This year marks 25 years since Ernest Mandel died. His contributions to Marxist theory remain relevant to 'understanding the world in order to change it'.

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.