Memoirs of a French revolutionary

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“An Impatient Life: a Memoir,” by Daniel Bensaid (foreword by Tariq Ali). Translated from the French by David Fernbach. Verso, 2013.

Daniel Bensaid (1946-2010) was an important Marxist thinker and leader of the former French sec­ tion of the Fourth International (FI), the Ligue Com­ muniste Revolutionaire (LCR). His memoir, very ably translated from the French, “Une Lente Impatience,” is a dense but rewarding read, part personal odyssey and part meditation on revolutionary politics.

Bensaid grew up in Toulouse, where his parents ran a “solidly red” bistro frequented by a mixture of na­ tive French and foreign-born workers, including refu­ gees from the Spanish Civil War, veterans of the Inter­ national Brigades, and the anti-Nazi resistance. The local cell of the French Communist Party (PCF) held its annual meetings there.

His father was a Sephardic Jewish immigrant, a for­ mer amateur boxing champion of Algeria. His mother was descended from a long line of proletarian mili­ tants who opted for the Communist Party when the French Socialist Party split after the First World War. A determined and combative woman, she success­ fully lobbied the authorities in Vichy France for the release of her husband, who had been interned at Drancy, where French Jews were held before trans­ port to the death camps. Two uncles and two young cousins on his father’s side were not so fortunate.

Against the backdrop of the Algerian war and the Cuban revolution, Bensaid helped form a Jeuness­ es Communistes chapter in his high school. Revolt against the rigid catechism and bureaucratic heavyhandedness of the PCF leadership was not long in coming. He and his young comrades wanted to know why Trotsky and Luxemburg were not published, and he recalls asking in a “pale and hesitant voice” what the Party had to say about the Hungarian revolt of 1956, crushed by Soviet troops. “Scarcely enrolled, we had an openly contestatory spirit. And from in­ subordination to conspiracy is only a short step.”

Summarily expelled from the Communist Party and gravitating towards Trotskyism, the young “left op­ positionists” went on to found the Jeunesses Com­ munistes Révolutionaires (JCR) in 1966 and played a significant role in the mass student and worker up­ surge that shook De Gaulle’s regime in May 1968. The JCR then contributed to founding the re-constituted French section of the Fourth International (Ligue Communiste, and later Ligue Communiste Révolu­ tionnaire). By 1969, the Ligue had grown to 1000 members, with an average age under 24. In Bensaid’s words: “In the unceasing rush of the 1970s, we re­ mained torn between a bohemian impatience for combat and the patient burrowing of the mole.”

While becoming an accomplished orator and politi­ cal educator, Bensaid was deeply involved in produc­ ing political tracts and the party newspaper, Rouge. At the same time, he was responsible for the party’s Service d’Ordre (stewards charged with defending 8 SOCIALIST ACTION APRIL 2015 demonstrations from the police and the far right).

In April 1973, the Ligue mobilized the far left to pre­ vent an anti-immigrant rally in central Paris by the fascist organization, Ordre Nouveau. Bensaid and the Ligue’s Service d’Ordre were centrally involved. In the ensuing battle, both the police and the fascists were put to flight. The following day, the Ligue was banned and its public leaders, Alain Krivine and Pierre Rous­ set, imprisoned. Bensaid defends this initiative while revealing that the Ligue’s trade-union fraction con­ demned the action as ultra-left.

Inflated expectations and adventurist temptations were also reinforced by the rising curve of struggle internationally, above all in Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula. In Spain, the death of Franco was expected to unleash a period of class contestation that in an optimistic scenario would be amplified by the revolutionary dynamic in Portugal.

The 9th World Congress of the International in 1969 had endorsed the perspective of armed struggle in Latin America. This provoked a deep division within the FI and a split in its Argentine section, the Par­ tido Revolutionario de los Trabajadores (PRT). A significant minority in the International, led by the American Socialist Workers Party, allied with Nahuel Moreno’s PRT-La Verdad in Argentina, opposed the armed-struggle line.

In the end, the hopes aroused from 1968 to 1974 were not fulfilled. First, a CIA orchestrated coup overthrew the Allende government in Chile. Then the revolutionary surge in Portugal was turned back. With the death of Franco, Spain saw a more or less orderly transition to a constitutional monarchy. And in Argentina, the ruling class brought back Perón be­ fore turning to a military dictatorship to crush the mass movement. The FI majority, led by its French section, had clearly underestimated the bourgeoisie’s capacity to restore order using the Social Democratic, Stalinist, and Populist apparatuses, or when required, by unleashing a reign of brutal repression and terror.

Bensaid served at this time as a kind of roving am­ bassador for the FI majority, travelling to Spain, Por­ tugal and Argentina as well as Brazil and Mexico. Recollections of his trip to Argentina in advance of the 1974 World Congress make particularly heart-rending reading: “Our comrades were young and intrepid, full of confidence in the socialist future of humanity. Three years later, half of the people I met at these meetings had been arrested, tortured and murdered.”

In discussions with Argentine comrades of the FI majority, Bensaid was dismayed to find armed strug­ gle viewed as the dividing line between reformists and revolutionaries. He realized “we were clearly on a wrong path” and “running headlong into an open grave.” This premonition was to be tragically con­ firmed after 1976 when the Argentine generals or­ dered the extermination of the country’s left-wing vanguard. Bensaid does not say whether he tried to press his assessment on the FI leadership. But it was not until the 1979 World Congress, after the bloody setback in Argentina, that the FI abandoned its line (Photo) Bensaid (left) marches with LCR leader Alain Krivine, at funeral of Maoist Pierre Overney, killed by security guard at a Renault plant, February 1972.

on armed struggle.

After he became ill in the 1990s, Bensaid was less active in the LCR leadership, turning to teaching and writing. In “An Impatient Life,” details of his personal and party life are interspersed with ruminations on diverse theoretical and historical questions.

Whether it is on the nature of revolutionary cri­ sis, the decline of journalism, the post-’68 retreat of French intellectuals from their erstwhile revolution­ ary enthusiasm, or Trotsky’s years in Mexico, Bensaid can be counted on for a few paragraphs or pages of stimulating and insightful prose rich in historical, theoretical, and literary references.

The text is weighted toward the French context but fortunately is generously annotated. Attention to these notes can serve as a primer on the history of the French and international workers movement.

Lenin’s notion of crisis was the subject of Bensaid’s thesis in philosophy. He concedes that in his forma­ tive years his thinking (and the politics of the Ligue) tended to an excessive “voluntarism.” This was the time of “a hasty Leninism,” with May 1968 seen as a “dress rehearsal” for the première event, analogous to 1905 in Russia.

For him, the current fashionable dismissal of the (Leninist) “party form” is “above all a way of avoid­ ing contents and projects.” A party is essential to prepare for crises (“the impromptu of the event”) and as a repository of “strategic thinking.” The social movements cannot substitute for this necessary po­ litical task. In this, he sides with Lenin against Lux­ emburg—or at least, against her acolytes. For the lat­ ter, politics is “an almost organic product of struggle” while for the former, “politics is not the reflection of the social (but) a transposition of it.”

Beyond this theoretical commitment to Leninism, Bensaid has little to say on the concrete measures to be applied in building a party on the Leninist model in France or on how to move the project of a revolu­ tionary international forward.

Bensaid speaks of his generation of revolutionaries’ having to learn a “slow impatience.” He shows how a lack of patience in the early years of the French sec­ tion led to certain ultra-left tendencies. But is it pos­ sible to see the LCR as yielding again to impatience, this time in the opposite direction, with the hasty for­ mation of the Nouveau Parti Anti-capitaliste (NPA) in 2009? The memoir is notably silent on the NPA, into which the party dissolved itself. The option of main­ taining an organized revolutionary current within the broader formation was apparently rejected. The absence of comment on this important decision is disappointing. It is true that Bensaid breaks off his memoir around 2005. Nonetheless, one presumes he was privy to discussions preceding this turn away from Leninist party building.

Part of the reason for this silence may lie with his preference for leadership consensus. In the introduc­ tion to the memoir, Tariq Ali gently chides his friend for unwillingness to address political errors if it meant clashing with the party majority.

To the non-European reader, Bensaid’s references can sometimes be obscure and his language opaque. This reflects his early induction into the intellectual world of French philosophy and social theory, so heavily influenced by the weight of the French work­ ing class in political life and the student and worker revolt of May 1968. On the positive side is the lyrical quality to his writing nourished by his love of litera­ ture.

One wishes that other topics had been more fully addressed—for example, the accelerating eco-crisis under capitalism or the impact of second-wave femi­ nism. However, if the memoir comes up short in some respects, there is much that is positive to be gleaned from it. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Bensaid was loyal to the course on which he embarked. His memoir stands as an excellent innoculation against social democratic reformism degenerated into social liberalism—and equally against the disastrous legacy of Stalinism (including its Maoist variant). Reflecting on past errors, Bensaid warns of the temptations of ultra-leftism. Against the anarchist and spontaneist tendencies in the contemporary generation of mili­ tants, he defends the need for a revolutionary party.

He is eloquent in dissecting the nature of commit­ ment to revolutionary politics, to communism, which “despite the infamies committed in its name remains the most pertinent word, the word most freighted (continued on page 10, in “University workers strike blow against austerity”)

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... Yemen (continued from page 1: “U.S. backs Saudi bombing of Yemen”) suspend its drone strikes aimed at the forces of Al-Qa­ eda in the Arabian Peninsula. Popular support for the government of Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi declined in part because of its collaboration with the U.S. drone operation, which caused a number of civilian deaths. So complete was the Hadi government’s collapse that the Saudis were compelled to use its naval armada to evacuate what remained of this regime, along with UN observers.

A “negotiated settlement” is not to be excluded, as when Yemen’s “Arab Spring” protests were shut down through Saudi intervention in 2011.

Following a year of mass protests against unemploy­ ment and corruption, the 2011 rebellion ended when Yemen’s military strongman president of 33 years, Ali Abdullah Saleh, agreed to a “pact” pressed by the Saudis. Under the terms, Saleh would step down and be replaced by his vice president, Hadi, who served as president until he fled last month to Saudi Arabia. The Houthis, while rejecting this 2012 “pact,” have allied today with defecting military forces that are still loyal to Saleh.

The Houthis are a populist movement based on the Zaidi Shiite expression of Islam, and represent some one-third of the population. They have been periodi­ cally and brutally oppressed by the essentially Saudiinstalled Hadi regime and by the Saleh dictatorship before him.

The Houthi drive to power in this impoverished na­ tion began in August 2014, when its leadership took advantage of discontent over the government’s re­ moval of fuel subsidies, and called for protests. Tens of thousands demonstrated in Sana’a, with demands against corruption and calls for the government to re­ sign. The following month, the Houthis took over key government buildings, before signing a UN-brokered pact to form a “unity government” with Hadi’s regime. In January 2015, Houthi forces occupied the presi­ dential palace, demanding that a new constitution be drafted to ensure more representation for minority groups. Instead, Hadi and his government resigned and fled the capital.

Hadi initially took refuge in the southern port city of Aden—capital of the formerly independent and pro-Soviet People’s Democratic Republic of South Yemen and a major center for the transport of oil in the region. He is currently partaking in secret nego­ tiations in Saudi Arabia to “resolve” the conflict. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, representatives of the Arab League, and it seems, all other Saudi allies are involved. There have been no reports to date that the Houthi rebels are party to these discussions.

The imperialist powers are pressing for a “solution” aimed at re-establishing the capitalist status quo and its Hadi government enforcers. But Saudi officials have repeatedly warned that nothing but total rebel surrender would be acceptable.

Saudi intervention in the past The Saudi regime is not new to intervention in neighboring Yemen. To thwart a republican alterna­ tive to the reactionary clerical government of North Yemen in the 1960s, the Saudis smashed the insur­ gent movement with the support of Britain and weap­ ons supplied by Israel.

Similarly, the Saudis were first on the scene to bru­ tally crush the 2011 Bahraini pro-democracy move­ ment. Some 1000 Saudi troops to support the Sunni monarchy headed by King Hamad bin Isa Al-Khalifa in the face of massive protests by the island’s Shiite ma­ jority against their marginalization. Under Saudi pres­ sure, the United Arab Emirates sent in another 500 troops to secure the oppressive regime. Mass Bahraini mobilizations exceeding 100,000 were crushed, with thousands arrested and many tortured.

Under worldwide pressure, Al-Khalifa was com­ pelled to agree to an independent commission of inquiry, which issued a report on Nov. 23, 2012, con­ firming “systematic torture and other forms of physi­ cal and psychological abuse on detainees, as well as other human rights violations.” The report rejected the monarch’s claim that the protests were instigated by Iran.

Likewise, Saudi Arabia, almost always with U.S. agreement, is no newcomer to “regime change.” In July 2013 it colluded with the Egyptian military coup led by U.S.-backed General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to re­ move the elected president, Mohamed Morsi.

The unleashing of 150,000 oil monarch troops in Ye­ men, backed by promised U.S. air support, will amount to yet another major escalation of the regional catas­ trophe set in motion when the U.S. first intervened in Iraq with 250,000 troops and devastated that nation, beginning in 2003.

There is yet another dimension to the events unfold­ ... Economy (continued from page 6: “Legalized theft Capitalist economics, U.S. style”)

tions” [emphasis added].

Departing from this “age-old practice” of allowing the criminals to get off scot free except for a mod­ est fine—almost always qualitatively less than the amount stolen—the S.E.C. is now contemplating throwing a bit of a scare into the corporate world.

This is projected at a time when corporate crime extends to major corporate players’ ripping off other major corporate players, as when the Ameri­ can International Group (AIG), the insurance cor­ poration, attempted to rip off the Bank of America after the latter had filed an insurance claim de­ manding AIG payment for monies lost from B of A’s failed mortgages. In the end, this matter was resolved to everyone’s satisfaction, and especially so when the government agreed to bail out both to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.

Modern-day capitalism always requires a sem­ blance of “honesty among thieves,” lest the whole ing in Yemen today. Houthi mosques in Sana’a have been systematically attacked by Islamic State suicide bombers, according to IS’s own claims, although oth­ ers point to al-Qaeda terrorists as the culprits. A re­ corded IS release stated: “IS soldiers will not rest until they stop the Safawi [Iranian] operation in Yemen.”

Houthi leader Abdul Malik al-Houthi released a March 22 statement accusing U.S. and Israel of sup­ porting the terrorist bombings. He also scored Saudi Arabia and regional Arab states for financing terror­ ist groups operating inside Yemen. Indeed, the Saudi government itself, if not forces high in the Saudi mon­ archy, was central to the organization and financing of IS when its immediate objective was the removal of Syria’s Bashir al-Assad government. In Syria as in Yemen, Libya, Bahrain, Egypt and elsewhere, U.S. and Saudi-backed insurgencies and coups—whether led by kings, military dictators, or terrorists—are the pri­ mary “weapons of choice.”

A religious war?

Although the corporate media promotes the notion that the events in Yemen are at base a proxy war be­ tween Saudi Arabia and Iran or a religious war be­ tween Sunni and Shiite versions of Islam, every recent war in the modern era refutes this caricature of his­ torical analysis.

The foundational politics of the Middle East today were established at the dawn of the colonial era, when expanding imperialist capitalism sent conquer­ ing armies around the world to secure resources and establish new markets for its ruling-class elite. In the course of this genocidal venture, tens of millions were slaughtered, as in Africa, where in the “Belgian” Congo alone, 12 million Africans fell victim to King Leopold II’s imperial aspirations. Millions more perished in every African colonized land.

In the name of “civilization” itself, usually “Christian civilization,” and the racist notion of the “white man’s burden,” whole continents were enslaved and their historic territories divided and re-configured, while compliant puppets were set in place to administer the conquered peoples. “Divide and conquer” became the worldwide imperialist modus vivendi; ethnic di­ visions and hierarchies were created where none had previously existed. Today’s protests have been qualitatively more an expression of massive outrage against the neoliberal capitalist austerity imposed on poor nations by a flagging world capitalist order than the product of differences in religious beliefs.

Yemen is a case in point of the underdevelopment and poverty that imperialism fosters throughout the world. The country is beset by 40 percent unemploy­ ment. A quarter of the economy rests on oil drilling— Tony Savino / Socialist Action predatory operation descend into chaos of a magnitude that threatens the workings of the system itself.

Here it is critical to note the fact that the S.E.C. is keenly aware that it does not or cannot always win in the courts of capitalist justice—and not for the lack of trying. The corporate “legal” system in capitalist America operates far from the myth of “blind justice.” Judges are appointed far more often based on their past po­ litical loyalties and benefactors than for their legal “expertise.”

Indeed, after the ambitious U.S.

Attorney Preet Bharara succeeded in winning convictions in some 18 cases of Wall Street insider trading last year, he was not alone in being shocked when his convictions were overturned by a higher court.

Few, if any, serious players on Wall Street, in this writer’s humble opinion, believe that “inside knowledge” remains secret when the leaking of such knowledge can result in millions, if not bil­ lions, of dollars in benefits to the takers—not to mention under the table benefits to the leakers.

When billions or trillions of dollars are at stake, as is more the case today than in any time in the modern era, legal niceties are ignored in order to facilitate the gifting of lavish sums to those who play the profit game and also run the country. Cap­ italism, in truth, is a system of legalized crime that operates across a spectrum extending from the ex­ ploitation of individual workers to entire nations, and today throughout the globalized economy.

Working people have no interest in the preserva­ tion of this system and every reason to organize to replace it forever with a socialist economy and society that forever advances the needs and inter­ est of the vast majority, as opposed to the .0001 percent who rule with impunity today. n which some believe will run out in several years, lead­ ing to even higher joblessness.

In present day Yemen, the Zaidi Shiites have had a long history of peaceful and collaborative relations with Sunni Muslims. The same can be said for virtual­ ly all parts of the world. In Iraq, for example, the initial U.S. invasion was in significant part opposed by both Sunni and Shiite forces, whose experience with previ­ ous eras of imperialist conquest was far from distant in their consciousness.

The notion that the demise of the Arab Spring and the subsequent chaos in the region is the product of historic differences among Muslims fades before the reality that the U.S. and its European imperialist part­ ners—aided by client states like Saudi Arabia and Is­ rael—remain the chief sources of terror and discon­ tent in the world today.

Iran, whose secular president Mohammed Mosad­ degh was removed in a 1953 CIA coup and replaced with a king (the Shah) is a prime example. When the earthshaking Iranian Revolution removed the Shah 26 years later, in 1979, the U.S. retaliated by arming and financing Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, then a touted U.S. ally, who proceeded to conduct a 10-year war against Iran that caused the deaths of one million Iranians as well as close to the same number of Iraqis.

The present U.S.-imposed sanctions against Iran, supposedly over Iran’s right to refine nuclear fuel, are nothing less than a pretext to force Iran back into the imperialist orbit in order to once again secure control of a nation with fossil fuel resources. The sanctions, have had devastating effects on the Iranian people— including a decline of some 30-40 percent in the stan­ dard of living.

The demise of the Arab Spring, a regional movement in almost all cases characterized by the massive rising of poor and oppressed peoples against their capitalist rulers, is tragic proof that whatever momentary gains are won by mass struggles cannot be maintained or expanded without a challenge to the capitalist system, including a break with U.S. and other imperialist ex­ ploiters. Employing one reactionary means or anoth­ er, the U.S. was quick to intervene in the Arab Spring popular mobilizations, with the central objective of subordinating them to imperialist control.

It is essential to construct mass revolutionary social­ ist parties to lead the masses in the struggle against austerity and oppression and in revolutionary action aimed at bringing about a fundamental transforma­ tion of society. A new world can be brought into be­ ing—one in which socialist equality and freedom will flourish, based on the rule of the vast majority as op­ posed to the private profits of the elite few. n SOCIALIST ACTION APRIL 2015 9

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News and views from SA Canada website: http://socialistaction.ca and so-called “anti-petroleum ideologues,” take note. Meanwhile, greater police spying, more frequent use of cop agents to disrupt social movements, and arrests increas­ ingly made without due process, combined with mounting civilian casualties from CF18 air strikes abroad, will likely help ISIS to recruit—and round and round it goes. This is the political treadmill for more war, more auster­ ity for the vast majority, and many more lies. Remember the Fair Elections Act that made elections less fair? The