"Our 'model' of socialism, contrary to what many opponents of Marxism contend, promises neither paradise on earth nor the millennium. We have no illusions about a society without conflict or an 'end of history'. We know very well that hundreds of problems will remain unsolved for centuries - and many new ones will emerge. We are indeed very modest people, with quite modest goals. All we want to do is solve those half dozen or so problems resulting from the incongruity between the technical and scientific capacities of the human species on the one hand and the system of production for private profit on the other. There is no mystery about what these problems are: hunger, physical misery, social and economic inequality, war, inequality between men and women and between different nationalities and races, exploitation of the labour of others, political repression, socially organised violence. All these obstacles to the self realisation of the human personality can be eliminated through the overturn of the existing relations of production and the political structures that uphold them. All the myriad of other problems, and the future ones that will undoubtedly arise, we of hundreds of millions of people over centuries and have made the lives of thousands of millions of others miserable beyond description. A victorious struggle for socialism would make a seminal contribution to human progress, and it is for this reason that the fight for these goals, modest as they are, is the crucial human endeavour of our age."
(Ernest Mandel, 1979)