Ernest Mandel Quotes

Revolution is not a goal in itself.

Factions are a sign of illness in a party.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Mistakes in themselves are unavoidable.

I do not believe in self-proclaimed parties.

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