De socialistische wetenschapper en activist Ernest Mandel werd honderd jaar geleden, op 5 april 1923, geboren. Een 'Vlaams internationalist van Joodse afkomst', Mandel was schrijver van enkele van de belangrijkste werken van marxistische theorie in de tweede helft van de twintigste eeuw.

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Any serious discussion in a Marxist organization has two aspects.ⁱ It is born of ongoing events and tends to respond to a need for action born from the same events. In this respect, any discussion which is not artificial is inevitably partly pragmatic. But the answer given and the method which determines it become part of the whole of Marxist theory, and in one way or another modify the ideas—and the action—of future generations of Marxists, and even the answers given by the same generation to future questions.

For eighty years, the theory of permanent revolution has been the object of a permanent debate inside the international labour and revolutionary movement.ⁱ A great number of articles and books have been devoted to the discussion. A significant number of revolutions and counter-revolutions have. occurred in the less developed countries of the world in which this theory could be tested in the light of real historical development.

Henk Sneevliet (1883 – 1942) was een Nederlandse socialist van wereldformaat. In Nederland, in Indonesië en in China streed hij tegen kolonialisme en kapitalisme, en voor socialisme. Op 13 april 1942 werd hij samen met zes andere verzetsstrijders van het Marx-Lenin-Luxemburg-Front door de Nazi’s vermoord. Nog elk jaar worden Sneevliet en zijn kameraden herdacht, dit jaar op 16 april. 

Council socialism is a social order in which the mass of the population itself decides in a self-governing, self-determining manner what is produced, how production takes places, and how a decisive part of the results of this production is no longer distributed via the market, but according to the principle of satisfying needs.ⁱ