Life & Wisdom Quote by Ernest Mandel

“Always open, always critical, always self-critical” is less a description than a sales pitch for a tradition that, by Mandel’s time, had a branding problem. Writing in the long shadow of Stalinism, the Soviet invasion of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and the West’s Cold War habit of treating Marxism as synonymous with dogma, Mandel (a major Trotskyist voice) tries to rescue Marxism’s self-image: not a closed creed, but a method.

The rhetoric is doing careful triage. “Open” signals permeability to new evidence and new struggles; it’s a rebuke to party-line certainty and to the idea that history has already been solved. “Critical” performs two tasks at once: it keeps faith with Marx’s original posture (critique of political economy) while staking a claim to intellectual seriousness in a culture that associates revolution with simplification. Then comes the loaded third beat: “self-critical.” That word is a quiet indictment of movements that demanded discipline from the rank-and-file but treated leadership and doctrine as untouchable. Mandel is saying: if Marxism can’t interrogate its own failures, it deserves to become a museum piece.

The subtext is defensive and aspirational. Defensive, because Mandel is fencing off the charge that Marxism inevitably hardens into authoritarianism. Aspirational, because he’s proposing a Marxism that behaves like a living science: revisable, argumentative, exposed to reality. It’s also a recruitment line aimed at the disillusioned left: you can join without surrendering your doubt.