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The Wconomist of 22/9/62 contained the following review lMandel's Traite d'iconomie Marxiste. Mandel will be known to readers of the Bulletin as the editor of ba Gauche the Belgian left-wing socialist weckly, he spoke at Kessingland camp getting by far the best reception. We understand that question of getting this work translated into imglish and published in Britain is in hand, no doubt this review will assist this process:
“Marxist economic theory has in the last few decades presented a picture of stagnation and decay. Continental Social-Democrats, German and French have openly renounced the doctrine as antiquated and have yielded some sort of a monopoly on Marxism to Moscow. In Soviet hands the theory has turned into quasiecclesiastical canon and undergone almost complete ossification. True, more recently fresh tnuought has stirred under the dogmatic crusts, but it has not zyet had enough vigour to break through.
"However (as a writer in the Times Literary Supplement has‘ remarked) in communism as in Christianity the doctrine is alive not in the church but in the heresies. M. Mandel, a Belgian socialist, is obviously’a heretic: the guardians of the Muscovite ortho@xy would certaif” excomminicate him as a "revisionist" and "Trotskyist". He is in fact heavily indebted for his ideas to Trotsky and other anti-Stalinist Marxists, to whom he should have frankly acknowledged his debt. But he is an independent thinker, combining an exceptionally wide erudition with a remarkable lucidity and fluency of expression. His treatise is by far the best popularisaticon of Marx's economic theory that has appeared for forty or fifty years; and it is far more than that - an ambitious, and largely successful attempt to bring the doctrine up to date. The author tests, for instance, ingels's theory on the origins of family, property and state against the rich findings of mcdern ethnology. He rostates the theory of "Das Kapital" replacing Marx's Victorian facts and statistics by contemporary empirical material. \Vhere Marx's analysis, of necessity, centred on western Liurope or rather on Ingland M. Mandel surveys the rise and fall of cconomic systems, pre-bourgeois and bourse eois, on a global scale. In a most instructive series of chapters he assesses the changes in western capitalism that have occurred since the days whea Hobson, Hilferding and Lenin presented their views on imperialism. His ideas on the "transitional economy" and on the function and future of political economy will startle many readers — he expounds them in the brilliant and provocative style of classical Merxism.
"The ticeatise also has its weaknesses, It just fails to come to grips with the "theory of crises" and the problems which the postwar trade cycles present to the Marxist. (lf. Mandel, howover, argues quite cogently that our economy is periodically confronted by the choice between slump and inflation and that inflation may in the long run become a factor of social instability almost as great as was tho old type of slump. ) The section on the Soviet economy is unfortunately all too sketchy and indeed outdated: it ingores nearly all the changes that have occurred in the course of the post-Stalin decade. Connoisseurs of Marx will miss in lM. Mandel's exposition the philosophical profundity of the originals: but others may prefer the "Cartesian" style of the Traite to Hegelian dialectics, But whatever its weaknesses, no student can afford to ignore this very important work. It is to be hoped that an inglish edition will be available soon,"