Ernest Mandel
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Ernest Esra Mandel, also known by various pseudonyms such as Ernest Germain, Pierre Gousset, Henri Vallin, Walter etc. (b. Frankfurt April 5, 1923 - d. Brussels July 20, 1995) was a Belgian Jew recruited to the Fourth International in his youth in Antwerp. His parents, Henri and Rosa Mandel, were emigres from Poland. 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 a German concentration camp. 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 newspapers 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 the FI suffered a major split in 1953, Mandel developed into a leader of the West European-based 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 Confederation of Labour of Belgium and an associate of the Belgian syndicalist André Renard. He was expelled from the Socialist Party not long after the Belgian General Strike for opposing its coalition with the Christian Socialists, and its acceptance of anti-strike legislation.
In 1963 he led the ISFI into a reunification with James Cannon's Socialist Workers' Party (USA). This regroupment was known as the United Secretariat of the Fourth International or "Usec", and until his death in 1995 Mandel remained its most prominent leader and theoretician (the main part of the SWP (USA) exited from the Usec again in the mid-1980s). In Belgium, he was a member of the SAP-POS (Socialist Workers' Party - see http://www.sap-pos.org/).
Until the publication of a massive treatise "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. He resumed university studies and graduated from the Ecole d'Haute Etudes in Paris in 1967. Only from 1968 did Mandel become wellknown as 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, 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 Cambridge University, 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 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, which were translated into many 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.
He is probably remembered most of all for being an indefatigable 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 Esra Einstein) is Tariq Ali's Redemption (Picador, 1991).
Bibliography of Ernest Mandel's main books
- Marxist Economic Theory (2 vols.).
- The Formation of the Economic Thought of Karl Marx, 1843 to Capital
- La Longue Marche de la Revolution
- Introduction to Marxist Economic Theory
- Europe versus America: Contradictions of Imperialism
- Decline of the Dollar': a Marxist view of the Monetary Crisis
- The Second Slump
- Revolutionary Marxism Today
- Revolutionare Strategien im 20e Jahrhundert
- Trotsky: A Study in the Dynamic of his Thought
- From Stalinism to Eurocommunism
- Late Capitalism
- Verveemding en revolutionaire perspectieven
- Offener Marxismus
- Réponse à Louis Althusser et Jean Elleinstein
- Long Waves of Capitalist Development
- Introduction to Marxism
- Delightful Murder: A social history of the crime story'
- De la Commune à Mai 68: Histoire du mouvement ouvrier international
- Karl Marx: die Aktualitat seines Werkes
- La Crise
- The meaning of the Second World War
- Beyond Perestroika: the future of Gorbachev's USSR
- October 1917: Coup d'état or Social Revolution?
- Trotsky as Alternative
- Kontroversen um "Das Kapital"
- Power and Money: A Marxist Theory of Bureaucracy
- The Place of Marxism in History
- Cash Krach & Krisis: Profitboom, Börsenkrach und Wirtschaftskrise
- Revolutionary Marxism and Social Reality in the 20th Century
books (co-)edited by Ernest Mandel
- 50 Years of World Revolution 1917-1967: an International Symposium
- Arbeiterkontrolle, Arbeiterrate, Arbeiterselbstverwaltung
- Ricardo, Marx, Sraffa: the Langston Memorial Volume
- New Findings in Long-Wave Research
External links
- a Dutch historian currently researching a biography of Ernest Mandel (http://www.iisg.nl/staff/jst.html)
- [1] (http://www.isg-fi.org.uk/archives/mandel/mandel.htm)
- [2] (http://www.marxists.org/archive/mandel)
- [3] (http://www.geocities.com/mnsocialist/theory.html)
- Bibliography of Ernest Mandel (http://www.trotskyana.net/) by Wolfgang and Petra Lubitz
- Symposia on Mandel's work (http://www.iisg.nl/research/mandel.html) (see also Gilbert Achcar (ed.), The Legacy of Ernest Mandel [London: Verso, 1999])
- Obituary Andre Gunder Frank (http://rrojasdatabank.info/agfrank/mandel_tribute.html)
- Ernest Mandel Centre (http://www.iire.org/mandelcenter.html)de:Ernest Mandel