ERNEST MANDEL, one of the world's most eminent Marxist economists and a lifelong revolutionary socialist activist, died in his native Belgium on the morning of July 20th, 1995.
In the post war period, there were few more passionate, eloquent and well known representatives on the international stage of the revolutionary tradition of Lenin and Trotsky than Ernest Mandel.
His life seemed to embody the struggles, hopes and setbacks of that period. Mandel would wish to be remembered first and foremost in his role as leader and foremost theoretician of the Fourth International, the world organisation founded by Leon Trotsky and his followers in 1938 to reconstruct an international revolutionary socialist movement from the wreckage of Stalinism.
Resistance
Born in 1923, Mandel joined the Trotskyist movement in Belgium in 1940, helping to rebuild an underground group after the Nazi invasion. He was active in the Resistance throughout the occupation; arrested twice, he was deported to a prison camp in Germany in 1944. Prior to this, he had participated in the first European conference of the underground sections of the Fourth International.
In 1946, the second world congress of the International elected Mandel to its leadership body, where he remained on to his death. The 1950s proved difficult years for Trotskyists, in the context of an unexpected stabilisation of international capitalism.
Through this period of "crossing the desert", Mandel was instrumental in developing a non-sectarian and undogmatic brand of Marxism which allowed the Fourth International to link up with and grow rapidly out of the worldwide youth and student radicalisation of the 1960s.
Mandel was a key intellectual influence on many of the student leaders of the May 1968 revolt in France, as well as other revolutionary student leaders like Tariq Ali in Britain and Rudi Dutschke in Germany. In the post-1968 period Mandel became one of the best-known spokespersons for revolutionary Marxism internationally, analyzing the problems of the revolutionary movement in a host of pamphlets and lectures.
Banned
In that turbulent period it was evident that the governments of the day did not regard Mandel as a minor irritant; he was barred at various periods from entering the United States, France, Switzerland, West Germany, and Australia.
The militant solidarity with the oppressed evinced by his support for the student revolt, workers in struggle and oppressed nationalities was a tradition he maintained in recent years with the active support he gave to the revolutionary Sandinista government in Nicaragua and the emergence of the Workers Party in Brazil.
Shortly before his death, Mandel attended the fourteenth World Congress of the Fourth International; the building of that organisation, which today includes sizeable sections in countries as diverse as France, Sri Lanka and Mexico remained his central and burning concern until his death.
Outside of the revolutionary movement, Mandel, who was Professor Emeritus at the Free University of Brussels, was best known for his pioneering work in the field of Marxist economics. "Marxist Economic Theory" (1962) was an ambitious attempt at applying the principles of Marx's "Capital" to modern reality. "The Formation of the Economic Thought of Karl Marx" (1971) traced the development of Marx's economic analysis from the early philosophical manuscripts to the writing of "Capital".
Mandel's most ambitious work was "Late Capitalism" (1975), which predicted the end of the period of rapid capitalist growth which had characterised the three decades subsequent to the second world war and put forward the theory of "long waves" of capitalist development (or rather updated the theory initially developed by Kondratiev in the 1920s). The theory of "long waves" has been at the centre of a debate going well beyond the circles of Marxist economists alone; it was restated in "The Long Waves of Capitalist Development", based on a series of lectures given at Cambridge University in 1978 (a revised version of this work is to be published by Verso later this year).
Global recession
"The Second Slump" (1978) was Mandels's attempt to analyze the global capitalist recession of 1974-75. Many readers will also be familiar with the substantial introductions which Mandel wrote to the Penguin edition of Marx's "Capital".
Mandel's theoretical output was not confined to economics; he produced a host of major works taking up a whole series of political and historic questions. Of these, "The Meaning of the Second World War" (1985) and the series of interviews collected as "Revolutionary Marxism Today" (1979) are perhaps the best introductions to the breadth of his thought.
In recent years, Mandel's creative output barely flagged; he produced major studies of Gorbachevism, the nature of bureaucracy, and (most recently) "Trotsky as Alternative".
Mandel's activities in the wider labour movement, in particular in his native Belgium, should not be forgotten.
During the 1950s and 1960s he was a member of the economic studies commission of the FGTB, the Belgian national union federation, as well as editor of the socialist newspaper La Gauche and he actively participated in trade union and workers' seminars throughout Europe.
Optimism
Always concerned with making economics accessible to workers, he took satisfaction in the fact that his "Introduction to Marxist Economics" had been translated into many languages and sold over half a million copies. "From Class Society to Communism" (1978), later republished as "Introduction to Marxism", sold at similar levels.
Mandel had been disappointed with many of the trends in global politics over the latter years of his life, but retained an unbreakable optimism, perhaps best summed up in the peroration to a talk he gave a couple of years before his death at the New York Marxist School: "Understand that you cannot be happier than if you know that you have dedicated your life to this defense of human rights everywhere in the world; the defense of the exploited, the oppressed, the downtrodden, the despised. There is no better way to be a good human being in this world than to dedicate your life to this great cause. That's why the future is with Marxism".
20th July 1995.