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.

Marxism / Leninism • Reform / Revolution • Role of a Vanguard Party

How do we develop a political organization capable of avoiding the same traps of the past? Are communist parties inevitably social democratic and bureaucratic? Can existing parties in the US be saved? In this panel, Marxist organizations come together to learn from the experience in India and elsewhere. This public event is both a workshop and a frank and sober discussion about the road ahead.