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.

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.

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.

Factions are a sign of illness in a party.

Mistakes in themselves are unavoidable.

Revolution is an instrument, like a party is an instrument.

Revolution is not a goal in itself.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

I do not believe in self-proclaimed parties.

You need a vanguard organization in order to overcome the dangerous potential brought about by the uneven development of class militancy and class consciousness.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

You cannot make a socialist revolution without really trying.