Class and party : Daniel Bensaïd’s philosophy of strategy against the randomization of politics.

Abstract

This article argues for the centrality of the notion of class struggle in both political theory and praxis in order to counter what E. M. Wood, echoing P. Anderson (1983), has referred to as the «randomization of politics» (1986), namely a politics reduced to pure contingency where no causality between the social and the political is allowed. It suggests that class struggle is precisely the lost cause of radical politics, since class struggle operates as a synthetic principle informing a concept of society as a whole and a view of antagonism as a systemic and totalistic instance. Drawing on Daniel Bensaïd’s «philosophy of strategy» and its critical reading of Marx’s class theory (Bensaïd, 1995; 2002; 2011; 2016), the article suggests that class struggle be rethought as a new «strategic universalism» across the international division of labor. Along the lines of Bensaïd’s understanding of politics as a «strategic art» of recommencement (Bensaïd, 1995), it will be argued here that radical politics cannot do without class struggle or without the party