'RECESSION SEEMS TO HAVE ENDED' SAYS MANDEL
1973Cliff SlaughterRevisionism and the left groupsEconomic crisis Read the scan at ETOL (PDF) →Read from the scan by machine and not corrected: headlines and words can be misread, and a caption or advert can run into the text. For anything you quote, read the scan.
BY CLIFF SLAUGHTER "The international capitalist recession seems to have ended.' No this is not the •Wall Street Journal' speaking, trying to bolster up confidence in the midst of international monetary turmoil and falling stock prices.
It is Ernest Mandel, leader of the Pabloite 'Unified Secretariat' the body which falsely claims to be Trotskyist.
Mandel is writing in the current issue of 'Intercontinental Press', weekly organ of the Unified Secretariat, edited by Joseph Hansen.
It was Mandel wno througn- Te out the boom peddled most determinedly the 'theory' of 'neo-capitalism'. According to this conception, post-war capitalism had changed fundamentally; because of a new 'technological revolution' and state intervention, capitalism was no longer prone to crisis and slump. It could be 'structurally reformed' to make it more pleasant for the workers. In everything but name this was merely a rehash of the old Fabian theory of reformism.
But it is clear that the more the capitalist crisis is deepened, the more Marxism is confirmed by the chaos reigning in the world's money markets, the more Mandel and his fellow revisionists intended to cling to their discredited theories.
in...or Www.nad • 108;30 Freshly printed dollars In Washingt pace with the rapid rise in prices.' For Mandel, inflation is not a class matter, but a purely technical matter. The capitalists can, it seems, 'avoid a crisis by continuing their inflationary policies!
Again he deliberately mis: samdi Saii on and Mandel (Inset) doesn't think t pare for the sharpest trade and money crises.
Mandel also clearly seeks to cut the struggle of the working class down to economic, syndicalist proportions. For him the struggle is purely over 'onthe-job' economic questions.
He consciously ignores the political and offensive content istian... here & a crisis. lutionary politics and limit their struggle to purely economic level.
How does this revisionist see the 1970s? They are certainly not going to be years of revolutionary struggle for power, according to his prognosis. i so. as i proposing that the workers fight on a purely minimum programme.
He rejects, even in words, the basis of both the Third International, as founded by Lenin and Trotsky, and the Fourth International; bodies based upon the Transitional Programme, one which fights