“No serious debate about socialism can be developed as if we were still in the XIX century, when there still hadn’t been any concrete experience of it anywhere. Not now. It is impossible, at the dawn of the XXI century, to talk about socialism while making an abstraction of what was advanced in its name throughout the XX century. What lessons does history throw our way?” That is the beginning of a four part series by TalCual [ES] editor, Teodoro Petkoff and translated by the prolific Guillermo Parra.