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Ernest Mandel Quotes

Type: Author Quotes Category: Quotes Date of Birth: April 5, 1923 Date of Death: July 20, 1995 Nationality: Belgian Find on Amazon: Ernest Mandel Related Authors: Henry David Thoreau Mark Twain Samuel Johnson Victor Hugo George Eliot George Orwell Gertrude Stein Henry Miller

A vanguard organization is something which is permanent. A vanguard party has to be constructed, has to be built through a long process. Ernest Mandel And you cannot have a socialist revolution commandeered from the top, ordered around by some omniscient leader or group of leaders. Ernest Mandel 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. Ernest Mandel Factions are a sign of illness in a party. Ernest Mandel 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. Ernest Mandel 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. Ernest Mandel I do not believe in self-proclaimed parties. Ernest Mandel If the workers would be at the highest point of militancy and consciousness all the time, you would not need a vanguard organization. Ernest Mandel 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. Ernest Mandel Marxism is always open, always critical, always self-critical. Ernest Mandel Mistakes in themselves are unavoidable. 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. 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. 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. Ernest Mandel Periodically, the workers do revolt against bourgeois society, not by a hundred, five hundred, or a thousand, but by the millions. Ernest Mandel Revolution is an instrument, like a party is an instrument. Ernest Mandel Revolution is not a goal in itself. Ernest Mandel Socialist democracy is not a luxury but an absolute, essential necessity for overthrowing capitalism and building socialism. Ernest Mandel Socialist democracy is not, a luxury and its need is not limited to the most advanced industrial countries. Ernest Mandel 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 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 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 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 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 There is a process of social and of political differentiation going on in the real working class all the time. Ernest Mandel 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 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 You can have relatively high levels of class consciousness with a lower level of class militancy than one would have expected. Ernest Mandel You cannot have a spontaneous socialist revolution. Ernest Mandel You cannot make a socialist revolution without really trying. 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. Ernest Mandel

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