Ernest Mandel
Based on Wikipedia: Ernest Mandel
The Economist Who Escaped the Nazis Twice
In 1972, the United States Supreme Court ruled that a Belgian economist could be legally banned from entering the country. His crime? Writing books about Marxism. The case, Kleindienst v. Mandel, remains a landmark in immigration law. But for Ernest Mandel, being barred from America was just another obstacle in a life defined by them.
Mandel had already escaped Nazi captivity twice during World War II. He had survived a German concentration camp. He had been banned from West Germany, France, Switzerland, and Australia at various points. The American visa denial was, in some ways, a validation—proof that his ideas were considered dangerous enough to keep out.
What made this economist so threatening to governments across the political spectrum?
Born Into Revolutionary Politics
Ernest Mandel entered the world in Frankfurt, Germany, on April 5, 1923, but his story really begins in Poland. His parents, Henri and Rosa Mandel, were Jewish emigrants who had been swept up in one of the most dramatic political movements of the early twentieth century. Henri Mandel had been a member of the Spartacist League, a revolutionary socialist organization led by two figures who would become martyrs of the German left: Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.
The Spartacist League had attempted to launch a communist revolution in Germany in 1919, just after World War I ended. It failed. Luxemburg and Liebknecht were captured and murdered by right-wing militias. The survivors scattered. Henri and Rosa Mandel eventually settled in Antwerp, Belgium, raising their son in an atmosphere saturated with radical politics and the memory of failed revolution.
Young Ernest didn't rebel against this inheritance. He embraced it.
Trotskyism: The Revolutionary Alternative
To understand Mandel's life, you need to understand what Trotskyism actually meant in the 1930s and 1940s. It wasn't just an abstract political philosophy. It was a survival strategy for leftists who rejected both Western capitalism and Soviet-style communism.
Leon Trotsky had been one of the architects of the Russian Revolution alongside Vladimir Lenin. After Lenin's death, Trotsky lost a power struggle to Joseph Stalin and was eventually exiled, then assassinated in Mexico in 1940. But before his death, Trotsky founded the Fourth International in 1938—a network of revolutionary socialist organizations that opposed both capitalism and Stalinism.
This was a dangerous position to hold. Stalinist communists viewed Trotskyists as traitors and enemies. Fascists viewed them as communist subversives. Liberal democracies viewed them as dangerous radicals. Trotskyists were hunted from all sides.
The teenage Ernest Mandel joined this movement anyway.
Resistance Under Occupation
When Nazi Germany occupied Belgium in 1940, Mandel was seventeen years old and a university student. The German authorities promptly shut down the university. For many young people, this might have meant waiting out the war in quiet desperation. For Mandel, it meant going underground.
He joined the Belgian Trotskyist resistance alongside two other young Jewish radicals: Abraham Leon and Martin Monath. They didn't just hide. They actively organized against the occupation. Mandel helped edit an underground newspaper called Het Vrije Woord—Dutch for "The Free Word."
This was extraordinarily dangerous work. Getting caught meant torture, deportation, and almost certain death. Mandel was arrested twice during his resistance activities.
Twice, he escaped.
The third time, there was no escape. Mandel was captured and sent to a Nazi concentration camp at Dora, in central Germany. Dora was one of the deadliest camps in the Nazi system, where prisoners were worked to death constructing V-2 rockets in underground tunnels. Roughly twenty thousand prisoners died there.
Mandel survived. Abraham Leon did not—he was murdered at Auschwitz in 1944 at age twenty-six.
The Youngest Leader
After the war ended, Mandel emerged from the camps and immediately returned to political organizing. In 1946, at age twenty-three, he was elected to the leadership of the Fourth International, making him the youngest member of its secretariat. He would remain in the leadership of various Trotskyist organizations for the rest of his life—nearly fifty years.
The postwar years saw Mandel develop two distinct reputations. As a journalist, he was prolific and accessible, writing for mainstream outlets including Het Parool (a Dutch newspaper), Le Peuple (a Belgian paper), l'Observateur, and even Agence France-Presse, the major French news agency. He had a gift for clear, lively prose that made complex economic ideas understandable to general readers.
As a debater, he was formidable. At the height of the Cold War, when defending Marxism publicly could destroy careers, Mandel took on all comers. One of his most notable debate opponents was Joop den Uyl, a social democrat who would later become Prime Minister of the Netherlands. Mandel argued for revolutionary socialism; den Uyl argued for gradual reform within the existing system. These weren't academic exercises. They were battles over the future of European politics.
Working Within the System (Temporarily)
Mandel's political strategy in the 1950s might seem surprising for a revolutionary. Following the Fourth International's policy, he joined the Belgian Socialist Party—a mainstream center-left party, not a revolutionary organization. The idea was to work within mass working-class parties to build support for more radical positions.
He didn't just join. He became influential. Mandel edited La Gauche (The Left), a socialist newspaper, and its Flemish counterpart, Links. He served on the economic studies commission of the General Federation of Belgian Labour, the country's major trade union federation. He became an associate of André Renard, a powerful Belgian union leader known for his militant tactics.
This arrangement lasted until 1960-61, when Belgium was rocked by a massive general strike. Workers walked out to protest austerity measures, and the strike paralyzed the country for weeks. Mandel and his comrades supported the strikers and opposed the Socialist Party's decision to form a coalition government with the Christian Democrats—a center-right party. They also opposed anti-strike legislation that the coalition passed.
The Socialist Party expelled them. Mandel's time working within mainstream social democracy was over.
Reunifying the Divided International
The Fourth International had fractured in 1953 over disputes about how to relate to Stalinism and mass communist parties. One faction, the International Secretariat, took a more flexible approach. Another faction, the International Committee, led by the American Socialist Workers Party under James Cannon, broke away entirely.
Mandel was one of the main architects of reunification. In 1963, the two factions came back together to form the reunified Fourth International (also known by its French initials, USFI). This organization would remain the largest Trotskyist international until Mandel's death and beyond.
The reunification was significant because it gave Trotskyists a global organizational structure at exactly the moment when radical politics was about to explode worldwide.
The Book That Changed Everything
Until 1962, Mandel's Marxist writings appeared mostly under pseudonyms: Ernest Germain, Pierre Gousset, Henri Vallin, Walter. This was partly for security—being openly identified as a Trotskyist leader could create problems—and partly because his Fourth International work was separate from his mainstream journalism.
Then he published Marxist Economic Theory, a massive book that attempted to update Marx's nineteenth-century economic analysis for the postwar world. The book appeared in French in 1962 and was soon translated into multiple languages.
One reader who took particular notice was Che Guevara.
Working with Che
Guevara was fluent in French—he had been born to an upper-middle-class Argentine family and was well-educated—and he read Mandel's book shortly after it appeared. At the time, Guevara was serving as Cuba's Minister of Industries, trying to figure out how to build a socialist economy on an island ninety miles from the United States.
Guevara invited Mandel to Cuba. The Belgian economist traveled there and worked closely with the revolutionary government on economic planning. This wasn't a ceremonial visit. Mandel and Guevara collaborated on the practical problems of running a planned economy: how to allocate resources, how to measure productivity, how to balance different sectors.
The collaboration connected two different strands of the revolutionary left. Guevara represented the guerrilla tradition—the idea that small bands of armed fighters could spark mass uprisings. Mandel represented the Trotskyist tradition—the idea that revolution required organized working-class parties with sophisticated theoretical understanding. For a brief moment in the early 1960s, these traditions converged.
The Global Star
Mandel returned to formal education in his forties, earning a degree from what is now the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris in 1967. The following year, the world seemed to catch up with his revolutionary expectations.
1968 was the year of global upheaval. Students occupied universities in Paris, nearly bringing down the French government. Protests erupted from Mexico City to Tokyo to Prague. Young people everywhere seemed to be questioning capitalism, imperialism, and the established order. Suddenly, there was massive demand for Marxist speakers who could explain what was happening and what might come next.
Mandel became a star of this circuit, touring university campuses across Europe and America, giving talks on socialism, imperialism, and revolution. He was a compelling speaker—passionate, knowledgeable, able to connect abstract theory to current events. For a generation of young radicals, he was the living link to the revolutionary tradition.
The Visa Wars
Mandel's prominence made him a target. Governments across the political spectrum decided he was too dangerous to let in.
The American case became the most famous. In 1969, Attorney General John Mitchell rejected Mandel's visa application, overruling the State Department, which had recommended approval. Mitchell invoked the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, a Cold War law that allowed the government to exclude anyone who advocated "the economic, international and governmental doctrines of world Communism."
This was legally questionable. Mandel had been granted visas in 1962 and 1968 without incident. His supposed violation during the 1968 visit was asking for donations for French demonstrators' legal defense—hardly advocacy for Soviet-style communism.
A group of American scholars challenged the ban, arguing that it violated their academic freedom to hear Mandel speak. In 1971, a Federal Court in New York agreed and voided Mitchell's decision. But the government appealed, and in 1972, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the Attorney General had acted within his authority.
The case established that the government has broad power to exclude foreign speakers for their political views—a precedent that remains controversial today.
Late Capitalism
Despite being officially barred from West Germany, Mandel managed to earn his PhD from the Free University of Berlin in 1972. His dissertation was published as Late Capitalism, which became his most influential academic work.
The title requires explanation. Mandel wasn't arguing that capitalism was about to collapse. "Late" in this context meant something like "mature" or "developed"—capitalism had entered a new phase with distinctive characteristics. The book analyzed how postwar capitalism differed from its earlier forms: the role of the state had expanded, multinational corporations had become dominant, technology had transformed production.
Critics who expected traditional Marxism to predict capitalism's imminent death found Mandel's analysis surprisingly nuanced. He argued that capitalism hadn't overcome its tendency toward crisis—there would still be recessions, financial panics, and social upheavals. But he also acknowledged that the system had proven more adaptable than earlier Marxists expected. Late capitalism was "late" in the sense of delayed, not in the sense of dying.
This earned him criticism from both sides. Some Marxists thought he was "too soft on Stalinism"—too willing to work with communist parties he should have opposed. Others thought his analysis of capitalism's resilience was too pessimistic for a revolutionary movement.
The Long Wave Theory
In 1978, Mandel delivered the Alfred Marshall Lectures at the University of Cambridge—a prestigious invitation that signaled his acceptance by mainstream economics, even as he remained a revolutionary outsider. His topic was "long waves of capitalist development."
This theory, originally proposed by the Russian economist Nikolai Kondratiev in the 1920s, suggested that capitalism moves through cycles of roughly fifty years—periods of expansion followed by periods of stagnation. Mandel developed this into a sophisticated analysis of how technological revolutions, wars, and class struggles combine to produce these waves.
The timing was significant. The postwar boom was clearly ending. The oil crisis of 1973 had triggered a global recession. Inflation and unemployment were rising simultaneously—a phenomenon called "stagflation" that existing economic theories struggled to explain. Mandel's long wave analysis offered an explanation: capitalism had entered a downward phase of the cycle, and no amount of policy tinkering would restore the boom.
The Last Campaigns
Mandel never retired from activism. Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, he campaigned on behalf of dissident left-wing intellectuals facing political repression around the world. He advocated for canceling Third World debt—a cause that would later become mainstream through initiatives like the Jubilee 2000 campaign.
When Mikhail Gorbachev introduced reforms in the Soviet Union, Mandel saw an opportunity. He spearheaded a petition calling for the rehabilitation of the defendants in the Moscow Trials of 1936-1938—the show trials in which Stalin had eliminated his old Bolshevik rivals, including many who had known Trotsky. After decades when such demands had been ignored, Gorbachev's government actually began rehabilitating the victims.
In his seventies, Mandel traveled to Russia—something that would have been impossible for a Trotskyist during the Soviet era—to advocate for democratic socialism. He still believed in the possibility of revolution in the West. He never gave up.
The Crime Fiction Interlude
One book in Mandel's bibliography stands out as unexpected: Delightful Murder: A Social History of the Crime Story, published in 1985. It's exactly what the title suggests—a Marxist analysis of detective fiction.
Mandel argued that the crime story emerged alongside bourgeois society and reflects its contradictions. The detective represents the hope that reason can restore order in a chaotic world. The criminal represents the dark side of competitive individualism. The genre's popularity reveals anxieties about property, violence, and social breakdown that capitalist society prefers not to acknowledge directly.
It's a reminder that Mandel's intellectual range extended far beyond economics and politics. He read voraciously, wrote prolifically—approximately two thousand articles and thirty books in German, Dutch, French, English, and other languages, which were translated into many more—and maintained interests that might seem incongruous in a revolutionary leader.
The Tension at the Heart
Those who knew Mandel's work often noted a tension running through it: the conflict between creative independent thinking and strict adherence to Marxist orthodoxy. He was genuinely original in his economic analysis, willing to acknowledge complexities and developments that didn't fit neatly into traditional categories. At the same time, he remained committed to the Trotskyist framework and its organizational expressions.
Some called him "Luxemburgist"—a reference to Rosa Luxemburg, the revolutionary his father had followed, who emphasized democratic participation and grassroots initiative over centralized party control. Mandel's commitment to socialist democracy distinguished him from both Stalinists and more authoritarian Trotskyists.
This tension may have been productive. It kept Mandel engaged with reality rather than retreating into sectarian fantasy. It also meant his work remained relevant to people who didn't share all his political commitments.
The Legacy
Ernest Mandel died at his home in Brussels on July 20, 1995, after suffering a heart attack. He was seventy-two years old.
A leading German Marxist, Elmar Altvater, said that Mandel had "done much for the survival of Marxism in the German Federal Republic." This was no small claim. West Germany in the postwar period was deeply hostile to Marxism—both because of Cold War anticommunism and because of the Nazi experience, which had associated revolutionary politics with chaos and violence. That Marxist ideas survived there at all owed something to Mandel's ability to present them in sophisticated, non-dogmatic forms.
More broadly, Mandel influenced a generation of scholars and activists. His books on late capitalism and long waves became standard references for anyone trying to understand the dynamics of modern capitalism from a critical perspective. His popularizations of basic Marxist concepts introduced countless readers to ideas they might otherwise never have encountered.
The Trotskyist movement he led never achieved revolution in the West. But it provided a space for leftists who rejected both Western capitalism and Soviet authoritarianism—a position that seemed marginal during the Cold War but has become more common since the Soviet Union's collapse.
The Question He Leaves Us
Mandel's life poses a question that remains relevant: What does it mean to be a revolutionary in a world where revolution seems perpetually delayed?
He spent fifty years predicting capitalism's crisis and working for its overthrow. Capitalism did have crises—severe ones, including the stagflation of the 1970s and the financial collapse of 2008. But it didn't collapse. The revolution didn't come.
Yet Mandel wasn't simply wrong. His analysis of late capitalism identified features—the dominance of multinational corporations, the interpenetration of state and economy, the cycles of boom and bust—that are more visible today than when he wrote. His warnings about debt crises in the Third World anticipated problems that exploded in the 1980s and continue today. His insistence that capitalism's stability was temporary, not permanent, resonates differently after the chaos of recent years.
Perhaps the most enduring lesson of Mandel's life is simply persistence. He survived Nazi concentration camps, government bans, political isolation, and repeated disappointment. He kept writing, kept organizing, kept arguing for his vision of democratic socialism. He died still believing that a better world was possible.
Whether he was right about that, history hasn't finished deciding.