Hope and Marxism

Contents

Contents

Introduction: Ernest Mandel’s late capitalist Marxism

1. Althusser corrects Marx

2. The causes of alienation

3. Rosa Luxemburg and German Social Democracy

4. The dialectic of growth

5. Rosa Luxemburg and political economy

6. We must dream: Anticipation and hope as categories of historical materialism

7. A critique of Eurocommunism

8. On the class nature of the capitalist state

9. Emancipation, science and politics in Karl Marx

11. The origins of National Socialism: Singularity and repeatability of the Nazi crimes

Sources

Notes

Introduction:

Ernest Mandel’s late capitalist Marxism

Alex de Jong

‘In reality, the most effective and most humane way of constructing a classless society is by way of experimentation. It is about finding improvements through successive approximations. There exists no book of recipes.¹

Ernest Mandel (5 April 1923 - 20 July 1995) was one of the most significant Marxists of the second half of the 20th century. In his intellectual and political work, Mandel’s Marxism was simultaneously orthodox and open. He was an orthodox Marxist in the sense he defined in a 1983 article; ‘one who ‘‘acts’’ in the spirit of Marx’ and is ‘bound by the obligation to resist all inhuman social conditions’.² His Marxism was open in the sense that Mandel described in a conversation with German radical Johannes Agnoli; it was ‘a task of continuing development, of incorporating new facts and new scientific considerations’; ‘it is part of the essential nature of Marxism to examine significant empirical changes’.³

Class struggle and science

Mandel’s orthodoxy and his openness were parts of a whole. For Mandel struggles against injustice and for emancipation were a motive force in history. As history is partly the product of continuous struggles, its development is radically uncertain and open. Mandel was a Marxist in the tradition of Gramsci’s statement that ‘one can scientifically foresee only the struggle, but not the concrete moments of the struggle, which cannot but be the results of opposing forces in continuous movement’; ‘one can foresee to the extent that one acts, to the extent that one applies a voluntary effort and therefore contributes concretely to creating the result "foreseen’’’.⁴

History can only be understood, Mandel argued, as a totality that is undergoing constant change, driven by inner contradictions. Hence, Mandel argued that Marxists needed to adopt a ‘historical genetic’ method to understand social phenomena. By way of an analysis of the bourgeois state Mandel’s essay on the ‘On the class nature of the capitalist state’ gives an example of this approach. Any ‘attempt to derive the character and essence of the bourgeois state directly from the categories of Marx’s Capital – either from capital in general or from the exchange and trade relations on the surface of bourgeois society, or from the conditions of valorisation of capital – overlooks the fact that the bourgeoisie itself did not make the state in the sense of a state machinery that is disconnected from society and elevated to the status of an autonomous institution. The bourgeoisie limited itself to taking over the state as it existed before it came to power.’⁵

Side by side with the history of class struggles is the history of science and social theory, Mandel wrote. Science follows its own laws and is not at the service of the ‘liberation of the proletariat’, of ‘freedom’ or of ‘historical progress’. Science is useful to the struggle for liberation when it provides knowledge that helps to make correct political decisions. But it is only able to do so as science, following its laws, not when it is subjugated to political criteria. Manuel Kellner described Mandel’s Marxism as ‘a conceptual expression of social relations that only fully matured with industrial capitalism’, ‘simultaneously the theoretical expression of a liberation movement that rebels against class society in general and against capitalist class society in particular.’⁶

This historical genetic approach is of continuing value for Marxist research. It also set Mandel apart from those ‘structural’ Marxists who attempted to explain social phenomena as the effects of the immutable laws governing capitalism. His reconciliation of theory and history and the study of political economy made Mandel an intellectual free spirit. He found himself ‘outside mainstream Marxism, outside doctrinaire Althusserianism and outside what Perry Anderson called Western Marxism, which had turned its back on economic research.’⁷

Late capitalism

Mandel’s major works in political economy (Marxist Economic Theory (1962), Europe versus America?: Contradictions of Imperialism (1970); Late Capitalism (1972) and Long Waves of Capitalist Development (1980), as well as dozens of conjunctural articles, were written to provide the workers’ movement and socialists with tools to understand ongoing developments and to make political decisions in the struggle against class society.

Late Capitalism in particular can be considered Mandel’s master-work. In it, Mandel rescued the theory of long waves in capitalism, a concept that had been used by both Marxist and non-Marxist economists like Kondratieff and Schumpeter. The work initiated a revival of long wave theories among political economists, including among the Social Structure of Accumulation school in the United States and the Regulation school.⁸

In his 1964 article ‘The economics of Neo-Capitalism’ in The Socialist Register Mandel first considered the issue of long waves.⁹ In Marxist Economic Theory, published two years before, such long periods in the history of capitalism were not yet considered. The 1964 article broadened the perspective by considering three authors who had first formulated the research agenda on long waves: Nikolai Kondratieff, Leon Trotsky and Joseph Schumpeter, wrote Francisco Louçã.¹⁰

Mandel argued that capitalist development moves through alternating long waves, periods of growth (long upswings) and relative decline (long downswings). The long-term rhythm of such up- and downswing overlays the more frequent business cycles. N. D. Kondratieff maintained that ‘lower prices and cheap capital loans would sustain a long upswing with large-scale investment, land improvement and the training of highly skilled workers’ while ‘a long down-swing would emanate from the termination of such preconditions’. J. A. Schumpeter’s Business Cycles followed by labelling these long waves ‘Kondratieff cycles’, but with the important difference that Schumpeter ‘shifted the explanatory cause from monetary factors to entrepreneurial techno-logical innovations’.¹¹

Such issues had come up during debates in the early 1920s debates in the Communist International. At the time, Trotsky not only argued against ultra-leftist theories, such as those of Bela Kun, that capitalism was heading for imminent, irreversible collapse, but also against Kondratieff’s view that capitalist development had a cyclical character, consisting of waves lasting around 50 years. Such a theory suggested capitalism had an inherent capacity for renewal. Kondratieff sought an explanation for the development of long waves in ‘causes resulting from the essence of the capitalist economy’.¹² If, in the beginning of an upswing, phenomena such as the incorporation of new markets through colonialism as well as wars and social unrest were especially pronounced, this was ‘only of an empirical character’ and in no way an explanation for the development of long waves.¹³

Trotsky criticised Kondratieff for overgeneralising from the existence of ‘minor cycles conditioned by the internal dynamics of capitalist forces’ to the existence of a long-term cycle as well. Trotsky warned against ‘vulgar schematisation’ and ignoring ‘the tenacious internal conditioning and succession of ideological processes’ as ‘economics is decisive only in the last analysis.’¹⁴ Trotsky argued that long-term waves are in their ‘character and duration determined not by the internal interplay of capitalist forces but by those external conditions through whose channel capitalist development flows. The acquisition by capitalism of new countries and continents, the discovery of new natural resources, and, in the wake of these, such major facts of superstructural order as wars and revolutions, determine the character and the replacement of ascending, stagnating or declining epochs of capitalist development.’ According to Trotsky there exists an interrelationship between specific historical epochs and segments of the curve of capitalist development’.

The Japanese political economist Makoto Itoh summarised this debate as one between two streams.¹⁵ One stream, represented among others by Kondratieff, explained long waves of about 50 years as driven by the internal, endogenous dynamics of capitalism. On the other side was the stream that explained long waves as driven by events which are exogenous to the capitalism economic system proper. The endogenous theory sees the ‘economic system’ as separate from social history. It was against this reified conception that Trotsky and Mandel argued for the role of ‘superstructural’ factors such as new markets, the discovery of natural resources, wars and revolutions as part of economic dynamics. In a letter to Makoto Itoh, Mandel summarised his view: ‘I stand for a long wave theory which is not automatic but asymmetrical, i.e., while the expansive long wave turns automatically into a depressive long wave, the latter only leads to the former through ‘‘systematic-shocks’’, i.e. exogenic influences (wars, revolutions, counter-revolutions etc.)’

The epoch of ‘Late Capitalism’ was characterised by a tendency towards what was called ‘organised capitalism’. This meant increasing attempts at private and state regulation of the economy, attempts that were unable to overcome the inherent contradictions of capitalism.¹⁶ ‘Capitalist states and governments’ can do many things, Mandel wrote, ‘and so can capitalist entrepreneurs and firms. But they cannot abolish money capital and profit as the starting-point and final point of the system’s operations, nor can they abolish the operation of market forces, or eliminate the law of value.’¹⁷

The attempts to regulate the industrial cycle had been partially successful thanks to the relative autonomy of the national currency zones of the large imperialist powers, as long as the US dollar functioned as a ‘world money’. This function was undermined by processes that would later be summarised under the term ‘globalisation’. The declining purchasing power of the dollar endangered the system of nationally manipulated currencies. The multinational enterprise had become the decisive form of capitalist enterprise, one over which the state had less influence. But the ‘more the monopolies think they have withdrawn from the law of value nationally, the more they become subject to it internationally’.¹⁸

Late capitalism was thus the epoch in which the contradiction between the growth of the forces of production and capitalist relations had assumed an ‘explosive form’.¹⁹ Late Capitalism, originally published in 1972, predicted the long downturn that began in the mid-1970s and which Mandel saw as leading to a new cycle of social struggles.

Mandel argued that with the conceptual tools of Marxist analysis, it was possible to explain such long-term developments in capitalism, but only if one considered that several of the key variables of this conceptual system were ‘partially autonomous’. Partially autonomous instead of independent, as they functioned within parameters set by the capitalist system itself. In the 1980s, Mandel formulated ten key ‘propositions’ to understand capitalism’s long-term developments, including the inevitability of expansive long waves turning into a depressive long wave:

(1) the law of value; (2) the law of capital accumulation; (3) the law of surplus value; (4) the law of equalization of the rate of profit; (5) the law of concentration and centralization of capital; (6) the law of the tendency of the organic composition of capital to rise; (7) the law of class struggle determination of wages; (8) the law of tendency for the average rate of profit to decline; (9) the law of the cyclical nature of capitalist production and of the inevitability of crises of over-production; (10) the law of the unavoidable collapse of the system (Zusammenbruchs-theorie).²⁰

His own contribution to Marxist economic theory Mandel described as ‘an additional time-frame for proposition 9: the long waves of capitalist development, in which among other things, basic technological revolutions are realised, and the equalization of the rate of profit between non-monopolised and monopolised sectors asserts itself.’

According to Mandel, these propositions would be accepted by most Marxists, ‘with the possible exception of proposition 10’. The ten propositions are essentially endogenous to capitalism from an economic point of view. In other words, they are produced by the structure of the system; ‘private ownership of the means of production, primitive accumulation of money capital, creation of a class of wage earners, expanding commodity production, i.e., market economy’. But apart from these endogenous factors, there are exogenous factors as well since ‘the concrete historical process of capitalist development is always the result of an interaction between the system and the environment in which it develops; this environment is never 100 per cent capitalist.’

Class struggle and history

For Mandel, the non-capitalist elements in its environment, as well as the results of pre-capitalist history, continue to have an impact on the key variables of capitalism. Although pre-capitalist ‘anti-slavery revolts, peasant revolts in the old Asian mode of production, peasant revolts of the late Middle Ages’ as well as ‘the rebellious, machine-storming workers of early capitalism’, for example, were destined to failure, such struggles provided ‘a tremendous tradition of forms of struggle and organisation as well as of revolutionary thoughts, ideals, dreams and hopes from which the proletarian struggle for emancipation draws nourishment’; without such predecessors, the development of the proletarian struggle would be much more difficult.²¹

The struggle against exploitation and oppression, according to Mandel, had its roots in fundamental aspects of human anthropology; in ‘the social character of labour, the social origins of communication and the impossibility to withdraw from these without paying a high price’.²² ‘Humanity’s wealth’, wrote Mandel, ‘consists of the wealth of human relations, in other words, of social relations.’²³ With the development of productive forces under capitalism, the struggle against inhuman conditions made socialism a possibility.

By incorporating the influence of non-capitalist elements, historical factors and the role of social struggles, Mandel formulated a vision of history that opposed determinism. Although the long-term laws of capitalist accumulation assert themselves ‘behind the backs of the subject’, its effects are influenced by them, together forming part of the totality. In an early text, a discussion with Sartre, Mandel wrote that everything that exists is only one result from ‘a bundle of possibilities’.²⁴ A certain level of the development of the productive forces makes possible a range of relations of productions, of frameworks in which the class struggle takes place, with different outcomes.

In the long term, Mandel wrote, developments in the class struggle are ‘subordinated to the level of development of the productive forces, to the existing relations of production, and to the structures of major social classes’. But ‘historical necessity’ does not provide actors with specific conclusions. Rather, the general law asserts itself in particular developments.²⁵ It is from within the changing, particular conditions that socialists need to make choices and act.²⁶ There is no guarantee that the collapse (Zusammenbruch) of capitalism would lead to socialism rather than barbarism.

Missed encounters

Looking back at his 1980 conversation with Mandel, Agnoli expressed admiration, as well as exasperation. Agnoli, a political scientist whose radical democratic ideas had been a strong influence on the German student movement, wrote that Mandel was able to reply to his questions with ‘precise and convinced answers’. Agnoli credited this to Mandel’s ‘political experience, his immediate political activism, as well, and more essentially, the rigour of his thinking and his wide historical knowledge’ in which he often found important and correct analyses and insights. In Agnoli’s eyes Mandel’s orthodoxy was open in its recognition that the intellectual process of analysing the world remained unfinished, but stumbled when it failed to extend its critique to the ‘parameters’ of analysis themselves.²⁷ It is true that for Mandel classical Marxism seemed like an apparatus with which all new empirical data could be analysed and interpreted.

In a critical introduction to a new edition of Mandel’s 1974 introduction to Marxism (published in English as From Class Society to Communism), Daniel Bensaïd pointed to ‘certain silences’ in the work where such parameters would have needed to be questioned.²⁸

One of these was women’s oppression and liberation. The 1970s saw a worldwide rise of the movements for women’s emancipation. At its 11th world congress, in 1979 the Fourth International adopted an important programmatic document on the question. However, in Mandel’s texts women’s oppression often occupies at best a marginal place. The 1979 resolution, ‘Socialist revolution and the struggle for women’s liberation’, discusses the essential role of women’s unpaid domestic work in lowering wage costs, and how capitalism exploits divisions in the working class – especially during times when capital accumulation slows down, such as after the end of the post-war expansive wave.²⁹ In the preceding decade however, Mandel tended towards a conception of the working class that prioritized the position of (male) breadwinners. In a 1968 speech, delivered some months after the French May events, he defined the proletarian condition as a ‘lack of access to means of production or means of subsistence’, forcing the proletarian ‘to sell his labour power’, in exchange for which ‘he receives a wage which then enables him to acquire the means of consumption necessary for satisfying his own needs and those of his family’.³⁰ This definition implicitly separated those engaged in unpaid work, such as ‘housewives’, from the working class.

Capitalist development means that an increasing share of the total population shared the proletarian condition of depending on the sale of labour power. Mandel not only thought the working class in this sense was growing in size, as new layers were integrated into the working class while petty-bourgeois layers such as artisans and peasant declined, but in 1968 he was of the opinion that the mass of wage and salary earners were ‘turning into an increasingly homogeneous proletariat’, with supposedly increasingly similar conditions of work and domestic life.³¹

Mandel at times seemed beholden to a belief in progress that conflated economic and political struggles and saw the proletariat’s sociological development flowing into the proletariat’s liberation. Their ‘objective conditions’ in ‘the long run’ would drive ‘wage-earners towards collective awareness of the unremitting alienation to which they are subjected’.³² In a debate with Luciana Castellina of Rifondazione Comunista in the early 1990s, Mandel asked her, in response to her confirmation that the great bastions of the Italian working class, above all Fiat in Turin, were being dismantled, how many people still worked at Fiat. ‘One hundred and fifty thousand’, Castellina answered. Mandel replied; ‘That is some dismantling! One hundred and fifty thousand employees for a single boss, in a single city, is not exactly a dismantling. It’s a weakening, it’s something else, I don’t disagree. But in the end, something like that didn’t exist in the past, even during the great factory occupation movement in Italy in 1919-1920, and it didn’t exist in 1945 or 1948. We have to realise that this numerical growth, to which we must add, I insist, the increase in level of qualification and cultural level, is an asset that our grandparents did not have.’³³

But the tendency to homogenisation in the 1960s and early 1970s, Daniel Bensaïd pointed out, had been far from irreversible, as was shown by the neoliberal offensive; ‘the tendency to homogenisation was undermined by the policies of dispersal of work units, intensification of competition on the world labour market, individualisation of wages and labour time, privatisation of leisure and lifestyles, the methodical demolition of social solidarity and protection.’³⁴ The extension of commodification into all fields of life, the logic of commodity fetishism and the reification of social relations, processes just as structural as the extension of the ‘proletarian condition’ led to fragmentation, and the division of society into antagonistic identities.³⁵

Although Mandel for a long time underestimated such dynamics, he was not unaware of counter-tendencies to homogenisation. In works such as Late Capitalism he argued ‘that the concentration and centralisation of capital, the constant increase in labour productivity and the displacement of living labour from the production process as a predominant tendency is mediated by constant revivals of dispersion, new creation of smaller units and therefore also of producing with lower labour productivity in sub-sectors.’³⁶ However, Mandel saw those contradictions as primarily the result of ideological manipulation, of recuperation by capital of the leaderships of bureaucratized workers’ organisations and of ideological differences that resulted from peculiar, transient historical conditions. Nevertheless, in later texts, he put more stress on the contradictory aspects of the growth of ‘the mass of wage and salary earners’.

Mandel’s stress on the shared experience of alienation helped him to avoid the reductionist mistake of seeing rebellion and resistance as the product of material poverty. Rather, it draws attention to the role of dignity and the refusal of forms of rule and authority that are experienced as unjust. This notion is central to Mandel’s The Formation of the Economic Thought of Karl Marx, originally published in French in 1967. Drawing on his knowledge of texts by Marx that were often not yet available in French, Mandel contested the Althusserian idea of an epistemological break between a ‘young’ and a ‘mature’ Marx. The notion of alienation in Marx evolved, rather, from an anthropological to an historical one, resulting from the capitalist division of labour, generalized commodity production and human activity increasingly taking the form of alienated labour. But this same mode of production generated the possibility of the all-round development of all human beings.³⁷

Capitalism contra the environment

Another ‘silence’ mentioned by Bensaïd is the issue of ecology. Mandel’s 1973 essay on ‘The dialectic of growth’ is in fact a pioneering Marxist consideration of the contradiction between capitalism and ecology. Just as From Class Society to Communism, the article posits the need for the growth of productive forces and the productivity of labour. Bensaïd remarked it is ‘necessary, under pain of falling into blind productivism and ecological insouciance, to subject these productive forces themselves to a critical examination.’ In the 1973 essay Mandel formulated three principles as a starting point for such a critical examination. ‘A triple priority can be established in consensus with the majority of the world’s inhabitants; (1) primary needs of all people must be met; (2) new and different forms of technology which save and replenish the reserves of scarce natural resources must be sought; and (3) the intellectual abilities of all must be developed.’³⁸

Michael Löwy argues it is necessary to ‘go a few steps further in criticising the Marxian heritage and in the radicality of the break with the existing techno-productive paradigm.’ Drawing inspiration from Marx’s remark on the Paris Commune, that the workers cannot take over the capitalist state apparatus and put it to work at their service but ‘rather must break it and replace it with another, of a totally distinct nature, a non-state and democratic form of political power’, Löwy argues ‘the same is true, mutatis mutandis, for the ‘‘really existing’’, i.e. capitalist, productive apparatus: by its nature and structure, it is not neutral, but at the service of the accumulation of capital and the unlimited expansion of the market.’ The ecosocialist goal is qualitative change in development: ‘put an end to the monstrous waste of resources by capitalism, based on production, on a large scale, of unnecessary or harmful products’, instead ‘orienting production towards the satisfaction of authentic needs’ starting with the human needs for clean water, food, clothing, and housing. Mandel however only tended towards this view, wrote Löwy.³⁹

In his contribution to a 2005 colloquium on Ernest Mandel, Daniel Tanuro discussed why, even if Mandel was early in mentioning ecological concerns, the issue had not been more important in his intellectual trajectory. Mandel, like other Marxists, had ‘missed the encounter with the environmental question’.⁴⁰ Tanuro related part of the explanation to Mandel’s political activity in the years between 1968 and the early 1990s. Mandel was early in perceiving implications of the ecological question, but saw these rather as confirmations of the socialist project than as reasons to modify it.

Referring specifically to Mandel’s 1973 article, Tanuro offered two possible explanations for the missed encounter with the ecological question. One of the implications of the ecological question is a discussion of limits on the development of the productive forces. Marx’s concept of ‘social metabolism’, or ‘exchange of matter’ (Stoffwechsel) between humanity and nature, is according to Tanuro the most concrete expression of such a limit. Marx stated that within the realm of necessity (the maintenance and reproduction of life) freedom consists in that human beings, organised as the associated producers, ‘govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control instead of being dominated by it’.⁴¹ This claim only makes sense if the matter exchanged in this metabolism is not unlimited. Mandel’s article is however shot through with the fear that a discussion of limits ‘will serve as a cover for an austerity offensive against workers and for global neo-Malthusianism against the poor.’ For Tanuro, Mandel associated the rise of ecological concerns too strongly with the general irrationality and despair characterising the ideological climate of a depressive phase of capitalist long waves, and missed the point that such concerns predated the end of capitalism’s expansive long wave in the early 1970s.

A new epoch

Although he was not a determinist, the idea remained in Mandel’s thinking that, while history could take many different roads, there was one which history was expected to take. In a 1979 interview, Mandel insisted that ‘under no circumstances’ should Marxists ‘suggest that the specific course of world revolution was predetermined for structural reasons’. And yet, Mandel described the recent history of actual revolutionary processes mostly taking place in the ‘less developed countries’ as a ‘historic detour’, one that was ‘gradually nearing its end’; ‘the trend clearly shifted with the general strike and massive crisis in France in May 1968’. ‘The historical laboratory of urban-based proletarian revolutionary has been Europe.’⁴²

Mandel was hopeful about possible revolutionary developments in Spain and especially Portugal. The Portuguese revolution of 1974/75 probably came closest to Mandel’s vision for socialist revolution.⁴³ During a period of rising class struggle and movement ‘from below’, Mandel was confident, the working class would develop its own forms of self-organisation. To the extent that the working class would abandon or possibly remake the bureaucratic structures of the workers’ movement, it would learn to incorporate new experiences and formulate new answers. In Mandel’s vision, a small revolutionary group could ‘surf’ on such a rising wave and grow in strength.⁴⁴

But Mandel’s confident 1979 prediction ‘that coming years will see pre-dominantly proletarian revolutions not only in Europe but also outside it’ was not borne out. A brief movement of hope were the mass protests that broke out in German Democratic Republic. But the protests ended with the GDR being swallowed by the republic of Bonn.

Mandel’s most creative period had followed the worldwide radicalisation of 1968. His works bears the mark of intensive political engagement during a period of rising class struggle. Mandel’s famous optimism during those times was partially the product of a contradiction he himself had noted in Trotsky, between the task of the analyst, and that of the organisational and political leader. Whereas the former is static, the work of the latter is a ‘dynamic attempt to unblock and change the situation’.⁴⁵ But as the carrier of Mandel’s revolutionary hopes, the classical workers’ movement, entered into deep decline, he struggled to retain his optimism and warned against the dangers if capitalism was not overcome: ecological collapse, mass hunger and starvation, nuclear war, a collapse into barbarism.

Towards the end of his life, Mandel was confronted with a crisis of the socialist project he had dedicated his life to. Five years before he passed away, Mandel wrote this crisis was ‘above all a crisis of credibility of socialist ideas. Five generations of socialists and three generations of workers were driven by the deep, unshakeable conviction that socialism [was] possible and necessary’; ‘the current generation is no longer convinced that it is possible’.⁴⁶ This was for Mandel in essence the outcome of a crisis in ‘the praxis of socialists’, of the failures and crimes committed in the name of socialism.

Mandel always upheld a classic interpretation of socialism, ‘as a society based on the ‘‘direct association of producers’’ who would use their own direct judgement in allocating resources and organising production and distribution.’⁴⁷ For this not only a certain level of economic development was needed but also a radical shortening of working time, enabling human beings to collectively control society. Mandel linked ‘an emotionally and morally based attitude with his conception of a new society, the transition to this society, and the methods he considered acceptable and useful to achieve the desired change’. It is possible to be ‘scientifically’ convinced of socialism but morally, for reasons of ‘realpolitik’, behave ‘like swine’.⁴⁸ But in Mandel’s eyes this led to catastrophes – even in narrow ‘realpolitik’ terms, as confirmed by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the discrediting of the socialist project.

To overcome this crisis, Mandel argued in 1992 at a meeting of the São Paulo Forum of left parties that ‘the practice of socialists and communists must be totally consistent with their principles. We must not justify any alienating or oppressive practices whatsoever. We must, in practice, realise what Karl Marx called the categorical imperative: to struggle against all conditions in which human beings are alienated and humiliated. If our practice is consistent with this imperative, socialism will once again become a political force that will be invincible.’⁴⁹ Mandel’s optimism of the years after 1968 was ultimately disproved by the facts but his work still helps us in the necessary task of looking beyond them.

*

This book is the third in a series of collections of essays by Mandel. The first volume, Introduction to Marxist Theory, collects writings by Mandel explaining basic concepts of Marxist theory. The second volume, Marxists against Stalinism, collects essays on the nature of the Soviet Union and Mandel’s debate with the British Marxist Chris Harman on this question. This third volume gathers essays in which Mandel applied and developed his historic-genetic method. In essays on phenomena such as National Socialism and the bourgeois state, Mandel draws out their specificity as well as their relation to the general laws of capitalist development. This approach informed Mandel’s critiques of other interpretations of Marxism, such as those of Jon Elster and Althusser. The studies on the work and role of Rosa Luxemburg show the strong influence of Luxemburg on Mandel’s Marxism. The essays on alienation, and on the notion of progress in Marx and Bloch, show Mandel’s anthropological vision.

Rather than grouping the texts by theme, they are