Marx for our Times: Adventures and Misadventures of a Critique, by Daniel Bensaid, Verso, €20 Hardcover, Reviewed by DUNCAN CHAPPLE
Trench academic Daniel Bensaid's history, class and scientific reasoning. On each topic he resembles a restorer of paintings.
A founding member of the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire, Bensaid strips away faded, flat and highly simplified notions of "Marxism', and produces a much more vibrant, detailed and sometimes contradictory Marx underneath.
Of course, many people dislike the brighter colours of restored paintings and fear that the interpretation involved in a restoration can corrupt the artist's original vision.
For those of us used to reading the very certain and dogmatic superstructure of 'historical materialism' that modern Marxists have built on top of Marx, Bensaid's reading of Marx is very exciting.
It is, almost certainly, the most significant book to have emerged from the European revolutionary left since the
Like it or not, this book is a landmark for Marxism which looks set to be widely used by those outside Marxism to understand it. For example, the Labour, Liberal and Conservative parties all sell this book to their members, and I bought my copy from the Fabian Society.
Only now available in English, Bensaid's book appeared in France in 1995, when a major resurgence of class struggle and Marxism was underway. Bensaid contributes to the redevelopment of Marxist thinking after the collapse of Stalinism in two ways.
First, Bensaid aims to defend Marx against attacks by philosophers. This defence is aimed mainly against Karl Popper, a philosopher and anti-communist throughout the Cold War, and a 1980s academic current around Jon Elster that, while attempting to create an 'Analytical Marxism', opposed core theories of Marx on value and labour.
Second, Bensaid re-examines Marx because he feels that both Popper and Elster criticise some ideas that Marx did not defend. For example, Popper criticised Marx as a 'historicist' who thought that the future could be largely predicted from the past, rather like worshippers who refer to daily events to confirm the inevitable realisation of a religious vision.
On occasions some of Marx's journalism and letters make it seem as if communism is the inevitable consequence of capitalism. But while Marx's major works explicitly reject such unilinear views of history, later Marxists are still often pulled towards a mechanical view, in which Marxism pretends to have a predictive power almost as strong as those of the natural sciences.
Bensaid argues that Marx clearly Brice air He one to.
cal predictability. He notes that Capital is not a science of the laws of history, but a "critique of political economy". Rather than develop a philosophy of history, Marx describes a complex world where politics can* overpower the dominant historical trends and where "progress" is neither straightforward nor guaranteed.
Marx finds trends and tendencies, which later 'Marxists' dressed up as laws that are supposedly as irresistible as the laws of physics.
Bensaid points out the gap between Socialist
EDITORS: John Bulaitis, Terry Conway, John Lister Marx may have written in black and white, but the colour and depth of his analysis can be restored As some old truisms disappear some readers will be disconcerted ... the rigid correspondence between the economic 'base' and the social 'superstructure' which many Marxists talk of, and Marx's own stress on the discordance and heterogeneity in history produced by people and politics changing the course of events. Bensaid's book repeatedly aims to " restore Marx's own words on a range of questions against leftists, from Labriola to Geras, whose elaborations have not only extended Marx's but also overlain mistakenly and concealed them. As some old truisms disappear, some readers will be disconcerted. One representative criticism is that of Mike EDITORIAL BOARD : Mandy Baker, Julia Brandreth, John Bulaitis, Andrew Burgin, Terry Conway, Sam Feeney, Phil Hearse, John Lister, Kathy Lowe, Pauline .......acnair, who wrote that Bensaid's
book "reads Marx as a 'postmodernist" and attempts the Marxism into a pure critique of the world-as-it-is, without testable implications". Read the book, and make up your own mind. the University of Paris VIII and is the author of books on Marxism, Walter Benjamin, the French Revolution and Joan of Arc. His book • • • intervenes into academic debates in the mid-1990s and is correspondingly complex. Verso gives precious little aid for those unfamiliar with some terms in this book. Obscure words like aporias, polysemy, fatum, hypostasis, revenants and Zeitwidrig pop up unexplained every few pages (I juggled English, French and German dictionaries). The lack of footnotes to introduce these terms is quite unforgivable in a book aimed at non-academic audiences in the English-speaking countries, and could usefully be resolved in a future printing. Roland, Liam McUaid, Piers Moystn, Karen O'Toole, Alan Thornett, James White and Paul Wilcox. DESIGN: Pete McGreal and John Lister SPONSORED BY: International Socialist Group, Socialist Solidarity Network and individuals including Toby Abse, Patrick Baker, Julia Brandreth, Andrew Burgin, Brenda and Brian Bushell, Mathew Caygill, Duncan Chapple, Frances Curran, Norma Dowd, Andy Gibbons, Jamie Gough, Catriona Grant, Patrick Hall, Rick Hatcher, Wayne Holmes, Nick Lidgett,
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