As revolutionaries, we have a duty to learn from our movement's past, to draw correct lessons and not to sugarcoat the flaws of our movement's precious attempts at creating a new world.

The latter mistake is one of overenthusiasm; defending the socialist experiments of the past and present against duplicitous bourgeois propaganda. But comrades go to excesses here, falsely recasting errors as correct policies.

A big problem here is when comrades attempt to clumsily apply what was unique and contingent about previous socialist experiments from other societies and other times and places, and apply them directly to our society today.

Winning a revolution in the United States and implementing socialism will require enormous creativity, and a supple understanding of a complex set of cultures in a vast, multi-national territory with hundreds of millions of inhabitants.

Our movement has yet to produce the sort of visionary and innovative thinking that would allow us to succeed in this project. Our best thinkers are fixated on the past. These comrades must ultimately break with dogmatism if they are to contribute to the revolutionary movement

However, the worse error is committed by our democratic socialist friends. These comrades let pessimism consume them and limit their vision to only what’s in front of them. They ignore the long arc of history and take too seriously the objections of the bourgeoisie.

They seek at every turn to lower our movement’s expectations, and they advocate strategies that will inevitably lead to failure, so the better to tamp down enthusiasm out of concern that the movement might go “too far.”

They happily sacrifice the long-term health of the movement for short-term gain, since for these comrades, at the end of the day we’re stuck here, in capitalism, and it’s all about trying to make the best of things.

Most socialists fall into this camp, although most of us aren’t diehard reformists, but rather we’ve been so steeped in bourgeois ideology, disoriented by creature comforts, & made pessimistic by perfunctory study of history, that we simply don’t see any other way things could be

Many of these comrades, when the working class rebels, enthusiastically wade into things, and fight alongside the masses with admirable courage. What they lack, unfortunately, is a clear vision of where our movement needs to go.

This is an error that can be easily remedied by study, struggle, and, perhaps most importantly, a conscious decision to commit to a lifetime of hardship and sacrifice on behalf of the people.