Document 1 of 1 A Mandel for All Seasons Author: Wald, Alan ProQuest document link Abstract (Abstract): A decades-long member of the Fourth International, he was nonetheless of a political breed different from those whose education in pre- 1 960s Trotskyism too often addressed contemporary events by reciting catechisms about a "historic program," "the lessons of October," and a profession of "faith" in the working class to carry out its "mission." Stutje reveals to us how Mandel tenaciously held to the core ideas of Lenin and Trotsky - a transitional "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" leading from the old society to the new, a strategy of "Permanent Revolution" to address economic underdevelopment in a largely rural society, and a view of the urban working class as the central category of political agency in the industrialized world. But Mandel maintained that such ideas had merit only to the degree that they could be critically justified by empirical data from World War I to the present. From the late 1960s on, Mandel displayed his finest gifts when he disdained customary Trotskyist rhetoric, especially the traditional dismissal of adversarial arguments by assigning them scare-labels such as "reformist," "petit-bourgeois," and "centrist"; instead, even when he employed the canonical vocabulary of Leninism, his thinking frankly grappled with rather than evaded the knotty problems of revolutionary politics. Links: Availability at University of Michigan Full text: A Mandel for All Seasons Ernest Mandel: A Rebel's Dream Deferred By Jan Willem Stutje Translated by Christopher Beck &Peter Drucker. London:Verso, 2009, 392 pages, $25 hardback. THE GERMAN NEW Left activist Rudi Dutshcke declared just prior to his death in 1979 that his friend Ernest Mandel "continues to surprise and yet remains the same." (197) Dutshcke's appraisal draws attention to the appeal of Ernest (born Ezra) Mandel (1923-95), the Belgian Marxist economist and revolutionary activist, for a generation of young people impelled toward Leftist politics in the 1960s era of decolonization, civil rights activism, and the student revolt. The personal and political life of Mandel, a Jewish internationalist whose first loyalty was to the working class, is scrupulously restored and judiciously scrutinized in Jan Willem Stutje's comprehensive biography. Stutje's labors remind us that large-scale radicalization may be rooted in tangible conditions, but the ideology and organizations through which a newly arising fervor for social change is articulated are in some measure produced by vestiges of prior practice. Mandel, owing to a preceding quarter-of-acentury of activism that served to ripen his political thought, bridged several generations of militants in a fashion that might serve as an exemplar for the present stratum of aging socialists in the New Millennium. Mandel not only embodied Marxist culture in his activist commitments, but also made an effort to provide sophisticated answers to the exacting questions posed by those familiar with the past performance of the Left and distressed by its record of failure and even self-deception. A young radical of the 1960s, faced with the legacies of Communism, Social Democracy and Trotskyism, justifiably had as many reasons to be repulsed by as attracted to affirming continuity with the historic Left. To act was imperative - but how? How should a radical attend to the barbaric record of human suffering inflicted by the Stalinist states? How might one effectively reform a social order in view of the decades of complicity with the capitalist (and colonialist) systems exemplified by liberal and social democratic parties and governments? How should one forge a political movement independent of all exploitative societies - East, West and neocolonial - in light of the cult-like sectarianism all-too-frequently evidenced by Trotskyism?