Life & Wisdom Quote by Ernest Mandel

Mandel is doing two things at once: romanticizing rupture and trying to domesticate it. By tying "the highest level of self-organization" to "revolutionary crises", he rejects the comforting liberal notion that participation steadily improves through institutions. For him, the peak of democratic capacity arrives when the normal machinery of the state and workplace breaks down and ordinary people are forced to improvise governance in real time. Crisis is not just catastrophe; it's the laboratory where latent collective intelligence suddenly becomes visible.

The phrase "Soviet type of organization" is the provocation, but he immediately softens it with a translator's shrug: "workers' councils, people's councils, call them what you want". That's not casual. It's an attempt to rescue the council form from the Cold War's semantic minefield, separating early soviets (as bottom-up assemblies) from the later Soviet state (as top-down party rule). In other words: don't get stuck on branding; look at the mechanism.

The subtext is a wager about political maturity. Mandel implies that, under pressure, people can coordinate production, distribution, and security without bosses or parliamentary professionals. It's also a critique of left strategies that wait for elections or build permanent bureaucracies; he’s arguing that real legitimacy is forged in moments when legality loses its monopoly on order.

Context matters: Mandel, a Trotskyist economist writing in the shadow of 1917's mythos and 1968's uprisings, is defending spontaneity against both capitalist management and communist party centralism. The promise is exhilarating. The warning is implicit: outside crisis, that intensity rarely holds, and every council risks being swallowed by the very state it tries to replace.