Ernest Mandel Quotes

It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism.

Marxism is a revolutionary worldview that must always struggle for new revelations.

The mass of workers, as yet non-Socialist, is retarded in its development towards Socialism.

The working class will not halt until socialism has been realized.

Regardless of the degree of class consciousness of their members, the trade unions are, by their very nature, driven on to the revolutionary goal.

Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause; they are, as Lenin said, cogs and wheels in the whole revolutionary machine.

The academic Left has a long history of taking the idea of 'false consciousness' seriously.

To begin to know the philosophy of socialism, in backward countries where the class differences are great, very great, and terribly exaggerated over the conditions we know in this country, to overcome this, the theory of revolution, of force and violence, was necessary within those political conditions. It couldn't be anything else.

I believe, as Lenin said, that this revolutionary chaos may yet crystallize into new forms of life.

In the 1970s, many intellectuals had become political radicals. Marxism was correct, liberalism was for wimps, and Marx had pronounced that 'the ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.'

The important part of Marxism was its demand for active, constant, practical, class-war.

As the class struggle sharpens in the U.S. Marxism will come into its own as a great popular study.

I was working with C. L. R. James; I believed in Marxist ideas about the labor and movement and the workers being the secret to the future. And I learned differently just by being in Detroit and being married to Jimmy Boggs.

Solidarity Forever

Only idiots think that the proletariat will win a majority right away. First we topple the bourgeoisie. Then we seize power. That is the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Marxism today is playing dead, but it is not altogether abolished.

Any member of the party who … advocates crime, sabotage, or other methods of violence as a weapon of the working class to aid in its emancipation, shall be expelled from membership of the party.

Labor is, on the one hand, more and more furnished by a class; Property or Capital, on the other, held and controlled by another class. Here you have workers without property—the proletariat. There you have property without work—or capital…. The workers without property are excluded from their products, from the riches they create—which accumulate in the hands of the property holders, capitalists and large land-owners.

Communism was not only defined as the things that Marx and Lenin had advocated, but included anything that had the potential for change in the society.

Workers thought that the moment was ripe to take possession once [and] for all the means of production. They armed for self-defense... and began to organize production on their own.... It was the right of property abolished in fact... it was a new regime, a new form of social life that was being ushered in. And the government stood by because it felt impotent to offer opposition.

The modern proletarian class doesn't carry out its struggle according to a plan set out in some book or theory; the modern workers' struggle is a part of history, a part of social progress, and in the middle of history, in the middle of progress, in the middle of the fight, we learn how we must fight...

Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

Communism … is not a stale state …. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.

Socialism has not struck root very deeply in the United States, the very heart of the capitalist world, and that the workers there have not yet succeeded in organizing an independent political party on the English model.

The class struggle is precisely that which resolves the contradictions between two opposed classes by abolishing them at the same time that it constitutes and reveals them as classes.