> You keep thinking I am propunding a theory, but I am only summarizing
> empirical history.
I think it's your empirical history that's wrong. In your telling, revolutions happen as the culmination of a long movement through which people in struggle somehow deduce *ex nihilo* that they need to widen their angle of vision in order to obtain the narrower victories they seek.
But this is always an illusion. Just as Keynes pointed out that "practical men" who think they're expounding pure common sense are actually aping some dead economic theorist, activists "discovering" they need to fight for socialism or revolution to attain their narrower ends are always aping some political theorist.
You put a lot of weight on Rosa Luxemburg and 1918-19. Do you really think Luxemburg's KDP, had they succeeded, would have approached the task of building socialism starting from a blank slate, with nothing but practical exigencies in mind? Don't you realize that they all came out of a half-century long socialist tradition marked by *constant* and *intense* and *explicit* debate over the nature of socialism? (E.g., Proudhonians vs. Lassaleans vs. Marxists - with Marx and Engels weighing in with explicit, schematic descriptions of "how socialism works" in Critique of the Gotha Program and Anti-Duhring.)
There is zero historical support for your argument that talking about socialism doesn't have a *central* place in socialist movements (including more successful ones).
SA