Re: the request for info on this book
Everyone seems to be busily slamming Desai's book (which I haven't read) but nobody seems to have any comment on Bensaid's book (which I am currently groping through).
Full disclosure demands that I note that I share a political tendency with this fellow. That being said, even if I didn't, I'd have to say this is one of the most wonderful books to come down the pipe in quite some time.
Rarely does a dustjacket ever come close to describing a book's content, but in this case the term "post-post-modern" Marx would apply.
The language of the book might be a bit off-putting for those who don't already have some familiarity with much of the subject matter (it's certainly not the easiest read I've encountered).
To call it a "refreshing reinterpretation" of Marx or something like that would be to miss the point entirely. What Bensaid does, like other thinkers such as Ellen Meiksins Wood or Hal Draper, is excavate the real Marx which has been buried for so long by the distortions of both Diamat hacks and (no-longer-trendy)pomotistas.
Those who grind their teeth at Hardt and Negri's lazy "multitude" drivel will find solace in Bensaid's recovery of the working class, which seems to anticipate a lot of H&N's arguments, which is rather amazing considering that this book was written in 1995. Basically, Bensaid correctly fights for the notion of the "working-class" as the polarity of a dialectic rather than an empirical sociological category (the arguments he makes might receive some nods of approval from Carrol Cox, who has argued this point on lbo-talk before).
The other two sections of the book deal with Marx's critique of the historicism and scientism of his day, and proving that Marx does the contigency, unevenness, indeterminacy riff a hell of a lot better than all those johnny-come-lately PoMos. Fans of Michael Lowy's critiques of Second International ontology might find useful confirmation in Bensaid's book.
If I get some time, maybe I'll try to transcribe some useful passages. It's a wonderful book, beautifully written (but like I said, not exactly in colloquial language).
I'm a big fan of the two articles on Lenin that Yoshie posted. Hopefully Bensaid will develop it into a book-length work.
I attended a panel at the European Social Forum in Florence where Bensaid gave a bravura critique of Empire, along the lines of whether we embrace multitude and abandon working-class, debunking all this "anti-power" nonsense, and tactfully, wittily, but incisively demolishing the tragically inept misinterpretations of the Chiapas rebellion that Northern activists use to rationalize these shoddy concepts.
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