Review
The Legacy of Ernest Mandel , edited by Gilbert Achcar, Verso - London
Reviewed by Charlie van Gelderen
Enzo Traverso called Ernest Mandel "... the last great figure of post-war classical Marxism" and this is a characterisation with which few of the contributors to this book will quarrel.
The contributions are not uncritical, and that is how Mandel would have wanted it. If there is any criticism of the book itself it is that there is not a specific tribute to his work as a militant of the Fourth International, although that it referred to in passing.
As Gilbert Achcar writes in his introduction, "He was one of those few men and women in the history of the socialist movement who were able to combine untiring activities of a revolutionary with a body of intellectual work..."
Some of the contributors to this volume were, at one time, members of the Fourth International. They were drawn into its ranks in 1968, during a rising revolutionary wave. When this revolutionary tide receded, they rapidly withdrew back to their academic and literary activities.
But not Ernest Mandel. To paraphrase Marx, his position was that it was no longer enough for academics to analyse and dissect the political and economic world, they must actively engage in changing it.
For Mandel, his immense and unparalleled theoretical and literary output was part of what he regarded as his main purpose in life - building and strengthening the Fourth International. If anyone was Trotsky's heir, it was Ernest Mandel. He was firm in his conviction that to combat international capital, the working class needed an international organisation to co-ordinate the struggle and give it guidance where necessary.
Marxism had been distorted - primarily by the revisionism of Stalinism but also by a variety of philosophic interpretations. "As a result Marxism and particularly Marxist political economy became sclerotic, incapable of understanding the forms acquired by capitalism in the second half of the twentieth century" (Albarracin and Montes in their contribution on Mandel's Late Capitalism).
More than anyone else, Mandel, basing himself "on the methodology and fundamental categories used by Marx" developed Marxism for the second half of the century.
With his Late Capitalism, he "erected a bridge to connect the origins of Marxism to its subsequent evolution, placing economics at the centre of the analysis and recovering the fundamental categories of Marx's political economy to explain the evolution and present state of capitalism".
The book contains noteworthy analysis of Mandel's development of the 'long wave' theory, and perhaps of prime importance, his contribution on the Marxian theory of bureaucracy.
Mandel puts both the growth of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union and the bureaucracies in the social-democratic parties in the west under the microscope. He went back to Rosa Luxemburg who, well before Lenin and Trotsky, understood that the emergence and development of the trade union and party officialdom was the key to German social democracy's growing officialdom.
In his contribution, Charles Post defends, although not without some criticism, Trotsky and Mandel's characterisation of the Stalinist-dominated Soviet Union and the other countries under the rule of the Stalinist Communist parties, as degenerate workers' states, refuting the theory of state capitalism as espoused by the late Tony Cliff and the SWP. He argues:
"The strongest historical validation of Trotsky and Mandel's thesis that the former USSR and Eastern European regimes were not rooted in a new mode of production was the rapidity with which they collapsed in 1989-91.
"Bureaucratic rule in these countries was not overthrown by either the working class or imperialism, but imploded as a result of chronic economic stagnation. Not surprisingly, the social formations that emerged... have yet to make a successful transition to capitalism."
This position is reinforced in Catherine Samary's contribution on Mandel's views on the transition to socialism, although she does stress that there was, in the Soviet Union, a real sociological trend towards reproduction of the bureaucracy.
This was reinforced under Brezhnev when, increasingly, sons and daughters of the bureaucracy had a better chance to go to university and become bureaucrats than others. There was, Samary maintains, a dynamic for the bureaucracy to establish itself as a class even if it did not succeed.
Norman Geras disagrees with Mandel on the historical importance of the Holocaust. Whereas Geras sees the Holocaust, the deliberate extermination of an entire race, as unique, Mandel maintained that it "has only pushed to paroxysm the barbarism of the habitual methods of imperialism in our epoch".
Enzo Traverso, in his "Understanding the Nazi Genocide" supports Geras on the uniqueness of the Final Solution, as did Isaac Deutscher.
Anyone who seeks a shortcut towards an understanding of Marxism can do no better than to turn to Mandel's Why I am a Marxist, which, thankfully, is included in this volume. I cannot end this review without quoting from it, the text I believe to be Ernest Mandel's Testament:
"... I am a Marxist because only Marxism makes it possible to keep believing in humanity and its future without self-deception - despite all the terrible experiences of the twentieth century, despite Auschwitz and Hiroshima, despite famine in the 'Third World' and the threat of nuclear annihilation.
"Marxism teaches us to take a positive attitude towards life and human beings and to love them without a false gloss, without illusions, in full awareness of the never-ending difficulties and unavoidable setbacks in the millions of years which it has taken our species to develop from ape-like creatures to global investigators and stormers of heaven..
"To conquer conscious control over its social existence has today become a matter of life and death for this species. In the end it will succeed in realising the noblest of all its aspirations: the construction of a humane, classless, non-violent world socialism."