Search results for ""Author Ernest Mandel""

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 contemporary Eurocommunism are the "bitter fruits of socialism in one country" in the USSR.Mandel's book contains trenchant and documented criticisms of the ideas of Santiago Carrillo in Spain, the economic policies of the PCI in Italy, and the PCF's theories of the State in France. But it also sets these Western developments in the context of European politics as a whole-discussing the Russian response to Carrillo, the organizational attitudes of the CPSU to the Western parties, and the emergence of major dissident currents in Eastern Germany sympathetic to Eurocommunism.From Stalinism to Eurocommunism represents the first systematic and comprehensive critique from the Marxist Left of the new strategy of Western Communism. It can be read as a barometer of the storms ahead in the European labour movement.

Read more less

Was October 1917 a coup d'etat or a social revolution? Writing as both a historian and political activist, Ernest Mandel vigorously reasserts the deep legitimacy of the Russian Revolution. He considers mistakes made by the Bolshevik leadership in 1917-21 and sets out lessons to be learnt.David Mandel's 'Factory Committees and Workers' Control in Petrograd in 1917' draws on Russian-language archives to tell the story from below. Petrograd workers did not dream at first of 'socialist experiments'. Factory committees met fierce resistance from owners, they were driven to take management into their own hands and to seek the nationalisation of industries. Common conceptions about the 'utopian' and 'anarchistic' impulses supposedly behind the October Revolution are reassessed and refuted.The introduction by Paul Le Blanc, provides a new evaluation of the events one century on. He discusses recent scholarship and debates, new ways of comprehending class, the centrality of women and that of ethnicity, race and national identity, as well as Lars Lih's reassessment of the role of Kamenev and Zinoviev. Paul Le Blanc considers 'what went right: the revolution that brought 'bread, peace and land' to millions, and 'what went wrong'. Were the Bolsheviks elitist, sectarian and authoritarian? He assesses what is still relevant today and what is not.

Read more less

Late Capitalism is the first major synthesis to have been produced by the contemporary revival of Marxist economics. It represents, in fact, the only systematic attempt so far ever made to combine the general theory of the ‘laws of motion’ of the capitalist mode of production developed by Marx with the concrete history of capitalism in the twentieth century. A landmark in Marxist economic literature, Late Capitalism is specifically designed to explain the international recession of the 1970s and is an invaluable guide to understanding the nature of the world economy today. This edition includes a new introduction by Cédric Durand assessing the book’s continued relevance.

Read more less

The "forgotten" second volume of Capital, Marx's world-shaking analysis of economics, politics, and history, contains the vital discussion of commodity, the cornerstone to Marx's theories.

Read more less

Unfinished at the time of Marx's death in 1883 and first published with a preface by Frederick Engels in 1894, the third volume of Das Kapital strove to combine the theories and concepts of the two previous volumes in order to prove conclusively that capitalism is inherently unworkable as a permanent system for society. Here, Marx asserts controversially that - regardless of the efforts of individual capitalists, public authorities or even generous philanthropists - any market economy is inevitably doomed to endure a series of worsening, explosive crises leading finally to complete collapse. But healso offers an inspirational and compelling prediction: that the end of capitalism will culminate, ultimately, in the birth of a far greater form of society.

Read more less

'A groundbreaking work of economic analysis. It is also a literary masterpice' Francis Wheen, GuardianOne of the most notorious and influential works of modern times, Capital is an incisive critique of private property and the social relations it generates. Living in exile in England, where this work was largely written, Marx drew on a wide-ranging knowledge of its society to support his analysis. Arguing that capitalism would cause an ever-increasing division in wealth and welfare, he predicted its abolition and replacement by a system with common ownership of the means of production. Capital rapidly acquired readership throughout the world, to become a work described by Marx's collaborator Friedrich Engels as 'the Bible of the working class'.Translated by BEN FOWKES with an Introduction by ERNEST MANDEL

Read more less