The Place of Marxism in History

Ernest Mandel

IIRE Notebook for Study and Research no. 1 (40 pp. €2.75, £2, $3.25)

Since 1989, many repentant leftists have proclaimed Marxism incapable of explaining the new phenomena of the dawning new century. Ernest Mandel reminds us in The Place of Marxism in History that Marxism drew from its very inception on the advances of all the social sciences and emancipation movements of its time. In a survey of the multiple sources of Marx and Engels' theory, he identifies the specific contribution of the two friends in the various disciplines to which they applied themselves: philosophy, political economy, social history, revolutionary organization, self-organization of the working class, emancipation movements, and internationalism. Concluding that Marxism 'constantly learns from perpetually changing reality' and that it is the conscious expression of the real movement of workers towards self-emancipation, Mandel proposes a formula that provides for a dialectical interaction between innovation and the verification of established tenets. This text is based on a series of lectures given at the IIRE.

Ernest Mandel was active in the revolutionary socialist movement from the late 1930s until his death in 1995, and participated in the struggle against the Nazi occupation of Belgium. Successively editor of La Gauche, a member of the economic studies commission of the General Confederation of Labour of Belgium, and a leading figure of the independent radical left, he taught at the Free University of Brussels. He was the author of many books, including Marxist Economic Theory, The Formation of the Economic Thought of Karl Marx, Late Capitalism and Long Waves of Capitalist Development, as well as IIRE Notebook no. 17/18, October 1917: Coup d'Etat or Social Revolution?

The Chinese Revolution

I: The Second Chinese Revolution and the Shaping of the Maoist Outlook

The Chinese Revolution

II: The Maoist Project Tested in the Struggle for Power

Pierre Rousset

IIRE Notebook for Study and Research no. 2 (32 pp. €1.75, £1.50, $2.25) & no. 3 (48 pp. €2.75, £2, $3.25)

The Chinese revolution of 1949 was one of the most important experiences in the history of twentieth-century national liberation movements. It triggered wide-ranging debates among, and often inside, revolutionary currents around the world. The Chinese regime's turn towards the market since the death of Mao Zedong make it all the more important to understand the revolution's distinctive origins and strange destiny. The first part of Pierre Rousset's study deals with the 1920s: the second Chinese revolution of 1925-27, its lessons, the evolution of the Communist movement, the emergence of Maoism and the beginning of the antagonism that developed between the Chinese CP leadership under Mao and the Soviet leadership under Stalin. The second part examines the 1930s and '40s: the anti-Japanese united front, the revolutionary strategy pursued during the third Chinese revolution, and the foundations of the regime established in 1949. Rousset invites readers to join in collective reflection on the historical constraints that revolutions face and the means of coping with them.

Pierre Rousset was born in 1946. He has been active on the French left since the 1960s and participated in many solidarity campaigns with national liberation struggles, particularly with Indochina and other Southeast Asian countries. He has produced several studies on Vietnam, in-cluding two books, Le Parti communiste vietnamien (1975) and Nationalisme et Communisme au Vietnam (1978), and the essay 'The Peculiarities of Vietnamese Com-munism' in The Stalinist Legacy (1984). He has travelled extensively in East Asia and regularly contributes articles on the region to several periodicals. He is an IIRE Fellow and former director.

Revolutionary Strategy Today

Daniel Bensaïd

IIRE Notebook for Study and Research no. 4 (36 pp. €3.25, £2, $3.25)

Since the rise of capitalism, socialists have faced certain deep-seated obstacles: the hostility of the bourgeois state, the fitful curve of proletarian class-consciousness, and the inertia or active opposition of apparatuses originally built by the workers for struggle. Daniel Bensaïd reviews the answers to these problems given in the 'classical' period of the Marxist movement. He then examines them in light of events in Southern Europe and Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s, including the growth and diversification of the state, growing aspirations to self-management, multiple forms of dual power and the experience of left reformist governments.

Daniel Bensaïd was born in 1946. He was active in the French student and anti-imperialist movements that led up to May 1968. Drawing the lessons of the failure of the general strike, he emerged as one of the main advocates of building an independent radical left. He is an IIRE Fellow and teaches sociology at the University of Paris. His many published works include: Portugal: la révolution en marche (1975), Mai si! rebelles et repentis (with Alain Krivine, 1988), Le pari mélancolique (1997) and Les irréductibles: théorèmes de la résistance à l'air du temps (2001).