Ernest Mandel, Jew And Trotskyist
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Ernest Mandel, who died at the age of seventy-two on July 20th, was possessed of outstanding talents as thinker, speaker and political leader, in a combination that has become rarer as the century has progressed. He was one of the world's leading Marxist economists, and author of more than twenty books published in as many languages, yet never pursued an academic career. He was an inspiring speaker in half-a-dozen languages and an indefatigable campaigner and organizer. He passionately defended the ideas of Leon Trotsky at a time when this was both unpopular and dangerous and he was a leading member of the Fourth International for over four decades. Yet, in contrast to many leaders of groupuscules, he was possessed of a lofty outlook and commanded affection, respect and admiration from wide layers of the Left. Perhaps more than any other single person he was the educator of the new generation recruited to Marxism and revolutionary politics by the student revolts of the sixties, especially in Europe and the Americas. For several years the United States, France, West Germany, Switzerland and Australia denied him entry, deeming his very presence a threat to 'national security'. His Introduction to Marxist Economic Theory ( 1968 ) sold half a million copies worldwide. For over thirty years Ernest Mandel was a regular contributor to New Left Review and Verso was proud to be the publisher of many of his books. His friendly admonitions and irrepressible optimism will be sorely missed.

Ernest Mandel was born to Belgian Jewish parents who had emigrated from Poland at the turn of the century. In the remarkable extract from an interview which we publish here Mandel describes his early contact with a Trotskyist group before the outbreak of war and his experiences in the Resistance and in a German prison camp. Following the end of the war he studied at the University of Brussels and the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris. His first major work was a two volume Treatise on Marxist Economics (published in French in 1962 and in English in 1967) though he had already made his mark as a gifted polemicist, contributing, under the name Ernest Germaine, both to Trotskyist disputes and to the debate in Les Temps Modernes aroused by Jean-Paul Sartre's Les Communistes et la Paix. Mandel's Marxism was attractive to the new team at NLR in the early sixties because it was focused on current politics and informed by wide
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Communist front man, Jew, multilingual, trouble maker.