Mistakes in themselves are unavoidable.

And you cannot have a socialist revolution commandeered from the top, ordered around by some omniscient leader or group of leaders

I do not believe in self-proclaimed parties.

You need a vanguard organization in order to overcome the dangerous potential brought about by the uneven development of class militancy and class consciousness.

The only conclusion you can draw from the real historical movement is that by and large, in day-to-day life, what Lenin called trade union consciousness dominates the working class. I would call it elementary class consciousness of the working class.

You can have relatively high levels of class consciousness with a lower level of class militancy than one would have expected.

For Marx, 'pure' economic theory, that is economic theory which abstracts from a specific social structure, is impossible.