Ernest Mandel Quotes

28 quotes in 370 categories

• 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…
• You need a vanguard organization in order to overcome the dangerous potential brought about by the uneven development of class militancy and class consciousness.
• 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
• Revolution is not a goal in itself.
• You cannot make a socialist revolution without really trying.
• Socialist democracy is not, a luxury and its need is not limited to the most advanced industrial countries.
• Marxism is always open, always critical, always self-critical.
• I do not believe in self-proclaimed parties.
• Mistakes in themselves are unavoidable.
• Periodically, the workers do revolt against bourgeois society, not by a hundred, five hundred, or a thousand, but by the millions.
• Revolution is an instrument, like a party is an instrument.
• There is a process of social and of political differentiation going on in the real working class all the time.
• 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…
• 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,…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…

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