"Periodically, the workers do revolt against bourgeois society, not by a hundred, five hundred, or a thousand, but by the millions"
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Mandel insists that the apparent stability of capitalist, bourgeois society rests on a fragile foundation. Class antagonism is not a background condition but a pressure that periodically erupts, and when it does, it does so on a mass scale. The emphasis on millions rejects the idea that history turns through the daring of small conspiratorial minorities; it affirms the working class as a collective agent capable of reshaping society through strikes, uprisings, and the sudden creation of new organs of power.
As a Marxist economist shaped by the Trotskyist tradition, Mandel tied such eruptions to the rhythms of capitalist development. Crises, unemployment, inflation, and falling living standards puncture the promise of bourgeois normality and accelerate the formation of class consciousness. He often linked these cycles to long waves of accumulation, arguing that structural downturns make mass movements more likely, though never mechanically inevitable. The timing is contingent, but the recurrence is not accidental.
History offers the texture behind his claim. The mass strikes and soviets of 1917–1920, the sit-down strikes and popular fronts of the 1930s, the insurgent workers of 1944–45 in Italy and France, the ten million who walked out in France in May 1968, the revolutionary process in Portugal in 1974–75, and the Polish Solidarity explosion in 1980 all show the capacity for millions to enter politics directly. Outcomes differ because institutions, leaderships, and strategic choices mediate the raw power of numbers. Social-democratic and Stalinist apparatuses have often contained or diverted such upsurges; repression has crushed others; sometimes reforms are won and the system stabilizes. For Mandel that variability underscores, rather than weakens, the central point: the working class remains the indispensable subject, and the decisive question becomes how organization and strategy can convert mass revolt into durable transformation.
The line is both diagnosis and warning. Beneath periods of quiet, contradictions persist. When they break into the open, they do so on a scale that redefines what is politically possible.
As a Marxist economist shaped by the Trotskyist tradition, Mandel tied such eruptions to the rhythms of capitalist development. Crises, unemployment, inflation, and falling living standards puncture the promise of bourgeois normality and accelerate the formation of class consciousness. He often linked these cycles to long waves of accumulation, arguing that structural downturns make mass movements more likely, though never mechanically inevitable. The timing is contingent, but the recurrence is not accidental.
History offers the texture behind his claim. The mass strikes and soviets of 1917–1920, the sit-down strikes and popular fronts of the 1930s, the insurgent workers of 1944–45 in Italy and France, the ten million who walked out in France in May 1968, the revolutionary process in Portugal in 1974–75, and the Polish Solidarity explosion in 1980 all show the capacity for millions to enter politics directly. Outcomes differ because institutions, leaderships, and strategic choices mediate the raw power of numbers. Social-democratic and Stalinist apparatuses have often contained or diverted such upsurges; repression has crushed others; sometimes reforms are won and the system stabilizes. For Mandel that variability underscores, rather than weakens, the central point: the working class remains the indispensable subject, and the decisive question becomes how organization and strategy can convert mass revolt into durable transformation.
The line is both diagnosis and warning. Beneath periods of quiet, contradictions persist. When they break into the open, they do so on a scale that redefines what is politically possible.
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| Topic | Equality |
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