Ernest Mandel quotes

For Marx, 'pure' economic theory, that is economic theory which abstracts from a specific social structure, is impossible. (Ernest Mandel)
Marxism is always open, always critical, always self-critical. View quote
Ernest Mandel
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. View quote
Ernest Mandel
Factions are a sign of illness in a party. View quote
Ernest Mandel
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. View quote
Ernest Mandel
You need a vanguard organization in order to overcome the dangerous potential brought about by the uneven development of class militancy and class consciousness. View quote
Ernest Mandel
Revolution is not a goal in itself. View quote
Ernest Mandel
You cannot make a socialist revolution without really trying. View quote
Ernest Mandel
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. View quote
Ernest Mandel
Socialist democracy is not, a luxury and its need is not limited to the most advanced industrial countries. View quote
Ernest Mandel
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)
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. View quote
Ernest Mandel
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. View quote
Ernest Mandel
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. View quote
Ernest Mandel
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. View quote
Ernest Mandel
You can have relatively high levels of class consciousness with a lower level of class militancy than one would have expected. View quote
Ernest Mandel
There is a process of social and of political differentiation going on in the real working class all the time. View quote
Ernest Mandel
Revolution is an instrument, like a party is an instrument. View quote
Ernest Mandel
Periodically, the workers do revolt against bourgeois society, not by a hundred, five hundred, or a thousand, but by the millions. View quote
Ernest Mandel
Mistakes in themselves are unavoidable. View quote
Ernest Mandel
I do not believe in self-proclaimed parties. (Ernest Mandel)
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. View quote
Ernest Mandel
Capital, explaining the origins of the capitalist mode of production, points towards the inevitable historical decline and fall of this same social system. An economic theory based upon the historical relativity of every economic system, its strict limitation in time, tactlessly reminds Messrs the capitalists, their hangers-on and their apologists that capitalism itself is a product of history. It will perish in due course as it once was born. A new social form of economic organization will then take the place of the capitalist one: it will function according to other laws than those which govern the capitalist economy. View quote
Ernest Mandel
By stating that the analysis of the laws of motion governing the capitalist mode of production necessarily includes at least some essential elements of an analysis of economic phenomena valid for the whole historical epoch encompassing economic organizations in which commodity production exists, one extends the validity of parts of Marx's Capital not only into the past but also into the future. View quote
Ernest Mandel
Yes, he does indeed and again this is very positive. Our movement has defended this thesis for 55 years and was therefore labelled as counterrevolutionary. Today people, both in the Soviet Union and in a large part of the international communist movement, understand better where the real counterrevolutionaries were. View quote
Ernest Mandel