Against Capitalism and Bureaucracy: Ernest Mandel's Theoretical Contributions

The first comprehensive overview of the theoretical and political contributions of Belgian Trotskyist, Ernest Mandel. Ernest Mandel (1923-1995) was one of the best-known Marxist scholars of the second half of the twentieth century. He participated in the underground resistance to the Nazi occupation of Belgium, became a leading member of the Fourth International, and his books on capitalist economics, bureaucracies in the workers' movement, and power and socialist strategy were translated into dozens of languages. In Against Capitalism and Bureaucracy, Manuel Kellner examines Mandel's life and work, finding that a red thread of democratic self-organization of workers ran through all of his thinking. Kelnner argues that this insistence on working class activity, and Mandel's work in general, remain of paramount importance for the debates on a socialist alternative in the twenty-first century.