The State and Strategies for Socialism

Stephen Maher and Rafael Khachaturian’s essay Socialist Strategy and the Democratic Capitalist State examines the the state in its liberal-democratic form, arguing that we should move beyond both vanguardist and social democratic models toward a view of the state as a contradictory site of class and social struggles. Paul Christoher Gray’s article on Socialist Project is taken from his recently published From the Streets to the State: Changing the World by Taking Power, where he takes on the limitations of dual power and extra-parliamentarism and the flaws inherent in the electoralist approaches and where there can be some reconciliation of the best aspects of these tendencies.

Germany 1918-1924: False Hope or Missed Chance?

The communists of Germany now struggled to reconnect with the German working class and rebuild a revolutionary movement in the Weimar Republic, a society that was, on the one hand, striving to return to normalcy and, on the other hand, slipped easily and often into economic and political chaos. They fought, but they lost. In the process, the working class was divided and demoralized, the capitalist class went looking for a savior, and the foundations of Nazism were laid.