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Daniel Bensaid

Daniel Bensaïd (2007): Guy Debord (1931-1994), or, The spectacle, the highest stage of commodity fetishism

24 June 2025
In 1953 Debord painted on a wall on the Rue de Seine the slogan “Ne travaillez jamais,” “Never Work.”

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. 

Daniel Bensaïd (1997): Stalinism against communism

11 June 2024
Work at White Sea Canal (Belomorkanal) in the Soviet Union (from october 16, 1931 until august 30, 1933). Most of the work was done manually by forced labour.

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

Daniel Bensaïd (2008): Myths and legends of domination

20 March 2024

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’.

Daniel Bensaïd: The rhythms of capital. On Mandel's The Long Waves of Capitalist Development

19 February 2024

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.

Daniel Bensaïd (2005): A fragment on Fanon

26 January 2024

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.

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