Unquenched
spirit
THE following review of "The Legacy of Ernest Mandel" (ed. Gilbert Achcar,
Verso, €30) first appeared in the Times
Literary Supplement of August 18,
2000. Its author is a leading member of the British Socialist Workers" Party.
ALEX CALLINICOS
| RNEST Mandel belonged to what 1 Gilbert Achcar calls an 'increasing/ly endangered species' , the 'theoreticians of militant Marxism'. Mandel, who died in 1995 in his early seventies, was for fifty years the dominant figure in the Fourth International, Trotsky's official heirs. He evokes a now largely defunct world - that of the leftist Jewish intellectual who spurns not only conventional disciplinary boundaries but also the academy itself, preferring to practise Marxism as a full-time political activist.
This world was destroyed by Hitler and Stalin. Mandel himself nearly fell victim to the Holocaust. In a vivid interview appended to this collection he recalls how as a *crazy youth' active in the Trotskyist resistance during the German occupation of his native Belgium, he was arrested three times. Mandel escaped from a prison camp in Germany by shinning over the fence and managed to talk the gamekeeper who recaptured him out of shooting him on
The mature Mandel was a master of words as well. Fluent in half a dozen languages and immensely widely read, he was a powerful orator. May 1968 marked his heyday, producing a mass audience versions of Marxism critical of Moscow's orthodoxies. During the most violent confrontation between students and riot police in Paris, Mandel mounted a barricade in the Latin Quarter, and, watching his own car burning, exclaimed: 'Ah! Comme c'est beau! C'est la Révolution!'
Robin Blackburn observes: 'Perhaps more than any other single person he was the educator of the new generation recruited to Marxism and revolutionary politics by the student revolts of the sixties, especially in Europe and the Americas.' Mandel tirelessly and skilfully defended his version of Trotskyism in print and at midable debater. Blackburn recalls a frail
Mandel demolishing the then Spanish
Prime Minister, Felipe Gonzalez, in 1991.
Mandel was more, however, than a pamphleteer and controversialist. He devoted considerable effort to developing
Marxist political economy, notably in
Marxist Economic Theory (1962) and Late
Capitalism (1972). The latter work represents his most important intellectual contribution, an attempt to integrate an orthodox Marxist theory of the business cycle, in which crises reflect the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, with the idea, first developed by Nikolai Kondratieff in the early 1920s, that capitalism undergoes
"long waves' of expansion and decline.
Mandel contended that the end of the 1960s represented the beginning of a downward wave.
### Critical examination
Rightly, Late Capitalism receives much attention in this collection (which is based on papers delivered at a seminar in 1996). Michel Husson subjects the book's main theoretical propositions to sympathetic but critical examination. In a tantalizing piece Francisco Louçã argues that Mandel's version of long wave theory pioneered what he calls the complexity approach" in political economy. This conceives capitalism as liable to sudden and catastrophic changes that cannot be modelled by the linear equations used by conventional economists.
Mandel's contribution as a Marxist economist is thus well represented in this collection: aside from Husson's and Louçã's pieces, Catherine Samary critically reviews Mandel's debate in the 1980s with Alec Nove, in which he vigorously rebutted the idea - now more or less unchallengeable orthodoxy among leftwing economists - that the only viable alternative to capitalism is market socialism. Yet the collection avoids, as Achcar puts it in his editorial introduction, 'any judgement on the political and organizational choices through which he attempted to translate his Marxist convictions"
This is an odd decision. First, it is so at odds with Mandel's own insistence on the unity of theory and practice as one of the most basic axioms of Marxism. Secondly, as leader of the Fourth International he was famously prone to sweeping and (from his perspective) optimistic predictions - of
Review * global economic slump after the Second
World War, revolution in Western Europe during the 1970s, and the transformation of the Soviet Union (which he persisted in calling a 'degenerated workers' state') into a socialist democracy in the late 1980s.
Any serious assessment of Mandel's
Marxism would have to trace the relationship between these erroneous political judgements and the basic structure of his theoretical beliefs.
At the same time, Mandel's optimism is his most attractive quality. It helped save him as a 'crazy youth' in Nazi Germany and still motivated his passionate rejection of capitalism in old age. It was, as Michael
Löwy observes, deep-seated, la sort of antropological optimism'. The young Marx's 'categorical imperative to overthrow all conditions in which the human being is a debased, enslaved, neglected and contemptible being' corresponds, Mandel claimed, to 'the inextinguishable spark of revolt against inequality, exploitation, injustice and oppression, which lights up again and again in the human race'. It is indeed rooted in 'our antropological nature' - in the fact that we walk upright and co-operate socially. From a long historical perspective Mandel was confident of ultimate victory.
Norman Geras objects that this optimism made Mandel insensitive to the dark side of history. In a stimulating analysis of his writings on the Holocaust, Geras argues that Mandel tended not to face up to the singularity of the Shoah, treating it as merely the most extreme case of capitalist barbarism. This reflected a failure to confront what Mandel formally acknow]edged, the human potential for destruction. Geras also reproaches him also for his adherence to a 'universalist ethic shorn of any special concern for the sufferings of one's own". To me, however, Mandel's universalism - and its implication that the Nazis' murder of the Jews concerns us all - seems a welcome corrective to the obsession with identity that so blights contemporary culture. * To order "The Legacy of Emest Mandel" at a discount price:
- From Britain, please send a cheque for £12.00 made out to "Socialist Outlook" to PO Box 1109, London N4 IAX.
- From the US, please send a cheque for $30.00 made out to "Solidarity" to Solidarity, 7012 Michigan Av., Detroit MI - From other countries, please do a giro transfer (indicatadress) to Netherlands Postbank account no. 1757144, CER/NSR, Postbus 53290, 1007 RG Amsterdam, for NLG 50.00 if you live in Europe (NLG 45.00 if you live in the Netherlands) or NLG 65.00 if you live outside of Europe.
49
ON October 17th, World Poverty Day, 200 women representing the World March for Women will be received at the United
Nations in New York, highlighting the special importance that the fight against poverty has for women worldwide. Women, in all sectors of the world represent the majority of the poor, and the increasing number of women-headed households - created by war, migration as well as marriage failure - risk trapping more and more children into a spiral of poverty.
However this initiative will represent far, far more than those women able to be in New York and the fight against poverty alone. Since the Women's Federation of Quebec (Fédération des Femmes de Québec) launched their call in 1995 the
World March of Women against poverty and violence against women has become an international series of initiatives based on a platform of demands which go far beyond these first two essential challenges to the discrimination and oppression
At the international preparatory meeting in October 1998, 140 women from 60 countries adopted a more developed platpromotion of equality between women and men;
stimulating a large movement of women's groups around the world;
denouncing patriarchy and capitalism and its current neo-liberalism form, proposing alternative solutions based on
This same meeting also defined the way in which the movement was to be organised: led by women, and leadership shared equally through all regions of the world while respecting and valuing the differences that exist between different cultures, noting also that the March is a pacifist action. Over all the continents a broad variety of women's organisations has come together in support of the march. The collaboration between these organisations, feminist groups, NGOs, indeed even government representatives, has not always been easy. Questions of fundamental importance for example in relation to sexuality and fertility control remain points of divergence. Nevertheless the World March has become a Symbol of the global resistance to neo-liberalism and its specific effects on women.
Capitalist globalisation deepens inequalities between the advanced capitalist and developing countries, and between different sections of the workforce and population in these countries. Thus as the inequality between young and old, those in casualised jobs and stable employment, immigrant and indigenous populations grows, so does the difference between women and men in combination with all these other factors of inequality.
The importance of the World March is that it has made women and women's demands a specific factor in the resistance to this capitalist globalisation and thus in turn strengthens the movement also represented by the anti-globalisation initiatives which passing from Seattle to Geneva to Porto Alegre next January are a sign of a reactivation of social movements which had been almost absent from the scene for much of the 1990s.
In August of this year groups of women in 157 countries were participating in different initiatives running from
International Women's Day March 8 to the high point around October 17th. Coordinating committees had been constituted in 101 countries from Australia to Pakistan, from El Salvador to Brazil, from Togo to Benin, from France to the
United States. While we can count on success for the different initiatives including the European March in Brussels on
October 14th and the march in Washington on October 15th the real challenge ahead of us is to build a real worldwide coordination that will continue after October, ensuring a feminist presence in future anti-globalisation initiatives. IPD| *
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50 International Viewpoint #324 September-October 2000
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