The Ballot, the Streets―or Both: From Marx and Engels to Lenin and the October Revolution

by August H. Nimtz Jr.

August Nimtz uncovers attempts to chart a course between plain opportunism and anarchist rejections of the electoral arena. Instead, electoral campaigns are seen as crucial for developing political education and organization, and as a key way to measure your forces and communicate with the wider population. As radical left reformist projects, exemplified by Sanders and Corbyn, once again become a political force and the left has to think about what it means to run for office in a capitalist state, it's a good time to look back at how the left has historically conducted such debates.

Genres: History, Politics, Nonfiction, Russia

540 pages, Paperback

Published November 5, 2019

About the author

August 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.

Reviews

[Soph Nova · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bit of a messily formatted book, with some outdated contemporary analysis for its 2019 release date, given that it’s actually a combined release of two books published in 2013/14; but, those qualifications aside, this was a great dig into little known history of Lenin’s work between the revolutions in 1905 and 1917 that detail his in-depth work in parliamentary politics - and his commitment to doing so as an expression of his revolutionary Marxism.

“Not only could elections be useful for propaganda purposes, to disseminate revolutionary ideas, but they offered revolutionaries an excellent opportunity to count preferences in order to determine the most propitious moment for actually taking power - “for storming the winter palace”.

[Luke Pickrell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Indispensable for an understanding of Lenin's electoral strategy (grounded in Marx, Engels, and the social democracy of the Second International) and the success of the Bolshevik party during the Russian Revolution.

[Toby Crime · Rating 5 out of 5]

Re-reading this book with close note taking has unsurprisingly been hugely strategically insightful

[Jehiel L · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nimtz is right to argue that the importance of elections for Lenin has been massively understated by all sides of Lenin scholarship. His book is unsurpassed in terms of breadth and depth in study of Lenin’s perspective on parliamentary work, which Lenin held to be very important. But by focusing the optic of criticism too narrowly on revisionism and outright reformism, Nimtz doesn't really address what would become the real problem of the Second International and in Russia: centrism and tailism. Many of the conceptions Nimtz ascribes to ‘Leninism’ were not in principle rejected by Second International orthodoxy. This waters down Lenin’s particular contribution to understanding parliamentary work: dealing innovatively with the problem of class alliances and class leadership in revolutionary struggle. Contra Nimtz, elections were not just about putting forward the party programme, something which was more akin to Kautskyan orthodoxy. Though Nimtz gives plenty of evidence to support this.

Lenin's orientation to parliamentary work was to work for the strategic alliance for revolutionary seizure of power, in which Social Democracy was the leading force. Lenin's view was that parliament did not blunt class antagonism but instead brought it out more sharply. This assessment was not in abstraction from the class struggle as a whole and the intervention of the given political forces, but nevertheless Lenin did not invert and replicate the liberal view that parliament was not an arena of class struggle. He did not ignore the fact that parliament brought together the whole people, rather all the better for raising Social-Democratic consciousness among workers as the vanguard of democracy. Early on Lenin established the orientation towards an alliance with the Trudoviks to form an RSDLP-Trudovik bloc, as a reflection of the aspiration towards a worker-peasant alliance for democratic revolution, the alliance that could lead the democratic dictatorship. This while the Bolsheviks consistently polemicised ideologically against the SRs, who competed for influence among workers as well as peasants. Interventions were not merely directed towards winning the peasants to Marxist consciousness, but were about drawing the peasantry toward the strategic goals of Social Democracy. This orientation meant sharp criticism of those forces with rival hegemonic projects, centrally the then-popular liberal Cadets. There was a double task of fighting for Social-Democratic leadership of the proletariat, and fighting for proletarian leadership of the peasantry, to secure independence of not only the workers but of the people against the bourgeoisie.

Lenin's policies directed at the peasants would appropriately change in response to developments in the class struggle. Through the 1905 experience Lenin went from being against raising nationalisation of land based upon a concrete assessment of peasant consciousness, to adopting nationalisation out of confidence in the advances the peasants evidently had made through the struggle. The development of the revolutionary struggle was not simply a realisation of previously articulated theory; Lenin's understanding of the peasant question shifted in light of developments in the class struggle. The interests of the peasantry could not be reduced to that of the proletariat, but an alliance could and had to be forged on political-strategic terrain. Investigating the possibilities of disaggregation and unification of the people was a matter of concrete analysis. At the RSDLP unity congress, Lenin's call for nationalisation of the land was opposed by Plekhanov and the majority, who instead favoured municipalisation, the transfer of the estates to organs of local self-government. Municipalisation did not designate the institution of enactment, and did not condition itself on a democratic republic, and so Lenin interpreted this as effectively calling for the transfer of land to the Zemstvos. It only applied to landlord estates and would maintain the demarcation between landlord and peasant lands, and therefore did not smash to the greatest degree Russia’s social backwardness. To secure the revolution one had to carry it to the end. Lenin, isolated even among Bolsheviks on the question of nationalisation, made a compromise in supporting the divisionists, who supported the formation of peasant committees and the seizure and division of the land by peasants themselves. The divisionists, which included Stalin, thought their policy was best for developing working class support for the legitimate demands of the peasantry. Division was pitched as peasant self-emancipation alongside proletarian self-emancipation. But this failed to lead the peasants toward the demand of the democratic republic. When the peasant said that the land was god's, the people's, and nobody's, it was true that the supposed socialistic character of this concept was an illusion, but division would leave Social Democrats in friction with the peasant attitude in a way that would lead to confusion, whereas the demand for nationalisation met the peasant illusion with a direction toward the democratic republic. As the peasants' illusions were inseparable from the peasantry as a real political force, it was not right to simply dispense with their illusions in one's own positions and act upon their interests correctly conceived, as this would leave their illusions to the logic of spontaneity. Nor could one simply assert proletarian hegemony, even if there was good will between classes. One had to reckon with illusion to work with it as a condition of action and function of leadership. The ideology which actuated the peasant masses in the class war had to be integrated into the struggle for hegemony.

As a result, policy was not just about what you are for on principle, but also about the detail of what it will look like and how it is to be achieved. The Cadets were for land to the peasants, but their conception of it was very different. The Cadet reforms relied on the existing state for implementation, and called for compensation to the landlord class which had ruined the peasants and strengthened the state power in the past. In contrast, Lenin called for expropriations, and argued that real land reform could only be achieved in the context of a democratic republic. It was in such a way that partial demands were linked to the strategic goal, by delineation of the political perspectives behind the policy proposals of the day. This was to be done carefully and with sobriety. Lenin stressed that without political freedom and agitation to mobilise, support for Social Democracy in the Duma would risk being nothing more than an expression of the primitive protest of the people without direction.

A running theme in Lenin’s organisational arguments is that the vanguard must clearly position itself as a demarcated force in order to win the following of broader layers. Lenin was against party blocs in the first round of voting, seeing it as giving up too much the presentation of Marxism. Agreements with other parties were permissible in further rounds, depending on the circumstances: blocs with the Trudoviks to beat the Cadets, and sometimes blocs with the Cadets to beat the Black Hundreds. The Mensheviks in contrast were for agreements in the first round of voting. The Bolsheviks compromised in advocating a clause which allowed first round agreements only in cases of necessity and with parties which agreed with the main slogans of the immediate struggle, for armed uprising and a democratic republic. Criticism of lesser evilism was framed in terms of which class ought to lead the struggle of the people against tsarism. The Menshevik alliance with the Cadets gave leadership to the bourgeoisie, whereas Social Democracy was for proletarian leadership. If the Cadet could complain about a Social Democrat not voting Cadet, why could a Social Democrat not complain about a Cadet not voting Social Democrat? It was a swindle by the Cadets to suggest that voting Social Democrat ensured Black Hundred victory. The greatest danger was not electoral victory by the Black Hundreds but was the ceding of leadership of the people to the bourgeoisie. Conversely there were disagreements within the Bolsheviks about alliances. Lenin had to fight purists who refused agreements with other parties. Agreements were good if they really advanced the position of the RSDLP and proletariat as leading forces.

The Third Duma was effectively rigged and was more reactionary. The campaign for the Third Duma was certainly on less favourable terrain. The peasants being locked out to the favour of landlords saw peasant apathy and disengagement. The SRs called for a boycott while standing as the nominal representative of the peasantry, and this also had sway among a layer of workers. But still Lenin was against a boycott, and the Bolsheviks’ anti-boycott position had positive effect. Often the Bolsheviks had to encourage worker participation in the Duma and fight electoral absenteeism, to make the case for the significance of the Duma elections for the struggle for a democratic republic. Lenin’s ‘Against Boycott’ exemplifies his approach: the arguments for intervention are concrete, situating the party’s intervention in an assessment of the balance of forces.

To fully understand the Menshevik orientation one has to know that the Mensheviks were in origin not united in thinking the bourgeoisie trustworthy. The broad starting point of Menshevism was that *only* the working class could be trusted to fight for democracy. It was in running up against the political limitations of this view that Mensheviks for various reasons came to defer to the bourgeoisie. The Menshevik conception of proletarian hegemony was one in which the party guided the proletariat through successive stages of self-activity and self-consciousness, through political forms in which the proletariat could express its distinct class interest. Thus focusing on the pressuring the liberal opposition was for Menshevism consonant with working-class self-activity, so long as it positioned the working class and the party to engage in political education through the stages of the struggle. Martov throughout his life never thought the bourgeoisie trustworthy. But, if only the proletariat could be trusted, then the democratic revolution led by them would be isolated, hence the idea that the RSDLP should not take power in the bourgeois-democratic revolution. Instead, the proletariat could supposedly lead without taking state power by acting as a pressure group on the bourgeoisie, the proletariat coming to learn in practice the need for its independence by being guided through the successive stages of this process. Proletarian independence was for them antithetical to the party taking power in the bourgeois revolution, which in total was opposed to Lenin, who very much thought that hegemony was about state power. A key plank of Bolshevism was looking to the peasantry as a revolutionary democratic ally in its own right, the peasants being the class which the Mensheviks were uniformly hostile to. For Lenin what defined the revolution as being inevitably bourgeois was not a necessity of historical stages but the strategic requirements of the seizure of power by the vanguard of the people. For Lenin it was a higher level of class consciousness that workers conceived of their role in an alliance of the people in this way, instead of fighting merely for their own aims, even if this was to be supposedly about enacting immediately socialist measures, which Lenin thought a reactionary illusion. It was against this that some Mensheviks accused Lenin of being to their right, of supposedly opportunistically leaning on the peasantry to take power in a bourgeois revolution like a misguided Jacobin. But this only ceded leadership of the people to the bourgeoisie, and leadership of the proletariat to a force like the SRs, as workers spontaneously strove for an alliance of the people but would defer to a non-Marxist force if Marxism didn’t take up the task. The liquidators were the logical conclusion of this, whom called for the end of hegemony and instead for a class party. Lenin was clear about what this meant: liberalism calls for workers to strive for their own political rights, while Marxism calls on the workers to lead the whole people toward revolutionary state power. This was what made the Duma concretely more important than soviets in mid-1906: when some Mensheviks and SRs in 1906 called for the reconstitution of soviets, Lenin argued against this and in favour of Duma intervention, because the key task at hand was to unite the peasant struggle and the workers’ struggle in the arena on which both classes focused at the time. For Lenin, class consciousness was about more than being conscious of the protagonist role of one's own class; it meant being aware of the adversary's ability to react upon one's own subjectivity, and therefore had to be reflexive to the political and strategic logic of the class struggle as a whole.

In 1905 the Mensheviks conceived the soviets in terms of working-class self-activity as a worker model parliament and a pressure group on elected officials and liberal democrats. Its non-party character was a means of bringing in the broader masses and laying the grounds for a future revolution. The debates and agitation around demands would prove in practice the need for armed uprising organised by the masses themselves rather than a party. The St Petersburg Bolsheviks mirrored this assessment in their initial hostility. The Menshevik focus on worker self-activity could in some persons mutate into 'revolutionary economism', which was a response to the spontaneous development of the workers' struggle which aimed to destroy any 'illusion' in a community of interests between classes in favour of raising the particular demands of the workers. This was seen in its extreme in Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution and the flirtation of some Menshevik leaders with the idea of a purely workers' government in 1905. Thus by some persons a hostility to the Duma due to it being an organ of all classes. Notions of the soviets as self-government denied the need to organise the insurrection, or at least to take initiative in organising it, subordinating revolutionary dictatorship of the people to an experiment in political education. Lenin conceived the soviets as equally necessary as the party for the armed uprising, but nevertheless the party was crucial to organising insurrection. The good aspect of the non-party character of the soviets was that it allowed the proletariat to lead other classes, and the soviets in this way were the embryo form of a revolutionary provisional government. Though non-partisanship as an ideology of the working class still needed to be combated, and anti-demagoguism, programme, and experience had to be brought to the movement so that the vanguard didn't dissolve into the masses. Proletarian independence was to be secured through RSDLP leadership of the proletariat in a class alliance for revolutionary insurrection. The soviets were not too broad nor too narrow to provide leadership for this end. The soviets needed to enlist deputies from the soldiers and sailors, the peasantry, and revolutionary intelligentsia, and this would be a medium in which the proletariat could lead. The soviets were not a labour parliament nor an organ of self-government of any kind, they were instead fighting organisations for the achievement of definite aims. The democratic dictatorship would enlist the whole people in the practice of government but dictatorship would be led by the vanguard, and the soviets were an exemplar organ for this task. The working class was declared by Lenin to be spontaneously Social Democratic not because of what it thought (it did not spontaneously raise socialist demands) but by what it did by in practice breaking the moment of bourgeois hegemony in the Duma as compromise between tsar and bourgeois. It destabilised the adversary while raising a revolutionary coalition for proletarian hegemony in the democratic revolution. That it was not exclusively proletarian but could enlist the whole people in revolutionary activity made it an embryonic revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the people and a basis for revolutionary democratic state power.

Imperialism and the outbreak of world war established new divisions, potentials for unity, and tasks of the revolutionary people, and thus established new horizons in assessing the soviets in 1917. The age of imperialism had seen the bureaucratic state machine determine the nature of bourgeois parliaments in a way that changed the nature of the revolutionary demand for a parliament. A parliament attached to such a state machine would serve the bourgeoisie. The imperialist war for Lenin made it that revolutions of the people would constitute parts of the international socialist revolution, and the socialist revolution could not but be a revolution of the people, the proletariat its vanguard. The soviets as direct government by the armed people could be reconceived as the organs of state power and as superior to parliamentary democracy. Democracy is about the whole people, and soviet democracy was therefore a higher form of democracy in the form of government by the armed people, compared to a parliament that governed via a bureaucratic military apparatus. The proletariat must win the people to its side, but this is not simply to be done via parliamentary vote. The decisive section of the people in the soviets, those leading revolutionary activity, had to win the people not only with demands that met their interests but lead with decisive action to seize power against the paralysed provisional government. In moments like the insurrection it is pedantry to wish for a perfect counting of views before seizing power, when the seizing of power itself is a key element in determining the support of the people. Lenin had a foundation for his later views in his understanding of democratic dictatorship, but the war as international crisis established new tasks for the international movement against imperialism. The soviets in 1917 and afterwards were superior for involving all classes but doing so on terms in which the proletariat could lead, rather than a bureaucratic state machine submitting the people to the bourgeoisie. This did not mean that parliamentary work was obsolete: it as a key arena of political struggle involving all classes remained true. Lenin's first significant tactical advice after the outbreak of WW1 was to use parliamentary positions to carve out a radical anti war position, and we only have to look at his Left-Wing Communism to see later arguments in favour of parliamentary work. But what was true was that the tasks of parliamentarism had to be integrated into a struggle for direct revolutionary seizure of power, a principle which required concrete assessment but was consistent for Lenin’s approach to both Duma and soviet. Lenin’s strategic orientation defined his unique approach to electoral work as well as his unique understanding of the significance of the soviets in the struggle for democratic and then socialist revolution.

[Lucien Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nimtz tracks the most consequential events of the Russian Revolution, linking them to the concurrent sections of the Lenin corpus. He asserts that Lenin’s writing places a strong emphasis on democratic power in preparation for the revolution, and that this was reflected in the historical record of the Dumas and other revolutionary body, AND that these were instrumental to the Revolution’s success. Nimtz’s absolution of Lenin for the crimes of the Soviet Union will be controversial and in far from qualified to make any judgments of that, but his main point is that Lenin’s writing can still inform political process today. When so many Americans—particularly on the left—feel that government policy bears little resemblance to their own needs and interests, Lenin’s analysis of using the established political process to organize and critique the state itself can’t be completely irrelevant.

[Jacob Woocher · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a really good and thorough look at Lenin's approach to electoral politics. Anyone on the left seeking to engage in electoral politics, or wondering whether to engage, should read!

[Freya Olivia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sharp, insightful exploration of how Marx, Engels, and Lenin balanced electoral politics with mass struggle. Meticulously researched and urgently relevant.