Thanks to the International Institute for Research and Education (see http://www.iire.org/) for making available recordings of Bensaid's lectures-- see http://www.iire.org/en/resources/audio-s-daniel-bensaid.html for more.

Bensaïd begins with a survey of the general conditions of building a revolutionary proletarian party. Under this heading, he sets out the differences between the proletarian revolution and the bourgeois revolution. The conditions of the exploitation of the proletariat reproduce the conditions of class and an alienated relation with the goals of production. He relates all these points to the party question, where workers need to organise themselves to take power. Bensaïd then discusses several points from Marx, Engels and the party question regarding building a proletarian conscious party. He underlines that the concept of party in Marx and Engels was different from the concept of party in Lenin. The two meanings of party: historical party, and the conjectural party. In Engels, revolution was a natural process and the party is not an active initiative agent of the revolution. Bensaïd then moves onto the Leninist theory of the party, which is mainly taken as a technical process of organisation. The concept of "class party". However the key point is not the technical aspect, it's not the degree of centralisation or discipline; it is the delimitation of the party from the class.

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