Mandel

Marx and Engels have often been accused of advocating double standards, and having a double morality.¹ Supposedly, they opposed applying the same ethical principles that usually regulate relations between individuals to the class struggle. Hence the accusation that they and their disciples (Lenin and Trotsky, among others) put forward the principle that in the class struggle ‘the end justifies the means’.

This article article originally appeared in the January 1964 issue of Nuestra Industria, the journal of the Cuban Ministry of Industry, headed by Che Guevara. Ernest Mandel and Charles Bettelheim had been requested by the Cuban government to give their ideas on socialist construction in what became known as "the Great Debate''. This translation was originally published in: Bertram Silverman (ed.) Man and Socialism in Cuba. The Great Debate (1971).

Economic Categories and Historical Reality

Naturally one cannot reduce the political struggles that characterized the three successive phases of the bourgeois, national-democratic revolutions in the Southern Netherlands (those of the 16th, 18th and 19th centuries) to purely or essentially religious and constitutional conflicts.ⁱ One must lay bare the socio-economic motivations and components of these struggles. This may sound banal. For some contemporary historians, however, it is far from self-evident.

El movimiento sindical moderno es producto de la primera fase del capitalismo moderno, el de la libre competencia. El modo de producción capitalista niega a los productores el libre acceso a los medios de producción y los alimentos, obligándolos así a vender su fuerza de trabajo para obtener los medios de subsistencia diaria; su fuerza de trabajo se transforma en una mercancía. Como cualquier propietario de mercancías, el propietario de la fuerza de trabajo va al mercado a venderla.

The history of fascism is at the same time the history of the theory of fascism.ⁱ For no other new social phenomenon of modern times is the simultaneity of its appearance and the attempt at understanding it as striking as for fascism.

In this lecture Mandel discusses the character of the 1968 upsurge, its strengths and weaknesses, the political surrender of many former radicals and the gains of the movement. This lecture was given at an event organized by the US socialist organisation Solidarity

In 1970 gingen Ernest Mandel en Joop den Uyl, toen fractievoorzitter van de PvdA, in debat met elkaar over socialistische strategie. Een opname van dit debat is nu beschikbaar.

This year marks 25 years since Ernest Mandel died. Mandel (5 April 1923 – 20 July 1995) was one of the most significant Marxist economists of the second half of the twentieth century. To make his thinking accessible to a new generation, IIRE Amsterdam  is working on several new volumes of essays by Mandel.