Revolutionary Marxism today

by Ernest; Rothschild Mandel

248 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1986

Reviews

[Julio The Fox · Rating 4 out of 5]

Isaac Deutscher once wrote that it was the tragedy of Trotsky to be proven right in the negative, meaning all he warned would happen if the working class followed the wrong political course came to pass, from the bloodbath Jiang Gai Shek unleashed on the Chinese Communist Party in Shanghai in 1927 to the return of capitalism in Russia on top rather than against the ruling Stalinist bureaucracy. Ernest Mandel suffered the same Cassandra-like fate. To his chagrin he lived long enough to witness the failure of Third World revolutions in Iran, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Angola, in other words everywhere, and the restoration of capitalism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. But, before he departed for the great dictatorship of the proletariat in the sky he left us these interviews, conducted in 1978, just over sixty years after the Bolshevik revolution and a little over fifty years since Trotsky's exile from the U.S.S.R. Yes, in the age of globalization and neoliberalist triumph Mandel remains vital reading. The capitalist world is still divided between the master's room, the United States, Japan, the European Union, and the garbage dump of Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, and most of Asia. One of the critical questions Mandel addressed is why this political-economic order, i.e., imperialism and its discontents, cannot be reforged inside a global capitalist economy. However impressive the BRICS, India, Brazil, and South Africa are not on their way to becoming future Canadas, much less Japan or the U.S. The bourgeois revolution in these countries has stalled, just as Mandel and Trotsky before him prophesied. One topic Mandel could have expanded on at much more length is China, which, after Mao's death in 1976 proceeded down the road of "market Leninism", a phenomenon not accounted for in these pages. Can Stalinist regimes re-invent themselves through economic growth by way of market reforms? Mandel drily notes this path flopped big time in Hungary, Poland, and Yugoslavia. Cill china, once again in history, prove the exception? Much food for thought here, and that is why Mandel is one of our best contemporary thinkers.