Ernest Mandel Quotes

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

  Ernest Mandel

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Dangerous, Potential

• You cannot make a socialist revolution without really trying.

  Ernest Mandel

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Socialist, Revolution

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

  Ernest Mandel

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Consciousness, Levels

• 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.

  Ernest Mandel

  Topics in Economy

  Tags in Capitalist

• 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.

  Ernest Mandel

  Topics in Experience

  Tags in Believe, Revolutions

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

  Ernest Mandel

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Political, Differentiation

• 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.

  Ernest Mandel

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Revolution, World

• 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.

  Ernest Mandel

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Interests, Organization

• 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.

  Ernest Mandel

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Historical, Movement, Consciousness, Working

• 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.

  Ernest Mandel

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Better, Working, Organization

• 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.

  Ernest Mandel

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Characteristic, Development, Working, Class

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

  Ernest Mandel

  Topics in Democracy

  Tags in Socialist

• Revolution is not a goal in itself.

  Ernest Mandel

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Revolution

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

  Ernest Mandel

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Revolution, Instrument

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

  Ernest Mandel

  Topics in Society

• 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.

  Ernest Mandel

  Topics in Society

  Tags in Federation, Socialism

• 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.

  Ernest Mandel

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Revolutionary, Soviet, Type, Organization

• 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.

  Ernest Mandel

  Topics in History, Uncategorized

  Tags in Conscious, Organizations

• Mistakes in themselves are unavoidable.

  Ernest Mandel

  Topics in Mistake

  Tags in Themselves

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

  Ernest Mandel

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Marxism

Ernest Mandel (25)

Birth:	5th April, 1923
Death:	20th July, 1995
Nationality:	Belgian
Profession:	Author, Economist, Professor, Theorist

About

Ernest Ezra Mandel was born in Frankfurt, Germany. He was a German-born Belgian revolutionary Marxist theorist, author, economist, and professor. He is the author of such works as Late Capitalism, An Introduction to Marxist Economic Theory, The Meaning of the Second World War, Trotsky as Alternative, and Power and Money. He was a professor at the Free University of Brussels. He was one of the most prominent anti-Stalinist Marxist intellectuals of his time. A political theorist and economist, his worldview was shaped by experiences in the Second World War as an underground political activist in Occupied Belgium and during his subsequent internment in a Nazi prison camp.

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