Over the course of forty-plus years of neoliberal offensive, revolutionary socialists in groups like the International Socialist Organization, of which I was a member until its recent dissolution, performed the valuable service of helping keep Marxist ideas alive by insisting that class struggle would eventually revive, that the Left should not limit its prospects solely to the confines of the Democratic Party, and that capitalism itself would soon enough force socialism and revolution back onto the popular agenda.

Sam Farber’s contribution, “What Revolutionary Socialism Means to Me,” confirms the value of sticking up for these points. And Farber has consistently done so over the years in a creative and nondogmatic manner. Hailing from the same broad political family, I agree that our tradition can help “provide some guidelines” to today’s new socialist movement and reinvigorated class struggle.

But revolutionary socialists must go a step further. We must identify where our fealty to very decent starting propositions over many reactionary decades may have dulled our sensitivity to new developments we didn’t expect.