Time & Perspective Quote by Ernest Mandel

Marxism, in Mandel's hands, isn't a shrine; it's a lab notebook. The line is engineered to rescue a revolutionary tradition from its most damning caricature: that it's a closed dogma pretending to be science. By insisting Marxism is "always open", Mandel is arguing that its credibility depends on revision, not reverence. The phrasing does quiet polemical work: "new experiences" nods to lived political defeats and surprises (bureaucratization, fascism, decolonization), while "new facts" appeals to the authority of evidence rather than party discipline. He wants the reader to hear Marxism as method, not scripture.

The slyest move is the clause "including facts about the past". That line admits something many ideological systems try to dodge: history itself changes as archives open, as scholarship advances, as suppressed narratives surface, as the present asks different questions of old events. Mandel is preempting the accusation that Marxists rewrite history opportunistically by reframing reinterpretation as a feature of serious inquiry. It also signals a willingness to revise sacred stories of 1917, Stalinism, and postwar capitalism without surrendering the project.

Context matters: Mandel was a leading Trotskyist economist writing after the catastrophes of "actually existing socialism" and amid a rapidly mutating postwar capitalism. "Corpus of scientific socialism" is both a claim and a dare. He borrows the prestige of science while conceding science's price: permanent vulnerability to new data. The intent is ideological triage - keep Marxism alive by making it accountable.