Ernest Mandel

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Mistakes in themselves are unavoidable.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Marxism is always open, always critical, always self-critical.”

“You cannot make a socialist revolution without really trying.”

“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.”

“I do not believe in self-proclaimed parties.”

“Factions are a sign of illness in a party.”

“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.”