This the eighth installment in a debate over the relationship between democracy and socialism that kicked off with an article by Renzo Llorente last December in Comonaut Magazine. On the Democratic Re

Here is the PDF of the capsule history of the relationship between democracy and Marxism that I will present at the San Diego DSA panel on Saturday.

The event is sponsored by the San Diego DSA Education Committee. I've been on the committee for about a year but had no part in making the decision to have a panel, although I have stressed over that

Here is the Zoom link for a panel discussion of the Constitution on Saturday 7/23 at 6:30 PM Pacific Time https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register

It seems to me that two issues are at stake in this discussion of the rise of right-wing authoritarianism that need to be kept separate. One issue is the question of what is going on in ruling class c

Replying to Mark Lause, I date the beginning of an alternative conception of a democratic politics in the US to the appearance of Neil Harding's first volume of Lenin's Political Thought in 1977. Pete

Here's a different view on US "democracy." We twist ourselves into conceptual and political pretzels if we designate our current political system as a democracy. It isn't, and it is a delusion to beli

A big difference, but a disqualifying difference? What's primary? That it was built by the working class or that it was ideologically bourgeois? Even if the Democratic Party wasn't built by the workin

A third party doesn't necessarily have to split the vote. It could be primarily ideological at first, challenging mainstream Democrats in primaries. It isn't discussed much, but because of the first-p

Since people have raised the idea of a third party again, I'll repeat what I have been saying for a number of years now, which is similar to what Daniel Lazare and some elements in DSA have been sayin

I thought this was over. The 1903 Program of the RSDLP reads: "Therefore, the RSDLP takes as its most immediate political task the overthrow of the Tsarist autocracy and its replacement by a democrati

Funny, the dysfunctional Jacksonian state managed to use the 14th Amendment to establish in the 1880's that corporations are persons. For whom is the Constitution dysfunctional? It's divide-and-conque

OK. We are past discussing Marx's and Engels' formulations and on to what to do and say now. Nothing that the Right is doing or proposing should diminish in the least our advocacy of democracy. The Ri

Fine. We'll end it here. You say that there is some form of the state other than the democratic republic, which the vulgar democrats think will not be superseded by communism, within which the struggl

The passages from Marx in COTGP are: "Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a poli

Nothing you quote contradicts Marx's and Engels' point that the democratic republic is the state form in which the class struggle is fought to a conclusion. Yes, they called it the last bourgeois form

I go with Rosa Luxemburg on the tragedy of the Russian Revolution. Of course, the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly was the right thing to do, but then the suspension of all elections and press

What do you propose that will reduce the deaths more quickly? How does linking an explanation of why the Supreme Court exists at all detract from the demand for abortion rights? I don't see that a des

No oversight. Who since Hal Draper's "Marx and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat" in 1962 doesn't know that the democratic republic was the specific form of the dictatorship of the proletariat in Ma

And? Our response? Our ideology? Our program? What did other people do when faced with an authoritarian, undemocratic political regime?