Every Introduction to Marxism is an interpretation of Marxism, because an introduction is precisely where one tries to convey its essence. What Marxism is has always been, and still is, something Marxists often disagree about among themselves. So I will not try to summarise the book, but I want to say something about the kind of Marxism to which Mandel offers his readers an introduction.
Mandel’s Marxism seems, at first sight, to be marked by a paradox. Mandel called himself, with some pride, both an orthodox and an open Marxist.
Orthodox Marxism
Mandel’s orthodoxy refers to the way in which Marxism, as a method for analysing human societies, formed a coherent whole for him. As long as this method can process new material, formulate hypotheses and also revise them without losing this coherence, one can, according to Mandel, speak of a scientific method. Certain empirical claims can be refuted without this proving that the Marxist method has been refuted.
In the Introduction, for example, Mandel writes that the Marxist conception of history holds that ‘the way in which people organise their material production forms the basis of every social organisation.’ As Mandel would acknowledge, this is only the beginning of a concrete analysis of human societies. Forming a ‘basis’ is not a direct and uniform determination. The description of the so-called ‘primitive communities’ without classes in the Introduction is highly questionable from an anthropological and historical point of view. But that is not yet a refutation of the method, rather a warning against simplifying the complexity of human societies.
For Mandel, science had to inform political practice. Without an analysis of society and its possible development, political activism loses its direction. It then lapses either into pure moralism, lamenting injustice as an end in itself without a strategy to counter that injustice, or into the opposite: conformism and chasing positions as an end in itself. For Mandel, Marxism was the method for avoiding these dangers. Social theory and political practice must come together in the famous praxis.
Open Marxism
The analysis of society serves to formulate hypotheses and, as society changes, those hypotheses will also have to be adjusted. Or in other words: the analysis must constantly be informed by factual material. Mandel called this, in an expression that other Marxists would later use too, an ‘open Marxism’. In a conversation with the German-Italian radical Johannes Agnoli from the same year in which this version of the Introduction originally appeared in Dutch, Mandel stated that it belongs to the ‘essence’ of Marxism to be ‘open’: constantly processing changes in reality means developing Marxism further and incorporating new insights and experiences.
Categorical imperative
But socialism as a political movement does not coincide with Marxism. For Mandel, a political, socialist commitment was based on what he called Marx’s categorical imperative: ‘to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, abandoned, despicable essence.’ That categorical imperative ultimately rests on the proposition that ‘man is the measure of all human things.’ Or ought to be… ‘That is the postulate underlying Marx’s philosophical, ideological and political-moral stance,’ Mandel wrote in a text from 1988, tellingly titled ‘de getuigenis van Ernest Mandel’ [the testimony of Ernest Mandel]. And this also holds for Mandel himself.
‘Doubt everything’
Politics answers to different criteria than science. It is no coincidence that Mandel referred several times to Marx’s favourite motto: ‘doubt everything’. In science, ‘criteria of verification and falsification apply, to substantiate or reject a given proposition. That is the Marx who also states clearly in one of his letters: I have contempt for no one so much as for someone who claims to practise science but who falsifies or distorts the results of scientific research for whatever reason.’
Much of what Mandel said about Marx naturally also applies to himself. The Introduction is a fine example of how Mandel combined those two sides, science and the categorical imperative. It is a book that spans human history and is based on years of study of economics and history. At the same time it is a highly political text that calls on readers to stand up for the ‘communist ideal’.
Mandel as an exception
In 1999 Gilbert Achcar called Mandel a representative of an almost extinct species, namely a theorist of a militant, politically active Marxism. That made Mandel a rarity, and not only in the 1990s. In his famous essay on ‘Western Marxism’ from 1978 (Considerations on Western Marxism), Perry Anderson also called Mandel an exception. ‘Western Marxism’, according to Anderson, was a result of the defeat of attempts at socialist revolution in Western Europe. This had led to a form of Marxism that increasingly withdrew from political practice, was increasingly academic in nature and, instead of questions of political economy and class struggle, turned to questions of a more abstract and philosophical character.
Mandel’s tradition, that is to say the Trotskyist tradition, was according to Anderson in essential respects a ‘polar contrast’ to Western Marxism. Mandel’s tradition ‘concentrated on politics and economics, not philosophy’ and was ‘resolutely internationalist’. Moreover, it spoke ‘a language of clarity and urgency’. Those are qualifications that also apply to Introduction to Marxism.
Marxism through history
In some 200 pages Mandel attempts to sketch the history of humanity. Mandel introduces his readers to Marxism through history. It is therefore only logical that the two purely ‘theoretical’ chapters, on dialectical and historical materialism, come at the end of the book. The theoretical conceptual apparatus summarised in these two closing chapters seems, as it were, to rise up out of the historical material.
This historicising reading of Marx has been heavily criticised since Mandel’s Introduction first appeared. To be able to discern the historical conditions of existence of capital in history, for example, one must first have a concept of what capital actually is. Merely staring at the historical factual material is not enough. One must have a concept of what one is looking for. For Mandel this starting point is the struggle against exploitation and oppression, class struggle. Or as the subheading on p. 9 puts it, ‘the revolt against social inequality throughout history’. In Introduction to Marxism — and I would say in all of Mandel’s work — it is not an economic category such as capital, but an anthropological one, that forms the starting point. In the beginning was not the word, but the deed and, to put it more precisely, the revolt.
Image of humanity
Underlying this view of history is a certain image of humanity. In the same year that the revised edition of Introduction to Marxism appeared, 1980, Mandel wrote:
As a socially producing and communicating being, man is cooperative by nature. The leap from classless society to a society torn into hostile social classes, which began some 10,000 years ago, caused an enormous traumatic shock in human feeling and human thought, precisely because it corresponded so little to our cooperative nature. That is why the history of humanity is not only a history of class struggle, but also a history of countless expectations, projects, anticipations, yearnings, poems, stories, philosophical treatises, political plans and battles, around the problem: How can we return to the ‘golden age’ of classless society? What is the origin of social inequality? How can that social inequality be abolished again?
Rebels
To illustrate that view of history, Mandel quoted the Austrian poet Nikolaus Lenau in the same text. In 1842 — six years before the publication of the Communist Manifesto — Lenau had written a poem named after the Albigensians, the Christian heretics of the thirteenth century. According to Lenau, the Albigensians were a kind of medieval proto-socialist rebels, who were suppressed by the nobility and the church because of their striving for freedom. More specifically, Mandel quoted the end of this poem, in which it is dramatically declared that the authorities will not succeed in veiling ‘the light from the sky or the sunrise’. For the Albigensians will be followed by yet other rebels, right up to the stormers of the Bastille.
Den Albigensern folgen die Hussiten
Und zahlen blutig heim, was jene litten;
Nach Huß und Ziska kommen Luther, Hutten,
Die dreißig Jahre, die Cevennenstreiter,
Die Stürmer der Bastille, und so weiter.[After the Albigensians come the Hussites
And avenge in blood what the former suffered;
After Hus and Žižka follow Luther, Hutten,
The Thirty Years’ War, the fighters of the Cévennes,
The stormers of the Bastille, and so on.]
Lenau is called one of the foremost late-Romantic poets and a typical representative of Weltschmerz. With this we are on very different terrain from the one with which Mandel is normally associated: the study of the rate of surplus value, the long waves in capital accumulation, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, et cetera.
Mandel is not known as a romantic. Rather, Mandel counts as a representative of the Enlightenment. In his foreword to the 2007 edition, Daniel Bensaïd even associates Mandel with Voltaire, as someone who could still happily hope for a liberated future, a future from whose vantage point the horrors of the twentieth century would turn out to have been only ‘a long detour, or an annoying delay’. Mandel was, Bensaïd writes, a ‘classical humanist and man of the Enlightenment’.
In books such as Marxist Economic Theory and Late Capitalism, Mandel brought together enormous amounts of material in order to dissect the ‘laws’ of the development of capitalism. One of the reasons why the Introduction is such a rich work is of course that it was written after all the research for those earlier classics. In the end it was history itself that Mandel relied on to prove Marxism right.
Or as Mandel wrote in the Introduction:
In the final analysis, the facts will confirm which theory has been truly scientific, i.e. capable of grasping the real in all its contradictions, of understanding its whole movement, and which assumptions have been wrong, i.e. capable of explaining only part of reality, by separating the parts from the structured whole, and therefore incapable of grasping the long-term movement in its fundamental dialectic.
The victory of the world socialist revolution, the advent of a classless society, will confirm in practice the validity of revolutionary Marxist theory.
The optimism of this quotation seems to have been determined not only by the time in which it was written, but also by the need to spur people to action.
Socialism or barbarism
Towards the end of his life, in 1992, Mandel formulated ten general laws of capitalism. Number ten was that capitalism will not collapse of its own accord. What does exist, however, is a tendency towards the combination of ever deeper crises, which will confront humanity ever more urgently with the choice ‘socialism or barbarism’. Towards the end of his life, Mandel’s warnings against that barbarism became ever more urgent.
Jan-Willem Stutje, in his biography of Mandel, Ernest Mandel: A Rebel’s Dream Deferred, closes the description of Mandel’s funeral with the words: ‘farewell to a prophet’s life that deepened faith in humanity’.
A prophet with a faith: that does not sound very scientific either.
Was there perhaps a flaw in Mandel as a thinker and as a person, a kind of split personality, on the one hand the scientist who scrutinised economic growth figures, on the other the prophet who, as the political tide turned, also became increasingly pessimistic?
I do not think so, but I would argue that there is an aspect of Mandel’s life and work that he himself did not acknowledge, namely a certain romantic side. Let me explain what I mean by that.
Romanticism
The goal of the Marxist Mandel was of course a socialist society, without classes, without exploitation, without a state. Mandel himself did not want to call this a utopia. He preferred to speak of a ‘concrete vision of the future’.
In the conversation with Agnoli cited earlier, Mandel states that the aspiration of Marxists is actually rather modest: it is ‘only’ a matter of solving a handful of problems, namely ending hunger, poverty and war by abolishing private ownership of the means of production and thereby also abolishing the division of humanity into classes and nation states. I am not sure whether Mandel was being very ironic when he described this aspiration as a ‘modest claim’.
As mentioned, according to Perry Anderson Mandel was an exception because throughout his life he combined this ‘modest claim’ with study and science in his political practice, while many Western Marxists withdrew from politics. According to Anderson, a revolutionary political practice such as Mandel’s had been made possible by the revival of social struggle in Europe after May ‘68. Anderson wrote this in the mid-1970s. But by the end of the 1970s, after the end of the Portuguese revolution and the ‘controlled’ transition to bourgeois democracy in Spain between 1975 and 1978, it was clear that the prospects for a socialist upheaval in Europe were rapidly diminishing again.
Mandel, however, was not discouraged.
Moral command
Ultimately Mandel rated the categorical imperative (‘to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, abandoned, despicable essence’) higher than theory itself. According to Mandel, Marx, ‘even if he had become convinced that a just, socialist, classless society was unrealisable’, would still have fought to come at least as close to it as possible. According to Mandel’s Marx, the struggle for human emancipation is a moral command.
Longing
Mandel rejected claims that history had refuted the striving for socialism by pointing out that human beings constantly produce new forms of society. Only when history is over can it be established in hindsight whether socialism was possible or not. As long as that history is not yet over, it cannot be ‘proven’ either that socialism is not possible. In other words: Mandel’s conviction was based on something that is not, on something that transcends given reality, on the longing for classless society.
That Mandel, the man of reason, could give expression to such a longing was part of the appeal of his work. In his memoirs the Dutch historian Ger Harmsen describes how in the 1970s he heard Mandel speak several times and, at least until he was walking again through rain-soaked, dreary Dutch streets, began to believe in a socialist upheaval. That was remarkable for someone like Harmsen, who had long since given up the idea of revolution and actually had a strong aversion to Trotskyists.
It was also in that longing that Mandel persevered — after the political tide turned in the late 1970s and, as Daniel Bensaïd put it, ‘the door of hope, which had seemed to stand ajar for a moment, was closed again’. That longing I would call romantic. Mandel was driven by the rejection of contemporary capitalist society and by a feeling that something has been lost, in this case classless society. His life was a quest for that lost world. Is that not a romantic aspiration par excellence?
Man, Mandel wrote, is a ‘socially producing and communicating being’. Without reason, without science, that social production and communication is not possible. But human beings are also beings who dream and long, and without dreams and longing that social production and communication has no direction.
Life or death
In a text titled ‘why I am a Marxist’, Mandel summed up his conviction as follows:
Finally, I am a Marxist because only Marxism makes it possible, despite all the terrible experiences of the 20th century, despite Auschwitz and Hiroshima, despite hunger in the “Third World” and threatening nuclear annihilation, to maintain faith in humanity and its future without self-deception. Marxism teaches us to love life and people and to accept them positively, without embellishment, without illusions, in full awareness of the eternal difficulties and the inevitable setbacks during the millions of years of progress of our species, from the stage of the half-apes to that of the astronauts and stormers of heaven. Winning conscious control over their social existence has today become a question of life or death for this species. It will ultimately succeed in realising its noblest aspiration: the building of a humane, classless, non-violent world socialism.