This lecture was Mandel’s contribution to the 1970 congress ‘Capitalism in the Seventies’, organized by faculty and students of the Hogeschool Tilburg, the Netherlands.


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The third volume in our series of selected essays by Ernest Mandel is now available. This book collects essays exploring Marxist theory and history. Most of the texts are newly translated. Essays include historical examinations of Rosa Luxemburg’s place in the German workers movement, the development of the bourgeois state, and of the roots of Nazi violence. Other chapters discuss Marx’s notions of progress, alienation and emancipation, Luxemburg’s views on political economy and political strategy.

This text was Ernest Mandel’s contribution to a colloquium on the occasion of the centenary of Marx’s Capital, organized by the institute of political science of the Goethe University Frankfurt and publisher Europäische Verlagsanstalt. The contributions and discussion were originally published in Kritik der politischen Ökonomie heute,100 Jahre Kapital (Frankfurt am Main, 1968). 

Socialist scholar and activist Ernest Mandel was born one hundred years ago, on April 5, 1923. A 'Flemish internationalist of Jewish descent', he was a militant and scholar, writing some of the most significant works of Marxist theory of the second half of the twentieth century.