### MANDEL
1923-1995
Ernest
ERNEST MANDEL was born in April 1923, the year which terminated in the irrevocable defeat of the revolutionary period in Germany. His German Jewish parents were already living in Antwerp, Belgium, but had returned to Frankfurt, Germany for the birth. Henri Mandel had fled Germany for Holland rather than serve in the 1914 war. He returned to Germany when the Kaiser (emperor) was deposed in November 1918. There he worked in the Berlin office of the Soviet Press Agency, newly created by the Bolshevik government. A member of the Communist Party of Germany, he became friends with Karl Radek, Lenin and Trotsky's ambassador to the German revolution. Shocked by the January 1919 assassination of Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht, Henri left Germany again, this time settling in Belgium.
The young Ernest lived through years of economic crisis and the threat of war. The misery of his working class environment, and his family's communist, revolutionary, anti-fascist and anti-Stalinist tradition led him at a young age to choose the camp of the working class and the oppressed. His father explained the news to him revolution. By François Vercammen (SAP/POS) and the Fourth International
Brussels, August 1995 every day, and introduced him to the strong Marxist tradition of the German workers' movement. ANTWERP in the 1930s was a turbulent place. The lively, active workers' movement contained political struggles between social democrats, communists and Trotskyists. In the Socialist Revolutionary Party (SRP/PSR)! Ernest frequented the most avant-garde workers, the (often selftaught) leaders of mass struggles. The SRP was by now also the home of the central core of the exiled German section of the Fourth International (FI). All this made the party a frenetic, internationalist microcosm: passionate discussions, preparation of a newspaper for smuggling into Germany, organisation of contacts with those comrades struggling against Hitler in the underground, exchange of letters with Trotsky himself. This was the period which sealed Ernest's insoluble bond to the German proletariat, his belief in the possibility of a socialist revolution in Germany, and his constant "dialogue" with Karl Marx and Rosa Luxembourg. His conviction in 1944-45 that the German workers' hour had come, just as in 1918-
23, and even his "crazy faith" in the possibility of socialist renewal in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) when the Stalinist bureaucracy trembled in 1989-90, all stems from this initial period. THIS INITIAL EXPERIENCE also gave him temerity, in his darkest moments, when, during the Second World War, he distributed leaflets to the German soldiers occupying Belgium. Or, once he was caught, his ability to convince his German guards, who turned out to be former members of the forbidden Social Democratic and Communist Parties, to let him escape. Or again in 1945, when he was liberated from a concentration camp, and he overcame a thousand obstacles in order to return to Belgium and rejoin his comrades in the party.
These existential challenges of his militant youth were surely at the root of his famous optimism and his human warmth. Not a naive faith in the goodness of the human soul, nor in the ideas of the philosophers of the enlightenment, but faith in the possibility that humanity, the weak and the strong, the courageous and
Emest Mandel with his brother Michel after theSecond World War
International Viewpoint n° 269 — September 1995 11 the cowardly, the downtrodden and the rebellious, would be as ready as himself to struggle on under the hard social conditions of capitalism, and thus win political consciousness. And faith that the most motivated and best organised of us can "make miracles" if we manage to link ourselves to the working class and youth, and to build a revolutionary party up to the tasks it will surely face. RESISTANCE AND DEPORTATION
Ernest joined the SRP in 1939. The party had by this time become less marginal, and had participated in the general, sectoral and inter-professional strikes of 1933-36. There was a real implantation among the miners, metalworkers and dockers (longshoremen). But the party had suffered from the defeat of the workers in 1938, and was hit very hard by the repressive measures of May 1940 and June 1941.
The Belgian Trotskyist movement participated actively in the resistance to the occupation of the country by Hitler's armies?. The SRP paid heavily: many of its leaders and militants were to die in the Nazi camps across Germany. Ernest himself was arrested three times, the first time when he was caught distributing leaflets to German soldiers. He was imprisoned at St. Gilles, near Brussels, awaiting deportation to Auschwitz, but he managed to escape. He was arrested again in March 1944, after distributing leaflets at the Cockerill factories in Liege. This time he was sentenced to forced labour and deported to a labour camp in Germany. He escaped, but was again arrested, and liberated from a second labour camp only in April 1945. He would certainly have perished if the concentration camp system had not been characterised by increasing bureaucratic confusion; his gaolers never reali-
The SRP had been decapitated at the beginning of the war. It was reorganised under the occupation by Abraham Léon. Born in 1918, Léon established clandestine structures, a communication system between cells and regions, and the publication of La Voie de Lénine (Lenin's Path) and the first resistance leaflets. He oriented the work of the Belgian section against the Nazi occupation along two fronts: internationalist and broad-based anti-fascist resistance, with the working class as the back-bone of the movement, and political work directed at the German soldiers, carried out in co-operation with our German comrades of the IKD: The perspective, shared by the Fourth International as a whole, was to work for the transformation of the second world war into a socialist revolution across the European continent, as had been the context in ERNEST JOINED the Central Committee of the party4. In November 1943 he participated for the first time in an meeting of the Fourth International: that of the newly-established Provisional European Secretariat. And in February 1944 he participated in the first European Conference
### Ernest
1923-1995
MANDEL
of the FI. From that moment on, the twin pillars of his activity were the construction of a revolutionary party in Belgium and the construction of the Fourth International. He remained present in the leadership of both bodies for the rest of his life, although from the late 1960s onwards, his international activities became clearly dominant in his timetable.
From the outset, Ernest, together with Abraham Léon, proposed to the International the resolutions already adopted by the Belgian section on the problems of the day, including The Tasks of the Fourth International in Europe (February 1942), The National Question (dealing with the political consequences of the German domination over several of the other imperialist states) and a draft resolution on The Revolutionary Liquidation of the Imperialist War (clearly prepared together with Léon).
The European section of the leadership of the International thus began to rebuild itselfs. But it was hit, again, by the arrests of Léon, Mandel, and the French leader Marcel Hic. Only Ernest would survive the camps.
In three years, Abraham Léon had transmitted his wide vision of society and the workers' movement, his militancy and his revolutionary optimism to his comrades of the underground struggle.
Ernest's preface to the first edition of
Léon's Materialist Conception of the
Jewish Question (written in 1942) contained the martyred leader's credo "Behind each reason for despair, search out the reason for hope"
12 International Viewpoint n° 269 — September 1995
### MANDEL
1923-1995
Ernest
IN 1943-44 Ernest and Abraham developed their analysis that the delay in the emergence of a revolutionary situation in Europe was not simply the result of the treason of the reformist leadership. They tried to explain why the Stalinists and Social Democrats were able to reinforce their political and organisational domination over a working class which shifted from passive to offensive behaviour, as was the case in Italy and France. They started from an analysis of the "general crisis of the workers' movement", where they identified an interaction between the role of the reformist leadership and the weakness of class consciousness. Ernest would refine and develop this dialectic interpretation throughout his life. THE BELGIAN UNION MOVEMENT
Ernest's personal involvement in the Belgian workers' movement, from his youth until 1965, was to prove an extremely fertile experience. It led to several of his principal political theses, shaped his particular conception of militant engagement, forged his remarkable capacity for theoretical, but rarely abstract, generalisation, combined with a never-pedantic teaching style.
Isolated and marginalised by the early 1950s, the FI turned its forces towards "entryism" — participation in the mass reformist parties as an autonomous revolutionary current. Ernest joined the Belgian Socialist Party (BSP/PSB), and worked as a journalist for their daily newspaper Le Peuple (The People) in 1954-56. There he was 'spotted' by André Renard Deputy General Secretary of the General Federation of Belgian Workers (ABVV/FGTB). Renard was an anarchosyndicalist militant who had become a leader of the resistance, and the "idol" of the powerful left current in the trade unions. He integrated Ernest into the federation's Research Commission, and found him a job as journalist at the metalworker's union daily newspaper La WalTHE TASK was to reveal the power, the economic mechanisms and the real goals of the major capitalist groupings. Ernest also played a key role in the drafting of Holdings and Economic Democracy, one of the historical programmatic documents of the Belgian workers' movement. He then helped draft the programme of structural reform which, despite all its ambiguities, was an opening towards an action programme aimed at a general strike.
Together with the other members of Renard's team, Ernest tried to popularise the programme. The process familiarised him with the trade union movement from top to bottom, with its strengths and weaknesses, its day-to-day routine and its struggles, particularly the impressive general strike during the winter of 196061. He met with hundreds of delegates and militants, the cream of the vangard at the time, and saw the conditions of exploited factory labour close up.
In Belgium this turn to entryism was the result of the party learning the lessons of the resistance and the general strike of 1950. We understood that it was in linking up with André Renard's radicalised trade union, and in extending his influence within the BSP/PSB that we would help prepare the ground for a wide left current, which could be the trampoline for a Marxist-revolutionary party rooted in the working class.
During this period he also pushed successfully for the creation of two new weeklies, La Gauche (French, edited by Ernest) and Links (Flemish), which from 1956-7 onwards brought together a broad. pluralist left current of workers and intellectuals inside the Socialist Party. While the programmatic position of this current was confused and contradictory, it distinguished itself from the reformist right through a series of political and social struggles.
A remarkable success: we revolutionary Marxists had shown that, few in number, we could nevertheless take the political initiative on the grand scale, and place ourselves at the heart of the political life of the workers' movement. This lesson would not be lost. Ernest never stopped explaining to new comrades of the Belgian section the importance and validity of this strategy.
The 1960-61 strike and its immediate aftermath represented the high point of this wide anti-capitalist movement. After it was expelled from the Socialist Party in 1964-5, it gradually split into separate currents, which failed to form any new left socialist party with a mass character. A REVOLUTIONARY STRATEGY FOR EUROPE
Deepening his reflection, drawing on the great debates of the workers' movement during the 20th century, and at the same time working on his Marxist Economic Theory (first published, in French, in 1962), Ernest worked to elaborate a strategic plan for the socialist revolution in the developed capitalist countries of Europe. His self-interrogation, begun during the war, returned in force. How to explain (so as to burst through) this persistent reformist domination over the working class?
His analysis worked at both ends of the chain. What objective contradictions of the capitalist system could result in a new revolutionary situation, short of a new world war, which would be nuclear and imply mass destruction? And what subjective changes would characterise the adoption of an anti-capitalist and revolutionary consciousness by a working class living in a context of economic prosperity? How could Marxist revolutionaries take the lead in the class struggle, and how could they build their party?
In Late Capitalism 7 Mandel uncovered the motor forces of contemporary capitalism and their impact on social relations and the class struggle. He also tried to deepen his earlier strategic and programmatic conclusions through a dialogue with the left in the socialist and communist parties (particularly in Italy), which was at this time asserting itself across Europe, The revolutionary wave in southern Europe in 1968-74 made it possible to test Ernest's theses. THE NEW POLITICAL PERIOD also made it necessary to integrate the consequences of a number of substantial modifications which had taken place in the societies and social movements of capitalist Europe. After for many years being the exclusive concern of small circles of militants, hundreds of thousands of militants would participate in this debate on the international scale.
International Viewpoint n° 269 - September 1995 13
TAKE-OFF: 1962-64
From the mid 1960s onwards, an increasingly important part of Ernest Mandel's public activities were in the international, rather than Belgian sphere. What started as a modest attempt to meet the new student radicalisation, which was starting to feel its way in politics, became an impressive effort to drag the Fourth International up to the level required by its historic vocation: to participate in the construction of a new socialist revolutionary leadership of the world proletariat.
Looking back, it is now clear that 1964-66 was a major turning-point, the coming together of three slow, cumulative evolutions which were to determine the objective context for the life of the International and of Ernest. Cracks were finally appearing in the leaden seal which American imperialism and the Soviet bureaucracy - the victors of the second world war - had imposed on the world. * The victory of the Cuban revolution (1959), the defeat of French imperialism in Algeria (1962) * Working class revolts in East Berlin (1953), Poland and Hungary (1956), the Sino-Soviet conflict, and the end of the monolithic nature of the Communist Par-
* An clumsy rebirth of the strike movement in the imperialist countries.
A faint light shone through these cracks. With the inevitable exaggerations, our revolutionary optimism, much-maligned and often ridiculed by the disillusioned broader left, proved itself to be a powerful vector of analysis of the new situation. The Seventh Congress of the
Fourth International (1963) fully appreciated the Current dialectic of the world revolution - the title of the central reso-
"NINETEEN SIXTY-EIGHT" came unexpected. There was a simultaneous upsurge in all three sectors of the world revolution: neo-colonial, Stalinist-bureaucratic and imperialist. Our remarkable sensitivity to this reality was not the result of any kind of prophetic capacities. It was the result of our larger and more collective leadership system. The internationalist, globalist conception was closely linked to the activities of the International, its sections and its militants. Despite the political margalisation inherited from the
"crossing of the desert" begun in 1938, the Fourth International had been able to link itself to radical struggles and revolutionary experiences of considerable political richness. And its exemplary behaviour contrasted with that of the dominant currents in the workers' movement. TO ORGANISE a work brigade to Yugoslavia in 1950, (just when Stalin was trying to stifle the "Yugoslav road") and to seize self-management as a lever of socialist renewal, to become the "delivery boys" of the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) to help in the defeat of French imperialism, then to try to encourage the Algerian revolution to mutate towards socialism, to understand as early as 1960 the socialist element in the Cuban revolution, and to support, without prejudice, the Che Guevara-Fidel Castro leadership, then, with many others, to support the guerrillas in Latin America: the Fourth International was certainly small, never representing more than a minority, but it certainly didn't behave as a sect, preoccupied above all with self-preservation and self-proclamation.
Ernest Mandel was involved in all these processes. Himself a product of this same evolution of the Fourth International, he had matured within a leadership characterised by a rich internal dialectic. This had familiarised him with all the great questions of this century. And by 1963 these intellectual gains had marinated in a quarter century of militantism in a mass workers' movement. LEADING THE INTERNATIONAL
The period from 1965 to the 1980s represents the highest point of Ernest's intellectual creativity and political influence on the revolutionary avant- garde and left intelligentsia around the world. This was linked to the change in the world situation and the increasing numerical and political weight of the
Fourth International itself. Sections everywhere seized the new moments of struggle, interpreting them as elements of a world socialist revolution.
The frontiers began to close around
Ernest. Refused visas by the Stalinist governments, he now faced bans on entry into the USA, France, Germany, Switzerland, Spain (under Franco) and Australia.
Ernest's greatest joy was to realise that he had been able to act, together with a rejuvenated and renewed leadership team, in total harmony with the organisation. He carved a new space for the Fourth International, one rather larger than the actual forces we had at that time. He oriented the organisation beyond the horiirnest
1923-1995
MANDEL
zon of immediate struggles, to the wide historical perspective. He built political foundations solid enough to support this frantic militantism, breathed self-confidence into the movement. Ernest's contribution in these years is engraved in the history of the Fourth International. We need more distance from the events to analyse the extent and complexity of his contribution. AFTER 1968, Ernest became known well beyond militant circles. He was to be found at all four corners of the world, at mass meetings, educational meetings, discussions on work in progress, and university courses. There must be thousands of "pirate" cassettes with Ernest's voice on the bookshelves of militants all round the world. Listening again to Ernest's lectures and speeches, you understand how his thinking developed through direct contact with a militant public, both critical and enthusiastic.
There was a "hidden face" of this overwhelming public activity. Ernest remained an organiser of the Fourth International and its Belgian section. He remained concerned by all the aspects of militant work, including the most "technical", like translation, layout, fund-raising, animation of networks of sympathisers, and material infrastructure. He joined the
International Secretariat in 1946, at a moment when Europe was still in ruins.
He gave of himself to rebuild our sections on the "old continent". Not just in Belgium, but in particular in the key countries, including the defeated powers, Italy
14 International Viewpoint n° 269 - September 1995
### MANDEL
1923-1995
Ernest
and Germany. He then left for Asia, to reestablish contact with the Fourth International organisations in India, Indonesia and Sri Lanka, where the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (Sri Lanka Socialist Party -LSSP) was gradually becoming the country's main working class party. He also gave considerable importance to relations between the International and the US Socialist Workers Party (SWP), a pillar of the pre-war and wartime Trotskyist movement. And in the International as in the wider movement, Ernest always struggled for unity and against sectarianism. Indeed, the unity of the International was a preoccupation of his.
After participating in the labour brigade to Yugoslavia in 1950, he joined socialist intellectuals from both halves of Europe at the conference on the Yugoslav island of Korcula. He also participated in initiatives of solidarity with the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN). Belgium became an important base for underground solidarity work.
He jumped with joy in 1962, when Che Guevara invited him to Cuba to participate in the 1962-3 debate on the economo-political orientation and construction of socialism. AFTER 1968, Ernest's "diary" of faceto-face conversations, consultations, and organised discussion with revolutionary and anti-capitalist leaders and left intellectuals in all parts of the world never stopped growing. Many people came knocking at his door. In particular, he never missed an opportunity to meet an east European or Soviet "émigré", to absorb the experience of life in these societies - territories from which he was completely banned.
His personal notes, from internal meetings and conversations, his contributions to our internal debates (published in our various internal bulletins), his immense correspondence, and his articles in the various publications of the International are a gold mine for future research.
He never stopped cultivating his wide range of interests. He had a passion for Spinoza, and dreamt of writing a book on the "permanent [bourgeois] revolution in Flanders/Holland in the 16th century". He was very interested in ethical questions, drew on the ideas of Ernst Bloch, who he considered to be "the greatest Marxist philosopher of the 20th century". He even "debased" himself in reading dozens of crime novels, as he would "confess" in the book he later wrote on this subject?. THREE FUNDAMENTAL problems of this century formed the centre of gravity of his analytical work throughout this period: the dynamic of the contradictions of the capitalist system as a whole, the activity of the working class and the role of the workers' movement under advanced capi-
He knew that Trotsky's analysis of Stalinism represented an exceptional step forward in political thought on this crucial phenomenon of the 20th century. Ernest made a powerful contribution to the modernisation of Trotsky's analysis, in contrast to the dogmatism of a number of Trotsky fans. He quickly became the Fourth International's report-writer on the subject. In 1957 he presented the report which was to become at the same time our balance sheet of Stalinism, and our proposals for a re-foundation'°. HE FOLLOWED with interest the various attempts at bureaucratic reforms quarta internaziona in eastern Europe and the USSR, uncovering in his writings and speeches the economic and social foundations of that system. He constantly searched the horizon for signs of the political revolution, first in the USSR, later in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). At the end of his life more than ever, he considered that political clarity about the nature of "socialist democracy" was an absolute pre-condition for (re-)establishing the support of the workers, nationalities and youth of these countries for a socialist perspective, after the disastrous experience of "actually existing socialism"1 THE FINAL STRUGGLE
Developments in the GDR, eastern Europe and the USSR after the collapse of the Stalinist regimes were an immense disappointment for Ernest, as they were for all the anti-Stalinist and genuinely socialist left. It was with strong personal reservations that he finally admitted that the process of restoration of capitalism
had made a significant step forward.
Ernest mobilised all his remaining energy for one last battle: to save the maximum from this debacle. He mobilised militant and financial resources to consolidate Marxist revolutionary cells in the former Soviet Union and eastern Germany. He fought to defend the "legitimacy of the October Revolution!2 as well as the role and ideas of Trotsky in his new contacts with the post-Stalinist world. He participated in public debates in the former Soviet Union and eastern Germany, and met with leaders of the former ruling Communist parties. He was particularly proud to have aided in the publication of a new book on Trotsky by the former Communist Party's publishing house. HIS FAMOUS OPTIMISM didn't blind him to the reactionary turn in the world situation. He knew from experience that the survival of the Fourth International, its revolutionary spirit and its organisational integrity depended more than ever before on the political conviction of its cadre and militants. Hence the preparation and publication of Socialism or Barbarism, a manifesto for the Fourth International on the eve of the 21st century.
His initial goal was to consolidate the political gains of the International in the face of the doubt which was attacking the left around the world. But he quickly understood that the upheavals underway would not just affect the balance of forces, but lead to deep transformations in the social structure of societies, states, classes, political forces, the cultural ambience, and consciousness in many, many countries. Preparing the Fourth International for the 21st century implied a substantial extension of our revolutionary Marxist programme, a refusal of all sectarianism and dogmatism, and a new political profile turned resolutely towards the future and the coming generations of THE FIRST HEART ATTACK in December 1993 did not stop him playing his role at the centre of the International. He hoped against hope for a reversal of the general situation, in particular through a breakthrough for the left in Brazil. And he raged against the barbarism of capitalism, the decline of the "classic" workers' movement, and the moral and political collapse of its traditional reformist leadership. He asked himself about the survival of the species after a nuclear or ecological catastrophe.
He continued to throw himself into his work despite the decline in his health.
Ernest
"For the International, the sense of my life", he wrote in his last will and testa- 1923-1995 ment. He was comforted by his wife
Anne, with whom he shared the last 13 MANDEL
years of his life.
Ernest is no longer with us. We mourn him, but at the same time we turn towards the revolutionary struggle. His life was a powerful call to take sides with the oppressed and the exploited, and to build a revolutionary socialist party and International. He leaves us a fabulous political heritage, which we will make use of - with a critical spirit - in the political and ideological struggles to come. Struggles which cannot be avoided in the redefinition of a programmatic and strategic alternative for socialism. 1. Belgian section of the Fourth International, the forerunner of today's Socialist Workers Party (SAP/POS). 2. The different brands of Stalinist for many years claimed 3. Internationalist Communists of Germany. The IKD comrade Monat-Widelin was responsible for this work, first in Belgium, later in France. 4. by now called the Revolutionary Communist Party. 5. The role of Michel Pablo, already important, was to grow 6. The January 1944 issue of Quatrième Internationale reproduced a 1943 article by Ernest (signed ER) called "The world crisis of the workers' movement and the role of the Fourth International". This article was the result of the RKP/PCR intervention in the sullen mass strikes of metal workers in Liege and Antwerp, and in the mines of Charleroi, in 1941-42. And of Mandel and Leon's participation in the secret meetings of the "committees of trade union struggle", a new workers' movement in rupture with reformism, and anti-capitalist despite its ideological confu7. in his earlier works he uses the term 'neo-capitalism'. 8. "La Belgique entre néocapitalisme et socialisme" published simultaneously in La Gauche and Partisans (Paris, Oct.-Dec. 1965), "Une stratégie socialiste pour l'Europe occidentale*, in Revue internationale du socialisme, May-June 1965 (magazine edited by Lelio Basso). 9. Delightful Murder: A Social History of the Crime Story, 10. "Montée, déclin et chute du stalinisme", Quatrième Internationale, December 1957. This report was presented to the Fifth World Congress of the Fourth International ear11 Socialist Democracy and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, a resolution adopted by the Fourth International in 1985. Ernest inspired the report and was its principle edi12. Notebook for Study and Research, Amsterdam
International Viewpoint n° 269 — September 1995 15