To the Editors:
Professor Schapiro is perfectly
entitled to disagree with my assessment of Trotsky’s ideas and
role in history [NYR,17 April 1980]. He is
equally entitled to reject my friends’ and my own concepts
about the need to overthrow capitalism, as traditionally
defended by Marx and his followers, in order to solve the world
crisis and build a classless society without oppression or
exploitation. But he is not entitled to grossly misrepresent
these concepts.
That is, however, what he has
done in his review of my book Trotsky, A Study in the
Dynamic of His Thought. He therein attributes to me the
following idea: “Faced with the obvious lack of revolutionary
fervor among the prosperous workers of the developed industrial
countries, the Trotskyists including Mandel have sought support
for revolution wherever it could be found – in national
liberation movements, among radical students, among supporters
of women’s liberation or from minority groups ... But it is
difficult to see the connection between an anarchical revolution
of students or oppressed minorities with anything that Marx
envisaged – unless you believe, as many Trotskyists presumably
do, that the destruction of capitalism is desirable at any
price, and in any manner.”
Nothing could be further from
my convictions, as clearly expressed in the above-mentioned book
and many other writings. While there seems to me nothing wrong
with giving support to movements in favor of defending any
sector of the oppressed, my friends and myself have stubbornly
clung to the basic concept of Marx, that only the working class,
i.e. the mass of all those forced to sell their labor power in
exchange of wages, unites the objective and subjective
conditions for building a socialist, i.e. classless society. We
have defended that idea throughout the long postwar boom, when
it was even less fashionable than it is today. We have been, and
continue to be heavily attacked for this “archeo-marxism,”
even in left circles. As early as 1964 I wrote that “even
under conditions of exceptional prosperity, revolutionary
explosions in Western Europe remain possible,” because, among
else. Capital can never “integrate” the workers as
producers, at the work place. The general strike of ten million
wage earners in May 1968 in France, the tremendous strike wave
in Italy in 1969, which involved twelve million workers, the
Portuguese revolution of 1974-1975, and the regional political
strikes in Spain in 1976 – which all occurred before the
turning of the economic tide in these respective countries –
rather confirmed these predictions.
During a lecture tour in the US
in 1968, I made a speech to the Socialist Scholars Conference
with the subject: On the revolutionary potential of the
working class, which I repeated in many universities. One
might or might not agree with my assessment that events since
1968 have borne out these concepts. But it serves no useful
purpose to polemicize not with an opponent’s ideas but with
ideas which are arbitrarily attributed to him.
Ernest Mandel
Brussels, Belgium
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