"You cannot make a socialist revolution without really trying." -- Ernest Mandel
Ernest Ezra Mandel, also known by various pseudonyms such as Ernest Germain, Pierre Gousset, Henri Vallin, Walter (April 5, 1923 - July 20, 1995), was a revolutionary Marxist theorist.
"And you cannot have a socialist revolution commandeered from the top, ordered around by some omniscient leader or group of leaders.""Factions are a sign of illness in a party.""For us, Marxism is always open because there are always new xperiences, there are always new facts, including facts about the past, which have to be incorporated in the corpus of scientific socialism.""Furthermore, there is absolutely no contradiction between the separate organizations of revolutionary vanguard militants and their participation in the mass organizations of the working class.""I do not believe in self-proclaimed parties.""Marxism is always open, always critical, always self-critical.""Mistakes in themselves are unavoidable.""On the contrary, history generally confirms that the more conscious and the better you are organized in vanguard organizations, the more constructively you operate in the mass organizations of the working class.""Only under conditions of revolutionary crises do you have the highest level of self-organization; this is the Soviet type of organization, which is to say, workers' councils, people's councils, call them what you want, popular committees.""Otherwise we get off the track and we do not fulfil the historical role which we want to fulfil: to help the masses, the exploited and the oppressed of the world, build a classless society, a world socialist federation.""Periodically, the workers do revolt against bourgeois society, not by a hundred, five hundred, or a thousand, but by the millions.""Revolution is an instrument, like a party is an instrument.""Revolution is not a goal in itself.""Socialist democracy is not, a luxury and its need is not limited to the most advanced industrial countries.""The conclusion you can draw from these characteristics is that you have an uneven development of class activity and an uneven development of class consciousness in the working class.""The more workers you have in your organization, the better you are implanted in the working class, the more likely you are to come up with the concrete problems of the class.""The only conclusion you can draw from the real historical movement is that by and large, in day-to-day life, what Lenin called trade union consciousness dominates the working class. I would call it elementary class consciousness of the working class.""There are no conditions in which we subordinate the interests of the class as a whole to the interests of any sect, any chapel, any separate organization.""There has been hardly a single year since 1917, and in a certain sense since 1905, without a revolution somewhere in the world in which the workers participated in a rather important way.""There is a process of social and of political differentiation going on in the real working class all the time.""We do not believe that the Marxist program, which embodies the continuity of the experience of the actual class struggle and real revolutions of the last one hundred and fifty years, is a definitely closed book.""Workers do not strike every day, they cannot do that the way they function in the capitalist economy. The way they have to live by selling their labor power makes that impossible.""You can have relatively high levels of class consciousness with a lower level of class militancy than one would have expected.""You need a vanguard organization in order to overcome the dangerous potential brought about by the uneven development of class militancy and class consciousness."
Born in Frankfurt, Mandel was recruited to the Belgian section of the international Trotskyist movement, the Fourth International, in his youth in Antwerp. His parents, Henri and Rosa Mandel, were Jewish emigres from Poland, the former a member of Rosa Luxemburg's and Karl Liebknecht's Spartacist League. Ernest's entrance to university studies was cut short when the German occupying forces closed the university down.
During World War II, he escaped twice after being arrested in the course of resistance activities, and survived imprisonment in the German concentration camp at Dora. After the war, he became a leader of both the Belgian Trotskyists and the youngest member of the Fourth International secretariat, alongside Michel Pablo and others. He gained respect as a prolific journalist with a clear and lively style, as an orthodox Marxist theoretician, and as a talented debater. He wrote for numerous media outlets in the 1940s and 1950s including Het Parool, Le Peuple, l'Observateur and Agence France-Presse. At the height of the Cold War he publicly defended the merits of Marxism in debate with the social democrat and future Dutch premier Joop den Uyl.
After 1946 World Congress of the Fourth International, Mandel was elected into the leadership of the International Secretariat of the Fourth International. In line with its policy, he joined the Belgian Socialist Party where he was a leader of a militant socialist tendency, becoming editor of the socialist newspaper La Gauche (and writing for its Flemish sister publication, Links), a member of the economic studies commission of the General Federation of Belgian Labour and an associate of the Belgian syndicalist André Renard. He and his comrades were expelled from the Socialist Party not long after the general strike in 1960-1961 Winter General Strike for opposing its coalition with the Christian Democrats and its acceptance of anti-strike legislation.
He was one of the main initiators of the 1963 reunification between the International Secretariat and the majority of the International Committee of the Fourth International, a public faction led by James Cannon's Socialist Workers Party that had withdrawn from the FI in 1953. The regroupment formed the United Secretariat of the Fourth International (USFI or "USec"). Until his death in 1995, Mandel remained the most prominent leader and theoretician of both the USFI and of its Belgian section, the Revolutionary Communist League (Belgium).
Until the publication of his massive book Marxist Economic Theory in French in 1962, Mandel's Marxist articles were written mainly under a variety of pseudonyms and his activities as Fourth Internationalist were little known outside the left. After publishing Marxist Economic Theory, Mandel travelled to Cuba and worked closely with Che Guevara on economic planning, after Guevara (who was fluent in French) had read the new book and encouraged Mandel’s interventions.
He resumed his university studies and graduated from what is now the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris in 1967. Only from 1968 did Mandel become well known as a public figure and Marxist politician, touring student campuses in Europe and America giving talks on socialism, imperialism and revolution.
Although officially barred from West Germany (and several other countries at various times, including the United States, France, Switzerland, and Australia), he gained a PhD from the Free University of Berlin in 1972 (where he taught some months), published as Late Capitalism, and he subsequently gained a lecturer position at the Free University of Brussels. In 1978 he delivered the Alfred Marshall Lectures at the University of Cambridge, on the topic of the long waves of capitalist development.
Mandel campaigned on behalf of numerous dissident left-wing intellectuals suffering political repression, championed the cancellation of the third world debt, and in the Mikhail Gorbachev era spearheaded a petition for the rehabilitation of the accused in the Moscow Trials of 1936-38. As a man in his 70s, he travelled to Russia to defend his vision of a free and democratic socialism.
In total, he published approximately 2,000 articles and around 30 books during his life in German, Dutch, French, English and other languages, which were in turn translated into many more languages. In addition, he also edited or contributed to many books, maintained a voluminous correspondence, and went on speaking engagements worldwide. He considered it his mission to transmit the heritage of classical Marxist thought, deformed by the experience of Stalinism and the Cold War, to a new generation. And to a large extent he did influence a generation of scholars and activists in their understanding of important Marxist concepts. In his writings, perhaps most striking is the tension between creative independent thinking and the desire for a strict adherence to Marxist doctrinal orthodoxy. Due to his commitment to socialist democracy, he has even been characterised as "Luxemburgist".
He is probably remembered most of all for being a tireless rationalist populariser of basic Marxist ideas, for his books on Late Capitalism and Long-Wave theory, and for his moral-intellectual leadership in the Trotskyist movement. His critics however claim that he was 'too soft on Stalinism', eclectic and unsystematic in his economic theorizing, an over-optimistic politician, a supporter of reforms within capitalism, or simply that he wrote more than he could do well.
A satirical novel featuring among others Ernest Mandel (in the guise of the encyclopedic, computer-brained genius Ezra Einstein) is Tariq Ali's Redemption (Chatto & Windus 1990 (ISBN 0-7011-3394-5), Picador, 1991).
Mandel was co-founder, with Livio Maitan, of the International Institute for Research and Education, which was selected as the home of the Ernest Mandel Study Centre after this death. Working together with the Ernest Mandel Foundation, the IIRE plays a key role in expanding the circulation of Mandel's works.
Die EWG und die Konkurrenz Europa-Amerika, 1968. (Europe versus America: Contradictions of Imperialism, trans. Martin Rossdale, 1970.)
La formation de la pensée économique de Karl Marx: de 1843 à la rédaction du "Capital", 1970. (The Formation of the Economic Thought of Karl Marx, 1843 to Capital, trans. Brian Pearce, 1971.)
Decline of the Dollar: a Marxist view of the Monetary Crisis, 1972 (a collection of articles)
Der Spätkapitalismus, 1972. (Late Capitalism, trans. Joris de Bres, 1975.)
Vervreemding en revolutionaire perspectieven, 1973.
Why they invaded Czechoslovakia, 1974.
Introduction au marxisme, 1975. (From class society to communism: an introduction to Marxism, trans. Louisa Sadler, 1977.)
La longue marche de la revolution, 1976 (a collection of articles)
Krise und Aufschwung der kapitalistischen Weltwirtschaft 1974-1977, 1977. (The second slump: a Marxist analysis of recession in the seventies, trans. Jon Rothschild, 1978.)
Critique de l'eurocommunisme, 1978. (From Stalinism to Eurocommunism, trans. Jon Rothschild, 1978.)
De la Commune à Mai 68: Histoire du mouvement ouvrier international, 1978 (articles)
Long Waves of Capitalist Development, 1978.
Revolutionary Marxism Today, ed. by Jon Rothschild, 1979 (based on interviews and discussions)
Revolutionäre Strategien im 20. Jahrhundert : politische Essays, trans. and ed. Gisela Mandela, 1978.
Réponse à Louis Althusser et Jean Elleinstein, 1979.
Trotsky: A Study in the Dynamic of his Thought, 1979.
Offener Marxismus: ein Gespräch über Dogmen, Orthodoxie und die Häresien der Realität, 1980 (with Johannes Agnoli)
La crise 1974-1982: les faits, leur interprétation marxiste, 1982.
Delightful Murder: A social history of the crime story, 1984.
Karl Marx: die Aktualität seines Werkes, ed. Willy Boepple, 1984.
The meaning of the Second World War, 1986.
Cash Crash & Crisis: Profitboom, Börsenkrach und Wirtschaftskrise, 1989
Où va l'URSS de Gorbatchev, 1989. (Beyond Perestroika: the future of Gorbachev's USSR, trans. Gus Fagan, 1989.)
Octobre 1917 - coup d'État ou révolution sociale?, 1992. (October 1917: Coup d'état or Social Revolution?, trans. by Penny Duggan and Steve Bloom, 1992.)
Trotzki als Alternative, 1992. (Trotsky as Alternative, trans. Gus Fagan, 1992.)
Kontroversen um "Das Kapital", trans. Alfred Kosing, 1992 (taken from Mandel's introduction to Marx's Capital)
The Place of Marxism in History, 1994,
Power and Money: A Marxist Theory of Bureaucracy, 1994.
Revolutionary Marxism and Social Reality in the 20th Century: Collected Essays, ed. Stephen Bloom, 1994.
Books he (co-)edited
50 Years of World Revolution 1917-1967: an International Symposium, 1968
Ricardo, Marx, Sraffa: the Langston Memorial Volume, 1984
New Findings in Long-Wave Research, 1992
Biography
Achcar, Gilbert, ed. Gerechtigkeit und Solidarität. Ernest Mandels Beitrag zum Marxismus. Neuer isp-Verlag, Köln 2003
Stutje, Jan Willem. Ernest Mandel: Rebel tussen Droom en Daad. Antwerpen: Houtekiet/Amsab, 2007 (published in English as ErnestMandel: A Rebel's Dream Deferred by Verso in 2009).
