Mandel

In this article, originally published as the preface to Luxemburg's 'Introduction à l’economie politique', Mandel surveys Rosa Luxemburg's contributions to political economy.

(1930, uniformed members of the Reichsbanner, the defense organisation associated with the German SPD)

How democratic was the political thought of Spinoza? Mandel argues that to understand the seeming contradictions in Spinoza, we must place him in the historical context of early capitalism and an emerging bourgeoisie.

Originally titled 'Methodological problems in defining the class nature of the bourgeois state', this article is simultaneously an example Mandel's 'historical-genetic' analysis of social phenomena and the outline of an analysis of the capitalist state.

An early example of applying Marxist critique to ecological issues, in reply to the famous 'Limits to Growth' report.

In this paper Mandel argues that the theory of imperialism as developed by Hilferding and Lenin can be applied to explain the shift from direct colonialism to neo-colonialism and the changing composition of the bourgeoisie in dominated countries.

The Marxist view on the question maintains that the nation is the product of the struggle of a specific class, namely the modern bourgeoisie, the first class in history to give birth to a nation.

In this newly translated essay Mandel discusses a Marxist conception of progress, and how it is linked to the struggle for emancipation.

Written during 1969, this essay criticizes Althusser’s interpretation of the ‘mature’ Marx as breaking with the influence of Hegel and with the concept of alienation. Without denying the discontinuity in Marx’s thinking, Mandel thought Marx based his analysis on a materialist interpretation of Hegel’s dialectic. Mandel argued that rather than abandoning the notion of alienation, Marx changed this concept from an anthropological to a historical, materialist one. A ‘call to revolutionary action by the proletariat’ replaced a ‘philosophical conclusion on the plane of thoughts, ideas, intellectual work’. Althusser however had transformed Marxism into something ‘static’, without understanding that its basis is ‘the historically perishable nature of all ‘structures’’. Writing in the aftermath of May 68, this was a discussion that for Mandel had direct political implications.