Gelderen THE DEATH OF Ernest Mandel on July 20 deprived the Fourth International of its foremost leader and thinker. As writer, speaker and teacher, he was by far the most widely known Trotskyist in the world. Even those who did not agree with him respected his views and the courage with which he defended them. For Ernest, Trotskyism was synonymous with Marxism. His two volume Marxist Economic Theory and his introduction to the Penguin edition of Copital, placed Marx's theories firmly in the present epoch and marked him as one of the foremost exponents and champions of Marx's thought.
His literary output is formidable. But Mandel was more than a theore. tician. As a Marxist, for him theory ano pracace were orvisite. nat is why the building and strengthening of the Fourth International was central Charlie van Gelderen speaking at 1988 Socialist Outlook rally also addressed by Mandel to his life. Like Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky before him, he knew that the working class could not carry out its historic task without a party and that party had to be international, not only in outlook, making genuflections to interconalism, out organisaton ally. Marx's eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, "the philosophers have only Interpreted the world, the thing is to change it" was the foundation of his pollocal lite. garded the central task for todaythe building of the Fourth International.
He was severely critical of those he characterised as suffering from the disease of "national communism". who subordinated the interests of parts of the word proletnat to what they considered to be the priorities flowing from the needs of party building. in their own country.
Sophism
He regarded the argument of the British Socialise Workers Party, that you first had to build the basement and the floor before you can build the roof (che incernational) as a crude sophism. What architect or group of workers, he asked, could ever build a roof without knowing from the beginning of the building process, what it is going to be and how it is going to be built: not lust throuch a blueprint but through the current experience of building.
"National communism", even when proclaimed by comrades with the best of intentions, is but a variant of the reactionary utopia of "socialism in one country".
For Ernest, to be a Marxist, a proletarian revolutionary was first of all, to be an internationalist. This he was