“It is said that one should live with one’s times. These times are dying. Are we then to rot and disappear along with them?”¹

“But because thou art lukewarm and neither cold nor hot, I will begin to vomit thee out of my mouth”.²

Time is currently extracting a heavy blood tribute from the thinkers of the radical left. It is enough to list the names of those we have lost recently to get a measure of the hecatomb—Georges Labica, Giovanni Arrighi, Peter Gowan, GA Cohen, Howard Zinn. The juggernaut is likely to roll on relentlessly, picking up speed as it advances. Each death provokes a sense of shock and remorse—another fallen ally departing at the wrong moment, another pile of texts inadequately digested, another line of research and enquiry broken off in mid-stream. But for those of us on the revolutionary left, those of us still engaged in projects of building and maintaining organisational realities, the recent, sudden disappearance of two comrades in particular, despite their fundamental differences on every level—aesthetic, stylistic, temperamental, intellectual—leaves us with a real sense of solitude, especially in this peculiarly murky and uncertain conjuncture.

For Chris Harman and Daniel Bensaïd, two men who have died at almost the same age and within months of each other—one after a monumental 20-year struggle against illness, the other plucked without warning from the night—scarcely addressed probably more than a few sentences directly to each other in over 40 years. And yet their lifelong, daily, uncomplaining commitment to combine the patient, often wearisome, work of building a small revolutionary group with that of trying to theoretically regenerate the grandeur of the classical Marxist tradition by fertilising it constantly with elements of the new was nonetheless a common endeavour.

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