“Whatever happened to Leon Trotsky?” wondered the Stranglers on their 1970s hit single No More Heroes. Actually, the prophet lived on among his followers in the Fourth International and the cloud of sects that orbited his memory. They were to be found in all shapes and sizes from Gerry Healy and the Workers Revolutionary Party – a cult that made David Koresh and the Branch Davidians look well adjusted – to the Posadists, my favourites, who called on the Soviet Union to launch a pre-emptive nuclear attack on the West so that a socialist society could emerge from the ashes.
Yet at the same time the breadth and depth of socialist thought has been massively enriched by the writings of some members of some of these groups, even if some flowed from the catharsis of political departure rather than arrival. One of the most important, who stayed the full course, was the Belgian Ernest Mandel.
Mandel was a survivor. Born into a family of non-practising Jews, he became a communist at an early age. With the Nazi occupation he joined the Resistance and helped produce and distribute clandestine newspapers aimed at both the civilian population and the occupying troops, some of whom proved susceptible to an ideologically fuzzy left internationalism.
The risk of this kind of subversion was, early on in the war, negligible for non-Jewish comrades. The same was not true for Jews and, when Ernest was arrested, it was necessary to ransom him from the Gestapo for 100,000 Belgian francs. He went back to work as before but, with his second arrest, he was not so lucky and was sent to a series of concentration camps where his experience of subverting German troops was put to good use with his guards.
Post-war, Mandel built a career as a professional revolutionary, first in the Belgium Labour Movement and then further afield. His activities certainly cramped his travel plans. At one time he was banned from France, Germany, the United States and Australia. At the same time he developed as an intellectual with a series of groundbreaking books that led to a number of academic posts, even as he continued to play a central role in Trotskyite internal faction fights, whether it was about providing direct assistance to the Algerian Liberation struggle or supporting the armed wing of the Tupanaros in Argentina.
In the end his greatest contribution was academic. Some of his writing was overly constrained by the limits of Trotsky’s own thought, but many of his works will continue to resonate for generations. The Meaning of the Second World War identified five separate conflicts subsumed within one, of which the left could support four. He did sterling work on Krondratiev long wave theory, confronted neo-Ricardian economists and the threat to remove class consciousness from history as the organized Labour Movement disintegrated in the face of the tensions between globalization, nationalism and reaction with the Khomeinization of revolt.
His book Late Capitalism looked at the reasons for the post-war boom that made play of productivity gains from process innovation and I saw him apply the same logic when, in 1985, he explained to the European Parliament’s Committee of Inquiry into the Growth of Racism and Fascism in Europe the economic and scientific origins of the Holocaust. It was capitalist culture and social relations meeting racism and Taylorism.
Jan Willem Stutje has served his subject well, even if you disagree with his view that Mandel’s – like Trotsky’s – main fault was that he was too flexible and conciliatory.
