Ernest Mandel 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.

Factions are a sign of illness in a party.

And you cannot have a socialist revolution commandeered from the top, ordered around by some omniscient leader or group of leaders

Marxism is always open, always critical, always self-critical.

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

Furthermore, there is absolutely no contradiction between the separate organizations of revolutionary vanguard militants and their participation in the mass organizations of the working class.

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.

Otherwise we get off the track and we do not fulfil the historical role which we want to fulfil: to help the masses, the exploited and the oppressed of the world, build a classless society, a world socialist federation.

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.

Workers do not strike every day, they cannot do that the way they function in the capitalist economy. The way they have to live by selling their labor power makes that impossible.

You cannot make a socialist revolution without really trying.

Revolution is an instrument, like a party is an instrument.

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

For us, Marxism is always open because there are always new xperiences, there are always new facts, including facts about the past, which have to be incorporated in the corpus of scientific socialism.

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.

There has been hardly a single year since 1917, and in a certain sense since 1905, without a revolution somewhere in the world in which the workers participated in a rather important way.

Periodically, the workers do revolt against bourgeois society, not by a hundred, five hundred, or a thousand, but by the millions.

Socialist democracy is not, a luxury and its need is not limited to the most advanced industrial countries.

Only under conditions of revolutionary crises do you have the highest level of self-organization; this is the Soviet type of organization, which is to say, workers' councils, people's councils, call them what you want, popular committees.

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.

The real notion is that of the fusion in real life between this vanguard layer of the working class, the real leaders of real struggles of workers at factory and neighborhood levels, of woman's struggles, of youth struggles, of national minority struggles, and the political vanguard organization.

After all, the history of the 20th century is the history of social revolutions.

Coming out of all these basic conceptual distinctions we can conclude the necessity of a vanguard formation nearly immediately.

A vanguard organization is something which is permanent. A vanguard party has to be constructed, has to be built through a long process.

. A vanguard organization is something which is permanent. A vanguard party has to be constructed, has to be built through a long process.

They cannot have an overall, total correct view of reality because they see only a fragmented part of that reality.

If the workers do not fight for higher wages, if they do not fight for a shorter workday, if they do not fight for, let us say it in a provocative way, day-to-day economic issues, they become demoralized slaves.

In the light of these principles, it is clear that no socialist or communist society exists anywhere in the world today.

In a healthy party you have no factions; a healthy party from the point of view of both the political line and the internal party regime.

For Marx, 'pure' economic theory, that is economic theory which abstracts from a specific social structure, is impossible.

Mistakes in themselves are unavoidable.

I do not believe in self-proclaimed parties.

Socialist democracy is not a luxury but an absolute, essential necessity for overthrowing capitalism and building socialism.

Only if you bring together the experience of the concrete struggles conducted by the real masses in the three sectors of the world (which are also called the three sectors of world revolution), then you have an overall, correct view of world reality.

For us, Marxism is always open because there are always new experiences, there are always new facts, including facts about the past, which have to be incorporated in the corpus of scientific socialism.

Precisely because Marx was convinced that the cause of the proletariat was of decisive importance for the whole future of mankind, he wanted to create for that cause not a flimsy platform of rhetorical invective or wishful thinking, but the rock-like foundation of scientific truth.

Revolution is not a goal in itself.