"Theses of Resistance"
Daniel Bensaïd, Viento Sur
We are faced with a double responsibility: the transmission of a tradition
threatened by conformism, and the exploration of the uncertain contours of
the future.
In the course of the last decade (since the disintegration of the Soviet
Union and German unification), something came to an end. But what? Was it
the “Short 20th Century” of which Eric Hobsbawm and other historians speak,
beginning with World War I and ending with the fall of the Berlin Wall?
Or is it the short period that followed World War II, marked by the twin
superpowers of the Cold War, and characterized in the imperialist centres by
sustained capital accumulation and “Fordist” regulation?
Or again, is it the great cycle in the history of capitalism and the
workers’ movement, opened by the capitalist development of the 1880s,
subsequent colonial expansion and the blossoming of the modern labour
movement, symbolized by the formation of the Second International?