Ernest Mandel, also known by various pseudonyms such as Ernest Germain, (April 5, 1923 - July 20, 1995) was a Belgian Jew recruited to the Fourth International in his youth. During World War II, he escaped twice after being arrested, and survived imprisonment in a German concentration camp. After the war, he became a leader of both the Belgian Trotskyists and the youngest member of the Fourth International secretariat, alongside Michel Pablo and others. He gained respect as a prolific journalist with a clear and lively style, as an orthodox Marxist theoretician, and as a talented debater. He wrote for numerous newspapers including Het Parool, Le Peuple, l'Observateur and Agence-France Presse.

After the FI suffered a major split in 1953, Mandel developed into a leader of the West European-based International Secretariat of the Fourth International. In 1963 he led the ISFI into a reunification with James Cannon's Socialist Workers' Party (USA) . This regroupment was known as the United Secretariat of the Fourth International or "Usec", and until his death in 1995 Mandel remained its most prominent leader and theoretician (the main part of the SWP (USA) exited from the Usec again in the mid-1980s).

Until the publication of his first major book "Marxist Economic Theory" in French in 1962, Mandel's Marxist articles were written mainly under a variety of pseudonyms and his activities as revolutionary were little known. In the 1950s, he was editor of the socialist newspaper La Gauche, a member of the economic studies commission of the General Confederation of Labour of Belgium and an associate of the Belgian syndicalist André Renard .

Only from 1968 did Mandel become wellknown as public figure and Marxist politician, touring student campuses in Europe and America giving talks on socialism, imperialism and revolution. Although officially barred from West Germany, he completed a Phd dissertation from the Free University of Berlin in 1971, published as Late Capitalism , and he subsequently gained a lecturer position at the Free University of Brussels. He campaigned on behalf of numerous dissident intellectuals suffering political repression, and in the Gorbachev era spearheaded a petition for the rehabilitation of the accused in the Moscow Show Trials of 1936-38. As a man in his 70s, he travelled to Russia to defend his vision of a free and democratic socialism.

In total, he published approximately 2,000 articles and more than 20 books during his life, which were translated into many languages. In addition, he maintained a voluminous correspondence and went on speaking engagements worldwide. He considered it his mission to transmit the heritage of classical Marxist thought, deformed by the experience of Stalinism and the Cold War, to a new generation. And to a large extent he did influence a generation of scholars and activists in their understanding of important Marxist concepts. In his writings, perhaps most striking is the tension between creative independent thinking and the desire for a strict adherence to Marxist orthodoxy.

A satirical novel featuring Ernest Mandel (in the guise of Esra Einstein) is Tariq Ali's Redemption (Picador, 1991)

Bibliography of Ernest Mandel's main books

• Marxist Economic Theory.
• The Formation of the Economic Thought of Karl Marx, 1843 to Capital.
• Introduction to Marxist Economic Theory
• Europe versus America: Contradictions of Imperialism
• The Second Slump
• Revolutionary Marxism Today
• Trotsky: A Study in the Dynamic of his Thought
• From Stalinism to Eurocommunism
• Late Capitalism
• Offener Marxismus
• Long Waves of Capitalist Development
• Delightful Murder: A social history of the crime story
• Karl Marx: die Aktualitat seines Werkes
• La Crise
• Trotsky as Alternative

External links

• a Dutch historian currently researching a biography of Ernest Mandel
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• [2]
• [3]
• Bibliography
• Symposia on Mandel's work (see also Gilbert Achcar (ed.), The Legacy of Ernest Mandel [London: Verso, 1999])
• Obituary Andre Gunder Frank
• Ernest Mandel Centre