The revival of socialism in the United States and globally in the past few years has two sources. On the one hand, there is the revival of mass struggles, beginning with the Arab Spring, the Wisconsin Uprising, Occupy, and the various “movements of the squares” in Europe to the continuing teachers’ revolt around the world. These movements, which pit tens of thousands of working people against employers and the state in often illegal struggles, challenge the apparent omnipotence of our rulers, build solidarity among working people and show there is an alternative to neoliberalism and capitalism.

On the other hand, there are the electoral breakthroughs by self-proclaimed socialists and radicals such as Jeremy Corbyn in Britain and Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Rashida Tlaib in the United States. The rising electoral profile of open critics of neoliberalism give the renewed struggles outside the electoral arena a political voice — a voice which could stimulate new and broader struggles. Combined with the election of Trump, both the revival of mass struggle and the rising profile of socialists in the electoral arena have fueled this new radicalization.

It is not surprising that the new socialist left is attracted to strategies that seek to combine mass struggle and electoral politics. These strategies claim to avoid the pitfalls of both social-democratic attempts to regulate capitalism, which have increasingly led to austerity and attacks on working people, and “unrealistic” visions of a ruptural break with capitalism and its state through a workers’ revolution. Vivek Chibber’s “Our Road to Power,” inspired by the work of Andre Gorz and Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, melds together struggles “against” and “in” the capitalist state.