Fourth International economist who sided with Guevara in the Cuban Great Debate
Born in Frankfurt to Polish Jewish émigré parents and raised in Antwerp, he joined the Belgian Trotskyist organisation as a teenager and fought in the underground resistance against the Nazi occupation; he escaped twice after arrest and survived the Dora concentration camp. After the war he became the youngest member of the International Secretariat of the Fourth International, helped bring about the 1963 reunification, and remained the reunified Fourth International's leading theorist until his death in 1995. Guevara read his Marxist Economic Theory (1962) and encouraged his interventions in the Cuban Great Debate, where he criticised Bettelheim. His Late Capitalism appeared in 1972.
Also known as: Ernest Ezra Mandel · Ernest Germain
Activities and affiliations
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1946–1995
Political and party leadership
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1962–1995
Scholarship and theory
1964: criticising Bettelheim in the Cuban Great Debate
Guevara, who had read Marxist Economic Theory when it appeared in French in 1962, invited Mandel to Cuba to work on questions of economic planning. Mandel entered the Great Debate in 1964 with "Commodity Categories in the Period of Transition" in the Ministry of Industries' Nuestra Industria.
Bettelheim held that, since the productive forces were still underdeveloped, exchange inside the state sector was commodity exchange and decisions should be taken at enterprise level. Mandel criticised him. Social ownership of the means of production, he argued, is not merely a legal phenomenon: its nature lies in making possible a disposal of the means of production sufficient to stop the motive forces of capitalism and to secure growth according to the laws of a socialised, planned economy. The correspondence between productive forces and relations of production must be seen on a world scale; in an epoch of struggle between socialism and capitalism, qualitatively different relations of production can appear in several countries even before the world revolution has won. Commodity relations survive chiefly because the productive forces are insufficient, above all in the distribution of consumer goods.
In 1965 he brought the debate to Western Europe with "The Great Economic Debate" in the Paris review Partisans.