ‘scientific’ knowledge independently of all practical criteria. The cold current falls back into a form of criticism inside the circle of itself, unable to develop into revolutionary practice. Korsch, in his early writings, pointed out that, this form of ideology ‘can equally well develop, into all kinds of attempts at reform, which fundamentally remain within the limits of bourgeois society and the bourgeois state’.23 According to Bensaïd, the scientistic reading of Marx is the other side of the pragmatist reading. The cold currents do however raise a real difficulty, namely how to avoid a pragmatistempirical acceptance of the practical criteria (according to which the fact would have a value of truth)? This difficulty is a key tension of Bensaïd’s investigation of the relation of theory to practice. Bensaïd did not hold that the truth of a statement is determined by its immediate practical utility; he was not a Marxist utilitarian. Certain other problems also stood out for Bensaïd, namely how can we develop a critique of the Hegelian philosophy of history while retaining the critique of positive science inspired by the Science of Logic? How can we subject historical reason to critique through dialectical logic? How can we be Hegelians without falling back into the metaphysical myth of the grand subject? How can we criticise theoreticism without falling into pragmatism? To what extent did the appearance of Marxism utterly transform our notion of science?

22 23

Ibid. Quoted from ibid.

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The relation between Marxism and philosophy remains unresolved.24 It demands rejecting the abstract totality that asserts the tyrannical or bureaucratic primacy of politics to permit a pluralised Marxism. Philosophy should not be sutured or subordinated to the state or bureaucratic organisations but that is not to say it has no relation to politics. Theory has a determinate relation to practice, which means it need not remain stuck in a contemplative philosophical position. The contemplative position is a philosophical retreat from Marx’s breakthrough in the Theses. Neither is philosophy – interpreting the world – abstractly identical with politics. It has its own register that cannot be abstractly collapsed into changing the world. This is so, however: It is not at all surprising that philosophy, when rescued from its political trap, floats like an elusive ghost. Rather than ignoring it, the question is to think through the relation between theory and strategy (philosophy and politics) in the light of practice. Conflating theory and strategy into the ‘general line’, most parties (Stalinist and Maoist) have conceived of this fusion as a homogeneity and a one-way identity. The political imperative thus became the pretext for orthodox philosophy, invested with scientific authority as the will to do science haunted the unresolved universe of the conflict. However, another relation is conceivable that would not be a point of dependence or absorption, but a mutual tension and critique, of heterogeneity, of non-contemporaneity and multiplicity because theory never resolves itself into politics. When it claims to formulate a ‘line’, it degrades itself into an ideology of legitimation. This is not to simply avoid the subordination of theory to politics but to think through their respective conceptual temporalities; of accepting that immediate politics cannot decide long-term theoretical controversies. We can accept this without ceding to cynical indifference

24

Speaking about Marx and his work in an interview, Bensaïd said: ‘We have often thought, in the famous Theses on Feuerbach, that Marx says his goodbyes to philosophy. I think that it is a little more complicated. Marx explains that until present the philosophers have been content to interpret the world, and that the problem is of changing it. But to change it still consists in interpreting it, even if it is an active interpretation, turned to change and subversion. What Marx rejects in his texts, it is speculative philosophy, and not philosophy as a whole. Or if we take the Deleuzian criteria of a philosophy as a philosophy of immanence, as a space of the creation of an ensemble of concepts, we have in Marx a radical immanence inhabited by concepts (value, surplus-value, tendential laws, crises …)’. Bensaïd 1995a, Après Marx, quelle place pour l’action politique?

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whose flipside is a pragmatic politics (without theoretical referents) and a speculative theory (without a practical referents).25 Here Bensaïd’s text ends. There is a time of politics and a time of theory, which are not to be conflated. To put this in concrete terms, it means that a political congress that defines goals over the medium term can very well deliberate on theoretical questions falling under another temporal register, but it cannot settle them with a circumstantially assembled majority. Marx and Engels perfectly understood this fundamental difference when they refused to submit their theoretical writings to the incompetence of leading bodies of the German socialist party.

3

Against the Over-Politicisation of Philosophy

Before resuming the discussion of Marx l’intempestif, I briefly take up Le pari mélancolique, because there Bensaïd set out to confront the dangers that threatened politics, with consequences for philosophy. To rethink politics, ‘we must renounce the idea of a homogenous and empty space’ and the presumption of continuous and linear time. It ‘has become necessary to situate it in the place and moment where a plurality of human spaces and times are knotted, as a point of encounter … of heterogeneous practices’. This problem of politics was tied to a ‘new adjustment of its rhythms in relation to other modes of thought and action, which presupposes ending with the abstractly totalising pretention that “everything is political”’. The temporal environment is an assemblage of time, at times tied and concurrent, and at others inconsistent and discordant, relations concealed by the habitual notion of a single temporality, of clockwork and calendars.26

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Bensaïd 2000i, ‘Chauds, froids’. Paul Nizan’s example is a concrete example of this contradiction. Bensaïd wrote of him, ‘Nizan struggled in the fecund tensions that he thought he had unravelled, between the theoretical and aesthetic scrupulousness of the writer and the necessary determination of the militant, between his personal conscience and the impersonal authority of the Party. Subtracted from the test of practice, the “Eleatic” truth of the intellectual becomes doctrinaire and his theoretical field of vision closes in on itself; inversely, renouncing any reference to truth, partisan intelligence degenerates into an unscrupulous propaganda’. Bensaïd 2006b, p. 34. Bensaïd 1997, p. 129.

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Only in a certain way and up to a certain point is everything political. It is not the concern for the concrete totality with its mediations and moments that is totalitarian, ‘but the forced reduction of the whole to one of its parts. Every experience of the era of revolutions encourages us to defy the abstract and forced totality’.27 For Bensaïd, the Breton-Trotsky Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art written against Stalinism and fascism is fundamental to thinking through the bond between philosophy and politics. It is not confined to art, because philosophy is also embedded within the problem of the discordance of times. If the communist revolution is not afraid of theory and philosophy – or art – then it is better to march with anarcho-libertarians than cede to the policelike spirit of pragmatism or state reason. There is a libertarian streak in all philosophical and artistic endeavours because they are about creation. This has an impact on the way Bensaïd interpreted the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach. ‘Thrown onto paper’, these short notes must be situated in the ‘polemical context of rupture with the speculative philosophical tradition and the supersession of the classic antinomies between subject and object, theory and practice, abstract and concrete’, but we have seen that a blanket escape into politics and science is a false escape that can do much damage.28 To further specify the stakes, Bensaïd saw that three figures were especially attentive to Marx’s breakthrough: Bloch, Labriola and Lefebvre. For Bloch, Marx breaks with a purely contemplative form of thought, but he does not replace it with pragmatistempiricism but a non-contemplative form of thought. Philosophy cannot be abolished without being realised. For Labriola, ‘philosophy is and is not’, and is therefore not abolished arbitrarily. In Lefebvre’s argument: everything leads to maintaining a specific space (and a specific rhythm) for philosophical thought as a critical counterpoint to science and politics. Therefore, despite the declaration of its overcoming, philosophy persists … Lefebvre insists philosophy itself conserves the necessary role of thinking in the distance and interval, of being a sort of ‘judge without power’. For him, the new philosophy, which is no longer content to interpret the world, conceives itself as a philosophy of horizons, of which the aim is a truth of the possible and not a truth of being.29

27 28 29

Bensaïd 1997, p. 131. Bensaïd 1997, p. 133. Bensaïd 1997, p. 135.

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For too long, orthodoxy fused and confused the domains of politics and theory with the idea of a strict congruence and continuity between political positions and their implied theoretical and aesthetic representations. Within this confusion, a political position was considered the direct and necessary expression of a social nature and the revelation of a theoretical deviation. It is a self-defeating conception of politics, art and philosophy. For Bensaïd, knowledge is neither absolute, nor relativistic; values are uncertain and debatable. Though he dissented from an absolutist and possessive notion of truth, he defended truth as a relation and not a thing, which means it was not a thing of empiricism or rationalism, but a relation to be critically-philosophically thought-over. His conception is closely linked to the centrality of responsibility in politics and revolutionary practice.30

4

What Marx’s Theory Is Not

Bensaïd’s major works on Marx came at an auspicious time. Marx l’intempestif and La discordance des temps appeared in October 1995, just before the massive strikes in defence of public services and social security, marking an anti-neoliberal inflection in France. On the intellectual level, Derrida’s Spectres of Marx and The Weight of the World directed by Pierre Bourdieu appeared in 1993. After proclaiming Marx to be a ‘dead dog’, the ‘press could only marvel at this intellectual resurrection paralleling the “return of the social question” ’. Bensaïd positioned his reading of Marx about the concept of history. In the previous chapter, I argued that the messianic was a metaphor; now, I turn to Bensaïd’s systematic reconstruction of Marx’s theory. Bensaïd followed Maurice Blanchot for whom Marx brings to us ‘a mode of theoretical thinking that overturns the very idea of science’. And as Derrida recognised, Blanchot’s passage warns of the dangers inherent in certain Althusserian motifs. This is a warning not against ‘knowledge but against scientistic ideology that often, in the name of Science or Theory as Science, had attempted to unify or purify the “good” text of Marx … This other thinking of knowledge … does not exclude science. But it overturns and overflows its received idea’.31 Bensaïd identified a basic contradiction in Marx’s thinking between a fascination for the empirical-physical model of positive sciences and his loyalty to ‘German science’ that undermined positivism. Indeed, Bensaïd also suggested

30 31

Bensaïd 2010c, p. 246. Derrida 1994, pp. 40–1.

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that Marx’s thought has a plurality of unresolved contradictions. It is therefore not a homogenous body of thought. Importantly, however, neither is Marx’s thought incoherent or inconsistent. Instead for Bensaïd, it is ‘the theory of a practice open to several readings’.32 In place of giving a positive answer to what Marxist theory is, Bensaïd decided initially to point out what it is not. Firstly, Marx does not produce a speculative philosophy of History, nor a philosophy of unidirectional history. Marx deconstructs universal History and does not promise a final salvation. In other words, Marx’s deconstruction and production is not held together by an origin and an end. Out of this deconstruction, a profane history emerges the trajectory of which ‘is unsettled, in that it is determined conjointly by struggle and necessity’. For Bensaïd, Marx articulated a theoretical mode of writing history, in other terms, ‘a new way of writing history, whose alphabet is suggested by the Grundrisse’, beyond which: Capital thus indissociably deploys a new representation of history, and a conceptual organisation of time as a social relation: cycles and turnovers, rhythms and crises, strategic moments and contretemps. The old philosophy of history thus fades into a critique of commodity fetishism on the one hand, and political subversion of the existing order on the other.33 Secondly, Marx’s theory ‘is not an empirical sociology of classes’. Social classes are not objects or categories of sociological classification, ‘but the very expression of historical development’. Contrary to positive reason, which arranges and classifies, inventories and itemises, soothes and assuages, it brings out the dynamics of social conflict and renders the phantasmagoria of commodities intelligible. Not that the various social antagonisms (of sex, status or nation) are reducible to class relations. The diagonal of the class front links and conditions them without conflating them.34 Lastly, Marx’s theory is ‘not a positive science of the economy conforming to the then dominant model of classical physics’. Marx does science differently insofar as it is influenced by the critical and dialectical German Wissenschaft. He does so by rediscovering ‘the synthesising ambitions of the old metaphysics, which he explicitly adopts in the form of “German science” ’. This permits 32 33 34

Bensaïd 2002, p. 2. Bensaïd 2002, p. 3. Ibid.

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him to comprehend non-linear logic, laws of tendency and conditional necessities ‘of what Gramsci shrewdly identified as a “new immanence”’.35 Therefore, Marx’s theory is ‘not a doctrinal system, but a critical theory of social struggle and the transformation of the world’; Bensaïd’s stress is on critique, struggle and transformation.

5

Marx’s New Writing of History

What was the creative import of Marx’s new way of writing history? What was the content of Marx’s critique of historical reason? From what did Marx break, never to return? Bensaïd responded to the widespread myth that Marx had an ideological-teleological ambition promising a final end to human history. In this ideological-teleology, history operates behind the back of concretely existing human beings; such an ambition would suppose all that takes place on the slaughter bench of history does so to achieve an a-human finality.36 Teleology posits that future history is the aim of past history and the whole process is unidirectional and meaningful. History is personified. According to Bensaïd, this writing of history is a religious, ‘philosophical, speculative history: the history of ideologues’. Did Marx ascribe to this version of History? The sharp answer, as already hinted at above, is no, because ‘History does nothing … history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his own aims’. Marx (and Engels) stripped 35 36

Ibid. Stavros Tombazos, in a recent discussion of the concept of history in Bensaïd’s work perceptively demonstrated how not even this charge could be mobilised against Hegel by arguing that the criticism Marx levels at the Young Hegelians could not be mobilised against Hegel himself: ‘If “reason governs history”, according to Hegel’s famous phrase, it is because historical facts and events, that is to say that past, are not simply an accumulation of facts without forms or logic. If one examines the past, we discover an intellectual order in it, because, according to Hegel, we can observe a progress of freedom and consciousness of freedom … The affirmation of such historical progress can be criticised, refined, or even rejected as erroneous, but it is not a product of a conceptual metaphysics, a pre-established logical schema … There is therefore no apriorism of the concept and no arbitrary or whimsical construction in Hegel. It therefore goes without saying that “teleology” in Hegel’s concept of history guarantees no historical happy end … if, like the “Owl of Minerva” that “always takes flight at dusk”, philosophical knowledge only comes at night-fall, when things are judged and the dust has settled, it cannot predict the future. The hypothesis of the historical evolution toward freedom must be verified, forever new, with the end of each historical cycle. Hegelian philosophy therefore does not imply a linear progress because each phase in consciousness and the application of already-existing freedom does not mechanically determine the future phase on which philosophy can say nothing’. Tombazos 2016, pp. 92–3.

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history of its speculative gist, replacing it with a profane history with ‘no ends of its own’. In profane history, the future should not ‘be regarded as the aim of past history’, and to ‘de-moralise it is to politicise it, and open it to a strategic conceptualisation’.37 Positively, Marx inaugurated a new way of writing history that broke with speculative philosophies of history. Bensaïd explained that after Marx’s break with speculative histories, his task ‘was nothing less than the invention of a new writing of history’. Bensaïd’s move involved a strong thesis, namely that the new way of writing history involved a consequential theoretical revolution. In 1845–46, Marx argued that ‘History is nothing but the succession of the separate generations … This can be speculatively distorted so that later history is made the goal of earlier history, e.g. the goal ascribed to the discovery of America is to further the eruption of the French Revolution’.38 Marx and Engels settled accounts with their ‘erstwhile philosophical consciousness’, ‘from the standpoint of the class struggle and the critique of political economy’ which also meant settling with the speculative philosophy of history. It is to overturn ‘sacred history’, with its lost paradises and promised lands, in the name of ‘profane history’. It is to think in the present, not the future anterior.39 For Bensaïd, Marx inherited the philosophy of immanence stripped of its speculative content, fully on earth in its concrete development, deploying ‘an “immanent teleology” misunderstood by most of his critics, who are ignorant of Spinoza’.40 After Marx’s ‘settlement of accounts’, we no longer find any trace of a philosophy of history in his work. It is no longer his problem: he has changed terrain … Henceforth, what is at issue is taking history seriously – no longer as a religious abstraction, of which living individuals are merely the humble creatures, but as the real development of conflictual relations.41 On Bensaïd’s interpretation, the theoretical terrain Marx was able to cover between the years 1845 and 1882, ‘was considerable, but the enemy remained

37 38 39 40 41

Bensaïd 2002, p. 10. Bensaïd 2002, pp. 14–15. Ibid. Bensaïd 2002, p. 17. Ibid.

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the same: historical fetishism’.42 Breaking apart the ‘fetish of history liberates the categories that allow us to conceive of it differently’. ‘The Holy Family and The German Ideology thus conclusively renounce any notion of historical transcendence. Historical religiosity is systematically liquidated’.43 To provisionally summarise Bensaïd’s line of thinking, the theoretical revolution Marx’s inaugurates is transitional in the Grundrisse, made possible by the changing of terrain of the mid-1840s works, and effectuated in Capital. The new writing of history was implicit in Marx’s nota bene dot points and what was announced in the Grundrisse ‘was set to work in Capital’. This is a salvaging operation: where History is deconstructed, a theoretical revolution intervenes. In one of his Grundrisse notes, Marx wrote that historiography todate has resulted only in ‘an ideal history incapable of generating an understanding of real history’. He also introduced the notions of contretemps and non-contemporaneity. History, in Marx’s new writing of it, only becomes universal ‘in and through a process of actual universalisation. Then, and only then, can we begin to conceive it as constantly evolving universality’. By introducing notions of non-contemporaneity and non-linearity, discordance of spheres and times, time is ‘punctuated by alternation and intermittence. The broken time of politics and strategy’.44 It is clear that Bensaïd was making explicit a constellation of themes and concepts from Marx’s work, able to explain the discordant temporalities of history’s materialities and the specific nature of Marx’s new object, the capitalist mode of production. These concepts immunise historical materialism from mechanical uses of the base and superstructure metaphor. Though Bensaïd thought the dialectic of the forces and relations of production had explanatory power, Marx clearly saw the limits of this dialectic. For Bensaïd, Marx’s respect for the limits of dialectical-historical reason respected the real difference between concept and historical materiality. Additionally, [E]xplanatory necessity does not abolish chance, and the ‘how’ of history ‘necessarily’ refers to the aleatory instance of the struggle … History possesses no philosophical meaning. Yet it can understood politically and thought strategically … As both the index and the text attest, however, there is no longer any question of History as such.45

42 43 44 45

Bensaïd 2002, p. 28. Bensaïd 2002, p. 17. Bensaïd 2002, p. 23. Bensaïd 2002, p. 24.

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History is not the speculative product of universal categories or the Idea but is the process of real human beings actively shaping the lived world. Concepts can approach this complex and conflictual reality but cannot exhaust it. Bensaïd writes that ‘Contretemps … is the real world of politics, aesthetics, theory’, whereby ‘Politics is precisely the point where these discordant times intersect’.46 Moreover, the deconstruction of speculative philosophies of history, of origins and ends, had epistemological consequences. Bensaïd underscored the relationship between the present and knowledge, encountered in the last chapter and deepened in this one. For speculative philosophies of history, the future is the temporal category of knowledge that has primacy; as the category of speculative choice, it desires the last word. By contrast, Bensaïd thought the present was the decisive category for knowledge, opening the way to a comprehension of the past.47 This has an implication for any explanation of history, being a critique of historicism, because the efforts to ‘explain history by history is to go round in circles. This circle must be broken, the question turned around, and the totality broached’, History must no longer be posited as the explanatory principle, but as that which is to be explained. The new historiography thus demands elucidation of the actual internal structure of the mode of production. Logical order takes precedence over genetic order, which conceptual amateurs persist in confusing with empirical history. This knowledge is not articulated in the form of historical forecasts disguised as scientific predictions … [Marx’s] anti-utopian aim is to disentangle a bundle of possibilities – not to predict the necessary course of history, but to think the bifurcations emerging out of the present instant. Marx’s theory thus plunges into the innermost depths of the contemporary world, to unravel the knots of a time full of lumps, wrinkles and folds.48 Bensaïd’s insistence on the theoretical articulation of logical order is the key point. By continuing the critique of historicism and the tyranny of the concept, it not only makes visible the structures of a mode of production, it indeed shows the possibilities of a concretely existing social formation. What else emerges from this theoretical operation that has disposed of with the tyranny of the concept? An immanent rhythm of capital, a conceptualisation of its 46 47 48

Bensaïd 2002, pp. 21–2. Bensaïd 2002, p. 26. Ibid.

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crises, and a historicity in which politics ‘attains primacy over history’. In The German Ideology, ‘Marx invokes the “really historic interventions of politics in history”. They herald the intelligibility of real history, which presupposes the destruction of its own myth’.49 Bensaïd pursued a polemic against other currents of Marxism that reintroduced a speculative philosophy of history into their apparatuses of thought. He suggested, for instance, that Marx’s new way of writing history had escaped many commentators like the Analytical Marxists of the Anglo-Saxon world. According to Bensaïd, the Analytical Marxists had ‘an ossified understanding of “historical materialism” wrongly attributed to Marx’, which constructed a unilateral and empty architecture of the correspondence between the forces and relations of production. In separating history and politics, ‘they lapse back into speculative representations of history’, and all that remains is a ‘laboured collage of the positive odyssey of technology and a new theodicy of spirit’.50 Though they are not so popular today, Bensaïd’s criticism is analogous to Gramsci’s critique of Bukharin’s Popular Manual, which retains its validity.

6

Subterranean Friends of Marx: Benjamin and Gramsci

If we want to understand Bensaïd’s Marxism, we have to understand the company he keeps – Benjamin and Gramsci. I have dedicated the better part of the last chapter to Benjamin but none to Gramsci. To reiterate about Benjamin: Bensaïd used Benjamin’s metaphor of the secular Messiah to make visible the active sides of Marx’s theory in the context of his contradictions. Upon the release of Bensaïd’s study of Benjamin, he explained: There is in Marx the temptation of a teleological conception of history where the harmony between morality and politics is guaranteed by the hypothesis of progress or from the meaning of history. There is also the idea of a totally immanent history, open to the plurality of possibility. There is in him the temptation of scientific models and causal law calculated through mechanics, but also elements of an open causality, of a determinism fractured by the aleatory of politics and the event.51

49 50 51

Bensaïd 2002, p. 35. Bensaïd 2002, p. 64. Bensaïd interview in 1990 upon the release of his book on Walter Benjamin.

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To grasp what Bensaïd is doing, it is also important to go through Gramsci. In his Prison Notebooks, Gramsci insightfully wrote: ‘in a certain sense it seems to me possible to say that the philosophy of praxis = Hegel + David Ricardo’.52 Hegel and Ricardo are thinkers of modern bourgeois structures, with the former also producing an immanent thought, in line with Spinoza. Furthermore, Gramsci argued that ‘Marx continues the philosophy of immanence, but he rids it of its whole metaphysical apparatus and brings it into the concrete terrain of history’.53 This involved Marx in a theoretical revolution of profound consequence for emancipatory politics. Gramsci’s combination of Hegel and Ricardo was tied to the argument for historical immanence. This insight goes a long way to decipher Bensaïd’s interpretation of Marx. It takes us a step closer to grasping a Marxism that is able to conceptualise singular historicities, since Marx tries to ‘hold both ends of the chain: to extricate himself from the abstraction of universal History (the “floating universal”) without lapsing into the insane chaos of absolute singularities (“what only happens once”)’.54 Navigating this tension is a theoretical art that turns into political strategy. A theoretical art turned to political strategy requires an immanent history that poses an adequate relation between historical necessity and real possibility. Likewise, the relationship between the immanent laws of the capitalist mode of production, the dialectical laws of tendency and the untimely nature of revolutions are at stake. Bensaïd thinks revolutions are creative, always untimely and ‘to some extent, always “premature”’. They are the sign of what ‘humanity can historically resolve. In the nonconforming conformity of the epoch, they are a potentiality and possibility of the present, at once opportune and inopportune, too soon and too late, poised between the no longer and the not yet: a possibility whose last word has not been said’.55 It is conceivable for the ‘era of revolutions to 52

53 54 55

Gramsci developed this insight by writing: ‘And can one also say that Ricardo contributed to directing the first theoreticians of the philosophy of praxis towards surmounting Hegelian philosophy and to the construction of their new historicism, purged of all traces of speculative logic? It seems to me that one might try to prove this assumption and that it would be worth doing. I start out from two concepts fundamental to economic science, of a ‘determinate market’ and “the law of tendency”, which, it seems to me, we owe to Ricardo and I reason as follows: isn’t it perhaps from these two concepts that a motive was given for reducing the “immanentistic” conception of history – expressed in idealistic and speculative language by German classical philosophy – to an immediately historical and realistic ‘immanence’ in which the law of causality of natural science has been purged of its mechanistic aspect and has become synthetically identified with the dialectical reasoning of Hegelianism?’ Quoted from Gramsci 2011, p. 435. Gramsci 2011, p. 159. Bensaïd 2002, p. 61. Bensaïd 2002, p. 54.

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drag on in worsening times that are out of joint’. If revolution is the actualisation of a possibility, this brings us back to the present as ‘the central temporal category of an open-ended history’, as a strategic conceptualisation of struggle and decision. As the last chapter made explicit, at work in Bensaïd, the present plays a specific political role, in addition to the epistemological role for thinking history. It is the axis around which any political intervention is structured. Bensaïd illustrates it with reference to Saint Augustine: Saint Augustine implored God to teach him how he reveals future things – or, more precisely, ‘the present of future things’ – to the prophets. For ‘it is not strictly correct to say that there are three times’, linked by an order of chronological succession. Rather, there are three modes of one and the same time, which is triply present: ‘a present of past things, a present of present things, and the present of future things’. The present redistributes meaning, scans the field of what is potential from the vantage point of its ‘maybes’, and invents new opportunities.56 We have already encountered the prophet and its conditional message. For Bensaïd, the prophet betrays the inevitable and defies fate – it is awake to the possibility of the event’s advent. This grounds a distinction between necessity in the formal-speculative and the concrete-historical meaning of the terms. Immanent within history, necessity exists when there exists an efficient and active premise, consciousness of which in people’s minds has become operative, proposing concrete goals to the collective consciousness and constituting a complex of convictions and beliefs which acts powerfully in the form of ‘popular beliefs’.57 Necessity in its concrete-historical sense states what must and can be, not what will be. By stating what can and must be – where there is an efficient and active premise – real possibility becomes necessity. There is, therefore, a distinction and dialectic between a formal and real possibility in Hegel and Marx. As a formal possibility, the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism is thinkable. But so is the thought that capitalism will not be overthrown. There is a reciprocity of abstract-formal possibilities in the use of concepts, where opposites are simul-

56 57

Bensaïd 2002, p. 55. Gramsci 1971, pp. 412–13.

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taneously possible in theory. In Hegelian logic, there is as good reason for taking everything to be as abstractly impossible as to be abstractly possible, because every concrete content contains antagonistic characteristics. According to Bensaïd, Marx’s doctoral thesis on Epicurus and Democritus showed him to be a ‘thinker of possibility’ who handled the dialectic of possibility ‘perfectly’: Once again Epicurus stands directly opposed to Democritus. Chance, for him, is a reality which has only the value of possibility. Abstract possibility, however, is the direct antipode of real possibility. The latter is restricted within sharp boundaries, as is the intellect; the former is unbounded, as is the imagination. Real possibility seeks to explain the necessity and reality of its object; abstract possibility is not interested in the object which is explained, but in the subject which does the explaining. The object need only be possible, conceivable. That which is abstractly possible, which can be conceived, constitutes no obstacle to the thinking subject, no limit, no stumbling-block. Whether this possibility is also real is irrelevant, since here the interest does not extend to the object as object … Necessity appears in finite nature as relative necessity, as determinism … Relative necessity can only be deduced from real possibility, i.e. it is a network of conditions, reasons, causes, etc., by means of which this necessity reveals itself. Real possibility is the explication of relative necessity.58 Ultimately, revolutionary politics must respect the proverb that ‘A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush’. This is why no formula can replace the concrete analysis of the concrete situation (The Peasants’ War in Germany, The Eighteenth Brumaire, and Class Struggles in France are exemplars)59 because ‘Historical necessity’ does not license reading the cards and issuing predictions. It operates in a field of possibilities, where the general law applies in and through a particular development … to demand more from a dialectical law than its generality would yield an empty formality.60 At stake is the critique of a teleological-ontological conception of possibility. Henri Maler’s discussion of possibility in Penser le possible: De Hegel à Marx rigorously demonstrated, through a reading of the movement from possibility

58 59 60

Marx 2010f., pp. 44–5. Bensaïd 2002, p. 59. Bensaïd 2002, p. 58.

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to actuality in Hegel’s Logic and Marx’s theoretical development (though, contrary to Bensaïd, he saw certain limitations in Marx’s notion of possibility that needed rectification) that it is possible to break with an ontological and teleological concept of the possible in order to make way for a strategic concept of possibility. Maler took seriously the idea that possibilities were disruptive of the existing order only if historical conditions were seen as allowing for a strategic orientation within history. That is, conditions do not mechanically give rise to linear effects, which would negate the emergence of lateral possibilities in history. Historical conditions do not abolish the necessity of ruptures in history, but only that the key concepts of historical rupture are strategic concepts that can be deployed amidst transformative practice. They are not teleological concepts that dispose of the need for strategic intervention. This is so because historical possibilities are disruptive, ‘the negation of the established social order is still only potential: it is never totally immanent in history, sealed within a present that awaits the future. It is dependent upon a project that seizes upon conditions and contradictions that makes the possibility real, unifies the multiplicity of possibles, transforms the fractures into ruptures, totalises the partial negations: in other terms, it is Revolution’.61

7

Another Conception of Time: The Temporalities of Capital in Concrete Histories

For Bensaïd, Marx’s new way of writing history inaugurated a new appreciation of time. In the chapter dedicated to this claim, A New Appreciation of Time, we see Louise Michel’s account of the will to stop the flow of time. During the defence of Paris, her fellow communard, Amilcare Cipriani – who was a member of the First International – had shot and shattered the clock face of the Hotel de Ville. This gesture was a repetition of the insurgents of 1830, who themselves had fired on the clocks, in order to arrest the flow of time. Cipriani attempted to stop the flow of time at a moment filled with the liberatory struggle of the oppressed, which diagonally raises the question: What is time and how is it to be told? How does Bensaïd see in Marx – particularly but not exclusively in Capital – a new way of listening to time and of composing it? Marx’s conceptualisation of capital’s temporalities made historical development intelligible as a field in which strategic intervention may take place; Bensaïd’s point is to listen and compose the temporalities of historical devel-

61

Maler 1995, p. 106.

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opment. The time of listening and the time of composition are full of surprises because Bensaïd draws his reader’s attention to the role of Hegel’s philosophy of history. Bensaïd’s interpretation of Hegel needs to be situated in the context of previous readings of Hegelian time. In the Althusserian circle, we have Althusser’s contribution in Reading Capital and Pierre Macherey’s Hegel or Spinoza. These figures were quite foreign to Bensaïd, theoretically and politically. Yet, Althusser had argued that the concept of history and social totality had to correspond with a concept of differential temporality not subordinate to the ideology of a homogenous time, by which he meant the Hegelian conception of time. Althusser thought that Hegel’s notion of time was taken over from a vulgar, everyday and obvious empiricism. Althusser claimed that the specific structure of historical time should be understood in its diversity because history cannot be read as an ideological continuum of a linear time. Althusser’s concept of the totality assigned each level of the social whole its own specific rhythm, peculiar to each mode of production, in a differentiated manner. Althusser’s criticism of absolutist time was important as a critique, but it remained an undeveloped intuition, perhaps it was an intuition drawn from post-Bergsonian debates. In taking on Althusser’s critique of Hegel, Macherey saw in Spinoza a mode of thought that was similar to Hegel’s Logic, but was free from treating knowledge as beholden to a pre-established norm and teleology. Again, in this work the charge that Hegel is caught within a linear and homogenous understanding of time and thought was accepted. Bensaïd claimed, on the contrary, that there existed in Hegel’s thought an early rebellion against the emptiness of physical time, of linear time, and that there indeed existed no closure in his work. Hegel rejected the abstract representation of a linear time. ‘Careful readers’, Bensaïd wrote, will be surprised to discover in the philosopher of Jena a critique of historical reason in the making: a contrast between (abstract) empty time and full time (‘full of struggle’); repudiation of an abstract (one-sidedly quantitative) conception of progress; rejection of purely formal generalisation of the course of history.62 In general, ‘classical German philosophy is resistant to the historical schemas commonly attributed to it’.63 For Hegel’s philosophy, ‘it is always the present

62 63

Bensaïd 2002, p. 70. Bensaïd 2002, p. 69.

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that is at issue’. His philosophy did not ‘completely stifle rebellion against the appalling emptiness of physical time: “history is the process whereby the spirit assumes the shape of events”’.64 Hegel’s philosophy is at odds with the positivism of Comte who tasks himself with ‘overseeing the organic termination of revolution’, dreaming of ‘history as non-revolutionary progress’, that is ‘Governed by invariant laws’, this tasteless positivism wants to ‘restore order in society’, and finally guarantee ‘a genuinely normal state of affairs’.65 Hegel by contrast wanted philosophy to actualise the mole’s quest for light by painting grey on grey. Marx wanted revolutionary politics as a movement to abolish the present state of things by folding green on green. Bensaïd suggested that the shift of terrain onto subaltern politics allowed Marx to deepen and conclude Hegel’s inchoate critique of historical reason: After Hegel, how is historical time to be conceptualised? … This exodus is inseparable from the name of Marx and the way in which he multiplied time, according to the plural rhythms and cycles of a broken political temporality. Time is no longer the motor of history, its secret energetic principle, but the conflictual social relation of production and exchange.66 Within the conflictual social relation, general commodity exchange: strips human relations from their aura … time is money and money is time. Capital becomes the time of capital … Hollowed out and calculated, won and lost without being lived, this time is no longer that of gods and signs, labours and days, calendars and confessions. Like some spiteful evil genius, it henceforth seems to be pulling the strings of the social bond. It is the market measure of all things, starting with human activity reduced to a mere ‘temporal shell’.67 General commodity exchange plays a game of ‘invisible hands’, where capital puts its ‘confidence in the passage of time’. But time has no hands; it is not enough to put confidence in the passage of time, since this is akin to putting confidence in the invisible hand of the market and the time of accumulation. Time, ‘unties no knots simply by virtue of passing. That requires the fingers of the event, which belongs to another order and another register’. In other terms, 64 65 66 67

Bensaïd 2002, p. 70. Bensaïd 2002, p. 71. Ibid. Bensaïd 2002, pp. 72–3.

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‘Time is a fake healer anyhow’, Under the Volcano proclaimed. In fact, Marx’s new way of writing history breaks with ‘the sacred time of salvation, as well with the abstract time of physics’.68 Bensaïd articulated the temporal disequilibrium of the capitalist mode of production. Though the capitalist mode of production is dynamic, it is incapable of realising equilibrium as a permanent rule. Where political economy presumes that it can, it only occurs ‘by chance within the general irregularity, as a momentary transitory point in the midst of constant disequilibrium’. Perhaps instead, Bensaïd suggested the capitalist mode of production is a specific, contradictory conceptual organisation of social time. If this is the case – as Marx assumed – he forged the theoretical concepts able to grasp the elements of time. For Bensaïd, who followed Henryk Grossman, this temporalisation of economic categories constituted a major theoretical event: Marx was obliged to set foot here on a terrain that had never been entered before, and create all the categories and concepts which were connected with the time element (circuit, turnover, turnover time, turnover cycles); and he was completely justified in reproaching the Classical economists for having neglected the analysis of the time element – the form of the circuits and of turnover. He quite legitimately criticised classical theory for having neglected the time factor.69 Henryk Grossman was spot on, according to Bensaïd, since Grossman’s ‘radical desacralisation of time consolidates the representation of a rigorously immanent history’. Capital is a ‘specific organisation of time obeying its own immanent criteria’.70 The immanent representation of history Bensaïd articulates is, in the context of the critique of political economy, also a resolution to the difficulties of teleology that had animated German philosophy from Kant to Hegel. Time is the soul, if not the object, of Marx’s Capital. The object of Marx’s inquiry in Capital is the capitalist mode of production, in which capital ‘appears as a conceptual totality, coherent, structured and displaying the characteristics of a process, for this totality contains the rules of its own becoming’.71 Bensaïd’s interpretation of Capital was the outcome of a ‘collective originality’ that is closely associated with Tombazos’s thesis (later published as Time in Marx). 68 69 70 71

Bensaïd 2002, p. 73. Grossman 1977, p. 73. Bensaïd 2002, p. 74. Tombazos 2014, p. 3.

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Tombazos’s work sets the scene for the sections of Bensaïd’s work subtitled Time as a Social Relation and Time Measured and Time as Measure. Tombazos wrote: The categories of the three theoretical volumes of Capital fit differently in time. The categories of Volume i obey a linear and abstract temporality, homogenous time that is supposed to be calculable, measurable. We call the latter ‘the time of production’. The determinations of Volume ii fit into a cyclical temporality. The various categories of ‘the time of circulation’ concern the turnover of value. Finally, Volume iii is the volume of capital’s ‘organic time’, the unity of the time of production and the time of circulation.72 Writing metaphorically to capture the temporalities of Capital, Bensaïd suggested that volume one is the ‘book of stolen time’, that reveals ‘the incredible secret of the surplus-value extorted in the subterranean sites of production, safe from prying eyes’. This is the linear time of production where ‘the endless struggle over the division between necessary labour and surplus labour determines the shifting rate of exploitation. The line dividing this time in two is displaced according to the class struggle’. Though mechanical, ‘production time, in which commodities are reduced to the abstraction of value and labour is reduced to the abstraction of a non-qualitative time, is a social time from the outset’. Tyrannical, the abstraction of value, ‘troubles and subjugates bodies’, where the worker is reduced to ‘personified labour-time’.73 Bensaïd captured it thus, drawing Marx into effective relation to theorists of the surveillance society: Under the cyclopean surveillance of the clock, the hunt is henceforth on for scraps of time. It aims to convert duration into intensity, to gain from the latter what has been lost in the former, to close up ‘the pore of the working day’ in order to ‘compress’ labour itself. The antinomies of capital (use-value/exchange-value, concrete labour/abstract labour) issue from the open fracture of the commodity in Volume One. The unity of usevalue and exchange-value expresses a clash of temporalities. The time of general/abstract labour exists only in and through concrete/particular labour. As the establishment of a relation between these two times, value

72 73

Ibid. Bensaïd 2002, pp. 74–5.

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emerges as an abstraction of social time. Reciprocally, time is established as a measure that must itself be measured. The determination of socially necessary labour-time refers to the motion of capital as a whole.74 Volume two of Capital is the book of the circulation and metamorphoses of capital, ‘set against the labour-time that posits value, circulation time initially appears as an obstacle or negation, an inroad on surplus-labour time and an indirect increase in necessary labour-time, and hence as a threat of a possible devalorisation – as opposed to positive creation – of value’.75 As a whole the different moments of money capital, commodity capital and productive capital: The forms are therefore fluid forms, and their simultaneity is mediated by their succession. Each form both follows and precedes the others, so that the return of one part of capital to one form is determined by the return of another part to another form. Each part continuously describes its own course, but it is always another part of capital that finds itself in the form, and these particular circuits simply constitute simultaneous and successive moments of the overall process. It is only in the unity of the three circuits that the continuity of the overall process is realised … The total social capital always possesses this continuity, and its process always contains the unity of the three circuits.76 Lastly, Bensaïd explained how volume three is about the reproduction time of capital as a whole, which can be read as the organic time of capital. In it, ‘labour time and circulation time are conjoined in the unity of the overall process’. The parts are what they are only by and in relation to the living whole. When Aristotle said that a hand that is torn from a body is a hand in name only, not in fact, so it is with socially necessary labour time: If value is an abstraction of time, and time is the measure of all wealth, the determination of ‘socially necessary’ labour-time can occur only retrospectively, through the self-development of time in the expanded reproduction and accumulation of capital. To ensure its own expanded reproduction, capital consumes living labour, and does so without respite – at

74 75 76

Bensaïd 2002, p. 75. Bensaïd 2002, pp. 75–6. Marx 1992, p. 184.

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the risk (if the crucial step is missed, if use-value fails to coincide with exchange-value, if the cogwheel breaks) of the arrhythmias of crisis.77 The category of time is at the heart of the critique of political economy where historical development and temporalities are integrated. The contradictory dynamics of these temporal registers do not rest upon a bare empiricism in relation to historical becoming, which would be a ‘concept-less’ abstraction, inevitably reproducing the sensuous empirical reality of a history dominated by commodity fetishism and its alienations; rather, Bensaïd takes the principle of historical specification – mediated by Benjamin’s Arcades Project – where logical order takes precedence over historical order, to comprehend and grasp the internal structures of the capitalist mode of production in concrete histories. The outcome of Bensaïd’s move is that this coiled and slotted time ‘inside one another, like circles within circles’, determines ‘the enigmatic patterns of historical time, which is the time of politics’.78 Within this reconstructed social temporality: the repetition of ‘nows’ confers each instant its messianic opportunity. Thus: ‘[a] historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop. For this notion defines the present in which he himself is writing history’. This is a suspended present, which is not a transition but a fork and bifurcation; a strategic present for those who stand still on the threshold of time. An art of time and contretemps, strategy has as its temporal mode the present.79 This is all made possible by the fact that Marx’s research explored the different dimensions of durations. According to Bensaïd, in Marx’s immanent temporality, ‘he conceives [of] an original temporality in which time is no longer either the uniform referent of physics, or the sacred time of theology’. Instead, the durations of historical time were subject to economic rhythms, ‘organised into cycles and waves, periods and crises’. The ‘profane time of Capital links the contrary temporalities of production and circulation, the antagonistic requirements of labour and capital, the contrasting forms of money and commodity. Combining measure and substance, it represents a social relation in motion’.80 77 78 79 80

Bensaïd 2002, pp. 76–7. Bensaïd 2002, p. 77. Bensaïd 2002, p. 87. Bensaïd 2002, pp. 80–1.

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The measure of time becomes a difficulty on exactly this point. If any economy is an ‘economy of time’, then what is the measure of time? What is the measure of the measure? Bensaïd ventured: Now, we measure stretches of time, homogenous and yet different, according to whether they bring pleasure or suffering, expectation or oblivion. Between abstract time, a kind of transcendental referent, and concrete time, which is existential and immanent in motion, Augustine defined time, irreducible to an essence, as a relation of duration between movements, the measurement of a movement that lasts relative to another. And yet, if ‘[b]y means of time I measure the movements of bodies … what means do I use to measure time?’ For such a measure to be conceivable, whatever is subject to constant transformation and differentiation must be suspended, the diversity of forms of movement standardised, and duration spatialised. For the ‘absolute’ time of classical physics to be able to flow in homogenous, uniform fashion, the measure had to be abstracted from the movement, the time-measure from real time. In the same way, capital reduces the particular time of practical know-how, beautiful works and human effort, which are always unique, to an abstract social time.81 The ‘reduction of being to time is the very essence of alienation as selfestrangement’, Bensaïd wrote. This has inferences for the value-form, because ‘Value is not of the same order as quantity, for it escapes the established methods of measurement used by the so-called exact sciences’. Was time measured or was time itself the measure? In ‘following the development of capital, which determines labour-time socially, the critique of political economy tackles the enigmas of a measure that is itself subject to measurement’.82 Paradoxically: the time and motion of capital are therefore determined reciprocally. Social time measures the accumulation of capital, whose turnovers determine the social substance of time. So time appears simultaneously as a measure of value and as its substance. This substance is continually modified according to the changing conditions of social production. Incredibly mystical, it is every bit as strange as the measure whose measurements vary with what is measured. Value is determined by the labour-

81 82

Bensaïd 2002, pp. 77–8. Bensaïd 2002, p. 79.

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time socially necessary for the production of the commodity, which is itself fluctuating and flexible like a measuring instrument that varies with the object to be measured.83 Time is not a natural given. As Bensaïd already argued in his work on Benjamin, time is not to be understood substantively as the abstract time of Newtonian physics, because ‘separating time from development represented a speculative artifice par excellence. The antinomies of content and form, measure and substance, derive from it’.84 Time is a social relation in motion that must be grasped conceptually. While reviewing Tombazos’s work on time in Marx, Bensaïd wrote that the conceptualisation of time demands a reconstitution of the whole of the work [Capital – D.R.], hence a re-examination of the relations between this logic and that of Hegel’s. The search orients itself to an original road, at the borders of economics and philosophy, methodically in the tracks, covered up by dogmatic orthodoxies, of ‘the critique of political economy’.85 Tombazos accomplished this in light of ‘the theory of measure and the Hegelian syllogism’. On this conception, capital is ‘a living rationality, an active concept, the abstraction in actu’. Bensaïd explained how he thought about the logic of such a conception of time: From the specific problem of temporality, the work draws attention to a form of logic (Gramsci will speak on this subject of a ‘new immanence’) that revives, in the face of the movement of economic phenomena, the thought of Pascal, Leibniz, Hegel, often knocking out the Cartesian or positivist reflexes predominant in French culture […] From the implicit dialogue between Marx and Hegel emerge the renovated notions of law and causality, new relations between regularities and disorders, between equilibrium and crisis: thinker of disequilibrium and the arithmetic of crisis ‘in fact demands much more than a supplementary analysis in terms of equilibrium; it demands concepts that are entirely different, nonmathematical, and superior to the logic of identity’. Stavros Tombazos’s study reveals a Marx that is a pioneer of the critique of historical reason, true as it is that the rejection of the speculative philosophies of history 83 84 85

Bensaïd 2002, p. 80. Bensaïd 2002, p. 78. Bensaïd 1994.

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in favour of another idea of time, are wanting but never with the same conceptual rigour, in Nietzsche, Sorel or Péguy. Until Walter Benjamin linked up with the critique of ‘homogenous and empty’ time to take the earth-shattering political conclusions from it at the moment of disaster. The new listening to time at work in Marx founds the intelligibility of economic crises and the political event, which pierces the period with discontinuities. It makes possible a real rhythmology of cycles and waves etched from the discordance of times.86 The specific form of logic that represents the temporalities of capital grounds Bensaïd’s specific approach to Marx’s critique of political economy, reinforcing the manner in which the themes of immanence, the discordance of times and political intervention formed part of his contribution to Marxism.

8

The Distress of Historical Logic

Bensaïd searched for a response to what the late nineteenth-century German intelligentsia once called the distress of historical logic. The discussion effected an operation similar and different to Althusser’s conceptual pair, the epistemological break and the spontaneous ideology of the scientists. Bensaïd described how Marx’s new writing of history was inaudible to German historicism, and the ‘human sciences’. At stake was the problem of historical causality and the relation of the individual historical case and the regularity of historical laws. Human history, being non-mechanical, does not function like a machine. This raises a set of questions, some of which I have already discussed above: How did Marx develop a historical method that overcame the ‘laws of history’ which seem to follow the path of Newtonian causality and mechanics? Is history just the accumulation of facts or is it enough to apply universal rules to the chaos of history? Is there a way out of the reciprocity of cause and effect? If the world is not a giant machine, how could a notion of causality specific to history be found? For Bensaïd, the notion of ‘tendency’ directs us out of the pitfalls of Newtonian causality. And for Hegel, ‘the notion of causality is in fact as “highly questionable, as regards the physical world already, but much more so when it comes to the world of the spirit, to which the economy belongs as an aspect of

86

Ibid.

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objective spirit”’.87 Formal causality is a problem for Hegel, because whenever one makes the effort to understand a historical phenomenon, cause must be explained. Cause is thought to be independent from its effect, but a cause is also an effect. Hegel’s critique of cause and effect – taken as thought-determinations – shows how each operates as cause and effect. But this leads us no further than what Hegel calls reciprocity because, in the chain of cause and effect, the ‘chain bends back upon itself, becomes a circle in which there is no beginning, but a reflection of the all-sided interconnection of things which have their ground equally in themselves as in an Other’, as the perceptive Australian Hegelian Blunden has pointed out. ‘This failure of the notion leads us to the doorstep of the Notion’.88 Bensaïd explained: Law and causality, which belong to the objective logic, manifest themselves as fate or destiny, in so far as they are a matter of blind ‘mechanism’ (in that it is not recognised in its specificity by the subject). Finality, on the other hand, belongs exclusively to subjective logic. Hegelian teleology is thus opposed to mechanism, as self-determination is to purely external determination: ‘The antinomy between fatalism, along with determinism and freedom, is likewise concerned with the opposition of mechanism and teleology; for the free is the Notion in its existence’. The determination of teleological activity is thus related to the category of totality, in which the end constitutes the beginning, the consequent the premises, and the effect the cause, ‘the becoming of what has become’.89 History requires its specific notion of causality; historical singularity formed the core of the matter. Bensaïd here introduces Weber’s concept of ‘objective possibility’, which opened the path towards historical intelligibility because it is centred on historical decision in relation to possibilities and the reconstruction of a causal sequence. Between two possibilities on a battlefield, the struggle decides between each, ‘inscribed in the causal sequence’. According to Bensaïd, these discussions on method that took place in Germany were insensitive to Marx’s and Engels’s ‘inaudible thunderclap’. They, ‘seem to be unaware of the fact that, eighty years earlier, Engels had already observed that “history does nothing”, initiating a conceptual revolution in time whose significance was suspected by neither Weber nor Simmel’. Bensaïd continued:

87 88 89

Bensaïd 2002, p. 266. Blunden 2009, p. 65. Bensaïd 2002, p. 268.

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Often subtle and full of ingenious coinages, the discussion that was pursued from Meyer to Weber, Dilthey to Simmel, problematises the relationship between historical knowledge and the dominant rationality of the epoch. Yet it is striking to note just how inaudible the thunderclap of Capital remained to these authors – in part because of their simple ignorance of the texts, in part out of ideological deafness. Their intuitions, suggestions and refinements have an academic whiff about them. At issue between them was a methodological controversy over the comparative relationship between disciplines and their rules of investigation. That is why their critique of historical reason never gets to the root of things. Indeed, how can the ‘poor condition of the logical analysis of history’ (Weber), with its categories of necessity, causality and accident, be tackled without going back to the temporal structures of the rhythms, continuities and ruptures of social relations? Weber’s pioneering exploration in this regard had led Marx to the threshold of a different rationality, in which history is bound up with politics and knowledge becomes strategic.90 Bensaïd made explicit the conflict between the effects of Marx’s Capital for an articulation of history and the German historicists – neo-Kantians; more specifically, it is a conflict over the relationship between the specific object of the capitalist mode of production and concrete histories, on the one hand, and the natural sciences on the other. For Bensaïd however, it was possible to take the post-Galilean and Newtonian breakthroughs of physics and the sciences to think through, making precise, the achievements of Marx’s Capital that can address the conflict at hand. As discussed above, if the speculative philosophy of history is deconstructed, one needs ‘a new conceptualisation of temporality and causality’, which is also a result of a critique of political economy that is not reducible to the ‘model of mechanical causality’. This is what Bensaïd wished to excavate.

9

The Differentiated Unity of Subject and Object

Bensaïd defended a notion of the differentiated unity between subject and object. Any defence of the differentiated unity of subject and object requires a more specific detailing of Hegel’s position. Hegel argued that subject and

90

Bensaïd 2002, p. 264.

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‘object are implicitly the same. But it is equally correct to say that they are different. In short, the two modes of expression are equally correct and incorrect’.91 Subject and object are categories that must not be held in abstract isolation. The process of development of subject-object must be grasped in history. Furthermore, negativity is at the core of Hegel’s Absolute where subject and object differentiate themselves within a greater unity. Hegel made an effort to dissuade his readers from holding on to the idea that the objective world and subjectivity are separated abstractly, which is to say separated off in a static indifference the one from the other. The objective world for Hegel does not take up the position ‘of a dark and hostile power over against subjectivity’, split away from the subject but it rather involves subjectivity as a vital element in itself: Anyone who, from want of familiarity with the categories of subjectivity and objectivity, seeks to retain them in their abstraction will find that the isolated categories slip through his fingers before he is aware, and that he says the exact contrary of what he wanted to say.92 Bensaïd thought that Marx inherited Hegel’s mediated identity. Insofar as Bensaïd held this position, he was a philosophical thinker of identity (quite distinct from Althusser and Adorno): We find it once again in Marx, in the relation between the reified character of social relations (individuals being the supports of the structure) and the subjective will to change the world. Neglect of this contradictory unity results in abstract, unilateral interpretations; structuralist-objectivist on the one hand (the radical elimination of the subject is consummated in the contemplation of structural machinery); humanist-voluntarist on the other (reducing the crisis of humanity to a ‘crisis of revolutionary leadership’).93 Clearly this is not just a question of theory but has political stakes. Bensaïd’s point had political stakes too – recall his criticism of Chris Harman in 1980, where the only problem for the European revolutionary left was a subjective one, a problem of the transitional programme, as well as his criticisms of Mandel.94 More than politics, at the theoretical level, Bensaïd claims that 91 92 93 94

Hegel 2009, p. 358. Hegel 2009, pp. 361–2. Bensaïd 2002, p. 269. In his autobiography, we see another form that this critique took related to the years of

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capital itself is the differentiated unity of this objectivity and subjectivity. For Marx, ‘the same elements of capital which, from the point of view of the labour process, can be distinguished respectively as the objective and subjective factors, as means of production and labour power, can be distinguished, from the point of view of the valorisation process, as constant and variable capital’.95 Here, subject and object are immanent to capital itself. According to Bensaïd, without ‘this immanent inclusion of the subject in the object, structures would be hopelessly immobile’.96 Revolutionary practice would become impossible. None of this is to say that the subject is not unruly and contradictory. If class is a subject, then it is ‘a schizoid subject’ that has gone through a century of severe political ordeal. Besides, objectivity is an ‘objectivity for us’, where ‘the subject is no longer the divine master and possessor of its object, but, more humbly, the subject of its labour and product. Hence a fallible subject. And that is still a lot’.97 It is important to see that Bensaïd is critically taking up – and attempting to provide an alternative to – Althusser’s distinction between an object of thought and the real object, which he discerned from reading Marx’s 1857 Introduction. Bensaïd is close to Althusser when he defends a thought concrete in its specificity, but far from him when he suggests a differentiated unity

95 96 97

‘hurried Leninism’: ‘The “objective conditions” now being met, we would have nothing more to do than resolve as rapidly as possible the question of subjective conditions, under pain of vertiginous collapse into a barbarism of which the century already offered too many examples. We were in a hurry … It was impossible, however, to claim indefinitely that “objective conditions” had reached the point of being over-ripe, and at the same time rest content with deploring the absence of a “subjective factor” up to the task, or denouncing the eternal betrayals of bureaucratic leaderships … This was the time of “hasty Leninism”, according to Régis Debray’s formula in La Critique des armes, except that the “foquismo”, whose theorist he was, was hardly Leninist despite being hasty. Our feverish impatience was inspired by a phrase from Trotsky that was often cited in our debates: “The crisis of humanity is summed up in the crisis of its revolutionary leadership”. If this was indeed the case, nothing was more urgent than to resolve this crisis. The duty of each person was to contribute his or her little strength, as best they could, to settle this alternative between socialism and barbarism. It was in part up to them, therefore, whether the human species sank into a twilight future or blossomed into a society of abundance. This vision of history charged our frail shoulders with a crushing responsibility. In the face of this implacable logic, impoverished emotional life or professional ambition did not weigh very heavy. Each became personally responsible for the fate of humanity. A fearsome burden’. Bensaïd 2013, pp. 90–109. Bensaïd 2002, p. 269. Ibid. Bensaïd 2002, p. 270.

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of subject and object, because Althusser would take this to be a Hegelianempiricist move of theoretical construction that in the last instance remains historicist.

10

The Antinomies of Historical Necessity

Bensaïd’s conception of subject-object complements his radically immanent theoretical operation. He accepts the notion of teleology, so long as it is ‘rid of its religious connotations and seen, not as a subordination to an external order, but as an “internal finality” and an immanent thrust’. Crucially, ‘the opposition between Hegelian teleology and Spinozist immanence is then resolved in the invention of temporal relations without first or final causes, and in the gravitational necessities of social conflict’.98 Radical immanence introduces a new conception of causality, one that ‘illuminates the antinomies of “historical necessity” ’. The term ‘necessity’ creates quite a bit of confusion, ‘largely attributable to the fact that some philosophers, tautologically considering possible what actually happens, end up thinking that everything is absolutely necessary’.99 Historical necessity implies a problem for thinking revolutionary politics and historical events; is a revolutionary event a result of pure contingency or a certain necessity? Is an economic crisis a result of caprice or necessary laws? How does Bensaïd propose a solution to this antinomy? He relied on Leibniz and Hegel in this respect. On the former, he draws out the distinction between absolute necessity and moral necessity: The uncertainty of historical necessity is attested by the contingency of the event, which ‘has nothing in it to render it necessary and to suggest that no other thing might have happened in its stead’. It is not impossible for what has been foreseen not to occur. Strongly, ‘predisposed’, ‘conditional necessity’ is no longer contrasted with contingency. Each thing is contingent to the extent that it requires another thing in order to exist. In their unity and mutual preservation, the real and the possible form a contingent being. The necessity of particular beings can consist only in their relation to the totality … the future of the conditional necessity is simultaneously determined and contingent. In fact, Leibniz refuses any con-

98 99

Bensaïd 2002, p. 271. Bensaïd 2002, p. 272.

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fusion between certain and determined, certainty and necessity, metaphysical necessity, which leaves no room for choice, and moral necessity, ‘which obliges the wisest to choose the best’.100 This discussion about necessity and contingency refers to what is possible. Here, Bensaïd returns to his earlier discussion of the distinction between formal and actual possibility. In Hegelian logic, ‘What is actual is possible’, where ‘possibility contains two moments, one positive … the other negative’. In its positive function, possibility is ‘simply logical or formal’, it is as ‘superficial and empty as the law of contradiction itself’. The negative moment determines possibility ‘as an imperfection: “that possibility lacks something, that it points to an other, to actuality in which it completes itself” ’.101 Possibility must make its way from formality to actuality. This is always a case of historical truth, which is concerned with possibilities in time, ‘earthly events that are all too temporal’, where every ‘singular assertion is historical’.102 This forms the backdrop of actuality, for which: The potential power of the actual always exceeds its immediate determinateness. Any effective reality is in fact possibility on two counts. On the one hand, factual determinateness is contingent with respect to other possible determinacies: ‘the actual is itself only one possibility’. On the other hand, possibility is the essential actuality.103 A reflection on possibility cannot be separated from contingency and necessity. Possibility must make its way through actuality – actual conditions, facts, and contingencies – into real possibility. Only through this path can necessity be arrived at, which is the goal, undoubtedly consisting in eliciting the necessity concealed under the semblance of contingency. This means that necessity and contingency are not abstractly divorced, rather, the ‘necessity delineated is thus no longer the exclusive opposite of contingency, but precisely its other, its shadow, its necessity’.104 In fact, contingency is not possible without necessity, on Hegel’s speculative reading. ‘Without contingency, there would be no such thing as either reason or necessity … despite the categorical position on the necessity of contingency, Hegel is still treated as a pan-logicist and a purely

100 101 102 103 104

Ibid. Bensaïd 2002, p. 275. Bensaïd 2002, p. 274. Bensaïd 2002, p. 275. Ibid.

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deductive philosopher’.105 In this way, necessity and real possibility are not different but only seem so, rather they are identical, ‘this is an identity which does not have to become but is already presupposed and lies at their base’: For the real actual as such is the determinable actual, and has first of all its determinateness as immediate being in the fact that it is a multiplicity of existing circumstances; but this immediate being as determinateness is also the negative of itself, is an in-itself or possibility, and thus it is real possibility.106 A multiplicity of existing circumstances is just that, but it contains real possibility within it. Effectively, real possibility is a circle with two categories – possibility and immediate actuality – where the one mediates the other. This possibility is no longer, however, the abstract possibility which was initially posited, but the possibility which is. As a circle, it is a whole, ‘and thus the content, the actual fact or affair in its all-round definiteness’. Both of the characteristics of this circle are distinct, yet in unity, realising ‘the concrete totality of the form, the immediate self-translation of inner into outer, and of outer into inner’.107 This is why a revolutionary-historical event cannot be arbitrary, yet is contingent, since a multiplicity of circumstances effect the flow of historical development, where specific histories have already handed down relations of class power and struggle, social gains, political capacity, historical memory, gradations of autonomy of the workers’ and social movements, making the flow of history not arbitrary. However, for Bensaïd, the multiplicity of historical circumstances remains contingent in relation to the laws of capitalist production, and the ‘contingency relative to a given mode of production is not an absence of causes’ but involves an articulation of the necessary laws of the capitalist mode of production and the concrete histories in which these ‘causes’ attain their effectivity.108

105 106 107 108

Bensaïd 2002, p. 277. Quoted from Bensaïd 2002, pp. 275–6. Hegel 2009, p. 308. Bensaïd 2002, p. 277.

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Against the Philosophical-Ontological Representation of the Proletariat

Throughout this work, I have insisted that Bensaïd moves against ‘ontologising’ forms of thought, producing a relational notion of classes to the detriment of an essentialist-substantivism; he was not the first to do so, and indeed the move against any ontological turn was a means of safeguarding the primacy of politics and a strategic conception of history, as well as an articulation of the critique of political economy able to comprehend the capitalist mode of production and domination. As pertaining to classes, Bensaïd did not fall into a ‘proletarian ontology’, as Artous explained well: In order to struggle against a ‘scientistic’ and/or ‘economistic’ Marxism, many authors have often ‘ontologised’ or ‘substantified’ elements of the social that will be, on their own, bearers of critique and emancipation: the proletariat as the latent subject of history, labour as the framework for the realisation of the human essence, etc. Henri Maler was correct to explain that it is an ‘ontological concept of the possible that neutralises its strategic concept’. [In the ontological conception] [t]he possible is already there, a social form in suspension that only asks for itself to be realised. Nothing of the sort in Daniel Bensaïd: he refused every substantialism in favour of a relational approach to the social. As Marx wrote in the Grundrisse: ‘Society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand’. This relational problematic of social conflict is the other face of a strategic approach … if there doesn’t exist a class subject, there indeed are relations of domination and exploitation that generate class conflicts. Admittedly, Daniel Bensaïd noted, in Éloge de la politique profane, that classes are what sociologists would call ‘constructs’ or ‘probable classes’, according to Bourdieu. But on what does the validity or the suitability of their ‘construction’ rest? Why ‘probable’ rather than ‘improbable?’ To unilaterally insist on conceptual construction, in order to avoid an essentialist approach, withdraws away from a simple but decisive question: that of the analysis of social relations that, without end, produce the ‘social material’ which permits the construction of classes and not another social form.109

109

Artous 2011, pp. 22–3.

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In line with what Artous explains above, Bensaïd conceives of class relations as strategic concepts and not sociological givens, nor as subjects of history that are already pre-formed. The relation of exploitation generates contradictions and conflicts, a process through which social groups form into classes. Artous wrote, ‘Thus, written in 2003 in Un monde à changer: “The central role that Marx attributes to the working class does not follow from a sociological determinism that will mechanically lead the proletariat to act in conformity with its essence. It is of a strategic order: rally particular discontent and overcome differences in a common combat through the process of universalisation”’.110 Decisive is the denial of a pre-constituted essence. Class is the result of relations being ‘the perspective that is largely dominant in Marx, in particular in Capital’, to which I turn in the section Class Struggles are Relational.111 In continuity with Bensaïd, Artous claimed that a strategic treatment of politics, the construction of the conditions in which the working class can become the politically dominant class, was simply opened up but far from resolved by the Communist Manifesto. What was at stake was not ‘the affirmation of the centrality of this [the political – D.R.] struggle – on that point there is no ambiguity in Marx – but its articulation with what, in the Marxist tradition one calls the economic struggle’. According to Artous, Marx ‘did not systematically treat’ the relations between the two: Thus, in The Poverty of Philosophy, he described the passage from the class ‘in-itself’ (the economic level of organisation against capital) to the class ‘for-itself’ (to the class struggle because all class struggle is political) as a vast process in which he draws a parallel with the manner in which the bourgeoisie constituted itself into a class. A description that one can interpret – as certain Marxist currents will do – according to an organic problematic of the relations between economic struggle and political struggle: the second being in some way inscribed in the very dynamic through which the first structures itself. A theme that in general, but not always, is tied to the working class as the pre-formed subject of history. Access to politics hence becomes access to consciousness. Lenin carried out a radical rupture with this vision: ‘Class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without, that is, only from outside the economic struggle, from outside the sphere of relations between workers and employers’. Which means that the passage from the ‘class in-itself’ to

110 111

Artous 2011, p. 10. Artous 1999, p. 310.

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the ‘class for-itself’, from the economic struggle to the political struggle is not primarily understood as the product of a historically cumulative process, but refers to the conditions of accessing a particular level of social reality for the working class: that precisely of the political struggle.112 Bensaïd, for his part, also argued that the concepts of a class in-itself and class for-itself were infrequent in Marx’s work. They were part of the idealistphilosophical representation of the proletariat present in Marx’s early writings. According to Bensaïd, the examples of such idealist-philosophical notions could be found in Marx’s September 1843 letter to Ruge and The Poverty of Philosophy; ‘they are’, Bensaïd writes, ‘inscribed in the problematic of the selfdevelopment of historical subjectivity, and betray the strong influence of Hegelian phenomenology as a science of consciousness and self-consciousness, and nostalgia for what Lukács embraced in his later work as an “ontology of social being”. In certain early works, the proletariat appears to be still ontologically “compelled as proletariat to abolish itself” ’.113 The philosophical representation reads the fate of the proletariat from the ontological writing of its being for which consciousness is the middle term; thus, for Bensaïd, Marx’s early concept of the proletariat remains conjoined to two redundant elements: the discourse of Hegelian phenomenology and a primordial authenticity of Being behind that which exists. As Artous notes above, Bensaïd adopted the standpoint of Marx’s Grundrisse. Bensaïd writes ‘the Grundrisse and Capital present themselves as a labour of mourning for ontology, a radical deontologisation, after which no space remains for any “world beyond” whatsoever, any dual content, any dualism of the authentic and the inauthentic, science and ontology. There is no longer any founding contrast between Being and existence, nothing behind which there lies concealed some other thing that does not come to light’.114 Marx’s turn to a relational conception of classes aligned to a mature critique of political economy made the ‘pathetic philosophical incantation, the obscure disclosure of the in-itself in the for-itself’ dissolve ‘in its own conceptual impotence’.115 Bensaïd thought the philosophical discourse about the in-itself and the for-itself a metaphysics of class consciousness and the subject.116

112 113 114 115 116

Artous 1999, pp. 65–6. Bensaïd 2002, p. 115. Bensaïd 2002, p. 116. Ibid. Bensaïd 2011a, p. 86.

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Class Struggles Are Relational

Bensaïd thought of classes in terms of their relational struggles. In this section, I will focus on his methodological approach to the question. Though class struggle is at the centre of Marx’s thought, much ‘ “Marxist” common sense seems oblivious to how easy it is to cite canonical texts containing the notion of class, yet how difficult it is to find a precise definition of class’.117 The formulas that do exist do not constitute a reference point for defining class. This troubles anyone who wants to discover a sociological Marx in the traditional sense. Unfortunately, ‘the manuscript breaks off’ before defining class in volume three of Capital. In the face of this problem, two essential things must be kept in mind. One must not demand a sociology conforming to criteria external to the critique of political economy and class struggle politics; and there is no eluding the logical architecture of Capital. What was Marx doing, Bensaïd asked, ‘Treating his dreadful boils, sharing family problems, putting off his creditors, doing jobbing journalism to pay his debts, treating Uncle Phillip harshly, keeping up a voluminous correspondence, conspiring and organising the working-class movement? Above all writing and rewriting Capital’.118 Among all this drafting and effort to sculpt Capital into an artistic whole, Marx did not succeed in defining class. In a sense, Marx did not enumerate the criteria for a finished definition. Perhaps Marx proceeded through the ‘determination’ of concepts (productive/unproductive, surplus-value/profit, production/circulation), which tend towards a concrete as articulated within a totality, in a movement from the abstract to the concrete. Rejected by mainstream sociology, this totality demanded more from Marx than the slightly more sophisticated definitions of the working class that run something like: the working class (subject) is the sum total of grumbling hunchbacks (predicate) wearing blue overalls, watches football in place of polo, on average has between five and fifty dollars in their wallet and usually swears more than polite society demands of the average individual, but, above all, a worker is a thing that can be manipulated by statistics to demonstrate that the worker in fact does not exist. This approach is the opposite of Marx’s relational totality. The crude sociological approach is not satisfactory for a German science based on determinations [Bestimmungen] which are not definitions understood in the English empiricist or French rationalist sense. Bensaïd argued, where positivist sociology claims to ‘treat social facts as things’: 117 118

Bensaïd 2002, p. 97. Bensaïd 2002, p. 98.

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Marx always treats them as relations. He does not define his object once and for all by criteria or attributes; he pursues the logic of its multiple determinations. He does not ‘define’ a class; he apprehends relations of conflict between classes. He does not photograph a social fact labelled ‘class’: he has his sights set on the class relation in its conflictual dynamic. An isolated class is not a theoretical object, but a nonsense.119 Two things are decisive in Bensaïd’s claim about relationality. First, as noted already, classes are based on struggle. What a social class is may only be understood in the context of conflictual relations. The emphasis on conflictual relationality is opposed to an essentialist conception of classes. Class relations in Marx operate within production, circulation and the reproduction of capitalism as a whole. This was why classes could not be defined from the outset, they become conceptually thinkable only at the end of the process: in the last unfinished chapter of Capital. Class relations are not reducible to the confrontation between worker and boss at the site of production. They presuppose the metabolism of competition and the world market. The class struggle also decides the conditions of possibility for their reproduction. Bensaïd therefore dissents from a simplified interpretation of class, because a ‘real social formation does not reduce itself to the brute framework of the relations of production. It includes cultural and political dimensions of the relations to the state, education, the city, the experience and collective memory of struggles’.120 Second, to demand from Marx a traditional sociology means to bury the ‘inaudible thunderclap’ of Capital by evading its method – the descent from the concrete to the abstract and ascent from the abstract to the concrete. For Bensaïd, in Marx’s method: [T]he end is always already contained in the origin. Thus, the results of circulation and reproduction are already present in value and surplus-value, which ‘presuppose’ the class struggle and the determination of socially necessary labour-time. Preceding from the abstract to the concrete, in this optic the theory of classes cannot be reduced to a static operation of definition and classification. It refers to a system of relations structured by struggle, whose complexity is displayed to the full in the political writings (Class Struggles in France, The Eighteenth Brumaire, The Civil War in France), where Marx offers his last word on the subject.121 119 120 121

Bensaïd 2002, p. 111. Bensaïd 2000, pp. 79–80. Bensaïd 2002, pp. 98–9.

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Neither reducible to attributes of which the individual units featuring them are the bearers, nor the mere sum of these units, class constitutes ‘a relational totality’ that does not align with formal logic because class exists ‘only in a conflictual relationship with other classes’. Therefore, the dynamic reality of classes ‘never falls into the inert domain of pure objectivity’.122 According to Bensaïd, one should not only ‘seek the morphology of classes at the level of … Volume One, to which most popularisers confine themselves’. In Volume One, the class relation receives an initial basic determination: that of the relation of exploitation. In Volume Two, it receives a new and essential – but not definitive – determination: that of productive or indirectly productive labour … But why seek the last word for a theory of classes in the sphere of circulation? Marx broaches the subject systematically only in Volume Three, in the framework of his study of reproduction as a whole.123 In Volume Three of Capital – concerning itself with the production and reproduction of capitalism as a whole – classes: are no longer exclusively determined by the extraction of surplus-value, or by the categories of productive and unproductive labour. They are determined by the combination of the relation of exploitation in production, the wage relation and the productivity/non-productivity of labour in circulation, and the distribution of revenue in reproduction as a whole … In Volume Three, classes form the subject of a specific chapter once the theoretical conditions for a systematic approach have finally been met. The partial determinations of classes, at the level of extraction of surplusvalue in the production process and the sale of labour power in the circulation process, are now integrated into the overall dynamic of competition, equalisation of the profit rate, the functional specialisation of capitals, and the distribution of revenue.124

122

123 124

Bensaïd 2002, pp. 100–1. Here, Bensaïd challenged the fetishistic illusions that transform history or class into so many mythical subject: ‘Marx specifically accuses Proudhon of treating society as if it was a “person”. Denouncing this “fiction” of the society-person, he scoffs at those who make a “thing out of a word”. His approach precludes treating class as a person or as a unified, conscious subject, on the model of the rational subject of classical psychology. Class exists only in a conflictual relationship with other classes’. Bensaïd 2002, p. 107. Bensaïd 2002, pp. 107–8.

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Marx is finally able to ask, ‘What constitutes a class?’ Then, from this question follows, ‘What makes wage-labourers, capitalists and landlords constitute the three great social classes’? This passage closes in a tautology, because, at first glance, the identity of revenues and sources of revenue determines class. Therefore, revenue determines class and class determines revenue. In the last paragraph of the manuscript: Marx does not make do with this first glance. The claim is immediately corrected by an objection: ‘from this point of view, however’ – the criterion of revenue – one would slip into the fragmentation of a descriptive sociology, since ‘doctors and government officials would also constitute two classes, for they belong to two distinct social groups, the members of each of these groups receiving their revenue from one and the same source’. There would never be an end to it. Classes would be dissolved into status groups and socio-professional categories.125 Breaking-off the manuscript did not go a paragraph further, ‘leaving a major theoretical question begging’. It is important to take note of what Bensaïd endorsed in Marx’s understanding of class. Marx underlined the structuring role the relation of exploitation plays and uncovered the mysteries of production – and there descended into Dante’s Inferno. He tried to understand the crystallisation of social groups around strategic projects. Class struggle is at the centre of social and historical change and classes crystallise from the vantage point of the social whole. Facing the above-mentioned problems, Bensaïd asked if it were not possible to approach the unfinished part of Capital from the opposite direction, ‘leading from the class struggle as a political struggle to the mode of production’.126 This raises the problem of how social classes mediate political representation. In his well-known statement of the question, he said: Revolutionary theory has something in common with psychoanalysis. Political representation is not the simple manifestation of a social nature. Political class struggle is not the superficial mirroring of an essence. Articulated like a language, it operates by displacements and condensations of social contradictions. It has its dreams, its nightmares and its lapses. In the specific field of the political, class relations acquire a degree

125 126

Bensaïd 2002, p. 110. Bensaïd 2002, p. 111.

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of complexity irreducible to the bipolar antagonism [of exploiter and exploited] that nevertheless determines them.127 There are broadly four implications for the above point. First, in the political sphere, the relations of production are articulated with the state, it ‘is through this “imbrication” that class fractions are differentiated, political representations developed, and alliances forged. It is also the site where class relations and the bureaucratic body of the state interact’.128 Second, the mediations between social relations and political representation must be meticulously followed. Third, if the working class can potentially liberate humanity, this potential is not realised automatically: ‘Capital underscores the obstacles to the development of class consciousness inherent in the reification of social relations. To these obstacles peculiar to the production relation are added the specific effects of practical victories and defeats’.129 Lastly, the relation of dependence and domination between nations at an international level mediates the relationship between social structure and political representation: So the social structure of class does not mechanically determine political representation and conflict. If a state or a party has a class character, their relative political autonomy opens up a wide range of variations in the expression of this ‘nature’. The irreducible specificity of the political makes the social characterisation of the state, parties – and a fortiori, theories – a highly perilous exercise.130 By what miracle could the proletariat free itself from this enchanted world, asked Bensaïd in his discussion of reification whereby the alienated conditions of capitalist production lead to the appearance of a ‘bewitched and distorted world’? Above, I quoted Bensaïd saying that Capital underscores the obstacles to the development of class consciousness inherent in the reification of social relations. This is so because ‘Value, as an autonomous social relation, is imposed on individuals as a natural law. Its very elements become ossified in autonomous forms’, whereby: The discovery of abstract labour-time leads ineluctably to that of commodity fetishism. Hence the ‘bewitched, distorted and upside-down 127 128 129 130

Bensaïd 2002, p. 112. Ibid. Bensaïd 2002, p. 113. Bensaïd 2002, p. 114.

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world’, ‘this autonomisation and ossification of the different social elements of wealth’, ‘this personification of things and reification of relations of production’ – in short, a veritable ‘religion of everyday life’.131 Only struggle can begin to break the hold of reification persisting in class relations. This has an important theoretical implication: A class does not exist in isolation. A class is not a separable entity. It only exists in the dialectic of struggle, and this invokes the differentiated unity of subject and object discussed above. But classes do not evaporate when the harsher and more conscious forms of struggle die down, ‘Heterogeneous and uneven, consciousness is inherent in the conflict that commences with the sale of labour power and resistance to exploitation – and is unceasing’.132 The very notion of consciousness, it should be said, is not about mere self-knowledge, it is instead a political knowledge that is practical, concrete, theoretical and ideological; it does not follow directly from the fact of labour power, but from the organised, cohered and deliberate struggles against exploitation. In a sense, without struggles against exploitation, there can be no real theoretical conceptualisation or practical articulation of political consciousness.

13

André Gorz’s Farewell to the Working Class

Bensaïd’s critique of André Gorz’s Farewell to the Working Class was an important recuperation strategy, defending class struggle, while also adjusting and refining his conception of class consciousness. The background of the discussion was Gorz’s argument that the ‘crisis of Marxism’ was the result of ‘the crisis of the working-class movement itself’.133 Gorz’s intervention raised ‘real problems about the emancipatory capacities of the working class, in the concrete conditions of its alienation[; however,] it constantly mixes this examination with an ideological overinterpretation that is one-sided, to say the least’.134 Bensaïd’s response to Gorz is also indicative of his difference with the common sense of the revolutionary Left that emerged from the 1960s. That common sense, as Kouvelakis has explained, consisted in ‘a certain historical optimism, founded on the idea that there is a final meaning of history, a meaning that the 131 132 133 134

Bensaïd 2002, p. 118. Ibid. Bensaïd 2002, p. 183. Bensaïd 2002, p. 185.

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revolutionaries have mastered and for which they will guarantee its concrete realisation. This vision is the root of the revolutionary movement’s “common sense” before 1989, well beyond the ranks of “orthodox” communism’.135 The key figure that Bensaïd challenged here was Mandel, who Bensaïd charged with an over-optimistic faith in time. I shall get to this criticism, but, before I do, it is necessary to quote Kouvelakis on the status of this move: Here it is, the essential pair which had to be broken: the belief in a time that worked for us, in the meaning of progress, and an ‘ontological’ conception of the proletariat, a conception that attributes to it a sort of fixed nature, a stable being beyond its changes, and that will be a revolutionary being.136 Gorz held that the ‘crisis of Marxism’ was not some ideological collapse but, rather, a deeper problem of the ‘changes in the working class: at issue, in the first instance, is a crisis of the working-class movement itself. From the Crash to the war, capitalism survived – not unscathed, but it survived’.137 The answer was that ‘the development of the productive forces … is increasingly incompatible with the socialist transformation for which it is supposed to lay the foundations. The contradiction between the daily lot of a proletariat maimed by labour and its emancipatory vocation is resolved by registering its impotence’. In this conception, there is no possibility of the working-class to become everything from being nothing, because Gorz takes ‘this nothingness to a conclusion’.138 Bensaïd writes of Gorz, But to do this, we must take our leave of the great subject of the revolutionary epic according to Saint Marx. The concept of class in his work was generated not by the experience of a militant, but out of an abstract historical imperative: ‘only [consciousness of their class] mission will make it possible to discover the true being of the proletarians’. What flesh-andblood proletarians happen to imagine or believe is of little consequence. The only thing that counts is their ontological fate: become what you are! In short, the being of the proletariat transcends the proletarians … It allows a self-proclaimed vanguard to play the intermediary between what the class was and what it should be. Since no one is in a position 135 136 137 138

Kouvelakis 2010, p. 63. Kouvelakis 2010, p. 64. Bensaïd 2002, p. 183. Ibid.

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to settle the questions that divide it … the last word was reserved for a ventriloquist history, invested with the power to condemn or acquit.139 Gorz charged that, in Marxism, ‘The class as a unit is the imaginary subject who performs the reappropriation of the system; but it is a subject external and transcendent to any individual and all existing proletarians’. Bensaïd acknowledged that, under the bureaucratic regimes, it was a fact that ‘the class became a robotic fetish of this sort’. But it would be wrong to lay the charge against Marx: ‘To impute it to Marx, who consistently denounced society-as-person, history-as-person, and all mythical personifications and incarnations – in other words, any transcendence in which irreducible inter-individuality vanishes – is unserious’.140 Moreover, but just as serious – strategically speaking – Gorz suggested that Marx ‘endowed the proletariat with an imaginary ontological capacity to negate its own oppression’ because he was unable to demonstrate its practical cultural capacity. Bensaïd is effectively taking Gorz’s work to criticise it specifically, but simultaneously to also criticise figures from his own political current on the subject of the ‘sociological wager’ or an optimistic sociology. It was legitimate, on Bensaïd’s reading, to question the basis of (Mandel’s) ‘triumphant march of the historical subject’. Gorz rejected the idea that the contradiction between the emancipatory power of the proletariat and its crippling subservience to work is automatically overcome by growing social polarisation, with numerical development, concentration and raised consciousness proceeding in tandem. From this perspective, ‘controlling production and recapturing a sense of purpose in work would restore the alienated workers to themselves. The divisions provoked and maintained by competition in the ranks of the class might counter this tendency, but not cancel it’.141 By contrast, Mandel held that: ‘Competition among wage-earners … is imposed upon them from outside, not structurally inherent in the very nature of that class. On the contrary, wage-earners normally and instinctively strive towards collective cooperation and solidarity’.142 According to Bensaïd, this was a normative view of the way class consciousness took shape: If this tendency does indeed recurrently manifest itself, the countertendency to fragmentation is equally constant. The asymmetry invoked 139 140 141 142

Bensaïd 2002, pp. 183–4. Bensaïd 2002, pp. 184–5. Bensaïd 2002, p. 188. Mandel 1981, pp. 76–7.

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by Mandel attaches to natural competition between capitalists, and artificial competition between wage-earners (‘imposed from outside’). This is to underestimate the coherence of the mode of production in which capital, as a living fetish, imposes its law on the whole of society, and inseparably maintains competition between owners and wage-earners thrown onto the labour market. Reducing sometimes antagonistic social differences to mere ‘uneven levels of consciousness’ disposes of the difficulty. Mandel thus ends up trusting in time, the great restorer and leveller in the face of eternity, to iron out these inequalities, imposing solidarity in conformity with the postulated ontology of the proletariat.143 In a manuscript Mandel sent to Bensaïd on 10 April 1989 concerning the defence of revolution, he said: these qualities [the tendency to solidarity – D.R.] are only affirmed progressively and partially. They are not yet universally affirmed. They are fragmented and periodically thwarted by the inverse tendencies. But as they result not from an exterior indoctrination but from the daily experience lived at the very heart of bourgeois society, they have a tendency, over the long term, to affirm themselves more and more and not less and less [italics – D.R.].144 ‘Over the long term’ was circled in red by the reader, presumably Bensaïd. Unfortunately, in itself, history does nothing. Neither does time. The dominant side of Bensaïd’s relation to Gorz was the critical side, of course, with two points in the focus: Gorz’s search for a new revolutionary subject and his philosophical shares in the ‘underclass’. Gorz had searched for a new subject of social emancipation. Bensaïd said of him, ‘What is now at issue is not so much emancipating ourselves in work as liberating ourselves from work, beginning by reconquering the sphere of free time’.145 On this interpretation, Gorz effectively thought: The aspiration to all-round personal development in autonomous activities does not, therefore, presuppose a prior transformation of work … the

143 144 145

Bensaïd 2002, pp. 188–9. This letter was found among Bensaïd’s personal documents. Bensaïd 2002, p. 190.

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old notion of work is no longer valid, the subject assumes a critical distance not only from the product of his work but from that work itself.146 In addition, Gorz waived class analysis: The central conflict over the extent and limits of economic rationality … used to be considered, culturally and politically, at the level of workplace struggles; it has gradually spread to other areas of social life … The question as to the ‘subject’ that will decide the central conflict, and in practice carry out the socialist transformation, cannot, consequently, be answered by means of traditional class analysis.147 According to Bensaïd, Gorz’s apparent ‘radical innovation leads, via novel paths, to some old tunes’. The new subject would be incapable of taking on the state and regulating production, ‘this polymorphous and rhizomatic subject is summoned to develop its counter-culture, with a hegemonic vocation, in free time’. Yet, Bensaïd queried, how can we imagine emancipation in leisure when work remains alienated and alienating? How can a collective, creative culture develop when the cultural sphere itself is increasingly subject to commodity production? How can state domination be escaped when the dominant ideology is imposed mainly through the fantastical universe of commodity production? If querying the emancipatory capacities of the proletariat is (to say the least) current, how can we have credence in those of the ‘non-class’ formed by the deprived and excluded?148 These were unavoidable questions for any revolutionary project. This search was strategically inoperable: To claim that this new, post-industrial proletariat does ‘not find any source of potential power in social labour’ is to attribute to marginality virtues that it does not possess. After the encirclement of the towns by the countryside, that of the sphere of production by the fluctuating world of

146 147 148

Ibid. Quoted from Ibid. Bensaïd 2002, p. 191.

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precariousness? Defining this new proletariat as a ‘non-force’ dedicated to conquering not ‘power’, which is inherently corrupting, but increasing ‘areas of autonomy’, is to make impotence a virtue and seek to surpass productivism … in a troubling ‘free subjectivity’ … Under the pretext of embracing the cause of the worst-off, this ideology of non-work, centred on the primacy of individual sovereignty, is actually the new guise of a utopia of the distraught middle classes … for whom ‘real life’ begins outside work.149 What Gorz also does, with this search for a new subject, is to issue a ‘summons to the rescue the “non-class of non-producers” whose mission, qua negation of the negation, is closely akin to that of the young Marx’s “philosophical” proletariat’. This non-class, the most downtrodden in society, was supposed to ‘explode a programmed, one-dimensional society, this new subject is, rather, the symptom of a mythical regression compared with the patient determination of classes in and through the reproduction of capital’. This position misunderstood Marx, for whom the relation of exploitation is rooted in production, yet simultaneously, ‘the whole logic of Capital demonstrates that it is not reducible to it. It structures the field of reproduction in its entirety’. Marx however went beyond a purely philosophical representation of the proletariat. Gorz retreated back into a different form of this philosophical representation, even as he criticised Marx ‘for building his theory on sand – on a philosophical conception of the proletariat lacking any solid relation with its reality’. Up to a certain point, Bensaïd clarified, ‘this criticism is not unfounded’, because: Seeking to transcend German philosophy, which was powerless to transform reality, the young Marx initially sought a solution in a speculative alliance between philosophy and the proletariat, between suffering humanity and thinking humanity [being …] the vehicle of both a dissolution of capitalist society and a total recovery of humanity. What this involves is indeed a philosophical representation of the proletariat, predating the ‘critique of political economy’. The following year, the revolt of the Silesian weavers was likewise presented by Marx as the material manifestation of the proletarian essence. Following Engels’s investigations of the actual proletariat (the working classes in England), the

149

Ibid.

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critique of political economy worked out the concrete configuration of the proletariat (as commodified labour power) in its overall relations to capital.150 Labour power in its overall relations to capital includes within itself the class struggle. By the time Marx developed the critique of political economy, he grasped capital as a social relation of domination and competition, combining both of them in a unity: ‘At the level of production, the rate of surplus-value s/v expresses the class relation independently of the relation of competition. At the level of (re)production as a whole, the rate of profit (s/c+v) expresses the relation of exploitation mediated by the relation of competition’.151 Within this general theoretical and strategic complex, the battle over free time and leisure time – or an expanded cultural sphere autonomous from production – cannot be separated from capitalist society as a whole. If this is so, then neither can it be separated from alienation at the very core of the production and reproduction of the capitalist mode of production. Any search for a new subject must encounter this obstacle.

14

Marxist Theory as Anti-Sociology

As it should now be quite clear, Bensaïd took Marxist theory to be an ‘antisociology’. The position has theoretical and political implications. Sociology was concerned with ending any threat of proletarian revolution; it emerged as an ideological product of restoration. By contrast, as a theoretical product of working-class conditions of struggle and practice, Marxism concerns itself with winning this revolution therefore it must retain its theoretical and political independence. In this sense, Bensaïd followed Gramsci’s polemic against Bukharin’s Popular Manual, which had stressed the ‘irreducible antagonism between the two approaches’. Bukharin’s manual, Bensaïd gathered: [y]ields a vulgar evolutionism. Despite its pedagogical intentions … ‘The Manual contains no treatment of any kind of dialectic’. This defect could have two origins: ‘on the one hand, a theory of history and politics conceived as sociology … and on the other hand a philosophy proper, this being philosophical alias for metaphysical or mechanical (vulgar) mater-

150 151

Bensaïd 2002, p. 193. Bensaïd 2002, p. 196.

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ialism’. The attempt to reduce ‘the philosophy of praxis to a form of sociology’ in fact reveals a desire – at once both illusory and disturbing – to hold ‘the whole of history in the palm of its hand’. The real issue is to know what sociology amounts to as a separate discipline, and its role in the historical development of culture.152 Bensaïd’s anti-sociological theoretical operation required its allies, among whom was Hegel, to be sure. Bensaïd thought it was indeed decisive that Marx had rediscovered Hegel’s Science of Logic as he was writing the Grundrisse. To Bensaïd, it seems, a sociological reading of Marx in fact buried a theoretical breakthrough that had stood on the shoulders of Hegel. The theoretical issues at stake begin with knowledge and facts. If knowledge is not the simple collection of facts, the ‘difficulty resides in the transition from facts to knowledge, in the relation of logical categories and their content’. A way out has to be found between the two movements. If concepts are without content, they are lifeless; they are the artefacts of a failed transition from given facticity to theoretical articulation. On the other hand, ‘the immediate and chaotic concreteness of “life” or “romantic” nature’, is indicative of another theoretical failure, insofar as logical categories collapse before the illusion of an immediate and non-conceptual relation to the concrete sensuous world.153 These opposite movements are reciprocally determinate. It was Hegel’s great merit that he went as far as possible in resolving the reciprocal relationship. The initial step in Hegel’s effort to resolve the reciprocal relationship of formal abstractions and a concrete immediacy can be located in Hegel’s critique of empiricism. Empiricism, ‘rather than searching for the true in thinking’, refers to given experience, ‘postulating that what is true must exist in reality and exist for perception’. Usually, empiricism is simply written off in its entirety, but Hegel demonstrated that the failure of empiricism was the fact that it only goes half way. Empiricism works, Hegel argued: under a delusion, if it supposes that, while analysing the objects, it leaves them as they were: it really transforms the concrete into an abstract. And as a consequence of this change, the living thing is killed: life can exist only in the concrete and one. Not that we can do without this division, if it be our intention to comprehend … The error lies in forgetting that

152 153

Bensaïd 2002, p. 100. Bensaïd 2002, p. 102.

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this is only one half of the process, and that the main point is the reunion of what has been parted. And it is where analysis never gets beyond the stage of partition that the words of the poet are true: Then the parts in his hand he may hold and class, But the spiritual link is lost, alas!154 At stake is the status and use of the concrete totality, because a ‘content has its justification only as a moment of the whole, outside of which it is only an unfounded presupposition or a subjective certainty’; thus, for Bensaïd, Marx is neither an empiricist nor a Kantian, because: The genesis of Capital presupposes this critique of empiricism and Kantian philosophy. Most of Marx’s detractors (the ‘sociology of class’ is the most blatant example) unimaginatively follow the opposite route, criticising the unfinished determinations of the dialectical totality in the name of the metaphysical categories of empirical perception. In the 1857 Introduction, Marx explains the transition from the abstract to the concrete as a ‘synthesis of many determinations’ and ‘unity of the diverse’. The concrete is not the empirical immediate datum of statistical investigation but a conceptual construction, or thought-concrete.155 Factual information does not constitute scientific knowledge; indeed, the ‘possibility of scientific knowledge is inscribed in the distance between the empirically given and this constructed concrete’.156 That is why the method of Marx’s Capital was an object of investigation for Bensaïd. The result of the method is a work whereby each volume of Capital contributes its own specific determination to the approximation of the concrete, in which each concept that Marx uses has a dual character because the mystification of the capitalist mode of production converts social relations into things: It is an enchanted, perverted, topsy-turvy world, in which Monsieur le Capital and Madame la Terre do their ghost-walking as social characters and at the same time directly as mere things.157

154 155 156 157

Hegel 2009, pp. 161–2. Bensaïd 2002, p. 102. Ibid. Marx 1971, p. 830.

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Essence and appearance are mediated. Marx’s project is to grasp the social essence of the capitalist mode of production to explain its thing-like appearance. For example, prices are not only appearances, but the expression and determinate manifestation of their essence: ‘irreducible to value, they are nevertheless not immaterial to it. The mysteries of capital are played out in this hieroglyphic relation of simultaneous revelation and dissimulation’.158 Bensaïd’s practice of German science was a red thread tying his different reflections together.159 The political imperative to respond to crises that history presents in its diverse novelty pushes towards German science, because historical crises are the terrain of dialectical thought. When all seems confused, lost or chaotic, returning to Hegel has been a necessary moment of reorientation. ‘Hegel is for Marxism the equivalent of the Red Sea in the exodus from the land of slavery’, there is no option other than to pass through it in a movement for liberation.160 Because as Bensaïd pointed out, commenting on Lenin’s famous remark about the Marxists who did not bother to read Hegel, ‘those who believed it possible to proceed directly to Marx, bypassing Hegel, could understand nothing of him’.161 Faithful to this insight, it is to Bensaïd’s credit that, in coming to grips with the dark years of the 1980s, and the legacy of his tradition, he seriously worked upon the subversive nature of German science. German science was the product of discordance of temporalities and non-contemporaneity. As a result of German economic backwardness and the political delay in German unity and modern bourgeois state construction, the ‘Germans’ (who were not even a unified nation) were, ‘the philosophical contemporaries of the present without being its historical contemporaries’. Germany’s practical backwardness was turned into a theoretical advance. Hegel demanded that thought determinations should not remain at the level of abstract thinking whereby abstraction breaks apart of the concrete and isolates its determinations. By doing so, only single properties and moments are seized, in abstract isolation from one another. This is, perhaps, the fate of empiricism and French materialism. But what was the content of the subversive German heritage against the fate of other forms of thinking? Tombazos spelt out the aim of this method of thought, which is effective in Bensaïd’s ‘theory of resistance’:

158 159 160 161

Bensaïd 2002, p. 144. According to Sophie, Bensaïd was seriously reading Hegel’s Science of Logic between the mid-1980s and the release of Marx for Our Times. Michael-Matsas 2007, p. 108. Bensaïd 2002, p. 241.

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Bensaïd demonstrated how this ‘German science’ is subversive. Having capital and the social relations that correspond to it as its object, it introduces us to a conceptual logic – meaning a logic that is superior to the understanding (of the dualism of essence/phenomena) – of contradiction and dynamics, that opens the door to ‘another knowledge that is receptive to the reason of unreason’, ‘more attentive to what is hidden than what is disclosed’. It therefore opens the door to another rationality and a strategic thought that doesn’t confine itself to describing effective reality but which aims at grasping its unspoken nightmares, repressed dreams and desires and above all exploring the range of its possibilities in order to liberate its hidden potentialities.162 The subversion of German science provides for the interpretation of a world in need of transformation. Importantly, Tombazos stressed that German science is concerned above all with the Concept, meaning that each practice of the sciences of nature (definition, causality, force, law, necessity, life, mechanism, chemism, teleology, etc) is contained as ‘aufgehobenes Objekt (an object superseded) in a much richer logic of relations’.163 For Tombazos, and Bensaïd followed this line too, the German practice of science had the capacity to interiorise diverse materialities, individual sciences, conceptual articulations, and new knowledges into its apparatus of thought; the result is a kind of subversion of the positivist paradigm, since it ‘torments the pact between positive science and power, where the logical and the necessary so often coincide with the blind and fragmentary cynical realism of capital’.164 So, the logic of relations is a means to think the sciences, with potentially subversive effect, only if the practice is revolutionary, not apologetic.

15

Spinoza

If German science had the ambition to be an absolute knowledge beyond ‘the understanding operative in the exact sciences’ that ends up ‘only formulating the mechanical laws of an inert material world’, then German science ‘turns the critical gaze on knowledge on itself’. The critical gaze on knowledge had a practical component too; metaphysics and politics were not separate, even if they can be handled orthogonally. The critical and practical ambitions – opposing 162 163 164

Tombazos 2010, p. 172. Tombazos 1995. Ibid.

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itself to the unilateral mathematisation of a calculating modernity – had their forbearers. So, what were the sources of this German science Bensaïd speaks of? Among them, Spinoza’s irrepressible philosophical revolution stands at the forefront. Without Spinoza, ‘philosophy vanishes’. For Spinoza, ‘knowing the world was insufficient; the aim of such knowledge must be the supreme ethical goal of salvation’.165 According to Bensaïd, Spinoza’s knowledge of the third type allows the philosopher to ‘penetrate into nature’s interior design whereas formerly he had its external facet only’, it: attains to essences and assembles adequate ideas of ourselves, God, and other things. The quest for singularity distinguishes it from knowledge of the second type. To produce this knowledge is to glimpse the truth as subject and self-development: Knowledge of the third kind will itself only be perfected when we have genetically reconstructed the combination of motion and rest that characterises our particular essence.166 Turning back to Spinoza’s third kind of knowledge had its precedents in French Marxism, among whom Althusser is most well-known. And, Spinoza’s tripartite set of knowledges (vulgar, rational and intellectually intuitive) gripped Bensaïd. He wrote, ‘the jubilation of knowledge is generated by knowledge of the third kind, which presupposes and supersedes [my italics – D.R.] the second kind. Fascinated by the expansion of the positive sciences, Spinoza nevertheless preventively repudiates the scientistic ideology hatched by their success’.167 Recognising the importance of Spinoza’s aspiration, Bensaïd suggests that: With the pleasure attendant upon grasping the thing itself, rational knowledge is no longer separated from aesthetic pleasure. Acknowledging his debt to Spinoza, Hegel nevertheless criticises him for a conception of the totality that is inert and unilateral, since it lacks mediations and negation. Founding a new knowledge, the Spinozist philosophy of immanence does not yet posit the mediation of historicity that makes humanity its own creator. Correcting Spinoza by Hegel, and vice versa, Marx makes labour the relation with nature through which humanity contemplates itself in a world of its own creation … Capital deciphers the dynamic of emancipation inscribed in the immanent laws of tendency of social reality … Strictly speaking, it becomes the moment that makes it possible to 165 166 167

Bensaïd 2002, pp. 208–9. Bensaïd 2002, pp. 209–10. Ibid.

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recapture the totalising dynamic of knowledge in a specific – capitalist – society, where the economic determines the totality. In it, judgements of fact and of value coincide, as they do in ‘knowledge of the third type’.168 At this moment of our discussion, I take a detour through Tombazos’s commentary of Marx for Our Times. Combining an intimate knowledge of Bensaïd’s Marxism, ancient Greek philosophy and the Germanist philosophical tradition, his reflections on Spinoza, Hegel and Marx vis-à-vis Bensaïd are of great aid to us. Spinoza had developed a critique of a form of thinking that split reality in two. Reality was nothing more than one totality, Substance. This idea made Spinoza a central starting point for modern philosophy, according to Hegel; admittedly, Hegel thought it was an Eleatic, therefore static, conception of the Absolute. This meant that Spinoza’s ‘totality is obtained, if we examine Spinozian philosophy a little closer, by the “destruction” of singular and determinate things’. For Spinoza, ‘every determination is a negation’. As Tombazos explained, the attributes of Spinoza’s Substance (thought and extension) are determinations and negations; they ‘are thus in themselves incomplete and dependant. They do not have a real and effective existence … Thus, every determined thing geht necessarily zu Grunde’.169 Tombazos saw a ‘constructive ambiguity’ in this German expression: ‘zu Grunde gehen signifies “vanishing” [or disappearance – D.R.] and at the same time a return to “ground” [or foundation – D.R.]. Substance is therefore the simple unity of mind with itself, its liberation from finite contents’.170 Within Substance, all finite things vanish into its abstraction, which is the Eleatic character of Spinoza’s philosophy. This is why Hegel could write of Spinoza that: The world has no true reality, and all this that we know as the world has been cast into the abyss of the one identity. There is therefore no such thing as finite reality, it has no truth whatever; according to Spinoza what is, is God, and God alone. Therefore, the allegations of those who accuse Spinoza of atheism are the direct opposite of the truth; with him there is too much God … nature and the individual disappear in this same identity.171

168 169 170 171

Bensaïd 2002, p. 210. Tombazos 1995. Ibid. Hegel 1995, p. 281.

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Spinozist Substance was only a starting point for modern philosophy and Hegel’s commencement is Spinoza’s result. In Spinoza’s Substance within which everything finite and individual disappears in a generalised Eleatic philosophical manoeuvre, Hegel noted that ‘activity and subjectivity’ were lacking. As Tombazos writes, Substance ‘is only an abstraction that cannot concretize itself, a universality that cannot particularize itself, a passive God and, in the last analysis, impotent … Reflection’s dualism chased out of the door comes back by the window, because the concrete doesn’t belong to the content of substance, but is placed opposite it like an other’.172 Where Spinoza ends Hegel begins. In Hegel, the Substance becomes Subject and the Hegelian Concept, ‘and the capital of Karl Marx’. On this reading, Substance was abstract in Spinoza, because it grasped negation in a unilateral way. However, in Hegel, the world in its unity is subjectivity that self-produces itself, the concept that produces its concrete, particular and finite contents and which destroys them in a process without end in order to affirm itself as the only valuable and infinite content.173 When Hegel said that there was too much God in Spinoza, ‘we could translate it’ as ‘there is too much of the universal … there is only the universal’. However, according to Bensaïd, Spinoza played a fundamental and foundational role for any philosophy of immanence precisely because liberation cannot ‘proceed from a moral imperative external to its object’. The struggle ‘obeys neither the mirages of utopia nor the impatience of the will. I can achieve liberation only through a conscious recognition of constraints and the deployment of a conditioned effort’.174 This, essentially, is about the materiality of bodies in movement, which need to be grasped through intellection and moved through resistance, each of which must go beyond the instabilities of illusion.

16

Critique in the Blend of English and German Sciences

One of Marx’s favourite maxims was ‘nothing human is alien to me’. Marx took the best from the German culture of philosophy, the sharpest radicalism from the French political traditions and the most up-to-date scientific investigations into the natural and economic world from England. This blend was not 172 173 174

Tombazos 1995. Ibid. Bensaïd 2002, pp. 210–11.

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without contradiction. Vitally, for Bensaïd’s reading of Marx’s contradictory concoction, critique plays a mediating role, between German science and the so-called English sciences. For example, ‘the “natural laws” of capitalist production generate social antagonisms’, but how can a historical mode of production be modelled on a natural law modelled on English natural science? This apparent contradiction has been a stubborn difficulty because: Charmed by the metallic accents of English science, Marx seems to be restrained by the bonds of ‘German science’ and the whispers of a history in which the voices of Leibniz and Goethe, Fichte and Hegel, mingle. This unresolved dilemma was to prove fruitful … Marx’s thought, balanced on the knife-edge of critique, beckons towards the ‘organic mechanism’ and the ‘scientific borders …’ whose spectres haunt our instrumental reason.175 The critique of quantifiable and instrumental reason, and the defence of a form of organic thought, were key points for Bensaïd. The German form of thought permitted Marx to search for the living organism, ‘where conceptual order constantly comes undone in carnal disorder’, where the ‘universality of the structure and the singularity of history’ combine.176 Bensaïd reads Marx systematically, even with a positive argument about a theoretical revolution, yet Marx’s method in Capital does not submit to the rigours of scientific formalisation that reduces ‘genuine science’ to a physical model. To invoke ‘German science’ means to evoke a rich philosophical heritage and a language that ‘embraces the movement of ideas and the reciprocal relations between form and content’, and unlike ‘the positive connotations of “Science” in the French sense … Wissenschaft … includes all theoretical knowledge’.177 In Marx’s vocabulary, the impact of German modalities of thought determinations comes to the fore, since many categories of central importance and in constant use, in Capital as elsewhere, come from, or can be articulated to, Hegel’s Logic. Within the German modality of science, it was perfectly legitimate for Marx to use and explore metaphor in his scientific work – sorcerers, vampires and dancing ghosts all have their place – because, ‘Marx’s metaphorical creativity discloses the need for a knowledge that is simultaneously analytic and synthetic, scientific and critical, theoretical and practical’.178 Goethe’s 175 176 177 178

Bensaïd 2002, p. 203. Bensaïd 2002, p. 204. Bensaïd 2002, p. 205. Ibid.

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remark, ‘Do not forbid me use of metaphor; I could not else express my thoughts at all’, could indeed be applied to Marx: under the influence of ‘English science’, he [Marx] thought within the constraints of a strange object – capital – an intimate understanding of which required another causality, different laws, another temporality – in short, a different mode of science. ‘German science’ marks the spot. This is where we must dig – read, discuss and interpret – rather than accepting the slapdash accusations that sometimes make Marx into a vulgar economist.179 Marx testified to this heritage saying: economics as a science in the German sense of the word has yet to be tackled … in a work such as mine, there are bound to be many shortcomings in the detail. But the composition, the structure is a triumph of German scholarship.180 Marx’s project was a systematic and immanent critique of its object, a critique of the established science that was political economy. This critique was a triumph of German scientificity because a ‘critique of appearances and fetishism, this science is directed towards the “inner relations” underlying phenomenal forms’.181 This method aims at a knowledge that is concerned with totality and singularity, ‘the point at issue is not abandoning the totality under the pretext of elucidating each of its parts, but rediscovering the universal in the singular’.182 To continue in Marx’s footsteps is to continue this immanent critique, which is something deeper than to simply hold fast to his results.

17

From Essence and Appearance to the Production of the Concept

The critique of political economy would be superfluous if the essence of things directly coincided with their appearances. There is, however, no forever split between Schein, Erschein and Wesen, illusory being, appearance and essence. This was the case neither for Hegel nor for Marx. In the work of Kant, essence 179 180 181 182

Bensaïd 2002, p. 206. Quoted from Bensaïd 2002, pp. 206–7. Ibid. Ibid.

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does, in fact, refer to an inner content that is unattainable by perception. Moreover, for Hegel, to search for the essence of a thing is a superior conceptual labour than the qualitative and quantitative description of things. For Hegel, essence shines forth, appears and manifests itself. For Marx it ‘governs the play of appearances from within: rather than the world of phenomena being that of laws, prices and value. The manifestation of the essence thus forms part of the appearance’.183 For Marx, the vulgar economist’s way of looking at things ‘arises, namely, because it is only the immediate phenomenal form of these relations, that is reflected in their brains and not their inner connection’.184 If this were the case, there would be no need for science. The whole point for Marx is to demonstrate how the law of value asserts itself, how the essence manifests itself. This cannot be accomplished without the production of the concept. A contradictory relationship between phenomenon and essence, appearance and reality exists. Thus, these concepts are related and inseparable from each other. Bensaïd argued that ‘The couples “surface/depth”, “illusion/reality”, “fragments/structure”, are so many approximate expressions’.185 In Hegel’s book of Essence, opposing determinations – like form and content – contradict one another and exist in opposition to each other; they are reciprocal. These concepts reach their limits being displaced by their opposite. A continual movement, back and forth, between essence and phenomenon also pervades the work of Marx (and Hegel’s Logic). Most vital is the relationship of essence and phenomenon, since essence is a reciprocal logic of relations. Essence must explain the phenomenon but cannot do so unilaterally. However, if essence could explain the phenomenon, by itself, there would have been no need for Hegel to write the doctrine of the subjective-Concept. The dualism at the heart of reflection – in the book of Essence – between each opposite cannot be overcome without the intervention of the Concept. Bensaïd writes, The act of going beyond the reflective dualism is nothing other than the Hegelian Notion [der Begriff ] … a moment that particularly interests us: not only because it enables a rich reading of Capital, but because it enables, at the same time, a rich reading of the capitalist economy.186 For Bensaïd, between these conceptual pairs, ‘there operates the labour of the concept – science as production and transition (the production of its object, 183 184 185 186

Bensaïd 2002, p. 228. Ibid. Bensaïd 2002, p. 229. Tombazos 2014, p. 73.

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not the revelation of a hidden essence)’.187 For Marx, scientific labour as production and exploration is ‘poles apart from the confusion between thought and reality’ or their abstract divorce. For Hegel, the divorce between idea and reality is especially dear to the reflective-static-analytic understanding. The abstract divorce between ideas and reality, or philosophy and actuality, rules out the possibility of activity as the unification of theory and practice. Bensaïd continued Hegel’s line of thought, though with Marx’s materialist qualification: But thought remains a component part of reality, in a process of ‘gradual differentiation’. This close differentiation of the object, this gestation of the subject in the object, avoids the specular trap of tautological reflection. Through the mediation of practice, theory can ‘truly apprehend things’, rather than embracing their conceptual phantom.188 This way of doing science is a ‘historical dialectic’ (in Gramsci’s words) that is opposed to the illusion that there exists a science in-itself, a method in-itself, hypostatising an abstract science that remains constant throughout history in the place of a historical and concrete dialectic. By contrast to a reflectiveanalytic-static scientistic illusion, the ‘German science’ that Marx inherits is a theory destined to become strategy.

18

Open Totalities, Determinate Abstractions, the Science of the Concrete Particular and Logic

To be more precise, Bensaïd thinks Hegel plays a fundamental role in Marx’s critique of political economy in four senses, namely those of open totality and contradiction, determinate abstractions, a science of the concrete particular, and the relationship between logical order and historical order. For Hegel, the concrete totality is ‘articulated and mediated’, the whole being the set of its moments. In Marx’s theory, his dialectic ‘amounts to a determinate, differentiated totality exhibiting the articulation of its moments’. The totality is selfmediated. For Hegel, mediation is a key concept, and Bensaïd writes: The great open circle of Capital reproduces this ‘self-moving selfsameness’ through its own differentiation and contradictions. Anyone who

187 188

Bensaïd 2002, p. 229. Ibid.

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mentions mediation must then conceptualise law, morality, institutions, a reciprocity of differences, a logic of conflicts and oppositions, and not some formally declared reconciliation.189 To speak of totality raises the question of where to begin, because the ‘totality inhabits each link, each fragment, each detail of the chain. Yet there is a single fragment that encapsulates and discloses the whole’.190 The beginning is not arbitrary and not all beginnings are valid. ‘Thus, Capital, could not begin with money or prices. Marx spent a long time deciding to begin with the commodity’, Bensaïd noted. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the search for a beginning ‘to make political economy scientific began with the living whole (population, nation, state, etc.) as it appeared to the pioneers of the new science’. These living totalities – or concrete immediacy – ‘could enter into the works of the economists of the seventeenth century only as “chaotic conceptions of the whole”’. It was necessary to use the force of abstraction to pull out the simple concept ‘which he [Marx – D.R.] understands as a cell and which is a “simple” (elementary, seed-like) unity of opposites’. The commodity is not the cell-form because of its place in the historical chain of evolution. It is ‘not decided by simplicity and priority of historical appearance’; instead, it presupposes the birth and development of a capitalist mode of production as necessary for the economic cell-form. Here Bensaïd effectively agrees with Jindřich Zelený, for whom ‘Hegel prepared the way for the Marxian thesis on the starting point of science by his reflections on the circular structure of a scientific system and on the combination of the immediate (the unmediated) and the mediated in reality and thought’, ‘Just as Swann’s way and Guermantes’ way are summed up by biting on the madeleine’.191 The beginning contains thus both immediacy and mediation. With what must science begin? Hegel asked, to which Marx responded, ‘the commodity, the value-form of the product’. The commodity encapsulates and discloses the whole, and the categories that flow from the commodity ‘unveil the marvellous totality of a constantly changing world’. This permits a theoretical grasp on a living totality, because ‘Capital is not a totality ossified into a thing, but a living, mobile social relation. Fissured, rent, wounded, the totality is prey to real contradictions, irreducible to the appeasement of identity’.192 The commodity discloses the immanent and insuperable limits of a developed 189 190 191 192

Bensaïd 2002, p. 242. Ibid. My translation slightly modified. Ibid. Translation slightly modified. Zelený 1980, p. 33. Bensaïd 2002, p. 245.

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capitalist mode of production. Via the pathways of the force of abstraction, ‘the commodity-form of the product of labour – or value-form of the commodity’ being the economic cell-form, Marx reaches the possibility of the concrete totality. None of this is divorced from historical development. Rather, the category of the present demands a logic of the Concept. This is implicit when Marx claimed that the human intellect for 2,000 years had made every effort in vain to reach the content of value, even Aristotle, though it was not possible until the nineteenth century to grasp its nature and ramifications. This was not possible in Aristotle’s time because ‘Greek society was founded upon slavery, and had, therefore, for its natural basis, the inequality of men and of their labour powers’.193 As Marx wrote in the Grundrisse, ‘the economic concept of value does not occur in antiquity … the concept of value is entirely peculiar to the most modern economy’.194 The critique of political economy is rooted in the capitalist present; to unpack the critique of political economy, it is therefore necessary to employ the labour of the concept. The labour of the concept is necessary to reach the totality. Concrete and comprehensive knowledge that unfolds from a beginning is not a matter of the mechanical addition of knowledge, following a historical sequence, but a logical activity of knowledge that thinks structures. Here, we can follow Tombazos again, because ‘capital itself [is] more precisely a concrete application of the Hegelian “Concept”’. It was necessary to grasp the logical dimension of Capital in this sense: Quite rightly, D. Bensaïd wrote that Capital follows the three moments following the development of the Hegelian Concept: mechanismproduction, chemism-circulation (in the strict sense), teleology (more precisely life)-reproduction of the whole. Before entering into some details, note this: if, according to Marx, capital doesn’t differ in its logic from the Hegelian Idea (thesis that D. Bensaïd accepted quite correctly), how does Hegelian idealism differ from Marxist materialism? In Hegel, the contradictions of the concept are the real motor force of knowledge. In Marx, social suffering is the real motor force of society. The philosophical concept of the one is the socio-economic relation of the other. The first thinks thought, the second shows how society is a thought that thinks itself. The first thought ‘masters’ the concept; the second shows the way in which the concept governs us. In other terms, man (by means of the

193 194

Marx 2010g, p. 70. Marx 1973, p. 776.

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French Revolution) didn’t construct the world according to the Idea, but the Idea is autonomised in order to become, against man, its inhabitable and alienated world. Thus – contrary to a very widespread opinion but without foundation – what separates them is, in fact, the theory of fetishism and alienation such that it appears in Capital. Apart from that we don’t see other essential differences. Capital, Marx wrote, is an ‘abstraction in actu’. That means that capital is not a simple abstraction, that is to say a Substance, but a Substance (value) that has become Subject (capital). To understand this is the key to grasping the logic of Capital.195 In the context of the logic of Capital, determinate abstractions approximate the concrete, because scientific thought isolates and separates determinate abstractions then reconstructs the unity of these diverse abstractions in a production of the concrete whole. Determinate abstraction is essentially what Marx meant when he wrote of profit, ‘Since we have not so far analysed the different component parts of profit, i.e. they do not for the present exist for us’.196 Genuine thought for Hegel is self-supporting and must be intrinsically concrete. This Hegelian determination ‘involves disclosure by contrast against the background of totality’.197 Determinate abstractions do not make any sense without the concrete totality, because for Hegel: For the truth is concrete; that is, while it gives a bond and principle of unity, it also possesses an internal source of development. Truth, then, is only possible as a universe or totality of thought.198 Possessing an internal source of development, ‘Hegelian discourse is thus conceived as a process that “must let the inherently living determinations take their own course”’. Determination has nothing to do with dictionaries, in fact, ‘Marx explicitly lays claim to this dynamic logic of determination, as opposed to the static, classificatory logic of definitions: “What is at issue here is not a set of definitions under which things are to be subsumed. It is rather definite functions that are expressed in specific categories”’. Marx’s concepts ‘originate in the totality’ and make possible the rise from the abstract to the concrete, which takes place through determination.199 This relates to the mathematisation of

195 196 197 198 199

Tombazos 1995. Marx 2010h, p. 213. Bensaïd 2002, p. 245. Hegel 2009, p. 117. Bensaïd 2002, pp. 246–7.

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political economy. Despite a thorough knowledge of mathematics, Hegel could not bear ‘mathematical arrogance’ because the goal of such knowledge is magnitude: Whereas the concept divides space into its dimensions and determines relations, magnitude is an ‘inessential’ difference. Whereas the process in its totality, which engenders and runs through its moments, constitutes the concrete and the truth of the concrete, the determinations of quantity are those of mutual exteriority.200 It is quite necessary to pay attention to the concept of measure in Hegel, because in this determination, quantity is a quantity of quality, a ‘qualitatively determinate quantity’. Measure is no longer quantity in mutual exteriority with quality. For Bensaïd, this is an important point, since in Marx’s work, ‘exchangevalue does not abolish use-value, or abstract labour concrete labour’. There is a dialectic of quantity and quality because, ‘exchange-value is use-value that has become negative, just as abstract labour is concrete labour become negative’. Classical political economy aimed to quantify quality ‘by homogenising an irreducibly heterogeneous economic space. It succeeds thanks to a “common measure”: time’.201 On the surface it seems that ‘Marx subscribes to this reduction’ when he considers ‘time as the measure of labour’. This is so only on the surface because Marx changes register: Time is no longer a sort of supposedly uniform standard of reference, but a social relation that is determined in production, exchange and conflict. Competition and the market see to it that concrete labour is reduced to abstract labour. There is then no longer any question of quality: ‘Quantity alone decides everything’.202 But concrete labour and use-value have not disappeared, ‘they rebound in crises’. This reveals the status of Marx’s theoretical revolution in contrast to classical political economy. According to Marx, his scientific discoveries consisted in the revelation of the general forms of surplus-value, the revelation of the dual character of labour, an understanding of capital as a social relation and, an appreciation that use-value is not simply abolished in exchange-value,

200 201 202

Bensaïd 2002, p. 249. Bensaïd 2002, pp. 249–50. Bensaïd 2002, p. 250.

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but retains a specific standing. Grossman drew out the status of Marx’s discovery of the dual character of labour and it is an open question as to whether Marx would have been able to discover the dual character of labour ‘without the Hegelian rejuvenation of 1858’ through his chance rereading of the logic. In the Science of Logic, Hegel says one should: on the one hand, go on to develop the abstract determination of the quantitative aspects of natural objects (a mathematics of nature), and on the other hand, to indicate the connection between this determination of measure and the qualities of natural objects, at least in general; for the specific proof, derived from the Notion of the concrete object, of the connection between its qualitative and quantitative aspects, belongs to the special science of the concrete.203 Bensaïd captured the demand for a science of the concrete particular. As we have seen, the ‘distinction between what the object has become and the history of the object pertains to that between logic and history’. The statement is a crucial aspect of Bensaïd’s reading of Capital. This is complicated because the relation between the logical structure of Capital and the historical development of the capitalist mode of production do not fit into an oversimplified opposition. Bensaïd claimed that it once again ‘recalls Marx’s debt to Spinoza, Leibniz and Hegel’, because the ‘genesis of a form is not the same as its historical genesis. It is only the “ideal expression” of it’.204 However, Historical and logical moments constantly overlap in Marx. Time, operator of change, is thus inscribed in the very heart of development. Capital temporalises logic and logicises economic rhythms.205 Marx’s project was to uncover the non-physicalist yet objective structure of the capitalist mode of production, but the conceptual procedure that he used to grasp this structure, the ideal genesis thus reconstituted, is distinct from real history. But it is both a structural concept and a historical concept because its structure presupposes history. Marx inverted logical and historical order. Marx’s theoretical construct does not follow historical development in a determinist sequence. This inversion is explicit in Capital. Bensaïd relied on

203 204 205

Hegel 1969, p. 331. Bensaïd 2002, p. 253. Bensaïd 2002, p. 252.

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Marx’s statement that merchant’s capital and interest-bearing capital are derivative forms theoretically though they were historically prior to the modern form of capital. The key point about this, on Bensaïd’s reading, is that the mature capitalist mode of production reproduces itself autonomously, in which the form of dependence of worker to capital is perpetuated automatically, akin to the laws of nature; this, he thinks, is different from the period in which the capitalist mode of production emerged historically, because then, the relation of exploitation needed the violent intervention of the modernising bourgeois state apparatus to be implemented. Bensaïd distinguishes between the mechanisms of the developed structure and historical genesis.206

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The Specific Logic of Marx’s Critique of Political Economy

Marx’s scientific critique of political economy can only begin with the commodity form once the commodity structure infiltrates society in all of its facets and remoulds it in its own image. As Lukács had also seen, with the capitalist mode of production, we are at a point in the history of humanity where every problem leads us back to the riddle of the commodity and capitalism’s structure. Capital is the universal organising principle of humanity’s historical horizon, weaving its way through each particular sphere of our world. The above discussion explained that Marx practises a dynamic logic of determinations and not a logic of static definitions, in relation to the starting point of the commodity. This is the only way to grasp the social phenomena embedded in a totality in movement. To grasp these relations, determinations must be able to change accordingly and logically. The rise from the abstract to the concrete moves directly along this logic of determination. One must elicit this method by reading Marx’s theoretical practice, because (fortunately) Marx did not leave behind a formalised Science of (Materialist) Logic. ‘Is a logic of singularities formalisable’? Bensaïd asked: Though a commendable pedagogic intention, the methodological and dialectical logic as sketched have an unfortunate tendency to lapse into the ‘thing of logic’ to the detriment of ‘the logic of the thing’. The ‘logic of Capital’ is not a general logic, but a specific logic, determined by the use of the genitive case [i.e. it belongs to the capitalist mode of production – D.R.].207 206 207

Bensaïd 2002, p. 253. Bensaïd 2009a, p. 180.

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For Bensaïd, there was no abstract method in general. Capital is Marx’s specific subject-matter (object of inquiry). To read Marx ‘is therefore, not exclusively, first of all to read Capital … the Philosophical and Economic Manuscripts of 1844 … in passing through the Manuscripts of 1857–58 (Grundrisse), by the Manuscripts of 1861–63, and through those that specifically make up Capital’.208 Why did it take Marx so long to write Capital, why nearly a quarter of a century before Capital could be published? As outlined above, Marx had to answer the crucial question: in a world that forms a whole, in which the parts are articulated and independent, where can a scientific critique of political economy begin? Marx did not cease to pose the question of where to begin, as Bensaïd writes ‘between September 1857 and April 1868, Rosdolsky lists 14 tables and modifications of the planning of Capital’.209 When referring to the 1857 plan, which involved six books, Bensaïd saw that ‘logical order henceforth illuminated historical order, which it prevailed over without abolishing. The structure of the mode of production (its logic) dominates its genesis’. He explained that this plan did not yet ‘succeed in conceptually unifying the different processes (production, circulation and reproduction) and the different circuits (money, productive capital and commodity) of capital in becoming’. The ‘structural primacy of production remains obscured by the classical analysis of factors of production’, capital, landed property and labour.210 So, the original plan then changed. What we have in Capital is not this original plan, as this had hit a methodological impasse. Bensaïd reproduced Marx’s latter plan that he dated from 1864: Book i The process of production of capital. Book ii The process of circulation of capital. Book iii Structure of the process as a whole. Book iv On the history of the theory. This change of plan had major consequences for the method of Marx’s Capital. The separate books on wage labour and landed property, the state, foreign trade and the world market disappear: The ‘definitive’ plan of Capital is evidence of a robust theoretical coherence. To understand how the logic of the thing dominates the thing of

208 209 210

Bensaïd 1995, p. 15. Bensaïd 1995, p. 16. Bensaïd 1995, p. 17.

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logic spares many misinterpretations. Concerned with debatable pedagogical concerns, party and union training courses have for a long-time reduced Capital to a commentary on its first volume. Some exegeses have recommended skipping over the first chapter for its so-called difficulty. Others conveniently saved themselves from Volume Two, too technical for their taste in its dry reproduction schemas. As if we could follow the film by stopping it at the first reel or by skipping over the second.211 Bensaïd did not reproduce a running commentary on Capital. Rather, as can be seen from my discussion above, he wanted to underline its logic as a specific conceptual organisation of social time and its rhythms. This point informed his position on the 1857 plan, which was an intermediary stage in the movement from the historical form of presentation to a logical order of presentation. This was so because it was influenced by the classical analysis of the factors of production. But Marx moved beyond this. In underlining the logic of Capital, Bensaïd picked up on the thread left over by Rosdolsky in looking at the relation between Hegel’s Logic and the conceptual organisation of Capital. Essentially, Bensaïd holds that position that, being inspired by Hegel’s Logic, the three books of Marx’s Capital ‘follow the three moments of nature in The Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences: mechanism (the relation of exploitation in production), chemism (the cycle of different forms of capital), and organic physics or life (the reproduction of the whole). The difficult question of commencement … is finally resolved’. The essential point in this comparison is to say that in each level we attain a deeper knowledge of the whole that follows the progression from the abstract to the concrete. He pointed out that this is a formal correspondence.212 Bensaïd therefore holds that Marx’s Hegelian debt rests not ‘under the angle of his philosophy of history, but under the angle of the logic’.213 Therefore the essential point about Marx’s mode of exposition in Capital is organised from the point of view of the totality of its object.

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The ‘Vast Syllogism’ of Hegelian Logic

Above, I have reiterated the formal correspondence between Hegel and Marx, on the basis of Bensaïd’s claims, though here it is necessary to go into Hegel’s 211 212 213

Bensaïd 1995, p. 20. Bensaïd 2009a, p. 114. Bensaïd 1995, p. 38.

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logic of ‘life’ in more detail, because it grounds Bensaïd’s case so fundamentally. In the essay on the Difference between the Systems of Fichte and Schelling, Hegel drew out the foundations of what would become his project. Bensaïd explained: The so-called human sciences are superior to those of nature. History is their crowning achievement, for nothing is valid for humanity unless it is the object of self-consciousness. The knowledge that the mind achieves of itself and by itself, through knowledge of the world, is the ultimate goal of science.214 Hegel sought for a knowledge that incorporated and overcame the compartmentalisation of positive scientific discourse. Its conceptual work seeks to sublate ‘mathematical truths’, because ‘the movement of mathematical proof does not belong to the object, but rather is an activity external to the matter in hand’. Bensaïd thought that, if the positive sciences remain ignorant and arrogant of German science’s conceptual labour, they would consequently: take pride in a flawed knowledge, which is ‘defective’ in its poverty of purpose ‘as well as in its material’. In fact, the aim of mathematics can be nothing more than ‘magnitude’ as a ‘relationship that is unessential, lacking the Notion’. What is involved is a process of knowledge that ‘proceeds on the surface’ and ‘does not touch the thing itself’, since ‘the actual is not something spatial, as it is regarded in mathematics’. This is why it only ever attains ‘a [non-actual] truth’, and makes do with ‘rigid, dead propositions’: ‘it is the Notion which divides space into its dimensions and determines the connections between and within them’.215 Hegel’s logic of relations meant to overcome ‘dead thought’ (an ever-present theme, as the skull’s presence as a limit point of the Phenomenology shows), by also introducing time and history into logic. Hegel temporalised logic. His ‘science of a constantly evolving totality, the concept of speculative science thus radicalises Kant’s Copernican Revolution, for which humanity’s self-knowledge determines not only its own conduct, but also the other modes of knowledge’.216 The stakes were high, and Hegel positioned himself thus: ‘Other sciences may try as much as they like to get by without philosophy and to rely 214 215 216

Bensaïd 2002, p. 213. Bensaïd 2002, p. 214. Bensaïd 2002, p. 215.

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only on clever argumentation, but without philosophy, they are unable to possess any life, spirit, or truth in themselves’.217 Decisively, Bensaïd recognised that Hegel continued the Copernican Revolution, instead of retreating to the old metaphysics. What would a critique of political economy be without ‘Life’ understood in the Hegelian sense as a specific logic? Would it be possible? What is life anyway for Hegel? Bensaïd thought that a critique of political economy without the Hegelian concept of ‘Life’ would be a mechanically ossified abstraction (indeed mechanism is some steps before the reproductive logic of life). Science must be able to elucidate the inner connections of things in their living totality and self-reproduction. For Bensaïd, since ‘essence is phenomenalised in existence’ (just as value is phenomenalised in capital), then ‘Reality, finally, is the unity of essence and existence, the unity of value and capital. This is the relation that science must elucidate’.218 While true, this does not yet tell us how Marx resolves the apparent antinomy between logic and life. Bensaïd gave a succinct account of the meaning of Hegelian ‘Life’, writing that: Life pertains to the logic of the concept, to the moment of the completion of the totality: that of the Idea. The logic of Capital likewise covers the moments of production (characterised by a circular, physical organisation of time); circulation (characterised by a circular, physical organisation of time); and reproduction as a whole (characterised by an organic temporality of the living being). In the course of these determinate abstractions, capital is gradually revealed to be like a living being and, what is more, a ‘vampire’. The competition between many capitals evokes the metabolism of ‘organic exchange’. Thus, it is not by chance that in Volume Three we find the metaphors of the body and the circulation of blood proliferating.219 For Hegel, the ascent to ‘Life’ represented the movement towards ‘the concrete synthesis of the living being’: The Idea of Life is concerned with a subject matter so concrete, and if you will, so real, that with it we may seem to have overstepped the domain of logic as it is commonly conceived. Certainly, if logic were to contain

217 218 219

Hegel 2018, p. 42. Bensaïd 2002, p. 215. Bensaïd 2002, p. 143.

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nothing but empty, dead forms of thought, there could be no mention in it at all of such a content as the Idea of Life.220 In Marx, capital is ‘a living organism and therefore a teleological process, that is to say a process that is comprehended by its finality’. What is this finality? Tombazos writes: This finality is the realisation of profit or its own reproduction. More precisely, it reproduces itself thanks to the three vital cycles of industrial capital, which is capital in its fundamental form. The cycle of money-capital, the cycle of productive-capital and the cycle of commodity-capital. These three united and interdependent cycles each denote a property of capital: reproduction in the way of multiplication, reproduction in the sense of self-conservation, assimilation of social needs. They refer at the same time to three fundamental economic rhythms: the rhythm of the production of profit, the rhythm of the social reproduction of value and the rhythm of the expansion of national and international solvent needs. Growth and crises depend on relations of proportionality between these three rhythms. There is nothing that is for capital, that is not present … in these three vital cycles. They therefore designate the totality, they are somehow the rational ‘circumference’ of the totality, which must concretise through its internal differentiations … Capital’s history from a certain viewpoint is teleological, because it is understood through its goal, namely that of the reproduction of capital in an economic, social and international environment in constant mutation.221 ‘The real is living! Capital likewise’, Bensaïd seems to have jumped for joy. Marx’s logic overcomes formalism and the divorce between itself and life. It overcame the calculating virtues of the static-analytic-reflective understanding. It could only do this with the concept of the ‘concrete totality’. For Bensaïd, in ‘Capital as in the Logic, it is only with reproduction that life is concrete and is vitality … “In every other science”, specifies the introduction to the Logic, subject matter and method are distinct’.222 This separation could go on no longer, hence the relevance of Hegel:

220 221 222

Hegel 1969, p. 761. Tombazos 1995. Bensaïd 2002, p. 216.

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With him, what we have is a novel concept of treating things scientifically, in which the laws of thinking are not external to the object being thought, and the movement of thought does not derive from an external process. There are no rules of thinking outside their actual implementation, no method external to its object. This logic is indeed the basis for a theory of historicity. But how can Marx conserve its logical core and, at the same time, reject the philosophy of history that is its reverse side? By overturning the system. With a radically immanent theory of history punctuated by conflict, the logic of the thing is modified in return. The theory of historicity becomes its foundation.223 The distinction between the abstract and the concrete is fundamental if we are to comprehend Hegelian ‘Life’. The abstract and the concrete are philosophical concepts that concern the development of conceptual knowledge – to the concretion of Life. The difference between the abstract and the concrete is not the same as the common-sense difference between an idea and reality: what is in our mind and ‘out there’ before us. Hegel tried to overcome precisely this vulgar distinction. ‘A concrete concept is the combination of many abstractions’, whereas an abstract concept is very poor and unable to tease out the many sidedness of contradictory social phenomena.

21

Conceptual Thought Makes the Transition to Strategic Practice via Critique

Hegel’s challenge to formal thought, and the disenchantments of modernity, in fact is ‘an invitation to cross the security zone of the understanding (instrumental reasoning) to plunge into the search for a knowledge that cannot be reduced to measuring, estimating, describing and calculating relations’.224 This German science of the Concept ‘is not meant to be a narration of happenings but a cognition of what is true in them, and further, on the basis of this cognition, is to comprehend that which, in the narrative, appears as mere happening’.225 We see, with the above discussion, that a formalistic and dead method is inferior to dialectical method that has reached the moment of an open totality of self-reproduction. And importantly, dialectical method cannot be thrown 223 224 225

Bensaïd 2002, p. 219. Bensaïd 2002, p. 218. Hegel 1969, p. 588.

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onto, in an alienated fashion, the immanent development of its subject matter – the profane world of capital to be overthrown. The great Hegelian-Marxist Labriola summed up the demand for a ‘philosophy that is immanent to the things on which it philosophises’, ‘from life to thought, and not from thought to life; this is the realistic process’.226 To this immanent philosophy Bensaïd pays heed. With this inheritance, Marxist theory is an independent whole without need of addition – but it demands theory and engagement, to ‘live a life parallel to its object’, or else conceptual forms would be rigidly severed from their content. Hegel himself places this demand upon philosophy-science when he wrote that ‘True scientific knowledge … demands abandonment to the very life of the object’, to follow its logical necessity.227 Thus for Hegel, This alone is the rational, the rhythm of the organic whole, and it is just as much the knowing of the content as that content itself is the concept and the essence – that is, it is this alone which is the speculative. – The concrete shape which sets itself into movement makes itself into simple determinateness, and it thereby elevates itself to logical form and is in its essentiality. Its concrete existence is only this movement, and it is immediately logical existence. It is therefore unnecessary to apply externally a formalism to the concrete content. That content is in its own self a transition into this formalism, but it ceases to be the latter external formalism because the form is the indigenous coming-to-be of the concrete content itself.228 Critical theory must flow from the historical and profane materialities of the capitalist mode of production and the struggles against it, which requires the logical reconstruction of this object, in its modes of reproduction, through conceptual determinations. According to Bensaïd, by receiving the message of German science, the ‘fracture now ran through the core of philosophy itself: between speculative philosophy (treated as early as the German Ideology as ideology squared) and the philosophy of praxis (which moves towards an “exit from philosophy”)’. This exit is not an epistemological break, as Althusser would have it, that opposes science to ideology; rather, ‘Plunged into history, knowledge of the third type becomes critical theory and strategic thought’. Having become revolutionary theory, ‘from the Paris Manuscripts to Capital, it 226 227 228

Labriola 2010, p. 216. Hegel 2008, p. 45. Hegel 2018, p. 36.

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remains “critical” throughout’.229 Its red thread is the critique of political economy where ‘the unity of theory and practice in opposition to all speculative or dogmatic knowledge’ comes to the forefront. Bensaïd ties the immanentist and specific logics at work in Marx to critique and practice: The critical turn of philosophy leads towards practice, in order to combine the arm of critique with the critique of arms. For on the conceptual battlefield, critique is a double-edged weapon, deployed against the scientistic illusion of attaining reality via the facts, and against the idealist illusion of absorbing reality into its symbolic representations … Critique tests the beginning, the better to loosen the buckle of the system. It shatters the conceptual circle of the greater Logic, which is too nearly closed. It slices through its desperately smooth totality, in order to half-open the field of possibilities. It is not so much a new doctrine as a ‘theoretical stance’, a polemical relation to history, which refuses to fix the intelligibility of the real in the hypostasis of science. Having become critique of political economy, it will be a sort of negative science, irreducible to dogmatic and doctrinaire formulas. Refusing itself the slightest repose, it knows that it will never have the last word, and that it is at best a matter of leading thought to the threshold of the struggle, where it takes strategic flight.230 In order to take thought to the threshold of the struggle, it is necessary that revolutionary critique cripples the antinomies between the part and the whole, subject and object, absolute and relative, singular and universal and theory and practice. Revolutionary theory is not the description of facts; rather, ‘It scans the flickerings of reality and watches out, on the crests of the future, for the shimmering of unfulfilled possibilities’. It is a labour of demystification and de-fetishisation, ‘attuned to the discourse of capital’ where ‘In the first two volumes of Capital, it rips apart the appearances, tears off the masks, unveils the two-faced being of the commodity and labour, penetrates the mysteries of production, and elucidates the metamorphoses of circulation. In the third volume, it finally launches the assault on the mysticism of capital’.231 But, as a revolutionary theory, it confronts the mirages of fetishism without being able to defeat its spells because capital is an alienated social power, turning social facts into natural things. Capital appears as a ‘social power’ whose functionary is the 229 230 231

Bensaïd 2002, p. 221. Bensaïd 2002, pp. 222–3. Bensaïd 2002, pp. 224–5.

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capitalist: ‘a power that no longer stands in any kind of possible relationship to what the work of one individual can create, but an alienated social power which has gained an autonomous position and confronts society as a thing, and as the power that the capitalist has through this thing’. Critique battles against the religiosity of everyday life where ‘the personification of things and the reification of persons’ reigns. Bensaïd articulates the limits of critical theory while deconstructing a notion of fetishism that is reduced to a form of misrepresentation. The twofold structures and operations of reification and commodity fetishism determines the scope and boundaries of critique because they are articulations of social relations. If fetishism happened to be reduced to misrepresentation, then a non-critical science could deliver the truth to a consciousness, beyond the cloak of illusion. Such a conception would be a matter of adjusting minds to the objective structure of the capitalist mode of production. As Bensaïd writes, if fetishism ‘were only a bad image of the real, a good pair of spectacles would suffice to rectify it and exhibit the object as it really is. But the representation of fetishism operates constantly in the mutual illusion of subject and object, which are inextricably linked in the distorting mirror of their relationship’.232 What consequence does Bensaïd draw from this? Well, it follows that a science capable of definitively dispelling false consciousness is not possible; moreover, there can be no master subject who possesses the object in itself for good. Why? Because false consciousness emerges from and is coterminous with the conditions of capitalist production’s automatic reproduction, it is not about ideas that can be dispelled once and for all, so long as the historically existing given – the capitalist mode of production – prevails. Bensaïd explains: As long as the relations generating it survive, alienation can only be contested, not abolished. In a world prey to general commodity fetishism, there is no triumphal exit from ideology through the arch of science. Critique is aware of its own incapacity to possess the truth and speak the truth on truth; its endlessly renewed struggle against the invading undergrowth of madness and myth can never end. It can only lead to the fleeting glades where political events can supervene … The sequel is played out in the struggle, where the arm of critique can no longer dispense with the critique of arms, where theory becomes practice, and thought becomes strategy.233

232 233

Bensaïd 2002, pp. 226–7. Ibid.

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Bensaïd wagers on the possibility of historical transformation; he does however demonstrate the limits of scientific reason as it confronts the singular object of capitalist production. The relations of science and non-science need constant critique, thus Bensaïd’s operation is a materialist one, with a historical grounding; essentially, Bensaïd intervenes into the terrain of the validity of science and ideology, defending the former in the terms of critique, while recognising the structural validity of the latter. The effective conclusion of the relations between science and non-science, and false consciousness more generally, is to be found in a critique mediated by political events capable of transforming history, overturning relations of domination that generate fetishism and alienation and false consciousness.

22

The New Rationality of Post-Newtonian Materialities

One step more abstract compared to the specific logic of the critique of political economy, it could be said that Bensaïd addresses the scientific rationality of Marx’s materialism in a manner that does not fall back to Engels’s Dialectics of Nature, since he is attentive to the scientific breakthroughs of the new physics Engels was necessarily ignorant of; additionally, Bensaïd uses the further development of scientific thought to make explicit the nature of Marx’s nonGalilean and post-Newtonian materialism, or at least the manners in which Marx destabilised the old physical ideal. Bensaïd takes an imperative antihermeneutic step forward, because one unresolved problem of Marxism has been the fact that Engels himself wrote the notes for what would become the Dialectics of Nature at a time when the old physics were about to be undermined and were eventually superseded by Einstein, Planck and Heisenberg. Engels’s thoughts on the materialist dialectic were applicable to nineteenthcentury physics, but not necessarily for the subsequent breakthroughs, meaning a rationality of materialism had to take its starting point from the most advanced sciences of modern bourgeois culture. Alongside this, Bensaïd is focused on the way in which Marx’s ideal of causality undermines the homogenous space and linear time of post-Galilean causality (the Galilean ideal had a strict causal structure) and the scientific breakthroughs that undermined Newtonian physics by making it a special case. The presentation owed much to Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers’s work on chaos theory. Bensaïd was on the lookout for what altered the epistemological base of the sciences, underscoring the role of Darwin, thermodynamics and Marx, then the transformation of an idea of ignorance in the new representation of science that had made probability an intrinsic property of a system. Mechanical

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causality, he notes, underwent a sublation through which it became a constituent feature of the lawfulness of complex structures and the reciprocal relations of part and whole. Decisive, for Bensaïd, is the combination of mechanical causes and probabilistic contingencies in the new representation of reason; it is effectively a logic of disequilibrium. The materialities of such a representation maintain their contradictions. The probabilistic properties of situations and systems meant that Bensaïd dissented from Laplace’s metaphor of the demon, which had expressed the ideal of a unified physics, as well as the notion that scientific thought and determinist causality were identical. Bensaïd effectively makes the case for a Marxian logic of systems that does not match the imaginings of classical predictability; as a thinker of disequilibrium, Marx combined the ‘dynamic stability of cyclical reproduction schemas with the structural instability of the system (technological, social and political mutations)’, though Bensaïd acknowledges that Marx did not have adequate mathematical instruments to think the combination.234 Crisis folds back onto the probabilistic logic since in the new representation, crises are taken to be bifurcations without the option of knowing or foreseeing exactly which determinate possibilities shall prevail and dominate new conjunctures. Bensaïd defends scientific rationality and a materiality of contradiction without positivism. At the level of scientific and materialist reason, Bensaïd understands the manner in which the Galilean world of mathematical language which expressed the homogenous temporal order of causal relations had indeed been disrupted by quantum physics. Bensaïd sees that the new physics caused an epistemological upheaval that had consequences for a thinking of causality – quantum probabilism makes it impossible to ‘organise phenomena in a univocal linear succession’ and the reference points of the Galilean causal representation of the universe. It also had consequences for thinking about contradictory materialities. Three elements constitute the new thinking of materialities. First, in the context of Galilean cause and effect, Bensaïd thinks there was an assumption about the ‘invisible frontier’ – a limit – to knowledge that amounted to the idea that gaps in scientific prediction basically had their origin in an incomplete inventory of initial information, the first given. If this were the case, the accumulation of knowledge about the variables could solve the dilemmas of prediction. Second, with quantum mechanics chance becomes constitutive in a way that cannot be eliminated through the accumulation of knowledge, the result being that only a part of physical reality (a special case) can be captured by classical causality. Third, the probability wave

234

Bensaïd 2002, p. 289.

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makes it necessary to clarify how events can be simultaneously non-arbitrary and unpredictable. For Bensaïd, these three points made for a transition for a rationality of materialities, which revolved (Bensaïd refers to Heisenberg) around a world of probabilities and not a world of facts.235 The reader should acknowledge how Bensaïd’s metaphor of the Messianic has a determinate relationship to scientific breakthroughs and their elaboration, as well as a philosophical reflection on the scientific culture of one’s time, because the metaphor attains its meaning in light of the recognition that objects and practices of measurement are ‘uncontrolled’, the outcome of which is a non-arbitrary chance and aleatory probability.236 Bensaïd maintained, despite the semblance of metaphor, rationality to the detriment of mysticism, reforming the ‘threatened rationality the better to salvage it’.237 In reading Bensaïd, it is thus – this section proves it – necessary to draw a line of demarcation between the messianic metaphor and mythical mysticism. The move also has political effects that are decidedly anti-Stalinist, since the Stalinists claimed to treat history scientifically but did so in a homogenous and linear manner; by contrast, quantum mechanics blurs the distinction between subject and object, and as Bensaïd writes, ‘physicists preceded politicians in observing that the motives for a decision cannot be known in full. Upon examination, the facts altered’.238 Bensaïd paid particular attention to Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences, though he situated it in the constellation of modern bourgeois society’s oscillation between instrumental rationality and the returns of barbaric mythological irrationalism. For Bensaïd, Husserl’s attempt to address the crisis of the European sciences was the most moving effort – as compared to the other works produced in the same constellation by Freud, Carnap and Popper. Two points are worthy of remark about the moving enterprise. First, Husserl’s efforts were part of a larger project of reforming and unifying the scientific paradigm at a particular moment of social-political-moral collapse, as he recognised that the old rationalism-positivism was an archaic conception of science. Husserl is useful as an example because his attempt to reform scientific reason also shows the unresolved conflict between objectivism and subjectivism; thus, though Bensaïd used Husserl as an example of a defence of scientific reason – critical because it is also an implicit anti-Heideggerian move – he remained a symptom of the impasses left over by the Cartesian revolution, i.e. the effort to give sci235 236 237 238

Bensaïd 2002, p. 292. Bensaïd 2002, p. 291. Bensaïd 2002, p. 292. Ibid.

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ence a foundation of certainty. Second, Bensaïd thinks there can be no strictly philosophical-theoretical-scientific solution to the crisis of human civilisation (and the specific case of Nazism and world war). Notwithstanding the fact that the messianic metaphor embraces a necessary rational-intellectual renaissance, it is not reduced to it. Bensaïd has his sights on the implicit antinomies between rationality and irrationality, the former tending in the direction of a universal humanity in becoming, and the latter towards the communitarian spiritual hatred and barbarism, while seeing that in the terms of the bourgeois sciences a resolution must be found in the liberatory practices of historical transformation. At stake for Bensaïd is thus the rationality of materialism; this is key because Bensaïd is practising a materialist philosophical reflection on the scientific developments of his time, and thinking back onto Marx’s critique of political economy with them. To grasp the gist of Bensaïd’s approach is it above all necessary to reinforce that he is concerned with the mixture of dynamically stable and dynamically unstable regimes, their ordered chaos and bifurcations. Part of his materialist reflection has him point to the ‘poetic intuition’ of the atomists of antiquity; this is not a retreat to an outdated scientificphilosophical exposition, instead the stress is on the truthful insights into the nature of atom and void, specifically in relation to the distinction between closed systems (where the end state is determined by initial conditions) and open systems (where there is a permanent exchange of materialities and their encountered environments maintaining themselves in an ‘improbable condition’). Bensaïd’s entire line – and the reason for his use of poetic intuition – is to defend the materialities of open systems in their holistic nature. Bensaïd is thus committed to the emergent nature of systems that pose new problems and require new modes of scientific-conceptual-mathematical thought. The commitment relates importantly to ecological wholes and nature, but it is not reducible to them. Bensaïd is committed to the articulation of the isomorphic plurality of materialities with open systems, which is why his commitment to holism does not contradict his isomorphic orientation. To illustrate this, perhaps we can return to Laplace’s determinism, with which one should consider the twofold impasses of closed systems. On the one hand, Laplace’s closed system comprises of a belief in the causal structure of nature with its ideal of intelligibility, has faith in the capacity of mathematical laws to predict the future and trusts in mechanical reductionism, but open systems shake all of these; on the other hand, not strictly related to Laplace but to another form of closed system, is Carnap’s failure to unify scientific knowledge under the domination of the language of physics, and Bensaïd effectively suggests stressing the iso-

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morphic requirements of domains and discourses of scientific discovery. He writes, ‘Instead of the unified universe posited by classical determinism, there emerges a perspectivalist feuilleté of different levels of organisation, overlapping systems and subsystems, possessing local and regional sets of laws’.239 Bensaïd is making the case for a materialism capable of reasoning with the plurality of specific scientific objects and natural processes that can no longer be arranged into a unified science, which is distinct from his stress on methodological holism. As I have reiterated, and will repeat, Bensaïd is engaged in a materialist philosophical operation – not a hermeneutic one, despite his openness to this form of interpretation as it pertains to the messianic – of making explicit the new rationality of Marx’s critique of political economy in light of chaos theory and the new physics. His thesis is simple: the systematic scientificity of Marx’s Capital, written in the context of scientific breakthroughs and prior to the new physics required the invention of a different rationality specific to its singular object. Importantly, Bensaïd draws the historical and theoretical parallel between classical political economy and the old physics. Locke’s political economy of value had coincided with Newton’s discoveries. Bensaïd writes, ‘To the physical abstraction of space corresponds the economic abstraction of the market, which renders different types of labour and wealth commensurable through the monetary relation. To homogenous, empty physical time corresponds the linear time of circulation and accumulation, whose harmony is interrupted only by fortuitous disruptions and natural calamities’.240 Bensaïd extends the parallel of a homogenous Newtonian physics to the determinist equilibrium of classical and neoclassical ideals of the market to show how critique then disrupts the homogenous space and time of such an idealised abstraction. Bensaïd reveals something crucial about the function of the critique of political economy here with reference to Luxemburg: critique makes visible the uneven ‘turbulent topography’ of spaces shaped by the object of capital. No longer confined to the closed space and time of the old physics and classical economics, the capitalist mode of production resembles an open and non-linear system that is profoundly uneven. With this in mind, Bensaïd is exact about the object of Marx’s science, and effectively, Bensaïd is thinking the aporias of Capital which suggest that Marx’s practice of science could not be adequately captured by the prevailing nineteenth century ‘epistemological terms of reference’ (despite Marx’s relation to

239 240

Bensaïd 2002, p. 300. Bensaïd 2002, p. 301.

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Hegel’s logic of relations).241 This was despite the fact that Marx produced a new representation of his object and was not simply a thinker of the old physics as certain readers suggest. I think Bensaïd makes a key move in his practice of making precise Marx’s critique of political economy, because he suggests that Marx’s problems, obstacles and experimentations need to be resolved by the subsequent development of scientific (and theoretical-philosophical) culture. This does not amount to a supplementation of Marx with new philosophies or sciences, nor does it amount to the anachronistic suggestion that Marx entirely anticipated the developments of the sciences, especially those outside of the critique of political economy; instead, and specifically in relation to Marx’s conceptualisation of the swirling economy and an organisation of time grounding the differential periodicities of the capitalist mode of production, it is about Bensaïd making explicit just how Marx is capable of producing a thought of social relations that ‘exhibit their astonishing choreography’.242

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Capital: A Critique of the Criminal Mode of Production

On a register quite different to the Hegelian background to Marx’s critique of political economy and the novel representation of materiality Bensaïd explored, I now turn to Bensaïd’s pedagogical staging of Capital as a crime novel, before returning to the theme of economic crisis. ‘Capital’, Bensaïd wrote, ‘has the reputation of being a difficult book. However, Marx claimed to have written it for the workers’. Though, for Bensaïd, The truth is between the two: the book is not easy, but readable. And it would enthuse any reader of crime novels. Because it is a crime novel, indeed the very prototype of a crime novel, written at a time when, from Balzac’s A Murky Business to the heroes of Conan Doyle, passing by Poe, Dickens, and Wilkie Collins, the genre matures, to the extent that modern cities develop, where the threads of the culprits are lost, where the criminals blend into the anonymity of the crowd.243 As the arguments of the earlier sections show, Bensaïd emphasised Marx’s search for a beginning and found it in the commodity. This is where the gripping crime fiction begins, with wealth being ‘an immense accumulation of 241 242 243

Bensaïd 2002, p. 304. Bensaïd 2002, p. 305. Bensaïd 2009a, p. 113.

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commodities’. With this ‘inaugural determination’ of wealth, Marx sets upon the journey to break through the modern mystery, ‘the great marvel of money expected to make more money’.244 And at the beginning of wealth, ‘was the criminal extortion of surplus-value, that is to say, theft of forced labour time that is not paid to the worker’. This theft, which is also the foundation of anonymous social murder, is what ‘Sherlock-Marx assisted by Watson-Engels will consecrate the greatest part of his life to’.245 The magnifying glass follows three volumes. I take each in their turn.

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The Scene of the Crime: Theft in Production

If we were to remain at the surface of the marketplace, with its circulations, buyers and sellers, where money and commodities exchange for each other, ‘the mystery of the accumulation of wealth would remain unresolved’. If ‘exchange was equal, the market would be a zero-sum game. Each player would receive the exact counterpart of what each brings’. Some would lose what others gain. Yet, ‘the immense accumulation of commodities incessantly grows. Capital accumulates’.246 Whence comes this growth? There is no answer to this enigma without leaving the marketplace where goods circulate. ‘The detective Marx invites us to go elsewhere’, to discover ‘what happens behind the scenes, or rather underground, in the cellars where the mystery is’. This is a descent into the inferno: Behind the stir of the market, taking place at the surface, there is the tannery, the scene of the crime: the workshop and the factory, where the worker is whipped for surplus-value, where the secret of capitalist accumulation is finally revealed. Amidst the commodities, the worker has a very special one, labour power. It has the fabulous virtue of creating value just by being consumed, an ability to function longer than the time necessary for its own reproduction … The worker who has nothing else to sell but his/her labour power has no choice.247 In the underground hellish workshop, the worker is reduced to ‘personified labour time’, to ‘a carcass of time’ that ‘the employer legally has the right to operate as long as possible’. Scandalously: 244 245 246 247

Bensaïd 2009a, p. 115. Ibid. Ibid. Bensaïd 2009a, p. 117.

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An original crime has thus been committed. Surplus-value has been stolen! If the victim, the worker, is not dead (but sometimes does die: workplace accidents, suicides, depressions, diseases induced by the workplace), he or she remains physically and psychologically mutilated by it. For, in modern manufacturing, ‘it is not only work that is divided, it is the individual him/herself that is fragmented, and transformed into an automatic spring of an exclusive operation. The intellectual powers of production develop one-sidedly because they disappear from all the others. What the fragmented workers lose is concentrated before them in capital’. The consequence is what Marx already called ‘industrial pathology’.248 Marx’s detective work is unlike what came before him, Bensaïd suggests. ‘Ricardo’, Marx wrote in Capital, ‘never concerns himself about the origin of surplus-value. He treats it as a thing inherent in the capitalist mode of production, which mode, in his eyes, is the natural form of social production’.249 Where Ricardo saw a natural form of society, Marx saw a permanent scandal demanding investigation, using his magnifying glass (of critique) to uncover the criminal’s trace. However, Bensaïd specifies, ‘it is not enough to have committed a near perfect crime and rob the victim. It is still necessary to be able to profit from it, and for that, to launder the loot’.250

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Capital Laundering: The Circulation of Capital

According to Bensaïd, the effacement of capital’s past, origins and source is the object of the following two volumes of Capital, ‘the process of circulation and the process of the whole, through which the transformation of surplusvalue into profit is accomplished’. The scene of the first volume was the ‘place of production (the factory, the workshop, the office), the second, the market’. The subject matter of it: no longer uncovers the mystery of the origins of surplus value, but the way in which it circulates in order to return to the hands of men in moneyform. The worker no longer appears as a producer exploited of surplus-

248 249 250

Bensaïd 2009a, p. 119. Marx 2010g, p. 516. Bensaïd 2009a, p. 121.

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labour, but as a seller of his/her labour power and potential purchaser of consumer goods. The capitalist in action plays the first role of the drama here: the financier, the entrepreneur, and the merchant, who are the successive incarnations of capital.251 Throughout the circulation process, capital incessantly changes its costumes. It enters the scene as money form (M), then goes out for a stroll and comes back through the backyard as productive capital (P). There, it takes on the form of machines and raw materials – or constant capital – and wages (variable capital). Then it goes out again to present itself in another form, as commodities (C). It hopes to transform anew with the act of selling itself to take on the form of money capital. In the three figures of the process of circulation, every moment (money, productive capital, commodity) appears successively as a point of departure, an intermediary point and the return to the origin of the cycle. The production process serves as a ‘medium in the circulation process and reciprocally. But, in reality, every industrial capital is engaged in the three cycles simultaneously’. Throughout this process, capital hopes that, ‘through the thread of its metamorphoses, capital has grown’. It hopes for accumulation, where: In the production process (volume one), time is linear. There, it is a question of the struggle over the division of a working day that is divided between necessary labour and surplus labour. In the circulation process (volume two), time is cyclical. It is a case of rotations in the course of which capital travels through the cycles of its transformations: ‘Capital, as valorising value, is not enclosed only in the relations of classes … founded on the existence of labour as waged labour. It is a movement, a cyclical process passing through different phases, which in turn is constituted by three stages. We can therefore conceive it only as a movement and not a stable state’. In fact, circulation establishes a necessary social relation between production and realisation of value. Capital is not a thing but a continuous movement. Just as a cyclist falls if he/she stops pedalling, if capital stops circulating, it will die. Indeed, each of its metamorphoses, each act of sale and purchase, is a perilous leap, because there is no necessary bond between the one and the

251

Ibid.

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other. If the commodity does not find a buyer, if it remains in stock or on the commodity’s rack, the cycle is interrupted. Capital risks a cardiac arrest.252 Circulation is not homogenous. In volume one, ‘what Marx called constant capital (that is to say, factories, machines, raw materials, warehouses) and variable capital (consecrated to the purchase of labour power) intervene as specific determinations of capital in the sphere of production’. Things are different in volume two, where ‘fixed capital (machines and premises that aren’t exhausted in the course of one cycle of production) and circulating capital (materials and wages) intervene as specific determinations in the sphere of circulation’.253 Circulating capital is consumed and renewed at each cycle, whereas fixed capital is only consumed partially and renews itself in spurts. Capital can remain for a long time under its money form, but it cannot be conserved under its perishable form of commodities. Each cycle of individual capitals is interlinked and conditions the others. ‘It is this entanglement that makes up the movement of the whole of social capital’, within which, factors of arrhythmia and discordance manifest themselves in crisis.254

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Handing Out the Loot: The Distribution of Surplus Value

In volume one, ‘surplus-value was stolen. In book two, it is passed from hand to hand. In book three, it is the moment of the distribution of the loot’, Bensaïd continues, A book of ‘capitalist production considered in its totality’, volume three of Capital aroused Engels’s enthusiasm: ‘This book will definitely overthrow all of political economy and will make an enormous racket’ … we reach the end of the intrigue. Progressing from the abstract to the concrete, from the single cycle of an imaginary capital to the movement of the whole, of a multiplicity of capitals, from value to price and profit, the skeleton of capital to its flesh and blood, the composite sketch of the social killer has become more and more precise. It now appears as a living being, unquenchable, with a continuous thirst for new profits.255 252 253 254 255

Bensaïd 2009a, pp. 121–2. Bensaïd 2009a, p. 123. Ibid. Bensaïd 2009a, p. 125.

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At this level of determination, profit is surplus-value that has metamorphosed, which is at the core of the process of capitalist production as a whole. But ‘surplus value is still only profit in potential. It must be realised in order to then be directed to consumption, or accumulation’. Furthermore, values measured in labour time are transformed into prices of production when commodities leave the process of production. These prices are simultaneously equal to, and different from value, both its negation and fulfilment. Likewise, profit is simultaneously, says Marx, surplus-value under another form and another thing than surplus-value.256 The metamorphosis of surplus-value into profit gives the detective clear leads into the whereabouts of the stolen loot. Nevertheless, ‘Disguised as profit, surplus-value actually denies its origin, loses its character, and becomes unrecognisable’. But by uncovering value, surplus-value and the whereabouts of this disguised loot, Marx’s crime saga cracks the enigmas that the hitherto economists could not solve. The hitherto economists concealed the common source of the different revenues of rent, profit and wages. Their common source constitutes the historically specific characteristic of the capitalist mode of production. For these economists, ‘every factor of production corresponds to revenue that is naturally legitimate and equitable: to capital, profit; to land, ground-rent; labour, wages’. ‘This’, Marx wrote, ‘is the trinity formula which comprises all the secrets of the social production process’, capital, land and labour.257

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The Theory of Economic Crisis

Bensaïd analysed Marx’s theory of economic crisis in his essay The Time of Crises and Cherries. The title had its extra-economic reasons. ‘Each year, on the first Sunday of May, the family would stand up round the table and sing “Le Temps des cerises”, bringing a lump to everyone’s throat’, Bensaïd recollected in his memoirs.258 I discuss Bensaïd’s analysis here, while drawing attention to the affinities between the essay and Tombazos’s work on the categories of time in Marx, specifically their implications for a theory of crisis. 256 257 258

Bensaïd 2009a, p. 127. Marx 2010h, p. 801. Bensaïd 2013, p. 21. Complementary discussions of crises are to be found in Marx mode d’emploi and Les Crises du capitalisme.

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Crises take place under capitalist mode of production because the valorisation of capital tends to face ever-growing obstacles. These obstacles are immanent to the logic of capital. As tendencies of capitalist production, they ‘lead to ever deeper and more acute crises’. In this immanent sense, Tombazos holds, ‘“The true barrier to capitalist production is capital itself”, in other words, capital as a contradictory and specific articulation of a logical temporality (a system of determinations) and social history grows ever more problematic and fragile’.259 This language complements Bensaïd’s logical conceptualisation of crisis (and classes), in which ‘Marx produces their determination at different logical moments, the process of production, circulation and the reproduction of capital. This isn’t a coherent and finished positive theory, but a negative theory, proceeding through successive approximations’.260 Capital, ‘the unity of production and circulation, is not simply the “sum” of the determinations belonging to these two spheres. The links that unite them are internal and organic, conceptual’. The organic time of capital ‘is that point where the time of production and the time of circulation unite without becoming identical, producing in this way the concrete and stable, phenomenal, forms of capital’. Effectively, for Bensaïd, capital as an Idea is the correspondence of a logical organisation of time – obeying its own immanent criteria – with historical time. This correspondence is a permanent relation of tension and conflict, a relation of sometimes hidden and sometimes evident contradiction. Crises, particularly structural crises, are violent moments of confrontation between antagonistic forces. They open up various possibilities, among which are those of a new ‘peace’ between the ‘subjective side’ and the ‘objective side’ of capital. This is why capitalism is a coherent system of determinations, at the same time completed and open, dynamic and in movement. Peace, of which we have just spoken, is what can eventually be called ‘regulation’.261 For Tombazos, social capital – society’s abstract labour – is a subject-object, ‘that reproduces itself as the identity of the identity (abstract labour) and the non-identity (concrete labour)’. This social capital is ‘ “in itself” in society’s money capital, since only in this form does it exist in an immediate way’. To reproduce itself, capital must pass through a series of concrete labours that are distinct and particular. Defining itself through a ‘triple autonomous movement’, social capital ‘is a movement of valorisation, conservation and autocritique/self-control of value’. The first refers to the rate of exploitation of the

259 260 261

Tombazos 2014, p. 286. Bensaïd 1995, p. 41. Tombazos 2014, p. 300.

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working-class and the organic composition of capital, for the ‘rate of valorisation of social capital depends on these’. The second movement conserves the total abstract labour time of society. The third movement ‘expresses both the valorisation and the conservation of value, inseparable from each other and dependent on solvent social needs, that is, on favourable or unfavourable market conditions’. For Tombazos, these interwoven processes ‘enable us to interpret the organisation of capital as a rich and complex organisation of rhythms. As Marx puts it, the three functional forms act simultaneously, but their simultaneity is the work of their succession’. Space and time play a role in these circuits and at ‘each moment certain proportions must be respected’. On the one hand, these processes ‘reflect the smooth or problematic unfolding of the three processes’, because social capital has to ‘be valorised, reproduce itself (in terms of the living labour spent during certain given time periods), and find the necessary sales markets for the realisation of value’. These processes form an organic totality, but ‘there is nothing more contradictory than this totality’, because the ‘higher the rate of valorisation of social capital, the more the reproduction of capital becomes difficult and sales markets become scarce. If, however, the rate of valorisation is too weak, less capital is invested and sales markets are less abundant’. Consequently: On the basis of his analysis of capital as the unity of these three cycles, Marx opens the way for a rich explanation of crises. This explanation is not confined to the specific pattern in which unfolded the crises of overproduction of Marx’s time. The reversal of the economic conjuncture can result from various causes, and the chain of cause and effect can vary in time and space. Capital thus conceived is an autonomous organisation of rhythms, and the crisis of the social organism is a kind of ‘arrhythmia’, that is, a momentary disturbance of the system’s coherence. This way of looking at things enables us to go beyond the usual static representations of the equilibrium.262 As is clear from other sections of this chapter, Capital is not a complete theory of historically existing capitalism, ‘instead, it is a coherent system of determinations, a system capable of evolution, self-development and concretely materialising time and again in historical space and time, without losing its internal coherence’. We can view the problem from another angle still following Tombazos’s reading:

262

Tombazos 2014, pp. 143–5.

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The conditions for immediate exploitation and for the realisation of that exploitation are not identical. Not only are they separate in time and space, they are also separate in theory. The former is restricted only by the society’s productive forces, the latter by the proportionality between the different branches of production and by the society’s power of consumption.263 Crises are possible because production and circulation are ‘organically linked and dependent on heterogeneous circumstance. Every crisis – periodical or structural – stems from this contradictory unity, from this united and separated couple, when the separation becomes relatively predominant’.264 Crucially, the parallel between Tombazos’s reading of Marx and Bensaïd’s presentation of crises rests on their interpretation of the conceptual-temporal organisation of theory. Tombazos’s point that ‘We are not attempting to establish a correspondence between the theory of capital and the history of crisis, but rather to examine the conceptual link between the totality-capital and historical time’, fully applies to Bensaïd’s The Time of Crises and Cherries (but Bensaïd did tie this theory to history in Crises d’hier et d’aujourd’hui).265 Simply put, Bensaïd saw that ‘In Volume One, the first conceptual determination resides in the disjunction between the sphere of production and that of circulation. Book Two enriches this by a specific determination of the process of circulation: the disjunction between rhythms of fixed capital rotation and circulating capital. Book Three introduces a much more concrete determination by linking the crisis to the tendency for the rate of profit to fall’.266 The last determination conserves the preceding two determinations. Marx’s theory of crisis searched ‘for the reasons for irrationality, the logic of absurdity’. Compelled by the urgency of the American economic crisis of 1857, Marx undertook to grasp crisis. According to Bensaïd, Marx’s understanding of economic crisis appears alongside the metaphor of madness, a madness that dominates the lives of people. The schizophrenic tendencies of capitalism are fully manifest in moments of crisis, where ‘the apparent unity of the commodity is “split”. Use-value and exchange-value are divorced and are autonomised from one another’. The economy becomes delirious, ‘ “alienated”, as an autonomous sphere that has become uncontrollable’. Why does this moment of madness break out? Bensaïd explained, 263 264 265 266

Quoted from Tombazos 2014, p. 274. Ibid. Tombazos 2014, p. 275. Bensaïd 1995, p. 53.

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The condition of possibility for crises is written into the double-dealing of the commodity. Like every good-hearted bourgeois, a double life is led. Inwardly, it is materialised abstract labour. Outwardly, the result of a concrete determinate labour. To compare itself with other amounts of labour, it ‘first has to be transposed into labour time, into something qualitatively different from itself’. This ‘double life’ bears within it the permanent risk of scission.267 It risks differentiating itself until a full-blown contradiction between the particular nature of the commodity as a product – use-value – and its universal nature as exchange-value explodes. The crisis of 1857 evidenced the ‘divorce between use-value and exchange value expressed in money’. It is possible ‘that the commodity can no more be “equated with its universal form, money”. The discord is thus set in between production and circulation’, where purchase and sale take on forms of existence that are spatially and temporally distinct from one another, indifferent to each other’s plight. The crisis ‘reveals and brings to its climax this identarian malaise. The search for a lost identity becomes a fuite en avant, a succession of excruciating separations and ephemeral reunions’.268 A scission never occurs alone and in volume three of Capital Marx orders these arrhythmic outbursts that generalised commodity exchange generates. ‘During crises – after the moment of panic – during the standstill of industry, money is immobilised in the hands of bankers, bill brokers, etc.; and just as the stag cries out for fresh water, money cries out for a field of employment where it may be realised as capital’.269 Yet the scission between use and exchange value threatens the ability for commodities to become money capital. It is the perilous leap of capital from the commodity to the money form that can be deadly. The seed of crisis is present in the money form. It is value that has become autonomous and ‘this autonomy engenders the illusion that money can get knocked up through parthenogenesis, increasing in the credit circuit without being impregnated in its passage through the production process’.270 So that capital can continue to live on, without the risk of a breakdown, circulation is the necessary condition and moment of the entire motion. Capitalism needs this form of exchange. So that it can renew itself, the entire product must be transformed into money. This is unlike previous modes of

267 268 269 270

Bensaïd 2009b, pp. 4–5. Bensaïd 2009b, p. 6. Marx 1973, p. 621. Bensaïd 2009b, p. 6.

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production where exchange did not concern production in its totality but only with more marginal production and luxury products. For a product to have an exchange value means that ‘exchange value obtains a separate existence, in isolation from the product’. This exchange value is money and in ‘the form of money all properties of the commodity as exchange value appear as an object distinct from it, as a form of social existence separated from the natural existence of the commodity’. It is not possible to efface the contradictions that come from the existence of money. It is also ‘impossible to abolish money itself as long as exchange value remains the social form of products. It is necessary to see this clearly to avoid setting impossible tasks, and to know the limits within which monetary reforms and transformations of circulation are able to give a new shape to the relations of production and to the social relations which rest on the latter’.271 Here, ‘within bourgeois society, the society that rests on exchange value, there arise relations of circulation as well as of production which are so many mines to explode it’.272 Under capitalist commodity production, the value of things turns their back on their useful nature. When production and circulation are out of order, capitalist order must be re-established through force and violence and large-scale state intervention. This is often the only way to bring moments that are separate from one another – production and realisation – back into unity. This capitalist management is not a social harmony: in the real development of money there are contradictions which are unpleasant for the apologetics of bourgeois common sense, and must be covered up. In so far as purchase and sale, the two essential moments of circulation, are indifferent to one another and separated in place and time, they by no means need to coincide. Their indifference can develop into fortification and apparent independence of the one against the other. But insofar as they are both essential moments of a single whole, there must come a moment when the independent form is violently broken and when the inner unity is established externally through a violent explosion. Thus already in the quality of money as a medium in the splitting of exchange into two acts, there lies germ of crises, or at least their possibility, which cannot be realised, except where the fundamental preconditions of classically developed, conceptually adequate circulation are present.273 271 272 273

Marx 1973, p. 145. Marx 1973, p. 159. Marx 1973, p. 198.

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The metamorphoses of money, productive capital and commodities are differentiated moments, the circuit of which can break down. It is specific to the capitalist mode of production, whereby production is not oriented to immediate human need, but to production for profit and creditworthy demand. For commodity production, to realise the surplus-value incorporated in it, commodities must necessarily be transformed into money but money does not necessarily have to be transformed into commodities. This is why there can be a rupture between purchase and sale. In its primary form and possibility, the crisis is the transformation of the commodity itself, the disjunction between purchase and sale. The fact remains that, to realise surplus-value, it is necessary to sell. Yet overproduction is a permanent possibility under capitalism. This overproduction has nothing to do with the saturation of social needs. It is relative to the logic of the accumulation of capital. Capital carries crises in its cycles of self-reproduction. According to Bensaïd, Marx demonstrated this, though differently in the Grundrisse and Capital. Bensaïd took it that ‘in the 1857–58 manuscripts, the crisis intervened in a triple manner: empirically, through the American recession; through the separation of purchase and sale that set the formal conditions for its possibility; finally, metaphorically, as the madness and distress of the scission’.274 At this point, the theory of crisis still suffered from trial and error while Marx was drawing up his initial plans for his critique of political economy. With Capital, crisis theory finds a new level of coherence. Consistent with his insistence on the specific logic of Capital, Bensaïd did not think one could find a complete theory of crises in either Volume One or Two, because Marx did not break his ascent from the abstract to the concrete, the dialectic of possibility and actuality and structure and history. This was necessary because ‘Form determines possibility, but a possibility is not a cause. The specific cause comes out of the concrete historical and political determinations of struggle’.275 As I mentioned above, Marx’s theory of crisis is opposed to theories of equilibrium. Jean-Baptiste Say was a proponent of such nonsense, taking overproduction to be impossible because of the immediate identity between supply and demand. In a metaphysical leap, Say asserted that there exists an equilibrium between sellers and buyers whereby supply constitutes demand. For Say’s Law, equilibrium between purchase and sale, supply and demand, is assured because every time someone sells a commodity, someone else buys it. Yet, Say’s

274 275

Bensaïd 2009b, p. 14. Bensaïd 1995, p. 46.

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Law misses the point. Money is used to exchange goods on the market. Nothing guarantees that the seller will buy something else immediately. Money measures value between goods that are exchanged, but it also stores value. A capitalist or a consumer can hoard money instead of spending it. If money is not being spent, the goods that have been produced will not be sold. Thus ‘Nothing can be more childish than the dogma that because every sale is a purchase, and every purchase a sale, therefore the circulation of commodities necessarily implies an equilibrium of sales and purchases’, railed Marx against the dogma of equilibrium. Sale and purchase ‘constitute one identical act, an exchange between a commodity-owner and an owner of money’ and this act is carried out by two persons ‘as opposed to each other as the two poles of a magnet’. If a single person purchases and sells, ‘they form two distinct acts’, Marx claims, and ‘the identity of sale and purchase implies that the commodity is useless, if, on being thrown into the alchemistical retort of circulation, it does not come out again in the shape of money; if, in other words, it cannot be sold by its owner, and therefore be bought by the owner of the money’.276 The life of the commodity and its transformation ‘is henceforth suspended, pegged to the desires and caprices of its potential purchaser’, this suspension risks asphyxiation. This asphyxiation means that the ‘disjunction and asymmetry between the act of buying and the act of selling is not a factor of equilibrium but dynamic disequilibrium’. Bensaïd pointed out that, at this point in Capital, we see the ‘concept of crisis intervene’ for the first time, ‘not in order to evoke empirical crises, but as a logical consequence of the “intimate bond” and contradiction between disjointed acts’.277 According to Marx: If the interval in time between the two complementary phases of the complete metamorphosis of a commodity become too great, if the split between the sale and the purchase become too pronounced, the intimate connexion between them, their oneness, asserts itself by producing – a crisis. The antithesis, use value and value; the contradictions that private labour is bound to manifest itself as direct social labour, that a particularised concrete kind of labour has to pass for abstract human labour; the contradiction between the personification of objects and the representation of persons by things; all these antitheses and contradictions, which are immanent in commodities, assert themselves, and develop their modes of motion, in the antithetical phases of the meta-

276 277

Marx 2010g, p. 123. Bensaïd 2009b, p. 15.

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morphosis of a commodity. These modes therefore imply the possibility, and no more than the possibility, of crises. The conversion of this mere possibility into a reality is the result of a long series of relations, that, from our present standpoint of simple circulation, have as yet no existence.278 This problem reappears in the chapter the General Law of Capitalist Accumulation where according to Marx the accumulation of capital originally appears ‘as its quantitative extension only’. Beyond a mere change in quantity, the accumulation of capital ‘is effected … under a progressive qualitative change in its composition, under a constant increase of its constant, at the expense of its variable constituent’.279 Constant capital and variable capital are key concepts within the first volume of Capital. The organic composition of capital is a crucial concept with a fundamental role in the subsequent determinations for the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. And the chapter on the General Law of Capitalist Accumulation points to another aspect of crisis theory – the industrial cycle. Marx reminded us that ‘It will be remembered that the year 1857 brought one of the great crises with which the industrial cycle periodically ends’.280 In his afterword to the second German edition of Capital, Marx succinctly demonstrated the importance of the periodic cycle in his work by stating ‘The contradictions inherent in the movement of capitalist society impress themselves upon the practical bourgeois most strikingly in the changes of the periodic cycle, through which modern industry runs, and whose crowning point is the universal crisis’: As the heavenly bodies, once thrown into a certain definite motion, always repeat this, so is it with social production as soon once it is thrown into this movement of alternate expansion and contraction. Effects, in their turn, become causes, and the varying accidents of the whole process, which always reproduces its own conditions, take on the form of periodicity. When this periodicity is once consolidated, even Political Economy then sees that the production of a relative surplus population – i.e. surplus with regard to the average needs of the self-expansion of capital – is a necessary condition of modern industry.281

278 279 280 281

Marx 2010g, pp. 123–4. Marx 2010g, p. 632. Marx 2010g, p. 660. Marx 2010g, pp. 627–8.

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So, on Bensaïd’s reconstruction of Marx’s negative theory of crisis, three elements are introduced for crisis theory – the logical possibility of crisis, the concepts of constant and variable capital then an outline of the industrial cycle – in the first volume of Capital. In Volume Two, throughout the circulation process, ‘Marx marks the stations of the commodity’s suffering in the process of circulation. He introduces new determinations’, notably fixed capital and circulating capital and their uneven rhythm of renewal. Marx also ‘draws the consequences from the discontinuity between production and circulation’, whereby it is not guaranteed that the process of circulation will return to itself uninterrupted. That means that it is not guaranteed that capital, as the self-expansion of value,282 can go on smoothly without disturbance. Capital’s leap from the commodity form to money is always a perilous one, as Bensaïd liked to say, because the spectre of crisis haunts this perilous leap. In relation to the reproduction of the capitalist mode of production taken as a whole, Marx demonstrates how the formation of capital into diverse capitals, industrial, commercial and banking capital, can temporarily shield the growing disproportion between expanded reproduction and final demand. A crisis can be temporarily deferred by finance capital, but it cannot definitively be avoided. The crisis cannot be warded off infinitely. Capital cannot prosper indefinitely on credit because credit is not the engine of the system – production is. Finally, the tendency for the rate of profit to fall arises from capitalist accumulation; it is the most important law of modern political economy, constituting the innermost barrier to capitalist accumulation. ‘Simple as this law appears from the foregoing statements, all of political economy has so far had little success in discovering it’. Throughout the coherent logical course that Marx took to reach Volume Three of Capital, he was able to solve the problem that haunted classical political economy. The tendency for the rate of profit to fall is the social barrier that capitalist accumulation hits. Bensaïd wrote that the counteracting tendencies have ‘nourished many controversies’ about this law and as a result of the counteracting tendencies ‘it seems, in fact, to be able to impose itself only through its own negations’. Capital can increase the intensity of exploitation and reduce the cost of labour power, or gain from cheapening constant capital. Capitalists can also chase investments overseas or invest more in the military industrial complex or innovative spheres of investment. Each of these possibilities can reduce the growth in the organic composition of capital,

282

Bensaïd 2009b, p. 17.

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thus counteracting the fall of the profit rate. Hence, the ‘law acts only as a tendency’, and ‘it is only under certain circumstances and only after long periods of time that its effects become strikingly pronounced’. Yet, with the tendency for the rate of profit to fall, Marx’s reader arrives at the most concrete determination of his negative theory of crisis. For Bensaïd, it is in the third volume that the ‘separation of buying and selling that constitutes the general-formal condition of crises is concretely interpreted by the fact that the capacity for solvent consumption enters into contradiction with the search for maximum profit’.283 As Bensaïd highlights, this law is not a mechanical or physical law but a social law affected by multiple variables, like social struggles with an uncertain outcome, relations of social force and unstable political situations. It is in constant self-contradiction. The resultant crises do not constitute the absolute limits of production and the consumption of social wealth, but rather contradictions relative to a specific mode of production, where the capital relation is the biggest barrier to capital itself. Marx never spoke of a ‘final crisis’ since capitalism continually seeks to overcome its immanent barriers. By doing so, it staggers on at the cost of greater instability and hardship. None of this implies final the automatic crisis of the capitalist system. These crises are inevitable but not insurmountable. The question is to know at what price and on the back of whom they may be resolved. If Marx was correct, then the solution does not rest in the critique of political economy but in the class struggle and its social and political actors. It is a question of politics and the event: a question of cherries and political power.

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Bensaïd’s Reconstruction of Marx’s Revolutionary Politics

When Bensaïd read Marx’s and Engels’s political-conjunctural writings, he did so in a way that prioritised the present of revolutionary political reconstruction. The outcome of Bensaïd’s reading of Marx’s and Engels’s politics was to discover a set of authors who thought the invention of the unknown in history; this meant that Marx and Engels were political thinkers of the emergence of historical novelties in the direction of liberation. Bensaïd, of course, dissented against those readings of Marx that accused him of being an implacable economic determinist. More fundamentally, Bensaïd polemicised against the attempt to turn Marx into an a-political thinker:

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Bensaïd 2009b, pp. 25–6.

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Not only are Marx and Engels reproached as flat economic determinists, but some go as far as deploring the fact that there is a pure and simple absence of political thought in them. If one means there is no theory in Marx of parliamentary democracy and political philosophy in the way the ‘political sciences’ and their institutes conceive of it, this is a fact. And rightly so. Marx is a subtle – and underrated – chronicler of English parliamentary life, but parliamentary regimes hardly existed in Europe at the time. In contrast, we find in him a critique of State reason that goes hand in hand with his critique of political economy. Through his critique of the Hegelian state, he is indeed on the lookout for a politics of the oppressed, that is to say, in the way in which they are excluded or kept away from the sphere of the state, in their daily struggles and their own politics. A politics of the event, which rips apart the veil of social reproduction, of which wars and revolutions are the extreme forms.284 Whether a result of wilful malice or a dissatisfaction of another sort, most of the time, this charge is made through sheer ignorance of Marx’s and Engels’s political and strategic writings – The Class Struggles in France, the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and The Civil War in France. Engels himself was a prolific strategic writer, putting his pen to Po and Rhine, Savoy, Nice and the Rhine or The Austro-Prussian War of 1866. Trotsky said of Engels’s war writings that he ‘injected no abstract doctrine into the domain of the science of war from without and did not set up any tactical recipes, newly-discovered by himself, as universal criteria’.285 So, Marx’s and Engels’s political texts were written under the condition of wars and revolutions. They are thinkers of struggle. They are the other side of Marx’s (and Engels’s) critique of modernity, because another conception of politics, representation, the state and democracy take shape in their content. This politics of the oppressed is not a mechanical issue, since Marx shows himself to be a dazzling analyst of conjunctures and a virtuoso of politics, not as the simple reflection or effect of social and economic determinations, but as an art of mediations. The relations of force and the historic role of individuals are deciphered like the symptoms of the unconscious in Freud, through a play of displacements and con-

284 285

Bensaïd 2008c, p. 13. Trotsky 1924.

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densations of slips and dreams. Political action is never reduced to a flat translation of a historical logic or a fulfilment of a destiny set in advance. The incertitude of the event that may be born, of an incident, a slip or an impromptu detail has its role to play … Every revolution had its own: a singular injustice, a scandal or a provocation. The attempt to disarm the people of Belleville in 1871 gave birth to the Paris Commune.286 As I discussed in the chapter on Lenin and then on Benjamin, when an event erupts, it breaks the ordinary course of work and days. The ordinary course of work and days is a monotonous repetition, a time without events, the empty time of the clock and the calendar, ‘the eternal return of hours and seasons’. The political struggle has its own temporality, its own cycles and its own rhythms ‘that are not necessarily fixed to those of the economy’. Between the ‘political and the social, there is a play, where the symbolic and the imaginary have their part’. Politics is the art of mediation; it is also ‘an art of contretemps and of the favourable moment’. According to Bensaïd, it is a ‘question of the discordance of political, social and symbolic time’, in which political deliberation is a means to condense, rationally understand and correct, in order to direct, the clashes of temporality, wagering on a liberated humanity in becoming.287

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Revolutionary Contretemps

An event rarely erupts on time. Too early and too late simultaneously, Engels grasped their discordance in a letter to Kautsky: ‘What they [the plebeian “fraternité”] wanted no one could say until, long after the fall of the Commune, Babeuf gave it definite form. If the Commune with its aspirations to fraternity came too soon, Babeuf for his part came too late’.288 Between the no-longer and the not-yet, what is necessary and what is possible do not always join. ‘This’, Bensaïd wrote, ‘is the tragic lot of revolutions’. Marx was aware of this when he said, ‘The revolution may come sooner than we would like. Nothing could be worse than the revolutionaries having to provide bread’. Engels hoped that critical communist literature would facilitate an unpicking of the threads of revolutionary tragedies and allow for an orientation within the labyrinths of history, so that tragedies would not be in vain. Every situation 286 287 288

Bensaïd 2008c, p. 14. Bensaïd 2008c, pp. 15–16. Engels letter 20 June 1887 to Karl Kautsky.

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presents an entanglement of factors following from different temporalities. A revolution is a process where different temporalities clash. ‘The dead holds the living in his grasp’, Marx wrote of contretemps, because Alongside of modern evils, a whole series of inherited evils oppress us, arising from the passive survival of antiquated modes of production, with their inevitable train of social and political anachronisms. We suffer not only from the living, but from the dead. Le mort saisit le vif!289 Tying together an ensemble of disparate determinations and combining discordant timescales, revolutions straddle yesterday’s tasks with those of today; this is one reason why they are inconsistent, propitious to transfigurations and metamorphoses, irreducible to a simple definition, bourgeois or proletarian, social or national. In the New York Daily Tribune, Marx wrote: The name under which a revolution is ushered in is never that borne on the banner on the day of triumph. To hold out any chances of success, revolutionary movements must, in modern society, borrow their colours, at the beginning, from those elements of the people which, although opposed to the existing government, are quite in harmony with existing society. In one word, revolutions must receive their tickets of admission to the official stage from the ruling classes themselves.290 Revolutions never come on time. Tragedy lurks in the divorce between the necessary and the possible. Names like Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht are testaments to this discord. Importantly, for Bensaïd, even though revolutions are not pre-determined, yet are indeed tragic, they ‘nevertheless remain intelligible’. What is more, to grasp the past’s intelligibility it was necessary to radically reverse the relations between history and politics, in which the past is to be understood with political categories, because politics attains primacy over history. The present is not a simple chain in the mechanical sequence of time. It is an exemplar of the rhythmic and broken time of politics, the time of action and decision. Politics is precisely this art of the present and contretemps, of the conjuncture and the favourable moment. It is the opposite to the religious miracle which comes from nothing or pure divine will; revolutions have their reasons. But they emerge where and when they are least expec-

289 290

Marx 2010g, p. 9. Marx 1857.

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ted. Necessarily untimely, they reserve their effect for surprise. At the risk of making their own actors destitute and forcing them play a role against themselves. Revolutions are the extreme examples of a non-linear temporality that is full of knots, in which the tasks of the past, present and future overlap. The revolutionary events of 1848 split the people in two. In his History of the French Revolution, Michelet wrote that the obscure germ of the unknown revolution had matured. He saw it in the Parisian sans-culotterie in 1793, ‘the classic republicans had after them a spectre that marched quickly and gained momentum: the romantic republicanism of the hundred heads … what we call today, socialism’. It is this spectre that haunted Europe on the eve of the 1848 revolutions.291 When it erupted ‘the spectre took shape’. The defeat of the June insurrection, ‘the most colossal event in the history of European civil wars’, had prepared the ‘the ground on which the bourgeois republic could be founded and built up, but it had shown at the same time that in Europe the questions at issue are other than that of “republic or monarchy”. It had revealed that here bourgeois republic signifies the unlimited despotism of one class over other classes’.292 The bourgeoisie no longer had a king; the form of its reign was the republic. ‘Here, in the bourgeois republic, which bore neither the name Bourbon nor the name Orleans, but the name Capital, they had found the form of state in which they could rule conjointly’ warding off the red scare of the social republic.293 In these bloody June Days, ‘the spectre as announced in the Communist Manifesto continued to haunt “the subsequent acts of the drama like a ghost”’.294 Blanqui recognised the importance of the June event. After the June Days, it was necessary for the socialists to distinguish themselves from the simple bourgeois republicans who wanted to ‘recommence February, no further’.295 It was the Republic with Napoleon as its presiding figure in which the fractions of the bourgeoisie could exercise the terrorism of their class domination. And when Engels returned to the June events, he acknowledged that ‘what was then necessary to know about the social republic, “the workers did not know yet”’. Bensaïd thus claimed that, following from this, the ‘idea and the word were in advance of the thing. It would be necessary for this spectral republic to take

291 292 293 294 295

Quoted from Bensaïd 2008c, p. 21. Marx 2010d, p. 111. Marx 2010d, p. 120. Bensaïd 2008c, p. 19. Ibid.

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shape, through the long apprenticeship of the real movement nourished by industrial growth and Victorian globalisation and, above all, the anonymous invention of the Commune by the people of insurgent Paris would be necessary’.296 According to Bensaïd, Marx and Engels began to take the necessary lessons from the June events, amounting to the birth of the revolution in permanence. This strategy invokes the name of Blanqui. Marx wrote that the ‘proletariat is turning more and more to revolutionary Socialism, to that Communism to which the bourgeoisie itself has given the name of Blanquism. This socialism is the declaration of the permanence of the revolution’, a new battle cry of the workers.297 Bensaïd explained that this was ‘an enigmatic slogan’, that ties the act and the process, the instant and the duration, event and history. It ‘lays out the dialectical specificity of political temporality’.298

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The Time and Space of Permanent Revolution

The revolution was not only permanent in time but also in space. Politics has its own rhythms, in which hours are worth days and days are worth months, but it also has its own places and spaces. Bensaïd articulated the spatial emergence of revolution, writing that from the Communist Manifesto onwards, ‘the spectre of communism was no longer content to haunt France or Germany. It haunted Europe’. Europe, after the French Revolution, is, a fortiori, the ‘theatre of operations’, in which ‘Marx and Engels did not stop thinking of politics in this continental scale’. Engels was able to see ‘with a visionary capacity’, ‘as lucid as it was icy’ when he wrote of the transformations of war.299 The permanent revolution ‘has a European dimension at the outset’, in which the dialectical relation between war and revolution is locked into a continental perspective. Bensaïd explained that within ‘the national territories are the moving and partial battlefields of civil war … until the crushing of the German, Hungarian and Italian revolutions between 1918 and 1923, European revolutionaries, beginning with the Bolsheviks, had in fact conceived of their action along this European dimension of strategic space’.300 ‘This is the conclusion that Marx drew’, in the Class Struggle in France, where he wrote:

296 297 298 299 300

Bensaïd 2008c, p. 20. Quoted from ibid. Ibid. Bensaïd 2008c, pp. 22–3. Bensaïd 2008c, p. 24.

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[W]ith the victories of the Holy Alliance, Europe has taken on a form that makes every fresh proletarian upheaval in France directly coincide with a world war. The new French revolution is forced to leave its national soil forthwith and conquer the European terrain, on which alone the social revolution of the nineteenth century can be accomplished … Thus only the June defeat has created all the conditions under which France can seize the initiative of the European revolution. Only after being dipped in the blood of the June insurgents did the tricolour become the flag of the European revolution – the red flag!301 ‘Modern revolutions’, so Bensaïd thinks, ‘have a logic of civil war, in which the protagonists and stakes inevitably overflow borders’. And, within revolutionary upheavals, Engels immediately grasped ‘at what point the civil class war reveals a theological character’, the moment ‘the bourgeoisie claims that the workers are not enemies that must be defeated but enemies of society that need to be exterminated’.302 On this conception, humanity remains intact only so long as private property and the modern bourgeois does. Marx captured this logic too, writing: ‘During the June days all classes and parties had united in the party of Order against the proletarian class as the party of anarchy, of socialism, of communism’. The party of Order ‘“saved” society from “the enemies of society”’. They had given out the watchwords of the old society, ‘property, family, religion, order’, to their army as passwords and had proclaimed to the counterrevolutionary crusaders: ‘In this sign thou shall conquer! Society is saved just as often as the circle of its rulers contracts, as a more exclusive interest is maintained against a wider one’.303 The proletariat is no longer a simple enemy in a classical war but ‘the incarnation of absolute evil, a threat to the human race’. The civil war then becomes a holy war ‘in which the ruling class arrogates to itself the monopoly on humanity, civilisation, the human race itself, a logic verified many times by the Russian, German, Spanish and Chilean civil wars’.304 Marx and Engels thought the revolutionary civil war could not be unhooked from the transformations taking place on the European continent and beyond, and in Germany – in its patchwork of small states – the struggle between the working class and bourgeoisie had begun before the bourgeoisie had conquered political power for itself. ‘This is why’, Bensaïd pointed out, ‘the internal 301 302 303 304

Marx 2010c, p. 70. Bensaïd 2008c, p. 26. Marx 2010d, pp. 111–12. Bensaïd 2008c, p. 26.

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dynamic of the class struggle in Germany goes through the mediation of war from the outside’. The French-German war of 1870 created favourable conditions ‘from its beginning of German unity and, as a consequence, the unification of the German proletariat beyond the fragmentation of small states and principalities that enclosed it in the stupidity of their closed horizon’.305 The transformations of war are concrete questions that cannot be separated from the historical development in which they take place. There is no abstract principle that can be established beyond the historical circumstances and the balance of class forces. In Germany, at the time of the 1848 upheavals, it was clear to Marx that democracy could not be victorious and unite the nation ‘so long as the reactionary hand of backward Russia hung over her’. In fact, he called for an offensive war against Russia. The comparison between wars in the nineteenth century and those in the twentieth is a great example of the transformation of war: in the nineteenth century they were national wars, which promoted the creation of national states. The national wars of the nineteenth century played a role in destroying feudal society and the emergence and consolidation of the modern bourgeois nation state was a necessary phase in the development of capital. Wars from the French Revolution until the Italian and Prussian took this form. War in the twentieth century took the form of an imperialist war; therefore, national independence in the metropolis of the most advanced capitalist nations could not be unequivocably called progressive. Beyond the passive revolution, the transformations of war and the global system cannot be separated from social revolution: Just as the revolution of the Commune rose up from war, the October Revolution from the First World War and from the Second the Chinese Revolution, Greek, Vietnamese and Yugoslav Partisans … But at what price! On a mass of corpses and ruins more and more terrifying, whose weight will weigh heavier and heavier on the life and brains of the survivors. To the point of transforming dreams of emancipation into nightmares.306 If one takes the political writings of Marx and Engels as they are presented under the condition of wars and revolutions, the reader is able to appreciate their theatre of strategic operations, grasping the articulations of war and revolution, which is decisive for our time.

305 306

Bensaïd 2008c, p. 27. Bensaïd 2008c, p. 30.

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Marx’s Early Critique of Politics

On numerous occasions, Bensaïd turned to Marx’s early critique of politics, especially in relation to the wood theft debates and polemics over On the Jewish Question. I focus, however, here on Bensaïd’s account of Marx’s critique of Hegel’s philosophy of the state, since it grounds Bensaïd’s reading of Marx’s breakthrough for a politics of the oppressed that is designed to avoid the social illusion and the fetishisation of history. According to Bensaïd, to safeguard politics ‘is to preserve an open space for collective decision … at the undecidable point where many determinations crystallise and combine’, against illusions in the social and the great recital of history’s meaning.307 Since the French Revolution, ‘the workers’ movement has suffered from both of these temptations’: Marx had properly seen the second problem, in refusing the speculative philosophy of history that accepted a fetishised history manipulating humans and acting behind their backs. In putting history back on its feet, being the result of their uncertain conflicts, he kept it open. In contrast, he had less vigilance when it came to reducing politics to the social, in the identification of the parties, classes and the state that resulted from it. On this decisive point, Lenin was, contrary to the dominant prejudices, much closer to a statement of contradiction that was specifically political. It is through the long movement of experiences and disasters in which it has become possible to think and understand this question today.308 Marx’s break with Hegel was predicated on his search to emancipate politics from modernising bourgeois state reason. Hegelian philosophy had ‘annexed politics to the philosophy of right’. Marx sought to liberate politics from religious abstraction and speculative philosophy in order to render to it ‘its specific substance’: While the articles of 1842 undo the theological-political knot in order to forcefully affirm the autonomy of the political space, those of 1843, and, in particular, the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, in focusing their critique of the fetishism of the state, seem to bring back into play this autonomy in a perspective for the disappearance of the political state.

307 308

Bensaïd 1997, p. 110. Ibid.

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This change of terrain resulted from the discovery of the ‘radical revolution’ and of ‘universal human emancipation’, irreducible to the ‘purely political revolution’ inspired by the French Revolution. Alone, the conquest of political rights, necessary as they are, is far from accomplishing the need for freedom through social emancipation.309 Marx’s radical position articulates the class struggle, which requires that politics be de-professionalised and de-statised. This is a radical break for classical political philosophy because, throughout its history, it was thought under the condition of pre-modern and modern state formations, bureaucracies and institutions. Hegel’s political thought is a case in point. What alternative was there to thinking politics under the conditions and constraints of modern bourgeois states and institutions? The alternative was the invention of a specific politics of the oppressed: [T]herefore opening, to those who were socially excluded from it, the forbidden city of politics … Hence Marx reproached Hegel for nothing less than having lacked that which is truly political in politics and of having only produced the false semblance of a political knowledge reduced to the grip of the state.310 At stake is a transfer of religiosity. Bensaïd argued that the King’s decapitation during the French Revolution was a foundational act in the transfer of religiosity – from the divine incarnation of the old regime to the modern fetish of the abstract general will. Perhaps, Marx cut more heads off, breaking radically with the fetishism of modern bourgeois-bureaucratic power and with the new religiosity of the civil service that it generates. Breaking with the fetish of the abstract general will did not mean that Marx gave up the perspective of a popular sovereignty. Rather, he conceived of a new democracy that broke the antagonisms of the political state whereby it disappeared as an alien body. In the context of this break, The political state here refers to the separate state, the fetish state of the Hegelian political philosophy of right. The disappearance of it as a separated form is the condition for the advent of the true democracy. It does

309 310

Bensaïd 1997, pp. 110–11. Bensaïd 1997, p. 111.

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not signify the disappearance of politics as such. It is only the usurpation, the subordination to the arrogance of the state, that this state takes itself for the whole.311 In the context of these discussions, Bensaïd contended that Marx’s theoretical and political efforts (culminating in 1843) invented a politics of the oppressed, rather than a unilateral passion for the social. This is why Marx thought of politics under the condition of the events of wars and revolutions. The politics of the oppressed cannot be conceived as the simple reflection of social and economic processes. Thinking politics under the condition of the event demands thinking in terms of mediations and ruptures of continuity. Marx implicitly retained the idea of political representation, though it was not systematically worked out, due to the conditions of the epoch, namely the relative lack of representative institutions and the domination of the bureaucratic-gelatinous state (at least in the context of France). ‘Political representation, in the strict and theatrical meaning of the term, is a “stage” – a play of mirrors between representations and the represented, between state and citizens’.312 On this point: Marx aimed for the end of the state, and of politics subordinated to it, the (last) form of alienation. With the disappearance of the state (and with this, of state politics) the alienated community would return to a concretely reconstituted community. The problem in such a perspective is not that direct democracy will abolish representation and fuse the social and political, it is rather the postulated transparency where politics would quite simply be annihilated. Actually, this final transparency presupposes a perfect match between classes and their parties (or political forms). It is why, if the political question is not absent in Marx (it powerfully comes into play from the point of view of the social movement and the events of wars and revolutions in particular), that of the political institution tends to be reduced to a sociological wager on the invention of forms, of which the travails of the Commune provide the most vivid example. This invention is supposed to spontaneously realise the identity of the ‘political class’, the party and the state, in the overcoming of the modern separate and abstract state.313

311 312 313

Bensaïd 1997, p. 112. Bensaïd 1997, p. 114. Ibid.

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Bensaïd went further in his interrogation of representation, arguing that, in Marx, we find a politics of resistance and the event – politics is not thought through as an institution. Thus if Marx made a breakthrough for politics, it was not the last word, and if there is a weakness in his thought, it is the question of the representation in relation to the institutional dimension of politics: Reduced to the unity of site and evental moment … the form finally found of the Commune allows for an evasion of the problem of representation, however inevitable this question is when politics is organised throughout space (a territory larger than a city) and duration (necessary to the exercise of mandates, of responsibility, and revocability) … Deprived of depth and duration, the political scene no longer permits representation. It reduces itself to a succession of instants.314 Bensaïd was not alone in thinking through this absence in Marx. In his book, Marx, l’Etat et la politique, Artous reflected on a similar problem. The two approaches certainly did not overlap in every respect (however, Bensaïd recognised the significance of Artous’ work). Artous took up the two principal critiques of Marx, namely that of ‘the absence of a theory of the state and the incomplete character of his political thought’. ‘We know that’, Bensaïd wrote, ‘in the different plans of Capital, Marx had initially planned a last book on the state which would have logically crowned the analysis of the process of reproduction of the whole’. This project was not accomplished because it found itself – in logical terms – outside the specific object of Capital. Consequently, for Artous, ‘one therefore finds no theory of the capitalist state in Marx that would be a counterpart to the analysis of the relations of capitalist production carried out in Capital’. The result of this absence? That certain questions are ‘left hanging’, for example, the connection ‘between wage labour, the legal form and political representation; or, decisively, that of bureaucracy’.315 Artous’s book also spoke to Bensaïd’s concern for socialist democracy; as Bensaïd wrote: If democracy, referred to as ‘the democratic self-institution of the social’, is not to be trapped in the bureaucratic-representative state, and if social struggles can invent another idea of citizenship and democracy, it is still

314 315

Ibid. Bensaïd 1998a, Marx, l’Etat et le politique: un livre d’Antoine Artous.

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necessary for this invention to revolve around relations of production and forms of social appropriation, which are the object of a programmatic question that is largely open.316 To reiterate, while Bensaïd in no way ever held the position that Marx was not a political thinker, he accepted that Marx’s weakness was the institutional dimensions of politics in their relation to representation (though, Marx was a thinker of representation). The political problem facing Bensaïd is important to understand. Specifically, experiences of dual power had receded into the distant past on the European continent. So too had revolutionary crises. This is not to say that they were not possible in the future. However, in the absence of dual power or a revolutionary crisis on the horizon, the axis of revolutionary politics (in France) revolved around building a fighting left-wing political force that could build up its credibility and hegemony before the outbreak of such events. This was a long path of social and political reconstruction. Along this road, Bensaïd thought that Jean-Marie Vincent’s point about Artous’ work was spot on, where Vincent wrote: Antoine Artous criticises the illusions, which some people believe in, that direct democracy – a sudden epiphany or illumination of the social – could resolve the problems of power and politics. He shows with great analytical observation that we cannot do without the problem of representation, simultaneously as a problem of the relation between represented and representatives and as a problem of what is produced and shaped in representation.317 For Marx, the modern bourgeois state is tied to a specific mode of production. A definite relation of exploitation, combining formal autonomy with real dependence, historically determines the state. The form of political sovereignty that results from this relation is specific. There is, thus, a double determination of the state – formal freedom and real subjugation. This dual problematic grounds Bensaïd’s engagement with the critical interrogations Arendt and Badiou had posed to politics (to which I briefly return in the next chapter). Both shared a common problematic summed up in Badiou’s phrase that ‘we must deliver politics from history’ and render it to ‘the event’. He went as far to say that, from the point of view of politics, history does not exist,

316 317

Ibid. Vincent 1999, pp. 13–14.

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‘only the a priori periodised occurrence of hazard’.318 In asserting the primacy of politics, Badiou (and Arendt) effectively excluded its situated nature in history, while also barring politics from representing class struggle. The substance of Bensaïd’s critique can be read from the following: While Arendt believed she had solved the problem by opposing one form of representation (that of councils) to another (parliament and parties), Badiou thought he solved the problem by reducing politics to the fidelity to the event where, with luminosity, the people themselves decide. Through two different roads, the one and the other establish a fictitious politics.319 However, in response, Bensaïd suggested that: In reality we should situate ourselves in the terms of the contradiction, posed but not resolved by Marx, of the double determination of the state. As a ‘separate body’, it is not a pure machine of domination but also, and inseparably, an organ of representation, from where it retains its stubborn legitimacy. It is precisely in this hiatus, in this roaming space between society and the state, in their relation of separation but not indifference, that we must think politics.320 What takes place in the sphere of political representation is not a simple illusion, but a real representation, able to highlight the fractures in the class struggle and also structure the social and political choices that opens a new horizon for struggle. Bensaïd thinks one would be wrong to confuse the two. The episodes of crisis are precisely acts where representation takes its distances from the ordinary illusion of fetishism, where the masks of political representation drop. What takes place in the sphere of political representation is important, and indeed, at crucial moments, it can be decisive for revolutionary politics. And, to think politics radically is to confront the hollowing out of the public space. ‘If, today, it is subject to atrophy and is discredited, this is not because domination has disappeared, but on the contrary, its forms have been multiplied’.321

318 319 320 321

Bensaïd 1997, pp. 118–19. Bensaïd 1997, p. 119. Ibid. Ibid.

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369

The Modern Bourgeois State and Bureaucracy

Throughout Marx and Engels’s political writings, the relationship between the state, the Commune and the revolution are of course strongly present. The period between 1850 and 1871, the poles between which Marx wrote The Class Struggle in France and the Civil War in France made up the rise, decline and fall of the Second Empire. This interval permitted Marx to reflect on ‘this strange modern political phenomenon’, Bonapartism, and ‘through it reconsider the question of the state and its relation to civil society’. In this period, the major lesson that Marx learnt – ‘proved especially by the Commune’ – was that ‘the working class cannot simply lay hold of read-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes’.322 According to Bensaïd, the ‘formulae sketched’ that we find in The Eighteenth Brumaire is reinforced in the Civil War in France. The centralised state apparatus, with ‘its ubiquitous and complicated military, bureaucratic … organs, encoils the living society like a boa constrictor’. The French Revolution ‘was forced to develop what absolute monarchy had begun’, the centralisation and organisation of state power, ‘the number of its tools, its independence and its supernatural sway of real society which in fact took the place of the medieval supernatural heaven with its saints’. Every revolution since the Great French Revolution ‘only perfected the state machinery instead of throwing off this deadly incubus’, because, ‘All reactions and all revolutions had only served to transfer that organised power – that organised force of the slavery of labour – from one hand to the other’.323 Even the ‘parliamentary republic, in its struggle against the revolution, found itself compelled to strengthen the means and the centralisation of governmental power with repressive measures’, whereby the parasitical excrescence upon civil society grows to its fullest development.324 Bensaïd thought the Commune actualised that which was theoretically articulated in the early Marx’s critique of the state, arguing that the young Marx’s critique of bureaucracy from the Kreuznach Manuscripts was set alight by the blaze of the Commune. For Marx, the corporative spirit survived the old regime ‘in the bureaucracy as a product of the separation between the state and civil society’.325 Marx carried out an immanent critique of Hegel and argued that the bureaucracy could only be abolished when the universal interest really 322 323 324 325

Bensaïd 2008c, p. 31. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

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becomes a particular interest, ‘and not, as with Hegel, becoming so purely in thought, in abstractions’. ‘This’, Marx tells us, ‘is possible only through the particular interest really becoming universal’.326 The form finally found by the Paris Commune ‘appeared precisely in the eyes of Marx as the critique in action of the bureaucratic state and as the particular interest becoming effectively the general interest’.327 At this moment of human history, the dreams of the July Revolution of 1830 and the bloody June days of 1848 were found in the ‘positive form of the social Republic’. Being more Hegelian than Hegel himself, Marx did not ‘teach the world what it ought to be’, rather the real movement itself invented the unknown.

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The Commune against Bonapartism

Bonapartism’s enigma is inseparable from the bureaucracy and the problematic relation of the state and civil society. For Marx, it was ‘the only form of government possible at a time when the bourgeoisie had already lost, and the working class had not yet acquired, the faculty of ruling the nation’. The bourgeoisie delegated its power to ‘an apparatus incarnating a simulacra of the general will’. Though the ‘contradictory task of the man explains the contradictions of his government, the confused groping which tries now to win, now to humiliate, first one class and then another, and uniformly arrays all of them against him’, ‘Bonaparte would like to appear as the patriarchal benefactor of all classes’.328 According to this reading, Bonapartism was the only form possible in order for the bourgeoisie to continue its domination over the producing classes. Illustrating the point, Marx wrote that ‘in order to save its purse the crown must be struck off its head and the sword which is to protect it must be hung over it like the sword of Damocles’.329 Bonaparte seemed to rest above the different classes. The police and the army which enveloped civil society constituted the rule of the praetorians. This was possible because the ‘old organisation of the administration, the municipalities, the courts, the army, etc., continued to exist intact, or, where the Constitution did make a change, this change concerned the table of contents, not the content; the name, not the thing’.330 Furthermore, according to Engels,

326 327 328 329 330

Quoted from Bensaïd 2008c, p. 32. Ibid. Marx 2010d, p. 195. Marx 2010d, p. 143. Marx 2010d, p. 114.

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Bonapartism was a necessary form of the state in a country where the working class had been defeated. ‘Bismarck was the German version of it’, and it becomes the true religion of the modern bourgeoisie that does not directly rule. Between a working class that is not ready and a bourgeoisie that can no longer rule directly, Bonapartism ‘arises like a third robber, to pull the chestnuts out of the fire’.331 This phenomenon was not purely French, nor German, and it was more dangerous: Bonapartism is the tendential or creeping form of the state of exception in the modern state. Under the parliamentary republic, State power can only be used as a ‘mandated instrument of civil war’ in a period that is declared to be one of civil war, otherwise said, in ‘spasmodic and exceptional’ situations. But it remains ‘inadmissible as a normal political form of society’, and even seemed ‘unbearable to the mass of the middle class’. On the other hand, the Bonapartist regime becomes addictive. The exception is banalised and becomes the rule. Hence, Bonapartism, as ‘state power of class domination in modern times – at least on the European continent’, looked retrospectively as a laboratory of the regimes of exception throughout the twentieth century.332 The Commune is the radical alternative to such Bonapartism, bureaucracy and empire. In the Commune, alienated state power was ‘henceforth abolished’. ‘Abolished’ was a strong word, of course, which Bensaïd queried. What could it mean? It is not an arbitrary decree but rather ‘a process, of which the conditions must be assembled: the reduction of labour time, the transformation of property relations and the radical organisation of work’. This is where the ‘terms “extinction” or “disappearance” (of the state) that, along the lines of the “revolution in permanence”, put the accent on the bond between act and process, and underline a dynamic and temporality at work within the revolutionary transformation of the world’.333 The withering away of the state, or its ‘abolition’, in Marx’s politics is a process or a movement, rather than a decision of decree. The withering away signals an immanent process without transcendent intervention, through which popular bodies – not a parliamentary body – become both legislative and executive at the same time. Thus, the disappearance of the state is not ‘the absorption of all of its functions in social self-administration’, or a

331 332 333

Quoted from Bensaïd 2008c, p. 37. Bensaïd 2008c, p. 38. Bensaïd 2008c, pp. 38–9.

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simple administration of things, rather central public functions would be under popular control. Furthermore, ‘The withering away of the state … does not signify the withering away of politics or its extinction in the rational administration of the social. Rather, it signifies the extension of the domain of political struggle through the de-bureaucratisation of institutions and the permanent deliberation of public affairs’.334 The seizure of political power is only the first step in this perspective. Elsewhere in Marx l’intempestif, Bensaïd wrote: Marx and Lenin referred to the withering away or extinction – not the abolition – of the state. This withering away is conceivable only as a process, the time in which nothing, in effect, becomes everything (if it ever does). As long as relative scarcity and the division of labour persists, the state will inevitably re-enter through the back window. Its positive disappearance cannot be decreed. It involves a form of dual power prolonging the revolutionary event in a process of extinction-construction, in which society would control the state and progressively appropriate the functions that no longer need to be delegated. Such an approach invites us to consider the institutional architecture of power and the relative autonomy of the sphere of law, rather than assuming that both would naturally ensue from might dictating right.335 Bensaïd returns his readers to the enigma left by the Internationale – how from nothing can the proletariat become everything? The working class is not nothing in the sense that workers have their own experiences, memory of their struggles, culture and knowledge. Thus, is such a becoming everything, in fact, suitable for them? Bensaïd suggests that Marx borrowed this phrase from Abbé Sieyès ‘who made of it the slogan of the Third Estate, the formula is far more suited to the ambitions of the victorious bourgeoisie than to the social emancipation of the proletarians in whom the result will be to overcome the antinomy between all and nothing’.336 As a process, it is in accord with the disappearance of classes. The withering away of the state cannot be arbitrarily decreed by the will of a utopian maximalist. In this complex of problems, the Paris Commune was one of the greatest examples of this real movement that abolished the existing order within the antinomy of all or nothing, since for Bensaïd:

334 335 336

Bensaïd 2008c, p. 40. Bensaïd 2002, p. 192. Bensaïd 2008c, p. 41.

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The movement began through measures that didn’t seem to overthrow the existing order of things: the separation of Church and state … the public destruction on the 6th of April of two guillotines; the liberation of political prisoners; the suppression of night work for bakers; the closure of the pawnbrokers; the demolition of the Vendôme column; … the admission of foreigners to serve in the Commune, whose flag is that of the ‘universal Republic’; the liberation of women from the ‘degrading slavery’ of prostitution; the transfer of public services of the state into the hands of the Commune; and above all, the ‘suppression of the permanent army and its replacement by the armed people’. This is not everything. But this is not nothing. And if Marx reproached the Communards with not having dared laid their hands on the Bank of France, of not having marched on Versailles and of having missed the ‘right moment … because of conscientious scruples’, it is better to salute them and pay them the homage they deserve.337 Crucially, for Bensaïd, the withering away of the modern bourgeois state and its apparatuses of domination – the undoing of alienated and structurally bourgeois power relations – coincides with the disappearance of capitalist modalities of domination, class antagonisms and bourgeois oppressions. At stake is the transition from a modern bourgeois society in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, of which the modern bourgeois state fortifies domination, to a modern society without the presence and domination of the capitalist mode of production. This, no doubt, involves the radical transformation of social relations, in which the conceptual paradigm of the critique of political economy and the despotism of the commodity would also undergo change. Bensaïd stresses that a metabolism between ‘the socialised human species and the natural conditions of its reproduction’, would continue, but labour ‘will disappear in the sense of work as a result of compulsion or the force of an asymmetrical social contract. Similarly, when the “labour market” disappears, labour power will no longer be a commodity, the logic of solidarity and common goods will win out over profit and generalised competition’.338

337 338

Bensaïd 2008c, pp. 42–3. Bensaïd 2008c, p. 43.

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The Final Form of Emancipation

Bensaïd narrated that, over a quarter of a century, communism had accomplished its transformation from its initial appearances in the 1840s that was philosophical and utopian, to the final political form at last found for emancipation embodied in the Commune. In Germany, ‘communism arose first as a philosophical tendency’.339 In France, before the experiences of 1848, communism was discussed in the rue du faubourg Saint-Antoine, where this ‘spectral communism, without a precise programme, haunted the spirit of the age’, imagined in the sects of the Egalitarians and the dreams of Cabet. The real movement overcame the dreamy pitfalls of the love of abstract principle. Furthermore, the Commune was the positive form of the ‘social republic’ that was demanded in the 1848 revolutions. Was this ‘final form of emancipation’, the dictatorship of the proletariat? For Engels, all one had to do was to take a look at the Commune, to know what the dictatorship of the proletariat resembled. And so Bensaïd wrote, ‘it is indeed worth looking at it a little closer’. The dictatorship of the working class was a revolutionary slogan. The meaning of the word ‘dictator’ throughout the nineteenth century ‘still evoked the virtuous Roman institution of an exceptional power, duly mandated and limited in time in order to face an emergency situation. It is opposed to arbitrary “tyranny”’.340 The dictatorship relates to the 1848 revolutions, because the June Days split the word ‘revolution’ in two, henceforth divided into ‘“a nice revolution” and a “hideous revolution” in the eyes of the possessing class’. Between the two, ‘It was a fight for the preservation or annihilation of the bourgeois order. The veil that shrouded the republic was torn asunder’, distinguishing it from the phase of revolution in which general harmony prevailed: The February revolution was the beautiful revolution, the revolution of universal sympathy, because the conflicts which erupted in the revolution against the monarchy slumbered harmoniously side by side, as yet undeveloped, because the social struggle which formed its background had only assumed an airy existence – it existed only as a phrase, only in words. The June revolution is the ugly revolution, the repulsive revolution, because realities have taken the place of words, because the republic has uncovered the head of the monster itself by striking aside the protective, concealing, crown.341 339 340 341

Bensaïd 2008c, pp. 44–5. Bensaïd 2008c, p. 49. Marx 2019, p. 125.

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The real hideousness, it almost goes without saying, was the counter-revolutionary offensive after the proletariat’s defeat, just as the erasure of the Commune was bloodstained, making the repressions of the Gracchi brothers seem like children’s play by comparison. The bourgeoisie’s victorious cruelty was proportional to the great fear it had experienced. It is ‘faced with this unrestrained violence of despotism of the possessing class that Marx takes up for the first time the bold motto’ to overthrow the bourgeoisie and replace it with the dictatorship of the working class. In other words, Marx called for a real state of exception. The meaning and import of this dictatorship, being a necessary moment in human liberation, has been smothered and smashed ‘to the point of becoming unpronounceable’ by the totalitarian regimes throughout the twentieth century that used it as camouflage. However, we ‘must be careful’, Bensaïd warned, ‘not to confuse the word and the thing, and not to remove along with the word the problem whose response was sought after’. This means that ‘it matters to know in more detail what the Commune was’.342 Mandates were under permanent popular control and representatives were to receive a workingman’s wage: ‘The vested interests and the representation allowances of the high dignitaries of the state disappeared along with the high dignitaries themselves. Public functions ceased to be the private property of the tools of the central government’. The ‘repressive organs of the old governmental power were to be amputated’, and its ‘functions were to be wrested from an authority usurping pre-eminence over society itself’. ‘After six months of hunger and ruin, caused rather by internal treachery than by the external enemy’, the Parisian labouring classes rose up, ‘beneath Prussian bayonets, as if there had never been a war between France and Germany and the enemy were not at the gates of Paris. History has no like example of such a greatness’. Taking up arms, the Parisian proletariat created its own self-defence against the internal and external enemy. This was the first decree of the Commune. It did not suppress the class struggle, ‘but represented “the liberation of labour” as a “fundamental condition of all individual and social life” ’.343 The political form in which the working class took power ‘created the “rational atmosphere” in which social emancipation can begin – and begin only’. ‘Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people, constituted in Communes’. Bensaïd also took up the question of imperative mandates. Unlike permanent revocability, Bensaïd argued that the

342 343

Bensaïd 2008c, p. 52. Ibid.

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‘imperative mandate would lead to the paralysis of democratic deliberation. If the representative is only the spokesperson for the particular interests of its constituents, without a possibility of adjusting its point of view depending on the discussion, no general will can emerge’. This was an elementary feature of political deliberation, because ‘the mere addition of particular interests’ does not add up to the general will.344 On the contrary, the mere agglomeration of particular interests can lead to a bureaucracy that is lifted up above the fragmentation of particular wills, albeit claiming to represent the general will. However, according to Bensaïd, it was necessary to strongly underline, ‘since it often is forgotten’, that this dictatorship of the proletariat remained one of universal suffrage (from which women remained excluded) and a territorial representation of the communes and the quartiers. Thus, the Commune demonstrates what for Marx and Engels the dictatorship of the proletariat was. For Bensaïd, the so-called dictatorship respected political pluralism and universal suffrage; decisively, it was an antiLeviathan, i.e. the measures the Commune took, of de-bureaucratisation and de-militarisation, were measures against the Leviathan State. If Hobbes set out the contours of new despotic forms of power emergent from modern civil wars, then the Commune sublates it by securing a new political form of emancipation while tending towards the undoing of its own Leviathan conditions. The participatory democracy and the social justice of the Commune also showed that – and Bensaïd is insistent on this point – the ‘dictatorship’ was not an arbitrary exercise of power in a state of exception; instead, it was the ‘suspension of the existing legal order benefitting the exercise of an inalienable constituent power of a sovereign people’.345

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Representation and the Historic Bloc

Representation was one key difficulty raised by the Commune. The basic starting point is, to reiterate, that politics is not the simple reflection of social relations; from such a non-reflection it follows that representation is a problem because of the plurality of possible representations of classes. Consequently, representation is not dissolved into the simplistic opposition between direct democracy and representative democracy. Representative politics is a complex, mediated and deliberative outcome, not a simple reflection of the social. In

344 345

Bensaïd 2008c, p. 54. Bensaïd 2008c, p. 55.

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fact, ‘the play of representation is a challenge to a vulgar sociological determinism’. The rejection of a reflection theory of politics opens the possibility ‘not only for political alliances, but of a rallying of forces, of a “historic bloc” (which is not yet thought of in terms of hegemony)’.346 Representation and the historic bloc could bring forth a response to the general problems of the national crisis and society at large. In these terms, it breaks the bounds of corporatism, while remaining mediated by class. The historic bloc is not a problem relegated to the past, when the peasant question was a key component of revolutionary strategy in France. It is much vaster in light of historical experience and the structural development of the capitalist mode of production. It is that of the permanent reconstitution of differentiations at work in modern bourgeois societies, in which the proletariat is not a homogenous historical subject. The historic bloc and representation are also relations, not of correspondence, but of translation and transposition, in and between social relations and their political expressions. The problem of the historic bloc and representation revolves around the ability of a class to bring a non-corporative response to the nation and society as a whole. One could compare what Marx wrote in the Class Struggles in France and what took place in the Commune for an illustration. Marx wrote that, in 1848, ‘No one had fought more fanatically in the June days for the salvation of property and the restoration of credit than the Parisian petty bourgeois’. The ‘shopkeeper had pulled himself together and marched against the barricades in order to restore the traffic which leads from the streets into the shop’. In the shopkeepers’ thirst to defend the rights of property, ‘when the barricades were thrown down and the workers were crushed and the shopkeepers, drunk with victory, rushed back to their shops, they found the entrance barred by a savoir of property, an official agent of credit, who presented them with threatening notices’, of rent, bond and credit notes all overdue.347 After the June days were drowned in blood, the Constituent Assembly (22 August) rejected the bill on ‘amiable agreements’, aimed at introducing the deferred payment on debts. This ruined a section of the petty bourgeoisie who were entirely dependent on the creditors of the rich bourgeoisie. Marx continued, But, having gathered its strength, credit proved to be a vigorous and jealous god, driving the insolvent debtor out of his four walls with wife and child, handing his supposed property over to capital and throwing

346 347

Ibid. Marx 2010c, p. 65.

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the man himself into the debtors’ prison, which had once more cast its threatening shadow over the corpses of the June insurgents. The petty bourgeoisie realized with horror that by crushing the workers they had delivered themselves unresisting into the hands of their creditors. Since February their creeping bankruptcy, which they had apparently ignored, had become chronic, and after June it was declared openly.348 Things were otherwise under the Commune. The Commune was ‘the first time in history the petty and middling middle class has openly rallied round the workmen’s revolution, and proclaimed it as the only means of their own salvation and that of France! … The principle measures taken by the Commune are taken for the salvation of the middle class – the debtor class of Paris against the creditor class’.349 In the Commune, the tug of war between debtor and creditor was put to an end. Marx underlined the importance of the measures taken in favour of the debtors. In 1848, this petty bourgeoisie had been sacrificed to the creditors after they supported the butchery against the June insurgents. This was not the only reason for rallying behind the workers, for they ‘felt there was but one alternative – the Commune, or the empire’. Under the empire, they were ruined economically, suppressed politically and morally shocked ‘by its orgies’.350 This was significant because the form finally found for social emancipation, the Commune, is, at the same time, ‘a workers’ government and “the true representative of all the healthy elements of French society”. Otherwise said, a universal particular’.351

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Representation and Class Struggles

According to Bensaïd, the problem of representation could be more specifically articulated in relation to the formation of classes in struggle. For illustration, Bonaparte’s Band of December Tenth was the grouping of a ‘comedy in the most vulgar sense … a masquerade in which the grand costumes, words, and postures merely serve to mask the pettiest knavery’. It was from ‘the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call la bohème; from this kindred element Bonaparte formed the core of the Band of December Tenth’. For Rancière, through this process, ‘the political scene was emptied 348 349 350 351

Marx 2010c, p. 66. Marx 2010c, p. 258. Ibid. Bensaïd 2008c, p. 57.

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of its assigned actors, bourgeois and proletarians in order to make room for a band of substitute comedians, through which the burlesque representation concluded with the triumph of Louis-Napoléon the buffoon’. Rancière thought this class decomposition into the lumpen could be read as ‘the mockery of all political explanations in terms of class: hence, the alleged materialist analysis of social classes is indeed rather the myth manifesting the continual flight of identity and the common abandonment of classes’.352 The symbols of the political theatre are never the mechanical manifestations of the social. In this vision, political representation cannot be crossed through with class. Bensaïd explained how in Rancière’s conception, ‘every class, the bourgeoisie just as the proletariat, thus looks doubled, decomposed by its own caricature, or, to say more exactly, its lumpen’. This lumpen is not a class, but a ‘myth’. There is, therefore, an ‘inner scission between the real class, its weaknesses and its cowardice and the historic class, its grandeur and its supposed heroism’. For Rancière, the real working class – ‘forgetting’ its revolutionary vocation – ‘renounces the honour of being a conquering class’.353 Bensaïd insisted that this was a mythological articulation of the social struggle. Rather than myth, Marx looked for the mediations between classes and the clashes between parties. This was a difficult strategic problem. Rancière excessively radicalised the antinomy between a real worker and the virtual proletariat. This is a radical separation of Marx’s philosophical representation of the proletariat, by which he stated that ‘It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment regards as its aim. It is a question of what the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with this being, it will historically be compelled to do’.354 Effectively, for Rancière, the real worker will only ever be a petty bourgeois, while the historical proletariat would be the absolute negation of the worker as he or she really exists: ‘The artisan, the lumpen, the petty bourgeois are for all that the “comedic masks and the disguises that the distance between the worker and the proletariat wears, the non-coincidence of the time of development and the time of the revolution”’. This position inevitably ‘makes the early communism of Marx and Engels a purely speculative communism’.355 This contradiction is real to which Marx and Engels searched for a mediated response. According to Bensaïd, their

352 353 354 355

Quoted from Bensaïd 2008c, pp. 58–9. Ibid. Marx 2010e, p. 37. Quoted from Bensaïd 2008c, p. 60. The polemical point is directed at Jacques Rancière’s The Philosopher and his Poor.

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logic is simple: the fatigue and brutishness of labour demand that the workers ‘be represented by a party’, but this party can really only be ‘in conformity with their being’ in extreme situations of revolutionary crisis which are rare and exceptional. Between two crises comes the moment of critical theory. Then on the (relative) intermissions of politics under the form of partisan action after the 1848 revolutions as in the days after the Paris Commune of 1871.356 Rancière nevertheless sees ‘in Marx a theoretical antinomy and a political impasse’, in this absolute distinction between the real worker and its historical mission.357 Though where Rancière saw an impasse, Bensaïd suggests, ‘Isabelle Garo sees – on the contrary – a fruitful dialectic. For her, Marx is fundamentally “a thinker of representation”, that is part of a philosophical history of representation’, therefore a thinker of mediations in every sense of the term.358 Bensaïd makes this explicit, writing: In the face of the 1848 revolutions, he seemed to discover that this representation is not the ‘pure’, clear expression that he had thought, but a play of phantasmagorias and theatrical mockeries, and it was necessary to get behind the scenes and witness the inner workings. This will be the task of the critique of political economy, of unveiling how the marvels and the mystifications of the political scene have their secret in the transfigurations and concealments in commodity fetishism, the transformations of concrete labour into abstract labour, of use value into value, value into price … It is from the internal split of the commodity that ‘the logic of representation’ or more precisely, ‘determined representations’, unfold. The use of the term varies in Marx where ‘the construction of a univocal concept of representation’ is not possible. But, throughout his critique, he shows that ‘representation is mediation, rather than a state’. It is not a surface image or a simple reflection. It is not an illusion but a play of ‘necessary appearances’. Thus, it is involved in the social structure, while a margin for its freedom from a strict logic of reproduction and legitimation is preserved, at least in certain situations. This allows theoretical critique to squeeze into the crevices of contradiction. It comes therefore as thinking representation as an ‘irreducible reality’ and not as an illusion

356 357 358

Bensaïd 2008c, p. 61. Ibid. Bensaïd 2008c, pp. 61–2.

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to suppress. This is why Marx defined representation as a ‘diversified concrete logic’ enabling an identification of the concrete and fractured lines of the real. It is in this respect the condition of possibility of critique. And of politics.359 Politics attaches itself to the problem of representation. Simultaneously, ‘representative of real contradictions and an integral part of their evolution’, representation is difficult to interpret because theory is not the direct production of class antagonism. Between theoretical and literary concepts and class struggle there is displacement, not simple reflection. Thus, for Bensaïd, representations could play an active role through the class struggle itself in which the consciousness of these antagonisms develop. This requires a developed language of representation, because the theatre of the struggle is not the world of illusion, but indeed that of representation. For Bensaïd, it simply would be wrong to confuse the two, because: In fact, politics often presents itself as the enigma of representation, consisting in recognising dominated representations, therefore representations of the dominated (which are not necessarily the same thing) against which political combat is necessary. Simultaneously representative of the contradictions of the real and taking part in their evolution, representation is dubious by nature. Class oppositions do not exactly overlap with theoretical concepts.360 Garo developed the thesis, in Marx, une critique de la philosophie, that Marx is a thinker of representation, an argument that permitted her to pose the question of Marxist philosophy in a new light. ‘From the first to the last texts, without exception, the question of representation reveals itself as one of the most unremitting theoretical concerns of Marx’, tending to ‘unify the whole of his research’.361 The notion of representation is a critical instrument. She wrote: Marx’s argument is that we must analyse the real conditions of historical becoming in order to comprehend the way in which humans forge ideas, beliefs and representations of the world and of themselves in every

359 360 361

Bensaïd 2008c, pp. 6–63. Bensaïd 2008c, p. 63. Garo 2000, p. 16.

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age. Representations are simultaneously later in relation to the base, but involved in it, necessary for its very existence, the whole forming what he called an economic and social formation. They are the place of fermentation, then the formulation of a communist project, the condition of possibility of Marxist theory itself … What’s more, the notion of representation is one of the classical notions of philosophy and above all a key concept of German idealism: it provides Marx with the occasion for a stern and permanent confrontation with this tradition, in particular with Hegel, even if he proceeds through incidental remarks or even by simple allusions.362 Marx practises an immanent-historic dialectic, a form of thinking that articulates discourses and real historical problems, because forms of discourse do not remain outside of a representation cut off from discourse’s formative base. Form is an aspect of the essential process, not its abstract and separable representation.363 In contrast to a perspective that cuts form and content off from each other, political representation is a part of the social and historical totality. The relations of form and content can be glimpsed in various of Marx’s political and polemical writings. In his attacks on Proudhon, Marx argued that ‘categories are but the theoretical expression’ of the historical movement. For classical political economy, this meant that ‘The more the antagonistic character [of this historical movement – D.R.] comes to light, the more the economists, the scientific representatives of bourgeois production, find themselves in conflict with their own theory; and different schools arise’.364 This not only concerned the working-class parties, but proved to be a dilemma for the bourgeoisie itself during the 1848 revolution when [t]he spokesmen and scribes of the bourgeoisie, its platform and its press, in short, the ideologists of the bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie itself, the representatives and the represented, were alienated from one another and no longer understood each other … Far more fateful and decisive was the breach of the commercial bourgeoisie with its politicians. It

362 363

364

Garo 2000, pp. 16–17. This point refers to Garo 2000, p. 123. We should take note of her passage, ‘But, he [Marx] maintained the thesis of a functional discrepancy between form and content, whose dialectic does not necessarily progress in the direction of a more complete unity and which will finish by reducing representation into that which it represents’. Marx 2010i, p. 176.

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reproached them, not as the Legitimists reproached theirs, with having abandoned their principles, but, on the contrary, with clinging to principles that had become useless.365 Moreover, the social structure of the peasants in France during the 1848 revolution precluded them from representing themselves. Marx claimed that because the peasants could not represent themselves ‘they must be represented. Their representatives must appear simultaneously as their master, as an authority over them, an unrestricted governmental power that protects them from the other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from above’. Hence, ‘the state power is not suspended in mid-air. Bonaparte represents a class, and the most numerous class of French society at that, the small-holding peasantry’.366 In this example, representation can account for one of Marx’s most perplexing questions: how could the most simple-minded man in France acquire the most complex significance? Garo’s response is simple: ‘political representation determines the spectrum of choices that structure social and political life’.367 ‘Just because he was nothing, he could signify everything’, i.e. different and antagonistic classes could see in him a national saviour. Representation is not a simple lure and bait that deludes, but a play of ‘necessary appearances’. Contrary to vulgar attitudes towards politics, the play of representation is therefore a challenge to sociological determinism, a displaced relation that transposes and hides as much or more than it shows. There is the possibility within it, not only of political alliances, but the rallying of forces capable of giving a non-corporative or non-economistic response to the problems of society as a whole.

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Marx’s Virtualities

This chapter has taken us through the status of a Marxist practice of philosophy, the critique of political economy and the reconstitution of revolutionary politics under the condition of wars and events. Bensaïd effectively searched for what remained actively current in Marx’s many voices. This does not mean that any reading is legitimate, hence falling into a pluralistic and fragmented Marx: ‘not everything is permissible in the name of free interpretation; not

365 366 367

Marx 2010d, pp. 169–70. Marx 2010d, pp. 186–7. Quoted from Bensaïd 2008c, p. 63.

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everything is valid. Text and context specify constraints, define a field of variations compatible with its own aporias, and consequently invalidate the results of misinterpretation’.368 Today, the destruction of the bureaucratic states offers a contradictory moment of deliverance from the Stalinian domination of Marxist theory. The positive result of this deliverance is far from being exhausted as of the present. Without a doubt, this moment of liberation must continue. Readers of Marx’s revolutions for thought and politics have won the right to recommence and invent, and the crisis and revolt of our world constitutes the foundation of the renaissance of Marxisms. In this context, Bensaïd pointed out how to go forward: This efflorescence often answers the demands of a free and rigorous research, while guarding against the traps of academic exegesis. It demonstrates the extent to which the spectres of Marx haunt our present, and how erroneous it would be to oppose an imaginary Golden Age of Marxism of the 1960s to the sterility of contemporary Marxisms. The molecular work of theory is without a doubt less visible than yesterday. It does not boast of the notoriety of the master thinkers as it once did. It is probably denser, more collective, freer and secular. [Importantly …] To be faithful to his [Marx’s] critical message is to continuously judge that our world of competition and war of all against all is not reformable with a touch up, that we must overthrow it, and that it is more urgent than ever to do this. In order to understand it in order to change it, instead of contenting ourselves with commenting on it or denouncing it, Marx’s thought and the inaudible ‘thunderclap’ of Capital are not a point of arrival, for sure, but a point of departure and obliged passage that requires itself to be overcome …369 Bensaïd did not claim to uncover the true thought of an authentic and unknown Marx. He demonstrated one of his possible uses in the contemporary world, in showing how his radical critique, recalcitrant to all orthodoxy, every bigoted doctrinaire, which is always ready for its own self-critique and its own transformation. For this reason, Marx is simultaneously an invitation to discovery and controversy.

368 369

Bensaïd 2002, p. 2. Bensaïd 2009b, pp. 194–5.

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Ready to Roll the Dice? In 1913, Rosa Luxemburg released her brilliant study The Accumulation of Capital. In leading the theoretical fight against reformism in Germany, albeit on the terrain of the critique of political economy, it also sums up the horizon of expectations the working class held on the continent. In Western Europe, she says, the cruel contradictions of capitalism are naked for all to see, the ‘rosecoloured’ classical view of Smith and Ricardo of a budding bourgeois economy had vanished long ago. ‘Since then, optimism had only been possible in the camp of the rising working-class and its theorists … The negative tendency of capitalism … is compensated towards elation: the hopeful and victorious striving of the workers for ascendency in their trade-union movement and by political action’.1 Actors at the beginning of the last century held confident hopes in the ascending political power and trade union growth that would hasten the coming daybreak. For Antonio Labriola, the publication of the Communist Manifesto marked communism’s ‘first unquestioned entrance into history. To that date are referred all our judgements and all our congratulations on the progress made by the proletariat in these last fifty years … The proletarians can have in view nothing but the future’.2 The century that opened with optimistic hope, however, finished in obscure tragedy. An obscure disaster, as Alain Badiou claimed. Hope for a better world seemed to be in ruin, with the certitudes and illusions collapsing without clear truths having emerged; the task of revolutionising the world remained as urgent as ever, though perhaps more doubtful than Marx and Engels had originally thought. Uncertainty and inquietude gripped the most lucid radicals as the twentieth century came to a close. The concern, raised by Hannah Arendt, that politics would disappear completely from the world had to be taken seriously. Did politics have any meaning at all anymore? The difficulty rested in unpacking a general tendency of late capitalism, one that is tied to the commodification and privatisation of the world and its spaces for deliberation. This generalisation of commodity production has for its counterpart the narrowing of public space, public space’s loss of substance, the obliteration of civic

1 Luxemburg 2003, pp. 249–50. 2 Labriola 2010, p. 6.

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behaviour and the risk of seeing politics dissolve into an automatic market mechanism. The stable traditions that had held for the better part of the twentieth century had been shaken: [S]omething finished with the century, without yet knowing what will emerge, if the sun will ever rise again: a certain idea of revolution, of citizenship, of democracy; a dated representation of the time and space of politics. It is a time of dizziness from changes of scale and of the acceleration of rhythms.3 Bensaïd sought to re-actualise the theme of the wager – to place our bets on the possibility of revolution and fight for it – amid the defeated hopes of the past and the uncertain expectations of the present. This theme was not original; it was present in classical Marxism as a subterranean theme, but the way in which he deepened the discussion of the melancholic side of this wager and its bond to the discordance of political time was creative and original. This chapter will discuss the themes present within one of Bensaïd’s most beautiful works – Le pari mélancolique: métamorphoses de la politique, politique des métamorphoses – in which he defended the dignity of a politics of the oppressed against the background of the liberal dissolution of politics. It meant reaffirming the art of political conflict in place of resignation to the market. This work of Bensaïd’s should be read as a contemporary diagnosis in conjunction with his political reading of Marx. Furthermore, Bensaïd reminds his readers of Pascal and Mallarmé – we are already embarked in a world where every single thought and act is a roll of the dice.

1

A Wager against Closure in Space and Time?

Space and time underwent a great transformation at the turn of the fifteenth century. ‘The enclosed world of bounded land opened itself up to an infinite universe’ and ‘Vertical and closed time opened up to an uncertain future’.4 Expansion and uncertainty accompanied: The growth of watch making technology, the formal equivalence of commodity exchange and the advent of interchangeable labour constituted

3 Bensaïd 1997, p. 19. 4 Bensaïd 1997, p. 11.

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the threefold abstraction of modern time, money and labour. With Bacon and Galileo, science will soon emancipate itself from theology. From Machiavelli to Spinoza, politics became secular in turn.5 History became enigmatic. Bensaïd claimed, ‘The more it declared the certitude of its ends, the more it was made in the incertitude of the present’ stripped of transcendence or God; politics henceforth had to find its way in the ‘contingent field of profane history’. Sovereignty became the ‘political state of this secular world’. Without a divine order on earth, profane politics had to invent itself, ‘in the contingency of action, its failures and successes’. Within these enigmas, ‘the revolutionary experience is part of this uncertain future opening up and the practical awakening of an epoch to universality’. The revolution, within these poles, ‘breaks the order of time in two’.6 This is why their dates are remembered. Dates announce their worldly inauguration. But history also piles up names of places. ‘Rather, disasters have the names of places, gloomy lowlands, devastated fields’, like Guernica or Auschwitz.7 For Bensaïd, the memory of dates and places reminds us that, ‘in its effort to establish and continue its sovereignty, politics is involved in mastering time and space’. But the rhythms of time and space have been challenged by ‘the derangement of temporalities and the geopolitics of globalisation’, with the world bursting at the seams, in which ‘The spaces of the economy, law, ecology and information overlap and contradict each other. The time of production, circulation and reproduction intertwine and contradict one another’.8 Bensaïd thinks this derangement poses a threat to politics – in particular, a politics of the oppressed – because the familiar landmarks shy away. The capacity of anticipation weakens. Expectation exhausts. Hope exits the room. The will orientated to a goal resigns itself to a present without tomorrow.9 Bensaïd thought it was necessary to search for the reasons for these transformations and to resurrect a politics that was being threatened by the dislocation of territories and dissonance of time, to salvage the specificity of its terrain. There are three great mutations Bensaïd wanted to interrogate: the spatial and

5 6 7 8 9

Ibid. Bensaïd 1997, pp. 11–12. Ibid. Bensaïd 1997, p. 13. Ibid.

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temporal transformation of war, the figure of the foreigner and the enigma of European humanity. Why was he interested in these questions? Precisely, to find out how these transformations could impact revolutionary transformation, which was ‘closely associated with the sentiment of a hurried march to the future, following the arrow of progress’. Did these changes signal the end to ‘prophets and events’ or ‘more simply, a change of the idea of revolution in the profane sense, a revolution without capital letters, without myths or fetishes’?10 Was politics still able to master a space? Was it still possible for the future to take shape on the horizon of long-term engagements, with patient wills, stubbornly faithful to the original event? These were, on Bensaïd’s word, Musical question[s] par excellence. Question of accords and harmonies. Of just relations between disjointed spaces and times.11 For Bensaïd, a profane and secular revolution is a question of a strategic horizon, not a fetish, because fetishes cannot deliver liberation, instead they inaugurate new forms of servitude. At stake is the relation strategic politics had to the new world in which the challenges of dislocation and dissonance remained. In short, Bensaïd wrote in ‘praise … of politics in rough weather’, its reasons and irrationalities, thrown up by the enigmas of time and space, which led to an unavoidable wager: An obliged wager, although uncertain, on the possible. Since all thought ‘emits a Roll of the Dice’. In politics, but clearly also in revolution, being the critical moment of choice and bifurcation in modern politics. Where time jolts, where days are worth years and hours, months.12 This wager was not any old wager, but a melancholic wager: one always rolls the dice in contretemps, always too late, forever too early, when the necessary and the possible are fissured and do not yet join. Yet, they roll the dice, in the lucid consciousness of an improbable success, with the accepted risk of a bad number or a disastrous

10 11 12

Bensaïd 1997, p. 14. Bensaïd 1997, p. 13. Bensaïd 1997, pp. 14–15.

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draw. With no way of avoiding this urgent obligation to wager, to play the whole on the part, to bet with absolute determination on the uncertain against the merciless certitude of the worst, against which one must despite all, try to ward off. A melancholic throw of the dice, without a doubt.13 Bensaïd posited a classical melancholy, the most healthy and profound kind, which puts us in good company with Pascal, Mallarmé, Blanqui and Péguy. But where should we begin in terms of the wager? Beginning always poses a problem. Where does a totality begin if one returns tirelessly to the point of departure? For Bensaïd, ‘the event’, whether revolutionary or amorous, holds the key to this enigma of commencement always recommenced. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dreary years of neoliberalism, Bensaïd held that something was finishing with the century. Yet we did not yet know what would emerge in its place. A great cycle had closed, that of the exhilarating force of the October Revolution. Smashed under the ruins of triumphant Stalinism in the 1930s, the light that shone from this universal event was extinguished with the fall of the Wall. Though this was the final deathact of an already rotten corpse, horizons and expectations were shattered – the landmarks lost their meaning – in the hegemony of liberal capitalism. Bensaïd thought that it was not only the question of the Eastern bloc, but a much deeper crisis of what was inherited from the Republican tradition in a conjuncture of globalisation. The French Revolution and the regicide had founded the conditions of possibility for modern Republican politics. The citizenship of a plurality of singular individuals was henceforth tied to a political space, the national territory and the time of politics, that of democratic deliberation: The Republican paradigm implied a public space founded on the separation of the public and the private, of property-owners and the property-less, of nationals and foreigners: The current crisis is not only that of citizenship and its forms of representation. It is a crisis of civilisation, a general crisis of the spatial and temporal conditions in which sovereignty is exercised, a crisis where the infinite expansion of space is combined with the hysteria of a time accelerated by the furious round of commodities.14

13 14

Bensaïd 1997, p. 15. Bensaïd 1997, pp. 19–20.

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This acceleration of time perpetuates an undifferentiated present. An undifferentiated present throws off an ability to think in relation to the world. This has an impact on political practice. Feuerbach had already set to thought the relations that space and time have to practice: Space and time are the forms of existence of every entity. Only the existence in space and time is existence. The negation of space and time is always only the negation of their limits, not of their essence. A timeless feeling, a timeless will, a timeless thought, a timeless entity are nonthings. Whoever has not time in general, also has no time and no urge to want and to think. The negation of space and time in metaphysics, in the essence of things, has the most deleterious practical consequences. Only someone who everywhere takes a stand in space and time has also tact and practical understanding in life. Space and time are the first criteria of praxis. A people which excludes time from its metaphysics and sacrifices the eternal, i.e. abstract, existence detached from time, as a consequence excludes time also from its politics and sanctifies the anti-historical principle of stability, a principle contrary to right and reason.15 As Feuerbach suggests, space and time are the first criteria of praxis, a claim already confirmed by Aristotle, for whom – Bensaïd notes – ‘the political presupposes determinate spatial and temporal conditions’.16 But the time of bourgeois societies and the capitalist mode of production is interrupted by spasmodic silences; the space of the commodity is carved out into borders and hollowed with uneven inequalities. Off its hinges, bursting at the seams, the epoch is riddled with discordance. The time is ‘out of joint’, ‘an unequal, badly combined development, Trotsky would add. The inequality without either tolerance or coordination that eliminates, exiles, condemns and no longer combines’.17 The spatial and temporal disorders are at the centre of political disorganisation. Geopolitics is torn between a transnational horizon and fixed points. These were ‘dark times’, of transition, where the old world was dying without the new yet being born. In a well-known passage, Hegel already said of the French Revolution that, In like manner the spirit of the time, growing slowly and quietly ripe for the new form it is to assume, disintegrates one fragment after another of 15 16 17

Quoted from Bensaïd 1997, p. 20. Bensaïd 2008a, p. 262. Bensaïd 1997, p. 21.

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the structure of its previous world. That it is tottering to its fall is indicated only by symptoms here and there. Frivolity and again ennui, which are spreading in the established order of things, the undefined foreboding of something unknown – all these betoken that there is something else approaching.18 The time is out of joint. Hegel’s passage is worth noting when we look at the structural difference between a bourgeois and workers’ revolution. Within the structures of feudal societies, the frivolity and ennui spreading through the established order, disintegrating one fragment after another was the growing economic and cultural hegemony of the bourgeoisie. Their cultural and economic transformations had taken place before the seizure of state power. The growth of commodity exchange and cultural wealth supported the idea of a progression toward the lifting of the sun. The reverse is the case for the workers’ revolution. It is entirely possible that the alienated world of the commodity continues to spiral, as it seems to undo itself in a myriad of ways, where transitions go on to the unknown. The ‘disarray accumulates and nourishes a catastrophe to the sole profit of economic and financial interests’.19 Meanwhile, populations are displaced. Refugees flee. War beckons. Climate disaster is already present. These are indeed times of transition, but these times of transition are reversed, since modern bourgeois societies have taken hold. The daybreak is already behind us, with an order breaking down in our present. At this moment of uncertainty, Marx’s lines from the first German edition of Capital remain true: These are signs of the times, not to be hidden by purple mantles or black cassocks. They do not signify that tomorrow a miracle will happen. They show that, within the ruling classes themselves, a foreboding is dawning, that the present society is no solid crystal, but an organism capable of change, and is constantly changing.20 Bensaïd was thinking through the further implications of the critique of abstract progress, directed against certain cultures of the workers’ movement. For instance, as quoted above, Labriola said that the workers had ‘nothing in view but the future’, where ‘all scientific socialists are primarily concerned is the present in which are spontaneously developed and in which are ripening the 18 19 20

Hegel 2008, pp. 27–8. Bensaïd 1997, p. 27. Marx’s preface to the first German edition of Capital.

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conditions of the future’.21 If the union of communists and the workers movement was then ripening, making its way to the future, Bensaïd’s present had an inverse march. After the cycle of the Russian Revolution had closed, the present becomes an uninterrupted catastrophe without the perspective of an historical alternative. With no harmonious and organic era historically conceivable at the critical time, Bensaïd surmised: The secular orders of territories, nations and states, undo themselves without imposing new coherences. This is the uncertain hour of decomposition without recomposition, deconstruction without reconstruction, contradiction without synthesis, conflict without resolution, of the great and perilous unmediated gap between the formal rationality of globalisation and the irrationality of identity panics … The crisis of representation and the discrediting of politics are only the visible effects of the profound collapse of foundations.22 On Bensaïd’s assessment, the global situation has the dimension of tragedy, and can be summarised in Blanqui’s phrase ‘must not whatever can happen of all things have already happened, resulted and gone by’? Here is Blanqui’s metaphor of eternal recurrence, with his fear of the ‘monotonous flowing of an hourglass that eternally turns and empties itself’, having only ‘vulgar reeditions, repetitions’. The point of liberatory politics is to produce something new that breaks the circle of repetition. Such a politics requires historical sense and spatial reference. Bensaïd effectively thought that, in the terms of liberatory politics, We are thrown back to a kind of 1846, gripped by the feeling of something new to come, like Baudelaire writing on the threshold of an unknown present: ‘It is true that a great tradition has been lost and that the new is not made’. The difference being that this pre-revolutionary observation appears quite optimistic to our contemporary eyes, confident in the coming of a new tradition. We ask ourselves, rather – with Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt, in this century that is closing – whether the tradition has not been irremediably lost, and what should be done with a tradition heralded by no testament.23

21 22 23

Labriola 2010, p. 42. Bensaïd 1997, p. 27. Ibid.

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Yet we return to space and time, the conditions for practice, because, on Bensaïd’s word, they have the strange and marvellous ability to unite and separate, in the same movement, in the same momentum, in love as in politics. It is this beat, this sway, that seems now disjointed. The world loses its human dimension, its common measure … When the metamorphoses of time pulverise the sense of history, when the metamorphoses of space erase the landmarks, politics loses its bearings.24 Thus, Bensaïd called somehow for a politics of the oppressed that must gather its courage and wager. This is why the nature and content of the crisis of politics should concern his readers: Behind the crisis of politics, the discrediting of parties, the problems of representation … the issue goes much further than corruption scandals and the decadence of elites. These are the conditions of possibility, present and future, of a sovereign citizenship.25 For the future of a sovereign citizenship, we must understand the rhythms of politics and understand its place and dignity. Bensaïd takes us into the labyrinth of the space and time of these metamorphoses.

2

Uneven and Combined Spaces

Our entry point into Bensaïd’s understanding of space in a globalised world incorporates a series of tensions that are irresolvable for the capitalist mode of production, exemplified by the twofold crisis that began to develop in France throughout the 1980s. This was the so-called crisis of the nation state and the weakening of the welfare state. It was interwoven with concrete political concerns, the construction of the European Union and debates surrounding the European constitution. As can be seen from the above, the general problem that Bensaïd was working on – it remained an unsolved problem in his work – was a response to the transformation of the spatial and temporal conditions of political action that had prevailed since the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-

24 25

Ibid. Bensaïd 1997, p. 29.

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turies. The notions of sovereignty, the people, the nation and a territory were shaken without being replaced. This general concern informed his work into the 2000s as well, because political action always takes place in a plurality of spaces (economic, legal, ecological and cultural), but, for three centuries, the national space had become the politically dominant one. The relations of social force and corresponding rights yielded themselves to these relations. Today, we are obliged to act in the mobile scale of closely intertwined spaces. As an example, Bensaïd thought it is possible to rely on the domestic balance of power to defeat the European Constitutional Treaty of social demolition, but responses to the great challenges (employment, social protection and budgets) could only be made at the European level; the important questions of ecology, migration and anti-war mobilisation could only be resolved at the global level. Bensaïd outlined four elements of the contemporary organisation of space. First, the formal rationality of globalisation encourages irrational identity panics; the abstract universalism of the commodity unleashes particularisms and feeds nationalisms. Second, capitalism is characterised by two historical tendencies on the national question. On the one hand is the creation of national states, where the modern idea of the nation involves a unity between the soil and a representation. On the other hand, is the growing international market and the increase of international intercourse that becomes more predominant in mature capitalism. Third, where capital dominates, frontiers and borders are not abolished and the violence of the state is not diminished, but is displaced in the movement of globalisation. The tendency is contradictory. It is a balancing act that alternates and combines deterritorialisation ‘without borders’ and defensive reterritorialisation. France and Germany’s borders are opened only to close the Schengen area off like an inverse prison. Fourth, the only rational response to the rise of nationalism and imperialism is working-class internationalism. Who should inherit the legacy of the Enlightenment of universal citizenship? Does the ruling class or the working class inherit the Enlightenment’s revolutionary conception that opened itself to foreigners? Bensaïd maintained the position that the workers’ movement – as a particular – could incarnate the universal. In a text titled Les nations entre cosmopolitisme et internationalisme, Bensaïd wrote that ‘without the internationalist logic of class emancipation, an integral citizenship in Europe will remain a generous repertoire of ideas but powerless in the face of the unleashing of national and religious intolerance’.26

26

Bensaïd 1993.

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Since the Enlightenment, ‘without ceasing to dream of a global “cosmopolitan” order perfecting universal history, man has remained a political animal on a small scale’.27 The early communist project make every effort to change the scale. Against the unleashing of fictitious nationalisms, whose menace continues to be real, for Bensaïd there was ‘no other means to face it than an effective internationalisation of struggle, a reconstruction of solidarities, a fraternisation from below, poles apart from all the hypostasis of state reason’.28 This is not a case of abstractions. ‘Expressing their particularities without dissolving them into an undifferentiated totality, internationalism conceives nations as moments of an effective universalisation driven by class solidarities’: Although it isn’t in the spirit of the times, we must continue to repeat that the class struggle constitutes the necessary middle term between the nation and internationalism, the only mediation allowing for the overcoming of the first in the second. If this red thread is broken, states, blocs, camps, beliefs, tribes and ethnicities and other unsavoury phantoms will overrun the landscape of conflict. Class struggle alone constitutes the going beyond of the national labyrinth; of recognising in the other, whatever its flag or uniform, a part of oneself.29 According to Bensaïd, a necessary condition for internationalism was the rehabilitation of politics, ‘modestly reconstituting practices and common mobilisations around issues like unemployment, ecology, disarmament, debt in the third world, which more than ever demands action of an international scope’.30 Taking into account the proclaimed universalism of the French Revolution, he relied on the young Péguy, who called for a dialectical relation of the national and the international founded on the living contradiction between the universal message of the French Revolution (the declaration of the universal Rights of Man) and its particular tradition. In the name of such a concrete internationalism, Péguy declared war on the Meline government’s colonialist practices: As French internationalists, we know what we say when we respond to him: Yes, we universally attack every army insofar as it is an instrument of offensive war, that is to say a tool of unjust collective violence; and 27 28 29 30

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

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we particularly attack the French army insofar as it is an instrument of offensive war in Algeria, in Tunisia, in Tonkin, in Sudan and in Madagascar, that is to say a tool of unjust collective violence; and if we attack the French army in particular, it is precisely that, as internationalists, we are still French because in the International we are truly the French nation, we are the only good French: the nationalists are the evil. It is because we are indeed French that the colonial massacres committed by the evil French make us personally remorseful; it is because we are French Internationalists that the crimes of General Galiéni are more painful to us than the English, German or American crimes. [For Bensaïd,] [t]he patriotic deviations of the late Péguy do not detract from these strong words.31 At the level of theoretical articulation, Bensaïd was working with a form of uneven and combined development, which he owed to Trotsky. Uneven and combined development began as a strategic conception, then became a socalled law of development. Bensaïd writes, ‘empires, nations and regions: the territorial metamorphoses of sovereignty are not the product of institutional conceptions of space. Capital models spatiality just as it models social temporality’.32 There are, therefore, spatial inequalities inherent from the origin of the development of capitalism and the accumulation of capital encourages these social and spatial inequalities that are necessary to its metabolism. Trotsky’s concept of uneven and combined development captures capital’s metabolism in this sense. In conjunctural terms, the world Bensaïd’s generation was born into was the outcome of war, ‘in a space organised between Moscow and Washington, Churchill and Stalin’, but the ‘equilibrium of Yalta that organised for half a century the world’s geopolitics has ceded way under the pressure of globalisation’. Under the impetus of the world market – given in the concept of capital itself – ‘pure commodity globalisation multiplies spaces without producing real universality. The dialectic of place and space, of local meaning and universal knowledge … is blocked’.33 The web of this movement of capital creates, ‘on the one side, an abstract cosmopolitan space carried by the pressures of finance; on the other, pulverised places, between outsourcing and relocation, between deterritorialisation and imaginary roots, without the

31 32 33

Ibid. Bensaïd 1997, p. 41. Bensaïd 1997, p. 32.

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horizon of universality’. In this movement of capital, the ghetto proliferates, private space is multiplied to the detriment of public space and urban space itself is privatised – water, electricity, transport, reserved quarters ‘annihilating the citizen without creating for all that a shadow of universal citizenship’.34 Politics follows this movement of the commodity; the specificity of the political space is degraded. Capital thus shapes territories and politics. Bensaïd pointed out that the idea of territory as a unity of the soil and representation is constitutive of the modern idea of the nation, where ‘the making of territory seals the – statist – relation between space and power, politically organising a national area for the market’.35 The political body and its representation were tied to the administrative organisation of territory after the French Revolution. Within these borders existed disequilibrium and inequality between different regions and urban centres: Behind the mirage of harmonious national unity persisted spatial contrasts and antagonisms. If territory became the dominant form of spatial commodification and political sovereignty, the plural space of the social bond never reduced itself to a two-dimensional territory on a map without history.36 The consequence of which was: The carving out of territory invented an intelligible order and promoted a spatial representation … It legitimated the exercise of political power through the mediation of the soil. Concordantly, it established a tight, dynamic bond between territorialisation and secularisation. The principle of territoriality becomes thus the bearer of the aspirations to freedom and equality. It announces a citizenship defined by the soil … It determines the foundations and the ideas of the modern political order around the notions of nation, sovereignty and security. The trail of fixed borders and the imperative of boundaries break other bonds without abolishing them. In claiming a geographical naturalness, in reality they establish an imprisonment of populations in an administrative affiliation.37 34 35 36 37

Bensaïd 1997, p. 33. Bensaïd 1997, p. 34. Ibid. Ibid.

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The territory and the nation do not constitute isolated atoms within the capitalist world market. The tendency to globalisation produced relations that crossed through states along many dimensions, multiplying new allegiances and superimposing different authorities. This is an example of the law of uneven and combined development, working its way through the particularity of the European Union. For Bensaïd, this process created disjointed spaces, which carried great risks along with it. This was so because: Originally, the invention of territory is the bearer of universality to the extent that it split and dissolved the particularisms that existed in a secular spatiality. Political citizenship progressively overrode mystical communities of blood and sacrifice. Inversely, the disintegration of territory to the benefit of cities and nomadic networks revives the logic of exclusion. Territory loses its function of political contractuality to become the place of a wilfully ethnicised identarian entrenchment: ‘the political invention of identity’ wins out over that of territory. This crisis, where social and cultural coherences dissolve themselves, tends to reverse the secularising and universalising effects of the territorial principle. With the dismantlement of territories – the fluidity of capital, the circuits of information, the outsourcing of enterprises – seem to escape from all political hold reduced to the impotent simulacras of a representation without presence. This functional weakening of territory is favourable to the panicked returns back to nature and the sacred, to tribal and clannish belonging, to the re-sacralisation of the soil and identification through blood ties.38 So, for Bensaïd, the crises of territory, representation and politics were interwoven. Citizenship is a historically determined form of politics; territory constitutes the spatial projection of sovereignty. Globalisation compromises this citizen, split between fragmented cosmopolitanism and an anxious localism. Within this tension, the future is no longer liberatory, in a sense, since the ‘erasure of all mobilising representations of the future darkens the horizon, as if the search for a goal, the quest for the better, had only been a transient request for meaning’.39

38 39

Bensaïd 1997, p. 37. Bensaïd 1997, p. 55.

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399

The Temporal Dimension: A Plea for Historical Sense and Slow Thought

As is clear, Bensaïd thought the expanded reproduction of capital pervades and determines space. Capital’s accelerated rotation also contracts and determines time. The law of production and exchange of commodities bends time and space to the imperatives of the market and capital accumulation. The rhythms of time produce a present that is only a fleeting moment in the chain of capitalist reproduction. This is the moment of profit making, the short-term calculation of capital gains that structures the historical horizon, the capitalist cult of the fleeting instant that accelerates. Somehow, political action must resurrect memory and a horizon of hope that transcends such a fleeting instant. According to Philippe Corcuff, one of Bensaïd’s signature contributions to the radical left was his response to the impasse that François Hartog called ‘le présentisme’. This expression refers to a present that is imprisoned within itself – or the enclosure of the present – that is more and more disconnected from the past as it is from the future. In the flux of the media industry, the ‘irruption of the new is banalised in the diversity of the facts, in the succession of news without novelty, in the disintegration of a history into fragments’, this is the primacy of the image of a fetish-like instant.40 In this fetish-like instant, the image crushes history under the avalanche of facts and breaks the logic of causal relations. The logic is one of ‘frenetic acceleration, with its cult of eating fast, and thinking fast … in the indifference of the ephemeral news item’, in which history becomes apolitical.41 This acceleration is anti-strategic because it lacks memory and cannot project itself into the future. Things are otherwise with strategic thinking, which balances the audacity of youth and the cautious lessons of experience and mediates the impatience of action and the slowness of thought. Bensaïd saw the pitfalls in the new post-modern discourse of acceleration: The interrogations tend to give credence to the idea of an automatic time whose power we must submit to. The daily vocabulary speaks of the acceleration of time, or the acceleration of the world. It thus invokes the existence of a character called Time, more or less hurried, to which we will have to adjust to. However, physical time is not as capricious. It represents the quantifiable invariant allowing the enunciation of relations of caus-

40 41

Bensaïd 1997, p. 59. Bensaïd 1997, pp. 60–1.

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ality. The experience of a uniform temporal flux results from the social development of the measure of time and the operation of an abstraction of social time across generalised commodity exchange. The hypostasis of a Time, comes from a fetishistic confusion between physical time, as a measure, and social time, which is a bond and a relation, which in no case is an independent substance or an object. To speak of a contraction and expansion of time participates more or less in the fetishistic representation of it.42 Where can we find the secret of this time that seems natural and thing-like? This abstract time must homogenise difference and turn plurality into uniformity, therefore it functions like money. One of the paradoxes of Marx’s understanding of time – this gets to the root of things, human beings themselves – is that the socially necessary labour time that measures value is itself determined by the movement of circulation and reproduction of capital across the market and competition. This has a destructive role, in a certain sense. An example of this destructive role is how the fetish of time as money and money as time effaces plurality and the discordance of time. Bensaïd feared this would have grave consequences for the environment. Why is this so? Because the capitalist mode of production is rooted in the constraints of the biosphere. It is absurd to imagine a social organisation of labour without the earth. Marx said that labour was the father of material wealth, the earth its mother, but labour under the alienated conditions of the capitalist mode of production threatens to create a violent, murderous domestic dispute. Two temporalities clash violently because they are irreconcilable. This ecological perspective reveals the explosive contradiction between two temporalities. According to the rationality of the market, the autonomisation of the economic temporality in relation to the biological (night work) or planetary (consummation of non-renewable energies) supposes an accumulation of capital spontaneously guaranteeing the reproduction of humanity and the biosphere.43 Unlimited capitalist production ignores natural constraints. In its short-term thirst for profit, it has no regard for the fact that the reproduction of capital does not automatically reproduce the biosphere. ‘As a complex living system, the

42 43

Bensaïd 1997, p. 61. Bensaïd 1997, p. 64.

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biosphere possesses in effect its own reactions, its own immanent rationality, irreducible to the mechanical reason of the market’.44 Thus, two temporalities animate this antagonism. On the one side, an instrumental reason whose temporal scale is short and mired in immediacy, a result of competition and the law of value. On the other side, the time of the biosphere is long and in accordance with its own immanent rationality where the future is worth no less than the present. To master this political discordance of time and ensure harmony between economic reason and nature demands a political project in direct opposition to the horizons and expectations of capitalist production. The commodity has no regard for the future outside of its own metamorphoses. Buy, produce and circulate, that is its immanent slogan. It ignores, or encourages, the robbery of nature. It holds that it can steal from nature without consequences. But the immanent rhythms of the earth that have developed over the centuries and millennia are not in harmony with this relatively new mode of human production that knows no limits to its profit making and war. The human species faces a temporal difficulty. This short temporal horizon appears detached from a long-term horizon that concerns the survival of the species. Discordant, our time is radically out of joint. In the thick of the discord, revolutionary political action can permit a rational appropriation of the future, only if it fastens the discordant times and moving spatial scales into a coherent politics that can point a way out of the discord. Capitalism homogenises the planet under a dominant temporal regime, ‘to the detriment of local spaces and times’, but it also transforms the terms of the past, present and future. In this transformation exists ‘the feeling that time shrinks, implying an agonising closure of duration’, where the concepts past, present and future are thrown out of harmony in their relation to one another. In general, historical chronology is a learning process and means of orientation, ‘a way of situating oneself and a means to regulate conduct’, tying the relations between past and future generations. These relations experience discord, because The dictatorship of the nanosecond disintegrates the temporal flux into a ‘sequel of static snapshots’. The meaning of the long-term atrophies. Confusion permeates between the past and the future, the real and the virtual, the immediate and the postponed. The sequence of days and seasons are diluted into the greyness of time.45

44 45

Bensaïd 1997, p. 66. Bensaïd 1997, p. 70.

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Yet the opening of the future and the memory of the past are essential political features of time, commanding fidelity to a past and the capacity for anticipation towards the future. The present is the ‘gap in time’ for decision, if we follow Arendt: [A] checkpoint in time, this present, open to that which is virtual in itself is always untimely. Contrary to all notions of fate or of destiny, political responsibility is based on its indeterminacy. It is essential to be able to look behind in order to look forward. The prophetic dialectic of memory … and project, of retrospective and prospective thought is the key to historical consciousness.46 We encounter again Benjamin’s dialectic, whereby ‘the double relation of the oppressed past to a menacing future is the basis for the specifically political temporality of the present as the moment and place of decision’.47 For Marx, in breaking with the speculative philosophies of history, the present becomes the dominant category of historical time, in a transformation in which: Henceforth, the present no longer shows itself as imitating a model of the past, or of attaining a dreamt for end, but of incessantly deciding between many possibilities … This present … [i]s the collector of time and dealer of meaning, through which the past and the future are permanently redefined, but never abolished.48 This is the broken time of politics, discontinuous, strategic, of conjuncture and project, of the adjustment of means to master an end in the distance and the duration. In this political present, political time is secularised for the first time, opening the way for political responsibility.

4

The Decapitation of the King

The decapitation of Louis xvi was a foundational event for modern bourgeois politics, of consolidation more than commencement. After the monarchy was overthrown in 1792, the judgement of the dethroned king presented a prob-

46 47 48

Bensaïd 1997, p. 71. Ibid. Ibid.

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lem: did the King henceforth become an ordinary citizen? If this were the case, he would have to be judged as an ordinary criminal. Or, if he was not to be treated like an ordinary citizen with an ordinary trial, it was a political trial. The National Convention became the supreme judge of the King; it broke the constraints of the judicial form. It was not an ordinary tribunal. As hinted at in the previous chapter, this immediately raised the question of representation. In opposition to this trial, the Gironde made a call to the people in the name of the theory of an inalienable sovereignty: representation must become one with the represented. The Montagne responded, however, that in demanding the responsibility of representation before the represented: this representation must be fully exercised instead of taking refuge in the silent will of the electors. Emerging from a popular insurrection, the National Convention is really the constituent body whose meeting nullifies the preceding constitutional pact. Convened, it becomes the source and foundation of the law.49 The National Convention is therefore the judge; thus, the trial of the dethroned King takes place in a public emergency, involving a ‘Singular judgement, judgement of exception, escaping the law and its forms’. The National Convention had to navigate its way through the tension between the exception and the rule. Bensaïd writes, The problem … is terribly new. It is to the honour of the National Convention of having posed it publicly and debated the terms thoroughly for nearly a trimester, despite the state of emergency and the war on the frontiers. Emancipated from divine right and providence, by consequence from all transcendence, liberated humanity finds itself for the first time confronted by the question of law and justice that they themselves define: if men and not God dictate the law, how to make sure that this law does not change at the discretion of moods, of opinions and simple relations of force? Certainly, the Constitution establishes a Law of laws, whose revision depends on the suspension of the social pact through insurrection. This supreme law is no less relative to it. Law of a society left to itself, it is obliged to exercise, without an excuse or appeal, its frightful power over life and death.50

49 50

Bensaïd 1997, pp. 87–8. Ibid.

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History had posed the novelty of the relation between the exception and the rule, in which a lacuna between the exception and the rule in the foundation of a new right subsists. The fate of the King’s head testified to this lacuna. Coupled with sovereignty, the relation between representation and the represented persists within this lacuna, because the lacuna suspends the norm: Whatever the claims of myth, the interventions of Robespierre and SaintJust broke … with the vicious circle between the simple authority of number and the illusory sovereignty of a mythic people being incarnated by its representation. Their dialectic of the exception and the rule follows from the principle of sovereignty. Popular sovereignty, as Rousseau conceives it, is inalienable. As a consequence, it implies a right to resist oppression and the right to insurrection, formally recognised by the Constitution of 1793. In a state of insurrection, only the people command. Hence the Revolution legalises its own unfinished nature, otherwise said its ‘permanence’, as Marx would formulate after the 1848 revolutions. In effect, the foundational act is a difficult problem. Affirming a new right, it cannot submit to that which does not yet exist.51 This leap to a new right is necessary, though literally criminal, lest there be a revolution without a revolution. Bensaïd clarified that it is equally necessary not to confuse a new emergent right of a violent popular foundation and the brutality of an established state and its forms of right. Yet, why did the King’s body have to be dismembered? First, the King played a symbolic role, ‘according to the mentalities and the representations of the time, the living King remained the incarnation of divine legitimacy’.52 This split between the human and the divine condemned him to execution. Second, the King was, by definition, outside the social pact, and therefore it is non-sensical to judge him as a citizen. Rather, he was a political monster according to the norms of the new and formative public space. There was simply no common measure or language between the divine order that he symbolised and the political space that the Revolution brought into being. Third, to decapitate him was to break the King’s allure – ‘today we would say its alienation or fetishism’ – to uncover his all too human existence and the transcendence of God’s realm on earth to self-legislating humanity.53 51 52 53

Bensaïd 1997, p. 89. Bensaïd 1997, p. 91. Bensaïd 1997, p. 92. Perhaps this dilemma was captured by Alice in Wonderland, ‘The executioner’s argument was, that you couldn’t cut off a head unless there was a body to cut it

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Though they took the first steps in this new world without divine foundations, norms and codes, the National Convention left a series of problems unresolved, which show that human wagers are always hazardous, occupying a space between relative truth and relative certitude. Above all, their political equations remained unresolved, where the social conflicts born at their core did not yet contain their solutions. Private property and individualistic egotism now reigned in place of God. It had not really broken with the rule of fetishes. The temporal realm of God was smashed. Real and concrete democracy still had to be worked out within the vicious circle of the constitution’s selffoundation, between the powers constituting and the constituted. Rousseau already asked how it was possible to find a form of government that might place the laws above man, in failing to secularise the divine will, the temptation exists to deify the general will within the conditions of bourgeois society. The regicide facilitated the transfer of religiosity from the old regime to the modern bourgeois representative state. The contradiction between a public space and civil society now occupied the foundation of modernity, unresolved.

5

How Can Politics Still be Thought?

I reconnect here with a theme from the previous chapter on Marx and subsequent chapters, Bensaïd’s engagement with Badiou and Arendt, now in the context of Bensaïd thinking through the crisis of politics. The general problem began with Alain Badiou’s Peut-on penser la politique? written in 1985, in which he claimed that, within the crisis of Marxism, there is a deeper, more profound crisis of politics in its entirety. What then, on this wager, is this crisis of politics? Does it have specific contents? Does politics mean anything any longer? What kind of politics is in question? Can politics be thought? Answering these questions, Bensaïd also drew Arendt into the discussion. For Arendt, politics implies a pluralism dealing with the community and the reciprocity of different beings. Politics in a public space implies difference; politics cannot be reduced to economic necessity. According to Arendt, the crisis threatened this pluralism and she sought to untie politics from the social. Instead, politics was inseparable from the ancient Greek polis. The particular-

off from: that he had never had to do such a thing before, and he wasn’t going to begin at his time of life. The King’s argument was, that anything that had a head could be beheaded, and that you weren’t to talk nonsense. The Queen’s argument was, that if something wasn’t done about it in less than no time, she’d have everybody executed, all round. (It was this last remark that had made the whole party look so grave and anxious)’. Carroll 1998, p. 76.

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ity of human beings consists in the fact that they can live in a polis and that the organisation of this polis represents the highest form of human community. The specificity of the polis is decisive according to Arendt. And Aristotle said that ‘man’ is a political animal, only where the polis is. Arendt’s work was challenging and Bensaïd sought to respond to her charges against Marx and class struggle while taking her seriously. The immediate question was the resemblance of problematic, namely the threat that politics might lose its specificity. The crisis of the 1930s being Arendt’s starting point, she tried to identify the concrete forms the risk of the disappearance of politics took: essentially its annihilation in the logic of history – the subordination of politics to historical categories. There were two forms of this threat. The first was what she accused Marx – unilaterally and incorrectly – of doing, namely of subordinating politics to History. The second concern was far more legitimate, namely the threat that politics could dissolve into the social. Bensaïd believed that the second case had a little more truth because there exists a danger of folding politics back onto a sociological determinism, of reducing it to the pure reflection of the social, of searching for the essence or social nature of every political phenomenon, disregarding the specificity of the political field. He states it thus: The danger is real. It is verified under different forms in the workers movement, not only in the proclaimed orthodox Marxism, but also in social democracy before 1914, and, as paradoxical as it appears, in the libertarian movement. Hence, I do not think that it comes as an original invention of Bolshevism, but a problem that is more profound, a theoretical and practical temptation widely shared. It is why I insist on the rupture of continuity between social and political struggles.54 At stake are the spaces of political deliberation. Arendt effectively sought to re-establish the autonomy of the political space in the Greek sense. In her perspective, this was incompatible with Marxism, since she thought the latter compromised the political space of the polis by dissolving it into the march of history or economic necessity. She was, in fact, defending the principle of political responsibility, in which the spatial dimension of politics is decisive and freedom is the immanent meaning of politics. As she wrote, ‘This public space becomes political only when it is guaranteed in a city [or town] … this city that offers a stable place to the actions and ephemeral words to mortals is

54

Bensaïd and Petit 1999, p. 24.

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the polis’.55 The political space is a meeting place and somewhere to deliberate (the agora, the public place and the assembly), a place where people ‘meet one another, not as unequal private persons, but as equal citizens, united by a place of reciprocity; a place where the right of re-union is exercised, the right to assembly for petitioning, political freedom par excellence’.56 This is one side of politics, but, so Bensaïd suggests: Curiously, Hannah Arendt always thinks of politics under the condition of space, rarely under the condition of time. Perhaps, because she absorbs time into history. Her preoccupation with saving political freedom from historical necessity will lead her to avoid time, along with history … Arendt maintained, from this problematic, the theme of beginnings and foundations. Miraculous events, all beginnings incessantly interrupt the chain of time … This vision, which is in many ways decisive, blocks a more articulated comprehension of the plurality of times that knot and assemble in politics. Where there is movement, there is tempo, a concrete duration made of rhythmic distinctions, periods and arrests … political intervention adjusts its own temporality in trying to free up the optimal rhythm from mechanistic constraints.57 Since in the terms of representation inaugurated by the French Revolution to call on the people and speak in the name of the people is haunted by the circularity of representation, then, Bensaïd claims: Sovereignty demands the presence of an absence, the phantom-like appearance of the people … stubbornly posing the question of knowing how sovereignty can be exercised without contradicting itself. Responding to this enigma, Marx gave the most radical response, in imagining the suppression of the contradiction through the final disappearance of the state.58 Because the French Revolution produced an internally split and discordant claim to representation, the general will became an alien imposition on the newly dominated class. The inherent contradictions of representation result-

55 56 57 58

Arendt 2001, p. 26. Bensaïd 1997, p. 97. Bensaïd 1997, pp. 99–100. Bensaïd 1997, p. 100.

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ing from the French Revolution are specific to modern bourgeois societies. Representative democracy retains this discord embodied in the form of the political state. As already noted, for Bensaïd, politics retained the dimension of representation and if this foundational point is shaken, politics becomes unthinkable and impractical – the play of the void. However, it was otherwise with Arendt, specifically in the terms in which she took up the traditional opposition between direct, participatory democracy of the council movement and the representative democracy of parties and parliament.59 She postulated that councils were organs of democracy, organs of action and participation, which were opposed to revolutionary parties, being organs of representation. Within her overall project, this thesis made sense. It was in the councils that the lost space of political freedom was restored. However, ‘to resolve the threatening contradiction, being concerned to safeguard the political character of revolutions – their space of freedom – from the social question … Arendt must resort to a historically unverified postulate’ that councils were more interested in the political than the social aspect of revolution. Her framework held that the social question played a subordinate role to the political question during times of revolution. This argument, Bensaïd retorted, was historically weak: This unilateral interpretation of history makes it harder to account for the Turin factory councils of 1920, the industrial Cordones of Chile 1972– 3, the formation of the worker’s commissions and the neighbourhood committees in Portugal 1975, and a fortiori the soviets of 1905 and 1917 (which Hannah Arendt knew the genesis of very well from reading Oskar Anweiler’s book). In reality, throughout the course of great national crises, the separation between the political and the social blurs. Both interact with each other in permanence. Workers’ councils respond for the most part to functional questions of transport, supplies, housing and distribution. They are led to take charge of production … Although the question of representation, its forms, its modes of control, of the relation between

59

Arendt wrote, ‘The conflict between the two systems, the parties and the councils, came to the fore in all twentieth-century revolutions. The issue at stake was representation versus action and participation. The councils were organs of action, the revolutionary parties were organs of representation, and although the revolutionary parties halfheartedly recognized the councils as instruments of “revolutionary struggle”, they tried even in the midst of revolution to rule them from within; they knew well enough that no party, no matter how revolutionary it was, would be able to survive the transformation of the government into a true Soviet Republic’. Arendt 2003, p. 528.

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mandates and the mandated, will not be resolved for all that, the social does not cease to burst into the political scene. If Hannah Arendt tried to schematise the historical facts on this point, it is because she poses for herself an insurmountable problem by making the ‘social question’ responsible for the failure of modern political revolutions taken as revolutions of Liberté.60 Bensaïd did not follow Arendt in her critique of Marx, either. He thought she was one-sided; additionally, the distinction between direct and representative democracy was simplistic, leading to many blind spots. The social question and the overthrow of class exploitation were not harbingers of the terror, leading freedom to capitulate before necessity as Arendt thought. Neither were political parties. Only through the struggle and confrontation of political parties can contradictory public opinions be voiced. What is more, since the experience of the French Revolution, nineteenthcentury revolutionary thought – and not only Marx – had argued that ‘political rights are no longer separable from the social rights to existence and “purely political” emancipation accorded rights without the real means of exercising them’. Therefore, the republic must become social. All these problems concerned the political conditions for the emancipation of labour. Alain Badiou, on the other hand, saw politics within the hiatus of civil society and the state. Politics begins with fidelity to the event, where the oppressed decide, enunciate and proclaim equality, a movement in which politics does not ‘represent’ the oppressed. It is, for Badiou, therefore rare that politics takes place, as Bensaïd summarised: Therefore, the future of politics beyond its crisis lies in the capacity of detaching and subtracting ourselves from the state – apolitical by its very nature in the sense that it stands on the ashes of the event – and in preserving at all costs, ‘the eventfulness immanent in politics’.61 Consequently, Badiou’s notion of political organisation eliminated the duty to represent (the class or the oppressed) in order to remain rather a network of militant fidelity. Bensaïd was not content with either Arendt’s or Badiou’s conceptions of politics and sought a third road:

60 61

Bensaïd 1997, pp. 102–3. Bensaïd 1997, p. 84.

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We maintain, for our part that politics, as a form of being together, acting together, thinking together, remains within this pluralist existence in the coordinates of social space and time, whose creation it contributes to. To the extent that it implies sovereignty, it implies a certain spatial mastery of a territory. To the extent that it implies the power of decision, it aims at a certain temporal mastery of the future. As long as the hiatus between civil society and the state continues, we will maintain that politics conserves a dimension of representation, or that it ‘roams’ between the event and representation. Otherwise said, we can only think of politics as representation too, with its impasses and contradictions.62 Bensaïd defends the margins of politics, which also involves an attack on statist identity-thought. An illusory way to finish with politics is with the strict identity of the state and society, in a totalitarian statification of society embodied in the phrase: je suis l’état. Opposed to statist identity-thought, Bensaïd would rather speak of the crisis and disappearance of a certain form of politics, ‘of an epoch and a certain form of sovereignty’, where it was necessary to insist on the spatial and temporal dimension of the crisis and the uncertain nature of this already-proclaimed death: ‘while waiting for its fulfilment, the state and society, private and public, classes and parties, cannot be confused without peril. The pivot of these distinct spheres and their own temporalities, the forms and modes of representation that result from it, remains the political order’, able to act with authority.63 Consequently, Bensaïd thinks it was still necessary that there be a mastery of the space and time of politics, or else their plural dimensions would accord, in a form of conciliatory consensus, with the prevailing and dominant modalities of bourgeois space and time; nevertheless, one deliberates politically on a terrain undergoing rapid change, with the spatiotemporal framework that emerged from the French Revolution destabilised.64 The meaning of politics is weighed down by a century of experience that had definitively demonstrated that the ‘extreme antithesis of politics [as a defence of freedom – D.R.] is the concentration camp’. But what is politics in the first place? Bensaïd recognised that to attempt a definition of politics risks falling into the traps of definitions so, ‘rather than searching for an essence or substance of politics, I prefer to think of it as a relation to the economy, social organisation, institutions and the state apparatus’.65 Politics is in the first 62 63 64 65

Ibid. Bensaïd 1997, p. 85. Ibid. Bensaïd and Petit 1999, pp. 13–14.

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instance, relational. Politics is a space to think through the historical transformation of these relations, in that sense it is a praxis in the Greek sense. Cautiously, Bensaïd suggested that the formula that politics was ‘the art of possibility’, was the least bad. As we have seen, the term possibility is liable to misunderstandings. If history is not the fulfilment of a pre-written scripture but an open history, then political action is the exercise of a freedom and responsibility, which articulates circumstances and determines a field of effective possibilities, rich and concrete (abstract-formal possibility being only a poor possibility: that which is not contradictory on its own terms) … This actualisation of possibilities determines a specific political temporality where the present is neither the simple prolongation of a past gone by, nor the simple perpetuation of tradition, nor an arbitrary invention of the desired future … but the moment where the selection of possibles is in constant interaction.66 Bensaïd’s conception of politics has specific categories: the present, possibility, and a specific idea of the relationship between contingency and necessity, liberation and constraint. To invoke the category of liberation is, at the same time, to invoke collective deliberation as a space where constraint is understood and transformed into liberation. A politics of possibility and collective decision implies the duty or imperative to affect (in the sense of an ability to passionately move) active transformations of the world. One actually has to practise politics as a way of life in opposition to individualist egoism. To be an affective active militant is an elementary ethic of politics involving a principle of responsibility. This is so because politics is an art of conflict, an art of pushing the boundaries and shaking things up by breaking the continuity of empty time. Bensaïd added, in this spirit, ‘Françoise Proust defined the political as “an art of conjuncture and contretemps”. The formula suits me. I adopt it’.67 Politics only makes sense in concrete historical conditions, and it cannot be reduced to History. In fact, we can speak of a common origin between the emergence of politics as a specific category and the elaboration of a historical discourse. As the chance encounter of multiple forces, politics is tied from the outset to

66 67

Ibid. Bensaïd and Petit 1999, p. 15.

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the ‘times of alarm’. Thucydides was a child when Aeschylus wrote Eumenides. The experience of a political temporality opens up the possibility of a historical temporality. Politicisation and temporalisation go together. But the political theory of the Greeks did not imply a philosophy of history: no concept of progress came to unify expectations.68 Politics and history had a common origin and it would be inappropriate to envisage a general form of politics outside of its historical conditions. From this vantage point, Bensaïd suggested that we try to follow the relations between history and politics, and, in particular, the slow and long movement of secularisation of politics, up to the advent of a modern profane politics. The key question was precisely ‘where are we today?’ in this movement. From the French Revolution and the symbolic fracture of the regicide onwards, what is the new relation between history and politics? What is the play of permutations between them both? Auguste Comte tipped that the nineteenth century would be that of history. A prognostic that was widely verified: political discourse was subordinated to historical logic.69 In the neoliberal era, politics is subordinated to the abstraction of the market. If politics is subordinated to historical abstractions the contingency of political action is lost. By affirming the contingency of political action, some ‘categories of the atomists and Greek sophists are recovered’ and reappropriated. The notion of clinamen made its comeback in order to think through the small and aleatory deviations that have a profound impact. Additionally, Bensaïd explained that: There is equally an interest in the concept of kairos of the Sophists – the favourable moment, the conjuncture – associated with the exploration of a strategic thought of the interaction between the subject and the object, between the situation and representation. In the Renaissance, Machiavelli reinvented the politics of the encounter, between ‘the occasion’ (the conjunctural opportunity) and the will (‘fortitude’). The emphasis was on contingency, consequently on the greater responsibility on the political actor.70 This tradition of politics is lost if it is devoured by a fetishistic philosophy of history. Folding back on Bensaïd’s relational conception of politics as opposed to

68 69 70

Bensaïd and Petit 1999, p. 16. Bensaïd and Petit 1999, p. 17. Bensaïd and Petit 1999, p. 18.

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a substantialist one, how could we characterise Bensaïd’s struggle for the specificity of politics? The first point to make is that not everything is political, ‘at least not directly, not without mediations’. Not everything is political because time is plural: I consider that there is a durable plurality of time and not a pre-established, natural harmony between the economic, social, political and ecological temporalities. This is not a discovery. Since Marx (with his notion of ‘contretemps’), Ernst Bloch (with his idea of ‘non-contemporaneity’), Halbwachs (with his analysis of the plurality of social time), Althusser (with his idea of an articulated multiple time), the idea has certainly made the rounds. Françoise Proust titled one of her books L’histoire à contretemps. I speak, for my part, of the discordance of times … Today, my idea of the political will be at the same time ambitious (contribute to rescuing its meaning from its disappearance in a free fall into barbarism) and much more modest: restore the eminence of the political without believing in an abstract totalisation of the world by decree. Not everything in effect is adjusted and indexed to a political temporality. There is a time and a rhythm of aesthetics, an ecological time, a time and a rhythm of morals and everyday sensibilities … This articulation of discordant time implies a relation of tension and dialogue between different registers and regimes of thought.71 Bensaïd’s project is ambitious because it seeks to maintain the contingency of political action and its own temporal order in relation to a living totality that is full of discordance. Again, I direct the reader’s attention to the difference here between an abstract and formal totality and a concrete totality. The abstract totality is not mediated, it is unilateral; in the concrete totality, mediation forms the core of the whole through the different temporal orders constituting its living substance. We saw in the last chapter that a politics of the oppressed cannot be confused with, subordinated to, or reduced to, the state, either. The workers’ movements of the nineteenth century continually invented their own forms of access to politics. A later example of the twentieth century was the movement of the sans-papiers that ‘produced politics in the sense that it raised the question of the foreigner and his or her place in the city: what is a foreigner today, an immigrant worker, what is the relationship between citizenship and

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Bensaïd and Petit 1999, p. 21.

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nationality’?72 It is a good example, showing that politics must exercise a form of collective deliberation that is not crushed by the powerful, intimidation, economic might and military force. To wager on an ability to collectively decide a future life-world, a future temporal and spatial arrangement, it is also necessary to reflect on the relationship between the individual and the collective. The commodification of the world makes individuals without individuality: standardisation, massification and conformism, above all, through the privatisation of the individual to the detriment of the social connections. The global domination of the capitalist mode of production creates abstract and alienated individuals. Bensaïd argued for the concrete individual, ‘immediately positioned in its relation to the collective’, instead of egoist individualisation. In this sense, he claimed that emancipation is neither a mental nor an isolated egoistic pleasure because to substitute the conspiracy of Egos for that of the Equals does not have much hope.

6

Trotsky versus Sartre: For a Concrete Political Morality

Bensaïd took seriously the ethical dimensions of liberatory action, while holding fast to the primacy of politics over history; indeed, the primacy of politics is centred on a notion of responsibility that, to some extent, has an existential and even, to take Beauvoir’s notion, an ambiguous nature. In this sense, a politics of the oppressed has an ethics. The ethical dimension of politics is tied to the fact that revolutionary situations emerge in history though in their rarity. In this sense, Bensaïd tried to develop a concrete and political revolutionary morality. I turn to his reflections on morality in his work on Benjamin to illustrate the point. Revolutionary morality concerns means and ends. It is neither purely deontic, nor purely consequentialist, because it acts with principles on the terrain of class struggle politics and historical development. Morality pertained to values and facts, and the so-called dichotomy between how things are and how things ought to be, passing over to the dilemma of means and ends. The relationship of means and ends was debated in the Second International in its early phases. One only has to cast a glance back to the dispute between Karl Kautsky and Otto Bauer in 1906. Bensaïd summarised it in the following terms:

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Bensaïd and Petit 1999, p. 26.

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For Kautsky, ethics – like technologies, institutions and ideologies – are historical. Value resolves itself into fact. Just like history, it is the object of science. The ‘meaning of history’ separates the moral honesty and solidarity of rising classes, from the cynical and egoistic morals of decadent classes. Does this subordination of ethics to the laws of history not also announce a ‘proletarian’ positive right as complacent and pragmatic as bourgeois positive right? For Bauer, science was occupied with what was, not what ought-to-be. Against the reduction of ethics to science, he demanded its autonomy. The present is the line of temporal demarcation between science and morals. In Kautsky, moral judgements therefore suppose a ‘philosophy of history’ according to which moral meaning and historical meaning will coincide under the aegis of progress. What is real is rational … and moral! The future prolongs the past. In Bauer, the present fractures temporal continuity. But, in the name of which legislator over the future? In the name of an anthropological natural right, an eternal humanity that still feels a secularised divinity moving within it? This would be another ‘philosophy of history’, but perhaps the same philosophy of time. The circle is more vicious than expected.73 Bensaïd asked his readers to draw the consequence from the claim that morals do not march in step with the meaning of history. To demand this of morality is to remain fixed within the ‘homogenous and empty time’ of linear progress and the idealist philosophies of history that are imprisoned within it. Bensaïd rejected a morality fixed within an abstract time, asking instead for a concrete political morality, indeed even a messianic one. The given and contingent present becomes, as it is in politics, the nodal point for a morality. This contrasts with Kautsky and Bauer, at least insofar as they were devoted to philosophies of history without the decisive points of crisis. For Kautsky, the future was only the logical continuation of the past, and, for Bauer, science dominated the past whereas morals took charge of the present. Neither of them questioned the linear flow of time, the meaning of history or the law of progress. The revolutionary crisis does not feature in a homogenous and empty time, yet ‘revolutionary crises are certain. Their outcome is not. Socialism or barbarism’.74 What is desirable and possible form part of an unfinished history. A concrete political morality must take into account the undecided nature of a revolutionary

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Bensaïd 2010c, pp. 219–20. Bensaïd 2010c, p. 226.

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crisis. Who will win? In other words, a practical judgement, orientated towards action, is inseparably moral and political, with deontic principles (the categorical imperative to overthrow all forms of exploitation and oppression) and an orientation to concrete consequences (the withering away of the modern bourgeois state). Bensaïd posed anew the relation between means and ends. To illustrate his position, he began with Sartre’s notes on morality, where Sartre commented on Trotsky’s Their Morals and Ours. Sartre thought that Trotsky used bourgeois criteria in his pamphlet on morality when he wrote that Lenin’s ‘rejection of supra-class morals’ ‘did not hinder him from remaining faithful to one and the same ideal throughout his whole life; from devoting his whole being to the cause of the oppressed’. On this point: Sartre was surprised. Trotsky, intransigent revolutionary, apologises for traditional virtues (honesty, fidelity, loyalty, courage) … As if he accepts values which, tearing morals from history, testify to a nostalgia for the absolute.75 Trotsky ‘himself would be surprised with Sartre’s surprise’, Bensaïd opined, since ‘a-moralism’ simply uncovered the hypocritical nature and duplicity of bourgeois morality. The bourgeoisie’s moral hypocrisy was ‘the expression of a split in society itself, condemning man to lead a double life, public and private, man and citizen’. In Sartre’s existentialist argumentation, morality comes back to individual oppression and the rejection of authority, the need for choice. Beyond ‘class oppressions, this resistance of the individual is rooted in ethical protest. It presupposes a philosophy of freedom and the subject, condemned to solitary responsibility’.76 Yet, each traditional virtue Trotsky invoked loses its hypocritical character when it is rooted in the political struggle of the oppressed. To take the side of the oppressed and to take part in their struggles meant that one becomes the judge of the oppressor, which is a simultaneous judgement of fact and value. In modern bourgeois societies in which the capitalist mode of production dominates, to take the side of the oppressed majority – the labouring classes, women, the colonised, occupied, racialised, etc. – meant to situate moralities within concrete histories, distinct from the a-historical floating of the Cartesian moral actor. Bensaïd wrote:

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Bensaïd 2010c, p. 220. Ibid.

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Posed incorrectly, the question uproots the moral subject from all historical contexts. In a conflictual society, the field of reference is always already given. The response sprouts from the relation of the universal to the particular. To realise its own ends, the bourgeoisie was, up to a certain point, the bearer of abstractly universal values. Abstractly, because their practical realisation (equality of men and women, liberation of slaves, right to existence over right to property, emancipation beyond borders) had stumbled over its particularisation as a class, over the consolidation of its state, over the strengthening of its national borders. The proletariat does not carry within itself the same inherent barriers to universality as the bourgeoisie. In order to emancipate itself, it is expected to put an end to all oppression.77 Bensaïd’s perspective of the ability of the oppressed permits a recognition that means are never neutral in relation to ends. This unlocks an ethical principle that does not bow down to daily pragmatism.78 Here, Bensaïd drew out a Bolshevik counterpoint to Kant’s abstract universal maxim against lying, which in bourgeois terms effectively meant keeping the promise of a contract. The ends pursued, of universal emancipation, made the Bolshevik Party ‘the most honest party in history’ when it ‘actually represented the proletarian vanguard’. Surely, it deceived its class enemies, but ‘it told the toilers the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth’. ‘The ends’, Bensaïd wrote, ‘forbids the means that annihilate it’. On this point, Sartre detected Trotsky’s yearning for absolutes, saying, ‘Here is then an absolute end: social antagonisms are suppressed and man becomes an end for man, lies and violence are banished, all the strength of the human species is directed towards nature which man undertakes to conquer. Here, I discover a Kantian ideal: it is the city of ends’.79 On the contrary, for Bensaïd, this end of human liberation is historically determinate and relative. Only ‘on the horizon of our history, and for us’, is it an absolute ideal, since all the ‘rest is speculation before the eternal silence of infinite space’.80

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Bensaïd 2010c, p. 222. Bensaïd explains that ‘Trotsky asks … what is it that justifies the end? And who is the judge? Morality does not descend from heaven onto societies torn apart by social struggles and conflicts. The means can only be justified by the end, “but the end also has need of justification”. The fault lies in the question right from the start. By separating end and means, bourgeois moralising ends up in a logical blind alley’. Bensaïd 2013, p. 248. Quoted from Birchall 2004, p. 78. Bensaïd 2010c, p. 223.

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Bensaïd’s defence of Trotsky against Sartre went even further still, while acknowledging the need to avoid smuggling fetishised abstractions into moral and political exigencies. Bensaïd challenged Sartre’s implicit separation of morals and politics by posing the need for an ‘open totality’ (a term of Sartre’s), which demands the engagement of individuals, whereby the hypothesis of a future and the invention of action are inevitable. In this open totality, there is no supreme religious or historical fetish, no supreme historical tribunal. Therefore, ‘in the absence of a supreme tribunal … a practical judgement, orientated towards action, is inseparably moral and political’.81 Bensaïd argued that, through ‘the separation of morality and politics, Sartre thinks he is saving his good and his bad conscience simultaneously’. But this separation would lead Sartre to new metaphysical dualisms, which paradoxically were associated with politics. In the backyard, waiting to sneak through the open window, was Sartre’s attitude to Stalinism. Bensaïd explained the terms of Sartre’s problematic. Should one [f]ight Stalin by resigning oneself to imperialism or defend Stalin so as not to ‘howl with the wolves’? Merleau-Ponty got out of it with a formula of compromise: ‘The revolution is not pure, the counter-revolution is not impure’. In the name of ‘Realpolitik’, morality permits itself accommodations that revolutionary politics does not allow. On this point is Trotsky’s intransigence, while Sartre and Merleau-Ponty preached reconciliation: to spare Stalin under the pretext of not demoralising Billancourt will end with demoralising Petrograd and Kolyma, without saving Billancourt anyway. A bad morality does not make a good politics … Soft on Stalin in the name of political realism, Sartre accused the Trotskyists of impotent moralism. Under the pretext of ‘not choosing its camp’, with or against Stalin, ‘Trotskyism deprives itself of the possibility of preventing the war or of winning it in one or the other camp. It refuses realist politics in the name of an imperative that does not appear to be connected to the facts, in its turn it becomes idealist’. Ruthlessly, ‘concretely’, ‘politically’, Sartre condemned ‘this moral and abstract attitude’. If, on the contrary, ‘Trotskyism had won the masses, it would have been able to become concrete and political’.82 In the face of Stalinism, the logic of geographical camps was a barrier to clarity, crucial because the concentration camp is the antithesis of politics. Bensaïd 81 82

Bensaïd 2010c, pp. 223–4. Bensaïd 2010c, pp. 224–5.

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asked, ‘In the binary logic of camps, where will those of the Kolyma fit into’? He took his criticism of Sartre further: An immoral politics is also a vicious circle, moral and political. It is another form of politics in the name of the choice … between camps. Sartre confused classes and states. He ends up with a politics of state reason. When there is no immediate and conscious adhesion of the masses to a policy, the connection between theory and practice is obscured. Many escape routes become possible. Sometimes powerless theory is transformed into aesthetics, sometimes into moralism, to better ignore what can happen to a practice that is freed from any principle. If the verdict of practice was transparent and instantaneous, if the defeated and the absent were necessarily wrong, ethics would disappear into positive right … In the moments of extreme stress between theory and practice, to bear witness can still be the ultimate form of action. This is needed to safeguard the intelligibility of history at its most enigmatic moments. Far from falling into protesting moralism, the refusal to capitulate (to recant) before Stalin is a political act. Without this resistance pushed to its ultimate consequences it would today be impossible to hold a conversation that is different from the ideological vulgarity – liberal or religious – when it comes to Stalinism and the Gulag. It matters that the first struggle against Stalinism had taken place in the heart of the communist movement, at a time when, in the name of campist logic and diplomatic imperatives, ‘the friends of the ussr’ closed their eyes with a beguiling clemency.83 With the intransigent clarity of a revolutionary political morality, Trotsky’s morals were superior to Sartre’s, because he did not abstractly separate morals and politics. Where Sartre was caught in the abstract dilemma of the individual and the collective, ending up in good old metaphysical dualisms, Trotsky demanded a concrete political morality. A concrete morality constructs a perspective of human liberation that regulates action in a history for us. However, the conditions for the realisation of human liberation do not come from moral postulates that remain hypothetical. The conditions result from the given historical situations of the oppressed and a historically determined liberation. Behind every oppression and exploitation there is a future, for the totality is present in each of its parts; there is a potential liberatory future in every present moment. 83

Bensaïd 2010c, p. 225.

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Reasonable is to Wager on the Uncertain

Undoubtedly, Bensaïd’s presentation of the wager is a vital contribution to revolutionary culture. Somehow, a politics of the oppressed must gather its courage and wager on the slight possibility of transforming history with liberatory consequence. Throughout the rest of this chapter, I shall deal with the wager. Whence came this wager? Blaise Pascal introduced the concept of the wager. His seventeenth-century logic ran as follows: Because we cannot reasonably and certainly know whether God exists or not, we must wager that God exists. According to Pascal, those who muster the courage to wager that God exists have everything to gain and nothing to lose. Yet, if one does not wager on God’s existence, he or she might lose everything, namely eternal life. The wager is necessary because God is silent. This wager is more than a Jansenist exploit, more than a lame costbenefit analysis. It was implicitly dialectical, and Pascal was one of the rare French authors to have deployed dialectic. Bensaïd effectively thought that true dialectical thought must incorporate the wager. But why? Already in Goldmann’s study The Hidden God, he demonstrated that Pascal’s thought marked one of the great turning points of Western thought, ‘the moment at which it began to abandon the atomistic approach of rationalism and empiricism, and move towards dialectical reasoning’. According to Goldmann, rationalism and empiricism are opposed to dialectical thought, the latter being relative in relation to the whole. Goldmann writes of the dialectic’s genitive particle, for this affirms that there are never any absolutely valid starting points, no problems that are finally and definitely solved, and that consequently thought never moves forward in a straight line, since each individual fact or idea assumes its significance only when it takes up its place in the whole, in the same way as the whole can be understood only by our increased knowledge of the partial and incomplete facts which constitute it. The advance of knowledge is thus considered as a perpetual movement to and fro, from the whole to the parts, and from the parts back to the whole again, a movement in the course of which the whole and the parts throw light on one another.84 For Goldmann, two key fragments throw light on Pascal’s dialectic. I will quote one of them and reproduce the spirit of the other: 84

Goldmann 1964, p. 5.

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If man were to begin by studying himself, he would see how incapable he is of going beyond himself (passer outre). How could it be possible for a part to know the whole? But he may perhaps aspire to a knowledge of at least those parts which are on the same scale as he himself. But the different parts of the world are all so closely linked and related together that I hold it to be impossible to know one without knowing the others and without knowing the whole. Thus, since all things are both the result and the cause of causes, both helpers and receivers of help, both mediately and immediately linked together by a natural and imperceptible chain which connects together things most distant and distinct from one another, I hold it to be equally impossible to know the parts without knowing the whole, and to know the whole without having a particular knowledge of each part.85 In the second instance, Pascal also wrote that ‘the last thing one discovers when writing a work is what one should put first’; one of the most difficult problems in dialectical thought being about where to begin. With what should science begin, Hegel asked? With what should revolutionary politics begin, the contingent historical given imposes? Is there only one beginning or must we continue to begin, over and over? As soon as one asks for a totality, those questioning are forced to wager. Bensaïd’s wager placed its bets that a particular class might overthrow the chains of subalternity and liberate humanity. In this sense, the wager is fundamental to revolutionary, political and dialectical thought and practice. If one catches a glimpse of a liberated humanity within the fractures of barbarism, then our hope remains open, permitting us to wager all of our fortune on the possible coming into being of this liberated world. For Goldmann, the wager ‘means committing oneself to do everything possible to bring [it] into being … And the quest for probable, though not absolutely definitive, reasons in favour of the future creation of certain values forms an integral part of that commitment of one’s whole life to a cause which truly constitutes the wager’.86 However, in the act of wagering, we encounter tragedy, which is itself a necessary part of any human endeavour that may fail. Revolutions are nothing but untimely and thus they are tragic. The discord between Marxism’s provisional theoretical sophistication and political goals, and its fate on the other hand, is a complex of hope and tragedy. It should be clear that this tragedy is inescapable for the modern revolutionaries: 85 86

Quoted from Goldmann 1964, pp. 5–6. Goldmann 1964, p. 304.

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This tragedy is that of freedom. In fact, it comes from thinking together the necessity of contingency and the power of freedom. In Hegel, the task of spirit is already not to become a reason (to justify its own resignation) but to liberate itself. Yet it is necessary that this freedom does not sink into caprice. What delivers contingency from the absurd is not necessity but indeed freedom, as it unites the truth of necessity and the assumption of contingency. Hence the latter appears as a necessarily constitutive moment of the drama of freedom … the modern militant experiences the tragic weakness of an action whose result can contradict the goal that was originally set forth.87 And yet, we moderns hope for liberation.88 When we hope, we act. Can there be no tragedy when there is hope? In his study of Kant, Goldmann affirmed the interconnection between hope and tragedy: It must not be thought that where there is the slightest hope there can no longer be tragedy. On the contrary, that hopeless pessimism which abandons the search … has nothing to do with classical thought or the tragic vision. Tragedy only exists when man searches with all his powers for a means of escape and where he is ready to set his life upon the weakest and flimsiest hope before he will acknowledge the void. Only in grasping this can we understand the philosophy of Kant or classical thought in general … the most important question left by Kant’s philosophy to its successors: Is the tragedy of human existence really insurmountable? Is there no way for empirical man to achieve the unconditioned, the highest good? The principal philosophers of German idealism, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, as well as its ‘materialist heir’, Marxism, have been concerned to give a positive answer to this question.89 According to Goldmann, the ‘idea that man is “embarked” and that he must wager becomes, after Pascal, the central idea in any philosophical system which recognises that man is not a self-sufficient monad but a partial element inside

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Bensaïd 2003b. Terry Eagleton’s Hope Without Optimism is a brilliant companion to the melancholic wager. He wrote, ‘the exemplary case of hope is tragedy … there can be no tragedy without a sense of value, whether or not that value actually bears fruit. We would not call tragic the destruction of something we did not prize. If tragedy cuts deeper than pessimism, it is because its horror is laced with an enriched sense of human worth’. Eagleton 2015, p. 115. Goldmann 1971, pp. 225–6.

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a whole which transcends him and to which he is linked by his aspirations, his actions and his faith. It is the central idea of any concept which realises that man can never achieve any authentic values by his own efforts, and that he always needs some supra-historical help on whose existence he must wager, for he can live and act only in the hope of a final success in which he must believe’. To be embarked hence involves ‘risk, possibility of failure, hope of success and the synthesis of these three in the form of a faith which is a wager’ being ‘the essential constituent elements in the human condition’. It is ‘certainly not the least of Pascal’s titles to glory that he was the first man to bring them explicitly into the history of philosophical thought’.90 The wager was not foreign to the Fourth International. Mandel’s unshakeable belief in the rebellious and creative capacities of human beings made him receptive to the significance of Pascal’s wager. He knew Lucien Goldmann’s thesis well and invoked it in an essay about the foundation of the Fourth International: Never was the equivalent of the ‘Pascalian wager’ in relation to revolutionary commitment as valid as it is today. By not committing oneself everything is lost in advance. How can one not make that choice even if the chance of success is only one percent? In fact, the odds are much better than that.91 The last line in Mandel’s paragraph points to a certain tension. His faith in humanity – what Löwy called ‘a sort of anthropological optimism’ – could become a source of ungrounded optimism.92 Optimism in humanity’s creative potential ought not slide into deluded optimism. 90 91

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Goldmann 1964, p. 302. Quoted from Löwy 1999, p. 32. It is very interesting to compare this passage to Goldmann. For the latter, ‘“You must wager, it is not optional, you are embarked” … If … we look upon our life as a whole we shall see that we are in fact “embarked” by virtue of the very quest for happiness which Pascal considers an essential and inevitable part of the human condition. Our freedom is made up of two things: our ability to make a choice in the many wagers that we come across in everyday life, and our need to wager in the one essential choice offered to us between God, on the one side, and nothingness, on the other. The “nature of the odds” which Saint Augustine failed to recognize shows that man has to “work for uncertain things” only in so far as these odds govern the human condition as such, with man’s inevitable quest for happiness and the impossibility of ever establishing this quest on a firm and non-paradoxical basis’. Goldmann 1964, p. 289. Löwy recognises: ‘when it ceased to be “optimism of the will” in the Gramscian meaning (i.e. coupled with ‘pessimism of the intellect’) to become a sort of ungrounded ‘optimism

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The Labyrinth and the Eternal Return of the Same

Bensaïd used the metaphor of the labyrinth to capture the moving intricacies of revolutionary commitment. A labyrinth is a crisscrossing of pathways, enigmatic in its organisation, in which one must search for a way out. The normal state of being in the labyrinth is one of profound disorientation, to be lost, but whatever we may think of it, there is a beginning and an end of the labyrinthine way. One enters, one leaves, that is the way it goes. Any wandering throughout the labyrinth means something only in relation to the beginning and the end, i.e. entrance and exit. The metaphor captures something about the relationship between the embarked state, resistance and revolution. However, in the 1990s, post-modernism and the discourse on the end of ideologies represented the collapse of a horizon of emancipation, when no more hope was invested in the future. Bensaïd wrote his outrage: ‘before this discourse on the end of ideologies, of history and politics, a moment of rage –

of the intellect’, or rather just plain and simple over-optimism, it was a source of great weakness. It inspired some of his notoriously optimistic oracular predictions, so often repeated and so often falsified, about the “impetuous rise of the masses”, and the imminent revolutionary upsurge, in the ussr, in Spain, in Germany, in France, in Europe and in the whole world. This pattern that frequently reproduced itself, started very early as show by the following example: in an article from 1946 “E. Germain” (Mandel) insisted that the uprisings of the years 1944–45 were only ‘the first stage of the European revolution’, soon to be followed by a second. There will be no “relative stabilization”, he said: the present situation is only “the calm before the storm”, “a transition towards a general revolutionary upsurge”. Cutting short any counter-argument, “Germain” concluded: “this is not optimism, it is revolutionary realism”. No comment is needed. Mandel’s over-optimistic predictions were short-lived’. Löwy 1999, p. 34. In a personal interview with the author, Löwy showed another side of this, ‘While Ernest Mandel remained within the framework of classical Marxism (Lenin, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg) with some new developments, but still basically inside this framework, placing a great emphasis on the economy … Bensaïd goes beyond that. It is not a break. It’s a kind of dialectics of continuity and renewal. He goes beyond that, introducing new elements of reflection … the new elements are Benjamin, the critique of progress. This wasn’t really present in the Fourth International and not in Mandel, who believed in progress. And he was very optimistic about revolution. So, Benjamin, the critique of progress, the Messianic moment, these are new. Charles Péguy and the critique of modernity … It is something new which was not in the traditional “holy writings” of classical Marxism. Now other elements were not absent but they gained a much greater emphasis in Bensaïd. For instance the idea of the wager, le pari. You can already find it in Mandel. Because Mandel had much admiration for Lucien Goldmann, he read Lucien Goldmann and, in some moments, he uses the idea of the wager. But it is not central. While, in Bensaïd, particularly in The Melancholic Wager, it’s a central concept. He redefined Marxism around the concept of the wager. And so he goes beyond what already existed’.

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a political sentiment par excellence – is necessary … Its thought of a horizon definitively foreclosed, a non-horizon, becomes in effect the foundation of a politics of non-engagement, of the disenchanted repetition of a present without a day before or after, that undoes the future as a field of responsibility and disperses heritage into a cumbersome bric-a-brac’.93 In criticising the one-sided uniform and deterministic conception of history, post-modernism fell into the other antinomy of absolutising the present as a perpetual event without past or future. This ‘cultural logic of late capitalism’, was a pragmatic adaption to the dominant mode of production, turning liberal democracy of the market into the unsurpassable horizon of history. This pragmatic adaption represented resignation, micro-moralities and the apologetic de-politicised management of the market. Read in terms of the labyrinthine metaphor, postmodernism was the incessant errancy without possibilities of exit; it had forgotten where it entered. According to Bensaïd, post-modernism was an a-political administration of the bourgeois present, though the apologia of ‘apolitical administration’, presented itself as a progression beyond modernity. The linear and chronological vision escaped the key question with its declaration of (repetitive) novelty, Bensaïd thought: Still, we have to dare to call things by their names. The modern enigmatic word is capital itself. This process without a sovereign subject, this automatic commotion, this transfer of human subjectivity into the impersonal objectivity of the fetish, has little place in the grand lyrical recital of universal history. Lyotard maintains (on purpose?) the confusion between the critical theory of Marx and the discourse of orthodox Marxisms. However, in Marx, ‘history does nothing’. Men make their profane history, mundanely, in the incertitude of their struggles.94 Modernity is an experience in capital-induced repetition. In the previous chapter, I showed that Bensaïd’s Marx understood critical theory as a critique of the abstract notion of progress. The outcome of this critique means that, ‘Read and understood as such, Marx is neither modern nor post-modern’, but rather ‘a-modern’. For Bensaïd, to be a-modern, a character trait shared by Blanqui and Benjamin, means to go against the grain of history, ‘in fidelity to the event in which the victims pronounce: “Continue, Continue”’.95 Modernity, in (Fran93 94 95

Bensaïd 1997, pp. 235–6. Bensaïd 1997, pp. 238–9. Ibid.

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çoise) Proust’s terms, is a form of experience in which time and generations are lost, which destroys truths and forms of existence. The twofold nature of modern experience is captured in the following sense: the patriotic discourse of the state means the brutalised experience of the trenches and atomic devastation, the capitalist praise of growth is experienced as class war inflation and poverty, government defences of civic duties and moralities are known to be lies and falsities. As for Benjamin, the choice between socialism and barbarism is necessary because within modernity, ‘all remains ever new, ever the same’: Modernity, the time of hell. The punishments of hell are always the newest thing going in this domain. What is at issue is not that ‘the same thing happens over and over’ (much less is it a question here of eternal return) but rather that the face of the world, the colossal head, precisely in what is newest never alters – that this ‘newest’ remains, in every respect, the same. This constitutes the eternity of hell and the sadist’s delight in innovation. To determine the totality of traits which define this ‘modernity’ is to represent hell.96 The metaphor of the labyrinth, if conjoined to a post-modern illusion, has no means of escape, because there is no beginning or finality, no exit from the alienations of the capitalist mode of production and modern bourgeois societies. One goes round in circles. In Benjamin’s above passage, it is part of a hellish modernity. This is an aspect of the Nietzschean metaphor of eternal recurrence, or Benjamin’s reading of it too. Yet, not only did Bensaïd argue for a historical sensibility that went against the grain of post-modern discourse, thus accepting the beginnings and exits of the labyrinthine circuit, he also held hope for historical events. Only the ‘amorous or revolutionary encounter can break the curse of eternity’.97 The eternal repetition of the same is circular in nature; that is the function of the metaphor, to ask the reader to affirm the circular experience of modern life. But the future is not decided in advance, therefore, the circular experience is not entirely adequate, because it is not closed; the circular nature of modern life can open, with an unknown emerging in history through a bifurcation (a pathway leading to the exit, if I may reintroduce the metaphor of the labyrinth).

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Benjamin 2002, pp. 842–3. Bensaïd 1997, p. 245.

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Why Are Revolutionaries Melancholic?

Eternal, closed and circular repetition is distressing; radical politics must look into the void beneath its surface appearances while repetitive disaster constantly recurs under capitalism. There is a spectrum of responses to the demanding thought of eternal recurrence: Contrary to Blanqui, Nietzsche ignored ‘the chapter of bifurcations’, alone open to hope. In autumn 1883, the despair became absolute … In order to ward off the terror of the identical return of the same, Nietzsche did not have the slightest drop of hope, in the small fissure that makes all the difference, the liberating clinamen that breaks the circle and opens it to an authentic novelty.98 This clinamen, as understood by Marx via Epicurus and Lucretius, was the atom’s declination from a straight line. This minute difference means that perhaps, history’s bifurcations remain open to hope: In the infinite complexity of combinations, possibilities remain multiple and what is probable does not win all the time. It is sometimes tenuous, and tears. This is the way the bifurcations that become great recommencements flow. The repetition of defeats is therefore not an absolute fatality.99 Tragic destiny can accomplish itself infinitely, but it cannot prevent an exception that a bifurcation can produce. For Bensaïd, the tension between foreclosure and the evental emergence of authentic novelty produces a certain melancholy, as expressed in the figures of Saint-Just and Blanqui. Bensaïd thought that, indeed, revolutionaries were melancholic. But this melancholy was specific, being ‘an active melancholy, a classic melancholy that searches in Antiquity for the arms for the future’. For Saint-Just was a character in a time when ‘“all becomes possible”, an actor of “the transformation of the world”’, for whom [t]he revolutionary event, in its brevity, is the only work of his dimension. He is not an adventurer or a banal man of action, but this rare thing:

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Bensaïd 1997, p. 246. Bensaïd 1997, p. 247.

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‘a thinker for action’. When action becomes impossible, he falls silent, definitively. He is imprisoned in what Malraux called ‘his scornful sleepwalking’. ‘The wing of suicide stretches itself out over his last night’, in the indifferent and sour wait of an execution written into the logic of the thing itself.100 For Bensaïd, Saint-Just’s melancholy answered the unbending melancholy of Blanqui, another ‘thinker for action’. Yet, Bensaïd asks, why are revolutionaries melancholic? The names of Robespierre, Lenin, Benjamin, Tucholsky, Mariatégui, Guevara, Marcos and Trotsky feature in this melancholy: It is always this same feeling of fatigue, of Moses before Canaan, SaintJust’s last long sleepless night, Benjamin before closed borders, Guevara at the dawn of his last march … It is the fatigue of the same film always started over and of duty continually unaccomplished. No boasting before the danger, no consoling certitude of victory, simply the feeling of having done what is necessary.101 Bensaïd makes a point worth reading well, for revolutionaries: do not to give in to despondency, give up illusions while preserving courage, strength and flexibility, begin from the beginning, when necessary, over and over again, in approaching an extremely difficult task of transforming the world in a history made of bifurcations. This form of melancholy does not disarm; nor is it a sickness. The melancholy is not depression, and is sometimes open, sometimes hidden, it is active. Radical politics cannot step outside of its own becoming, ‘the circle which presupposes its end as its purpose, and has its end for its beginning, it becomes concrete and actual only by being carried out, and by the end it involves’.102 Radical politics, like knowledge, does not move in a straight line, but a curve, which endlessly approximates a series of circles, a spiral. In the terms of the spiral, Trotsky’s melancholy – ‘so carefully hidden’ – is illuminating. In 1935, he was between two disasters, Bensaïd wrote: This is a new period of exile and deportation, of dispersed disciples, of the dislocated family: Alexandra the first wife, deported to Siberia; the younger son, Seriojka, deported; Liova, the oldest son exiled to Paris; Zina, 100 101 102

Bensaïd 1997, p. 250. Bensaïd 1997, p. 252. Hegel 2008, p. 30.

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the first daughter, suicide in Berlin; Platon Volkov, son in law, disappeared; tossed across borders, Seva, the orphan who, in Paris, learnt his fourth language after Russian, Turkish and German … And the worst is still to come.103 At the ‘midnight of the century’ (Serge), Trotsky had clarity, lucidly grasping the challenges and catastrophes that were underway and about to take place. Trotsky’s melancholy was an expression of the discordance of the necessary and the possible. Yet, the wager continued, an effort to fight for the liberation of others in their own futures (actually affirming the central point of Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity). We see in Trotsky’s words: Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air may enter more freely into my room. I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the full.104 The melancholic wager was necessary as European capitalism snaked towards barbarism and the Holocaust. Bensaïd’s actuality, if I may now open a small dialogue with the present, invites a series of questions: Where is our contemporary capitalism snaking? Are we so sure we have seen the worst? How can we ever be sure? Resistance without illusion remains melancholic. Here, Péguy and Trotsky ‘had in common a “rebellious character” that did not capitulate in the face of failure, did not resign themselves, remained distant from the consolations of success, embourgeoisement and bureaucratisation, who tenaciously refused to bow down before compromising collusions, of ceding a little to state-reason before capitulating a lot’.105 Bensaïd is making the argument for the quality and character of revolutionary activists, a great merit. And so, it goes with revolutionary events and victorious defeats; in the first evental outbreak, it is easy to refuse to submit; it is the second time that matters, where fidelity begins. Bensaïd argues that it is necessary ‘to have gone to the limits of the possibilities of an epoch. All the “thinkers for action”, prey to the derangements of temporalities, know themselves to be condemned when 103 104 105

Bensaïd 1997, pp. 252–3. Ibid. Bensaïd 1997, p. 254.

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the necessary and the possible no longer join’.106 Their fate is tied to the logic of their objects, and ‘when the necessary and the possible detach, when an absolute effort rests on a relative certitude, when the ambition of the remote shatters against the poverty of what is coming, where there is no longer a common measure between the dream and reality’, the melancholic wager – in the domain of certitude, not truth – is required.107 Melancholic, revolutionaries are convinced of the necessity of their task; they remain obliged to act within the insurmountable discordance of times. On this point, Bensaïd drew from the insights of Landauer and Naville. Landauer saw that revolutionaries were tormented by an ‘“incurable imperfection” … it is without a doubt the root of their melancholy, simultaneously, a “seed of lucidity in the catastrophe of modernity” and the “capacity for awakening” ’.108 Pierre Naville, too, noted that a ‘certain fundamental despair’ is the lot of serious spirits, intensely steeped in their object. Their pessimism guides the search for extreme means ‘so as to escape from the uselessness and disappointments of an epoch of compromise, as are all epochs’. This pessimism is behind the philosophy of Hegel and, ‘it is also the source of the revolutionary method of Marx’.109 Perhaps, Hegelian Spirit is forever too early and too late to know itself absolutely, the difficulties of being thrown back to the relative certitudes of the moral standpoints always are constantly present in efforts not just to interpret, but to transform the world. Bensaïd thinks a certain melancholia prevails among those steeped in the profane world to be changed, while thinking and surpassing its limits. When the time is out of joint, the terror of ‘the missed opportunity’ fills revolutionaries with melancholy, continuing to confront a time of crisis with an inconsolable, classical melancholy. The classical melancholy is sober and lucid, without resignation or renunciation, it has nothing to do with the post-modern complaints about an absent finality or the aestheticisation of a disenchanted world. It searches for the new connections between the necessary and the possible that can erupt à la gauche du possible.

106 107 108 109

Bensaïd 1997, p. 255. Bensaïd 1997, p. 258. Bensaïd 1997, p. 256. Ibid.

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Messianic Politics as a Response to the Crisis of Historical Experience

Bensaïd, relying on the work of Reinhart Koselleck, thought that the world witnessed a ‘temporalisation of history’ since the Renaissance, ‘in a “singular form of acceleration which is the mark of our modern world”’.110 Leading up to the French Revolution, and after it, history found itself within the limits of a coherent universality; this modern historical experience, Bensaïd wrote, was ‘beyond the particular and many histories’, being ‘henceforth the fresco of majestic history’. Yet, this form of historical time was in a crisis: the multiplicity, today, has returned. Time and history become plural. The simultaneousness of non-simultaneity, non-contemporaneous contemporaneity, become essential experiences of history.111 The pulverisation of time makes it more difficult to test the simple causal relation of an effect to a perceptible cause; it makes a universal judgement more difficult. History as such is consequently questioned, especially the veracity of a historical event understood to be an irreversible caesura. This is so, according to Bensaïd, because ‘the meaning of something new happening is lost in undecipherable polysemy. Perhaps therein resides the secret of these non-events, these events without novelty or radiance, which seem to slide without leaving a durable trace between the mesh of the epoch’, like the fall of the Berlin Wall, the disappearance of the Soviet Union or the Gulf War.112 When the event is banalised and lost in the accumulation of happenings, or facts, reality becomes one damned thing after another, leading to the collapse of futural projects, horizons of expectation, and a devaluation of utopian anticipations and strategic projects. If a present does not have a day before it, nor a day after, one is resigned to the perpetual instant. Of the trappings of the flux of instants, Bensaïd wrote: It succeeds less and less in making the past relevant. It struggles to build the interim forms for an anticipated future. It is prey to forgetfulness and lacks a movement to a goal; it loses its substance and fails to produce a new temporality. Passive anticipation defeats active anticipation.

110 111 112

Bensaïd 1997, p. 259. Bensaïd 1997, p. 260. Bensaïd 1997, p. 262.

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The atrophied project veers into resigned depression. The past and the future become obscure … The connection between heritage and hope severs.113 One is thus reduced to post-modern immediacy without perspective; it is the presence of false consolations in the indicative mood, without imperatives or subjunctives, each of which have a place in efforts to deliberately transform situations. Against these ideological modalities of immediacy, messianic politics defends politics as a creation that incorporates a past and a future; it must produce a new articulation other than that of the commodified instant (which erases its own past and future potential), implying a project that ties expectation to defence of a tradition. As was already clear in the chapter on Benjamin, the difficulties of the century implore us to untie the conditional anticipation of a project, the messianic expectation as an active restoration of tradition, from the consoling promise of a happy end, which is a utopian expectation. The memory of a tradition is not the nostalgia of a lost past but rather a call: ‘Remember!’: the imperative of this reminiscence is not a return to origins, but a memory for the future, of tasks unaccomplished much more than those that were realised. The foundational event is rethought, reexperienced, at every moment, as its own anniversary, like a long phrase in which the meaning is only unveiled at the last word never spoken. Because commencements are also recommencements.114 Bensaïd argued that in the derangements of historical time, our expectations organise themselves around a narrowed present. Typically, official and bureaucratic politics nourishes oblivion and forgetfulness; memory shortens. With the shortening of memory goes the field of anticipatory possibility. Bensaïd’s radical response to the situation is to affirm that one must still live, not by accepting things as they are, or acquiescence, and definitely not in resignation, but according to initiative and preparation, ‘on the “lookout for occasions to act and possibilities that present themselves”, a “life of tension and risk”’.115 Thus, it is a wager that liberation can become effectively possible. It is an uncertain wager with a form of futural anticipation found in the strategic project, which, for Bensaïd, necessarily entails a distinction between a ‘chimerical’ utopia and a ‘strategic utopia’: 113 114 115

Ibid. Bensaïd 1997, p. 265. Ibid.

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Marx, Blanqui, and Sorel distrusted manufacturers of perfect utopias, always ready to sell off their outlandish plans for the future city on the black market of reforms. On the contrary, released from its chimeras, delivered of its spatial assignation of an in accessible alterity, strategic utopia works in the miseries of the present. Shoots break through the surface, in the elementary defence of denied rights. Against the fraudulent testimony of fait accompli, it becomes a principle of resistance to the probable catastrophe … If it no longer has visions of a distant future of the transcendence of a final end (which dims the view), it is better able to focus on the inventions that are immanent in becoming. This secularised utopia is a modest ‘clinamen of the real’.116 The chimerical utopia collapses. Every future is necessarily uncertain and opaque. The work for the uncertain is necessary. One endures politics without the unknown in clear sight. Other things and life-worlds are possible. Their contours are undetermined. But ‘something must arrive, because eternity does not exist’. By contrast to the chimerical utopia, a strategic utopia recognises that the future has a potential degree of liberatory practice. The accomplishment of this potential liberation needs a conditional political project; lines of action are drawn, as are lines of demarcation, situated in the present. The strategic utopia does represent the future; in a conditional manner, it is tied to the present as creative anticipation. This is the key point because politics, according to Bensaïd, is about creation, meaning: The creative anticipation constructs the future by actualising it. This is the common trait of love and revolution. Both respond to the allure of an unaccomplished future.117 The heritage of prophetic rationality can uncover a coherent relationship between anticipation and the future, responding to the crisis of historical time, though it varies according to the expectation in question. Modern historical temporality secularised the relationship between experience and expectation, whereby the prophetic mode transformed into a strategic anticipation of the future: [T]he future thus passed from the field of arbitrary divination to that of thinkable probability. It is a ‘pre-vision’ founded on the calculable exper116 117

Bensaïd 1997, pp. 265–6. Bensaïd 1997, p. 267.

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ience of the conjuncture. This art of political calculation was developed in Italy from the fifteenth century. The prognostic is no longer an oracular prediction but a project, an organiser of a hypothetical action … space and time is opened to the will, to Saint-Just’s hard-headed first-person plural imperative: ‘we must!’118 Bensaïd expresses the need for a strategic anticipation of the future, rather than a fatalistic enunciation. While it is quite possible to predict, this is on the condition that one is unable to enter into details where exactly the element of incertitude is. Without the ability to anticipate the future in a conditional capacity, strategic projects become meaningless. By hook or by crook, a strategic project must navigate between categorical fatalism and the arresting inability to say anything about the future, so that it might act. Between these two poles, messianic expectation dictates, an active, creative and decisional conduct, that narrows the presence of irrationality in political deliberation without entirely expunging it (which is impossible). The prophetic ‘perhaps’ controls fate: The duration of the prophet is discontinuous, pierced with evental possibilities. The intelligence of the future is born in the present and not from the divination of the future. The prophetic intervention aims thus to present the field of possibilities implicit in social reality as ‘prerequisite deliberation, alternative and decision’. It ‘carries the consequences of human freedom to the extreme’. The old Jewish prophets are not the oracles of an inexorable destiny. Oriented to the future, their prophecy roots itself in the convulsions and conflicts of the present. It is why their enunciation is subjunctive-conditional: if …, then … It warns against infidelity to the foundational event and the forgetting of tradition.119 This form of discourse retains simultaneously liberatory practices and politicalhistorical-social necessity, though it remains committed to traversing the extreme limits of human liberation and conscious action. This is why, according to Bensaïd, prophetic hope does not describe ‘a false future’. It does not promise guaranteed bliss. On the contrary, it opens ‘the course of time in the minds of the disaster’s victims’. It refuses resignation. It upholds an active patience,

118 119

Ibid. Bensaïd 1997, p. 268.

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a busy wait. Jeremiah announced that captivity would be long but that the captives would be delivered. Master of fidelity … a slow impatience henceforth governs the dialectic of urgency and perseverance. Yes, this will be long.120 When Bensaïd was writing this work, post-modernity and the ethics of imperialist intervention dominated public and intellectual discourse. The result of their destruction of a political horizon was a discourse of consolation, basically an apolitical ethics. The tradition of messianic prophecy was the antidote to this development, ‘the only form of demystification’, because the collapse of grand historical narratives announced by post-modernism did not cancel out the strategic necessity of resistance and of a project. The uncertain form of messianic politics – the politics of the oppressed – recognises that the worst ‘defeats, the most durable, the bleakest, moral as well as physical, are the defeats without combat’. Tenacious and stubborn, messianic reason is profoundly political, a profane art of perspective, relations of force and favourable moments, the quintessential art of overturning subalternity. Bensaïd articulates a profane art of revolutionary politics, which is the condition of possibility for a historical transformation from the capitalist mode of production to post-capitalist liberation. An infinite patience that is open to the coming of the possible animates it. Working in every moment, it dreams towards an event; the event can rupture the existing order of things. A product of patient work and contingent surprise, theory attains its final form in the event. Tied to the creative activity of millions, necessity turns into liberation. Awaited and anticipated, Bensaïd suggests that in it we ‘dream ahead of ourselves, a high-risk intrusion into the “dark space of the future” in gestation. Still, it is an intermittent prophecy, stretched by the desire for an improbable artistic, political or amorous event where the liberated past of tradition finally wins out over the infernal eternity of a novelty that is forever identical’.121 Only in the active wager can pulchritudinous dreams and infinite patience remain tethered to the modern present. Bensaïd insists that the contours of historical-revolutionary rebirths are, by definition, unknowable. Likewise, armies often lag behind wars, because they have been formed in the study of old battles for which they look for resembling motions. They only know this present by way of simulation, but reality always exceeds fiction; history always exceeds simulation in a difference that is not

120 121

Bensaïd 1997, p. 269. Bensaïd 1997, p. 272.

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sameness. Often theory is behind practice. One might dream of the revolutions to come through the discourse of past revolutions, however: No one can draw up plans for future revolutions, defying their irreducible novelty. Who is entitled to proclaim – in the invention of unseen forms, in a history that amplifies (to the extreme) the tiniest difference, even when it seems to idiotically repeat itself over and over – the building of models with the materials of yesterday? The Bastille, the Commune, October, are each a ‘Here’ and a ‘Now’. At most, we can collect their part of universality. Because one thing is certain: eternity does not exist, except in hell. It will therefore be necessary that ‘that’ change, in one way or another, in one sense or another, sometimes for the best, often times for the worst.122 Without an adequate discourse of historical difference, a proper model or a prefabricated schema, the revolution is a strategic hypothesis and a horizon that regulates our activity, in one of the most significant passages from Bensaïd’s entire oeuvre, If it is impossible to predict the forms that the next century will invent, what the barricades and insurrections of the future will resemble, what exact mix of peaceful and violent resistance will be seen to accomplish it, what really matters, is to affirm, intransigently, that the vicious circle of fetishism and the infernal round of the commodity can be broken; that terrestrial eternity does not exist any more than celestial eternity, that there is necessarily a resolution, an escape, an exit, and that we will end up finding it. This northeastern passage to spaces of justice and liberation will be made, certainly and without any doubt, by a radical transformation of forms of property and power, between humans, between the sexes, between the generations. We do not know for certain how this passage will be crossed, or if it will ever be crossed, but we know for sure that it is possible, since the question is human, that it depends on us, without any transcendence; since the economy, money, history, science, the state and other idols are our creatures and not our ministering gods. We must search and rally our forces, and make our way towards the horizon. This ‘strategic regulating horizon’ of the ‘goal’ is also, moreover and inseparably, an ethical horizon, the only one conceivable, without which, the

122

Bensaïd 1997, p. 290.

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will gives up, the spirit of resistance capitulates, fidelity fails, tradition is lost and the loyalty to those unknowns no longer has any raison d’être. Without it, it is no longer possible to distinguish between principles and tactics … The end loses itself in the means. The goal dissolves itself in the movement. In contrast, this horizon orients forces and desires toward a future universality, which is the liveable and habitable future of the species.123 And, a year after Bensaïd’s death, police lines were broken, government party headquarters went up in flames and mass strikes rocked military dictatorships throughout the Middle East and the Maghreb. Workers and the youth were on the streets in Europe in the great struggles against austerity and economic crisis. Without seeing how the passage to concrete liberation – the very hardest – will be made, the train has left the station; we are embarked and running at full speed. Stuck between the earthly infinite that is possible and the silent nothingness that threatens, either heads or tails may turn up. What will you wager? One cannot refuse to make the choice, nor refuse participation. One simply makes the most of the embarquement. I return to Pascal’s wager, which, as shown above, marked a decisive turning point in modern thought, namely ‘the passage from individualist philosophies to tragic thought’. It was vital to see that, according to Goldmann, Marx’s theory had a most intimate affinity with the Pascalian attitude. To decide to participate in the inauguration of future values, ‘in a future conditioned by the play of multiple factors, can never count on the tranquil and doctrinaire assurance of an absolute and definitive truth. Tied to the incertitude of action, it remains, irreducibly, in the order of a wager’.124 This is a wager on revolutions in which experience and experimentation have primacy in full lucidity, with ‘a practical certitude that forever remains conscious of the contrary possibility’. Acting, not on the evidence of an assured outcome, but on the irreducible contingency of the hypothesis. It is better to recognise the disquieting obligation of the wager than to ignore it, in the frivolous recklessness of belief and faith.125 Bensaïd shows just how we are certain of our incertitude. We face the tyranny of doubt without it leaving us. Without paralysis, we gather our strength and act, 123 124 125

Bensaïd 1997, pp. 290–1. Bensaïd 1997, p. 294. Ibid.

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combining hope and responsibility. We make a reasoned wager on the future. One could lose everything, and one knows it. Yet, ‘we work for the uncertain’, as Saint Augustine said, and Pascal added: ‘When we work for tomorrow and for the uncertain, we act with reason’. In the religion of the hidden God, as in the politics of the improbable event, this obligation to wager defines the tragic condition of modern man. It is active in the creation of a link between the hope of a novelty that might occur and the responsibility toward the possible that can die. To grasp in flight what Jonas called ‘the non-Orthodox moment of action.126 Prophets, heretics, dissidents and rebels, all those who have taken up the fight against power and property, those who have not accepted the destiny capital has set for us, it is to this cortege that we march. Arm in arm, hand in hand, all of those with whom we have breathed the air of this earth, all these partisans whom we carry away, in the most recollective movements of all, the political struggle for a liberated humanity. Benjamin said that ‘that which has been turns … towards the sun which is dawning in the sky of history’, ‘Just as flowers turn their heads towards the sun’. These flowers of the partisans who have died for liberation – it is their resurrection that we wager upon. We must save them from the triumphal march of the victors, but We inherit the same challenge. The enemy is implacable, tenacious, organised and more powerful than ever. To resist the enemy without any guarantee of victory calls for the paradoxical alliance of absolute energy and relative truth.127 For Bensaïd, since this political engagement is not an act of faith but a reasoned wager on historical becoming, a concern with the concrete conditions of possibility for revolutionary change: In effect, ‘every player risks a certainty to win an uncertainty’. But to wager is necessary because no judgement will ever have the last word … The political event, the scientific invention, the artistic creation and the amorous encounter produce an authentic novelty and unprecedented forms of

126 127

Ibid. Bensaïd 1997, p. 295.

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the possible burst onto the scene. In history … it is not a question of calculating trajectories but of determining the field of possibilities in which the hidden parts of the real are lodged, capable of being actualised by action and will.128 Though disaster has followed many whom have taken up this wager, it is however important to note that the revolutionary wager is made by singular individuals, having a collective effect. This is captured in Maurice Nadeau’s recollection of Bensaïd. With thirty years of separation, Nadeau could write of Bensaïd: when ‘my dissident political current dried up with the war, the Occupation, the deportations and individual disasters, Daniel had been one of those who gave me back life … the conviction that the world isn’t finished. When we shake hands, the word “comrade” regains its meaning … When the magic of words is lost, we’ve got to wager for hope’.129 This other side of hope, even in its melancholic character, was something Bensaïd expressed. As Löwy pointed out: With the idea of the melancholic wager, Daniel brings us a new sight of hope, a sight that helps us re-establish the passage between the memory of the past and the approach of the future. Without smug optimism, without illusions in the ‘better days’ that near, without any faith in the ‘laws of history’, he no less affirmed the necessity, the urgency, the actuality of the revolutionary wager.130 In conjunction with hope, when a singular individual wagers to change the world, they open a margin of liberation for interpretation, moving freely, in theory and politics, between indicatives, imperatives and subjunctives, to say what is, for what ought to be, conditioning what may be. Transforming the world and interpretation fold back on one another. The folding back and forth is an intimate feature of the wager. Yet, as for wagers and their events, how many times have the dice been rolled?

128 129 130

Ibid. Nadeau 2010, p. 106. Löwy 2012, p. 30. In a private interview, he affirmed this: ‘I was a student of Lucien Goldmann, but at the beginning, I didn’t understand the importance of the wager. When I wrote, a book with Samir Naïr, on Lucien Goldmann, there is only one and a half pages on the wager … Bensaïd helped me to see this a really a key issue in Marxism. So, I think this is an important contribution which, of course, is based on Goldmann’s, but again to give it a new meaning, a new emphasis’.

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In the night of 8th and 9th Thermidor? On the pavement in June 1848? On the last barricades of the rues Haxo or la Fontaine-au-Roi, in May 1871? The march on the Winter Palace in 1917? In 1923 on the roofs of Hamburg? In May 1937, on the Ramblas of Barcelona? In August 1949, on the slopes of Mount Grammos? In 1957, the Granma’s beach landing? In some lost corner of Bolivia, the 9th of October 1967? And even, against all probability, against all the statistical reasons and the resignations of an obscure time, on the 1st of January 1994 at San Cristobal de Las Casas?131 Two centuries of uninterrupted wagers, oppressed humanity has pushed the limits of possibility; they are the audacious actors and thinkers of the extreme limits of their times, who show just how the choice to throw the dice remains open because, ‘where conflict continues, there remains also choice, decision and the reasoned risk between many possible outcomes and the unavoidable obligation to act’.132 With a conditional intelligibility we can push the limits of human liberation, yet: Without a doubt, it is melancholic, this wager on the improbable necessity of revolutionising the world.133 The road will be long, as the prophet Jeremiah said. Humble or extraordinary, an inaugural gest of refusal asks for a protracted wager. An initial engagement is a commencement. All the rest is a Pascalian wager; a promise of liberation that yet perhaps may be fulfilled.

131 132 133

Bensaïd 1997, p. 296. Ibid. Bensaïd 1997, p. 297.

part 3 Open-ended Conjunctural Judgements

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The Return of the Social Question Throughout the downturn of the 1980s the double death of the working class and Marx was announced. Consensus replaced class conflict. Class was dissolved into the obscure mass of individualism; the time of restoration was filled with hasty proclamations. Against the prevailing pressures, one of Bensaïd’s favourite exchanges clarified the problem. When Le Nouvel Observateur asked Marguerite Duras ‘which left wing value should be promoted as a matter of urgency’, the response was: ‘class struggle … Apart from reinstating class struggle, I don’t see anything else’.1 A clear and simple answer to take up a partisan position, which uncovers the key questions of contemporary societies, giving others an arc of coherence too. Duras’ answer seeks a relation of truth while restorationists conceal class antagonism by way of consensus. Massive and combative strikes in the public services in opposition to Juppé’s plan to reform of the social-welfare system rocked France throughout December 1995. The strikers were accompanied by millions of demonstrators on the streets. The public gave widespread support to the strike. With public transport workers paralysing the transport system, public opinion supported the strikers to the point of accepting as legitimate the demand for payment while on strike. Bensaïd argued that: ‘The clocks have now been set right: class struggle continues and collective action is not a thing of the past’.2 The social question, a revenant, had returned to haunt French politics. The strikers were ‘struggling to resuscitate hope’, with the realisation that ‘for the first time in fifty years, the next generation would probably have a harder time than its predecessors’.3 This was a significant turn in the class struggle. How do we situate this turn? What tendencies did it intersect with? At the beginning of the 1970s, the number of strike days lost in France was about 4 million per year, peaking in 1976 with 5 million days lost.4 Over the period of 1971 to 1981, the figure was 3.3 million, indicating the drop off from 1976. In 1980 2 million days were lost. From 1981 to 1991, strikes dropped further to 1.1 million days lost. Throughout the 1990s, strikes dropped even fur-

1 2 3 4

Quoted from Bensaïd 2002, p. 95. Bensaïd 1996. Bensaïd 1996. For the statistics in this section and below, I refer to Bensaïd’s and Aguiton’s book Le Retour de la question sociale.

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ther to 400,000 days lost in 1992, yet then rose to 600,000 in 1994. Conflicts of Autumn–Winter 1995 met with a context of a slight rise in social mobilisation, albeit within an overall downward trend. Bensaïd explained that: After the 1980s we have seen in France, just like the other developed countries, a general degradation of relations of force … the middle of the 1990s therefore represent a plateau or a breaking point.5 French neo-liberal restoration degraded the strength of the working class; yet the massive strike movement was a counter-tendency against Juppé: The Juppé plan was thus perfectly understood as a counter-reform, destructive of established benefits and social bonds. Moreover, the strikers and demonstrators quickly established a connection between this plan and the threat to the public services, represented by a ‘draft plan’ for the railways proposing the closure of lines deemed unprofitable and the sacrifice of railways to roads, plans for partial or total privatisation of railways, telecommunications and energy, and hospital reforms favouring private clinics at the expense of public hospitals. From the issue of defending social security, the mobilisation grew within a month into a movement of general opposition to commercial globalisation and the neo-liberal offensive, and their effects. Public-transport workers – both national and municipal – were the tough and spectacular nucleus of the strike. In other sectors, like electricity, health, education, the mail and the civil service, the movement was more sporadic, alternating one-day stoppages with demonstrations.6 Perspectives of class struggle and politics began to expand with the onset of mass strikes. Time was needed to overcome the dense traditions of a century of disappointments and disasters. Unfortunately, the logic of crises and battles does not wait for a clean and peaceful rebuilding of forces. Bensaïd insisted that, notwithstanding the depth of the strike movement, the patient work of political-social reconstruction was necessary, because politically, where could the movement go? If the average striker were asked in 1968 where the movement should go, the overwhelming response would be, ‘to socialism’. Things were otherwise in the 1995 strikes, since the perspectives were confined to

5 Bensaïd and Aguiton 1997, p. 41. 6 Bensaïd 1996.

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liberal-democratic regimes. Bensaïd thought that, more than half a century of Stalinism and over ten years of Socialist Party government in France had represented a formidable enterprise of demolishing expectations. Stalinists and Socialists – the bureaucrats of today and yesterday – were the butchers of words and robbers of dreams, who had left behind them a blackened political terrain.

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A Critique of Normative Sociology

The strikes of November–December 1995 led to a debate over sociological and political interpretation of the movement. Was this a social movement or not, in the first instance? For Alain Touraine, it was ‘a shadow of a movement’. Another asked whether the struggle ‘has expressed a social movement in the precise, in the sociological use of the term, that is to say, a strong project of contestation led by an identifiable actor putting the principles of collective life into question’?7 The sociologists answered in the negative. The sociological approach provided a concrete example of the conflict between Marxist critique and sociological apparatuses of thought, earlier criticised in Marx l’intempestif. Bensaïd and Aguiton argued that the sociologists approached the strikes in a normative manner, which lost something of their real dimension. Others objected to the term because the strikes did not bring forward a ‘societal alternative’, but, in all of these sociological explanations, ‘the “social movement” risks becoming an object that is “not to be found sociologically”. It is quite rare that consciousness precedes action, that a movement is born from a model or idea and not from a struggle, a conflict of interests’.8 The sociological treatment of the movement raises a problem about the concept of social movement itself. The sociologist created a normative definition through which they could judge social reality; they had reified, or objectified, the social movement. But how does it relate to social and class conflicts? Why would the sociologists go so far to define what a social movement is? Bensaïd and Aguiton stated that the ‘fury to define the social movement, imposing inaccessible norms on it, quite simply aims at preventing its reality and dynamics from being interpreted according to the categories of contradiction and social classes’.9 A sociological-normative and a Marxist-critical interpretation emerged in response to the strike wave. They were not only two different sociologies in opposition, but opposing theories, functions of theories, 7 Bensaïd and Aguiton 1997, p. 8. 8 Bensaïd and Aguiton 1997, p. 9. 9 Bensaïd and Aguiton 1997, p. 10.

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strategies and political positions. Bensaïd’s and Aguiton’s method, by contrast to the normative sociologists, did not superimpose an a priori definition onto social reality, rather they sought to explore the different phenomena that the term ‘social movement’ expressed. First, the social movement expressed the changing social makeup of French capitalism. Since the beginning of the 1980s, ‘in percentage and absolute numbers’, the industrial proletariat had declined and no longer constitutes the ‘landmark’, ‘visible to all, of a collective identity’.10 Second, the massive entry of women into the workforce since the war ‘has substantially modified the relation between the sphere of production and reproduction, between directly productive work and domestic work, between the public space and the private space’.11 Third, it expressed the changes in the economic and social context. After the crisis of precarity, the rise in unemployment, ‘outsourcing, decentralisation of large enterprises, the transformation of work, the importance of communication-networks, the urban and educational crisis results in a redeployment of social resistance to the neoliberal offensive, inside and outside of the enterprise, on the terrain of housing, health, schooling and exclusion’.12 This explained the combination between the large strike movement and demonstrations – right across the country – that went beyond the places of production, embracing every domain of social reproduction. Fourth, there was a change in the relationship between social struggle and political representation. In the 1970s, strikes and demonstrations were explicitly tied to the projects of the left, for example, the slogan, ‘One solution, the Common Programme’. On the contrary, the notion of social movement demonstrated a distance and a distrust towards the political sphere. Years of disillusionment with the left in power and the impact of globalisation had their part in this distrust. Bensaïd and Aguiton thought it was far more incisive to take the concept social movement to be an expression of many different processes at work in the real and historical world, which is distinct from superimposing an a priori and normative definition. As said above, these are two different approaches; the former wants to critically understand the potential and dynamic of these (liberatory) struggles and practices, while the latter appoint themselves to judge them through a normative definition, which in the last instance, is about ideologically disciplining the liberatory practices. One key line of attack from the sociologists, made against the strikers, was that the strikes were corporatist. Liberal discourse denounced the so-called corporatism of the railway workers 10 11 12

Bensaïd and Aguiton 1997, p. 11. Ibid. Ibid.

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in 1995, then the truck drivers and the junior doctors in 1997. This is a common charge against workers on strike. The true corporatist however implicates neoliberal politics itself, because neoliberalism destroys solidarity and unleashes a vicious competition of all against all, to the detriment of collective responses. A workers’ struggle often begins by a defence of a set demands; this clears the way to transformations of consciousness; the political horizon of workers can be opened. The charge of corporatism, by contrast, demoralises the logical movement from particular interests to the general. This movement from the particular to the general was evident in the 1995 strikes, in the widespread slogan of ‘Tous ensemble’! Bensaïd and Aguiton explained the significance of the slogan: The representations and proclamations of the ‘general interest’ are not naturally and spontaneously given among the oppressed and exploited. They imply that daily alienation and the fact that wage workers are, first of all, rival commodities – opposed to each other through the law of supply and demand on the labour market – is overcome. Only the repeated experience of struggle, their collective memory, collective organisation of daily resistance allows them to overcome it. The notion of the general interest is therefore not an innate point of departure, but a result, the culmination of a construction that is necessary despite the constant tendency toward division. If one wants to accept that this notion ‘viewed from below’ has something to do with what one called, even yesterday, a class consciousness, it is necessary to underline that this consciousness, a fruit of a social and historic experience, is the opposite of an abstractly given consciousness. It is developed through conflict … The trajectory of co-federal unionism is thus the result of a long process of organisation around trades, branches, and enterprises, which constitute, in a given epoch, the core identity of the movement. The general interest congeals around the driving groups and symbolic figures, of which Zola’s miner, Renoir’s railway worker, the steel worker of Carné or Visconti have been able to constitute in turn this emblematic image. These cores have been dissolved or durably broken up by the crisis and restructuring: closing of factories, the breakup of the metal works and steel factories and naval construction. Those that have disappeared have not really been replaced, despite the massive struggles of the bank workers in the 1970s … or the health workers in 1988.13

13

Bensaïd and Aguiton 1997, pp. 13–15.

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Bensaïd insisted that new mutations were at work within the working class, but that these did not signify the end of the working class, despite the fact that: Since the late 1970s, the number of the industrial working class has undergone an absolute decline. But this decrease appears to be an overall erosion of the proletariat as a result of an optical illusion (not without a whiff of workerism), which reduces the working class to the active, symbolic core workers of a given epoch. The proletariat has neither the same composition, nor the same image, as in 1848 (apart from the Silesian weavers, the proletarians evoked in the Communist Manifesto are predominantly artisans or craft workers from small Parisian workshops); under the Commune (following the boom and industrialisation of the Second Empire); in June 1936; or May 1968 … But the destruction of the iron and steel industry or shipbuilding does not signify the disappearance of the proletariat. Rather, it heralds new mutations.14 The railway workers were somewhat of an exception to the general tendency of regress. Before the mass strikes of 1995, they accounted for about a tenth of all industrial action; they maintained their traditions; it was not surprising that they played a leading role in the 1995 struggles. However, the combination of class mutations, maintenance of militancy on the railways and the flourishing of other social movements like the mobilisations against the Debré law and for the sans-papiers, marches against unemployment, the right to housing, the women’s movement and the anti-fascist campaigns led many commentators to signal the disappearance of class struggle with the appearance of the social.

2

Marx or Bourdieu: Reasonable Constructivism and Overdetermination

Bensaïd’s exchange with Philippe Corcuff, who considered himself a postMarxist working within the framework of Pierre Bourdieu, raised another layer to the relations between Marxist theory and sociology and the relation between classes and social movements. To work with Bourdieu’s schema meant seeing the diversity of social fields as being relations of social space that were

14

Bensaïd 2002, p. 187.

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autonomous from each other but related to forms of domination and the capitalisation of resources that were more or less specific. These included economic, technocratic and cultural capitalisation. The post-Marxist framework led Corcuff to argue that ‘we do not therefore have, at the core of a society like ours, an economic capitalism that a priori structures the rest of the social relations (like in Marxist schemas), but many capitalisms’.15 How did Bensaïd and Aguiton respond? They did not write off a priori the Bourdieusian approach. But they did raise a problem that needed to be solved, namely that ‘all of us are, in some way, knots of conflicts and diverse belongings, of age, sex, religion, nation, class and status. A thread that allows us to begin (to only begin) to unravel this tangled knot, in a specific epoch, remains to be determined’. Corcuff proposed constructivism to answer this problem, whereby, ‘classes and social divisions are apprehended not as “objective necessities” (as a number of Marxists do) … but as social constructs endowed with a more or less active historical durability in daily life’.16 Bensaïd and Aguiton were in accord with this point, putting it in other terms: The wage relation of exploitation structures class conflict. That is not to say classes are homogeneous. Neither does capitalism reduce itself to ‘economic capitalism’: it organises and structures in a relatively coherent manner the whole of the relations of production and reproduction (including heath, education, the city, domestic work and the relation between generations). Finally, the consciousness of belonging to a class, the constitution of a collective memory, the production of a political and union culture are not mechanical products of the struggle. They presuppose a specific elaboration in the specific field of ideological and political struggle. In short, it is a ‘construction’, what Corcuff calls ‘dual symbolic and political work’. We are in agreement about this. But it is still necessary to know, among the diverse range of possible constructions which site is open for struggle … If one renounces, among the ‘grand interpretations’, the terms of class struggle, there are strong chances that representation in corporatist (particular against the universal) terms or national terms (according to the opposition national/foreigner) will win out. It is, in any case, our choice. Not because this opposition would go without saying. Or because its consciousness will come spontaneously to it and easily to

15 16

Bensaïd and Aguiton 1997, p. 29. Ibid.

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the demonstrators and strikers, but precisely because it comes as constructing a collective consciousness that is antagonistic to vengeful and exclusive affiliations.17 The class struggle provides a thread of universality allowing for an orientation to the labyrinths of bourgeois societies that create identarian, nationalist, ethnic and religious fantasies. Bensaïd handled these issues in a later contribution – in the first edition of Contretemps – where he scrutinised the relationship between capitalist exploitation and the plurality of dominations. Again, this meant looking at the relation between Marxist critique and a critical Bourdieusian sociology. The cross-fertilisation between critical Marxism and critical sociology was not fortuitous, but a result of common causes: the 1995 strike wave, support for sans-papiers, the perspective for a social Europe and opposition to the Balkans war. The ‘dialogue today marks a double encounter, in one way between two critical cultures, but also between two generations’. The Marxists present in the debates had come from the 1960s and the 1970s, whereas ‘the critical sociologists belong to the generation that was formed in the social sciences in the 1980s and 1990s’.18 Between both traditions, there existed important areas of agreement. First of all, ‘we share a critique of essentialist or substantialist conceptions (in particular applied to the analysis of social classes)’ of social life. We have seen in previous chapters that Bensaïd defended a relational approach to social classes, which was ‘not only compatible, but coherent with a crucial aspect … of Marx’s critique of political economy’. Capital is not a thing but a social relation, and the capitalist mode of production dominating modern bourgeois societies is ‘a system of historically determined social relations’. This is why ‘the logic of capital’ is a ‘logic of becoming’ and not a logic of being or essence.19 17 18 19

Bensaïd and Aguiton 1997, p. 30. Bensaïd 2001b, p. 31. Bensaïd 2001b, p. 31. Elsewhere, in discussing Bourdieu, Bensaïd wrote: ‘As long as words and things determine each other reciprocally, the real does not vanish behind the signs that it determines. It is well known, since Spinoza at least, that the concept of a dog does not bark. But, in order for things to make sense, we still need real dogs that bark and bite. The border is tenuous between a reasonable constructivism and a radically relativist constructivism. The first is correctly opposed to substantialist or essentialist representations of the world. Social classes are not things that can be pigeon-holed into a table of contents, but historical and dynamic phenomena … Classes are not mechanical products of an economic base, but the result of a process constitutive of their definition. Legitimately taking into account this political, cultural, and symbolic dimension of social representations can also lead, if one is not careful, to confusing the obscuring of representations with the disappearance of the realities that they represent’. Bensaïd 2000, pp. 71–2.

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Secondly, Marxists and Bourdieusians could both refer themselves to, Bensaïd wrote, ‘what I call a reasonable constructivism, of which Edward P. Thompson’s book on The Making of the English Working Class offers a good example’. ‘Reasonable constructivism’ is a concept that relates the evolution of technology, the conditions and organisation of work with the formation of a discourse and the ‘English working class’s’ formative social practice. In an analogous perspective we can interpret the dialectic between the ‘probable class’ and the ‘mobilised class’ in Pierre Bourdieu, underlining that this constructivism does not reduce itself to a play of language. It refers to real transformations. Or else, why would class be probable rather than improbable?20 Thirdly, they were in agreement about ‘taking into account the plurality and complexity of belongings that makes up the singularity of each individual’. Every singular identity is a composite of diverse social relations. However, taking plurality into account does not necessarily lead human beings to becoming fragments or broken individualities because it is still necessary to locate, ‘in a given situation, that which knots together the diverse belongings and forms the person as such’.21 In the last place, ‘the theory of the plurality of fields (and of capitals) can undoubtedly help in thinking through the plurality of modes of specific domination and the discordance of times’, because the different fields are not transformed at the same pace. Class relations, ‘relations of sex, relations of society to the ecosystem are subject to different temporalities and it is not because one has adopted a law on social appropriation that one has finished with the Oedipus complex’.22 Bensaïd was aware of the consequences of the approach: Nonetheless, this problematic of the plurality of fields raises a question that is laden with strategic implications. If the different fields were simply juxtaposed, like a social mosaic, the oppressed of these fields could tie and untie conjunctural and thematic alliances … but their convergence or their unification would have no real foundation. Every effort to rally them together thus comes from a coup de force and a pure ethical voluntarism.23 20 21 22 23

Bensaïd 2001b, p. 32. Ibid. Ibid. Bensaïd 2001b, p. 33.

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To explain this strategic dilemma, one must be able to answer certain questions: how is their articulation thinkable and possible? If their autonomy is relative, what is it autonomous relative to? Developing a response, Bensaïd argued that not all fields are equal, because not all fields play an equivalent role in social reproduction. Where the capitalist mode of production dominates modern bourgeois societies, no sphere can become fully autonomous from the life of capital. If one recognises that commodity globalisation is tied to the contemporary forms of capital accumulation, then this leads us to the following point: [I]t appears that capital and the ‘commodification’ of the world are, much more than the past century, the great unifying agents. Their great ventriloquist recital has survived the proclaimed death of meta-narratives. Today, more than ever before, capital is the grand impersonal subject in whose shadow we are condemned to think, as Jean-Marie Vincent said. It is here that the decisive notions of alienation, fetishism and reification intervene, that has to do with the very status of wage labour.24 This invites us to take seriously breaking out of the vicious circle of capitalist reproduction as a condition for emancipating other oppressed groups. Furthermore, ‘to say that capital is the grand subject of the epoch, whose false totality (abstract totality) weighs with all its weight on every domain of social life, can appear to be a simple magical formula’.25 However, Bensaïd proposed that ‘we can return to the notion of overdetermination used by Louis Althusser (and God knows that I have never been an Althusserian). It avoids the hardly dialectical notions of reflection or simple mechanical causality between structures’.26 With this concept – or others that play a similar role – different contradictions are ‘overdetermined by capital’s logic’. We can take two examples: women’s oppression and the nation (I return to women’s liberation in the chapter The Smile of the Frightful Hobgoblin). Bensaïd recognised that women’s oppression (inseparably social, sexual and symbolic) ‘does not date from the formation of the global commodity economy’ but precedes it. However, ‘the forms of domination and oppression are transformed with those of the social formation’. The capitalist mode of production remoulded and modernised women’s oppression, by modifying the role of the family in social reproduction, redefining ‘the division between the 24 25 26

Bensaïd 2001b, p. 35. Ibid. Ibid.

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public sphere and private sphere. It results in a tight interlocking between the social division and sexual division of labour’. ‘This is why’, he tells us, that here and now, the struggle against oppression is strategically inseparable from the struggle against exploitation. That does not mean that the former is spontaneously extinguished under the impact of social appropriation. But the transformation of relations of production and the social division of labour will inevitably pose the question of oppression in a new context and different relations of force.27 As for the nation, ‘the problem must be tackled from a historical point of view’. The nation ‘has neither the same meaning, nor the same function as when it was a case of the unification of a still infant national market … of the Republican nation of the French Revolution, German and Italian unification, the struggles for national liberation against colonial domination’. The contemporary national question cannot be ‘separated from the context of globalisation and the law of uneven and combined development’. The ‘double movement, of market unification and partition of spaces, the creation of continental collections and regionalist demands fans social and national frustrations’.28 These two points were necessary to construct an argument against those who concluded from the multiplicity of social movements that one can simply ‘line up a string of racial, sexual, generational, religious and national oppressions … and class’. For Marx, class conflict ‘is not an ordinary n at the end of an enumerative chain. It is at the core of the extraction of surplus-value, therefore of the logic of accumulation’.29 Of course, Bensaïd’s thesis is debatable. To combat it, one would have to construct an alternative critique of political economy capable of explaining social reproduction as a whole. Short of doing that, ‘every theoretical effort will be annihilated in a lifeless eclecticism that will avoid any test of the real’. This informed Bensaïd’s criticism of Ernesto Laclau, who at least ‘had the merit of coherence. Rejecting the centrality of class relations’, Laclau ended up abandoning Marx, ‘renouncing all social alternatives’, resigning himself to the insurmountable horizon of a liberal and well-tempered market democracy. For Bensaïd’s part: 27 28 29

Bensaïd 2001b, p. 36. Ibid. Bensaïd 2001b, p. 38.

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I therefore remain convinced of the hypothesis that the relation of exploitation remains central in the contemporary social dynamic, on condition of not reducing it to the sphere of production, but of conceiving of it in each dimension of social reproduction (distribution of revenues, division of labour, educative system, housing question, etc). In fact, it is a case of knowing how the social surplus is produced and used globally. From here, we cannot dissociate the sphere of production from that of circulation … and the reproduction of the whole. To consider that capital exerts a kind of hegemony over the different fields and plays the mediating role between them raises major theoretical and conceptual problems … Thus, Philippe Corcuff underlines the difficulty of thinking the global in plurality. Difficult? Without a doubt. Impossible? That depends on the conceptual tools put to work and notably the relevance or not of the categories of totality, structure and system; all that is not foreign to the question of the relation between the production of knowledge and a certain search for truth (a notion practically buried by ‘post-modern’ jargon). However, even in a pragmatic approach that replaces the problem of truth with utility, the question of the totality and the truth, as well as their relation, would not be resolved. To think society, not as a substance, but as a relation, yes: this is our point of departure. But how to think the relation between relations? To renounce this will lead us to resign ourselves to a world of sound and fury, of fragments, unthinkable otherwise than in a poetic form.30 The historical corollary of this theoretical point concerned the history of the trade-union movement. The union movement existed initially in France, Italy and in Spain as a territorial social movement around the Maisons du peuple and the Bourses du Travail. It was not exclusively a movement of demands concerning the negotiation of the sale of labour power alone but, equally, a movement of mutual social aid, literacy and culture. The movements of women and soldiers sometimes found their place within its walls. With this background, it could be said that the ‘new social movements’ were not as new as they appeared, and what more, they were politically divided: They have existed for a long time, have known their eclipses, their mutations which it would be interesting to establish their curve in relation to the evolutions of the workers’ movement itself. But, above all, they are

30

Bensaïd 2001b, p. 42.

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not by nature ‘anti-system’. There is a revolutionary ecologist movement, a reformist ecologist movement and a reactionary ecologist movement; there is a critical political ecology and a conservative, naturalist ecology. There is a revolutionary movement of women and a reformist movement, which, in the name of parallelism, is sealed off from the class struggle and struggle of sexes, accommodates itself to social democracy as the lesser evil, even if its politics of austerity, restriction of the public budget, weigh very heavily directly on the condition of women.31 To return to the theoretical register from the historical, ‘detaching the social formation from a mode of production, reduces it to a simple collage of micro relations and abandons the global for a theoretical minimalism of the local’.32 This difficulty included Bensaïd’s refusal of the idea of truth as a substance (to discover and possess) or as an correspondence (a reflection or adequation) between thought and the real. In terms of thinking the truthful determinations of a theoretical whole – the alternative to substantialist and correspondence notions of truth, Bensaïd insisted that the task was ‘not new’. A totality that is abstract and unmediated is a totalitarian ‘dogmatic totality’. Many authors have resisted the dogmatic totality. ‘Henri Lefebvre, in speaking of the “open totality”, Jean-Paul Sartre, by speaking of the “detotalised totality”, Theodor Adorno in opposing himself to the “false totality” of capital. Georg Lukács made it the touchstone for all dialectical thought’. With the category of the open totality, ‘the idea of a relative autonomy will logically have as its corollary that of a relative unification, conceived not as a natural given, but as a labour and as a strategic process’. Yet, it is still necessary that there is in reality the ‘conditions for this unification, the conditions for its “effective possibility” (Reale Möglichkeit)’ in order to escape a disquieting ‘voluntarism of reason’.33 If the construction of class politics is inseparable from themes of overdetermination, constructivism and the relations of exploitation to social movements mentioned above, then in class conflict a solidarity of all the exploited is conceivable. As the chapter on Marx also demonstrated, Bensaïd had a conflictual notion of classes. According to Bensaïd, such a class conflictuality is an alternative to other forms of conflict that take on identarian forms. Certainly, Bensaïd argued that it is not necessary to be certain of tomorrow’s world to take part in a class conflict that takes place every day, under all sorts of forms, including the most classic. Indeed, one needs a will to make this class conflict 31 32 33

Bensaïd and Aguiton 1997, pp. 86–7. Bensaïd 2001b, p. 43. Bensaïd 2001b, p. 45.

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live, because from the conflict we can construct universality. The weakening of class references is the counterpart of the surge of other belongings: communitarian, religious and national. Writing in Le Retour de la question sociale, Bensaïd and Aguiton claimed that ‘the question of the moment is definitely not that of the disappearance of classes … but that of the metamorphoses of wage labour’, and the struggles that will inaugurate its new representations. Being a partisan of class politics meant being, ‘attached to its “construction”’. The real difficulties of the epoch were therefore the obstacles and the difficulties of this construction, ‘in the incertitude of the process of deconstruction/reconstruction that are today at work’, [W]e have to focus on the obstacles that now exist to working-class organisation and consciousness: the privatisation and individualisation of social life; flexibility of work; individualisation of work time and forms of earnings; the pressure of unemployment and job insecurity; dispersal of industry and changes in the organisation of production.34 Responses to themes associated with the construction of class consciousness would only be found in new experiences of struggle and conscious, deliberative political militancy. To draw in themes about Bensaïd’s understanding of class from the chapter on Marx, and therefore to deepen Bensaïd’s conception of ‘construction’, it is necessary to recall that there is no descriptive definition of class in Marx’s work because Marx did not proceed through definitions. The definition is a logical type that is present in the French positivist tradition, but absent in the German logics of Hegel and Marx, which work through determination (Bestimmung). There is a conflictual relation when handling classes since classes determine each other mutually according to a relation of conflict. Bensaïd’s fundamental question concerns a strategic conception of class, which is formulated from the struggle. To be sure, if we look for definitions of class, we can find pedagogical value in them, but they will only be guesstimates. Conjoined to class determinations is the conception of the subject. Bensaïd’s understanding of class means he did not think we should break with the idea of the proletariat as a revolutionary subject.35 But he argued to break with the metaphysical vision of the subject: 34 35

Bensaïd and Aguiton 1997, p. 32. What he certainly did concede, was that: ‘It is necessary to break with a closely related vision, that transfers onto social phenomena a kind of psychology of the subject, of the subject-individual, the consciousness of the subject that comes from classical psychology

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I do not claim here … to treat the plurality and strategic unity of social movements, but rather the representation in terms of subject – the category equally part of what I called the political paradigm of modernity which emerged among others with the Cartesian Ego. This category is, to a certain extent, attached to classical psychology and its relation to politics (to citizenship, civic consciousness, the opinion of the voter, etc.). In fact, the great subjects of revolutionary change – the Ps in particular: People, Proletariat, and Party – have been fantasised about as the great collective subjects, resulting in a debatable dialectic of the in-itself and the for-itself, of the conscious and unconscious. The problem has to pose itself in other terms today: how can a multiplicity of actors that can be rallied around a common negative interest (of resistance to commodification and the privatisation of the world) make for a strategic force of transformation without resorting to this dubious metaphysical dialectic of the subject. I say, for all that, for me, the class struggle is not one form of conflict among others, but the vector that can traverse the other antagonisms and surmount the closures of the clan, chapel, race, etc.36 As noted earlier, the metamorphoses of wage labour and the struggles possibly capable of inaugurating new representations of class struggle concerned Bensaïd deeply. His concern involved a series of questions related to the construction of classes: do the new ways that work is organised, the privatised modes of consumption and social atomisation still allow us to construct a collective social force to transform society? Could the disjunction between the social and the political find a solution in a world in the midst of transformation where politics loses its influence on the common good, where the public space is privatised, where the old scales of sovereignty are outdated without new coherent regulations appearing? After the relative loss of the centrality of the conflict of capital/labour centred on the perimeter of the great industrial

36

from the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century. From the outset, one imagines the proletariat as a giant individual that must, like every individual, go from infancy, to apprenticeship, then finally come to adulthood though a kind of metaphysics of consciousness of the “in-itself” and the “for-itself”, etc. We find little of that in Marx, maybe, barely a formula in The Poverty of Philosophy, but much more clearly in Lukacs … I believe that it would be more worthwhile to think the formation of a force for social transformation. To say “force” does not presuppose the idea of consciousness. It is a force for transformation that is a force of permanent construction, a combination of a plurality of organised forms’. Bensaïd 2009, Théorie de la valeur, travail et classes sociales, interview with Henrique Amorim. Bensaïd 2006, interviewed by the Argentine journal Praxis.

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complexes (for example Renault-Billancourt), could it produce only a ‘punctual and episodic conflictuality’ incapable of unifying the movements around great common projects and constructing a collective memory that has accumulated experience? These questions are open; they were unresolved when Bensaïd departed. However, writing in the 1990s, Bensaïd recognised that it was too early to give definitive answers; answers would only emerge from engaged struggles, their temporary outcome and the lessons that they would teach.

3

The System of Class Representation

Associated with the construction of class identity, Bensaïd and Aguiton discussed the stakes involved the tendencies at work within the ‘crisis of the system of representation’. The system of political and union representation that characterised the liberal democracies in the post war period of Western Europe complemented a specific social structure and organisation of labour – large and concentrated industry, mass production and consumption and social welfare. The setup assumed the existence of inter-professional, representative and accountable unionism, capable of playing a role in the conflictual compromise between capital and labour. On the one hand, this form of unionism was modelled by the struggles and social mobilisations but, on the other hand, by the mechanisms of social negotiation, which explained that such a ‘social compromise, made possible by the long wave of economic expansion, was translated into the great accords that regulated the sale of labour power on the national labour market, as well as by the branches and large units of production. The distribution of the “fruits of expansion” were negotiated in permanence’.37 The ability of the union movement to apply pressure was complemented by the powerful reformist workers’ parties – Socialists and Stalinists – in the political sphere. This system was: a result of the relations of force that came out of the Second World War and of the bourgeoisie’s (seriously discredited by its attitude to Nazism) deep fear. But it finished by responding to the needs of reconstruction and of a relative social peace, more and more financed by neo-colonial super profits. Throughout the 1970s the entry into the long recessive wave had eroded the functional coherence of this model. The imperialist bourgeoisie responded by desperately hunting for relative surplus value and

37

Bensaïd and Aguiton 1997, pp. 69–70.

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productivity gains that implied a restructuration of the industrial framework and the organisation of labour. The crisis … is not in fact, in the strict sense, an ‘economic’ crisis but the more global crisis of Keynesian regulation disparaged by the internationalisation of production, of capital, services and the division of labour.38 After the first post-war crisis, the European ruling class pushed for more and more savage attacks on the system of social protection and the union movement. The process was uneven. Questions remained for capital, such as how hard they could push against the welfare state? How far could they weaken the union movement without creating an empty space that could be socially explosive? Several tendencies were at work in this process: a relative narrowing down and fragmentation of the old base of social consensus; the search among the bosses and the unions to respond to the new situation; an atrophy of the political and parliamentary sphere, through which the loss of functionality translates into a discrediting of political parties, growing abstention, a compensatory inflation of communication and political marketing to the detriment of organising machines for class combativity.39 The need for a reconstruction of class consciousness still remained. After falling significantly, the rate of unionisation had not regained its prior strength, marking a ‘profound internal mutation. Its industrial vertebral column weakened without new sectors yet coming to take over’. This ‘situation of transition is expressing itself in the erosion of the feeling of class belongingness … more generally, workers, young or not, declaring a loss of interest in politics’.40 Strike activity in the 1980s had fallen dramatically in relation to the previous two decades. 1985 was the lowest point since the Second World War, and then the early 1990s saw a further drop off. The rhythms of strike activity intersected with the generational change. There were the generations ‘of the Popular Front in 1936, the Liberation, of ’68 … Since, the organised militants have aged and worn, without a new foundational experience appearing on the scene for a new generation’.41 According to Bensaïd, in the construction of class consciousness and organisation, if one cannot envisage the simple repetition of the past, what proletariat would emerge from the growing individualisation, modification of socialisation and withdrawal into the private sphere? 38 39 40 41

Bensaïd and Aguiton 1997, pp. 70–1. Bensaïd and Aguiton 1997, p. 71. Bensaïd and Aguiton 1997, pp. 82–3. Bensaïd and Aguiton 1997, p. 84.

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Bensaïd Responds to Lionel Jospin’s Victory

Bensaïd responded to Lionel Jospin’s first year as Prime Minister; I thus move explicitly to the political side of the French landscape. Drawing from Bensaïd’s critical balance sheet of the Jospin experience in the aftermath of the mass strikes of 1995 permits us to see the extent to which the social upsurge translated itself in the representative terrain, in the context of the general crisis of representation. I refer to Bensaïd’s bilan in Lionel qu’as-tu fait de notre victoire? On 1 June, Bensaïd voted for the left in the legislative elections. Likewise, he had voted left in 1981, 1988, and 1995. Less for the left rather than against the right, Bensaïd would say. And this was despite the capitulations and dreary years of Mitterrand. Therefore, it was a vote without illusions in the new government. When Jospin won the 1997 elections, he asked for one thing: time. Here was a serious man, Bensaïd opines. The product of years and years and years of Trotskyist entryism in the Socialist Party was now Prime Minister. He was accorded the patience as the right was in disorder, but the distrust remained – Europe, the Pasqua-Debré laws, privatisations and the Juppé plan. Would he turn the left around? Would France see the rebirth of a left that was dignified of its name under Jospin’s tutelage? According to Bensaïd, after ‘the disaster years of Mitterrand, a new failure on this terrain would have unpredictable consequences for the political landscape of the country and the future of all of the left. The movement of the unemployed was responsible for the powerful reminder’.42 What would be the future of unemployment and jobs under a left Prime Minister? What did Jospin do with the left’s victory? He was swimming with the currents, confluent of many factors: the strikes in 1995 against the neoliberal counter-reforms and the xenophobic legislation of Jean-Louis Debré in 1997. Bensaïd wrote, In 1993, fourteen years of Mitterrand and ten years of governmental administration had left a left in ashes and ruins, its people demoralised, without a project nor a future promise, more than three million unemployed and a Le Penist electorate of four million. Lionel Jospin did a lot to redress this down-and-out left, reinvigorating it quicker than its own leaders had hoped. He was able to do it thanks to traditions, to the deep culture of the left, more combative, more tenacious than its occasional parties and leaders. A left rooted in history, in the daily reality of social

42

Bensaïd 1998, pp. 9–10.

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conflicts, in the struggle between capital and labour, between the rights to existence and the despotic right of property. It was to a large degree, the delayed effect of a social renaissance of the left. The echo of the December 1995 strikes, the struggle of the sans-papiers, the demonstrations against the Debré laws, the Assises for women’s rights.43 Jospin had reasons to maintain a strong left face. After these movements, he knew that he would have unionists, militants and hundreds of thousands of demonstrators who had ‘spared no efforts to struggle against the plans and the laws of the right’. The left in power needed a new dynamic and new life to expand its base of support. Bensaïd argued that a new sell out would lead to a deeper disaster, ‘a return in force of a right more and more reliant on the National Front’. In fact, the process was already underway: After the last legislative elections, there is no longer a single département where the scores of the National Front are less than 5 %. In 28 départements, they are situated between 10–15%; in 30 départements between 15–20%; in 12 départements between 20–25 %; in the Var and Vaucluse they scored over 25%.44 Written in the 1990s this observation has been confirmed by the continued forward motion of the Le Pen family line. But, at that time, nobody could predict what far-right demons might arise if the left underwent a decomposition, and if the oppressed classes did not put forward their own responses and own solutions. But Jospin wanted to take his time. Being in government means being confronted by contradictory imperatives. On the one hand, to manage discontent, and on the other, to comfort the business class. To consolidate confidence in the left, he would have to quickly demonstrate a sharp change of direction, yet, to satisfy the business class, he would have to search for consensus and conciliation. How long could anybody put their faith in a compromising and conciliatory left? Faced with this political development, Lazare’s observations, as recounted by Péguy, rang true to Bensaïd: As the great Bernard Lazare one day said to me; and I remember his words textually; it was the moment that it became evident that parliamentary politics, having perverted the matter, was going to pervert the recovery

43 44

Bensaïd 1998, pp. 13–14. Bensaïd 1998, p. 15.

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of the matter: ‘The opportunists, he said to me, have taken thirty years to rot; the radicals haven’t taken thirty months; the socialists won’t even take thirty days’.45 The need to manage this contradiction between consolidating the left and appeasing business explains why Lionel would call for time and patience. Jospin had to play a double game. The ‘culture of opposition pushes for disobedience’, and ‘the culture of government calls for obedience’. Jospin embodied this duplicitous split, Bensaïd wrote: The day before the first round of the legislative elections, the First Secretary – ‘culture of opposition’ obliged! – denounced the pact of stability as a ‘super-Maastricht’ and ‘a concession’ that the French government had ‘absurdly’ made to the Germans. He added with good logic: ‘Therefore, I have no reason to feel committed with respect to that’. Words of a citizen! Three weeks later, the Prime Minister – ‘culture of government’ and binding state reason! – signed the Amsterdam Treaty. As First Secretary of the Socialist Party and leader of the opposition, Lionel demonstrated against the closing of Renault-Vilvorde. As candidate to the legislative elections, he undertook, more prudently, to re-open the dossier; as Prime Minister, Jospin swung towards closure … As First Secretary, Lionel signed a petition initiated by the union federation Sud-ptt against the privatisation of France Telecom, only a few months before the elections; all of the left had also voted against the law on the 26th of July 1996 transforming France Télécom into a quasi-standard private company. As Prime Minister, from his inaugural speech to the Assembly, Jospin announced the retreat, introducing the subtle distinction between the public services, ‘subjected to a fundamental conception of the society to which we hold above all’, and the public sector, which the telecommunications fall under, which, ‘today, has become a question of property’. Between the lines, the green light was opening up to capital … The culture of government dictates its law. At times in protest and reluctance, it is necessary to fold to the financial markets, to the institutions, to cohabitation, to the reason of the state. Reforms can wait. Not the renunciations.46

45 46

Quoted from Bensaïd 1998, p. 11. Bensaïd 1998, pp. 18–19.

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According to Bensaïd, Jospin was the product of capitalist administration and had to play into its game, and private honesty and sincerity did not have much to do with it; it is the role and function that one has to play amid the constraints of government. Under capitalism, ‘splitting into two’ is the rule: the private individual and public citizen. This has implications for bourgeois state administration. Another passage of Charles Péguy summed up the play of Jospin, so Bensaïd tells: It is always the same vice of modern duplicity. They want to play twice. They want to play two separate games and contradictory wills. They want to play on two tables. They want to play two hands.47 Bensaïd’s central claim was that the Socialist left faced two possible roads in Jospin’s government. They could back down, ‘hoping to squeeze through the eye of a needle’, or gather the strength to fight for a way forward, all the while with the risk of provoking an open governmental and social crisis. The first road was Blairism à la française, a tempered social-liberalism. The second road would have to mobilise the exploited and oppressed for a confrontation with the logic of late capitalism. Only the second option could rebuild confidence in the ability of the left to wage battle and resuscitate hope. The very fact that Jospin’s starting point was not the need to rebuild a left that supports unrelenting resistance to attacks on the working class and a commitment to the fight for a radically different world, he was not prepared to provoke an open crisis in defending this road: Those on the left were ready to give him the time asked for. Still, it was necessary to give un-debatable signs of a change of direction. To refuse to ratify the Pact of Stability, which is not even included in the Maastricht Treaty, which penalises and aggravates it. To oppose clearly … the closing of Vilvorde. Unequivocally re-establish a system of social protection through distribution and the repeal of the Thomas Act on pension schemes. Stop the privatisation of France Télécom. Frankly repeal the Debré laws, legalise the sans-papiers who demand the end of all previous discriminatory measures and overhaul the ordinance of 1945 on foreigners. Substantially boost purchasing power. Announce a deep fiscal reform. The government would have against it the bosses, the mysterious finan-

47

Bensaïd 1998, p. 20.

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cial markets, the right and German Christian Democracy … So, faced with a groggy right, the electoral victory would bear the necessary legitimacy to spur a clear turn. Lionel Jospin would have remobilised his own side and a spurt of hope against the resignation to economic and monetary constraints. At the risk of a European crisis and a crisis of cohabitation, it is true. But this crisis will come, sooner or later. Later will not necessarily be for the better.48 Bensaïd’s approach went against the grain of Blairism à la française. To go against the grain of Gallic Blairism would have risked a deep conflict in the balance of class power, possibly upsetting the general trend of neoliberalism, beginning to turn the class struggle in favour of workers. But this was not Jospin’s agenda in power. It would also have meant going against the grain of the market with its miserable measure of all things. Electoral victories and parliamentary jousts have their importance, they can be decisive, to the extent that they open up opportunities, present new choices and new orientations. But they remain at the surface of things. These are the manifestations behind which class struggles rage or monstrous dangers threaten. With Jospin, the left was in a pitiful state, ‘emptied of social and programmatic substance’. Democracy without adjectives was its only horizon. But democracy is only a political form that can change according to historical variations. Everything depends on its connection to the social relations of domination and oppression: ‘hence the true question is knowing if capitalism … and not atemporal democracy has become the unsurpassable horizon of our times’. The reasons for this closed horizon were not surprising: Throughout the century, the Stalinists have discredited the revolution. The Social Democrats have discredited reform. Lionel Jospin himself declared: ‘Reform has defeated revolution, but the reformists give the impression of no longer believing in reforms’. To seriously, deeply and durably reform, it is necessary more than ever to revolutionise the relations of power and property.49 The political extinction of reform and revolution was not the only problem during the neoliberal period. According to Bensaïd, the division between the political right and the left gained renewed urgency. Jospin claimed that ‘the

48 49

Bensaïd 1998, pp. 21–2. Bensaïd 1998, p. 29.

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right believes in tradition’, and ‘the left in progress’. At stake were not beliefs, however, but the divisions opened in real class conflicts, which returns us to the question of the construction of the classes through struggle, relevant anew in the context of a left government. For Bensaïd, construction has both material and symbolic components: Under the impact of the neoliberal offensive, some words become unpronounceable. We could no longer say workers or proletarians, only ‘the people’, ‘the clients’ or ‘the opinion polls’. Classes were decreed as having been dissolved into consensus and consumption. Finished, archaic and transcended. December 1995 was a pitiless reality check … Because facts and words have their inseparable importance. When the National Front is bent on substituting the national/foreigner antagonism in the place of the exploiter/exploited, it knows the importance of this war of words. It knows that worldviews are at stake. It is, reciprocally, crucial to defend the central role of the social front and class interests. It hardly matters whether representation corresponds to the spontaneous idea that a teacher, nurse or truck driver has of himself or herself. Like all social consciousness, class consciousness is constructed in struggle and in language. Walter Benjamin highlighted the importance of the fact that Hitler’s Germany became the country where naming the proletariat was a crime. And Hannah Arendt often insisted on the significance of the substitution of classes by ‘the masses’ in the vocabulary of the regime.50 To confront the disappearance of words, Bensaïd thought a new and combative left was needed, armed with history and memory, because ‘all pasts do not have the same future. Without doctrine, without project, the left will be incapable of even opening the doors of the future that are half open’. Bensaïd asked if the Socialist Party was this vehicle. It was not likely since ‘too many betrayals weigh on its shoulders. This is not the party of Jaurès. Not even that of Léon Blum or Marcel Pivert’. The Socialist Party was increasingly professionalised, with its links ‘with popular sources of its renewal being considerably loosened and weakened’. The party had ruled as unemployment doubled, precarity has grown, and the National Front had surged. Neither was the Communist Party likely to be radically transformed. However, there remained a problem:

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Bensaïd 1998, pp. 30–1.

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These parties are still, also of the left. And the left is our camp, in spite of everything, a pesar de los pesares. Thousands of militants face this dilemma. It will indeed be necessary to come to the conclusion that this left, crippled by resignations and felonies will not redress itself by itself, through its own accord and with its own energy. New equilibriums and new relations of force at its core are necessary to change it, if we want to change the world before it erases us. Whatever will be the name that we give to it, a new left in the left will be necessary in order to remember its origins that are also its ends.51 A left with memory and tradition is a left with theory, because, in order to act, an intelligence of the world was necessary. And a left with theory implies a left with a history. Theory, memory, tradition and history form a web constantly woven within a combative left. As the chapter Ready to Roll the Dice already discussed, the ‘post-modern’ was a moment when the intransigent ideologies were supposedly finished with. Bensaïd asked, in the aftermath of the death of these ideologies what is one left with? ‘Flexible, adaptable, pliable and accommodating’ ideologies without coherence, a socialism without ideas; thus, a brica-brac of common sense put together into a melting pot to be called theory? Or ‘An eclectic harlequinade made of Rawlsian justice … and Habermasian consensus’? Marx certainly did not say the last word on the enigma of capital but he carved out the first words, the critique of political economy, the critique of the vampire that continues to suck the blood of its underlings. Bensaïd never proposed an uncritical return to Marx as one reaches for a comfort blanket on a winter night. It instead was always a matter of going through Marx and beyond, ‘without losing the thread’. Nothing invents itself out of nothing, and ‘nothing is built on forgetting and obliteration’. If Jospin treated theory appallingly, he did the same to history, saying: ‘I am not going to resolve the question of whether Stalinism was the inevitable product of Leninism or if it was a deformation, a perversion of Leninism, and as Trotsky wrote, a revolution betrayed’.52 Odd words for a former Trotskyist. This is without a doubt a key question of the century around which revolve many, many implications for a reconstruction of the left. Jospin’s theoretical and historical worldviews and a reconstruction based on the critique of political economy and revolutionary politics were ends apart. Bensaïd’s bilan of Jospin’s time in office effectively demonstrated how Jospin was disciplined and changed by bourgeois state reason while a revolution51 52

Bensaïd 1998, p. 36. Quoted from Bensaïd 1998, pp. 34–5.

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ary reconstruction might discipline and overturn capitalism itself. Jospin was adaptable to sitting in government office, while revolutionary reconstruction is built in the militant workplaces, the streets and the creative consciousness of millions. These contrasting orientations do not overlap in their attitude to the real: Only yesterday, the first secretary Lionel preached ‘the invention of the possible’. A proud formula! The Jospin of Matignon was hardly slow to sacrifice this possible, not to the real – which is rich, contradictory, which includes the virtual – but to dreary realism, which is an impoverished real, simplified, a shadow of one-way reality. Only yesterday, Lionel argued that ‘democracy lives only by inventing its potentials’. In 1983, Jospin had judged with resignation, the turn to ‘inevitable’ austerity: ‘We break before necessity’. In him, ambitiousness for the possible is soluble in constraint.53 Bensaïd is demonstrating in this passage a political content to his more theoretical arguments about possibility and reality. He thought that if responsible realism remains pervasive in politics, which is, ‘always the same fetishistic cult of the real amputated from its possibilities’, then the political future would be poor indeed. A subtle point perhaps, though with far-reaching consequence, Bensaïd’s politics of the oppressed does not share this conception of the real, because it puts a primacy on the possibilities of changing the situation, not accommodating to it. In the last instance, all that exists is destined to perish, Bensaïd explained, Nothing, however, is eternal. Not even diamonds. Everything has a history and an end. That includes the reign of capital. Far from being natural, as old as the world … it represents only a brief and recent episode in human history. Some centuries at most … It will not continue. The question lies in knowing how it will end, well or badly, to the benefit of whom, to the detriment of whom. No one can escape this question. We are embarked, said another.54 Bensaïd’s interventions on the social question and the political landscape concerned the ambiguity about what consequences could result from the changes

53 54

Bensaïd 1998, pp. 37–8. Bensaïd 1998, p. 33.

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taking place, from European construction through the fall of the Eastern bloc and the rise of globalisation. In this epoch of transition, every step the left took backwards fuelled the far-right: ‘Le Pen, its Dorian Gray’s portrait of the left disowned, the faithful mirror of its betrayals’.55 One result of these accumulated disappointments was the divorce between the social movement and representative politics, in which the distrust was considerable. Bensaïd worried, ‘the perils are accumulating and the horizon is blurring in a disquieting manner’. A new political proposal was both urgent and necessary, but he warned against ‘impatience and shortcuts, of the weariness that comes with time and the anxiousness to get out of marginality (at any price?)’: We have been minorities without qualms, for more than thirty years, with application and perseverance. We have often distanced ourselves from the petty game of ambitions, careers and appearances. Not by a spirit of sacrifice. Simply by ‘loyalty to those unknowns’, as the old Polish dissident Karol Modzelewki said. We have been criticised for posturing from a position of comfort, as if our hands are so clean and unused that we may as well have no hands, dreams without reality … principles without practical efficacy … This is the eternal lullaby of every opportunist, the justification for kneeling before the fetish of fait accompli. The concern for immediate, hurried, efficacy is legitimate. But, according to what criteria, on what timescale, is that effectiveness judged?56 Two antagonistic poles menaced the drive to a new left: a majoritarian impatience and the complacency of a minority. Majoritarian impatience might sell its dreams on the black market, while the complacency of a minority might fall into the ‘narcissistic aesthetic of defeat, doctrinal hypertrophy, a sectarian spirit … To be in a minority tends to become second nature, a way of life. We are never sure of totally escaping it’. Yet the duty to intersect with real conflicts and transmit a heritage remained, because nothing is born of nothing. To begin is always to begin anew in context. The left is the product of a specific period: 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 being challenged today. In its current state, it will be incapable

55 56

Bensaïd 1998, pp. 271–2. Ibid.

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of confronting the historical shocks that lie ahead. For that, it does not have the theory, the programme, the militants or the leadership formed in the rude school of struggles and events.57 The time is out of joint. The rhythms of political action and reflection do not coincide. Therein lies a contradiction that remains, between ‘the long-time of the accumulation of experiences, of reflection, of patient discussion and the immediate urgency of action. In this long and slow impatience, itself patient, in this “inevitable revolutionary slowness”’.58 Bensaïd was quite farsighted in writing these lines in the 1990s. These contradictions and problems have been exacerbated by the Europe of austerity and pandemic. The discordance of time tests the strongest wills; the situation more than ever demands urgency; the forces capable of practically realising this urgency need time. Bensaïd also put the call out for a new left that could build itself by ‘opposing a culture of resistance and rebellion to that of the – temporarily dominant – disenchantment, resignation and accommodations’. Radicals and rabble rousers, dissidents from the different left parties, libertarians and everyone else who wants to topple the status quo, to these singular individuals Bensaïd appealed. He saw the need for a new element that could change the situation: ‘this is the political engagement of a layer leaders and organisers of the social movements and a renewal of unionism. Many are feeling the deadlock of the situation and the lack of a politics to meet their own struggles’.59 A fighting left, a vanguard organiser that could intervene politically and overturn the situation. Again, the wager retains its relevance, which is what one does every day, in silence, in its simplicity, sometimes anonymously, underground and above ground, in prison and outside, all those who struggle against injustice: ‘By loyalty to them, when one is embarked, one has no right to throw in the towel, to give in at the first defeat and the slightest fatigue’.60

5

The Call for a Left-Wing Left

Bensaïd had indeed responded to the call put out by Pierre Bourdieu for a ‘left(-wing) Left’. Bourdieu’s call took shape amid the renewal of struggle and the social movements discussed above. What then, was the future for the 57 58 59 60

Bensaïd 1998, p. 273. Bensaïd 1998, p. 277. Bensaïd 1998, p. 278. Bensaïd 1998, p. 282.

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European left? If the establishment left continued in its course toward socialliberalism and Blairism it would narrow the visible alternatives because the ‘centre of gravity of the left is indeed moving towards the right’, yet in France this phenomenon was somewhat deformed given that Jospin and the plural left government were dependent on the relations of social forces marked by the struggles of 1995, putting them to the left of the rest of Europe’s institutional left. In this context, ‘a small electoral space, from 5 %–12 % of the left of the administrative left’ emerged in a series of European countries. For Bensaïd this was a fragile expression of an alternative to neo-liberalism, ‘without forgetting that the soul of neoliberalism … is capital itself’.61 One of the dangers of the situation was the fact that the social and union landscape was moving without an equivalent translation into the political arena. From this fact, one could turn a necessity into a virtue by ‘confining the movement to the subaltern role of a lobby group in relation to the plural left government’. Bensaïd explained, The social movements by themselves cannot project themselves directly in the struggle for a rebalancing of the left without denying what makes their force: their unity and their specificity. We find again the idea of the political field that requires its own specific forms. Whether we call them parties, movements or organisations does not matter much: it comes as fighting the politics of those who have the monopoly on it today and make a business of it.62 For Bensaïd, there was a potential to build a really left-wing left. Some say a ‘Left of the Left’ but the slogan – put out by Bourdieu – was ‘gauche de gauche’ not ‘gauche de la gauche’. A really left-wing Left is opposed to the centre-left, the right-wing left and even the plural Left. Its other name could be a red left or ‘100% Left’, defined by its interventions, partisan positions and commitments to the exploited and oppressed. In the decade leading up to this call, there were struggles that rendered rich experience like the 1995 strike wave, the opposition to the Gulf War, the left opposition to the Maastricht Treaty for another social Europe, the struggle of the sans-papiers and women. Overall, the elements of these struggles were dispersed but they were the material for a combative reconstruction of the left. This was so even though these dispersed struggles did not have the propulsive force that a founda-

61 62

Bensaïd and Petit 1999, p. 101. Bensaïd and Petit 1999, p. 109.

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tional event like May ’68 or a revolution had. Bensaïd thought that they were barely on the threshold of a re-foundation, but still without a foundational event: The recent events are until now destructive and negative. They deconstruct without producing novelty. They are nothing like the lifting of the great sun, welcomed by Hegel the day after the French Revolution: they are the stars without radiance … We lack the great collective experiences allowing us to say: from these experiences, those from the communist left, radical ecologists, libertarians and left-wing socialists can gather, to confront the new tests with a new political vocabulary.63 There was no insurmountable reason why ‘militant groups, unionists, campaign groups, through militant communists, ecologists, to the radical left and even the socialist Left’, could not rally together to overcome the fragmentation of the left: We do not wish to imprison ourselves in the ghetto of the extreme left, we would very much like to go beyond ourselves and even outdo ourselves. But without disowning ourselves. Outgrow ourselves to what and how? That is the question. To gain in social reach without losing in political sharpness. There is factually emerging a sort of potential party – this really left(-wing) Left. It is a case of turning the potential into reality. This is the challenge for the years to come. Either a consensual social-liberal space will impose itself … this will be a heavy defeat for the oppressed and dominated. Or this really left(-wing) Left succeeds to exist, in the prolongation of common combats, on quite solid bases for acting together, all the while leaving questions open and respecting its diversity.64 This discussion highlights the continuity and overture of Bensaïd’s perspective, which remained constant until the launch of the New Anti-capitalist Party. In this context, Bensaïd intensified his calls for the formation of a new political force to translate the social upheavals into a political force, rallying experiences and different cultures upon entering the new century, to resume – in the conditions of the new epoch – the project of revolutionary transformation. In 1998 he wrote:

63 64

Bensaïd and Petit 1999, p. 116. Bensaïd and Petit 1999, p. 114.

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In current conditions, a new political force cannot fit into the exclusive descent of one family and one political culture of the past. It must gather together experiences, traditions, different trajectories, coming along different roads of trade-unionism, feminism and ecology … A new left, a new party? The question is obviously on the agenda.65 A communist current ‘would have an indispensable place’ in a new project that gathered together different traditions. For Bensaïd, it was a question of openings and continuity, which constituted the guiding thread of his contribution to the fourteenth congress of the Ligue held in June 2000.66 Reaching the new century, the Ligue was soon to celebrate its thirtieth birthday. Some of its oldtime leaders like Bensaïd and Alain Krivine would soon write their memoirs, cataloguing a half-century of revolutionary activism. The life of the Ligue was marked by its presence in every key political struggle in France. From the general strike of May ’68 to the unemployed movement of Winter 1998, passing through the solidarity campaigns with the workers at Lip in 1973, the postal workers’ strikes in 1974, the rail workers in 1986, the nurses in 1988, and the great mobilisations of students from 1971, 1973, 1986, and 1993. They had been involved and stood in solidarity with the struggles of soldiers’ committees in the 1970s. They had been active in the women’s liberation movement, through the support and participation in the democratic campaigns for the right to abortion and contraception to the united demonstrations for the equality of rights. They had been through the campaigns against the militarisation at Larzac and the installation of a nuclear reactor at Creys-Malville.

65

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Bensaïd 1998, pp. 274–6. For his part, Alain Krivine wrote of the moment that, ‘the synchronicity of the winter strikes of 1995 and the electoral breakthrough of the far left owes nothing to chance. Every study carried out since confirm it: the electorate of the revolutionary left is a working class electorate, in part composed of people who had traditionally voted for the pcf’. Krivine 2006, p. 197. In the combination between openings and continuity lay necessity and danger, particularly in the lead up to the New Anticapitalist Party. Olivier Besancenot said, ‘I recognised that Daniel was not the most enthusiastic, because if he saw both the advantage and necessity of building something new, he also saw the dangers and everything that we could lose. We all knew it, no-one was completely enthusiastic, but everyone saw, at the same time, that there was an objective problem’. Besancenot 2016, p. 205. This point is supported by Francois Sabado, ‘In the last months of his life, he was worried about another problem, that of a loss of political substance in the party. We had debates about this when the npa was launched. He worried that “the extension of the surface could lead to a loss in substance”. We could, over time, compensate for this weakness through the dynamic triggered by a new experience. The success at the beginning could in the first moments mask this problem, but it was to return in force with the first difficulties’. Sabado 2012, p. 166.

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Going into the 1990s, they were involved ‘against the Juppé plan, in solidarity with the sans-papiers, against the Pasqua-Debré laws, for the defence of the unemployed, the precarious and homeless’. The Ligue’s ‘antifascism goes back far: from its dissolution in 1973, and the imprisonment of its leaders for having demonstrated against the xenophobic meeting of the European far-right in Paris, to the participation in the birth and development of the Ras l’Front’. The Ligue had always been on the side of those suffering from French colonial aggression and ‘educated in militant internationalism in the active support to the Algerian struggle for liberation, the Ligue has equally been in all the campaigns of solidarity with the people of Indochina, the victims of the Franquist repression, the Chilean revolution crushed by Pinochet’.67 Woven into this tapestry of struggle: From its birth, the Ligue gave itself the label communist. First, because since the Manifesto of this same name, published just 150 years ago, communism incarnated the programme of human emancipation whereby the exploited and oppressed challenged the despotism of capital and the market … Secondly, so as not to abandon the communist word and ideal, that of the Communard insurgents and the Russian October, to the Stalinist bureaucrats that usurped it in order to commit their crimes in its name. Lastly, through fidelity to les nôtres to all those who have struggled and are dead so that the confusion between communism and Stalinism would never be allowed … Thanks to these dissidents and these rebels from the very beginning, the disasters of the century that has finished have remained intelligible. Thanks to them, the first opposition to the bureaucratic terror was raised in the name of communism. Thanks to them, it remains possible to disentangle the revolutionary promise of liberation from the crimes of the counter-revolution.68 The communist name was defended by the Ligue against all forms of anticommunism. Integral to Bensaïd’s perspective was that – with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disappearance of the Soviet Union, German unification – the previous political century had come to a close, i.e. the political sequence of human history beginning with the First World War had finished in 1991 with the collapse of the Stalinist regimes. ‘A new epoch has opened’, and with it, the possibility of recommencement. Bensaïd argued: 67 68

Bensaïd 1999, Ouverture et continuité notes prepared for the central committee in preparation for the xiv congress of the lcr, held in June 2000. Ibid.

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But this collapse has not led to a new emancipatory upsurge on a planetary scale, but the revenge of capital and liberal counter-reform. Not on a new liberatory wave, but on a period of reaction and restoration. Not on a new convergence of the struggles on different continents, but on what the Zapatista leader Marcos called, ‘the broken mirror of globalisation’ and resistance in fragments. A new project, and a new internationalism remain to be reconstructed.69 ‘Time is needed to rally new forces and clear away new paths. It is the moment first of all of resistance’, Bensaïd noted. Certain was the fact that forces ‘that will rise again, take back confidence, will invent new paths, will not form a direct link with the currents of the worker’s movement born of the First World War and the Russian Revolution’. Bensaïd effectively recognised the need for new foundational experiences of struggle that would politically shape new generations of the class struggle. Standing upon new foundational events, ‘new alignments and new regroupments, new lines of demarcation will appear’ and ‘we are barely on the threshold of this necessary reorganisation’.70 But the entry into struggle of these new movements and actors was not sufficient for their immediate translation into a specific political expression, because the electoral and institutional terrain remained, for the most part, occupied by the old bureaucratic and reformist apparatuses. That is why Bensaïd’s call for a new political force concretely took shape. Framed in terms of the necessity for a new force, and debating whether or not to change the name of the Ligue, Bensaïd noted: The Ligue is thirty years old, and it is changing. Not to deny its past, not to efface that which it is proud of, but to acknowledge a change of epoch, to enter into the new century, and to meet the new generations. The landmarks upon which the great currents of revolutionary thought and action were built are not erased, but they are disrupted. From the tests and disasters of the century, words have not emerged unscathed. Militants of new generations will search for the arms of critique and means of abolishing the existing order of capital through other words. We will indeed finish by giving a new name to our expectations. By inventing in the plurality of our practices the most accurate words in order to clearly say what we no longer want and what we really want … That doesn’t make a line yet, but

69 70

Ibid. Ibid.

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it is more than a dot. Not a programme, but a solid common base. Thus, a potential party is outlined. A party, to give to the social movement a political response. A left party, to the extent that the opposition between right and left – despite all, in a deformed way – the struggle between rich and poor, the possessors and the possessed … A revolutionary party, because we need a left in the left, more than ever resolved to change a world which very much needs it, a party faithful to its commitments. It is in this perspective that the Ligue changes in order to be reborn.71 Bensaïd’s proposal was in line with his argument that a revolutionary party could not be built by the patient accumulation of individuals independent of the experiences of mass collective struggle; in the context of Besancenot’s electoral success in 2002 and 2007, the Ligue wanted to use it as a springboard towards rebuilding a revolutionary project in France. The 2002 Besancenot campaign had an impact beyond electoral results, since the Ligue, ‘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’.72 The rapid growth was a qualitative step forward for the organisation. ‘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’.73 The Ligue outpolled the pcf, with 4.25 percent of the vote. The result demonstrated that the Ligue was more firmly established in the political landscape and could help to confirm its credibility in the social movements. All of this consolidated Bensaïd’s sense that the Ligue had to be transformed in order to be reborn, and that there was a risk worth wagering upon, to turn a potential into actuality.

71 72 73

Ibid. Johsua 2015, p. 76. Ibid.

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Who Is the Judge? Bensaïd made the case for a ‘secularisation of the historical heritage’, in which historical material was to be reworked to be transmissible, involving the source of transmission, the listeners and receivers.1 Within this problematic, Bensaïd searched for a subterranean historical immanence because history is unceasingly reinterpreted, questioned and ‘subjectivised in relation to new tests’, which implies – after grappling with the end of the speculative philosophy of history – an operation of historical thought able to reflect ‘on the production of its meaning’.2 Bensaïd’s book Qui est le Juge? is, in many ways, a systematic attempt to think judgment without the consolations of a speculative philosophy of history. It was also a partial response to the threats to political deliberation. As he wrote in the 1990s, ‘an evil haunted the epoch, the compulsive mania of judging’. The process pervaded public life. Everyone ‘seemed to want to judge everyone, as if this legal escalade was to alleviate the obfuscation of politics and the drop off in public spirit’. These developments were ‘the sign of a weakening of the intellectual debate, of the obscuring of the horizons of expectation, an atrophy of political controversy, smothered between a ventriloquial History and the verdicts without appeal to a definitive justice’.3 The rise of ‘crimes against humanity’ testified to the judgemental atmosphere, in which historical judgement was increasingly used to reinforce juridical judgement. For Bensaïd, this entailed a confusion, the confusion between historical temporality and legal temporality … The collision, demonstrated by the convocation of historians to the bench, playing a similar role to experts who testify under oath … Their respective functions mingle and blur. This play of mirrors between the judge and the historian results in masking the excluded third, the hidden face of judgement: its political character.4 On the legal level, a series of questions were raised. Regarding the Pinochet case, under what conditions could humanity become the source of law and 1 2 3 4

Bensaïd and Petit 1999, p. 50. Bensaïd and Petit 1999, p. 53. Bensaïd 1999a, pp. 7, 15. Ibid.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2024 | doi:10.1163/9789004687028_010

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how to judge the dictators? In the trial for crimes against humanity, what use could one make of history? In relation to the Papon case, could one, fifty years after the facts, untangle individual responsibilities from those of a regime or state? On the historical level, judgement was wedged between the demands for historicisation and myth, myth being embodied in the Black Book of Communism, which dissolved the complexities and contradictions of social history into the idealist logic of the ideological concept. There was a temptation to remain trapped in the fetishised form of judgement where the accused are ‘objectively guilty’ in the same manner the Stalinists carried out their legal processes (one confesses before the laws of History). Bensaïd deconstructed such myths, his radical immanence precluding him from accepting the myth of a ‘last and objective judgement without appeal’: To unfailingly maintain the radical immanence of judgement against the masked nostalgia for great old transcendence, to decipher the subtlety of the three in their interaction (legal judgement, historical judgement and political judgement), we must return to the enigma of our fearsome faculty of judging, to the thorny question of historical causality and political responsibility.5 In this quest, three questions were at the forefront of Bensaïd’s thinking: who is the judge? Who is guilty? And, above all, who is innocent?

1

Legal, Historical and Political Judgements

Before the French Revolution, the uncertainty of human judgement was masked by divine providence. After the French Revolution, under the duress of this uncertainty, Bensaïd claimed that ‘History was charged with avoiding the dizziness and the doubts of an uncertain and profane justice. The History of the world was built up as the world’s tribunal’. History will be the judge, according to this line of perverse obfuscation. And History will acquit us, they continued. The Stalinists perfected this process because they had to justify the oppression and persecution of the proletariat in its own name. They did this in the name of the ‘meaning of history’, where ethical subjectivity became

5 Bensaïd 1999a, p. 8.

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soluble in historical objectivity, law in force, responsibility in necessity. Politics was devoured without respite by the new fetish of an automated becoming.6 For Bensaïd, after the collapse of the Stalinist regimes, one might have hoped that this form of gymnastics would disappear. It was a hope unfulfilled, the ‘recourse to the abusive joker of History’ returned with a vengeance, though articulated now by liberal ideologues. The Black Book of Communism demanded a Nuremberg trial of communism in the name of conclusions from its historical investigations. When it does this, ‘it poses – in its way – the recurrent question of the relation between facts and values, between scientific cognition and political judgement, between judge and historian’.7 In Italy, the trial of Adriano Sofri, the leader of Lotta Continua who was jailed as a result of the testimony of a ‘collaborator with the courts’, displayed the spirit of the times quite clearly, namely ‘a resolutely police-like and legal conception of history, from which the frenzy to judge is the logical consequence’.8 This posed a serious problem: when the work of historical index mixes itself up with the judicial inventory, it threatens the historians themselves because they risk disqualifying themselves as historians, but they do not become judges. The Black Book of Communism and its authors were a case in point. Hurried to become judges, ‘they forget the thickets of history, its complexities and the requirements of the “historian’s craft”’ (Marc Bloch’s term): On the subject of the Adriano Sofri trial, the former leader of the Italian far left condemned to twenty years after the facts of a lone testimony of a pentito, Carlo Ginzburg noted: ‘The acts of the Milan trial and the instructions that had preceded it have often placed me facing complex and ambiguous relations between the judge and the historian … The dialogue, which has never been easy between historians and judges has today attained crucial importance for each of them’. According to him, history is situated at the junction between medicine and rhetoric. The example of the first examines situations ‘looking for natural causes’. It parades them by ‘following the rules of the second’, which is an ‘art of persuasion born before the courts’.9 By falling back on the expertise of the historian, one tries to make up for political judgement. But how can the difficult equation between responsib6 7 8 9

Bensaïd 1999a, p. 13. Bensaïd 1999a, p. 14. Bensaïd 1999a, p. 15. Bensaïd 1999a, p. 16.

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ility and historical irrationality be resolved? Where does political responsibility stop and where does bureaucratic delirium begin? When historians are called to the bench, they cannot escape the tension between making a testimony and being ‘an expert’ in history. Purely factual, ‘the object of expertise excludes taking up a normative position. The mission of the experts “can only have the test of questions that are of a technical order as its object”, on which they draft up a report’. The testimony of these historians is then used in trials, ‘they metamorphose – through the miracle of the sermon – into what, professionally, they are not: appearing as witnesses, they swear to tell the truth “the truth and nothing but the truth, all of the truth”’.10 The metamorphosis invokes objective and historical truth; in this trial, scientific research is instrumentalised when it is filtered through the expert’s testimony for the judge. As witnesses, the historians ‘in reality incarnate the authority of science’.11 According to Bensaïd, at the trial of Papon, the historians were certainly cited as witnesses, swearing to tell the truth, all of the truth and nothing but the truth. The pretension is excessive, however, because, before a tribunal, the historian can only be a witness in the second degree, a witness of the archives and investigations, not a witness of the facts. Can they still claim to be a witness of the truth? Or must they play a much simpler role as a moral witness? A witness of historical morality? We see a strange category between morality and law breaking through here, which – Bensaïd reminds us – implies the solid establishment of the epistemological status of the discipline of history and its relation to truth. Bensaïd suggests that the troubled relation between historical and legal judgement brings us to Péguy’s crucial questions regarding the Dreyfus Affair: what form of judgement and what form of history are able to evaluate it? Are there moral presuppositions? What is historical judgement? Bensaïd pointed out that, for Péguy, there is a relation of inclusion and excess between the legal and historical judgement. The historical judgement is already a legal judgement, but it is not only a legal judgement. It is a legal judgement yet it exceeds the legal judgement; it fills up and overflows the legal judgement; the legal judgement defines the historical judgement, but it defines it only as a necessary and insufficient definition; the historical judgement is a legal judgement, in the sense that all the guarantees of right that the legal system grants to the accused, we must ourselves grant them to the characters of history; and the

10 11

Bensaïd 1999a, p. 18. Bensaïd 1999a, p. 19.

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historical judgement exceeds the legal judgement in at least two ways: first, in the sense that we must grant to the same characters of history the guarantees which are not granted to the accused by the system of law; and, second, in the still much more interesting way that historical judgement must follow the reality of a continuous movement, whereas the legal judgement can and must only follow the reality of a discontinuous movement. Therefore, the legal judgement does not return to the thing judged, whereas, in contrast, the historical judgement forever remains open to appeal and permanent revision. Continuity and discontinuity, it is still a question of movement and temporality, of measure and gradation. Péguy was an attentive critic of the Dreyfus Affair. One striking point that came out of it was that the legal judgement could only ever be imperfect. It is a justice that lacks propriety and accuracy. A legal judgement is not as comprehensive as a historical judgement, because it drowns simple honesty in the complications of the trial, the simple administration of evidence in the incertitude of arguments and discourse. It subjugates subtleties and nuance to a legal authority incapable of satisfying its requirements. In the face of this complication, Péguy put forward the need for historical judgement. His historical judgement was entirely immanent, a judgement that was the hope and the action of the vanquished. Not being a transcendent judgement, it is humble. The difference between his historical judgement and the judgement of History was between an immanent and a transcendent judgement. It does not rely on the end point of History, closing off cases – rather, revisions and more revisions can continue indefinitely. Again, this distinguishes it from the legal judgement, which weakens historical judgement if it remains within its web. In the legal judgement, crimes are ‘graded, represented on a scale of gravity’, with intervals and gaps, whereas the living and moving formations of historical reality adjust badly to the rough formations of the law. In this sense, a legal judgement can be equitable without being just, in the face of which historical judgement opposes a justice of another order, which does not issue forth sentences; instead, for Bensaïd, the historical judgement puts forward an obligation, or a demand, to act in the present in the name of a justice that requires its adequate practice. In this sense, the historical judgement does not set the laws, nor any kind of precedent, and neither does it administer the laws. Instead, it is constantly refining its historical judgements, because history is an open process of inquiry, accordant with a different index compared to the legal judgement that ends with the decision of the judge and the courtroom. The continuous nature of the historical judgment involves justice without the sentencing, and the perpetual travails of appeal, without a fixed outcome.

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This historical form of justice is intended to be understood as thoroughly immanent. An immanent justice cannot be subordinated to legal closure and its binary alternatives, innocent or guilty (there is a third term, undecidable, but this presents its own problems). More questions were at stake, too. In an immanent history, what is the law? What is legislation? And what is the highest jurisdiction? Péguy’s response was humanity, in the conditional, which he took to be ‘neither a concept nor a legal institution’. Under capitalism, ‘the will to judge in the name of humanity clashes’ with the difficult problem of the multiple sources of law and with the ‘political mediations which hinder the universalisation of rules and procedures. Historical justice remains a justice in becoming’. Always incomplete, it registers a path and fulfils a tendency, pointing to an as yet unpredictable future. Crucially, ‘the justice in question is not the passion of law or an institution, “it is the messianic passion for a just world”’. None of this suggests that legal judgement is to be banished from human culture because if so, the rule of caprice and the arbitrary would haunt us. It is simply to say that the historical judgement and the legal judgement are two specific orders, ‘two modes of judgement’ that can enter into dialogue without confusing the two, and also without escaping a contradictory tension.12 Historical judgements are made in the immanence of historical processes; this fact then reveals a political dimension: Exceeding legal conventions, confronted by sequences, over which complexity and mediation cover their tracks, constrained by challenges for which it is continually necessary to reinvent the rule, the judgement is compelled to assume the audacity of a self-referential justice with all the risks and dangers this entails.13 Robespierre and Saint-Just were political figures who faced these risks. They did not avoid their foundational political responsibilities; they didn’t fall behind the consoling forms of an ordinary trial for the King. They bore the responsibility of a state of exception, since the King could not be tried within the social pact: he could not be judged, he was guilty for being the King. The important point, for Bensaïd, is that, in a state of exception, ‘the question is then knowing how to demarcate with the most meticulous precision the exception and the rule and illuminating the one by the other’.14 To do this recognises that every event is a political question, but not reducibly so. One cannot be content with 12 13 14

Bensaïd 1999a, pp. 51–60. Bensaïd 1999a, p. 57. Bensaïd 1999a, p. 58.

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an event’s depoliticisation – even in a case like Papon – because the contradictory character of the trial reintroduces complexity and political conflict. The excluded third of politics intrudes. Another problem emerges when the historian’s work is used as testimony before a court: the facts must be explained through their context, but who decides the context? How is the beginning and the end of the context determined? Reconstructed to reinforce a hypothesis, the historical context remains conditional-subjunctive. The legal use of the context makes it pass over to the indicative-factual. The domain of the historian and the judge – operating at different temporalities – consequently merge and become confused: In his research into the Sofri trial, Carlo Ginzburg emphasises this dangerous methodological slippage: in telescoping the plausible and the effective, the judge shows himself at the same time to be a bad judge and bad historian. On the other side, the historian approaches the judge when he contributes, through his determination of the context, to qualify as crimes actions that he is professionally banned from judging.15 In the trials of crimes against humanity, these matters are raised to another level. States are innocent before the law but if this is so, one finds it difficult to escape from the binary choice between the impossibility of collective responsibility (because only individuals are responsible) and that of individual responsibility (because an individual cannot pay for the state’s crime). The only way of breaking this binary hold is a detour through politics. For, ‘until the present, the crimes against humanity have only been imputed to people acting as individuals or as members of particular organisations and not in a criminal system organised as a legal mode of the state’. What happens when the immunity that is granted to heads of state is rejected? Does this not also put the immunity of the state into question? Would this not imply a redefinition of the relation between history, justice and politics? To reiterate, for Bensaïd, these questions demonstrate that because there is a tension between legal judgement and history, a ‘difference of register, function and separated times’, then a mediation is required, that of the excluded third of politics. Between legal judgement and historical judgement, the political judgement balances on the sharp point of the present. It combines the point of view of the actor engaged in the event and that of the spectator who experiences the uni-

15

Bensaïd 1999a, p. 20.

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versality of it. This political judgement must accept its own fragility and bear its risk. In a permanent tension, these three temporal registers do not suffice to guarantee a just verdict or a just reparation. Without the intervention of the political mediation, history and law are antinomies: The functional opposition, retained by orthodox rhetoric, between the strict determination of questions from which the penal sentence follows and the unlimited opening of those which nourish the debate over the facts seems hopelessly blurred. Historians do not produce evidence. They content themselves with constructing plausible chains. It is, moreover, why classical rhetoric placed history outside of the theory of evidence, in the narrative of the story. This distinction would return to two discrete notions of truth: historical truth falling under the suitability of the judgement to the facts while the law declares the truth rather than finding it. It turns out to be too general when the ‘testimony’ of the historian contributes to qualify in law the facts that it treats. The work of the judge requires resistance to the temptation of dissolving the responsibility of the accused into the diversity of causes. He decides according to a binary logic: culpable or innocent. On the contrary, the historian works over nuances, complexities and the division of faults.16 This antinomy is a vicious circle if the political mediation between law and history is eliminated; the withdrawal of the political moment becomes soluble in the market, just as law becomes soluble in moralism. This implies that legal, historical and political judgements each have their place in a mediated relationship. In another sense, one could say that legal temporality and historical temporality are regimes of constructed times that belong to political choices, irreducible to time understood as a substance. On the one hand, the historian operates within ‘the circle of the present’, anchored in a durée, and on the other, the judge operates in the present but tends to go astray in a historical durée: Between the court and history, between the short time of the judge and the long-time of the historian, the difference of rhythm is obvious. For the court, once the verdict is pronounced the case is heard. One does not return to the thing judged. In history, Blanqui said, ‘the appeal is

16

Bensaïd 1999a, p. 25.

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always open’. The last word is never said. We cannot rely … on the comforting certitude of a last judgement. We judge in the uncertain … the new event unceasingly redistributes roles, reshuffles the cards, modifies the insights and overthrows values. Justice has the taste for settled cases. History knows only unsettled cases.17 Important for Bensaïd is the fact that within these antinomies, there exists the problem of anachronism. The following example can illustrate the pitfalls. At the bicentenary of the French Revolution, Robert Hossein staged the trial of Marie-Antoinette, where the public was called to vote on the outcome: for or against the execution of the King? Outside of the context, the question seals a perfect double bind. To vote against would be to condemn the Convention as bloody barbarians; to vote for, two centuries later, would be to vote by plebiscite for capital punishment, now a recognised barbarity. How can a past that is already historical transmute into a legal present? Who is the judge and who decides? Can we understand this process without political mediations? Péguy saw an incommensurability between the experienced time of the real event and the reconstructed time of the historical event, between the present, where one moves, and the past, where one does not. Yet does one not assume they are commensurable if the historical event can be transmuted into a legal present? If one assumes they are commensurable, then one assumes that the morals of the spectators and the judges of our present are able to definitively close a case in history, voting by plebiscite for a barbaric practice to return, in the above example. A rich, contradictory and complex historical event is ruled against the metric system of the judge and spectators.

2

Saint François (Furet)

Bensaïd applied his critical approach about judgment to Furet, which entailed a polemic against a form of political-historical ideological idealism. Bensaïd wrote of how, ‘In the Passing of an Illusion, François Furet tried to close the communist interlude with a definitive judgement of the century’. Furet’s history was the history of an idea, ‘not to understand its real metamorphoses, but in order to unwind the imaginary self-development of the concept’. Rather than unwinding the twists and turns of antagonistic social struggle in its complexit-

17

Bensaïd 1999a, pp. 33–4.

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ies, Furet wrote a genealogy of the idea. Furet’s political move and historical writing ‘reduced the social movement to mere onlookers without existence or their own thoughts. The hopes and suffering of millions of beings are dissolved into the passion for power’. Furet’s history of the communist idea produced ‘a battle of abstractions’ that remained ‘outside the play of social conflict’.18 Thus, history is explained through ideological artifices, where, if communism produced totalitarianism, it was a result of ‘the totalitarianism of the idea’: Making the fate of revolutionary passion his Adriane’s thread, Furet knows only continuities. He superbly ignores fractures, tears and discontinuities: far from contradicting each other, antagonising each other, battling out against each other, revolution and counter-revolution have to make for one bloc and one homogenous mould. From Lenin to Stalin, from one (authoritarian) regime of exception and civil war to a (totalitarian) regime of institutionalised terror, there is only a simple extension and pure continuation. However, this unity of the Russian Revolution is ‘a retrospective myth’, constructed in defiance of a periodisation filled with punctuations, purges and deportations. These millions of deaths mark a reversal, an infidelity, and a betrayal of the founding event named October. Released from social discontinuities, the alleged continuity of the idea erases every strategic difference around which the great bifurcations of the century revolved: on the subject of socialist construction in the ussr, the German Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, the rise of Nazism, the Civil War in Spain, and the Hitler-Stalin pact.19 One curiosity of Furet’s is that he produced a form of teleological determinism whereby everything was already inscribed into the genesis of the concept. Because of Furet’s method, Bensaïd baptised Furet as a new theologian. Theology resulted from Furet’s project, which was ‘entirely dedicated to the impossibility of being communists without being Stalinists’. More bizarre, this was a result of Furet trying to rehabilitate ‘evental contingency’ through dissolving great social causes ‘into an embroidery of arbitrary accidents on a homogenous ideological foundation’. According to Bensaïd, this procedure was anathema to the ‘most profound critiques of bureaucratic totalitarianism in the name of another idea of communism’, that, under the pens of figures like

18 19

Bensaïd 1999a, pp. 162–3. Bensaïd 1999a, pp. 163–4.

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Luxemburg, Trotsky, Souvarine, Korsch, Istrati, Mariategui, Naville and Benjamin.20 Furet’s reading of history can lead to nothing but despair; to inscribe the fate of totalitarianism into any revolutionary process forecloses the possibility of emancipation. This necessarily resulted in the apology for liberaldemocratic capitalism, ‘concluding itself in the vaguely melancholic resignation to the eternity of really existing liberalism’. Denis Berger and Henri Maler posed the following problem to Furet: ‘The interpretation of the past is always more or less combined with an anticipation of the future: it is the past understood that illuminates the anticipated future, and the hoped-for future that conditions the knowledge of the past. Every interpretative reading of history is integral to a strategic reading’. Under the pretext of taking a classical inventory of ‘ideas, wills and circumstances’, from the point of view of the provisional winners, Furet indulged in an apologetic logging of ‘already made’ sets. From here, the irrepressible attempt for a final end, a terminus of history: henceforth, he proclaimed in a sigh, we would be ‘condemned to live in the world in which we live’ … the historian becomes a simple ‘solicitor of the fait accompli’. There is no longer another possible history, no more real but thwarted possibilities. ‘A strategist of battles of which he knew the outcome’, the historian according to Furet substitutes chronology for strategy.21 Furet’s foreclosing method of historical construction should be the object of critique. A writing of history that had entered into a pact with the provisional victors and did not acknowledge its duty to the defeated, banned any translation of this critical moment (the October Revolution) into the political horizon of future emancipatory movements. To establish a strict continuity between communism and Stalinism would erase the ability of ‘the promise attached to the name of October’ to be handed down to future generations. ‘The challenge is considerable’. An activist had to confront this challenge because ‘the intransigent maintenance of this difference [between Stalinism and communism] is not least the duty of memory to the communist victims of Stalinism’.22 A history for activists (hopefully) avoids the twofold binary of the registration of facts and the police-like mania for judging.

20 21 22

Bensaïd 1999a, p. 165. Bensaïd 1999a, p. 166. Bensaïd 1999a, pp. 167–8.

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487

Critiques of Historical Reason

As mentioned above, August Comte claimed that the nineteenth century would be one of history in place of religion. This was so, but history became the modern religion, which ‘oscillates between the simple registration of the victor’s narrative and the police-like mania of judgement’. I return here to the theme of historical objectivity and the critique of historical reason. In Nietzsche’s critique of historical reason, ‘naive historians call the assessment of the opinions and deeds of the past according to the everyday standards of the present moment “objectivity”: it is here they discover the canon of all truth; their task is to adapt the past to contemporary triviality’.23 Objectivity and justice have nothing to do with one another; justice is irreducible to factual truths and values irreducible to facts. Rather than the illusory judgement of the historian, ‘as though our age, being the final age, were empowered to exercise over all the past, that universal judgement which Christian belief never supposed would be pronounced by men but by the “Son of Man”, Nietzsche demanded an engaged history’.24 This is exemplified in his use of Goethe’s saying that ‘In any case, I hate everything that merely instructs me without augmenting or directly invigorating my activity’.25 In a sense, Nietzsche was content for history to judge and condemn, in the context of the given situations. But the imperatives of judging contain profound difficulties in the context of a revolutionary political perspectives in given situations. Bensaïd points out, relying on Merleau-Ponty that: The fragility and grandeur of judgement is precisely held in this temporal operation. It stands at the point of the present, at an equal distance from the evidence of the past that is no longer and the consolations of the future that is not yet, between bourgeois justice which decides in the name of a bygone past and a justice, hastily qualified as revolutionary, which executes by anticipation the decrees of an improbable future. Fully political, this judgement rests on a truth and on a fragilely processual legality, on the becoming-true forever unfinished, on this truth the Revolution tries to achieve truth without the certitude of attaining it.26

23 24 25 26

Nietzsche 1997, p. 90. Nietzsche 1997, p. 101. Nietzsche 1997, p. 59. Bensaïd 1999a, p. 38.

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Overthrowing time in this way, the present benefits from the downgrading of the past, but who is the judge? Merleau-Ponty thought, if it is indeed the case that we have the right to judge history: We have just as much right to judge the past as the present. The past, moreover, comes forward to meet the judgements we pass upon it. It has judged itself; having been lived by men, it has introduced values into history. This judgement and these values are part of it, and we cannot describe it without either confirming or annulling them … It is necessary, therefore, to choose between a history which judges, situates, and organises – at the risk of finding in the past only a reflection of the troubles and problems of the present – and an indifferent, agnostic history which lines up civilisations one after another like unique individuals who cannot be compared.27 If it is not God nor History nor a fetishised Humanity, who is it that judges? Nietzsche’s above passage effectively responded that it was life – a kind of aristocratic vitalist materialism (in the service of new forms of domination). This was unsatisfactory to Bensaïd, who saw the category of life as another tutelary god, where ‘one fetish hunts for another’. Who, again, is the judge? What authorises a judgement? The who of judgement must be answered for dialectical thought, because ‘What remains of the dialectic if one must give up reading history and deciphering in it the becoming-true of society’? Truth and judgement cannot be separated easily, since someone is always doing the judging. For a heretical Marxist, this question is quite loaded. Is it the Proletariat, the Party or History that judges? Stalinism answered in the affirmative for each. But who will judge the true line, the true situation, the true history? It is illusory to believe that a judge can be outside of a situation. When we judge, we are not performing a purely subjective act. We cannot separate our judgement from the multiplicity of perspectives in given historical situations. This is so, and Bensaïd felt the full force of Péguy’s point that ‘I have such a horror of judgement that I would rather condemn a man than judge him’. Could it be that this condemnation without judgement forms a necessary part of action? Is it a ‘justice in situations and action’? If justice is immanent in a situation as it unfolds, then this presents a difficulty, for instance, the Papon trial:

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Merleau-Ponty 1973, p. 20.

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It was perhaps just to condemn and execute Bousquet, Touvier and Papon in 1945, in the justice of civil war. Organised half a century later, following the criteria of the criminal procedure, their trial grapples with the inevitable disproportion of the offence (thousands of disappeared deportees) and the punishment (ten years for Papon).28 Bensaïd was in favour of the condemnation of Papon, but this case was an example of the contradictions of bourgeois legal judgement. As a judge, ‘you must stand higher than he who is to be judged; whereas all you are is subsequent to him’. Such judgements do not participate in the situation; the demand for impartiality is a demand for non-participation. What would be a judgement that did take part in the Papon case? This radical historical decision is ‘partial and absolute’, flowing from the nature of civil war, between the collaborator and the resistant, ‘there is an absolute choice in the relative, sanctioned by deaths. Any impartial arbitrator between these choices is disqualified by this very fact, all impersonal justice illegitimate’.29 The resistant rejected collaboration ‘in the name of the future he was seeking’, while the collaborator, ‘fashioned a destiny out of a provisional situation and extrapolated a momentary present into the future’. Between these positions, an absolute choice of relative considerations was involved. As Merleau-Ponty suggests, much is due to the absolute demands of political choice, where: Everything depends on a fundamental decision not just to understand the world, but to change it, and to join up with those who are changing the world as a spontaneous development in their own lives.30 The profane political individual is an ‘unhappy consciousness’, condemned to engage all of their absolute strength in a struggle always founded on relative certitudes, obliged to take capital (this word in the Latin sense throughout the French Liberation) decisions on the basis of necessarily incomplete information, to make simple choices in order to unlock complex situations. The absolute undecidability is inescapable for political action.31 The professional judges are able to take refuge in factual objectivity as a foundation for their judgements. For political action that seeks to transform

28 29 30 31

Bensaïd 1999a, p. 41. Merleau-Ponty 1969, p. 43. Merleau-Ponty 1969, p. 36. Bensaïd 1999a, p. 47.

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history, in a ‘Here’ and a ‘Now’, ‘the judgement follows neither from simple empirical generalisation or the imperative of the rule, but from the mediation between theory and practice. It consists precisely in “in every case reinventing the rule”’.32 The line between universalism and relativism is tight but one must walk along its exigencies. To demand – as Bensaïd does – an immanent and profane form of historical and political judgement means giving up on the aspiration for definitive justice, ‘the moment where everything stops, where everything is said, where there is no more appeal; where everything will remain what it was at the moment of the verdict; where there will no longer be change or time … Without a conclusion’, or Last Judgement.33 An immanent concrete history has its actors participate in an open history. If ‘the future is a matter only of methodological conjectures and not the object of an absolute knowledge, then possibilities are an irreducible part of the real. Befallen history is cut off from its junctions, bifurcations, forks, before which it was necessary to run the risk of strategic decisions on an uncertain outcome’.34 A profane politics therefore recognises that the Last Judgement is unattainable. This does not rule out the possibility that the regulative idea of a delivered and resurrected humanity can play a role in profane politics if it be a radically immanent judgement: It is not the future revelation, once all has been accomplished, of a subterranean force, which drove us without our knowledge. We have the right to invoke it only insofar as it appears on the horizon of present action and to the extent that it is already sketched there. The revolutionary future can serve to justify present action only if the future, in its general lines and in its manner, is recognisable in such action.35 On this point, for Bensaïd, profane politics enters the realm of tragedy and ties itself to the ancient Greeks. Greek tragedy is tightly linked to the emergence of politics ‘as an experience of the contingency of action’. Political action among the Greeks was the essential factor in historical transformations; history was not the ‘unveiled secret of politics’. Therefore, any operation that would like to (re-)establish (Hannah Arendt) the full responsibility of political judgement ties itself to this tradition. This assertion recognised that:

32 33 34 35

Bensaïd 1999a, p. 44. Ibid. Bensaïd 1999a, p. 45. Merleau-Ponty 1973, p. 77.

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political judgement can no longer rely on historical authority. It can no longer invoke attenuating circumstances or the force of destiny. It can no longer indulge in the mediocre excuses and the denial of responsibilities. It suffices that, faced with the same dilemma, others could have made a different choice, that of opposition rather than the rallying to Stalin, that of the Resistance rather than functional collaboration … in order to prove that something else was possible. That this was not above human capability. We can understand the small renunciations, the small failures and refrain from judging them. In contrast, we cannot forget that they were not irresistible.36 This need to decipher history raises Hegel’s problem, namely that to judge a thing is quite easy, to grasp it with the hand of thought is more difficult, to conjoin judgement and comprehension with a description that is sound is the most difficult thing of all. This challenge is raised for a historically transformative politics. Indeed, it follows from the regulating idea of a humanity delivered from its servitude to an automated capital fetish and modern bourgeois dominations.

4

The Structure of Judging Revolutions

I now turn to Bensaïd’s discussion of political judgement in more depth by focusing on the structure of judging revolutions. The guiding threads throughout this investigation are: in the name of whom and what can revolutions be judged? Bensaïd ruled out that one could judge revolutions in the name of scientific truth or History, because these are the fetishised refuges of subterfuge. What about in the name of the Proletariat? Bensaïd did not rush to say yes. The singular identity of the proletariat becomes problematic as soon as one recognises the multiplicity inhering in the proletariat. How can a faithful guarantee be found between the reported speech and the speech that is assigned to the proletariat? Of the representative to the represented? The problem of representation is raised anew, now from the vantage point of judgement: The enigma of the judge leads straight to that of representation. Without mediation, without the intervention of a third party, there is no judgement, but a simple eye for an eye, vendetta and the tit for tat. The legit-

36

Bensaïd 1999a, pp. 48–9.

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imacy of judgement supposes the admission of a mediator. To accept it, it is to subscribe to the faithful representative postulated by, in the name of …37 Judgement itself is a difficult question because it involves a necessary but contradictory relation between the singular (the case, the matter, the crime, the revolution) to the universal. This brings us to Kant’s third critique of the faculty of judgement; the third Critique’s significance pivots on a new mode of judgement that Kant calls reflective. It is legitimate to invoke Kant at this point if we read him as grappling with some fundamental antinomies of bourgeois societies and history, specifically in the judgement of revolution. For Kant, judgement is the faculty for thinking the particular under the universal; he makes a distinction between a determining judgement and a reflective judgement. This is an essential distinction. In its determining role, judgement subsumes a particular under a concept or universal, which is already given, ‘it is not necessary to think for itself for a law’. But, if it is only the particular that is given, for which the faculty of judgement must find the universal, the faculty of judgement is reflective. This is ‘quite different from the usual process of abstraction that involves stripping particulars of their particularities in order to achieve an empty general truth’. The reflective judgement is ‘compelled to ascend from the particular in nature to the universal’, where one specifies the universal concept in bringing the diverse under it.38 For Bensaïd, engaging with Arendt and Dick Howard, the relation between the reflective judgement and beauty, politics and teleology was worth discussing; it relates to Revolution as such.39 Kant described the principle of taste as a ‘subjective principle of judgement in general’. The judgement of taste is always a singular judgement, but the understanding can, ‘in comparing the object, under the angle of satisfaction, with the judgement of the other, announce a universal judgement’. In common sense, ‘everyone has his own taste’ and ‘there is no disputing about taste’. The former ‘is another way of saying that the determining ground of this judgement 37 38 39

Bensaïd 1999a, p. 209. See Bensaïd 1999a, pp. 210–11. Elaborating upon the political implications of Kant’s third critique of judgement, Hannah Arendt wrote: ‘the topics of the Critique of Judgement – the particular, whether a fact of nature or an event in history; the faculty of judgement as the faculty of man’s mind to deal with it; sociability of men as the condition of the functioning of this faculty, that is, the insight that men are dependent on their fellow men not only because of their having a body and physical needs but precisely for their mental faculties – these topics, all of them are of eminent political significance … Judgement … arises from “a merely contemplative

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is merely subjective … and that the judgement has no right to the necessary agreement with others’. The latter, ‘amounts to saying that, even though the determining ground of a judgement of taste be objective, it is not reducible to definite concepts, so that in respect of the judgement itself no decision can be reached by proofs’. Between these positions, a third was missing, where there can be contention about taste, with the hope of coming to terms. Hence one must be able to reckon on grounds of judgement that possess more than private validity and are thus not merely subjective. And yet the above principle (everyone has his own taste) is directly opposed to this.40 This is a Kantian difficulty because when we say that something is beautiful, we count on universal approval through the disinterested adhesion of others. Here, Bensaïd draws the link with revolution: The enthusiasm of the spectators before the great revolutions or major events manifests ‘a universal interest which however, is not egoistic’ … Although all judgements of taste are singular judgements, they in fact aim for a universal subjective validity. In that they differ from the simply indifferent coexistence of purely subjective opinions: one ‘postulates a universal voice concerning the satisfaction without the mediation of concepts’.41 The appreciative judgement of beauty is not a logical judgement, nor can it be captured in a concept. The beautiful is that which pleases universally and overcomes private egotism:

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pleasure or inactive delight” [untätiges Wohlgefallen] … This “feeling of contemplative pleasure is called taste”, and the Critique of Judgement was originally called Critique of Taste … we shall see that his final position on the French Revolution, an event that played a central role in his old age, when he waited with great impatience every day for the newspapers, was decided by this attitude of the mere spectator, of those “who are not engaged in the game themselves’ but only follow it with ‘wishful, passionate participation”, which certainly did not mean, least of all for Kant, that they now wanted to make a revolution; their sympathy arose from mere “contemplative pleasure and inactive delight” ’. Arendt 1989, p. 15. Kant 2007, pp. 164–6. Bensaïd 1999a, p. 211. Or we see the significance of beauty when Arendt said: ‘The condition sine qua non for the existence of beautiful objects is communicability; the judgement of the spectator creates the space without which no such objects could appear at

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[I]f it merely pleases him, he must not call it beautiful. Many things may for him possess charm and agreeableness – no one cares about that; but when he puts a thing on a pedestal and calls it beautiful, he demands the same delight from others. He judges not merely for himself, but for all men, and then speaks of beauty as if it were a property of things. Thus, he says the thing is beautiful; and it is not as if he counted on others agreeing in his judgement.42 A contradiction pervades this process when it involves the judgement of one and many individuals. The judgement of the other (from the many) can contradict our own (of the one), we may doubt our judgement, but we do not have to cede to the judgement of others: no convincing empirical argument permits us to decide and impose a judgement of taste on someone. The tension between the singularity and the universality of the judgement seems to be immobilised in an insurmountable contradiction. This is a vicious circle – of the one and many – in which it seems impossible to make a judgement of taste. After all, Kant demands that a subjective principle determine what pleases or displeases, ‘by means of feeling and not through concepts’, but which also has universal validity. To make his way through this contradiction, Kant argued that the judgement of taste depends on our presupposing the existence of a rational common sense. Without a rational common sense, human experience would be impossible. Without rational common sense, human communication would break down. One would not be able to pass on knowledge of any kind without rational common sense. The same goes for taste. Without rational common sense, it seems difficult to envisage a judgement of taste. Without rational common sense, our pretention to a judgement of taste would be without an object, a conglomerate that is merely a subjective play of powers of representation, just as scepticism would have it. It would, ‘annihilate itself in a brute, autarchic subjectivity, without overture to the other’.43 Why does this matter for politics and revolution? Bensaïd has it:

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all. The public realm is constituted by the critics and the spectators, not by the actors or the makers. And this critic and spectator sit in every actor and fabricator; without this critical, judging faculty the doer or maker would be so isolated from the spectator that he would not even be perceived … Spectators exist only in the plural. The spectator is not involved in the act, but he is always involved with fellow spectators … the faculty they have in common is the faculty of judgement’. Arendt 1989, pp. 262–3. Quoted from McCloskey 1987, p. 52. Bensaïd 1999a, p. 213.

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This common sense goes hand in hand with the idea of ‘public sense’, which occupied a central place in Kant’s political thought, in the ‘public exercise of reason’ characteristic of the Enlightenment, in the ‘the spectator’s way of thinking publicly’ before revolutions, or in the judgement as a singular act of public justice. ‘To make public use of reason in all domains’ is necessary for critical thought and the ‘mode of expanded thought’ open to communicability. Kant himself established on this subject an unexpected relation between art and politics: both are ‘phenomena of the public world’.44 Kant’s insight into the judgement of taste matters because judgement and opinion go hand in hand. If judgement is no longer purely subjective, the faculty of judgement ‘can save opinion’ from being philosophically discredited. Relying on Arendt, Bensaïd pointed out that ‘all truth is binding and coercive, but if a political reason exists, it is characterised by the capacity to judge and form opinions’. Kant therefore grasped ‘something non-subjective and non-arbitrary in what appeared as the most private and the most subjective sense – taste, because one always issues judgements as a member of an already constituted community’.45 Judgement is a mode of thinking that anticipates others. Its specificity is thus embedded in a system of communicability, ‘the judgement is not the taking possession of a truth, but the expression of a social relation’.46 Bensaïd wondered what relations the reflective judgements of Kant could be established between the legal, historical and political judgements? In the three forms of judgement only the particular is given: the crime and the culprit, the event that may not have been, and the conjuncture or the ‘concrete situation’ in which the decision to act reveals or suppresses possibilities. The faculty of judgement must find for it a universal referent or to take Kant’s formula, bring this diversity under a universal concept.47 Thinking politics in light of the reflective judgement, it is a judgement that is founded on no predetermined concept, ‘a subjective experience “that nevertheless claims a supposed universal validity”’. This judgement is only workable if there exists plurality and common sense because one always begins with a given particular. The reflective judgement claims ‘a truth that is not simply sub44 45 46 47

Ibid. Bensaïd 1999a, p. 214. Bensaïd 1999a, p. 215. Ibid.

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jective, intuitive or empirical: “it appeals to an Other that it wants to convince”, and “to appeal to an Other is to recognise its autonomy, but it is also to express a sense of its own responsibility in the face of it” ’.48 This need demonstrates the difference between a determining and reflective judgement. The determining judgment gives a particular a universally valid attribute under which it is subsumed. On the contrary, the reflective judgment starts from a particular ‘in order to integrate it into an immanent universal law, which is never presupposed, which is constructed through communication, in the reciprocity of the overture to the other’.49 This is something raised for the political and historical judgement that is not raised by the legal judgement. In the legal judgement, the case is singular where acts and persons are judged. The legitimacy of the legal judgement is established ‘to the extent that common sense turns, in some way, the reflective judgement into a determining judgement’. In the name of the law, the singular case is always treated as a particular case of the general norm that is (pre-)established by custom or through the shared recognition of values and the principles of right. The historical or political judgement does not share this indulgence: The problem of historical and political judgement is difficult in a different way. It is impossible to invoke in their subject a law of history under which actions and events are subsumed, a law recognised and shared in the name of which judgement would be exercised. Because the challenge of history and politics is precisely to determine the law. While the court will readily recall that ‘none will be able to ignore the law’, no analogical recall is conceivable concerning history. The historical-political judgement can therefore be considered as a radically reflective judgement, impossible to subtract from the immanence of values, impossible to rescue from the knot of the genesis and the norm. As a difference with the judgement of taste as Kant defined it, it is no longer conceivable to invoke here ‘a universal voice’, no longer concerning satisfaction without the mediation of concepts, but justice without the mediation of concepts. As if the phantom of a ventriloquist humanity shows itself immediately, directly, by this voice. As if humanity and universality were already given – the historical judgement has to deal precisely with human becoming and the universal becoming of humanity and with the historical process of humanisation and universalisation.50 48 49 50

Bensaïd 1999a, p. 216. Ibid. Bensaïd 1999a, p. 217.

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As has been said, political judgement is exercised in the uncertainty of struggle and conflict. Decisively, neither political judgement nor historical judgements take place in the register of being; they instead are made in the register of becoming. This is a difference with the legal judgement, which forms part of being, not becoming. Conjointly, aesthetic judgement without a concept has a limited relationship to the political and historical judgement. This led Bensaïd to seek a rapprochement between the historical judgement and Kant’s faculty of teleological judgement; the rapprochement with the teleological judgement seemed productive. For Kant, a teleological judgement compares the concept of a product of nature as it is and ought to be. It is the faculty of reflective judgement in general. There are two issues of causality at stake beyond the faculty of judging: natural causality and causality through freedom. Here we enter the Kantian dualism between nature and freedom. The production of all material things and their forms must be considered as possible according to simple mechanical laws; however, certain productions of material nature cannot be considered possible according to simple mechanical laws. Another notion of causality is required, that of final causes. Linear and abstract causality are inadequate for the reflective judgement: the knowledge of final causes demands a causality different from mechanism, namely knowledge of intelligent cause acting according to ends. It indicates the limits of a purely mechanical rationality and the need for a dialectical rationality. Kant argued that the faculty of cognition has two realms, concepts of nature and the concept of freedom, according to which philosophy is divided into the theoretical and practical. The theoretical function of philosophy prescribes laws by means of concepts of nature while the practical function prescribes laws by means of the concept of freedom. The freedom of action and the contingency of the event in human history demonstrate the limits of a purely mechanical causality. This involved a ‘good teleology’, and Bensaïd asked, ‘must we then, in order to save the rationality of universal history, invoke a teleological causality, a rationalisation oriented by ends? And ends of what register, immanent or transcendent’? The last question is key.51 Bensaïd was attracted to the notion of teleology as a ‘finality without end’, because it provided for a historical judgement as indexed to an immanent teleology of historical development; in other words, a historical judgment based on the rational anticipation of a process of humanisation and universalisation. Many shrink away when they hear the word teleology, but the notion of a finality without an end allows one to ‘con-

51

Bensaïd 1999a, p. 219.

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ceive of a regulative horizon of historical judgement, likewise freedom serves us as a “universal regulative principle”’.52 This argument recognises that the only species in the world for which causality is teleological (orientated to complex ends) is the human species. It is the final goal of nature, because human culture makes no sense without nature. But human culture is not reduced to nature.53 There were two different and opposed kinds of teleology – one that assigns a providential destiny and end to the history of the world, and one that is inspired by a German way of doing science. The German way of doing science can be conceived of as goal-directed (purposive) action inscribed in the immanence of real processes. Human liberation is the goal. Through this one can posit a secular teleology. This does not equate to a bad or mechanical teleological progression to this finality. Confined to its own alienated mechanisms, the capitalist system is a system whose component parts appear as moments of a totality whose strictly immanent dynamic does not allow for the survival of any exteriority. This dynamic certainly does not lead to freedom of its own accord. However, resistance and revolution against this reality can be judged from the vantage point of the oppressed class’s struggle for liberation and the actual universalisation of the world and history. Here, one can judge human affairs and events from what is – modern bourgeois societies in which the capitalist mode of production dominates with a complexity of systematic oppressions – with what ought to be – real and effective human liberation. It is hard to free historical judgement from the principle of teleology. To orient oneself in the play of historical possibilities that unfold in a given historical situation, recourse to the Kantian reflective judgement in its teleological variant seems necessary. We could also qualify such a judgement a strategic judgement or ‘judgement of possibility’, bearing on that which could happen if certain conditions are changed. This idea has no need of an unintentional religious finality. Concrete human beings – their singularities being an ensemble of social relations – institute their own aims and ends. It is always possible to maintain liberation as a goal, as a regulative horizon for our projects. Through this process, we are able to 52 53

Ibid. Kant explains what this finality without an end means for him: ‘In addition to this there is our admiration of nature which in her beautiful products displays herself as art, not as mere matter of chance, but, as it were, designedly, according to a law-directed arrangement, and as purposiveness [finality – D.R.] apart from any purpose [end – D.R.]. As we never meet with such an end outside ourselves, we naturally look for it in ourselves, and, in fact, in that which constitutes the ultimate end of our existence – namely in our moral vocation [the moral side of our being – D.R.]’. Kant 2007, p. 131.

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free judgement from its disrepute. Teleology does not belong to any doctrine, neither the science of nature, nor theology, but only to ‘the critique of a particular faculty of knowledge, namely the faculty of judging’. Historical judgement comes under this teleology. It is not a normative judgement or a verdict but rather, ‘a judgement geared to the “finality without end” of historical development and on the rational anticipation of the process of humanisation and universalisation. This is what we will call a strategic judgement’.54 Irreducibly, it is a strategic judgement, because the moment one judges res gestae from the vantage point of human liberation, one must account for why this liberation was actualised or not actualised through the course of historical conflicts and complexities. The notion of finality without an end places responsibilities on us in our present, in the name of a posterity that it contributes to determine, hopefully opening spaces of liberation, in struggling with the actuality of indeterminate situations, ‘the strategic judgement is tragically left to itself’. These responsibilities produce a will, in which, historical and political judgement come together. Their general problem is to think the particular, because ‘to think, means to generalise’. Judgement is the faculty that combines the particular and the general. To do this is daring and bold because: All judgement turns to this part of the enigma. After the ravages of totalitarianism, the reticence or the difficulty of judging is embedded in a much larger crisis of comprehension and meaning. More exactly, ‘the crisis of comprehension is identical to the crisis of judgement’. Both are inextricably linked. To comprehend, to restore meaning, we must begin by daring to judge; by daring to run the risk of judgement, of its fallibility and its injustice.55 This demand to judge is audacious. The demand implies that politics is the public exercise of this judgement. But it comes up against an objection from Badiou, who holds that there is a confusion between politics and opinion in the act of judgment. His position ‘puts truth to the test of opinion, constantly tempts the philosopher to declare the existence of a single site of Truth’. It is not a minor quarrel but involves, deciding whether judgement and politics retreat back ‘to the Sophist and the market of the verb, outside of any sight of truth’.56

54 55 56

Bensaïd 1999a, p. 221. Bensaïd 1999a, p. 226. Bensaïd 1999a, p. 227.

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Bensaïd is trying to situate us within the tension between the Sophist and philosopher, rather than one-sidedly stick to each of them. That is why Arendt is Bensaïd’s ally. For Arendt, the essence of political action that can give rise to a new beginning does not submit to the historical chain; it is not dominated by historical necessity. To find this primacy of politics means to begin by recovering the meaning of action, ‘it is not knowledge or truth that are at stake, but rather judgement and decision’. Through action, new beginnings are born. This imperative seems to be in contradiction with the spectator’s faculty of judgement. Arendt tends to dissociate judgement and decision, relying on Kant, ‘in order to show how “an event of our age proves the moral tendency of humanity”, Kant said, we must grasp “the enthusiasm” created among the public by the French Revolution’.57 The function of the spectator is to remain disinterested although exalted by the event, where the ‘public that watched from the outside as a spectator without the least intention of becoming involved in it effectively’. This is a problem because the actor decides but ‘is necessarily blind’, therefore ‘only the spectator can judge, because judgement has for its very first condition disinterested satisfaction that specifies impartiality’.58 Badiou did not share this position: For Alain Badiou, this compromise is untenable. Like Kant, Arendt would have liked the consequences of the event without the event itself, the consequent without the antecedent, the Republic without the Revolution. Like a public spectacle, the Revolution is admirable. But the actors are repulsive. In the ‘Conflict of the Faculties’ this contradiction is flagrant. Kant hoped for the Republican regime, but he refused any recourse to revolutionary means to establish it. Elsewhere, he unequivocally condemns the rebellions and the popular uprisings and waited on the diffusion of the Enlightenment and progress of education for the self-reform of the state. It is better to patiently convince the monarchy to treat the people according to ‘principles in accordance with the spirit of the law’ than to give free rein to the popular passions.59 We are faced with the tension between the spectator’s judgement and the revolutionary’s principle of action, and it seems impossible to reconcile the two. Badiou’s response is to say that only the actors and not the spectators have

57 58 59

Bensaïd 1999a, p. 228. Ibid. Bensaïd 1999a, p. 229.

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access to truth. It is with Saint-Just and Robespierre that you will see truth, not Kant or François Furet, Badiou would claim, because the truth is not to be found in opinion or judgement, but in action and the event. Is there an absolute line that divides the partisan acting within the event from the spectator outside the event? If there is, it means that there can be either no politics outside the event, because it is reduced to the play of opinion or there can be only blindness within the event, because all actors are blind. Therefore, the meaning of the event rests within the hands of the spectators. Somehow, the ambiguity of both positions had to be held onto in their tension, rather than being absolutised. Bensaïd explains: We can be in agreement with Hannah Arendt that the actor cannot produce the meaning of the event on their own, but not that it will be as blind as she claims of its own action. It also has participated in judgement. The whole question is precisely to determine how the judgement, far from being one-way, is played out within the reciprocity between the actor and the spectator. The actor acts for a real and imaginary public, present and future. The spectator, in turn, unceasingly interprets the actor, in replaying the dilemmas and the heartbreaks of it. They need each other. Without which, the actor gesticulates in vain before a deserted audience and the spectator remains speechless before a desperately empty scene.60 For Bensaïd, a concrete form of politics must be situated in the tension between the actor and the spectator. The strategic judgement of concrete politics is partisan, immanent to the historical situation; therefore, it cannot be absolutely reduced to opinion or truth.

5

The Enigmas of Historical Judgement

Bensaïd drew out the enigmas of historical judgement, recognising that when one wants to understand a historical event – with all of its complexities – one usually makes the effort to establish the responsibility of the actors within it. In the legal judgement, it stumbles on the idea of causality. The modern idea of responsibility ‘is often presented as the abstraction of a quite particular form

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Bensaïd 1999a, p. 230.

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of causality: mechanical causality whose quasi-exclusive domination corresponds to the advent of classical physics’. This relationship between cause and effect, where the results follow from what precedes, implies a homogenous temporal relation, ‘without rupture of rhythm, between the time of cause and that of effect’. Translated into judicial terms, ‘it founds the linear “responsibility” of the cause towards the effect: the culpable is the cause, the victim the effect’.61 The procedure also excludes action at a distance, eliminating the causes that are too far away by cutting off the homogenous temporal sequence. Others saw the operation, like Weber – who rejected the idea that causal analysis can ever produce a judgement of value. Moreover, a value judgement cannot produce a causal explanation. History and ethics must respect the limits between law and history. As I noted above, by distinguishing causality through nature and causality though freedom, Kant underscored the limits of mechanical causality and pointed to the need for another rationality. The demand for another rationality is striking once we enter the realm of historical phenomena because history is made of events determined by conditions, circumstances and the heritage of the past, but the specificity of the event remains that it might not have taken place at all. History involves an element of human liberation that no mechanical causality can adequately account for. It ‘is one possible among others, become effective’. Bensaïd’s discussion of Max Weber elaborated on this point. For Weber, how is order brought to this ‘chaos of existential judgements’? It is practically impossible to exhaustively describe every single aspect of a given phenomenon: Order is brought into this chaos only on the condition that in every case only a part of concrete reality is interesting and significant to us, because only it is related to the cultural values with which we approach reality. Only certain sides of the infinitely complex concrete phenomenon, namely those to which we attribute a general cultural significance – are therefore worthwhile knowing. They alone are objects of causal explanation … We select only those causes to which are to be imputed in the individual case, the ‘essential’ feature of an event. Where the individuality of a phenomenon is concerned, the question of causality is not a question of laws but of concrete causal relationships; it is not a question of the subsumption of the event under some general rubric as a

61

Bensaïd 1999a, p. 236.

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representative case but of its imputation as a consequence of some constellation. It is, in brief, a question of imputation.62 Weber’s point makes us ask why certain facts are of interest to our perspectives; and Bensaïd’s response is simple, related to his attitude to teleology: certain facts interest an author because of their strategic and political value. To explain a historical event strategically, one does so with a problematic of imputation. Whether implicitly or explicitly, this concept is used when historical events are discussed. Lukács was aware of the import of the concept of imputation, noting that it helped single out the objectively decisive, causal context from any confusing superficial connections and arbitrary, subjective conditions. Imputation in political-historical writing implies the use of the concept objective possibility, a concept that Bensaïd thought was indeed necessary. With the category of objective possibility, ‘the adequacy of our imagination, oriented and disciplined by reality, is judged … [but] the recognition of the significance of this category is not equivalent to the admission that the door is wide open to subjective arbitrariness in “historiography”’. Its use in historical reconstruction is essential because Reflective knowledge, even of one’s own experience, is nowhere and never a literally ‘repeated experience’ or a simple ‘photograph’ of what was experienced; the ‘experience’, when it is made into an ‘object’, acquires perspectives and interrelationships which were not ‘known’ in the experience itself.63 Among the infinite elements of a complex historical situation, one chooses the determinants through historical interest. It would be meaningless and impossible to reproduce every concrete element of an event. One instead handles an adequate causality; while being unpredictable, it remains intelligible according to the immanent logic of the situation. A specific question that jurisprudence raises can aid us in our political judgements: Jurisprudence, and particularly criminal law, however, leaves the area of problems shared with history for a problem which is specific to it, in consequence of the emergence of the further problem: if and when the objective purely causal imputation of an effect to the action of an indi-

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Weber 1949, pp. 78–9. Weber 1949, p. 178.

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vidual also suffices to define the actions as one involving his own subjective ‘guilt’. For this question is no longer a purely causal one, soluble by the simple establishing of facts which are ‘objectively’ discoverable.64 There is again a return to politics, because the guilt of an individual cannot be answered simply through history or law. Rather, when we respect objective possibility within reality, we do not establish objectively discoverable facts that are purely causal – we also employ, ‘a judgement of value, which is a matter of politics’.65 This inevitably leads us to the profane realm of strategic judgement that operates within the radical immanence of values. If history is intelligible according to the immanent logic of its situations, one must make value judgements to comprehend it. To write history one requires judgement, in the sense where it is also to resolve a problematic situation by means of inquiry and reconstruction. A radically immanent and reflective historical judgement does not re-establish a historical transcendence but rather recognises that all historical reconstruction is by necessity selective, which itself cannot escape the unfolding of immanent history, allowing one to oppose positivist historicism with a strategic representation of history. What has effectively happened is never the only possible past, before the evental bifurcations, decisions and responsibilities meddle that diverge from other lateral possibilities. Strategically speaking, the guiding thread throughout the life work of Bensaïd is the Latin phrase victrix causa diis placuit sed victa Catoni, translated as ‘the victorious cause pleased the gods, but Catoni preferred the cause of the vanquished’. Arendt appropriated it and, for Bensaïd, it echoed Benjamin’s idea that one’s duty to the defeated matters much more than the comfort of future generations. It is a melancholic, uncertain, tragic and perilous judgement. Our judgements and evaluations of these situations restore a certain meaning to the world because when victors take centre stage, their monumental victory is not the Last Judgement nor does it necessarily have the value of truth. The Latin phrase demands a navigation between the active political consequences of a defeat and the narcissistic aesthetic it can produce. The path of immanent strategic judgement is narrow and difficult because a tension infiltrates judgement and truth, with judgment sliding into historical relativism and truth

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Weber 1949, p. 168. Bensaïd 1999a, p. 245. John Dewey also interested Bensaïd in this discussion, ‘In his logic of interrogation, John Dewey distinguished between confused situations, whose outcome is unforeseeable; obscure situations, whose consequences are uncontrollable; and conflictual situations, whose opposed solutions are equally possible’. Bensaïd 1999a, p. 246.

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establishing the strict universalism without a mediated response. Bensaïd describes the two contradictory elements: The progressive reduction of truth to a linguistic form of judgement results in a disastrous cultural and historical relativism … With the obliteration of truth in language games, the only really existing universalisation reduces itself to the poverty of the commodity and monetary abstraction: on the one hand, the world considered as a global market; on the other, the fragmentation of closed identities, abandoned to communitarian relativism. Intransigent partisan of philosophy in its face-off with the Sophist, Alain Badiou resolutely takes the opposite view: politics is the matter of truth. Truth against judgement, we are in the heart of the matter.66 Badiou makes a new Platonic gesture (more about this in the section dedicated to Bensaïd’s reading of Badiou) confronting the deconstruction of truth at the hands of post-modernism and the inconsistency of opinions. Truth and opinion cannot be reconciled. He argued that there are political judgements as judgements of truth and not as simple opinions. Political truth is universal, a product of evental politics and it is only retroactively decipherable under the form of a knowledge. The emergence of truth ‘engages unconditionally: we do not owe the truth to anybody; one is engaged by the truth’.67 Badiou subdues the Sophist rather than situating himself in the dialectic between the Sophist and the philosopher, Bensaïd claimed: Postulating that ‘all truth emerges in the singular’, but that its ‘singularity is immediately universalisable’, otherwise said that ‘every victory won, local as it is, is universal’, Badiou suppresses the tension between the particular and the universal, which is the object of the reflective judgement. The whole difficulty of judgement in effect disappears in the elevation without mediation of the evental singularity in its universal diffusion. This eruption is akin to a revelation or a miracle. The invocation of Saint Paul is then not so surprising. He does not believe that truth is historical, attested to or of memory; it helps us to ‘seize the bond between evental grace and the universality of truth’. Badiou insists that the truth is ‘grace’ and not ‘history’.68 66 67 68

Bensaïd 1999a, p. 251. Ibid. Bensaïd 1999a, pp. 251–2.

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The event is a pure beginning without mediation. It is the road to Damascus in the story of Saint Paul. Bensaïd ends up labelling Badiou with dogmatism because he runs politics into a practical impasse. The Christ of Pascal was a mediating figure, but, for Paul, in contrast, [L]ike for those who think that a revolution is a self-sufficient sequence of political truth, the coming of Christ interrupts the anterior regime of discourse … the fury to preserve its unique lustre from the daily vicissitudes of judgement founds a theology rather than a politics. And, in theology, dogma is never too far away.69 To avoid theology, Badiou employs the imperative of fidelity to account for his profane and secular conviction. The truth is processual coming ‘from an announcement, a revealed secret and not from the controversy of discussion and public debate. It is the same object of the apostle’s mission, of which the discourse is “pure fidelity to the possibility opened by the event”’.70 Thus the truth is never disclosed in opinion. This philosophical-political decision was useful to withstand the pressures of liberal consensus during the 1980s that buried the possibilities that May ’68 opened up, but is it capable of founding a politics of the oppressed? Fidelity, for Badiou, means to continue; Paul’s saying that, ‘we also rejoice in our afflictions, for we know that affliction perfects patience in us. And patience, experience; and experience, hope: and hope putteth not to shame’, captures Badiou’s message. There is much merit in this position, but, according to Bensaïd, it is limited. This form of politics ‘of the pure will and the unconditional fidelity to the event shuts itself within the profession of subjective faith that 69 70

Bensaïd 1999a, p. 252. Bensaïd 1999a, p. 253. Françoise Proust criticised Alain Badiou for his notion of fidelity, intersecting with Bensaïd’s critique of Badiou’s formalism. Proust said, ‘For my part, I do not use this notion of fidelity. Why? For many reasons. Because fidelity goes hand in hand with betrayal. This is enough to raise my distrust of this concept. In fact, Badiou speaks of fidelity to a specific name. But the name is carefully chosen, specifically. It makes the object of a declaration (1830, 1848, the Commune, October …) It is a choice. What follows is fidelity to this choice – to 1917 or to another sequence – because other names will arise. But this fidelity risks shielding the emergence of other specific names. The flip side of fidelity is the idea of betrayal. Betrayal as a theme is quite present in Badiou, notably in his Ethics. It is scary to imagine that someone who has shared your fidelity and moved away from it will be considered a traitor. What consequences do we take from this in amorous fidelity? In politics, we immediately see the sequence: betrayal-persecution-execution. Fidelity is more complex. Sometimes, one is faithful in an appearance of infidelity and visa-versa’. Proust and Bensaïd 1999.

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is cutaway’ from historical conditions. In subtracting itself from the opinionated discourse of being – all judgements within the media, parliament and the unions – its subtraction remains within the closed circle of itself. There is a short road from the closed circle of this will to a sect. Even though Badiou has the merit of refusing the marketisation of politics, art, love and science, ultimately, To refuse to plant ourselves in the contradiction, of working in the creases and downturns, of lodging a concrete practical politics in the tension between truth and opinion, between will and judgement, between revolutionary subjectivity and the constraint of conditions, between the formative momentum and the inertia of the establishment, between the philosopher and the Sophist, between the representative and the represented, to claim to found a politics on the universalisable event, without mediations or representations, one oscillates between a pure voluntarism (which is the proper form of ultra-leftism) and (more likely, so strong is the temptation to renounce) a philosophical or aesthetic posture which is a subtle evasion of politics.71 Bensaïd ultimately rejects the logical (political) outcome of the Platonic gesture. To conclude about judgement. For Spinoza, no matter how hard a tyrant tries to mould its subjects, it cannot force them to give up their faculty of judgement entirely: ‘no one is able to transfer to another his natural right or faculty to reason freely and to form his own judgement on any matters whatsoever, nor can he be compelled to do so’.72 Yet, at the same time, it is not easy for fragile human beings to ‘hold good on immanence’, avoiding the invocation of ‘the joker of transcendences’ – fetishised History. For Bensaïd, however difficult, ‘it is necessary to hold fast, despite all, on the imperative of immanence. Do not waver from its principle’. Immanence is necessary because history does nothing. It is the outcome of uncertain battles. Nevertheless, we must move with the radical immanence of ‘action that invents itself’ without the theological solace of an origin or end. Do not let go of the immanence of a judgement that is ‘incessantly condemned to produce its own criteria’. To judge is a difficult art and requires audacity, responsibility. It is not a professional competence, but rather,

71 72

Bensaïd 1999a, p. 255. Spinoza 1989, p. 291.

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a profane art, in an unstable equilibrium between the renewed fundamentalist temptations of a sacred History and the resigned dropouts of a post-modern history in fragments, between the illusory refuge of a grand History and the satisfied game of telling little stories.73 Judgement judges throughout the shared publicity of controversy in a ‘process without a subject nor end’. Politics always mediates it. But we always return to the same questions: Who is the judge? Who is the culprit? Above all, who is innocent?

73

Bensaïd 1999a, p. 261.

chapter 9

Smile of the Frightful Hobgoblin In the 1990s, Furet was asked what he thought the relevance of Marx was. He responded frankly: ‘almost nil’.1 The liberal ideologues often claim to close the file on communism: the issue was settled. But how could a spectre that once haunted a continental spring be finished with once and for all? The party of capital feared the class struggles that split a nation in two, and made every effort to repress, transfer and deflect their fear. It is said that, as the fighting was going on near Tocqueville’s apartment throughout 1848, a servant who had just returned from the Faubourg Saint-Antoine smiled. Could one agree with Negri that the true spectre of communism is in that smile? Displayed in the smile, communism is no doctrine. In the first instance, it is this real movement, an accumulation of constantly renewed experience and an upsurge of hope that puts suppression of the existing order onto the agenda. When Bensaïd wrote Le sourire du Spectre, Résistances and Les Irréductibles the spectre that haunted Tocqueville was said to have disappeared forever under the ruins of Stalinism. Was it possible that it had only been eclipsed? If there did indeed exist a new spirit of capitalism, this must mean that there is also a new spirit of communism, ‘following it like its shadow’. Over a hundred years had passed since Tocqueville’s frightening encounter with the spectre. And spectres do not age. They do experience metamorphoses, for, as long as capital grows throughout its rotations and fattens up on surplus-value, the thread of the class struggle remains to grasp the conflicts of the globe: [T]o the extent that capital infiltrates all the pores of society, this struggle generalises itself. The new spirit of the communist is therefore also an ecologist and feminist spirit: woman is the future of the spectre – and reciprocally. And it is, more than ever, an internationalist spirit that is no longer content to haunt Europe but also globalises itself, its way of haunting the globe.2 At the turn of the century, the spectre of revolution was not present as it had been in 1848. But history was far from over. After Seattle, Genoa and Porto

1 Quoted from Bensaïd 2000, p. 17. 2 Bensaïd 2000, Les fantômes se rebiffent interview by Jean-Paul Monferran.

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Alegre, history was getting its colours back. Ghosts were stirring. Revenants were arriving to disturb the peace of the established mores. In this context, writing on Marx ‘would have remained academic if it had not entered into resonance with the renewed practices: it was the red colour of December 1995, the beautiful conflagration of winter resistance, and the growth of the Left of left’.3 The spirit of Seattle raised the idea that ‘the world is not for sale’ – including schooling and healthcare and other institutions of public space and societal reproduction; only a decade earlier, such a movement was hardly imaginable. Ghosts stirred against the backdrop of the historic defeats of the twentieth century’s greatest hopes. At the threshold of the twenty-first century, this translated into a narrowing of horizons and the retraction of historical temporality around an impoverished present. Historicise everything turned into Praise the Now! In this context, strategic projects that could put the left on the road to a better world needed reconstructing because historical perspective and strategic reason are tightly woven, as Guy Debord well understood.

1

Le sourire du Spectre, Les Irréductibles and Résistances

In this chapter, I explore the three works mentioned above. Le sourire du Spectre was a popular work resulting from Bensaïd’s long detour through Marx and back to the present. In an interview, he said: I have worked firstly on key questions relating to the relevance of the critique of capitalism, the problems of work and its metamorphoses, those of ecology as the second great symptom of what I call ‘the evil-measure’ of the world, otherwise said, the crisis of a society ruled by the law of value, and, finally, on the questions of the egalitarian transformation of the relation between the sexes.4 Les Irréductibles was a project born in a ‘reflection collective’ in the spring of 2000. The journal Contretemps was also born of this experience. It should therefore be seen in two ways, namely as a text that makes the effort to re-actualise strategic debates, while the ‘ghosts were stirring’, and an intervention into the cross-proliferation of debates among the radical left opened by the launch of Contretemps. A few years after its launch, Bensaïd explained the rationale for Contretemps: 3 Bensaïd 2000, p. 11. 4 Bensaïd 2000, Les fantômes se rebiffent interview by Jean-Paul Monferran.

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Noting that, in what still remains of the radical left, the tendency to remain content with reheating the leftovers of the sharp debates of the 1970s, noting that strategic thought on the left reached degree zero, noting finally the temptation of critical research to hold itself at a distance from political engagement and the fear of seeing ourselves reduced to following the agenda dictated by media fashion, we have undertaken to start an independent programme of work of which Contretemps will be the vector. It was a matter of subjecting theoretical and practical questions that have haunted the politics of emancipation since the great revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to contemporary tests and the new contributions of critical thought. The opening article of the first edition explained the project: ‘We claim that one must live in their time. We must no less know how to think in contretemps, in an untimely manner or in untimely mediation, against the grain as Walter Benjamin would have said’. Without hiding the political affiliations (to the Ligue communiste) of most of its initiators, we proposed to enlarge the core of a pluralist collective of social and intellectual radicalism to turn it into a meeting point.5 The project emerged during the plural left government’s rule. According to Bensaïd, the plural left had resigned itself to realpolitik and did not reach for the impossible. However, as Weber pointed out: ‘it is perfectly exact to say, and all of historical experience confirms it – man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible’. Contretemps aimed to reach the possible through reaching out for the impossible – the essence of the left of the possible. Most of the founding figures of the project were militants from the Ligue coming from the Marxist tradition, but it intersected with a new generation with a more diverse range of theoretical reference, ‘not only Marx, but equally the libertarian tradition, political ecology, feminism, sociological work and philosophical critiques’. It had four elements: – A meeting point of critical thought from different cultures and traditions; – A meeting point for militant milieus and university research; – A confluence of generations formed in different political and intellectual contexts; – An encounter with foreign work that is unknown or misunderstood in France.6

5 Bensaïd 2008d, pp. 6–8. 6 Ibid.

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The last of the three works to be discussed in this chapter is Bensaïd’s Résistances, Essai de taupologie générale a work that synthesises his philosophicalpolitical inquiry into history and the event. In this work, Bensaïd carved out an independent position within the new radicalism that emerged as an antidote to traditional political philosophy. What was the content of this new radicalism? The radicalism was not exactly new. The departures for thought unreconciled with the hegemonic moralism of social-liberal political philosophy in the 1990s had a long history: The ideas of Bourdieu, Badiou, Rancière, Balibar, each after the 1960s, come from afar. They have been elaborated in the 1970s and the 80s (the Theory of the Subject of Badiou dates from 1983, Can Politics be Thought? from 1985, Being and Event from 1988; the texts of Rancière assembled for On the Shores of Politics from 1986–90; the work of Françoise Proust … matured in the 1980s; the founding works of Bourdieu are much older; as for critical Marxism, it has a long history). Just like the class struggle, ‘radicalism’ has never disappeared, it only became invisible and inaudible, an effect of the conjuncture, under the impact of the liberal counter-reform. What is new, is that its echo has been recovered, in relation to the political and social changes that have occurred in France in the middle of the 1990s … Without becoming crimson, the spirit of the age has regained its colour since the red glow of December 1995.7 To reiterate content from the previous chapter, thought from another angle, a triple change took place in the French situation throughout the 1990s. First, the social question returned with the 1995 strikes in defence of the public services. This (re)turn was announced by the first national march of the unemployed in 1994, the renewal of the women’s movement and was confirmed by the struggle of the sans-papiers in 1997. Second, there was an intellectual turn that was symbolised by the return and the resurrection of Marx, announced in 1993 by Derrida’s book, Spectres of Marx, that was echoed in 1998 by the international meeting on the 150th anniversary of the Communist Manifesto organised by Espaces Marx with the support of numerous journals. Third, the first appearance of a political turn illustrated by the electoral debacle of the right in the 1997 elections and the significant scores of the radical left in the presidential

7 Bensaïd 2000, paper given at a conference held at Oxford, Y a-t-il une nouvelle radicalité en philosophie politique?

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elections of 1995, the regional elections in 1998 and the European elections in 1999 (an average of 5–6% with scores of 15% in some places and working-class neighbourhoods). According to Bensaïd, radicalism became fashionable, though the term does not determine a precise content, but instead evokes a tone and attitude of refusal. Radicalism therefore is always relative to a situation. This means that what is radical today can turn into its compromising opposite tomorrow, thus ‘radicalism is not the same under Juppé or under Jospin’. The key point for Bensaïd was that radicalism ‘evokes a politics of resistance and the conjuncture rather than a project over the long term’.8 Paradoxically, most of the authors labelled under the title of radical political philosophy actually rejected traditional political philosophy. Political philosophy was insipidly bourgeoisacademic; it was associated with the reactionary liberal counter-reforms of the previous two decades. Politics, therefore, could only conceive itself as a radical rupture with traditional political philosophy, as Bensaïd summarised, ‘[E]nemies of political philosophy, we philosophers’, Jacques Rancière proclaimed proudly. Finishing with political philosophy is for him as it is for Badiou a fundamental requirement of contemporary thought, because this consensual philosophy … claims to think empirically without having to engage … without having to ‘be a militant of any real process’, as Badiou said.9 Though these authors produced unique contributions, they all went against the grain of neoliberal restoration and maintained a logic of conflict: [A] categorical imperative of resistance (developed notably in the work of Françoise Proust, unfortunately deceased in December 1998 due to cancer); a politics of the event (in Badiou), of the spectral apparition (in Derrida, who occupies a singular place in this landscape) of the messianic upsurge (in Françoise Proust and in a certain sense, myself).10 Bensaïd characterised these works as ‘philosophies of resistance’ despite the differences among their authors. They were cut for the most part by the defeats

8 9 10

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

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and retreats of the 1980s (‘a little like those of Sorel or Péguy after the crushing of the Commune’) facing down the backlash against May ’68 and subversive thought more generally.

2

Communism: Capital’s Other

Communism involves a form of thought and practice subject to two forms of possible defeat and victory. On this point, Bensaïd was in agreement with Alex Callinicos when Callinicos distinguished (in reference to Marxism) between political defeats and theoretical defeats, which are neither of the same nature nor of the same scope. We have ‘suffered unquestionable political and social defeats’. We have also ‘suffered from the liberal ideological counter-offensive and came under the fire of its heavy artillery. The defeats in matters of theory succeed from other criteria and are not, in any case, a matter of number’.11 When in Le Passé d’une illusion Furet claimed to close the dossier on communism, he immobilised the eternity of the commodity, as capitalism became his posited unsurpassable horizon. Was Marx dead? Were vanguards gone forever? Was history over? Could we say an infinite farewell to communism? In striking back, historical battle reanimated Marx’s corpse. Deleuze could say, ‘I don’t know what these people mean when they say that Marx is wrong. There are urgent tasks today: it is necessary for us to analyse the world market, its transformations. And for that we must pass through Marx. My next book – and this will be the last – will be called Grandeur de Marx’.12 Marx gained some respectability among the bourgeois academy; the same could not be said of communism. The word seemed buried under Stalinist demolition. But what is communism and whence did it come? Communism is a reference to human liberation in the specific context of the capitalist mode of production. For Heine, ‘Communism is the secret name of this formidable adversary, who posits the rule of the proletariat with all its consequences in opposition to the current regime of the bourgeoisie’. It is not a doctrine, but the real movement that abolishes the present state of things, the ‘accumulation of experiences often defeated and always recommenced’.13 Communism as a real movement can overcome the antinomy between utopian socialism and pragmatism. It just has to wait for its cue, to ‘read its play, 11 12 13

Ibid. Quoted from Bensaïd 2000, pp. 9–10. Ibid.

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thwart its phantasmagorias, to respond to its enigmas is always Marx’s concern – and that of communism’.14 Since communism is capital’s Other, it cannot be buried forever, neither in name nor in thing. It can, however, be eclipsed and transform, but this is the logic of itself as capital’s Other. Its haunting spectre transforms in the present. It is there when the slogans bread, dignity, and social justice rage in the workplaces and the streets of the Middle East and North Africa. No longer is it only Tocqueville’s domestic servant who smiles in revolt but the textile-worker in Cairo and the cleaning lady in Greece. Since the Communist Manifesto, ‘the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeois and of its rule’, has not ceased. The outcome of this revolt has taken the forms of crises, wars and revolutions: At the root of these lacerations in the fabric of work and days, through which the Messiah can sneak in, there is the neurotic split of the commodity between use value and exchange value; the separation between the act of selling and the act of buying, which sometimes provokes ruptures in the cycles of accumulation; that of the production and realisation of surplus-value, which makes its transformation into profit a dangerous leap. The disjunction between different moments of social reproduction is periodically surmounted by the violent restoration of their unity. Such is the remedial role of crises, unless the practice of the oppressed produces a bifurcation, the slight deviation that modifies the monotonous course of things.15 The Communist Manifesto deciphered the enigma of the historical moment when it wrote that history is a history of class struggle. The French Revolution contributed to the transformation of orders and old estates into modern social classes, disentangling ‘the economy’ from the political state. The old corporative spirit ‘survived in the form of the bureaucratic state, the suppression of which supposed that the particular interest becomes general and the general interest becomes effective’. The Communist Manifesto uncovered the historical conditions for the emancipation of the working class, not the pursuit of an ideal city, ‘but a logic of emancipation rooted in the real struggle’. For Bensaïd, the ink

14 15

Bensaïd 2000, p. 12. Bensaïd 2000, pp. 18–19.

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poured over the feudal socialists, true socialists, and petty-bourgeois socialists has withstood the test of time because ‘they do have their inheritors and descendants’. Bensaïd, above all, implores his readers to listen to a revolutionary frequency of historical change; Marx exemplified this by understanding early on that every revolution dissolves the old society and, insofar as it does, it is social, but also that every revolution brings down the old ruling power, and to that extent it is political. As it overthrows, it is a political act; as dissolution, a social process. At the end of the twentieth century the immense hope for this dual process seemed exhausted. The Left Opposition and the traditions associated with it were doubly defeated: [B]y the bourgeoisie from the exterior and by the bureaucratic enemy from the interior and if we sometimes deceived ourselves, our great error was an overestimation of humanity and the impatience for liberation that we have shared with all the princes of the possible. However, nobody can reproach them for having tried to clear the limits where the traces of a tyrannical God of sinister memory are lost. It will be incomparably more severe, and even really shameful, if we were to bow our heads and cower under the ‘meaning of history’, of being cowardly resigned to its voluntary servitude, without even having tried to break the vicious circle of capital and its idols.16 The capitalist mode of production has filled every pore of modern bourgeois society with the logic of the commodity. Its continued existence through metamorphoses is a testament to its vitality thus far, and yet: Nothing immunises it against the resurgence of the communist question in the century that has barely begun. The spirit of Christianity indeed survived the fall of Constantinople and the disasters of the Inquisition. The spirit of Judaism with the destruction of the Temple and the expulsion from Spain … Communism will again be born from real resistance to the intolerable order of things, to its injustices and disenchantment.17 For Bensaïd, the October Revolution was perhaps the greatest moment of human emancipation, from which it was possible to adopt Kant’s attitude

16 17

Bensaïd 2000, p. 36. Bensaïd 2000, p. 226.

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toward the French Revolution (as Thermidor was weaving its reactionary plot). Kant said of the French Revolution: For that occurrence is too important, too much interwoven with the interest of humanity, and its influence too widely propagated in all areas of the world to not be recalled on any favourable occasion by the nations which would then be roused to a repetition of new efforts of this kind.18 The Spectre will still smile because history has not finished and resistance continues its subterranean work; Capital has an irreducible Other. Bensaïd insisted that to have some chance of warding off catastrophe, one must begin by resisting the irresistible, ‘by declaring a state of alert, at the step of the narrow door through which, at any instant, the smiling Spectre can appear’. Bensaïd declared, it is always an imperative to make a revolution, even if words become unrecognisable, ‘we will remain at bottom communists and, if necessary, “Marrano communists”’.19

3

The Right to Be Lazy

Bensaïd explored the theme of coerced Sisyphean and playfully self-actualising labour, being an integral part of the metamorphoses of the spectre, dissecting the underpinnings of modern alienated labour. As outlined in the chapter on Marx, capital subsumes the quality of life under the imperative of quantity, and fetishism and reification personify the financial markets, even displaying social murder as a natural statistic (as the covid-19 pandemic shows clearly). Alienating work produces an ever-present remainder, namely that ‘Youth stooped at machines die before their time’.20 The creations of humanity – mediated by dead labour – threaten, ruin and murder their subjects. Between the human being and the machine, numbers and abstract time rule as the clock ticks on.21 This is the reality of ventriloquist capital, a vampire incessantly devouring its 18 19 20 21

Kant 2001, p. 304. Bensaïd 2000, p. 231. Xu Lizhi quoted from Red Flag 2014. Sometimes an individual social fact can uncover the essence of capital’s world. Not a thing, but a social fact such was the murder of Foxconn worker Xu Lizhi. His poetry unveils the social brutality of the capitalist system: Full of working words; Workshop, assembly line, machine, work card, overtime, wages …; They’ve trained me to become docile; A screw fell to the ground; In this dark night of overtime; Plunging vertically, lightly clinking; It won’t attract anyone’s attention;

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subjects, sucking life out of them, congealing life into cold and dead things. Congealed and cold, dead labour rules those subjected by the capitalist mode of production. ‘Like the love that young workers bury at the bottom of their hearts, with no time for expression, emotion crumbles into dust. Industry captures their tears before they have the chance to fall. Time flows by’.22 Benjamin pointed out that the Protestant work ethic was resurrected among the German workers’ movement as it thought of itself moving with the direction of history. Dietzgen’s announcement that labour was the saviour in modern times encapsulated the sentiment. Labour under the alienated conditions of capitalist production is no saviour in-itself, however. In his own time, Engels reproduced the words of ‘Dr. J. Kay’, ‘a competent judge’ in his study of the English working class to illustrate the point: Continuous exhausting toil, day after day, year after year, is not calculated to develop the intellectual and moral capabilities of the human being. The wearisome routine of endless drudgery, in which the same mechanical process is ever repeated, is like the torture of Sisyphus; the burden of toil, like the rock, is ever falling back upon the worn-out drudge … To condemn a human being to such work is to cultivate the animal quality in him.23 In modern bourgeois societies in which the capitalist mode of production and its division of labour dominate, all work loses its individual character and attraction. The worker becomes ‘an appendage of the machine, and it is only the simplest, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him’. As machinery and the division of labour develop, ‘in the same proportion the burden of toil also increases’ by extending the working day, making work more intense, increasing the speed of the machine. This form of labour is converted into capital, money or rent, ‘into a social power cap-

22 23

Just like last time; On a night like this; When someone plunged to the ground; Sealed workshops store diseased iron; Wages concealed behind curtains; Like the love that young workers bury at the bottom of their hearts; With no time for expression, emotion crumbles into dust; Industry captures their tears before they have the chance to fall; Time flows by, their heads lost in fog; Output weighs down their age, pain works overtime day and night; In their lives, dizziness before their time is latent; Some still endure, while others are taken by illness; I am dozing between them, guarding; The last graveyard of our youth. A space of ten square meters; Every time I open the window or the wicker gate; I seem like a dead man; Slowly pushing open the lid of a coffin. Xu Lizhi quoted from Red Flag 2014. Engels 2010, p. 467.

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able of being monopolised’. This bourgeois power is nothing other than the ‘power to subjugate the labour of others’. In that sense, communism spreads the news that the wealth of the rich is ‘the produce of a theft’. Workers share this news because the capitalist must be made impossible. Only once this has taken place can labour become a salvation; it will be free and creative labour without human domination. Paul Lafargue’s pamphlet – The Right to be Lazy – written in the SaintePélagie Prison in 1883, was one of the boldest attacks on the religious cult of labour under capitalism, and Bensaïd drew from it. Socialists, Lafargue wrote, ‘must march up to the assault of the ethics and the social theories of capitalism; they must demolish in the heads of the class which they call to action the prejudices sown in them by the ruling class; they must proclaim in the faces of the hypocrites of all ethical systems that the earth shall cease to be the vale of tears for the labourer; that in the communist society of the future, which we shall establish “peaceably if we may, forcibly if we must”, the impulses of men will be given a free rein’.24 It is often said that if private property were to be abolished, no one would ever work and laziness would overtake modern society. This logic can be turned against the rule of private property itself, for ‘bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who work, acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything do not work’. This was another version of capitalist tautology that wage-labour would not be possible without capital. What was Lafargue’s deep concern? Perhaps that ‘Our epoch has been called the century of work. It is in fact the century of pain, misery and corruption’. ‘Laziness’ – i.e. all time not spent in producing profit – is a social pleasure the bourgeois class wanted to discipline. As Napoleon elegantly said, ‘The more my people work, the fewer vices they will have … I am the authority … and I should be disposed to order that on Sunday after the hour of service be past, the shops be opened and the labourers return to their work’.25 For Lafargue, capitalism inculcates a disastrous illusion, ‘the love of work, the furious passion for work, pushed even to the exhaustion of the vital force of the individual … In capitalist society work is the cause of all intellectual degeneracy, of all organic deformity … our miserable slaves of machines’.26 The bourgeois defends the dogma of work; Lafargue’s point is coherent because the class struggle is first and foremost a struggle over the working day: it rebels against the capitalist

24 25 26

Lafargue 1907, p. 4. Quoted from Bensaïd 2000, p. 103. Lafargue 1907, p. 10.

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homogenisation and theft of time. Capitalist production eliminates the qualitative, human and individual attributes of the worker, Bensaïd summarised, because, in actually existing society, as of yet we do not produce as human beings. Real labour is not a loving, erotic labour [in the wider Greek sense of the term – D.R.], but a constrained labour, alienated: abstract labour, corresponding – according to Taylorist vocabulary – to the ‘loyal workday’ of the ‘average man’. Reduced to a uniform and undifferentiated labour-time, this labour is, Marx said, ‘stripped of all its quality’.27 The personality of the worker is reduced to an isolated particle and fed into an alien machine. In a commodity producing society, labour becomes social only in its quality of being equalised, abstract labour. Abstract labour dominates societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails. And Lafargue wrote, ‘At her feet, Industrial Capitalism, a gigantic organism of iron, with an ape-like mask, is mechanically devouring men, women and children, whose thrilling and heart-rending cries fill the air; the bank with a marten’s muzzle; a hyena’s body and harpy-hands, is nimbly flipping coins out of his pocket’.28 Pierre Naville argued that this notion of abstract work was elaborated parallel to that of abstract time, as physics and astronomy employed it in a more and more precise way thanks to watch making. Physical time measured by clocks is an abstraction. Measured by time, work borrows from its instrument of measure an essential character: abstraction.29 From the vantage point of the capitalist working day, hours outside of production are useless, an expression of laziness; these hours are empty of surplusvalue. This is why Lafargue put forward the bold demand of the right to be lazy; much more audacious than the demand for the eight-hour day. Workers should struggle ‘to forge a brazen law forbidding any man to work more than three hours a day, the earth, the old earth, trembling with joy would feel a new universe leaping within her’: … O Laziness, mother of the arts and noble virtues, be thou the balm of human anguish … These individual and social miseries, however great 27 28 29

Bensaïd 2000, p. 97. Lafargue 1907, p. 55. Quoted from Bensaïd 2000, p. 97.

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and innumerable they may be, however eternal they appear, will vanish like hyenas and jackals at the approach of the lion, when the proletariat shall say ‘I will’. But to arrive at the realization of its strength, the proletariat must trample under foot the prejudices of Christian ethics, economic ethics and free-thought ethics. It must return to its natural instincts, it must proclaim the Rights of Laziness, a thousand times more noble and more sacred than the anaemic Rights of Man concocted by the metaphysical lawyers of the bourgeois revolution. It must accustom itself to working but three hours a day, reserving the rest of the day and night for leisure and feasting.30 The struggle for the reduction of the working day is a historical struggle. Even if free time remains alienated, it is already an obstacle to the exploitation of labour power. During her free time, the worker has the possibility of artistic leisure, participating in a union meeting or read Capital or exploring the infinities of pleasure. That the struggle for the reduction of labour time is permanent is therefore not a secondary question, even within the framework of capitalism. However, within the framework of capitalism, there is a close relation between alienated work and alienated pleasure, and, as a result, we cannot really be free outside of work if we are dominated in the workplace. Therefore, it is not enough to reduce the time of forced labour, it is also necessary to transform the content and organisation of labour itself across the social whole, to construct an emancipation in work and outside of work. There might always be hard and alienating work, it may not be very creative to sweep the streets or pick up trash (who knows?), it may always be necessary that society consecrates time to non-creative labour and life will be outside of this labour time. However, we might do alienated work but at the same time unfold our creative capacities outside of it. The problem for a socialist society is how to distribute this type of work, how to overhaul its organisation. It is clear that there are tasks that are neither pleasant nor stimulating, but the radical transformation of the division of labour remains the condition of any socialist society, producing a multiplicity of voluntary engagements as the condition of life. In opposition to the rationalising and instrumentalising effects of capitalism on production, Marx had a radically different idea of what work could be. It would not be ruled by the abstract quantum but by free and creative human beings themselves. In actualising Marx’s dream of free and creative mutual labour the conflict between human beings and nature can be overcome.

30

Lafargue 1907, p. 29.

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A Fully Developed Humanism Is Also a Naturalism

Bensaïd thought it was significant that for the young Marx, communism was a fully developed naturalism and a humanism; likewise, a fully developed humanism was also a naturalism, the genuine resolution of the tension and conflict between human beings and nature and among human beings themselves. As human beings flourish, the natural world is liberated, so goes the wager. In this section, I discuss Bensaïd’s critique of anti-humanist political ecology. The ecological crisis facing humanity is one of the most striking revelations of the limits of commodified irrationality. Bensaïd began, from the early 1990s onwards, to give papers and write extensively about the ‘torment of matter’ (which appears in Marx l’intempestif ). The natural conditions of humanity’s reproduction over the long term do not follow from the short-term requirements of market criteria and capital accumulation. The miserable measure of all things – abstract labour – reaches its limits when faced with a finite nature. The capitalist mode of production has an instrumental use of finite nature, gifting itself of its goods as if the finite belonged to capital accumulation by divine bequest. Immediate profit sanctions the tortures of nature with its mechanical inventions and deployments. Bensaïd articulated how he generally grasped nature and history: It remains no less the case that, here and now, in a historically determined social formation, the question of the relations of humanity to its natural conditions of reproduction is overdetermined by the law of value, that is to say, through the reduction of social relations to a ‘miserable measure’ (that of abstract time).31 Resulting from an understanding based on overdetermination and the law of value, Bensaïd affirmed that there is no one form of ecology. There is deep ecology and social ecology, there are fascistic right-wing ecologies and communistic left-wing ecologies, each joining the ecological and social questions together in a different, and indeed irreconcilable, manner. Each of them has a distinct understanding about the interlinking of the mode of production, nation-states and nature (the concepts of nature differ too). According to Bensaïd, it is necessary to see that ‘today, really existing productivism is organically tied to the intimate logic of capital. It is why the anti-productivism of our times

31

Bensaïd 2001b, p. 35.

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is necessarily anti-capitalism: the “ecological paradigm” is inseparable from the “social paradigm” determined by the relations of production’.32 Bensaïd’s anti-productivist point was not shared by the entire spectrum of the ecologist movement. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who threw up the barricades in May ’68 alongside Bensaïd, held a version of ecological gestionnaire, in which the ecological paradigm played a role in the ‘“third left” without attachments to class’. Cohn-Bendit said: ‘The political overthrow is not desirable; the people are correctly convinced that the system working best is capitalism’. A technocratic ecological solution complements Cohn-Bendit’s limitation of environmental politics to the capitalist market. The pro-market orientation, without any ambition for social transformation, is not able to meet the ecological challenges of our times. To the extent that the ecological question obliges us to ‘get to the core of our society’s inner workings, it also interrogates the “Greens”’. Bensaïd thought that the dead-end of administrative ecology was demonstrated by the Greens’ participation in the plural left government: ‘two years with a Green minister for the environment have not confirmed a reformist tenacity … [with the] conversion to ministerial realist ecology’.33 What was Bensaïd’s alternative? He developed a critique of ‘a certain fundamentalist ecology’. Fundamentalist ecology is indifferent to class domination and social matters. But Bensaïd also criticised the unilateral focus on the social question without respect for the specificity of the ecological question. In fact, ‘the inverse reduction of the ecology to the most diverse social suffering passes by the essential question of the relations of human societies to their environment and the relative natural limits that condition their capacity to reproduce’.34 It was the becoming conscious, or recollection of past thinkers (Marx, Engels, Morris, Lankester, etc.), of these limits that forms the novelty of ecology. Bensaïd underlined that a political opposition between a humanist ecology and an anti-humanist ecology pervades the environmental movement. An ecology that takes social exploitation and oppression seriously is a humanist ecology. Between the two conflicting positions the question of knowing whether humans can be considered as the end-goal of biodiversity or one species among others, posed itself. If we lean towards a humanist ecology, we recognise that, confronted with the miseries of our age, we aim to respond to it with our means by arranging our own spatial-temporal niche. At this stage, the ecological crisis intersects with the social crisis. The social limits of capitalist society thus have 32 33 34

Bensaïd 2000, pp. 119–20. Bensaïd 2000, pp. 120–1. Bensaïd 2000, p. 123.

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grave natural effects. Human agency plays a potent role in relation to nature. And, against the anti-humanists, a humanist ecology avoids the demobilising effects of apocalyptic ecologism: Faced with the disastrous consequences of the greenhouse effect, nuclear waste stocks, low-cost transport of pollutants, the impact on the environment of savage urbanisation and industrial agriculture, it is through the concrete experience of the bond between critical ecology and class struggle that consciousness and ecologist mobilisation will win the necessary strength to ward off the perils that threaten us.35 It is important to see that in their polemics with Malthus, Marx and Engels rejected the ideological notion of natural and absolute limits. They did not – without being conscious of the ecological question exactly as it is posed to us today – ignore the notion of relative limits in a given mode of production, nor the reality of a finite earth. Capital, ‘survives at the price of a growing irrationality, is well and truly its own limit’. Yet, capital’s expansion is unlimited; at stake is the reconciliation of a finite earth and the social world that respects it. Bensaïd supposed: Through its systematic workings, the biosphere allows for the flourishing and the reproduction of the living. It operates like a giant organisation of complex recycling and regulation permitting a passage from the organic to the inorganic and vice versa. From the pioneering works of Marsh (1864) and Haeckel (1867) unto the Club of Rome’s report (1972) and the Bruntlandt report, the idea of a specific ecological temporality has emerged with notions like non-renewable energies and sustainable development. The Brundtland Report defines sustainable development as ‘responding to the needs of the present without compromising the capacity of future generations to respond to theirs’. It is a case of reconciling two partially contradictory orders: that of the biosphere to which we belong and that of a human social world.36 Ecology, broadly understood, has an immanent temporality that is specific to it. Between the social temporality of capital, whose rhythm accords with the cycles of accumulation and the ecological temporality of the biosphere there

35 36

Bensaïd 2000, p. 126. Bensaïd 2000, p. 127.

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is a discord. Ecological temporality is a striking refutation of the eternal existence of the commodity and the infinite growth of capital; it recognises finitude. In relation to the regulations of the biosphere, the partial rationality of the market must pay the price of a growing global irrationality. Amid this discord, a series of questions are posed: what kind of resource planning and projects are compatible with truly sustainable development? What form of democracy can decide and deliberate on it? These questions imply that politics is not just about warding off disaster but of determining the humanity that we want to become, in a nature we shape and that shapes us. Human liberation, saving the planet and maintaining the existence of the human species are not to be separated. The dominant economic paradigm operates – in theory – according to the optimal allocation of resources according to the market. It is the cunning of reason that ignores the rhythms of the finite ecological body. Capital makes nature a pure object for itself, a matter of utility. How can the ecological crisis be resolved without a radical rupture with the capitalist mode of production? For Bensaïd, the social and ecological temporalities needed adequate articulation: Against the arrogance of the eternity of the commodity, the ecological verdict is merciless … We cannot escape from the question of the relation between the predatory relation to nature and the social relation of exploitation. Are they two juxtaposed domains, indifferent to each other? Or on the contrary, are they tightly interwoven? The history of science and technology, of the growth of capitalism, industrialisation and urbanisation speaks in favour of the second hypothesis.37 Bensaïd effectively raises the need for a convergence between the workers’ movement and ecological mobilisations. Undoubtedly, workers and the poor are already bearing the full force of the ecological crisis. But workers are not merely victims; they are rather potential subjects and actors who have the power to ward off the disaster. Often, the workers’ movement is seen to only concern itself with the defence of jobs where the ecological question is unrecognised. A new, or renewed, encounter between an industrially militant workers’ movement and ecological mobilisations is needed. The prerequisite for this encounter-convergence is industrial and ecological militancy. Without this encounter-convergence, the ecologist does not have many options. They can become vegetarians and save their souls. They can

37

Bensaïd 2000, p. 128.

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lobby institutions to influence government policy. They can adopt a technocratic approach to merge efficient market management with environmental concerns. None of these options will ward off the catastrophe that faces humanity. None has the power to arrest the capitalist mode of production’s environmental destruction. Neither can these other worldviews create a new democratic relation between the present and the future, between regional, national and international spaces. Only an eco-communist project can overcome the impasse between private property and democratic planning which is decisive for the durable administration of resources, the planning of territory, the politics of transport and the city. Therefore, the struggle against pollution, against the pathologies of work, for the defence of public health and quality food, for the development of a sustainable agriculture and against the pollution of waters by agribusiness are inseparably social and ecological. This convergence is more pressing than ever; time is on the run.

5

The Torment of Matter

I now turn to Bensaïd’s more theoretical writings on ecology to see this problem from another angle. This takes us to the torment of matter – his contribution to the critique of political ecology – in Marx l’intempestif. We have seen, in earlier chapters, that Bensaïd worked on the contradictory nature of Marx’s theory. This pertained to his understanding of Marx’s ecology and the history of ecology in the socialist movement. Was Marx, Bensaïd asked, [p]roductivist evil genius or ecological guardian angel? Whether we blame him for bureaucratic productivism and its catastrophes, or conveniently claim him as a Green, dicta to support the verdict can easily be found in Marx. From the early works to the ‘Marginal Notes on Wagner’, his oeuvre is certainly not homogenous. But faced with the test of the present, some trails long obstructed by the dead weight of didactic vulgarisation are once again open. Obviously, it would be anachronistic to exonerate Marx of the Promethean illusions of his age. But it would be just as inaccurate to make him a heedless eulogist of extreme industrialisation and unidirectional progress. We must not confuse the questions he posed with the answers subsequently given by social-democrat or Stalinist epigones. On this point as on others, the bureaucratic counter-revolution in the ussr marked a rupture. The research of Vernadsky, Gause, Kasharov and Stanchisky paved the way for a pioneering ecology, which could have been integrated into the promise of a ‘transformation in the way of life’ in

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the 1920s. The dates speak for themselves. As early as 1933, Stanchisky was in prison, his venture wrecked and his ideas banished from Soviet universities. The productivist delirium of forced collectivization, the craze for accelerated industrialisation, and the Stakhanovite frenzy became incompatible with any innovative ecological critique. At a time when the regime’s ideologues were inventing ‘the construction of socialism in one country’, this would have entailed conceiving the development of the Soviet economy within the constraints of its global environment. It would have required democratic choices over priorities and the mode of growth, which were utterly incompatible with the confiscation of power and crystallisation of privileges. Finally, a certain idea of the interdependence of humanity and nature, a consciousness of its dual – social and natural – determination, would have clashed head-on with the bureaucratic voluntarism that made ‘man the most precious capital’.38 After the bureaucratic Thermidor, ‘there was no longer any question of changing life, only of “catching up with and overtaking” the achievements of capitalism itself, according to the competitive maxim of industrial and sporting productivism’. However, Bensaïd wanted to ‘rediscover the abandoned theoretical streams … of yesteryear’ within Marx’s work and the philosophicalscientific traditions that formed part of Marx’s thinking about nature. Following Marx, a human being is a natural being, a human natural being (a complement to understanding communism as a humanist naturalism). Marx penned that ‘nature constitutes “man’s organic body”’, and that ‘man is directly a natural being’, themes he articulated in the 1844 Manuscripts.39 Taking these texts as his starting point, Bensaïd developed a strong thesis: in relation to nature, ‘notwithstanding subsequent theoretical revisions, the young Marx’s approach persisted’. That is to say, ‘the formula from Capital according to which labour is the father of material wealth, and nature its mother, is therefore not a chance utterance: it is a line of strict continuity [my italics]’. According to Bensaïd, ‘the young Marx’s approach in fact inaugurates a long critical journey through political economy’ by which Marx uncovers the compulsive and irrational dynamic of capital vis-à-vis nature: Rather than enriching humanity, the needs determined by capital are one-sided and compulsive. It is they that possess human beings, not vice

38 39

Bensaïd 2002, p. 312–3. Bensaïd 2002, p. 313.

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versa. This negation of freedom consigns humanity not to some original or natural bestiality, but a social brutishness that can easily prove to be a good deal more savage. The negation of the humanity in human beings posits the restoration of their naturalness as a condition of emancipation. That is why, after having affirmed the identity of humanism and a consistent naturalism, the young Marx simply designates communism a ‘fully developed naturalism’. At work as early as 1844, this logic is not suppressed with the liquidation of the ‘erstwhile philosophical consciousness’.40 What were the essential components of Marx’s continuity in his understanding of nature? First, Marx posited ‘the principle of a radical monism’ through which everything begins from the fact that we must first of all eat and clothe ourselves in a reality that is not split in two. We cannot do that without the premise that ‘ “in the beginning is nature”, and “objective natural being” ’.41 Second, ‘the classical philosophical antinomies (between materialism and idealism, nature and history) are resolved in this radical monism. Marx breaks the vicious circle of fallacious oppositions’.42 Bensaïd suggested that in breaking with such a vicious circle of fallacious oppositions, Marx ‘postulates that a consistent naturalism and humanism are one and the same thing’. This has other implications, namely that: The formal contradiction between materialism and idealism is resolved in their unity. From the standpoint of this close unity, ‘only naturalism is capable of comprehending the process of world history’. The result is an upheaval in the relation between subject and object, a transformation in the notions of subject and subjectivity, object and objectivity: ‘A being which has no object outside itself is not an objective being’. Objectivity assumes the incompleteness and alterity of the … subject.43 Third, ‘humanity’s original membership of nature … also implies that it is first of all “equipped with natural powers, with vital powers”’. To labour is a natural, vital power. When it takes the form of labour power – bought and sold as a commodity – this means that ‘the natural determination persists in the social determination of labour power’. The ability for humans to labour, a constant 40 41 42 43

Bensaïd 2002, p. 314. Ibid. Ibid. Bensaïd 2002, pp. 314–15.

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throughout every mode of production, ‘is always conceived as the “expression of a natural power”. In labour, man “confronts the materials of nature as a force of nature … he acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature”’. Humanity’s ‘irreducible dependence’ on nature is ‘revealed in natural need, which is the starting point for the whole system of needs’, in which ‘nature is denied without being effaced. It is cracked and differentiated without being broken’.44 Therefore: In its particularity, distinct from its natural universality, humanity is thus specifically determined by its historicity: history is its birth certificate. That is why, far from being opposed to nature in some insurmountable antinomy, ‘[h]istory is the true natural history of man’.45 Bensaïd suggested that the ‘path opened up by the 1844 Manuscripts and the Theses on Feuerbach led, ten years later, to the magisterial elaborations contained in the Grundrisse’, where Marx wrote that the ‘tendency to create the world market is directly given in the concept of capital itself’, which Bensaïd took to be a decisive step, because it means that ‘the creation of absolute surplus-value by capital pushes the sphere of circulation to expand constantly’, playing a key role in capital’s ‘exploration of all of nature in order to discover new, useful qualities in things; universal exchange of the products of all alien climates and lands; new (artificial) preparation of natural objects, by which they are given new use values’.46 Where the law of value rules, the specificities of each social formation are taken in their spiral developments. But it cannot escape the barriers it creates for itself, nor those of the finite earth. Bensaïd remarks that Marx ‘never believed that nature is offered “gratis” ’, yet:

44 45 46

Ibid. Ibid. Bensaïd 2002, p. 316. To take the point further: ‘Production based on capital simultaneously creates universal industry and a universal system of exploitation of natural and human properties. Nothing seems any longer to possess a higher value in itself, to be justified for its own sake outside this circuit of production and social exchange. It is thus capital alone that “creates the bourgeois society, and the universal appropriation of nature as well as of the social bond itself by the members of society” … the dynamic of capital “drives beyond national barriers and prejudices”. It tears down “all the barriers which hem in the development of the forces of production, the expansion of needs, the all-sided development of production, and the exploitation and exchange of natural and mental forces” […. However,] [i]f capital surmounts each such obstacle “ideally”, “it does not follow … that it has really overcome it”. Its production “moves in contradictions which are constantly overcome but just as constantly posited”’. Bensaïd 2002, p. 317.

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The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature. Of course, we cannot here go either into the actual physical nature of man, or into the natural conditions in which man finds himself – geological, or hydrographical, climatic and so on. All historical writing must set out from these natural bases and their modification in the course of history through the action of men.47 Here, Bensaïd follows the work of Alfred Schmidt, who ‘argues convincingly that for Marx, nature is irreducible to a social category’. Natural specificities and processes are ‘not extinguished in historical socialization’. ‘ “Man’s inorganic body”, nature in the young Marx’, ‘has similarities with Spinozist substance’. Yet, Marx’s debt to German philosophy shines forth quite clearly in his appreciation of nature. In The Holy Family it is written that Among the qualities inherent in matter, motion is the first and foremost, not only in the form of mechanical and mathematical motion, but chiefly in the form of an impulse, a vital spirit, a tension – or a ‘Qual’ [torture of matter], to use a term of Jakob Böhme’s … In its further evolution, materialism becomes one-sided … Knowledge based upon the senses loses its poetic blossom, it passes into the abstract experience of the geometrician. Physical motion is sacrificed to mechanical or mathematical motion … Materialism takes to misanthropy. If it is to overcome its opponent, misanthropic, fleshless spiritualism, and that on the latter’s own ground, materialism has to chastise its own flesh and turn ascetic. Thus it passes into an intellectual entity; but thus, too, it evolves all the consistency, regardless of consequences, characteristic of the intellect.48 According to Bensaïd, this passage showcases Marx’s ‘non-mechanical conception of nature’. Mechanics and mathematics ‘are moments of motion, whose concrete totality involves a logic of the living being, evoked by the notions of “impulse”, “vital spirit” and “tension”’. Nature is conceived as a unity of subject and object. In the Theses on Feuerbach, Marx’s critique of passive materialism and mystical idealism fused matter and knowledge. Bensaïd seems to suggest

47 48

Quoted from Bensaïd 2002, pp. 319–20. Quoted from Bensaïd 2002, p. 320.

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that material practices and the non-mechanical conception of matter entail hybrid stuff, because ‘Marx’s practical categories are “hybrids” of matter and knowledge’. Further, As early as The Holy Family, a non-mechanical conception of matter inspired by the Hegelian critique of the understanding is pitted against abstract geometrization and distanced from the ‘French science of nature’. The reference to Jakob Böhme and the mystical sources of the German dialectic is by no means fortuitous. The mysteries of the capitalist economy cannot be solved exclusively on the terrain of economics. Labour attests to the ‘torment of matter’, the painful irruption of life in non-life. As the creator of use-values, as useful labour, labour is one of the conditions of existence of humanity regardless of social forms: it constitutes a natural, necessary and external mediation between humankind and nature … The notion of ‘organic exchange’ or metabolism [Stoffwechsel] appears as early as the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. It refers to a logic of the living being that counters mechanical causality and heralds the nascent ecology. Marx arrived at it via the legacy of the German philosophy of nature conceived as a totality in motion and a unity of subject and object … Marx considered the organic exchange between humankind and nature, mediated by labour, as ‘the strategic crux of social being’.49 This theoretical constellation permitted, and was consolidated by, Marx’s rejection of the idea of abstract progress. For Bensaïd, this has a strict political implication for ecology, which folds back onto the theoretical constellation and the humanist ecology discussed above. It is necessary that emancipatory politics retains the perspective of a radical political democracy that can introduce a medium term between the way humankind satisfies its needs while harmonising itself with nature. Marx’s critique of political economy can aid us in this struggle, because ‘political economy is indeed stymied by the incommensurability of heterogeneous temporalities (the cycle of capital and natural cycles …), and by the “miserable” character of its own forms of measurement’.50 This means that ecology cannot avoid theoretical critique or politics. Neither can it be resolved by scientific experts alone. Only the class struggle can pave the way for this new form of political democracy.

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Bensaïd 2002, p. 321. Bensaïd 2002, p. 356.

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Women’s Liberation: Class Struggle Solidarity, Not Differentialist Separatism

On numerous occasions, Bensaïd took up the issues and stakes flowing from the women’s liberation movement, women’s oppression and the theoreticalpolitical constellations involved in them; the guiding thread of his interventions, which hopefully amounted to more than a male-monologue, was to defend solidarity, not separatism. In relation to feminism, Bensaïd did not identify as an unqualified feminist, but one committed to its articulation to class struggle. Bensaïd’s position took shape in the contours of the Ligue’s orientation to women’s liberation; within the Ligue itself, Josette Trat explains: it is certain that, for all of us, the articles of Antoine Artous and the ‘brilliant’ Frederique Vinteuil, member of the women’s secretariat of the Ligue communiste, powerfully clarified the contributions and limits of Marxist theory in analysing women’s oppression and the divergences we had with feminists like Shulamith Firestone, Christine Delphy, and the Italian feminists.51 Bensaïd did not claim to innovate on the question of women’s liberation but rather synthesised the work of his contemporaries in the Ligue. Again, Trat writes that Bensaïd insisted on the importance of a rigorous use of Marxist concepts in order to avoid the shortcomings of some feminist theoreticians from the 1970s who not only analysed domestic production as a mode of production in its own right but also concluded that the household was the ‘centre of social subversion’.52 After May ’68, the Women’s Liberation Movement had begun in August 1970 with three demands: free abortion, free crèches and equal pay for equal work. During the second half of the 1970s, women’s work was a priority for the lcr. The Cahiers du féminisme began in 1977 and they tried to build women’s groups committed to class struggle feminism. This was a distinct strategic approach within the women’s liberation movement, for they argued that there would be no women’s liberation without socialist revolution and transition. The Cahiers

51 52

Trat 2012, p. 95. Trat 2012, p. 96.

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du féminisme continued to be published until 1998. It made its appearance with second wave feminism in France, and was both product of, and intervention into, the Ligue (which had been active in the women’s movement since at least 1972).53 1977 was a pivotal year for the establishment of feminist journals, for Des femmes en mouvement, Questions féministes, la Revue en face had each appeared in the same year. The Cahiers was distinct from the other journals for three reasons. First, they were for an autonomous women’s movement – it had to be independent from masculine domination, the modern capitalist state, churches and political organisations. This meant they were distinct from the traditions of the pcf, which, in unsurprising Stalinist style, had controlled the Union des femmes françaises, a conveyor belt for party policy (Bensaïd himself suggested, early on, that a ‘red women’s front’ should be set up, based on this experience – he was criticised by Trat for this). Second, within the feminist movement itself, the Cahiers group had fought for class struggle feminism. Based on the anthropological work of Maurice Godelier’s La production des grands hommes. Pouvoir et domination masculine chez les Baruya de Nouvelle Guinée (1982), they disagreed with Engels over whether or not masculine domination had preceded the emergence of private property. However, they recognised that masculine domination was not a parallel social relation to the capitalist system, but a social relation which, while preceding class relations, had been remodelled by capitalist relations and integrated into them on the national level, as well as in the framework of imperial domination. They argued for a convergence between the women’s and workers’ movements, which was not a spontaneous orientation for many other feminists at the time (some mechanically divided the struggle in trade unions and workplaces from the feminist struggle). Trat wrote of the reasons: It is true that the pcf’s and cgt’s positions in 1968 against the student movement – they called it ‘petty-bourgeois’ – and later against the feminist movement, accused of dividing the working class and being ‘in the service of the powers that be’ fed into the blindness of some feminists in their inability to see female waged workers. On the contrary, the feminist militants of the Ligue who also happened to be trade unionists actively participated from 1974 onwards in the setting up of ‘women’s trade union commissions’ and the coordination of women’s groups in the workplaces.54

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Trat 2011, p. 15. Trat 2011, p. 19.

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The feminist movement in France had three main tendencies, understanding each of which is helpful to situate Bensaïd’s later interventions. The Psychoanalysis and Politics current – popular among artists and writers – had embraced a differentialist vision of sex, by postulating the creative capacities of women that were bound to their procreative function, which placed women on the side of the concrete, life, and peace (traits constructed by socialised gender norms under capitalism). For this trend, ‘who found resources in psychoanalysis, the struggle had to prioritise resistance to all symbols of “phallocratic” domination. One of its central slogans was “Chasser le phallus de sa tête”’.55 In their struggle to free the world of the phallus, with its symbols of domination, Psych and Po patented the mlf sign (1979) with the National Institute of Industrial and Commercial Property and threatened legal action against those that dared to use it.56 The ‘radical feminists’ were distinct from this psychoanalytical, differentialist trend, because they saw sex as a social construct, the function of which was to legitimise masculine domination. Christine Delphy (alias Dupont) was a key figure. From the point of view of the class struggle feminists, though, the radical feminists had theoretical and strategic difficulties: they incorrectly theorised (for Delphy, it was a theoretical move in conscious opposition to the pcf and the far-left) that, just as workers are exploited by their bosses in the production process, women are exploited by their husbands, and, on the basis of this exploitation, women could form a unity (whatever their social background) against the patriarchs. This meant they prioritised the unity of women exploited by their husbands over class struggle, a point of disagreement between them and the ‘class struggle feminists’ (the third tendency). The Cahiers’ last distinctive trait was that they were involved in the life of a political organisation, the Ligue. Editors of Cahiers like Claire Bataille worked full time on the editorial team of Rouge overseeing the feminist column, and Frédérique Vinteuil intervened into the theoretical journal of the Ligue, Critique Communiste with Capitalisme et “patriarchat”: questions de méthode (1975) and a response to Artous’ intervention about the basis and origins of women’s oppression, which appeared in Femmes, capitalisme, mouvement ouvrier (1978). Bensaïd demonstrated what was the key problem for him in a text that appeared in Critique Communiste called Le corps et la parole saisis par la marchandise (1977):

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Trat 2011, p. 35. Trat 2011, p. 38.

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The problem therefore is to grasp how the development of the consciousness of the oppression of women can form itself not from the outside, but in the very formation and development of class consciousness. Women wageworkers, who share the fate of all workers exploited by capital all the while continuing to undergo the common oppression of domestic workers, are the principal vehicles of this fusion.57 Bensaïd constantly underlined that women’s oppression has existed across different modes of production. However, the capitalist mode of production did not simply prolong and reproduce this thousands-year-old muck of ages from the pre-modern to the modern. The capitalist mode of production integrated women’s oppression, altering it according to its specific needs, structures and dynamics. Bensaïd argued that ‘the consolidation of the nuclear family to the detriment of the extended family and the role of women thus corresponded to a redefinition of the distribution between private space and public space, between the workplace and the living quarters, between production and social reproduction’.58 Taking care of the household became a private matter, as the institution of the modern family among the labouring classes was a conscious strategy pursued by capital and the state machine. The modern family disciplined the working classes and reproduced labour power for as little cost to capital as possible. In 1848, the Minister for Public Instruction explained, ‘The more it is permitted for the mother to stay home, the less the state will have to make up for her through outside help’.59 The women’s liberation movements of the 1970s developed a rich debate over the notion of a domestic mode of production and its relations to the capitalist mode of production. In La révolution et le pouvoir Bensaïd keyed into an exchange with the Italian feminist theorists. Bensaïd’s general historical and theoretical operation did not substantially change from this early exchange. He does, however, take a step toward fulfilling his statement in Le Retour de la question sociale, namely that it is necessary to articulate the connections between the development of the women’s struggle and the evolution of the workers’ movement. The articulation has Bensaïd deepen his engagement with women’s liberation (which I return to below, after discussing his theoretical interventions).

57 58 59

Bensaïd 1977b, pp. 104–5. Bensaïd 2000, p. 139. Quoted from Bensaïd 2000, p. 140.

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The Dual Systems Debate

In the Italian feminist debates, the authors of Être exploitées tried to develop a critique of the domestic or patriarchal economy with a foundation that was comparable to Marx’s critique of political economy. Their approach raised important theoretical difficulties, ‘notably tied to the transposition to domestic relations of concepts like exploitation, surplus-value, profit, whose status is defined precisely in the body of capitalist relations of production’.60 The Italian theorists ended up with the following theoretical position, so Bensaïd thought: Women’s domestic labour is thus considered as free surplus labour that the husband appropriates, mimicking in the household the role of the boss in the workplace. However, the simple analogy masks decisive differences. If free domestic labour can be compared to drudgery, it does not produce commodities that are put onto the market thus allowing for the establishment of value that validates the socially necessary labour time for their production. Non-waged reproductive labour does not give to a husband a profit that can be accumulated with which he could accumulate capital. The extortion of surplus labour did not go through a labour contract but by a bond of personal dependence, legally and symbolically consolidated in marriage, which generally makes the male of the household a vulgar domineering petty bourgeois. Its social value is only indirectly recognised through the wage, covering the upkeep of the ‘worker and his family’. The worker in question is today more and more often a female wage-worker, but the presupposition remains the same: in claiming to cover the cost of the reproduction of labour power, the wage in reality leaves out free domestic labour. As this latter is still essentially done by women, the hidden exploitation of domestic labour permits justifying the persistent inferiority of women’s wages in relation to men’s wages, in equivalent posts and with equivalent qualifications.61 Domestic labour makes use-values that are consumed and appropriated within the walls of the bourgeois family because of the conditions of their production and consumption. There is no common measure between atomised domestic labours that are not adjudicated by the market. Many ‘attempts to quantify the volume of free domestic labour carried out by women take as their reference

60 61

Bensaïd 2000, p. 140. Ibid.

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the time of production recognised for the equivalent tasks carried out within the framework of commodity relations (cleaning companies, hospitality, etc.). This is legitimate to the extent that it makes visible a real, hidden labour, but the method remains no less approximate and problematic’.62 Bensaïd believed that: We can speak of the exploitation of domestic labour. It is thus a case of a specific exploitation, the modalities (hierarchical and symbolic) of which are different from the ‘free’ sale of labour power on the labour market and the appropriation of surplus-value by capital. The question remains of defining the relation that the domestic mode of production enters into with the accumulation of capital, if indeed there is one. A path suggested by Claude Meillassoux consists in studying the concrete way in which the two socially distinct temporalities are formed.63 The argument in favour of the existence of an autonomous domestic mode of production deals with its articulation or non-articulation of the domestic mode of production to the capitalist mode of production. According to Bensaïd, ‘Some feminists tried to separate them radically, to give a theoretical and historical foundation to the autonomous movement of women, since if two modes of production exist in a juxtaposed way, there must also be parallel struggles (worker and feminist) that can build and deconstruct alliances but no organic solidarity can bring them closer’.64 To tackle the problem of oppression in terms of a parallelism as it relates to the relation of exploitation can lead to inter-classism for ‘women as such are not part of any class, even if the fact of being associated to a bourgeois man brings with it certain privileges’. Bensaïd wrote of the way this produces an invariant notion of femininity: ‘Being without a class, a woman tends thus to become a being without history, entirely from Nature, rooted in the eternity of her invariant oppression, while the “working class is a class that forms part of a masculine system”. Not only the workers’ movement, dominated by men, but the working class as such, because its struggle “is the struggle of the bosses of the family with the capital that continually puts the family in danger” ’: ‘It is no longer as producers themselves exploited, but as the bosses of the family jealous of their prerogatives that workers rise up against the boss’.65 To posit the 62 63 64 65

Bensaïd 2000, p. 142. Ibid. Ibid. Bensaïd 1995, p. 143.

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invariant nature of women’s oppression can mean the workers’ struggle is read as repressing the real relation of modern servitude, in which the class struggle becomes a struggle of the privileged layers. Bensaïd remained committed to specifying the relation between the domestic mode of production and the accumulation of capital, which could be ascertained through a study of the concrete way in which two socially distinct temporalities are formed. This would be concerned with the way they interact logically and historically, decisive, because the historical point (with theoretical consequences) often advanced in favour of a strict parallelism between the oppression of women and exploitation of the working class is that of the chronological anteriority of the existence of oppression prior to the emergence of class domination, and modern bourgeois societies in which the capitalist mode of production dominates. However, the diachronic argument about anteriority does not solve the problem of the synchronic structural connections between diverse spheres or different fields of the global social formation. Bensaïd writes that, in Marx, There is a strong logical connection between the process of production, the process of circulation and the process of reproduction of the whole, which make the object of the three books of Capital. The reproduction (‘the maintenance of the worker and his family’) indeed contributes to determine the socially necessary labour time for the regeneration of the collective labour force and the domestic relations are founded on the control of the means of production. Relations of production and reproduction, Meillassoux insists, ‘therefore overlap but are not confused’. The whole difficulty is in this overlap, in what joins at the meeting point and the intersection between exploitation and oppression.66 From the beginning of the 1970s, Christine Delphy developed an analysis which was made up of three fundamental pillars: 1) patriarchy is a system of the subordination of women to men in contemporary industrial society; 2) this system has an economic basis; 3) this base is the domestic mode of production. For Bensaïd, Delphy then made a ‘curious economistic reduction’, where she concluded that the exploitation in the framework of the nuclear family founded ‘a common oppression of all women from which class belonging thenceforth is abolished: “patriarchal exploitation” (the obligation to provide domestic work that is socially underappreciated) constitutes “the specific, common and prin-

66

Ibid.

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cipal oppression” of women’. This was a consistent articulation of the ‘two modes of production’ thesis: ‘a commodity mode of production to which capitalist exploitation corresponded and a domestic mode of production to which familial exploitation corresponded or “more exactly, patriarchal”’. She effectively denied the possibility of tying the capitalist mode of production to the domestic mode of production, arguing that ‘the domestic mode of production, as an ensemble of production relations existed earlier than the capitalist mode of production. There is no theoretical bond between them. But evidently, there are concrete bonds’. Bensaïd pointed to the contradiction implicit in this position: This idea of concrete bonds without any relation with theoretical bonds is rather curious. It confirms a conceptual divorce between the concrete and the abstract, as if the ‘concrete bonds’ had no theoretical implication … This perplexity is a simple indicator of a non-resolved difficulty … For Christine Delphy and Diana Léonard, there are indeed two distinct modes of production, ‘empirically and historically intermixed’, which ‘influence and structure one another’. If, in the absence of theoretical connections, there are indeed ‘concrete connections’ between them, ‘empirically and historically’ attested to, it is this knot, this intermingling, this reciprocal influence that it is necessary to clarify. Before the real difficulty of this task, both of these authors derive a hasty conclusion from their observations, as unexpected as it is hardly convincing, consisting in ‘envisaging that women’s liberation can be accomplished under capitalism and that capitalism can be overthrown without patriarchy being weakened’. Nevertheless, this practical conclusion is coherent enough with the theoretical premise of the two modes of production, not only distinct but disconnected.67 According to Bensaïd, the dual system thesis was neither theoretically nor practically adequate. He instead upheld the hypothesis according to which the contemporary oppression of women is embedded in a structure dominated by the logic of the commodity where capital captures the different forms of domination and gives them coherence according to its overdetermining mode of exploitation (as mentioned above with the concept of overdetermination). For Bensaïd, the concrete connection between women’s social movements and capitalist exploitation is historically confirmed too. The ‘non-theoretical “con-

67

Bensaïd 2000, pp. 145–6.

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crete bond”, that Christine Delphy admits between domestic exploitation and capitalist exploitation is indeed largely verified historically. Since the French Revolution, the ebb and flow of the feminist movement testifies to a close connection, sometimes subterranean, sometimes uncovered, with the fluctuations of the social movement in its ensemble’.68 Before discussing his validation of this statement, I will make a short detour through the category of totality. As stated elsewhere, Bensaïd defended an open and mediated totality, in which capital structures the social formation as a whole through the generalisation of capital and the commodity form. This methodological move shows the structure around which different oppressed actors can unify without splitting into a bad infinity. The contribution of any theory of the autonomy of social movements depends on its articulation with this structure – the capital relation and the struggles of class and oppression implicit in it. It is, therefore, possible with the category of totality to think the unity of plurality, because every person is certainly an actor of a great number of institutions, their specific socialisations and ‘authoritative’ norms ruled by specific temporalities (family, school, factory, neighbourhood), but there exists, in our historically determined modern bourgeois societies, a complex of social relationships that influences practically all of them. Value that is valorised and the general commodification of social relations structure (with a certain time scale) the negative unity of

68

Bensaïd 2000, p. 148. In this discussion, Bensaïd also engaged with Pierre Bourdieu’s work on masculine domination. Bourdieu was ‘hardly interested in female waged-labour and preferred to insist on “the extraordinary autonomy of sexual structures relative to economic structures, of modes of reproduction relative to modes of production”. For him, it is essentially the evolution of the school and the family that explains that masculine domination … and it is symbolic violence, the dimension of all domination … Certainly, Bourdieu guards against an ethereal interpretation of the symbolic that would minimise the role of physical violence. However, he conceives of it as the principal foundation that orders the reciprocal and symmetrical relation between eroticised (male) domination and eroticised (female) subordination … This domination-subordination is therefore an effect of symbolic violence that is exercised “for the most part through the purely symbolic channels of communication and cognition (more precisely, misrecognition), recognition, or even feeling”. How is it possible to escape from this social “inscription in the body”? … Bourdieu correctly recalls the limits of individual conversion and the “simple effort of will”. He refuses the illusion that consists in believing that symbolic violence can be defeated with only the arms of consciousness and will. But he is also led to minimise the resistances and experiences through which collective consciousness and memory is developed over the long-term … Only “a few historical accidents” remain open to hope, opening an ephemeral gap in the leaden horizon of domination. Being enclosed in the vicious circle of masculine domination, Bourdieu has great trouble placing himself in the point of view of women’s oppression and taking a real interest in the history of the feminist movements as the debates that have traversed it’. Bensaïd 2000, p. 147.

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resistances to the despotism of capital. The category of an open and mediated totality – not an abstract and formal, indeed totalitarian, totality – permits one to sustain an open theoretical operation. In Bensaïd’s essay he recalled that, during the 1970s, ‘certain feminist currents had elaborated a representation of women’s oppression modelled on class relations’. It was within these debates that the notions of ‘domestic exploitation’, ‘patriarchal mode of production’ and ‘the struggle of sexes’ appeared. The goal of these controversies was to search for the ‘principal contradiction’ between two real antagonisms (sex and class). ‘At the risk’, he writes, ‘of seeing oppression as a structural invariant that is indifferent to modes of production, and of underestimating its historical transformations, the question of its “origin” became central: their anteriority was regarded as founding their primacy’.69 If women’s oppression has existed throughout different modes of production – slavery, feudalism and capitalism – then it is not a static invariant persisting unchanged across each mode of production. To reiterate a previously mentioned point, the capitalist mode of production does not simply reproduce an age-old oppression: ‘it redefines it, reshapes it, reorganises it, in excluding women from the public space in formation’: Since the Renaissance, the growth of manufacturing and waged labour was accompanied by the vicious expulsion of women from spheres of production (and knowledge) to which they still had access to in the system of corporations. Capitalist development thus rooted oppression in the exclusion of women from productive labour and in household reclusion. Produced by this process, the nuclear family perpetuates it and doubles its effects. Its specific structure corresponds to the appearance of the ‘free’ worker on the labour market, to the capitalist division of labour and to the scission between production and reproduction. The formation of the modern nuclear family is thus tied to the development of market relations and the formation of the modern state. Whereas lineage solidarity, adapted to agricultural autarchy and the collective accomplishment of drudgery, becomes a factor of immobilism, the new family caters to the demands of a free and mobile labour force. The social division of labour and labour’s subordination to the despotism of the factory manifest the split between the sites of work and living, between production and reproduction.70

69 70

Bensaïd 1995, p. 127. Ibid.

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Why, then, does this discussion matter? It matters theoretically because Bensaïd’s writings on women’s oppression uncover a key tension. On the one hand, Bensaïd does not think that women’s oppression will disappear the moment the capitalist mode of production is overthrown. Additionally, if one accepts the autonomy of the women’s movement, it is necessary to clarify its relation to the class struggle. Despite being committed to the abolition of capital, a specific temporality of women's liberation and its political-social deliberations would be required; faith in an automatic guarantee is ruled out. That justifies the autonomy of the women’s movement for an indeterminate time, beyond the transcendence of the capitalist mode of production. Today, here and now, the struggle against women’s oppression is closely interleaved with the struggle of the workers’ movement, demands over labour time, over public services, childcare, education, the right to access abortion, contraception, menstrual amenities in workplaces, etc. Class and women’s struggles are organically tied. What allows for the unification of these struggles is not an a priori ought, but the fact that capital creates the conditions – and again, not mechanically – that can permit the articulation.71 However: Some readings of Marx understand oppression as a simple derivative effect of capitalism, due to naturally expire with the abolition of private property and the massive entry of women into productive labour. Naïve or self-serving, this reading is not acceptable. The oppression of the sexes is unquestionably anterior to the relations of capitalist exploitation and

71

In an interview in 1991 he said of the subject: ‘I don’t think I reduced the feminist struggle to the class struggle. It is clear that the relations of sexual oppression are not reducible to class exploitation. These debates are already old. I have not re-read them. And it is probable that my own opinions on the question have evolved. But it was something else: the specific articulation of the relation of oppression to the relation of exploitation in a given social formation, capitalist society. If I remember well, the polemic was aimed at the arguments of an Italian feminist collective (and a book Être exploitées), as well as certain political interpretations of Luce Irigaray’s books. I believe that the Italian collection in question, in interpreting the relation of oppression as a relation of exploitation between man and women, reproducing in the family the mechanism of capitalist exploitation, ending with simultaneously losing sight of the specificity of this exploitation and that of oppression. The demand for a domestic wage resulted from this, which seemed to me to create a situation of imprisonment in the familial ghetto. My problem was therefore, rather, in the general logic of the book, to try to understand how, through the family, sex oppression articulated itself, on the one hand, to the institutional arrangements of the state … and on the other hand, in the social division of labour. The conclusion was that oppression wasn’t born with it, (there was a critique of the role of the family in the Stalinist ussr) which justified a fully autonomous movement for women’s liberation but was

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nothing guarantees that it will disappear with their overthrow. Once this relative autonomy is admitted between the relations of sexes and class relations, the whole problem consists precisely in theoretically determining the modalities of their interweaving and their specific articulation in the framework of a given mode of production.72 Bensaïd thought it was necessary to use Marxist categories in a theoretically specific way, being one condition for taking the debates forward and resolving the outstanding disputes of the 1970s. The demand for conceptual specificity had both theoretical and strategic implications because: The theoretical renaissance of the 1970s had witnessed different attempts to affirm the pre-eminence of the patriarchal relation over the relation of exploitation. Originally prevailing over production, reproduction then justifies the primacy of the struggle of sexes over the class struggle. Playing on the analogical ambiguity of the categories of exploitation and productive labour, other currents asserted a strict parallelism between the struggles of sexes and class. Their hypothetical convergence vanishes in a faraway future. This approach reveals itself compatible with questionable immediate alliances between radical feminist currents and reformist parties, in the name of a historical division of tasks, from a workers’ movement qualified as on the whole male. Others finally insist on housework as a fundamental relation common to women in production, independently of their class affiliations or their different conditions. Hence, the

72

neither parallel to the relation of exploitation. It has been remodelled by capital and was dominated by it in a totalisation of social relations. So, the women’s struggle could not be conceived as parallel to the class struggle, but in a strategic alliance with the working class as long as this domination was not overthrown. That obviously doesn’t exhaust the problem and I think that today I would approach it in another way in the framework of a re-reading of Volume Three of Capital and in light of the subsequent contributions of the women’s movement. But the trajectory of certain radical feminist currents has since illustrated the discord around which the controversy revolved at the time. In the name of the disconnection between the women’s struggles and the class struggles, we thus saw the founding core of the mlf support Francois Mitterrand as the least bad, a choice of tactical realpolitik perfectly compatible from the point of view with the maintenance of a strategy for women’s liberation. However, the articulation takes its vengeance: a social policy of austerity and renunciation of change cannot not have an impact on the social conditions for the liberation of women’. Entretien avec des étudiants, with Thierry Briault, Miguel Galaz, Kyeong-ki Hong, Jacques Rouge and Stavros Tombazos. Bensaïd 1995, p. 130.

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household replaces the workplace as the site of confrontation. The universal woman becomes the subject of subversion … the touchstone for all strategy.73 Labour power includes the means necessary for its reproduction, so that the pool of those who own and sell labour power can continue. Capital only values wage labour that is able to produce surplus value. If a worker contributes with his salary not only to the reproduction of its own, individual, labour power but to the upkeep of his own family, the cost of this upkeep would vary as a result of the unpaid and socially non-measurable domestic labour. For the Italian feminists, ‘the wage is the price of the male family boss who sells himself to the capitalist and thus becomes boss of his family, appearing from there as a free individual’: The price paid by the capitalist for female labour is the exact difference between that which is paid to men and what men give to women for their upkeep. Men’s wages will therefore be structurally superior to that of women, because, inside its value, there is, even if this is only partial, the value of essential domestic labour: the upkeep and reproduction of labour power.74 The definition of ‘exploited domestic labour proceeds thus from an analogy with surplus-labour handed over “freely” by the worker to the boss’. In the relation ‘of capitalist exploitation, this surplus-labour has the characteristic of being convertible into profit and accumulated as a capital form’. For Bensaïd, the ‘indirect integration of domestic labour in the determination of wages nevertheless creates a bond of personalised dependence … rather than a relation of exploitation in the specific meaning of the extraction of surplus-value’. This results in a relation of ‘authority and domination’ and can lead to tyrannical and despotic domestic relations but this does not make the worker into ‘an exploiter in the strict meaning of the concept, in a determinate mode of production’.75 This would be a ‘patriarchal’ or ‘domestic’ mode of produc73 74 75

Bensaïd 1995, p. 138. Bensaïd 1995, p. 130. Bensaïd 1995, pp. 130–1. Certain feminists responded to the objection by (analogically) claiming that masculine control over women was a mode of production. For example: ‘A patriarchal mode of production can be defined as a specific network of relations, including without reducing itself to them, control over the means of production which structures the exploitation of women and/or children by men, in a social formation that can include other modes of production, without any necessarily prevailing’.

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tion. As mentioned above, the major difficulty was that domestic labour is carried out outside of the market. It ‘produces use values destined to be consumed in the family. Therefore, it cannot possess an exchange value’. If these use-values created in the domestic sphere ‘escaped the closed circuit of production/consumption in order to venture out to the market, it would immediately deny itself as domestic labour and fall into the sphere of commodity production’: If it is not able to directly increase the social surplus-product which is the object of the class struggle, domestic labour nevertheless contributes to indirectly determine the labour socially necessary for the reproduction of labour power. A growth of its productivity in fact allows a relative decrease of the value of commodities necessary to this reproduction and, as a consequence, an indirect increase of surplus-value. No more than domestic work is the source of a new category of value (domestic value), the domestic production of use values does not define a patriarchal (or domestic) mode of production that superimposes itself over the capitalist mode of production. The form according to which a society produces its means of subsistence, the mode of production has a social character: the forms of concrete production of individuals must be inter-linked, the production of every cell of the system must be socially connected to the other organs via the market. Or else, there exists no common measure between the domestic labour that is carried out in the family and that which is carried out in another.76 The exchange value of a commodity is determined by the socially necessary labour (time) for its production. The labour theory of value does not deal with ‘the number of hours employed in the production of a particular object taken in isolation’. Rather, it is accounted for ‘through the labour time that it is necessary to make it in the average conditions of production of this historically determined society’. The exchange value of a commodity thus determined by the quantity of socially necessary abstract labour needed for its production, the market providing the recognitive mechanisms of measuring. Money is the form of appearance that this value attains on the market. Therefore, ‘if domestic labour creates a certain type of value, it will have to be possible to speak of a socially necessary abstract labour’. In any case:

76

Bensaïd 1995, pp. 131–2.

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What does ‘socially necessary abstract labour’ mean in this case? No social metabolism permits the determination of the time of abstract domestic labour and the value of ‘one woman’s hour in the household’. To the extent that this work is not mediated by the market (a domestic labour market), no social mechanism is able to mark the number of hours of necessary domestic work into an average to produce the food of a family and the upkeep of a household. To speak of socially necessary abstract labour thus has no meaning [italics added]. Strictly speaking, the ensemble of use values produced by domestic labour will therefore not define a ‘patriarchal mode of production’. In capitalist society, the production of domestic use-values is insufficient for the reproduction of family members according to the average socially recognised needs. It is necessary to buy commodities. In order to be able to buy them, it is necessary to sell labour power. Short of falling into the Robinson Crusoe myths of self-production and an autarchic domestic economy, it must be recognised that the so-called patriarchal (or domestic) mode of production, left to itself, would immediately collapse in the breakdown of social relations.77 It is accordingly quite difficult to bring domestic labour under the category of abstract labour. It produces use-values in the home and, to this extent, one rightly calls it labour. This is as far as the concept will go. Bensaïd underlined that the will to bring domestic work under the category of productive labour, without making it clear whether it is productive labour in the broad sense (production of use-values) or in the strict sense (labour that is productively exchanged with capital) results in strange formulations. No social mechanism allows one to determine how one hour of domestic labour (concrete labour) is worth an hour of another form of concrete labour if the market does not play a mediating-recognitive role. Or, in other words, it cannot be socially equalised labour in the specific form that it acquires in a commodity economy. Of this problem: The imprudent transfer of Marx’s concepts outside of their specific field of application has often obscured the problems, as the approximate handling of the notions exchange value and productive work illustrate. The distinction between use-value and commodity value (exchange value) thus constitutes, according to Andrée Michel, an ideological heritage

77

Ibid.

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marked by the last century. She defined domestic use-values as ‘potential exchange values’. The terminological artifice resolves nothing to the extent that all activity, including a spontaneous recreational activity, can represent a ‘potential exchange value’: it is enough that Maradona the kid, who ‘gratis’ played with the ball on a Buenos Aires sidewalk, becomes a waged professional player in order to go through the sphere of the game to that of the spectacle’s commodity production. Regarding the productive character (or not) of domestic work, the confusion is at its peak. Lending this category an axiological reach, the feminist theoreticians have often seen in the restrictive determination of productive work (exchanging itself with capital) the expression of a male conception of productivity and the justification for free non-productive domestic labour. As a reaction, they identified the productivity of this labour by its utility. If all useful activity is productive, the concept of productive labour becomes so elastic that is loses all of its theoretical pertinence.78 Clarity about Marx’s critique of political economy provides for a rewarding theoretical exchange between feminist research and the critique of political economy because one unavoidable question facing theorists of different kinds of oppression is the following: how are institutions of oppression and domination moulded and shaped by the capitalist mode of production and its internal functioning? But there is a danger that the specificity of Marx’s critique of political economy is not grasped or adequately applied, the new way of doing science is not heard and some can jump too quickly to rejecting or confusing Marx’s central theoretical concepts. This is exactly what certain feminists did when they considered a productive activity as that which is not an activity for oneself, ‘but a labour “furnished to another”’. This was a necessary move in order to ‘stress that wives do productive work for their husbands within the labour relationship of marriage. The tasks they do vary with their husbands’ needs and desires’. Because of this position, the concept of appropriation is used in a moral way, between ‘the person for whom a service is performed and the person by whom the labour incorporated in the service is appropriated’.79 This relation is then held within the bounds of the nuclear family. If this is so, then, Bensaïd suggests that ‘we are far from the specific productivity of labour from the point of view of capital’.80 The specificity of Marx’s concepts, as they revolve around

78 79 80

Bensaïd 1995, p. 134. Ibid. Ibid.

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value, means that one cannot use terms like exploitation, appropriation or productive labour outside of their specific field of application. From the point of view of the theory of value, it makes no sense to speak of domestic exploitation because value is not valorised. Given these claims, Bensaïd reproached certain feminists for identifying production and reproduction, and of mechanically applying the categories of value, surplus-value and exploitation to the sphere of reproduction where the nuclear family is situated. Cinzia Arruzza wrote of Bensaïd’s intervention: Value is a social relation, that is to say, it does not depend on the physical or moral qualities of the object or the service produced but rather on the relation between production, circulation and reproduction of capital. It is only within this relation that one can speak of ‘abstract labour’ and of ‘socially necessary abstract labour’. Otherwise said, without the arbitration of the market, there is no common measure, therefore no abstract labour, value, and furthermore, no surplus-value. As Bensaïd suggested, with his citation of Claude Meillassoux, the domestic economy belongs to a different temporal order, because labour power is not a commodity in it [in the domestic sphere – D.R.]; it is still necessary that it becomes it, and the way in which it reproduces itself is not entirely regulated by Capital’s clock watch.81 The discordance of time played a critical role in Bensaïd’s understanding of women’s liberation and oppression, within which Bensaïd paid close attention to the reproduction of the capitalist mode of production. Non-waged activity, activity that does not produce surplus value, finds itself socially devalued and depreciated. The ‘exclusive sanctification of productive labour from the point of view of capital depreciates all recreational activity and repressed nonprocreative sexuality. A general process of infantilisation and social debasement knocks the marginal and excluded out of the sphere of commodity production’.82 Domestic labour’s specific role in the reproduction of capital involves reproducing the relations of production and the division of labour. That is to say, institutions like the family and the schooling system do not produce, but are the effect of class formation and discipline, reproducing it. On the surface, reproduction seems abstract, but it is eminently effective for life. Capital seizes on pre-existing specific forms of oppression and subjects them to

81 82

Arruzza 2012, p. 83. Bensaïd 1995, p. 136.

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its own reproductive imperatives. To theoretically defend his position, Bensaïd held to his conceptual maxim that logical order is primary over historical order. Bensaïd’s point of systematic departure for analysis is the structural conditions of the reproduction of this historically specific social formation; Bensaïd, in effect, followed a principle of historical specificity. Tied to this maxim, he wrote: Research into oppression often considers that the question of reproduction is one of Marx’s blind spots. This is not exactly the case. During the past century, the institutional apparatus of reproduction (schooling, public health, social housing and social protection) was embryonic. By far, the family remained the principal one among them. The value of labour power is determined by the ‘costs to maintain the worker and his family’, it is not a case of immediate costs destined for a strict biological reproduction, but in fact a historical (intergenerational) reproduction, including the transmission of a culture, knowledge, morals. Through the impact on the determination of socially necessary labour time, reproduction feeds back into the division between necessary labour and surpluslabour. From the point of view of the process as a whole, tackled in book three of Capital, it is this that determines, on the basis of the preceding cycle, the relations of value put into motion at the beginning of the new cycle of accumulation.83 Bensaïd’s theoretical writings on time may also have a systematic place in the further elaboration of a Marxist theory of social reproduction that does not fall into the traps of a biological determinism; such a determinism isolates biological, physical and social reproduction from the historically specific social relations in which they form and change, which inevitably ends up producing a theoretically inadequate concept that Marx called a simple abstraction – ‘an abstraction which universalises what is historically specific and therefore yields only partial or misleading knowledge’.84 Marxist theory can overcome biological determinism because ‘it pays attention to the fact of biological reproduction and to the differential role that the sexes play in it, not because of the way capitalism sets limits and constraints on them; in other words, because of the specific way intergenerational reproduction is socially organised within capitalism’.85 83 84 85

Bensaïd 1995, pp. 136–7. Arruzza 2016, p. 23. Ibid.

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With the emergence of the capitalist mode of production, domestic relations were founded on the control of means of reproduction ‘rather than [merely] on the means of production’, and reproduction was subordinated to production (though, as concepts, production and reproduction form a differentiated unity and cannot be collapsed into one another). The twofold process means that the time socially necessary to reproduce labour power follows from a ‘double temporality or different cycles: an economic cycle of the reproduction of capital and a generational cycle of the reproduction of labour power, an immediate cycle of reproduction and an expanded cycle of reproduction of labour power, difficult to reduce to the same social measure’. While capital constantly tends to save time and raise productivity through the organisation and intensification of work, ‘it tends to economise the time of reproduction, through the imposition of norms distinct from norms of production’. From one angle, ‘in giving this invisible time the name of natural familial harmony, in raising the productivity of domestic labour through the development of electrical technologies, finally in partially socialising this reproduction via the means of public services’.86 Wages indirectly represent the part of the product socially necessary for reproduction in historically given conditions: When this indirect wage (and through it access to public services, education and health) is attacked, the burden of reproduction must be deferred to another social relation (the domestic relation). After half a century where women have massively entered into active wage labour and where the initial role of the family unit has been reduced through the commodification of a growing number of its functions (laundry, meals, repairs), nobody could predict the consequences of such a reversal.87 There is another dimension to Bensaïd’s discussion in La discordance des temps, namely the way in which capital ‘seizes bodies and words’. This theme is taken directly from his intervention into Critique Communiste from 1977 titled Le corps et la parole saisis par la marchandise (a response to a certain political reading of Luce Irigaray). Bensaïd directly echoed the language of this early text where he said, ‘Capital has seized bodies and reduced them to a common abstraction. It turns “labour power”, into a commodity among many, like the others: a unity of use-value and exchange-value’. Capitalism assigns women the task of reproduction and upkeep of labour power – the societal-economic meaning that the system imposes on women’s bodies. This domestic function, subordinated as it is to commodity relations ‘remains partially foreign to them’. 86 87

Bensaïd 1995, pp. 137–8. Ibid.

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This ‘includes in periods of massive social mobilisation of the female workforce’, via the double workday, women remain subject to the ‘direct production of use-values’. According to Bensaïd, this is a feature of a reified social world. Women, having a specific embodied experience of the world, maintain ‘a relation to the body and speech, to time and matter, not amenable to the generalised fetishism of the commodity’. ‘Such’, Bensaïd wrote, ‘is indeed the paradoxical counterpart of the great imprisonment in the family and the household, of the social and cultural denigration of an activity that is excluded from the relation of monetary exchange’. The family, contradictory in its social and historical nature, is shaped by commodity production, but also can be a site of reified rebellion against the heartless nature of this system. Temporality is linked to this paradox. Though domestic labour does not take place under the direct watch of capital’s clock, it is still articulated to the capitalist market and has a certain relation to the temporalities of capital. The relation therefore has resistance implicit in it, Bensaïd writes: Every oppression generates its resistances, even if they are subterranean. Thus, secular exclusion fashions the world of women … a universe subject to another temporality, to another flow of works and days, to reproductive cycles other than those of the metamorphoses of the commodity. At the risk of accepting the naturalisation of its own condition … the women’s movement has sometimes searched for an original and preserved authenticity in this domestic space. Against the artificiality of capital and its enchanted world, the private and intimate sphere would have preserved the enjoyment of the body, a language where the world scales the weight of words and words their weight of meaning, a period punctuated by seasonal words and blood cycles, an original life of which women would be the guardians. Like a shelter and freedom from commodity production, domestic labour would remain rooted in an anterior experience to the great fractures of the capitalist division of labour. It will maintain a creative dimension, a secret complicity with nature, a sympathetic confidant whose whispers contrast with the anonymous indifference of the market. It perpetuates the mystery of a time that is resistant to mechanical abstraction … This silent critique of commodity relations and relations of power which go hand in hand risks going astray into the archaeological search for origins and the jargon of authenticity. Capital’s reign leaves nothing natural intact and saves no culture.88 88

Bensaïd 1995, pp. 140–1.

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Bensaïd postulated a materialism in opposition to the idealist-ideological search for primordial Being. So too did he take domestic production to be, ‘in certain respects’, comparable to artisanal activity, which ‘Swallowed up and remodelled to the detail by the market’s demands, does not escape the laws of the market’. As the ‘direct production of use-values, forced and mutilated, domestic labour is not free labour, but the obliged other side of wage labour’. The movements and activities of use-value production are not immune to the alienation of dominated and exploited labour. This ‘real subsumption of the domestic relation to the commodity relation gets to the root of oppression much better than the formal identification of woman as a commodity’, making the woman a ‘use-value for man’, an ‘exchange value between men’.89 Bensaïd also handles reproduction in a manner contrasted with ultra-left proposals. Though he recognises that reproduction had been conceptually neglected, he also insists that it should not be detached from production as the ultra-lefts tend to do. The ultra-left calls to immediately abolish the institutions of reproduction, like education and the family, treat them autonomously from capitalist production as a whole. If they are detached from production, one cannot make sense of modern modes of domination, their historical transformations and their synchronic organisation, let alone entertain the idea of their immediate abolition without a transition to a new mode of production. This is why Bensaïd endorsed Frédérique Vinteuil’s assertion that ‘women have a history, but it is a fragmented history, shaped by the evolution of modes of production, the strengthening of the state and its effects on the family’.90 The primacy of modes of production, and their relations to the state and the family, is a means of centring an argument against the continued reproduction of the capitalist mode of production and the oppression of women (and lgbtiq oppressions related to bourgeois gender norms) synchronically articulated to it.

8

The Political Reading of Irigaray and the Consequences for Authenticity

Bensaïd paid particular attention to Irigaray’s politics and philosophy of sexual difference. Specifically, he thought Irigaray’s proposals in The Sex Which is Not One ceded too much ground to a jargon of authenticity. One should note that Bensaïd was not engaging generally with Irigaray’s new practice of philo-

89 90

Ibid. Quoted from Bensaïd 1995, p. 140.

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sophy, which is indeed radical and tends in the direction of materialism, which could be further elaborated. Instead, Bensaïd was interested in the theoretical impasses and possible political effects of Irigaray’s differentialist feminism. Bensaïd’s challenge centred on Irigaray’s claims that woman is a commodity as such, ‘a use-value for man’ and ‘an exchange value among men’.91 Bensaïd raised three objections to Irigaray’s positions, each of which dissented against the conceptual slippage and transposition of the categories of a critique of political economy onto the articulations of sexual difference, though in a manner different from the other authors discussed above. First of all, woman as such is not a use-value for man, nor an exchange value among men. Bensaïd’s counter-claim was that woman is an oppressed producer of domestic use-values; additionally, though the exchange of women can be taken symbolically, it does not accord with the concept of commodity exchange – but Bensaïd did not mention the realities of sex trafficking and the persistence of enslaved women. Second, the abrupt identification of woman with the commodity does not grasp the specificity of women’s oppression in its relation to the division of labour and the familial institutions. Third, Bensaïd suggests that the privileged relation between the commodity and the matter-materiality of its content (the feminine body) amounts to a kind of vulgar economics. Each difference relates to the articulation of the feminine embodied singular individual and the critique of modern bourgeois societies in which the capitalist mode of production dominates. Bensaïd thought Irigaray simply did not allow for conceptual argumentation; he disagreed with her parameters of dialogue, writing that Irigaray ‘preventatively refuses all conceptual discussion’.92 Bensaïd attributes to Irigaray an orientation that is not theoretical, nor rigorous, but is a discourse based on pure analogy. This needs to be read as a criticism of the jargon of authenticity because, for Irigaray, feminine language has no place for theoretical-conceptual articulation, which is taken to be a positive masculine discourse that is in the service of a weaponisation directed against women (which it no doubt can be). The partition of discourse means Irigaray engages, so Bensaïd thinks, in an a-historical and pre-emptory affirmation of sexual difference in relation to conceptual-truthful-theoretical argument, leading to generalities about the exploitation of women as such. This is a delicate point because Irigaray – to my mind – is right to make the case for a new practice of philosophy able to disrupt the masculine Master-discourse of the idealist philosophies. At a very basic

91 92

Irigaray 1985, p. 31. Bensaïd 1995, p. 141.

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level, Irigaray’s move is radical and materialist. However, it confuses a rejection of masculine-idealist-discursive systems with conceptual systematicity, weakening it, and fails the test of universality, which is structured by a commitment to a philosophy of difference. In the terms of Bensaïd’s criticism, for lack of systematicity and theoretical universality, Irigaray produces a poor abstraction of the modalities and transformations involved in relations of women’s oppression. At the practical level, Bensaïd thinks Irigaray’s orientation leaves no choice but an illusory escape from the domestic, sexual and oppressive alienations of feminine experience in modern bourgeois societies. As powerful as Irigaray’s political-philosophical practice is, it is not up to the task of women’s liberation, so Bensaïd effectively thought. Though Bensaïd cut against philosophies of difference, the jargon of authenticity and the search for a primordial Being of femininity, in line with his disagreement with Heideggerian themes, he nevertheless took seriously the singularity of feminine time in societies in which the capitalist mode of production dominates. Important in terms of lived experience, it also speaks to another dimension of Bensaïd’s orientation. He took the materiality of sexual difference seriously, effectively in continuity with Beauvoir, which does not reduce feminine singularity to a relativistic gender construction alone (as crucial as such socio-historical-performative construction is). Neither does it amount to biological determinism. The materiality of sex has five elements in Bensaïd’s argument, none of which is removed from modern bourgeois societies: bodies are subsumed into the disciplinary apparatus of capital; all bodies are potential labour power; the feminine body (not psyche) is different because it assumes the physical reproduction of labour power, thus the moment of dissimilarity affirms an embodied feminine relation to the world of modern bourgeois societies (and women remain much more than their bodies); the feminine specificity implies a dual function, namely as a means of production (variable capital) and reproduction in a historically specific context; the modern bourgeois state machine and its apparatuses, tied to the mechanisms of capitalist production and reproduction, intervene to shape lived experiences, embodiment, expectations and deny bodily autonomy all in the context of the contradictory dynamics of capitalist accumulation, which can ideologically shift back and forth from a conservative celebration of motherhood, attacks on abortion and then celebrations of the publicly engaged and independent woman. With these five steps, it is critical to see that Bensaïd is neither a strict sexual differentialist (essentialist), nor a pure gender constructivist (relativist), but instead a materialist in the line of Beauvoir, for whom sexual difference is involved in feminine embodiment and becoming, which can be articulated in a project of masculine-feminine (class) solidarity for liberation because it is historically

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situated; however, Bensaïd isn’t blind to gender construction and the zones of gender fluidity aligned to it. As a historically specific materialist he provides helpful conceptual tools to think performativity and gender construction.

9

Commodity Fetishism and the Liberation of Bodies

The contradictory phenomenon Bensaïd has outlined can be related to commodity fetishism. Fetishism fragments perceptions of reality, turns things upside down, and produces the illusion that only in the private-individual sphere can one freely regain lost time. This is why Arruzza is precise to point out that, ‘rather than searching for a solution in the private bearer of original and non-commodifiable values, it is better to think of the liberation of the body as conditioned by the overcoming [dépassement] of the commodity category as such’.93 In La discordance des temps, Bensaïd wrote: [a] conceptual organisation of time, capital is also an inventory of the submission of the body to the discipline of the machine and to the principle of performance (productivity) put to work. As labour power, the body becomes a commodity among others and every body becomes a potential commodity … Even temporarily subtracted from the labour market, the (maternal) body of the woman is not for all that an enjoyment of the body dedicated to a natural activity. It always bears the marks of the institutional networks commanded by the state. The double workday speaks to this dual bodily submission: dominated as a potential commodity, the body is also subjected as the producer of offspring.94 As a consequence of this mutilation: Whatever they are, the deadly treatment of the body and the way it is put to work as a spectacle (aesthetic and sportive) bear the ineffaceable scars of this mutilation. Obedience and docility at work do not exclusively follow from the authoritarian intervention of the state and its institutions. It proceeds from the division and organisation of labour. The emancipation of the body therefore goes through the disappearance of commodity categories, beginning with that of labour power.95 93 94 95

Arruzza 2012, p. 94. Bensaïd 1995, p. 142. Bensaïd 1995, p. 143.

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Bensaïd articulates a radical anti-essentialism, but also recognises the centrality of time to liberation, as social act and process. I think one should follow the further development of these themes that Arruzza suggested concerning performativity and temporality concerning Judith Butler’s early work on gender, particularly Gender Trouble. Gender, being a social construction, conceals its genesis and process of becoming. Time plays a crucial role, Arruzza explains, gender being ‘therefore both the sedimentation of a series of norms, which present themselves in a reified form as corporeal styles, as the “natural configuration of bodies,” and the practices that enact these styles and therefore produce gendered subjects’.96 Gender is seen then as a social-temporal construction, ‘if corporeal styles are the reified form taken by the sedimentation of norms, they could be understood as objectified time, as past time which haunts the present under the form of reification’ which make the norms take on a natural form, the post festum effect of sedimentation (Arruzza’s claim that reification plays a central role in Butler’s account of gender is critical here).97 The reified bourgeois standpoint looks upon a socially constructed reality in a post festum manner, but it is within this social-temporal framework that gender and capital can be de-reified, opening the possibility for agency and transformation, for (with regard to Butler): [S]ocially constituted temporality and repetition – in the form of a historicity without history – are the two key concepts for Butler’s de-essentialisation of gender. Even the gendered body is, as we have seen, a gendered corporealisation of time, so that the spatial metaphor of a ‘ground’ is nothing but repetition and sedimentation in the form of reification. Finally, as the enactment of corporeal styles requires a performative repetition of acts and practices, gender identity can never be considered stable, for it is always exposed to the possibility of the breaking of this abstract temporality, through lapses, resistances, the ironical play of gender performances, ruptures of the binary boundaries imposed by heteronormativity, and the incoherence between gender and object of sexual-desire choice.98 In Arruzza’s and Bensaïd’s projects, it is necessary to historicise (with attention to historical transformations) but also elucidate the specific logic at work

96 97 98

Arruzza 2015, p. 34. Arruzza 2015, pp. 34–5. Arruzza 2015, p. 36.

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within a mode of production. The specific logic of capital – where abstract time rules – imposes sedimentation (think of Merleau-Ponty’s notion), repetition and variation, and constructs gender and sexual identities. Butler’s limitation, then, is that she ‘herself does not explicitly recognise this relation, the ritualistic character of gender performance, this spatialisation of an empty time that takes place in the forced repetition of stylising acts, is mediated by the pervasiveness of abstract time given by the diffusion of the commodity form’.99 There is a theoretical need, therefore, to explore the full implications of the reification of sexual identities, ‘but also the very process through which this reification takes place, i.e. the repetition over time of their enactment, can be understood as part of a capitalist totality, inasmuch as one understands the latter as a conceptual organisation of time and as an ensemble of social relations and practices’, meaning that the ‘perspective of temporality and performativity … illuminates the fundamental imbrications between objectification and repetition or reproduction that characterises both capital and gender in advanced capitalist countries’.100 With this argument, we have another angle from which to read Marx l’intempestif and La discordance des temps. The application of Marxist categories within the field of the critique of political economy opens pathways for thinking the liberation of bodies from reified gender and sexual identities (hence a space open for thinking the fluidity of gender forms). Arruzza’s insights can be related to what Josette Trat called Bensaïd’s ‘obsession’, which amounted to taking ‘into account the diversity of dominations all the while articulating them to class exploitation and to an anti-capitalist perspective’.101 In his writings on feminism, Bensaïd insists on the political necessity of situating the feminist movement in a ‘class’ perspective, because women’s liberation is not possible under the capitalist mode of production. Bensaïd criticised certain feminists for thinking that it was: It is not likely that the concrete liberation of women is compatible with [capitalist] relations of production and domination. Reciprocally, if it doesn’t guarantee the automatic liberation of women, the overthrow of capitalism is hardly conceivable with patriarchal domination as it stands.102

99 100 101 102

Arruzza 2015, p. 48. Arruzza 2015, p. 50. Trat 2012, p. 100. Quoted from Trat 2012, p. 98.

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The other side of this problem concerns strategic orientations, Bensaïd wrote: While racial and sexual equality are not in principle incompatible with capital … exploitation is the essence of it. Class exploitation has a distinct status of oppression, ‘a strategic function at the very heart of capitalism’, that the pluralisation of conflict doesn’t wear out: ‘a democracy founded on class differences is a contradiction in terms’.103 If one indefinitely pluralises conflict, by denying a mode of global regulation in which social relations cohere, this has the consequence of renouncing bearers of possible universalisation; in this context, the quest for the concrete is without limits. Everything has its own specificities. Caught up in fragmented interests, ‘individuals themselves are condemned to a desolate solitude’. This patchwork of generalised identities is the ‘ultimate avatar of commodity fetishism’ with only ‘abstract singularities of an individualism without individuation’. Class conflict is not one conflict among others. ‘At the heart of the dominant mode of production, it structures the whole of socialisation’, Bensaïd argued. ‘To underline that’, he continued, ‘doesn’t lead us to consider oppression as secondary’. The ‘accumulation of capital nourishes this oppression and continues it’. The ‘capitalist exchange economy doesn’t abolish the domestic economy of transmission’. It ‘takes possession of it and uses its occult role in the “permanent accumulation of a base [labour power – D.R.]”, at the level of the national market and at the scale of international unequal exchange’. Concluding his discussion in La discordance des temps: Oppression existed before capitalism. It will not instantaneously disappear with it, without a specific struggle following from another temporal register. This is where the autonomy of the women’s movement for emancipation is necessary. But the contradictions are inseparable from each other. The social relations of class and sex follow neither from the same temporality, nor the same degree of abstraction. In Capital, women have no existence as gender or ‘social sex’. Although women’s labour and migrant flows play a prominent role in determining the value of labour power, the concept of class appears sexually neutral at the level of abstraction which is that of the mode of production. At the level of reproduction closing capital’s cycle, ‘sex’ directly intervenes. Oppression perpetuated by the relation of domestic domination acts reciprocally on the

103

Bensaïd 1995, p. 144.

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class structure itself and on the devolved role of women in the organisation of wage labour itself. Sexually splintered, class relations thus appear ‘gendered’. Criss-crossed with the class front, relations of sex reciprocally appear ‘classed’. Criss-crossing through the whole of the social field, the relations of sex dynamise all the aspects of it.104

10

Women’s Struggle and the Cycles of Social Mobilisation

I return to Bensaïd’s reconstruction of the relationship between the women’s struggle and cycles of social mobilisation as a whole, featured in Le sourire du Spectre; I thus shift from theory to history. Trat pointed out that Bensaïd had ‘perfectly reappropriated the critical reflection collectively led in the perspective of “class struggle feminism” by the feminists of the lcr concerning the relations between the capitalist mode of production and patriarchal oppression, the class struggle and feminist struggles’. Importantly, for Trat, Bensaïd’s La femme est l’avenir du spectre was not ‘a simple repetition of the 1995 book’: It is the occasion to reflect on the contributions and limits of the analysis of masculine domination in Pierre Bourdieu and certain concepts like ‘habitus’ and ‘symbolic violence’. In his conclusion, he makes a nuanced critique of this system of thought: if Bourdieu obliges us to think the inscription of domination in the body, ‘he is also thus led to minimise the resistance and experiences through which a consciousness and a collective memory are formed over the long-term making a movement’. Supporting himself on the sources of feminist historians like Marie-Hélène Zylberberg-Hocquard, [Bensaïd] summarises the women’s struggles in France since the French Revolution, recalling on this occasion the different positions taken by the different currents of the workers’ movement in the face of women’s labour, but equally the political differentiations that arose among the feminists themselves ‘faced with the social question’.105 Women entered the public space throughout the French Revolution. The women’s clubs, the Declaration of the Rights of Woman (written in 1791 by Olympe de Gouges) and the agitation of the Tricoteuses confirmed the mass

104 105

Bensaïd 1995, pp. 144–5. Trat 2012, pp. 98–9.

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entrance. Then, in the days before the revolutions of 1848, ‘a radical feminism symbolised by Flora Tristan was fermented, heir of the feminist and universalist politics of the Tricoteuses’.106 And the Paris Commune was the second time in the history of France that women made their mass entrance into politics and the public sphere. For Bensaïd, it was not coincidental that, The great social transformation, tied to industrialisation, from the end of the 19th century saw the emergence of a militant feminism. It is not because one is a feminist that one works, but because one works that one becomes a feminist, notably among the schoolteachers. In forty years, from 1866 to 1906, the number of women considered ‘active’ (a category that confirms the social depreciation of domestic work) went from 5 million to 7.5 million and from 40% to 59 % of the adult female population. In this same period, the number of women wageworkers in the service sector increased fourfold (they are 800,000 on a total of 2.2 million employees). Hence Le Progrès de Lyon described them as the ‘the queens of the urban proletariat’ … Militant feminism reflected this reality: the teachers and the functionaries played a determinant role. This feminist wave is in many ways comparable to the years 1960–70. The period that preceded the First World War is equally marked by an important legislative activity, with the laws of 1884 (recognising the right of women to union activity without the authorisation of their husbands!), of 1892 on the regulation of women’s and children’s work, in 1907 (which allowed women to use their wage as they please), 1910 (which imposed eleven hours of daily rest for women), in 1913 (which established eight weeks maternity leave).107 Bensaïd narrates that the growth of wage labour was tense and uneven, destabilising the function the bourgeois family strategy assigned to women in the household. As a result of the tension, the ‘responses oscillate’, according to the conjuncture, between a policy that sends women back to the home and managing the public services of education, health, crèches and food. On each side of this oscillation are two absolutes that capitalism cannot solve: retaining all women at home to do unpaid domestic labour without any involvement in the public sphere, thus depriving capital of half the working population it could exploit; or retaining all women in the public sphere without the need, duty and material pressure to reproduce in a private, domestic sphere at the low106 107

Bensaïd 2000, p. 148. Bensaïd 2000, p. 149.

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est cost to capital, which would lead to a collapse in the very conditions for the reproduction of capital or their full state-capital sponsored support. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the legislation passed protecting female labour was perceived by the unions as a way to push down wages and inflame competition between men and women in the workforce. Proudhon, who had an impact on the revolutionary syndicalist movement, contributed to the regressive ideas on women when he wrote that nature had given to women purely domestic functions: ‘Be housewives’! he advised them. The early union movement in France was divided over the question of women’s wage labour, Bensaïd explains: In 1890, a resolution at the fourth congress of union federations considered that ‘for moral and social reasons, the place of women is in the household and not the workshop’. In 1900, the fifth congress of the cgt, founded in 1895, ‘decided that the unions must preach by example and not make their wives work in industry where they take the place of men’. Besides the weight of ideological heritage and symbolic domination, the recurrent tensions between the union movement and the feminist movement appeared clearly tied to the fear of a competition of the labour market weighing down wages. Female labour is confusedly seen as a part of the industrial reserve army of labour on which employers can rest on in accordance with the fluctuations of the conjuncture. However, it is in 1879, then from the creation of the French Workers’ Party that the emancipation of women and equality of the sexes are engraved for the first time into the programme of a political party. After many hesitations, Jules Guesde declared: ‘No, the place of women is no longer in the household, it is everywhere where her activity can and wants to be employed. Why lock up and enclose her?’108 In France, class struggles polarised and differentiated feminism. Socialist feminism emerged as distinct from bourgeois liberal feminism, Christian social feminism, or even Christian reactionary feminism. Unlike the Anglo-Saxon countries, this feminism, on the whole, was not very suffragist. It was more preoccupied with questions like school education, professional training and equality at work.109 108 109

Bensaïd 2000, pp. 151–2. Louise Michel was the symbol of this feminism as it divides itself along class lines. A schoolteacher, communard and revolutionary, Louise Michel became an ambulance nurse and soldier, belonging to the Montmartre sixty-first battalion during the Paris Commune.

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Women’s suffrage rights took steps forward as a result of the resistance against the German occupation and the Liberation; the impetus for formal bourgeois rights coincided with mass upheavals like the uprising against occupation. Many women were involved in the resistance and were drawn into war production. This was also the case in Italy. However, it was the great social transformation that resulted from the long boom in which the new feminist movement emerged, surging forward after May ’68. The relationship between the general strike and the development of a women’s movement was significant, and again, the pattern re-emerged in 1995: It is not a surprise that one finds it again, closely related to the social struggles in the days before and after the great strikes of winter 1995. After the struggles – women making up a large part – of the nurses, teachers, social workers, the demonstration for the right to abortion on the 25th of November 1995 appears thus as the symbolic prelude to the strikes in the public sector.110 Another aspect of this question is the rate of workplace participation. At the end of the 1960s, the rate of workplace participation among male and females was 70% against 40%. In 1996, the proportion grew to 79 % and 64% respectively, where women made up 46% of wageworkers. This made women’s liberation united with the collective school of class struggle (it is from the working class that the largest potential independent women’s movement can emerge). Furthermore, the 1970s and 1980s witnessed a series of legislative reforms. The laws on parental authority in 1970, the law on equal pay in 1972, the Veil law on abortion in 1975 and the Roudy law on professional equality in 1983. However, under capitalism, reforms are not permanent: As the constant battles over contraception and abortion demonstrate, nothing is definitively acquired that isn’t guaranteed by relations of force. Without automatically resulting, as it might have been feared, in a massive return of women to the household, the economic crisis and the

110

She recounted in prison that when she was free, ‘I had my classes: 150 students or more. It wasn’t enough for me to live on, since two thirds of them didn’t pay me. I had to give lessons in music, grammar, history, a little bit of everything, until ten or eleven o’clock in the evening, and when I went home I went to sleep exhausted, unable to do anything’. The radical feminism that Louise Michel embodied was strong among the teachers. Bensaïd 2000, p. 153.

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mutations of work have translated into more subtle attacks: putting into question public services and social protection that is accompanied by a revalorisation of the family. Making the labour market flexible and casual hours imposed on women create new forms of competition.111 Legal victories are a step forward, but bourgeois and formal equality are limited by their own historical conditions. Modern bourgeois society cannot produce a concretely universal human culture between the sexes. It can only produce the social and historical contradiction between a proclaimed universality that it constantly contradicts in practice. In theory, capitalism declares equal pay for women and men. In practice this is not so. According to Bensaïd, notions of abstract universalism were the other side of the conscience of those in power. Against this abstract universality of domination and against the oppressions it conceals, the necessary rebellion of differences and autonomous affirmative action in favour of the oppressed is necessary. For Bensaïd however there remains a danger that difference may fossilise into a liberal form of essentialism, therefore: The struggle for the liberation of women is not separable from the context in which it is embedded. The danger of anti-universalist reaction in the face of global commodification can also translate into the essentialisation of identities and crystallize into communitarian corporatisms to the detriment of the in-common. The logic of singularity thus becomes that of the fragmentation of differences in a post-modern broth and an individualism without a collective horizon. The rhetorical taste for identity tends to absolutise one belonging to the detriment of others … Rather than exclusive identities, long live the singularities that make a passage and connection between the universal and the particular! And long live the difference that differentiates itself in turn! To think equality that will not be homogenous, which takes into account heterogeneity and infinite singularity, it is precisely what Derrida called ‘the democracy to come’. In the network of alliances and conflict where each is engaged, it is without a doubt necessary to look for the red thread that permits, at a given moment, in a given determinate historical situation, unpacking the mix of belongings without any form of discord and dissidence being reducible to this single thread. Contradictory interests (class, sex, generation and nation) wrap, cross and weave at different rhythms, according to social, sexual and men-

111

Bensaïd 2000, pp. 153–4.

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tal temporalities. Under the despotic iron rule of capital and its vindictive fetishes, the diagonal of class criss-crosses through feminism like that of ecology. The recognition, across the notion of gender, of the historical and social antagonisms of sex, incites us to think class consciousness and gender not as parallel and mutually exclusive resistances, but as convergent in a strategically conflictual alliance. The woman is the future of the Spectre. And reciprocally.112 Class struggle and women’s liberation are not mutually exclusive travellers whom happen to bump into each other at random. They have the capacity for spontaneous connection because class struggle is not one conflict among many others. Women’s struggles inevitably converge, somehow, or at least raise sharply, problems of class domination, and have the capacity to become universal. This raises the communist project of finishing with the capitalist mode of production. The communist project invites the smile of the Spectre.

11

Les Irréductibles

Les Irréductibles is constituted by a set of theses about resistance against the spirit of the times. Each thesis revolved around a simple question: must the future be reduced to an infernal repetition of the existing order? ‘Evidently his [Bensaïd’s] response is negative’, Löwy wrote.113 Bensaïd’s counter to postmodernism was the organising principle of Les Irréductibles. He did not seek to re-affirm classical rationalism and its idea of truth, ‘but in fact to meet the challenge of post-modernity in welcoming its part of pertinence. The categories of reason, progress, history and universality have everything to gain in accepting the test of catastrophe and disaster’.114 Despite the pertinence, in moments of political defeat, of reaction and restoration, the daimon of eclecticism appears; carrying out his critique of the post-modern, Bensaïd expressed a certain anxiety. He asked, confronted with new reactions and restorations, whether we were indeed condemned, in turn, to a fragmented thought and politics? Are we reduced to minimalism and the miniature, modest thought and weak thought, to ephemeral pleasures and action without goals? Were we finally resigned to the local without a horizon of universality?

112 113 114

Bensaïd 2000, pp. 158–9. Löwy review not dated. Bensaïd 2001c, pp. 13–14.

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Bensaïd was grappling with a broader perspective too, rejecting the term ‘post’ in the post-modern, since it invoked a formal chronological sequence: first modernity, then post-modernity in a linear fashion. It was more useful to see eclecticism as recurrent theme of phases of defeat and political depression. Situated within this constellation of recurrent themes, Bensaïd proposed five theses of resistance; their form deliberately emphasising ‘the necessary work of the negative’. In what did these theses consist? 1. Politics cannot be dissolved into ethics or aesthetics; 2. The class struggle cannot be reduced to the politics of communitarian identities; 3. Imperialism has not been dissolved in commodity globalisation; 4. Whatever the words to express it, communism is irreducible to [and irreconcilable with] its bureaucratic counterfeits; 5. The dialectic of reason is irreducible to the broken mirror of post-modernity. These five points were incontrovertible, according to Bensaïd. I discuss the first, fourth and fifth theses in this chapter.

12

Politics Cannot Be Dissolved into Liberal Ethics or Aesthetics

We have encountered Bensaïd’s echo of Arendt’s fears that politics would disappear completely from the world owing to a totalitarian abolition of plurality and its effacement before automated market mechanisms. Bensaïd wrote that ‘This fear is confirmed by the fact of having entered an era of depoliticisation, where the public space is squeezed by the violent forces that accompany economic horror and by an abstract moralism’. This ‘weakening of politics and its attributes (project, will, collective action) permeates the jargon of post modernity’. As we saw in our discussion of Le pari mélancolique, the conditions for political action were undergoing a crisis ‘under the impact of time-space compression’.115 Such conditions undermine democracy and fuel the rise of moralism and neoliberal aesthetics, ‘If the aesthetisation of politics is an inherent recurrent tendency to crises of democracy, the awe for the local, the search for origins, the ornamental overload and the manoeuvres of authenticity undoubtedly reveal an anxious vertigo verifying the impotence of politics faced with conditions that have become uncertain’.116 Against the grain

115 116

Bensaïd 2004b. Ibid. Translation modified.

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of the aesthetisation of politics, Bensaïd defended politics as ‘the profane art of duration and space, of drawing up and moving the lines of the possible in a world without God’.117 This defence rested on five key points. First, ‘history is not dissolved into a pulverised time with no tomorrow’.118 Deconstructing historicity and praising the ‘cult of the immediate’ results in the collapse of political projects with a horizon. Otherwise said, ‘medium term projects no longer have space’, because ‘[i]n the conjugation of the misadjusted social times, political temporality is precisely that of the medium term, between the fugitive moment and the unattainable eternity’.119 Second, ‘place and site are not dissolved in the frightful silence of infinite space’, because collective action is always ‘organised in space’. We speak of ‘the meeting, the assembly, the encounter, and the demonstration’. Bensaïd endorsed Lefebvre’s point that ‘only the class struggle has the capacity to produce spatial differences irreducible to the single economic logic’.120 Third, ‘strategic opportunity is not dissolved in economic necessity’. Possibility and contingency remain constituent features of strategic thought: The political sense of the moment, the opportunity, the bifurcation opened to hope, constitutes a strategic sense; that of the possible, irreducible to necessity; not the sense of an arbitrary, abstract, voluntarist possible, of a possible where everything would be possible; but a possible determined by an authority, where the propitious moment emerges for the decision adjusted to a project, an objective to be attained. It is, at the end of the day, sensed from the conjuncture, the response adapted to a concrete situation.121 Fourth, ‘the objective is not dissolved in the movement, the event in the process’. That is to say, the necessary goal of revolutionary rupture remains valid. ‘Certainly’, Bensaïd tells us, ‘there is no longer a single revolutionary moment, a miraculous epiphany of history, but rather moments of decision and critical thresholds’. The tests of the last century like Spain, Indonesia, Chile and Portugal demonstrate the necessity for revolutionary rupture. This hypothesis takes into account ‘the vicious circle of fetishism and commodification, the

117 118 119 120 121

Ibid. Translation modified. Ibid. Translation modified. Ibid. Translation modified. Ibid. Translation modified. Ibid. Translation modified.

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conditions of reproduction of domination’.122 Different hypotheses of gradualism ignore the reality of commodity fetishism and the reproduction of domination. Finally, ‘the political struggle is not dissolved into the logic of a social movement’. Between parties and social movements, there operates ‘dialectic, reciprocity, and complementariness’. If social movements were subordinated to parties, this would result in ‘a statisation of the social’. On the other hand, ‘politics in the service of the social would rapidly lead to corporative lobbying, a summary of particular interests without general will’: Between the social and political struggles, there are neither Chinese walls nor watertight compartments. Politics arises and is invented inside the social, in the resistance to oppression, the statement of new rights that transform victims into active subjects. Nevertheless, the existence of a state as separate institution, simultaneously false incarnation of the general interest and guarantor of a public space irreducible to private appetite, structures a specific political field, a particular relationship of forces, a language of conflict, where social antagonisms are pronounced in a game of displacements and condensations, oppositions and alliances. Consequently, the class struggle is expressed there in a manner that is mediated under the form of the political struggle between parties.123 Lastly, ‘crisis is not soluble in the majestic eternity of structures’. The capitalist mode of production appears to be the end of history, in which there is no longer anything more to the human adventure, ‘no after, no elsewhere’. ‘We will’, Bensaïd wrote, ‘henceforth be condemned to turn round and round in the hellish repetition of immobile structures like in a prison yard’. However, there is ‘still conflict and contradiction’. There is ‘more than ever a cultural and civilisational malaise. Malaise is only a step away from crisis’. And the crisis happens at a crossing of paths, metaphorically. Non-metaphorically, the crisis intervenes where the constraints of a situations which requires contingent action in an encounter, because constraint and contingency ‘opens a breach in the vicious circle of repetition’, piercing through the fortifications of modern dominations, planting ‘disorder in the well-ordered routine of works and days’.124 These are the moments of crisis, the breakdown of bourgeois modes of political and economic domination, where ‘the determined part is tied to the non-fatal part of becoming, historical logic being tied to the evental eruption. 122 123 124

Ibid. Translation modified. Ibid. Translation modified. Bensaïd 2001c, pp. 22–3.

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The crisis is not yet the event, but it is already announced in it, a door that is ajar through which these belated possibles can emerge’.125

13

Communism Is Not Reducible to Its Bureaucratic Counterfeits

Bensaïd wagered on another incontrovertible fact, namely, whatever the words for expressing it, the spirit of communism cannot be reduced to its bureaucratic counterfeits.126 The liberal-restorationist efforts to ‘dissolve communism into Stalinism’ required the reductionist thesis, resting on what Bensaïd called a genealogy of the concept, in which ‘the idea leads the world’. This ideological method would have it that historical Stalinism is the result of concepts like the dictatorship of the proletariat and the vanguard party. We saw Bensaïd’s criticism of Furet along these lines in Qui est le Juge? Bensaïd rejected the right-wing attacks that argue bureaucratic despotism will forever be the logical development of the revolutionary adventure, and Stalin being the legitimate filial line of Lenin or Marx. This did not mean that Bensaïd was uncritical of the revolutionary experience. As Pierre Rousset noted, ‘Daniel contributed to renewing the debates around the counterrevolutionary processes in the “transitional societies” ’.127 And Löwy wrote of the themes that concerned Bensaïd, If we must refuse with all our energy the liberal counter-reform’s attempt to dissolve communism in Stalinism, we cannot do without a critical balance sheet of the errors that disarmed the October revolutionaries faced with the test of history, favourising the Thermidorian counter-revolution: confusion between people, party and state, and blindness in relation to the bureaucratic peril. We must take certain historical lessons from it: the importance of socialist democracy, political pluralism, the separation of powers, of autonomy of the social movements in relation to the state.128 Bensaïd made concrete political criticisms of concrete political choices of the Bolsheviks. He practiced a materialist critique, before which nothing is sacred: 125 126 127 128

Ibid. Bensaïd 2001c, p. 73. Rousset 2012, p. 112. Löwy review, not dated.

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the contradictions of democracy, inherited from the French Revolution, a confusion of people, party and state, the decreed fusion of the social and the political, blindness in the face of the bureaucratic danger (underestimated in relation to the main danger of capitalist restoration), were propitious to the bureaucratic counter-revolution in 1930s Russia. There are in the Russian Thermidorian process elements of continuity and discontinuity. The difficulty in accurately dating the triumph of the bureaucratic reaction relates to the asymmetry between revolution and counterrevolution. The counterrevolution is indeed not the reverse fact or the inverted image of the revolution, a sort of revolution in reverse. As Joseph de Maistre put it very well with regard to the Thermidor of the French Revolution, the counter-revolution is not a revolution in the opposite sense, but the opposite of a revolution. It depends on its own timescales, where ruptures are accumulated and complement each other.129 Bensaïd initially followed Trotsky’s line of argument; he saw the counter-revolution as completing itself at the beginning of the 1930s. While Thermidorian reaction followed the ‘death of Lenin’ (not the cause) it was consummated in the 1930s ‘with the victory of Nazism in Germany, the Moscow trials, the great purges and the terrible year of 1937’. To a certain extent this prognosis is similar to Arendt’s position in The Origins of Totalitarianism. She ‘establishes an apparent chronology that dates the coming of bureaucratic totalitarianism proper to 1933 or 1934’. These dates were reinforced by Moshe Lewin’s work, which brought to light the quantitative explosion of the bureaucratic apparatus of the state from the end of the 1920s. In the 1930s, the repression against the popular movement changed in scale. It is not the simple prolongation of what was prefigured by the practices of the Cheka (the political police) or the political jails, but a qualitative leap in which the state bureaucracy destroyed and devoured the party that believed it was able to control it.130 Bureaucratic Stalinism represented a rupture. Bureaucracy is not the result of a false idea but a social phenomenon, having ‘a particular form within primitive accumulation in Russia or China, but it has its roots in scarcity and the division of labour. It manifests itself in diverse forms and different degrees of a uni-

129 130

Bensaïd 2004b. Ibid.

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versal manner’. Despite the bureaucracy consolidating in conditions of relative backwardness, Bensaïd drew the conclusion that a modern revolutionary project in the industrialised countries could no longer be constructed on the basis of the mirage of abundance. This mirage was mythical, and giving it up was associated with the need to break with the other illusions about the absolute transparency of the people or proletariat (a mythical notion of representation and sovereignty) and the immediate abolition of the state. Furthermore, Bensaïd argued: It is necessary to draw all the consequences from ‘the discordance of times’: economic, ecological, legal, moral, mental and artistic choices follow from different temporalities. The contradictions of sex and generation will not resolve themselves in the same way or at the same rhythm as class antagonisms. The hypothesis of the withering away of the state and law, as separate spheres, does not signal their abolition by decree, unless we want to see society statised rather than power being socialised.131 For Bensaïd, and the Fourth International more generally, one conclusion to be drawn from the bureaucratic Stalinist experience was the need for democracy and political pluralism that upholds the autonomy of the social movements in relation to the state and party apparatuses too, involving upholding juridical right and the separation of powers.132 Otherwise said, Bensaïd thought it was legitimate to discuss (and possibly reframe) ‘the question of majority democracy, the relation between the social and the political, the conditions for the weakening of domination’ during and after the dictatorship of the proletariat. To carry out a discussion like this does not mean that Stalinism was just a theoretical deviation or that the Stalinist experience could be abstracted from its material conditions (Stalinism, in the last instance, represented a colossal social reaction that thrived in the absence of an international revolution). Nevertheless, Bensaïd’s position was in opposition to the historiography of Hobsbawm when it came to the Russian Revolution. Hobsbawm had diminished the Thermidorian process, ‘as if what happened, had to happen, by virtue of the objective laws of history’, Bensaïd opined. Consequently, Hobsbawm ‘hardly glimpses what could have been different’, avoiding ‘any social analysis of the Stalinist counter-revolution’; he was instead ‘content with stating that,

131 132

Ibid. Ibid.

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starting from the 1920s, “there the dust of the battles settled, the old orthodox empire of the Tsars resurged intact, in its essentials, but under the authority of the Bolsheviks”’, Bensaïd thought: With this funereal phrase a serious critique of bureaucracy is avoided; it is simply considered as transitory, an ‘inconvenience’ of the planned economy founded on social property, as if this property was really social and as if the bureaucracy was a small and lamentable expense rather than a counter-revolutionary political danger! Hobsbawm’s work has more the perspective of a ‘historian’s history’, than that of a critical or strategic history capable of discovering the possible options in the great turning points of events … In Trotsky vivant, Pierre Naville strongly emphasised the reach of this methodological slant: ‘The defenders of the accomplished fact, whoever they are, have a much shorter vision than political actors. Active and militant Marxism is predisposed to an optic which is often contrary to that of history’ … with the possibility of unfolding its retrospective wisdom, enumerating and cataloguing the facts, the omissions, and the errors.133 While taking into account other orientations that could have been engaged, Bensaïd thought it worthwhile to ‘do something that our movement has neglected’, namely: to take on a deeper discussion about the notion of totalitarianism in general (and its relations with the epoch of modern imperialism), and on bureaucratic totalitarianism in particular. Trotsky frequently used this term in his book Stalin: ‘La société, c’est moi’! He did not flesh out its theoretical status. The concept could be considered very useful in approaching certain contemporary tendencies (pulverisation of the classes in masses, ethnicisation and tendential deterioration of politics) analysed by Hannah Arendt in her trilogy on the origins of totalitarianism, and the particular form that they could take in the case of the bureaucratic totalitarianism. This clarification would allow us to avoid a vulgar and far too elastic usage of the term that only serves to set up the opposition between pure democracy and undefined totalitarianism the only legitimate division of our time.134

133 134

Ibid. Ibid.

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One last aspect of Bensaïd’s understanding of Stalinism should be noted, too; he was open to other attempts to explain Stalinism. This was a late reflection, since the early Claude Lefort and Castoriadis had theorised different versions of bureaucratic rule in the ussr mid-century, and the group Revolution! around Henri Maler and Samy Johsua had rejected the notion of a degenerated workers’ state in the ussr, opting instead for a state-capitalist thesis. The other interpretations included Mattick, Dunayevskaya and Tony Cliff’s notion of state capitalism; the theorists of the new exploitative class, like Rizzi, Burnham; then Trotsky’s and Mandel’s theory of the bureaucratically degenerated worker’s state. ‘They are all’, Bensaïd wrote, ‘compatible with the idea of a bureaucratic counter-revolution. To insist on this latter conception does not at all mean burying the debate around the revolutions of the 20th century, but to continue it thanks to a better critical distance’: When one confirms that the struggle against the nomenklatura demands a new social revolution and not only a political revolution, it is not a case of simple terminological flourish. According to Trotsky’s thesis, developed by Mandel, the principal contradiction of a transitional society is between the socialised form of a planned economy and the bourgeois norms of distribution that formed the basis of bureaucratic privileges and parasitism. The ‘political revolution’ thus meant putting the political superstructure into conformity with the already acquired social base. This is to forget that ‘in post-capitalist societies, the state is involved in the infrastructure in the sense that it plays a determinant role in the structuration of relations of production; it is, from this angle, beyond the common wage form, the bureaucracy, as a social group of the state, can find itself in relations of exploitation with the direct producers’. This remark is relevant, even if it would be better to avoid dressing up these societies with an allusive ‘post’, as if it came chronologically ‘after’ capitalism, since they are contemporary with it and they remained determined by the contradictions of the accumulation of capital on a global scale.135 Bensaïd did not adopt the notions of state capitalism or bureaucratic collectivism. Instead, he continued to think that the concept of the degenerated workers’ state seems to him to have been the most useful for grasping a new and moving reality, and for orientating a practical politics. However, he con-

135

Bensaïd 2001c, pp. 83–4.

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fessed ‘that it is only the least bad. But is this not the fate of nearly all theories that approximate reality without being able to capture it, as it is true that the real always overflows theory’. Despite his choice of a degenerated workers’ state, he cautioned against thinking of these societies as post-capitalist, since these notions – which remain descriptive – are either senseless or produce error: Strictly speaking, the ussr and the Eastern bloc have never been ‘postcapitalist’: neither in a chronological sense (they are necessarily contemporaries of capitalism as long as the domination of the global market continues), in a qualitative sense (the productivity of labour, consumption and free time have never ‘overtaken’ the existing levels in the richest countries). What irritates me, in this type of terminology is that it still refers to a linear representation of time, instead of thinking the relation between societies in space-time or, if you prefer, in an articulated totality, where capital remains dominant.136 Bensaïd effectively thought the starting point for any understanding of the Stalinist economies was the overdetermined global nature of the capitalist mode of production thus making it possible to articulate the development of these economies – their novel modes of bourgeois domination – and the self-styled Western capitalist economies. This meant thinking of their relations in a way irreducible to a univocal representation of history.

14

The Dialectic of Reason Is Not Reducible to Post-Modernity’s Broken Mirror

The reference to an articulated totality leads us to the next part of Bensaïd’s critique of post-modernism. This part can be summarised with the phrase that the dialectic of reason is irreducible to the broken mirror of post-modernity. As I outlined about the Le pari mélancolique, post-modernism and modernism do not constitute two ‘chronological sequences, but two contradictory tendencies inherent in the logic of the valorisation of value: centralisation and fragmentation, consolidation and dissolution, outsourcing and territorialisation, savings that last and ephemeral waste, unity and dispersion, universality and singularity, reason and unreason’. Nevertheless, ‘like Janus’s two

136

Bensaïd 1990, interview upon the release of Walter Benjamin, sentinelle messianique.

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faces, modernity and post-modernity therefore constitute the two magnetic poles of the accumulation of capital’. The tendencies of modernism and postmodernism gain precedence over each other depending on the conjuncture. Post-modernism ‘wins out in moments of malaise and depression, when the hour of eclecticism and resignation sounds’.137 Between modernism and postmodernism: The ‘philosophical discourse of modernity’ presents itself as a rhetoric of clarity, as a logic of the excluded third, of the incompatibility of contradictions, the repulsion towards the mixture, the hybrid, the composite, the impure and weird … It carried out a merciless war on ambiguity and the undecidable. Inversely, the post-modern taste for ambivalence, and that which is unaccomplished, today combines with a non-methodical doubt and a sceptical relativism that is more senile than critical.138 Post-modernism appeared as a continuous revolt against modernity, against the mathematisation of space and time, against the despotism of cartography and the clock, against the effects of mass urbanisation and compulsory labour, expressing ‘a revolt against the secular faith in the meaning of history and in the order of progress. It claims to seek revenge for the rude disciplines of reason, so often associated with state domination and the illusions of progress’. By celebrating the heterogeneous mixture, the miscellaneous, the fragment and the part, post-modernism created a one-sided discourse, a mutually incompatible other of modernity. Therefore, it represents no supersession, which is theoretically-politically disarming, ‘this depressive discourse leaves little hope of overthrowing the capitalist order and its “capitalised violence”. It unilaterally puts the accent on the tendencies of commodity fetishism’.139 Worse yet: Intimately tied to ‘social critique’ (of injustices and inequalities) in the 1960s and 1970s, the ‘artistic critique’ (or ‘societal’) of alienation has detached itself from it under the blow of disappointments conducive to social co-optations and domesticated careers. The language of commerce and consumption triumphs … Under the pretext of finishing with egoistic calculation and instrumental reason, the moment has come for the wig and sham. One then participates without shame or scruples in capital’s 137 138 139

Bensaïd 2001c, pp. 86–7. Bensaïd 2001c, p. 87. Bensaïd 2001c, p. 88.

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gruesome dance and the hellish round of the commodity. Post-modern re-enchantment and its mythology do not however contain the antidote to modern irrationality. The refusal of rational argumentation, the dissolution of the totality into parts, the denigration of universality only to benefit origins, roots and belongings, the depoliticising aestheticisation of politics speaks to new barbaric nuptials between art and technology.140 Conjoined to the pact between commodified art and technology, the search for the universal and truth cannot easily be done away with, however, even if it is entirely legitimate to develop a critique of the delusions of progress, abstract universals and illusory truths (ideologies of truth). This discussion was methodologically tied to the fact that conflictual difference is not dissolved into an ambivalent liberal diversity. Post-modern heterogenous theories proclaim that it is reductionist to attempt an articulation of social and class conflict. As a reaction against this, they enunciate the inauguration of the ‘plurality of spaces and contradictions’, which is plausible up to a certain point because every singular individual is constituted by a unique assemblage of many properties, however, according to Bensaïd: Most of the discourses of post-modernity, like certain tendencies in analytical Marxism, take this anti-dogmatic critique as far as the dissolution of class relations into the murky waters of methodological individualism. Not only class oppositions, but more generally conflictual differences, are then diluted in what Hegel had already called ‘a diversity without difference’: a constellation of indifferent singularities. Certainly, what passes for a defence of difference often comes down to a permissive liberal tolerance that is the consumerist reverse of commodity homogenisation. As opposed to these manoeuvres of difference and individualism without individuality, vindications of identity on the contrary tend to freeze and 140

Ibid. He wrote in Le sourire du Spectre: ‘Alex Callinicos correctly underlined that postmodernity as a category, circulating between economics, culture and politics, hardly allows for a rigorous periodisation of contemporary history. He insists rightly on the political dimension of such discourse: post-modernity, whether or not we accept the term is inseparable from social defeats and political disappointments that capped the decade after 1968 off. The disappointments and the ebb then fuelled a hedonistic cynicism, whetting the appetites for social promotion, stimulating the intellectual aspirations for institutional recognition and consensual reconciliation … The great “cultural turn” of which Jameson spoke could thus characterise itself as the return in force of the private and egoistic subject, raised upon the ruins of collective subjects’.

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naturalise differences of race or gender. It is not the notion of difference that is problematic (it allows the construction of structuring oppositions), but its biological naturalisation or its identitarian absolutisation. Thus, whereas difference is mediation in the construction of the universal, extreme dispersion relinquishes itself from this construction. Whereas difference represents a mediation between the singular and the universal, the diversity in fragments renounces any horizon of universality. When one renounces the universal, says Alain Badiou, what prevails is universal horror … This dialectic of difference and universality is at the heart of the difficulties that we frequently encounter.141 A weak political project cannot handle the dialectic between the universal, particular and individual. The emancipation of the proletariat constitutes, under capitalism, the mediation of the individual worker, of a particular nation, and the universal emancipation of humanity. To attack the concrete universal is to attack this project. It constitutes the attempt to dissolve the universal into the particular and the individual. Of course, abstract universality is often the mask and alibi for domination (masculine or colonial), but the critique of abstract universality and its formalism cannot avoid implicit reference to a concrete universality in becoming: the demystification of the first presupposes the second. The project of changing the world rests on a particular class that is the bearer of concrete universalisation. We find the rejection of concrete universalisation ‘in Roger Martelli, for whom “the essential is no longer to prepare the transfer of power from one group to another, but to begin to give to each individual the possibility of taking control of the individual and social conditions of their life”. The very legitimate anti-totalitarian theme of individual liberation ends then in solitary pleasure in which social emancipation is diluted’.142 The position that Bensaïd was articulating had also been a red thread throughout his engagement with Marxism: the demand to employ the concrete totality. This category is opposed to the logic of atomisation and fragmentation that is a feature of capitalism’s reproduction. The deconstruction of the abstract totality is inseparable from concrete totalisation: that is, not an a priori totality but a becoming-of-totality. This totalisation in becoming happens through the articulation of experiences, but the subjective unification of struggles would arise from an arbitrary will (an ethical voluntarism) if it did

141 142

Bensaïd 2004b. Ibid.

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not rest on a tendential unification of which capital, understood here under the form of commodity globalisation, is the impersonal agent. The concrete totality is not reducible to its parts. Under the impact of post-modernism, it seemed that no contradiction was able to unify or combine the multiplicity of oppressions. But it is not so easy to give up on the totality. Rather than rejecting it, it is better to elucidate the way in which the whole and its parts interact: [A] ‘grand narrative’ survived the announced death of the Subject and its epic narration: that of ventriloquist capital, the tyrannically impersonal subject of the world’s desolate stage. Individuals … are the organs and members of it … For Hegel, on the contrary, the one is always the one of another, in the becoming of a totality in movement. The intimate logic of capital is certainly not that of an essentialist totality, but a relational totality, of a living organism, and not a mechanical one in the uniform meaning of the term. Like the famous psychological test of forms, it can be perceived either as a duck, or either as a rabbit. The totality gives meaning to their unity: duck and rabbit! But, in order to reach the rabbit, one must begin by unpacking the false and unilateral evidence of the duck.143 In this way, ‘heterogeneity supposes homogeneity. The other, the same. Relative measure, absolute measure. And the part, the whole’.144 Duck and rabbit, like whole and part. For ‘Lukács, the part only has meaning as a passage and moment of totalisation; because the non-dogmatic totality is not Being or Essence, but becoming. The “crucial category”, concrete totality is thus opposed to the logic of atomisation and fragmentation specific to the reproduction of capital’. It is opposed to the abstract totality, the ‘false totality’ that ‘weighs on the whole of social relations and constrains one to think, whether we like it or not, under the condition of capital’.145 The dialectical totalisation presupposes the impossibility for certain particular-finite subjects to reach the hidden God or a totalising perspective. In a context where the dizziness of the instant is opposed to historical intelligibility, ‘where universalising concepts are weakened, the totality becomes suspect of totalitarian agendas’. Without the totality, we are left only to think of capital-

143 144 145

Bensaïd 2001c, pp. 92–3. Ibid. Ibid.

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ism as ‘an incoherent ensemble, as a simple collage of juxtaposed dominations, and not as a whole governed by an immanent logic’.146 The net result of the battle against totality is the rejection of a thorough and radical social revolution. The real question we should pose for the concrete totality is the following: under what circumstances, from what subject perspectives and in what historical conjuncture is it possible to grasp a totality? An adequate answer can only be sketched if our starting point is concrete totalisation, open to its own negation, being opposed to the tyranny of the absolute. Through this methodological move, we can maintain that ‘classes, groups, sexes are not autonomous substances, exterior and indifferent to each other … but conflictual poles of an internal relation of the totality [my italics]. In the contemporary social formation, this relation is none other than capital itself’.147

15

Résistances: The Mole’s Subterranean Work

The revolutionary upsurges throughout the Middle East and North Africa showed the relation between resistance and the event was a contemporary question, making Bensaïd’s Résistances, Essai de taupologie générale quite relevant anew. A synthesis of Bensaïd’s thinking about resistance and the event as it engaged with his contemporaries, it was also an attempt to correct the reductionist and defensive definition of politics ubiquitous among radical thinkers. Bensaïd effectively thought that writers like Badiou, Negri and Rancière shared a common attitude to politics, indeed a reductive attitude because they thought of politics as a rarity. For Badiou, politics was reduced to the event; for Negri, to constituent power; for Rancière, against the police. The thought underlying these attitudes was the idea that to think of politics not under the condition of its rare and occasional emergence would be equivalent to collaborating with the bourgeois organisation of power and its consensus. Bensaïd took these attitudes to be sophisticated evasions of politics which was ever tempted by the flight into aesthetics and philosophy – in fact a flight from political deliberation with its element of doxa into a posture beyond opinion. I take it that Bensaïd’s political thinking was an effort to resolve the oscillation between leftist elitism and contemplative retreats, which denying politics’ relation to institutions and historicity tends towards; no doubt, this did not mean Bensaïd thought politics was reduced to the state.

146 147

Bensaïd 2001c, p. 94. Bensaïd 2001c, p. 95.

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Bensaïd’s politics is the politics of the profane where the ‘train of progress has been derailed’, where now the revolution is henceforth ‘no longer comparable to a race won by an invincible machine, but rather to an alarm signal, fired so as to interrupt its mad race towards catastrophe’. The revolution was once a locomotive of history in the era where the railway, the steamship, the telegraph contributed to the feeling that humanity could just build ‘up enough speed to break free’. Transport, travel, materials, knowledge, production and work practices were revolutionised with the forward march of capital. The railway was the symbol of the revolution as a ‘roaring locomotive of history’.148 The metaphor of the mole overcomes the pitfalls of the locomotive in an era in which ‘capitalist globalisation is seeing the commodification of the world and a generalised fetishism’, where the dream of the ‘twilight era has already ceased to be one of infinite progress and great historical promises’. Are we then condemned to circle round and round with the weight of defeats and disasters reducing ‘every event to a dusty powder of minor news items, of sound bites which are skipped over just as soon as they are received, of ephemeral fashions and of faddish anecdotes’?149 The eternal wheel of bourgeois society is a world that standardises difference, formats opinions and ‘no longer enjoys either “magnificent sunrises” or triumphant dawns’. Bensaïd’s philosophical exploration of resistance and the event in Résistances is a refusal to give in to this reactionary position that leaves little room for political mobilisation. From one angle, Bensaïd’s philosophy of resistance is an attempt to tie a creative political perspective to active memory, because ‘Detached from any creative perspective, critical recollection turns to tired-out ritual’. Without the key link between memory and creative politics, we are ‘condemned to the snapshots of an eternal present’. This results in a ‘dust of images’, with ‘scattered pieces of a puzzle which no longer fits together’.150 However, the eclipse of the event does not put an end to the subterranean work of the mole. This is not in the nature of the mole. Bensaïd wrote, ‘Though he looks tired, our old friend is still digging away’, for ‘when everything seems asleep’, the mole ‘prepares the way for new rebellions’. There is no end to a negativity that never comes to a standstill. New contradictions advance ‘in the great transformations of the present time’.151 The great task of historical actors and subterranean struggles

148 149 150 151

Bensaïd 2010a, pp. 132–3. Bensaïd 2010a, p. 134. Ibid. Bensaïd 2010a, p. 135.

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is to move the limits of possibility; however limited attempts might seem, they are also ‘fermenting the great rages of days to come. They herald new outpourings’, as Bensaïd suggests: It is a stubborn advance made up of irreconcilable resistances, welldirected ramblings along tunnels which seem to lead nowhere and yet which open up into daylight, into an astonishing, blinding light. Thus the underground heresies of the Flagellants, the Dolcinians and other Beguines paved the way for the likes of Thomas Münzer (1490–1525) to appear with his ‘apocalyptic propaganda calling for action’, before his execution sealed the lasting alliance between the reformed priest and the country squire.152 According to Bensaïd, even in periods of Thermidorian reaction, and Thermidor is a recurrent theme and inseparable from the revolutionary upsurge, the attempt to shift and remove the limits of possibility remains a task. Thermidorian reaction does not have the power to end the mole’s negativity. It is quite difficult to imagine the end of the old mole, since it ‘is forever born anew from his own failures. It took no more than thirty years for the flames of 1830 or 1848 to rekindle the embers kept glowing by various hidden groups’: Less than twenty years after the bloody suppression of the Commune and the exile of its survivors, the socialist movement was already being born again, as if a timeless message had spread from generation to generation down a long line of conspiratorial whispers.153 To these recurrent regenerations we may ask: will the residues of the mole be wiped out from an Egyptian prison, unruly workplace or popular neighbourhood? Is the mole indifferent to the graffiti on a Syrian wall declaring that the fight will go to the end against reaction and the regime? If the regime is not ended with in the first round, where is the end to be found? This mole does not rush; it simply digs its own path: He has ‘no need to hurry’. He needs ‘long periods of time’, and he has ‘all the time he needs’. If the mole takes a backward step, it’s not in order to hibernate but to tunnel through another opening. His twisting

152 153

Ibid. Bensaïd 2010a, p. 136.

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and turning allow him to find the place where he can break out. The mole never disappears, he only heads underground.154 Then may come the insurgent breakthrough. A revolution can be defeated and a revolution may be betrayed. But they are not easily wiped out from memory. They are ‘prolonged within latent forms of dissidence, spectral presences, invasive absences, in the molecular constitution of a plebeian public space, with its networks and passwords, its nocturnal assignations and its thundering explosions’.155 When order reigns and bourgeois peace has returned to the streets everything can appear in place. The very fact of being in place under the domination of capital can inaugurate new beginnings, tearing asunder bourgeois order. Bensaïd is calling his readers to commit to an undying and unending political-revolutionary struggle: When resignation and melancholy follow the ecstasy of the event, as when love’s excitement dulls under the force of habit, it becomes absolutely essential not to ‘adjust yourself to the moments of fatigue’.156 What is needed is the skilful art of ‘rubbing history against the grain’, accepting the ‘inevitable revolutionary slowness’, ‘an urgent patience, which is the opposite of fatigue and habit’. This slowness is the opposite of habit, being ‘the effort to persevere and continue without growing accustomed or getting used to things, without settling into habit or routine, by continually astonishing oneself, in pursuit of “this desirable unknown” which always slips away’, as Bensaïd would say. In ‘the rift between the real and the legal’, nobody knows when the truth of an evental upsurge will break through the surface. Who will this truth be returned to? The revolutionary-evental truth will search for those ‘who will be able to carry it further’. And though the ‘morning after a defeat can easily lead to an overwhelming feeling that things must forever begin again from scratch’, the bifurcations remain open to hope, Bensaïd engraves a truth for us: When the universe seems to repeat itself without end, to keep on marking time, nevertheless, the ‘chapter of changes’ remains open to hope. Even when we are on the point of believing that nothing more is possible, even

154 155 156

Bensaïd 2010a, p. 142. Bensaïd 2010a, p. 136. Ibid.

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when we despair of escaping from the relentless order of things, we never cease to set the possibility of what might be against the poverty of what actually is.157 It is at this juncture that certain dangers might appear. Radical critique braces itself against the tide, inspired by new ways of thinking resistance and events. But the bond can be broken between resistance and the event, in the rupture, theology can intervene to mend the fissure. Bensaïd was aware of this, explaining the challenge that inspired his thinking: In the vicious spiral of defeats, those engaged in defensive resistance sometimes harbour doubts about the counter-attack which is so long in coming; the hope of a liberating event then falls away from everyday acts of resistance, retreats from the profane to the sacred, and ossifies in the expectation of an improbable miracle. When the present drifts without past or future, and when ‘the spirit withdraws from a given era, it leaves a collective frenzy and a spiritually charged madness in the world’. When it loses the thread of earthly resistance against the order of things, the desire to change the world risks turning into an act of faith and the will of the heavens. Against renunciation and its endless justifications, those involved in the politics of resistance and events never give up looking for the reasons behind each loss of reason. But the disjunction of a fidelity to events with no historical determination from a resistance with no horizon of expectation is doubly burdened with impotence.158 In the face of defeats, Bensaïd argued that ‘even in the worst of droughts and most arid places there is always a stream’. These streams can herald surprising resurgences, there ‘are always new beginnings, moments of revival or renewal. There is never any end to the secret composition of the uninterrupted poem of “probable impossibilities”’. The breakthrough of these ‘untimely invasions’ where the contingency of the event ‘cuts a path through insufficient yet necessary historical conditions, make a breach in the unchanging order of structures and of things’.159 These breakthroughs should astonish us. We should be open to their surprise without having done nothing for their coming.

157 158 159

Bensaïd 2010a, pp. 137–8. Ibid. Bensaïd 2010a, pp. 139–40.

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Furet’s ‘scandal of a closed future’, in this context, is just that, a scandal. This does not change the fact that in facing off against defeats one distinguishes between a rebellious messianism, which does not cede ground nor give in and the ‘humiliated millennialism which looks instead towards the great beyond’. We must, Bensaïd claims, ‘always distinguish between the vanquished and the broken’. The broken fall into the consolation of utopia. The vanquished continue a form of resistance that perpetuates an ‘illegal tradition’ in passing on a ‘secret conviction’. No prison or ordinance can obliterate it.

16

Françoise Proust’s Praise of Resistance

Françoise Proust’s work on resistance had animated the wonderful, somewhat anti-Cartesian, dictum that ‘I resist, therefore I am’. The dictum captures the fact that resistance cannot be separated from what it faces. ‘I would prefer not to’, resistance announces, relative to what stands in its way. Resistance is an act of conservation and insubordination: a refusal to surrender and give in, a non-negotiable refusal entirely fastened to the present. There is no one form of resistance, ‘it is not by chance that the emergence of a “right to resistance” will be contemporaneous with Galilean physics’: The refusal to give in despite the uneven balance in the fight, the refusal to disown, in spite of the moments of human fragility, despite the trials of doubt and discouragement. Without this dark side, without the recognition of risk and without the temptation to give in, resistance will only be an edifying tale. On the contrary, it implies an inequality, an inferiority that is recognised but not consented to: a defeat accepted, not a renunciation that humiliates.160 In many ways, Bensaïd had a deep affinity with Françoise Proust. He adopted her phrase that politics is the art of contretemps, also exploring her notion of resistance; two months before her early death after a battle with cancer, a few days before her last hospitalisation, Bensaïd carried out an interview with her, published in Actuel Marx. Proust’s last book was her testament, in which she

160

Bensaïd 2001e, p. 33. Auguste Blanqui was an emblem of this resistance: ‘Indestructible and untameable, Blanqui seems like the flag bearer of political resistances, the militant of a resistance on a dual front: exterior – against those of yesterday’s and today’s Versailles; intimate, against madness, relenting, despair, that assails him in prison’. Bensaïd 2001e, p. 34.

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developed a philosophical discourse of resistance. The notion of resistance, for her, was not only political, but echoed her own philosophical and bodily struggles too; she tried to construct the concept of resistance adequate to these experiences. One could not speak of resistance in politics and use the concept in a completely different way in psychoanalysis or when one is confronted with difficult situations in their life. ‘This is a point that I very much hold’, she said. ‘Resistance is first of all a tremor or a shake. In this sense it is neither active nor passive’. Resistance is a law of being, immanent to a subject, ‘a logical fact and not an ethical obligation’ as such. Resistance is not the consequence of an idea but an idea that awakens because one resists: Outside of right and outside of the law, the ‘points of resistance’ emerge everywhere in the networks of power as their irreducible vis-à-vis. Not as a consequence of an idea, but as its source. Second in relation to the event to which it responds, resistance is first in relation to thought: the idea awakes in resisting; it is born in the first resistance.161 This philosophy of resistance has a Spinozist starting point: to exist is to resist that which threatens the ability to exist. It is a strategy of the living, a physical phenomenon that stubbornly perseveres in its being. ‘Therefore, resistance is synonymous with endurance’, and through resistance we find the reasons for resistance. To resist is always to resist the irresistible, to apply the indestructible power of resistance to destruction. And do we only resist that to which we fear not being able to resist? This is why the supreme resistance, the resistance of resistances, is in resisting death, this ‘sublime power of competing with the omnipotence of nature’. For Proust, resistance is held in a strict immanence. She said in an interview with Bensaïd: Me, I try to hold myself in a strict immanence, closer to Deleuze (and Spinoza) … of the Resistance (or what I provisionally called counterbeing). Which clearly means that being itself, the course of things, the state of things, the world as it is, history (what others call the State) creates inside itself, coextensive with itself, a sort of double that returns against it, a resistance which counter-being confirms that both are connected.162

161 162

Bensaïd 2001e, pp. 35–6. Proust interview with Bensaïd 1999, published in Actuel Marx.

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There is no political outside or moral exteriority of immanence. To a certain extent, resistance is exterior to that which it combats but it is not a ‘commandment, a summons’. It does not come as a miracle. Neither does it come from an enlightened few. Situated and immanent, One doesn’t resist in the name of whatever force, in the name of God or the father, the people or the proletariat. Resistance is not an order, a summons, an appointment with whatever sublime mission. An unbearable situation, an intolerable injustice provokes it. And it is ‘from the interior of the situation that a turn in things takes place, a new way of living which is just’.163 For Proust, there is no place for the commands of transcendence, because situations are self-creators of resistance, from which two points flow. Immanent to a situation, an act of resistance is an ‘irreducible act of liberation … requiring the “experimentation of liberation” and courage’. There is a danger of being held in the grip of that which it resists, of accepting a subaltern position. However, ‘resistance is at the same time absolute and relative – absolute in the sense that it goes right to the extremes and does not compromise; but relative to a given situation’.164 It undermines the heavy weight of those who dominate. She says that: Resistance draws a curved line. In a way, its line is always sharp and clear: a blunt stroke, without adjustment or correction, without nuance or hesitation, unswerving, indestructible and invincible … In another way, its line twirls, curves and bends according to the situation that it passes through and the obstacles that it encounters … Balancing on a razor wire like a ropewalker, from a point simultaneously threatened and invincible, detecting the dangers that lurk everywhere and the opportunities that lie in this very danger, such is the line of resistance, at the same time blunt and winding.165 Shaky, resistance is often defeated. Sometimes it is not. A politics of resistance always risks spinning around rhetoric or aesthetics if it contents itself with the narrowing of horizon or anaemia of projects. This is a trap. Resistance must produce a project, so Bensaïd suggests: 163 164 165

Bensaïd 2001e, p. 37. Bensaïd 2001e, pp. 38–9. Ibid.

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if resistance is first a reaction to an injustice or an unbearable situation, in taking responsibility for politics, it beats the trap of the defensive without a counter-attack, of the refusal without perspective, of the negation without the negation of the negation. From the setting in motion and entry into action, every resistance, reactively, becomes declarative and affirmative. It invents responses. It explores issues. It transforms the victim of injustice or offence into an actor of his or her own drama. From a pure object of compassion, it is made the agent of its own struggle.166 Resistance invents and creates politics at its source, because ‘every resistance is in rupture with that which is’, in ‘logical rupture with the circulating opinions of the rulers’. Crucially, ‘the act of resistance proceeds less from a reasoned politics than it inaugurates it’.167 And resistance in action is a movement from rage to courage. Resistance is ‘an experience of subjectivisation’, an experience of liberation. In raising oneself up in resistance, one exercises the courage for and of liberation, inaugurating a trajectory towards an immanent other form of life. The courage of and for liberation involves a rage that is mobilised, the patience and enduring exercise of confrontation that has coherence, consistency and endurance, the sum of which can be called a virtue of resistance. What is the relation between resistance and politics? If Badiou and Rancière thought politics to be rare, the thesis on the infrequency of politics was not Proust’s. She ‘did not share the thesis on the rarity of a politics reduced to its evental exception’. She said, my position is almost the inverse. As soon as there is a body there is resistance. Resistance is always already there … my thesis, which is close to Foucault, is that as soon as there is power there is automatically resistance. It is implicit in the general political situation.168 Like Proust, Bensaïd did not accept the thesis of the rarity of politics. He held resistance and the event in concrete relationship, in which political truths emerge in the event, but in which a space for political deliberation exists when resistance is in rupture with the opinions of modes of domination. Bensaïd is consistent, alongside Proust, retaining the thread of earthly resistance against the order of things, without which, the desire to change the world risks

166 167 168

Bensaïd 2001e, p. 41. Ibid. Proust interview with Bensaïd 1999, published in Actuel Marx.

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turning into an act of faith and the will of the heavens. If there is always resistance in some form or another, there is always politics in general. Resistance invents politics and creates the discords immanent to being. Politics as such is not rare; rare is politics’ shaping into an organised form in a determinate relation of enduring force. This means that politics outside the event is possible, one reason why Bensaïd was in accord with Proust. Resistance, nevertheless, remains. Proust said: I know, like everybody, obviously that resistance in action (I will not speak of successful resistance) can be so small, reduced to some individuals, that they are not even remembered by history, that they don’t form a political force, that they can’t even leave a trace. Because successful resistance is not necessarily the measure of the justice of the resistance. There is, everyone knows it, just resistance that fails and unjust resistance that wins. But there is always resistance.169 Political practice has a dual function. It cannot evade the concrete conjuncture it belongs to and resists. But it exceeds the belonging when it changes, or tries to change, the situation. Among some theorists, politics becomes abstract, like an absolute figure emptying political deliberation of all substance. A certain paralysis can form around a pure will and purification. If politics is a pure object, it is empty. This point is important because Bensaïd’s political operation seeks to establish an aleatory but not arbitrary relation between resistance and the event. The event is determined but not predictable. It happens ‘like the hatching of an improbable possibility in a field of possibility’. For politics to actualise a real possibility, the necessity of a pre-evental politics is implied. This form of politics – operating within the tension between being and the event – does not fall into theology. The relation between resistance and the event thus permits to place on the agenda a ‘prophetic politics’, instead of dissolving politics into the miraculous advent of an event without history. When it comes down to it, resistance enters into action. It invents ideas and brings into being the possibility of another world. Resistance can be tied to an evental – revolutionary – project, in turn implying a politics of resistance. The event is no longer a pure arrival, nor a pure possibility, but a real and determined possibility, mediating between history and politics. Resistance occasions a melancholic politics of upsurge. Resistance forms the stubborn

169

Ibid.

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kernel of revolution. It is in ‘resisting the irresistible, that one becomes a revolutionary without knowing it’.170 Such is Bensaïd’s politics of resistance and the event where frightful hobgoblins appear and spectres smile.

170

Bensaïd and Petit 1999, p. 80.

part 4 Bensaïd and His Contemporaries

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Althusser: Trapped in Stalin’s Glass Jar The next four chapters set Bensaïd into detailed dialogue with Althusser, Badiou, Negri and Derrida; more exactly, I set into motion the vital deliberative and polemical content of Bensaïd’s writings. Bensaïd produces a specific reading of these writers based on the experience that in the early 1960s, history seemed as if it had forever become immobilised in structures, with a ‘structural eternity’ in which historical and revolutionary transformation were rendered unthinkable, while after May ’68, the immobility of the structure transformed into its opposite: a subject without history or evental contingency floating above historical necessity. Bensaïd handled this specific problematic. Each writer had their own specific response to the antinomy between structure and event. The late Althusser made explicit the philosophy of the encounter; Badiou, philosophically articulated ‘the miraculous event’; Derrida called up a Messianism without a Messiah; and lastly, Negri developed the notion of constituent power. The commonality of these writers pertains to the question about how stubborn resistance and the openness to the event can be articulated. Decisively, they posed this articulation without falling into a metaphysics of the grand historical subject; they were more or less materialist, deconstructive or dialectical, depending on the thought operation in question. Each discourse mixed theology and politics in its own way. To some extent, each writer left Bensaïd unsatisfied. A simple guiding thread holds this part together – to what extent was a politics of the oppressed thinkable and possible with the philosophical-political-theoretical constellation of each writer? Unambiguously, for Bensaïd, revolutionary theory and practice set out a strategy that aims toward the conquest of political-economic power, of socialist transition and communist construction. In a sense, Bensaïd’s notion of theory encompassed philosophy and science into one term, the destination of which was a strategic thought. Such was Bensaïd’s position in the 1970s. A shift of nuance in the later phase of his life, Bensaïd recognised that all was not directly political in the sense that everything theoretical could be subsumed without mediation by politics. Nevertheless, the tension between theory and politics, and their connection, could not be severed. Therefore, political concerns continued to matter for Bensaïd’s handling of these different writers; he takes them at their theoretical word, searches for contradictions through an immanent critique that goes beyond their word; then he searches for their mediated effects in politics and the unsatisfied remains of their work.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2024 | doi:10.1163/9789004687028_012

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Anti-Althusserians

As it clear, Bensaïd was not an Althusserian, though he did adopt the concept of overdetermination. Bensaïd recalled that in his younger years he was ‘vigorously “anti” – up to the point of excess’, describing the theoretical constellation he operated with, Leaving no stone unturned, we searched in Korsch, Lukács, Reich, Lucien Goldmann, Lefebvre, even Sartre, for the disparate sources of ammunition against what we perceived as a new avatar of positivist academic machinery reinforced by the omnipotence of Stalinist State reason. We should remember that in 1968, Ernest Mandel published The Formation of the Economic Thought of Karl Marx, being a polemic against the epistemological break. In 1975 ‘we published … a collection of articles, simply titled Contre Althusser’.1 Bensaïd recalled that, like most ‘communist apprentices at the time, we read Althusser with passion and uneasiness, pencil in hand, underlining and annotating, extensively debating’.2 During the winter vacation of 1965–66, Artous and Bensaïd cut their teeth on For Marx and Reading Capital. Bensaïd wrote, ‘We discussed step by step the ideas that fell from the prestigious sanctuary of the rue d’Ulm, without forgetting to follow the radio informing us of the massacre of Indonesian communists’.3 Politically, Artous and Bensaïd were active in the left opposition of the communist student movement ‘for a more active support for Vietnamese liberation and against the support for Mitterrand at the first round of the presidential elections of December 1965,’ and ‘more attracted to the emblematic figure of Che than by the Maoist liturgy, our conclusion was definitive: we were not Althusserians’.4 Bensaïd refused Althusser as a result of political choices; it was an overpoliticising reading. Althusser, Bensaïd thought, ‘ “in the last instance”, seemed to cover for the party leadership in a sophisticated way’. Theoretical reasons were also present in the critique, namely ‘we had the feeling of a horrible internment of the subject in the structure’. The political and theoretical elements were decisive, each left their trace in Bensaïd’s subsequent development.

1 2 3 4

Bensaïd 1990. Ibid. Bensaïd 1999b. Preface to the second edition of Contre Althusser. Ibid.

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He even thought that though ‘there was, in the fury of the moment, indeed approximations and misunderstandings. In hindsight, there is no reason to regret it’. Politically, Althusser’s work has hardly withstood the test of time. Above all, according to Bensaïd, Althusser cultivated ‘two disastrous beliefs: by maintaining beyond the reasonable the idea of a possible turnaround of the party and by symmetrically encouraging a Maoism haunted by Stalinist nostalgia’. But theoretically? Things are more complicated. Althusser’s ‘thought appears over the long-term to be much more contradictory and moving than we imagined in the fire of political battle’.5 Bensaïd acknowledged that the major part of Althusser’s later work ‘was ignored at the time by our juvenile indignations’.6 However, Althusser’s later work interested Bensaïd because of the effort to make explicit, unearth and articulate a subterranean materialism of the encounter. When Bensaïd wrote the new preface for Contre Althusser, he read texts he had not previously engaged with, and re-read texts that he had, in a new light. Upon returning to Althusser, Bensaïd accepted his radically anti-teleological theoretical stance; it was a point of convergence. Did this lead to a resounding endorsement of Althusser? No. There is a fundamental continuity in Bensaïd’s attitude to Althusser: this would be his critique of Althusser’s ‘theoreticism’, politics and his rejection of the epistemological break, the crux of Althusser’s materialist philosophical proposal.

5 Ibid. In his autobiography, he wrote: ‘Our difference was indeed a political one. We were not waging the same quarrel vis-à-vis the Party. Resolutely anti-Stalinist, convinced that the Soviet Union had undergone a bureaucratic counter-revolution a long time ago, we no longer believed in the possibility of a calm self-reform. No more did we have illusions as to the capacities of the pcf for regeneration. The rupture was therefore inevitable … Henri Lefebvre denounced (which took a certain chutzpah at that time) this “structuralist ideology” as an “ideology of power” and “the birth of an ideology in the guise of the struggle against ideology”. The formalism of the vacuum produced an impoverished vision of the real, to the detriment of the possible. If a theory is “a gymnastics of the possible”, then a fetishised reality, amputated of its possibilities, imposes codes that are digested uncritically. It tends to justify the established bureaucratic order, whether in Moscow, Beijing, or within the pcf. It leaves little place indeed for disorder and crisis. A glacial Marxism, without style or passion, reduced to a scientific objectivism without critical subversion, gradually shrunk to a skeleton to be fleshed out in the livery of new dogmatisms. The inertia of structures ended up legitimising strange compromises between an intransigent radicalism of theory and a resigned realism in practice. Touched by Maoist grace, good pupils could best reconcile in this way an anti-hierarchical generational revolt with a solid appetite for power and social ascent. French Maoism did not take long to perish from this contradiction’. Bensaïd 2013, p. 80. 6 Bensaïd 1999b.

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Bensaïd’s Opposition to the Epistemological Break

In an interview with Éric Hazan, Bensaïd expressed his concerns about the very idea of the epistemological break, as Althusser applied it to Marx. Bensaïd asserted, ‘I don’t think we can cut a work with secateurs’, and indignation and revolt were not absent from Marx’s mature Capital. ‘The 1857–58 manuscripts, which some find more lyrical and more audacious from a literary point of view, form part of the preparatory material of Capital’. The thesis of the epistemological break was animated by the determination to separate ideology from science; Althusser thought this was a basic move a materialist in philosophy should attempt to make. But, for Bensaïd, the really valuable question is: what kind of science was at stake? As is clear from Marx l’intempestif, Bensaïd entered into resonance with Maurice Blanchot; Blanchot had written, in Marx’s Three Voices, about how Marx articulated politics, philosophy and an idea of science that was ‘so disconcerting to the French culture’. The French culture of science and philosophy was one element, as Bensaïd recollected: Some of the reserves about Marx’s work are due to the fact that his ideas are confused in their minds with a doctrinaire Marxism. I myself had been educated with Stalin’s immortal brochure, Historical Materialism and Dialectical Materialism, with George Politzer’s Elementary Principles of Philosophy, etc. Another reason is the editorial ignorance of Marx in France. In 1968, the Grundrisse was not translated. Althusser didn’t know them … in The Future Lasts a Long Time, he claimed only to have read book one of Capital at the time. In France, it is this ignorance that has contributed to a reading of Marx that has been dominated by positivism … This is where the nonsense about Marx as a scientist comes from. Marx noted the difference between what he called ‘German science and English science’. For him, English science is the exact or positive sciences. He admires, sometimes too much, the progress of physics, chemistry, geology … And there is German science, Wissenschaft, which is not science in the French meaning of the term: it is the dynamic movement of knowledge. Hardly anyone in France has taken this into account. In particular, the first Althusser, from the 1960s, becoming notorious for his scientific complex, a desire for Marxism to be so scientific that Marxists could be recognised by their academic counterparts as serious people, and not as petitioners, intellectual mercenaries. Whence the (unfinished!) search in Marx’s work for an ‘epistemological break’ that cannot be found: when did Marx become a scientist, bey-

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ond being an ideologue and a philosopher? In the end, Althusser discovered the hidden gem: Marx had become a Marxist shortly before his death, in 1883, in a small text called The Notes on Wagner. It was about time!7 Bensaïd constantly underlined the problem that faced Althusser, specifically about where exactly to place the epistemological break, cutting science off from ideology. Bensaïd wrote, ‘Attached to an aleatory border between science and ideology, Althusser had to displace the famous “epistemological break” where Marx was meant to have escaped from humanist ideology and step onto a new scientific continent’. As the above passage mentions, Althusser successively displaced the epistemological break later and later, in the works ‘from the introduction of 1857 to the last Marginal Notes on Wagner, alone totally “exempt from all traces of Hegelianism”’. Bensaïd put his finger on an unsustainable paradox: Marx supposedly produced a science only at his last breath ‘in a startle before his death’.8 Incredulity before the epistemological break had put Bensaïd into Derrida’s company. Of Derrida’s distrust of the ‘epistemological break’, Bensaïd wrote: His silent reluctance bears upon the notion of the epistemological break, tracing a border between a pre-Marxist ideological Marx and a scientific Marx who has become himself. Derrida was never convinced of this thesis concerning the two Marx’s. In his opinion, the concept of science was not the last word allowing an escape from the heterogeneity of Marx and his thought. In addition, despite its sophistication, the discourse of Althusser and his disciples appeared to him, he recalled, like a ‘new scientism’ and a ‘new positivism’. Decisive questions like ‘what is an object?’ were ruthlessly censored … Among the reservations before Althusserian thought … Derrida mentioned the fact that many questions appeared to him to be avoided, ‘notably those concerning the historicity of history and the concept of history’: ‘I found that Althusser subtracted some things from history too quickly, for example, when he said that ideology has no history. I did not understand renouncing history. The destruction of the metaphysical concept of history didn’t signal in my eyes that there was no history’.9

7 Bensaïd 2007, Marx et le marxisme, interviewed by Eric Hazan. 8 Bensaïd 1990. 9 Bensaïd 2001e, pp. 99–100.

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Derrida found Althusser’s theoreticism elusive. Contrary to Althusser’s scientistic temptations, Derrida thought the concept of ideology had a history, therefore ‘the split between science and ideology itself has a history’. Indeed, the history of ideology and its concept teaches one to mistrust any severe epistemological break between science and ideology, making for many differences and subtleties in Marx’s oeuvre that require visibility. Bensaïd, for his part, regretted the fact that ‘paralysis and intimidation reduced these reserves to silence. Their public expression by a philosopher whose prestige was growing would have, at the time, been able to change the terms of a pretty obscure debate’.10 Despite Bensaïd’s rejection of the epistemological break, he did accept the notion that history is a process without a subject, writing ‘the lead is good’ yet, ‘one feels that the project is spoiled’ in Althusser’s hands.11 If the materialist thesis about history being a process without a subject is hindered by theoreticism, the notion that history is a process without a subject runs into a theoretical (and practical) impasse, which Bensaïd took to be a constituent feature of the Althusserian project. Bensaïd paid attention to the effects of Althusser’s project. Despite any disagreement about the content of the epistemological break and the scientific nature of Marxism, Bensaïd recognised that the effect of the move was to emancipate theory from the day-to-day meddling, censuring and control of the pcf’s political bureaucracy. Thus, the effect undoubtedly had its liberating qualities. As Bensaïd described, henceforth abstracted from the vicissitudes of the open crisis of Stalinism, theoretical practice could become its own criterion, containing ‘in itself definite protocols with which to validate the quality of its product, the criteria of the scientificity of the products of scientific practice’. For communist students ‘in conflict with the totemic figure of the party, this emancipation of theory sounded the signal for an effective freedom of thought’,12 Servant of an all-powerful science because it is ‘true’, these intellectuals, exonerated before the ‘party of the working-class’ and martyrs, themselves became producers, since it was henceforth necessary to ‘conceive of knowledge as production’ and not as a worldview.13

10 11 12 13

Bensaïd 2001e, p. 100. Bensaïd 1999b. Bensaïd 2001e, p. 101. Bensaïd 2001e, p. 102.

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If the Althusserian effect was to make visible a scientific Marxism, this was also part of an attempt to win precious academic recognition for it, at least on Bensaïd’s interpretation. The demarcation of ideology from ‘the majestic serenity of scientific laws’ was manna to an aspiring generation traversing the dilemmas of Stalinism, the expansion of university education, who were intent on managing the conflicting demands of careers in academia and political militancy. The Althusserian liberation of theory could ground a compromise between the technocratic power of science and the good conscience of the cause. Yet, so Bensaïd thought, ‘If the Althusserian gesture appeared liberating, every freedom had its price’: A theory emancipated from politics? To the point of imprisoning itself behind the closed doors of its own practice and breaking all relation to practice at all. What relationship between the revolutionary pretention of this theoretical aggiornamento and the real politics of the Party in 1968? In this armed peace between theory and practice, politics remained in the politicians’ hands of the leadership of the Party … Althusser combined the Stalinist positivism of Statised ‘Marxism-Leninism’ and the positivist tradition of the French university. Exit history: evacuated … since ‘the knowledge of history is no more historical than the knowledge of sugar is sweet’. All the fire was aimed the theoretical leftism of Lukács, Gramsci, accused of ‘confusing in one sole historical materialism simultaneously the theory of history and dialectical materialism, which are however two distinct disciplines’. A science of history on one side? A ‘science of the distinction of truth and error’, a metalogic, a meta-science, on the other? Regarding politics, the last word remains the wisdom of the party.14 According to Bensaïd, though cognisant of the liberating effect of Althusser’s project, it nevertheless remained a failure; albeit it was a failure that opened fruitful paths that could be developed. The effective failure, on Bensaïd’s interpretation, relates to the impossibility of an Althusserian politics, ‘no less evident than that of [the impossibility of] a Hegelian politics’.15

14 15

Bensaïd 1990. Bensaïd 2001e, p. 130.

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Althusser’s Politics: An Insect Trapped in Stalin’s Glass Jar

Bensaïd’s thesis about an impossibility of an Althusserian politics concerns the relationship Althusser’s concrete and immediate politics in the pcf (basically an attempt to reform the Stalinist party from within) and the theoretical nature of his inventiveness. If Althusser’s politics have aged much worse than his theoretical work, then clarifying the link between the two is necessary. Politically, as Bensaïd captured the impasse in an altered Wittgensteinian metaphor, ‘Althusser’s political thought will collide, like a captive insect, against Stalinism’s glass jar’ (the implication is that Althusser’s philosophical undertaking did not show the way out of the glass jar).16 As Althusser’s Reply to John Lewis demonstrated, he understood Stalinism to be a theoretical deviation rather than a formidable historical counter-revolution. What Can No Longer Continue in the Communist Party, written in 1978, ‘came a bit late’, Bensaïd opined. A couple of years earlier, ‘Althusser still saluted the 22nd Congress as “a decisive event, a decisive turn in the history of the Communist Party and the French workers’ movement”’.17 Bensaïd was focusing on Althusser’s political appraisals of the pcf and Stalinism to show the internal tensions involved in them. For instance, Bensaïd draws out how Althusser, while criticising the abandonment of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the internal regime of the party, still ‘congratulated the strategic innovations of the congress and categorically rejected the idea of a right to form tendencies (which, however, has some necessary relation to the idea of a pluralist socialism): “The recognition of organised tendencies seems to me outside of the question in the French party” … because tendencies are always rejected as “a threat to unity”’. Therefore, What Could No Longer Continue ‘had already continued too long. It was too late’. Years before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the ussr, Althusser was to ‘wither away with his abolished universe, hoping until the end for a Gorbachevian miracle’.18 According to Bensaïd, in the pcf Althusser pursued a policy of ‘tactical apoliticism’,19 which meant that 16 17 18 19

Bensaïd 2001e, p. 106. Bensaïd 2001e, p. 109. Bensaïd 1999b. On this point, Balibar’s preface to the 1996 edition of For Marx is interesting. Responding to Althusser’s claim in his autobiography that within the French Communist Party, only a theoretical intervention was possible and not a political one, he said: ‘I can only cite Althusser and return to his text. But I can also say that I don’t believe this “explanation”, at least not under this conspiratorial form. It seems to me to be forged after the event, with intentions and in a state of mind of 1985. It does not accord with my memory of the entanglement of our theoretical intentions and political hopes’. Balibar 1996, p. xiv.

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it was surprising to see Sylvain Lazarus argue that Althusser was the first to ‘open up the thinkability of politics’. Rather than this being the case, Bensaïd argued: Althusser’s success among the elite of the great schools stood above all on the fact that he enabled them to win on all fronts, to emancipate themselves from the stifling tutelage of the party in the privileged name of competence and the expertise of Marxism. The aspiring master thinkers became specialists in the class struggle, assured of their new legitimacy and convinced that their knowledgeable teaching authority readily deserved some power. It is here, on the dual scene of the École Normale and the Party, that the prestige of theory and poverty of politics were tied.20 Though Bensaïd’s observation about the poverty of politics seems just, he did however miss certain elements, of Althusser’s relation to politics, or at least did not discuss them. Out of his field of vision were the extensive lectures and writings Althusser dedicated to the critique of politics; so too did he more or less neglect the debates between Althusser and Balibar over the state and liberatory politics. This does not detract from the political critique Bensaïd penned against Althusser in the context of the pcf, but it does show that it is not definitive, at least when scrutinised against Althusser’s efforts to think Marx’s critique of politics.

4

Althusser’s Deconstruction of Marxism as a Humanist and Historical Eschatology

Bensaïd endorsed elements of Althusser’s philosophical operation, namely the deconstruction of Marxism understood in an ideological-teleological form, in which history is taken in eschatological terms. Indeed, the very idea of the melancholic wager can be thought in terms of Althusser’s metaphor of the moving train that the materialist catches; one is already embarked without knowledge of the train’s origin or end. Beyond the historical context and metaphor, to theory, Bensaïd pointed out that Althusser’s success at the end of the 1960s revolved around three themes: the epistemological break, the critique of historicism and theoretical anti-humanism.

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Bensaïd 1999b.

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As mentioned above, Althusser claimed, about the break between science and ideology, that ‘I have finally and despite all my precautions, conceived and defined it in rationalist terms of science and non-science’.21 Bensaïd related this to the Stalinian and bureaucratic search for proletarian rationality, ‘When we know the interpretation made of the struggle between proletarian science and bourgeois science is sent back to the fervour of ideologies, we glimpse the formidable usage that bureaucratic reason could make of this ruthless rationalism’.22 Things turned out to be more complicated, however. In 1967, Althusser proclaimed the fight against humanism was the primary theoretical duty of Marxism. According to Bensaïd, the move had ‘an undebatable part of legitimacy’ since it involved setting to work a distinction between a Marxist theoretical anti-humanism (not a political one) and the ‘temptations of speculative anthropology’. Bensaïd agreed with the need to deconstruct speculative philosophies of history, seeing too that The Holy Family and The German Ideology marked an explicit rupture with the ideological-teleological-idealism. For Bensaïd, the other side of the critique of speculative philosophies of history was the speculative anthropology that needed a settlement of accounts. Until that point, Bensaïd tells us, all was fine.23 Althusser’s solution rested on the work of his cutters, the epistemological break that would rid the traces of alienation, Subject and Man from Marxism. On Althusser’s word, these speculative-anthropological concepts had to be overcome to leave room for ‘process’. History being a process without a subject, the hold of an ideological Hegelian teleology had to be slackened. However, Marx owed the very concept of process to Hegel (Althusser effectively reads the Absolute Idea as a process without a subject). The process offers the alternative to a humanism based on the anthropological-speculative Subject of Man. Althusser is quite insightful when he defends the thesis that we are indebted to Hegel for the concept of process. However, how far could the secateur’s slice go (another metaphor for drawing a line of demarcation) that would demonstrate Marx’s decisive break with humanism? For Bensaïd, it was necessary to demonstrate the problems Althusser might run into, or even symptomatically avoid. In fact, Bensaïd shows an alternative way to handle Marx’s break with speculative-anthropology, distinct from the epistemological break: Henceforth, it was necessary to dive deep into the work and search for the perfect break, so very difficult to find, without smudges or return. Instead 21 22 23

Quoted from Bensaïd 2001e, p. 111. Bensaïd 2001e, p. 111. Bensaïd 2001e, p. 122.

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of proposing a stringent critique of anthropological concepts and their transformation through the new conceptual arrangements worked out by Marx in the long genesis of Capital, Althusser was content to liquidate them. Without further ado one is tempted to say. Even if it means avoiding the problem by alleging that the constitutive categories of theoretical humanism had disappeared … The undebatable ‘persistence’ of the concept of alienation in the Grundrisse and in Capital (henceforth tied to fetishism and reification) is however significant. It proceeds by a conceptual work and a change of problematic (or terrain) effectively permitting a passage from an anthropological concept to a concept belonging to the critique of political economy. One could carry out a comparable work on the concepts of subject (and of revolutionary subjectivisation) and of humanity (in the sense of a historical humanism that is distinct from an anthropological humanism).24 Bensaïd is insightful here. Importantly, he thought that theoretical antihumanism could lead to a false theoretical-political exit from Stalinism. This could be avoided, however. If one could avoid the false theoretical-political exit from Stalinism, then theoretical anti-humanism could ‘become productive for the critique of a speculative philosophy of history that continued to haunt Marxism well beyond Marx’.25 Short of taking the conditions of exiting Stalinism seriously, then theoretical anti-humanism could well turn into ‘a very practical anti-humanism, perfectly compatible with Maoist fundamentalism’.26 Aside from the critique of humanism is the critique of historicism. In Reading Capital, Althusser claimed that Marxist theory needed to renounce every teleology of reason. To do so, it was necessary to conceptualise of history – between a result and its conditions of existence – in terms of relations of production rather than expression. Expression was taken to be a LeibnizianHegelian residue of idealism, effectively a God thought, where a principle reveals the whole; in opposition to the expressive Leibnizian-Hegelian totality, Althusser demanded the necessity of contingency as well as a new concept of the overdetermined whole. Althusser’s operation went against the traditional idealist philosophies that teleologically organised their systems of categories from Origin to End. The new concept of the whole, replacing the LeibnizianHegelian totality, was supposed to be structured and open to differences in

24 25 26

Bensaïd 1999b. Ibid. Ibid.

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temporalities, the rhythms of history and social formations in which the capitalist mode of production dominate; I take Bensaïd’s account of Althusser’s move, which called for a concept of history that was no longer empirical, that is to say in the vulgar historicist sense. Henceforth it was a matter of liberating the theory of history from all compromise with empirical temporality and with the ‘ideological conception of time that it rested on’. It is there that ‘the basis of contemporary historicism’ confuses the object of knowledge with the real object. History is not what happens in history.27 As mentioned above, the profane and materialist conception of history Marx already sketched in the Holy Family renounced a transcendent finality. According to Bensaïd, on this point, Marx’s theoretical project as reconstructed by Althusser was ‘convincing’. Bensaïd saw Marx as no longer trying to develop a supra-philosophical general history. This is a decisive point of possible convergence between Althusser and Bensaïd, depending on how they are read. For Bensaïd, after settling accounts with his old philosophical conscience, Marx ‘lost interest in the concept of history in order to better work on the critique of political economy where one can uncover the alphabet of a “new writing of history”’.28 This new writing of history, which was active and can be possibly reconstructed from Marx’s specific critique of political economy, was not conceptualised explicitly; as a consequence, certain vulgar teleological conceptions could return to interpretations of Marx unexpectedly. Against these vulgar conceptions Bensaïd explained that: Althusser offers valuable insights with respect to the consequences of a rigorous critique of historical reason. Notably with respect to the status of the notions of origin and genesis: ‘at their root, I take for religious the concepts of origin and genesis, taken of course in the rigorous sense constituted in their couple’. This is to present a particular dialectic that is no longer that of a genesis but of an emergence where ‘something new begins to operate autonomously’. In flagrant contradiction with the accusations of dogmatic structuralism, the critique here provides its rightful place (risking the fall into the miracle) to the evental eruption, in psychoanalysis as in history: ‘Ultimately, the thought of genesis strongly supports the

27 28

Bensaïd 1999b. Bensaïd 2001e, p. 125.

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idea of mutation and discontinuity under the absolute condition that we designate these mutations and discontinuities in the development of the same individual previously identified’. All genesis assumes the developed individual was contained in germ programmed from ‘the origin of its process of generation’.29 Althusser perceptibly rejected the ideology of genesis. The ideology of genesis is often attributed to Marx by vulgarisation. By contrast, Althusser reads the capitalist mode of production as not being begotten by feudalism like its offspring; instead, the capitalist mode of production emerged from the encounter and combination of certain very precise elements. Althusser’s recognition imposed the need for a non-genetic theory of the historical event and logic. For the author of Reading Capital, the capitalist mode of production was a result of a process that did not take the form of a genesis, but the process of an encounter of different elements engendered in the previous historical process. It is not the result of a genesis through which we could retrace our steps in a determinist sequence towards the feudal mode of production as an origin; it is the result of a complex process that, at a given historical moment, produces the encounter of diverse elements from which a new structure emerges. As a new emergent structure (the result), the capitalist mode of production is separated from its pre-history by the intervention and presence of contingency. This means that Althusser refuses the notion of origin in its pact with vulgar empiricism and historicism. One can note that origin has religious connotations: At the beginning was the Word – the abstract concept or the demiurge – the task of which was then to develop its concrete wealth of elements taking shape and flesh in history. To the vulgar historicism that thinks in terms of genesis, the question of origin is the most important, but this is an obstacle to a systematic theory of the capitalist mode of production effective in concrete history. Bensaïd explained that, in Althusser’s critique of historical reason, ‘the mobilisation of the structure primarily guards against the allure of Genesis’; the critical move had Spinoza confront Hegel, Bensaïd writes: This critique is clearly inspired by a radical Spinozist immanence that forbids any use of origin and end. On the contrary, in Hegel, the end that makes its way through immanence is still a masked figure of transcendence. He lacks the radicalism of causa sui. The rejection of theological

29

Bensaïd 2001e, p. 126.

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geneticism permits the sketching of an elaboration of historical temporality breaking with the homogenous continuity of Hegelian time as ‘continuous in which the dialectical continuity of the process is manifested from the development of the idea’. He liberates another idea of contemporaneity and of the historical present. In Hegel, ‘all the elements of the whole always coexist in the same present and are therefore contemporaneous with each other in the same present’ … This present constitutes the absolute horizon of all knowledge. The absence of strategic knowledge of the future hence annihilates all possibility of a political knowledge bearing the future effects of present phenomena. It is why there cannot be, according to Althusser, a ‘possible Hegelian politics’.30 Since the only Hegelian debt Althusser permitted to Marx was the decisive philosophical category of process, the effect of this permission readjusted an understanding of the sovereign subject. The German Ideology conserved the category of the subject. Nevertheless, ‘the critique of anthropological and philosophical history resulted in a decisive conceptual conquest’.31 What did this critique of the Subject imply? The notion of the sovereign subject – for example Man – is ideological. Althusser rejected the notion of a subject as an abstract principle from which history is supposed to unfold. Instead, it was a result, or an effect of a material-historical conjuncture that takes hold. The subject, as Bensaïd describes it, ‘is no longer the subject of history but a subject in history’. The subtle difference between of and in is quite convincing, which is why it is preferable to renounce the term (subject) and choose the notions of agent or support (Träger), which are less charged with a psychologising or idealist-ideological connotation. Bensaïd endorsed the phrase. He wrote of Althusser: forged ‘in the texts of 1968 (Marx’s Relation to Hegel) and 1973 (Lenin Before Hegel), the concept of a “process without a subject or end” is coherent with the idea of a profane history without origin or Last Judgement. It allows for a liberation from all teleological persistence’.32 The process has an unintentional ‘motor’ and dynamic, which is the class struggle (which is not to say that intentions do not exist in class struggles). The very idea of a process without a subject, so central to Althusser’s materialist dialectic, breaks with ideological philosophies of consciousness, and this rupture was accepted, more or less, by Bensaïd. But for Bensaïd, the rupture was destined to an impasse. If Althusser’s history as a process without a subject was a good thread, it was 30 31 32

Bensaïd 2001e, pp. 127–8. Bensaïd 2001e, p. 129. Bensaïd 2001e, pp. 129–30.

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limited by its excessive imprisonment in the polemic against historicism and humanism. Part of the excess, at least according to Bensaïd, was Althusser’s ‘strange positivist maxim according to which “the knowledge of history is no more historical than the knowledge of sugar is sweet”’. For Bensaïd, this was either a banality or nonsense: If it meant applying to the knowledge of history the scientific ideal of the exact sciences … it is nonsense: the knowledge of history is well and truly historical, like all ‘human sciences’, and this critical reflexivity, founded on subject/object unity is essential. From that moment on we are not easily finished with the question of the subject.33 Discourse is not enunciated from the self-speaking sovereign subject. On Althusser’s reading, produced by the intersection of a materiality of materialism and psychoanalysis, discourse is the place of a subjectivisation. The subject loses its illusions about itself. Why, then, does the same not pertain to history? Bensaïd effectively thought that there was still theoretical-historical-political space for a concrete subject in becoming: the abandonment of an anthropological conception of a sovereign subject, Master of its reason and author of its history, does not for all that mean – in good Spinozist immanence – the abandonment of a subjectin-becoming, ‘the process without subject being also the emergence of a subject that, in order to be entirely relative, is no less real’. As far as that goes, theoretical anti-humanism does not necessarily imply the renunciation of historical humanism qua discourse for action, in which humanity and universality are no longer abstract entities but concrete becomings across the practice of production, reproduction and the struggle through which everything is engendered.34 To do justice to Althusser however, it need be said that a major element of his philosophical-political-scientific struggles was to grasp the concrete becoming of subjects in history that were not reduced to the bourgeois subject of law and its metaphysics of consciousness. Bensaïd conspicuously leaves this aside, but it relates to Althusser’s aleatory materialism of the subject (where he reads the ancient atomists as thinkers of such aleatory subjects) and the difficulties

33 34

Ibid. Bensaïd 2001e, pp. 131–2.

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of ideological interpellation of the singular individual in modern bourgeois societies where the capitalist mode of production dominates – which Althusser never succeeded in adequately capturing at the theoretical level.

5

Althusser, the Status of Science and Positivism

Bensaïd constantly returned to Althusser’s unresolved antagonism between science and non-science. Despite the scientific ideal and positivist temptations that haunted Althusser, sometimes refused and openly assumed, he was committed to the problems raised by Marx’s critique of political economy and the Freudian theory of the unconscious; Marx’s critique of political economy and the Freudian unconscious were objects that precluded positivism and scientism yet they were taken by the Popperian model of science to be non-scientific. At stake was a comprehension of the specific objects Marx and Freud had discovered and thought through. For Bensaïd, Marx’s irreducibly singular object of a critique of political economy required an alternative notion of rationality and causality opposed to positivism, For Marx, Capital’s logic is not a mechanical logic but an organic logic, and capital itself is a subject and a vampire that gorges on dead labour … To the extent that the scientific base is no longer physics but a knowledge of history and politics, we can admit with Sylvain Lazarus that Althusser resisted the scientism that threatened him and that his contradictions manifested without satisfying Marx’s proven need to practice science otherwise. He somehow wanted to escape the Stalinist fusion of science and ideology through a ‘double unbinding’: ‘of thought and the party’, and, ‘in thought itself, of science and ideology’. This effort runs into a double difficulty: the logical narrative specific to its objects, first of all (history, the unconscious), and the paradox that there is still history after the ‘break’: the truth is made of histories!35 Althusser recognised the problem. He searched for an alternative causality in the works of Spinoza, so as not to fall into a Hegelian concept of teleology, putting forward the concept of overdetermination. Bensaïd recognised in Althusser’s effort a legitimate concern to ‘avoid the apologetic version of the Hegelian dialectic in force in the discourse self-justification being employed

35

Bensaïd 2001e, pp. 115–17.

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by the Party’.36 In his autobiography, Althusser acknowledged that he wilfully suppressed any category in Marx that could pass as an apologetic category of the dialectic that served as a self-justification for accomplished fact.37 Bensaïd endorsed this preoccupation (not the outright suppression of categories). However, according to Bensaïd, if Althusser indeed tried to construct the concept of history that was no longer apologetic, by giving it a scientific status, he was far from having done that for the concept of science. This was all coherent with Althusser’s reference to Spinoza, who underpinned Althusser’s thought, and with his idea of non-empirical truth, which is not true depending on the success of its application, but whose criterion is immanent to the practice: whereas the criterion is always in the classical representation of science, the figure of a judge and a jurisdiction that must guarantee the validity of the true, Spinoza speaks only of the true that ‘states itself’. Because ‘it is in the process of their production that knowledges prove their worth’.38

36 37

38

Bensaïd 2001e, p. 116. In his interrogation of the status of Marxist theory, Bensaïd developed upon the ‘capital sin’ of historicist Marxism that Althusser identified: the confusion between the object of knowledge and the real object. Althusser’s critique of empirical pragmatism still uncovered a difficulty even though he could not resolve the problem he raised. Every time practice is invoked to test theory the following dilemma is raised: is the theory powerful because it is true or true because it is powerful? For Althusser, when theory is absorbed by practice, the monolithic – homogenous – totality threatens theory. He charged that the historicist currents of Marxism inherited this homogenous and monolithic totality from Hegel. Bensaïd was indignant to say the least, shouting, ‘Or Stalinist! Why not call things by their names, Rollet a thief, and this opaque totality, strictly totalitarian, by its name, instead of diagonally imputing it to Hegel’. Then he said, ‘In searching for a conceptual order safeguarded from the tumults of history and the fate of political change, Althusser hunts for the scars of a badly digested historicism. In his preface to Volume Three of Capital, Engels wrote: “Marx wishes to define where he only investigates, and that in general one might expect fixed, cut-to-measure, once and for all applicable definitions in Marx’s works. It is self-evident that where things and their interrelations are conceived, not as fixed, but as changing, their mental images, the ideas, are likewise subject to change and transformation; and they are not encapsulated in rigid definitions, but are developed in their historical or logical process of formation”. Althusser suspected in this variability of relation and in the processual development of their knowledge the impossibility of a scientific knowledge. As if the metamorphoses of the object imply a generalised relativism where the inconsistent rein of opinion (scientific and political) would win out over the safe order of truth. However, Engels’s text says something else. Of another idea of knowledge where logic does not abolish itself into history, where the historical and logical process are linked’. Bensaïd 2000i, ‘Chauds, froids’. Bensaïd 1999b.

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Though Althusser attempted to unbind thought from the party and science from ideology, making the effort to raise the concept of history to a science that could no longer be corrupted or compromised by making history, hoping to protect materialist philosophers and theory from the intrusion of incompetent, bureaucratic and police-like politicians, in doing so he substituted the tribunal of history for the scientific tribunal. Nevertheless, Althusser’s scientific ideal crossed the limits of classical physics because of the need to address history and politics as specific objects. As I mentioned above, when Althusser claimed something irreversible took place, or had begun in 1845 that marked a point of no return, Bensaïd thought Althusser had ‘set his readers on a course to look for the break that could not be found’. He was aware of the problems that this concept raised, hence the ‘corrected notion of a “Break as a process”, or a continuous Break, in an effort to save the concept of the break: “All science is only ever a continuous Break, punctuated with consequent, interior breaks”’.39 Who is the judge of the break? Where does it end? Althusser’s efforts to demarcate science from ideology never ends, Bensaïd suggests: If it is a matter of thinking the dialectic of continuity and discontinuity, this interplay between the majuscule Break and miniscule breaks seems uselessly confused. In politics, one is constantly required to think rupture and continuity, event and history, act and process in their ensemble – in their contradictory unity. If Althusser insists on maintaining the break, despite the chronological acrobatics that it imposes on him, it is because it fills a crucial function in his conceptual arrangement. Leading the reader of Marx into impasses has however, a price. That his thought – like all thought that develops, creatively researching – experiences turns and leaps, that goes without saying. That it is useful to identify and draw out these inflections is evident. This, being on the condition that one also follows the interlaced threads of continuity and discontinuity. Short of this, the break – forever imperfect and uncertain – incessantly finds itself driven back unto the final limits of the work.40 Another consequence of Althusser’s failure to resolve the irreconcilable issues raised by the epistemological break was the lack of a concrete relation of thought to the party and politics as a strategic art. And from another angle,

39 40

Bensaïd 2001e, p. 112. Bensaïd 2001e, pp. 112–13.

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if there indeed exists a sharp split between science and ideology, this has an implication for political pedagogy. It would have to play the role of transmitting a determinate knowledge to subject who does not possess it, and the pedagogical relation exists because of the inequality between knowledge and non-knowledge; according to Bensaïd, this posited an absolutised discourse between knowledge and ignorance, in which authority is legitimised by an absolute knowledge that faces off against the absolute ignorance of non-knowledge, the determinate political content of which is that the ‘populist Maoism slogan of ‘Serving the People’ and its cult of the masses thus appears as the inverse figure and the intellectual atonement of this master discourse’.41 Althusser was conscious of this tension, even though he would not cede an inch on the distinction between science and non-science. As mentioned already, the contradiction is constituted by an oscillation between the positivist model of science and a radically new conception of science. It is also why Althusser takes up Lenin’s polemic in Lenin and Philosophy. ‘The distinction between “relative truths” and “absolute truth” is indefinite, but it is sufficient, Lenin says, to “prevent science from becoming a dogma in the bad sense of the term”, and “sufficiently definite to enable us to draw a dividing-line in the most emphatic and irrevocable manner” in relation to fideism and agnosticism, to sophistry and “definite enough to permit an implacable struggle against all variants of idealism”’.42 ‘It is therefore not without reason’, Bensaïd claimed, that Althusser ‘defended himself against the accusation of positivism that was addressed to him’. Yet, for Bensaïd, Althusser’s attitude to Comte indicated his oscillations: In his letter to Merab on the 16 January 1978, he recognised a real fondness for the Comtean heritage, so weighty in the French university: ‘what I did fifteen years ago was to fabricate a tiny, very French, justification, in a good little rationalism nourished with a few references (Cavaillès, Bachelard, Canguilhem, and behind them a bit of the Spinoza-Hegel tradition) with pretensions to Marxism (historical materialism) which presented itself as a science … I half-believed this, like any “good” spirit, but in order to write that half, mistrust was necessary for the other half’. However, in a text in 1966 on the Philosophical Conjuncture, he still characterised August Comte as ‘the only great French philosopher of the 19th century’,

41 42

Bensaïd 1999b. Bensaïd 2001e, pp. 118–19.

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who would have ‘saved the honour of French philosophy’ from ‘terrible spiritualist reaction’. Thus, he declared war on spiritualist affiliation, of which Bergson, Péguy, Merleau-Ponty occupied a part … Althusser therefore remained quite stubborn in ignoring the distrust with which Marx held ‘our great philosopher’ Auguste Comte!43 Only year after his profession of Comtean faith Althusser designated positivism as ‘enemy number one’. In his foreword to the renewed edition of For Marx, Balibar also noted the clear tension between the application of an existing scientific model to Marxism and the radical recasting of the concept of science. Related, but not reducible to the tension between positivism and Marx’s science, Althusser also defended himself against the charges of structuralism. From the beginning, Althusser showcased in a well-known passage, we insisted on the structural difference between combinatory (abstract) and combination (concrete), which was the whole problem. Nobody took any notice of this difference. Everyone accused me … of structuralism, of justifying the immobility of structures of the established order and the impossibility of revolutionary practice, while I have however more than sketched on the subject of Lenin a theory of the conjuncture.44 Bensaïd accepted this qualification, however, it remained no less a weighty structural interpretation of the mode of production that ‘practically rendered unthinkable revolutionary subversion’. Again, Bensaïd articulates the tension between the anti-structuralist and structuralist features of Althusser’s theoretical operation. Elsewhere, Althusser’s self-criticism of 1972 shows he accepted that the notion of ‘structural causality’ clumsily flirted with structuralism. Despite the flirtation, ‘All is not in vain, far from it, in this effort to think the specific efficacy of the “absent cause” or of the whole on the part … What mattered, Althusser protested, is that we were decreed structuralists’. Bensaïd conceded that his criticism of the structuralist features of Althusser’s intervention was ‘without a doubt, a polemical simplification … Balibar was not wrong to underline that he intended thus to use the articulated structure, opposed to the expressive Hegelian totality, not in order to think the merciless meaning of history, but “the necessity of contingency in history” ’. Importantly for Bensaïd, however, Balibar ‘did not explain, in contrast, how

43 44

Bensaïd 2001e, pp. 119–20. Quoted from Bensaïd 2001e, p. 120.

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the anti-humanist and anti-historicist preoccupation would logically intersect with the dominant structuralist ideology at the time and enter into a pact with it’.45 Bensaïd did not think Althusser’s work on structural causality was hopeless. The thesis that the economic dialectic is never active in the pure state flows from the recognition that theoretical-systematic scientific reconstruction is about the general, not the particular concrete case, of which the polemic against philosophies of history that rely on the base-superstructure metaphor has an important place. For Althusser, the superstructures, ‘are never seen to step respectfully aside when their work is done or, when the Time comes, as his pure phenomena, to scatter before His Majesty the Economy as he strides along the royal road of the Dialectic’. It is well-known that for Althusser, the ‘lonely hour’ of the last instance is forever absent.46 Althusser’s exigency for the notion of the overdetermination of any social formation and the differential temporality which it implied, was a proposition of a new order of causality to overcome Marxism’s economistic and historicist distortions. In continuity with Althusser’s critique of Leibnizian-Hegelian totalities, structural causality demanded that we do not see society as being determined by one element (His Majesty the Economy) or as a self-alienated and self-restoring totality. Althusser’s critique of illusions in the pure economic dialectic determining a social formation and a superstructure without the presence of overdetermination, connected to Althusser’s Spinozist-immanentist break with the model of abstract historical time; this, it need be said, is a point of convergence with Bensaïd’s attempt to read a new writing of history from Marx’s theoretical revolution. Indeed, Bensaïd thought about the convergence between his own theoretical operation and Althusser’s attempt to ‘elaborate the concept of history as a structured whole’, in which Capital can be read ‘as an “interlacing of different times” and decipher its crises as an effect of their discordance’.47 This was a great angle; but Althusser’s lead would hit a brick wall, so Bensaïd writes, caused by the simultaneous impossibility of an Althusserian politics and the mire of theoreticism that Bensaïd argued remained present in Althusser’s oeuvre. In addition to the criticism of Althusser’s political limits, Bensaïd challenged the notion that Althusser’s self-criticism was a break, holding instead that it remained on a continuum. Althusser himself had said that he never disowned

45 46 47

Bensaïd 2001e, pp. 120–1. Quoted from Elliott 2006, p. 136. Bensaïd 2001e, pp. 128–30.

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his essays because there was no need to do so. They were, somehow, affected by ‘theoreticism’, as part of his fight against bourgeois ideology; the stakes, for Althusser, were nothing but the effort to establish the revolutionary novelty of Marxism. However, ‘the notion of the break would have resulted “in a rationalist interpretation of the break opposing truth to error under the sort of speculative opposition between science and ideology in general”’. ‘The class struggle’, Althusser said, ‘was practically absent’.48 For Bensaïd, this confirmed that Althusser had been tempted by the positivism that ‘we reproached him for at the time’. Another aspect of the self-criticism fascinated Bensaïd, specifically the recognition of Althusser’s debt to Spinoza, for ‘to be a heretical Spinozist is almost orthodox Spinozism, if Spinozism can be said to be one of the greatest lessons in heresy that the world has seen’. ‘This is perfectly correct’, Bensaïd exclaimed. As mentioned already, Althusser took from Spinoza ‘knowledge in the singular’ (captured in the theme of the conjuncture), the putting into question the human subject as a principle, the idea of the misrecognised self’s illusion and opacity (the theme of ideology), making ‘an inventory of this heritage: knowledge of the first type which is “spontaneous ideology”; knowledge of the third type as knowledge of a singular and universal object; a theory of knowledge that recognised a “thought without a subject”, without Origin or End; finally the body as a “surprising anticipation of the Freudian libido”’.49 Spinoza reinforces Marx against the masked transcendence of Hegelian teleology. The annihilation of the Subject in Substance, ‘this is Spinoza’. While recognising the heresy, he also made the effort to recentre contradiction, thus invoking Hegel: It will always lack what Hegel had bequeathed to Marx: contradiction. And this absence ‘did its work’ in Althusser’s own thought. This clarified lack explains the other lack, ‘what was essentially lacking in my first essays: the class struggle and its effects in theory’. The understandable theoretical sin became here a capital political sin. Althusser seems however to confess it only in order to save the essentials, the famous break, that he will keep in use, ‘but in displacing it’.50

48 49 50

Althusser 1976, p. 105. Bensaïd 2001e, pp. 133–4. Bensaïd 2001e, p. 134.

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The Subterranean Tradition of the Materialism of the Encounter

Through their different paths, Bensaïd and Althusser were thinkers of aleatory materialism. It is true that Bensaïd effectively read Althusser’s work as divided into two periods – a judgment now challenged quite conclusively by recent philological scholarship and philosophical articulation – the first of a structuralist flirtation and the second a materialism of the encounter. Bensaïd’s reading of Althusser essentially reproduced the notion that the early Althusser dissolved politics into structures while the late Althusser dissolved politics into the encounter. As Bensaïd thought, Althusser’s philosophical articulations were cut through by the instabilities (personal and political) of the times. Bensaïd’s late reading of Althusser held it to be most plausible to read the latter’s theoretical lifework – ‘with the part of pain the term implies’ – as a ‘work that failed’; it left its residues for posterity, of which the singularly precious thing is Althusser’s ‘effort to resist the spirit of the times, in which the last texts on the “materialism of the encounter” are the priceless outcome’. The late texts retrospectively illuminate Althusser’s journey, his blunders and silences, in which Althusser ‘discovered a materialist tradition “nearly completely unknown”’.51 Though Althusser was suspected of having ceded to the tyranny of structures, Bensaïd tells us that he ‘appears in his posthumous texts as a thinker of the “subterranean materialism of the encounter” ’. The late Althusser fought back against the closure of the future and the ‘extinction of hope’.52 In Althusser’s materialism of the encounter the ‘petrified structure shatters under the evental impact of clinamen’, of the minuscule declination. This ‘event is not an origin but an upsurge’, thus Althusser retrieves his earlier critique of origins. To think the world of singular aleatory encounters Althusser takes Wittgenstein’s dictum that Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist and relies on Heidegger’s ‘there is’ [es gibt] of the facticity into which one is thrown, to deconstruct a religious-teleology based on ‘in the beginning there was …’. Althusser desperately sought out a materialist philosophy recognising the contingency of the world into which we are thrown, where history ‘is nothing but the permanent revocation of the accomplished fact by another undecipherable fact to be accomplished, without knowing in advance whether, or when, or how the event that revokes it will come about. Simply, one day new hands will have to be dealt out and the dice thrown again on the empty

51 52

Bensaïd 2001e, p. 136. Bensaïd 2001e, p. 97.

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table’.53 Bensaïd captures that for Althusser the accomplishment of facts is the pure effect of contingency which ‘depends on the aleatory encounter’. Indeed, before ‘the accomplishment of the facts, before the world, there is only the non-accomplishment of the fact’. The stakes of this materialist thesis about the non-accomplishment of the facts are quite high, since it involves the thinkability and philosophical articulation of the coming together-conjunction of elements and determinations capable of producing a new historical life world.

7

Conjuncture

In combination with the aleatory, Althusser’s concept of the conjuncture greatly interested Bensaïd. The conjuncture is a unity of multiple determinations. Bensaïd had already tried to think the conjuncture in a different form, namely in the terms of Lenin’s notion of revolutionary crisis. Upon later reading Althusser anew, Bensaïd drew specifically on the study of Machiavelli, where Althusser effectively grasped the conjuncture, or at least presented it, as a ‘thought of the unthinkable: “what does it mean to think in the conjuncture? To think a political problem under the category of conjuncture? It first means to take into account of all the determinations, of all the concrete circumstances”’.54 It can be said that the conjuncture intervenes between the aleatory and the necessary present in Marx’s thought. For Althusser, Marx was ‘constrained to think within a horizon torn between the aleatory of the Encounter and the necessity of the Revolution’. This too, is the key contradiction of Bensaïd’s lifework, being a contradiction implicit in the political conjuncture, one is obliged to hold onto the aleatory and necessarian terms in order to think the determinations and interventions of a conjuncture. For Bensaïd, the late Althusser opens a commendable track with the notions of encounter and conjuncture which ‘serve not only to think the reality of history but that of politics and their articulation in struggle’. But Bensaïd also thought that Althusser did not go as far as Benjamin in affirming the primacy of the political moment over the abstraction of historical logic, which also threatens necessity itself. Rather, Althusser uses his concept of a process without a subject where the materialist is the person who takes the train already in motion without knowing from whence it comes and where it is going. There is an

53 54

Bensaïd 2001e, p. 136. Bensaïd 2001e, p. 137.

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absence of the primacy of politics in this metaphor, perhaps. By missing out on Benjamin, ‘Althusser seems tempted to resolve the contradiction that he attributes to Marx, namely the split “between the aleatory of the Encounter and the necessity of the Revolution,” in suppressing one of its terms, that of necessity’.55 According to Bensaïd, this suppression is evidently problematic. To a certain extent even bizarre, Bensaïd thinks, because in some of Althusser’s older texts he underlined the original content of the concept of necessity in Marx. Marx had already criticised the abstract relation between chance and necessity, and on the question of historical necessity, Marx’s thought had nothing to do with the finality of destiny. Marx instead thought necessity in terms of tendencies and counter-tendencies. Bensaïd noted that on this point ‘Althusser indeed saw the rich logic of Capital and its “tendential laws”’, originally unifying chance and necessity in contradiction. Althusser was justified in his protest against ‘the simplifying accusation of structuralism. His Marxism is beyond structuralism because, in the tendency, contradiction wins out over the process: “Instead of thinking contingency as a modality or exception of necessity, it is necessary to think necessity as the becoming-necessary of the encounter of contingencies”’.56 However, philosophically-conceptually (not philologically), Bensaïd criticised Althusser’s late texts because, Strangely, the texts on the materialism of the encounter, while they systematise a diffuse problem … seem to unravel the contradiction. Althusser could no longer hold its tension together. Now the indeterminate aleatory overrides it [the contradiction]. The event seems uprooted from historicity to the point of emerging in the pure contingency like ‘the miracle of the clinamen’ (Althusser’s own formula). We witness also a spectacular reversal of the structuralist temptation into an arbitrarily subjective voluntarism.57 Althusser’s materialism of the encounter eventually led to the impasses of an aleatory politics without any possible effect. One needs to distinguish two elements at this point. First, the role of the aleatory in Althusser’s writings – at least since his monograph on Montesquieu – and second, the effects of the late aleatory materialism that Bensaïd reads as hitting up against an impasse of Althusserian politics. 55 56 57

Ibid. Bensaïd 2001e, p. 138. Bensaïd 2001e, p. 139.

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Is the Crisis of Marxism a Sign of its Liberation?

Bensaïd concluded his essay on Althusser by posing the crisis and liberation of Marxism, based on Althusser’s dual personal and political tragedies. Althusser’s thought had revolted against itself. In 1978, Althusser announced ‘a defeat and deliverance’ with the recognition of a crisis of Marxism, which had finally become visible to all. It was, so Bensaïd writes, ‘already too late’; the crisis of Marxism was political, not just theoretical, let alone philosophical. According to Bensaïd, the ‘explosion of the crisis inextricably tied theory and politics’ because no longer could the thesis that Stalinism was a ‘theoretical deviation’ be sustained. Could the crisis of Marxism be the beginning of its liberation? Certainly, so Bensaïd exclaimed. But the crisis ‘revealed something else, “a singular paradox” … “One of the strongest Marxist thinkers of the century has without a doubt never exactly been a Marxist” ’.58 A debatable term ‘exactly Marxist’, but this point negatively testified to Bensaïd’s argument that the age of Althusser was not the Golden Age of Marxism, but involved a play of semblance shaping the perceptions of Althusser. Most importantly, for Bensaïd, here and there Althusser opened up productive paths, but each should ‘be seen as a failed project’. Outside of ‘the class struggle, social practices, the real working class, an outside “which is not only that of philosophy but that of theory” ’, Bensaïd effectively concluded about the primacy or not of philosophy for Marxism: It is also why he cannot help but approach politics under the condition of philosophy and of according in turn a directly political function to philosophy. What distinguishes philosophy from science, is its organic relation to politics: it is political because it intervenes directly into the interior of the political struggle. The specific object of theory and Marxist philosophy would then be ‘the distinction between scientific knowledge and ideology’. But the practice invoked by theory remains ‘theoretical practice’, and intervention into ‘a determinate conjuncture’ … remains a philosophical intervention into a theoretical conjuncture: ‘If I today propose a new formula: philosophy is in the last instance the class struggle in theory, it is exactly in order to put in their proper place the class struggle (last instance) and other social practices (among them scientific practice) in their due relation to philosophy’. Philosophy, therefore, is the first served. In fact, it holds the secret to the theoretical and political

58

Bensaïd 2001e, p. 140.

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impasses of Althusser. ‘We have been Spinozists’? The problem is to have remained there without taking on the transformations carried out by Marx. ‘Spinoza and other heretics’? Althusser grasped the red thread of this heresy.59 A distance separates Bensaïd and Althusser in their attitude to theory and practice, as can be seen from their respective readings of Marx; it is part of the conditions of possibility for the liberation of Marxism from its crisis. The connection between theory and a field of possibility open to practice is tied to Bensaïd’s criticism of theoreticist residues in Althusser’s philosophical practice. By proclaiming the self-sufficiency of theory where the criteria of the truth of knowledge produced by Marx’s theoretical practice is given by theoretical practice itself, through the scientific credentials of forms that assured the production of knowledges to it, we end up with a theory whose referents are internal to itself. Theory is no longer true because it is effective but because it conforms to the demands of science. ‘From a non-pragmatic criterion of practice, we thus pass over to self-referential “theoretical practice”, subtracted from the tests of practical practice and its avatars’, Bensaïd wrote. Severed by ‘the epistemological break, outside the heavy empirical artillery of the facts, theory thought it was able to speak to itself at ease. The principle of reality painfully caught up with him at the turn: the contradictions and impasses of Althusser fit into this unfinished mourning process of Stalinism’.60 Armed with the secateurs of science, ‘he thought he was able to dismiss history. History fought back’, ending in Althusser’s universe of thought being abolished.61 Notwithstanding the criticisms, Bensaïd continued to maintain that the Althusserian experience had its productive effects that could intersect with a new generation of Marxists. Writing in Rouge, after the death of Althusser, Bensaïd claimed: Today, paradoxically, his inaugural invitation is charged with a new subversive bearing. In a disorientated time, to reread Capital, with and against Althusser, remains the necessary point of departure for our logical revolts.62

59 60 61 62

Bensaïd 2001e, pp. 141–2. Bensaïd 1999b. Bensaïd 1990. Ibid.

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Negri: The Dissolution of Politics into Violence The gist of Bensaïd’s critique of Negri needs to be understood with the earlier critique of Althusser in mind; it can be summed up as follows, though attention to its context dependence (it was written prior to Bensaïd’s renewed reading of Althusser and Negri) is necessary: Althusser and Negri reduced Marx’s theory to impotence. By dissolving politics. One in the structure, the other in violence.1 Bensaïd arrived at the dual conclusion of this passage from an interpretation of the development of Marx’s thought, and the exigencies of the theoreticalpolitical-historical conjuncture. The attitude towards Negri also needs to be situated in the context of the debates over revolutionary subjectivity in Marx’s work and the humanism debates, but also the possibility of politics as a strategic art of mediations and hegemony. As is clear, the development of Marx’s thought was a subject fully charged with polemical zeal. It was recommenced with the discussions of the Paris Manuscripts and the discovery of the Grundrisse. According to Bensaïd, in the ‘debate of the 1960s over the epistemological break, the controversy was centred around the relations, rupture or development between the Manuscripts of 1844, the Grundrisse and Capital’.2 Three trends emerged responding to this debate, which Bensaïd reconstructs (one can read them in relation to the chapter on Althusser too). The first current (Fromm, Rubel, Bigo, Calvez) refused to accept that a significant discontinuity took place between the Manuscripts and Capital. The ‘historical conception of alienation was subordinated to the anthropological conception that predominated in the Paris Manuscripts’. Alienated labour played the central role to the detriment of the concepts of Marx’s mature critique of political economy, the theory of surplus-value and labour-value. The leader of the post-war Italian Communist Party, Togliatti, concluded that ‘All of Marxism is contained here’,3 and for Bensaïd, the consequence of the interpretation was the following: 1 Bensaïd 1995, p. 183. 2 Bensaïd 1995, p. 169. 3 Ibid.

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This dominant ethical interpretation indeed nourished an anti-bureaucratic humanism (in the face of Stalinist cynicism) and an abstract humanism (of Social Democratic inclination) where the progressive march to disalienation took precedence over the irreducible conflictuality of the relation of exploitation, compromise over the class struggle and the road to reforms over the revolutionary strategic hypothesis.4 A second trend went even further than the first in affirming the subversive superiority of the young Marx in relation to the austere ‘scientific positivism’ of the Marx of Capital and its schemas of reproduction. And the third group wanted to liquidate the Marx of alienated labour to develop the science of Capital. Many figures in the third trend came from the different communist parties after the Khrushchev speech. One problem was that in the decade or so after the Second World War knowledge of Marxist texts was limited; greater knowledge had come to replace textual ignorance by the 1990s: Thanks to a better understanding of the texts, it has today become undebatable that the theme of alienation did not gradually disappear to the extent that we advance to the so-called mature works. It is effectively present in the Grundrisse. And in Capital, it loses its entire anthropological stench in order to embed itself in the social relation of generalised fetishism and commodity reification of which it becomes a modality. Without even having seen the Manuscripts or the Grundrisse, Georg Lukács (perhaps inspired by Max Weber) in History and Class Consciousness was able to make explicit, from 1923 onwards, the central problem of reification in Capital. Likewise, in his Karl Marx, Karl Korsch considered that Capital ‘brings back all the other alienated categories of the economy to the fetish character of the commodity’. At last, [Isaak Ilych] Rubin consecrated a penetrating chapter in his Essays on the Labour Theory of Value to the ‘Marxist theory of commodity fetishism’. In them a hot and living Marxism was developed, which was for a long time buried under the ice sheet of Diamat Orthodoxy.5 According to Bensaïd, from the vantage ground of Capital, what is lost in alienation is not humanity’s origins or true nature, but the possibility of a humanity in becoming. It is not possible to return to a schema of alienation that prom-

4 Ibid. 5 Bensaïd 1995, p. 170.

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ises a teleological resolution of a lost origin. That does not mean one can discard the category of alienation. Historically, Stalinist ideological apparatuses repressed the notion of alienation because of its anti-bureaucratic potential. Lefebvre grasped what was at stake in saying that the concept ‘through a superior order of state reason, had to disappear’. The Social Democrats in the 1930s, faced with Nazism and Stalinism searched in the Manuscripts for new arguments, notwithstanding their economic determinism and abstractly arbitrary individualist morality permitting them to avoid the strategic question of the state and revolution. In the 1960s, direct interest in Marx’s texts began to refresh the debate, in which the contributions of Reading Capital, Ernest Mandel’s The Formation of the Economic Thought of Karl Marx and Antonio Negri’s Marx Beyond Marx featured. We could add Jean-Marie Vincent, the author of Fétichisme et Société as well. Vincent and Mandel used the Grundrisse in a polemical way to demonstrate, against Althusserian positions, that there was a continuity in Marx’s work, that the theme of alienation had never been abandoned. Consequently, there would be no opposition between the young Marx, a theoretician of alienation, and the Marx of Capital, critical theoretician of reification and fetishism. There was certainly an evolution and transformation, but no adequate grounds to divide his work into the young humanist Marx against the old scientistic Marx (I return to this issue in the last chapter on commodity fetishism). Mandel was basically ignored throughout the 1960s Marxist-humanist debates; yet, Mandel had produced the most coherent and systematic demolition of the Althusserian epistemological break until that point.6 As Bensaïd

6 Appraising Mandel’s contribution to Marxist theory, Bensaïd spoke of the paradox that Mandel’s work faced: ‘It is in France … that the theoretical work of Ernest Mandel remains underestimated. There are probably many reasons for that. Firstly, the Marxiological debate in France has been characterised, as all intellectual life, by a philosophical and ideological hypertrophy, and the rigours of economic research have been undervalued for long time. In his precious little book Considerations on Western Marxism, Perry Anderson insisted on this singularity: “Trotsky himself had written no major economic work, unlike most theorists of his generation: Rosdolsky himself, not an economist by training, undertook his work out of a sense of duty to succeeding generations, as a lone survivor of the East European culture that had once produced Bolshevism and Austro-Marxism. His hope was not in vain. Four years later, Ernest Mandel – a Belgian Trotskyist, who had been active in the Resistance and imprisoned by the Nazis, before becoming prominent in the Fourth International after the War published in Germany a full-scale study of Late Capitalism, directly indebted to Rosdolsky: the first theoretical analysis of the global development of the capitalist mode of production since the Second World War, conceived within the framework of classical Marxist categories … The tradition descended from Trotsky has thus been a polar contrast, in most

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recalled, Mandel had a better understanding of the ensemble of Marx’s works that were incompatible with Althusser’s thesis; Bensaïd was not however an uncritical partisan of Mandel’s labour: From often unknown texts at the time or that were inaccessible in French (in particular the Grundrisse and Rosdolsky’s book), he re-established the genesis of the concepts of Capital in their complexity. One could say, however, that being carried away by the immediate issue of the polemic and the apologetic role that the scientistic reading of Marx played, he had a tendency to put the emphasis on the humanist continuity in Marx rather than on the metamorphoses of the category of alienation and the specific logic of capital.7 Mandel nevertheless articulated another resolution to the Marxist-humanism questions.

1

Negri’s Subjectivist Proposal

For our narrative of Bensaïd’s thinking, Mandel’s line has a determinate relation to Negri, because Mandel’s line was something more adequate than the conflict between Althusser’s attack on the subject and Negri’s return to subjectivist voluntarism (which Bensaïd claims of Negri). Bensaïd captured Negri’s position, with an outline of the stakes involved:

essential respects, to that of Western Marxism. It concentrated on politics and economics, not philosophy. It was resolutely inter nationalist, never confined in concern or horizon to a single culture or country. It spoke a language of clarity and urgency, whose finest prose (Trotsky or Deutscher) yet possessed a literary quality equal or superior to that of any other tradition. It filled no chairs in universities. Its members were hunted and outlawed”. The second reason for the lack of knowledge of Mandel in France is probably on the one hand a result of the combined weight of the Communist Party and its vulgar orthodoxy, and a conceptual protectionism in the university halls that is palpably protectionist, for whom “Mandel’s Marxism” presented an inexcusable ‘inconvenience’ for remaining deeply militant. In the traditions of Marx, Lenin, Rosa, Trotsky, he never separated theoretical research and practical engagement, at a time when the divorce between both was splitting apart. Until the end of his life, Mandel, this was the least of his merits, had always consecrated a large part of his energy to practical, material, organisational questions of the daily struggle’. Bensaïd 1995, L’héritage théorique d’Ernest Mandel, http://www.ernestmandel.org/new/sur‑la‑vie‑et‑l‑oeuvre/article/​ l‑heritage‑theorique‑d‑ernest. 7 Bensaïd 1995, p. 172.

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Personally, I think that this question has been very useful to better understand, finally, the intimate logic of Marx’s thought. While, for Negri, it was a case of opposing a revolutionary and subversive Marx, theoretician of workers’ subjectivity, to the scientistic and positivist Marx who theorised, through the reproduction schemas of Capital volume two, a kind of eternity of capital, a capitalist system that would scientifically tend toward equilibrium. For Negri, the only dynamic factor is the proletariat in-itself and capital is only a reaction to the creativity of the proletariat. That leads to a very subjectivist position, which, up to a certain point, has contemporary consequences. If globalisation is only capital’s reactive response to the inventivity and creativity of the proletariat, therefore everything that moves in this direction of openness is positive, whether this will be the European Constitutional Treaty, or neoliberalism, which plays a progressive role comparable to the capitalism that Marx described in the Communist Manifesto. I developed this question in more depth in an essay on Antonio Negri in my work La discordance des temps.8 Negri put the call out to return to the Grundrisse to justify a return to subjective volition. According to Bensaïd, the call did not pay sufficient attention to the logical structure and genesis of Capital itself. And how could the fact that Capital was an indignant work remain unseen? For Bensaïd, ‘Negri radicalised this Gramscian approach of subjectivity regained against the Althusserian tyranny of the structure’. Furthermore, in Marx Beyond Marx, Negri claimed that Marxism could well be entitled the ‘science of crisis and subversion’. The system, dynamic and open, ‘is completely dominated by the question of the relation between the crisis and the emergence of revolutionary subjectivity’. The centre of gravity of Negri’s work is the conceptual couple subject/crisis, ‘recalling that the prudent Kautsky was careful not to exhume the Grundrisse, Negri wanted to oppose its burning subversion to the cold science of Capital’.9 For Negri, the Grundrisse was ‘a political text that combines an appreciation of the revolu8 Bensaïd 2009. In his Entretien avec des étudiants, Bensaïd (1991) said: ‘Negri (in Marx Beyond Marx) pushed this distinction [between a subversive younger Marx and a cold scientific older one] to the extreme in opposing a Marxist theory of the subject (the proletariat and its revolt) that was to be found in the Grundrisse, as opposed to what is to be found in Capital. The problem is all the more irresolvable if one artificially hypostasises the subject and the structure. Perhaps it is an expression of a moment, in politics and thought, of extreme tension, of an extreme divorce between theory and practice … If one rereads Marx in light of Hegel’s Logic, the problem is posed in other terms’. 9 Bensaïd 1995, p. 172.

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tionary possibilities created by the “imminent crisis” together with the theoretical will to adequately synthesise the communist actions of the working class faced with this crisis; the Grundrisse is the theory of the dynamics of this relationship’. Negri took the Grundrisse to be burning; Capital, by contrast, was a cold, German work, ‘Our Italian comrades recognized that “the ensorcelling of the method” in Capital is weak, and concluded that this “blocked research”. The objectification of categories in Capital blocks action by revolutionary subjectivity’.10 According to Negri, the Grundrisse was written in the intensity and proximity of crisis where the constitution of a revolutionary subjectivity was urgently posed. The theoretical work was, therefore, in a close relation to practical questions, whereas Capital was written years after the crisis conjuncture; somehow, as a consequence of this, Negri suggests that Capital blocks considerations of the real development of subjectivity. Capital considered in Capital is something that arrives at the end of its development. As for the Grundrisse, Negri suggests: Is it not the case – and we will see this shortly – that the Grundrisse is a text dedicated to revolutionary subjectivity? Does it not reconstruct what the Marxist tradition has too often torn apart, that is to say the unity of the constitution and the strategic project of working-class subjectivity? Does it not present Marx as a whole, where other texts cut him apart and give unilateral definitions?11 For Bensaïd, Negri’s return to the Grundrisse, pitting the subject against coldobjective structures was a legitimate curative operation against the suffocation of the subject. However, the subject remained conceptually confined to a static structure, its antinomical Other; it solved nothing. Negri’s move echoed an impatient leftism: This subject that erupts in the crisis is stamped with impatience. As if it knew that it was condemned to the precarity of the ephemeral upsurge. It rejects the constraints and gravity of a dead objectivity in order to rush into the urgency of voluntarism and a feverish activity … Violence, not as a necessary social relation but as the symbolic expression of the subjective will, furnishes the figure of it.12

10 11 12

Negri 1991, p. 8. Ibid. Bensaïd 1995, p. 176.

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In Negri, the violence of the subject was a main focus for communism as a movement: Proletarian violence, insofar as it is a positive allusion to communism, is an essential element of the dynamic of communism. To suppress the violence of this process can only deliver it – tied hand and foot – to capital. Violence is a first, immediate, and vigorous affirmation of the necessity of communism. It does not provide the solution, but it is fundamental. It is perhaps the only means, insufficient but appropriate, for use value to emerge on this level of analysis (and on the interpreted reality) from the indistinct horizon of behaviours. Proletarian violence is a symptom of communism.13 Negri radically theorised a substitutionalist project by putting proletarian violence at the centre of the subject, subjectivisation and agency. This move took place around the middle of the 1970s, when the left experienced a radical reversal; on these grounds violence suddenly replaced politics among some currents. Politics became ineffectual, Bensaïd suggested, in which ‘the subject … remained suspended above a class … the will becomes voluntarism and the desire for revolution, literally ultra-leftism’.14 In Negri, the relentless subjectivisation of the subject is incarnated into a project. The project this subject articulates is an immediate transition to communism; communism decreed at once. This was the time when il Manifesto put out the slogan for a communism without transition, built on the hyper-maturity of the productive forces. It was the post-68 ‘happy and prosperous revolution’: everything at once. Negri wrote: We must resolutely demystify and overthrow all kinds of necessity and determinism attributed to the process of transition … it is not the transition that reveals itself (and eliminates itself ) in the form of communism, but rather it is communism that takes the form of the transition.15 Negri synthesised a form of communism in which the subject somehow develops over the course of a crisis of the capitalist mode of production; it is a highly subjectivist conception of communism. Was it not as incapable as conceiving the passage and transition to communism as a rigid structuralism without 13 14 15

Negri 1991, p. 173. Bensaïd 1995, p. 176. Negri 1991, pp. 153–4.

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the subject? Negri refused to think through the transition because it involved cutting things ‘into two fragments, one which serves as an introduction and is situated within capital, in the interstices of its contradictions, the other which finally comes after and reveals itself in a space beyond the catastrophe in the full liberty of communism’.16 He preferred to collapse the two ‘fragments’ and suppress the contradiction into a communism that takes the form of the transition. About Negri’s suppression of the contradiction, Bensaïd suggests situating Negri’s affirmation in the context of the late 1970s; effectively, the affirmation amounted to an abolition of the transition by the pure will of subjectivity, instead, as it formerly had been, obliterated by ‘structural determinism’.17 For Bensaïd, this was a case of a reversal, analogous to the Stalinist period ‘where man is continually sent back from the angel unto the beast: sometimes subdued before the inflexible laws of historical determinism, sometimes raised by bureaucratic arrogance which claims to defy those very laws to write into blood and stone the signature of his rule’.18

2

Negri’s Interpretation of Capital and the Political Subject

To maintain his charge that Capital smothered the subject and was inferior to the Grundrisse, Negri wrote off one of the most important commentators on the relationship between the two works – Roman Rosdolsky. To Negri, Rosdolsky’s work seemed limited because of ‘the ideology of the communist left in the inter-war period: on the one side an extreme objectivism, on the other the necessity to found that objectivism by recuperating Marxist orthodoxy’.19 For Negri, the disappearance of the subject is inherent in the way Capital unfolds (and Rosdolsky discusses) its objective logic accompanied by the pure erasure of the initially planned book on wage labour. Bensaïd writes, ‘Inconsolable, he [Negri] is sorry about this lost chapter, which “would have been a chapter on the working class, struggle and necessary labour” ’. ‘More generally’, Bensaïd pointed out, Negri ‘cannot resign himself to the absence of classes, reduced in volume one to their conceptual bones’, however, ‘the return of the totality on itself, the circle of circles finally completed in the reproduction of the whole will only allow the entry onto the scene of these determined classes already in

16 17 18 19

Negri 1991, p. 152. Bensaïd 1995, p. 179. Ibid. Negri 1991, p. 17.

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struggle’.20 While one does not get very far remaining at the conceptual level of production, reproduction as a whole presupposes not only the immediate relation of production, but the relations of exchange, distribution, reproduction and their articulation to the state. Value returns to socially necessary labour time but this necessity is established only through the movement of the whole and social conflict. Bensaïd thought that Negri’s position could not adequately answer the question that Volume 3 of Capital left open: how can a class dominated by alienated labour and commodity fetishism escape from its total negation to become everything? Bensaïd suggests that Negri’s absolutisation of the subject, in which violence replaces political mediations, could not answer this question. There was effectively no mediator between the critique of political economy and revolutionary strategy embedded in the art of political conflict. An unmediated subjectivism was the conscious or unconscious result of this lack. It is unclear whether his theoretical problems stem from this political problem or vice versa. Nevertheless, they are intimately tied. As for Rosdolsky, he asked two vital questions: what were the themes that were to be treated in Capital? And why was a particular book on wages renounced in it? For Rosdolsky, the ‘strict separation of the categories of capital and wage labour, which the old outline envisaged, could only be taken up to a certain point and then had to be abandoned’.21 Negri rejected this assertion, contending that this ‘means that all these listed themes must be considered as elements subaltern to the analysis of capital’.22 Bensaïd retorted that: Wages had to find their place logically in Volume Three, alongside profit and rent, in the movement of the whole of revenue’s distribution, the trinity formula of capital and competition. What Negri stubbornly refuses is in reality the implacable logic of Capital.23 Negri contended that the Grundrisse, in contrast to Capital, reconstructs what the Marxist tradition had too often broken, a knowledge of the unity of the constitution and the strategic project of workers’ subjectivity. In the Grundrisse, capital, exchange and exploitation do not annul the independence of the proletarian subject, whereas, in Capital, subjectivity is annulled in objectivity, of which the elimination of the chapter on wage-labour is symptomatic. Bensaïd 20 21 22 23

Bensaïd 1995, pp. 180–1. Rosdolsky 1977, p. 54. Negri 1991, p. 130. Bensaïd 1995, p. 181.

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however concluded that Negri’s anti-structuralist operation, which was the key issue, was actually an ideological move. Again, we return to the problem of communist transition, which is indissociable from a reading of Capital and working-class political subjectivity, Bensaïd explains: Against the structuralist ideology of order, he opposes the ideology of creative crisis. Both have in common the evacuation of politics and of strategy, one in aid of the mechanical laws of structure and the other nourishing the foundation of a utopian ethic. Negri’s scheme deduces, without mediation, a communism of the subject and the subject of crisis. The conditions of total liberation are always already given. They do not follow a conquest but a revelation through which violence is capable of actualising. In the strict sense this is an ultra-leftist reading that abolishes the transition without being able to think it through.24

3

Constituent Power

Broadly speaking, Bensaïd engages Negri’s theoretical-political work on two occasions, before and after the Seattle anti-capitalist movement. According to Bensaïd, in the meanwhile, Negri did not take stock of the defeats of the neoliberal era and, therefore, the disagreements in Marx Beyond Marx re-emerged, repackaged, in Bensaïd’s subsequent critiques. In Negri, an understanding of the contemporary situation, the defeats the proletariat had suffered in the face of the neoliberal counter-reforms of the 1980s seemed to play no role. On Bensaïd’s reading, throughout the post-2000s, Hardt and Negri hardly posed questions about the durable or conjunctural impact of the neoliberal counterreforms, which mutilated radical thought. By doing so, Negri avoided every balance sheet of his own past theories of working-class political subjectification – the mass worker or the social worker – thus repeating the schema through a new subject, the multitude. Bensaïd’s later writings on Negri engage with Constituent Power, respond to the release of Empire in 2000 and the anti-capitalist movement, of which Negri was a prominent figure. Democracy formed the core of Negri’s writings on constituent power, because ‘To speak of constituent power is to speak of democracy’. Negri’s work dealt with the contradiction between the constituents and constituted, on the lookout for constituent liberation and revolution. Vitally, humans can make

24

Bensaïd 1995, p. 182.

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their history rather than submit to its constituted force. Negri’s conception of constituent power was revolutionary insofar as it represents the human ability to innovate and creatively produce history; constituent power is inherent and infinite. Ontologically, it is a potential (in the Latin derived sense quite different to auctoritas and imperium); it is more than the exercise of institutionalised power. Through constituent power, the multitude can assert its democratic will; it has the practical capacity to rupture and disharmonise hitherto stable regimes of politics. For Negri, the Paris Commune is an example of this thoroughgoing historical and practical capacity because the propulsive force of democratic will was capable of putting the politically separate machine of the state into question. Faced with the illusory separation of the social and the political, Negri drew out the implications of a dialectic of potentia [puissance – D.R.] and potestas [pouvoir – D.R.], ‘a double process of the politicisation of the social and the socialisation of the political’.25 Constituent liberation is manifest in the resistance against solidified institutions. This emergent subject is formed in the conflict between private property and state administration. This resistance faces the instituted and tyrannical power of capital and the contemporary form that constituent power takes is communism, the real movement that abolishes the present state of things. It is in moments of revolutionary crisis and the tearing apart of domination that the social and political fuse; however, Bensaïd suggests that by Interpreting the strategically determinant notion of ‘dual power’ (that for Lenin characterises a revolutionary situation) not as a constitutional fact, but as a constituent fact, Negri tends to avoid the constitutive contradiction of political democracy … through the self-destruction of a democracy that is a victim of its own accomplishment. In the tracks of Machiavelli, Negri makes a distinction between ‘virtue’ and ‘fortune’, the founding declaration of the dialectical tension between constituent and constituted, between the dynamic principle of subversion and the conservative inertia of institutions.26 Within Negri’s ontological conception, resistance to oppression is inherent in constituent power. Constituent power erupts through the open door of a crisis and Negri insisted on the dialectic between processual patience and evental exaltation. The French Revolution furnishes the great example of this pro-

25 26

Bensaïd 2001e, p. 195. Bensaïd 2001e, pp. 197–8.

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cess, when according to Negri, constituent power had its own temporality. The revolutionary temporality of the French Revolution then poses the problem of knowing where a revolution begins and where it ends since the specific time and space of the revolutionary event takes the form of ‘an abyss of democracy’ in the dangerous moment where constituent radicalism and its eruptive force demystify the scene of representation. The more Thermidor – and its counter-revolutionary and institutional politics – makes the effort to suppress an immanent thirst for liberation, the more it pushes the social forces to a new and deeper upsurge, affirming itself as a ‘permanent revolution’. Deciding when a revolution is over thus has two dimensions in the context of permanence: Whence the double meaning attached to the will, so often heard since Babeuf and the Thermidorians, of ‘finishing the revolution’: in pushing to its inaccessible terminus for the former; and in putting it to an end once and for all for the others! Babeuf and the Conspiracy of the Equals want ‘to finish the revolution’ because it isn’t made, or badly done, only half: a botched job; the important part remains to be done. On the contrary, Benjamin Constant and François Furet intend to end it. In the factual sense of the term, the revolution has finished on Thermidor’s scaffold. In the meaning that its constituent permanence gives to it, it remains incomplete, interrupted, interminable. Its subterranean power moves through invisibly woven paths to sudden resurgences, June 1848, the Commune, June 1936, May 1968.27 The key difficulty Bensaïd articulates about Negri’s notion of constituent power is the ontological philosophical construction that underlies it and the political effects it produces. Negri makes a sort of turn to ontology, wholly conscious also that every ontology has its share of political content. On the one hand, the ontological turn involves a combative argument for immanent struggle for liberation; insofar as this is the case, it is indispensable. However, on the other hand, the ontological turn – like all ontological turns – suffers from an ontologisation tending to threaten or even to suppress political mediations. This, so Bensaïd thinks, is clear in the case of the multitude: Following Spinoza and Machiavelli, Hardt and Negri define politics as the movement of the multitude. Despite the ‘decline of traditional spheres

27

Bensaïd 2001e, pp. 202–3.

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of resistance’ and although ‘the public spaces are more and more being privatised’, politics, against what Hannah Arendt feared, is not threatened with disappearing. It only loses its illusory autonomy to be confused with the social struggle: ‘The social conflicts that constitute the political confront one another directly, without mediations of any sort’. If politics is an art of mediations, what remains when one suppresses mediations? The decreed fusion between the political and the social evades the difficulty without resolving it. To conclude, without further ado, that the movement of the multitude will have to ‘invent the democratic forms of a new constituent power’ traces out a perspective that is too vague for the challenges of the period.28

4

Bensaïd’s Critique of Empire

In the English-speaking world, Empire was welcomed by those like Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek with open arms. Žižek even spoke of it as being a new Communist Manifesto. For Bensaïd, the salutation was welcome, if a little excessive; the book’s virtues were that it went against the grain of weak thought and resignation. It was further justified, so Bensaïd wrote, because it ‘confirms in Toni Negri, the consistency of a thought developed over the length of time from Marx Beyond Marx … to Constituent Power, through The Savage Anomaly and Subversive Spinoza. This demarche today opens with an attempt to come to grips with the great “passage” in which the world is embarked, from a post-Marxist materialist point of view, nourished by Spinoza and Machiavelli, Deleuze and Foucault’.29 Because it was impossible to treat the ensemble of Negri’s work – whether in Empire itself or the rest of his work – in some short reviews, Bensaïd focused on the central thesis of the work. In Empire, Hardt and Negri took note of the passage from modernity to post-modernity, welcoming ‘this “capital transition in contemporary history” as the advent of a liberation and as the opportunity for a hybrid and nomadic politics, radically opposed to the binary and territorial logics of modernity. Without regret, they observe the decline of state and national sovereignties favouring an Empire without limits: while classical imperialism signified the expansion of the nation state outside of its borders, there is no longer, in the current imperial phase, nation-states nor imperial-

28 29

Bensaïd 2001e, pp. 208–9. Bensaïd 2001f.

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ism: this new arrangement “supra-national, global, total, we call Empire”’.30 Hardt and Negri’s Empire, by abolishing the borders between the exterior and interior, no longer has an outside, being An Empire Without an Outside, as Bensaïd titled his review of the book in Le Monde. The supposedly new paradigm ‘rendered the tactical concerns of the “old revolutionary school” obsolete. It put a counter-globalisation onto the agenda, bustling with an immanent desire for liberation’. The stratagem that the writers of Empire employed was seductive, but ‘its justification often remains fragile both empirically and conceptually’. Bensaïd therefore raised certain questions for these authors: The analysis of the current reality of capitalist accumulation often remains evasive and the world market, when it is not thrown onto the back-burner, reduces itself to an abstraction. What is the precise relation between the concentration of capital with its territorial localisation and with its state logistics (monetary and military)? What are the geopolitical strategies at work and the dialectic between state powers and international institutions? How to work in the tension between an emergent supra-national law and a global order that still rests on an inter-state structure? What is the relation between the mobility of capital, commodities, the flow of labour power and the new international division of labour? That imperial dominations can no longer be thought of in terms that they were at the beginning of the century, by Rosa Luxemburg or Rudolf Hilferding, that it is useful to take on afresh the debate between Lenin and Kautsky over ultra-imperialism, does not for all that mean that we can take our leave from these classics without re-examining, in a comparative way, that which has really changed and to what extent. If Empire, contrary to imperialism according to Rosa Luxemburg, henceforth operates ‘without an outside’, the question becomes knowing how the uneven and combined development necessary to its metabolism has been able to be ‘internalised’ … Certainly, capital and firms go beyond borders, but they continue to support themselves with the military, monetary and commercial power of dominant states.31 Without responding adequately to these questions, Bensaïd thought that Hardt and Negri’s thesis oscillated between a rhizomatic resistance to Empire ‘without a horizon of rupture’ and a catastrophist allure, where every insubor-

30 31

Ibid. Ibid.

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dination to the existing order immediately becomes subversive. Capital’s antagonisms would become ‘more and more insurmountable because it is exhausting its room to expand’. An uneven and combined conception of global capitalism shaped Bensaïd’s response to Hardt and Negri, which also related to their notion of historical time and development. It was, so Bensaïd thought, unduly linear, which again threatens the art of politics understood in terms of mediations and non-contemporaneity. Of Hardt and Negri’s chronological vision of the transition from modernity to post-modernity, Bensaïd inferred: Hardt and Negri seem to use the problematic notion of post-modernity in the sense of a chronological periodisation. They conceive of modernity and post-modernity as successive epochs and not as two complementary and contradictory cultural logics of capital accumulation: centralisation on the one hand, fragmentation on the other; crystallisation of power and generalised dissolution; ossification of fetishes and fluidity of the circulation of commodities. The separation in time of these twin tendencies makes it seem that the new imperial order is ‘post-modern’, ‘postcolonial’ and ‘post-national’. It reinforces the illusion of the ‘after’. In reality, the globalised imperial order does not suppress the old order of interstate dominations. It superimposes itself on them. In taking extrapolated conclusions from tendencies that remain contradictory, the formula of ‘Empire, the final stage of imperialism’ runs the same risk as that of imperialism ‘final stage of capitalism’: a one-way catastrophist interpretation for which the ‘last stage’ becomes a terminal stage, in a cul-de-sac. Politics, as an art of the relations of forces and contretemps, thus becomes soluble at the focal point between capital’s limits and the unlimited desires of the multitude.32

5

The Multitude

Bensaïd indicates that though Hardt and Negri would have liked to see the multitude become a political opening for new paths of revolution, the notion of the multitude itself rendered this project problematic. For Bensaïd, the multitude is an insufficient concept, both politically and philosophically, and it cannot substitute for theoretical notions of class. The notion of the multitude could become subject to the isolating mechanisms of commodity fetishism in its cel-

32

Ibid.

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ebration of diversity and plurality, but, paradoxically, it could also flirt with a form of trite populism. It is significant that Bensaïd began his critique of the notion of the multitude with two quotes from Arendt. The first from Thinking the Event, and the second from The Origins of Totalitarianism. Respectively they read: To the breakdown of European class society, the Nazis answered with the lie of the community of the people. The transformation of classes into masses and the parallel elimination of all group solidarities are the condition for total domination … The totalitarian organisations are massive organisations of atomised and isolated individuals.33 The central notion of the multitude appears as the ‘corollary of the Empire whose foundations will be threatened by a post-modern plebs’. The term found an echo in some of the resistance movements against capitalist globalisation, a success resulting from its superficial-descriptive relevance. However, Bensaïd maintains, Empire in fact seems to account for the plurality and the diversity of resistances, of the crisis of identities and social belongings … It seems thus able to sum up in one word the extension of intellectual wage labour, the rise of exclusions, the strong and durable tendency to precarisation. The motley crowd of the popular uprisings in Argentina, rallying workers, piqueteros, mothers from the Plaza del Mayo, student victims of the university crisis, middle classes ruined by the debacle of the peso, can spontaneously think of itself and recognise itself as a ‘people’ or as a ‘multitude’. Nonetheless, the notion is theoretically confused, sociologically imprecise, philosophically obscure, and strategically empty.34 At stake, like constituent power, was the ontologisation of social and political life. Searching for an ontological definition of the multitude, Negri illustrated its conceptual fragility. At times, it seemed that the multitude is a class concept, but it was distinct from the concept of the working class. Bensaïd wondered whether this ‘terminological innovation (which revives not only

33 34

Quoted from Bensaïd 2003a, p. 69. Bensaïd 2003a, pp. 71–2.

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Marx but Hegel, with the multitude of Machiavelli and Spinoza, that is to say with the pre-industrial plebs of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) is not solely aimed at correcting a past workerist vision (notably that of the “workerist” tradition, which Negri himself embodied in he 1970s)’.35 On this reading, the Italian workerists had a restrictive definition of working class, which reduced it to the industrial proletariat; the multitude, as a reversal, was the concept of a proletariat expanded by the development of commodity relations.36 Negri did give the notion of the multitude historical weight. Again, Bensaïd endorsed the challenge to all unitary hypostatic temptations of the historical subject. This was not new, because the working class has never been a homogenous static substance. As for members of the class itself, each is a combination of different determinations that are tied up and united; in short ‘I am a multitude all on my own’. Nevertheless, for Bensaïd: All these determinations combine … Their respective intensities are displaced according to concrete situations and the dominant conflict that characterises them. But how to ensure that the multiple individual does not fall into disjecta membra and fragments? All social determinations do not have the same weight and do not have the same permanence. The relations of class and sex play in our societies an overriding role in the formation of individuals, which testifies to the specific place of the trade unions and the women’s movements in the nebula of social movements. Beyond the simple view of the plurality and diversity of social subjects, the question that is posed is therefore of knowing if it is possible (and desirable) to rally them around a common alternative project to the despotism of capital, or if it is better to renounce every ambition of a total alternative, in order to content ourselves with coalitions and rainbow type alliances around punctual themes. What makes the convergence and unification of resistances possible is capital itself; it is the generalisation of commodity relations, the omnipresence of the law of value, the penetration of its impersonal domination into all the pores of social life.37

35 36

37

Bensaïd 2003a, p. 72. Negri himself recognised the conceptual incertitude of the multitude when he said in 2001 that: ‘From a scientific point of view, it is a concept that is without a doubt still elementary, that I threw up to see if it worked. When, to characterize the new proletariat, we speak of the multitude, we want to speak of a plurality of subjects, of a movement in which singularities co-operate’. Quoted from ibid. Bensaïd 2003a, pp. 73–4.

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The notion of the multitude could not account for the way in which plural identities and subjects were unified by the development of capitalist social relations; instead, the notion flirts with populism. Paradoxically, ‘Whereas the concept of the multitude is supposed to deconstruct the hypostasis of a Proletariat in the singular, the multitude is elevated in its turn into a grand mythic Subject’.38 Yet, Bensaïd queried: Were there no more contradictions in the multitude? Were there no more alienated and fanatical multitudes? Where ‘the plural of the struggle of classes puts the accent on antagonistic relations’, with his ‘ontology of the multitude’, Negri had reintroduced ‘the populist fetishism of a fusional people in the singular’.39 Reading for tensions and reversals, Bensaïd asserted that the philosophical obscurity of the concept was another kind of articulation of the problematic animating Negri’s prior workerism: The theoretical confusions and sociological inconsistencies borne by the notion of the multitude themselves rest on a debatable philosophical foundation. The multitude will be ‘the living flesh’ or ‘being’s permanent push towards liberation’. Thus, Negri replaces the dialectic of the struggle with the ontology of the multitude. It prolongs the ‘Copernican Revolution’ of his workerist period, when he claimed to inverse the subalternity of the proletariat facing capital by thinking of the proletariat as the sole creative force and capital (and its institutions) as the simple reactive crystallisation of its energy. Empire becomes, in its turn, a sort of residual result, practico-inert, of plentiful creativity of the multitude.40 Bensaïd wanted to emphasise that, in many respects, Negri’s work was strategically empty. The formula opposing the multitude to the people or to the proletariat and the ungraspable outpouring of desire hardly succeed in warding off the effects of reification and alienation. Bensaïd critically suggested that is not enough to counter a multitude constituted by irreducible individualities against a mythical people (tending toward homogeneity). Negri’s wager on the multitude, which makes the poor ‘the foundation of every possibility of humanity’, could be read, so Bensaïd claims, to follow from a regressive populism: The conceptual indeterminacy sustained around the notion of the multitude in fact contributes to masking a great strategic void. In the theatre 38 39 40

Bensaïd 2008a, p. 291. Ibid. Bensaïd 2003a, p. 79.

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of shadows, where the multitude and Empire clash (the imperial reaction and the ‘the permanent propulsion of being’) the political mediations are effaced: not only the nation-states, but parties, trade unions and all forms of organised political struggle. For Hardt and Negri, politics defines itself simply as a movement of the multitude. Despite ‘the decline of traditional spheres of resistance’, and although ‘public spaces are increasingly privatised’, politics will no longer be, contrary to what Arendt feared, threatened with disappearance. It will only lose its illusory autonomy in order to merge with the social struggle: ‘Social conflicts that constitute politics now act directly, without mediation of any kind’. If politics is an art of mediations, what remains of it when one has suppressed the latter? The decreed fusion of the political and the social thus avoids a non-resolved difficulty. To promise that the movement of the multitude will have to ‘invent the democratic forms of a new constituent power’, traces an all too vague perspective to respond to the challenges of an epoch.41 Bensaïd’s polemic over the multitude had practical implications. Without the engagement of the art of politics, with concrete mediations and a struggle for political hegemony, it is not possible to reconstruct political and social forces over the long term. Moreover, it misrecognises the nature of the contemporary capitalist conjuncture. Hardt and Negri themselves acknowledged that the task for the multitude, although clear at a conceptual level, remained rather abstract. Absent was any envisaging of the way the multitudes of social resistances could ‘transform into a political multitude (to paraphrase Marx speaking of the proletariat as a “political class”), the three demands that took the place of a programme in the last part of Empire (global citizenship, universal social wage, and the re-appropriation of new means of production) “oscillate between formal vacuity and impossible radicalisation”. According to the really existing relations of force, they reveal themselves to be indeed a double-edged sword’.42 Brandishing a double-edged sword, Bensaïd lamented the fact that Empire oscillated ‘between a new apocalyptic theory of the final clash and that of a dead-end system with no way out, leaving no other perspective than a resistance without end and an imaginary “desertion” to nowhere’. Exodus and endless resistance were two sides of the same coin. They were his answers to the impasse of a present of transition. Exodus, ‘otherwise said the retreat from the game, the refusal … The movement can be constructed on the exodus, but it

41 42

Bensaïd 2003a, pp. 80–1. Bensaïd 2003a, p. 84.

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must also resist. Because power will never let you choose exodus in peace. It continually attacks you. As a consequence, either exodus becomes militant and combatant, or it is the loser’.43 The infernal dialectic between exodus and resistance here returns in force. Bensaïd vows that exile, exodus and desertion will never suffice; they echoed the lines of flight proposed by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus; they are modalities of religious flight. In Negri, ‘the poetic theme of the line of desertion takes the place of a strategic “line of flight”’.44 To what horizon shall this flight reach? According to Bensaïd, there was no option to take flight because ‘We don’t collectively desert the system. We must resign ourselves to being subject to it, or bring ourselves to confront it, in order to break and change it’: In the unemployed movement, some long-term employed persons, hopeless to ever find a job, theorise their own exclusion in claiming to voluntarily desert production. Subjectively, there are work deserters. ‘Objectively’, from the point of view of the system and its logic, they nevertheless remain jobless, that is to say, the foot soldiers of the modernised industrial reserve army.45 Bensaïd also picked apart the return of the religious theme within Negri’s work, in which the ‘scheme of the religious conversion that gives birth to a new subjectivity by a diversion through an old mystified subjectivity’, emerged from the impasses of the present and Negri’s response to it, which trades, an unthinkable revolutionary politics for a strange mystique without transcendence. In the 1830s, in Germany, when the road of reforms seemed closed and that of the modern revolution was not yet open, the young disappointed rebels already tried out this ‘transubstantiation of the revolution into a communism of love’. Not able to find the forces capable of breaking the fatality of the present, the loving bestowal furnished them with the cement of a new profane religiosity. Thus, in Moses Hess, it resulted in and through the expansive joy of infinite and incommensurable love: ‘Love continually creates, and there where it ceases to act, everything crumbles’.46

43 44 45 46

Bensaïd 2003a, pp. 85–6. Ibid. Ibid. Bensaïd 2003a, p. 87.

chapter 12

Badiou: A Distant Companion Bordering philosophy and politics, Bensaïd played the anti-philosopher to Badiou, continuing a line of moves against Plato’s effects in radical philosophy and liberatory politics. The political and philosophical relation between Bensaïd and Badiou is perhaps underestimated; far from being a ‘sectarian’ exchange confined to the ghetto of the far left, relegated to a footnote, it could be read as one key among others to the political and philosophical stakes of the conjuncture, of which Bensaïd and Badiou, in their distinct ways, were equal participants. What more, Bensaïd and Badiou should be seen as ‘distant companions’ – to take Badiou’s own words. This distant companionship has two elements. They stood together in solidarity, against capital and the state, in their fidelity to the oppressed; they had their share of discussion and polemic too. While describing this relationship, Badiou recalled that Bensaïd had been the very first to intervene publicly in the press against slanders concerning Badiou’s support for Palestine. This is what, despite the divergences, intransigent distant companions do. Additionally, their intellectual exchanges, comprised of Bensaïd’s philosophical and political polemics, form the very core of this distant companionship. At the University of Paris 8, Bensaïd and Badiou discussed politics and philosophy. Between Badiou and Bensaïd, there was a respectful militant convergence that included the element of critique; as Badiou claimed, the day after Bensaïd’s death, they each refused ‘to drift over changing circumstances like a dead dog’.1 So, what was at the core of the political and philosophical divergences between Badiou and Bensaïd? We must first of all think in the constellation of their encounter. The decisive philosophical discord centred on the event and the nature of materialism. As is well-known, the event is the key concept in the work of Badiou. Being and Event, Logics of Worlds and Immanence of Truths constitute his masterwork. The event, otherwise understood as revolutionary rupture, was the key concept of Bensaïd as well, though articulated in a different lexicon. The problem revolved around what to do with the event.2 There are, in fact, similarities 1 Badiou 2020, Alain Badiou remembers the life and work of Daniel Bensaïd. 2 Ivan Segré, who wrote his thesis under Bensaïd’s supervision, and also La réaction philosémite and Judaïsme et révolution suggested that it was decisive to understand that ‘In qualifying the evental upsurge as “miraculous” from that which is not being, Bensaïd took on the central

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between Bensaïd’s attitude to Althusser’s aleatory materialism and Badiou’s philosophy of the event. The event was the key problem that Bensaïd’s messianic upsurge of possibility revolved around. In this sense, Bensaïd’s work on Benjamin constitutes the core of his philosophical and political understanding of the event, articulating a divergence vis-à-vis Badiou. Badiou said that Bensaïd ‘accused me of being a disguised theologian of the evental miracle’, ‘and I accused him of being an archaic determinist’ infused with monumental history. Badiou qualified this, writing that ‘at the same time, he has always recognized that things are produced largely by chance and I have always brought a great deal of attention to the logic of history’.3 It seems we are in a double impasse. If Badiou is not a theologian then Bensaïd is a determinist. If Bensaïd is not a determinist, it seems that Badiou is a theologian. This impasse was, ‘in short a question of hierarchy in thinking through time’.4 A temporal divergence? A temporal impasse? What is the place of history? Of event? What is the nature of a contemporary materialism? It would be naïve to think the philosophical discord between these two militants did not have practical consequences – in Badiou’s own words they did. This should not be discounted, since the meeting of bodies, as Badiou has claimed, is the very core of militant politics. According to Badiou, the discordances and its consequences are unsurprising, given that ‘things don’t proceed from philosophy to politics but from real politics to philosophy’, thus Badiou claimed: It is necessary to be tied to the people, and singularly to the popular masses, the workers, the employees … It is necessary to have participated in the struggles and collective actions of one’s epoch. It is also necessary to know how to hold oneself, in the long tunnels that chore against the grain, in the long moments of apparent solitude … Therefore, if the relation of philosophy to politics has meaning only from the viewpoint of emancipation, it is also necessary to be a militant.5

concept of Badiou’s philosophy, but – and the nuance is decisive – it is not the event as such that he puts into question, it is the way of thinking it through. The point is decisive … Bensaïd wanted to support, to reinforce Badiou’s affirmation concerning l’événementialité of truths, and radically, political truths, i.e. revolutionary, and it is why he is critical, not, therefore, to distance himself from a thought of the event, but on the contrary, to reach further into the problem’. Segré 2016, p. 103. I thank Sophie Bensaïd for showing me this before publication. 3 Badiou 2010a, pp. 21–2. 4 Badiou 2010a, p. 22. 5 Badiou 2010a, p. 23.

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What, then, was the core of Badiou’s and Bensaïd’s practical discord? Their discords centred on the party and hegemony. Steadfast, Bensaïd was for the party, despite criticism of its metaphysical status. In Badiou’s eyes, ‘the Stalinist and Maoist experiences had discredited it in making it the reinforcement of despotic states’. At the end of the day, Badiou asked, which one of us [he and Bensaïd] was Stalinist? Neither, Badiou responded. They were two ‘divergent anti-Stalinists, and so there was, after May ’68, the Trotskyist lesson of the event and the Maoist lesson’.6 This is a key difference from which we can understand their relation. Bensaïd represented the lessons of the event as an inheritor of the Left Opposition; Badiou embodied the lessons of the event as an inheritor of the Little Red Book. The two carried these lessons with them through the uncertain epochal transition. About these divergences, Badiou pointed out that: Daniel believed in the tactical virtues of elections, in a propagandistic use of parliamentary democracy, whereas I thought that it was necessary to hold oneself at a distance, as also from all forms of allegiance to the State power as it exists. We certainly didn’t have the same conception of continuity and discontinuity – in history, politics, institutions and forms of organisation. Once again; a divergence over the incorporation of principles in effective history … These divergences focused … on the notion of the event, and on the dialectical relation between continuity and discontinuity. He basically reproached me for seeking a pure politics, namely, in his eyes, a politics that emerges from the event as a radical beginning that is not rooted in concrete history has no hands, a politics that has no real practice. On my side, I thought that we could no longer continue in the anterior sequence of revolutionary politics, that we were indeed on the threshold of a new radicality, that our destiny was at the same time to reconstruct principles and experiment locally with new forms of organisation. All that centred around a very delicate and tender point: how is philosophy to articulate itself to politics when the Idea is that of communism, but the historic agents of the real process are not clearly nominated or constituted by objective analysis?7 Bensaïd hosted an interview (2006) with Badiou featured in Contretemps; there, Bensaïd said to him, ‘You say that the problem between us – without a doubt

6 Badiou 2010a, p. 22. 7 Badiou 2010a, pp. 22–5.

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not the only one – especially bears on the relations between politics and history. It will be necessary to “release politics from the tyranny of history in order to render it to the event”, because, “history doesn’t exist, but only the periodised occurrence of chance”’. ‘But’, Bensaïd continued, ‘if the event is detached from its historical determinations, if its coming is as impromptu as that of the miracle, then all strategic thought becomes useless’.8 From Bensaïd’s perspective, Badiou did not articulate a pre-evental politics, which amounted to the purity of abstention. According to Bensaïd, Badiou did not just abstain from elections; the abstention implicated the inability to work on the concrete relations of force, work on the daily struggles as they immanently develop and the quotidian work of political practice. An appreciation of what Marx’s critique represented was also one element of the backdrop of the exchange. The word critique is used here in a dual sense, to develop a critique of Badiou (reminiscent of Marx’s critique of philosophy) and to uncover the productiveness of critique as such. Bensaïd’s question pivoted around the following: Was Marx either a Sophist or a philosopher? If he is anything but a Sophist, is he then a subversive philosopher-king of modernity? Or is it that Marx’s theory itself is situated within the tension between the Sophist and the philosopher, a tension that critique unveils? Bensaïd explained that Marx situated himself at the core of this dilemma, ‘in the critical tension and the polemical dialogue specific to the relations of truth between two discourses that challenge and complement each other’. It is why the philosophy of practice is born in the form of aphorisms and practical criteria; for Bensaïd, the realisation of philosophy takes shape on the strategic terrain. However, Badiou proposed the opposite: to reinaugurate the Platonic gesture against the tyranny of opinion and the weakness of anti-philosophy.9 In the Platonic gesture, philosophy had to be released from its suture onto politics. Badiou’s proposition was to de-suture philosophy from other disciplines, like the political philosophy and also the poetic form. Political philosophy was a matter of consensus and of the bourgeois state and its apparatuses, while Badiou’s operation against the poetic form was an anti-Heideggerian move, one condition for taking up the ontology of being anew. In Badiou’s thinking, one must be able to identify the ‘lost place of philosophy’, by returning to ‘sutures’ and ‘de-suturations’.

8 Bensaïd and Badiou 2006, p. 52. 9 Bensaïd’s text found titled ‘Tout sauf un sophiste’ Alain Badiou, Marx et la fin de la philosophie in his personal archives. It was not dated. It bears resemblance to his later Alain Badiou and the Miracle of the Event.

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In another sense, Badiou articulates the relations between philosophy and its conditions. Philosophy is only possible because of its conditions. But philosophy cannot collapse into them. If philosophy is confused with one of its conditions, if it is, for example, subordinated and fused to the historical-political condition or the scientific condition, it collapses into such conditions and fails itself. This produces a ‘disaster’, in Badiou’s terms. Philosophical discourse must subtract from the ‘immediate grip of its own conditions, while nevertheless remaining under the effect of these conditions’.10 Badiou’s ‘renewed philosophical conquest’ orbits around the concepts of truth, event and subject. His central thesis is that ‘the science of being qua being has existed since the Greeks – such is the sense and status of mathematics. However, it is only today that we have the means to know this’ insofar as philosophy ‘circulates between this ontology (thus, mathematics), the modern theories of the subject and its own history’. For Badiou, philosophy must ‘propose a conceptual framework in which the contemporary possibility of these conditions can be grasped’. Philosophy can only do this if it recognises ontology ‘in the form of pure mathematics’. This, Badiou tells us, is ‘precisely what delivers philosophy and ordains it to the care of truths’.11 Badiou’s mathematical practice of philosophy intends to undo the Hegelian move of suturing philosophy onto Romanticism. Hegel is taken to be chiefly responsible for this subordination. In affirming that mathematics is ontology, Badiou wants to repair the bond between philosophy and mathematics that Hegel had severed. Hegel carried out the speculative gesture par excellence by temporalising the concept, ‘which constitutes the base of historicism’.12 If philosophy is amputated from mathematics and surrendered to Hegel’s immanent infinity, philosophy abandons itself to the finitude of speculative romanticism. If finitude continues to dominate philosophical and political thought, it is impossible to re-inaugurate a radical ‘desacralisation’. As a result, Badiou calls for a return to Plato, a way to end with the philosophies of finitude, some of which were articulated by Marxist philosophers, like Althusser and Tosel; Badiou took seriously the proposal that ‘Only by reducing the infinite to its “neutral banality” as a “mere number” can we hope to tear ourselves free

10 11 12

Zupančič 2004, p. 191. Badiou 2007, pp. 3–4. Bensaïd text found titled ‘Tout sauf un sophiste’ Alain Badiou, Marx et la fin de la philosophie in his personal archives. Badiou said of Hegel in Being and Event: ‘Since it is mathematics which constitutes the ontological situation. Hegel will find it necessary to devalue it … [proposing] to establish that mathematics, in comparison to the concept represents a state of thought which is “defective in and for-itself” ’. Badiou 2007, p. 161.

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from a “disgusting veneer of sacralisation”’. In short, Plato and mathematics – based on the conditions of set theory and Cohen – against Hegel’s speculative gesture of historicism and its concepts.13 One philosophical discord pertaining to the materiality of history concerns Badiou’s project of mathematical systematisation, which is not compatible with the dialectic of possibility and actuality at work in Bensaïd’s philosophical representation of historical contretemps. In a certain sense, Badiou develops a mathematics of the situation in which history is ontologised, while Bensaïd holds onto a mediated dialectic of historical becoming – through contretemps – in which there is a primacy of politics constructed upon the critique of political economy.

1

Is the Classical Era of Revolutionary Politics Over?

What is to be done with classical revolutionary politics? Badiou claims the classical era of revolutionary politics is over; coupled with the critique of philosophies of expression and historicism, Badiou writes that the decisive element of ‘expressive dialectics’ by which ‘political struggles, insurrections or revolutions are not structural effects – they are moments’ to be seized, wherein ‘the moment, the political struggle, expresses and concentrates social contradictions’. In the same way, the conception that ‘the revolutionary party, the revolutionary organisation, represents the working class’, alas ‘is probably finished’. Badiou’s goal is: just to try to open the way for a non-expressive conception of political dialectics, for a conception of political dialectics that forbids this type of passage [from class struggle to parties]. In this new conception, revolutionary politics is no longer the expression of the concentration of social contradictions; it is a new way of thinking and doing collective action. In this way, the political process is not the singular expression of objective reality; it is, in some sense, separated from this reality. It is a process not of expression but of separation. Exactly as in the Platonic vision of dialectics, a truth is separated from opinions; or again, as in the Lacanian conception, where truth is separated from knowledge. It is thus not a contradiction, nor a negation, but a separation. As you can see, I am really speaking of a politics of truth, because I am speaking about the possibility … of a politics of separation.14 13 14

Badiou 2007, p. 161. Badiou 2012a, pp. 61–3.

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Badiou’s statement just quoted is compatible with his assertion that, ‘We know that the question is to get rid of a representative vision of politics. The canonical statement by Lenin, according to which society is divided into classes and that classes are represented by political parties is out of date. In its essence this statement is homogenous to the parliamentary conception’.15 Thus, Badiou makes the effort to undercut an expressive dialectical conception of social reality with these positions. Badiou rejects the notion that politics follows the logic of social relations; he even rules out that social relations can be understood as dialectical contradictions. He notoriously wrote that, ‘There are no such things as class relations’, and as Panagiotis Sotiris perceptively noted, in Being and Event, Badiou omits the term ‘relations’. According to Sotiris, ‘Badiou’s negation of a dialectical/relational conception is also evident in Peut-on penser la politique? the work that marks the beginning of his turn towards a thinking of the event’.16 Badiou’s key difference to Bensaïd is a consequence of his politics of Platonic subtraction that substitutes for a classical revolutionary project. This philosophical-political operation abolishes the tension between truth and opinion, leaving no room for a philosophy aligned to politics as a strategic art. Badiou also negates a relational understanding of social reality, replacing it with mathematical formalism. Mathematics, for Plato, is a condition of thinking in rupture with the undecidability of opinion, because opinions can be calculated, but there are no mathematical opinions. The Sophistic move is then to devalue truth in order to leave the field to the free play of opinion. For Badiou, this is indeed the pre-eminent romantic proposal, ‘to render philosophy homogenous with the historical power of opinions’.17 Only a form of Platonism is able to complete a forceful split with opinion. Bensaïd was sceptical of the Badiou’s absolutisation of the opposition between truth and opinion, ‘the two for him are incompatible’. Bensaïd thought the problem had a long history in Marxist thought, which indeed passed over to Badiou, namely the 1960s polemics over the ‘epistemological break’ between science and ideologies. For Bensaïd, on finds there, ‘the opposition between a masterful discourse of truth and the commerce of opinions constitutive of the public space’.18 Bensaïd accepted that a harsh critique of the ‘fabricators of

15 16 17 18

Badiou 1985, pp. 86–7. Quoted from Sotiris 2011, p. 38. Quoted from Bensaïd ‘Tout sauf un sophiste’ Alain Badiou, Marx et la fin de la philosophie. Bensaïd and Petit 1999, p. 47. Elsewhere, Bensaïd said, ‘I have already evoked a curious parallel between his [Bourdieu’s] sociology and Badiou’s philosophy. They have a common point of departure: the famous “epistemological break” … It traces a sealed border between

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opinion’ was necessary. But Protagoras was also a thinker of democracy. Therefore, one must hold both ends of the contradiction that takes the form of an irreducible tension between truth and opinion. Truth does not go without opinion, the philosopher and the Sophist. The absolute incompatibility between truth and opinion, between philosopher and Sophist, between event and history, leads to a practical impasse. The refusal to work within the ambiguity, and the equivocal tensions that bind them together, ultimately leads to a pure voluntarism oscillating between a gauchiste form of politics and its philosophical evasion. In either case, the combination of theoretical elitism and practical moralism can indicate a haughty withdrawal from the public domain, crammed between the philosopher’s evental truth and the masses’ subaltern resistance to the world’s misery. Bensaïd and Badiou entered into dialogue over this question in the interview that Badiou accorded the journal Contretemps. Bensaïd asked, ‘Rather than thinking the philosopher and the Sophist … as two exclusive figures of knowledge, does not the militant position embed him/herself into their faceoff and in their tension’? Badiou responded to this by saying, ‘for me, the whole point is that a real change, not “of the” world but of a world, is the result of a truth-process’. The truth-process is the subjective consequence of an event. ‘If’, he continued, ‘we admit that the philosopher is the servant of truths, in identifying them in their form and in examining their contemporaneity, then it is clear that it is also the servant of political truths. In this way, it contributes to changing the world’. To partake in a truth-process is ‘militant in the precise sense: it is under the imperative of continuing to incorporate oneself into the process’. The truth literally ‘disciplines’.19 Bensaïd recognised a discord on this exact point. But Badiou was not so sure. For Bensaïd, the art of decision (of the favourable moment and the bifurcation open to hope) is a strategic art of the possible. The art of possibility is determined by the concrete situation: every situation is singular and the moment of decision is always relative to this situation because it is adjusted to the goal to attain. Beyond the formal antinomies

19

truth and opinion, between the “authority of knowledge” (scientific or philosophical) and the incertitude of political debate. It draws a division between a scientific word and a social empathy (recall the Maoist slogan to “serve the people”) it leaves little place for politics as such. Between the labour of the scholar and the support to the movement as it is, the political link is broken by the break: if one engages politically, one demeans the status of scientific knowledge, violating the rules of the profession; at the same time, one cannot abstain from a compassionate sympathy for a sociological object: the weight of the world and the rebellions that it causes. Hence the balance between the elitism of the scholar and the populism of action’. Bensaïd and Petit 1999, pp. 106–7. Badiou and Bensaïd 2006, pp. 47–8.

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of subject and object, of structure and event, of the material and symbolic, of the predictable and unpredictable, strategic reason is the art of the appropriate response. In fact, politics does not follow a scientific knowledge, but a strategic knowledge. The political does not obey an authoritarian truth without opponents; it establishes ‘relations of truth’ relative to a concrete situation. It puts truth and opinion into tension. This is decidedly distinct from a Platonic project, since it effectively articulates the insights arrived at by the Sophists without becoming sophistic. Bensaïd’s and Badiou’s political trajectories capture the lessons drawn out of May ’68, from a Trotskyist and a Maoist perspective respectively (I will return to this below). In Bensaïd’s case, Badiou’s politics of separation demanded by the Platonic gesture is not a road forward, but a kind of Maoist mask. Bensaïd takes the Sophist to be a double figure, often corruptible and demagogic, but also the necessary other of philosophy, the democrat who puts boundaries on the despotism of dogmatic and authoritarian truth, who makes the weaker argument stronger. For Bensaïd, radical political pluralism occupies a tension between opinion and truth, ultimately at odds with forms of masked Maoist fundamentalisms; neither is the truth alien to common sense. Common sense itself has a history, even if, under the capitalist mode of production, it has entered into a close relation to the dominant ideology. If politics comes from a strategic knowledge, it does not obey an authoritarian truth without opponents. Politics as a strategic art contrasts with a politics of Platonic truth and separation, overcoming the absolutising of truth and opinion.20 Bensaïd poses two questions to Badiou, pertaining to his Platonist philosophical-political operation. How does Marx think? How can Badiou’s Platonic gesture, salutary as it is, account for that thought? A ‘vigilant reader’, Badiou gives the impression of ‘no longer knowing what to do with Marx’. Badiou ‘stalls’ before Marx. The enigmatic appreciation ‘testifies to this malaise’: ‘Marx is anything but a Sophist, although this does not mean that he is a philosopher’.21 In a Platonic political-philosophical operation where the philosopher is the other of the Sophist, Marx can be named, placed and identified only with a near 20

21

Of this problem, Ivan Segré wrote: ‘Bensaïd saw [in the dichotomy between truth and opinion – D.R.] a master discourse, whose symptom, in political terms, is either a declared hatred for democracy, or its repression. Bensaïd thus links up with Jacques Rancière, for whom, since La leçon d’Althusser (1974) and Le philosophe et ses pauvres (1982), unto La haine de la démocratie (2005), places a workers’ practice of “self-emancipation” against the masters’ discourse on emancipation’. Segré 2016, p. 107. This is not to say that Rancière and Bensaïd end up at the same destination. Quoted from Bensaïd ‘Tout sauf un sophiste’ Alain Badiou, Marx et la fin de la philosophie.

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impossible difficulty. How does Marx fit into the binary couple of Sophist and philosopher? If he is not principally a philosopher, is he a second rate or thirdrate philosopher, without being a Sophist? If Marx is a second-instance philosopher, excluding the Sophist from his oeuvre, what is he in the first instance? Bensaïd concluded that: Taken in his ingenious network of sutures, Badiou does not interrogate this very particular way (in relation to the ‘dominant positivist suture’) of doing science that Marx insisted on calling critique and which tries to ‘think to the tune of capital’. Something new is at stake in the way he thinks, without subordinating himself to politics, maintaining with it a relation of conflict … What then of Marx? Is he everything other than a Sophist? Certainly, when one sees him ridiculing the mirages of public opinion in the name of ‘German science’. Or everything, including a Sophist? Certainly, when one sees him excoriating Proudhon’s ‘scientific excommunications’ and doctrinaire utopias. For, like Freudian humour, critique is mocking and ironic. It opposes its great burst of irreverent red laughter to the yellow laughter of the priest.22 If Badiou’s philosophical-political operation orbited around the concepts of truth, event and subject, and the deconstruction of the fetishism of each of these concepts was a major part of Bensaïd’s project. I now interrogate how Bensaïd assessed these concepts in Badiou. Towards the end of the twentieth century, the historical disasters had riven the concept of truth, making it fragmentary and discontinuous, ‘as though history no longer constituted its basic framework but merely its occasional condition’. Badiou developed an immanent truth, according to which truths can exist only in a situation oriented to an atemporal eternity. Truth is no longer ‘a subterranean path manifesting itself in the irruption of the event’, it becomes ‘a post-evental consequence’. As a post-evental consequence, truth is ‘wholly subjective’ and ‘pertains to the realm of declarations’. Philosophy must be able to recognise and declare the existence of a truth that has been produced in art, science, love and politics, because ‘it is only retrospectively that the event is acknowledged as such, by way of an “interpretative intervention”’.23 Badiou’s philosophical-political operation is the antithesis of Thermidorian usurpation of the event.

22 23

Ibid. Bensaïd 2004a, pp. 95–6.

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According to Badiou, truths happen; because truths happen, the distinction between truth and knowledge is essential. Truths emerge as an ‘ “immediately universalisable singularity”, which is characteristic of the event through which it comes to be’. On this point, philosophy assists the universal rather than a relativistic particularity confined to its own conditions. The different conditions of philosophy – politics, art, love and science – produce their own truths ‘however painful this admission may be’; philosophy does not produce truth as such. Philosophy extracts truths from their different conditions. As Bensaïd put it: As the poet Mandelstam said, it is the hole at the centre of the ring of bread that matters because that is what remains after the bread is eaten. Similarly, Badiou enjoins us to admit that philosophy’s central category is empty and must remain so in order to welcome the event.24 No doubt, Badiou’s defence of truth is decisive for radical French philosophy. Post-modernism sought to ‘cure us of truth’ through the arbitrary play of opinion, which is why Badiou took up the Platonic gesture against the post-modern (Sophist) turn, because ‘what the Sophist, whether ancient or modern, presumes to impose is the claim that there is no truth, that the concept of truth is useless or doubtful since there are only conventions’. To be clear, Badiou does not propose the Truth of all truths to be decreed abstractly; there are instead truths in the plural aligned to the eternal. Through establishing the relation between the philosopher and the Sophist, ‘it would seem that Badiou is obliged to address, both in general and for himself, the question of democracy’, and yet he represses this question or outright rejects its legitimacy. For Bensaïd, the democratic criticism of Badiou remains central because the repression of it leads to a ‘new danger … that of a philosophy haunted by the sacralisation of the evental miracle’. Bensaïd pointed out that truth for Badiou is a ‘pure fidelity to the opening brought about by the event’. Apart from the event, there are only current affairs and the common run of opinion. The event is Christ’s resurrection, it is the storming of the Bastille, it is the October revolution, just as it is illegal immigrant workers taking to the streets in order to become agents in their own right, in order to break out of their status as clandestine victims; it is the unemployed stepping out

24

Bensaïd 2004a, p. 96.

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from the ranks of statistics to become subjects of resistance, or the sick refusing to resign themselves to being mere patients and attempting to think and act their own illnesses.25 It is as if all is illusory semblance in relation to the truths of the event. What is the event’s relation to the ‘ontology of the multiple’? What is the event? It is aleatory by nature and cannot be predicted outside of a singular situation, nor can it be ‘deduced from that situation without some unpredictable chance operation’. It has no relation to ‘leaden structural determination’, it cannot be deduced from structures, so Badiou claims. One must retroactively name the existence of the event and remain faithful ‘to the truth which comes to light in it’. Subtracted from politics imprisoned in the shackles of the everyday illusory semblance, the event is also, according to Bensaïd, divorced from real history, The genuine event remains irreducible to all instrumental reckoning. It is of the order of an encounter that is amorous (love at first sight), political (revolution), or scientific (the eureka). Its proper name suspends the situational routine insofar as it consists in ‘forcing chance once the moment is ripe for intervention’. Yet this propitious ripeness of the opportune moment unexpectedly refers us back to the historicity that determines and conditions the latter. Inadvertently, it seems to contradict the oftrepeated claim that the event is entirely eruptive and cannot be deduced from the situation. In what does this ripeness of circumstances consist? How is it to be gauged? Badiou remains silent on this score. By refusing to venture into the dense thickets of real history, into the social and historical determination of events, Badiou’s notion of the political tips over into a wholly imaginary dimension: this is politics made tantamount to an act of levitation, reduced to a series of unconditioned events and ‘sequences’ whose exhaustion or end remain forever mysterious. As a result, history and the event become miraculous in Spinoza’s sense – a miracle is ‘an event the cause of which cannot be explained’. Politics can only flirt with a theology or aesthetics of the event. Religious revelation, according to Slavoj Žižek, constitutes its ‘unavowed paradigm’.26 In relation to politics, Badiou confirms Bensaïd’s quote above when he holds that, in his new conception of radical change, revolutionary politics is no

25 26

Bensaïd 2004a, p. 97. Bensaïd 2004a, p. 98.

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longer the expression of the concentration of social contradictions because such contradictions presuppose structural relations of a given historical world. The evacuation of real history that Bensaïd identifies implicates the so-called expressive conception of politics Badiou criticises. This encapsulates the core of the disagreement over politics and the event in Bensaïd and Badiou; it points to the reasons why history, at least represented in the manner he does so, mattered to Bensaïd. The discord comes to light as Badiou responded to Bensaïd’s questions. Now, Badiou makes the effort to demonstrate the discontinuity in the continuity of a world. Though this does not necessarily rule out historical determination, it indeed remains a new philosophical ontology – in a sense, this is what Bensaïd was at pains to deconstruct, or to demonstrate the couple ‘ontology-Maoist politics’ effective in his oeuvre. Badiou said of his ontological operation that: In Being and Event, I have given the ontological laws of a situation, and of a world (presentation of the multiple, re-presentation of parties, law of excess of representation on presentation, etc.). In the Logics of Worlds, I have given the logical laws of it: cohesion of appearances, regimes of negation, rationality of identities and differences … I believe I have a very solid and rather new theory of that which a world is in which there is an event. It is all the more important that the subjectivised consequences of the event are embedded in a world, are in struggle with the rules and inertias of this world.27 Badiou’s ontology facilitates a vision in which the consequences of an event play the predominant role, rather than a pre-evental strategy and tactics of political deliberation and representative institutions. This fact leads one to a dilemma. Bensaïd asked, ‘if no sign announces the event … if it is detached from all historical determination, not only untimely, but unconditioned, springing from nothing’, then what makes an event, an event?28 If it is purely post-evental, how do we know that it is not only fidelity that makes the event? Is this a vicious circle or a dialectical treasure? Does the event lay the basis for the fidelity that then retroactively founds the event? In that case, we are dealing with a pure question of will, of a subjective attitude after the event. ‘I would say’, Badiou remarked, ‘that the principal tension within the militant life is between the novelty of prescriptions and organisations and the inertia of the worldly mater-

27 28

Badiou and Bensaïd 2006, pp. 50–1. Ibid.

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ial, the precarity of convictions, the forever active temptation to resignation. How many politics have ended in corruption? Nearly all, if one calls “corruption” … complete inactivity of principles’.29 Badiou’s injunction is about going against the grain in the name of active principles. Unfortunately, an injunction does not lay the basis for a pre-evental politics, only post-evental activities. The anterior of Badiou’s post-evental principled activity is Bensaïd’s notion of hypothetical necessity, a notion necessary for strategy, operating prior, during and after an evental upsurge. Bensaïd’s hypothetical necessity rests on the differentiated unity between subject and object, meaning the subject does not remain within Badiou’s closed loop of subjective fidelity (which on Bensaïd’s reading seems to sever the subject-object relation for politics). Furthermore, it raises another difficulty for Bensaïd: why cannot we just replace Badiou’s notion of the ‘evental site’ with the strategic notions of conjuncture and situation? In ‘embedding themselves in a totality of social relations in time and space, the latter are indeed strategic concepts, while the “evental site” appears as a point of upsurge of the event that has come from the void or emerged from nothing’.30 The purity of subtractive politics does not face mediation in grace because it suppresses mediation and representation, having no relation to institutional and electoral party politics of the bourgeois system. In short, it serves a fictitious politics. For Bensaïd, ‘the question of the subject … tends to confirm our suspicions’, because ‘in the wake of Althusser’s “process without a subject”, Badiou presents us with a subject without history. Or maybe this is just another version of the same effort to hunt down historicism’. ‘“The subject is rare”, says Badiou. Rare like the event, rare like truth, and as intermittent as politics’. Truths become through this struggle. Truth is ‘thereby defined as a process of subjectivation’. Furthermore, Badiou demands a wager on the politics of emancipation – communism. The wager is necessary because ‘we will never be able to deduce it [communism] from capital’. According to Bensaïd, Badiou’s subject without history is flawed, because: the intermittence of event and subject renders the very idea of politics problematic. According to him, politics defines itself via fidelity to the event whereby the victims of oppression declare themselves. His determination to prise politics free from the state in order to subjectiv-

29 30

Ibid. Bensaïd 2008a, p. 97.

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ise it, to ‘deliver it from history in order to hand it over to the event’, is part of a tentative search for an autonomous politics of the oppressed. The alternative effort, to subordinate politics to some putative ‘meaning of history’, which has ominous echoes in recent history, is he suggests to incorporate it within the process of general technicisation and to reduce it to the ‘management of state affairs’. One must have ‘the courage to declare that, from the point of view of politics, history as meaning or direction [sens] does not exist: all that exists is the periodic occurrence of the a priories of chance’. However, this divorce between event and history (between the event and its historically determined conditions) tends to render politics if not unthinkable then at least impracticable.31 At stake for subjectivities is the discord between subtraction and mediation. For Bensaïd, Badiou’s philosophical trajectory made the ‘long march towards “a politics without a party”, the consummation of a subjectivation that is at once necessary and impossible’.32 What is politics if it is not the politics of parties? Is it a politics without politics? This is a charge that is not easy to evade. Badiou would answer in the negative because politics, according to him, ‘erupts like a pure instance of free decision when the order of things breaks down and when, refusing the apparent necessity of that order, we boldly venture forth into a hitherto unsuspected realm of possibility’. Again, this is a subtractive politics that seeks separation rather than a mediated politics of the conjuncture, Bensaïd supposed: Politics as such comes about, then, on the basis of its separation from the state, which is the very opposite and negation of the event, the petrified form of anti-politics; politics proceeds via a ‘brutal distancing of the state’. Nothing in the domain of the state can be against the state, just as nothing in the domain of economics can be against economics. So long as the economy and the state maintain their grip on the situation, politics is only a matter of controlled protests, captive resistances, reactions subordinated to the tutelary fetishes they pretend to defy. The only possible politics in such circumstances is, to use Gramsci’s terminology, a subaltern politics. For Badiou, the separation between politics and the state lies at the very root of politics. More precisely: it lies at the root of a polit-

31 32

Bensaïd 2004a, p. 99. Ibid.

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ics of the oppressed, which is the only conceivable form in which politics can endure once it has vanished under the pressure of totalitarianism or the market. Systematically elaborated during the course of the 80s and 90s, Badiou’s philosophical discourse must be understood in the context of the reactionary neoliberal restoration. It is opposed to market determinism, to communicational consensus, to the rhetoric of fairness, to the despotism of public opinion, to post-modern resignation and to the antitotalitarian vulgate. It tries to combine an injunction to resistance and an art of the event.33 This is intimately associated in Badiou with the impasse of ultra-leftism, or a rejection of mediated and representative politics. Indeed, what is a subtractive politics if not a rejection of mediation and representation? When Badiou himself says that he is for ‘a conception of political dialectics that forbids’ the passage from class struggle to parties, this is a rejection of mediation and representation. When he says that ‘in this way, the political process is not the singular expression of objective reality; it is in some sense separated from this reality’, this is a rejection of a pre-evental politics of conflict. The rejection of mediation and representation is clear when Badiou argues: It is a process not of expression but of separation … Exactly as in the Platonic vision of dialectics, a truth is separated from opinions … It is thus not a contradiction, nor a negation, but a separation.34 This formalism is quite consistent with the impact of a certain form of Maoism in his intellectual trajectory35 as expressed by Badiou’s principled rejection of elections, traditional trade unions and political programmes. The rejection of a mediated form of politics leads Badiou to a political blockage, which is why Bensaïd argued that:

33 34 35

Bensaïd 2004a, p. 100. Badiou 2012, p. 63. Badiou said in an interview with Bosteels: ‘l would like to say that Maoism, in the end, has been the proof for me that in the actual space of effective politics, and not just in political philosophy, a close knot could be tied between the most uncompromising formalism and the most radical subjectivism. That was the whole point. In Maoism, l found something that made it possible for there to be no antinomy between whatever mathematics is capable of transmitting in terms of formal and structural transparency, on the one hand, and on the other, the protocols by which a subject is constituted. These two questions were no longer incompatible’. Quoted from Bosteels 2011, p. 296.

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The absolute incompatibility between truth and opinion, between philosopher and sophist, between event and history, leads to a practical impasse. The refusal to work within the equivocal contradiction and tension which bind them together, ultimately leads to a pure voluntarism, which oscillates between a broadly leftist form of politics and its philosophical circumvention. In either case, the combination of theoretical elitism and practical moralism can indicate a haughty withdrawal from the public domain, sandwiched between the philosopher’s evental truth and the masses’ subaltern resistance to the world’s misery. Detached from its historical conditions, truth as the absolute colourlessness of a diamond, the event, just like the notion of the absolutely aleatory encounter in the late Althusser, is akin to a miracle. By the same token, a politics without politics is akin to a negative theology. The preoccupation with purity reduces politics to a grand refusal and prevents it from producing lasting effects. Its rarity prevents us from thinking its expansion as the genuinely achieved form of the withering away of the state. Slavoj Žižek and Stathis Kouvélakis have rightly pointed out that the antinomies of order and event, of police and politics, render radical politicization impossible and indicate a move away from the Leninist ‘passage à l’acte’.36 Bensaïd effectively charged Badiou with a refusal to confront the prosaic experience of political practice, keeping his hands clean of real contradictions. For Bensaïd, this is not an adequate political mode of confronting the facts of the world because the ‘realities of the relations of force … catch up with this conception of politics as pure will’. Bensaïd effectively situates Badiou in the core of an antinomy, ‘holy purification is never more than a short step away from voluptuous sin’. We are told, ‘If’, as Badiou claimed in 1996, ‘the era of revolutions is over’, the only ‘available options are either to withdraw into the haughty solitude of the anchorite or learn to get used to the contemptible state of current affairs’. Realism is the ‘profane converse of the heroic thirst for purity’; for Bensaïd, essentially: Badiou defines the militant as a ‘lookout for the void, guided by the event’. But by staring so continuously out into this desert of Tartars, from where the enemy who is to turn him into a hero will come, the lookout ends up dozing off before the mirages of the void.37

36 37

Bensaïd 2004a, p. 101. Bensaïd 2004a, p. 103.

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Though amicable and with great respect for Badiou, Bensaïd’s polemic was harsh though just, naming the concrete stakes of the philosophical-political operation. But it was also limited. Bensaïd hardly touched on Logics of Worlds and died before the release of Immanence of Truths. Additionally, Bensaïd hardly produced an immanent critique of Being and Event; rather he acted more the anti-philosopher to Badiou’s ontological construction. Yet, the discussion of the event was one of the most fundamental to emerge out of the French radical philosophical landscape after the ’68 fragmentation. Badiou wrote, ‘He [Daniel] had a tendency to say that I believed, fundamentally, in the miracle, that I was an idealist’, since ‘I expected the event, the good news … I think it is a little unfair’. In fact, ‘what I call the event is simply an event of discontinuity in the evolution of the real itself – and not the arrival of something that is implausible or miraculous! It is a dialectical category’. The event is ‘a moment where different phenomena crystallise, a moment where something is produced that, really, was not predictable and was not deducible from the situation’.38 And when Badiou said that ‘I give a considerable importance to this event, because it is always from there, to employ a language that is very present in Daniel, that there can be a new relation of forces, a new arrangement of forces in the social and political field’, he pointed to the antinomy facing both militants.39 Certainly, the event rearranges social and political relations of force after it takes place. But leaving matters there, without further ado, gives up the necessity of pre-evental politics. Pre-evental politics must aim to modify the relations of social and political forces before the event. Though simple, if this point is overlooked, it has consequences for the event itself. If the event is not fetishised, then a strategic operator is necessary for action, in Bensaïd’s political-philosophical key: Whatever its conjunctural or ephemeral form, collective political action (party, organisation or movement) appears thus as a strategic operator, the gearbox that is capable of articulating the political time of the event and the historical time of the process, the objective conditions and their subjective transformation, the tendential laws and the uncertainty of contingency, the constraint of circumstance and the freedom of decisions, the wisdom of accumulated experience and the audacity of novelty, the event and historicity.40

38 39 40

Badiou 2015, Badiou on Bensaïd: ‘He would often say that essentially I believed in miracles’. Ibid. Bensaïd 2003b.

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Whence come these aporias in the thought of Alain Badiou? For Bensaïd, his contradictions can be traced back to ‘the refusal of history and to the unsettled score with Stalinism’. For Badiou, the bankruptcy of the MarxistLeninist paradigm goes back to 1967. Why 1967? Because it is the turning point in the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the crushing of the Shanghai Commune. Why not earlier, however? To avoid having to examine Maoism’s historical record and its relations with Stalinism in greater depth?41 The stakes involved settling accounts with Stalinian thought and politics. For Bensaïd, drawing from Françoise Proust, who ‘has rightly noted that what is at stake here is a desperate attempt to get out of Maoism by “taking leave of history”. But the price of this great historical silence is exorbitant’.42 Badiou produced an iteration of the older thesis of Althusser’s that a theoretical deviation took place. If Bensaïd was concerned that Badiou could not adequately define his attitude to Marx, it is now clearer that, to Bensaïd, the failure owed much to his relation to the legacies of Stalinism and Maoism. Put another way, Bensaïd’s charge means that Badiou did not give up some of the problems inherent in Maoism and Stalinism (its formalism) and could not reach Marx. Despite stating that Marxism is not singular, ‘there is an extent to which he legitimates the accusation of positivism: “Marx and his successors, who in this regard showed themselves to be dependent on the dominant suture of the time [i.e. of philosophy to science], always claimed to be elevating revolutionary politics to the rank of science”’.43 As I mentioned above, Badiou, however, did not examine Marx’s way of doing science at odds with the ‘dominant positivist suture’ of the time. How could rigorous formalism complement the role of critique? Marx endeavoured to think ‘in a manner worthy of his object, which is to say, in a manner worthy of capital’, meaning that, ‘something new takes shape’ in Marx, ‘in the way in which thought, without submitting to the vicissitudes of politics, bears a relation of conflictual indivisibility to politics while continuously interrogating its practice’. This critique is the alternative to Badiou’s formalism. Bensaïd concluded: In Badiou, fidelity to an event without a history and a politics without content has a tendency to turn into an axiomatics of resistance … as instances of a commitment that evades all calculation and that is supposed to provide a paradoxical resolution for the absence of relation

41 42 43

Bensaïd 2004a, p. 103. Bensaïd 2004a, p. 104. Bensaïd 2004a, p. 105.

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between truth and knowledge … Emerging out of nothing, the sovereign subject, like evental truth, provides its own norm. It is represented only by itself. Whence the worrying refusal of relations and alliances, of confrontations and contradictions. Badiou invariably prefers an absolute configuration over one that is relative: the absolute sovereignty of truth and the subject, which begins, in desolate solitude, where the turmoil of public opinion ends. Hallward rightly sees in this philosophy of politics an ‘absolutist logic’ that leaves little space for multiple subjectivities, shuns the democratic experience, and condemns the sophist to a sort of exile. Badiou’s quasi-absolutist orientation preserves the ghost of a subject without object. This is a return to a philosophy of majestic sovereignty, whose decision seems to be founded upon a nothing that commands the whole.44 Bensaïd has essentially circled around the concepts of event, subject and truth, positing the same thesis about them, namely that Badiou’s absolutisations of each establish a Master discourse that inaugurates a set of norms that are not verifiable, nor practical, nor democratic, but which hang in the air like a castle in the sky of a majestic philosophical construction.

2

The Communist Hypothesis: Failure and the Liberatory Infinite

Bensaïd responded to Badiou’s The Communist Hypothesis, demonstrating the continuities and discontinuities in his relation to Badiou. What we witness is deepening criticism of the unsettled Stalinian-Maoist heritage in Badiou’s work – therefore continuity. This is so despite the fact that, for Bensaïd, Badiou’s work indeed ‘commands respect for his audacity to go against the grain of weak and fragmented thought, by his capacity to clearly name the enemy, by his fidelity to an Idea’.45 Five themes are implicated in Bensaïd’s response: the notion of failure, communism as a philosophical hypothesis, Badiou’s sequences and their consequences, Stalin’s continued presence and Badiou’s libertarian Platonism. What does it mean to fail? For Badiou, the event and victorious defeats – the Paris Commune, the Cultural Revolution and May ’68 – are stages in the history of the Idea of Communism; they are truths ‘inscribed in the general

44 45

Ibid. Bensaïd 2009c.

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becoming of Humanity’.46 But, as Bensaïd interrogated, ‘where, to what destination’ do these stages push if there is no end or Last Judgement of history? When we draw up a balance sheet of the last century and failures, Badiou posed four questions: does it require us to abandon the hypothesis itself, and to renounce the whole problem of emancipation? Or was it merely a relative failure? Was it a failure because of the form it took or the path it explored? Was it a failure that simply proves that it was not the right way to resolve the initial problem?47 For Badiou, ‘The thought of failure emerges at the point when a politics appears before the court of History, and when it sees itself there … it is the communist hypothesis that represents and imagines the consistency of History’.48 Here, Bensaïd has a certain reservation. The appearance before the court of History – with its sinister association – seems to re-establish its dubious prerogatives, an entrance of the formerly abandoned sense of the meaning of history. Could the communist Idea move from failure to failure, from defeat to defeat until the final victory, the final Last Judgement? In such a movement, Badiou produced a formidable dialectic which risks relativising the consequences, which are ‘always reparable (one does not easily come to an end with the hypothesis), the smears, deviations’, and the list of Stalinist crimes, all of which are reduced to the ‘soluble adventures in the great turbulent river of a “truth process”’.49 In the dialectic of failure and defeat, what does it mean to win in a profane history that never speaks its final word? For Badiou, ‘we were confronted with a sort of twofold notion of failure’, in the 1980s. On the one hand, ‘We had before our very eyes the classic rightist failure: those who were weary of militant action rallied to the delights of parliamentary power’, and on the other, ‘we could not forget the “ultra-left” failure which, by handling every contradiction, even the slightest, with brutality and death, trapped the entire process within the dark limits of terror’. Badiou’s latter point is a reference to the bloody Khmer Rouge experience. Bensaïd also recognised the problem, which is why he had already devoted substantial attention to it in Mai si! The ultra-leftist experience was nihilistic. For Badiou, this

46 47 48 49

Badiou 2010, p. 232. Badiou 2010, p. 6. Badiou 2010, p. 16. Bensaïd 2009c, p. 104.

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question of balancing between the right and the nihilistic ultra-left drives us ‘straight to the dilemma of power’, explored in the play L’incident d’Antioche which ‘describes a victorious and terribly destructive revolution whose leaders finally … take the unheard-of decision to renounce the power they have won’.50 According to Bensaïd, Badiou is effectively avoiding the dialectic between constituent power and institutionalised power ‘as if one could step to the side, remain entirely on the side of the event without ever compromising with history’. This concedes strategic reflection and thought. If the struggle and victory are incompatible, what is liberatory politics left with? For Badiou, communism has primacy as a philosophical Idea, because ‘To anticipate, at least ideologically, or intellectually, the creation of new possibilities, we must have an Idea … An Idea is always the assertion that a new truth is historically possible’.51 Without the Idea, the disorientation of the popular masses is unavoidable, so Badiou opines. For Bensaïd, by contrast, the point to establish was the relation between the ‘hypothesis’s philosophical statement and its political tests if his ideal communism is not to remain a mere hypothetical communism’.52 We saw earlier that Badiou developed a critique of modern Sophistry’s democratic language games under the banner of Plato, that philosophy depends on certain non-philosophical domains (the ‘conditions’ of philosophy), and that the truth has a historical dimension, but is also universal. Translated into the communist hypothesis, the ‘Idea is an operative mediation between the real and the symbolic … a historical anchoring of everything elusive, slippery and evanescent in the becoming of a truth’.53 It is atemporal though requires the finite embodiment of proper names. For Badiou, the communist hypothesis is ‘torn between a politics of the accomplished fact that affirms the real to conform to its concept and an idealist proposition that puts the Idea away in a safe place from the vicissitudes of history’.54 ‘The role of this Idea’, Badiou writes, ‘is to support the individual’s incorporation into the discipline of a truth procedure … by becoming a part of the body-of-truth, or the subjectivizable body’. The names of rebellious leaders gone past are ‘the rare and precious network of ephemeral sequences of politics as truth. The elusive formalism of bodies-of-truth is legible here as empirical existence’. One produces an atemporal, infinite Idea of communism that becomes part of a real body in

50 51 52 53 54

Badiou 2010, pp. 18–20. Badiou 2010, p. 256. Bensaïd 2009c. Badiou 2010, p. 247. Ibid.

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concrete struggle. This body is a new and collective Subject.55 In politics, it is ‘an organisation composed of individual multiples, we will say that it shares in the creation of a political truth’.56 This is a disciplined group organised around the Idea of communism, desperately trying to subtract themselves from Plato’s cave or return to it to enlighten others; the Idea of communism ‘is a modern version of what Plato attempted to convey to us under the names of eidos, or Idea, or even more precisely the Idea of the Good’.57 Bensaïd acknowledged the seductive power that this idea of politics could express as conjoined to a politics of the oppressed that is not reducible to what happens in the state. Up to that point he was in accord with Badiou. The dispute emerges when democracy and all that concerns number are identified with the state. Bensaïd was well aware that the truth does not vote, setting out instead a relational conception: But politics is not of the order of truth. Rather, it is in the order of ‘relative truths’ that Lenin spoke of. Otherwise said, of the order of relations and mediations [my italics – D.R.]. That electoral legitimacy is to a great extent a mystification is not in doubt. Not only because of the media’s manipulation, but more fundamentally due to alienation in and through work, the hypnotic effect of commodity fetishism and the biased methods of electoral representation. Elections are no less a constitutive element of the relations of social and political force … Badiou remains faithful to the radical Platonic critique of the democratic regime: we will not be able to manage a politics on ‘the anarchy of material desires’ and a ‘democratic government is unfit to serve any true Idea whatsoever’.58 The struggles for the right to vote were colossal class struggles. Yet, Badiou’s Platonic position in which every vote is considered to be a state operation means that ‘politics inversely remains the monopoly of the masters of truth, of the philosopher-king against the Sophist … the mythic figure who brings it forth – 55 56 57

58

Badiou 2010, p. 250. Badiou 2010, p. 245. Badiou 2010, p. 229. Badiou said of himself that: ‘The theme of the Idea appears gradually in my work. It was no doubt already present in the late ’80s from the moment when, in Manifesto for Philosophy, I designated my undertaking as a “Platonism of the multiple” … “true life” was conceived of as life lived in accordance with the Idea, as opposed to the maxim of contemporary democratic materialism, which commands us to live without any Idea’. Bensaïd 2009c.

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the immigrant worker – symbolically occupies the place of all those that the banishment of number reduces to silence’.59 Badiou said, ‘I have to tell you that I absolutely do not respect universal suffrage for itself alone, it depends on what it does. Why should universal suffrage be the one thing in the world that merits respect independently of its outcomes’?60 Of course, this was a useful reminder that ‘a numerical majority is never proof of truth or justice’. However, ‘Badiou’s radical critique relies on identifying democracy with capitalism pure and simple’. This was a drawback because: If democracy is representation, it is representation first and foremost of the general system that bears its forms. In other words, electoral democracy is not representative except to the extent that it is the consensual representation of capitalism, today rebranded ‘the market economy’. Such is its corruption in principle, and one comprehends why Marx thought that, faced with a democracy like that, the only remedy was a transitory dictatorship, which he called the dictatorship of the proletariat. ‘Dictatorship’ is a loaded word, but it does shed light on the chicanery of the dialectic between representation and corruption. For Marx, though, dictatorship was not in the least the opposite of democracy, and when Lenin spoke of ‘democratic dictatorship’ he didn’t mean it as an oxymoron.61 Bensaïd and Badiou were opposed to the market definition of what is possible and defended the possibility of communism. Their difference revolves around the nature of the communist hypothesis. For Badiou, as is clear, it is a pure philosophical Idea and, for Bensaïd, it was a politically regulating strategic hypothesis. Badiou opts for a broad definition of the communist hypothesis, writing it is a ‘philosophical concept and therefore the eternal, of the subjective rebel’. In it, the private appropriation of wealth will disappear and the coercive state apparatus will disappear. He was for the continuation of the communist hypothesis outside of the logic of taking power. For Bensaïd, this hypothesis, commendable as it is, fell into utopianism: The future of the hypothesis is thus opposed to the ‘past of an illusion’. In these definitions, communism loses in historical and political precision

59 60 61

Bensaïd 2009c. Quoted from Bensaïd 2011c, p. 22. Quoted from Bensaïd 2011c, pp. 22–3.

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what it gains in philosophical extension (and in eternity). The philosophical hypothesis of the evental exit from the cave or of Paulinian revelation, does not allow us to articulate the event to history, contingency to necessity, the goal to the movement. Or, for us, there is no exteriority of the absolute outside of politics in relation to institutions, of the event in relation to history, of truth in relation to opinion. The outside is always inside. Contradictions explode from the interior. And politics consists not in evading them but in installing ourselves in them in order to bring them to a point of rupture and explosion.62 The divergence between Badiou and Bensaïd rested on the incorporation of principles in effective history. This brings us to the next section of our discussion: sequences.

3

Sequences

Bensaïd’s key thesis about Trotskyism concerns the fact that the tradition made the 20th century intelligible or, at least, played a significant part in this intelligibility. Badiou’s conception of sequences is at odds with this intelligibility because it looks at the century from the Maoist perspectival ground. But it was not just the Maoist perspective that was at issue. The problematic of sequences was a point of contention. If there are nothing more than sequences of fidelity, inaugurated by the unpredictability of the event, which finish without us knowing why, the historical process of revolutionary preparation and reaction are equally excluded from a purely evental thought. If one skips over a historical analysis of the Thermidorian processes in the Soviet Union or in China, one is logically driven to oscillate between the idea that reaction is the outcome of the event itself and the idea that the sequence opened up by the event requires an uncritical fidelity without weakness to a final victory, which was the alibi of all the unconditional doctrinaires and of all the a-critical fidelities of the ‘friends’ of the ussr and China, obsessed with never ‘howling with the wolves’. To awaken from this fanaticism is perhaps difficult. The strength of the Trotskyist perspective is that it begins from the uneven and combined social totality to uncover a historical process, whereas the Maoist perspective remains trapped within the framework of ideological deviations. Bensaïd therefore argued that this is a flawed conception to which

62

Bensaïd 2009c, p. 107.

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Badiou succumbs present in the sequentiality of sequences. Badiou saw two great sequences in the communist Idea, and a third that was necessary to initiate. The first was the formation of the communist hypothesis and its reality as a movement. The second was the sequence of its disciplined and militarised organisation of its local victory and continuation. The first hypothesis runs from 1793 until the Paris Commune. Then, communism took shape as a movement. The unresolved problem of the Commune pertained to the ability of communism to win. To this, Badiou wrote that Lenin ‘forged the real historical answer to the problem bequeathed to us by the Commune in the form of a centralised Party with “iron discipline”. He created the instrument – and although it is a political instrument, Lenin’s model is a military machine – that could bring about the “destruction” Marx wanted, and that could replace the bourgeois State with a new kind of State exercising a popular despotism without historical precedent’.63 Stalinist terror was seen as the post-insurrectional way of using a tool designed to ensure the victory of the insurrection itself. Bensaïd was not convinced. However nuanced, it simply implies that the sequence conformed to the hypothesis. As if the mythic party of iron discipline from the 1934 Congress of the Victors had been, in whatever way, the legitimate heir to the Communist Manifesto and the Commune and not the rejection of it by a monstrous Thermidor attested to by trials, executions and mass deportations. Bensaïd drew out the dividing lines, as they pertained to sequences: We adhere fully to the affirmation of Walter Benjamin according to which ‘politics attains primacy over history’. We approve therefore of Alain Badiou when he puts the call out to ‘liberate politics from the tyranny of history in order to get to the event’ … We will not for all that reduce history to a succession of sequences of fidelity to a foundational event. When, why and how does a sequence finish? ‘There are only sequences’, and a sequence ‘finishes by saturation’. This observation of completion through a simple saturation cheaply dispenses with entering into the historical thickets of the bureaucratic counter-revolution, of untangling its social processes, of spotting the points of bifurcation in it, as if a sequence was one sole bloc … Lacking a grip of the problem of Stalinism, Badiou adds hypothesis to hypothesis, that of a very hypothetical fidelity to the initial eruption of the spectre.64

63 64

Badiou 2010, p. 274. Bensaïd 2009c, p. 108.

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The second sequence concerned victory and those engaged in this sequence thought of themselves as actualising the communist Idea of the first sequence. From what political perspective and point of judgment? Who thought so? According to what relation to reality? For Bensaïd, the formulation was perhaps misguided, when one confronts it to the reality of ‘socialism at a tortoise pace’ and ‘socialism in one country’, or when one puts it to the test of the Greek or Spanish Civil Wars, the division of Yalta, the Sino-Soviet conflict, the Vietnamese Revolution or Che’s message at the Tricontinental Congress. Badiou’s formulations make it imperative that he give up the idea of communism as a strategic project, because ‘to maintain the communist hypothesis as a strategic hypothesis, it is necessary to radically dissociate it from what was done in its name’. Badiou is unable to do this because he does not critically return to the history and politics of the second sequence when ‘a new kind of state exercising a popular despotism without historical precedent’ served the Idea. As if bureaucratic terrorism was done in the name of a Platonic Idea rather than ‘the interests of the Thermidorian caste or the new bourgeoisie in gestation at the heart of the party and state apparatus’. In an interview with Libération in 2009, Badiou declared that revolution had become ‘an empty concept’ and ‘not even the New Anticapitalist Party prepares the revolution’. Instead, the moment was comparable to that of the 1840s where utopian communism reigned without a real strategic project, an epoch in which the intellectual reconstruction of communism drew from the isolated experiences of workers before the encounter between the ideas of the Manifesto and the events of 1848. It is instructive to assess Badiou’s rejection of the New Anticapitalist Party project, because rejecting the project rested on his call for a new third epoch of the communist Idea, conceived of as an alternative to the ‘disastrous’ means hitherto adopted of the second sequence. Were these disasters simple errors or deviations? Again, the problem of Stalinism re-emerged, as Badiou wrote: ‘In Stalin’s time, we have to admit, the political organisations of the workers and popular classes behaved infinitely better, and capitalism was that much less arrogant’.65 Numerically perhaps, but this statement does not allow one to say if this was thanks to or despite the despotic leader; the sacrifices made by the liberatory movements were hardly made because of Stalin. In the interview with Libération Badiou continued, ‘my only tip of the hat to Stalin: he made the capitalists scared’. Bensaïd responded,

65

Badiou 2009 interview with Libération. See Badiou 2008, p. 26.

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This is one tip of the hat too many. Is it really Stalin who made the capitalists fear or indeed something else: the great workers’ struggles of the 1930s, the workers’ militias of Asturias and Catalonia, the demonstrations of the Popular Front? In short, fear of the masses. In many cases, not only did Stalin not scare the capitalists, he was their auxiliary, from the May Days of 1937 in Barcelona or the Hitler-Stalin pact, the division at Yalta and the disarmament of the Greek resistance.66 Badiou’s critique of Stalinism is reduced to a critique of method, which is implicit in Badiou’s rejection of the party-form. Bensaïd suggested that ‘instead of measuring the extent of the historic novelty’, Badiou deduces the tragedies of the twentieth century from a method of organisation, the partisan form and its genealogy. Badiou claimed, ‘This is why the party will engender (particularly from Stalin onwards) the figure of the party-state’. Bensaïd was not in agreement: As if the major event of the bureaucratic counter-revolution, ending in millions of deaths and deportations, did not raise questions of a wholly other nature, like the social forces at work, the relations with the global market, the impact of the division of labour, the economic forms of transition and political institutions. To finish deposing the nomenklatura in the party throughout the 1930s, it was necessary to methodically destroy – through trials, purges and massive executions – the essence of the Bolshevik Party of October. It was necessary to annihilate, one by one, the opposition. It was necessary, from the 5th Congress onward of the Comintern, under the fallacious pretext of ‘Bolshevisation’ to militarise the International and its sections.67 It is plausible that Badiou rejects the party form because he has a mythical representation of the Leninist party as the party of iron discipline, which caricatures Lenin’s project and party. And Bensaïd retorted to this representation that ‘Stalin was the man of iron. Under Lenin, the party was miles away from the image constructed by the Thermidorians and propagated by reaction’.68 Additionally, Badiou’s second sequence ended in the 1970s, after which Badiou

66 67 68

Bensaïd 2009, Une réponse de Daniel Bensaïd à Alain Badiou, https://www.lanticapitaliste​ .org/actualite/politique/une‑reponse‑de‑daniel‑bensaid‑alain‑badiou. Ibid. Ibid.

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refused the idea that a historical agent could incarnate the possibility of emancipation through the mediation of the party, reappearing in Badiou’s calls for the subtraction from the state, abolishing mediation. Bensaïd flipped Badiou’s objections back at him: That politics will be irreducible to the state is quite right, but a party is the condition of a politics at a distance from the state. Suppress the mediation of parties and there remains the opacity of the social or ‘civil society’ so dear to the liberals. Politics without parties will only be a fusional politics without mediations. Logically, the ‘rupture with the representative form of politics’ is indeed, for Badiou, a ‘rupture with democracy’, not only with its parliamentary modalities, but with all ‘tyranny of number’. How to radically reject the play of opinions … without mythifying the Commune as a form of power without a party or power? If, as Engels wrote, the Commune was the dictatorship of the proletariat, it was still a form of the state, without a doubt doomed to wither away, but still a state. Céphas’ dilemma [the revolutionary character from Badiou’s The Incident at Antioch – D.R.] isn’t resolved in deserting power, but by putting into play the dialectic (and not ambiguity) between the social and political struggles, between the self-organisation (commune, soviets and councils) and partisan mediations. What if the party was not the problem but an element of the solution? There however are parties and parties. And a party is also a means – certainly imperfect – of resisting the powers of money and the media, correcting the social and cultural inequalities and of creating a collective democratic space of thought and action.69 Bensaïd’s most explicit polemic against the political implications of Badiou’s libertarian Platonism were drawn out when Badiou admitted that he hoped the npa scored 10 per cent in the elections because it would create a little bit of disorder in the parliamentary game. But Badiou refused to contribute to it by casting his vote in favour of this disorder. Badiou’s position rested on three elements. He did not want to define himself from the point of view of the state, he did not want to play the electoral game, yet he recognised that we must resist the fetishism of the social movement. Through the latter point, he recognised the limitations of any alternative to the party-form. As we have seen, in order to satisfy the last aspect, Badiou approached the problem of political organisation from the angle of discipline. But, for Bensaïd, ‘today, we are quite far, speaking

69

Ibid.

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for the most of the organisations of the revolutionary left, from a military discipline and its mythologies. The question of discipline is subordinated to that of democracy: unity (discipline) in action is the issue that distinguishes the democratic deliberation of chatter and the simple exchange of opinion’. It is quite distant from the militaristic conception of democratic centralism because, ‘far from being mutually incompatible, centralism and democracy are the reverse side of the same process of decision’.70 Bensaïd explained it thus in Democracy in What State?: It remains the case, though, that ‘nothing gets done without discipline’, but ‘the military model of discipline must be surpassed’ … Badiou invokes a third stage of communism, ‘centred on the end of socialist splits, the repudiation of vindictive egoism, a critique of the motif of identity, and a proposal for non-military discipline’. Upon what might this non-military discipline rest? Unknown. Absent agreement democratically arrived at in view of a common project, it can only be the authority of a religious faith or a philosophical doctrine and their word of truth.71 This conception of democracy cannot square the circle of libertarian Platonism. At the end of his interview with Libération, Badiou argued that the New Anticapitalist Party was quite simply a return to the good old Communist Party of forty years ago. According to Badiou, in place of this kind of project, a genuine political organisation ‘begins at the level of the real, with a practical alliance with those people who are in the best position to invent it in the immediate’. Bensaïd was in total agreement about where political organisation begins, and simply responded: This is what all the militants engaged on a daily basis in the unions, in the anti-globalisation movements, in their struggle for housing, in the networks like Education sans frontières, in the feminist and ecologist movements. But is this sufficient? Is this not the ‘fetishism of the movement’, that Badiou dreads, the consequence of the renunciation to provide a political project – if one calls this a party, organisation, front, movement, who really cares – without which politics, so heavily relied upon, will be only a politics without politics?72

70 71 72

Ibid. Bensaïd 2011c, pp. 23–4. Bensaïd 2009, Une réponse de Daniel Bensaïd à Alain Badiou.

chapter 13

Derrida: Fellow Marrano Derrida has a unique place in Bensaïd’s relation to his contemporaries; though he seemed much less implicated in politics compared to others of the post-68 generation – Deleuze, Guattari and Foucault – his trajectory took an inverse direction compared to them, so Bensaïd thought. Instead of moving in the direction from radical politics to metaphysics, philosophy and the care of the self, Derrida’s trajectory moved from the metaphysical to the political. Derrida concerned himself with the singular contradictions of politics. Bensaïd claimed that Derrida was ‘Attentive to the relative without losing sight of the absolute, to singularities without ceding on the universal, he installed himself and worked within the permanent tension between the conditionality of law and the unconditionally of justice, between divine justice and mythical justice, between common sense and truth, between necessity and contingency, between event and history. He camped within the contradiction. There, precisely where politics takes off’.1 In a sense, Derrida was a political antidote to Badiou’s subtractive politics discussed in the previous chapter. In conjunction with the primacy of the political, the affective was present also, since Bensaïd shared deep care for Derrida. As Bensaïd wrote in a note for Éloge de la politique profane: This homage to Derrida the thinker of politics could surprise those who held him for a pure metaphysician. It seems however, amply justified by the evolution of his work and confirmed by the dedication in one of his 2001 letters: ‘Cher Daniel Bensaïd, this is only a pretext for thanking you from the bottom of the heart … for what you do, think, write, be, for this amicable [and generous] proximity that you show me and that I also feel (more than ever in Resistances that I am currently reading). We come from afar, each other, and have been quite far apart, but this only makes what binds us through our intersecting paths even more irreplaceable, and in the end even necessary’. Fruit of a late encounter, this reciprocal and modest complicity was patterned with cultural affinities as much as biographical coincidences. Without ignoring that which could separate us, I authorise myself to give a political meaning to it.2 1 Bensaïd 2008b, p. 352. 2 Quote from Bensaïd’s personal documents, shown to me courtesy of Sophie Bensaïd. A slightly modified note appears in Bensaïd 2008b, p. 352. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2024 | doi:10.1163/9789004687028_015

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Bensaïd’s engagement with Derrida was faithful to a certain Derrida, a heterodox reader of a certain Marx, and a thinker of the responsibility that emancipation implies. Contretemps and heritage were key aspects of both figures. Upon the release of Marx l’intempestif and the La discordance des temps, Bensaïd said in an interview that he found Derrida’s interpretation of Marx acute because it was outside of the official orthodoxies; the status of being at the margins of the official discourses meant Derrida was open to certain elements of Marx’s thought ignored by Stalinian orthodoxy and Marxist doxa. Bensaïd also included an essay on Derrida in the La discordance des temps. Furthermore, Bensaïd explained in this autobiography that: Before his Spectres of Marx, I had read Derrida intermittently, following the inspiration of the moment. I should have noticed much earlier the signs of what we shared without realising it, beyond the exile from an Algeria both close and distant. The experience of discordance and going against the grain, of the logic of spectrality, of curiosity about the Marrano ‘in breach of belonging’. Derrida did not believe for one second that the Marrano business could be readily wrapped up: ‘And what if not only Spinoza, but Marx himself, was a Marrano, a kind of illegal immigrant?’3 ‘Attentive to the plurality of meaning’, ‘determined to open new spaces of interpretation’, ‘without abandoning the unfaithful fidelity to the text’, Bensaïd had a deep affection for and appreciation of Derrida’s work. Derrida’s explorations of the notions of hospitality, spectrality, contretemps, the event and decision greatly interested Bensaïd, as well as Derrida’s interrogations of ‘the problematic nature of heritage as an active affirmation and not as something one receives by right’. Spectres of Marx both marked a turn in the intellectual landscape and a partial liberation of Marx from party and state orthodoxy. It sounded the signal to go back to Marx. This was, Bensaïd claimed, ‘between us, the object of friendly discussion, affectionate and discretely complicit, as if we were tacitly attached by a few shared secrets: Algeria (without any “nostalgeria”, he would have clarified), the Marrano, untimeliness and “a certain Marx”’.4

3 Bensaïd 2013, p. 228. 4 Bensaïd 2004d.

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The Untimely Presence of Marx

Derrida used his philosophical fame to proclaim the untimely presence of Marx. Bensaïd endorsed Derrida’s appeal to Marx, in which the latter asserted: It will always be a fault not to read and re-read and discuss Marx – which is to say also a few others – and to go beyond scholarly ‘reading’ or ‘discussion’. It will be more and more a fault, a failing of theoretical, philosophical, political responsibility. When the dogma machine and the ‘Marxist’ ideological apparatuses (states, parties, cells, unions, and other places of doctrinal production) are in the process of disappearing, we no longer have any excuse, only alibis, for turning away from this responsibility. There will be no future without this. Not without Marx, no future without Marx, without the memory and the inheritance of Marx: in any case a certain Marx, or his genius, of at least one of his spirits. For this will be our hypothesis or rather our bias: there is more than one of them, there must be more than one of them.5 Bensaïd appreciated Derrida’s principle of responsibility in the choices made when interpreting Marx. The relationship between responsibility and the plurality of meaning was key. Derrida’s inspiration was to call upon a certain spirit of Marxism, keeping ‘faith with what has always made Marxism in principle and first of all a radical critique, namely a procedure ready to undertake its self-critique’. Towards itself, this critique is ‘in principle and explicitly open to its own transformation, re-evaluation, self-reinterpretation’.6 What is Marxism and who are its heirs? What does this problematic illuminate? It asks us for a gesture of fidelity to the event Marx’s name is attached to. ‘Now’, Derrida wrote, ‘this gesture of fidelity to a certain spirit of Marxism is a responsibility incumbent in principle, to be sure, on anyone’.7 What and who exactly is a Marxist? Is there a set of doctrinaire criteria that one ticks off so that one may check, yielding the bureaucrat’s stamp allowing the gates to open? Does this Marxist checklist remain static or does it develop and transform in an open history? Bensaïd captures these themes in relation to the practice of reading, or their explicit implications, when he wrote of Derrida’s passing,

5 Derrida 1994, p. 14. 6 Derrida 1994, p. 110. 7 Derrida 1994, p. 113.

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Jacques Derrida has the reputation of being a difficult author, elitist even. Funnily enough, his spoken interventions, his interviews and a large portion of his work give the impression of great clarity. What often passes as obscurity is rather a rigorous concern for expression and style, a scrupulous respect for nuance and complexity, akin to a tight rope between literature and the labour of the concept. Jacques Derrida was first of all an extraordinary master of reading, the polar opposite of the quick and easy methods of a hurried time, attentive to the plurality of meaning and determined to open new spaces for interpretation without giving up the unfaithful fidelity to the text. His princely allure, sometimes bordering on dandyism, could pass as vanity. It above all expressed the refinement and elegance of this out of sync, decentred thought … in the image of this figure of the Marrano that fascinated him.8 A gesture of fidelity to a certain spirit of Marxism imposes responsibility on its heirs. After the collapse of the bureaucratic state-capitalist regimes, Marx’s spirit(s) were liberated. The rejuvenation of his spirit and fidelity to these spirit(s) are open to the pluralism of Marx’s work because no text is ever homogenous and there are points of undecidability implicit in all of them. Many interpretations and readings are possible and legitimate. But it is not simply the texts that are in question but the logic of the thing itself – capital and class struggles. Pluralist Marxism is not first and foremost a scholastic and philosophical discourse. Interpretation is, on Derrida’s reading, about not fleeing ‘from a responsibility’; more precisely, it is about submitting discussion to ‘several hypotheses on the nature of such a responsibility. What is ours? In what way is it historical? And what does it have to do with so many spectres’?9 Pluralism, fidelity and responsibility are inseparable, because, ‘What risks happening is that one will try to play Marx off against Marxism so as to neutralise, or at any rate muffle the political imperative in the untroubled exegesis of a classified work’.10 Derrida was categorical on this point. ‘One can sense a coming fashion or stylishness in this regard in the culture and more precisely in the university’. He sensed a moderating operation advancing, depoliticising the reference to Marxism. ‘To do its best, by putting on a tolerant face, to neutralise a potential force, first of all by enervating a corpus, by silencing it in the revolt’, Marx’s return was acceptable so long as ‘the revolt, which initially inspired uprising, 8 9 10

Bensaïd 2004d. Derrida 1994, p. 64. Derrida 1994, p. 37.

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indignation, insurrection, revolutionary momentum, does not come back’. ‘Yes, of course we think Marx is important’, in fact, ‘let’s read some of his work’. The one condition is that ‘a silence is maintained about Marx’s injunction not just to decipher but to act and to make the deciphering [the interpretation] into a transformation that changes the world’. ‘We’ll treat him calmly, objectively, without bias: according to the academic rules, in the University, in the library, in colloquia’. Systematically, these readings respect philological and philosophical exegesis. Yet, if ‘one listens closely’, Derrida writes, ‘one hears already whispered’, Marx, you see, was despite everything a philosopher like any other; what is more … he was a great philosopher who deserves to figure on the list of those works we assign for study and from which he has been banned for too long. He doesn’t belong to the communists, to the Marxists, to the parties – he ought to figure within our great canon of Western political philosophy. Return to Marx, let’s finally read him as a great philosopher.11 For Bensaïd, Derrida’s relation to Marx ‘remains uncertain’, but he ‘refused being criticised for the ignorance or misunderstanding that was addressed to him at times’. Derrida qualified that ‘I really read Marx, not enough; I have not read enough of him’, ‘We never read Marx enough’. This is a significant statement, according to Bensaïd because, Derrida affirmed in 1989: ‘Today all reference to Marx is prohibited in France … I would like to teach Marx and I will do it if I can’. The promise has been kept, to a certain extent, with Spectres of Marx. His declared intention in Politics of Friendship is to call for a new reading of Marx … His discourse does not claim, however, to be Marxist, in the sense that it is not dominated by a reference to Marxism, ‘but it is not foreign to Marxism either, nor anti-Marxist: it is not in principle incompatible with the event of Marx’. Derrida even advances the hypothesis according to which going beyond the classic categories of Marxism would be an injunction inherent in Marxism: ‘But I have never attacked the radicality of Marxist critique as such’ … His divergence concerns more precisely a certain Marxism inspired by what he called an ‘onto-theology’ … it is here that he held his distance from every variation of Marxism.12

11 12

Derrida 1994, p. 38. Bensaïd 2001e, pp. 182–3.

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Marx matters for Derrida’s messianism, exactly because it is the proper name of a major event making a messianic promise of a new kind; the messianic promise of a new kind invites an ineffable debt to a proper name. Derrida is thus a twofold ally of Bensaïd’s. On the one side, Derrida is an ally against the destruction of politics through ontological turns, because spectres of Marx or class struggles cannot be captured ontologically; on the other side, Bensaïd effectively defends Derrida against accusations that he was ignorant of Marx, arguing that despite the fact that Derrida’s thought is not filled with references to Marxism, it is compatible with the event of Marx, which aligns to the above quoted passage. This evental thought is key. Derrida takes Marxism to be necessary but always structurally insufficient; there are different modes of being Marxist and Derrida chose a faithfulness to a certain spirit of Marx. Moreover, Bensaïd polemicised against the Anglophone charge that Derrida paid no attention to class, or even rejected the concept. Indeed, class is an uncertain category in Derrida and in Marx also. It would be unjust however to suggest there is an absence of care towards class struggle in Derrida. This is a decisive point because it separates post-modernism from Derrida’s deconstruction. Deconstruction is compatible with a commitment to the class struggle, it hardly falls into the post-modern traps of a-truthfulness and a-historicity and a-commitment; deconstruction is profitably read as a philosophical strategy, a practice of reading and a means of criticising ideological forms that is ‘materialist’ and ‘revolutionary’. This is exactly why Derrida did not think deconstruction and Marxism were in disagreement, or were incompatible. Taken at its most scrupulous, deconstruction could serve as a means of relating to proper names; perhaps it is necessary to clarify the relationship between deconstruction and an immanent critique. But Bensaïd effectively endorses the notion that Marxism and deconstruction are compatible on the condition of remaining attentive to the exigencies of scientific critique and not slipping into hermeneutic fetishisms of the Word. The conjunction of deconstruction and Marxism folds back onto the manner in which Bensaïd read Derrida’s clarification about class, namely it is a vague concept, but it remains in need of being re-politicised; such a commitment to re-politicisation avoids ontological or substantialist traps because singular situations are attended to; the singularities of political conjunctures are not dissolved into an abstract essence.

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The Responsibility to Interpret

Derrida’s great strength was that no reading can escape Marx’s political imperative. To interpret is just one moment of the transformation. To arbitrarily suppress transformation while exalting interpretation is an act of regression. However, Marx’s thesis is often understood as the overpowering of philosophy by politics, a conception that often led to the tailoring of theory to pragmatic political concerns producing a confusion: This dreadful suture has too often allowed theory to fold to the urgency invoked by politics, to confuse their respective temporalities and rhythms, to the point of no longer leaving room for thought. It is especially necessary today to understand this plurality of time, this non-coincidence of rhythms and take all the necessary consequences from it … Politics does not absorb philosophy (theory or critique) up to the last drop. The eleventh thesis requires in turn the examination of critique. It is not suppressed for all that. One ought to not fall behind the intellectual event and the practical rupture attached to Marx’s name. It is no longer a question of re-philosophising as before as if nothing happened. It is always a case of changing the world. If Marx and his spirits withstand (demand) a plurality of readings, all are not equally legitimate.13 Fidelity requires truthfulness to the demand inherent in the political event that Marx’s name is attached to. This is the politics of the rebellious oppressed – the past and present of contretemps. Bensaïd was partly attracted to Derrida’s work because, for Derrida, the realm of the mole is the domain of the dead. Messiahs and spectres, ghosts and pop-up moles haunt his universe, which respond to the impatient wait for an apparition. Derrida wants us to learn to live with ghosts, in their company and their conversation. This may sound like an odd formula for a materialist. But, contrary to appearances, it is secular, since spectres and ghosts are Marx’s metaphorical go-to and feature in contretemps and language and justice and memory. Derrida wants to interrogate the function of the ghost, inheritance and generations that have gone past, which means talking ‘about certain others who are not present, nor presently living, either to us, in us, or outside us, it is in the name of justice’.14 What of

13 14

Bensaïd 1995, p. 235. Derrida 1994, p. xviii.

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the ‘furtive and untimely’ apparition of the spectre? Where does its temporality belong? The ghost enters, the ghost exits, then re-enters. To whom can this untimely spectre speak and address itself? Derrida wrote: The last one to whom a spectre can appear … is a spectator as such. The reasons for this are essential. As theoreticians or witnesses, spectators, observers, and intellectuals, scholars believe that looking is sufficient. Therefore, they are not always in the most competent position to do what is necessary: speak to the spectre. Herein lies perhaps, among so many others, an indelible lesson of Marxism. There is no longer, there has never been, a scholar capable of speaking of anything and everything while addressing himself to everyone and anyone, and especially to ghosts. There has never been a scholar who really, and as scholar, deals with ghosts. A traditional scholar does not believe in ghosts – nor in all that could be called the virtual space of spectrality. There has never been a scholar who, as such, does not believe in the sharp distinction between the real and the unreal, the actual and the inactual, the living and the non-living, being and non-being (‘to be or not to be’, in the conventional reading), in the opposition between what is present and what is not, for example in the form of objectivity.15 The present is homogenous for this kind of scholar. But Derrida (and Bensaïd) responded with a belief in the political virtue of the contretemps. The political virtue of contretemps is tied up with Bensaïd’s concern with language, which we encountered in the chapter on Benjamin. In The Powers of Communism, we see that Bensaïd concern for language echoes the problems that deconstruction dealt with. If there is a disjuncture in the very presence of the present and a non-contemporaneity of present time with itself, then language is problematic. Words and things do not co-exist harmoniously within homogenous time. What would happen to the word communism if it were equated with the thing of actually existing dictatorships? Though vocabulary is shaped over time, through use and experience, to conflate the communist word with the totalitarian thing would be to commit an injustice toward all those defeated women and men, anonymous or not, who lived out the communist ideal with intense passion and breathed life into it against caricatures and impostors. The deconstruction of language necessarily implies a debt to the forgotten past, those fallen under the weight of the victors. It also means we are not eas-

15

Derrida 1994, pp. 11–12.

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ily finished with spectres, and the spectres of Marx. It is ‘useless to claim to eliminate shadows to install ourselves in a present that is fully transparent to itself. Spectres circulate among times that no longer join’. The present is out of joint. Derrida’s very notion of contretemps, Bensaïd insisted ‘is thoroughly Marx’s’.16 Contretemps is lush with Messianic apparitions. It is that thirst for justice and the accomplishment of emancipation’s great promise. Derrida wanted the Messianic (without utopian Messianism) because without this experience of the impossible, ‘one might as well give up on both justice and the event’. This strange concept of the messianic signifies the indestructibility of the idea of justice and forever returns to the promise of emancipation. It is just this ‘opening which renounces any right to property, any right in general, messianic opening to what is coming, that is, to the event that cannot be awaited as such, or recognized in advance therefore, to the event as the foreigner itself, to her or to him for whom one must leave an empty place, always, in memory of the hope – and this is the very place of spectrality’.17 Bensaïd thought Derrida’s attitude to the metaphor of the messianic to be a decisive point of convergence and demarcation since Derrida makes visible the structure of the messianic, namely the ways in which it is about justice and emancipation in the experience of history. Derrida’s messianic without the Messiah, in this sense, is engaged in the secularisation of the world, and along with ‘spectrality’, the project of articulating historical experience aligned to liberation is anti-Utopian, but fundamentally concerned with the simple and the concrete. Bensaïd saw in Derrida an affirmation of a form of messianism that echoes the distinction between Benjamin (presentist) and Bloch (futural); furthermore, Derrida’s messianism is revolutionary, because it is not about a lost past, nor is it concerned with passivity, but is – to take Françoise Proust’s terms – the messianic passion for a just world. In general, the messianic is that which we cannot and ought not do without. We cannot exactly count on what is coming. If we could, ‘hope would be but the calculation of a programme’. If we had certainty, then there would be no prospect of awaiting the arrival of historical events.18 In the wake of Derrida, Proust conceived the messianic ‘not as an institution but as a passion, as “the messianic passion for a just world”, as an unconditioned right, as an immediate demand for justice here and now’. This idea is not a chimera but practical

16 17 18

Bensaïd 1995, p. 236. Derrida 1994, pp. 81–2. Derrida 1994, p. 212.

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in orientation and spirit. This passion joins up with a spirit of resistance that searches, in every point of time, for that moment in which history begins anew in the recommencements of time; the point is to have a historical ear that is attuned to the ‘beats and pulsations of history, because every present must be considered as liberation’s battlefield’.19 We must search for the liberation that can betray the inevitable. In the bourgeois revolution, the ‘phrase exceeded the content. Whence the anachronym of a revolutionary present haunted by its antique models’. The social revolution, beginning in the nineteenth century, would not necessarily abolish a time out of joint, but ‘this time the non-equivalence will stem from the excess of its “own content” with regard to the “phrase”. The “own content” will no longer frighten, it will not hide itself, driven back behind the bereaved rhetoric of antique models and the grimaces of death masks’.20 The content of the social revolution will exceed the form.21 The untimely difference between the bourgeois and socialist revolution laterally raises the problem of inheritance. Marx concluded in the Eighteenth Brumaire that we make our own history. This is the condition of inheritance because ‘appropriation in general, we would say, is in the condition of the other and of the dead other, of more than one dead, a generation of the dead’.22 A play on the Heideggerian concept of heritage taken up by Derrida, the task of inheriting Marxism is to ‘assume its most “living” part, which is to say, paradoxically, that which continues to put back on the drawing board the question of life, spirit, or the spectral’. Between a living present and a proper name referring to the dead, how is the dead resurrected? How can a non-presence become present? What will be transformed in this process? For Derrida, ‘This inheritance must be reaffirmed by transforming it as radically as will be necessary’. An act of infidelity perhaps, the road to fidelity runs through the winding path of unfaithfulness. Would not ‘a reaffirmation’ as this one, ‘be both faithful to something that resonates in Marx’s appeal – let us say once again in the spirit of his injunction – and in conformity with the concept of inheritance in general’? This makes inheritance a critical and transformative filter. It is not forever and already given. Inheritance is an agony inducing activity. One can certainly fail an inheritance by becoming unworthy of it. And, ‘like all inheritors, we are in mourning’.23

19 20 21 22 23

Bensaïd 2001e, pp. 176–7. Derrida 1994, p. 144. Bensaïd 2001e, p. 182. Derrida 1994, p. 134. Derrida 1994, p. 67.

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For Derrida, the moment one asks what it is to be or not to be a Marxist, one has posed a question of inheritance and mourning. ‘That we are heirs’, Derrida suggests, ‘does not mean that we have or that we receive this or that, some inheritance that enriches us one day with this or that’, but that rather one is first of all a being who inherits. This is so whether we like it or not. That means responsibility is embodied in what we are, so Derrida claims: There is no inheritance without a call to responsibility. An inheritance is always the reaffirmation of a debt, but a critical, selective, and filtering reaffirmation, which is why we distinguished several spirits.24 Inheritance is heterogeneous. Involving selection, it implicates pluralism, in which Marx’s spirits embody the pluralistic selections. Perhaps, an ‘inheritance is never gathered together, it is never one with itself’. The moment one invokes heritage by saying ‘One must’, ‘one must filter, sift, criticize, one must sort out several different possibles that inhabit the same injunction’. According to Derrida, this was appropriate precisely because the given of a tradition is not immediately legible, for one must: inhabit it in a contradictory fashion around a secret. If the readability of a legacy were given, natural, transparent, univocal, if it did not call for and at the same time defy interpretation, we would never have anything to inherit from it. We would be affected by it as by a cause – natural or genetic. One always inherits from a secret, which says ‘read me, will you ever be able to do so?’ The critical choice called for by any reaffirmation of the inheritance is also, like memory itself, the condition of finitude.25 The injunction is contradictory and divided. An inheritance will always keep its secret. According to Derrida, the secret is one of a ‘crime. The secret of its very author’.26 The task of deciphering the rhythm of a text and tradition never ends. There is never a final judgement. The responsibility to reconstruct Marx’s scientific and political breakthroughs in new conjunctures is unending. Derrida’s questions continue. What is our responsibility? In what way is it historical? And what does it have to do with so many spectres? Of this heritage, Bensaïd enunciated: 24 25 26

Derrida 1994, p. 114. Derrida 1994, p. 18. Derrida 1994, 116.

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This messianic debt without an accompanying credit interest (because we do not count, we do not calculate, the price of an event) is the counterpart of heritage … A messianic promise of a new kind has been formed, ‘an inaugural and unique mark in history’, and we remain with this debt, an ‘ineffaceable and insoluble debt toward one of the spirits inscribed in historical memory under the proper names of Marx and Marxism’. Marx the spirit, Marx the revenant. Derrida has sounded the signal. This is a beginning. The inactual actuality of this spirit is his site. The site of his haunting. Of the haunted quarters of capital, where surprising marvels are produced … Derrida’s Marx seduces not without awakening some suspicion. It resists every kind of academic recuperation and conciliatory depoliticisation. But isn’t there a danger of confusing the shadow and body, in this play of spectres? Why does this unheimlich (uncanny) Marx still haunt us? What does he require of us to be freed from his spectres?27 These questions will be left hanging, cut off before any consolation sparing one of debt. Consolations don’t settle debts, neither in the world of banking and finance, nor faced with the spirits of Marx.

27

Bensaïd 1995, p. 243.

part 5 Strategic Thinking to Break the Reproduction of Fetishism and Domination

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Praising the Profane ‘It is time’, Bensaïd wrote, for the oppressed ‘to learn the lessons of the experiences and defeats of the past century, to roll the dice of strategic reason, and, as Deleuze put it, “recommence from the middle”’. We saw in an earlier chapter that La révolution et le pouvoir was an intervention amidst the heightened strategic debates in the 1970s. To speak of revolution was to speak of power. In the late 2000s, Éloge de la politique profane was the La révolution et le pouvoir of the new century – situated between a utopian moment and strategic refoundation. In many ways, the guiding thread of this book has been the wager on a genuinely new historical invention, and for Bensaïd, this imposed the incessant task of seizing the present, by adjusting to it correctly, if this also meant resisting it à contretemps; it is in this sense that Éloge de la politique profane goes beyond La révolution et le pouvoir. Such an orientation implied a new philosophical genre, the ‘diagnostic’, which was a new way of thinking the present (according to Proust, the genre was invented by Marx and Nietzsche). ‘Every epoch deserves a diagnostic’, but thought is never completely the contemporary of itself, it is split between pasts and futures. Bensaïd wrote Éloge de la politique profane in the diagnostic spirit, as he tried to seize the actual nature of his historical coordinates.1

1

The Terrain of Intervention

In the first instance, Bensaïd saw that the ‘“best of all possible worlds”, promised by the ideologues of ‘blissful globalisation’ is beset by a triple crisis, social, ecological and ethical’. The threefold crisis is tied to the contradictions of late capitalism with the planetary rule of the commodity, but it was not a ‘natural’ result of the economy. It ‘translated and accelerated the major changes in the relations of social force and states, the impact of a new wave of technological innovation and the modification of the division and organisation of labour driven by the neoliberal counter-offensive of the 1980s’.2 Concomitantly, according to Bensaïd, the general privatisation of public goods, space

1 Proust 1997, pp. 84–5. 2 Bensaïd 2008b, pp. 7–8.

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and renewed forms of violence aimed at creating the conditions of a renovated primitive accumulation, through the confiscation of the common goods of humanity, land and water, and a narrowing down of the public space. The impersonal despotism of capital tries to escape from the contradictions that undermine it through a headlong rush into the social war declared on the oppressed and in the imperial wars and the recolonisation of the world. The demolition of rights and social gains has, for its counterpart, the rise in the power of the penal state and the normalisation of the state of exception under the cover of the struggle against terrorism. The reduction of the public space emptied forums for deliberative democratic debate, from this resulted an atrophy of political life, the rise of electoral abstention and the loss of legitimacy of representative institutions. Effectively, the social and democratic crises are inseparable. Internationally, in the days after 9/11, George W. Bush declared an unlimited war in time and space, the exceptional character of the war supposedly justifying recourse to any means necessary, whether legal or not. In this new malaise of civilisation, was another world still possible? From Seattle to Caracas, going through Porto Alegre, Genoa, Bamako, Mumbai, Karachi, the anti-globalisation demonstrators had declared their great refusal of the neo-liberal logic of competition (and of war) of all against all, The World Is Not for Sale! The World is Not a Commodity! Another World is Possible! The movement of the negative was at work. Perhaps it could be re-worked: another world is necessary. But, Bensaïd asked, what kind of world? And how was it to be achieved? These were henceforth the questions posed. We saw that since the end of the 1970s the strategic debate on the left had fallen to degree zero, in which strategic reason ‘experienced a durable eclipse’ and the movement of the negative of the last century ended in the obscure disaster. Bensaïd also asked if the conjuncture was witnessing the end of Hobsbawm’s short twentieth century, or was it the end of the political paradigm of modernity as it was formed since the seventeenth century accompanied by the notions of sovereignty, citizenship, territory, borders, the capital city, the people, national wars, international law, etc.? Globalisation shook up these categories, putting them to the test. The very idea of revolution that was consolidated by the semantic of historical time and the ideologies of progress prevailing since the French Revolution did not escape unscathed. How was it possible to be and remain a revolutionary in the twenty-first century? For Bensaïd, the idea of revolution functions as a regulative horizon. Without the conviction that another world, or other worlds, is or are possible and necessary, then one is resigned to the present order of things, which constitutes the collapse of conviction. The politics of the lesser evil then intervene, which in turn might be the shortest path to the worst betrayals.

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The social content giving rise to the colossal struggles and revolutionary movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was more present than ever, making the radical transformation of relations of property and power urgent. But the strategic content of this transformation remained uncertain. Bensaïd spelled out what this meant, in an interview he gave upon the release of his A Slow Impatience. He said of his political culture: We felt ourselves to be people of the twentieth century and more precisely, people of the phase opened by the Russian Revolution of 1917 … In this short twentieth century, historians like Hobsbawm or Moshe Lewin wrote, worked with common references, symbols and terms of political and strategic debate. We went through a body of political categories (prolonged war/war of position, armed insurrection, united front, Gramsci and hegemony, etc.) which formed part of a common language. We only interested ourselves much later in the origins of French socialism or in the socialisms of the nineteenth century. This common foundation began to chip away in the 1970s, where, from the point of view of philosophy, the success of thinkers like Guattari, Foucault or Deleuze (and some others, but first of all this triplet), who foresaw in a nascent state, what we could call the crisis of this political and strategic paradigm in which the left grew up with, particularly the radical and revolutionary left, all the way through the twentieth century. That doesn’t mean there is a blank slate, but we need to make an inventory of what remains useful of this heritage, and how to infuse it into new experiences.3 The strategic refoundation that Bensaïd is speaking of had to both preserve and supersede, mourn, the common culture of the left that existed during the aftermath of the Russian Revolution and ’68. To continually rehash that phase could be an exercise in nostalgia; one could be caught in a mournful labour. Yet, to forget this culture and its debates would be to enter future battles without memory. For Bensaïd, the condition of politics remained the fragile bond between continuity and rupture, of history and politics, of resistance and the event. What form would this take in the new century? What form could it take? How does the weight of the last century have an impact on it? These questions could not be separated from mourning the painful ‘century of extremes’ and its consequences:

3 Bensaïd 2004c.

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We are faced with the challenge of a process of social reconstruction that is made up of small resistances and partial victories … It is also a political challenge, where we have to redefine a strategic horizon, which has broken down. We must even reconsider the categories we use … The terms of the debate on reform or revolution between Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Kautsky and others, are not uninteresting today, but they are insufficient. This necessary theoretical reconstruction must confront the ideological bubble of post-modern thought, which talks about ‘society in pieces’ or ‘liquid society’, and which maintains the confusion between the flowering of individualities and the retreat into individualism. Because ideas that are critical of the established order have also suffered 25 years of defeats in the face of liberal counter-reforms. However, since the beginning of the 1990s, there has been the beginning of a recovery: 1994 with the Zapatista insurrection in Mexico, 1995 with the great strikes in France, then 1999, Seattle and the Social Forums. In 12 years, the landscape has changed fairly quickly, but there is still a long way to go. Personally, I did not think that there would be the start of a comeback so quickly, after the extent of the shock of the neo-liberal offensive. We ‘start again in the middle’, as Deleuze always put it. And it is still only a beginning …4 It was a beginning forever recommenced. Crucially, for Bensaïd, after the social and moral defeats of the twentieth century, one has the right and duty to recommence, to retie the broken threads of emancipation, to change the world before it sinks into social and ecological catastrophe. The logic of capital is certainly not a destiny or fatality foretold. It is a ‘tendency that will become unstoppable if we renounce resistance against it. But the real, Gabriel Tarde said, is only one particular case of the possible’.5

2

Illusory Paths of Liberation

Bensaïd thought that politics of liberation were at a juncture between utopia and strategy. It was not a case of returning to the infancy of utopian socialism, but of resuming the ‘dream to the future’ founded on the ‘real movement’ that aims at abolishing the present state of things. Why did Bensaïd speak of being between the utopian moment and a strategic re-foundation? Because Marx

4 Bensaïd 2007d. 5 Bensaïd 2003a, pp. 12–13.

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already denounced the ‘political illusion’ that consisted in thinking human emancipation could be reduced to the conquest of democratic rights and after the 1980s, the reversed illusion developed, which needed a response, as Bensaïd explained: The strategic impasse facing the liberal counter-offensive initiated in the early years of the 1980s has fuelled, resulting from the return of the social question in the middle of the 1990s, a symmetrical ‘social illusion’, according to which the social movements … themselves suffice.6 John Holloway’s Change the World Without Taking Power was the ‘extreme expression of this illusion’. Forms of the social illusion included the new libertarians who claimed to change the world by limiting themselves to the experimentation of micro-counter-powers while preaching an imaginary evasion of the system in exile and nomadic exodus. The currents that pushed the social illusion to the extreme also rejected the logic of hegemony, replacing it with a counter-hegemonic logic and a post-anarchist one of direct affinity. Richard Day’s Gramsci Is Dead was a theorisation of this position. Other forms of the utopian moment were manifest in the partisans of a better-regulated global capitalism and the neo-Keynesian socialists who were nostalgic for the welfare state of the long boom. In addition to the illusions, Bensaïd saw a moment of incertitude and redefinition for the anti-capitalist currents that were in the process of programmatic reconstruction and strategic reflection. This moment evoked the stammering of the new-born workers’ movement of the nineteenth century without returning to it as mimicry.

3

The Need to Re-Found Revolutionary Strategy within the Crisis of Modern Political Categories

Bensaïd made the most systematic intervention into the re-configuration of the radical left that was then underway in Éloge de la politique profane. Revolutionary strategy had to be re-founded in the new world, articulating a plurality of times and spaces, history and the event, act and process, the decisive moment to take power and the development of revolution in permanence. Throughout the twentieth century, Bensaïd saw two basic strategic hypotheses: the insurrectional general strike, ‘inspired by the Paris Commune and by the October

6 Bensaïd 2008b, p. 9.

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insurrection, as a rapid showdown to settle the central question of taking control of a capital and the centres of state power’. Second, the prolonged popular war, which was embodied in the Chinese or the Vietnamese revolution, ‘implying territorial dual power and self-administered liberated zones’. From the ‘German revolution to the Nicaraguan revolution … going through the Spanish civil war … the experiences of the twentieth century exhibit a variable combination of these characteristics’.7 Each of these strategies of subversion had used the political categories of modernity to overcome and surpass them. For example, sovereignty was to be democratic and popular, and citizenship social, not merely political. It did not shock Bensaïd that the crisis of the political paradigm of modernity was reflected in the crisis of the strategies of subversion, beginning with the upheaval in their spatial and temporal conditions. The crisis of these political concepts was not new as such. Since the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, modernity had experienced recurrent interrogations of the notions of sovereignty, representation and politics. The key themes and interrogations tying Éloge de la politique profane together were the following: indeed, take power to change the world. But how? How to take power in the conditions of a global capitalist mode of production? And how to avoid the bureaucratic gangrene that has ruined from the inside previous efforts of emancipation? What did the crisis of modern political categories disclose about the contemporary conjuncture?

4

The Discordance of Times and the Mobile Scale of Spaces

Bensaïd again returned to the necessary of grasping the contemporary rhythms and spaces of change, implying the plurality and discordance of social time and the mobile scale of spaces. The time of political decision is that of the middle term, distinct from economic rhythms, like that of morals, attitudes, aesthetics, law and ecological rhythms. These times, through which the time for democratic deliberation is necessary, are more and more squashed between the moment of emergency – humanitarian, health crises – or military decisions, and, on the other hand, the long durée of ecological choices. Globalisation has had its impact on the plurality and discordance of spaces. The social production of space studied by Lefebvre and Harvey was an essential element of the re-foundation of revolutionary strategy in Bensaïd’s thinking, because the

7 Bensaïd 2006, Penser la politique. Un entretien avec Daniel Bensaïd, interview with Praxis.

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domination of national space over other spatial dimensions seemed to assure a homogeneity between the experienced space, representation of space and the space of representations. The shock of globalisation tends to dislocate this relative unity: political spaces, legal, economic, ecological, monetary, are no longer congruent. The European Union is a complex combination of these different spaces. In these conditions, citizens, according to their social conditions, live in spaces that are more and more distinct and uneven: for the young of the ghettoised cities, the national space is often an abstraction in relation to the experienced space of its city and the imaginary spaces of the home country or the religious community. The logic of uneven and combined geographical development inherent in the accumulation of capital configures space. Far from constituting a global commercial space that is homogenous and smooth, where national sovereignties are dissolved, liberal globalisation signifies a new phase of imperialist domination resulting in a redistribution of the relations of dependence and domination. Thus, if the circulation of capital and commodities are freed from borders, the global division of labour remains extremely segmented. Bensaïd’s concern with space featured in the first edition of Contretemps where he published a review of David Harvey’s Spaces of Hope. Bensaïd was a close reader of Harvey’s work, complementary as it was to Lefebvre’s concerns in the Production of Space. Since the 1970s, space as a dimension of politics was reaffirmed, and this was not by chance. Bensaïd explained that it followed from ‘the dynamic of commodity “globalisation” (financial deregulation, transnationalisation of capital), the growth of technologies of communications, the thawing out of the emergent blocs from Yalta, and to a rewriting of territories following decolonisation and to the formation of regional wholes’.8 Faced with these developments it was necessary to think through the contradictory play of homogenisation and spatial differentiations, to analyse differentiated spatial unities, and to analyse in a new context the functioning of differential spaces and differentials in the mobility of the global labour market. Bensaïd broke down two key concepts in Harvey’s thought-kit to articulate these new spatial hierarchies: ‘uneven and combined development’, and ‘the production of scales’ as ‘a means to shape and control the social struggle’. This aligned with the fact that the nineteenth century witnessed the formation of modern nationstates and colonial expansion, with the definition of territories, conquests and means of navigation, parallel to which was the growing control of spaces – the

8 Bensaïd 2001a, p. 154.

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factory and the neighbourhood – that accompanied the growth of the worker’s movement. For Harvey, the left had to learn to combat capitalism at different levels and scales simultaneously: The left must learn to fight capital at both spatial scales simultaneously. But, in so doing, it must also learn to coordinate potentially contradictory politics within itself at the different spatial scales for it is often the case in hierarchical spatial systems (and ecological problems frequently pose this dilemma) that what makes good political sense at one scale does not make such good politics at another (the rationalisation of, say, automobile production in Europe may mean plant closures in Oxford or Turin). Withdrawing to the nation state as the exclusive strategic site of class organisation and struggle is to court failure (as well as to flirt with nationalism and all that it entails). This does not mean the nation state has become irrelevant – indeed it has become more relevant than ever. But the choice of spatial scale is not ‘either/or’ but ‘both/and’ even though the latter entails confronting serious contradictions.9 Bensaïd noted that ‘if the bourgeois strategies of domination and division frequently succeed in “the implantation of all manner of class, gender, and other social divisions into the geographical landscape of capitalism”, the divisions as they are between cities and banlieues, between regions, and among nations “cannot be understood as residuals from some archaic order” ’. Harvey captures the main point: They are not automatically swept away. They are actively produced through the differentiating powers of capital accumulation and market structures. Place-bound loyalties proliferate and, in some respects, strengthen rather than disintegrate through the mechanisms of class struggle as well as through the agency of both capital and labour working for themselves. Class struggle all too easily dissolves into a whole series of geographically fragmented communitarian interests, easily co-opted by bourgeois powers or exploited by the mechanisms of neo-liberal market penetration.10

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Harvey 2000, pp. 50–1. Harvey 2000, p. 40.

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For Bensaïd, capital constantly ‘constructs and reconstructs space in its own image’, producing and reproducing ‘a landscape that is geographically and socially specific to it’. It was necessary to think through its expanded reproduction in ‘terms of uneven development and of the “production of scale”. If globalised commodity domination henceforth hardly has an outside, these inequalities and differentials, not only between the centre and periphery, but from the angle of new spatial fractures at the very centre and of newly neglected spaces on the periphery that are given over to chaos’.11 Conflict cannot be measured by a sole and homogenous spatial scale. Uneven geographical developments upset the relationship between particular and general interests, Bensaïd suggests: This approach allows Harvey to sketch a response to the contradiction between a ‘totalising’ or ‘macro’ approach (inherent in globalisation as a theme) and a ‘micro’ thought, centred on the irreducible singularity of the body. For him, the body is not a monad, but a point of resistance and reproduction: ‘capital circulates, as it were, through the body of the labourer as variable capital’. It is precisely at this point that the knot between what we henceforth call ‘globalisation’ and the question of the body is tied. Marx described the circulation of variable capital (waged labour) as a commodity destined for exchange on the market: the labourer exchanges the use of his or her labour power against the use value of the commodities that his or her wage permits to be purchased. Exchanges of this kind are generally local. The labourer must daily take his or her body to work, but his or her labour power is forced as a commodity into the process of Money-Commodity-Money circulation that easily escapes from the spatiotemporal constraints of the local labour market and contributes to the accumulation of capital on a global scale.12 The spatial-temporal conditions aren’t alone in making liberatory social transformation elusive. The strategic agents of this transformation did too. The debates over the concepts of class and the multitude were indicative of this problem. As the section on Negri made clear, Bensaïd thought the notion of the multitude had a descriptive relevance, to the extent that it sought to reflect the diversity of mobilised crowds in Bolivia, Nepal, in the anti-war demonstra-

11 12

Bensaïd 2001a, pp. 156–7. Ibid.

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tions or in the marches of the undocumented migrants in the United States. Unfortunately, it had neither empirical or theoretical rigour, nor strategic function, avoiding class conflicts and contradictions at the core of the multitude, reducing struggles to a collision of abstractions (Empire and the Multitude) in a theatre of shadows. The substitution of the multitude or the plebs for the class struggle is symptomatic of a confused neo-populism. Nevertheless, the concept itself pointed to a destabilisation of the social subjects of emancipatory transformation in their relation to politics.

5

The Secularisation of the World is Just Beginning

Bensaïd praised profane politics, amid the complex web of these processes, to confront the ‘crisis of the political conceptual apparatus’. Bensaïd’s intervention effectively scouted for a new political lexicon: a ‘new lexicon’ is not invented artificially like Esperanto … It is born of the conflictual exchange of real language, of foundational social and historical experiences, and the struggle of words. Capital has its own vocabulary, that of the ventriloquial commodity and its spontaneous lexicon … Like the class struggle, the battles over languages are asymmetrical. The lexicon of the oppressed is subaltern to those of the oppressors … The battle of the verb … the discourse of resistance can only escape the vicious circle of the subaltern condition in getting to the root of things and in getting through appearances, in order to pull out from experience a few breakthroughs of truth.13 When the obscure disaster took place, it seemed that the century of the passion for the real was exhausted, definitively. The shift was accompanied by another, namely a longer period that was in the process of ‘being exhausted under the shock of liberal globalisation: that of the political paradigm of modernity and the categories under which antagonistic political strategies were conceived, for more than three centuries: the paradigm of classical rationality formed at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’. Because the development of social relations is not a smooth and homogenous process, Bensaïd thought that: The coherence of every historical periodisation, through an articulation of rhythms and combination of social times depends on selected cri13

Bensaïd 2008a, pp. 9–10.

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teria. And the narrative varies according to the temporal sequence under consideration. Constructed from a range of incoherent events, every sequence is a place of determined but accidental encounters. Its fragile unity always risks disintegrating.14 At stake, for Bensaïd, is the periodisation of history in terms of epochs. An epoch is an articulation of differentiated spaces and uneven durations, and Bensaïd pointed out that as for the concept itself, ‘only the modern epoch thought of itself as an epoch’. The epoch, indeed, is a curious thing. Does history make an epoch? Or do concrete human beings draw up what they conceive to be an epoch? Where does an epoch end? ‘The threshold’, Bensaïd tells us, ‘if it exists, is found beyond the chronological surface of events; because man, if he makes history, “does not make an epoch”. As a consequence, historical timing is a necessarily retrospective exercise’.15 What does this mean, on Bensaïd’s reading, for modernity? Since modernity is not a homogenous process, but is punctuated with events and bifurcations, then: The American and French Revolutions, Victorian globalisation and the expansion of colonial imperialism, the parliamentary institutionalisation of political parties and the growth of the bureaucratic phenomena, the wars and revolutions of the elapsed century. Each of these caesuras involve important rearrangements in the apparatus of domination and representation. The French Revolution overthrew the field of political representation on an international scale. The revolutions of 1848 ‘split the history of the world in two’ and laid bare new social antagonisms. Victorian globalisation engendered a world that was institutionally globalised, symbolised in 1884 by the Washington International Meridian Conference over the definition of the zero meridian and the unification of global time and, in 1885, the Berlin conference on the division of Africa.16 Throughout the different upheavals puncturing the surface of modernity, a relatively coherent conceptual apparatus of political struggle survived. Yet, ‘today we are engaged in a new mutation, where the split between that which is dying and that which is being born remains uncertain’.17 14 15 16 17

Bensaïd 2008a, p. 12. Bensaïd 2008a, pp. 13–14. Bensaïd 2008a, p. 14. Ibid.

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The Lacerations of Modernity’s Conceptual Apparatus of Politics

Enlightenment science and ideologies developed around the seventeenth century, embodied in figures like Bacon and Galileo, Descartes and Newton. Their names speak of the success of mechanical physics, the ‘triumph of a “universal causal style” and an “ideal objectivity”, the advent of an “abstract, homogenous and mathematical” time and space’.18 Two interrelated problems made their way through this ideological-scientific endeavour. Bensaïd noted that Calculemus was the slogan of this new paradigm. Probabilities were to be calculated; the social world was mathematised. Governmentality and its repressive apparatuses mobilised statistics through which the ‘exercise of power shall no longer be ruled by the supposed wisdom of rulers but by the administrative order. The rule of measure responded to the quantification of labour’. Mathematising the social world could be seen in the Enlightenment dream for a perfect and rational war, in which the battle was geometrically ordered, displaying a rigorous administration of forces. ‘The strategist becomes a land surveyor, mathematician … an engineer … Discipline superseded bravery … War became a science of quantities, trajectories and proportions; the army, a “mobile machine”’.19 Language also had to be reliable with the representational turn. Reason could only be reasoned with and through it words were assumed to match things in a clear and distinct manner. Clarity of the use of language and reason was an ideal of the Enlightenment, the ‘discipline of language accompanied a despotism of “method”’.20 Justice was handed out by calculating the punishment in proportion accorded to the rules of arithmetic. In line with these themes of modern representation and apparatuses of state reason, Bensaïd’s praise of profane politics engaged with Foucault’s Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics, the lectures Foucault gave to the Collège de France in 1977–78 and 1978–79. With Foucault’s work as a backdrop, Bensaïd wrote: Politics did not escape from the frenzy of calculation. The revolutionary turbulence in England and Holland speak to the quest for a new legitimacy, liable to found the art of governing on the clarity of laws. Combining with the procedures for the management of populations, ‘state

18 19 20

Bensaïd 2008a, p. 15. Bensaïd 2008a, p. 16. Bensaïd 2008a, p. 17.

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reason’ (in the dual meaning of its rationality and its interests) came into fashion. Taken as a ‘productive force’, the population requires a ‘new way of posing the problems of government’. In this new art of governing, physical dynamics and political dynamics are more or less contemporaneous, knowledge and power combine. The administration of the ‘number of men’ will make way for the art of government. The relationship between population and wealth orders fiscal questions, supply, shortages and scarcity, hence the ‘condition of political economy’s formation’. The sum of autonomous economic subjects, the population becomes the object of a ‘technology of power’ that supplements the ‘security of territory’. It is not yet a matter of substituting a ‘population state’ in place of a ‘territorial state’, but rather the appearance of new objectives, new technologies, and new urban problems.21 Bensaïd’s passage effectively takes up, renews, and adds another layer to the interrogation of modern representation he articulated in Le pari mélancolique. What gave this new state reason legitimacy? If the authority of the law no longer comes down from heaven, on what then is sovereignty founded? From this question ‘emerges a certain conception of sovereignty, permanently torn between the transcendence of the royal body and the immanence of “constituent power”’. Sovereignty organises space, carves out markets, cuts territories apart and prepares new divisions between the national and the foreigner. In the confines of the newly constructed borders – that cordon off a specific domain of sovereignty – the capital city, as a place and centre of sovereignty becomes the decisive strategic site. Within the sovereign space, the art of ‘governing becomes the art of determining a relation of equilibrium between territory and population … What one governs, “is the people”’.22 According to Bensaïd, the politics of modernity involves a ‘manner of thinking, of posing, of programming the specificity of government in relation to the exercise of sovereignty’. The art of ruling became a reason for the state and a reason of the state in charge of health, food supplies, hygiene, security, the organisation of markets. The police became its privileged apparatus. The ‘urban administration, democratic administration, treatment of social pathologies, the use of accounting and statistics became consolidated elements of its functioning. It must tender to the prosperity of the state and uphold it against civil strife’. For Bensaïd

21 22

Ibid. Bensaïd 2008a, pp. 18–19.

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the development of technical administration ‘carried in embryo the administrative and bureaucratic utopias of the nineteenth century’.23 Along with the new figure of the state – the modern bourgeois state machine – a derelict multitude was transformed into the organic people, the masses. The multitude becomes a pejorative name for a threat, an uncontrollable menace, a mass-like plebeian element of society capable of unleashing its violent rage. This was one among a number of paradoxes that haunted the political paradigm of modernity. Bensaïd deepened his interrogation of representation by articulating it to these elements. Torn from the illusions in God, ‘two conceptions of sovereignty took shape: that of a popular sovereignty, delegated but not alienable, exercised by the ensemble of citizens; and that of a state sovereignty resulting from a double contract through which the associated people immediately give up their sovereignty and gives itself to a sovereign’. The freedom of moderns was difficult to resolve – especially given the explosive presence of the multitude. For, the more civil society – economic relations as distinct from the state apparatus – develop into a mass commodity producing society subject to the centrifugal forces of competition, the more the necessity of a united and centralised sovereign power becomes a necessity. Thus, for Bensaïd, ‘The Social Contract depicts this nascent contradiction without being able to surmount it. It is what the Hegelian Philosophy of Right – in vain – still tried to resolve. Inalienable and indivisible, the will is general or it is not’. Rousseau, Bensaïd suggests, ‘remained a prisoner of the contradiction that was insurmountable in his time, between a contractual civil society eroded by competition and the dream of a general will, “one and indivisible”. When society and the state already no longer join, the temptation is great to put them in place by an authoritarian coup de force’.24 Rousseau’s contradictions – Hegel’s too, though in a distinct sense relating to the plebians – capture the problems of the paradigm of modernity; insurmountable, they are condemned to an impoverished permanent compromise between an imaginary general will and a despotism that is at best enlightened. Hence, Rousseau ‘oscillates between invoking Roman virtue and nascent Romantic melancholy, between what is no longer possible and that which is not yet’.25 Property is fundamental to the paradox of modernity. Already for Locke, property was a natural right in civil society and not the state. Freedom and

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Bensaïd 2008a, p. 19. Bensaïd 2008a, pp. 21–3. Bensaïd 2008a, p. 25.

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property went hand in hand; to be free was to be a property owner. Rejecting the one-sidedness of natural right, Hegel’s state would guarantee a ‘right of distress’ as he spelled out in paragraph 127 of the Philosophy of Right, writing that, ‘In extreme danger and in conflict with the rightful property of someone else, this life may claim (as a right, not a mercy) a right of distress, because in such a situation there is on the one hand an infinite injury to a man’s existence and the consequent loss of rights altogether, and on the other hand only an injury to a single restricted embodiment of freedom’. For Hegel, the right to life takes precedence over the right to property; to reiterate, it is a right, not a mercy.26 This was however an exceptional right of distress, and did not put into question private property ownership as such and nor did it mean Hegel managed to synthesis into his system a pacified place for the plebians.

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Revolutions and the Field of Possibility

The subordination of the right to property to the right to life appeared in the French Revolution at its most radical phase. Robespierre’s speech on the 10 May 1793 took up the question. The right to life and the means of existence were inseparable from the freedom of universal natural right. However, the epoch of the capitalist mode of production is incapable of resolving the contradictions between the right to existence – the right of distress – and the right to property, public good and egoistic calculation, public space and the privatisation of the world. Such was the problem that emerged for the young Marx, writing on the wood theft debate about ‘the modern distinction between the private and the public, and its application to property rights’. The judicial statistics of the time attested to the importance of the wood theft debate, uncovering the processes of ‘customary practices of the right to use and the growing penalisation of the practices by capitalist society in gestation. This period of transition represents a decisive moment in the redefinition of property relations’.27 The transition involved a clash between two antagonistic conceptions of property. If the epoch of capital cannot resolve the permanent tension between life and property, revolution becomes a necessity for their resolution. The transformation of power and property are central tenants of revolutionary change, even once the classic parameters of politics have been dislocated – people,

26 27

Hegel 1952, pp. 120–1. Bensaïd 2008a, pp. 26–7.

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nation, sovereignty, citizenship and territory; a whole apparatus of classical governmentality is traumatised without being replaced. Nevertheless, when one invokes revolution, one cannot do so without invoking the revolutionary events that accompanied modernity’s birth, specifically how the French and American Revolutions turned upside down the field of historical possibility, as it hitherto existed and was experienced, opening the field for an unprecedented potential of rational anticipation, in which the future became predictable: Modern revolutions have thus inspired a ‘new articulation of the concepts of experience and expectation’. The idea of revolution – the dynamic concept of the overturning of a social order – appears thus combined with the redistribution of historical time of which it provided the ‘regulative principle’, since the French Revolution. On the contrary, the current divorce between experience and expectation obscures the strategic horizon and the ‘concept of activist duty’ required by modern revolutions. For the most dogged, the revolutionary event tends to reduce itself to an aleatory interruption, an unconditioned event, surging up from the void, an event without history that tries to ward of the melancholy of a history without events … The fact is that today, the revolutionary dialectic of social time is put to a severe test. With the threat of caving in to the ‘sense of the possible’ relative to an open temporal perspective. More profoundly, perhaps we are witnessing a crisis of the ‘age of revolutions’. The past no longer illuminates the future. The future darkens. Time retracts around a fleeting present. No more anticipation, no more projects, no more programmes: No future?28 To search for a subversive and asymmetrical strategy is to search for a profane strategic reason that confronts power relations and force. The religious alienation of commodity fetishism and its ultimate stage, the spectacle, modernity, is threatened with a missed opportunity for its secularisation. This was Bensaïd’s desperate attempt to invite us to cross the security zone, ripping down the signs of non-admittance except on business, and adopt a critical orientation that makes all that is theological – first of all the commodity and its avatars – profane. As Bensaïd claimed, ‘Strategic reason is profane or it is not’ and it is an invitation to a new perspective on the world,

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Bensaïd 2008a, p. 35.

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where indeterminacy, the aleatory, and the contingent affirm their rights … A non-formal logic is more than ever required that gives its due to incertitude, to probabilities rather than trajectories and that grasp the importance of ‘points of bifurcation’ … [because] to speak of history, it is to admit ipso facto the role of the event that, by nature, perhaps would not have come. Between an entirely determined world and an arbitrary world pushed to the absurd, the path is tight and rugged … how to orient ourselves in the world of action without ceding to the relativism of values and the caprice of an unconditioned decision?29 Bensaïd’s strategic conception had two elements, one grounded in the periodisation and aporias of the political paradigm of modernity, and another grounded in the narrower debates on the French far left.

8

The Return of the Politico-Strategic Question

Bensaïd intervened into the debates over revolutionary strategy that began to take shape anew in the Ligue from the beginning of the 2000s, with two editions of Critique Communiste dedicated to the strategic question. The Ligue had written a draft manifesto the previous year to discuss its role on France’s far left. The discussion was propelled forward after the No campaign of the French referendum on the European Constitution was won, creating a push towards realignment of the far left. Throughout the debates, Artous had claimed that the Ligue was bereaved of a strategic hypothesis. The bereavement took place during and after the 1980s, constituted by the ‘structural crisis – which is not a synonym for disappearance – of the social nation-state, as a historically given political form’.30 Artous recognised that Bensaïd took this crisis seriously; however, Artous thought that simply saying that one must maintain ‘the revolution as a strategic regulating horizon’ in fact evaded the concrete problems that the crisis of territory posed. For Bensaïd, it was necessary to make a distinction between ‘global strategy operating on a world scale and “limited strategy” concerned with the struggle for the conquest of power within a particular area’. Broadly speaking, Bensaïd held on to a conception of permanent revolution, with the revolution beginning in the national area to unfold internationally. He argued that the ‘dimen-

29 30

Bensaïd 2008a, p. 47. Artous 2010, p. 87.

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sion of global strategy is even more important today than it was in the first half of the twentieth century, faced as we are with powerful states whose economic and military strategies are world-wide’.31 However in the debate, Bensaïd focused on the struggle for the conquest of political power at a national level. Even if the nation states were weakened by globalisation – not their repressive force or violence – they remained a key link in revolutionary strategy. As we have seen, this involved an analysis, attempting to grasp the structural crisis of modernity’s range of references in the categories of territory, sovereignty and political power.32 This was the historical backdrop for the debates over strategy. In the 1970s, the guiding thread of strategy – the Ligue’s strategic hypothesis – was the insurrectional general strike. This was no longer the case in the mid-2000s, ‘it is this hypothesis of which we are now the “orphans”, according to Antoine Artous’. Yesterday, the hypothesis had a political functionality. Its functionality had ceased by the mid-1980s. Though Bensaïd recognised that Artous’ position did not deny the continuing relevance of notions of revolutionary crisis and dual power, it still remained a search for a reformulated hypothesis. One that ‘avoids wallowing in the term “rupture” and in verbal trickery’: On the one hand, Artous insists that dual power cannot be totally situated outside existing institutions and be made suddenly to spring from nothing in the form of a pyramid of soviets or councils. We may, once upon a time, have surrendered to this oversimplified vision of real revolutionary processes that we used to pore over in political study groups. But I doubt it. Be that as it may, other texts swiftly corrected whatever vision we may have had. We may even, at the time, have been disturbed or shocked by Ernest Mandel coming round to the idea of ‘mixed democracy’ after he had re-assessed the relationship between the soviets and Constituent Assembly in Russia. Yet, clearly, one cannot imagine a revolutionary pro-

31 32

Bensaïd 2007a. He also held that this crisis had an impact on the different revolutionary and reformist organisations that were constructed around these categories since the nineteenth century. For Antoine Artous, former editor of Critique Communiste, the crisis came from the crisis coming from the ‘sociological’ evolution of wage labour, and the crisis of political territories. The crisis of political referents based on the marginalisation of great socioeconomic concentrations added to the crisis of national territory as a framework in which citizenship is exercised. This dual crisis, which multiplies the consequences of Stalinism’s balance sheet, has had devastating effects on forms of organisation and political representation of the workers’ movement and on its capacities of recomposition. Artous 2011, p. 18.

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cess other than as a transfer of legitimacy which gives preponderance to ‘socialism from below’ but which interacts with forms of representation, particularly in countries with parliamentary traditions going back over more than a century and where the principle of universal suffrage is firmly established.33 Artous’s ‘second concern, notably in his criticism of Callinicos, was related to the simple point that the social illusion can never solve the problem of power and politics. Though perhaps it was unfair to charge Callinicos with, the problem is indeed a real one. Political mediations that deal with the question of power can never be suppressed by invoking a social epiphany that comes from nowhere, nor even one that comes from somewhere. In this suppression, the problem of power is resolved ‘by some unconvincing deus ex machina, supposedly by a spontaneous tidal wave of the masses and a generalized outburst of soviet democracy’.34 With this problem in mind, I return to Bensaïd’s text concerned with two themes, the actuality of a strategic approach and the broad party. While debating Artous and Francis Sitel, Bensaïd held the position that, ‘having been thrown back for more than 20 years in Europe, no-one will claim that revolution has an actuality in an immediate sense. On the other hand, it would be a risky and not minor matter to eliminate it from the horizon of our epoch’. This distinction was useful for Bensaïd because it could articulate the present 33

34

Bensaïd 2007a. We may draw the reader’s attention again to the differences between the lcr’s manifestos during the 1970s and A gauche du possible to illustrate the fact that in practice ‘our ideas have evolved – as they did, for example, during the Nicaraguan revolution’. The notion of a dual chamber was toyed with. But the real problem was elsewhere: ‘The problem we face is not in reality that of the relationship between territorial democracy and workplace democracy (the Paris Commune, the Soviets and the Setubal popular assembly of Portugal in 1975 were territorial structures), nor even that of the relationship between direct and representative democracy (all democracy is partially representative). The real problem is how the general will is formed. Most criticism of soviet-style democracy by the Eurocommunists or by Norberto Bobbio is targeted at its tendency to corporatism: a sum (or pyramid) of particular interests (parochial, workplace, office), linked by a system of mandates, could not allow for the creation of the general will. Democratic subsidiarity has its drawbacks too. If the inhabitants of a valley are opposed to a road passing through it or if a town is against having a waste collection centre (in order to palm both off on their neighbours), then there really has to be some form of centralised arbitration. In our debates with the Eurocommunists, we insisted on the necessary mediation (and plurality) of parties so that a synthesis of propositions could emerge and a general will arise out of particular viewpoints. Our programmatic documents have increasingly incorporated the general hypothesis of a dual chamber. But we have not ventured into speculation about institutional nuts and bolts – the practical details remain open to experience’. Ibid. Ibid.

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balance of class and political forces. And what was more debatable however was ‘the idea according to which we could maintain the objective of conquering power “as a sign of radicalism but admit that its realisation is currently beyond our horizon”’: For him [Sitel] the question of government is not linked to the question of power, but to ‘a more modest demand’, that of ‘protection’ against the neo-liberal offensive. The debate about the conditions for participation in government does not go ‘through the monumental gate of strategic reflection’, but ‘through the narrow gate of broad parties’. Our fear here is that it may no longer be the need for a programme (or strategy) which dictates the construction of the party but the size of an algebraically broad party which determines what is seen as the best party policy. The issue of government would then be scaled down as a strategic question and recast it as a mere ‘question of orientation’ (which, to some extent, is what we did with Brazil). But a ‘question of orientation’ is not disconnected from the strategic perspective unless we fall into the classic dissociation between minimum and maximum programme. And, if ‘broad’ is necessarily more generous and open than narrow and closed, there are different degrees of broadness: the Brazilian pt, the Linkspartei in Germany, the odp in Turkey, the Left Bloc in Portugal, Rifondazione comunista, are not of the same nature. ‘The most erudite developments in matters of revolutionary strategy appear quite airy fairy’, Francis Sitel concludes, ‘compared with the question of how to act in the here and now’. Certainly, this worthy pragmatic maxim could have been uttered in 1905, in February 1917, in May 1936, in February 1968, thus reducing the sense of the possible to one of prosaic realism.35 Bensaïd posed a series of questions about how a move beyond the domination of capital, which reproduces itself almost automatically, domination in work, the division of labour, the commodification of leisure time could be achieved. How could an escape from this vicious circle be made? Additionally, this complex of issues informed Bensaïd’s exchange with Francis Sitel concerning the broad party and the slogans of the united front, workers’ government and transitional demands. According to Bensaïd, the ‘concepts of the united front, of transitional demands and of the workers’ government – defended not just by Trotsky but by Thalheimer, Radek, and Clara Zetkin – have a precise

35

Ibid.

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aim’. That aim was to link ‘the event to its preparatory conditions, revolution to reforms, the goal to the movement’. One great difficulty emerging from the postwar revolutionary experience was that of the workers’ government, debated at the Comintern. For Bensaïd, the debates revealed an unresolved ambiguity, ‘that came out of the early congresses of the Communist International and the range of interpretations which they could give rise to in practice’. Of the interventions at the Congress, Bensaïd essentially thought that there prevailed an ‘enormous confusion’, which ‘expresses a real contradiction and an inability to solve the problem, though it was raised in a revolutionary or pre-revolutionary situation’.36 The discussion of government participation was a key element for the new left because it was not a homogeneous current united by a common strategic project, but was ranged between two options. On the one hand, resistance and the social movements and, on the other, the temptation of institutional respectability. Parliamentary and governmental alliances were real acid tests. For example, Rifondazione Comunista was the crown jewel of this new European left but it committed suicide by participating in the Prodi government, a move which did not even prevent Berlusconi from returning to power. The Italian example is a stark reminder of what the temptations of institutional respectability can result in. The left can get wiped off the political stage, leaving cynicism and right-wing populism in its wake. There was a twofold problem behind this process, Bensaïd indicates: The ‘pillars’ of the alterglobalisation – the Brazilian Workers’ Party and Rifondazione Comunista – lead or actively participate in centre-left governments, implementing openly social liberal policies. This evolution in less than six years is full of consequences. The problem does not lie in the suddenness of the conversions … The lack of resistance that they have

36

Ibid. Without providing a hard and fast rule that would be universally valid for every situation, Bensaïd held ‘three criteria [that] can be variously combined for assessing participation in a government coalition with a transitional perspective: a) the question of participation arises in a situation of crisis or at least of a significant upsurge in social mobilisation, and not from cold; b) the government in question is committed to initiating a dynamic of rupture with the established order. For example – and more modestly than the arming of the workers demanded by Zinoviev – radical agrarian reform, “despotic incursions” into the domain of private property, the abolition of tax privileges, a break with institutions like those of the Fifth Republic in France, European treaties, military pacts, etc.; c) finally, the balance of forces allows revolutionaries to ensure that even if they cannot guarantee that the non-revolutionaries in the government keep to their commitments, they have to pay a high price for failure to do so’.

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encountered within their own parties must focus attention both on the limits of the anti-neoliberal rhetoric and the profound resignation that it has partially masked.37 Francis Sitel was fearful of returning to the same old themes or taking up the question in the terms posed by the Third International, thereby not addressing the radical novelty of new formations. He insisted on ‘the need for “fundamental revisions”, for reinvention, for “constructing something new”, as fitting the requirements of the workers’ movement’.38 While Bensaïd was certainly for updating whatever needed updating, between the old and the new there is a relation, in which the old cannot be forgotten. Two elements stand out in Bensaïd’s positioning. First, Bensaïd opposed the idea that the Ligue had become ‘orphans’ of the strategic hypothesis of an insurrectional general strike that served as a plumb-line in the organisation and therefore could throw away this past. A simplistic and youthful leftist vision of this had been corrected some years after 1968, partly because it is impossible to imagine, in countries with an established parliamentary tradition and universal suffrage, a revolutionary process without practices of direct democracy interacting with representative forms. Second, the broad party and notions of the workers’ government must pass through strategic debates and Marxist strategic concepts, because tactics needed to be articulated to programmatic principles. Bensaïd affirmed that, even though revolution may not have relevance in an immediate sense in Europe, it was still necessary to maintain revolution as a horizon of the epoch.

9

Their States of Exception and Ours

Bensaïd thought the state of exception was the central point of revolutionary strategy and politics, specifically demanding the representation of history from the vantage ground of the oppressed. As Benjamin famously wrote, if history is viewed from the vantage point of the oppressed, then states of emergency are the norm, not the exceptions. Two sides affect the state of exception, state machinery and rebellion of the oppressed. In the context of Bensaïd’s discussion, what is the logic of exception? What is the rule? Can the exception become permanent? What is Benjamin’s genuine state of emergency? The Patriot Act in the United States and the state of emergency the French gov-

37 38

Bensaïd and Rousset 2007. Bensaïd 2007a.

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ernment imposed in 2005 against the mass riots also put the relation between the exception and the rule front and centre onto the debates on the radical left. State of siege, martial law, emergency situation, had the exception effectively become the rule? Was the state of exception becoming a normal state of affairs even in times of peace? Bush’s war on terrorism was seemingly unlimited in time and space, the crusade of Good against Evil, where the exception was banalised, and generalised suspicion was extended to a planetary scale. The theological logic – in the Schmittian sense – of this unlimited war results in denying the enemy’s humanity, designating it as the incarnation of absolute Evil or the absolute Other. After the riots of the banlieues, Bensaïd opened issue fifteen of Contretemps by denouncing the security nightmares and the logic of exception: No-one could foresee the form and depth of the explosion, but we knew the dry gun-powder was waiting for a spark, only to be lit. Most of them rooted in Arab and African immigration, the ghettoised populations are the victims of a four-fold segregation: social, scholarly, territorial and racial. These discriminations have continued to get worse under the impact of the neoliberal counter-reforms, the rise of precarity and the demolition of public services. The rage of the banlieues is legitimate … it demands a firm solidarity that can face down the governmental provocations and the security fever of a minister already anticipating the (electoral) dividends of fear. It was a must that, faced with the curfew and the state of emergency, to proclaim a state of disobedience and insubordination in place … ‘To cede a little, is to capitulate a lot’ … [this] is more than ever necessary in these times of dark legislations that, under the pretext of anti-terrorism, attack our civil liberties on an ever-increasing scale.39 Global war had introduced a new conception of ‘right’ that rehabilitated torture and the outsourcing of clandestine prisons that evaded all jurisdiction. In this context, Bensaïd saw a real danger in any recourse to the state of emergency, being the new mask of the old states of siege and other forms of martial law. It was not just an ephemeral episode resulting from a maniacal minister for order, but a new stage of the habituation of the emergency transformed into the rule. The banalisation of the exception is firmly embedded in the logic of permanent global war. It is accompanied by the disciplinary state apparatuses. For

39

Bensaïd 2006a, p. 11.

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the past few decades, the obsession with law and order had won much ground, the advanced police and prison systems being the visible expressions of the penal state. Yet, when thinking in terms of the exception and the rule, Bensaïd recommends returning to the debates of the 1920s and the 30s to gain a clearer view of the contemporary situation. I now turn more explicitly to the relationship between the exception and the rule in Arendt, Carl Schmitt and Benjamin. In their distinct ways, each of these figures responded to the convulsions of a century and a continent where, between two world wars, the state of exception had become the rule. The state of exception first of all presupposes a subject, in the name of whom it is declared. For Bensaïd, this is already a constitutive dilemma of modernity; Bensaïd recounts, how ‘one remembers the tragedy of Robespierre’: feverishly writing, on his last night, a call to the people, conforming to the right to insurrection inscribed in the Constitution of 1793 … After having signed at the bottom of the document the first letters of his name, ‘Rob …’ the pen stops. In calling to the people? In the name of who?40 Was this the vertigo of a legitimacy without an ultimate foundation, without a divine transcendence to refer to? Did this tragic night illuminate the contradictions of modern politics Arendt had called the ‘vicious constitutional circle’ of self-reference and the aporias of constituent power? Within this vicious circle a norm cannot establish itself on its own terms. As Derrida also pointed out, ‘The foundation of all states occurs in a situation that one can thus call revolutionary. It inaugurates a new law; it always does so in violence’.41 We are essentially dealing with the foundation and beginning of a norm. This is useful. It permits us to assume the consequences of a radical immanence for any constituted normativity that takes institutional form. The contradiction between a founding act of violence and an established order becomes explosive in situations of transition from one mode of domination to another, as was the case in the chaotic period between the two world wars, the epoch of post-war revolutions, permanent civil war, the crisis of liberal democracy inaugurated the midnight of the century. This brings us to Schmitt. As a conservative, he was influenced by the European revolutionary experiences (Russian, German and Hungarian), the Italian situation and the chronic crises of parliamentary regimes. Thus the work

40 41

Bensaïd 2008a, p. 73. Derrida 2002, p. 269.

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of Schmitt cannot be separated from the Russian and German Revolutions, and Mussolini’s March on Rome; during the German Revolution of 1918–23, Schmitt published a series of texts like Dictatorship (1921), Political Theology (1922) and Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (1923). Schmitt tried to insert the problem of the state of exception into a general theory of law. As Bensaïd observed, for Schmitt, ‘it is in these critical situations that the grandeur of politics is manifest’, because the ‘norm is speechless before the unpredictable, and law is structurally unable to include within itself the exception, thus the decision outside of the norm that founds the new norm’.42 One might well ask, why would a Marxist care to discuss the work of an arch reactionary committed to modern bourgeois domination? Of course, he was not the only to do so. Mario Tronti did so in La Politique au crépuscule, claiming that it was impossible to read Marx politically without Schmitt; Balibar had also produced a left-wing reception of Schmitt.43 The problem raised by Marx’s formula and the importance he gave it in his celebrated letter to Kugelman remained for Bensaïd, which Bensaïd tied to the Schmittian problematic. The notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat had a strategic function, which is intimately tied to the state of exception. This strategic function was often raised in the debates of the 1970s upon its abandonment by the majority of (Euro)communist parties. Revolution implies a transition that is enforced by a state of emergency, i.e. an exception that breaks the norm and overturns a mode of domination. In Marx, new norms, a new form of law and new social relations emerge in discontinuity with the old form, which necessarily is in rupture with old norms. Along these lines, Bensaïd wrote, ‘If this strategic perspective, whatever name we give it, remains valid then there necessarily follows a series of consequences about how power is organised, about legitimacy, about how parties function, etc.’.44 This problematic makes Schmitt useful, because it relates to proletarian forms of exception; according to Bensaïd, ‘a proletarian form of exception, such as it was

42 43

44

Bensaïd 2008a, p. 76. Bensaïd is effectively using Schmitt to reinforce a political reading of Marx in the face of challenges posed by the short twentieth century. Razmig Keucheyan wrote in The Left Hemisphere: Mapping Critical Theory Today, that ‘We shall not understand Schmitt’s attraction for thinkers of the radical Left if we do not appreciate that he had himself experienced the influence of intellectuals and leaders of the labour movement. In his oeuvre, Schmitt refers to Marx, Lenin, Trotsky and Mao; and his Theory of the Partisan, for example, is directly influenced by them … In drawing on Schmitt, present-day critical theorists are therefore simply rediscovering themes originally derived from Marxism’. Keucheyan 2014, p. 27. Bensaïd 2007a.

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initially conceived of by Marx, thus introduced, in the fire of civil war, a historic rupture in the dialectic of the exception and the rule’ by [i]nterpreting it as ‘an unlimited power, outside of the law, resting on force in the most direct sense of the word’, or as a power that ‘directly rests on violence and is not tied to any law’, Lenin radicalised it in the sense of a dictatorship that is effectively sovereign.45 ‘The late Derrida’, Bensaïd writes, ‘seemed haunted by the inextricable knot that formed, in a situation of exception, the notion of politics, the evental eruption. Faced with an incalculable event, politics is summoned to respond by deciding the undecidable’.46 This decision cannot be subordinated to a historical and economic determinism, nor the preceding arrangement of norms, because, in Derrida’s language, the moment of the foundation of a new right ‘is never a moment inscribed in the homogeneous fabric [tissu] of a story or history, since it rips it apart with one decision’.47 The proletarian exception is thus marked by a tragic paradox. ‘If I know what is necessary to decide, I do not decide. Between knowledge and decision, a leap is required’. Is this the Hegelian leap that Lenin penned down in his marginal notes to the Logic? Is it Mallarmé’s throw of the dice? Or Pascal’s wager: The leap! The break in continuity. The norm is suspended. The Revolution appears as the specific political name of this leap, ‘what comes to disturb the order of time’, the ‘radical caesura in the ordinary course of history’, and ‘the only event dignified of this name’, exceeding all horizon of the possible. For Derrida, an attentive reader of Schmitt, ‘the leap of some discontinuity’ is the same reason for the state of exception.48 Schmitt identified the distinction between friend and enemy and defined the sovereign as the one who decides the state of exception. The decision determines the conditions of politics. The decision appears as an absolute beginning, and the beginning is nothing other than the sovereign decision. In extreme situations, the state of exception institutes a grey zone of transition in which the application of the law is suspended. How could the suspension of law be included in a legal order? How can the law waver without annihilating it? Can 45 46 47 48

Bensaïd 2008a, p. 75. Bensaïd 2008a, p. 77. Derrida 2002, p. 241. Bensaïd 2008a, p. 78.

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a constitution institute the legal conditions of its own annulment? Bensaïd explained, ‘Such are the inherent paradoxes in the writing of a right to disobedience, to resistance or insurrection, as was the case with the Constitution of 1793. These are pressing questions. Because, under a state of exception, “acts that are not law worthy, acquire the force of it”, a “force of law”, beyond the law, Agamben said’.49 Bensaïd elaborated on the theological nature of political concepts. In Dictatorship and The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, there was, in Schmitt, the ‘emergence of a new theological language’ that was ‘parallel to that of Bloch, Buber, and the negative theology of Benjamin’. Schmitt’s famous point sums up this theological component, namely that: All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularised theological concepts not only because of their historical development – in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent god became the omnipotent lawgiver – but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts. The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology. Only by being aware of this analogy can we appreciate the manner in which the philosophical ideas of the state developed in the last centuries.50 In Schmitt’s thinking, the modern state loses its monopoly over violence when a revolutionary class becomes the new effective subject of politics. From that moment onwards, the state loses its monopoly on politics. As Bensaïd resumed, ‘This is an aspect of the rupture between Marx and Hegel, announcing a politics of the oppressed that breaks free of the sphere of the state. It becomes impossible to think of politics from the point of view of a state; it is the state that must now be understood from politics, not the inverse’. For Schmitt, every modern concept of the state was theological, where ‘the legal ideal of the modern state remains to imitate divinity’. Bensaïd explained that this was not the case for Marx, because: This theology is the fetish form of the alienated State and the sign of religiosity and the refinements of the enchanted, inverse world of capital …. [Prey to the spells of the commodity in which social relations appear as

49 50

Bensaïd 2008a, p. 75. Schmitt 1985, p. 37.

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things or as automatons with their own life] The solution is … the withering away [of the state] which is the last word of a truly profane politics.51 Marx’s conception of politics upholds the plurality of politics and the heterogeneity of the social, implicating the moment of decision. Bensaïd favoured Gramsci’s notion of a ‘regulated society’, in which the functions of the state as a separate body from civil society would effectively wither away without defusing the regulative function of politics. It is important to grasp the specificity of Bensaïd’s position, in contradistinction to the liberal one. This is also necessary so as not to fall into Schmitt’s trap. For Schmitt, pluralism is the flight from the responsibility to decide. Pluralism masks itself with arithmetic and the play of opinions. His conservative politics demand that ‘the enemy’ be named and he defined politics as the specific distinction between friend and enemy, not between Good and Evil, so as to avoid the moralising platitudes of plural opinion. As a thinker of modern bourgeois domination, Schmitt’s enemy was the left that threatened the state and ‘the Jew’. From the point of view of the subalterns however, and Schmitt effectively acknowledged this, the Communist Manifesto is a political text par excellence. According to Bensaïd, on this point, Benjamin’s dialectic of the exception and the rule mattered: Against the exception that has become the rule, Benjamin called for a ‘real state of exception’, whose actual name is the Revolution … [he conceived of a politics] from the point of view of the ‘real exception’, otherwise said a revolutionary state of exception. As an event and commencement par excellence, it would open a breach in historical continuity and would give the impression that history ‘abruptly recommenced anew’. The eruption, the uprising, the insurrection that slashes the veins of an empty and homogenous time.52 On the surface, ‘the foundational decision, messianic eruption and the redemptive miracle seem to share the temptation of absolutising the event’. They all seem to break the bond between the necessary and the possible, between what may not have transpired and the conditions of its appearance, between the contingent and the determined, between history and revolution, between process and act, duration and favourable moment; the unconditioned event can seem a mystery warding off the infernal repetition of the rule. Ben-

51 52

Bensaïd 2008a, p. 80. Bensaïd 2008a, pp. 94–6.

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saïd explained that ‘between a resigned fatalism and an arbitrary will, which is the abstract and desperate form of the will’, politics becomes an aristocratic affair. However, we are told, ‘the Messianism of Benjamin’s eighteenth thesis is of another order’, where he ‘named the active wait to be the watchman on alert and the hunter on the lookout’. Like a Polish resister waiting to use a weak messianic charge to explode a railway under Nazi Occupation, Benjamin demands a patient strategic prophecy to explode the continuum of history. An introduction of authentic novelty become possible, but only with the qualification that the event has determinate conditions of possibility. In a sense, to posit the determinate conditions of possibility of events is to render them accessible to thought. But this is not enough, so Bensaïd thinks. One must situate the event and its conditions of possibility within the conjunctures that can be aligned a practical-political perspective to it, which is another condition for the maintenance of realistic and presentist hope; or else, the lookout for an event may become ‘the vanishing object of an apocalyptic expectation, or a drowsy standby before a desperately void horizon’.53

10

Deleuze and Foucault: The Combined Crisis of the Critique of Arms and the Arms of Critique

I now turn to Bensaïd’s most systematic treatment of the retreat from politics on the radical French intellectual scene.54 Bensaïd held that Deleuze and Foucault were, up to a certain point, the look-outs able to glimpse the contours of the neoliberal world entered at the threshold of the 1980s, partly because they announced the collapse of the political paradigm of modernity. For a generation that was brought up with the upheavals of May ’68 and the expectation of imminent revolutionary events, and indeed Foucault’s point that ‘We should have the modesty to tell ourselves that the time we live in is not this unique or irruptive point in history at which everything ends and then begins again’ certainly would have irritated many of the faithful. ‘If the owl of Minerva takes flight at dusk, it also happens that philosophical discourse runs ahead of the spirit of the times’, Bensaïd wrote. Accordingly, Deleuze and Foucault’s work revealed but also contributed to the collapse of strategic thought on the left. Deleuze and Foucault’s interrogations were indicative of a triple crisis: a crisis of modern historicity, a crisis of the strategies for emancipation 53 54

Bensaïd 2008a, pp. 96–7. Isabelle Garo’s Foucault, Deleuze, Althusser & Marx: La politique dans la philosophie is to be recommended for a systematic and complementary study of these problems.

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and a crisis of critical theory. ‘Otherwise said’, Bensaïd reminds us, ‘of a combined crisis of the critique of arms and the arms of critique’.55 During the 1980s, the strategic debate hit degree zero. Subversion was subaltern to whatever it resisted and opposed, unable to articulate a strategy to reach a horizon beyond resistance. For Bensaïd, ‘one of the reasons for the misunderstandings surrounding their success’, was indeed the contradictory combination of glimpsing the breakdown of the common leftist culture while contributing to it.56 In this sense, after the politics of power and impatience, the time for an apolitical counter-power came. The role that concepts from the work of Deleuze, Foucault and Guattari played in different interventions of the anti-globalisation movement made it imperative for Bensaïd to return to certain elements of their legacies. He pointed out: A vulgar Foucauldianism today deduces [from his work] that the historical character of the state is soluble into the networks of power of the liquid society, of the kind that it will no longer be necessary to take power in order to change the world … If the web of power relations remains to be undone and it is a process over the long term, the machinery of state power remains to be broken.57 ‘Something was lost’, Bensaïd remarked, throughout the transition from the impatience of the 1960s and the hollowing out of the strategic debate in the 1980s. The categories that were used by Machiavelli, Rousseau, Marx through to Lenin to articulate the politics of modernity, counter-modernity and emancipation, lost their place without being replaced. The ‘rhizome’ (or the ‘multitude’) was thus indicative of a theoretical absence rather than a solution. Deleuze, Foucault and Guattari pointed to the void of a new strategic paradigm that remained nonetheless ungraspable. To fill this void, a slow and prolonged period of maturation, new historical and foundational experiences would be necessary, and Bensaïd identified a time of decomposition without recomposition, ‘of the events of dusk without the lifting of the sun’; it remained to be seen if the beginning of the twenty-first century inaugurated the renaissance 55

56 57

Bensaïd 2008a, pp. 153–4. Responding to Foucault and Deleuze, Bensaïd did not insist on a pseudo-orthodox Marxist doctrine, reducing their work to a pale reflection of the spirit of the time. He accepted the interpellations that the controversy bore, without abandoning a critical Marxism. In fact, when speaking of Deleuze and Foucault, it was necessary to speak of Marx. It was necessary to think about their debt to him and the relationship they had to his thought. Bensaïd 2008a, p. 153. Bensaïd 2008a, p. 81.

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of strategic controversies. Nevertheless, Bensaïd’s subjective wager was that ‘it remains one of those utopian moments that obscurely prepares the emergence of new concepts, which, in deciphering the traces of the possible, announce a time when a dissatisfied gaze will finally be able to break through the mysteries and marvels of a world in the process of being born’.58 An example of this claim, at least in the sense of what was in the process of changing and breaking down, was the way Bensaïd situated the relation the changes of political context, with the neoliberal counter-offensive, had to Deleuze’s: By way of a ruse of reason whose secret is held by history, Deleuze’s conceptual invention, radically subversive with regard to capitalism that is state-based (or ‘molar’, in Deleuzian terminology) of the ‘post-war boom’, came at a time against the grain. It resonated, despite itself, with the discourse of liberal deregulation, of the “liquid society”, of history in fragments. In place of the isomorphism between national, centralised and organised, capitalism, a new isomorphism between a globalised, deterritorialised capitalism and a rhizomatic social movement took its place. Once again, the system demonstrates is its ability to feed of its critique and digest it.59 What, then, was the threefold crisis of which Bensaïd spoke, related to the transformations of modern bourgeois societies? Foucault expressed the crisis of history and its effects on liberatory thinking when he said that ‘we are deferred back to the year 1830, that is to say, we have to start all over again’. For Bensaïd, Foucault meant in context that, ‘we had to renounce thinking of ourselves as the heirs or offspring of October’, for no longer could they regard themselves as progenies of the Commune or the street battles of 1848. This entailed the difficult search for the primordial moment from where to recommence. For Foucault, one had to begin ‘from the painful gestation period of the Republic of Enjolras and the insurgents of Saint-Méry who re-enacted by themselves the Jacobin revolution as prelude for the modern labour movement and of the great and bloody wound of the June days of 1848’. At issue in Foucault’s formulation was the dream of tabula rasa, ‘the quest for some kind of “primary certitude that marks a point of origin or some invariable fixed point” ’. For Deleuze, this ‘search for an origin is vain’, because ‘things start to live again only in the middle’. ‘The question’, as Bensaïd pointed out, ‘was then to determ-

58 59

Bensaïd 2008a, p. 154. Bensaïd 2011b, p. 33.

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ine where exactly this middle passes through, and how to commit to it’.60 To begin again from the middle implies the triplet of history, strategy and theory. This means to confront their triple-crisis.

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The Crisis of Historicity

What was the crisis of historicity? At the end of the 1970s, Foucault said that it was the desirability of the revolution ‘which causes a problem today’. On the surface, desire is innocent. But such a desire substituted for need. Bensaïd asked, desire or need for revolution? According to Bensaïd, the question was posed at a point when the linguistic turn tore the social depth out of the revolutionary event, detached it from its historical inscriptions and assigned it to the symbolic order of the sign. So too was it the moment that Furet wrote Penser la Révolution française negating the revolutionary content of the event. This ‘deceitfully juvenile desire, with vague suggestions of 1968, gives off the bitter scent of a faded flower left on a grave’, because ‘Desire and longing, these are what are left over when the initial impetus and the original enthusiasm are definitively exhausted: a vague wish without force, covetousness without appetite, a death wish, a ghost of freedom, an erotic whim’. This is a ‘subjectivity enslaved to the impracticable feeling of the possible’. Bensaïd suggested desire that thinks itself liberated from needs is the ‘inverted reflection of the commodity on display’: The substitution of desire for need has a theoretical history, namely the replacement of labour-value by want-value by Leon Walras in his Elements of Pure Economics in 1874. As marginalism makes value subjective, ‘the object springs from desire’. To measure value, the economist Charles Gide thus replaced the excessively objective term ‘utility’ by that of ‘desirability’. Consciously or not, Foucault drew on this tradition when he enquired, in the late 1970s, whether revolution was still desirable.61 Bensaïd retorted that, as a ‘dim object of fetishistic desire, this revolution keeps one foot in the sacred’, in which the all too earthly social content of the revolution is forgotten. Profane history and revolution cannot be conceptualised without the profane dialectic of needs, low and base material needs, which

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Bensaïd 2008a, pp. 154–5. Bensaïd 2007c, pp. 202–3.

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could be read along the lines of Agnes Heller’s The Theory of Needs in Marx.62 At a time that farewelled the proletariat and the revolution, especially after the post-war boom, forgetting material and base needs made sense. However, Bensaïd thought that this was a danger for an emancipatory project, because the result is that the revolutionary idea tends to lose its political substance and to be reduced to a stance of desire, aesthetic or ethical, to a judgement of taste or an act of faith. It seems torn between a will to resist without any perspective of counter-attack, and the expectation of an improbably redemptive miracle … This melancholy re-enchantment is thus a re-deception, which must be urgently countered by a new effort of historicisation and an outburst of politicisation. Inasmuch as it is ‘the non-inevitable part of becoming’, profane revolution does not spring from a compulsive dynamic of desires, but from a dialectic of needs. It does not obey the whims of desire, but the reasoned imperative to change the world – to revolutionise it – before it disintegrates amid the din of ashen idols.63 On Bensaïd’s interpretation, Deleuze and Guattari played their part in this redeception, by announcing the collapse of a unitary and meaningful historical paradigm, and, so Bensaïd suggests, ‘Deleuze’s own philosophical discourse in fact contributed to this absent-mindedness’. On the one hand, Deleuze’s philosophy of immanent becoming challenged the one-way street of history and the teleology of progress, by introducing the abstract possibility of other life choices or a lived alterity. On the other hand, it also renounced all intentions to give this becoming the form of a strategic project. Deleuzian becoming produces nothing other than itself, neither does it have a subject distinct from itself or an appointed end. Apropos Guattari, Bensaïd held that he ‘sought to undermine “programmatic logic” by means of the “logic of situations” ’. This

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‘At the end of the 1970s, this dissolution of needs in the acid of desire was the latest thing. Baudrillard had already proclaimed in 1973, in his “critique of the political economy of the sign”, that “a theory of needs makes no sense”. He categorically rejected the possibility of any such theory, which he saw as an “ideological concept” … Agnes Heller was one of the rare philosophers to have tried to base an explicit theory of needs on Marx. While this plays “a hidden role of first importance” in the Marxian critique of political economy, the concept actually remains poorly defined. It is clear, however, that the categories of need that proliferate in Marx’s text are no longer those of classic political economy, which confuses social need with effective demand’. Bensaïd 2013, p. 203. Max Horkheimer was the first to ask about the desirability of revolution. Bensaïd 2007c, p. 204.

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transformation is ‘processual and pragmatic’, in a do-it-yourself way, one is somehow released from ‘the anxiety-causing or guilt-inducing obsessive fear of victory and defeat’. Bensaïd took up the distinction between history and becoming, since Deleuzian becoming is not ‘a history open to the plurality of possibilities, but, rather, an antithesis of history and a repudiation of any sizeable or victorious undertaking’. According to Bensaïd, this was problematic: By thus challenging the meaning of history in favour of an immanentist logic of becoming, Deleuze and Guattari were renouncing all strategic conceptions of politics in order to skip along a branched path, to improvise without a goal, and to shoot arrows in every direction in a random fashion with no specific target in sight. ‘What matters in a path, is always the middle, not the beginning or the end. We are always in the middle of a path, in the middle of something. In becoming there is no history’.64 Bensaïd articulated the conflict between the fragments, which had no need of a perspective towards hegemony or majorities, and macropolitics, which had to somehow relate to the exploited and oppressed. The distinction between the fragments and macropolitics pertains to the difference between a becomingminoritarian, which takes place in fragments, beginning over and over again, and the majoritarian ambition that is concerned with power and the making of History. For Bensaïd, this is a ‘fine idea’, ‘where the minority is not a question of number, but of subtraction from that which homogenises’; this becoming with no history is designed to save the pure place of evental possibility: The exit from history via the cheerful footpaths of becoming might as well have flirted with a pilgrimage to the origins of being which Deleuze was doggedly shying away from. ‘Never plant’. He was certainly thinking of finding in the enumerative conjunction of becoming (and … and … and …) the means to ward off the ontological temptation and to ‘uproot the verb to be’ to make room for the ‘logic of relations’. Hence becoming was expected to welcome the event with its arms wide open, which would arrive unexpectedly clothed in the untimely and the inopportune (‘another name for becoming, the innocence of becoming, that is to say, forgetfulness versus memory, geography versus history, and the rhizome versus arborescence’). The concept of Becoming promised to give birth

64

Bensaïd 2008a, p. 156.

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to an authentic novelty in a manner quite different from a non-sense history. ‘To make an event’ was then, very precisely, ‘the opposite of making history’.65 Bensaïd’s engagement with Deleuze requires further detail, especially since Deleuze rendered the great service of helping to liberate political action from all forms of false totalisation. But, consistent with my claim that Bensaïd did not settle theoretical accounts with Deleuze, the Bensaïd of La révolution et le pouvoir missed the fact that Deleuze was a thinker of the event, though this became clear to him in his return to Deleuze (by 2004).66 As a thinker of the event, Deleuze interrogated difference as a concept in-itself. He stressed the distinction between history as narrated through the state form and revolutionary becomings opposed to History itself, the liberatory becomings of minorities against the coercions of the molar state and fetishism, the rhizomatic recommencement midstream opposed to the submission of lines to their treelike fixed points, the smooth oceanic space against the striated cartographic form, the linear, punctual system of time, as opposed to the Untimely non-pulsed rhythm of creation. Deleuze’s was a robust, albeit dualistic, and abstractly machinelike philosophical programme for reading politics. Above all, and for all of his criticisms of the dogmatic image of thought that he believed was so central to traditional philosophy, Deleuze produced an immensely rich and philosophical reading of politics, maintaining a traditional space for philosophy. Deleuze produced a philosophical reading of politics, though he had no political programme to propose, as it was not his business. No political programme may be derived from Deleuze’s work, even though it is deeply concerned with, and even captured by, politics. This is where our problems begin and the non-fulfilled settling of theoretical accounts between Bensaïd and Deleuze is most striking. There existed between Bensaïd and Deleuze an irreducible difference of immanent ordered registers. In line with Lenin and subsequently Benjamin, Bensaïd thought history and 65 66

Bensaïd 2008a, p. 157. Bensaïd re-engaged with Deleuze’s political writings, which he seems to have read in the first half of 2004 (from where the material above comes). It is possible to reconstruct the central themes of Bensaïd’s political reading as judged from his later personal manuscripts. Bensaïd’s late turn to Deleuze’s political writings was untimely. During the 1980s, at Paris-8, Bensaïd – as he narrates in his memoirs – ‘did not take the time to attend the lectures of [his] colleagues’, including those of Deleuze, for fear of ‘reopening political wounds that had not well healed’. This was Bensaïd’s decision, even if it was indeed the case that the philosophy department at Paris-8 shared an aversion towards the ‘New Philosophers’ and the liberal political philosophy of Luc Ferry.

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the event through strategic and political categories. Bensaïd closely connected Marx’s new immanence and his new writing of history with this orientation. Deleuze, on the other hand, in line with Spinoza and Nietzsche, the Stoics and Bergson, de-historicised the political, the event and the One, and maintained a specific place for philosophy as a constructivist pursuit. Deleuze conceived of revolution in the philosophical register, not the strategic and political. Bensaïd saw in this a great difference. At the same time, Deleuze always risked a flight from this world into a pre-Kantian theological form. This was, as Garo has demonstrated so well, a way of returning to philosophy which is also, paradoxically, a modality of politics itself. This is something quite different to a pure and simple desertion of politics in the name of philosophy. Deleuze’s philosophical reading of politics also runs against hegemony as a key component of historical revolutionary politics as Bensaïd thought it. Becoming minoritarian was the essence of Deleuze’s philosophical reading of politics, of micro-politics. But at what point does this turn into an anti-strategic concept fearful of majoritarian ambition? On this point, Deleuzian politics (according to Bensaïd) is profoundly ambivalent, perhaps even owing to its simplicity. There are waves of dissidence and heresy; there are constant processes of minoritarian subjects and subjectivities in formation. But is it enough for them to subtract from whatever homogenises? Is this not a classical ultraleft, even romantic, form of politics that separates from all that is considered bourgeois normativity that cuts off any form of concrete connection between revolutionary politics and doxa or common sense? And what ensures that the act of subtraction, a form of flight, of radical difference, avoids an ontological retrogression within liberal capitalist society as such? Or, in other words, how can Deleuze guarantee that his political vision won’t revert to a particularism that finds a comfortable home within the reigning hegemony which is all too comfortable with fragmented neoliberal subjectivities? Deleuze risks becoming complicit despite his own critique of bourgeois society. Deleuze’s ambivalence, so Bensaïd thought, involved a twofold process. On the one hand, the event and its welcome are conditions for novelty within history; there is an openness to contingency and creativity. On the other hand, however, if this event is opposite to history, and is uprooted from its historical conditions it becomes difficult to think historically and politically. Without historical thought, revolutionary becoming tends to become a theological form. It is a theological form mired in dualism in which strategic closure here coincides with a Bergsonian openness. Deleuze proposed a reading of politics without programs, strategy without programs and arrows without targets. This combined with a forceful argument for philosophy as the systematic creation of concepts.

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Unavoidably, we are led to the figure of Marx, who inevitably plays an ambiguous role for Deleuze; Marx was by no means absent in Deleuze’s work. His interview with Toni Negri saw him claiming in 1990 to have remained a Marxist; Deleuze declared he would write his last book on Marx. In notes likely written in 1995, Bensaïd wrote that ‘we will soon see what The Grandeur of Marx Deleuze has announced, is’.67 Whether positive or sceptical, the expectation was never met. After Deleuze’s death, Bensaïd pointed to the existence of a Deleuzian enigma: if one works with a Deleuzian criteria of philosophy, with philosophy conceived as an immanent space for the creation of concepts, then it would appear to follow that Deleuze would discover ‘… in Marx a radical immanence populated with concepts (value, surplus-value, tendential laws and crisis)’.68 Deleuze’s attraction to Marx is intelligible given that Marx was, just like Spinoza, a thinker of immanence. Marx has an ambiguous role however because Marx straddles the sharp distinction Deleuze made between the functions of science and the specificities of philosophical concepts. Where exactly does Marx’s theoretical breakthrough fit? Are Marx’s concepts purely scientific-functionalist, or are they philosophical constructions? Deleuze grasped capitalism’s field of immanence, the importance of fetishism and the role of the socius. He understood well the epistemological primacy of the specifically bourgeois present, capital’s quantitative axioms of labour and money, the tendencies of the system as a whole and the role of contingency and accident in the history of capitalism’s formation. Deleuze wanted to grasp capitalism’s field of immanence, in which the ‘ever widening circle of capitalism is completed, while reproducing its immanent limits on an ever-larger scale, only if the surplus value is not merely produced or extorted, but absorbed or realized’.69 Operating from within this immanent field exists another determination, that of the State. With its police and its army, the state ‘form[s] a gigantic enterprise of anti-production’.70 These insights, however, represent an admixture of functionalism and philosophicalconstructivism. They also turn out to entail an abstract remove from a Bensaïdian politics conceived of as an art of mediation and representation within a history strategically and politically thought yet founded on the critique of political economy. Ultimately, the problem of revolutionary becoming remains trapped in an a-historical and a-strategic limbo, even though it has been conceptually articulated, with only an anchorage in the univocal plane of life, 67 68 69 70

Bensaïd 1995b, Marx l’histoire et ses demons. Bensaïd 1995a, Après Marx, quelle place pour l’action politique? Deleuze and Guattari 2004, p. 255. Deleuze and Guattari 2004, p. 271.

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its events and metaphysics. Deleuze is simply on the lookout for haecceities, degrees, intensities, events and accidents, a composition of speeds and affects on a plane of consistency.71 Nevertheless, Deleuze’s expectation remained within a concept of liberation worth defending. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze invoked the name of Marx to save his criticism of Hegelian representation of opposition, contradiction and alienation from the charge that Deleuze was putting forward a new discourse of the beautiful soul that fetishised the peaceful coexistence of differences. Deleuze also suggested that Capital possesses a category of differenciation which lies at the heart of a social multiplicity, the division of labour, and which precedes any conflict of the negative. He argued that social multiplicity and conflict cannot be captured by the movement of the negative. The strength of Deleuze’s reading of Marx is his insistence upon fetishism as an objective, transcendental illusion born out of the ‘conditions of social consciousness in the course of its actualisation’ whereby there are ‘those for whom the whole of differentiated social existence is tied to the false problems which enable them to live’.72 Deleuze referred to a process whereby fetishistic common sense may be broken down and social problems grasped by the faculty of sociability; such social problems can only be grasped if there is a collective process of defetishisation – a ‘rectification’. Deleuze equated this with revolution, the ‘social power of difference, the paradox of society, the particular wrath of the social Idea’.73 According to Deleuze, this process is very different to the Hegelian movement of the negative for ‘revolution never proceeds by way of the negative’, but by difference. The movement of the negative is a false problem par excellence. Deleuzian politics thus requires a break with the dogmatic image of thought because common sense, a style of thinking that annihilates difference, does not welcome an event that fundamentally restructures modern bourgeois sensibility. The break with dogmatic thought welcomes a discordance that ‘excludes the forms of identity, convergence and collaboration which define a common sense’.74 For Deleuze, revolution is a condensation of singularities in a sublime occasion where solutions explode abruptly, producing an actual historical world, beyond anything which can possibly be produced by false problems. For instance, the division of labour is a social multiplicity and it determines specific forms of sociability. Yet it also determines liberation, which ‘is always hidden 71 72 73 74

See Deleuze and Guattari 1987. Deleuze 2014, p. 271. Ibid. Deleuze 2014, p. 254.

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among the remains of an old order and the first fruits of a new’.75 This is a very enticing philosophical conception of revolution, but it is incomplete because it remains, in the last instance, in the philosophical register. Yet based upon the criticism of ‘a unifying history driven by a demiurge subject’, Deleuze’s reading of the social multiplicity, as articulated in Capital, amounts to a rejection of the fetishisation of history into a meta-subject. Deleuze made the effort to liberate mass politics from the dogmatic image of thought, but in the last instance produced no new writing of history able to theoretically articulate the immanent development of social relations, while tying this to a strategic concept of politics as art. This was the one great difference between Deleuze and Bensaïd: Deleuze replaced History with becoming, whereas Bensaïd explored and developed upon Marx’s new writing of history to articulate the immanent development of social relations and the strategic projects of transformation. Historicity was conceptualised in Bensaïd and made intelligible, which is a condition for strategic thought engaged in an ‘open temporality’. The way a philosophical reading of politics and history foreclosed such open temporality was reason why Bensaïd directed his aim at Deleuze, arguing that the substitution of history by becoming indeed abolishes the kinds of purposeful objects, goals and perspectives that strategic projects require and aim toward. In conjunction with the difference with Deleuze, Bensaïd also acknowledged Foucault’s search for an ‘incorporeal materialism’ of the event, since ‘Against a quantitative history arranged in a long duration and exclusively tailored to the emergence of the regularities of structures’, one could find a similar concern with historical eruptions in Foucault around the notion of événementialité. Foucault himself claimed that ‘I am not interested in that which does not move, I am interested in the event’. Foucault welcomed the ‘return of the event in the field of history’, ‘while regretting the fact that the latter had hardly been thought of in terms of a philosophical category’. Again, in the terms of Foucault’s incorporeal materialism, according to Bensaïd, the event risks being ‘uprooted from its historical conditions and difficult to think through’, and also threatened by theological antecedents: ‘the Immaculate Conception of some unconditional miracle’.76 The conflict Bensaïd is handling is between the philosophical operation of thinking history, hence the certain distrust of Deleuze’s distinction of History and becoming and Foucault’s événementialité to the detriment of a more profound historicisation and politicisation, despite the important truths of these philosophical operations. Bensaïd never resolved these tensions. 75 76

Deleuze 2014, p. 253. Bensaïd 2008a, pp. 157–8.

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The Redefinition of Revolutionary Change

Bensaïd also captured, as the 1970s were coming to an end, how the revolutionary event was metamorphosing from a partisan endeavour into the Kantian spectacle, in which the event ‘was defined in terms of its function to “make a spectacle” that would be attested to by the disinterested enthusiasm of the spectators’. ‘This surreptitious de-politicisation’, of the event ‘resonated with a hint of doubt that was then gaining ground in Foucault’, which folds back onto the desirability of the revolution at stake and the replacement of needs for desires, also present in Lyotard’s work. For Bensaïd, it was necessary to politicise the metamorphosis itself. Indeed, it could be said that the collapse of historical, strategic and theoretical thinking, conjoined to the replacement of need by desire, actually followed from a political reading of the twentieth century (at least, in part). Bensaïd argues that Foucault had recognised the change in the spirit of the times, ‘this is the first time for 120 years that there is no longer a single point on earth from whence could shine the light of hope. There are no bearings to be found anymore’. This dry pessimism was: the price to be paid for past engagements. After Russia, both China and Indochina failed to carry though the struggle and hope for emancipation. And if there was ‘no one country’ left which we could ‘claim to be representative of in order to say: that is how things should be done’, it is because European revolutionary thought has lost its bearings.77 With the collapse of European revolutionary thought, the revolution would no longer take the form of a political project, metamorphosing – on Bensaïd’s interpretation – into ‘a revolution of techniques and lifestyles’. Techniques and lifestyles are the nominalist residues of a revolution without a political project; a historical project turned inwards to the self. Without a political project, what remained of the revolution? The only road was to think ‘of the revolution in prosaic terms “as a style, as a way of life with its aesthetics, its asceticism, and its particular forms of relation to oneself and to others” ’.78 At the

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Ibid. Bensaïd 2008a, p. 159. We can look at these problems from another vantage point, from Isabelle Garo’s book on Deleuze, Foucault and Althusser. She says, ‘Deleuze and Guattari’s relation to Marx is first of all marked by rejections, appearing locally, but essential and in the end, fundamental. Concerning first the question of classes and more generally social confrontation, it is clear that Anti-Oedipus belongs to a rising current of thought theorising the integration of the working-class and renders null, from this, every alternative as

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threshold of the 1980s, Deleuze, Foucault and Guattari effectively redefined the meaning of revolution. In this sense, Bensaïd characterised Deleuze as a political ‘anti-strategic’ writer.79 The strength of this reading was that it drew out Deleuze’s politically a-strategic thought, a fine point too easily neglected amidst the metaphysical details of philosophy, and a continuation of themes in La révolution et le pouvoir. Metaphysical should be understood in the strong sense. The role of philosophy and its relations to politics is key here because, as Garo has convincingly argued that ‘for Deleuze revolution is primarily a concept, transferring the political question onto a metaphysical ground while still playing with its concrete resonances’.80 As for Guattari, he proclaimed that ‘We can call revolutionary a process engaged in an irreversible track, and which, for this reason, writes history in an unthought of way’, Micropolitiques announced, being the ‘problematic of molecular revolutions’, that had been germinating ‘following the events in Iran, Poland and Brazil’. Unfortunately, Bensaïd thought: As always, revolution as concept was losing in precision what it was gaining in extension, subsuming political, technical, cultural and sexual revolutions indiscriminately. The revolution was transiting from the field of political and social action to that of political philosophy or metaphysics. Let us bring on miniature revolts, minimalist revolutions, and a postmodern pleasure menu to choose from, along with ‘processual micropolitics’ which will rebuild modes of subjectivation, ways of life and a variety of unheard-of behaviours.81

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a whole to capitalism … This conception bans once more thinking politics as a place of mediations’. Anti-Oedipus could speak to a political generation in a downturn as they still remained committed to critical theory and a new mode of living. ‘It is a counter-culture that will now tend to occupy the place of the political alternative in crisis’ Abandoning class and their conflict meant to non-classes come to the fore, ‘their political role no longer consists in overcoming capitalism, but to “blast open” from inside the wheels of the machine. The minoritarian theme here finds its anchoring and its consequences: the most confrontational do not have a vocation of becoming a collective historical subject to replace capitalism, after the disappearance of the figure of the proletariat. They are those that, by their very existence, individual to the point of being idiosyncratic, practically contest … a social mechanism … Their principle political conclusion is that, now, taking power shall no longer matter … What matters is moving, becoming minoritarian, escaping from capitalism without every breaking out of it’. Garo 2011, pp. 226–31. Bensaïd 2004c. Garo 2009, pp. 620–1. Bensaïd 2008a, p. 159.

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With this re-definition, the possibility of thinking politics strategically was gone, with an aesthetic of subjectivation in its place. Bensaïd apprehends how, through Foucault and Deleuze, a profane historical process was revealed, symptomatic of a time of transition. The Revolution was breaking down; words and political categories were losing their meaning. For almost two centuries, the French Revolution had conditioned the representation of history, structuring the imaginary field of the left; Foucault captured this when he wrote that ‘the age of the Revolution came into force. It jutted out over history, organised our perception of time and polarised hopes. It represented a gigantic effort to acclimatise the uprising within a rational and controllable history’. After the post-68 crack up, this ‘empty form of a universal revolution’, had been deconstructed so as to ‘to apply oneself to thinking the plurality of secular revolutions and their irreducible excess as opposed to the reductionist myth of the great Revolution’.82 A testament to his politicisation of history and events, Bensaïd concerned himself with Foucault’s interventions at the time of the Iranian Revolution. Foucault challenged a normative conception of history, but he flipped over to its opposite, to pure non-norm governed singularity. The Iranian Revolution was taken to be a ‘symptom of a reversal in perspective and as a new semantics of historic times’. Writing for Le Monde Foucault claimed that the experience of the Iranian Revolution had gone beyond the paradigms that had defined similar revolutionary movements ever since 1789, the epoch of modernity. Foucault wrote: Then came the age of ‘revolution’. For two centuries, it hung over history, organised our perception of time, and polarised hopes. The age of revolution has constituted a gigantic effort to acclimatise uprisings within a rational and controllable history. ‘Revolution’ gave these uprisings a legitimacy, sorted out their good and bad forms, and defined their laws of development. For uprisings, it established preliminary conditions, objectives, and ways of bringing them to an end. Even the profession of revolutionary was defined. By thus repatriating revolt into the discourse of revolution, it was said, the uprising would appear in all its truth and continue to its true conclusion. This was a marvellous promise. Some will say that the uprising thus found itself colonised by realpolitik. Others would say that the dimension of a rational history was opened to it.83 82 83

Quoted from Bensaïd 2008a, p. 160. Foucault quoted from Afary and Anderson 2010 p. 264. I thank Sophie Bensaïd who gifted me Daniel’s edition of this book, with his personal notes and markings.

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The Iranian experience was beheld by Foucault as a bifurcation, outside the so-called Western paradigm of revolution, freeing uprisings from the prevailing paradigms since 1789. Somehow it was in Khomeini – not class struggle – that the final form of spiritual emancipation could be found. Foucault’s sombre yet naive writings on Iran tried to sketch out a new concept of revolution. They attempted to go beyond a universal vision of emancipation. In doing so, he flirted with Orientalism, hoping for salvation in a form of collective spirituality residing in an ‘irreducible Iranian alterity’. Here, relying on Janet Afray’s and Kevin Anderson’s study of Foucault, Bensaïd saw the practical fault lines of Foucault’s theoretical framework. Bensaïd also drew out the manner in which Foucault criticised Sartre’s pretention to establish himself as the spokesperson for the universal, but ‘to erect oneself as the spokesperson of singularities without a horizon of universality is no less dangerous’. Foucault fell prey to the danger. In the Iranian Revolution he saw an ‘expression of a “perfectly united collective will” … assuring readers that there was nothing to fear’ of the role of political Islam throughout the revolution. He held that there was neither a party of Khomeini nor Khomeini’s government. This movement ‘broke with the binary logics of modernity and transgressed the borders of European rationality’. It was the emergence of a new spirituality for Foucault. After all, what was politics without spirituality? For Bensaïd, this question ‘was legitimate’, however, ‘the implicit response, disquieting’: The conjoint politicisation of social and religious structures under the hegemony of religious law means the fusion of politics and the social, of the public and the private, not through the disappearance of classes and the state, but through the theological state absorbing politics and the social. Fascinated by a revolution without a vanguard party, Foucault only wanted to see in the Shiite clergy the incarnation without mediation of a plebs or a multitude in fusion. This infatuation rested on the idea of an irreducible difference between two discourses and two types of society: Orient and Occident. Foucault’s anti-universalism here found its practical test … The Iranians [Foucault posited] ‘don’t have the same regime of truth as we do’? Perhaps. But a cultural relativism does not authorise axiological relativism … The refusal of slavery or the oppression of women is not an affair of climates, tastes and customs. And civil, religious and individual liberties are no less important in Tehran than in London or Paris.84 The Iranian moment was an awkward one for Foucault. 84

Bensaïd 2008a, p. 164.

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The Crisis of Strategies

The discourse of anti-strategy developed in the years following May ’68. After May ’68, the official left parties signed the Common Programme in 1972, setting the stage for the retreat from the strategic question, and side-lining the question of power, which ‘became the motive for a division of labour between politics and philosophy, and the pretext for an untrustworthy compromise between the politics of well-tempered administration and philosophical radicalism’. For Foucault, this new theoretical morality was anti-strategic; he insisted on the need to ‘be respectful when a singularity rises up and uncompromising as soon as power violates the universal’, a contradictory approach insofar as it permitted an opening of new fields of militant engagement, while also testifying to a new confusion. Foucault stated: I have no wish to play the role of the one who prescribes solutions. I believe that the role of the intellectual today is not to lay down laws, to put forth solutions, to prophesise, because in this role, the intellectual can only be in the service of a given power status … I refuse the function of the intellectual as the look-alike of and at the same time the alibi for a political party.85 Was this response another way to say that a strategic impasse had been reached that revolved around power, classes and revolutionary politics? Bensaïd pointed out that, ‘The powerlessness in the face of the re-establishment of the bureaucratic state (after the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the Prague Spring and after May ’68) was favourable to a practical displacement of power to that of powers’. This involved a strategic impasse, which revealed, ‘behind the grand tutelary figure of the Leviathan, the network of relations and power games: “power is built and set to work out of a multitude of questions and effects of power”’.86 Bensaïd acknowledged that Foucault’s position had a twofold impact, of which I noted above. On the one hand, the ‘distinction between prior or underlying state power and power relations allowed for the articulation of different political temporalities that were so often conflated’, a distinction that featured in La révolution et le pouvoir. This was a positive development. On the other hand, what became of the state machinery in relation to the fragmented revolu-

85 86

Quoted from Bensaïd 2008a, p. 166. Quoted from Bensaïd 2008a, p. 167.

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tions? Resistance to power relations can shy away before the question of the state machinery, ‘no longer considered as the point where – in a given historical configuration – these power relations and relation of force were knotted and stitched together, but more like one power relation among many others. Programmatic strategy could then be dissolved into the processual sum of oppositions’.87 Bensaïd raised two questions about this: is the question of the state soluble into that of powers? Is class struggle and exploitation soluble into that of bio-politics? Bensaïd’s answer was as clear as it was in La révolution et le pouvoir: if the web of power relations remains to be deconstructed, and the deconstruction is a process over the long term, the machinery of state power remains to be smashed. The critique of powers had the virtue of promising the liberation of political action from all forms of unifying and totalising paranoia. However, this critique of power resonated with the retreat of those subversive actors hitherto subsumed under the proletarian Subject. Foucault did not write off class struggle, however. He retained a strategic function for the notion of class: Sociologists constantly revive a debate that has no end, as to what is a class and who belongs to it. Until now, however, no one has examined or deepened the question of knowing what struggle is. What I would like to discuss, starting from Marx, is not the problem of the sociology of classes, but that of strategic method concerning struggle.88 This point turned out to be quite enigmatic. As Bensaïd noted, the need to think class strategically put Foucault much closer to Marx than the vulgar positivism of his epigones. ‘But’, Bensaïd warned, ‘the call for a strategic representation of classes came about at a time when the parameters of a strategic thinking had already started to falter and when social affiliations had become blurred’. The outcome was a dual effect:

87 88

Ibid. Quoted from Bensaïd 2013, p. 84. It is very interesting to read the distinction between Weber and Marx on this very point, according to Bensaïd: ‘Whereas Marx underlined the structuring polarisation of the relation of exploitation, Weber insists on the nonnecessarily antagonistic plurality of social groups. Whereas Marx exposes the logic of conflict from the relation of production, Weber sees in domination an end in itself. Whereas Marx leaves the noisy market-place to burst into the mystery of production, Weber related social groups to positions on the market. Whereas Marx searched to clarify, among other recurrent divisions, strategic polarities, the constitution of groups around rival strategies with sights set on compensation from the market leads Weber to dispersal of conflict. For

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The archaeology of resistance thus worked in a beneficial way towards breaking up the imaginary hypostasis of the Proletariat as the demiurge of History. At the same time, it aimed at resuscitating pre-capitalist configurations of the masses, the plebe or the multitude. The context was favourable to such notions.89 A legitimate deconstruction of the fetishism of the grand proletariat turned into a justification of a crude neo-populism. The work of André Glucksmann was an example of this shift. It was quite different from ‘the juvenile populism of the nineteenth century which marked the transition from a belated feudal order to capitalist modernity’, because ‘this senile neo-populism turned out to be entirely regressive’. Foucault was aware of this regression when he said that ‘Undoubtedly, the plebe must not be conceived as the permanent reserve of history … There is no doubt that the plebe does not exist, but there is some plebe material, a plebeian share’. Yet, the farewell to the proletariat of the great socialist drama was rapidly becoming an accomplished fact and ‘out of its ashes the masses and the multitudes, which were anterior to the political category of the people’.90 The plebe became the a-temporal antithesis of totalitarianism.

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The Crisis of Theory

Bensaïd lastly took up the crisis of theory, because the ‘eclipse of strategic reason should logically be paired with the full return in force of speculative philosophy’ with its mission to judge any abuse of power ‘on the part of political rationality’. The crisis of theory and the return of a speculative philosophy had accompanied the indisputable crisis of a certain Marxism, which was stripped of its pretentions to critical universality and was brought back, according to Foucault, to its Western cultural groundings. For Bensaïd, what Foucault did with Marx was in ‘flagrant contradiction with his concern to think the multiple and to pluralise historical, social and ideological phenomena’, by claiming to ‘put Marxism (in the singular!) on trial’: He condemned it wholesale and indiscriminately, without making clear that what he was talking about was specifically an orthodox Marxism of

89 90

Marx, the class struggle is at the centre of social and historical change. For Weber, the division into classes is variable and contingent’. Bensaïd 1995, p. 109. Bensaïd 2008a, p. 169. Ibid.

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party and state. He was thus able proudly to ignore the tumultuous wave with its warm and cold currents. Criticising a supposedly Marxist tradition for having too often confused historical prognosis (backed by mechanical necessity) with strategic or performative prophecy, he applied the hot iron to the bloodiest part of the wound.91 On Bensaïd’s reading, the impasse that a certain Marxism faced could not be divorced from the dead-end of Althusserianism. Bensaïd explained that ‘If academic Althusserianism represented an ultimate attempt to “make Marx academically-friendly”, Marxism itself was no less responsible in Foucault’s eyes for an irremediable impoverishment of political imagination. “Such is our starting point”’, Foucault had noted.92 In this enterprise, Bensaïd summarised that: The critical theory of Marx would have definitively signalled the abortion rather than the birth of a strategic thought shackled by the strait-jacket of Hegelian dialectic and the influence of historical necessity on political contingency. It is thus in those logical terms that Foucault objected to the term dialectic, which would compel us to subscribe to the closed schema of the thesis and the synthesis. ‘A reciprocal relation is not dialectical, mutual antagonistic relations are not logical contradictions, but real oppositions without a reconciliatory synthesis’ [Foucault]. What took place in Marx’s oeuvre, says Foucault, is ‘in a way a game between the formation of a prophecy and the definition of a target’. A game understood as distancing, a badly adjusted fitting, a missed encounter between a discourse of struggle and a historical consciousness. The strategic expectation has perhaps been damaged in the in-between of these two seemingly contradictory discourses: that of historical necessity and that of the contingency of struggles. Although it is aimed at certain discourses pronounced in the name of Marx by orthodox Marxists (of the party or the state), this was a critique that had strong resonances. It revealed the mortifying split between ‘objective conditions’ meant to guarantee an ineluctable historic happy ending and the recurrent failure of the ‘subjective factor’. A schism between a reiterated trust in the laws of history despite the denials, the successive failures, and the voluntarism of a Maoist subject called upon to draw the new man on a blank sheet.93 91 92 93

Bensaïd 2013, p. 199. Bensaïd 2008a, p. 174. Bensaïd 2008a, pp. 174–5.

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The challenge to a pseudo-Hegelian dialectic of synthetic thought, and its passing over to orthodox Marxism thus induced a crisis of theory, inaugurating the era of theory in fragments, of the fragment against the totality, the local reform in thought against the permanent revolution of universal articulation.

15

Change the World without Taking Power?

John Holloway’s Change the World Without Taking Power (2002) and Richard Day’s Gramsci Is Dead (2005) captured Bensaïd’s interest because they intended to turn a page in the history of emancipatory movements. Their common point consisted in evading the question of political power, being more or less influenced by a vulgarised Deleuzianism and Foucauldianism. Bensaïd thought Holloway’s and Day’s works represented a specific moment. After the neoliberal attacks of Reagan and Thatcher, the Zapatista insurrection of 1994, the battle of Seattle in 1999 and the first world social forum in Porto Alegre in 2001, resistance to global capitalism experienced a renewal. For Bensaïd, the slogans that were raised and the ideologies expressed combined, on one hand, a refusal of the lethal logic of capital and on the other, a hope for something else, as yet still undetermined. The necessity to change the world was expressed, without being able to determine the goal and means of getting there. This was utopia as the ‘non-practical sense of the possible’, as Lefebvre put it. In this way, Holloway and Day expressed a ‘utopian moment’, of social illusions, in which the social movements were taken to be self-sufficient, thus dodging the political questions they were powerless to resolve. According to Bensaïd, such moments were characteristic of periods of consecutive restoration from great defeats, and Bensaïd even drew analogies between the utopian fermentations of the 1830–48 and those of the 1990s. I focus here on Bensaïd’s critique Holloway’s utopian proposal of changing the world without taking power. Holloway claimed to translate the Zapatista experience into theory, supporting his transference with a vulgar FoucauldianDeleuzianism converted to a ready-to-use ideology. Despite his deep disagreements with Holloway, Bensaïd granted him the merit of ‘relaunching a muchneeded strategic debate in the movements of resistance to imperial globalisation, after a sinister quarter-century in which this kind of debate had withered away, while those who refused to surrender to the (un)reason of the triumphant market swung back and forth between a rhetoric of resistance without any horizon of expectation and the fetishistic expectation of some miraculous event’.94 94

Bensaïd 2005, p. 171.

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There were four themes Bensaïd criticised in Holloway’s work: his spitting on history, abstract anti-statism, the impossibility of revolution, and anti-power. Before I address these themes, keep in mind one qualification Bensaïd made about Holloway’s self-proclaimed radical novelty: There is [Holloway said – D.R.] ‘something fundamentally wrong with the power-centred concept of revolution’. But what? Foucault passed this way a long time ago. As I have already mentioned, more than twenty-five years ago I wrote a book entitled La Révolution et le Pouvoir (‘Revolution and Power’), around the idea that the state can be broken but the ‘relations of power’ must still be undone (or deconstructed). This is not a new issue. It reached us by way of libertarian traditions and May ’68, among others. Why, if not out of ignorance, does Holloway make a show of radically innovating (still making a clean sweep) instead of situating himself in discussions that have … a (long) history!95

16

Statism and the Scream

Holloway’s work ‘starts from an imperative of unconditional resistance: we scream’. The scream is a negation, both a cry of rage and hope, like the Zapatistas’ scream in Chiapas – Ya Basta – that’s enough! The negation is the scream of resistance, against capitalist domination. Holloway’s project was to, ‘strengthen negativity, to take the side of the fly in the web, to make the scream more strident’. Partisan of the fly caught in the web, Holloway set out to ‘recapture a subjectivity that is immanent in negativity itself’, remaining ‘connected with the million, multiple forms of resistance, which are irreducible to the binary relation between capital and labour’. For Bensaïd, ‘this way of taking sides by crying out is not enough’, because one had to be able to theoretically, politically and historically account for the disasters of the last century: Why did all those cries, those millions of cries, repeated millions of times over, not only leave capital’s despotic order standing but even leave it more arrogant than ever? Holloway thinks he has the answer. The worm was in the apple; that is, the (theoretical) vice was originally nestled inside the emancipatory virtue: statism was gnawing away at most variants of the workers’ movement from the beginning. Changing the world

95

Bensaïd 2005, p. 189.

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by means of the state thus constituted in his eyes the dominant paradigm of revolutionary thought, which was subjected from the 19th century on to an instrumental, functional vision of the state.96 Thus, for Holloway, the Zapatistas could save the revolution from statism and the illusion of power. From the outset, Holloway’s position raised three related problems in the terms of Bensaïd’s polemic. First, Holloway ‘reduced the luxuriant history of the workers’ movement, its experiences and controversies to a single line of march of statism through the ages, as if very different theoretical and strategic conceptions had not been constantly battling with each other’. Hence, he ‘presents an imaginary Zapatismo as something absolutely innovative’.97 Second, through his account of ‘the dominant paradigm of revolutionary thought’ as consisting of a functionalist statism, Holloway takes ‘very little account of an abundant critical literature on the question of the state, which ranges from Lenin and Gramsci to contemporary polemics by way of contributions that are impossible to ignore (whether one agrees with them or not) like those of Poulantzas and Altvater’.98 Third, Holloway’s position intersects with the reactionary notion the Lenin led to Stalin without any rupture of continuity. By ‘reducing the whole history of the revolutionary movement to the genealogy of a “theoretical deviation”’, he can ‘hover over real history with a flap of angelic wings’.99 Bensaïd’s argument about historical method throws light on Holloway’s injunction to ‘spit on history’; it is to this I now turn, before moving through Holloway’s attitude to fetishism and anti-power. We should ask ourselves a twofold question: does screaming and spitting amount to thinking and to doing politics?

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Spitting on History and the Reproduction of Domination

Holloway, in Nietzschean terms, claims that history is ‘the great excuse for not thinking’. Bensaïd retorts, however, that if history is an excuse not to think, then does that mean we cannot think historically? What is it to think in the first place? Removed from historical sensibilities, one enters, so Bensaïd thinks, the ‘darkness of non-history, in which all cats are grey’, where one fails to catch even

96 97 98 99

Bensaïd 2005, p. 172. Bensaïd 2005, p. 173. Ibid. Ibid.

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the tiniest mouse. For Bensaïd, historical sensibility matters to think about Stalinism, because the black hole of non-history is ‘the preferred landscape for neoliberals and repentant Stalinists to hold their reunions, hurriedly wiping out the traces of their past without thinking about this past that makes it so hard for them to pass’. According to Bensaïd, there was a certain dishonesty about Holloway’s claims about history, because: Holloway blots out with his spit the criticisms that Atilio Boron, Alex Callinicos, Guillermo Almeyra and I have made of his work. He reproaches us with envisaging history as ‘something unproblematic’, instead of opening it up to theoretical questions. This is a gratuitous accusation, backed up neither with arguments nor with serious evidence. All of us have, on the contrary, devoted much of our work to interrogating, revising, deconstructing and reconstructing our historical worldview. History is like power; you cannot ignore it. You can refuse to take power, but then it will take you. You can throw history out the door, but it will kick over the traces and come back in through the window … ‘Using History as a pretext’, Holloway says, we want to ‘pour new struggles into old methods’: ‘Let the new forms of struggle flourish’. Just because we are constantly welcoming a portion of newness, history (!) exists rather than some divine or mercantile eternity. But the historical dialectic of old and new is subtler than any binary or Manichean opposition between old and new, including in the methodological sense. Yes, let the new flourish; do not give in to routine and habit; stay open to surprise and astonishment. This is all useful advice. But how, by what standard, can we evaluate the new if we lose all memory of the old? Novelty, like antiquity, is always a relative notion.100 Bensaïd contended that the scream and the spit on history do not amount to doing politics. The other side of a memoryless politics was the belief in the eternal reproduction of domination. Holloway diagnosed liberal globalisation as the absolute stage of capital’s domination and of the alienation of individuals that result from it, ‘in a way that all attempts to escape from it will be condemned in advance to reproduce the mechanisms of it’. From this diagnostic, one could only hope to achieve the molecular experience of the negation of power and individual asceticism, being the only ways one could subtract their self from a fetishistic fascination with power.

100

Bensaïd 2005, p. 190.

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According to Bensaïd, Holloway did have the merit of introducing Marx’s critique of fetishism anew, for ‘this subject Holloway provides a useful, though sometimes quite sketchy, reminder’. Bensaïd claimed that we ‘should acknowledge the service John Holloway has done in putting the question of fetishism and reification back in the heart of the strategic enigma’. But ‘We need nonetheless to note the limited novelty of his argument’. Property is alienated dead labour; capital is past activity congealed in the form of property. For Holloway, ‘thinking in terms of property comes down however to thinking of property as a thing, in the terms of fetishism itself, which means in fact accepting the terms of domination’. In this sense Holloway contends that to think in terms of property – and which social class has control of the means of production – is to remain within the bounds of domination. ‘Our struggle’, Holloway insists, ‘is not the struggle to make ours the property of the means of production, but to dissolve both property and means of production: to recover or, better, create the conscious and confident sociality of the flow of doing’.101 But how can the vicious circle of fetishism be broken? For Holloway, as Bensaïd described: The concept of fetishism contains in concentrated form the critique of bourgeois society (its ‘enchanted … world’ and of bourgeois theory – political economy), and at the same time lays bare the reasons for their relative stability: the infernal whirling that turns objects (money, machines, commodities) into subjects and subjects into objects. This fetishism worms its way into all the pores of society to the point that the more urgent and necessary revolutionary change appears, the more impossible it seems to become. Holloway sums this up in a deliberately disquieting turn of phrase: ‘the urgent impossibility of revolution’ … The fetish, this ‘real illusion’, in fact enmeshes us in its toils and subjugates us. It makes the status of critique itself problematic: if social relationships are fetishised, how can we criticise them? And who, what superior and privileged beings, are the critics? In short, is critique itself still possible?102 To this problematic Bensaïd asked, how can one avoid the dead end of a subaltern critique that remains under the ascendancy of the fetish that it is claiming to overthrow? Is the revolution even conceivable in this closed form of fetishism? For Holloway, there are three options: the traditional reformist response of trifling about the edges of the system; the classical revolutionary 101 102

Bensaïd 2005, p. 174. Ibid.

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response, ‘which ignores the subtleties and marvels of fetishism and clings to the good old binary antagonism between capital and labour, so as to content itself with a change of ownership at the summit of the state’; and lastly, a third way, by ‘looking for hope in the very nature of capitalism and in its “ubiquitous [or pluriform] power”, to which an “ubiquitous [or pluriform] resistance” is an appropriate response’.103 Bensaïd recognises that escaping from the circularity of a fetishised domination of the capitalist mode of production is indeed the key problem. But certain hallowed ways supercede Holloway; Holloway thinks that fetishism is not a state of affairs, but a dynamic and contradictory process of fetishisation, through which this ‘process is in fact pregnant with its contrary: the “anti-fetishisation” of forms of resistance immanent to fetishism itself’. For Holloway, ‘Our existence-against-capital’, is thus, ‘the inevitable constant negation of our existence-in-capital’. Though it was vital that the strategic discussion revolved around fetishism, nonetheless, Bensaïd noted: the ‘orthodox Marxism’ of the Stalinist period (including Althusser) had in fact discarded the critique of fetishism, its red thread had nevertheless never been broken: starting from Lukács, we can follow it through the works of the authors who belonged to what Ernst Bloch called ‘the warm current of Marxism’: Roman Rosdolsky, Jakubowski, Ernest Mandel, Henri Lefebvre (in his Critique of Everyday Life), Lucien Goldmann, Jean-Marie Vincent (whose Fétichisme et Société dates back to 1973!), and more recently Stavros Tombazos and Alain Bihr.104 Bensaïd rejected Holloway’s third way. If the goal was not to seize the means of production but rather to fan the diffuse plurality of negative screams, what is it to ‘defetishise’ capitalist relations? Is it a mental act or a historical act? Holloway’s, ‘stress on the process of “defetishisation” at work within fetishisation enables him to relativise (“defetishise”?) the question of property, which he declares without any further ado to be soluble in “the flow of doing” ’. What exactly the flow of doing is remains equivocal. It is a vague formula that does not provide an answer. Bensaïd explained, while recognising that ‘We live in a world of Monsters of our own creation’: While commodities, money, capital and the state are fetishes, they are not ‘mere illusions, they are real illusions’. Exactly. What follows from this, in

103 104

Bensaïd 2005, pp. 175–6. Bensaïd 2005, p. 177.

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practical terms? That abolishing these illusions requires abolishing the social relations that make them necessary and fabricate them? Or, as Holloway suggests, that we must be content with a fetish strike: ‘Capital exists because we create it … If we do not create it tomorrow, it will cease to exist’? In the aftermath of 1968, there were Maoists who claimed that ‘driving out the cop’ in our heads would be enough to get rid of the real cops too. Yet the real cops are still with us (more than ever), and the tyranny of the ego is still secure even in the best regulated minds. So would refusing to create capital suffice to lift its spells? Magical behaviour (conjuring away in our imaginations an imaginary despot) would only bring about a liberation which is just as imaginary. Abolishing the conditions of fetishism in reality means overthrowing the despotism of the market and the power of private property and breaking the state that ensures the conditions of social reproduction.105 By contrast, for Holloway, no longer is taking power at stake in revolutionary change. Instead, it is the ‘very existence of power’. All traditional revolutions aimed too low, since the ‘only way in which revolution can now be imagined is not as the conquest of power but as the dissolution of power’. Bensaïd simply thought this was not a realistic proposal, ‘While the experiences that inspire him have not aimed at taking power, neither have they – so far – succeeded in changing the world. Holloway simply (dogmatically?) asserts that there is no other way’.106 This put the author of Change the World Without Taking Power in an awkward contortion – how can we change the world without taking power? ‘At the end of the book, as at the beginning, we do not know’. Holloway’s work about anti-power, an exploration of the absurd and shadowy world of anti-power, involves no real no project of counter-power. Revolutions of the past have indeed seen counter-powers established. Counter-powers are a pre-condition for the transfer of power (and sovereignty). The Paris Commune is the classic example of a counter-power. Yet, for Holloway, ‘the revolutionary movement has too often been constructed “as a mirror image of power, army against army, party against party”’.107 His anti-power, by contrast, rests on a distinction between power-over and power-to. Power-over is state power or class power; power-to is about setting free the power-to from power-over, doing from work, and subjectivity from objectification. Hence anti-power should dissolve the power-over to emancipate the power-to. Holloway thus concludes, ‘It 105 106 107

Bensaïd 2005, pp. 188–9. Bensaïd 2005, p. 178. Quoted from Bensaïd 2005, p. 183.

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should now be clear that power cannot be taken, for the simple reason that power is not possessed by any particular person or institution’ but rather lies ‘in the fragmentation of social relations’. But this seems to be a slight of hand, using linguistics, that actually throws out any perspective of a concrete politics of the oppressed. Bensaïd concludes: Having reached this sublime height, Holloway contentedly contemplates the volume of dirty water being bailed out of the bathtub, but he worries about how many babies are being thrown out with it. The perspective of power to the oppressed has indeed given way to an indefinable, ungraspable anti-power, about which we are told only that it is everywhere and nowhere, like the centre of Pascal’s circumference. Does the spectre of anti-power thus haunt the bewitched world of capitalist globalisation? It is on the contrary very much to be feared that the multiplication of ‘anti’s’ (the anti-power of an anti-revolution made with an anti-strategy) might in the end be no more than a paltry rhetorical stratagem, whose ultimate result is to disarm the oppressed (theoretically and practically) without for all that breaking the iron grasp of capital and its domination.108 What a pity it is to end up with rhetorical stratagem that disarms the oppressed.

18

The Logic of Hegemony

Bensaïd had a positive alternative to Holloway’s praise of the scream and pitiful disarming of the oppressed, which involved a logic of hegemony and radical democracy. In this sense, Bensaïd’s Marxism conjoins the notion of hegemony and the state of exception, which effectively animate earlier discussions from chapter two. Too often, left-wing theoreticians used hegemony as a ploy to dodge the question of dictatorship, i.e. exception. Bensaïd constantly argued that in Marx the dictatorship of the proletariat had a strategic function. As such, it was a major strategic breakthrough with far-reaching political implications. In the 1970s the Eurocommunist currents suppressed the notion, underhandedly ridding themselves of its strategic implications. In reality they renounced all forms of the state of exception, of the ‘sovereign dic-

108

Bensaïd 2005, p. 183.

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tator’ that is able to found a new right (and new relations of property) … This interpretation of the notion of hegemony as a simple pacific expansion of parliamentary democracy watered down the contribution of the Prison Notebooks.109 Gramsci’s concept of hegemony is conjoined to the dictatorship of the proletariat since we find both the necessary revolutionary rupture and the transformation of the strategic defensive (or war of attrition) into the strategic offensive (or war of movement) implicated in it. Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks should be seen in continuity with the debates in the Communist International of the 1920s on transitional demands, the united front and the workers’ government. These polemics formed part of the then still early formulation of a revolutionary orientation applicable to the advanced industrial countries, necessitating the conquest of a majority and the emergence of an alternative legitimacy to the existing order. This process was not reducible to a power grab [coup de force] without the construction of hegemony. Of course, the notion of hegemony did not emerge in the 1920s from nowhere; it had a longer history. For instance, in Marx’s writings on the revolution of 1848, ‘Ledru-Rollin and Raspail’, were ‘the representatives respectively of the democratic petty bourgeoisie and the revolutionary proletariat’: Faced with the bourgeois coalition, the revolutionary parties of the petty bourgeoisie and the peasantry ought to have allied themselves with the ‘revolutionary proletariat’ to form a hegemonic bloc: ‘When he is disappointed in the Napoleonic Restoration the French peasant will part with his belief in his small holding, the entire state edifice erected on this small holding will fall to the ground and the proletarian revolution will obtain that chorus without which its solo song becomes the swan song in all peasant countries’.110 The logic of hegemony articulates the conjunction of proletariat and other oppressed layers of a social formation. We saw, in the earlier chapter on Marx’s political writings that during the Paris Commune, faced with ‘the capitulation of the Empire and the complacency of capital in the face of the Prussian occupation, the petty and middle bourgeoisie rallied for the first time’ to the proletarian revolution and formed part of the National Guard. It is ‘to con-

109 110

Bensaïd 2008a, p. 320. Bensaïd 2008a, pp. 313–14.

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solidate this hegemonic bloc that Marx insisted on the importance of measures taken favouring debtors’.111 The term then appeared in the Russian SocialDemocratic movement at the end of the nineteenth century. As a counter to the economist tendencies, they used the concept of hegemony to articulate the leading role of the proletariat in a worker and peasant alliance against the Tsarist autocracy, driving the bourgeois-democratic revolution forward. Interestingly, from 1898, Parvus thus envisaged the necessity for the proletariat to establish moral hegemony, and not only a majority power over the heterogeneous urban populations. And it is worth remembering Axelrod’s statement that with ‘the hegemony of the proletariat in the democratic revolution … our party will become the liberator par excellence, a centre toward which all democratic sympathies will gravitate and where all the greatest revolutionary protests will originate’.112 As for Lenin, a revolutionary militant was not just a trade unionist but a tribune of the people, rallying the oppressed fighters behind a project to overturn the existing order. This implies a perspective of hegemony. Bensaïd’s discussion of the Dreyfus Affair also shows the logic of hegemony at work in French conditions. While the term did ‘not appear in the controversy between Jaurès and Guesde on the implications of the Dreyfus Affair, its logic is nonetheless present in it’. For Jaurès, it was in the interest of the proletariat to ‘prevent too violent an intellectual and moral degradation of the bourgeoisie itself … it has become the tutor to bourgeois liberties that the bourgeoisie was incapable of defending’. This implied, for Jaurès, that the time would come ‘to sit in the governments of the bourgeoisie to control the mechanism of bourgeois society’, to carry out the founding work for the revolution. Guesde, on the other hand, was for a more intransigent attitude, in the name of a pure socialism, seeing that ‘a socialist in a bourgeois government is never more than a hostage’. However, The irony of history ensured that Guesde the intransigent ended his career as minister of a government of national and patriotic union, while Jaurès was killed as a probable obstacle to this Union.113 The clash between Jaurès and Guesde raised the following dilemma: how could the logic of hegemony be combined with an intransigent revolutionary perspective? On this point, Bensaïd suggested that Gramsci ‘widens the scope of 111 112 113

Ibid. Quoted from Harding 2009, p. 47. Bensaïd 2007e.

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the united front to the conquest of cultural and political “hegemony” in the process of the construction of a modern nation’. For Gramsci, the revolution could not be taken purely as a social revolution, but needed to be inseparably understood intellectually and morally, creating a popular will: The modern Prince must be and cannot but be the proclaimer and organiser of an intellectual and moral reform, which also means creating the terrain for a subsequent development of the national-popular collective will towards the realisation of a superior, total form of modern civilisation.114 Furthermore, according to Bensaïd, Gramsci’s notion of hegemony involves two ideas that ‘tend to disappear’ in a loose usage of the notion of hegemony. First, it is the ‘articulation of a historic bloc around a ruling class, and not the simple undifferentiated addition of categories of discontent’. Second, it signifies ‘the formulation of a political project, capable of resolving a historic crisis of the nation and social relations as a whole’.115 Gramsci’s approach, for the industrialised capitalist countries, is rooted in a perspective in which the war of position takes precedence over the war of movement. The war of movement characterised the revolutionary struggle in the East. In the advanced capitalist countries, ‘the seizure of power is inconceivable without a prior conquest of hegemony, that is to say without the affirmation of a dominant/leading role inside a new historic bloc capable of defending, not only the corporate interests of a popular class, but providing an overall response to an overall crisis of social relations’. Gramsci effectively enlarged the field of strategic thought, and by relating the dictatorship of the proletariat to hegemony, Gramsci moved back and forth between the revolutionary test of force and the construction of hegemony. Bensaïd reminded us of the historical context of hegemony that grounded the kind of back-and-forth Gramsci suggested: After the failure of the German Revolution of 1923, and the retreat of the post-war revolutionary wave, the task was not to proclaim the situation constantly revolutionary and advocate permanent offensive, but to undertake a prolonged struggle for hegemony through the conquest of the majority of the exploited and oppressed classes of the European work-

114 115

Quoted from Bensaïd 2008a, pp. 315–6. Ibid.

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ers’ movement which was profoundly and durably divided, politically and in trade union terms. The tactic of the ‘workers united front’ seeking to mobilise in unity responded to this objective.116 Bensaïd thought then that in the 1930s the united front approach experienced a significant deepening ‘with the articles of Trotsky on Germany, when Nazism was on the rise, and those of Gramsci on the notion of hegemony’. From these debates the distinction between the East, characterised by ‘a despotic state, a weak civil society, a nearly non-existent parliamentary tradition’, and the West, ‘where civil society will be on the contrary strongly organised, where the relations of domination intricately combine coercion and consent’ was formulated clearly. In the East, power is easier to win but more difficult to hold, whereas in the West it is more difficult to take but easier to hold. For Gramsci, the concept of hegemony ‘no longer evokes only a necessary alliance between the proletariat and the peasantry or the middle classes, but a politics that tries to surmount the subalternity of the proletariat itself and to rally the middle-layers to its cause’.117 While Bensaïd (following Gramsci and Trotsky) held that the seizure of state power was inconceivable without the preparation of a long and hard won hegemony by the subaltern classes – i.e. without the partial affirmation at least of a leading/dominant role at the core of a new historical bloc – the revolution remains a unity between an act of rupture and a process of construction/reconstruction, before and after the taking of power.

19

Post-Modernism and Hegemony

Bensaïd polemicised against post-modernism, as part of his discussion of hegemony, asking if hegemony were soluble in post-modern soup. Toward the end of the 1970s, the orthodox Marxism of the bureaucratic states and the parties seemed to draw their final gasps: Faced with the already perceptible debacle of really in-existing socialism and the reflux of the post-68 social wave, Eurocommunists tried to resuscitate an insipid Austro-Marxism, in trying to combine parliament and self-control on the pretext that in contemporary societies, ‘many cru-

116 117

Ibid. Bensaïd 2005, p. 317.

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cial antagonisms belong to discursive fields that are foreign to Marxism’. Tuning to the ‘post-modern’ and ‘post-structuralist’ rhetorics in gestation, ‘post-Marxism’ thus announced itself inclined to renounce the great narratives of emancipation to the benefit of micro subversions and miniature liberations. While classical Marxism postulated a universal social class apt to take on the representation of the totality, contingency and undecidability became fashionable themes in the morose zeitgeist.118 Hegemony re-emerged in the 1990s in a different context. In ‘order to ward off the eclipse of the strategic question’ and ‘open a breach in the horizon drawn by a triumphant neoliberalism’, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, reformulated hegemony ‘as a chain of actors without a strong link, or as a coalition of social subjects refusing to subordinate themselves to a contradiction deemed to be principal. The exclusive hegemony of a class inside a composition of alliances which is more or less tactical and variable will be henceforth replaced by “chains of equivalence”’. The theory of hegemony rests, in their work, on the idea of a universality that is, at the same time, ‘necessary and impossible, which only exists by being incarnated and subverted by the particular’. Reciprocally, ‘particularity accesses politics only in producing universalising effects’. They held that the perfect co-incidence between the particular and the universal is impossible, therefore, ‘the hegemonic relation implies the production of tendentially empty signifiers that maintain the incommensurability between the universal and the particular, permitting the second to represent the first’. This implies that they sever the concept of hegemony from its class determinations, ‘in order to give it a meaning of a contingent articulation of heterogeneous elements’.119 These heterogeneous elements can be the struggles against sexism, racism, discrimination and ecology, which ‘must be articulated to those of the workers to found anew a left hegemonic project’. For Bensaïd, the problem resided in how this articulation takes place and its modalities. This issue forms the terms of the exchange between Žižek and Laclau. For Laclau, one retains the category of class, reconciles it with the multiplication of identities that are embodied in the new social movements by ‘placing it in an enumerative chain: movements of race, gender, ethnicity and so on … “Without forgetting the good old workers’ movement”’. As Bensaïd pointed out, ‘becoming a simple link in the chain, the proletariat loses its privileged role’.120

118 119 120

Bensaïd 2008a, pp. 321–2. Bensaïd 2008a, pp. 322–3. Bensaïd 2008a, p. 324.

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Žižek, on the other hand, did not accept that the different elements intervening in the struggle would be in principle equivalent. Class struggle should not be soluble into the kaleidoscope of identity or community belongings. This was the wager of Marxism. Importantly, for Žižek, the ‘proliferation of political subjectivities’ that appeared to jettison the class struggle and put it into a subordinate position was ‘only the result of the class struggle in the concrete context of globalised capitalism’. Thrown onto the defensive by the neoliberal onslaught, the working class became more invisible in the social sciences, but this does not mean it has disappeared. Yet, if ‘one renounces any structuring of the fields as a whole by an impersonal logic – that of capital as it happens – the articulation [relations between different equivalents] can only represent the decree of a vanguard or an ethical voluntarism’.121 On the other hand, if capital structures the whole, a relative necessity can structure the different fields of struggle. Class struggle would lose its strategic function. Bensaïd accepted Žižek’s point in the debate that: The wager of Marxism is that there is one antagonism (‘class struggle’) which overdetermines all others and is, as such, the ‘concrete universal’ of the entire field. The term ‘overdetermines’ is used here in its precise Althusserian sense: it does not mean that class struggle is the ultimate referent and horizon of meaning of all other struggles; it means that class struggle is the structuring principle which allows us to account for the very ‘inconsistent’ plurality of ways in which other antagonisms can be articulated into ‘chains of equivalences’. The feminist struggle, for example, can be articulated into a chain with the progressive struggle for emancipation, or it can (and certainly does) function as an ideological tool used by the upper middle classes to assert their superiority over the ‘patriarchal and intolerant’ lower classes. And the point here is not only that the feminist struggle can be articulated in different ways with class antagonism, but that class antagonism is, as it were, doubly inscribed here: it is the specific constellation of the class struggle which explains why the feminist struggle was appropriated by the upper classes.122 By contrast, for Laclau and Mouffe, ‘classism’ was an obstacle to the hegemonic articulation of diverse autonomous subjectivities; this, essentially, was an expression of the broken mirror of liberalism and market democracy.

121 122

Bensaïd 2008a, pp. 324–5. Žižek 2006, pp. 361–2.

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Radical Democracy

Bensaïd’s Éloge also defended radical democracy, though it was by no means a novelty in his oeuvre, since it brings us back to the relation between the party and the class, in which Bensaïd followed Trotsky’s insights – in The Revolution Betrayed – that classes are heterogeneous, thus explicitly breaking with a homogenous representation of the proletariat. On this point, according to Bensaïd, Trotsky ‘took a new road’, where there ‘is some interplay between the political and the social’ that warns against the ‘phantasm of a totalitarian homogeneity’, after which one ‘can no longer decree the dissolution (or disappearance) of politics into a “social being” transparent to itself’.123 The concept of hegemony is a useful tool to deal with the fact that economic fragmentation and the heterogeneity of the working class itself and its relations to other popular classes work to prevent the realisation of class unity, making its political re-composition necessary. However, Bensaïd suggested that hegemony could be used in two senses, either democratic or authoritarian. In the authoritarian use of the concept, ‘the class nature of each demand is … fixed a priori (bourgeois, petty bourgeois, or proletarian) by the economic base’. The democratic use of the concept, on the other hand, allows for ‘the linking together of a multiplicity of antagonisms’ that are not abstractly fixed a priori. In the context of the democratic conception, political class consciousness develops through the transformation of social actors into political actors. The radically democratic conception of hegemony is confirmed by Trotsky’s passage, since (as Bensaïd notes) there is no ‘natural fit between a social base and political leadership’: The remaining gap between the social and the political allows on the contrary envisaging their articulation as a determinate possibility. Trotsky thus accused his contradictors of remaining prisoners of rigid social categories, instead of appreciating live historic forces. He saw the division of politics into formal categories of sociology to be a theoretical corpse.124 Bensaïd combined his reading of Trotsky with an appraisal of Lenin, since Lenin’s notion of hegemony supposed ‘a conception of politics potentially more democratic than anything in the tradition of the Second International’ because the distinction between the party and the class opened up the per-

123 124

Bensaïd 2008a, p. 329. Bensaïd 2008a, p. 331.

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spective of a relative autonomy and a plurality of politics: if the party is no longer confused with the class, then classes can have a plurality of representations. Bensaïd used the example of the trade union debates of the early Soviet state to illustrate his argument. In criticising social corporatism and economism, Lenin demonstrated that uneven and combined development, the discordance of time between the Russian Revolution and a hoped-for European Revolution, the lag between a proclaimed proletarian revolution and the construction of a ‘bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie’, required the relative autonomy of the political and to the concept of hegemony that is tied to it. In the debate of 1921 over the trade unions, Lenin logically supported those who felt the need to support the independence of the trade unions in relation to the state apparatuses. Even if all the consequences of it are not drawn out, its problematic implies the recognition of a plurality of antagonisms and points of rupture. Hegemony allowed for a strategy that intervened into the discordance of time between the national revolution and the international one. Decisively, the discordance set the conditions for the bureaucracy to develop, against which Bensaïd thought a primacy of politics needed attending to. The bureaucracy ultimately accomplished the tasks of industrial modernisation through brutal methods in the name of an atomised class, reduced to silence, until the bureaucracy itself became an obstacle to development and transformed into a new mafia-like bourgeoisie. In this sense, the permanent revolution was oxymoronic and internally contradictory because it was a process that ties the event to history, the moment to the long-term period, and the act to the process. In declaring the revolution permanent, the risk is run that the exception may become the rule, eternalising the emergency measures taken in a situation of civil war, where the question of pluralism and rule of law is indefinitely suspended and finished by getting lost between the dictatorship as a prolonged proletarian form of exception and the promised withering away of the state. To recognise the difference between social and political allows us to think of their articulation as a question to resolve.

21

Politics as a Strategic Art

As we reach the end of this chapter about profane politics, I must point out that it has been necessary to finish with hegemony and radical democracy because, for Bensaïd, a strategic politics must both hold good on the imperative of immanence and the concept of emancipation. The notions of hegemony and radical democracy play a crucial role in holding good on both of these

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demands because immanence guards against the invocation of a mythic subject of emancipation and emancipation is possible only with the construction of a new hegemonic historic bloc, implying a deepening of democratic content. ‘In the orthodox Marxist tradition’, Bensaïd argued, ‘it is true, classes have often been represented by a vanguard deemed to be the conscious depository of their unconscious historical interests. Without regrets, we can give up the idea of a party-surrogate, whose legitimacy can only be established on the improbable day of the Last Judgement’.125 Revolutionary politics cannot rest on the idea that a minority holds the truth and the science that the masses lack. This conception is another form of masked transcendence. Instead of this masked transcendence, Bensaïd saw the party as a strategic operator, ‘engaged in the incertitude of battle, immersed in the volatility of the relations of force, required to make decisions in the form of a reasoned wager, without the guarantee of scientific or historical truth’ that stand outside of the immanence of struggle.126 One ought to honour Bensaïd’s politics as a profane strategic art. The formula is ‘recurrent’ in his work, Artous writes. Politics as a strategic art cannot be divorced from immanence, for Bensaïd’s recovery of Marx’s ‘new writing of history’ was designed to uncover history’s rationality without falling into a ‘transcendent norms’. It aimed to uncover ‘an immanent rationality’, that is expressed strategically. Strategic reason must be able to grasp objective possibility. To do this, another rationality is necessary where history and politics are inseparable and critical knowledge can become strategic. On this point, Bensaïd defended what he called strategic hypotheses. A strategic hypothesis is not a normative model but rather a guide to action, constructed on the basis of past experiences and able to change depending on new experiences. Ultimately, only new historical experiences allow us to accumulate such strategic knowledge. Crucially, the role of the party as a strategic operator was tied to a conception of commodity fetishism, to which I turn in the next chapter. ‘It will be necessary’, Bensaïd claimed, ‘in order to find the words for it, to break the vicious circle of global capital and the absolute fetishism of the commodity’. This was only possible by passing through practice and struggles, ‘through a new cycle of experiences, through a patient attention to the lacerations of domination from where an untimely possibility can emerge, through the preparation of “this exceptional decision that belongs to no historical continuum”, which is precisely the domain of strategic reason’.127

125 126 127

Bensaïd 2008a, p. 337. Ibid. Bensaïd 2008a, pp. 356–7.

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Commodity Fetishism Towards the end of Éloge de la politique profane, Bensaïd identified a problem that remained with him until his last breath, which can be summed up with two words – Game Over. Some authors held that the society of the spectacle was the grand finale of domination. Bensaïd identified such a conception in Michel Surya’s essays on domination, since Surya ‘pushes to the extreme, the limits of this infernal vision of commodity eternity’ where there is no outside from the domination of capital and commodities. An absolutised domination of capital is a despairing prospect, which imprisons politics in the vicious circle of ‘the eternal reproduction of capital’, and for Bensaïd, the ‘repetition of emancipation’s defeat goes hand in hand with the disappearance of its heroic actors’. When the formerly recognised subject of emancipation retreats from view, one turns to substitute subjects. Moreover, Bensaïd recognised a kind of emotive response which tempts writers ‘to take vengeance on history’s betrayals and political disappointments through a philosophical retreat or aesthetic, ethical and ontological consolations’.1 As we saw in Le pari mélancolique, Bensaïd politicises the need to transcend the absolutisation of the capitalist mode of production; from this vantage ground, I situate and detail Bensaïd’s unfinished workshop. Bensaïd’s last work in progress was Le Spectacle, stade ultime du fétichisme de la marchandise. Marx, Marcuse, Debord, Lefebvre, Baudrillard. Bensaïd seems to have worked on the project from 2004 onwards. Löwy writes that ‘It is an unfinished work, but with much wealth, opening numerous threads of research’. The unfinished work is a testament to Bensaïd’s intransigence, in which his mode of writing is ‘often interrogative, burning, fiery … as if carried away by urgency, the alarm of a ruthless illness, a death that is tragically too close’.2 The unfinished nature of this work means I shall construct this chapter in the following sequence: I will discuss alienation, reification and fetishism in the French moment of Marxism and philosophy, from Lefebvre and Guterman, through the Althusserian circle, in order to elucidate the threads of Bensaïd’s unfinished book. Thus, I divide this chapter into two meta-sections: a pre-Bensaïd discussion, and a focus on his book. The two sections should fold onto each other. 1 Bensaïd 2008a, pp. 348–9. 2 Schérer 2011, p. 7.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2024 | doi:10.1163/9789004687028_017

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Alienation, Reification and Fetishism in the French Moment of Philosophy

Bensaïd’s unfinished book on commodity fetishism forms part of a philosophical practice of creating and applying distinctions, marked by the politicised concerns of his conjuncture. To make visible the distinctions involved in the themes associated with commodity fetishism – involuntary servitude, spectacle, reproduction of domination, alienation, reification, fetishism, the Hegelian concepts of the in-itself and for-itself – it is above all necessary to provisionally grasp the development of these elaborations in the French moment of Marxism and philosophy, the given conditions in which they were produced and applied, reconstructing the genesis and theoretical effects of the distinctions themselves, asking whether thought has produced something conceptually new in the tensions of controversy. To what extent do the authors under question in this chapter take alienation and fetishism as part of Marx’s conceptual production? What concepts had their effects, and which were repressed? The assumption of this chapter is twofold: philosophical critique produces new concepts; and alienation and fetishism, as Marx articulates them, are decisive theoretical constructions in modern philosophy, constituting a point of no return. Bensaïd’s reflections on commodity fetishism, alienation and the quantification of social relations should be situated in the debates over Capital and the critique of political economy in France, as Artous has reconstructed them: In the 1960s and the 1970s, the discussions were not principally carried out around the concept of reification, as a particular interpretation of the theory of commodity fetishism, but – with the exception of some authors, in particular Jean-Marie Vincent – they were enclosed in the face-off (and the play of mirrors) between the partisans of the theme of alienation and the partisans of Althusser who not only criticised this thematic, but rapidly assimilated the theory of commodity fetishism to that of alienation in the early texts; more generally, they have been outside the field of reflection posed by the Marxist theory of value [… later on – D.R.]. In Relire Le Capital, Tran Hai Hac underlined the difference between the 1844 Manuscripts and Capital … It nonetheless introduced a new dimension into the discussion that we undoubtedly must pursue … In Capital, Marx, in order to outline his own theory of fetishism, takes as his point of departure the effects of certain relations of production and not, as in the 1844 Manuscripts, the dialectic of subject/object, the scission between the two and the alienation that results from it: the domination of the object,

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and relations between objects, over the subject. That said, in the historical form of social individuality generated by capitalism, ‘the individual formed into an independent individual indeed [perceives] its relation to society as a relation to something exterior which dominates it’. The alienation structured by the inversion of the subject/object relation, is in a certain manner a result of the process of fetishism that simultaneously masks the realities of the relations of production, while corresponding to a form of social individuality. We thus understand the fascination that the 1844 Manuscripts exerted and to which this text undeniably expresses a certain truth. This truth is that of alienation as a reality of capitalism and belongs to the experience of the individual constituted into a subject.3 Bensaïd’s writings on commodity fetishism, as we shall come to see, included, but were not confined to the specific debates of the 1960s and the 1970s; he in fact made the effort to develop the theme of fetishism in relation to value, but situated this is a broader philosophical-immanent critique of Marcuse, Debord, Lefebvre and Baudrillard.

2

Lefebvre’s Critical Breakthrough for French Marxism

Lefebvre pioneered the consideration of alienation and commodity fetishism in France, with his book co-written with Nobert Guterman, La conscience mystifiée, a landmark of French Marxism. Lefebvre was also the first to work on Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts, Lenin’s Hegel Notebooks and, together, Guterman and Lefebvre edited a volume of Hegel’s writings. Conceptually, Lefebvre worked out the notions of ‘alienation’, ‘praxis’, ‘Total Man’ and the ‘social totality’, many terms of which were repressed by dogmatic Stalinian readings of Marx. Lefebvre’s sociologies of everyday life, deconstructions of the philosophy of history, reflections on temporality, works on language, the problems of the city, fascism, critique of the state and defence of revolutionary romanticism can each be articulated to the theoretical space opened by Marx’s critique of political economy. Furthermore, Lefebvre’s untranslated autobiography La Somme et le reste remains one of the most incisive reflections on the relationship between Marxism and philosophy (again, with a section dedicated to alienation and fetishism). Lefebvre’s entire operation was about the joyful liberation of living labour from the dead.

3 Artous 2006a, pp. 106–8.

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La conscience mystifiée, a product of the ‘age of extremes’, produced a twofold critique of classical bourgeois philosophy and the mystified forms of fascisticnationalist consciousness, through a detailed analysis of the roots of alienated consciousness. Lefebvre’s book was an initial step in his attempt to give Marx’s theory a coherent concept of culture, to articulate the domination of capitalist production to representation and subjectivity, paying particular attention to private life and the literary representations of its alienation. The key concept of mystification was used to come to terms with fascism. This is an important move in the history of Marxism, because if Lukács’s reworking of reification was carried out as a form of philosophical recollection conditioned by the event of the Russian Revolution, Lefebvre’s was accomplished in conditions of the Nazi consolidation of power, Franco’s coup against the Republic in Spain and the February riots in France of 1934. That is why, Lefebvre and Guterman concerned themselves with the ‘mystification and the consciousness of the Forum’, a formulation that recalls the Roman Forum and its play of masks and the spectacle as a stabilising mechanism of Roman society, allowing its crowds to release the resentments accumulated in a brutal slaveholding society. In context, the critique of alienation, fetishism and mystification was a critique of fascist prevalence in the public sphere. From one angle, Lefebvre’s Hegelian debt is the notion that the unblocking of historically given alienations can be philosophically articulated with concepts striving towards reconciliation; Hegel’s attempt to give a positive philosophical, rational and conceptual resolution to alienation was valuable because it is an anti-mythical form of thought, at least in aspiration, if not, finally, in result. Mythical solutions to alienation produce new dogmatic fetishes taking the place of critical thought, because if human practices striving to transcend alienation are transposed into mysterious and apparently unknowable forms – religion for instance – then such solutions give rise to the ‘unhappy consciousness’ in the private sphere and possibly mythical-fascistic ideals in the public sphere, mere external projections of historically existing alienations. Religious and mystical solutions to modern alienation are fetishistic, as are the fascistic solutions, because they perpetuate a false unity, a false communion with Otherness, while also prolonging the rupture of consciousness and practice. They are incapable of producing liberated activity; limits are placed on rationality when alienations are not concretely situated in human practices, producing general claims like ‘the irrational is at the foundation of life’ or ‘suffering and the state of being torn are part of human destiny’, each of which is a-conceptual and tends to reinforce alienation instead of pointing towards its historical clearing. If all social institutions are the products of human practice, then religious and mystified explanations of their genesis, existence and becoming turn the

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given historical totality into an absolutised fetish, and the antagonisms in this historical reality become mystified. By contrast, the rational and revolutionary orientation recovers the historical development of consciousness and reality in the terms of human practices; in this sense, Lefebvre read Marx’s Capital and the critique of political economy as a labour of demystification, which suggests the possibility of human development without absolutised alienation. Lefebvre moved from description to explanation, articulating the different solutions to alienation based on private choices: a life in God, a life in love, a life in nature or a life in art. In the context of reading Bensaïd, it is important to note that Lefebvre’s stress on historical and political critique, based on the critique of political economy, effectively anticipated Bensaïd’s themes; and Bensaïd explicitly related his own project to Lefebvre’s commitment to the immanence of historical class struggles. At stake is the choice of concretely critical politics in place of the different forms of escapism from modern bourgeois societies in which the capitalist mode of production dominates. For Lefebvre, the solutions of God, love, nature and art are all pseudo-solutions to alienation, more a means to escape it than surmount it; they may indeed anticipate the resolution of alienation, yet as Lefebvre wrote, each choice is ‘only a flight into the unreal more unreal than from that which one flees’. The escapist illusion is a mystification, turning concrete transcendence into its imprisoning opposite: Bourgeois ideology offers hundreds of easy ways to get out of the bourgeois world – without actually leaving it. There is more than one ‘out there’. The ‘out there’ of religion, of philosophy (via transcendence and the absolute), of art. Kingdom of Heaven, of the Idea, or of Beauty. There are also the escape routes of outrage and romantic revolt. We escape – and by escaping we join the elite, the ‘right’ people, those who ‘keep their own counsel’. We have been given a rank. Not only have we never escaped, we’ve dug ourselves deeper into order. That’s the trap of the ‘superior’! We should not condemn bourgeois escapism because it is escapism (if it succeeded, what would we have to say? – that would be magnificent!), but precisely because it is not, because it is one more failure, one more deception. It was Rimbaud who said, ‘On ne part pas’ – we never leave. The ‘out there’ is never real. It is only out there in the reflection, and what’s more, it honestly and sincerely fulfils its function of keeping us in the here and now.4

4 Lefebvre and Guterman 1979, pp. 160–1.

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Lefebvre shows that the solutions invoking God, love, nature and art, replace a conscious comprehension of human practices; these are the exhausted Absolutes of modern bourgeois societies, the ‘pure passions’, ‘mysticism’, ‘intuition’ and ‘primordial Being’, manners of adapting oneself to a perceived immobile condition, rendering the contradiction alienation engenders as tolerable as possible, but which ultimately serves to reproduce the condition itself. Lefebvre’s life work can be read as an effort to exhaust the concept of alienation, grasp its historicity and substantive content to understand the nature of the modern bourgeois conjuncture in which the capitalist mode of production prevails. Lefebvre articulated these themes clearly in his autobiography La Somme et le reste (the philosophical component of the book was partly written to reflect upon and intervene into the discussions with Jean Paul Sartre, Lucien Goldmann and Pierre Naville). In a sense, Lefebvre also sets out a programme of research in relation to alienation, arguing ‘I believe in the impossibility of understanding the present without this concept; I believe it is a plausible hypothesis, if not an indispensable one’.5 Lefebvre’s programme of research pointed to the following lines of orientation: It would begin with a study of the magical and metaphysical origins of the concept [of alienation] and its metamorphoses, from the beginning of human thought up to Hegel’s, with its successive forms (the Fall, the procession of the aeons and hypostasis, Otherness, the relations between essence and appearance and manifestations in metaphysics). This history isn’t to be isolated from a rigorous semantic and philological study of the words that signify alienation, which includes legal vocabulary. Such an undertaking would be similar to Heidegger’s on the Logos (and other terms of pre-Socratic philosophy) as well as the studies of semioticians regarding signs and images in philosophical thought. This semantic study, and this would be new, could be part of a sociological study of the agrarian community and the modalities of its dissolution through private landed property. In simultaneously following the history of ideas, words and property, one would not attain the whole history of knowledge or of philosophy … one would reach an important aspect of this history. On would see, perhaps in every age, the reinvention of alienation as a theme, as well as the effort to reintegrate it into an ideological and social context, as well as in the philosophical tradition.6

5 Lefebvre 1959, p. 525. 6 Lefebvre 1959, pp. 524–5.

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Lefebvre worked up the conceptuality of alienation, as well as the historicalphilological investigations grounded in a materialist interpretation of history. Importantly, when Lefebvre wrote La Somme et le reste, he thought the debate over alienation was stillborn; it had yet even to take place. This was one reason why Lefebvre thought philosophy was in crisis, or there was a crisis of the philosopher. To intervene into this crisis, Lefebvre made several key points about alienation, which he believed were crucial to it conceptually. First, as I hinted at above, alienation plays a decisive role in Hegelianism and the transition from Hegelianism to Marxism, but also in the major theologicalphilosophical constructions. The theological-philosophical constructions attempt to explain how the Absolute or Truth are degraded and fall into the relative and error; in these metaphysical and theological systems, it is accepted that – with different images and words – a fall, a scission, a diremption has already taken place, where God is disobeyed, Adam and Eve fall from their state of perfection and bring evil into the world, and it is the task of metaphysics and theology to mend and reconcile this initial split. If alienation has a mysticaltheological origin, it has also traversed the history of philosophical thought, becoming more and more rational until it reaches the Hegelian systematic construction. Second, Lefebvre takes Marx’s critique of the Hegelian theory of alienation, which is based on practice, as a fundamental critique of philosophy as such. Lefebvre claims that Hegel’s theory of alienation is general and abstract, in which all the philosophical moments are slotted into the Hegelian system, which becomes a conceptual game. Marx, so Lefebvre argued, concretises, humanises and disperses the concept of alienation. Marx pluralises alienation. In this case, there is no single form of alienation traversing history. The pluralisation of alienation takes place in three ways: words, modalities and new constructions. As Lefebvre draws out in terms of vocabulary, Marx uses distinct terms with distinct meanings in the German to refer to alienation. In French and English, these terms are usually translated indiscriminately: Entfremdung, Verwirklichung, Entäußerung, Verdinglichung, etc. Entfremdung is to become ‘estranged’ from oneself, while Entäußerung is to be torn from oneself, Verwirklichung to find in fulfilment the principle of one’s decline and loss, Verdinglichung to become more thing-like, reified. In relation to modalities of alienation, Lefebvre sees that Marx differentiates them. There are religious alienations, economic alienations, political alienations and historical alienations. These differentiated alienations aren’t synonymous; they do however intersect. Lastly, according to Lefebvre, Marx sketches a theory of fetishism and reification, which constitutes the constructive moment. It is here that Lefebvre adopts an independent stand within the French Marxism of his time:

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[T]he theory of reification and fetishism dominates the whole of Capital. According to Marx, capital and capitalism are only possible because the relations of production (living labour, and the division of labour), as relations between human beings, fades from view, in and through the products and social objects that incorporate them, so to speak, and dominate them. Only in such a way could a social class make itself master and forge its domination over creative labour, the whole of production and society. Marx’s work follows the dialectic of reification and fetishism in successive degrees, with more and more depth: the commodity, money and capital. A well-known theory and yet nearly always misunderstood, because the commentators oscillate between two excesses: some see Capital as a philosophical work, incarnating the theory of alienation – and the others see in Capital a majestic work of political economy, the work of a man who went beyond philosophy into the domain of science. Neither understood the subtitle of Capital: ‘Critique of Political Economy’. Both neglect the movement of Marxian thought and its culmination: the study of praxis, in industrial society, with a conceptual apparatus emerging from philosophy but overcoming it as such.7 Between the philosophical and scientistic poles of the interpretation of Marx, Lefebvre shows the movement within Marx’s thought, where Capital envelops the philosophical notions that appeared early in Marx’s work (which he ceased to use in the same way after 1845) but in a superior way. The concept of fetishism, therefore, is simultaneously a new concept but unthinkable without the pre-history of alienation.

3

The Althusserian Repression of Alienation

Althusser had effectively ignored Lefebvre. Lefebvre’s works above all predate Althusser’s publication of For Marx (the La conscience mystifiée is thirty years earlier). Yet in Althusser’s preface to For Marx, he deplored the absence of Marxist theorists in France. Consequently, the Althusserian attempts to intervene into philosophy-theory-critique, like Rancière’s essay The Concept of Critique and the Critique of Political Economy: From the 1844 Manuscripts to Capital, cannot be seen as forming a linear and continuous part of the philosophical

7 Lefebvre 1959, p. 118.

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field Lefebvre was himself engaged in. They were discontinuous, and in a sense, they remained behind Lefebvre’s problematic. The Althusserian project can be taken to be an attempt to repress the problematic of alienation and banish it from the critique of political economy as an object of science. The organising principle of the Althusserian repression involved the rejection of the speculative function of alienation within Marx’s theory, or more specifically, to undermine the theoretical foundation of reification and fetishism. Althusser’s move was anti-Lukácsian, thinking that Lukács articulated an ideological-idealist, even religious-messianic, conception of the proletariat. He read Lukács’s position as positing the essential being of the proletariat as a universal class revolting against the loss of man, thus revolting against its own loss and realising the human essence itself. Althusser hinted at this in a footnote to For Marx: The whole, fashionable, theory of “reification” depends on a projection of the theory of alienation found in the early texts, particularly the 1844 Manuscripts, on to the theory of ‘fetishism’ in Capital. In the 1844 Manuscripts, the objectification of the human essence is claimed as the indispensable preliminary to the reappropriation of the human essence by man. Throughout the process of objectification, man only exists in the form of an objectivity in which he meets his own essence in the appearance of a foreign, non-human, essence. This ‘objectification’ is not called ‘reification’ even though it is called inhuman. Inhumanity is not represented par excellence by the model of a ‘thing’ … An ideology of reification that sees ‘things’ everywhere in human relations confuses in this category ‘thing’ (a category more foreign to Marx cannot be imagined) every social relation, conceived according to the model of a money-thing ideology.8 Althusser’s intervention into the theoretical field rejected the philosophicalideological function of alienation within fetishism and reification. Thus, the early contributors to the first volume of Reading Capital were initially compelled to find ways to repress the term. The Althusserian travail indeed had its productive effects, and I take two of these productive effects, Rancière’s essay in Reading Capital and Etienne Balibar’s The Philosophy of Marx. Rancière’s essay was published in the first edition of Reading Capital, but not the second due to his break with Althusser. It was an attempt to understand the critique of political economy on the conceptual plane. The decis-

8 Althusser 2005, p. 230.

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ive conceptual move Rancière made was to uncouple the notion of Marx’s scientific critique of political economy from what he called the anthropological problem of the alienated ‘human essence’. In Rancière’s terms, a critique based on a pre-existing ‘human essence’ is anthropological and pre-scientific. Rancière’s conceptual move was in line with Althusser’s attitude towards the young Marx’s writings: he saw Marx’s writings before 1845 to be anthropological, which basically means Feuerbachian. This was a basic problematic in which Marx applied to religion, politics, history and economics a conceptual structure in which man projects and alienates a generic and essential speciesbeing into something that dominates humanity by transforming humanity’s own objects into an object-form. Althusser basically thought that Marx’s pre1845 writings on political economy were philosophical critiques.9 That is to say, they did not produce a new scientific critique of political economy. Marx simply applied an abstract and general criticism, based on his philosophical anthropology, to the existing theories of political economy that he had not yet been able to overcome. The strength of the Althusserian case is to argue for a dual Marxian theoretical break with Hegel and Classical Political Economy. The weakness of the position is that they left aside the concept of alienation and failed to account for its concrete and possible uses, as in the case of Lefebvre discussed above. Rancière argued that there were three levels of theoretical elaboration of the critique of political economy: An initial anthropological level that remained incapable of transforming a theoretical object; a second remaining at the already given and immediate form of capitalist society, which adorns this given immediacy with an unsurpassable reality (the Classical Political Economists who eternalise the capitalist mode of production and the ways in which it meets the eye). The third level alone is a scientific critique because it relates and produces categories specific to the logic of an object and its development, which is the level Marx’s Capital reached. Only in the third level of elaboration does Rancière sees the utility of fetishism. The theory of fetishism allows for a grasping of the Wirklichkeit – the phenomenal form and the essential reality – of the capitalist relations of production, as their forms manifest themselves and show their real relations to be a function of the capitalist mode of production. It is useful to pay attention to the category of essence within this theory of fetishism because Rancière ruled out that the actual social relations of the capitalist mode of production

9 I discuss the early content of this question in relation to Karl Korsch in my forthcoming Karl Korsch: Weimar Germany’s Marxist Heretic.

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are pre-existing essences that are distorted by the mechanisms of fetishism, since there can be no generic-human essence behind but distorted by capitalist relations of production. The fetishistic illusion instead forms part of the relations of production and the circulation of commodities. In this sense, Rancière treats fetishism as an interesting theory of ideological misrecognition that is no longer anthropological, and for this reason, Rancière’s contribution was path breaking in the French context. He also posed the problem of form, i.e. the value-form and its relation to fetishism, before the publication of Isaac Rubin’s work in French. According to Rancière, residues of philosophical alienation remain ideological; in the ideological discourse, the contradiction of alienation appears as a ‘scission’, in which philosophical critique is supposed to grasp the meaning of the scission and restore a primordial unity of the subject. Such a primordial unity, emerging from the subject and returning to it, is a truth characterised ideologically. As Bensaïd explained of Rancière’s arguments: In the 1844 Manuscripts, anthropology still comes before the economy, man over the worker and God over capital. Alienation, in which essence becomes a means of existence, therefore is the point of departure, the general form, of which pauperisation is only the expression. In his first economic manuscripts, Marx deals with the economy in general and not a historically specific mode of production. Rancière thinks that he doesn’t avoid a philosophy of the subject, whereas the scientific work of Capital will succeed in desubjectivising the relations of production and make man a simple support (Träger) of categories. In short, the movement has barely begun that will lead to a ‘process without subject or end’.10 The key point for Rancière (as Bensaïd also reconstructed it) was that a critique under the conditions of an anthropological problematic makes it impossible for a scientific discourse. That is why Rancière suggested there are two different structures between the 1844 Manuscripts and Capital. Rancière suggested that there re-emerged in Marx a confusion between them, where Marx reverted back to the model of alienation when thinking about the capitalist mode of production. It could be taken from Marx’s vocabulary. Rancière ‘argued that Marx did not carry out a critique of his vocabulary … If Marx did not deem it necessary to establish terminological differences it is because he never rigorously thought the differences between his discourse and the anthropological

10

Bensaïd 1995c, Le sujet perdu et retrouvé.

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discourse of the young Marx’.11 With Rancière’s stress on Marx’s terminological ambiguity, we arrive at the beginning of the Althusserian circle, or rather, its founding assumption of the strict divorce between science and ideology, which originally powered the Althusserian project along. One can trace the development of the Althusserian relation to Balibar’s The Philosophy of Marx, where the fetish can be said to return to such Althusserian inspired problematics. The distance between Rancière’s and Balibar’s texts is significant. Balibar most systematically treats the ‘theoretical-philosophical’ issues tied to the theory of fetishism, its link to the theory of value and its differences with Lukács’s theory of reification. This was probably the first time that an author emerging from the Althusserian current did so with such clarity. It is all the more critical since Rancière broke from Althusser and rejected the strict divorce between science and ideology, while Balibar remained more or less committed to this Althusserian impetus (up to a point); thus, it is to Balibar’s discussion of fetishism that I now turn. Balibar’s two significant moves are to separate and distinguish Marx’s fetishism from the notion of ideology, then to also separate fetishism from Lukács’s notion of reification. The different notions of ideology, reification and fetishism are all attempts to theoretically resolve the fundamental and persistent problem of ‘consciousness and social revolution’, but each had their limit points and consequently, had failed. Balibar recognises that, each of these wagers on the problems of ‘consciousness’ relate to a specific account of the political logic of the modern bourgeois state. If one retraces Balibar’s attitude to fetishism, it is worth underlining that Althusser had declared commodity fetishism to be the ‘last trace of Hegelian influence’ in Marx, and in a note to Elements of Self-Criticism, Althusser claimed that it was necessary ‘to clear up the problem of the theory which serves as a philosophical alibi for all this “reification” literature: the theory of commodity fetishism in Book i, Part i of Capital’.12 Balibar explicitly rejected the notion of commodity fetishism in the name of ‘Althusserian orthodoxy’ in the Self-Criticism of his contribution to Reading Capital (1973). In the text, Balibar suggested that the theory of fetishism is ‘totally idealist’.13 The effective word of polemic, idealist, has a specific meaning within the Althusserian-inspired project’s Spinozist conception of ideology. Althusser read into Spinoza the first great materialist critique of ideology, insisting that the concept of ideology, as a critique of all ideology in general, was the crucial 11 12 13

Ibid. Althusser 1976, p. 118. Balibar 1973, p. 57.

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aspect of Marx’s theoretical revolution. Yet, Marx had invented the concept of ideology, but he left it underworked and incomplete. Thus, Althusser thought that the Marxist tradition had a weak spot in its understanding of ideology. Althusser found in Spinoza the elements for a materialist theory of ideology superior to Feuerbach and Hegel, beyond a philosophy of history, alienation and the human essence. Althusser treated the theory of fetishism later in Marx in his Limits, which was a key intervention into the crisis of Marxism and the crisis of the communist movement at the time, in which Althusser claimed that the theory of fetishism failed to grasp, or entirely underestimated, the concrete reality of the ideological role of the modern bourgeois state apparatus, the ‘state’s political-economic-ideological function as a machine for transforming the force that emanates from class struggle into power’. Hence, it was no coincidence that Balibar stressed that Marx’s use of ideology in the German Ideology manuscripts was unprecedented in the history of philosophy. But in the 1970s, Balibar claimed that the theory of fetishism failed to break with idealism: On this particular, but decisive point, the rupture with idealism has not taken place. In fact, there has only been a change in the form of idealism, the discovery of a form which is, certainly, ‘critical’ and has played a necessary part in the process of constitution of historical materialism, but which remains ideological and thereby demonstrates to us the dialectical, i.e. contradictory, uneven and uninterrupted character of this process, as is the case for every scientific theory.14 Balibar made a specific move here, by ruling out the spontaneous formation of ideology from economic social relations themselves, in order to underline that a theory of ideology must be based within the practices materialised and reproduced by the ideological state apparatuses. Balibar seems not to have given up the distinction between a theory of ideology and a theory of fetishism. But a step forward is taken in The Philosophy of Marx, because Balibar presents the theory of fetishism as an attempt to theorise the emergence of ideality, the idealisation and mystification of capitalist social relations and the emergence of subjectivity, a theory of subjection, as opposed to the theory of ideology as a theory of power relations, leading to two different lines of research within Marxism, one oriented towards the state and power relations, the other towards processes of fetishism and reification. This distinction drawn between ideology and fetishism turns out in Balibar to have theoretical stakes that have political effects: 14

Ibid.

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The theory of ideology is fundamentally a theory of the State (by which we mean the theory of domination inherent in the State), whereas that of fetishism is fundamentally a theory of the market (the mode of subjection or constitution of the ‘world’ of subjects and objects inherent in the organization of society as a market and its domination by market forces).15 Aligned to the distinction between ideology and fetishism is that between fetishism and reification, where Balibar claimed that Marx’s chapter on fetishism gives rise to two divergent paths: reification based on thing-hood and alienation, and an analysis of the mode of subjection implied in the notions of exchange. A shift of emphasis takes place, since Balibar does recognise that Marx’s theory of fetishism is one of the great theoretical constructions of modern philosophy. How and why was Marx’s theory of fetishism one of the greatest constructions of modern philosophy? Marx’s section on the fetish character of the commodity goes beyond the strict sphere of political economy. The theory of fetishism grounds and articulates the constitution of social objectivity, inheriting that which Marx wrote in the first thesis on Feuerbach, namely that reality, sensuousness and the object arise from sensuous human practices. Terms like objective [Gegenstandlich] and sensuousness [Sinnlich] all appear as part of Marx’s presentation of the value-form and the fetish character of the commodity. And, for Balibar, the recasting of social objectivity is at the same time a radical transformation of the concept of the ‘subject’. After the theory of fetishism, it was no longer possible to think about subjectification, subjection, and subjectivity as philosophy had done so before, which is why the neo-Kantian, phenomenological, existential and individualist theories often stumble in the face of, or are compelled to respond to, the breakthrough of the theory of fetishism. I thus quote Balibar at length to illustrate the content of the philosophical background of fetishism: We must remember here that, in the tradition of German idealism since Kant, the subject had been conceived first and foremost as a universal consciousness, both set above all particular individuals (hence the possibility of identifying it with the Reason of Humanity) and present in each of them: what Foucault was later to term the ‘empirico-transcendental doublet’, which we have seen Marx denounce as a mere variant of essentialism. Such a consciousness ‘constitutes the world’, i.e. makes it intelligible by means of its own categories or forms of representation – space,

15

Balibar 1995, p. 78.

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time, causality (Critique of Pure Reason, 1781). This side of that constitution of the world, Kant had to set aside the domain of the ‘necessary illusions’ of metaphysics or pure thought, which did not refer to anything in experience. These were something like the inevitable price to be paid for the capacity of reason to forge abstractions. Beyond this, escaping the constraints of nature and experience, he situated a ‘pure practical reason’, i.e. an unconditioned moral freedom, which aspired to constitute a ‘kingdom of ends’ based on mutual respect between persons (but all the more implacably subject for that to the inner law of duty, the famous ‘categorical imperative’). And even when Hegel, rejecting the separation of the natural from the moral world, demonstrated that the experience of consciousness was properly located in historical experience, this schema of the constitution of the world remained determinant. It made it possible to understand why it was, in the end, that spirit or reason which has been lost or alienated in the forms of nature and culture merely, in its various experiences, returns to itself, to the contemplation of its own structure, its own ‘logic’.16 Balibar worked through the implications of fetishism for philosophy against Kant and Hegel. Marx had consolidated a change of terrain and made a detour through the critique of economic representation which then had its effects on a previous philosophical problematic. Fetishism, within those societies in which the capitalist mode of production dominates as an automatic mechanism, accounts for the specific manner in which the world is formed, ‘the social world, structured by the relations of exchange, which clearly represents the greater part of the “nature” in which human individuals live, think and act today’.17 At stake is the genesis of subjectivity as an effect of the structures and class struggles of a historically given capitalist mode of production; from this theoretical problem, I turn back to Bensaïd.

4

Bensaïd’s Plans and Intentions

In the above, I have schematically reconstructed the essential details of ideology, alienation and fetishism (and the contested presence of reification) in the French moment of Marxism and philosophy to help the reader understand the

16 17

Balibar 1995, p. 65. Balibar 1995, pp. 64–5.

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dense theoretical development that took place, from Lefebvre to Balibar. I have omitted certain works, like Mandel’s study of Marx’s economic development, Vincent’s Fétichisme et société and Labica’s Le Paradigme du Grand-Hornu, Tran Hai Hac’s Relire “Le capital” and Artous’s Le fétichisme chez Marx, each of which I consider to be key achievements; I have also omitted, as far as possible (with the exception of Rancière’s essay), the works and authors Bensaïd himself discussed in his unfinished work.18 However, what I have set out should already be enough to situate and ground – theoretically, politically and historically – Bensaïd’s own unfinished work on commodity fetishism, written in a novel ideological-theoretical-philosophical conjuncture compared to the previous works, which set out a different terrain of discussion. It should help the reader answer a basic question: to what extent did Bensaïd’s unfinished work point in a forward direction for the object of inquiry? The section above articulates the theoretical development alienation and fetishism underwent; the section below articulates Bensaïd’s diagnostic of the contemporary cultural-politicalglobal situation. Bensaïd seemingly but provisionally organised his study of commodity fetishism into six parts. The parts do not exactly match with the edited notes left by Bensaïd, though the plan shows the terrain of Bensaïd’s thinking. The first was dedicated to Marx, the enchanted world of capital, drawing out the content of Marx’s chapter on fetishism in Capital, the ‘Holy Trinity’ and the madness of the system. The second part concerned fetishism and reification, which would have discussed the concepts from Lukács to Jean-Marie Vincent, Benjamin to Kracauer, Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life and the controversy between Artous, Löwy and Tombazos (from Contretemps – I write of it below). The third section was about the move from a critical to a senile situationism, which would take up Debord’s writings. The fourth part dedicated itself to Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, with emphasis on the repressive de-sublimination of modern bourgeois industrial and administrative societies, which voided art (and politics) of its critical and liberatory capacity; Bensaïd also hinted at the relations between ‘communicational logos’ and critical reason as well as Barthes’ work on mythologies, power and modernity. The fifth section – which does not seem to have been worked on beyond a reading of Jameson – was supposed to be on Jameson’s Late Marxism: Adorno, Or, the Persistence of the Dia-

18

To be exact, Bensaïd discussed Rancière’s essay in the mid 1990s; but the themes reappear. Le sujet perdu et retrouvé. This text is nearly identical to what is found in La discordance des temps, and in particular the passage on p. 172. The difference is that, here, Bensaïd has a re-reading of Jacques Rancière’s contribution to Reading Capital, which does not appear in La discordance des temps.

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lectic. The final sixth section concerned the ‘post-modern’ turn, with Baudrillard in particular, ‘from the spectacle to the simulacra’. In addition to the plan, Bensaïd’s overarching themes, which demonstrate his intentions, included a critique of liberal globalisation as a finalising logic of domination, a critical discussion of the discourse of reproduction – as in Bourdieu’s Masculine Domination, the transition from the disciplinary society to societies of control, and Surya’s total domination – the consequences of the transformation with the rise of post-modern ‘storytelling’, the eclipse of politics (governance as a technology of power) and strategy; these themes intersected with Bensaïd’s efforts to grasp liberatory practices, crisis and the party.19

5

Of Involuntary Servitude

Étienne de La Boétie, a close friend of Michel de Montaigne, had discoursed (1548) on the nature of voluntary servitude, constituting a critical regard on the forms of personal sovereign power of his time. At stake was the nature of the transition from personal to impersonal forms of domination and the forms of resistance against them, which is why Bensaïd set out to criticise the notion that modern impersonal forms of domination could be broken by refusing the ‘voluntary servitude’, as La Boétie had argued. La Boétie’s lines, so Bensaïd reminded his reader, had become part of the habitual texture of the contemporary philosophical discourse of resistance, grounding a form of radicalism that, on Bensaïd’s interpretation, would not be sufficient to confront the modern bourgeois state machine and the capitalist mode of production. La Boétie’s discourse confronted servitude with libertas, enjoining his readers to insist on the joy of liberty, in opposition to the sovereign’s call of duty, humanising the sovereign by taking away his divinity, making him predisposed to resistance. La Boétie effectively articulated the powers of ideological interpellation in the reign of personal-pre-modern domination, which is why he asked, in such sharp terms, why subjects allowed themselves to be subjected to the sovereign; his solution, however, was not to topple the sovereign, but to change minds and refuse to grant him power, writing ‘I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces’.20 This, for La Boétie, was a refusal of voluntary servitude. 19 20

Bensaïd 2011b, pp. 131–4. La Boétie 1576, The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude.

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Bensaïd combated the conflation of modern and pre-modern, impersonal and personal, forms of domination, polemicising against the transposition of one form of resistance onto the other. He also drew the analogy with students in the aftermath of ’68 who thought getting rid of the police in their own minds would be enough to fight the police, the state apparatus and its ideological forms. For Bensaïd, one had above all to identify whether or not modern forms of domination and dependence were voluntary or involuntary, explaining that La Boétie ‘combated a theological conception of power based of bonds of allegiance and personal dependence’, a form of coercion in which the tiller of the land had to hand over all or part of their surplus labour to a lord. In the conditions of modern bourgeois societies in which the capitalist mode of production dominates and the modern bourgeois state, ‘impersonal domination – and no longer servitude – is rooted in the objectification of reified social relations’.21 According to Bensaïd, the anachronistic transposition of La Boétie’s Discourse onto the conditions of the modern bourgeois states and societies had deleterious consequences because it encouraged ‘social contempt’ against wage labourers; wage labourers, having nothing to sell but their own abilities and faculties and must consume the commodities marketed to them, are taken – in the terms of this transposition – to exercise a freedom of choice that complies with their own subjection and servitude. Thus, as Bensaïd explained, if it is sufficient to no longer serve to be free, then servitude seems to be the result or even ‘the punishment of a collective cowardice of the rabble’.22 The anachronistic transposition misses the historical specificity of the modern forms of bourgeois domination, which combines workers (most often) not through direct physical force (though this does feature) or forced labour, corvée labour or slave labour (though these forms persist), but by the effects of the market and the division of labour. Specifically, the modern bourgeois state is an impersonal form of power based on objective exploitation, not personal dependence, despite the fact that a multiplicity of dependencies remains effective in the forms of exploitation. In modern bourgeois societies, therefore, the ‘resolve to serve no more’ does not confront the impersonal power of capital, instead it results in ‘exile, exodus, evasion, towards lines of flight’ (a reference to those influenced by Deleuze).23 Bensaïd’s position directly pertains to a concept of liberation from the infernal cycle of capitalist reproduction, which cannot be evaded en masse; it is not ‘enough to imagine a happy Sisyphus’, Bensaïd argued, because liberation is an effective historical transformation, which is realist and prosaic, 21 22 23

Bensaïd 2011b, p. 19. Bensaïd 2011b, p. 20. Bensaïd 2011b, pp. 20–1.

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revolutionary in a collective sense. The defence of the historical and collective dimension of liberation, instead of individual lines of flight, flows into Bensaïd’s decisive claim that ‘the emancipation of each is the condition for the emancipation of all, insofar as emancipation is not a solitary pleasure’.24 Bensaïd’s opposition of a voluntary servitude to a tyrant and the ‘involuntary subjection’ [l’assujettissement involontaire] to the despotism of capital grounds the discussion of subjectivisation, consciousness, ideology, discipline, concentrating them on modern class struggles. At issue, additionally, is the relationship of the singular individual and the collective struggles, which is why Bensaïd also drew upon Gustav Landauer’s writings on revolution (Landauer had himself excavated La Boétie). Landauer recognised that La Boétie ‘was posing the question of his era, if people had sufficiently understood it: how can an entire people, consisting of countless individuals, allow a single person to torture them, abuse them, and rule over them against their interests and against their will?’25 Furthermore, Landauer explained in a section that spoke to Bensaïd: La Boétie’s essay is the most perfect of all of revolution’s microcosms. It represents a spirit that first appears to be solely negative, but soon draws enough power from this negativity to proclaim the positive that has to come even if it cannot be described yet. La Boétie’s essay already said what others would later say in various languages: Godwin, Stirner, Proudhon, Bakunin, Tolstoy … The message is: It is in you! It is not on the outside. It is you. Humans shall not be united by domination, but as brothers without domination: an-archy. Today, however, we still lack the consciousness for such a positive motto, so for now the motto must remain: without domination: – … The negation of rebellious souls is filled with love; a love that is force, in the sense formulated so well by Bakunin: ‘The joy of destruction is a creative joy’. Rebellious souls know that humans are brothers and that they ought to live as such.26 Bensaïd seems to have left the pathos of this libertarian passage uncommented upon, moving onto perhaps the more important feature of Landauer’s reading of La Boétie, that La Boétie had made two discoveries of the era, namely the ‘Contr’un’ and the ‘Contre-État’. The Contr’un is a people consisting of individuals with a sense of individual sovereignty who terminate their obedience 24 25 26

Bensaïd 2011b, pp. 19–22. Landauer 2010, p. 158. Landauer 2010, p. 160.

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to the one and rise above servitude; the Contre-État is a state that is no state, a ‘community of people outside the state; not as a sum of isolated individual atoms, but as an organic unity, a web of many groups’. Of this concept, Bensaïd understood not only personal emancipation, but a social counter-power: We do not know much yet about this supra-individual entity filled by spirit. One day, however, we will understand that socialism is not the invention of something new, but the discovery of something that has existed for a long time. Once the right bricks have been found, the right builders will be found too.27 Notwithstanding the ostensibly idealist overtones of Landauer’s claim, the kind of primordial rediscovery of a past form filled with new spirit, the identification of a social counter-power was significant, because it did point towards class struggles. This was a remarkable reading of La Boétie’s Discourse. However, and Bensaïd’s transition is quite abrupt about it, the main concern then became the effort of the philosophies of resistance, ‘a recurrent temptation, in defensive times, of “purifying the contradiction” [a term of Rancière’s] and eliminating from it all mediation and representation’.28 As previous chapters have made clear, and this chapter reinforces, Bensaïd constantly identified the manners in which philosophies of resistance produced a (false) Beyond owing to their inability to face the modern forms of bourgeois domination, which seems to absorb and integrate all forms of critique and contestation. Proponents of Beyonds as such act ‘as if one did not belong to this world, as if one could set up camp in an outside, in an absolute exteriority to the vicious circle of domination, even if it means substituting for the real protagonists of the historical struggle, no longer classes or fractions of classes, parties, social movements, but a theatre of shadows where the formless dissident masses (plebes, multitudes, hordes, unkempt) fight against the totalitarian state conceived as a gigantic Gulag’.29 Bensaïd is identifying the ideological transformation symbolised by Glucksmann’s The Cook and the Cannibal (1974), important, on Bensaïd’s word, because it also meant the conceptual transition from classes to plebes and peoples to multitudes. On this point, Bensaïd drew from Rancière’s criticism of Glucksmann’s book because Rancière had seen that the book was constructed entirely on the ‘purification of contradiction’, which counterposed the Master discourse to the plebeian discourse, a ‘displacement of vocabulary 27 28 29

Landauer 2010, p. 168. Bensaïd 2011b, p. 22. Ibid.

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[that] contributed to eliminating the question of mediations and representation, perceived as the principal obstacle to emancipation. The suffering of the plebe is mute’.30 As Bensaïd explained, a mute plebeian was all too convenient for the intellectual who claimed to speak for it. The figure of the plebe appeared as that which the intellectual was to represent, but in a way that denied representation; this gave way to a false immediate unity of the intellectual and the plebe. This search for an ahistorical subject that could substitute for the struggle of classes and parties – which require representation and mediation – was a familiar problem that emerged out of the anti-globalisation movement (Bensaïd named the Invisible Committee and John Holloway).

6

Myths and Legends of Domination

Bensaïd surveyed the different philosophical-cultural claims made about the vicious circle of domination; Marcuse was probably the most significant representative of the immediate post-war period (prior to Foucault’s diagnosis discussed in the last chapter), who appeared in Bensaïd’s early student writings, as well as his late unfinished set of questions. Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man concerned the pure form of domination that had seemed to find its final form in the advanced industrialised countries, where the proletariat seemed to have been tied to capitalism owing to abundance (implying that the proletariat had no material need or interest in its overthrow). Marcuse claimed that critique effectively lost its grounding in the advanced industrial societies because the modalities and systems of domination and administration produced forms of social organisation that could contain anti-systemic struggles and movements. The key point was that modern industrial societies could ensure no new qualitative breakthrough and transition towards another liberated mode of production. The revolution, on Marcuse’s argument, was checked by abundance. Marcuse was coming to terms with the new conditions of political and social liberation. According to Bensaïd, Marcuse’s anxiety was ‘representative of the doubts born of a period of post-war growth, of capitalism’s regained dynamism and its capacity to integrate the workers’ movement into the institutional procedures of the welfare state’.31 Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason (1961), the second volume of Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life of the same year, Gorz’s Neo-

30 31

Bensaïd 2011b, pp. 22–3. Bensaïd 2011b, p. 27.

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Capitalism and Workers’ Strategy (1964), Adorno’s Negative Dialectics (1966), Foucault’s The Order of Things (1966) and Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle (1967) formed part of this constellation of doubt and response. Among many different critical theorists – under different forms – one thus finds the echo of questions raised by Marcuse, but also Georges Perec, Guy Debord, Lefebvre, Jean Baudrillard, Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, particularly the theme of alienation in a consumerist society endowed with abundance. Bensaïd illustrated the constellation of doubt, in relation to Marcuse, with Georges Perec’s Things: A Story of the Sixties, in which one can read the agonies of a consumerist society of abundance, writing that it recalls ‘the first pages of Capital, where Marx defined capitalism as an “immense accumulation of commodities”, the inventory lists an immense accumulation of objects’.32 The characters, as Perec wrote, ‘wanted superabundance … the enemy was unseen. Or rather, the enemy was within them, it had rotted them, eaten them away … They lived in a strange and shimmering world, the bedazzling universe of a market culture, in prisons of plenty, in the bewitching traps of comfort and happiness’. The characters lived in a blessed parenthesis, ‘in a vacuum full of promise, and from which you expect nothing’. In this vacuum, ‘Jerome and Sylvie did not quite believe you could go into battle for a Chesterfield settee. But it was, all the same, the banner under which they would have enlisted so readily. There was nothing, they thought that concerned them in party manifestos’. This was the tranquil tragedy in which one no longer exists, across the passing hours, the succession of days, the procession of the seasons, the flow of time, you survive, without joy and without sadness, without a future and without a past, just like that: simply, self-evidently, like a drop of water forming on a drinking tap on a landing … like a rat.33 Perec’s passages relate to Marcuse and Baudrillard; the literature, as Bensaïd points out, interrogated the different environments in which new forms of resistance, subversion and alterity could emerge to confront instrumental rationality’s commodified and bureaucratic domination. Marcuse essentially thought the popular classes had turned conservative; as a result, it was necessary to find new sources of subjectivity among the pariahs, unemployed, persecuted coloured races, the prison and the asylums.34 According to Marcuse, ‘It is those who are without hope that hope is given to us’, a desperate hope that was found 32 33 34

Bensaïd 2011b, pp. 28–9. Perec 1990, p. 177. Bensaïd 2011b, p. 29.

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in the event of May ’68 and its continuations. Yet, in the end, ‘the medium of technology, culture, politics, and the economy merge into an omnipresent system which swallows up or repulses all alternatives’.35 As for Baudrillard, from the 1970s, he ‘announced the post-modern theme of a fragmented history and the loss of a sense of the future, by introducing – in The Consumer Society – the notion of simulation’.36 The nature of the consumer society and simulation diagnosed by Baudrillard – I draw on Bensaïd’s discussion – made it propitious to sporadic outbursts of violence without any strategic content, a fact that speaks to the late stage of commodity fetishism, the hour of the simulacra taking the stage of the spectacle. Thus, as Baudrillard claimed, ‘ “spectacular” violence and the pacification of daily life are homogeneous, because they are each equally abstract and each is a thing of myths and signs’. Consumer society is ‘at one and the same time a society of solicitude and a society of repression, a pacified society and a society of violence’. This kind of violence was objectless and sporadic, ‘but virtually endemic in all developed or over-developed countries, is that of the fundamental contradictions of affluence’.37 For Bensaïd, this represented a closing of historicity, annihilating the possibility of politics as a strategic thought beyond the administration of a modern bourgeois present in the cycles of the reproduction of domination; Baudrillard was, in this sense, quite perceptive, Bensaïd noting that ‘In 1970, Baudrillard sensed this eclipse of strategic reason. Ten years later in Simulacra and Simulation, he anticipated much of Fukuyama’s declaration, by decreeing the pure and simple loss of historical meaning’, in which history became the absent reference.38

35 36

37 38

Marcuse 1964, p. 12. Bensaïd 2011b, p. 30. For Baudrillard: ‘The usage of signs is always ambivalent. Its function is always a conjuring – both a conjuring up and a conjuring away: causing something to emerge in order to capture it in signs (forces, reality, happiness, etc.) and evoking something in order to deny and repress it. We know that, in its myths, magical thought seeks to conjure away change and history. In a way, the generalized consumption of images, of facts, of information aims also to conjure away the real with the signs of the real, to conjure away history with the signs of change, etc … It seems that a seriously splintered collectivity, because it is cut off from its past and lacks any imagining of a future, re-enters an almost pure world of drives, mingling in the same feverish dissatisfaction the immediate determinations of profit and sex’. 1998, p. 34. Baudrillard 1998, pp. 175–6. Bensaïd 2011b, p. 31. We see this when Baudrillard wrote, ‘The great event of this period, the great trauma, is this decline of strong referentials, these death pangs of the real and of the rational that open onto an age of simulation … Whereas so many generations, and particularly the last, lived in the march of history, in the euphoric or catastrophic expectation of a revolution – today one has the impression that history has retreated, leaving behind it an indifferent nebula, traversed by currents, but emptied of references … One

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The loss of historicity and the so-called degree zero of the political meant that Bensaïd reinforced the idea of recommitting to the contradictions of a relational notion of class struggle and a politics of mediation based on a strategic knowledge of history – in contrast to the purification of contradiction Rancière already identified. Fast forward some two decades, and with the return of the winter strikes of 1995 Bensaïd noted that there was a tendency to turn political incapacity into a virtue. At stake, now, was Bourdieu’s attitude to domination too. The winter strikes demonstrated that subversion not only existed, but that they didn’t remain subordinate to the fortified concept of domination; rather, according to Bensaïd, it was better to draw together the conflicts involving hegemony, exploitation, oppression, discrimination, notwithstanding the fact that they remained subaltern to that which they resisted, ‘the fate of all struggle being asymmetrical and the challenge of every resistance that would turn a weakness into strength’.39 Bensaïd thus articulated an alternative to concepts absolutising domination in a way that prioritises the historical, conflictual and political content of liberatory practices. Of course, Bensaïd’s position also implies an alternative to retreats into ontology and aesthetics, when they substitute for politics. In relation to the asymmetrical relations of exploiters and exploited, Bensaïd noted: The problem of politics, conceived of in a strategic and not in a bureaucratic way, consists in grasping the junctures of crisis and favourable moments to overturn this asymmetry [between rulers and ruled – D.R.]. To do that, we must accept working in the contradictions and real relations of force, rather than believe, illusorily, we can deny them or subtract ourselves from them. Because the subalterns (or the dominated) are not outside of the political domain of struggle and domination is never complete and absolute. The outside is always inside. Liberation pierces the very heart of the arrangements of power. Practice brings experience and specific knowledge, capable of providing the arms for an alternative hegemony. And the norms of domination can be broken by an event that results neither from the necessity of the social order, nor from the action of a subject historically predestined, nor from a theological

39

can no longer imagine what project, what power, what strategy, what subject could exist behind this enclosure, this vast saturation of a system by its own forces, now neutralized’. Baudrillard 1994, p. 43. Bensaïd 2011b, p. 39.

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miracle, but from ordering practical political battles, engaging the clutch of the movement that tends to abolish the present state of things.40 Bensaïd’s wager on a liberatory politics cut against those authors who thought it was no longer possible to break the vicious circle of domination, like Agamben who absolutised Foucault’s biopower or Holloway who closed the circle of fetishism. These are but conceptual absolutisations affirming Thatcher’s point that There Is Not Alternative, about which Bensaïd wisecracked ‘Mrs Thatcher was thus correct: she was just a little too early’.41 Bensaïd’s alternative, as the above passage shows, is to politicise history and historicise politics, to think politically and historically, the singularity of conjunctures and situations, and the liberatory event as an articulation of the necessary and the contingent, as a political singularity in concrete history. Bensaïd’s politicisation of history entered into an appreciative though critical dialogue with Rancière’s The Misadventures of Critical Thought. Bensaïd’s stress on the critique of political economy and the nature of strategicrevolutionary thinking was, at a certain limit, quite different to Rancière’s concerns. Rancière assumed that the ‘incapable are capable’, that ‘there is no hidden secret of the machine that keeps them trapped in their place’. Every ‘situation can be cracked open from the inside, reconfigured in a different regime of perception and signification’. According to Rancière, reconfiguring ‘the landscape of what can be seen and what can be thought is to alter the field of the possible and the distribution of capacities and incapacities’. What Rancière called ‘dissensus’ involved bringing back into the debates both the ‘obviousness or what can be perceived, thought and done, and the distribution of those who are capable of perceiving, thinking and altering the coordinates of the shared world. This is what a process of political subjectivisation consists in: in the action of uncounted capacities that crack open the unity of the given and the obviousness of the visible, in order to sketch a new topography of the possible’.42 However, the logic of Rancière’s work, on Bensaïd’s reading at least, ends in a form of powerlessness because, ‘the confidence in this capacity for invention, experimentation without a project, can also disconnect their critical capacity from all horizon of emancipation’.43 According to Bensaïd, a horizon of emancipation has to be reconstructed out of the critical experiences and experimentations of struggles, experimentations in which critical theory 40 41 42 43

Bensaïd 2011b, p. 40. Ibid. Rancière 2009, pp. 48–9. Bensaïd 2011b, p. 42.

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and political-strategic projects have a determinate place. In this sense, Bensaïd argued, ‘the question is thus posed of knowing if we will be able to rally the revolutionary and the anti-capitalist, the militant and the activist, those for whom the question of power is posed and those who unconditionally resist, the one that illuminates and the one who is actively involved, in order to weave between them a common revolutionary culture’, a classic convergence of those entering into struggle, with all the experiences they produce, and the experiences of an already constituted set of revolutionary politics that can intervene and orient at decisive moments of crisis and rupture.44 As we have seen, Bensaïd’s wager was one of radical immanence, since he argued that the ‘destruction of this world is immanent from within its crux. We must install ourselves in the contradiction, work on it from the inside. Neither exile, nor the exodus of new nomads’.45 For Bensaïd, Frederic Jameson was a positive example of the immanentist operation of theory and politics, since he situated the cultural turn in the context of the transformations of the capitalist mode of production, making the effort to understand the changes in the class struggle through the accumulation of capital and its mode of domination.46

7

From Alienation to Reification [chosification]

Bensaïd thought Marx combined the concepts of alienation, fetishism and reification; his conceptual articulation should be read against my discussion above, of Lefebvre, Rancière and Balibar. In Le spectacle, stade ultime du fétichisme de la marchandise, Bensaïd narrated the religious content of the tripartite concepts, interrogated certain meanings of the German terms for alienation, confronted Hegel – based on Marx’s critique – drew out the shifts in Marx’s theoretical discourse, and explored the history of the concept of fetishism. About the religious content of alienation, Bensaïd echoed the Gospel of John: At the beginning was the logos; likewise, ‘At the beginning, was separ44 45

46

Ibid. Bensaïd 2011b, pp. 42–3. Bensaïd was articulating a point common to the lcr of the mid 1970s with respect to Rancière. Antoine Artous’s review of the latter’s Althusser’s Lesson, where he wrote ‘it is not a systematic theory that is opposed to Althusser – however present in Marx – but effectively the inverse of theoreticism … We see in this the traces of a “theoretical spontaneism” which is expressed in the Maoist currents … Reacting to the discourse of the “autonomy of theoretical practice”, [they flip over – D.R.] to a reductionistic and populist vision of theoretical elaboration’. Artous 1975, pp. 94–5. Bensaïd 2011b, p. 43.

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ation – separation of man from nature, worker from his tool, producer and consumer, man from citizen, the social from the political, economics and morals’.47 Political economy took private property as its starting point, yet did not explain the fact of private property, shining no light on the cause of the division between labour and capital, and between capital and land, conjointly unable to account for alienation and private property, through which separation depreciates humans, dispossesses [Entäußerung] and alienates [Entfremdung] them from the world that they produce.48 Bensaïd effectively summarised Marx’s notes in the 1844 Manuscripts, in which private property is taken to be the product of alienated labour, the external relation of the worker to nature and to herself or himself. From classical political economy’s vantage ground, the worker is presented as a toiling animal reduced to narrow bodily needs. The more the working animal creates wealth, the more it becomes beastly and degraded facing the accumulation of the world of things. The worker is degraded, turned into a commodity and becomes the most wretched of commodities. The degradation of the worker is in proportion to the power of what she has produced. The worker exists first only ‘as a worker; and, second, as a physical subject. The height of this servitude is that it is only as a worker that she can maintain herself as a physical subject, and that it is only as a physical subject that she is a worker’.49 Also, so Bensaïd claims, the modern bourgeois world is filled with autonomous-alienated powers – Money, the Market, the Economy, the State, History, Science, Art – ‘that are expressions of human activity and social relations, but that appear to dominate their creator with their terrifying force’.50 All of this is a consequence of the fact that the worker is alienated from her labour’s product, and ‘So much does the appropriation of the object appear as estrangement that the more objects the worker produces the less she can possess and the more she falls under the sway of her product, capital’.51 Labour in bourgeois societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails is not about the satisfaction of needs, instead it is a means to gratify needs outside of the worker. To whom does this labour belong? ‘To a being other than myself’, but who is this being? To ‘some other person than the worker’.52 Bensaïd drew the consequence, for liberation, from this set of facts, namely that servitude

47 48 49 50 51 52

Bensaïd 2011b, p. 49. Bensaïd had referred to Jean Hyppolite’s translation of alienation as extranéité, for which, he suggests, the English use estrangement, which comes from old French. Marx 2010a, p. 273. Bensaïd 2011b, p. 50. Marx 2010a, p. 272. Marx 2010a, p. 278.

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cannot be abolished through consciousness alone, instead ‘one must go to the root of things’, to abolish the coerced labour and its derived forms of private property, i.e. to abolish the division of labour of modern bourgeois societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails and achieve liberation on the basis of the dialectic of needs. Bensaïd demarcated the young from the mature Marx, in a manner similar but not the same as Rancière in his contribution to the first edition of Reading Capital. Without having accepted the Althusserian thesis of the epistemological break, Bensaïd nonetheless pursued the philosophical strategy (we are indebted to Plato for it) of cutting through the middle of things; a decisive transition from Marx’s critique of religion, the 1844 Manuscripts signalled the transposition of critique from the religious to the social terrain. Critically, the manuscripts remained within the complex of concepts assigned by Hegelian anthropology, which as Bensaïd noted, articulated a sequence of alienation, since it grasps the production of humanity through itself as ‘a process of alienation (or “self-alienation of spirit”)’, and the ‘suppression of alienation – losing self, returning to self and sublating self – passing through labour’.53 Bensaïd draws out the distinction between Hegel and Marx in terms of the 1844 Manuscripts, relating that despite having grasped labour and human practices in the unfolding of Spirit, Hegel nevertheless produces an abstract and formal suppression of alienation in history, at least as one may reconstruct Marx’s thesis about the matter in this way. Besides, at stake is the relation between the role of the philosopher, who thinks concepts on an alienated terrain in order to arrive at reconciliation, and the materiality of class struggles, which can alter the alienated terrain; however, at the stage of the 1844 Manuscripts, Marx was in transition away from a not entirely materialist notion of classes. Hegel’s relation to alienation, which is the philosopher’s relation, tended to close the reproduction of alienation in on itself; implicit in the philosopher’s position is an inversion of real life and philosophy, because for the philosopher, as Marx argues, real political, religious, artistic, natural existence is not gained through the facts of existence, but through the production of a philosophy of such existent objects. On this point, Bensaïd read from Marx a twofold content, a conflict between an emerging materialism and a speculative idealism. On one side, Bensaïd took Marx to have situated alienation in the context of its material determinations ‘in the social relations of labour’, which is also a critique of those who made of it a simple illusion or false consciousness.54 Such is the

53 54

Bensaïd 2011b, p. 52. Bensaïd 2011b, p. 53.

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materialist side. On the other side, Marx’s critique remained within the speculative complex of terms, first the dialectic of consciousness and the development of consciousness, second the in itself and the for itself, and third, between appearance and essence, all within a Feuerbachian and Hegelian philosophical constellation. Within this speculative complex, Marx presented communism as the reconciliation of appearance and essence, or the actual realisation of the human essence. For Bensaïd, the notion of alienation – as read from The Holy Family – presupposes ‘an authentic common human essence lost in the appearances of the world’.55 Here, I read Bensaïd as making two criticisms, which we have encountered in previous chapters. Bensaïd was reaffirming, or restating, the criticism of authenticity, in which a substantialist use of essence is mobilised for the application of critique on the social terrain, but remains philosophical and speculative, despite Marx’s break with philosophy already on the way; more decisively, though intimately connected, Bensaïd underlines the moment of theoretical systematisation – in the Grundrisse and Capital – in which Marx moves beyond the speculative residues ‘that still haunt his own thought’.56 The second criticism is decisive. Marx’s early philosophical critique of alienated labour, which combines without overcoming classical political economy (its discovery of labour as a source of wealth) and Hegel’s centring of labour as the essence of humanity, indeed needed a theoretical systematisation of in the critique of political economy; furthermore, though Bensaïd sees the German Ideology manuscripts as a setting of accounts with the German idealist legacy, for they show that existence determines consciousness (consciousness being a social product), ‘in the absence of a more elaborated theory of fetishism, ideology remains a reflection/echo of social relations without specific history’.57 In contrast to these theoretical points, Bensaïd affirmed the two historical conditions for the abolition of alienation, specifically the existence of a mass of propertyless humanity and the sufficient development of the productive forces. In the context of this discussion, Bensaïd drew out the history of the concept of fetishism, which is generally attributed to Balthazar Bekker’s The World Bewitched (1691), where he compared the old pagan religions to the religions of ‘savages’, and Charles des Brosses book about religion and fetishism, in which he initiated a theory of primitive religions. Fetishism has its roots, as Bensaïd suggests in the Portuguese word for feitiço [ fabriqué-artificiel]. The term was invented, or used, by Portuguese navigators to name practices of certain African populations they encountered on their colonial incursions; in such practices 55 56 57

Bensaïd 2011b, p. 54. Bensaïd 2011b, p. 53. Bensaïd 2011b, p. 54.

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it was said that supernatural powers were invested in material objects, which were worshiped in turn. The key point about the term is that, so Bensaïd summarised, it refers to ‘symbolically poor’ primitive religions.58 The prejudiced and colonial-racist overtones of the early writers is clear. For des Brosses, fetishism among the African populations was ‘the sign of archaism in relation to the line of progress that consists in moving from sensible objects to abstract knowledge’.59 Artous also took the colonial origins the term up, writing: The term is taken up by the Enlightenment thinkers. Throughout the nineteenth century, the notion was reworked. Hegel limited fetishism to Africa and the cult of fetishes corresponded to a period where men are still outside of history … At the beginning of the twentieth century, Marcel Mauss explained that the theory of fetishism was void, because of its Eurocentric and strong colonial overtone.60 Bensaïd mobilised the history of the concept to focus on its modern-bourgeois and relevant content in Marx (and Freud), which means he could not be said to have agreed with Mauss that the theory of fetishism was void because of its colonial genesis; in Marx the concept concerns modern bourgeois social phenomena, in Freud, it refers to the contemporary psychic processes in which ‘the sexual perversion consists in taking the part for the whole’.61 The term makes a transition, moving away from its ethological character, towards its function as ‘a critical concept’.62 According to Bensaïd, the fetish character of ‘the commodity results from the absence of a critical reflection about social production and the attribution of natural properties to social things’.63 Turning to Marx, who already articulated the social objectivity of idols – money and the gods that were invested with power in the life worlds in which they were effective – he knew that the Delphic Apollo had a real power throughout the life of the Greeks. For Freud, such a fetishistic power emerges from the taboo (sacred and disturbing) that becomes an autonomous power, in which ‘the primitives see in the name a part of the person’. Marx’s ideas about fetishism in 1844 Manuscripts, so Bensaïd noted, present it as an archaic cult of money (as distinct from what it would become with greater systematisation).

58 59 60 61 62 63

Bensaïd 2011b, p. 55. Ibid. Artous 2006, p. 1. Bensaïd 2011b, p. 55. Ibid. Ibid.

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I must make a conceptual clarification at this point because Bensaïd is working with the distinctions between alienation, fetishism and reification. Three things need to be said about the distinction of these terms. First, Bensaïd was aware that the distinction was discerned already, or at least could be discerned, in the early Marxist authors like Lukács, Korsch and Jakubowski. Lukács had reformulated the theory of fetishism with a Weberian inspired philosophical construction, producing the concept of reification in his own right; Korsch differentiated between philosophical alienation and the scientific critique of fetishism, taking fetishism to be a key to all the other illusory categories of the capitalist mode of production and the scientific critique of political economy; Jakubowski, by contrast, returned to alienation, in Bensaïd’s terms, as flowing from the division of labour instead of being a structural effect of the reproduction of capitalist relations of production taken in their totality; false consciousness was thus an effect of the division of labour, thus raising the twofold difficulty of the division of labour in the young Marx, and the problematic of false consciousness. Indeed, in Jakubowski, Feuerbachian religious alienation is applied to the division of labour and the ways in which creativity is stifled and the labourers are torn from their product. For Bensaïd, this humanist critique of the division of labour returned to the young Marx, and is explicable in the context of the Stalinist regimes, against which a novel conceptual articulation was required.64 According to Bensaïd, as it should now be clear, the unilateral return to the young Marx’s problematic of alienation does not account for the interconnection between fetishism and the value-form; Jakubowski effectively takes alienation to appear unchanged with fetishism in Marx’s mature critique of political economy. Artous clarified the nature of the question, suggesting that alienation is present in Marx’s mature critique of political economy, but such a demonstration is limited on account of the fact that one must come to know the precise function alienation has in the concepts Marx put to work; did it remain a central category, and if so, how so? Of course, Artous qualifies the statement by suggesting that Marx’s thought didn’t progress in a smooth fashion, ‘proceeding through a simple process of linear enrichment of concepts that become more and more scientific’.65 In conjunction with the qualifications about alienation, one must not to have a too restrictive definition of fetishism. As Tombazos wrote in an exchange with Artous, ‘the theory of commodity fetishism and capital forms one theory, or rather the organic unity of three “systems”: mystified consciousness, alien-

64 65

Bensaïd 2000i, ‘Chauds, froids’. Artous 1999, p. 69.

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ation and the reification of modern capitalist time. It is true that the bond between these three aspects of the theory of fetishism is not yet sufficiently established, but it is more difficult and less fertile to treat them separately than to treat them as an ensemble’. On Tombazos’s account, alienation is a dimension of fetishism, which ‘is why communism appears in Capital explicitly as a presupposition of the demystification of the world and therefore as the end of human “pre-history”’.66 This is why the ‘discontinuity between the early works and those of Marx’s maturity is real … but it is not absolute. There is a continuity in the discontinuity and, from this point of view, some “opposed” readings of the theory of fetishism (as it happens, those of Artous and Michael Löwy) are in reality as complementary as contradictory’.67 Bensaïd himself recognised – was in the process of clarifying – how alienation, fetishism, and quantification systematically related to one another.68 The three concepts of alienation, fetishism and the quantification of social relations are not identical; neither can they be separated and understood without each other. As mentioned above, to specify the early role of fetishism in Marx, Bensaïd underlined the manner in which it was aligned to the religion of money. Bensaïd drew form the 1844 Manuscripts whereby Marx claimed that the monetary and mercantile political economists were fetishists of wealth, Catholics even, because they took private property to be merely an objective and autonomous substance that confronts human beings. Catholic wealth, that of private landed property of the autonomously existing old form of wealth as an object is effect66 67 68

Tombazos 2008, p. 166. Tombazos 2007, p. 108. Bensaïd 2011b, p. 49. In his master-work, Time in Marx, Tombazos spelled out the relation between alienation and the later work in Capital: ‘Capital must be understood as a living organism … as a real social subject capable of imposing its rules of the game and its institutions, legislation, law and state – determinations that are neither separate from nor independent of capital, but are instead, capitals own moments. To this vitalisation of the social relation corresponds, however, a “de-vitalisation” of the economic man who is reduced to the condition of a dominated subject, if not to the condition of a prop or a means. Capital decides and man reacts. The worker is not a subject to which the economy is subjected, but is instead a substance that productive capital feeds off … Let us note in passing that this is the basis on which “alienation” (such as it appears in Capital) must be interpreted, where its contents differ greatly from that found in the 1844 Manuscripts. Labour power is, in the capitalist mode of production, a substance that in order to become a living thing has to be incorporated, absorbed by an organism in which it becomes an organ. The worker is there only as a prop, not as a subject. His labour power lives by consuming itself, for, at the same time, it is transplanted from the worker’s biological body to the economic body of capital. Alienation at the level of production is a real mutilation. But alienation not only concerns the process of production stricto sensu. It also designates the loss of human control on social development’. Tombazos 2014, p. 80.

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ively sublated in commodity fetishism, about which Bensaïd wrote that ‘the proverb according to which money knows no master expressed, “the complete domination of dead matter over man”’.69 For political economy, man is brought within the orbit of private property, ‘with private property being incorporated in man himself and with man himself being recognised as its essence’. Political economy seems to recognise ‘man’ but, in reality, is an absolute denial, because, carrying the principle of labour to its logical conclusion, the essence of private property creates a split in ‘man’. However: This critique of monetary fetishism is still filled with Christian repulsion going back to Judas’s thirty pieces of silver – we still find an echo of this in the homonymous works of Zola [Money, 1891] and Péguy [Money, 1913]. Accordingly, it is a matter of overcoming a moralising critique of money and property by producing insight into that which determines the ‘system of appearances’.70 In the Marx of the 1844 Manuscripts, ‘the fetish that dominates and tyrannises humanity is thus still money as an abstract form of wealth, and not capital, the abstraction of the abstraction, which money will no longer be in Capital, anything else than one of its forms of appearance: the ultimate form of fetishism in the miracles of credit and the illusion of money’s self-creation’.71 In Capital, money is a form of capital’s appearance. In the Grundrisse, as a universal form of wealth, money has before it an entire world of pure abstraction. Besides the changes to fetishism, Bensaïd also related the two different structures of alienation to the development of Marx’s thinking about the value-form. If the problematic of alienated labour remained dependent on the dialectic of subject-object (and objectification and alienation) in Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts, in which alienation is taken to be a loss of self and the species being of humanity only to return to it sublated via communism, this structure underwent a change in Capital, where Marx’s starting point was the ways the capitalist mode of production organises, structures and determines labour through the self-expansion of value. ‘Otherwise said’, Bensaïd pointed out, Marx ‘no longer begins with anthropological man and the dialectic of subject/object involved in labour, but from the social structure and relations of production’:

69 70 71

Bensaïd 2011b, p. 56. Bensaïd 2011b, p. 57. Ibid.

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His theory of fetishism, underdeveloped in his early works, can now be deployed as a theory that is organically tied to value: reification of social relations and personification (fetishisation) of the thing results from the transformation of ‘social relations into social abstractions that circulate above the heads of individuals and dominate them’. In Capital, the theorisation of fetishism therefore no longer follows from a critique comparable to the Feuerbachian critique of religion. Fetishism now consists in considering value as a property of the singular thing rather than as the reified expression of a relation of social production and exchange.72 Bensaïd sees the Grundrisse as making the transition for the value-form, because in these drafts Marx articulated the split between purchase and sale, the theoretical context in which value becomes autonomous, a context also in which labour power is understood as a subjective condition of labour, the means of subsistence and production are taken to be personified things, or personifications of estranged givens, while value is endowed with its own power and volition. Money, in this context as Bensaïd drew out, is no longer a survival of an archaic form of monetary fetishism but is instead a ‘real social abstraction’, an exchange value detached from its product, because the form universal exchange takes is that of an appearance of the thing which has accumulated irrespective of the particular commodities and natural qualities of them. Bensaïd was making explicit the way thingification [chosification] superimposes itself over alienation and fetishism, since ‘money becomes the fetish’ as thingification of social relations. This comprises the transition from money’s use as a form of personal dependence, to become a master commodity with the extension and generalisation of commodity production, in which frenzied abstraction dominates and, as Bensaïd conveyed from Marx, a social relation of determinate individuals to each other taking the form of a purely physical substance in money. Bensaïd supposed a new dimension of thingification to be at work in Marx’s Theories of Surplus Value, with the relations of labour and capital, which shows the ways in which such thingification is effective in the relation of exploitation within capitalist relations of production. For Marx, the inversions already encountered in a study of money, to which Marx had applied fetishism, are operational in the inversion of labour and capital. For Bensaïd, this meant that ‘fetishism is here henceforth closely associated with thingification’.73 But

72 73

Bensaïd 2011b, p. 62. Bensaïd 2011b, p. 58.

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what did Marx mean by an inversion, in this instance? Explicitly that a thing is personified and a person is inverted into a thing. Capitalists dominate their workers because they are the incarnation of capital, a social power of impersonal domination, materialising dead labour over and against living labour. The means of labour present themselves as capital and come to dominate the worker in this relational context, even in their physical casing as machines and equipment they are capable of exercising such power. However, without a relation to capital, in which it is set to work and exploited, labour power is powerless and even broken, unable to function within the terms of capitalist relations of production. Bensaïd sees that ‘the effects of a determinant social form’ mystify the labour relation itself and ‘capital represents thus the ultimate stage of fetishism and reification’, in which capital becomes a self-reproducing automated fetish with value self-valorising.74 The mechanisms of a reified set of social relations automatically reproduce irrespective of the individual wills or subjective predispositions of atomised workers. Bensaïd finally draws out that the form of interest – developed in volume three of Capital – which he takes to be the most advanced form of reified capital. It shows, additionally, that real abstractions (theoretical expressions of materially existing relations dominating individuals) have a decisive function in the capitalist mode of production, relating to the objectivation of the social process as a totality. With the insights into the fetishistic character of the productive forces subsumed by capital (implying social domination) and money (as universal abstraction reifying social relations and interest-bearing capital and credit) two key manifestations of fetishism in production and circulation have been identified. Bensaïd thus has succinctly given an account of the different modalities of fetishism throughout Marx’s critique.

8

Ideology and Representation

With the background interrogation of the relations between alienation, fetishism and reification (understood in a sense of thingification), Bensaïd made the transition to elaborating the notions of ideology and representation, which he noted was in line with Lefebvre, to be manifestations of the fetishism and thingification inhering in everyday life. At stake was the relationship of ideology and false consciousness to the reality of modern bourgeois societies; so too, were the manners with which to grasp the ideological and the different

74

Bensaïd 2011b, p. 59.

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metaphors of transparency and revelation. For many authors, ideology is only meant as ‘false consciousness’ which posits the proletariat as a bearer of true consciousness, in the inversion of truth and falsity, with the proletariat the subject able to see through to the true reality hidden away; or, certain authors thought false consciousness, being an illusion, could be overcome through scientific ‘revelation’. Yet, Bensaïd rejected each of these two positions. Rather, Bensaïd situated the imaginary dimension of social life in its reality (a point he shared with Jean-Marie Vincent, Artous and Garo) because Marx is a thinker of representation, making it ‘necessary to recognise the existence of representations of the oppressed against which political combat is necessary’. Bensaïd’s discussion bears on the problem of real abstractions too. Unfortunately, all we have in his notes is the following, ‘cite Toni Artous’s important book that systematises’ this approach (Le fétichisme chez Marx).75 We therefore must track down some relevant passages for our discussion. Jean-Marie Vincent explained in his Fétichisme et société that ‘ideology is not the direct product of the interests of social classes, and neither is it selfjustification, it is a kind of spontaneous myopia in the context of the most developed commodity economy, the capitalist economy’.76 When Bensaïd claimed that the imaginary dimension of the social is inseparable from its real dimension, he made explicit reference to Artous and Vincent. A crucial concept for Vincent was ‘spontaneous myopia’, taken to be a symptom of capitalist society. Commodity fetishism is a conceptual and critical recognition of the basic structure of consciousness as a spontaneous myopia in capitalist society because fetishism involves submission to the spontaneous movement of capitalist society, being ‘simultaneously a reflection and the condition of reification of relations of production and inter-individual relations’.77 Vincent’s position was, as Artous explained: at the time very different from the then dominant one in the Marxist tradition which under the influence of Althusser … who had a double characterisation of ideology. On the one hand, it referred to the simple domain of illusion, error, separated from science like a Chinese wall … On 75 76 77

Bensaïd 2011b, p. 61. Vincent 1973, p. 223. Vincent 1973, pp. 222–3. Reviewing Vincent’s book in 1975, Löwy argued that it was one of the most creative theoretical interventions in French Marxism, for Vincent had a rigorous knowledge of the Marxist classics and bourgeois thinkers (Hegel, Weber and Parsons), he went beyond French provincialism with his engagement with Adorno, Kofler, Schmidt, Della Volpe and Colletti, was engaged in a revolutionary orientation and, lastly, had a disdain for eclecticism. Löwy 1975, p. 124.

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the other hand, it referred to the superstructure, all the while having real effects on the base, via its secretion through the ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’ and the producers of inculcation on the whole of the social body. Jean-Marie Vincent took off from another reading of Marx, making reference to, correctly, his critique of political economy and in his analysis of commodity fetishism.78 Artous, via Vincent, is justified in claiming that capitalist ideology is rooted ‘first of all in the dialectic of social forms generated by the process of valorisation and are not only the effect of a mechanism of “inculcation” or “justification”’.79 And as Vincent wrote: social relations coagulate outside of men, that is to say, place themselves independently of the most immediate social relations because they end up depending on social abstractions, like the circulation of money, financial markets, capital, labour markets, etc.80 These are social abstractions, forms of ossified social thought that organise practice and institutions as if above the head of human beings. To decisively break the power of spontaneous myopia that has a social objectivity founded on capitalist relations of production, class struggle is necessary to cut through and interrupt the reproduction of this historical economic form. We can come to the problem of ‘spontaneous myopia’ from another angle, by way of Garo’s work on ideology and representation, which as noted, is relevant to Bensaïd’s discussion. Such representations are ‘expressive of real contradictions and take part in their evolution’. Representation is an objective part of the 78 79

80

Artous 2006, p. 35. Artous continued: ‘One understands that this Marxist approach to the objectivity of the social employed in the analysis of commodity fetishism has posed many problems to the Marxist tradition, quite marked by a materialism content to oppose “matter” to “spirit” and “illusion” (ideology) to “truth” (science). In fact, it has been marginalised. Hence, in the 1920s, which witnessed a reactivation of a radical Marxism in the wake of the Russian Revolution, only the authors who took the Marxist theory of fetishism seriously treated it; often, it is true, through a Hegelianisation of Marxism. For example, in Marxism and Philosophy, Karl Korsch challenged the “Orthodox Marxism” of the Second International – which will become dominant in the Third – for whom, in supporting itself on some of Marx’s formulations, had a tendency to treat the superstructures and, what more, “the intellectual (ideological) structures of society as a mere pseudo-reality which only exists in the minds of ideologues – as error, imagination and illusion, devoid of a genuine object” ’. Artous, 2006, pp. 36–7. Quoted from Bensaïd 2011b, p. 63.

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social structure that is ‘historically rooted, which gives a margin of freedom to it and allows it to escape from the strict logic of reproduction’. Critique is therefore able to ‘identify the lines of fracture in the real’, making representation ‘the condition of possibility for critique’.81 Critique, or the theoretical representation of social conflict, is not a science that comes from the outside of social practice, but is ‘an “elaboration of unprecedented representations … immanent to practical struggles and emancipation …” [from which emerge the possibility of] … “the invention of another life”’.82 What is the place and role of theory in history? How can we conceive the possible unification between theory and practice? Critique and representation are part of the possibility of historical transformation. Ideology, in this case, constitutes a theatre of forms (political and economic ideas), which is not a world of pure illusion but the scene of representation which cuts worker in two, just like a commodity between use and exchange value, which implants a logic of representation in the worker. These are determined representations because, ‘representation as an exchange value – the commodity – creates a squared representation, as it is the privileged support of political economy’s theorisations and the starting point of economic and social reality in its totality’.83 According to Bensaïd, based on notes taken from Garo, ‘Reflection does not mean true knowledge, “but a complex process of the formations of representations simultaneously partially autonomous and durably subordinated to their objective genesis”’. Garo demonstrated that Marx used representation in many ways, making it difficult, indeed impossible, to construct a univocal concept of representation. Yet the category of representation has a solid presence in Marx’s work. Marx ‘shows that representation is explained through the causes that produce it and the social scission that perpetuates it, and not as an entity bestowed with a specific nature: “Representation is mediation, and not at all a thing or a state”’. Representation has a margin of liberation allowing it to critique and break the logic of the reproduction of capitalist relations in modern bourgeois societies. Garo rejects the notion that ideology is just a simple lie on the surface that conceals reality, which would be another form of the indoctrination thesis. In fact, ‘the dominant ideas are very strong but also very fragile’, because they are cut through with real contradictions and the dominant ideas take shape in the complex of class antagonisms; as a consequence, they combine ‘illusion and knowledge, critical range and conservative aims’. If the ideas of the ruling class are the dominant ideas of a historical conjuncture, then 81 82 83

Bensaïd 2011b, pp. 64–5. Bensaïd 2011b, p. 64. The quotes are from Garo 2000, p. 73. Garo 2000, pp. 153–5.

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these ideas clash with the hopes and dreams of the oppressed and exploited. The ‘very instability [of ruling ideas – D.R.] fosters contestation’. Furthermore, Garo summarises the expansive role of ideology: Ideology’s principal role is to function as a general notion that should encompass the ensemble of representations, illusory or not, that should include in this role both illusion and science, apology and the denunciation of the existing order.84 In dialogue with Garo’s interrogation of ideology, Bensaïd pointed out that, ‘the expression, “modes of representation” that we find in the Theories of SurplusValue can be conceived as a dialectical refinement of the notion of ideology’. Following Garo, ‘Ideology is neither an apparatus of the state, nor a defined doctrine, but a representation that is partially modelled by the social prescription from which it results’; thus, the reliance on representation requires an understanding about ‘how ideology organises its own comprehension and how theoreticians produce the theory of their activity’.85 In this exigency for understanding, Bensaïd was also concerned with the way in which an immanent critique of ideology is possible, allowing for a challenge to the vicious circle of domination, which concerns communism as a movement. Communism understood as a movement – with its own forms of scientific elaboration immanent to social practices – can begin to answer the need to cut through the reproduction of domination because it involves the formation of new representations; these representations develop immanently out of the practical struggles for emancipation. For Garo, ideology could be understood as an anticipation of another relation of theory to practice that challenges the division between mental and manual labour and the scission of individuals whose labour power is commodified, thus it is not merely another framework of thought on the same social plane; a power and a social illusion, ideology conceals the wealth that is socially produced, accumulated in private hands, into an abstraction.86 Ideology is a production that shapes the subjective experiences of a socially objective appearance. On this point however Bensaïd’s text leaves us searching, because he ended his notes by promising to follow up on Garo’s conclusion in L’idéologie ou la pensée embarquée. This small note is instructive of Bensaïd’s greater project in this last work, encapsulated by Garo’s point that ‘it is from the very heart of the capitalist mode of production, and not 84 85 86

Garo 2000, p. 77. Bensaïd 2011b, pp. 65–6. The quote is from Garo 2000, p. 276. Quoted from Bensaïd 2011b, pp. 66–7. The quotes are from Garo 2009b, pp. 103, 125–6, 127.

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from outside of it, that its radical critique and premises of its overthrow may emerge’.87 Her conclusion merits discussion from this vantage point because for Garo: [P]olitical economy is the crucial site of the formation of a representation that is meant to legitimise and contribute to the maintenance of social domination, but that always ends by splitting up between its apologetic task … and the revolutionary discovery of the origin of surplus-value and the logic of crises spelt out by Marx’s theses.88 The discovery of surplus-value and the logic of crises referred back to classical political economy, ‘Such is the specificity of theoretical representations in a capitalist mode: born and bred by and for it, they galvanise an understanding of its mortal limits … From then on, the critique of ideology can only continue to develop, beyond its first polemical vocation, in the direction of the comprehension of this totality and the contradictions that constitute it’.89 The contradictions of the totality can manifest in the immanent forms of consciousness. These immanent forms of consciousness do not create a stable duplicate of this reality, but, in a contradictory and living way, bear within themselves means that encourage ‘and orientate all historical action, whether these are conservative or transformative’, Garo explains: It is because all forms of consciousness situate themselves at a mediated and reflexive level – and not above the real – that they present and concentrate the characteristics of the totality to which they belong. Their intrinsic inversion in a topsy-turvy world is the very expression of this fundamental kinship, not a deplorable eccentricity that must be attributed to blindness … It is in the framework of a renewed reflection on mediations that are developed within a contradictory whole that Marx analyses ideas and ideologies: neither as relays, nor shields, they turn out to be a third kind of mediation, one that concentrates the dialectical life of the whole in each point of its structure, incessantly reproducing it and disintegrating it all at the same time. They are the place and the milieu for political intervention, opening its own space for the invention of historical possibilities … It is in the manner of the … historical development of an objective social dialectic, of which the subjective dimension has its 87 88 89

Garo 2009b, p. 158. Ibid. Garo 2009b, pp. 158–9.

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part, that Marx wants to develop the theorisation of ideas and the ideas themselves. It is not a philosophical overcoming but a real overthrow that is aimed at here.90 Garo’s decisive approach facilitates the comprehension of historical possibilities, instructively pointing to the fact that though Marx does not think that changing the world begins from people changing their ideas beforehand, ‘Marx is just as foreign to the idea of a revolutionary practice that could and must free itself from every reflexive moment and every representative mediation’. The difficulty, she reminds us, ‘is to think mediation as a combination, and as an impure combination, of the practice that has begun and of an engaged reflection, of constituent social life and established structuration, the one feeding the other and opening within the real those fractures and paths of its radical transformation’.91 Marx’s mediations do not lead to philosophical or political closure. Rather, they can lead to the conceptualisation of a practical and political moment, participate in a given situation, seize its limits and conditions, grasp them theoretically and diffuse this into popular form. Ideology in this sense is not just superstructural. It should be defined by its relationship to mediations, simultaneously different and equivalent, that are born of the social and economic formation. On this terrain, reflexive moments and multiple representations can form. ‘All the representative mediations analysed by Marx, whether it be money, coagulated political forms and projects, language, the imaginary and ideas, have in common clarifying – for the individual and collective consciousness – the contradictory nature of a totality, characterised by its internal dynamic and its incessant lacerations, by the social metabolism of its functional diversification, of its active reproduction and its permanent transformation’.92 Here, the role of critique points to a world beyond a historically given formation, towards social inventivity, ‘in the framework of a process of emancipation’. Its sights are set on the building of a mode of production without capitalist domination. These new forms remain to be constructed. Thus, Garo explains, a ‘true democracy’ ‘that does not suppress its delegatory moment but reconfigures it. New forms of non-market exchange, tied to social needs, rupturing with the “vampirism” that Capital describes, exhausting living labour and turning wealth against the producers themselves’:

90 91 92

Garo 2009b, pp. 159–60. Garo 2009b, p. 161. Garo 2009b, p. 163.

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To seize these processes historically, both in their singularity and in their connection, demands thinking of concrete and criss-crossing logics … The Marxist dialectic, in the fullest sense of the term, is nothing other than this capacity of theory to mould itself to a becoming and to participate in its own life. We could just about say that every one of Marx’s reflections on ideology wraps around and recaps this discovery: that we should oppose a regime of ideas with the invention of another world.93

9

Searching for the Lost Totality

In Bensaïd’s notes, the way in which generalised fetishism of traverses Art, Science, the State and History could not be reduced to, nor could it be separated from, the dominant function of commodity fetishism as rooted in the structure of the capitalist mode of production. Art, Science, the State and History are ‘each capitalised hypostases, where the domination of “real abstractions” are perpetuated, up to and including the fetishism of the bureaucratised administrative organisation’. Lukács ‘via Weber’ deserves to be acknowledged with having opened the road to a more profound critique of modern bourgeois rationalised culture. Bensaïd’s treatment of Lukács – however brief – is intended to fold back onto the more specific study of fetishism, alienation, ideology and representation in Marx’s critique of political economy. Bensaïd discussed Lukács’s philosophical construction of reification in History and Class Consciousness, Tailism and the Dialectic and Axel Honneth’s essay Reification. For Bensaïd, fetishism in Lukács’s sense, could be said to be Freudian, consisting in taking the part for the whole. The fetishised part is detached from the concrete totality, in which case only the proletariat can overcome reification by becoming the subject-object of its own knowledge. The critique of fetishism and reification in this sense is a critique of modern bourgeois society in which facts are taken in their isolation, which applies to the bourgeois sciences (the bourgeois metiers Husserl spoke of) where separation takes the place of the wholeness of the totality. For Lukács, Marxism overcomes the separations of the individual sciences of modern bourgeois societies, and the argument for the proletariat as the subject-object of knowledge able to articulate the concrete totality was demonstrative of a (limited) theoretical breakthrough capable of handling the modern forms of reified consciousness.

93

Garo 2009b, p. 165.

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While Lukács had not read Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts or the Grundrisse, Lukács produced an original construction by combining insights from Capital and Weber. Reification in this sense is a philosophical construction. The concept has comprehensive explanatory and descriptive power. Bensaïd defined Lukács’s term, reification, stating that the relation between persons takes on the character of a thing, comprising of an illusory objectivity, and as instrumental rationalisation grows, it eliminates the human and individual qualitative properties of the worker; in the labour process itself, mechanism divides up tasks, fragmenting the individuality of the worker. In this case, modern bourgeois societies are subject to the dictatorship of calculation. In reification humans become embodiments of empty and abstract time. The theory of reification is powerful also in its ability to illuminate the mechanisms of modern bureaucracies, in which the formal rationalisation of law, state administration and the collective brains of the civil service treat singular problems by applying formal and rationalised rules. The bureaucracy is a materialised mechanism of reification, producing a fragmented subjectivity that misrecognises the quality of singular cases before it. The judge is an automatic dispenser of justice. Subjectivities in modern bourgeois societies are dominated by the objectivity of capital, and the calculative-rationalisation inherent in bourgeois societies produces a specific form of atomised individualism in which individuals have no qualitative individuality. Reification effects both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, but class struggle on the side of the bourgeoisie can serve such alienation, while class struggle on the side of the proletariat has the capacity to break through the dehumanisation and generate a process that resolves reification in the direction of greater class consciousness in history, while the class struggle of the bourgeois radicalises its conservatism. One difficulty of Bensaïd’s notes is that he reads the authors in question, commentates on them, and then points towards critical arguments in need of elaboration, but these are often left hanging. In the case of Lukács, we have Bensaïd acknowledging that it is necessary to develop a criticism of the metaphysics of consciousness and the subject, specifically in relation to Lukács’s claim that the proletariat’s consciousness is the expression of a historical necessity since it is the contradiction of social evolution that has become conscious. Two critical points are key here; to reiterate, the criticisms are undeveloped and therefore inadequate. First, the notion of expression, about how a historical necessity can be expressed, in which a notion of the real contradiction of concrete history becomes conscious of itself; second, yet closely associated to the problem of expression, is the metaphysics of consciousness and the modern bourgeois subject, the criticism of which was a dominant feature of French Marxism. As I explained in the chapter on classes, Bensaïd had developed a

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criticism of the metaphysics of consciousness that rested on the Hegelian dialectic of the in itself and the for itself, in which the party becomes the incarnation of a historical consciousness of necessity. Bensaïd’s two critical pointers relate to his earlier critique of ‘ontologisations of Marxism’. Yet, despite any critical points about the constitution of class subjectivity, Bensaïd accepted Lukacs’s critique of reification, referring back to Lukács for a criticism of the fetishism of the facts, which prevailed in modern bourgeois societies, since facts do not speak for themselves. It is clear, according to Bensaïd, that reification is an empirically observable phenomena where people are treated like objects, the examples which he chose were the commodification of love relations and the expansion of the sex industry, both features of a modern bourgeois society in which women are reified for a market dominated by male consumption. Alongside Lukács, Bensaïd engaged Honneth, making more visible certain reservations he had about the ‘ontologising’ generalisation of reification, or it’s possible ontological uses beyond its reference to the domination of the capitalist mode of production. For Bensaïd, Honneth produced an ontologising conception of reification, which owed something to Lukács, namely the notion of a reification that becomes ‘second nature’. According to Bensaïd, tentatively and on the basis of his reading of Honneth, ‘the instrumental treatment of the other’ has certain ‘normative implications’ and ‘ontological presuppositions’, even presupposing ‘as an implicit reference of his critique of reification, a true or authentic form of human practice’.94 Bensaïd is effectively handling the relationship between reification and authenticity, which is why he takes up Honneth’s discussion of Lukács (and Heidegger too). Essentially for Bensaïd, Heidegger and Lukács (read through Honneth) are authors articulating an ontological fog that screens an authentic Being. The structure of this ontological move needs attention: there is a primordial essence that is covered over and needs to experience a clearing. The point I take Bensaïd to be trying to grasp is the philosophical mechanics of a concealing of Being in Heidegger’s terms, or reification of an authentic human being in the case of Lukács. Neither concealment nor reification can eliminate the primordial ‘care’ (Heidegger) or ‘engaged participation’ (as Honneth writes of Lukács). Within Honneth’s work, recognition replaces the Heideggerian notion of care, and Bensaïd summarises the process of recognition he reads therein. However, Bensaïd is critical of Honneth’s presentation of intersubjectivity in the philosophical mechanics of recognition because it is empty of class struggle. Specifically, on Bensaïd’s reading, ‘Honneth effaces the conflictual (class) dimension of self-emancipation

94

Bensaïd 2011b, p. 76.

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to the benefit of a pacification by putting the social relation, real abstraction, on the side of methodological intersubjectivity’.95 In this note, it is possible to discern Bensaïd’s critique of the ontological content of Honneth’s reformulation of reification, which is structured by a methodological subjectivity and a process of forgetting, the ‘forgetting of recognition’ or of Being (in Heidegger’s terms), thus articulating the theme of loss – loss of engaged participation or recognition – and the need to regain it through changes in subjective predisposition. The issue Bensaïd has with Honneth’s reformulation of recognition turns out to be that it ‘subjectivises’ reification, making it depend on subjective behaviours within the intersubjective and ontological structure it posits as given.96 This effectively confuses inter-individual relations with social relations that have become autonomous within modern bourgeois societies dominated by the self-reproducing capitalist mode of production. Hence, Bensaïd suggests that when Honneth criticises Lukács for not defining the positive attitude of the journalist (Lukács’s example of the journalist who loses himself because of reification and no longer writes truly), then Honneth’s subjectivist and inter-individual manner of posing the question, makes no sense in Lukács’s own problematic.97 At stake in Bensaïd’s criticism of Honneth was the conflict between reified relations of capitalist production, and the ways in which these relations reverberate throughout the concrete whole of modern bourgeois society versus the individualist structure of recognition that, in a sense, pacifies the social whole through a theoretical articulation that passes over into an ideology of methodological intersubjectivity and an ontologising ‘jargon of authenticity’.

10

One-Dimensionality, the Everyday and Debord

Bensaïd claimed the philosophical works of ‘late capitalism’ (Mandel’s formula), from Marcuse to Lefebvre’s, grasped the symptoms of a conjuncture that would explode in the youth revolts of May ’68. Bensaïd’s discussion of the eclipse of critical reason compared Marcuse and Lefebvre, in their attempts to grasp the post-war boom as a new phase of modern capitalism and their respective solutions to the transformation of domination in modern bourgeois societies. In the case of Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, as already discussed above, domination had a pivotal role and Bensaïd detailed the ways in which 95 96 97

Bensaïd 2011b, p. 78. Bensaïd 2011b, p. 79. Ibid.

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Marcuse thought about the novel coordinates of the politics of emancipation as based on American capitalist conditions, where domination seemed stronger than even under the rule of the absolutist regimes; individuals and classes seemed to reproduce a kind of desublimated repression in the conditions of modern liberal democracy; there was an immediate identification of individual and the administered society and Marcuse’s concern, as Bensaïd noted, was with the self-liberation of individuals from their own selves and their masters in the context of abundance, consumerism, administration and domination, which shaped the one-dimensional nature of modern bourgeois life, annihilating the possibilities of qualitative ruptures and novelty as well as the imaginary and romantic space of critical reason and artistic critique. The diagnostic of a foreclosed conjuncture means the atrophy of critique and desires and needs are subject to the growing repressive nature of ‘desublimation’. For Marcuse, desublimation was a mechanism of social control, where the sexual domain is desublimated, in which the erotic imaginary, exploration and adventure is reduced to immediate sexual satisfaction; this, in turn, banishes the need for liberation. The desublimation can be applied to dreams, art, politics and other forms of subversion that require a liberatory need. According to Bensaïd, despite Marcuse’s pessimism about the political and emancipatory capacities of the working class in a society of abundance – which is why he looked to other substitute subjects for historical transformation – the narrow gate through which an untimely possible could emerge was still open, by which Bensaïd meant that the logic of modern bourgeois domination was not closed. Perhaps the most insightful discussion of Bensaïd’s notes on commodity fetishism were those focusing on Lefebvre. Bensaïd acknowledged how Lefebvre came to different conclusions about the post-war boom as compared to Marcuse for three reasons. First, Lefebvre situated his critique and solution immanent to the contradictions of the post-war capitalism itself, not in a posited outside; second, Lefebvre began from a description and analysis of the everyday; third, by beginning with the everyday, Lefebvre identified the presence of the ‘irréductibles’ that could not be blunted by reification and remained a key to subversive and liberatory possibilities. For Lefebvre, the everyday and modernity went hand in hand and capitalist society reproduces itself in the context of the post-war capitalist boom through a ‘bureaucratic society of administered consumption’. In Lefebvre’s comments upon Ulysses, Bensaïd saw the problem of this eternal everyday: The book [Everyday Life in the Modern World] begins with a commentary on Ulysses, a novel of the everyday … Bloom’s day becomes, according to H. Broch’s expression, the symbol of ‘universal everyday life’, where noth-

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ing happens, no event. The vicious circle of domination that also disquiets Marcuse is in place, but it is not yet looped. The catastrophe is imminent, but there is still time to ward it off …98 Bensaïd also saw in Lefebvre many insights that were anticipatory, for instance the notions of the control society and biopower. And Lefebvre articulated the transition from the culture of the limitation of need (scarcity in effect) to the culture of the abundance of production and consumption, and he thus understood consumerist ideology as dispossessing the working class of its ideas and values. Bensaïd drew out the ways in which Lefebvre grasped the ideologies of commodification, which worked its way through language, literature, the social imaginary across its signs, images and discourses, the consequence of which was the liberation of a great mass of floating signifiers, in a sense of dispossessing singular individuals of real desire, pleasure and joyful art and leisure. It was decisive, to Bensaïd, that Lefebvre challenged the notion that the consumer society was a leisure society, made the distinction between growth and development, saturation and satisfaction, and showed that there was a poverty in abundance in which forms of leisure were not liberated activities, but generalised spectacles. No less decisive was Lefebvre’s commitment to the working class in the articulation of the everyday; the everyday is key to understanding the revolutionary capacities of the working class. Lefebvre tied the everyday back to the plurality of practices against alienation, resistances to the everyday that are experimentations in liberation, and can point the way out of the vicious circle of domination and ideology. With the commitment to the working class’s revolutionary capacities, Bensaïd also applauds, in his notes, the fact that Lefebvre defended the notion of a total revolution, especially in its festive sense. At the moment of Lefebvre’s defence of total revolution and liberation, Bensaïd also drew out Lefebvre’s critique of structuralism, composed of six moments: according to Lefebvre, structuralism was the ideology of a dominant everyday; it produced a methodological generalisation, namely a ‘metalanguage with universal scientific pretension’; structuralism embodied the totality immobilised; it produced ideologies of function, form, structure, which were all self-referential; structuralism was an ideology of power neutralising history and politics; and finally, structuralism dogmatised the existence of structure.99 Bensaïd thus referred back to Lefebvre in an anti-Althusserian move. We also

98 99

Bensaïd 2011b, pp. 105–6. Bensaïd 2011b, p. 110.

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glimpse, through the anti-Althusserian move, another defence of alienation, which is a critical manoeuvre, because Bensaïd affirmed that alienation is not just the question of Marxist humanism, but is tied to the concept of appropriation, which requires a subversion of the everyday, produces a rich concept of possibility and the virtual, a subjectivity capable of transforming the real and a reading of Marx that is Heraclitean and not Eleatic (the distinction is between an immobile form and a flux of becoming). At the foot of this discussion Bensaïd noted, in what is indicative of his project as a whole: ‘not bad, for the warm current of Marxism (Lukács, Bloch, Benjamin) and its productiveness’.100 Debord was the last author Bensaïd discussed in his notes on fetishism, chosen partly because Debord was on the frontlines of resistance like few others were, warding off the three intermingling threats to liberatory practices: the spectacle obliterating history, the city ruined by urbanism and the commodification of art. Debord was a source of profound insight for Bensaïd, owing to his ability to diagnose the contemporary situation of the spectacle and the nature of Marx’s interventionist thinking. Debord had raised the stakes about modernity’s historical character and its connection to the city as a site of revolutionary transformation, taking the city-based experience of modernity to historicise everything that seemed absolute. Not only is the city conducive to the conscious awareness of history; it is also implicated in the history of liberty. Cities matter for modern liberation and historical thinking. Bensaïd’s notes drew out the way in which Debord presented the spectacle as ideologically dominant, closing in on the critical and liberatory tendencies of modern societies. The criticism of the spectacle was implicit in two tendencies of the situationists, namely the positing of authenticity against facticity, concretely qualitative usevalues against abstractly quantitative exchange values and the effort to return to a lost unity prior to the schism and separations producing a schizophrenic society.101 The situationist effort symbolised by Debord was to find a unified practice able to overcome modern bourgeois scissions. Bensaïd took up Debord’s insight into commodified modernity’s ‘immense accumulation of spectacles’, a form of appearance inverting the qualitative concrete social relations between individuals and flattening their experiences, obliterating any temporal and historical experience that could subvert the spectacle. On this point, without ideas able to subvert the spectacle, then ‘the infernal circle of domination is closed’.102 However, for those tendencies of critical theory that continued to exist, they must come to combine 100 101 102

Bensaïd 2011b, p. 111. Bensaïd 2011b, p. 116. Bensaïd 2011b, p. 118.

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with revolutionary class struggles. In terms of the closed circle of domination, Bensaïd appreciated Debord’s distinctions between the diffuse spectacle, the concentrated spectacle of Stalinism and fascism, and the integrated spectacle of liberal democratic regimes, which articulate recuperation, totalitarianbureaucratic dictatorship and the annihilation of common sense in the public sphere respectively. Particularly, the integrated spectacle was an effect of historical defeat, since according to Debord, after the ‘incomplete liberation of 1944’, the post-war period was one of a generalised sequence of defeats for liberatory tendencies, integrated into the mechanisms of modern liberal democracies. Though appreciative of the power of Debord’s writings, Schérer said of Bensaïd’s specificity: With respect to the situationist argument of the society of the spectacle, even if we cannot ignore the descriptive value in it and a convincing force drawing a picture of a false reified and alienated consciousness, Bensaïd does not think that, to turn the spectacle into truth, to recover authentic human relations, it is enough to … lift the veil. There is no real, other world, behind that which offers itself on the scene. No point of view of the absolute spectator of truth. It is inside this very world that we must work. From it, which means accepting it fully, entirely, by resting ourselves on its latent promises in order to change it. Such indeed seems to be the doctrine and, if we are allowed to say so, the faith of Bensaïd. Daniel believed in the world and the possibility of saving it.103 Again, the theme of authenticity is present; however, Debord also gripped Bensaïd because of his interpretation of Marx, recognising two features of the revolutionary project attached to this proper name. On the one hand, Debord clasped hold of the strategic nature of Marx’s thinking that politicised incertitude, the aleatory and the reasoned wager which was counterposed to a scientistic-deterministic interpretation of Marx or the ideologisation of Marxism. On the other hand, the spectacle negates history and tends to abolish strategic thinking, since strategic forms of thinking not only require a historical experience to process, but also the concrete unfolding of class relations, which is the grounding of all strategy. The recognition of the twofold nature of Marx’s own thinking, specifically in terms of its effects that can branch out into different – strategic or scientistic and ideological – directions depending on the

103

Schérer 2010, p. 12. Schérer was also part of the panel assessing at Bensaïd’s Memoire d’habilitation.

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conjuncture, as well as the centrality of history to strategic thought, is indeed a clear fortification of Bensaïd’s Marxism, against the spectacle of a closed commodified modern bourgeois society.

11

Conceptual Creation and Diagnostics

Throughout this chapter I have made the effort to demonstrate the different ways in which French Marxist philosophers have come to terms with commodity reification-fetishism, a concept understood as a novel creation. Not a single author discussed in this chapter denied the conceptually creative construction that was fetishism-reification; the disagreements emerged over understanding its content and place within a Marxist critique of political economy and the broader critique of modern bourgeois societies in which capitalist mode of production dominates, as well as the modes in which modern proletarian subjectivity can emerge. In addition to the conceptual creation, alienation, fetishism and reification are capable of diagnosing the ‘malign conditions’ of modern bourgeois societies, as was the case of Lukács’s reification, Lefebvre’s mystified consciousness and alienation, Marcuse’s one-dimensionality, Lefebvre’s critique of the everyday and Debord’s critique of the spectacle. Bensaïd’s achievement, in his brief notes on commodity fetishism, was twofold: he conjoined the content of alienation, fetishism and reification-thingification in the constellation of Marx’s critique of political economy to the contemporary bourgeois-cultural conjuncture, a conjunction that found its concentration in the need for strategic-political-historical liberatory thought able to interrupt the eternal recurrence of commodification and modern dominations.

conclusion

Pointing Towards Spaces of Liberation [T]he publication of dozens of political and philosophical works didn’t prevent him from taking on important responsibilities … His ability to listen to people, his simplicity, his craving to read and write, like his passion for debates and ideas, allowed him to give an authentic life lesson to his entourage … He is … the living proof that it is possible to fight in a small organisation and bring, at the political and theoretical level, the oxygen that so many of the left parties are lacking.1

∵ Only some years after Bensaïd’s death, the world looks as if it has been turned upside down. The first round of Arab uprisings faced severe tests and defeats, and yet revolution returned in force throughout the Middle East and Africa; Hong Kong’s streets filled with rebellious youth in struggle against totalitarian dictatorship and Myanmar experienced the return of revolutionary militancy against military rule. The fascist right has grown and developed; the covid19 pandemic has transformed the societal landscape without it ever turning back; the climate crisis – marked by the oscillations in countries like Australia between savage bushfires and overwhelming floods – has us now locked into an unprecedented cycle of its effects. In the context of these historical, natural and political conditions, this book has had one intention throughout, from which it is to be understood, namely to provide truthful intellectual weapons for a new and radicalising generation of revolutionaries determined to resolve the crisis of Marxism. Disaster and redemption stand next to each other on the threshold of time. The time is out of joint; spaces are disarticulated. Such is the paradox of contretemps and the mobile scales of spaces. Radicals do not choose to engage in battles with a sovereign decision of reason. They are embarked in the dangerous layers and folds of contretemps. On this voyage:

1 Krivine 2006, p. 92.

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Strategic time is full of peaks and troughs, sudden accelerations and wearisome slowdowns, leaps forward and backward, collapses and setbacks. The needles on its dial do not always turn in the same direction. This time is discontinuous, punctuated by crises and opportunities waiting to be seized.2 Bensaïd’s contribution to Marxism is crucial today, beyond the bounds of the French-speaking left. He reminds us of the art that strategic politics is. This was, so to speak, in his being, ‘I don’t believe politics has ever been “my” vocation, “my style”! When it is presented as an art of contretemps, I am there like a fish in the water. When it manages the relations of force and requires the sense of compromise – its daily lot – I suffocate like a gudgeon on the shore’.3 Contretemps and the moving scales of space were notions fashioned in the service of an idea. That was the idea of communism. The Powers of Communism, testifying to a life in the service of this idea, was one of the last essays Bensaïd ever wrote. In the world in which we live today, who can deny the ‘relevance of radical communism’? Radical communism is not just an idea. It is, first of all, ‘the name of the movement which continuously goes beyond and does away with the established order’. ‘But’, Bensaïd told us, ‘it is also the goal which, arising from this movement, guides it and enables us to see what brings us closer to this goal and what takes us further away’. This late work was in direct continuity with what he wrote on strategy in the 1980s, when he said that revolutionary strategy embraces a combined system of actions which, by their association, consistency, and growth must lead the proletariat to the conquest of power. Moreover, radical communism is ‘the watchword for free individual fulfilment’. This concrete liberation means that the ‘development of the specific needs and talents of each person contributes to the universal development of the human species’. The social logic of communism is at radical odds with capital’s miserable common measure of abstract labour time, which ‘claims to quantify the unquantifiable’.4 Above all, this radical communism is a shield against unprincipled politics, pointless action and day-to-day improvisation. As such, it is not a form of scientific knowledge of ends and means, but rather a regulating strategic hypothesis. Inextricably and simultaneously, it designates the unwavering dream of another world of 2 Quoted from Riddell 2011b. 3 Bensaïd 2003 document found in his personal archives dated 26 December. 4 Bensaïd 2010d.

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justice, equality and solidarity; the continuous movement that seeks to overthrow the existing order in the epoch of capitalism; and the hypothesis that orients this movement toward a radical change in the relations of property and power – a far cry from accommodation to a lesser evil that is in fact the shortest path to the worst of all worlds.5 These were some wise last words. The strategic hypothesis that regulates political engagement is also a melancholic wager on the immanent direction of becoming. It is based on the assumption that a rupture is required to make a transition from an alienated to a liberated society. It is an unravelling of the meaning and consequences of the thirst for concrete liberation. ‘Fidelity to the event, as Alain Badiou said; fidelity to oneself also, to the first engagements, which are the ones of love, before the time comes for the engagements of reason, more appropriate without a doubt, but less enthusiastic’. ‘There is’, Bensaïd said, ‘a lot to say about the role of love at first sight, in love and in politics’. How is one faithful to this initial encounter? What are the traps of this new beginning? How are we to gauge the necessity of ‘an unfaithful fidelity and a faithful infidelity’?6 The sad litany of deaths of Marxist intellectuals of the 1960s generation has left us with the task of rememoration, theoretical construction, fidelity to the politics of liberation and the expansive traditions of emancipation. Revolutions need women and men who are willing to wager on the slight chance of emancipation we have. A logical revolt. An audacious revolt. At a time when disarray has mounted on the radical left, an offensive and combative positioning is sorely needed. Bensaïd’s story has nothing of the desert island recital so many intellectuals aspire to. He was a party activist to the end, remaining a revolutionary without a revolution. A party activist who worked with words. After being exiled from the French Communist Party, he gained more than thirty years of freedom of thought, initiative and action and forty years of militant fidelity. A militant through and through, he was simply an activist who tried to reflect on the world. To be a militant, ‘has never evoked in my eyes an image of enrolment, symbiotic indoctrination, military or religious, but more simply an elementary ethic of politics … its principle of reality and humility, the nurturing bond between theory and practice, the daily invention of a singular collective’. His example is an important one. For too long, the nightmare of Stalin-

5 Ibid. 6 Bensaïd 2003 document found in his personal archives dated 26 December.

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ism witnessed a twofold process for Marxist intellectuals. On the one hand, to maintain freedom of thought and theoretical activity most with few exceptions kept themselves away from political commitment. On the other hand, ‘when they chose the path of political commitment, they often had to sacrifice their conscience and theoretical work’; for Bensaïd, ‘The history of the relationship between French intellectuals and the communist movement is a chronicle of this tragedy. This is what happened to Paul Nizan, Henri Lefebvre, the surrealists, Pierre Naville, Aragon and many “fellow travellers” ’.7 Bensaïd carved out a singular and independent position against the backdrop of these figures. To be a militant working with words is not to be a maître penseur who hands out the Truth to others. To be a militant is to be embedded in a concrete political process and to contribute to a political singularity, engaging in everyday action with fellow activists and a political community of equals. To be a militant is the logical implication of political action. And militancy is, in fact, the ethics of politics, its specific principle of responsibility; without the militant testing ground, the master thinker produces an irresponsible politics. Bensaïd’s example is a call to both action and thought, which involves both plurality and the right to make mistakes, without which a political space becomes meaningless. As we emerge from the dark experiences of the last century, it is perhaps illusory to believe that this past does not continue to weigh on us like a nightmare; the nightmare continually catches us at every historical turn. We are simply not finished with the catastrophes of the last century and their mark on ours; Bensaïd’s great value consists in the manners in which the century transformed him in enriching ways without inducing a repentant spirit, dogmatism or forgetfulness. Today, it is crucial that we participate in any revival of the workers’ movements while contributing to vibrant theoretical research that is free from partisan hang-ups and censorship. To change the world, it is not enough to interpret it. The road through the rough school of class battles is the only way. But this never negates interpretation and theoretical elaboration. Here, we come to the problem of our dear friend, the wise mole. This book, in many significant ways, has been nothing more than a continuous circling around the character of the mole as it burrows away beneath the earth. ‘From translation to transposition, from slip of the tongue to shift in meaning, from Shakespeare to Schlegel, from Hegel to Marx, the old friend is transformed, until it feels strong enough to deal with the surface’, Bensaïd wrote. It is the insurgent breakthrough toward the sunlight that the enigma of the

7 Bensaïd 2006c.

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mole presents us with. In moments of intense social crisis and catastrophe, the mole is preparing to interrupt the descent into barbarism. This interruption is not of the order of fate or miracle, because the mole is only a metaphor, ‘the unheroic image of preparatory negation, of the indispensable preliminaries, of the task before the threshold. An agent of depth and latency. A sort of invisible text which always runs beneath the visible text, which frequently corrects it and sometimes contradicts it’. When the mole interrupts the ordinary course of things by making a revolution, ‘it is an event that causes a stir’: The catastrophe can still be averted. If … There is no other choice than to work towards catastrophe’s deflection. And this, precisely, is the mole’s job.8 Revolutionary politics demands the mobilisation of absolute energy for a merciless struggle. Somehow, as particular and finite human beings, we must do it without absolute certitudes and malign fanaticism. ‘We must at least try’, Bensaïd responded in an interview with Regis Debray. If this is the kind of militantisme a new generation of radicals can construct, then the work of those of the fire last time was not a wasted effort. On the contrary, it was an incredibly precious effort, the labours of which we may today recollect in order to move beyond. Without these treasures of intelligence and resistance, it would be infinitely more difficult to recommence in our present. In this regard, we have the responsibility to remember. Here I leave some last words to Daniel himself: I am and remain, first of all, a militant. Memory was key to this choice. But memory in its critical relation to the present, and not a nostalgic rehashing of the past … we cannot abandon the forever vanquished to liberal emptiness. There is a duty of ‘loyalty toward those unknowns’ and a messianic debt. We are expected on this earth, it is not just we who do the expecting. It depends on what we are and on what we do for the past to change its meaning. This responsibility weighs heavier than all the discouragements and setbacks … It is not only the Left Opposition to Stalinism that is at stake, as important as it is, but a whole culture, a movement of ‘civilisation’, including the heritage of each rebellion against the established order, from the old heresies to the socialist revolutions

8 Bensaïd 2001e, p. 241.

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passing through the French Revolution. How can we make a judgement in advance about what will be pertain to that? No Last Judgement allows for it.9 The cause of a vampiric system pleased the Gods – Money, the State and Capital. But Daniel Bensaïd was at home with the cause of the vanquished. Here was the fuel for a slow impatience. ‘This will be long’, as the prophet Jeremiah said. But ‘the future lasts a long time’. Another world is necessary. It is urgent to make it possible before the old world throttles us and ruins the planet.

9 Bensaïd 1996 interview with Régis Debray.

appendix

Daniel Bensaïd’s Melancholic Wager – Jury D’habilitation 2005 (by Way of an Introduction) Michael Löwy

It so happened that in 2005 I formed part of Daniel Bensaïd’s habilitation jury. I have reproduced here, as my intervention at this event is both a homage and reminder of some differences … The question of the wager was already the principal discovery of Daniel, as it appeared to me. I’ll address myself directly to the friend and the comrade, by going beyond the academic rituals:

∵ Let’s begin from the beginning. Your philosophical and theoretical development began under the aegis of May ’68 with a Master’s thesis on ‘The Notion of the Revolutionary Crisis in Lenin’, presented at Nanterre in September 1968, under Henri Lefebvre’s supervision. After a shorter version published in Partisans – and your retrospective commentaries – one had the impression of a surprising combination of Lukácsian voluntarism and Poulantzas’s structuralism. At the time I was shocked by the harsh polemic against Rosa Luxemburg … But it is twenty years after, in 1989, that your real research work begins, ‘under the dual impact of worldly political changes and personal circumstances’. I would like to know more about the motivations for this ‘turn’: it is just before the 1989 events, since the book Moi, la Révolution appeared in this year, before the ‘fall of the wall’. In any case, the result is impressive: in some years, you have become one of the most inventive and most imaginative intellectuals in the landscape of French Marxist thought – and beyond, since you are beginning to be translated into English, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, etc. Without giving up your revolutionary engagement, you have opened many new avenues and contributed to the rediscovery of the forgotten treasures of radical culture. In these 12 works, of uneven importance, but which are coherent taken as a whole, you unfurl ‘three interlaced threads’: the search for an ‘untimely’ Marx,

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the Messianic critique of reason – from Walter Benjamin – and the recovery of the dignity of politics, strategically related to the present. Your balance sheet of Marx’s work, your sociological analyses, the critique of contemporary thinkers are always interesting. But one finds in your works something more: true profane illuminations in the Benjaminian sense. I’m thinking particularly about your re-reading of Marxism – in light of the libertarian and melancholic constellation of Nietzsche, Blanqui, Sorel, Péguy, Bernard Lazare, Gramsci, Benjamin, José Carlos Mariategui. Refusing the positivist poverty of French Marxism – which is based on the blind confidence in the linear flow of one-way progress – you have discovered/invented/imagined a Marxism of the Pascalian wager (inspired by Lucien Goldmann), a prophetic Marxism, in the Old Testament sense – conditional expectations that are calls to act – in short, a Marxism of incertitude. Your strategic and messianic vision of history, which is opposed to the historian’s history – the chroniclers of the accomplished fact – and who sets out to ‘unravel the bundle of possibles’, is a passionate contribution to the renewal of critical theory. Certainly, I have some disagreements, doubts and criticisms. For example, on utopia, an old theme that we have debated among ourselves. You correctly reject ‘utopia in the bad sense of the term’, the arbitrary constructions, doctrinaire speculations on the future, the improbable projections. But there is utopia in the ‘good sense’, in the etymological sense of ‘that which is not in existence anywhere (yet)’, or in the manner of Mannheim’s definition: the ensemble of ideas that have a subversive charge with respect to the existing order of things. In Walter Benjamin, it seems to me that the Messianism and utopia are not at all contradictory: there is symmetry between the Messianic era and the classless society. Benjamin’s utopia relates to Marx – the abolition of classes – to libertarian thinkers – the end of domination – to Fourier – the harmony with nature. To imagine a society without patriarchy, he relied on Bachofen. I agree with you in saying that it is a strategic utopia. But strategy has no meaning without a utopian horizon, without the perspective of a society that is radically other. The other disagreement bears upon the term Messianic ‘wait’, that you often use to describe Benjamin’s attitude. It seems to me that Benjamin is not one of those who ‘awaited’ the Messiah; he belongs to the heretical tradition of dochakei ha ketz, the ‘accelerators of the end’, those who wanted to speed up – by magical and Kabbalistic actions – the coming of the Messiah. This active posture seems to me to correspond better to Benjamin’s thought, because it is a call to action rather than waiting – and yours, in any case! Third and last question, which concerns judgement: your distinction between the legal, historical and political is interesting, but it seems to me that, in evacuating the moral judgement, you lose an essential dimension of

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the problem. The ethical judgement is not reducible to the legal, or to the historical, or to the political – and vice versa; it retains its autonomy, its dignity, and its importance. I don’t understand how we could bypass it … To conclude: I cite a passage from your mémoire de synthèse: ‘in working for the uncertain, the only rule consists in taking the side of the oppressed’. Fidelity to this rule well characterises your militant revolutionary life and your philosophical work. This is called coherence.

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Index Actuality 52, 134, 143, 152, 159–160, 164, 177, 277, 292–293, 351, 439, 643, 701 Adler, Max 132 Adorno, Theodor 178, 198, 289, 455, 782n Aguiton, Christophe 442n, 445–449, 456, 459–459 A la gauche du possible 161, 430 Aleatory 50–52, 62, 75, 77, 111, 139, 175, 189– 190, 214, 239, 271, 273, 337, 412, 587, 595, 605, 613–615, 639, 649, 654, 698–699, 795 Alienation 96, 103, 106, 143, 165, 209, 240, 243, 261n, 283–284, 302, 308, 322, 334– 335, 365, 404, 426, 447, 452, 552, 554, 574, 600–601, 618–621, 635, 660, 698, 720, 733, 747–796 Althusser, Louis 22, 24n, 28–32, 61, 80, 90– 92, 95, 97–105, 117–122, 127, 178, 200, 235, 258–260, 261n, 267, 278, 286, 289– 291, 313, 332, 413, 452, 591–617, 618, 620–622, 639, 642, 646n, 651, 654, 656, 729, 735, 743, 747–748, 754–759, 772n, 782 Analytical Marxists 273 Anderson, Kevin 61, 725 Anderson, Perry 620n Antentas, Josep Maria 250, 251n Anti-humanism 599–601, 605 Anti-sociology 308 Aragon, Louis 90, 249, 800 Arendt, Hannah 367–368, 386, 392, 402, 405–409, 465, 490, 492, 493–494n, 495, 500–501, 504, 571, 630, 633, 636, 706 Aristotle 282, 321, 390, 406 Arruzza, Cinzia 548, 555–557 Artous, Antoine 20, 28, 39, 44, 82, 100, 115, 129, 136, 144, 188, 260n, 294, 295–296, 366–367, 532, 534, 592, 699–701, 746, 748, 762, 772n, 776–778, 782–783 Bachelard, Gaston 40, 609 Badiou, Alain 11, 178, 367–368, 385, 405, 409, 499–501, 505–507, 512–513, 576, 578, 586, 591, 638–667, 668, 799 Balibar, Étienne 22, 100–101, 178, 598n, 599, 610, 707, 755, 758–761

Barthes, Roland 762 Baudrillard, Jean 715n, 747, 749, 763, 768– 769, 770n Bauer, Otto 414–415 Beauvoir, Simone de 22, 197, 414, 429, 554 Bekker, Balthazar 775 Benjamin, Walter 4, 10, 38, 49, 52–53, 59, 71, 139, 156, 176–178, 190–225, 231–232, 236, 239, 242, 244–245, 273, 285–286, 357, 392, 414, 424n, 425–426, 428, 432, 438, 465, 486, 511, 518, 614–615, 629, 639, 663, 675–676, 704, 705, 709, 710–711, 717, 762, 794, 804 Bensaïd, Sophie 175, 311n, 668n Berger, Denis 486 Bergson, Henri 202, 213, 278, 610, 718 Bettelheim, Charles 117–118, 122, 127 Bifurcation 2, 50, 75, 156, 163–164, 190–192, 200, 208, 215, 222, 226, 229, 232, 272, 283, 336, 338, 388, 426, 427–428, 485, 490, 504, 515, 566, 581, 645, 663, 693, 699, 725 Blanchot, Maurice 197, 267, 594 Blanqui, Auguste 10, 139, 156, 187, 200–201, 207, 222–225, 242, 359, 360, 389, 392, 425, 427–428, 433, 483, 583n, 804 Bloch, Ernst 3, 111, 242–245, 266, 413, 676, 709, 735, 794 Bonapartism 369–371 Bourdieu, Pierre 267, 294, 448–451, 469– 470, 512, 540n, 559, 644n, 763, 768, 770 Bourgeois revolution 39, 51–52, 80, 107, 111– 113, 125, 181–182, 188, 232, 521, 677 Brossat, Alain 92, 97 Buci-Glucksmann, Christine 100–101 Bukharin, Nicolai 63, 65, 99, 125, 162, 273, 308 Butler, Judith 556–557 Callinicos, Alex 97n, 514, 575n, 701, 733 Châtelet, François 129 Clastres, Pierre 91, 105–107 Clinamen 412, 427, 433, 613, 615 Chinese Cultural Revolution 24, 116–118, 127, 135, 158, 656–657, 726 Cohn-Bendit, Daniel 25, 523

819

index Comte, Auguste 181, 199, 279, 412, 487, 609– 610 Contretemps 19, 20, 49–50, 75, 171, 198, 222, 268, 271–272, 283, 357–358, 388, 411, 413, 583, 632, 640, 643, 669, 674–676, 683, 797, 798 Contretemps (journal) 450, 510–511, 645, 689, 705, 762 Corcuff, Philippe 399, 448–449, 459 Crisis of Marxism 80, 134, 137, 142, 159–161, 167, 253, 255, 302–303, 405, 616–617, 759, 797 Critique Communiste 20, 80, 88, 103, 128, 152, 534, 550, 699, 700n Cromwell, Oliver 111, 113 Da Costa, Uriel 233 Debord, Guy 510, 747, 749, 762, 768, 794– 796 Debray, Regis 42, 290n, 801 Des Brosses 775–776 De La Boétie, Étienne 763–766 Deleuze, Giles 92, 103–104, 137, 514, 584, 630, 637, 668, 683, 685–686, 711–713, 715–724, 764 De Gouges, Olympe 559 Delphy, Christine 532–534, 538–540 Democritus 276 De Maistre, Joseph 569 Derrida, Jacques 267, 512, 513, 563, 591, 595– 596, 668–679, 706, 708 Dessalines, Jean-Jacques 185 Deutscher, Isaac 236 Dietzgen, Joseph 211, 518 Diderot, Denis 185, 257 Duras, Marguerite 24, 443 Engels, Friedrich 49, 51, 55–57, 61, 69, 107, 109, 111, 135, 178, 182, 220, 255, 257, 262, 265, 269–270, 287, 307, 335, 341, 344, 355–362, 369–372, 374, 376, 379, 385, 518, 523–524, 533, 607n, 666 Epicurus 276, 427 Être exploitées (Italian feminist collective) 536, 542 Eurocommunism 46, 128, 131, 141 Fetishism 19, 96, 156, 198, 209, 261n, 268, 283, 301, 317, 322, 333–335, 363–364,

380, 404, 436, 452, 517, 551, 555–558, 566–567, 574, 579, 601, 619–620, 626, 632, 635, 660, 717, 719–720, 734–736, 746, 747–796 Feuerbach, Ludwig 261, 266, 390, 759–760 Feuerbachian 756, 775, 777, 780 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 183, 316, 422 Filoche, Gérard 83, 88, 161n Foucault, Michel 22, 79, 116–117, 180, 586, 630, 668, 685, 694–695, 711–714, 721– 729, 731, 760, 767–768, 771 Fourth International 12, 22, 23–24, 42, 50, 83–84, 97n, 102, 117–118, 130, 134, 137– 138, 152, 153–154, 164, 176, 423–424, 570, 620n French Revolution 110–111, 179–190, 215–216, 232, 243, 270, 322, 359–364, 369, 389– 390, 395–397, 407–412, 431, 453, 471, 477, 484, 493n, 500, 515, 517, 540, 559, 569, 628–629, 684, 693, 697–698, 724, 802 Freud, Sigmund 40, 167, 236, 337, 356, 606, 612, 776, 788 Furet, François 179, 184, 189, 484–486, 501, 509, 514, 568, 583, 629, 714 Garo, Isabelle 103, 180, 179, 255, 257–258, 380–383, 711n, 718, 722n, 723, 782–787 Glucksmann, André 36, 91, 103, 105, 728 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 232, 310, 316–317, 487 Goldmann, Lucien 39, 259–260, 420–423, 424n, 437, 439, 592, 735, 752, 804 Gorz, André 39, 137, 302–308, 767 Gramsci, Antonio 10, 13, 54, 80, 90, 94–96, 99, 107–108, 113, 115, 132, 197, 256, 261n, 263, 269, 273–274, 285, 308, 319, 423n, 597, 622, 652, 685, 710, 732, 738–741 Grossman, Henryk 256, 258, 280, 324 Guattari, Félix 28, 91–92, 102, 103, 637, 668, 685, 712, 715–716, 722n, 723 Guevara, Che 23, 26, 42, 428 Guesde, Jules 225, 561, 739 Guillaume, Gustave 35n, 38 Habel, Jannette Hansen, Joseph Harman, Chris Harvey, David

23, 83 42–43 128, 148–150, 169, 289 688–691

820

index

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 13, 31, 37–38, 43, 60–62, 111, 194, 204, 212– 213, 228–229, 239, 241, 257, 262–263, 269n, 274–280, 285–293, 296, 309–311, 313–325, 327–332, 340, 356, 363–364, 369–370, 382, 390–391, 421–422, 428, 430, 456, 471, 491, 531, 575, 577, 595, 597, 600–604, 606, 607n, 609–612, 622, 634, 642–643, 696–697, 708, 709, 720, 729–730, 748, 749–753, 756, 758–759, 761, 772, 774–776, 782n, 783n, 790, 800 Heidegger, Martin 197, 213, 222–224, 337, 554, 613, 641, 677, 752, 790–791 Heine, Heinrich 236, 514 Hess, Moses 236, 637 Husserl, Edmund 337, 788 Hobsbawm, Eric 570–571, 684, 685 Holloway, John 116, 687, 730–737, 767, 771 Honneth, Axel 788, 790–791 Iranian Revolution 724–725 Irigaray, Luce 542n, 550, 552–555 Jakubowski, Franz 261n, 735, 777 Jameson, Frederic 575n, 630, 762, 772 Jaurès, Jean 225, 465, 739 jcr (Jeunesse communiste révolutionnaire) 20, 23–28, 42, 103 Joan of Arc 182, 246–252 Johsua, Florence 26, 152 Johsua, Samy 170, 572 Jospin, Lionel 460–469 Juquin, Pierre 95 Kant, Immanuel 214, 238, 280, 310, 317, 328, 417, 422, 492–502, 516–513, 722, 760– 761 Kautsky, Karl 20, 28, 49, 52–58, 60–65, 68, 70–73, 128, 131–132, 357, 414–415, 622, 631, 686 Korsch, Karl 28, 61, 178, 217–218, 256, 261n, 756n, 777, 783n Koselleck, Reinhart 431 Kouvelakis, Stathis 61, 177, 302–303, 654 Krivine, Alain 21–23, 25, 27, 86, 135, 156–159, 160, 472 Labriola, Antonio 391

13, 256, 263, 266, 332, 385,

Laclau, Ernesto 453, 742–743 Lafargue, Paul 256, 519–521 Landauer, Gustav 430, 765–766 Lazarus, Sylvain 599, 606 lc (Ligue communiste) 23–24, 26–27, 42, 83, 511, 532 lcr (Ligue communiste révolutionnaire) 1, 10, 26, 42, 44–45, 81, 83–87, 91, 97, 116, 128–130, 152, 161, 163–169, 473n, 532, 559, 701n, 772n Left Opposition 11, 90, 93, 102, 117–118, 123, 125, 128, 129, 132, 135, 162, 164, 192, 516, 640, 801 Lefebvre, Henri 19, 27–29, 32–33, 60–61, 257, 259–260, 266, 455, 566, 592, 593n, 620, 688–689, 730, 735, 747, 749–756, 762, 767–768, 772, 781, 791–793, 796 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 285, 291–292, 324, 601, 611 Lenin, Vladimir Ilych 9, 13, 19–78, 90, 92, 95–97, 101, 111, 122, 123, 126, 130, 132, 135, 139, 143, 153, 155n, 157, 159–160, 215, 244, 255, 257, 262, 290n, 295, 311, 357, 363, 372, 416, 424n, 428, 466, 485, 568, 569, 609–610, 614, 621n, 628, 631, 644, 654, 660–661, 663, 665, 686, 707n, 708, 712, 717, 732, 739, 744–745, 749 Le Pen, Jean-Marie 249–250, 460, 461, 468 Lequenne, Michel 27, 90 Levellers 112 Leviathan 114, 116, 376, 726 Lewin, Moshe 569, 685 Lih, Lars 62n, 72, 73–74 Locke, John 339, 696 Lotze, Hermann 202 Louverture, Toussaint 184 Löwy, Michael 44, 60–61, 88, 129, 139, 178, 191, 200, 202, 225–226, 239, 260, 423, 424n, 439, 564, 568, 747, 762, 778, 782 Lucretius 427 Lukács, Georg 28, 31, 37, 178, 222, 255–265, 259, 261n, 263, 296, 325, 455, 457n, 503, 577, 592, 597, 619, 735, 750, 755, 758, 762, 777, 788–791, 794, 796 Luxemburg, Rosa 13–14, 28, 29, 52, 55–60, 64, 65, 71, 128, 130, 131, 157, 162, 236, 256, 339, 358, 387, 424, 486, 631, 686, 803 Lyotard, Jean-François 91, 102, 105, 425, 722

index Machado, Joao 137 Macherey, Pierre 278 Maitan, Livio 42 Maler, Henri 276–277, 294, 486, 572 Mandel, Ernest 10, 28, 42, 97, 110, 128, 151, 162, 163n, 191–192, 242n, 289, 303–305, 423, 424n, 572, 592, 620–621, 700, 735, 762, 791 Maoism 24, 117, 127, 593, 609, 653, 656 Marcuse, Herbert 28, 749, 762, 767–769, 791–793, 796 Mariatégui, José Carlos 246, 428, 486, 804 Marrano 139, 194, 232, 236–237, 253, 517, 669, 671 Marx, Karl 1, 3–5, 10, 13, 15, 28, 34, 46, 49– 51, 55–57, 59, 61, 65–66, 69, 71, 75, 77, 79, 91–92, 103–105, 107–110, 117, 124, 135, 137–139, 142, 144, 167, 176–179, 193–195, 198, 210, 213–214, 217–218, 222– 225, 235–236, 243, 253–384, 385–386, 391, 400, 402, 404–407, 409, 413, 425, 427, 430, 433, 437, 443, 445, 448–458, 466, 509–512, 514–516, 517, 520–531, 536, 538, 542, 546, 547, 549, 568, 594– 596, 599–604, 606–608, 610–612, 614, 615, 617, 618–623, 634, 636, 641, 646– 647, 656–661, 663, 669–679, 683, 686, 691, 697, 707–710, 712n, 715n, 718–721, 727–729, 734, 737–739, 746, 748–751, 753–762, 768, 772–789, 794–796, 800, 803–804 Marxism 1, 3–4, 5, 7, 10, 12–16, 20, 22, 27– 28, 30n, 31, 47, 52, 54, 56–57, 61, 66, 77, 79–80, 90–92, 95–102, 105–106, 116–117, 121, 138, 168, 170, 176, 178–179, 190–193, 195, 199–200, 209, 224–225, 232, 243, 253–264, 273–274, 286, 294, 304, 308, 311, 313, 314, 335, 384, 386, 406, 421– 425, 439n, 450, 512, 514, 571, 576, 593n, 594, 596–597, 599–601, 607n, 609–612, 615, 618–619, 621–622, 656, 670–673, 675, 677, 679, 707n, 712n, 728, 729–730, 735, 737, 741–743, 747–750, 753, 759, 761, 782n, 783n, 788, 790, 794, 795–796, 798, 804 Mauss, Marcel 776 May ’68 1, 20–27, 30, 39, 49, 83, 86, 89, 92, 98, 102–104, 116, 134–136, 144, 147, 156– 159, 232, 471–472, 506, 514, 523, 532,

821 562, 591, 640, 646, 657, 711, 726, 731, 769, 791, 803 Meillassoux, Claude 537–538, 548 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 418, 487–490, 557, 610 Michel, Louise 277, 561n, 562n Michelstaedter, Carlo 238 Mitterrand, François 21, 81, 135–136, 140–141, 144–145, 147, 150, 152, 179–180, 186, 225, 460, 543, 592 Montag, Warren 98 Moreno, Nahuel 42–43 Moses 233, 236, 239 Mouffe, Chantal 742–743 Nadeau, Maurice 439 Napoleon (the Third) 379, 519, 738 Naville, Pierre 430, 486, 520, 571, 752, 800 Negri, Antonio 128, 509, 578, 591, 618–637, 691, 719 Nietzsche, Friederich 10n, 104, 179, 202, 210, 213, 223, 286, 426, 427, 487–488, 683, 718, 732, 804 Nizan, Paul 257, 265n, 800 npa (Nouveau Parti anticapitaliste) 169n, 472n, 664, 666–667 Overdetermination 28, 32, 448–458, 522, 539, 592, 606, 611 Pannekoek, Anton 52, 55, 57, 59, 65–66, 128, 131 Papon, Maurice 477, 479, 482, 488–489 Paris Commune 6, 55, 67, 76, 141, 143, 357, 370, 372, 380, 560, 561n, 628, 657, 663, 687, 701n, 736, 738 Pascal, Blaise 187, 227, 229, 231, 285, 386, 389, 420–423, 437–440, 506, 708, 737 pcf (Parti Communiste Français) 20–27, 39, 80–81, 84, 90–91, 94–98, 100–103, 136, 140, 157–158, 169n, 255–256, 258– 259, 472n, 475, 533–534, 593n, 596, 598–599 Péguy, Charles 10, 139, 156, 181, 188, 216, 223– 230, 249, 286, 389, 395–396, 424n, 429, 461, 463, 479–481, 484, 488, 514, 610, 779, 804 Perec, Georges 768

822 Plato 227, 241, 505, 507, 638, 641–644, 646, 648, 653, 659–660, 774 Plekhanov, Georgi 60–61, 198 Plenel, Edwy 139 Politzer, Georges 195, 257, 594 Porschnev, Boris 111–112 Portuguese Revolution 44, 80, 84, 88, 113, 130, 135, 143, 166 Post, Charles 86 Poulantzas, Nicos 32, 37, 42, 80, 88, 117–118, 120–131, 732, 803 Proletarian Left 22, 93 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph 299n, 382, 561, 647, 765 Proust, Françoise 178, 411, 413, 506, 512–513, 583–588, 656, 676 Rancière, Jacques 98, 178, 378–380, 512– 513, 578, 586, 646n, 754–758, 762, 766, 770–772, 774 Ricardo, David 274, 342, 385 Robespierre, Maximilien 184–185, 215, 404, 428, 481, 501, 697, 706 Rocard, Michel 135, 140–142 Rosanvallon, Pierre 142 Rosenzweig, Franz 238–239 Rouge 27, 80–81, 84, 87, 116, 128, 152, 534, 617, 658 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 110–111, 187, 404– 405, 696, 712 Rousset, Pierre 83, 568 Rubin, Isaak 619, 757 Saint Augustine 275, 284, 423n, 438 Saint-Just 404, 427–428, 434, 481, 501 Santucho, Roberto 42 Sartre, Jean-Paul 22, 28, 40, 414–419, 455, 592, 725, 752, 767 Sawer, Marian 62, 65–66 Schérer, René 177, 795 Schmidt, Alfred 530, 782n Schmitt, Carl 705–710 Segré, Ivan 235, 638n, 639n, 646n, 705 Shandro, Alan 54 Sheppard, Barry 82 Sitel, Francis 136, 701–702, 706 Sonthonax, Léger-Félicité 184–185

index Sorel, Georges 139, 223–225, 230–231, 286, 433, 514, 804 Spartacus 201 Spinoza, Baruch 10, 111, 195, 227, 233, 236, 237–238, 270, 274, 278, 312–315, 324, 387, 450, 507, 584, 603, 606–607, 609, 612, 617, 630–631, 634, 649, 669, 718– 719, 758–759 sp (Socialist Party) 42, 46, 80–81, 89, 94, 136, 140–141, 265, 445, 460, 462, 465 Stalin, Joseph 28, 119, 122, 125, 128, 142, 194, 199, 396, 418–419, 485, 491, 568, 571, 664–665, 732, 799 Surya, Michel 747, 763 The Terror 187 Tombazos, Stavros 214, 269n, 280–281, 285, 311–312, 314–315, 321, 330, 345–348, 543n, 735, 762, 777–778 Trat, Josette 532, 533, 557 Traverso, Enzo 191 Tronti, Mario 707 Trotsky, Leon 12, 48, 70–71, 90, 113, 117–118, 122, 125–126, 162, 193, 236, 266, 290, 356, 390, 396, 414–419, 424n, 428–429, 466, 486, 571, 620n, 621n, 702, 707n, 741, 744 Union of the Left 87–88, 94, 136, 140 Vincent, Jean-Marie 97, 103, 128, 129, 367, 452, 620, 735, 748, 762, 782–783 Vinteuil, Frédérique 532, 534, 552 Wager 385–440 Weber, Henri 22–25, 80, 88, 94, 128, 129, 131 Weber, Max 287–288, 502–503, 511, 619, 727n, 728n, 777, 782b, 788, 789 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 598, 613 Women’s Liberation Movement (mlf) 80, 114, 166, 168, 534, 543 Wood, Ellen Meiksins 74–75 Yovel, Yirmiyahu 237 Žižek, Slavoj 630, 649, 654, 742–743 Zola, Emile 447, 779 Zylberberg-Hocquard, Marie-Hélène 559