"There has been hardly a single year since 1917, and in a certain sense since 1905, without a revolution somewhere in the world in which the workers participated in a rather important way"
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Mandel’s line is doing a quiet but aggressive piece of calendar politics: it turns the 20th century into an almost unbroken workers’ timeline, with 1917 and 1905 as the anchoring beats. Those dates aren’t neutral history markers; they’re signals. 1905 is the “dress rehearsal” for Russia, 1917 the proof-of-concept that a workers’ uprising can actually seize state power. By starting there, Mandel frames everything after as aftershocks, not isolated accidents.
The specific intent is polemical without sounding like a slogan. “Hardly a single year” is deliberately sweeping, the kind of claim that dares you to nitpick while it smuggles in a more durable point: workers are not episodic extras in modern politics, they’re recurring protagonists. The phrase “in a certain sense” is the tell. It’s Mandel hedging just enough to keep the statement elastic - revolution as insurrection, general strike, anti-colonial rupture, regime change with mass labor mobilization. That flexibility lets the claim survive different geographies and different definitions of “revolution.”
Subtext: stop treating capitalism’s stability as the default setting. Mandel, a Marxist economist writing in the long shadow of Cold War “end of ideology” narratives, is insisting on continuity - that class conflict keeps resurfacing even when it’s declared settled. “Participated in a rather important way” is almost comically understated, a dry rhetorical move that makes the workers’ centrality sound like common sense rather than prophecy.
Context matters: post-1917, revolutionary energy does travel - through factory committees and strikes, but also through decolonization and popular fronts. Mandel is mapping that churn to argue that the system’s pressures reproduce rebellion, year after year, whether elites notice or not.
The specific intent is polemical without sounding like a slogan. “Hardly a single year” is deliberately sweeping, the kind of claim that dares you to nitpick while it smuggles in a more durable point: workers are not episodic extras in modern politics, they’re recurring protagonists. The phrase “in a certain sense” is the tell. It’s Mandel hedging just enough to keep the statement elastic - revolution as insurrection, general strike, anti-colonial rupture, regime change with mass labor mobilization. That flexibility lets the claim survive different geographies and different definitions of “revolution.”
Subtext: stop treating capitalism’s stability as the default setting. Mandel, a Marxist economist writing in the long shadow of Cold War “end of ideology” narratives, is insisting on continuity - that class conflict keeps resurfacing even when it’s declared settled. “Participated in a rather important way” is almost comically understated, a dry rhetorical move that makes the workers’ centrality sound like common sense rather than prophecy.
Context matters: post-1917, revolutionary energy does travel - through factory committees and strikes, but also through decolonization and popular fronts. Mandel is mapping that churn to argue that the system’s pressures reproduce rebellion, year after year, whether elites notice or not.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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