These were my remarks from the chair at to open the meeting. The contributions from Alex Callinicos, Gilbert Achcar, Stathis Kouvelakis and Terry Conway were affectionate, moving without being sentimental and intellectually rigorous. The videos are online here.

Welcome to this meeting to celebrate the life and work of our comrade Daniel Bensaid who died on January 12th.

Socialist Resistance which has organised this event is the section of the Fourth International in Britain and as you will all be aware Daniel was a prominent member of the International for the bulk of his political life. Like Chris Harman who also died recently Daniel was one of that generation who were brought to revolutionary politics by the wave of internationalism, militancy and class struggle that swept the world in the 1960s and 70s. Unlike many of their contemporaries Daniel and Chris lived and died as unrepentant, unbroken fighting socialists.

Last weekend in this building members of SR met in this building to discuss the International’s upcoming World Congress and to a great extent our debates were influenced both by Daniel’s personal legacy and the revolutionary Marxist tradition of which he was a part.

I’d like to briefly spotlight three elements of this legacy.

The first is an inflexible commitment to revolutionary democracy. You can see if you read the conference documents on the International Viewpoint website that a range of contending views are expressed. To borrow Rosa Luxemburg’s aphorism “freedom is only the freedom to dissent” and in common with other Fourth Internationalists Daniel vigorously defended this right in his own organisation and the organisations of the working class. Anyone familiar with the life of the LCR will be aware of its culture of lively debate and more or less comradely disagreement. We think that this has helped it emerge as a small but significant force in French politics.

The second is a shared conception of the necessity for a broad class struggle party to fill the political vacuum being created by the Europe wide march to the right of the traditional workers’ parties. Different national settings impose different tactical choices. The LCR decided to dissolve itself in order to establish the NPA. This was not an uncontroversial choice inside the Fourth International. In Britain members of SR are active inside Respect which we see as a potential component of a broader working class party and in our discussions over the weekend the French experience was an important point of reference and it has been one which has strongly influenced our political approach in recent years.

The third and final point I want to make is a shared awareness of the necessity to see Marxism as a creative instrument with which we can change the world. Just as in the 1960s and 70s Marxists were obliged to deal with the new realities created by the women’s movement and the LGBT movement now we have to integrate an understanding of ecology in a way that is novel for many of us. An attempt to elaborate a Marxist approach to the catastrophic climate change that capitalism is creating has been a central part of the political work that SR has been involved in over recent years – to the extent that we call ourselves an ecosocialist current in order to register the centrality of this issue in our politics. Again this is being reflected in the discussions in the International. This is only right since unless the working class and its organisations elaborate our response to climate change the people who created the problem will impose theirs.

So it’s apt that on the day when as the result of the crooks, gamblers and speculators  who play the currency markets the working classes of Greece, Spain, Ireland and Italy are facing attacks on their pensions, wages and social services that we meet to honour Daniel.