Thirty years after: A critical introduction to the Marxism of Ernest Mandel

Ernest Mandel’s Introduction au marxisme [“Introduction to Marxism” tittled in English From Class Society to Communism] has been and remains for many activists a reference work. Thirty years after its publication, in 1974, Daniel Bensaïd looks back at one of the most read book of Mandel.

The first edition by the Fondation Léon Lesoil of this Introduction to Marxism¹ dates from 1974. The date is not without importance. After the “oil shock” of 1973, Ernest Mandel was undoubtedly one of the first to diagnose the exhaustion of the post war boom and predict the reversal of the long wave of growth which followed the Second World War².

Documents joints

1. Published first in English as From Class Society to Communism.
2. Ernest Mandel, La Crise, Paris, Champs Flammarion, 1978.
3. The Mandel quote relates to a certain extent to the criterion of the scientific status of a theory upheld by Popper, that of falsifiability”; a theory can only be called scientific if it is capable of being refuted in practice. That is why Marx’ s theories, like those of Freud, which survive the denial of their prognostications or their therapeutic setbacks, cannot claim to be scientific. The argument rests on a series of debatable presuppositions, concerning both the relationship between the social sciences and the exact sciences, and the different forms of causality.