Ernest Mandel Quotes (43 Quotes)


    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.

    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.

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


    You cannot have a spontaneous socialist revolution.


    The most elementary self-organizations are trade unions.


    You cannot make a socialist revolution without really trying.

    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.

    The radical and international definition of a communist society given by Marx and Engels inevitably leads to the perspective of a transition (transition period) between capitalism and communism.

    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 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.

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

    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.

    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.

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

    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.

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

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

    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.

    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.

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


    A vanguard organization becomes a vanguard party when a significant minority of the real class, of the really existing workers, poor peasants, revolutionary youth, revolutionary women, revolutionary oppressed nationalities, recognizes it as their vanguard party, i. e., follows it in action.


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

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

    We do not believe that Marxism is a full, final doctrine, dogma, or Weltanschauung.

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

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

    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.

    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.

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

    If the workers would be at the highest point of militancy and consciousness all the time, you would not need a vanguard organization.

    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.


    And if the mass of the people do not accept your choice of priorities, no power on earth, even the biggest terror of Stalin, can force them to do the one key thing that you need to build socialism have a constructive, creative, and convinced participation in the production process.

    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.

    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.

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

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

    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.

    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.


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