"Mistakes in themselves are unavoidable"
About this Quote
Mistakes are part of any serious attempt to change the world because action unfolds in uncertainty. Choices must be made with incomplete information, conflicting pressures, shifting forces, and limited time. Error is not proof of bad faith; it is the companion of initiative. The deeper claim is practical and political: progress depends less on avoiding mistakes than on what we build to recognize, correct, and learn from them.
Ernest Mandel, a Belgian Marxist economist and a leading Trotskyist intellectual, drew this lesson from a century of revolutionary experience. He watched how bureaucratic regimes tried to mask fallibility with a claim to infallibility, turning errors into dogmas and treating criticism as treason. That path multiplies small mistakes into disasters. By contrast, a movement rooted in workers democracy, open debate, and accountability treats error as a signal, not a scandal. Mandel often stressed the difference between honest, strategic misjudgments, which are inevitable in complex struggle, and betrayals or abuses of power, which are avoidable and intolerable.
The point reaches beyond politics into economic planning and everyday practice. Any rational coordination of social needs requires feedback, experimentation, and revision. Plans improve when they are exposed to transparent data, plural perspectives, and the corrective of those affected by them. Fear of making mistakes paralyzes; a culture that allows self-criticism without humiliation energizes. The true failure is not the initial misstep but the refusal to examine it, the concealment that blocks learning, or the repetition that follows from dogma.
Treat fallibility as a given and design for corrigibility. Protect minority opinions, publish results, rotate leadership, test hypotheses in practice, and correct course quickly. Under those conditions, mistakes stop being a stigma and become the price of discovery. What matters is not the absence of error but the presence of institutions and habits that turn errors into improvement faster than they harden into harm.
Ernest Mandel, a Belgian Marxist economist and a leading Trotskyist intellectual, drew this lesson from a century of revolutionary experience. He watched how bureaucratic regimes tried to mask fallibility with a claim to infallibility, turning errors into dogmas and treating criticism as treason. That path multiplies small mistakes into disasters. By contrast, a movement rooted in workers democracy, open debate, and accountability treats error as a signal, not a scandal. Mandel often stressed the difference between honest, strategic misjudgments, which are inevitable in complex struggle, and betrayals or abuses of power, which are avoidable and intolerable.
The point reaches beyond politics into economic planning and everyday practice. Any rational coordination of social needs requires feedback, experimentation, and revision. Plans improve when they are exposed to transparent data, plural perspectives, and the corrective of those affected by them. Fear of making mistakes paralyzes; a culture that allows self-criticism without humiliation energizes. The true failure is not the initial misstep but the refusal to examine it, the concealment that blocks learning, or the repetition that follows from dogma.
Treat fallibility as a given and design for corrigibility. Protect minority opinions, publish results, rotate leadership, test hypotheses in practice, and correct course quickly. Under those conditions, mistakes stop being a stigma and become the price of discovery. What matters is not the absence of error but the presence of institutions and habits that turn errors into improvement faster than they harden into harm.
Quote Details
| Topic | Learning from Mistakes |
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