Ernest Mandel Study
Centre
The board and staff of the International Institute for Research and Education in Scientific Socialism (IRE) are firmly determined to continue the tradition of living Marxism which Ernest Mandel so strongly represented.
The development and elaboration of a new emancipatory perspective in the best tradition of humanistic and non-dogmatic socialism is more needed today than ever before. To this end the IIRE board has resolved to create an Ernest Mandel Study Centre on the premises of the Amsterdam school.
The aim of this new Centre is to foster political studies for the emancipation and liberation of all oppressed peoples and groups world-wide. The guiding light of the studies will be the example of the open-minded, humanistic, democratic and scientific spirit that Ernest Mandel expressed in his own many works. We feel that the only real tribute we can pay our teacher for so many years is to guarantee the continuation and intensification of that great tradition of living Marxism. We envisage emphasising studies in the fields of economy, history and democratic rights.
We invite all those who learned from or otherwise benefited from the works of Ernest Mandel to assist us in continuing his efforts.
The IIRE Board
18 International Viewpoint n° 269 - September 1995
1923-1995 Ernest Mandel
International Viewpoint n° 269 - September 1995 19
To support the Ernest
Mandel Study Centre, send your contribution, marked 'Mandel Centre' to 'account name 'IRE', account number 630-
0113884-65, Caisse Privee
Rutgers University (USA) 1968: Socialist Scholars Conference
Banque, Brussels Belgium.
Or send your cheque, made payable to 'TRE', to
Willemsparkweg 202,
1071 HW Amsterdam,
Netherlands.
To minimise our bank charges, please avoid
Eurocheques, and if possible pool your contributions.
All donations will be acknowledged in writing and listed in the IRE reports.
Enest Mandel founded the IIRE in 1983 as a unique study and education centre for activists in labour and liberation movements In its 13 years of existence, hundreds of leading activists from a great variety of labour, women's. youth and other emancipatory movements all over the world have gathered in our centre for courses, conferences and seminars.
Under Ernest's chairmanship the IIRE published a series of Notebooks for Study and Research in English, French and Spanish. We also issued a series of international Working Papers, intended to stimulate deeper research on the pressing and complicated problems of modern capitalist society. Ernest
Mandel did not just contribute actively to the publication of his own work, but was a permanent, very critical but always loyal and stimulating sparing partner for all our other contributors. Many of the Notebooks have subsequently been translated into other languages, ranging from Japanese and German to Dutch and Portuguese.
Ernest gave hundreds of hours of lectures at our centre, on a wide variety of subjects. These lectures are available in tape form for visitors.
Continuing Ernest's work is the memorial he would have wanted. And creating a solid financial base for the IRE's activities is one of the preconditions for doing so.
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20 International Viewpoint n° 269 — September 1995
### MANDEL
1923-1995
Ernest
debate with its author. The book shows the intellectual scope of this man we have lost, undeniably the most fertile and universal Marxist mind of his age. IN ARTICLES written in French for Inprecor beginning in 1975 and published in 1978 as La Crise (published in English as The Second Slump) Ernest tried to show that the generalised recession of 1974-75 confirmed the ebb of the long wave that he had foreseen; that it was thus an expression of a long-term depressive tendency; and above all that it was the ineluctable result of capitalism's internal contradictions and their cumulative exacerbation over a long period, not a simple accident due to "exogenous factors" (such as the oil crisis). The subsequent evolution of the world capitalist economy has largely borne out this "Mandelist" diagnosis. It has evoked growing international interest in the theory of long waves, which Ernest had done more than anyone to rehabilitate.
One relatively early result was that in 1978 the author of Late Capitalism was invited to give a series of lectures on long waves as the Alfred Marshall Lectures for that year at the University of Cambridge. An expanded and more worked-out version of these lectures was published in 1980 as Long Waves of Capitalist Development: The Marxist Interpretation. In this work Ernest returned to the theses he had already expounded in his magnum opus. He tried to make a link between long waves and "cycles of class struggle", and for the first time took strong exception to the idea of a cyclical sequence of long waves. The man who had for years predicted the crisis and the end of the post-war expansive long wave thumbed his nose at the capitalists by refusing to make the inverse prediction once the crisis had arrived. The turn from an expansive to a recessive long wave flows from the system's inherent contradictions, he explained, but there is nothing automatic about a turn back toward protracted expansion. For that the role of exogenous factors is indispensable. ON A COMPLETELY different subject, articles written in French for Inprecor were collected and completed with unpublished chapters to make up Ernest's book Critique de l'eurocommunisme in 1978 (From Stalinism to Eurocommunism in English), followed by Réponse à Louis Althusser et Jean Elleinstein the year after. Also in 1979 a series of interviews with Ernest was published in London under the title Revolutionary Marxism Today, in which he passed judgement and made predictions on many different historical, theoretical, and current political issues. Giving his thoughts free range, the Fourth International's leader, speaking as such, showed his strengths as well as his weaknesses, which were noticeable above all in excessive optimism or defensiveness. Last of all in 1979 Ernest published in English his Trotsky: A Study in the Dynamic of His Thought. This essentially didactic work was devoted to the formation of the thought of the great Marxist whom Mandel venerated and constantly re-read, always marvelling anew at Trotsky's perspicacity. Brussels, 1 May 1982.
The first years of the 1980s brought an ebb in struggles. They gave Ernest an opportunity in 1984 to write and publish in English his book on detective novels. Delightful Murder: A Social History of the Crime Story. It was a rough sketch of the work on the relationship between capitalism and crime that death would prevent him from completing. Then he finished and published in 1986, again in English, The Meaning of the Second World War. This is not just a Marxist interpretation of this terrible mid-century (which shaped the young Ernest Mandel): it is also a fierce denunciation of capitalism "with a human face", and a penetrating reflection on key issues of the materialist conception of history. The Place of Marxism in History, (1986) a didactic presentation of Marxism's historical and intellectual genesis was the result of his teaching at the Amsterdam-based International Institute for Research and Education in Democratic and Scientific Socialism (IIRE), his first IIRE Notebook (the NSR series). ALSO IN 1986, Ernest took on Alec Nove in New Left Review in a debate over the relationship between plan and market in a post-capitalist economy. He vigorously criticised the idea of "market socialism", and defended the revolutionary Marxist tradition's democratic socialist project. This debate, a new version of the irreducible conflict between the "realism" of reformist resignation and the "utopia" of revolutionary intransigence, continued until 1988 (Nove 1987; Mandel 1988; Elson 1988). It reflected the spirit of the time, the heyday of Gorbachevism. Ernest was one of the first to grasp that this was a
International Viewpoint n° 269 — September1995 21 turning point in Soviet history, at a time when many people still tended to minimise it.
He was clear-headed enough not to have any illusions about Mikhail Gorbachev's chances of success, unlike many admirers of this sorcerer's apprentice of bureaucratic reform. (Khrushchev in his time had evoked identical hopes.) But he was mistaken, carried away by the revolutionary optimism that was typical of him, in underestimating the effects of decades of Stalinist dictatorship on the consciousness of the Soviet working class, and in overestimating its will to resist and the bureaucracys will to resist the dynamic of capitalist restoration. over-determined by the global context. These merits and faults shine through clearly in the book Ernest wrote about Gorbachev, which appeared first in French in 1989 as Où va l'URSS de Gorbatchev? (and in English as Beyond Perestroika). LIKE ALL OF US, he was disappointed by the reactionary turn of events in Eastern Europe from 1990 on. He may have felt it more intensely than others, because of the intensity of the hopes that the thaw had given him, which ended in a debacle He calmly finished the theoretical work on bureaucracy that he had been planning for a long time: Power and Money: A Marxist Theory of Bureaucracy published in London in 1992 [reviewed on page 30]. Events impelled Ernest to give this book a function that he had certainly not originally foreseen: to explain the roots of the Soviet and East European bureaucracies' restorationist turn, as he stressed in his introduction, criticising his own past errors of judgement along the way. It was also for him an opportunity to argue again the case for the self-managing socialism for which he had always
He argued another case the following year by defending the Russian revolution against its detractors, whose ranks swelled in the wake of the Soviet debacle.
This was his second IIRE Notebook:
October 1917: Coup d'Etat or Social
Revolution? Then he argued a third case, at the request of the German PDS' publishing house, this time in defense of Trotsky. Its title, Trotski als Alternativ (Trotsky as Alternative) echoed former East
German left-wing dissident Rudolf Bahro's book, which had made a stir in 1977.
Ernest defends Leon Trotsky and his struggle passionately, though in a critical spirit, before the court of history. He shows that Trotsky's contributions were
Marxism's only coherent response to the major problems of the 20th century (except on ecological issues). MUCH WEAKENED by declining health, in spite of a first stroke that he survived in December 1993, Ernest found the energy to finish preparing a new, revised and expanded edition of his book on long waves. Published in London shortly before his death, it was supplemented by two chapters in which Ernest reviewed the copious literature that had appeared on the subject since the 1980 edition. He returned at length to the debates raised by this literature, and re-affirmed his conviction that the conditions still do not exist for an end to the depressive long wave of this last quarter-century.
To conclude this rapid survey of an immense body of work? we cite the last lines of one of the most beautiful texts Ernest ever wrote: the preface, signed "E Germain", to the first edition of the 24. year-old Abraham Léon's extraordinary work on the Jewish question, written two years before Léon's death at Auschwitz. These lines bear witness to who Ernest Mandel was and what his life meant:
"Among those who learn the story of his life there may be some who will perhaps ask why a man of such remarkable qualities tied his destiny to a small revolutionary organization.... They will ask themselves: why did the Marcel Hics, the Martin Widelins, the A. Léons, who were among the most gifted European intellectuals, choose a movement which could promise them neither success nor glory nor honours nor even a minimum of material comfort, but which on the contrary demanded of them every sacrifi ce, comfort, including their lives, and which required long, ungrateful work, frequently in isolation from the proletariat to whom they wanted to give everything? And if they are able to recognize in these young revolutionists, along with their intellectual gifts, exceptional moral qualities, then they will say to themselves that a movement capable of attracting such men solely by the power of its ideas and the purity of its ideal and capable of leading those rationalist dialecticians to such heights of self-denial and devotion - is a movement that cannot die because in it lies everything that is noble in human-
### Ernest
1923
MANDEL
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1. The French-language sister publication of International Viewpoint. For a sample issue or subscription information write to PECI, PB 85, 75522 Paris cedex 11, France 2. In order not to make this article too long, we have deliberately not mentioned the many anthologies of articles written at very different dates, published thanks to Ernest's efforts or with his consent, such as La Longue marche de la révolution (1976), De la Commune à Mai 1968 (1978), Revolutionäre Strategien im 20. Jahrhundert (1978), Les Etudiants, les intellectuels et la lutte des classes (1979), Karl Marx: Die Aktualität seines Werkes (1984), etc. We have also failed to mention the very many collective works to which Ernest contributed or that he himself edited, alone or jointly, such as Fifty Years of World Revolution, 19171967 (1968), Ricardo, Marx, Sraffa (1984), New Findings in Long-Wave Research (1992), etc
The obituaries
"We should dream and build utopias, just like Ernest Mandel":
Three commentators discuss the Trotskyist leader
La Jornada, Mexico, 23 July 1995
2 International Viewpoint n° 269 — September 1995