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Late Capitalism
Ernest Mandel
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R876
R730
Discovery Miles 7 300
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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. Mandel's book starts with a
challenging discussion of the appropriate methods for studying the
capitalist economies. He seeks to show why the classical approaches
of Luxemburg, Bukharin, Bauer and Grossman failed to accomplish the
further development of Marxist theory whose urgency became evident
after Marx's death. He then sketches the structure of the world
market and the variant types of surplus-profit that have
characterized its successive stages. On these foundations, Late
Capitalism proceeds to advance an extremely bold schema of the
"long waves" of expansion and contraction in the history of
capitalism, from the Napoleonic Wars to the present. Mandel
criticizes and refines Kondratieff's famous use of the notion.
Mandel's book surveys in turn the main economic characteristics of
late capitalism as it has emerged in the contemporary period. The
last expansionary long wave, it argues, started with the victory of
fascism on the European continent and the advent of the war
economies in the US and UK during the 1940s, and produced the
record world boom of 1947-72. Mandel discusses the reasons why the
dynamic upswing of growth in this period was bound to reach its
limits at the turn of the 1970s, and why a long wave of economic
stagnation and intensified class struggle has set in today. Late
Capitalism is a landmark in Marxist economic literature.
Specifically designed to explain the international recession of the
1970s, it is a central guide to understanding the nature of the
world economic crisis today.
The extended critical interview is especially flexible as a form,
by turns tenacious and glancing, elliptical or sustained, combining
argument and counter-argument, reflection, history and memoir with
a freedom normally denied to its subjects in conventional writing
formats. Lives on the Left brings together sixteen such interviews
from New Left Review in a group portrait of intellectual engagement
in the twentieth century and since. Four generations of
intellectuals discuss their political histories and present
perspectives, and the specialized work for which they are, often,
best known. Their recollections span the century from the Great War
and the October Revolution to the present, ranging across Europe,
the Americas, Africa and Asia. Psychoanalysis, philosophy, the
gendering of private and public life, capital and class formation,
the novel, geography, and language are among the topics of
theoretical discussion. At the heart of the collection, in all its
diversity of testimony and judgement, is critical experience of
communism and the tradition of Marx, relayed now for a new
generation of readers. Lives on the Left includes interviews with
Georg Lukacs, Hedda Korsch, Jean-Paul Sartre, Dorothy Thompson,
Jir?i Pelikan, Ernest Mandel, Luciana Castellina, Lucio Colletti,
K. Damodaran, Noam Chomsky, David Harvey, Adolfo Gilly, Joao Pedro
Stedile, Asada Akira, Wang Hui and Giovanni Arrighi. New Left
Review was founded in 1960 in London, which has remained its base
ever since. In fifty years of publication, it has won an
international reputation as an independent journal of socialist
politics and ideas, attracting readers and contributors from every
part of the world. A Spanish-language edition is published
bi-monthly from Madrid.
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. Mandel's book starts with a
challenging discussion of the appropriate methods for studying the
capitalist economies. He seeks to show why the classical approaches
of Luxemburg, Bukharin, Bauer and Grossman failed to accomplish the
further development of Marxist theory whose urgency became evident
after Marx's death. He then sketches the structure of the world
market and the variant types of surplus-profit that have
characterized its successive stages. On these foundations, Late
Capitalism proceeds to advance an extremely bold schema of the
"long waves" of expansion and contraction in the history of
capitalism, from the Napoleonic Wars to the present. Mandel
criticizes and refines Kondratieff's famous use of the notion.
Mandel's book surveys in turn the main economic characteristics of
late capitalism as it has emerged in the contemporary period. The
last expansionary long wave, it argues, started with the victory of
fascism on the European continent and the advent of the war
economies in the US and UK during the 1940s, and produced the
record world boom of 1947-72. Mandel discusses the reasons why the
dynamic upswing of growth in this period was bound to reach its
limits at the turn of the 1970s, and why a long wave of economic
stagnation and intensified class struggle has set in today. Late
Capitalism is a landmark in Marxist economic literature.
Specifically designed to explain the international recession of the
1970s, it is a central guide to understanding the nature of the
world economic crisis today.
The question of whether 40-60-year Kondratieff long waves in
economic growth actually exist has been controversial since the
1920s. The authors of this book apply new methods of time series
analysis and report evidence of long waves in the 19th and 20th
centuries. In the second section of the book, contributions from
Russia, the USA and France show that there is a long wave pattern
in the aggregate profit rates of several highly industrialized
countries. Although there is still a lot to be discussed about the
properties of various profit rate estimates, this research sheds
new light on the discussion of the famous Marxian law of the
falling tendency of the aggregate profit rate. The third section of
this book provides theoretical discussions and attempts at
modelling the role of social, economic and technological factors in
the long-wave process, besides presenting new data on long-run
patterns of labour unrest. While answers to a number of old
questions come within reach, interesting new hypotheses emerge.
This book presents new methods for the analysis of time series and
the identification of long waves. In Part One it is shown that new
time series analyses confirm the existence of Kondratieff long
waves in economic growth for the 19th and 20th centuries. Part Two
presents evidence on long waves in aggregate profit rates for
selected major industrialized countries. Part Three covers
theoretical discussions and attempts at modeling social, economic
and technological factors in long waves.
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.
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.
The third volume of the book that changed the course of world history, Capital's final chapters were Marx's most controversial writings on the subject, and were never completed.
Between 1918 and 1968, the forces of revolution and
counter-revolution fought a ceaseless battle over Europe's history.
In Germany and Spain, the Moscow-led communist parties led the
revolutionary movements to disaster. In the decades after the
Second World War, democracy was regularly threatened by right-wing
movements which aimed to dramatically constrict democratic rights.
This 'Bonapartism' continually threatened democracy in France until
the 1968 worker- and student-revolt destroyed the foundations of
Gaullism.In this book a participant and political leader within the
revolutionary movement gives his perspectives on those struggles. A
biographical note by Ernest Mandel, which introduces this volume,
explains how over six decades in the workers movement Pierre Frank
became perhaps the best-known anti-Stalinist revolutionary in
France. He was one of the first to be arrested during the crisis of
1968, when the French section of the Fourth International was
banned.Frank was secretary to Leon Trotsky in the 1930s, a central
leader of the Fourth International from the 1940s and, until his
death in 1984, editor of its French-language theoretical journal,
"Quatri me Internationale." His best-known books are "The Long
March of the Trotskyists" and "Histoire de l'Internationale
Communiste," a chapter of which has been specially translated for
this volume.
We live in an age where everything has been internationalised.
Imperialism brought in its wake world politics and world economics.
In this book, Pierre Frank explains how the Fourth International,
founded in 1938 by Revolutionary Marxist militants, nuclei,
currents and organizations, answered the problem of the
construction of anti-capitalist, revolutionary political
formations. As Ernest Mandel's biographical essay explains, Frank
was secretary to Leon Trotsky in 1932-1933. This book draws on
Frank's experience as a central leader of the Fourth International
through to 1979. Daniel Bensaid's appendix explains the following
30 years of the Fourth International life. Two contributions
develop its perspective of establishing a new independent political
representation of the working class that takes into account the
diversity of the working class in defending a resolutely
class-based programme: a statement by founders of the French LCR
explaining its decision to dissolve into the NPA; and the key
resolution adopted by the Fourth International's 2009 world
congress.
A concise presentation of the basic principles of political
economy.
The credit crunch of 2008 produced an international recession in
2009. In this volume Claudio Katz and Michel Husson, both fellows
of the International Institute for Research and Education, and
Raphie de Santos lead an attempt not to only to describe the
present crisis, but also to understand its causes and debate
socialist solutions. Sean Thompson shows how neoliberal
globalisation has an inbuilt tendency towards deflation. As
explained in the article by Franois Sabado, the period since the
turn of the century has been a disaster for American capitalism;
first the catastrophe in Iraq and of the Bush government in
general, and now an economic collapse that has completely
undermined neoliberalism's 'Washington Consensus'. The ideologues
of capitalism are on the defensive. But the Marxist explanation of
the crisis has to be hammered home. Who caused this crisis? Why did
it occur? What is it in capitalism that leads to the globalisation
of poverty while a tiny elite become mega-wealthy? And what are
possible alternatives? This book is a signal contribution to making
those arguments.
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.
CONTENTS: Introduction - Labour, Necessary product, Surplus Product
- Exchange, Commodity, Value - Money, Capital, Surplus-value - The
Development of Capital - The Contradictions of Capitalism - Trade -
Credit - Money - Agriculture- Reproduction and the Growth of
National Income - Periodical Crises - Monopoly Capitalism -
Imperialism - The Epoch of Capitalist Decline - The Soviet Economy
- The Economy of the Transition Period - Socialist Economy -
Origin, Rise and Withering Away of Political Economy- Bibliography
- Index
CONTENTS: Introduction - Labour, Necessary product, Surplus Product
- Exchange, Commodity, Value - Money, Capital, Surplus-value - The
Development of Capital - The Contradictions of Capitalism - Trade -
Credit - Money - Agriculture- Reproduction and the Growth of
National Income - Periodical Crises - Monopoly Capitalism -
Imperialism - The Epoch of Capitalist Decline - The Soviet Economy
- The Economy of the Transition Period - Socialist Economy -
Origin, Rise and Withering Away of Political Economy- Bibliography
- Index
Analyses of bureaucratic power and privilege have an academic
pedigree but have also long preoccupied socialists. The collapse of
Communist rule in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe puts to a new
test the classical theories concerning the relationship between
bureaucracy and class. Power and Money is a timely contribution to
this renewal theory, exploring the social and historical roots of
bureaucracy, both within the capitalist state and in workers' mass
organizations. Ernest Mandel draws on archival and contemporary
accounts in an analysis of both capitalist administration and the
ideology and practice of bureaucratic dictatorship in the Communist
bloc. He measures the actual performance of Western and Eastern
societies against the forecasts of Lenin and Trotsky, Ludwig von
Mises and Roberto Michels, or the more recent reflections of Amitai
Etzioni and Alvin Gouldner. This lucid study challenges those
theories - Stalinist, Weberian or social-democratic - which claim
that an autonomous officialdom is a necessary feature of modern
societies. It also furnishes a perceptive account of the specific
dynamics of Communist and post-communist society.
In this revised and expanded edition of Long Waves of Capitalist
Development, Ernest Mandel seeks to explain the underlying
determinants of the booms and slumps of the trade cycle. Mandel
first establishes that there have indeed been twenty- to
twenty-five-year-long waves of capitalist expansion and
contraction-and that these have persisted in the period since World
War II. He then assembles evidence to show that while broad
tendencies in the rate of profit have been decisive in triggering
downturns, the ingredients necessary for a new upswing are, by
contrast, generally political and extra-economic in character. He
thereby demonstrates the falsity of neo-liberal doctrines,
according to which the free market will itself generate a new
formula for balanced and sustainable expansion. Long Waves of
Capitalist Development not only offers a penetrating analysis of
the ills that have afflicted contemporary capitalist economies but
also surveys, and takes forward, one of the classical debates of
modern economic history.
Leon Trotsky has become one of the twentieth century's most
enduring political legends. Joining the Bolsheviks on the eve of
the 1917 revolution he played a vital role as Lenin's right-hand
man in the insurrection and went on to lead the Red Army to victory
in the ensuing civil war. Having lost to Stalin the struggle for
power which followed Lenin's death, he became an implacable
opponent of the dictator over the next three decades-a stance which
cost him his political career, his citizenship and ultimately his
life. A charismatic orator, a prolific author and a political
philosopher whose ideas continue to resonate in the wake of the
collapse of the Stalinist regimes of Eastern Europe, Trotsky made
an indelible mark on world history. Ernest Mandel, one of the
foremost leaders of the international movement which Trotsky
founded before the Second World War and an influential economist
and political theorist, is uniquely placed to review the life and
work of Trotsky. In Trotsky as Alternative he presents a portrait
of his subject which is appreciative yet critical. He shows that
Trotsky's contribution to the history of the twentieth century was
primarily political rather than sociological, and this in a
practical as well as a theoretical sense. He locates Trotsky's
theory of uneven and combined development as a crucial tool whose
explanatory power of the mechanisms of world imperialism is as
relevant to the late capitalism of the 1990s as it was to the first
three decades of the century when it was formulated. Ranging across
Trotsky's struggles against Stalin's bureaucracy, his formulation
of an alternative economic strategy, his theories relating to the
Third World, fascism and the national question, his extensive
literary criticism, and concluding with a moving assessment of an
extraordinary life, this book is a fitting testimony to a man who,
in Mandel's words, "will be judged by history as the most important
strategist for the socialist movement."
The very scale of the 1939-45 war has often tempted historians to
study particular campaigns at the expense of the wider panorama. In
this readable and richly detailed history of the conflict, the
Belgian scholar Ernest Mandel (author of the acclaimed Late
Capitalism) outlines his view that the war was in fact a
combination of several distinct struggles and a battle between
rival imperialisms for world hegemony. In concise chapters, Mandel
examines the role played by technology, science, logistics, weapons
and propaganda. Throughout, he weaves a consideration of the
military strategy of the opposing states into his analytical
narrative of the war and its results.
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