The Ballot, the Streets—or Both? focuses on V.I. Lenin's approach to electoral politics and the institutions of bourgeois democracy, drawing on Bolshevik debates and Marx and Engels's own writing to show this to be a central feature of their revolutionary strategy.
In Lenin's electoral strategy, Nimtz uncovers an important attempt to chart a course between plain opportunism and anarchist rejections of the electoral arena. Instead, he shows, electoral campaigns can be seen as crucial for developing political education and organization and as a key way to measure left forces and communicate with the wider population. As left-wing reformist projects, including the Bernie Sanders campaign in the United States and Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party in the United Kingdom, reassert themselves as a political force, Nimtz's examination of historical debates about electoral politics, the capitalist state, and marxist strategy proves timely and instructive.
August H. Nimtz is professor of political science and African American and African studies and Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Minnesota. 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.
ISBN: 9781642590357
Publication date: November 5, 2019
“Lenin's reputation as a political thinker should rest on what he wrote and the role that played in the success of the Russian Revolution, and not in what happened 70 years later. No one has made this argument as clearly and with such impressive scholarship, and, therefore too, as convincingly as August Nimtz in this volume. And for something Lenin's electoral strategy that is at is at the center of most of the debates going on in progressive political parties and social movements everywhere today. We ignore Lenin's thinking on this subject at our own peril.” —Bertell Ollman, Professor of Politics, New York University, USA and author of Alienation and Dance of the Dialectic
“Provides an impressively detailed account of the work of the Bolsheviks in the Russian par-liament, the Duma, during the pre-revolutionary period. … Nimtz’s book also shows Lenin’s great commitment to democracy, in the face of the common right wing smears against him as an elitist or a despot. … This is a thorough and readable summary of Lenin’s work on elections and the nature of parliaments.” —Richard Donnelly, International Socialism, Issue 157, 2018
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