Blackwell Reference Online

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Born in Belgium, Ernest Mandel became a revolutionary Marxist as a teenager during World War II and participated in the resistance to the Nazi occupation. In the decades following the end of the war Mandel became one of the most prominent intellectual and political leaders of contemporary Trotskyism. The publication of Marxist Economic Theory (1968) , Late Capitalism (1975) , and Long Waves of Capitalist Development (1980) established his reputation as one of the world's foremost Marxist economists. In addition, Mandel developed a powerful critique of reformist strategies for socialism and defended the revolutionary Marxist political aims of smashing the capitalist state and creating a dictatorship of the proletariat in From Stalinism to Eurocommunism (1978) , Revolutionary Marxism Today (1979) , and Power and Money (1992) . Mandel's theoretical contributions and polemics on the question of socialist transformation in the advanced capitalist societies arguably constitute the most compelling defense of the Marxist case for revolution to appear in the past half-century. Throughout his career Mandel harshly criticized the authoritarianism, bureaucracy, and repression that had come to be associated with Marxist-Leninist regimes. But while Mandel considered existing workers' states to be deformed, he nonetheless recognized many of their economic and social achievements, ... log in or subscribe to read full text