There is a mismatch between leftists’ understanding of theory and their understanding of the real-world development of socialism. I think, though, the more we get interested in how, exactly, we change he world, the more we’ll be willing to stop clobbering others over the head and calling them “revisionists” and, instead, we willing to actually learn and understand what AES is up to and how they manage the external and internal threats of the bourgeois (petite or not).

I like the quote from Castro when he had his last visit to China:

Xi Jinping is one of the strongest and most capable revolutionary leaders I have met in my life.

Cuba has a lot of land-owning people and is still undergoing economic reforms. They’re still evolving. And so is China. China’s got billionaires. But the existence of these things doesn’t mean they are not building socialism. It just means that this is what socialism looks like in our time.

The USA was a bourgeois revolution but it did not end the slave system. It wasn’t until later that it could. I think too many leftists fail to realize that during periods of transition (which can last hundreds of years), there is going to necessarily be a mix of elements from both systems (old and new). But this is precisely what material dialectics says will be the case.