Politics & Power Quote by Ernest Mandel

Mandel’s line refuses the postcard version of “the working class” as a single, welded bloc. He’s pointing at motion: the class is not just acted upon by markets and states; it is constantly re-sorting itself through conflicts over skill, wages, gender, race, migration, union status, and access to political representation. “Differentiation” is doing double duty here. Socially, it names the lived hierarchies that develop inside wage labor: the foreman and the temp, the union shop and the gig worker, the citizen and the undocumented. Politically, it names the divergent routes those groups take into parties, unions, neighborhood organizations, and sometimes into apathy or reaction.

The specific intent is strategic. As a Marxist economist and activist writing in the long shadow of postwar capitalism, Mandel is warning the left against romanticizing “the workers” as automatically revolutionary. If differentiation is “going on ... all the time,” then solidarity is not a natural resource to be mined; it’s a project that must be built against the grain of real incentives and institutional pressures. The subtext is a critique of vanguard certainty: you can’t simply “represent” a class whose composition and consciousness are perpetually being reshaped by capitalism’s own churn.

Context matters: Mandel is speaking from an era when the industrial core was already fragmenting (white-collar growth, deindustrialization on the horizon, new social movements challenging old labor leadership). The sentence reads like a cold shower for anyone craving a unified subject of history - and a practical reminder that politics begins inside the fractures, not after them.