Daniel Bensaid

The two world wars and the catastrophes of the period between (victory of Nazism, Stalinism, the Spanish Civil War) hardly leave the cumulative vision of historical meaning and progress intact. Nietzsche, Péguy and Sorel already vigorously rejected historical fetishism and the ideology of progress that puts vigilance to sleep in the face of an inevitable accumulation of facts. 

Walter Benjamin had a profound understanding of the intimate links between conceptions of positivist origin and the representation of mechanical time, ‘homogeneous and empty’. 

Well beyond its own marginal activist circles, Situationism, of which Guy Debord was the central character, coloured the spirit of the times in the 1960s and had a diffuse but important influence on the movements of 1968. Debord’s book The Society of the Spectacle (1967), in which he developed a critique of consumer society, urban alienation and generalized commodity fetishism, could be read as a precursor of the 1968 movements. 

This text was originally published in 1997 as a supplement to Rouge. Writing in response to The Black Book of Communism, Bensaïd discusses the Stalinist counter-revolution.ⁱ

In 1964 Herbert Marcuse asked in One-Dimensional Man whether it was still possible to ‘break the vicious circle of domination’.ⁱ In other words, he questioned whether revolution was still possible in developed capitalist countries, where ‘the pure form of domination’ had taken shape. The working class, now linked to the system of needs ‘but not to its negation’,ⁱⁱ seemed bound to lose all its subversive capacity in the ‘affluent society’.

At the end of the Second World War, the revolutionary movement faced an unexpected situation.ⁱ The bureaucratic Soviet regime had not only survived the war, but appeared to be expanding in Eastern Europe. Capitalism, out of breath in the 1930s, seemed to be regaining strength.

As a motto to the conclusion of Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon quotes Marx: ‘In order to find their own content, the revolutions of the nineteenth century have to let the dead bury the dead.’ The social revolution cannot draw its poetry from the past but only from the future.ⁱ Hence, a descent to roots and a return to the source are not the solution. The existence of a black civilisation that disappeared in the 15th century does not grant black people ‘a badge of humanity’: ‘I am not a man of any past.

Daniel Bensaïd (2000), Marx’s Paris Turn

From colloquiums to seminars, from articles to opinion pieces, a thesis has spread to the point of acquiring the quiet force of a commonplace: it is to Marx himself, and not to Stalin or Lenin, that the original sin and the inevitable metamorphosis of the socialist paradise into a totalitarian hell can be traced.