Before any of us are very much older Verso will publish Jan Willem Stutje’s biography of Ernest Mandel. The sales pitch must have been interesting.

“That Nelson Mandela is very popular. I know about this guy with a similar name. He was a Belgian economist and a Trotskyist.”

In due course I’ll be doing a review of the book but there is one episode that is worth digging out. That is when Mandel went to Cuba to discuss the economic direction of the revolution with the leadership and the relationship he developed with Che Guevara.

Between 1962 and 1964 Guevara was in charge of the Ministry of Industry. Having disproved the Stalinist conception of creating a revolution by stages there was a current in the Cuban leadership which opposed both the growing influence of the Communist Party and the bureaucratisation of the process.

Unlike some of the Stalinist influenced economists, referred to as “Stalino-Kruschevites” in Cuba, Guevara rejected the use of material incentives and making value and profit the absolute economic measure.  He insisted that there had to be a human element in economic planning. This was an ongoing debate in the Cuban leadership at the time and Mandel cheekily intervened by sending Castro and Guevara copies of his recently published book Marxist Economic Theory.

Another major focus of the debate was the extent to which individual companies could have financial independence. Not content with sending over copies of his book Mandel circulated a document in support of Guevara’s position which opposed financial autonomy for companies. They differed on the issue of material incentives. Mandel’s view was that they could be used on condition that they were limited to prevent individual enrichment and that they were collective in order to encourage solidarity among producers.

Mandel spent seven weeks in Havana giving lectures, attending meetings and taking part in study circles along with Guevara and concluded that they had very similar conceptions to each other.

The law of value in post capitalist economies was a big element in the debates, in particular the extent to which it determined investment in the socialist sector of the economy. Adherence to this law, Mandel argued, consigned all the post-capitalist economies to under-development with the exceptions of East Germany and Czechoslovakia. The reason was simple. In these economies agriculture was more profitable than industry and obtaining goods on the world market was more profitable than making them. Expressed another way – sticking to the law of value preserved capitalism’s structural imbalances.

The consequence for Cuba, a society in transformation, was a struggle between the law of value and central planning.

Mandel’s assessment, which seems to have been confirmed, was that while Guevara won the debate on economics he lost the behind the scenes debate over the exercise of power by the working class in Cuba. That’s why he undertook the adventures in Africa and Bolivia.

Here we have either a scenario for a film or a bit of speculation about how history might have turned out differently. The Cuban revolutionaries were very open to even the most heretical and unorthodox opinions before they concluded that material necessity required them to submit to Moscow.