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Other authors named Ernest:
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Author's popularity: -2
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Popularity: 3
Vote: | A vanguard organization becomes a vanguard party when a significant minority of the real class, of the really existing workers, poor peasants, revolutionary youth, revolutionary women, revolutionary oppressed nationalities, recognizes it as their vanguard party, i.e., follows it in action. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | . A vanguard organization is something which is permanent. A vanguard party has to be constructed, has to be built through a long process. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | After all, the history of the 20th century is the history of social revolutions. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | And if the mass of the people do not accept your choice of priorities, no power on earth, even the biggest terror of Stalin, can force them to do the one key thing that you need to build socialism: have a constructive, creative, and convinced participation in the production process. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | And you cannot have a socialist revolution commandeered from the top, ordered around by some omniscient leader or group of leaders. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Coming out of all these basic conceptual distinctions we can conclude the necessity of a vanguard formation nearly immediately. |
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Vote: | Communism, from then on, would designate both a classes society without property, without ownership - either private or nationalised - of the means of production, without commodity production, money or a state apparatus separate and apart from the members of the community, and the social-political movement to arrive at that society. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Factions are a sign of illness in a party. |
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Vote: | 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. |
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Vote: | 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. |
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Vote: | I do not believe in self-proclaimed parties. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | If the workers do not fight for higher wages, if they do not fight for a shorter workday, if they do not fight for, let us say it in a provocative way, day-to-day economic issues, they become demoralized slaves. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | If the workers would be at the highest point of militancy and consciousness all the time, you would not need a vanguard organization. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | In the light of these principles, it is clear that no socialist or communist society exists anywhere in the world today. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Marxism is always open, always critical, always self-critical. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Mistakes in themselves are unavoidable. |
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Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Only if you bring together the experience of the concrete struggles conducted by the real masses in the three sectors of the world (which are also called the three sectors of world revolution), then you have an overall, correct view of world reality. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Periodically, the workers do revolt against bourgeois society, not by a hundred, five hundred, or a thousand, but by the millions. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Revolution is an instrument, like a party is an instrument. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Revolution is not a goal in itself. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Socialist democracy is not a luxury but an absolute, essential necessity for overthrowing capitalism and building socialism. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Socialist democracy is not, a luxury and its need is not limited to the most advanced industrial countries. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | The first function of a revolutionary vanguard organization is to maintain the continuity of the theoretical, programmatical, political, and organizational acquisitions of the previous phase of high class activity, and of high working class consciousness. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | The most elementary self-organizations are trade unions. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | The radical and international definition of a communist society given by Marx and Engels inevitably leads to the perspective of a transition (transition period) between capitalism and communism. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | The real notion is that of the fusion in real life between this vanguard layer of the working class, the real leaders of real struggles of workers at factory and neighborhood levels, of woman's struggles, of youth struggles, of national minority struggles, and the political vanguard organization. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | There is a process of social and of political differentiation going on in the real working class all the time. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | They cannot have an overall, total correct view of reality because they see only a fragmented part of that reality. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | We do not believe that Marxism is a full, final doctrine, dogma, or Weltanschauung. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | 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. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | You can have relatively high levels of class consciousness with a lower level of class militancy than one would have expected. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | You cannot have a spontaneous socialist revolution. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | You cannot make a socialist revolution without really trying. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | You need a vanguard organization in order to overcome the dangerous potential brought about by the uneven development of class militancy and class consciousness. |
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Biography
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Ernest Esra Mandel, also known by various pseudonyms such as Ernest Germain, Pierre Gousset, Henri Vallin, Walter etc. (b. Frankfurt April 5, 1923 - d. Brussels July 20, 1995) was a Belgian Jew recruited to the Fourth International in his youth in Antwerp. His parents, Henri and Rosa Mandel, were emigres from Poland. Ernest's entrance to university studies was cut short when the German occupying forces closed the university down.
During World War II, he escaped twice after being arrested in the course of resistance activities, and survived imprisonment in a German concentration camp. After the war, he became a leader of both the Belgian Trotskyists and the youngest member of the Fourth International secretariat, alongside Michel Pablo and others. He gained respect as a prolific journalist with a clear and lively style, as an orthodox Marxist theoretician, and as a talented debater. He wrote for numerous newspapers in the 1940s and 1950s including Het Parool, Le Peuple, l'Observateur and Agence-France Presse. At the height of the cold war he publicly defended the merits of Marxism in debate with the social democrat and future Dutch premier Joop den Uyl.
After the FI suffered a major split in 1953, Mandel developed into a leader of the West European-based International Secretariat of the Fourth International. In line with its policy, he joined the Belgian Socialist Party where he was a leader of a militant socialist tendency, becoming editor of the socialist newspaper La Gauche (and writing for its Flemish sister publication, Links), a member of the economic studies commission of the General Confederation of Labour of Belgium and an associate of the Belgian syndicalist André Renard. He was expelled from the Socialist Party not long after the Belgian General Strike for opposing its coalition with the Christian Socialists, and its acceptance of anti-strike legislation.
In 1963 he led the ISFI into a reunification with James Cannon's Socialist Workers' Party (USA). This regroupment was known as the United Secretariat of the Fourth International or "Usec", and until his death in 1995 Mandel remained its most prominent leader and theoretician (the main part of the SWP (USA) exited from the Usec again in the mid-1980s). In Belgium, he was a member of the SAP-POS (Socialist Workers' Party - see http://www.sap-pos.org/).
Until the publication of a massive treatise "Marxist Economic Theory" in French in 1962, Mandel's Marxist articles were written mainly under a variety of pseudonyms and his activities as Fourth Internationalist were little known. He resumed university studies and graduated from the Ecole d'Haute Etudes in Paris in 1967. Only from 1968 did Mandel become wellknown as public figure and Marxist politician, touring student campuses in Europe and America giving talks on socialism, imperialism and revolution.
Although officially barred from West Germany (and several other countries at various times, including the United States, France, Switzerland, and Australia), he gained a Phd from the Free University of Berlin in 1972, published as Late Capitalism, and he subsequently gained a lecturer position at the Free University of Brussels. In 1978 he delivered the Alfred Marshall Lectures at Cambridge University, on the topic of the long waves of capitalist development.
Mandel campaigned on behalf of numerous dissident left-wing intellectuals suffering political repression, championed the cancellation of the third world debt, and in the Gorbachev era spearheaded a petition for the rehabilitation of the accused in the Moscow Trials of 1936-38. As a man in his 70s, he travelled to Russia to defend his vision of a free and democratic socialism.
In total, he published approximately 2,000 articles and around 30 books during his life, which were translated into many languages. In addition, he also edited or contributed to many books, maintained a voluminous correspondence, and went on speaking engagements worldwide. He considered it his mission to transmit the heritage of classical Marxist thought, deformed by the experience of Stalinism and the Cold War, to a new generation. And to a large extent he did influence a generation of scholars and activists in their understanding of important Marxist concepts. In his writings, perhaps most striking is the tension between creative independent thinking and the desire for a strict adherence to Marxist doctrinal orthodoxy.
He is probably remembered most of all for being an indefatigable rationalist populariser of basic Marxist ideas, for his books on Late Capitalism and Long-Wave theory, and for his moral-intellectual leadership in the Trotskyist movement. His critics however claim that he was 'too soft on Stalinism', eclectic and unsystematic in his economic theorizing, an over-optimistic politician, a supporter of reforms within capitalism, or simply that he wrote more than he could do well. A satirical novel featuring among others Ernest Mandel (in the guise of the encyclopedic, computer-brained genius Esra Einstein) is Tariq Ali's Redemption (Picador, 1991).
Bibliography of Ernest Mandel's main books
*Marxist Economic Theory (2 vols.).
*The Formation of the Economic Thought of Karl Marx, 1843 to Capital
*La Longue Marche de la Revolution
*Introduction to Marxist Economic Theory
*Europe versus America: Contradictions of Imperialism
*Decline of the Dollar': a Marxist view of the Monetary Crisis
*The Second Slump
*Revolutionary Marxism Today
*Revolutionare Strategien im 20e Jahrhundert
*Trotsky: A Study in the Dynamic of his Thought
*From Stalinism to Eurocommunism
*Late Capitalism
*Verveemding en revolutionaire perspectieven
*Offener Marxismus
*Réponse à Louis Althusser et Jean Elleinstein
*Long Waves of Capitalist Development
*Introduction to Marxism
*Delightful Murder: A social history of the crime story'
*De la Commune à Mai 68: Histoire du mouvement ouvrier international
*Karl Marx: die Aktualitat seines Werkes
*La Crise
*The meaning of the Second World War
*Beyond Perestroika: the future of Gorbachev's USSR
*October 1917: Coup d'état or Social Revolution?
*Trotsky as Alternative
*Kontroversen um "Das Kapital"
*Power and Money: A Marxist Theory of Bureaucracy
*The Place of Marxism in History
*Cash Krach & Krisis: Profitboom, Börsenkrach und Wirtschaftskrise
*Revolutionary Marxism and Social Reality in the 20th Century
...(more on Wikipedia)
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Ernest Mandel".
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