International Institute for Research and Education

Dr. Peter Drucker, a graduate of Yale (BA magna cum laude in history, 1979) and Columbia (PhD in political science, 1994) Universities, previously served as programme co-ordinator in New York for National Mobilization for Survival (1989-91). He was IIRE Co-Director between 1993 and 2006. He is the author of Max Shachtman and His Left (1994) (available from Prometheus Books).

Drucker's teaching and research at the IIRE includes work on the origins of national and ethnic identities and conflicts, particularly in the Middle East, and the history of radical political thought and movements. He has turned his attention recently to the history of sexuality and the European socialist left. A paper he gave in October 2001 on the sexual attitudes in the mid-1920s of leading Dutch Marxists Henriette Roland Holst and Jacques Engels can now be downloaded from the website of the International Institute for Social History - click here.

Dr. Drucker has been lecturing since his arrival on staff in 1993 about liberation movements of lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender people in the Third World. In 1994 his research took form as an IIRE Working Paper, in 1996 as an article in the London-based New Left Review. In 1998, 2000 and 2002 he worked to include Third World participants and highlight Third World issues at the IIRE's Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual Strategy Seminars.

He has also edited and introduced a pioneering anthology on Third World gays and the left, called Different Rainbows.

Even before publication the book evoked high praise. Martin Duberman, Distinguished Professor of History at the City University of New York and the unofficial dean of US lesbian/gay studies, called it "a unique, long-needed, and immensely valuable book" whose "significance cannot be overstated". "The essays ... are brilliantly bound together by the book's editor", he added. Urvashi Vaid of the NGLTF Policy Institute, one of the most prominent figures on the US lesbian/gay left, called it "essential and engagingly written". More recently John D'Emilio has decribed Drucker's introduction as 'one of the best analyses yet written of gay identities and politics on a global scale'.

Drucker's conclusion argues, "Full lesbian/gay equality requires Third World liberation in a broader sense: liberation from poverty and dependency." He suggests that Third World movements are beginning to forge a new model of "liberation without ghettoization", which lesbian/gay movements in developed capitalist countries can also learn from.

Few people have contributed to forming and developing the Institute like our former directors. We would like to thank each of them for the great amount of work they have done to make the institute what it is today.

 Our former directors are:

• Marijke Colle
• Eva Ferraren
• François Vercammen
• Pierre Rousset
• Herman Pieterson
• Robert Went
• Susan Caldwell
• Peter Drucker
• Murray Smith
• Antonio Carmona Báez
• Bertil Videt

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Livio Maitan (Venice, April 1, 1923—September 16, 2004), scholar, activist and organic intelectual.

He graduated in Classics (lettere classiche) from the University of Padua, and became politically active during the years of the Nazi occupation of Italy, and was subsequently a leading member of the Italian Socialist Youth.

His generation were the cadres who continued as revolutionary Marxists through the post-World War II years, and who were gradually able to connect their vision with the young activists in the mid- and late 1960s. Maitan was actively involved in the large-scale student movement in Italy between 1969 and 1976

In the 1970s he lectured on the economy of underdevelopment in the School of Sociology at the University of Rome. He translated and introduced almost all the Italian editions of Leon Trotsky’s writings.

 A football fanatic, he played weekly until into his seventies. To his death he continued as a fellow of the IIRE. We collaborate with the Livio Maitan Study Centre in Italy, their website can be seen here.

Ernest Ezra Mandel, also known by various pseudonyms such as Ernest Germain, Pierre Gousset, Henri Vallin, Walter etc. (b. Frankfurt April 5, 1923 - d. Brussels July 20, 1995), became known as economist, activist and humanist through his important contributions to contemprorary marxist economy and his active participation in a decade of struggles.

In 1982 Ernest Mandel was a central person in the founding of this institute and became its first chairman. He contributed invaluable lectures and studies during his time as chairman and fellow. Besides giving lectures Ernest Mandel have also wirtten two Notebooks for Study and Research (see below). After his death, the institute established the Ernest Mandel Study Centre in his honour.

Biography: 

Until the publication of his massive book Marxist Economic Theory in French in 1962, Mandel's Marxist articles were written mainly under a variety of pseudonyms. He resumed his university studies (cut short by the german occupation of Belgium) and graduated from what is now the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris in 1967. Only from 1968 did Mandel become wellknown as public figure and Marxist politician, touring student campuses in Europe and America giving talks on socialism, imperialism and revolution. 

Although officially barred from West Germany (and several other countries at various times, including the United States, France, Switzerland, and Australia), he gained a PhD from the Free University of Berlin in 1972 (where he taught some months), published as Late Capitalism, and he subsequently gained a lecturer position at the Free University of Brussels. In 1978 he delivered the Alfred Marshall Lectures at the University of Cambridge, on the topic of the long waves of capitalist development.

In total, he published approximately 2,000 articles and around 30 books during his life, which were translated into many languages. In addition, he also edited or contributed to many books, maintained a voluminous correspondence, and went on speaking engagements worldwide. He considered it his mission to transmit the heritage of classical Marxist thought, deformed by the experience of Stalinism and the Cold War, to a new generation. And to a large extent he did influence a generation of scholars and activists in their understanding of important Marxist concepts.

His life and work are the specific study of our partnershiporganization The Ernest Mandel Foundation, who are digitalizing severeal articles, books and pamphlets by Mandel, their website can be found here.