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The Luck of a Crazy Youth (Interview with Ernest Mandel)

“Ernest, you were ten years old when Hitler seized power in Germany and sixteen when World War Two broke out. It was surely an awful time to be young, especially for someone like you, from a Jewish background. What are your first memories of that period?” read more

Petra Kelly and Willy Brandt

“The deaths of Willy Brandt and Petra Kelly in a way mark the end of two successive generations of mass leaders, two eras of the West European Left, spanning more than fifty years. Willy Brandt, a man of very modest beginnings, identified from his earliest youth with the . . .” read more

The Myth of Market Socialism

“We must be grateful to Alec Nove for keeping the controversy to the essentials, avoiding red herrings and side issues. Our debate does not concern the most adequate strategy for assuring immediate rapid economic growth and increasing social equality in relatively less developed countries. Neither is its object . . .” read more

In Defence of Socialist Planning

“In his book The Economics of Feasible Socialism Alec Nove criticizes the methods of Marxist economics, as misleading or irrelevant for the task of building socialism, and rejects the goal of Marxist politics—socialism without commodity production—as impossible of realization. Any effective answer to his objections must follow the . . .” read more

The Role of the Individual in History: The Case of World War Two

“The primacy of the relationships and conflicts between social forces in determining the course of history is one of the fundamental assumptions of historical materialism. In societies divided into different social classes, such relationships are perforce class relations. History is thus explained, in the final analysis, as a . . .” read more

The Threat of War and the Struggle for Socialism

“Several times during the last three years the threat of a third world war seemed to loom large. Impressionist commentators did not hesitate to draw this conclusion. In fact a panic wave arose. The powerful and promising anti-war movement, which is growing today in the imperialist countries, was . . .” read more

On the Nature of the Soviet State

“The sixtieth anniversary of the Russian revolution was celebrated this year. It was also the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed, which analysed the Soviet Union as a degenerate workers’ state. Many historic events have occurred during the past four decades. We have seen . . .” read more

Revolutionary Strategy in Europe--A Political Interview

“The revolutionary Left, and especially the Fourth International, is often accused—for example, by the leaderships of the PdUPC in Italy or the PSU and CFDT in France—of mechanically superimposing onto the reality of the advanced capitalist countries of Western Europe a ‘model’ derived from the Russian revolution: breakdown . . .” read more

The Industrial Cycle in Late Capitalism

“It is well known that ever since large-scale capitalist industry achieved domination of the world market, its development has assumed a cyclical character, peculiar only to this mode of production, with successive phases of recession, upswing, boom, overheating, crash, depression and so on. Although Marx left no finished . . .” read more

Recession and Its Consequences (Discussion)

“In September, when he was touring Australia, Ernest Mandel was invited to join a radio programme in which, through a link-up with London, he and Bill Warren discussed the impending world recession: its immediate and long-run effects, and its consequences for the working class. Naturally, in a . . .” read more

Solzhenitsyn, Stalinism and the October Revolution

“The Gulag Archipelago testifies to a threefold tragedy. First, the tragedy of the Stalinist purges that struck at millions of Soviet citizens, among them the majority of the old cadres of the Bolshevik party, who were innocent of the crimes they were charged with. Second, the tragedy of . . .” read more

Reply to Hernandez’s 'The Development of Marx’s Economic Thought'

“Angel Hernandez criticizes my Formation of the Economic Thought of Karl Marx on three essential points. He contends that: 1. in Marx’s mature writings, ‘alienation’ becomes synonymous with capitalist exploitation, as these writings have only one single object: an analysis of the capitalist mode of production; 2. it . . .” read more

The Laws of Uneven Development

“Before answering Martin Nicolaus’s critique of ‘Where is America going?’, the origins and intended function of that article should be explained. It is the transcript of a speech given to a seminar of Finnish students at Helsinki, in the framework of a symposium on ‘American imperialism today’. It . . .” read more

Trotsky’s Marxism: A Rejoinder

“Nicolas Krassó attempted to explain Stalin’s victory in the inner-party struggle of the Bolshevik party during the twenties by two alleged basic weaknesses of ‘Trotsky’s Marxism’: his ‘sociologism’, i.e. his constant underestimation of the autonomous role of political institutions; and his ‘administrativism’, which tended to identify him with . . .” read more

Where Is America Going?

“Today, profound forces are working to undermine the social and economic equilibrium which has reigned in the United States for more than 25 years, since the big depressions of 1929–32 and of 1937–38. Some of these are forces of an international character, linked with the national liberation struggles . . .” read more

Lessons of May

“The revolutionary wave of May 1968 constitutes an immense reservoir of social experience. The inventory of this experience is as yet far from complete. What characterized that wave was precisely the irruption onto the historical stage of the creative energy of the masses, multiplying forms of action, initiatives . . .” read more

Trotsky’s Marxism: An Anti-Critique

“Nicolas Krassó’s critique of Trotsky’s political thought and activities, which appeared in issue No. 44 of the New Left Review, provides a welcome occasion to unravel some of the misconceptions and prejudices about the historical role of the founder of the Red Army, which still haunt a large . . .” read more

After Imperialism?

“Michael Barratt Brown’s After Imperialism is undoubtedly one of the most important economic works recently published in English—indeed probably the most important for socialist theory and practice. The author’s purpose is ambitious: to test Lenin’s definition of imperialism against the realities of the British Empire, from the eve . . .” read more

The Dialectic of Class and Region in Belgium

“Belgian society today is a living illustration of the law of uneven development which has dominated the whole history of capitalism. The present structural crisis of the Belgian economy is a direct consequence of the fact that Belgium was the first industrialized country in continental Europe. The crisis . . .” read more