Life & Wisdom Quote by Ernest Mandel

A movement that can be splintered can be managed. Mandel’s line is less a placid call for unity than a hard-edged warning about how the left loses: not only to capital, but to its own internal border patrols. “No conditions” is the tell. It’s absolutist language designed for a world where factionalism isn’t a quirk of personality; it’s a political technology. Sects, chapels, “separate organizations” are framed as temptations that convert a class project into a clubhouse identity.

Mandel is writing out of the Trotskyist tradition, where the memory of failed revolutions and the long hangover of Stalinism made “unity” both necessary and suspect. The subtext is aimed inward, at comrades: stop confusing organizational loyalty with historical purpose. A “chapel” is not neutral imagery; it paints doctrinal micro-parties as quasi-religious, defined by ritual and purity rather than strategic traction. He’s also staking a claim against the idea that any party apparatus has the right to stand in for the class itself, a pointed rebuke to vanguardist self-importance.

The rhetorical move is clever because it elevates “the class as a whole” into the only legitimate constituency, then demotes everything else to fragmentation. That sounds noble, but it’s also a power move: who gets to define “the class” and its interests? Mandel’s intent is to keep the horizon universal and material, not denominational and procedural. The tension he leaves hanging is the one that always haunts mass politics: solidarity is an achievement, not a default, and it can be invoked to discipline dissent as easily as to overcome it.