August nimtz lenin biography

If we do not understand Lenin’s conception of “revolutionary parliamentarism,” as socialist scholar August Nimtz describes it in Lenin’s Electoral Strategy, then we cannot understand how the Bolsheviks came to power, supported by the majority of the Russian working class, in October 1917. Nimtz shines a spotlight on Lenin’s (and to a certain extent Marx and Engels’s) approach to elections, analyzing the choices they faced in the volumes’ subtitle: “the ballots, the streets—or both,” to reveal a little-discussed aspect of political work that was, according to Lenin, an “indispensible” part of the Bolshevik Party’s success.

Though the greater part of both slim volumes deals primarily with Lenin’s experience, Nimtz begins his study with a chapter that sets out to show that “Lenin’s position . . . was squarely rooted in the politics of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.” 

In 1848, Germany had only barely begun down the path of industrialization. A feudal ruling state structure divided its national territory into dozens of mini-fiefdoms, each ruled by a local king or prince. Marx hoped that the outbreak of revolution in Germany in 1848 would bring down this whole edifice, as the great French Revolution of 1789 had done, and usher in, not socialism,

•

•