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.

In this part of lecture, Bensaïd talks about the "Leninist revolution" on organisational question. He continues discussing the involvement of workers, such as professional revolutionaries, or selection, or democratic centralism, which implies that the party will act as a single body through a discipline which submits minority to majority decisions in action. All these points may look technical or administrative, but are geared towards the same goal: to distinguish the party from the class, and to protect the party from the dissolving influence of the bourgeoisie in the daily struggle of the class itself. Establishing a borderline between the party and the class corresponds to a new concept of strategy. The break comes with Lukács, who underlines consciousness and the revolution becomes a strategy. For proletariat, the strategical goal is taking power and destroying the bourgeois state; and only the party can build conscious project and plan to solve this question of power. Leninist concept of party is intertwined with the concept of strategy, of taking power. Bensaïd sets out positions of the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks with respect to their conjectural differences. He then starts talking about the context of German Revolution as well as the problems of organisational conception and struggle for power, with references to Rosa Luxemburg, Trotsky and Lenin. The difference between Lenin and Trotsky when they entered the process of Russian Revolution: Trotsky had a clearer view of the dynamics of the revolution, but he didn't have the organisational tool for that. Lenin, although he had a more confused view at the beginning, had the organisational mediation to correct his position and to put it into practice.

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