Love and Revolution

It is more pleasant and useful to go through the 'experience of the revolution' than to write about it

— V.I. Lenin, The State and Revolution'

The progressive revival of the I 960s, which in Belgium began with the general strike of 1960-61, brought with it a renewal of the connection between struggle and theoretical 'debate, a connection that had been lost during the interwar 'darkness at noon' of Stalinism.

Although Marxist critical thought had not been entirely silenced, as shown by the works of Cornelius Castoriadis and Paul Sweeny, Gramsci's Pn:son Notebooks and Karl Korsch's later work, in academia it had been marginalized, confined to the domains of aesthetics and philosophy.² In the 1960s such publishers as Maspero in France and Feltrinelli in Italy redis­covered the heterodox political literature that had long been on Stalin's index. Creative Marxist thought emerged from the shadow of the uni­versities and stimulated — in addition to the debates about neo-capitalism and the role of the proletariat — thinking about decolonization, revolution and post-capitalist society, the Soviet Union and China, Algeria and Cuba.

In Marxist Economic Theory Mandel had examined the economics of transitional societies.³ The sociologist Pierre Naville encouraged him to pursue the subject further. Naville was preparing to republish New Economics (first published in 1923), an analysis of the Soviet economy by Yevgeni Preobrazhensky, who had been killed by Stalin in 1937.⁴ He asked Mandel. to write a foreword.⁵ Central to the book was the question of what dynamic would arise in an agricultural society in transition from capitalism to socialism and what sources of socialist accumulation would be available. Mandel wrote that Preobrazhensky had made possible an economic policy free of pragmatism and iempiricism.⁶ This book's publication contributed to the economic debate in Cuba.





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