Art & Creativity Quote by Ernest Mandel

Marxism, Mandel insists, is not scripture; it is a living record of collision. The line is doing two jobs at once: defending the legitimacy of the “Marxist program” by anchoring it in “actual class struggle and real revolutions,” while refusing the comforting finality of doctrine. Calling it “not a definitely closed book” is a calculated rebuke to two audiences: the anti-communist caricature that treats Marxism as a rigid blueprint, and the ossified party orthodoxies that behave as if history ended with their last congress resolution.

Mandel’s phrasing is tellingly procedural. “Program” evokes strategy, not theology. “Continuity” is a claim of inheritance, suggesting Marxism earns authority not by prophecy but by accumulated tests in the street, the workplace, and the barricade. Yet the open-book metaphor signals an unresolved wager: if Marxism is continuous with revolutions, it must also be continuous with their failures, compromises, and betrayals. The sentence quietly smuggles in self-critique as a condition of survival.

Context matters. Mandel, a leading Trotskyist economist writing in the shadow of Stalinism and later amid the crises of the 1970s left, is threading a needle: distinguishing Marxism as method from the bureaucratic “finished product” of Soviet-style rule. The intent is renewal without renunciation. The subtext: if you want a politics capable of meeting new capitalism, new states, new defeats, you cannot inherit Marxism like an heirloom; you have to keep editing it under pressure.