First of all, I want to thank you for the invitation. It is an honour to comment on this reissue of Ernest Mandel’s Introduction to Marxism.

Although I do not see myself as a ‘Mandelist’ and do not hold a party card of the Fourth International (let alone a party card of any other Marxist party or organisation!), I can think of few authors who have left such a deep mark on my Marxism.

It is a supple, somewhat intellectual Marxism — some will call it opportunistic. But it is a Marxism. For that reason I owe the Mandelians a talk.

Mandel fascinates, especially today. In many respects he seems a twentieth-century fabulous beast — a mythological creature from a time when political animals could still speak.

That fabulous quality comes out in an anecdote. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Trotsky was asked by one of the supporters of the Bund, the organisation of Jewish workers, whether he felt more Russian or more Jewish. Trotsky answered as follows:

“I am neither Russian nor Jew. I am a social democrat.”

Non-Jewish Jew

That was before the collapse of the Second International in 1914, when the international workers’ movement still united Vandervelde, Lenin and MacDonald in its ranks and Kautsky was not yet a ‘renegade’.

I have found no passages in Mandel’s work that refer to this anecdote. Those who know and appreciate his work will recognise him in it all the same. Mandel confronts us with something that has become rare today: the ‘political animal’, as Aristotle called it, a zoön politikon, who built his identity on an ideology, not on inherited characteristics such as ethnicity, birthplace or nation.

In that sense he was a ‘non-Jewish Jew’, as his fellow Trotskyist Isaac Deutscher put it: someone who, precisely because of his Jewish origins, was capable of a universalism that only became truly possible within modernity. That made them powerful and vulnerable at the same time.

It goes without saying that both Mandel and Deutscher rejected every form of Jewish particularism. That would reverse the emancipation of Jews within modernity and saddle them with a national distinctiveness (‘giving back’ is an ideological category). The most striking, and probably most tragic, example of this was Zionism, which today is reaching its painful terminus.

That is not the train Mandel boarded, nor Trotsky or Deutscher (or Marx). Although their train did not really reach the terminus they hoped for, the fact that they once had a different destination in mind for their Jewishness, namely absorption into a universal humanity rather than a specific nation, is all the more important today. The paroxysms of Zionism show that the refusal of the universal, or the pursuit of a ‘Jewish Jewishness’, is a dubious undertaking.

Mandel was not only a Jew. He was also a Belgian — even the most translated Belgian after Simenon, as the announcement for this book points out. The indeterminacy was therefore twofold: Belgian and Jewish, both inviting internationalism. Belgium is in itself a rather stepmotherly fatherland, so the non-Jewish Jew had to look for a community elsewhere. And that is what he did: Mandel is the best proof that being Flemish or Belgian need by no means be synonymous with provincialism.

Biography

Besides Jew and Belgian, Mandel was something else: a Marxist, more specifically a Trotskyist. The fortunes of Trotskyism, as a revolutionary movement outside the state but inside institutions, overlap strongly with Mandel’s private life. For some, the latter did not really exist, at least if we are to believe certain biographers.

That also makes a biography of Mandel no easy task. Stutje tried, but I have to admit that his later work, such as the recent biography of Hendrik De Man, is better. His work on Mandel was (rightly) not warmly received by fellow Trotskyists who had known Mandel, among them Tariq Ali. That biography is somewhat disappointing.

There are reasons for that difficulty. A revolutionary life resists coherent character portraits. Mandel’s teacher Trotsky saw this clearly. He described life as a revolutionary in the following terms (in Literature and Revolution):

Life in Revolution is camp life… everything is unusual, temporary, transitional, recognizing its temporariness and expressing this everywhere, even in names. Hence the difficulty of an artistic approach. The transitory and the episodic have in them an element of the accidental and the accidental bears the stamp of insignificance. The Revolution, taken episodically, appears quite insignificant. Where Is the Revolution, then?

Scrapbook

My ambition in this talk is twofold: on the one hand an anthology of Mandel’s work, a personal anthology in any case, asking what in his oeuvre is alive and less alive in 2026. That means quoting and paraphrasing, so I ask forgiveness for the long paragraphs. This is my scrapbook from the Mandel omnibus. I assume I have a receptive audience for that.

On the other hand, I also want to deal with the question marks in his thinking. I do that in three parts. I want to begin with a first part on Mandel’s historical materialism, more specifically what he called ‘parametric determinism’.

Then I want to look at a practical application of it. That involves a question that occupies a great deal of political science: what effect does an individual have on collective processes? And what does that imply for one of the most contested habits of the Marxist, namely the tendency to prediction, for many a form of astrology? Especially when Marxists announce a new world crisis or imminent world revolution at every turn.

Then, as a third point, I want to approach this more biographically — above all Mandel’s unbending optimism, or the ‘hope against hope’ of which the Soviet dissident Nadezhda Mandelstam once spoke. That sometimes took quixotic forms, especially regarding what was then still regarded as the most important working class of the twentieth century — the German one.

Taxonomy of the Soviet Union

That also relates to his Trotskyism, with its specific ‘bureaucratic’ theory of the Soviet Union. The age-old question of classification — what was the Soviet Union: state capitalism, bureaucratic collectivism, or neo-feudalism? — now seems a thing of the past. Yet it has lost little of its pertinence. Marxists who pretend that this question is easy today are deceiving themselves, in my opinion.

The taxonomy of the Soviet Union is also an indicator of the heterodox Marxism one adheres to. Such Trotskyism is also subject to the typical contradictions that have marked every schismatic opposition movement since the Reformation: the difficult relationship with the mother church, which is both enemy and model.

Imagine the reaction of Protestants if the Vatican collapsed and was turned into an amusement park. That was more or less the Trotskyist reaction to 1989: the long-hoped-for revolution against the Soviet bureaucracy took place, but did not lead to a new workers’ state. Instead there came a planet united in the market, with the US as its arrogant guardian.

For a long time Trotskyists, Mandel among them, thought that the disgust with the political class that followed from this carried a revolutionary potential. Thirty years on, that diagnosis seems somewhat improbable, not to say mistaken.

Finally, then, I want to talk about the limits of Mandel’s worldview, and about what he, purely speculatively, would have found exciting about the present moment. I also want to talk about what would probably have filled him with less joy and even with disgust.

A contemporary reading of Mandel

I do not want to engage in political ventriloquism — I take responsibility for every interpretation — but it pays to read Mandel explicitly as a contemporary. What does he tell us about the year 2026, with its new Cold War, new politicisation and new Marxist thought and action, which has after all survived the end of history and continues its march in fits and starts? “History is a good deal cleverer than all these clever gentlemen put together,” Lenin once said. That holds even more today.

For when we reread Mandel today, we experience a Verfremdungseffekt: some things feel very familiar to us, aggressively pertinent even, while others seem outdated or archaic, finds from a bygone era. There is first of all the versatility: work on Marxist economics, the Second World War, Belgium, even a materialist book on crime novels.

Parametric determinism

Under this heading falls what we can now call revolutionary optimism. That optimism presupposed a certain capacity for prediction. That skill is generally regarded as suspect in today’s social science. But for Trotsky and Mandel — and, I must admit, for me personally too — it certainly belongs to the core principles of historical materialism.

That comes with some conditions. Mandel argued in various writings, including the book we are presenting, that genuine Marxism is a ‘parametric determinism’. By this he meant the idea summed up by Marx in that well-known sentence from The Eighteenth Brumaire that ‘men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances’. There are determining parameters, but within parameters there are in themselves no fixed options. That is the core of the historical freedom that Marx, Mandel and Trotsky advocated.

We need not give an extensive lesson in social theory here. But it pays to set out a few basic points. Broadly speaking, then, history has a logic, a grammar, but which statements it will make, what wild twists it will take across those long curves, is in itself unpredictable. And that is just as well, according to Mandel: human beings are free beings, and only people who are completely formatted are predictable. Then they provide fodder for econometrics.

When real history takes place, and people become the subject rather than the object of historical change, that will produce precisely unpredictable results. Unpredictable, however, does not yet mean arbitrary. People are free precisely because they have structures; agency arises within limits. Mandel also tried to build these basic insights into his non-deterministic — so I am not saying anti-deterministic, but non-deterministic — Marxism. For me that is also the greatest merit of the book we are reissuing today.

So let us say something about that ‘parametric determinism’. It is a probabilism rather than a mechanical determinism; the base lays out certain options, but does not yet prescribe options or determine in a one-sided sense. For me that is still the most elegant articulation of Marxism I have ever come across. I quote a critique by Mandel from 1982 (“How To Make No Sense of Marx”), in which he criticises a book from the school of so-called analytical Marxism:

Dialectical determinism as opposed to mechanical, or formal-logical determinism, is also parametric determinism; it permits the adherent of historical materialism to understand the real place of human action in the way the historical process unfolds and the way the outcome of social crises is decided. Men and women indeed make their own history. The outcome of their actions is not mechanically predetermined. Most, if not all, historical crises have several possible outcomes, not innumerable fortuitous or arbitrary ones; that is why we use the expression ‘parametric determinism’ indicating several possibilities within a given set of parameters.

For Mandel this naturally also had some clear political consequences.

The role of the personality

Marxism also has a true perception of the ambivalence of social/political inaction and action… Neither Hitler nor Stalin was an inevitable product of historical developments. Nor were their victories inevitable. They came as the end result of chains of actions and reactions, in which the absence of action by certain social forces played key roles. (Mandel, “How To Make No Sense of Marx”)

In this he was only taking up a classic idea of Engels, who formulated it as follows (letter to W. Borgius, 25 January 1894):

Men make their history themselves, but not as yet with a collective will or according to a collective plan or even in a definitely defined, given society. Their efforts clash, and for that very reason all such societies are governed by necessity, which is supplemented by and appears under the forms of accident… That such and such a man and precisely that man arises at that particular time in that given country is of course pure accident. But cut him out and there will be a demand for a substitute, and this substitute will be found… if a Napoleon had been lacking, another would have filled the place… Caesar, Augustus, Cromwell, etc. So with all the other accidents, and apparent accidents, of history. The further the particular sphere which we are investigating is removed from the economic sphere and approaches that of pure abstract ideology, the more shall we find it exhibiting accidents in its development, the more will its curve run in a zig-zag.

That brings us to a second theme, also touched on by Engels in the letter. A parametric determinism naturally comes with a specific view of the individual in history, in which history presents options to individuals who have themselves been shaped by that same history. As Alex puts it [in his foreword to this reissue]: “‘Historical necessity’ does not supply historical actors with specific conclusions. Rather, the general law asserts itself in particular developments. It is amid changing, particular circumstances that socialists have to make choices and act.” As Mandel noted in a well-known piece for the New Left Review, in which he took up some ideas of the early Russian Marxist Plekhanov:

Hitler as a political figure is the result of a specific concatenation of circumstances: the ruin of small shopkeepers, mass unemployment among the officer class, the destruction of small savings accounts by inflation, the antisemitic fear of competition among doctors and lawyers with few clients, the overproduction of surplus academics, etc. After 1918 there were literally hundreds of potential Hitlers and Himmlers walking around in Germany.

The individual has an impact, but has to contend with the larger structures, and as a soloist has to respond to what the symphony of history offers. That is both an optimistic and a modest conclusion.

Revolutionary optimism

That inevitably brings us to the third theme: Mandel’s revolutionary optimism, which strikes us today as so untimely. In his memoirs of 1930 Trotsky stated that “without a broad historical forecast (he could) imagine neither political nor intellectual activity.” Mandel agreed.

Well, in 1991 a comrade of Mandel’s, Daniel Bensaïd, who also contributed a foreword to this new edition of the Introduction, made a prediction. As a leader of the French section of the Fourth International and a former figurehead of the sixty-eight movement, he took a gloomy view of humanity’s future. “In the match of the century between socialism and barbarism,” he said, “the latter has taken a lead of a few lengths. We are entering the twenty-first century with less hope than our forebears had on the threshold of the twentieth.” (Jeanne de guerre lasse, 1991)

Two years earlier the Berlin Wall had fallen — an event that also left a bitter aftertaste for the European left. Although most left-wing parties had always been critical of the Soviet Union, many experienced 1989 as a disaster.

In Italy the Communist Party collapsed overnight. With it vanished the memory of what had once been one of the largest parties of post-war Europe, which in the 1970s had still stood within a short distance of state power. In England the British Labour leader Tony Blair struck the so-called ‘Clause Four’ from the party programme, which since 1906 had advocated a “socialisation of the productive forces”. The French Parti Socialiste, under Jacques Delors, turned fully to the construction of a neoliberal European Union.

In the 1970s Mandel had still argued against Poulantzas that European integration would soon take a qualitative leap. A European superstate would emerge, leading to an independent pole in the new world order. A harbinger of the ‘united socialist states of Europe’ about which Trotsky had speculated in the 1920s.

That seemed plausible for a moment in the 1990s, but was soon belied. Europe never became a superstate. It always remained an incoherent huddle of national elites. Today it is more and more an American vassal.

In 1989 Mandel also thought that the protests against the Soviet dictatorship would usher in the long-promised revolution against the bureaucracy — in East Germany too. That would make possible a socialism without apparatchiks. According to Trotsky and Mandel, the Soviet state resembled a large, corrupt trade union: not a capitalist class society, but a conservative union in which a red officialdom had drawn all power to itself. Trade unions had to be critically supported, but above all democratised — just like the Soviet Union.

Mandel applied the same formula to the dissident movements in Eastern Europe. In a text from 1989 (“Making Revolution: The Rebirth of East German Socialism”) he writes:

It is the greatest chance for democratic socialism… since 1918… The superpowers are afraid of the contamination that could spread from East Germany to the rest of Europe and to their own homelands… If the East German people don’t want to exchange bureaucratic despotism for the despotism of the market, if they don’t want reunification – that is, absorption into a capitalist West Germany – it is their perfect right to make that choice.

It turned out differently; thirty years later Germany is still ‘unequally united’, as one sociologist described it. Where did that misjudgement come from?

A few reasons come to mind. The English Marxist James Heartfield, for instance, argued that many Trotskyists saw the disgust with official politics as a revolutionary opportunity that could easily be radicalised to the left. But the collapse of the Soviet bloc did not usher in an era of revolution, rather a shift to the right on a planetary scale. The German revolution that had still seemed close in 1918-1919 and 1945 did not happen.

Even reformism is not what it used to be. ‘Reforms’ today are above all an alibi for social demolition. That is even more evident in the members of the Fourth International who did venture into state power. Here too an anecdote comes in handy…

Where had he seen the man before? Tariq Ali — the well-known British writer and Trotskyist intellectual — asked himself that a few years ago. On a Belgian train journey he had ended up sitting opposite a man of his own age. The man had been eyeing him for some time. When he looked back, the man covered his face.

Only when they both got off the train did the man offer some clarification. “You don’t recognise me, Tariq,” he is supposed to have said, “and that’s just as well. I used to be a Trotskyist in Belgium and was in the same international organisation as you. Now I am minister of public health in the current Belgian government.”

Ali was taken aback. “Well, that’s something,” he replied, “you could have been minister of finance or defence, something to hide your face for. But are you doing anything decent?” “That’s for you to judge,” the minister replied.

It does not take us Belgians much effort to recognise the fellow passenger from Ali’s anecdote, especially in the light of his participation in the current government. Frank Vandenbroucke, now minister of public health for the second time, has, like Ali, a past in the Fourth International. Ali had still known Mandel as a fellow Trotskyist; during their time he must also have run into Vandenbroucke.

Belgian connections

Mandel’s Belgian connections must not go unmentioned here. As early as the beginning of the 1960s he argued that Belgian society was “a living illustration of the law of uneven development which has dominated the whole history of capitalism.” For him the “present structural crisis of the Belgian economy is a direct consequence of the fact that Belgium was the first industrialized country in continental Europe.” (New Left Review, 1963) In the 1950s Mandel had himself made his own contribution to reflections on that crisis in the Belgian economy.

In a report for the ABVV he wrote about the need for so-called ‘structural reforms’, as against the short-sighted policies of the holding companies. Mandel agreed with a tactic of public investment; later he was accused of class collaboration and of illusory hopes in a ‘dynamic’ capitalism that condemned the working class to a coalition with technocrats.

For Ali and Mandel the old faith had never lost its force. With Vandenbroucke, of course, things were different. After the Agusta scandal he studied at Oxford and became an advocate of an ‘active’ welfare state. In Conner Rousseau’s renovated Vooruit he then found a home as an administrator, the familiar trajectory of the ex-communist.

Something of the radical past shows in Vandenbroucke’s pride in the capital gains tax, the crowning achievement of a contested participation in government. The tax is supposed to raise 500 million. Against that, after all, stand billions in cuts in other areas. On migration, Vooruit has already swallowed stricter conditions on family reunification. Then there is the time limit on unemployment benefits.

For Mandel the dilemma within the Belgian workers’ movement was still between reformism and revolution. Today, after thirty years of shifting to the right, there is no question of that split any more. The choice is now rather between taking part in right-wing governments that have their own idea of what ‘reforms’ entail, or total abstinence.

It is unfair to treat Vandenbroucke as the main example of ‘really existing Trotskyism’. That does sound very familiar, if not Stalinising.

Mandel today

But how would Mandel have looked at the present, beyond Vandenbroucke’s brisk reformism?

In the 1990s Mandel was confused by the wave of depoliticisation that swept across the capitalist world. There were now few historical guarantees for Marxists. Some spoke not only of the ‘end of history’ but also of the ‘end of revolution’ — the life project of Mandel and his generation. Marxists know a thing or two about personal crises of faith, the ‘dark night of the soul’ in Christianity. But this one was extraordinarily demanding. Was there still room for a Marxist theory of history in an era that had proclaimed the end of that very history?

Those were the questions of the 1990s. Today we do have some answers. Marxism has survived the end of history. Politicisation is back, the long post-political ice age of the 1990s is over; some even speak of repoliticisation and of a phenomenon called ‘hyperpolitics’. That hyperpolitics shows that Westerners are once again interested in political questions and that the critique of capitalism can once again be practised openly. The idea that capitalism is prone to crisis, one of Mandel’s core points, has today become a public cliché, even in the bourgeois press — just open a page of De Tijd.

How sweet the revenge of history can taste! Sometimes Marxists simply have to be patient.

The new hyperpolitics, however, is institutionally feeble: much mobilisation but no solid counter-power (I am trying not to advertise a book too much).

A Marxist theory of history, such as Mandel propagates, is relevant again in an era after the end of history. But Mandel’s mantra, that political commitment means little without an institutional framework, is also a lesson for the present. Trotsky could still say that he felt neither Russian nor Jewish, but a social democrat. That was only possible because there was a party with that name. It handed out membership cards.

Mandel, with his lifelong commitment to party politics, had that insight too. It is a truth to which the present is all too indifferent: without institutions, and more specifically without guiding bodies such as parties, anti-capitalist politics is a permanent waiting for Godot.

“I can’t go on like this,” says one character in Beckett’s play at a certain point. “That’s what you think,” replies the other. Such is life under capitalism without a workers’ opposition, Mandel knew. That is precisely why we must keep reading him today, in good times and in bad.

Thank you for listening, and I hope you enjoy this reissue as much as I do.