The following essay by Ernest Mandel was written for the collection Marx: the first one-hundred years published in 1983.i Edited by David McLellan, the volume intended to demonstrate that Marx’s work ‘one hundred years on’, remained ‘as capable as ever of generating fresh and relevant lines of inquiry’.
Introduction:
Sixty years ago, on October 1, 1965 the Indonesian army set in motion its plans to seize power from president Sukarno and to destroy the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), one of the main forces supporting the president. In the article below, dated November 1965, Mandel criticizes the political approach of the PKI in the preceding period.
1. On the dialectics of productivity, relations of production and emancipationi
Three defeats of the German revolution
I
On the occasion of the bicentenary celebrations of the Great French Revolution of 1789, there was an intense public controversy in France, Great Britain and the United States about the alleged ‘excessive costs’ of this revolution.i The conquest of human rights, so far, so good. But what about the deaths caused by the Terror and those of the Vendée uprisings?
At the end of the Second World War, the revolutionary movement faced an unexpected situation.i The bureaucratic Soviet regime had not only survived the war, but appeared to be expanding in Eastern Europe. Capitalism, out of breath in the 1930s, seemed to be regaining strength.
With Roman Rosdolsky, who passed away in 1967 in Detroit in the United States, the last surviving founding member of the communist movement in western Ukraine and one of the most remarkable Marxists of recent decades passed away.
The fate of Rosdolsky is characteristic of an entire generation of European revolutionaries. His peculiarity was that he survived the successive persecutions by local fascism as well as Nazism and Stalinism.
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.
I
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).
El socialista y militante Ernest Mandel nació hace cien años, el 5 de abril de 1923. Fue un “internacionalista flamenco de ascendencia judía”, un intelectual que escribió algunas de las obras más significativas de teoría marxista de la segunda mitad del siglo XX.
El socialista y militante Ernest Mandel nació hace cien años, el 5 de abril de 1923. Fue un “internacionalista flamenco de ascendencia judía”, un intelectual que escribió algunas de las obras más significativas de teoría marxista de la segunda mitad del siglo XX.