Life & Wisdom Quote by Ernest Mandel

Mandel’s line lands like a small act of sabotage against the left’s oldest bad habit: confusing a brand with a base. “Self-proclaimed parties” evokes the sect that declares itself the vanguard by sheer assertion, treating legitimacy as something you can print on a masthead. Mandel, a Marxist economist shaped by war, resistance, and the postwar battles inside European socialism, is pushing back on the idea that a party becomes “the party” through correct doctrine or internal certification. If you have to proclaim it, he implies, you probably haven’t earned it.

The intent is organizational, not merely philosophical. Mandel is talking about power: who gets to speak in the name of workers, and by what proof. The subtext is a warning about substitutionism, the move where a small cadre substitutes itself for the class it claims to represent, then substitutes slogans for strategy, and purity tests for persuasion. “Self-proclaimed” is the tell; it suggests a closed loop of validation, a politics that feeds on declarations because it can’t win the messier contest of building majority consent.

Context matters because Mandel lived through an era when “party” could mean liberation movement, bureaucratic machine, or splintered micro-sect. His skepticism reads as a critique of Stalinist self-anointment and of Trotskyist fragmentation alike: if politics becomes an identity, organizations multiply while influence shrinks. The line works because it flips a romantic assumption (that radicals are automatically the authentic ones) into a harder democratic demand: representation is conferred from below, not announced from above.