Ernest Mandel Archive

“For Mandel, the hope for such a future was based on the spark of rebellion that had always made people rebel against oppressive and alienating conditions. The task of socialists was to fan that spark into a flame by supporting all such rebellions and by presenting an alternative way forward.”

“Mandel’s main fault, several speakers at the commemorative meeting claimed, was over-optimism. But he left us with writing on the history and economic grounding of capitalism, analyses of bureaucracy and alienation, and an account of the underlying structural preconditions for the world we live in today.”

This article was first published under the pseudonym of Louis Couturier in La Gauche, the journal of the Belgian section of the Fourth International, on 19 September 1990.

Using insights from Belgian Marxist thinker Ernest Mandel, economist George Kerevan argues capitalism will suffer profound breakdown this century.

Ernest Mandel (1923-1995), who died a quarter of a century ago, has left us a significant theoretical legacy. It is unavoidable for anyone who wishes to make a balance sheet of the 20th century and contribute to the elaboration of revolutionary perspectives for the 21st century.

A quarter of a century after the death of Ernest Mandel, this article is not intended as a tribute. In the spirit of living Marxism that he embodied, we will limit ourselves rather to showing how his economic writings are still relevant, while sketching the questions, old or new, that they suggest.

Concern for the environment appeared strongly in Mandel’s writings only from the 1970s. It hardly appears, for example, in Marxist Economic Theory (1962). It is true that we already find, in this “inaugural” work, the idea of “stopping growth” under socialism: “When society has a supply of automatic machines large enough to cover all its current needs (…) it is likely that “economic growth” will be slowed down or even temporarily halted. Man, completely free from all material and economic concerns will be born".

In recent years, discussion on the definition and explanation of the class nature of the bourgeois state has expanded considerably. Although still mainly conducted in the GDR, France, Great Britain and Italy, the ‘Stamocap’III theory and debates on the class nature of the ‘national democratic state’ (in some former colonies in Africa and AsiaIV) make it a debate that is truly global. We do not want to talk here so much about the specific content of the most important works on this subject that have appeared so far. Rather, our intention is to raise some general problems related to the application of the historical-materialist method to the problem of the class nature of the bourgeois state. Directly or indirectly such problems play an important role in this discussion. [1]

This article was originally published as ‘La Dialectique de la Croissance’, Mai, November 1972, pp. 7-14. This translation is based on the Dutch version published in the reader of a 1973 congress on the ‘Crisis in economic theory’, VESVU-kongreskommissie (ed.) Krisis in de ekonomiese theorie: lezingen en diskussies van het vesvu kongres vu-amsterdam (Nijmegen, 1973), pp. 55-76, available online in the Marxists Internet Archive here. Translation by Alex de Jong.
In these notes, remarks in (…)

This paper was submitted to the Bertrand Russel Centenary Symposium, Linz, Austria, September 11th to 15th, 1972. First published in: Ken Coates (ed.) Spheres of influence in the age of imperialism (Nottingham, 1972).