What if capitalism’s greatest weakness—structural crisis—is only half the story? What if the other half isn’t economics at all, but politics? Ernest Mandel’s final answer to that question might transform how you think about building movements today.
For decades, Ernest Mandel was known for one monumental achievement: mapping the deep laws of motion of global capitalism. Late Capitalism and Long Waves of Capitalist Development remain the most sophisticated Marxist analysis of how the post-war world economy generates crisis almost mechanically—through the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, through cycles of overaccumulation, through the system’s desperate need for military spending to absorb surplus capital that cannot find profitable outlets.
But Mandel’s final public act—a debate with the Spartacist League in New York City in November 1994, just months before his death—reveals something his economic works only imply. That rigorous analysis of capitalism’s structural contradictions logically demands a corresponding rigor in how revolutionaries practice organization. You cannot study the system scientifically while fragmenting the movements that fight it.
This insight connects Mandel’s two seemingly separate projects: the meticulously detailed economic analysis and the late-career polemic against sectarianism. They are not separate. They are one argument.
The Paradox That Changes Everything
Mandel’s economic framework contains a crucial paradox that most readers miss. On one hand, he demonstrates with chilling precision that capitalism is structurally prone to crisis. Crises are not accidents or policy mistakes. They are endogenous to the system—generated by its own internal logic, as inevitable as gravity.
But here is where Mandel breaks decisively with mechanical Marxism: the resolution of that crisis, the transition from downward spiral to new expansion, is not economically determined. It is political. It depends entirely on the subjective factor—the organization, consciousness, and strategic capacity of the international working class.
This means something radical. The economic analysis shows that capitalism must break down. But whether that breakdown leads to barbarism or socialism, to renewed capitalist expansion built on intensified exploitation, or to revolutionary transformation, depends entirely on whether workers can unite to seize the crisis as an opportunity.
If economics dictates only the downturn, then politics becomes a structural economic necessity. You cannot separate them. The depth of your analysis of capitalism’s crisis must be matched by an equal depth of analysis of how movements either facilitate or prevent working-class unity.
Which is precisely where sectarianism becomes a problem that is not primarily ethical, but strategic.
Why Sectarianism Mirrors Capital’s Logic
Most left critiques of sectarianism approach it as a character flaw—a personality disorder among some particularly dogmatic groups. But Mandel’s analysis offers something more powerful and more damning: sectarianism reflects capitalism’s own competitive, fragmented logic. It is the left unconsciously mirroring the very system it claims to oppose.
Capitalism divides workers by skill, by geography, by sector. It creates artificial scarcity of resources, markets, technological rents. It forces rival capitalists to compete fiercely over territory, advantage, access to profitable sectors. Left organizations that accept this logic—that compete for members, for status, for the title of “most correct,” that engage in mutual denunciations rather than principled debate—are replicating capital’s fragmenting dynamic.
The Spartacists embodied this perfectly. Every year they published more pages, organized more interventions, built a more impressive library. Yet they had built nothing real. They mistook competitive denunciation of other left groups for revolutionary work. They confused loyalty to their particular interpretation of Marx and Lenin with loyalty to actually building power in the working class.
Mandel’s point was not that the Spartacists were simply wrong about some theoretical question. It was that their practice—their method of fragmenting the left through sectarian denunciation, their substitution of doctrinal purity for mass work, their organizational isolation—actively weakened the entire revolutionary movement at precisely the moment when structural crisis should create the conditions for growth.
This is the connection that changes everything. If the resolution of capitalist crisis depends on working-class unity, and if sectarianism prevents that unity by replicating capital’s own fragmented logic, then sectarianism is not a moral failing. It is a structural obstacle to revolutionary success.
What This Means for Practice Today
We live in a world where Mandel’s analysis has proven prescient and alarming. The structural profitability crisis he described has deepened. The permanent arms economy that was supposed to manage that crisis through military spending now faces fiscal limits—$29 trillion in US national debt, nearly $1 trillion in annual interest payments on that debt. The system cannot indefinitely finance the weaponry that keeps it afloat.
Geopolitical tensions are escalating not because politicians are uniquely aggressive, but because competing imperial powers are fighting over access to technologies (semiconductors, artificial intelligence, green energy) that offer hope of temporary super-profits in a stagnating system. The ecological crisis imposes material limits that no market mechanism can solve. The working class faces simultaneous pressures from inflation, austerity, job insecurity, and ecological breakdown.
The conditions for radicalization are objectively present. People are feeling the pressure. But Mandel’s analysis screams that objective pressure alone is not enough. The subjective factor has to rise to the challenge. The left has to demonstrate the same level of rigor, seriousness, and clarity in building unified movements as Mandel demonstrated in analyzing capitalism’s contradictions.
Yet what do we see? Fragmentation. Competing sects. Social media pile-ons over whose interpretation of permanent revolution or revolutionary democracy is “correct.” Multiple organizations claiming to be the “real” vanguard. Brilliant analysis produced in isolation, never reaching mass audiences because the movements are too divided to amplify each other’s message.
Mandel would recognize this as defeat-in-motion. Not because the analysis is wrong, but because the practice prevents that analysis from becoming a material force.
The Unfinished Question
Mandel’s life work posed a question his own era did not fully answer. Given that capitalism’s structural crisis is inevitable, will the left learn to operate with the unity and rigor necessary to channel that crisis toward revolution? Or will we repeat the historical defeats of the 1920s, the 1930s, the 1960s, when objective crises went unresolved because movements were too fragmented to act decisively?
He spent his final months confronting sectarianism directly, not as an academic side project, but as the culmination of his strategic thinking. This was his legacy to us.
The question is whether we are ready to learn it.
This podcast offers something rare: a serious engagement with Mandel’s economic analysis—the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, the role of the permanent arms economy, the distinction between capitalism and degenerated workers’ states—but framed entirely around the strategic argument he was making at the end of his life. It connects the dots between structural economic crisis and the question of revolutionary practice.
Listen for the moment when the analysis shifts from economics to strategy. Listen for how the framework Mandel built to understand capitalism actually demands a particular form of organizing. And listen for the question that hangs over everything: Will we learn this lesson, or repeat the historical defeats fueled by fragmentation?
That question is not theoretical. It is the most practical question facing the left today.
