Eric Aarons lived through the great defeats of the twentieth-century socialist movement but refused to let those defeats have the last word. He joined the Communist Party of Australia as a young man. He believed, as millions did across the world, that he was on the right side of history. He watched, over decades, as history played out in reality — as Stalinism revealed its horrors, as the official Communist movement broke apart, as the social democratic compromise in the West frayed and was finally torn up. But he kept struggling for a better world. Not through moving back to the certainties of his youth, and not through moving forward into the accommodations of centrist politics, but by trying to move toward a new politics.

That is the spirit in which I want to speak tonight. Because we are gathered as socialists, as trade unionists, as people who want to live in a better world, decades after socialism was declared dead. Indeed, the socialist movement that millions of workers across the world built over 150 years — the parties, the unions, the cooperatives, the newspapers, the cultural institutions, the experiments in workers’ power and public ownership — is either gone or hollowed out.

But we should insist to the world that socialism was not wrong. Socialism suffered defeats.