Alex Callinicos 'Introduces' Kidron, But Misses Mandel's Framework for Understanding Our Period
How the SWP Assesses Crisis, And Why Its Framework May Be Wrong
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In the current International Socialism Journal, Alex Callinicos’s ‘introduction’ presents Michael Kidron’s Permanent Arms Economy theory as a genuine breakthrough in Marxist analysis. This is correct. What the essay risks obscuring, however, is a more complex and strategically crucial truth: understanding late capitalism is a team sport, and the positions taken in the Kidron-Mandel debate of the late 1960s directly shaped how contemporary revolutionary movements assess the epochal crisis we face today.
The question is not merely academic. It goes to the heart of strategic urgency and civilizational survival. The Fourth International’s 18th World Congress characterized the current period as a “double historic crisis”: the simultaneous collapse of both the capitalist system and the exhaustion of the twentieth-century socialist alternative. This is not a cyclical downturn. This is an epochal crisis that poses an “objective necessity” for revolution—not at some indefinite future moment, but within a timeframe measured in decades, not generations.
The decisiveness of this assessment lies in the ecological dimension. The accelerated destruction of the natural environment creates deadlines that capitalism cannot meet and that reformism cannot solve. Degrowth, the reduction of global production and transport, the prioritization of ecological survival over profit—these are “impossible under capitalism” and yet “objectively necessary” to preserve conditions for human civilization. This is not rhetoric. It means that revolutionary work cannot wait for subjective conditions to mature gradually. It means we do not have “generations of time to get out of capitalism.” It means the entire revolutionary strategy must be oriented toward achieving an ecosocialist alternative in time to prevent irreversible catastrophe.
Yet this extreme urgency coexists with a profound contradiction. The 18th WC documents recognize that while the objective necessity for revolution has never been sharper, the subjective factor—the development of revolutionary leadership and mass consciousness—remains severely underdeveloped. We face what Mandel formulated as the classical revolutionary strategic posture: “Act as though the revolution is near, even if it is far, and prepare as though it is far, even if it is near.”
This is the strategic challenge that shapes how contemporary revolutionary movements understand their tasks. Tendencies following Mandel’s framework see the objective urgency demanding immediate political education, transitional demands, and ecosocialist programs implemented now. Tendencies following the Kidron-Harman trajectory have historically been more cautious in their crisis assessments, emphasizing patient cadre-building over urgency claims. Understanding both frameworks, and their limitations, helps Red Mole readers navigate this contradiction: how to act with the intensity and focus of a revolution approaching in months while simultaneously preparing for a protracted struggle.
The truth is this: Kidron’s PAE mechanism is indispensable for understanding how late capitalism has managed accumulation; Mandel’s long-wave framework is indispensable for periodizing when systems exhaust themselves; and Harman’s defense of the PAE when Kidron himself abandoned it was strategically crucial for preserving analytical tools. But none of them, alone, gave us what we need to assess our current period—where ecological limits transform theoretical urgency into a civilizational imperative.
Harman’s Crucial Intervention: Not Secondary, But Custodial
Before addressing the broader synthesis needed, we must correct the implicit hierarchy in Callinicos’s essay. Harman’s defense of the PAE mechanism was not a minor theoretical skirmish. It was strategically vital.
In 1977, Michael Kidron himself declared that his most important theoretical contribution—the PAE framework that had animated his political economy since the 1960s—was flawed. In “Two Insights Don’t Make a Theory,” Kidron retreated to the notion of “nationally integrated state-capitals,” a concept that would be rapidly obsoleted by the subsequent internationalization of capital and the rise of neoliberal market disciplines. Had Kidron’s retreat gone unchallenged, the revolutionary left would have lost a crucial analytical tool at precisely the moment it was becoming more necessary.
Enter Chris Harman. In “Better a Valid Insight Than a Wrong Theory,” Harman provided what Callinicos acknowledges was a “cogent reply.” More than that, Harman recognized that the PAE mechanism was “the crux of the theory” required to explain postwar capitalist stability and, subsequently, its breakdown. While Kidron was abandoning his own insight, Harman stepped in as custodian and developer of the tradition. This was not secondary theoretical work. This was strategic continuity.
What followed vindicated Harman’s choice. In Explaining the Crisis (1984) and Zombie Capitalism (2009), Harman integrated the PAE mechanism into a broader historical analysis of capitalism, demonstrating that the theory was not a monocausal explanation but rather one crucial counteracting factor to the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. The PAE was preserved, defended, and developed precisely because Harman refused Kidron’s retreat.
This is worth emphasizing because it corrects a distortion in how some Mandel supporters present the debate. It is not accurate to say that Harman preserved the PAE in isolation, divorced from history. Harman located the PAE within the trajectory of capitalist crisis itself, arguing that as military spending became an ever-larger share of capital accumulation in the 1960s and early 1970s, it became increasingly difficult for the PAE to absorb surplus capital without generating chronic inflation and currency instability. This analysis was not wrong. It remains useful.
Yet here lies the genuine theoretical disagreement that matters today.
What Harman’s Framework Cannot Explain
Harman’s approach preserved the PAE mechanism but lacked what Mandel provided: a comprehensive theory of long waves linked to profit fluctuations, adequate analysis of ecological limits as systemic contradictions, and an explanation of the subjective weakness of the working class and our allies.
The PAE and Ecological Impossibility
Mandel theorized that the PAE’s failure is not mechanical breakdown but structural incapacity: a profit-driven system cannot address ecological limits. Military spending remains stabilizing for accumulation but is structurally incapable of redirecting resources toward ecological remediation (deemed “unprofitable”). Up to fifty percent of global productive capacity is wasted on arms at precisely the moment when rational, planned degrowth is necessary. The PAE cannot stabilize accumulation when the entire system becomes ecologically unsustainable; it accelerates that unsustainability.
Why Mandel’s Long-Wave Framework Was Necessary
The 1970s crisis took the form of stagflation, not simply PAE breakdown. Capitalism responded not by dismantling military spending but through neoliberal restructuring—restructuring the entire composition of capital, attacking wages, reorganizing imperialism. The PAE mechanism alone cannot explain this.
Mandel’s framework showed that the postwar boom (1948-1970) was driven by multiple exogenous factors: capital destruction from WWII, increased exploitation through labor discipline reconstruction, technological revolutions, and the PAE. When all these factors exhausted themselves, the transition to depressive long wave required understanding not just PAE breakdown but exhaustion of all exogenous stabilizers. Harman lacked this periodization, so could not adequately explain the 1980s neoliberal turn or whether contemporary crisis is cyclical or systemic.
Sources of Subjective Weakness
Mandel identified multiple mechanisms. Imperialist super-profits do create a “labor aristocracy” supporting reformism, but this is secondary. The deeper sources lie in late capitalism itself: long depressive waves create mass unemployment and fear of unemployment, weakening worker resistance; capitalism’s reification of social relations traps workers in bourgeois ideology through daily market dynamics; reformist and Stalinist bureaucracies prevent workers from developing their own power through “substitutionism.”
The 18th World Congress adds: defeats of left governments (Syriza, Podemos), historic bankruptcy of Stalinism, and material restructuring of the working class itself. Geographic relocation of production to Asia, technological reorganization, precariousness—these have created workers “dispersed, precarious, confused, divided, suffocated by competition.” Combined with neoliberal hyper-individualism and campist ideology, objective necessity for revolution exists alongside unprecedented subjective crisis.
The Strategic Question: Are We in Systemic Crisis?
Here is where the theoretical debate of the 1960s intersects with contemporary revolutionary strategy.
The Fourth International’s 18th World Congress recently assessed the current period as one of systemic polycrisis: ecological catastrophe, the permanent arms economy at near-breaking point, financialization exhausted, inter-imperialist conflict escalating, and a profound crisis of capitalist legitimacy. This assessment rests fundamentally on Mandel’s framework—the notion that we are transitioning from a depressive long wave toward conditions requiring either revolutionary transformation or barbaric adaptation.
This is not mere speculation. It is based on concrete analysis of average rates of profit stagnation, the chronic necessity of military Keynesianism despite its diminishing returns, the ecological limits to accumulation, and the absence of any exogenous factors (as Mandel identified them) capable of detonating a new expansive long wave. We have exhausted the postwar boom’s potential sources: there is no more labor to integrate through female participation; productivity gains are slowing; there is no new technology sector capable of absorbing surplus capital at acceptable profit rates; and military spending itself, while still massive, is increasingly a sign of desperation rather than stabilization.
How the Ukraine War Reveals Systemic Polycrisis
The Ukraine conflict exemplifies polycrisis logic: not a regional clash but a catastrophic feedback loop intensifying crises across all dimensions.
Geopolitically, the war triggered NATO consolidation and enlargement, accelerating inter-imperialist rivalries. Military spending rises not because it stabilizes accumulation but because imperialist powers see no alternative to confrontation.
Economically, the conflict exacerbated neoliberal globalization’s crisis. Supply-chain disruption intensified inflation from pandemic overproduction. The war exposed the fragility of neoliberalism’s integrated world economy: it depends on coercive force. Military expenditure now reaches levels even neoliberal governments struggle to justify, yet cannot reduce without surrendering geopolitical position. This is the PAE at breaking point: necessary for competition but generating chronic inflation and fiscal strain. Mandel’s analysis of transition to depressive long waves—where exogenous factors exhaust—finds perfect expression here.
Ecologically, the war compounds catastrophe. Direct destruction of habitats, poisoning of land and water, massive carbon emissions from military production, diversion of resources from ecological transition—all intensify the critical ecological crisis. There is no technological fix; there is no military-Keynesian solution; there is only the choice between immediate ecological revolution or cascading civilizational collapse.
Politically, the war deepens the crisis of capitalist legitimacy precisely when the ruling class most needs consent. Immense financial and military support toward a failing war effort—resources that could address healthcare, housing, education, or ecology—exposes capitalism’s barbaric priorities. Yet the subjective crisis of revolutionary leadership means this exposure does not automatically translate into revolutionary consciousness. The gap between objective conditions and subjective readiness becomes ever more dangerous.
This describes how late capitalism’s mechanisms generate decomposition: military spending that cannot stabilize accumulation; ecological destruction compounding economic crisis; geopolitical rivalry undermining the integrated world market neoliberalism requires; political repression delegitimizing the system further. Each crisis amplifies the others in a vicious spiral that is the hallmark of systemic, not cyclical, breakdown.
What This Means for Revolutionary Strategy
If this assessment is correct—and the Ukraine war, the ecological acceleration, profit stagnation, and military spending escalation all confirm it—then we face a qualitatively different situation than the one Kidron and Mandel debated in Hull. We face not just a cyclical crisis but a fundamental exhaustion of the mechanisms through which late capitalism has managed accumulation for seventy years.
What does this mean strategically? It means that the revolutionary left must act as if the revolution is both near and far; as if months and years remain for building alternatives, but also as if we are in the final stages of late capitalism’s ability to stabilize itself. It means developing transitional demands that connect immediate struggles (ending military spending, defending ecological limits, expanding public services) to systemic transformation. It means building revolutionary organizations capable of providing leadership when explosive contradictions erupt. It means assessing that the window for peaceful capitalist adaptation is closing, and that the cost of further delay in building revolutionary movements will be catastrophic.
Harman’s framework alone cannot support this assessment convincingly. It can explain the PAE mechanism, but it struggles with periodization—with understanding whether the current crisis is cyclical or systemic. Mandel’s framework, by contrast, provides the tools: long waves, exogenous factors, the rate of profit, and the historical specificity of different periods of capitalism.
What We Still Need: Integration with Imperialism
Mandel provided essential analysis showing imperialism persists despite decolonization through neo-colonial mechanisms and technological rent extraction. However, contemporary imperialism operates in conditions of financialization, ecological constraint, and digital monopoly that require integration of Mandel’s framework with newer analysis of financial hegemony, ecological extraction, and the specific role of tech corporations in reproducing global inequality.
Mandel’s framework, as developed, requires urgent supplementation on one crucial point—understanding how contemporary forms of imperialism interact with ecological crisis, and why imperialism remains central to accumulation despite changes in its form. The Hull debate between Kidron and Mandel over imperialism’s centrality was never resolved—partly because both theorists were right in different dimensions. Mandel correctly identified imperialism’s structural persistence through neo-colonial mechanisms; Kidron correctly observed that self-financing and domestic stabilization (PAE) had reduced the traditional export necessity. In the current period of financialization and ecological crisis, this irresolution becomes productive: neither theorist’s framework alone captures how imperialism now operates.
What Kidron Correctly Identified
Kidron was capturing real structural changes in the form of imperialism that proved insightful. He correctly observed that capital investment had become primarily self-financing and concentrated in advanced Western economies, and that this shift made the loss of direct colonial territory “more palatable” to imperial powers. This analysis anticipated the historical reality: the shift from direct territorial domination to neo-colonialism, where indirect control through debt, technology, and financial dependence replaced formal empire.
Mandel himself later confirmed this development, noting that advanced capitalist countries had conceded territory to local bourgeoisies, leading to the rise of “semi-industrialized dependent countries” where the accumulation process, while subordinate, was no longer completely dominated by foreign capital. India, Brazil, South Korea—these represented real changes in the geographic locus of accumulation.
What Kidron Got Wrong
Yet Kidron drew a catastrophic conclusion from these correct observations: that imperialism had become a “passing phase” or “Highest Stage but One.” This was a serious misjudgement. The fundamental economic root of imperialism—the existence of surplus capital seeking superprofits—remained intact. The structural need for imperialism persisted because neo-colonialism retained most of the former empire’s economic positions. Technological dependence, financial domination, and unequal exchange ensured that the imperialist core continued to extract immense value from the periphery.
What Mandel’s Later Work Contributed
Mandel’s later analysis of imperialism emphasized that the contemporary form of imperial competition centers on what he called the “constant hunt for technological rents”—surplus profits derived from monopolization of technical progress. Control of patents, discoveries, and specialized machinery creates a widening productivity and wealth gap between advanced and dependent countries. This technological and financial dependence facilitates the outflow of resources to imperialist metropolises through mechanisms far more subtle than colonial extraction.
Mandel also emphasized that the theory of Permanent Revolution remained central to revolutionary strategy precisely because of these changes. The industrialization of colonial and semi-colonial countries, while irreversible and creating local ruling classes, has not freed these countries from imperialist domination. Instead, the “complete accomplishment of the tasks of the national-democratic revolution is only possible by wrenching a country out of the domain of international capital” entirely—by breaking with global capitalism, not merely achieving formal independence.
The Unfinished Terrain
Mandel’s analysis of neo-colonialism, technological rents, and the structural necessity of imperialism remains essential. However, he theorized these dynamics in conditions where productive capital remained dominant. Today, financial capital’s hegemony, ecological scarcity, and the unprecedented monopoly power of tech corporations have reshaped how imperialism operates. We need Mandel’s framework integrated with analysis of financialization, ecological extraction, and digital imperialism.
How does competition for critical minerals, technological monopolies, and ecological space reshape both the form of imperialism and the strategic possibilities for liberation struggles? The Ukraine war, China’s technological competition with the US, the struggle over renewable energy infrastructure—these reveal imperialism operating in new forms that require both Mandel’s long-wave framework and an integration of ecological analysis.
We need an analysis that understands: How does contemporary imperialism maintain super-profits and transfer value from the periphery in an ecologically constrained world? How do military spending, technological control, and imperialist military intervention interact in the current period? How do geopolitical rivalries between imperialist powers shape the possibilities for liberation struggles when ecological limits are compressing the space for capitalist expansion?
Synthesis: What Revolutionary Movements Need
Here, then, is what a genuine synthesis would require:
First: Preserve and deepen Kidron’s PAE mechanism as analyzed by Harman. The Permanent Arms Economy is not an optional add-on to Marxist political economy; it is central to understanding how late capitalism has managed accumulation and why that mechanism is increasingly breaking down. Harman was correct to defend this against Kidron’s retreat.
Second: Integrate the PAE fully within Mandel’s long-wave framework. The PAE is not the sole explanation for postwar stability; it is one crucial factor among others (capital destruction, labor discipline, technological revolutions, state intervention). Understanding this prevents both overestimating the PAE’s current stabilizing capacity and missing how its breakdown is intertwined with the exhaustion of other exogenous factors.
Third: Periodize the current moment correctly. We are at the end of a depressive long wave without obvious exogenous factors capable of detonating a new expansive wave. The ecological crisis, profit stagnation, financialization exhaustion, and military spending at near-breaking point all suggest we face a systemic crisis, not merely cyclical downturn.
Fourth: Develop a comprehensive theory of contemporary imperialism that explains how value transfer, military spending, geopolitical rivalry, and liberation struggles interact in the current period. This cannot be adequately derived from the 1960s debates, but it requires their frameworks to be useful.
Fifth: Translate this analysis into strategic conclusions for revolutionary organization. If we face systemic crisis, then the task is to build revolutionary alternatives rapidly, prepare cadres for moments of explosive contradiction, develop transitional demands that point beyond capitalism, and maintain strict internationalism against all forms of national capitalist adaptation.
A Note on Method
This is not a matter of choosing between Kidron, Mandel, and Harman. Each contributed something essential. Kidron identified the mechanism; Harman defended it against retreat; Mandel provided the historical periodization. The tragedy is that these contributions were never fully synthesized because of sectarian divisions within the revolutionary left.
What the current moment demands is precisely the kind of “open Marxism” that Mandel himself advocated: serious engagement with the strongest arguments of different schools, integration of what is true in each, and movement forward. The Kidron-Mandel debate revealed genuine theoretical differences. But it also revealed—in retrospect—a deeper complementarity.
Red Mole’s readers do not need to choose between these traditions. They need a synthesis that takes seriously what each discovered while moving beyond their limitations. That synthesis is not merely an academic exercise. It is a necessary foundation for assessing strategic urgency in a period of systemic crisis and for building the revolutionary movements such a crisis demands.
Understanding late capitalism is indeed a team sport. The question is whether we can finally begin playing it well.