Life & Wisdom Quote by Ernest Mandel

Mandel’s line has the clipped impatience of someone who’s watched “revolution” get treated like a vibe rather than a project. “You cannot” is a scolding constraint, not a prediction; it narrows the range of comforting myths. The target is the perennial left-wing hope that history will do the hard part for us: that capitalism will collapse on schedule, that the masses will spontaneously cohere, that a better order will arrive by moral correctness and a few symbolic gestures. Mandel’s punchline is the unromantic verb at the end: trying.

The subtext is organizational, almost managerial, which is precisely why it bites. Socialist revolution is imagined as an eruption, a sudden clearing of the air. Mandel reframes it as work: strategy, discipline, institutions, and the slow accumulation of capacity. The phrase “really trying” also hints at self-deception. Plenty of people “try” in ways that preserve their comfort: purity politics, rhetorical maximalism, substituting critique for power-building. Mandel implies those aren’t failures of sincerity so much as failures of seriousness.

Context matters. As a Marxist economist and Trotskyist, Mandel wrote in a century where revolutions happened, were defeated, or ossified into bureaucracies. That record creates the quote’s edge: revolution is neither impossible nor inevitable, but contingent on human agency and organization. It’s a rebuke to both fatalism and fantasy, delivered in a sentence that sounds almost banal until you realize how many movements die from refusing its premise.