Ernest 1923-1995 MANDEL
International Viewpoint n° 269 - September 1995 9
Our comrade Ernest Mandel
As most of our readers already know, Ernest Mandel died on 20 July 1995. International Viewpoint presents here a modest and partial introduction to the life and work of this great revolutionary thinker, the main founder of our magazine, and its most prestigious collaborator. In this dossier, François Vercammen and Salah Jaber, two of our regular collaborators, outline Ernest's extraordinary life and considerable written legacy. We also reproduce the obi- 1938-1988 tuaries published by the Frankfurter Rundschau
(Germany), The Guardian (Great Britain), La Jornada 30aг
(Mexico), Le Monde (France), El País (Spanish state), Le Soir (Belgium), and Süddeutsche Zeitung (Germany). For reasons of space we are obviously unable to reproduce all the obituaries published in newspapers and magazines all round the world, some of international reputation, including The Times, The Times of India, The Independent, Der Speigel, Die Tageszeitung, others of national or local importance. But all of them testify to the considerable notoriety of our comrade, to a fame which goes much wider than the workers' and revolutionary movements to which he never hid his allegiance. The messages of sympathy from this last sphere are much too numerous to list, let alone reprint. But we were particularly touched by the messages printed in L'Unita, daily of the Italian Democratic Socialist Party (PDS, ex-Communist), Liberazione, the daily of the Communist Refoundation Party in Italy, Neues Deutschland, the publication linked to the German Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), and Economic and Political Weekly (Bombay, India). And by the messages sent to us by Militant Labour (Great Britain), Movement for Socialism (MAS, Argentina), Movement for the People's Participation (MPP, Uruguay), Movement STUIT (MST-UIT Argentina), Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP, West Bank Occupied Territories), Socialist Unity Party (BSP, Turkey), Socialist Workers' Party (SWP, Great Britain), Workers Party (PT, Brazil), and Workers' Struggle (LO, France). We warmly thank these comrades, as well as all those not cited here, especially all those comrades and partners with whom we work closely, and for whom Ernest's death was surely as painful as for us.
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MODE
Ernest MANDEL
1923-1995
The main leader of the Fourth International during the His deepest aspiration was to build and to lead - in the post-war period has disappeared. An extremely creative line of Lenin and Trotsky - an organisation, the Fourth
Marxist theoretician, an unbeatable educator, a skilled orator International. And to make this organisation match up to the and a tireless propagandist, Ernest always defined himself as a political and organisational tasks of the world socialist revolutionary militant in the workers' movement.
Leader of the Belgian Socialist Workers Party
10 International Viewpoint n° 269 — September 1995