In the remarkable series of interviews that makes up his new book, Ernest Mandel sets out a comprehensive analysis of the contemporary world scene and the opportunities it affords for a revolutionary breakthrough to socialist democracy. Mandel begins with a discussion of the economic and social dynamics of the advanced capitalist societies of Western Europe in a period of crisis, and the strategy necessary to confront the bourgeois-democratic institutions which typically dominate their political life. The sequence of anti-imperialist upheavals in the Third World since 1945 forms the topic of the second interview, centred on an elaboration of Trotsky’s theory of ‘permanent revolution’. Mandel then turns to the societies of the East in which capitalism has already been overthrown. In one of the most sustained Marxist reflections in many years on the nature and evolution of these societies - most notably the Soviet Union - he stresses their transitional character and affirms the possibility and necessity of an anti-bureaucratic political revolution as the only means of attaining full proletarian democracy within them. The fourth interview integrates the themes of these discussions into an overall survey of global politics since the War, delineating the main lines of force and fracture of class struggle in the modern era. Mandel analyses the nature of the Second World War, the Cold War and the ‘long boom’; considers the peculiar situation of the working classes of the United States and Japan; and, in conclusion, outlines the programme and perspectives of his own organization, the Fourth International, and the socialism for which it fights today.
Edited and introduced by a fellow-militant of the FI, Jon Rothschild, Revolutionary Marxism Today provides a unique synoptic view of the common cause of socialism throughout the world.
