Darren Roso is a socialist activist based in Melbourne. His book Daniel Bensaid: From the Actuality of Revolution to the Melancholic Wager (Historical Materialism Book Series) is forthcoming.
Daniel Bensaïd rejected the idea of historical inevitability, seeing history as a series of crossroads, not a single path. For Bensaïd, class struggle will remain central as long as capitalism exists, but the outcome is always unpredictable.
The French Marxist thinker Daniel Bensaïd grappled with the history of socialist defeats to supply us with a road map for the present. The result was a brilliant reformulation of Marxism that can guide today’s left-wing movements in their struggles.