Ernest Mandel: an 'intellectual portrait'

The following review of the French edition of The Legacy of Ernest Mandel (from the French weekly Rouge) gives a sense of what readers can expect from the English edition.

The Marxism of Ernest Mandel will constitute a reference point for any future understanding of Mandel's indispensable work.

The difference between the book's title and the seminar's ('Ernest Mandel's Contribution to Marxist Theory') is revealing. The book is not just a reflection in several different voices about a body of work whose importance is undeniable. It aims to reach a broader audience than just Mandel's companions and disciples. The audience is also expected to be interested in the strictly theoretical side of Mandel's work: what editor Gilbert Achcar calls Mandel's 'intellectual portrait'.

Challenges

The book's difficulties are not only pedagogical, or having to do with the need to take a certain distance from a man who was both comrade and 'master'.... From this point of view, the desire to write something that both honours and criticizes Mandel is legitimately present in each of the contributions. Behind the diversity of approaches, this gives a deep unity to the collective work.

The problem is more fundamental. It has to do with the need to tackle the rich diversity of the theoretical labours of someone who was first and foremost a militant, and for a long period the Fourth International's main leader. In Mandel's work, political intervention and speculative thought are intimately, dialectically interwoven. This explains the originality of many of Mandel's writings, which were neither academic publications nor reducible to the political goals that their author consistently gave them. Often they seem to situate themselves in the interstices between science and politics, nourished by a constant back-and-forth between analysis and action.

The great variety of Mandel's writings - reflected in the book by the multiplicity of fields and approaches of its various authors - is held together by a centripetal force: the forceful coherence of his intellectual personality.

This is thus a 'profile' whose originality editor Achcar rightly stresses in its opening lines: Mandel 'was one of those few men and women in the history of the socialist movement who were able to combine an untiring activity as revolutionary leaders with a body of intellectual work fulfilling the scholarly criteria for scientific research, to the point of comprelling respect from academic circles'.

Ernest Mandel thus escapes from the usual criteria of classification of both fields of study and fields of political intervention. This made the project that led to this book an especially challenging one, since its goal was precisely to pick apart the unity of Mandel's work and personality, by separating the theory from the politics. 'Mandel's theoretical production did not occur despite his involvement in militant revolutionary politics. It rather occurred because of this involvement, which shines through all his publications', writes Achcar. 'It is possible, however, even necessary, to separate the appraisal of Mandel's theoretical achievement from the assessment of the militant endeavour that motivated it.'

The challenge has been responded to brilliantly. Across the plurality of approaches, witnesses and questionings echo through the book in a way that reproduces, in fact, 'the Marxism of Ernest Mandel'.

Contributions

Difficult as it is to deny the value and importance of Mandel's economic analyses, it is tempting simply to take them for granted. One of the book's most valuable aspects is that it shakes off habitual readings in order to rediscover the analyses' original power.

For decades, in face of a dominant ideology that incessantly repeated that capitalism had overcome its contradictions, Mandel was able to keep alive a rigorous, always alert Marxist analysis. Michel Husson's article on Late Capitalism and Francisco Louça's on long waves testify to the fecundity of the theoretical framework Mandel developed.

Mandel's analysis of the phenomenon of bureaucracy is also shown to be one of his decisive contributions, both theoretically and politically. Charles Post writes, 'Mandel, working from the foundation provided by Luxemburg and Trotsky, has provided us with the most theoretically rigorous and empirically well-founded Marxian discussion of bureaucracy to date.' Catherine Samary incorporates this problem into her overall study on problems of the transition, including the thorny issues around the concept of 'degenerated workers' states'.

Several authors, from their different points of view, converge in attributing some of Mandel's mistakes to excessive optimism. The two texts by Mandel published for the first time in the book confirm that decisive issues are at stake here. His 'Material, Social and Ideological Preconditions for the Nazi Genocide' (1988) illuminates considerably some remarks made by Michael Löwy in his article, as well as Norman Geras' article, 'Marxists Before the Holocaust: Trotsky, Deutscher, Mandel'. Mandel's second text, 'Why I Am a Marxist', gives an extraordinary synthetic picture of his thought.

As we re-evaluate the history of the twentieth century in an atmosphere of invasive melancholy, we need to take account of a paradox: the fact that the generation that lived through 'midnight in the century' showed such resistance to the horror and such revolutionary energy. It almost suggests that they underestimated catastrophes like Auschwitz and Hiroshima. Ernest Mandel is representative of this generation. Instead of complaining about the past, he preferred warnings, often apocolyptic warnings, about the future. They ring out like so many appeals to vigilance, struggle and organization.

This book's principal merit is doubtless to remind us that starting from Mandel's work is an indispensable dimension in any perspective of refounding an emancipatory project.