What do you think?
Rate this book
Lenin'in Seçim Stratejisi - I: Marx ve Engels'ten 1905 Devrimi'ne
Seçimler ve parlamento kürsüsü devrimci hedeflere ulaşmak için kullanılabilir mi? Boykot taktiğine hangi durumda başvurulabilir, komünist bir aday parlamentoya seçilirse kürsüyü nasıl değerlendirebilir? Lenin'in seçim stratejisinin kökenleri Marx ve Engels'te bulunabilir mi? Marx ve Engels'in seçimlere dönük görüşleri hangi klasik metinlere nasıl yansımış, Lenin bunlardan nasıl yararlanmıştır? Legal-illegal mücadele koşulları, sınıf ve seçim ittifakları, çarlığa karşı diğer muhalif kesimlerle işbirliği olanakları, Bolşevik-Menşevik ayrımının sıcaklığı ve 1905 Devrimi'nin öncesi ve sonrası göz önünde bulundurulduğunda, Lenin ne gibi stratejik değişikliklere gitmiş, Birinci ve İkinci Duma seçimleri için nasıl bir mücadele örgütlemiştir?
Hepsi, bugüne yansımaları da olan can alıcı sorular… Ve August H. Nimtz'in kitabı, Lenin'in stratejik yaklaşımları temelinde bu ve benzer soruların yanıtını oluşturan eşsiz bir çalışma.
Marx ve Engels'ten yola çıkıp 1905 Devrimi'ne kadar uzanan bu ilk ciltte, Lenin'in, seçim kampanyalarının nasıl yürütüleceği, seçim bloklarında yer alıp alınmayacağı ve bununla ilgili “ehvenişer” ikilemi, vekillerin partiye hesap vermesinin nasıl sağlanacağı ve seçim siyasetiyle silahlı mücadele dengesinin nasıl kurulacağı gibi meselelere nasıl cevap ürettiğini de görüyoruz. Lenin'in, daha sonraları bu çalışmadan çıkan derslerin Bolşeviklerin 1917'deki başarısı açısından “elzem” olduğunu söylediği düşünüldüğünde, bu dönemin ayrıntılı analizinin eksiksiz bir Leninizm kavrayışı için hayati önemde olduğunu görüyoruz...
Hepsi, bugüne yansımaları da olan can alıcı sorular… Ve August H. Nimtz'in kitabı, Lenin'in stratejik yaklaşımları temelinde bu ve benzer soruların yanıtını oluşturan eşsiz bir çalışma.
Marx ve Engels'ten yola çıkıp 1905 Devrimi'ne kadar uzanan bu ilk ciltte, Lenin'in, seçim kampanyalarının nasıl yürütüleceği, seçim bloklarında yer alıp alınmayacağı ve bununla ilgili “ehvenişer” ikilemi, vekillerin partiye hesap vermesinin nasıl sağlanacağı ve seçim siyasetiyle silahlı mücadele dengesinin nasıl kurulacağı gibi meselelere nasıl cevap ürettiğini de görüyoruz. Lenin'in, daha sonraları bu çalışmadan çıkan derslerin Bolşeviklerin 1917'deki başarısı açısından “elzem” olduğunu söylediği düşünüldüğünde, bu dönemin ayrıntılı analizinin eksiksiz bir Leninizm kavrayışı için hayati önemde olduğunu görüyoruz...
- GenresHistory
320 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2014
2 people are currently reading
154 people want to read
About the author
August H. Nimtz Jr.
12 books17 followersAugust H. Nimtz is Professor of Political Science and African American and African Studies and Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Minnesota, USA. He is the author of Marx and Engels: Their Contribution to the Democratic Breakthrough (2000), Marx, Tocqueville, and Race in America: The 'Absolute Democracy' or 'Defiled Republic' (2003), and a number of related articles in edited volumes and journals.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
November 10, 2020
I'm calling it now: if Geopolitical Economy: After US Hegemony, Globalization and Empire was my favourite new thing to read since Covid-19 broke out, this is a close follow-up.
What is Lenin's Electoral Strategy? It's a trotskyist polemic. It's leninology and philology. It's a synthesis of theory and political action. It's the argument from Left Communism: an infantile disorder applied to Lenin' own organising, and developed to a much more profound degree than popular knowledge of it would let appear.
It's trotskyist, in the sense that sometimes Nimtz gets carried away by his own politics. He underlines that according to Marx, no socialist revolution in backwards Russia could succeed without a victory in Europe, unrelated to the central argument he wants to make. He underlines time and time again that the Soviet Union under Stalin was fundamentally different from that under Lenin, and how misguided Socialism in One Country was. He raises quotes of Lenin's to challenge later Bolshevik developments. In other words, he's pitting theory against practice when he disagrees with it politically. Unless your marxism is strictly a debating society topic, you won't be interested in this.
But I can forgive him for that, because if you read past it you discover a genuinely insightful genealogy of Leninism. An infantile disorder can be summarized in one sentence -- political practice should be legal when possible and illegal when forced to, but it should always mold itself in agreement with the balance of forces and the objective conditions. Yet somehow "communist parties" around the world, particularly in the West, languish in sectarian obscurantism, feeling content to launch any radical-sounding slogan and denouncing 'imperfect' popular movements from the sideline. Nimtz blows the lid off the presumed theoretical basis of this attitude. Reading Eleanor Marx: A Life gave me a sense of Marx & Engels, the political organisers, distinct from the pure theorists; Nimtz' book expands this in full. Parliaments are a bourgeois institution and cannot be wielded by working class parties for political administration; bourgeois parties can only use it because their decisions fall within the realm of the possible, decided by the balance of forces based outside the parliament, ultimately decided by relations of property. But parliaments do offer a space for propaganda, organisation and agitation. Quoting Lenin's fiery speeches, Nimtz draws our attention to the decision of the Russian Social Democrats (ie the bolshevik/menshevik party) to run in blatantly undemocratic elections. They couldn't win, from the outset, and certain groups advocated abstention - even the bolsheviks themselves, at one point. But the significance of elections wasn't so much about seats gained, as about votes. Local work politicizes the working class, stimulates discussions, fires up the vanguard.
A crude reading of Marx would lead one to think that "reformism" stands in complete opposition to "revolutionary politics". But this would be difficult to square with Lenin's notion of Revolutionary Parliamentarism. Demands launched from the parliamentary pulpits can be completely "non-revolutionary" in form, tactically-worded, aiming at alliances with other groups (the representatives of smallhold farmers and the rural population especially), and still be revolutionary in function, by dint of the ruling class not accepting them and the working class insisting on them. Peace, land and bread as crowbars for a socialist state. The line separating revolutionary from reformist politics is not the slogans, but the conception of political power. Marx, Engels, Lenin, and the rational spirit of marxism see the parliament as an arena and a platform to be used in the political struggle, with representatives acting purely as, well, representatives of the extra-parliamentary party, rooted in the working class. Reformist social democracy, practiced by many Second International parties, even before the overt split, gets it lopsided: mass struggle is neglected in favour of having competent parliamentarians who know how to negotiate with the other parties. Initially, this works - the threat of mass action and foreign revolutions lead the ruling class to take on a more conciliatory attitude. But eventually, honest socialist politicians can get corrupted by their limited institutional experiences, and abandon the primacy of class struggle. Eventually, ironically, they themselves become their own victims as their left-wing demands fail to find purchase and they move steadily to the right, fighting the establishment not as the tendrils of the organised working class but as individuals.
Lenin saw only one safeguard against this, which he already deemed absent in the majority of the Second International: the unquestionably primacy of the Party over its politicians, the rootedness of the Party in the working class, and barring individuals from the wrong class background from the parliament. This last part especially was confronting to me. Lenin's distaste towards professors and politicians moved by altruism stems not so much from doctrine as from practical necessity: in his experience, these individuals prevaricate, flinch and procrastinate, unable to act towards a practical goal in a disciplined manner. Lenin himself, a lawyer by profession, by then had spent enough time 'on the ground' to lose this mentality, but parliamentary cretinism - one of his favourite insults - was to be resisted at all costs. One can find echoes of this throughout socialist history: all around the world, intellectuals have been sent off to the factories and farms to be remoulded by labour.
It's barely 200 pages long, and comes with an appendix of primary sources (Marx, Engels and Lenin) devoted to the parliamentary question. Some first-world leftists have the good luck to be organising in Parties that live by this principle; others don't, and should find much to absorb in Nimtz' book. I couldn't recommend it more.
What is Lenin's Electoral Strategy? It's a trotskyist polemic. It's leninology and philology. It's a synthesis of theory and political action. It's the argument from Left Communism: an infantile disorder applied to Lenin' own organising, and developed to a much more profound degree than popular knowledge of it would let appear.
It's trotskyist, in the sense that sometimes Nimtz gets carried away by his own politics. He underlines that according to Marx, no socialist revolution in backwards Russia could succeed without a victory in Europe, unrelated to the central argument he wants to make. He underlines time and time again that the Soviet Union under Stalin was fundamentally different from that under Lenin, and how misguided Socialism in One Country was. He raises quotes of Lenin's to challenge later Bolshevik developments. In other words, he's pitting theory against practice when he disagrees with it politically. Unless your marxism is strictly a debating society topic, you won't be interested in this.
But I can forgive him for that, because if you read past it you discover a genuinely insightful genealogy of Leninism. An infantile disorder can be summarized in one sentence -- political practice should be legal when possible and illegal when forced to, but it should always mold itself in agreement with the balance of forces and the objective conditions. Yet somehow "communist parties" around the world, particularly in the West, languish in sectarian obscurantism, feeling content to launch any radical-sounding slogan and denouncing 'imperfect' popular movements from the sideline. Nimtz blows the lid off the presumed theoretical basis of this attitude. Reading Eleanor Marx: A Life gave me a sense of Marx & Engels, the political organisers, distinct from the pure theorists; Nimtz' book expands this in full. Parliaments are a bourgeois institution and cannot be wielded by working class parties for political administration; bourgeois parties can only use it because their decisions fall within the realm of the possible, decided by the balance of forces based outside the parliament, ultimately decided by relations of property. But parliaments do offer a space for propaganda, organisation and agitation. Quoting Lenin's fiery speeches, Nimtz draws our attention to the decision of the Russian Social Democrats (ie the bolshevik/menshevik party) to run in blatantly undemocratic elections. They couldn't win, from the outset, and certain groups advocated abstention - even the bolsheviks themselves, at one point. But the significance of elections wasn't so much about seats gained, as about votes. Local work politicizes the working class, stimulates discussions, fires up the vanguard.
A crude reading of Marx would lead one to think that "reformism" stands in complete opposition to "revolutionary politics". But this would be difficult to square with Lenin's notion of Revolutionary Parliamentarism. Demands launched from the parliamentary pulpits can be completely "non-revolutionary" in form, tactically-worded, aiming at alliances with other groups (the representatives of smallhold farmers and the rural population especially), and still be revolutionary in function, by dint of the ruling class not accepting them and the working class insisting on them. Peace, land and bread as crowbars for a socialist state. The line separating revolutionary from reformist politics is not the slogans, but the conception of political power. Marx, Engels, Lenin, and the rational spirit of marxism see the parliament as an arena and a platform to be used in the political struggle, with representatives acting purely as, well, representatives of the extra-parliamentary party, rooted in the working class. Reformist social democracy, practiced by many Second International parties, even before the overt split, gets it lopsided: mass struggle is neglected in favour of having competent parliamentarians who know how to negotiate with the other parties. Initially, this works - the threat of mass action and foreign revolutions lead the ruling class to take on a more conciliatory attitude. But eventually, honest socialist politicians can get corrupted by their limited institutional experiences, and abandon the primacy of class struggle. Eventually, ironically, they themselves become their own victims as their left-wing demands fail to find purchase and they move steadily to the right, fighting the establishment not as the tendrils of the organised working class but as individuals.
Lenin saw only one safeguard against this, which he already deemed absent in the majority of the Second International: the unquestionably primacy of the Party over its politicians, the rootedness of the Party in the working class, and barring individuals from the wrong class background from the parliament. This last part especially was confronting to me. Lenin's distaste towards professors and politicians moved by altruism stems not so much from doctrine as from practical necessity: in his experience, these individuals prevaricate, flinch and procrastinate, unable to act towards a practical goal in a disciplined manner. Lenin himself, a lawyer by profession, by then had spent enough time 'on the ground' to lose this mentality, but parliamentary cretinism - one of his favourite insults - was to be resisted at all costs. One can find echoes of this throughout socialist history: all around the world, intellectuals have been sent off to the factories and farms to be remoulded by labour.
It's barely 200 pages long, and comes with an appendix of primary sources (Marx, Engels and Lenin) devoted to the parliamentary question. Some first-world leftists have the good luck to be organising in Parties that live by this principle; others don't, and should find much to absorb in Nimtz' book. I couldn't recommend it more.
December 31, 2024
Other than the brief interlude where the defence of Trotsky gets a bit too overt, an absolutely fantastic book. Would seem genuinely useful for modern electoral strategy, even if the goal is not to simply adopt the Bolshevik strategy wholesale but to use and analyze it.
November 25, 2023
Fantastic, would love more works and discussions grounded in how communist electoral strategy has functioned/failed in 20th century, and what is to be done in 21st.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews