ABSTRACT
Besides being unclear about what economic justice and democracy mean, “we” on the left were wrong about many other things, some of them quite important. Of course who “we” were needs to be clarified. For every myth that plagued the left during the twentieth century, for every mistaken strategy based on some erroneous belief, invariably someone, or some group of people, recognized the mistake at the time. Sometimes their criticisms even became widely known and fostered great debates, but often objections received too little publicity and were soon forgotten. This is not to say that progressives never learned from their mistakes as the twentieth century progressed. There are many leftists today who have long since disabused themselves of many of the debilitating myths discussed below. So it is neither the case that none objected to these mistakes at the time, nor that many did not learn from mistakes afterward and modify programs, policies, strategies, and tactics in appropriate ways. Still, it is important to own up to major misconceptions that adversely affected left political practice during the last century and clarify the lessons to be learned. Confusion about the meaning and implications of economic justice and economic democracy were addressed in the previous two chapters and are the principle concerns of this book. In this chapter, I briefly touch on a few other confusions that are important to address before evaluating capitalism, communism, social democracy, and libertarian socialism in Part 2.
