Available in English, at last: Ernest Mandel’s 1977 polemic with Nahuel Moreno
Ideology and Society: On some theoretical premises of the Transitional Programme
Ernest Mandel published Ideology and Society: On some theoretical premises of the Transitional Programme in Spanish in 1977. It was his reply to a twenty-eight-page attack by Nahuel Moreno in the Colombian journal Ideología y Sociedad. It has never appeared in English. Until today.
Red Mole is publishing the first English translation as an ebook from 26 April 2026. Behind the polemic, Mandel is defending the 1938 Transitional Programme against a reading that collapses it back into the maximum-and-minimum-programme architecture of classical Social Democracy. What Moreno calls metaphysical scholasticism, Mandel argues, is the characteristic failure mode of a certain kind of Trotskyist orthodoxy: a taxonomy of concepts in place of materialist analysis. The questions it raises are the questions any serious left has to face: how class consciousness actually develops, what ‘advanced workers’ means in a period of decomposed labour organisation, how transitional demands work when the institutional movement is hollowed out.
The edition is available online through Barnes & Noble, Rakuten Kobo, Apple Books, Everand, tolino, OverDrive, cloudLibrary, hoopla, vivlio, BorrowBox, Smashwords, Gardners, Bookshop.org and fable. Hoopla’s processing times are running long at present; the others should populate over the next day or two.
The translation is a working edition rather than a finished scholarly one. The editor’s preface explains why, and what readers should and should not take on trust
