Ernest Mandel Class Quotations

The only conclusion you can draw from the real historical movement is that by and large, in day-to-day life, what Lenin called trade union consciousness dominates the working class. I would call it elementary class consciousness of the working class.

You need a vanguard organization in order to overcome the dangerous potential brought about by the uneven development of class militancy and class consciousness.

The conclusion you can draw from these characteristics is that you have an uneven development of class activity and an uneven development of class consciousness in the working class.

There are no conditions in which we subordinate the interests of the class as a whole to the interests of any sect, any chapel, any separate organization.

There is a process of social and of political differentiation going on in the real working class all the time.

We do not believe that the Marxist program, which embodies the continuity of the experience of the actual class struggle and real revolutions of the last one hundred and fifty years, is a definitely closed book.

You can have relatively high levels of class consciousness with a lower level of class militancy than one would have expected.

On the contrary, history generally confirms that the more conscious and the better you are organized in vanguard organizations, the more constructively you operate in the mass organizations of the working class.

The more workers you have in your organization, the better you are implanted in the working class, the more likely you are to come up with the concrete problems of the class.

But that is going to change because the working class has become a majority in society in practically all the important countries of the world.