Commissioned Book Review: Daniel Bensaïd, The Dispossessed
| Author | Igor Shoikhedbrod |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14789299211031861 |
| Published date | 01 November 2022 |
| Date | 01 November 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Commissioned Book Reviews |
Political Studies Review
2022, Vol. 20(4) NP3 –NP4
journals.sagepub.com/home/psrev
Commissioned Book Review
1031861PSW0010.1177/14789299211031861Political Studies ReviewCommissioned Book Review
book-review2021
Commissioned Book Review
The Dispossessed by Daniel Bensaïd (Trans.
Robert Nichols). Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press, 2021. 137 pp., $25 (p/b), ISBN
9781517903855
Robert Nichols has performed two important
services for Anglo-American political theorists
in his capacity as translator of The Dispossessed.
First, he has skilfully translated Daniel
Bensaïd’s incisive but still neglected essay,
thereby contributing to the latter’s growing
reception in the English-speaking world.
Second, Nichols has also supplied an updated
translation of Marx’s early journalistic reflec-
tions on the Wood Theft Law, which is the sub-
ject matter of Bensaïd’s essay. These
accomplishments parallel the underlying aims
and strengths of Bensaïd’s short book, namely,
returning to Marx’s earliest journalistic writ-
ings with the aim of making critical sense of
contemporary forms of dispossession and the
diverse struggles to which they give rise.
As Nichols points out in his concise intro-
duction, Bensaïd was foremost an activist-the-
orist, originally steeped in the Trotskyist
revolutionary tradition but drawn increasingly
to the work of Walter Benjamin in later years.
This dimension of Bensaïd’s political biogra-
phy helps explain why he may have been less
concerned with the reception of his work in the
English-speaking world. Bensaïd’s scholarly
interventions were above all political, and The
Dispossessed is an excellent case in point.
Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to sidestep
the penetrating philosophical insights that are
interspersed throughout the book, especially in
connection with the interplay between law and
politics, in Marx’s world as much as our own.
Bensaïd’s investigation begins with an
explication of Marx’s early journalistic reflec-
tions on the Wood Theft Law, which, if imple-
mented, would criminalize the customary
practice of gathering fallen forest wood by
impoverished peasants. What is particularly
distinctive about Bensaïd’s explication is that it
dialectically reconstructs Marx’s disparate
writings by weaving together concepts that are
seemingly contradictory and inseparable: pau-
perism and malfeasance, property and theft,
market and popular economy, private property
and the right of necessity, privatization and the
common good and so forth. The virtue of
Bensaïd’s point of departure is that it remains
attentive to the rich background of social strug-
gles that inform the various antinomies of
right, whether they are conceived as the prop-
erty rights of landowners against the custom-
ary rights of the poor, or for that matter, the
contractual rights of capitalists against those of
workers. In this respect, Bensaïd thoughtfully
positions his contribution alongside the
Marxist historian E.P. Thompson, who identi-
fied the legal arena as one that is characterized
by struggles over competing conceptions of
property (12–13). What sets Bensaïd apart
from Thompson is that he traces the antinomy
of rights to Marx’s earliest writings all the way
through his mature work while also noting
Marx’s decision to republish his early journal-
istic writings in 1851 (8). The upshot of
Bensaïd’s explication is that he can make
cogent sense of Marx’s defence of the custom-
ary rights of the poor (18–20), his vociferous
debate with Proudhon (32–36) and his endorse-
ment of individual property in Capital (49–51),
without being mired in de-politicized debates
about the significance of the so-called ‘episte-
mological break’ in Marx’s thinking.
To be sure, Bensaïd’s essay also ventures
beyond Marx, although it does so in the spirit
of Marx’s call to clarify the struggles and aspi-
rations of one’s age. Consequently, the third
and final section of Bensaïd’s stimulating study
focuses on contemporary forms of disposses-
sion, which culminates with a renewed call to
action: ‘Rise up dispossessed of the world!’
(57). Bensaïd is concerned in this final section
with the different manifestations of privatiza-
tion in the contemporary world, ranging from
the privatization of the natural environment
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