/pol/ - International /Pol/itics & /Bant/er

Sorry for the vague question. Hopefully explaining some of the context behind the inquiry might help to clarify.

I've read some Marx, Lenin, Mao, and recently started on Settlers by J Sakai. A trend I keep seeing is a longing to return to the past, which always seems to correspond to a petit-bourgeois class position, or revisionism (these two seem related as well, though I'm unclear on the exact relation). For instance, in Imperialism, Lenin says

>We shall see later how "on these grounds" reactionary, petty-bourgeois critics of capitalist imperialism dream of going back to "free", "peaceful", and "honest" competition.

Sakai develops this in

>The politics of the [American Anti-Imperialist] League did not support national liberation; they were not anti-capitalist or even anti-racist. The heart of their movement was the appeal of a false past, of the picture of Amerika as an insular European society, of an economy based on settlers production, in small farms and workshops.

It's pretty clear that on a general level, yearning for (or trying to establish) a past mode of production is antithetical to progress, and thus reactionary. But I'm not sure how this wouldn't just apply to any yearning for anything past. Surely it isn't any less antithetical to progress to yearn for, say, a past government, if conditions no longer support it. First worlders spout inanities like "I wish we could go back to the good old days where companies still made good products" all the time. But isn't all that nostalgia is a yearning to return to the past? Is there any kind of yearning for the past that wouldn't be reactionary?