Ernest Mandel

Ernest Mandel traces the development of Marx’s economic ideas from the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 to the completion of the Grundrisse. In a series of focused chapters he provides an overview of the debates and discussions central to Marxist economic theory.

Ernest Mandel’s book is a study of Eurocommunism unlike any other. Written in the polemical tradition of Trotsky, its sweep extends well beyond the immediate prospects of the Communist Parties of Western Europe. Mandel traces the long historical process which has transformed the once embattled detachments of the Third International into the constitutionalist formations of “historic compromise” and “union of the people” today. He then goes on to argue that the national roads to socialism of...

Der klassische Staatssozialismus, der aus der Oktoberrevolution von 1917 hervorging, scheiterte nicht zuletzt auf ökonomischem Gebiet. Zwar gelang es sozialistischen Staaten in Osteuropa und Asien in der Nachkriegszeit durch die Übernahme des sowjetischen Systems der zentralen Planwirtschaft Schwerindustrien aufzubauen und Wirtschaftswachstum zu erzeugen. Nach anfänglichen Erfolgen bei der nachzuholenden Industrialisierung gerieten diese Länder aber in wirtschaftliche Krisen. Das Modell der...

Leon Trotsky was the most important contributor to the development of revolutionary Marxism this century, after Lenin. As exiled militant or Soviet statesman, party organizer or public orator, as political analyst, soldier or commentator on cultural trends, he was centrally involved in the world-historic upheavals of his time and foremost among the interpreters of their significance for socialism. Yet the fate of his achievement was dramatically discrepant from Lenin's. At the latter's...