I spent a good chunk of the afternoon watching l’Etabli, the film of Robert Linhart’s book (which I own but have never read). It is an arresting depiction of the brutality of the assembly-line and the racalialised hierarchies at work in the factory. The theme of the film is of a Maoist cadre from an academic and privileged background (in philosophy!) who enters the factory to foment resistance and revolution and finds that it is a lot tougher than he had perhaps imagined. But an opportunity presents itself when the Citroen management decide to make the workers toil unpaid for an extra three-quarters of an hour each day to “repay” the gains they’d made in May and June 1968. He helps to lead a strike and watches as the his new comrades are picked off by management and their goons, as immigrant workers are threatened with deportation and they are all subjected to acts of petty humiliation. A year later, we see him lecturing on Hegel at the University of Vincennes (later, I believe, dismantled by the French authorities as a hotbed of leftism).
The film is available to watch for free here (under “Drama”)
It reminded me a little of the Fourth International (Mandel version)’s policy of sending its students and white-collar workers into the “industrial working class” a decade later. Just as the industrial working class was actually disappearing from Western Europe and North America, they decided it was (as previously announced by Marxist theory) central to the struggle to overthrow capitalism. Some of my friends did end up in a car factory in Oxford, from which they were very soon fired once their identities became known. Others gave up good jobs in health and education but failing to find factory jobs ended up working in public transport. One of them I remember absolutely loved being a train driver compared the anxiety and stress of their previous school-teaching life. As for me, I was torn between my misplaced allegiance to the organisation (which in the UK at the time was the International Marxist Group then the Socialist League) and my conviction that this was all a dreadful mistake. So I took the path of least resistance and decided to carry on being a student (a postgraduate one) until the madness blew over. And so I ended up as a political philosopher in a university rather than whatever else I might have become (a lawyer, I suspect).
{ 32 comments }
Ray Vinmad 12.07.25 at 12:02 am
I will look for that. ‘Blue Collar’ by Paul Schrader is another movie about how management crushes unions and turns people in them against one another. Perhaps a cynical movie but worth the watch.
wp200 12.07.25 at 7:39 am
The Mandel inspired revolutionaries are still chugging along.
https://www.iire.org/index.php/
They used to own a townhouse in the south of Amsterdam (I lived next to them as a student), but they have since moved to the east of Amsterdam.
The means of production are about to be seized… any moment.
LFC 12.07.25 at 3:56 pm
The 1976 English translation of Capital vol. 1 that I read in college carries a long introduction by Mandel, which I think is the only thing I’ve ever read by him. When the new translation of Capital v. 1 was published last year (by Princeton Univ. Press), one or two reviewers remarked on the difference between Mandel’s intro and the intro to this new trans., which is by Wendy Brown.
Chris Bertram 12.07.25 at 4:15 pm
@LFC, inevitably, I’ve read quite a bit by him. On the one hand, most of his output is considerably less wooden than that of most leaders of Trotskyist groups. On the other, it is still pretty dogmatic. I can’t think of anything that has stood the test of time. I once knew someone who was in a relationship with him and he gave her a reading list so that she could work towards his level. I think that was the end of that.
LFC 12.07.25 at 7:23 pm
@CB
Interesting, thanks.
Matt 12.07.25 at 9:49 pm
In my main areas of work Mandel is most famous for being refused a visa to come give some lectures in the US, and so being a party to an (in)famous supreme court case where it was held that visas could be refused on ideological grounds and that there was not a 1st amendment interest in parties inside the US to engage in active discussion with people the government would keep out on these grounds. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/408/753/ This view was slowly and to a degree eroded over time, with perhaps the high point coming in relation to the denial of a visa to Tariq Ramadan, where a panel of the 2nd circuit court of appeals suggested that the 1st amendment argument raised by people who would engage with an excluded person had some potential validity, though it was not, I think, central to the decison, and the Obama administration ended his exclusion w/o a decision on the matter. (The exclusion had been put in place by Bush II.) (Ramadan turned out to be pretty reprehensible for other unrelated reasons.) I mention all this because these arguments are likely to come up again in relation to some Trump exclusions. I’m not very optimistic about how the current Supreme Court will deal with them.
(On Mandel himself, the only things I’ve read by him were his contributions to the New Plagrave volume on Marxian Economics, which I found somewhat dull, but comprehensible.)
LFC 12.08.25 at 3:16 am
Matt @6
Following your link, I looked at Kleindienst v. Mandel. Blackmun’s majority opinion acknowledges that there is a First Amendment right to receive ideas — citing one of my favorite cases, Red Lion Broadcasting — but holds, in essence, that Congress’s plenary power to exclude classes of non-citizens, delegated here to the executive branch, overrides it. It’s a pretty bad opinion. I assume the current SCOTUS majority will follow something like this line.
Keith 12.08.25 at 9:35 am
CB@4, that’s a great story. The one time I saw Mandel speak in person, towards the end of his life, he was more subtle in his condescension. I don’t remember much about the speech itself, but in the Q&A he was tackled by a younger female SWP member who condemned him for his movement’s insistence that the Soviet Union was a degenerated workers’ state, although he had not referred at all to this in his remarks. Mandel’s English was excellent, if slow and heavily accented, but he really laid it on thickly in his response, which began: ‘Let me at once tranquilize you on this point. …’
Matt 12.08.25 at 9:39 am
LFC – thanks – you’re right, I’d put it a bit loosely, but your presentation is the right one. I agree that it’s a bad opinion, but also one that’s likely to be looked on favourably by the current Supreme Court.
alfredlordbleep 12.08.25 at 3:33 pm
Bertrand Russell 1939-40 is an entertaining early example of visa nonsense and “immoral teachings” at public universities (esp. UCLA). Recall just his Marriage and Morals.
“Supreme Court of New York revoked his appointment . . . on grounds his teachings were immoral.”
—“Russell Defended by LA Students”, Santa Rosa Press Democrat, Tuesday, 2 April
1940, p. 1
Tm 12.08.25 at 8:38 pm
@10: https://existentialcomics.com/comic/623
Russell‘s visa wasn’t affected, though? He settled in the US, albeit without income, until Barnes (founder of the Barnes Foundation) in Philly hired him to give philosophy lessons. He was dissatisfied and soon tried to fire him but Russell successfully sued him for breach of contract. He used his teaching notes for his History of Philosophy. At least that’s how I remember the story…
Laban 12.09.25 at 11:14 am
“which in the UK at the time was the International Marxist Group then the Socialist League”
Wasn’t it the Socialist Labour League. or was that a different grouping?
“just as the industrial working class was actually disappearing from Western Europe and North America”
The strategy – if it can be called that – of moving manufacturing industry overseas because “they can do it cheaper” has been utterly disastrous for the UK, and to a lesser extent the US. Only Germany of Western nations continued to be world-class manufacturers, and they are now crippled by the loss of Russian gas. Read Eamonn Fingleton on why manufacturing jobs are so important.
Tim Strangleman :
I think a lot about the contrast between what corporate strategy looked like in the years after WWII and now. When I ask students in my sociology of work courses to reflect on their work experiences, their stories sometimes make for grim and even disturbing reading or hearing. Most are in their late teens or early twenties and work predominantly in service jobs such as retail and, increasingly, coffee shops. They ‘enjoy’ very different working conditions, including internationally known brands limiting them to six-hour contracts to avoid having to pay for statutory breaks mandated by weakened employment law. They describe the abuse from customers frustrated at waiting those extra seconds for their beverage because the company has pared down staffing levels to a minimum. My students also tell me about the training packages they must complete at home rather than getting paid to train in the workplace.
When I talk to them about my Guinness (Park Royal in London, now housing) research, I feel a mixture of emotions. I feel guilty that I am showing what their parents — or really grandparents — thought of as ‘good work’. Am I rubbing their noses in their own situations, highlighting unobtainable riches they will never enjoy? But I also believe that it’s important to describe the working conditions of the past so that we can understand where we have been and why we are where we are now.
https://futuresofwork.co.uk/2020/04/01/work-at-guinness-remembering-what-we-had-and-could-have-again/
Now we live in a world where a three bed terraced house, built for working class Britons, can be worth a million-plus in the right location i.e unaffordable for nearly everyone. All the council houses in my rural neck of the woods, built for people working in agriculture, are long sold to Birmingham commuters who’ll talk about “jobs the British don’t want to do” – like working in agriculture.
I was looking at Ealing Trailfinders rugby the othet day. Their ground was formerly the Great Western Railway employee sports ground, when built a hundred acres of pitches.
John Q 12.09.25 at 11:28 pm
One the most impressive leaders of the student left when I was at uni followed this path and became a bus driver and activist. From there he became state secretary of the Rail, Tram and Bus Union*, and then (as I just found out) a Commissioner with the Fair Work Commission, which sets minimum wages and other conditions.
MisterMr 12.10.25 at 3:20 pm
@Laban 12
This is a list of european country by manifacuring share of GDP:
https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/Share_of_manufacturing/Europe/
UK is quite low (8.28%), but so is France (9.73%); Germany is way higer (18.36%) but Italy is also reasonably high (15.26%).
Italy and UK had roughly the same GDP in the 80s, now UK GDP is way higer; and in the meanwhile Germany for good or bad is positioned to take advantage of cheap eastern european labor (in the form of cheap imports).
In principle I understand the idea that industry shouldn’t be totally offshored, but I suspect that the UK didn’t offshore, it would have followed a track more similar to that of Italy (that in the 80s had a similar GDP than UK, now much lower).
In some sense it is a problem that modern rich economies cannot compete very well with growing low wage economies (Germany is an exception but I think it is a special case due to the imports), and so they tend to financialize, or if they don’t they get stuck in stagnation.
alfredlordbleep 12.11.25 at 12:40 am
@11
While the details of Russell’s appointment were being determined, he requested
an immediate letter from Robert Sproul confirming his future employment at
UCLA (see Figure 5) to extend their visas, a request Sproul addressed by
providing a signed statement Russell submitted to immigration officials. While Russell assumed this action would take care of the matter, he was shocked
to receive an order from a New York immigration on 4 August 1939 requiring
him to leave the country within eleven days or face deportation. The order
centred on the fact that Russell had entered the country as a temporary visitor
destined for the University of Chicago, and aliens on a temporary visa were not
allowed to change the purpose for which they were originally admitted
https://bertrandrussellsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/stevenson-michael.pdf
Again, for entertainment especially the last sentence—
engels 12.11.25 at 9:45 am
MrMr I think you’re cherry-picking, eg, Sweden has 14% and pulled ahead of UK in that period (and has a much smaller financial sector).
LFC 12.11.25 at 11:00 pm
@ MisterMr
Especially w.r.t. developed countries that have reached a certain threshold, GDP doesn’t in itself tell one anything about overall quality of life in a society, degree of inequality, extent to which basic needs are being met, etc.
MisterMr 12.12.25 at 7:23 am
@Engels 16
You are right that it isn’t impossible, but I still think it is difficult. Sweden is a very small country compared to UK, Italy or France, so a small number of big companies can pull Sweden’s economy in a way that would be harder than the whole UK.
Finally, Sweden’s manufacturing share of GDP also fell since the 80s
https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/Sweden/Share_of_manufacturing/ (so did Italy’s).
@LFC 17
True, but because of how a capitalist economy works, a growing GDP impacts how easy it is to find a job, become independent, etc., so ceteris paribus has a big impact on quality of life. Then ceteris are not paribus: if a country, to increase its GDP, has to make laws that make life worse for its citizens, like increasing working hours or similar, then it is true that it isn’t worth it.
But, I’m not trying to make a pro-Tatcher statement here, I’m noting that there is a reason the manufacturing share of many developed countries fell, otherwise we get tò the kind of delusions like Brexit or Trump’s tariffs, where people think they can summon back manufacturing jobs without paying a price in the rest of the economy (same with being a net exporter).
Chris Bertram 12.13.25 at 9:54 am
@Laban, no the SLL was the precursor of the Workers’ Revolutionary Party led by Gerry Healy
The IMG was the British section of the (United Secretariat of the Fourth International) and then changed its name to the Socialist League which then split into various components some of which fused with outcasts from the WRP such as Alan Thornett. Their current incarnation is Socialist Resistance whom I still quite like in various ways since they had imo sensible positions on Brexit, Ukraine, and Palestine.
engels 12.13.25 at 6:30 pm
Italy’s yuge petty bourgeoisie and famously crazy politics (not to mention il Bunga Bunga in chief) probably didn’t help either, just my two lira…
Laban 12.14.25 at 2:37 pm
MisterMr @14
German manufacturing was still thriving until Russian gas supplies stopped (for whatever reason). It was Europe’s only world-class manufacturing exporter, so that’s bad news for all of Europe.
Chris Bertram @19
Thanks, I can’t now disentangle all the various strands and tendencies of those years, though I note to this day that the printshop of Socialist Worker seems to roll on, I still see that well known font at all sorts of demos.
Laban 12.14.25 at 2:46 pm
LFC @17
“GDP doesn’t in itself tell one anything about overall quality of life in a society”
Agreed. Two women caring for their children at home – no GDP.
Two women swapping kids and paying each other £x a year – £2x of GDP.
I live in a house I could never afford to buy now (my rural village has changed from ordinary folk to the two Range Rover director class over 35 years), but as I pay no rent, the ONS “imputes” a rent of around £2.5k a month which is added to GDP.
MisterMr 12.15.25 at 11:35 am
I’ll preface this by saying that I’m certainly not a fan of Tatcher. However it seems to me that some people (some on the left, but also many on the right) do not realize that there are tradeoffs involved, and this mindset gave us stuff like Brexit, or Trump’s tariffs, that when they come into force seem stupid and are blamed on the leader’s idiocy (Trump or Johnson) but in reality are born already bad because people didn’t understand the tradeoffs to begin with.
@engels 20
Berlusconi certainly sucked, but he was in power only 50% of the time, the other 50% it was a neoliberal center left that was busy privatizing stuff and making the labor market more “flexible”. Those things were made in order to keep Italy more “competitive”, whereas the way you put things it is like one can be competitive without having these kind of policies.
The reason Italy is in perma-recession since the 90s is that, in addition to this flexibility, Italy, due to the high level of debts and being part of the euro, cannot stimulate much internal demand, and so it is like it is trying to go on on an “export based” model of the economy, but in a situation where said exports cannot really pull the whole national economy, and an higer level of internal consumption is needed.
Berlusconi, by cutting taxes on the rich, certainly didn’t help, but on the whole cut taxes on the rich while being neoliberal with the working class is what most other countries did too, so I don’t think Italy’s policies were expecially bad: they were bad, but like the others, or maybe worse than the others but not by much.
Also about policies, I remember that during the euro crisis that followed the GFC, many commenters outsdide of Italy referenced Italy’s supposedly excessively high and generous welfare state, which however was alredy beeen mostly destroyed by both Berlusconi amd the neoliberal left in the previous decades, so there was a very big disconnect between the way the italian system was perceived from the outside and how Italian took the idea that we had to do even more austerity.
By the way the “neoliberal” reforms were very similar to what Germany also did with the Hartz reforms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartz_concept
@Laban 21
According to this:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_net_goods_exports
Italy was the 6th or 7th gross exporter in the world in 2023, that I would call “world class” in the general sense of the term.
For net exports, Italy is only 17th, but still this isn’t bad, considering that many countries above Italy are large oil exporters.
This other page makes Italy 11th:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_exports
but also has the UK very high due to exports of gold? Weird.
This other page, specifically about manufacturing:
https://www.safeguardglobal.com/resources/blog/top-10-manufacturing-countries-in-the-world/
has this list:
China – Global manufacturing output (2024): $4.66 trillion, or 27.7% of the global share
United States – Global manufacturing output (2024): $2.91 trillion, or 17.3% of the global share
Japan – Global manufacturing output (2024): $867 billion, or 5.15% of the global share
Germany – Global manufacturing output (2024): $830 billion, or 4.93% of the global share
India – Global manufacturing output (2024): $490 billion, or 2.91% of the global share
South Korea – Global manufacturing output (2023): $416 billion, or 2.47% of the global share
Mexico – Global manufacturing output (2024): $364 billion, or 2.16% of the global share
Italy – Global manufacturing output (2024): $345 billion, or 2.05% of the global share
France – Global manufacturing output (2024): $298 billion, or 1.77% of the global share
United Kingdom – Global manufacturing output (2024): $292 billion, or 1.73% of the global share
Italy is still in a goodish position, but for example Mexico is above it; Germany is much stronger but Japan is above it but isn’t doing great in the last decades, the UK is still in the top 10.
If you compare this other list of countries by wage:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_wage
only the USA and Germany have both more gross manifacturing exports AND higer wages than Italy (yes Japan has slightly lower wages than Italy, probably due to the strong euro).
My point is that you cannot generalize from China and Germany, and Italy is in this case more representative of a rich country trying to compete in manifacturing with lower wage countries, for this reasons: China obviously started from very low levels of wages, and its policies is still based on apying workers less than they can produce so they totally need an unreasonable level of foreign exports to go on. Germany on the other hand doesn’t really underpay workers in the same sense, but is also in a weird situation, either because part of its exporting prowess is actually due to cheap labor in eastern europe, or also because, being part of the euro, its currency is undervalued relative to what the Mark would be if Germany was still on it; either way it isn’t generalisable.
Furthermore, countries with very big trade surpluses aren’t working correctly because either workers are underpaid, or anyway their economy works because someone other somewhere else is going deep into debt, so it doesn’t make sense to chide the USA for being a big importer and praise Germany or China for being big net exporters, because these are the two faces of the same coin.
Tm 12.15.25 at 6:12 pm
Laban 21: Last I looked, Germany was still a huge industrial exporter. Admittedly the automobile industry is in trouble, but mostly due to poor management and a stubborn refusal to accept technological progress.
I think Switzerland also counts as a European world-class maufactoring exporter?
alfred 15: I didn’t know that backstory, thanks. I thought he came to the US after having received a job offer in NY. Really wild. Amazing that he did manage to stay in the US after having been branded an imoral communist and “a particularly obnoxious
and dangerous person to be invited under the roof of a State University to propound his theories on life, which are destructive of every decent religious and normal standard, without the preservation of which we are doomed to go the way of Babylon and Nineveh and the other races who hungered like the Israelites for the ‘Fleshpots’ of Egypt.” Wow.
Tm 12.16.25 at 11:54 am
MisterMr: The differences between those wikipedia lists are quite striking, and I thought trade is something that we have very reliable data about? The List_of_countries_by_exports (couldn’t find out what source it’s based on) has Ireland at number 12 with 760 billion in exports, whereas the other list gives the number 209 billion. I guess we should ignore the first list. Here’s a third list btw: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_merchandise_exports
Gold does count as a “goods” export, which does distort the trade balance of some countries. I mentioned Switzerland and gold is in fact an important export good (which of course doesn’t “create jobs” but makes oligarchs rich). Gold trade is poorly regulated and it’s quite possible that the genocidal war in Sudan is in part financed by Swiss gold traders (through the UAE). Gold exports to the US have increased insanely in 2025 because MAGA America apparently needs huge amounts of gold for their bunkers (?). Ironically, Trump demands Switzerland eliminate its trade surplus with US but his tariffs don’t affect the gold trade.
Switzerland is 18th biggest exporter, which is impressive given that most of the other top exporters are much bigger countries. The top exports are pharmaceuticals but machines and instruments are also huge.
Tm 12.16.25 at 9:52 pm
There’s no good reason to think that being a net exporter is per se desirable, nor is a trade imbalance necessarily a bad thing. There’s no requirement that everybody should necessarily balance their trade, although excessive imbalances could be problematic. But countries should at least be aware of their strategic dependencies and try reducing them. I think the only country that nowadays practices this kind of strategic economic policy is China. Europeans urgently have to learn or relearn to think strategically about trade and dependencies. It’s outrageous that European leaders still fail to understand the vital strategic necessity of energy independence and instead continue prioritizing the interests of the fossil fuel oligarchy.
independence
Laban 12.17.25 at 10:54 am
“I thought trade is something that we have very reliable data about”
Not so much in these days of creative accounting. For example, one of those Swiss exports is coffee. You’ll have noticed all the plantations there. I would imagine hardly any physical coffee ever arrives there.
https://cictar.org/all-research/starbucks-swiss-scheme
Similarly Ireland has flourished by being an English speaking tax haven inside the EU. I don’t know how they do the accounting now almost everything comes down from the web, but this was Microsoft a dozen years ago.
“Microsoft has over 40,000 employees in the state of Washington in the United States. But they don’t actually physically burn on to disks the software they develop. Instead, Microsoft, has a manufacturing plant in Puerto Rico employing 185 people that gets credited in Microsoft’s books with a lion’s share of Microsoft’s Western hemisphere revenue and profits. It’s making disks that’s the really important thing that Microsoft does. Despite all you’ve heard about Microsoft being a software company, they are actually a manufacturing company, at least for tax accounting purposes. To the IRS, Microsoft is basically a Puerto Rican, Irish and Singaporean industrial goliath with a money-losing R&D outpost in Redmond, WA.”
Laban 12.17.25 at 10:59 am
Bur coffee machines are a different story.
https://theswisstimes.ch/the-swiss-village-behind-every-starbucks-coffee/
“From humble beginnings as a small, family-owned business that made whipped-cream machines, Thermoplan has grown to become a bit of a giant in the coffee world: In 1999, it won an exclusive contract to supply Starbucks with its espresso machines, and since then, its fortunes, and that of the world’s coffee, have changed. Almost thirty years later, Thermoplan still supplies coffee machines to all Starbucks’ outlets worldwide (over 30,000 of them), as well as Costa, McDonald’s, and IKEA.”
Tm 12.17.25 at 2:04 pm
Well the cacao doesn’t grow in Switzerland either but they do manufacture and export chocolate. That isn’t creative accounting.
Gold is different. It’s really just a scheme to obscure the source of the gold by sending it to a place like Switzerland with next to no regulation, melting it and moving it in new shape all over the world. It’s shameful.
Btw there’s another comment of mine apparently waiting.
engels 12.17.25 at 4:02 pm
Microsoft has over 40,000 employees in the state of Washington in the United States. But they don’t actually physically burn on to disks the software they develop. Instead, Microsoft, has a manufacturing plant in Puerto Rico employing 185 people that gets credited in Microsoft’s books with a lion’s share of Microsoft’s Western hemisphere revenue and profits
If you think it was bad then, wait until AIs are churning out these schemes (as someone mentioned on another thread they already are with management consultancy bullshit…)
alfredlordbleep 12.17.25 at 7:25 pm
Apologies to Chris Bertram and Tm for inconsistent indication in quoting above.(!)
per Laban @26
Always write that the US should be included as a leading tax haven:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_as_a_tax_haven
MisterMr 12.18.25 at 4:07 pm
@TM 26
“It’s outrageous that European leaders still fail to understand the vital strategic necessity of energy independence and instead continue prioritizing the interests of the fossil fuel oligarchy.”
I believe european leaders understand this very well, but they don’t know where to find the energy as most EU countries consume way more energy than they can produce (even France with its nuclear plants still imports 44% of the energy it uses), maybe green energy will solve the problem someday but we are still quite far from there.
Other links:
Sources of energy in EU countries, anc comparison between energy imports and net imports:
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/interactive-publications/energy-2024
How dependent are EU member states on energy imports? [spoiler: a lot]
https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/infographics/how-dependent-are-eu-member-states-on-energy-imports/
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