Rapid Survey of a
Substantial Body of
Ernest Mandel belonged to a species that has become increasingly endangered in this second half of the 20th century:
theoreticians of militant Marxism. He was able to combine untiring activity as a revolutionary leader with a body of intellectual work which it fulfilled the scholarly criteria for scientific research, and thus compelled respect from academic mandarins.
16 International Viewpoint n° 269 — September 1995
### MANDEL
1923-1995
Ernest
ACADEMIC MARXISTS had as little in common with Ernest as the professional theorists of bureaucratic parties, in which a specialized "ideological department" combines the functions of ministry of propaganda and theological seminary. He was one of the people who conceives theoretical activity as an integral part of revolutionary activity - in the sense in which Marxist theory is a guide to action, as Engels said, and "theoretical production" is an essential, inseparable dimension of political struggle, not just speculative acrobatics.
Ernest Mandel was so entirely devoted to this struggle, to which he had decided to dedicate his life, that, even when he happened to write a little book on a "trivial" subject like crime stories, he produced a telling dissection of bourgeois society. The "Tartuffes" (revolutionary hypocrites) whom he denounced in his preface have never adequately acknowledged the value of this dissection.
His force of character and physical strength allowed him to escape from the Nazi concentration camps, which the two comrades of his generation whose intellectual abilities he admired most, Marcel
Work
by Salah Jaber Paris, July 1995 Hic and Abraham Léon, did not survive: both died before they were thirty. Ernest brought to his work an ardor enhanced by the sense of owing them a moral debt. He put the will to survive that saved him from the Holocaust in the service of a movement that, in the aftermath of the Second World War, seemed to be on the verge of dying out. Like Trotsky in exile, he threw himself into "uninterrupted work in order to ensure the transmission of the heritage". He redoubled his efforts when he jubilantly witnessed the new youth radicalisation of the 1960s. He set himself the task of "supplying the new generation with a revolutionary method".
In a half-century of unbroken labour, he often managed just the same to write "joyously", as he noted in the dedication of one of his books. He left an extraordinarily impressive body of writing behind him, which could easily fill several dozen volumes. He had a great capacity to write. Ernest was a man who could write letters. an article or a brochure or finish off a chapter of his current book while he was participating attentively and actively in a political meeting. But with him quantity never came at the expense of quality.
Whether or not one agrees with this or that conclusion, a political or theoretical work by Ernest Mandel is always a rich and stimulating document, even if it was only one of the personal discussion letters of which he wrote so many. HIS ERUDITION was of a kind that the constant, cumulative progression of printed knowledge is putting further and further beyond human reach. It impregnated all of his spoken statements as well: he was someone whom one could listen to for hours, always with the feeling of learning more and discovering new horizons. And Ernest was certainly not a man to hug his knowledge jealously to himself. Not that he showed off his knowledge out of pedantry, far from it; but he felt a duty to pass on what he knew and to communicate his thirst for information as well as his intellectual passions. These concerns marked all his works.
An exhaustive bibliography of Ernest Mandel's writings — even if it were restricted to published works, books, brochures and articles, leaving out his voluminous correspondence - would be an undertaking on the scale of a doctoral dis-
International Viewpoint n° 269 — September 1995 17 sertation. We can only mention here the high points, the most striking marks left along the trail, of this immense body of work, written in German, English or French, the three languages that Ernest used best (besides Flemish, his mother tongue). IN MAY 1960 Ernest completed, in French, his first major work, the one that would make his name as an internationally recognized Marxist economist with encyclopaedic knowledge. The book appeared in 1962 under the somewhat misleading title of Traité d'économie marxiste (which became Marxist Economic Theory in most of the many translations). A misleading title, because, in the style of Stalinist-inspired manuals, this scholastic title hid a gigantic effort (ten years of work, a fifty page list of works consulted) to breath new life into Marx's most important scientific contribution, which the Stalinists had petrified and twisted out of shape.
Ernest's goal, as he explained in the preface, was "to start from the empirical data of the science of today" in order "to reconstitute the whole economic system of Karl Marx" and "de-Westernise" it. On top of this he made a similar effort to reconstitute the Trotskyist analysis of the Soviet Union and the problematic of transition to socialism. This first, refreshing work, was presented (already!) as "an invitation to the younger generation of Marxists", an invitation that was widely taken up to judge by the great success the book enjoyed. THEORETICAL AUDACITY
Marxist Economic Theory's theoretical audacity was to defend and illustrate the Marxist heritage. Only after having written it - and probably dissatisfied with its on-the-whole rather traditional analysis of what he still called "the epoch of capitalist decline", at a time when the postwar long expansive wave was reaching its climax, flouting most Marxists' predictions, did Ernest turn to the theory of long waves of capitalist revolution. He came to believe that this mode of production had after the Second World War entered a new, third historical phase (after the classic and imperialist phases). He drew the outlines of what he then called "neo-capitalism" in a 1964 article that was added as an appendix to later editions of Marxist
Economic Theory. It was also included in the best known of his many pedagogical pamphlets, his Introduction to Marxist
Economic Theory, which was first published in French that same year, 1964.
Not wanting to be classified as a mere illustrator of Marxism or to be consigned to the "historico-empirical" school of economics by "Western Marxists" or quasiStalinist theorists, Ernest wrote his most "philosophical" work, The Formation of the Economic Thought of Karl Marx. (published in French, in 1967 under the title La Formation de la pensée économique de Karl Marx). This work intervened directly in the debate, very fashionable at the time, over the relationship between the young Marx and the mature Marx. (The period covered by the book ends just as Marx is about to write Capi-
But it also made worthwhile contributions on other fashionable topics, such as "the Asiatic mode of production", the theory of alienation, and its relation to "industrial civilisation" (Ernest never accepted the term "post-industrial"). This work would be completed later with introductions to a new English edition of the three volumes of Capital, which appeared one after another in London in 1976, 1978 and 1981. (The three introductions were published together in one volume in Castilian ('Spanish) under the title El Capital: Cien Años de Controversias en Torno a la Obra de Karl Marx). EUROPE VS AMERICA was first published in Germany, in 1968 (Die EWG und die Konkurrenz Europa-Amerikai). A milestone in Ernest's thinking about capitalism's third phase, the work concerns inter-imperialist contradictions between the United States and the Europe of the Common Market. As the German title indicates, these contradictions, and their monetary consequences, have considerable implications for the prospects for European integration. Out of date now, this work remains interesting because of the relevance of the problems it raises and because of its shrewd prediction that west European governments would tend toward protectionism once the generalized recession that he foresaw broke out. DURING the first years after the great upheaval of 1968, several important theoretical texts by Ernest, the length of a pamphlet or a long article, were published in several languages. Most noteworthy were his lectures on bureaucracy (originally in French), his two texts on fascism and on the Leninist theory of organisation (originally in German), and many polemical works, often written in English, particularly those debating the theory of state capitalism in the USSR. In 1970 he published an anthology with a long introduction on a theme that was dear to him as a revolutionary and former tradeunionist: Contrôle ouvrier, conseils
### Ernest
1923
MANDEL
-1995
ouvriers, autogestion (Workers' Control, Workers' Councils, Self-Management).
In 1972, at last, Ernest Mandel's work on the third phase of capitalism was published in German. He would consider this book his magnum opus, and would rightly be proudest of it: Der Spätkapitalismus (the revised and updated English edition appeared in 1975 as Late Capitalism). It was an innovative work in several respects: particularly because of its updating and refinement of the theory of long waves (which it linked to the falling tendency of the rate of profit; its theory of crises; and its analysis of the connections between the third technological revolution, tendency to permanent innovation, and the arms race, on the one hand, and structural transformations of capitalism, on the other hand, in light of the laws of capitalist development that Marx discovered. Late Capitalism is above all the first serious attempt - the only attempt so far - to sketch an overall picture of contemporary capitalism, integrating the various dimensions such as social classes, the state and the world market. Themes which Marx intended to cover in Capital, but did not achieve.
The ambition was considerable, especially for one man on his own. The work that Ernest Mandel produced in the end can certainly be debated: how could it be otherwise, given the extreme complexity of the contemporary world and the multitude of issues he addressed? But it is undeniably a respectable and respected work. Irritated bourgeois economists have mostly preferred to ignore it rather than risk a