The World Socialist Web Site is republishing a lecture delivered in August 2007 by Chris Marsden, the National Secretary of the Socialist Equality Party, “Stalin, Trotsky and the 1926 British general strike”.
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I am very conscious of the great honour of being invited to participate in this seminar (2012) as someone who did not belong to the same international current as Daniel Bensaïd and only got to know him in the last decade of his life. But as soon as we met, what drew me towards Daniel was not simply his immense personal qualities—his strength of character, warmth and kindness, and a dry sense of humour congenial to an Anglo-Saxon sensibility (although inflected by Daniel's strong southern accent, the product of a clime very different from the damp island I inhabit)—but the presence of an exceptional intellect. Reading the flood of writings Daniel produced in his last 15 years I was strongly attracted to a highly original body of work with whose substance I strongly agreed even though it was expressed in a very different philosophical idiom from my own. [1]