Death came as a release for Daniel Singer on December 2, but we feel like protesting its rude intrusion. In one of the last things he wrote for us, a review of some books about Sartre, he quoted a friend’s son, on the day of the French philosopher’s funeral. Asked where he had been, he said he was coming “from the demo against the death of Sartre.” We’d like to join a demo against the death of Daniel. Better, though, would be one celebrating the life of our valued colleague, The Nation‘s Europe correspondent for nearly twenty years.
He wrote about many a demo in his reports to us, incessantly probing for signs of vitality on the European left–or the rot of fascism on the far right. During the 1980s, as Reaganism and Thatcherism blanketed the Continent, he seemed, at times, one of the few remaining Marxists. A protégé of the great Marxist intellectual Isaac Deutscher, he held a steadfast faith in democratic socialism but not in any hard doctrinal way. Indeed, the book of his that prompted Victor Navasky to send associate editor Kai Bird to Paris in 1981 to talk to Daniel about writing regularly for us was The Road to Gdansk, a study of Solidarity, which he presciently celebrated as the first crack in the monolith of Soviet Communism and another exemplar of the power of working people to change the world, which was his abiding faith.
When the neocon intellectuals of France, here and elsewhere jumped aboard the funeral hearse of socialism, Daniel stood defiantly on the sidelines. He never modified his conviction that capitalism’s injustices were as glaring after the wall fell as they were before. In his last book, Whose Millennium? Theirs or Ours? he ended with a ringing affirmation: “We are not here to tinker with the world, we are here to change it!”
We’ll miss Daniel–his wisdom, his courtly kindness, his brilliance, the stubborn courage that carried him through, from his Polish boyhood before World War II when, as a self-styled “deserter from death,” he narrowly escaped the Holocaust, until the end. Before he died, he sent readers the following message:
“These are the last words I shall write to The Nation. With my normal absence of modesty I believe that over the years I acquired a radical readership. Radical need not mean sure of itself; nor does it rule out compromises and calculations. But a ‘Luxemburgist socialist’ (the definition I like best) could not resign himself to the idea that with the technological genius at our disposal we are unable to build a different world. Nor can we accept the fashion that capitalism will vanish without a vast social movement from below.
“That something can happen does not mean that it will happen. I, for one, shall not see this world. Yet, I am departing with the feeling that on the whole I have followed the right road and even with a degree of confidence. Among my young interns, Carl Bromley and his companions, among the youthful fighters from Seattle to Seoul, one can detect a refusal of resignation. You must join them as they now begin to show the way.”
