An Impatient Life: A Memoir

by Daniel Bensaïd, David Fernbach (Translation), Tariq Ali (Introduction)

A philosopher and activist, eager to live according to ideals forged in study and discussion, Daniel Bensaïd was a man deeply entrenched in both the French and the international left. Raised in a staunchly red neighbourhood of Toulouse, where his family owned a bistro, he grew to be France’s leading Marxist public intellectual, much in demand on talk shows and in the press. A lyrical essayist and powerful public speaker, at his best expounding large ideas to crowds of students and workers, he was a founder member of the Ligue Communiste and thrived at the heart of a resurgent far left in the 1960s, which nurtured many of the leading figures of today’s French establishment.

The path from the joyous explosion of May 1968, through the painful experience of defeat in Latin America and the world-shaking collapse of the USSR, to the neoliberal world of today, dominated as it is by global finance, is narrated in An Impatient Life with Bensaïd’s characteristic elegance of phrase and clarity of vision. His memoir relates a life of ideological and practical struggle, a never-resting endeavour to comprehend the workings of capitalism in the pursuit of revolution.

Genres: History, Biography, Biography Memoir, Autobiography

392 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Daniel Bensaïd was a philosopher and a leader of the Trotskyist movement in France. He became a leading figure in the student revolt of 1968, while studying at the University of Paris X: Nanterre.

Reviews

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really loved this book. Bensaid was a French Trotskyist of the May ’68 generation, born in Toulouse in 1946 to an Algerian Jewish father and French mom who broke with her family to marry his dad. Deeply involved in left politics from a young age, he traces his life story with great political and philosophical insight. I could easily make a ten year reading project just by following his footnotes. He got a doctorate in philosophy, read everyone, and thought deeply about broad Enlightenment intellectual currents – Kant, Hegel, Marx, Heine, Kautsky, Trotsky, Lukacs, Korsch, Benjamin, Arendt, Breton, Mandel, Anderson, to "name-check" just a fraction of those cited. His family and community roots were in the French CP. But even as a teenager he identified with and joined its dissidents, and drifted toward Trotksyism as the home for revolutionary-left politics unpolluted by Stalinist apologia of any kind. Unlike in the United States, in which Trotskyism, like socialism and Marxism more broadly, was repressed in the trade unions and forced into isolation from kind of working class base, at certain times and in certain parts of Europe, Latin America, and Asia, Trotskyist politics had organic connections to mass working class politics. He was deeply involved in Latin American revolutionary currents as a representative of the Fourth International, read his Mariategui, grappled with focoism and the bitter lessons of the defeats of the Popular Unity government in Chile, and the bending of the Workers Party in Brasil to the will of international capital. He is quite self-critical about the late 60s/early 70s illusions about armed struggle not only among the Gueveraistas, but among his own Trotskyist compatriots, who often paid for such illusions with their lives. There is a wonderful consistency of his international solidarity from the work on Latin America to his refusal to give anything other than a universalist reading of the choices in the Middle East. The brief chapter of personal and political reflections on his Jewish heritage and identity so closely mirror my own thinking that I’m tempted to read long excerpts of it at the next family seder, when we’re all invited to contribute our own thoughts and texts for consideration. It’s quite clear that while other leading lights of May ’68 became apologists for the status quo, he held to his revolutionary aspirations and values. There’s a nice discussion of sectarianism, and the need for a certain modesty and openness to criticism. The difference between his intellectual modesty and that of someone like Reinhold Niebuhr is that Bensaid, unlike Niebuhr, never became an apologist for a triumphalist capitalism; quite the contrary. His penultimate chapter on the future of emancipatory thought and politics is so beautiful, so poignant, it almost made me cry. After decades of deep engagement, and many defeats, he knows the deal – we’ve barely pushed the needle of human progress these last hundred years; in important ways we’ve even gone backwards. He is way too smart to fall back on any kind of progressive determinism – in fact he critiques that brilliantly (in ways that neatly parallel Enzo Traverso’s critique in “Left Wing Melancholia”). But he’s also way too committed to human emancipation to give up on it, to see the present as acceptable. We could certainly use his insight now; but he died in 2010.

[Brendan Campisi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unlike anything else I've ever read. At the core, Bensaïd tells the story of his political life, animated to a great extent by the desire to defend the 'generation of '68' and its commitment to revolutionary social change from the endless condescension and dismissal these have received, including (or especially) from some of those who took part in that experience but later went in other directions politically and socially. Woven into the political biography, however, are thematic chapters dealing with subjects ranging from the concept of revolutionary crisis, to the political and ethical questions raised by political violence, to the nature of journalism, to Jewish identity. Some of these sections are quite dense, but all reward reading as much as the biographical thread does.

[Sean Egan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful book about a life on the left. I found an early chapter about classical philosophy to be a bit of a slog but it's worth sticking it about for battles with fascists on the streets of Paris, the ins and outs of running a revolutionary newspaper and a whistle stop hour of various revolutionary Marxist insurgencies around the world. The chapter about Trotksy's last years in Mexico is particularly striking.

[Marc Lichtman · Rating 1 out of 5]

I wrote a serious review of this book once, but appear to have lost it. Bensaïd was a leader of the faction of the Fourth International that despite being wrong on almost everything, held a majority position, and had nothing but contempt for the Socialist Workers Party in the US. The SWP made a lot of mistakes too, but we drew a sharp line between ourselves and Maoists and other Stalinist groups. We were usually able to force the Communist Party (pro-Moscow Stalinists) into a united front in the movement against the Vietnam War. We saw building that movement as our chief responsibility--see Out Now: A Participant's Account of the Movement in the United States Against the Vietnam War.

We played an important role in fighting racism and developed a close relationship with fighters like Robert F. Williams, and most importantly, Malcolm X--see Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power. Later, when a court ruling on desegregation faced violent racist reaction in Boston, we played a big role in forming the National Student Coalition Against Racism, which also took part in many local battles and then turned to supporting the struggles in Southern Africa.

We got many of the works of Leon Trotsky into English, and also published much by our founder, James P. Cannon, who they had no respect for. The European majority published books for intellectuals and won new members more to far leftism than to revolutionary Marxism.

We had agreed at the reunification of the Fourth International in 1963 that Cuba was a healthy workers state, but they dropped this and kept looking toward Stalinist parties as not really being Stalinist because they led revolutions (ignoring the extreme circumstances that forced them to do that).

When Cuba started playing a huge role in Southern Africa, starting with the impetus given by the overthrow of the Portuguese dictatorship in 1974, we oriented more and more toward Cuba again, publishing Dynamics of the Cuban Revolution: A Marxist Appreciation, followed by getting out-of-print material on Cuba back into print and then publishing dozens of new books, mostly interviews with Cuban revolutionary leaders.

The faction Bensaïd was in ignored the increased international role of Cuba, while we, besides publishing books, played a big role in Cuba solidarity coalitions.

We recruited most of what became the Iranian section of the Fourth International, and while it isn't possible to have a party there currently, many of our former comrades are able, despite the censorship, to publish a large amount of Marxist literature in Iran. People can find this, as well as our books on Cuba and US politics and history on pathfinderpress.com. Meanwhile, the largest party in the Fourth International, in France, dissolved itself into what they call "an anticapitalist coalition"!

The European majority voted for the turn to industry, but the leaders had no intention of carrying it out.

It took years to convince the intellectuals that guerilla warfare in Latin America was a tactic, not a principle, something the Cubans had long before discovered. And then they scapegoated Livio Maitan rather than taking full responsibility.

Today the SWP is still oriented to the working class, see The Low Point of Labor Resistance is Behind Us: The Socialist Workers Party Looks Forward and away from liberal Woke politics, see Labor, Nature, and the Evolution of Humanity: The Long View of History, away from the "socialism of fools,"--Jew-hatred, masquerading as solidarity with Palestine, see The Fight Against Jew-Hatred and Pogroms in the Imperialist Epoch. We firmly support independence for Ukraine. We long ago stopped calling ourselves "Trotskyist," but that wasn't the reason why we left the Fourth International--Its bankrupt politics was.

The SWP has sister parties in Canada, the UK, and Australia, and supporters like me in many parts of the world. The weekly newspaper, the Militant, is still published as a newspaper, with a website that includes all issues starting in 1928.

[Giuliano Vivaldi · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most impressive memoirs I've read in a long time.

[Andrew · Rating 1 out of 5]

Read to about pg.35 and I realised I have no fucking interest in this whatsoever. *Everything* I detest about the 68 Left, the most self indulgent, spoilt, naval gazing, whiny, pathetic, nauseatingly introspected, bourgeois and worthless breed of leftists developed anywhere ever in incarnate in Bensaud. So far, its a bewilderingly tedious array of references to irrelevent and hopelessly obscure French communist sects and figures, and a detestable tone of truly vomit inducing smug, smary, self pleased tone of absolutely hateful pretentiousness. He, like all fucking trots, seemed to want to do was just listen to poetry and drink and fuck while crying endlessly about how awful communist parties were, how bureaucratic and boring and angry they were and how they didn't care to cultivate their precious oh so profoundly spiritual artistic souls, and were more interested in theory and organisation and doing shit. Awww poor liddle Trot infants. So bored by parties and having a party line? Awww, not self indulgent enough for them? Not nauseatingly bourgeois or self obssesed or witty enough for them? Well fuck them then. One almost wishes that generation of leftists would have been theoughouly persecuted for a bit under a millitary dictatorship, for no other reason than to get them to *shut the fuck up*, stop whining about how "oppresive" your indulgent capitalist nanny state is to you and fucking well put down your goddamed shit and wretched beat poetry record recordings and some fucking Lenin.

Of course, looking back from the Doom Years, the Hell Years, the abject nightmare no hope dystopia world of 2024 where every attempted left utopia stands in smouldering ruin, any prospect for hope crushed utterly without trace, every disaster embraced, every wrong turn gone down, every positive development reversed or seriously damaged in some way, the oh so horrible awful days of hierarchical bureaucracy in huge communist parties representing sometimes millions of people, with rigorous standards of discipline and regimentation, operating at national and local levels, with firm ideological bases and a long term commitment to winning power, doesn't seem, you know...that bad. Like, really at all.

I just can't stand this tripe. All autobiographies are worthless narcassism. One from the trust fund generation of polytechnic leftists that wants to spend half its time waffling and whining about its oh so greater moral superiority to its predecessors makes me want to sick up my own intestinal fluid.

[Tiarnán · Rating 4 out of 5]

Moving and lyrical memoir by a radical French 68-er who never reneged on his radicalism unlike many of his contemporaries. Details Bensaid's youth among the métissage of the French proletariat, his experience of and ultimate exit from the youth wing of the communist party, his eventual attachment to revolutionary Trotskyism and subsequent career as a political militant and public intellectual. Bit windy in parts, with unnecessarily long (if often insightful) chapters on a wide variety of topics including political violence, contemporary journalism, and his experiences with the Latin American left. A must-read for contemporary revolutionaries, political theorists, and leftists of all hues.

[Rjurik Davidson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Longer review to come, but this is a rich and thoughtful book.