Dougal McNeill

Thinking about ecology with Marx – A review of Kohei Saito’s 'Marx in the Anthropocene'

“If you want to remember you better write down the names”, runs a line from “Murder Most Foul”, Bob Dylan’s incantatory, delirious, visionary riffing from the Kennedy assassination to the nightmare of the United States, and the rest of the song conjures its world, through a running loop of borrowed, stolen and reworked phrases taken from across the American songbook. Sinatra rubs up against Stan Getz, Howlin’ Wolf against Patsy Cline, Black freedom traditions against white Tin Pan Alley jingles. 
“Murder Most Foul”, with its re-imagining of the United States and its myths—Kennedy’s Camelot as a liberal age most obviously, and what Jordy Cummings, in <a href="https://newpol.org/issue_post/painting-the-passports-brown/">a brilliant reading</a>, calls “the monstrosity that is American society”—arrived in the middle of last year’s lockdown, the gloom and grime of its topic and tone matching the moment just as the exhilaration of its music (and the reminder that Dylan was still here, still creating, still urging us to “stay safe, stay observant”) delivered relief from the claustrophobia and fear of those weeks. The song builds, across more than fifteen minutes, from a murder ballad and survey of the wreckage of “<a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/cannon/works/1948/twoamer.htm">the American century</a>” into a self-referential guide to listening to Dylan’s music itself, a way of working his own poetry into a self-generated tradition:
Play “Misty” for me and “That Old Devil Moon”
Play “Anything Goes” and “Memphis in June”
Play “Lonely at the Top” and “Lonely Are the Brave”
Play it for Houdini spinning around in his grave
Play Jelly Roll Morton, play “Lucille”
Play “Deep in a Dream”, and play “Driving Wheel”
Play “Moonlight Sonata” in F-sharp
And “Key to the Highway” for the king of the harp
Play “Marching Through Georgia” and “Dumbarton’s Drums”
Play darkness and death will come when it comes
Play “Love Me or Leave Me” by the great Bud Powell
Play “The Blood-Stained Banner”, play “Murder Most Foul”
The insistent, repetitive imperatives that structure this stanza give it a ritualistic power. But notice too what Dylan conjures. Jazz and blues, creations of Black America, are evoked by Bud Powell, Jelly Roll Morton, Big Bill Broonzy, and brought into aural connection with white musicians transformed by jazz (Sinatra) and classic songs (“Misty”) that have become part of Black and white songbooks alike. “Marching Through Georgia” is a Union song from the revolutionary Civil War, while “the blood-stained banner” is a phrase that once evoked the Confederate rag and, more recently, has become a key phrase for <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnPHFwakWhg">Christian devotion</a> in Black spiritual music and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-zKPziZTKg">Christian missions for working-class social reform</a>, union rights and migrant rights’ organising. 
Dystopian lyrics of death, murder and loss somehow produce a utopian image of anti-racist unity in American sounds; just as “Marching Through Georgia” promised that the Union struggle would “bring the jubilee” in its defeat of southern slavery, “Murder Most Foul” offers a way into a musical tradition, one it creates. It’s the sound of freedom itself.
If this sounds contradictory, it is: Dylan, like his inspiration Walt Whitman, “embraces multitudes”. For the past 25 years his albums have been developing this uneasy, heady combination. Song after song draws on, acknowledges and immerses itself in the music of the Black freedom struggle—from “If You Ever Go to Houston” (2009) and its borrowings from “The Midnight Special”, to “High Water” (2001) and its homage to Charley Paton, the early twentieth-century Delta Blues musician, to last year’s “Goodbye Jimmy Reed”.
Rough and Rowdy Ways (2020), Tempest (2012), Together Through Life (2009), Love and Theft (2001) and Time Out of Mind (1997) create the soundtrack to an imagined America, stuffed together with half-remembered lines, redolent images, sounds echoing from the half-forgotten sources in folk songs, white and Black, country music tracks, poems and phrases from the movies. 
From Emmett Till’s murder in <a>The Times They Are A-Changin’</a> (1964), to the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, when a white mob carried out a pogrom in the city’s “Black Wall Street” in Rough and Rowdy Ways (2020), Dylan’s is a moralist’s recording of America’s racist brutalities and cruelties. Nothing from the culture is lost in Dylan, and nothing fades; like Shakespeare’s Ariel in another Tempest, he has the ability to make it suffer a sea change “into something rich and strange”. Borrowing, reworking, re-imagining, projecting connections: this is a constant now too across 60 years. The first track on Dylan’s first album, after all, covers Jesse Fuller’s “You’re No Good”, while his most famous song, “Blowin’ in the Wind”, draws on the Black spiritual and response to slavery, “No More Auction Block”.
Too much writing on Dylan focuses on the 1960s themselves, by which time the artist’s project and outlook were basically set. Better, if we follow the music, to listen to all of this as a response to a formation in the “long”, radical 1950s: the decade of the Montgomery bus boycott, the murder of Emmett Till, Brown vs. Board of Education, the Birmingham campaign, the 1963 march on Washington (at which <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCjGSbm2LFc&amp;t=22s">Dylan sang</a>). The profound, mass radicalisation of a generation of Black workers, inspiring in turn solidarity responses from a layer of young white activists, changed American culture in lasting, generative ways.
The freedom tradition—from anti-slavery rebellion to the Civil War to civil rights sit-ins and marches—has always had music, culture and oratory bound up in its organising and agitation. And Black self-expression, from Miles Davis in jazz to Muhammed Ali in sport, showed performances of self-respect, dignity and confidence that couldn’t but have political resonance as signs of how freedom might live. This energy, explosive in its own right, leaped across stations, barriers and audiences too, making the music of Elvis Presley thinkable, shocking into life all the currents of modern and contemporary popular music. 
Is it any wonder that a middle-class boy from a Jewish family in Minnesota, himself out of place in the WASP suburbs, and an outsider further still amidst the anti-Semitism of wider American society, might find this wild mercury sound electrifying? Of course, the coffee shops and the folk revival mattered too, and, via Woody Guthrie, some echoes of the old left and the popular front played their role in Dylan’s formation, but this can all get overstated. Folk music could never hold an artist’s attention in the decade of civil rights; you can’t dance to it, for one thing, and its deadening orthodoxies couldn’t accommodate the wayward energies that youth rebellion, anti-racist insurgency and shifting cultural allegiances required. 
Dylan’s formal lyrics have, anyway, always been ambivalent politically, and “the answer is blowing in the wind” isn’t really a claim to get feet marching to a protest beat. Listen instead to the “wild mercury sound” and hear how, in Jordy Cumming’s words, “his protests weren’t for the movement, they were of the movement”. Cummings, in a nice phrase, calls him “a cognitive cartographer of the New Left”, his canny ear for stray and unhoused sounds and snatches of lyric mapping out an America that might be.
Or might be again. Dylan’s bringing together of working-class white cultural forms in country, hillbilly music and folk with the energies of the Black freedom struggle’s soundtrack in spirituals, blues and the idea (if not an audible affiliation) of jazz perhaps showed, in music, forms of unity and reconstruction that political struggle might recreate. The colour line, in music along with so much else in America, was created and enforced to serve racist business interests. 
<a href="https://lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n19/alex-abramovich/even-when-it-s-a-big-fat-lie">Country music was segregated</a> in the imagination by an industry afraid of what “race music” might do to its audiences; contemporary Black country musicians like <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/rhiannongiddens">Rhiannon Giddens</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/PriscillaRenea">Priscilla Renea</a> and <a href="https://leylamccalla.com/">Leyla McCalla</a> are reclaiming connections previously sundered, rather than moving into a “white” creative space. It’s telling too that some of the best interpretations of Dylan’s love songs—self-indulgent, misanthropic, often misogynist and boring in his own renditions—are from performers shaped by the freedom struggle: Nina Simone, Mavis Staples, Odetta, Betty LaVette, Miriam Makeba.
Never trust the teller, trust the tale: as with most massively wealthy stars, Dylan’s political pronouncements and formal views have, this past half century, ranged from the banal to the boorish (“all that foreign oil / controlling American soil”) to the reactionary. None of that really matters, though. We don’t look to political theory for experiences of life’s beauty, and we don’t approach music for strategic analysis. Listening in, instead, to the chimes of freedom flashing across 60 years of music shaped by the possibilities for vision given by the freedom struggle, we get a chance to hear a music giving an indictment, despite itself sometimes, of the America that is now and, in its elusive, slippery, rattling sounds, a promise of what a true liberation might be.

It’s all protest music: Bob Dylan at 80

This was a win on an historic scale. You have to go back almost 80 years, to the First Labour government’s victories in 1938 and 1946, to find suitable comparisons for Labour shares of the popular vote so commanding, and so clear. This was New Zealand Labour’s best result since the mixed-member proportional (MMP) system was introduced in 1996, and the Greens’ third best, trumped only by their vote in 2011 and 2014, which both occurred in the context of listless and demoralised Labour campaigns.
The parliamentary left has won a decisive majority. No wonder pro-capitalist commentators are scrambling now, without evidence, to claim Labour’s win was due to tactical voting against the Greens or strategic moves by National Party supporters. There’s an embarrassing fact to explain away: National’s result was the second worst in the party’s history. Special votes (including absentee ballots and postal votes), once counted, are likely to make these facts all the more stark.
So we should start by savouring a moment’s victory. There have been signs over the last three years that society is shifting leftwards, and parliament’s composition now is an index of that shift. The moves left in Aotearoa have been less dramatic than some of the big confrontations overseas, to be sure, but they are noticeable: a modest rise in strikes and workplace confidence, in particular the big nurses’ and teachers’ strikes; an increase in union membership; huge turnouts for the School Strikes for Climate; and widespread popular support for the land protectors at Ihumātao. 
Molecular changes in attitudes, confidence and outlook at the level of the workplace, classroom, family and flat express themselves now in a popular vote for parties positioning themselves on the left. That popular vote can, in turn, give further confidence to workers, students and the poor. The enormity of the result can help left-wing people feel, for a change, that they are moving with the popular stream.
Labour topped the party vote in all the seats in the South Island. National was beaten into third place in Wellington Central, Rongotai and Mt Albert. Over half the votes cast at Victoria University in Wellington went to the Greens, with another 30 percent for Labour. The swing from National to Labour across Auckland was more than 30 percent. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise: this was a result for the left, and with voter turnout at levels unseen in 21 years.
The comparison with Labour’s last such win—in the context of a world war and the introduction of the welfare state—draws out some of the political issues involved in Labour’s response to COVID-19. Much of the talk from National and its pet commentators has centred on the idea of this as “the COVID election”, as if that explains away the result as an anomaly.
But responses to the COVID-19 pandemic reveal political priorities. The lockdown from March, going hard, going early, could not have succeeded without mass social solidarity—it’s not something, as we see from overseas, that can be imposed on unwilling or unconvinced communities. Iwi and hapū (Māori tribes and clans) locked down to protect families; communities organised together, and we saved lives. 
Jacinda Ardern’s decision, against constant pressure from capitalist forces, to follow through with a decisive lockdown saved lives, and people remember that. They also remember who opposed her: if tourism bosses, the vice-chancellors of the universities, hospitality bosses and others had been listened to and the restrictions relaxed too early then how many more would have died? How many of our elders and our vulnerable are worth sacrificing at the altar of the economy? 
National promoted these lines as it sought to undermine the collective effort, and people remember that also. John Key, the National Party prime minister of New Zealand from 2008 to 2016, announced that there was no health crisis but an economic crisis. If this was a COVID election, it is all the more political for that fact.
But there are layers of the ironies of reformism, and of struggles around social reproduction under capitalism. If Ardern saved lives, she may well also have saved New Zealand capitalism in ways National, a party more closely wedded to individual blocs of capital than the Labour Party, could not have managed. Labour’s message that protecting health meant protecting the economy is right, but it is right on capitalist terms. Its bailouts—the wage subsidy scheme most notably, taken up by the Warehouse to the tune of NZ$67.8 million, only for the company later to sack workers—were for bosses’ profits, not primarily workers’ wellbeing. The COVID-19 pandemic is now also being used as an excuse to trim various sails on the reformist ship. 
If the results point to a class moving left, they also confirm Labour in the centre. Gone, on the campaign trail, was much talk of the “transformational” government we heard about in 2017. Gone the commitments to extending fee-free tertiary study. The idea that Labour will now be free of the shackles of New Zealand First and able to push leftwards is so much wishful thinking: the party pitched itself to the right, ruling out wealth taxes and stressing its compatibility with those who admired Key and Bill English in years past, and emphasized Ardern’s leadership over much in the way of substantial new promises in its campaign material. 
On election night, both Ardern and Labour finance minister Grant Robertson spoke of ruling for all New Zealanders, political code to reassure the bosses that they had no plans to move left. “Let’s keep moving”, the slogan ran. But the road we’re on is without a clear direction.
This tension will be a key thread running through the next three years. Labour in power, and facing a recession, may well disappoint its supporters in precisely the areas where action so urgently needs to be taken: housing, inequality, poverty and climate change. We should not exaggerate the speed with which that disappointment will come. The last three years, after all, saw real, if modest, reforms, and a solidification of Ardern’s popularity. And we should not assume it will flow in left-wing directions. But those are the challenges for the extra-parliamentary left: not to let Labour tell us to wait, and to mute our criticisms lest they benefit the right, but rather to build social movements—in the streets, workplaces and campuses—that can push for real change and pressure the government on its commitments. And this confidence can also open an audience for socialist ideas further left still.
That’s why the Greens’ result matters. All the contradictions within the Greens remain: they are an unstable balance of younger left-wing, white-collar workers and middle-class professionals and businesspeople, a grouping of those who both want to renew a greened capitalism and those who are looking for a more radical, activist party. But this election saw them build their vote, unheard of for a junior coalition partner in recent New Zealand history, and through a campaign that had them tilt left. 
The Greens campaigned on a wealth tax, on better employment laws, on student issues: classic reformist demands. Their new crop of MPs includes two seasoned veterans of social movements, Teanau Tuiono and Ricardo Menéndez March, emphasising the party’s activist wing. Sitting outside government, the Greens may be in a position to open a space for a left-wing opposition to some of Labour’s compromise and inertia. 
The Māori Party pitched left this election too, its disastrous anti-migrant position to one side. Rawiri Waititi’s win in Waiariki shows the promise of discontent with Labour and the limits of incrementalism drawing out other possibilities. Ardern’s inaction over the ongoing injustice at Ihumātao has been a long-standing rebuke to those, within te Ao Māori and outside of it, who support her against the right but hope for more for Māori from a government so dependent on Māori votes for its success. Without the excuse of New Zealand First and Winston Peters it will be much harder for Labour and Ardern to continue the approach of strategic ambiguity on Māori questions and Māori demands. There is new space now for movements outside parliament to exert real pressure.
Reconfiguration on the right introduces the unexpected to politics, too. National’s defeat leaves its most socially reactionary MPs, secure in safe seats, stronger in the caucus, and the so-called liberal wing much diminished. The passions that motivate these figures—culture wars, scepticism towards climate change, evangelical Christian hostility towards gender diversity, bodily autonomy and Palestinian freedoms—are out of step with the mainstream values of New Zealand capitalism, let alone those of workers and society more generally. 
National thus faces a bind: the emotions that will motivate those around this core to regroup are repulsive to the mainstream but, without affect and feeling, what kind of motivations can drive people in a political project to rebuild? ACT, meanwhile, with its best result ever, has brought in a slew of gun lobbyists and “free speech” warriors. National Party leader Judith Collins, however long she remains, will continue her toxicity. Opposition is likely to remain ugly, vindictive and, on cultural and social questions, dangerously unpredictable.
Labour’s decisive victory, though, sets the terrain for the coming months and year. It will have given confidence to workers and the oppressed and dismayed the forces of the right. More far-sighted capitalists will know, of course, that they have in Ardern and Robertson a reliable pair they can do business with, however reluctantly. The challenge for the socialist left now is to turn the glow of the encouragement and confidence the election has given into self-activity and action for workers’ fights, Māori land struggles, genuine transformation and, as part of this, the rebuilding of a truly anti-capitalist current within the workers’ movement and politics more broadly.

New Zealand's election dismays the right and challenges the left

A review of Rjurik Davidson’s Unwrapped Sky, Tor: 2014, $19.99
Docks that are the site of thaumaturgical wonder-working as well as industrial agitation; a seditionist hideout where revolutionaries debate philosopher-assassins; tram manufacturers that combine speed-ups and shop-floor discipline with magic and incantations: Rjurik Davidson’s Unwrapped Sky offers us a richly detailed, fully explored science fantasy world in the best traditions of political imagination.
Science fiction explores radically other worlds, so it is no wonder that socialists have been drawn to it as a form. Freed from having to represent the world as it is now, science fiction can make us perform imaginative exercises pondering just what a wholly other world – a world outside of capitalism and the “common sense” realities of our present – might involve.
Davidson, for many years a militant in the Democratic Socialist Party in the 1990s and a revolutionary socialist still, writes in the tradition of Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed or China Mieville’s Iron Council. He adds a new, wonderfully strange, world to our imaginative armoury.
Unwrapped Sky imagines revolution. Its city, Caeli-Amur, is run by competing houses, all now in periods of extended decline, and much more vicious as a result. “The old is dying”, in Gramsci’s phrase, “and the new cannot be born”. The world of Unwrapped Sky is full of the “morbid symptoms” of a social order decaying and turning in on itself.
Once, there was magic and myth; now there are common tricks, charms and incantations designed to speed up production, which leave workers coming out of trances “ashen-faced and distraught”. Rebellion and discontent are beginning, tentatively, to take organised form. The novel follows these developments from both sides.
Davidson’s great achievement is his smashing together the fantastical and the familiar. There’s lots of wonderfully weird science fantasy going on in Unwrapped Sky to exercise the imagination – curious worlds, uncanny forms of surveillance, ancient powers. But there are also many all too recognisable dilemmas from the world of our own activism and commitment.
Davidson has chosen, wisely I think, to make none of his characters wholly sympathetic, or, rather, to make them sympathetic in uncomfortable ways. We spend time with a class traitor, “rising” from the factory floor to management; a spy or informer getting pulled towards the revolutionary ideas she must betray; a revolutionary theorist watching his ideas and expectations bend and warp in the face of real revolutionary possibility.
Davidson isn’t afraid to make ideas, argument and debate a central part of his action. Some of the most thrilling parts of Unwrapped Sky occur when the reader must follow seditionist debates through to their consequences.
Too many fantasy worlds reproduce a kind of Tolkien or George R.R. Martin template of the frozen north. So it’s nice to uncover (as with Mad Max) something of the Australian environment in this other world – a city much like Sydney in its hills, chaos and “stifling heat and burning sun” in a “radiant pulsing glare”. Not all the novel works this well; the stimulating strangeness and rigour of the seditionists’ battles leave a rather conventional emotional sub-plot, involving a disappointingly familiar “romance” from our own world, feeling flat.
But, at its best, this is an exhilarating, militant, politically engaged and imaginatively ambitious debut. Its final pages make clear there will be sequels to come. Red Flag readers should look out for them.

Imagining revolution

The conservative National Party’s 20 September New Zealand (Aotearoa) election victory was a defeat for workers and the left. National won 48 percent of the vote, an increase compared to the last election. In the weeks following the results, National has outlined plans for the coming years: anti-union laws and charter schools.
So we must begin with a lucid registration of defeat: with each election, National has maintained or increased its support. Unlike the last time it was in government, the party is not attempting a major reform of New Zealand capitalism. It is instead making do with a mixture of cronyism, dairy industry promotion, increasing exports to China and rebuilding following the Christchurch earthquake. This partly explains prime minister John Key’s anti-political, “everyman” image, and its success. He remains a popular public figure.
A record level of non-participation in the last two elections is the other aspect to the situation. A concerted trade union campaign to increase voter participation made little difference. A significant section of the population is disengaged almost entirely from political life. This goes some way towards explaining why Key remains popular despite there being inequality and poverty throughout the country.
Labour’s crisis
Labour’s result is its worst since the 1920s. New Zealand has a proportional representation system much like Germany’s, so the seats Labour “won” conceal a more thorough defeat. Even leading MPs managed to pull fewer party votes than National in a host of safe seats. After a lacklustre and unenthusiastic campaign, Labour puttered into nowhere.
Two lessons stand out. One is that the Maori and Pasifika industrial working class continue to be Labour’s solid support. Labour topped the poll for party votes in all of the Maori seats. Labour held South Auckland, the heartland of Pasifika New Zealand.
The other lesson is that this will not be what mainstream and respectable opinion chooses to stress. Already a fight is on to punish Labour leader David Cunliffe for making a half-turn towards the left. A leadership contest is under way, and the media establishment have united against Cunliffe. The parliamentary party – which is to the right of the membership – and the capitalist class are fighting to push the party to the right.
What of the Greens? Being kept from government again spares them the test of power. But their contradictions develop. A pattern from the last election repeated itself, with the Greens doing well in wealthy areas and slipping in poorer (and brown-skinned) areas. The party campaigned around inequality and child poverty, but not with or to those affected by this situation. Shedding, with each election, their association with the historical left, the Greens face an uncertain future.
Taking 10 percent of the vote, a small drop from the last election, and after months of hoping for much more, the Greens may be reaching an electoral plateau, the fate of so many Green parties internationally. One in 10 votes may be the scope of socially liberal affluence.
The rout of Internet Mana
The Greens’ disappointments are nothing to the defeat of Internet Mana. Internet Mana was an alliance between the progressive and left wing Maori nationalist Mana Party and internet millionaire Kim Dotcom’s Internet Party. Mana, struggling for years with no real presence outside of the Maori world, hoped the alliance would pull it out of the political margins.
The gamble failed, with Mana losing its sole MP – the veteran protester and activist Hone Harawira, a principled fighter – and gaining little support in the process. In fact, the party suffered almost total marginalisation.
What next? 
	National and Key continue in a position of astonishing strength. Our side remains in disarray, with our unions weak, social movements demoralised and the parties and organisations of the extra-parliamentary left smaller than they have been in generations.
Yet nothing is inevitable or eternal. In 2004, after Liberal prime minister John Howard won a fourth term in Australia, it seemed as if the conservatives were invincible. Some columnists wrote about moving to New Zealand, such was their demoralisation. Three years later his government was defeated and Howard had lost his seat, broken by opposition to his industrial relations attacks.
In New Zealand, the divisions between the wealthy and the poor will continue, and probably widen, in coming years. Class struggle will continue to be waged by their side. How will ours respond?

Left routed in New Zealand election

In June 2013 more than 100 activists gathered in Auckland for a weekend conference of discussions and debates that led to the formation of the Aotearoa Boycott, Divestments and Sanctions network. This was the first national Palestine conference in Aotearoa for more than 20 years. The sense of unity and purpose the call for BDS sent out energised Palestine solidarity campaigners.
If the conference was the theory, a picket in Wellington on 22 February was the practice: 60 protesters, some of whom had travelled from Auckland, demonstrated outside a performance by the dance troupe Batsheva, part of the New Zealand Festival running through February.
Batsheva, which is funded by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs and which was sponsored at the Festival by the Embassy of Israel is, in the words of Israel’s Foreign Affairs ministry, “the best known global ambassador of Israeli culture.” Their presence in the Festival was part of a campaign by the Israeli state to enhance Israel’s public image. As the Aotearoa BDS Network noted, “this is part of a deliberate strategy of using arts and culture to whitewash Israel’s human rights abuses and violations of international law”.
Israeli apartheid is a particularly charged topic in this country, given the importance of boycott of South African rugby in the anti-apartheid movement in the 1970s and 80s. John Minto, a veteran of that movement, made the obvious comparison between Israel and South African apartheid during the Batsheva picket, to the feigned outrage of the 40 pro-Israel counter-picketers who had gathered to support the performance.
These counter-protesters, many of whom had been bussed in by evangelical protestant churches, obviously hoped they could discredit the Palestinian cause by smearing it as anti-Semitic and as “racist lies”. No such luck – between 5 and 10 people decided not to attend the performance after talking with BDS picketers. We came away feeling inspired for further protest in favour of boycott, divestments and sanctions.
The <a href="http://iso.org.nz/">International Socialist Organisation</a> has been a proud supporter of BDS from its inception.
This is just the beginning.

BDS Comes to Aotearoa

Daniel Bensaïd, An Impatient Life, trans. David Fernbach (Verso, 2013)
This absorbing, affecting memoir is a beautiful testament to a richly productive and dignified life. Daniel Bensaïd spent over forty years as a partisan of the revolutionary left in France, writing, campaigning, organising and agitating.
Drawn into Communist politics as a young man and then radicalised, along with a significant section of his generation, by anti-colonial struggle abroad and the events of 1968 at home, Bensaïd was a leader and theorist in the Ligue communiste révolutionnaire (LCR), a Trotskyist party that emerged as a libertarian, free-thinking and inventive gathering together of the best of 1968.
He represents so much of what is admirable about the militants of his generation. As well as being a fine writer, if David Fernbach’s elegant translation is any indication, Bensaïd was a thoughtful and reflective strategist. Too many memoirs of 1968 grub about in complacent nostalgia; Bensaïd’s interest was always in our possible future.
1968 in France was, of course, an extraordinary year, seeing one of the biggest mass strikes in history, workplace occupations, widespread student unrest and the revival of revolutionary hopes and ideas. Bensaïd was at the centre of all of this, and narrates a lively, sometimes sardonically funny, story of his generation’s political awakening. 
“We had all grown up in the historical sequence opened by the Great War and the Russian Revolution, on a continent that was now almost submerged,” he writes; the events of 1968 shook up the stuffy certainties of the left in France, smothered by a bureaucratic and tedious Stalinism that had, in the powerful influence of the Communist Party, dominated trade union, intellectual and political life for decades.
Bensaïd and his co-thinkers re-discovered the libertarian, free-thinking and open traditions of the Russian revolution, debating Trotsky, Lenin, Serge, Rosmer and Luxemburg as anti-imperialist rebellions abroad and mass strikes at home made the revolutionary tradition come alive again.
Theirs was a generation coming into adulthood with history “breathing down their necks” – the inspiration and example of Che Guevera and the Cuban revolutionaries; the urgent demands of Vietnam, its people fighting heroically against the US empire; Black Power; the first re-stirrings of women’s liberation, all of this made history feel alive and present after childhoods spent in conformity and relative political stability.
The LCR – banned by the French state early in its life, and needing renamed as its leaders came out from underground – combined youthful flair and exuberance with a willingness to re-discover suppressed traditions of dissent.
So far, perhaps, so familiar. There are plenty of memoirs of ageing baby boomers about, most eventually rounding on the failings of the generations since their own. Bensaïd’s book is different, almost an anti-memoir. “Enough harking back on 1968, enough generational effusions, memories of youthful companionship at the finest age of life. Too much has been said, and too much made […] We were not born to political action in 1968, and we are not hostages of this imaginary birth.”
Bensaïd is more interested in what comes after, the years of “hasty Leninism” as the new groupings of radicals and revolutionaries face the challenges of organising in the 1970s, their young excitement turning into lives shaped by commitment to a cause.
Bensaïd’s work as a leader of the Fourth International takes him to Latin America, Argentina and Brazil in particular, making contact with militants and organisations, arguing politics, thinking through strategy. These parts of the book are particularly affecting – many of the political friends Bensaïd makes he loses to torture and shooting by US-backed dictators – and self-critical.
Bensaïd does not avoid reckoning with what he calls the “Guevarist voluntarism” of the Fourth International, and its acts “of faith in the virtues of exemplary action”. Inspired by the example of Che, and taking seriously his demand that the job of revolutionaries was to make the revolution, Bensaïd and his co-thinkers romanticised armed struggle, seeing in it a test of revolutionary seriousness.
They needed to learn, and paid a high price in the process, that reformists can carry guns, too, and that there are no substitutes for independent workers’ activity. Their Latin American co-thinkers learned these lessons often at the cost of comrades’ lives; Bensaïd pays tribute to them through a sombre reckoning with these defeats and setbacks.
The excitement of the times – the forces that would create the PT (Workers’ Party) in Brazil defying the Generals; the left resurgent in Argentina; the example of Cuba still energising the continent – is evoked alongside its aftermath. They were “running headlong into an open grave,” he writes, their obsession with armed struggle hastening their own organisations’ disintegration and disorientation.
As the revolutionary offensives of the 1970s were beaten back by the neoliberal reaction of the 1980s, many of Bensaïd’s generation made their peace with the system, seeking comfortable careers and promotions inside France’s Socialist Party, or going over to the side of open reaction and empire, as in the case of the “New Philosophers”.
Radicals who a decade ago had expected revolution around every corner decided now that, having turned the corner and found more struggles to come, history was finished: liberal capitalism was the horizon. Bensaïd is quietly scornful of this kind of impoverished view: “No one chooses their historical moment. You have to be content with the challenges and opportunities that the era offers […] When great hopes have lead in their wings, little ones spring up like mushrooms on the ground, in everyday resistance and miniscule conspiracies.”
The choices that a revolutionary makes are not to do with whether revolution is likely any time soon, but to do with what humanity needs, what answers exist for the urgent questions – questions now ecological, economic, social – facing us:
“Bad faith claims that the world is doing fine, and above all that nothing need be changed. Resignation murmurs that there is cause for concern, but that nothing can be done, the market being natural and inequality eternal. The senile cynic, finally, admits that not all is for the best in this best of worlds, but goes on to add right away that humanity is too mediocre to alter the course of things.
“Yet eternity does not exist, so it is necessary to wager […] The notion of commitment clumsily evokes this logical wager on the uncertain. A secular, everyday wager, launched anew each day. The wager, unavoidable as long as the necessary and the possible remain in disagreement, is made by countless people across the world, however discreetly.”
This wager never involves dogmatism. An Impatient Life splices chapters of memory with chapters of speculation and theoretical summary, thoughts on everything from the nature of historical time to Jewish identity to the role of theory. “A theory proves its vitality by the fruitfulness of the controversies it arouses”: Marxism retains its relevance as a guide to action, a method and means for strategising, thinking through the world.
History and tradition, in this memoir, are offered as things to think with. “These historical references furnished, if not models, at least valuable strategic reference points”: an anti-Stalinist Marxism looks to the examples of past revolutions to learn and to reflect for next time. Bensaïd’s fidelity to 1968 is in a different thought-world from most exercises in nostalgia. He stresses imaginative, experimental, open thinking not – as many on the left now suggest – because historical questions have somehow become irrelevant, or because theoretical controversy is out-dated, but the better to be able to think with the intensity the moment requires:
“This non-doctrinaire critical theory is constantly fuelled by social struggles and practices whose impersonal logic it unravels. The question then is to know whether there still exists, in this ticklish plurality of a thousand Marxisms, a common denominator that can justify the generic name they still claim. Too generous a proliferation of ‘Marxisms’ could in fact lead to their dissolution pure and simple, in a cultural broth lacking heuristic vigour or practical pertinence.”
Particularly interesting are Bensaïd’s reflections on his Jewish heritage, an identity he had little interest in reflecting on until Zionist terror in Palestine – carried out in the name of Jews everywhere – forced him to make a different account: 
“The strong component of Jewish origin among the rebel youth of the 1960s is hardly a sociological mystery. They were, for the most part, sons and daughters of survivors […] Our war had not yet ended. […] From being intransigent against anti-Semitism, we now came out also as resolutely anti-Zionist, deeply convinced that, far from being incompatible, the two things went together. Refusing to accept the pariah status of the Palestinians essentially meant remaining faithful to the history of Jewish suffering.”
Bensaïd’s reading and writing in Jewish radical traditions – and, wonderfully, in and around the writing of Walter Benjamin – links these personal and familial connections, and the history of Jewish suffering in Europe, with the urgent anti-imperialist task of standing alongside Palestinian resistance: “We too have had to learn this biblical patience, this old Jewish patience going back more than five thousand years, and transformed today into the patience and endurance of the Palestinians.”
Reading this memoir was a strangely exciting, unsettling experience. There is much to learn from these pages, and much pleasure to take from their unsentimentally emotional fidelity to the cause of revolution and human liberation. Bensaïd was an immensely stylish figure, too, unafraid of writing an allusive, richly philosophical prose, alert to historical ironies and dialectical humour.
Too often on the left in Aotearoa we veer between staid and boring writing – worrying whether it is accessible or not – and an equally dull academic style, anxiously establishing respectability. Bensaïd is intellectual without ever seeming academic; the divisions and gate-keeping of university life were totally foreign to him. He is partisan militant and committed whilst keeping up a sprightly, delightful writing style, seeming to insist in this that beauty and aesthetics are too precious to hand over to the other side.
Most of all, this is an energising book, a book that reminds us of the rightness of refusing the inevitability of capitalism and war, of the promise of international solidarity and socialism, of our responsibility to all those who have made sacrifices in this struggle. Fidelity, in politics, does not mean monogamy: ideas and parties are right only so long as they are useful for human liberation and advance that cause. Fidelity itself, however, is essential. This is a long struggle.
Bensaïd died, much too young, weakened by AIDS, in 2010. The original French edition of this book came out in 2004, before the Global Financial Crisis, the deepening radicalisation in Venezuela, the Arab revolutions. I wish we had Bensaïd still with us to offer the insights and provocations of his free-thinking Marxism for the current age. The example An Impatient Life offers is the next-best substitute:
“I have no religious sense of redemptive suffering. I have never conceived of my commitments as asceticism or reparation. I have never taken vows of intellectual poverty of chastity. As a young Communist, I took an immediate dislike to the bureaucratic bigotry of the Stalinist priests and its Maoist counterpart. The young red guards in their French version, hymning the thoughts of the Great Helmsman, were odious to me – these little monks who gave their person to the Cause (of the people or the proletariat).
“The Cause? It never occurred to me to sacrifice to such ventriloquous idols. Political militancy for me is the opposite of a sad passion. A joyous experience despite its bad moments. My party, like that of Heine, is ‘the party of flowers and nightingales’.”
[First published by the <a href="http://iso.org.nz/">International Socialist Organisation in Aotearoa/New Zealand</a>.]

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