Many years after having vanished, socialism is back in the US political arena. This is because of the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016 as well as Bernie Sanders’s campaign for the Democratic Party nomination. Even the more forbidden term “revolution” has made a comeback recently, with Sanders’s call for a political revolution to implement a progressive agenda of job creation, wage increases, protection of the environment, and universal health care.

The popularization of socialism and Sanders’s call for a political revolution has raised the question of how to respond for the Marxist left. To do so, it would be useful to outline the fundamental characteristics of the Marxist revolutionary tradition, a tradition that helps provide some guidelines to an appropriate response to the new political situation in the US.

For Marxists, Sanders’s progressive agenda is worth fighting for, in as much as it represents a stand against the neoliberal social agenda implemented by Democrats and Republicans alike since the 1970s. Their participation, however, is informed by the distinctive view that, in order to win those struggles, it is necessary to go far beyond the ballot box and take them into the workplaces and neighborhoods of America, to “socialize” those struggles and turn them into a movement from below, independent of the two parties. Marxist socialism seeks to articulate these and other progressive struggles — against racism and imperialism and for immigrants and refugees — into a long-term view of systemic change: a social revolution that brings down the economic and political system founded on the profit motive, capitalism, and replaces it with a politically and economically democratic one.