Lenin’s Perspective: What Exactly Does It Mean to Vote — Part 2

August H. Nimtz

PART ONE OF this essay, in ATC 231, July-August 2024, highlights the key kernels of wisdom that Marx and Engels bequeathed about the revolutionary employment of the electoral and parliamentary arenas, and the lessons Lenin distilled about the more than decade-long Bolshevik experience in their application for proletarian ascent for the first time. Part Two purports to make an original contribution to Marxist political theory by, first, putting a label on what Marx, Engels and Lenin concluded and, second, making a case for the political currency of such a label.

A Conceptual Innovation: “Voting Fetishism”

“I KNOW VOTING feels inadequate right now: just hear me out.” That plea titled a New York Times op-ed at the height of the massive George Floyd protests in summer 2020 penned by Democratic Party operative and then rising star in the organization, Stacy Abrams.

She begged with the protestors to abandon the streets and turn their attention to the November elections to make sure Donald Trump would not be reelected. “Voting,” she asserted, “is the most important thing you can do.” (NYT, June 4, 2020)

Abrams, however — regardless whether she actually believed that — was engaging in and/or enabling what the political philosopher Raymond Geuss calls “wishful thinking.”(1) For Lenin, less charitably, “crass stupidity, or else sheer deception of the workers.”(2) But what exactly does it mean to vote? Realist “conceptual innovation,” what Geuss proposes, may provide the answer.(3)

Voting comes from the Latin word, votum, to make a vow; for example, votive candles. That’s essentially what we do when we vote. To confuse it with the exercise of political power, as so many like Abrams are wont to do, is to make a claim, as Geuss explains, that flies in the face of reality.(4)

What I propose is to give a label to Lenin’s realist critique of the belief that “extremely important political matters” could be solved “merely by voting.”(5) To actually think so — to complement Marx’s and Engels’s “parliamentary cretinism” and in the spirit of Marx’s critique of bourgeois ideology — is to be afflicted with “voting fetishism.”

To vote is to exercise an important democratic right, often won in struggle or the threat of struggle, to register a preference for either a candidate or a particular policy. To exercise political power is to impose one’s will, to get someone or some group of individuals to do something that they otherwise would not have done. Nothing could be more foreign to exercising political power than an action that takes on average less than a minute and is done individually, at least in the ordinary sense of political voting.

To believe otherwise is to engage in voting fetishism, a form of wishful or magical thinking. Registering a preference should never be confused with exercising power — two very different verbs and, hence, actions.(6)

As part of a new research project, investigators have sought to measure “the quality of political representation” by how often Congressional representatives deliver on the preferences of their constituents. “Overall,” they report, “we find that citizens get what they want only about half the time.”(7) Again, registering a preference for something should not be mistaken for its realization.

The first time this writer tried to vote, in 1964 in Jim Crow New Orleans, for the lesser of the two evil presidential candidates, I was denied that democratic right owing to how I looked, my skin color. Four years later, it was possible for me to exercise that right there.

How to explain? It was exactly because people who look like me, and our allies, had been in the streets during that interval imposing our will — exercising power.

Voting therefore, contrary to Stacy Abrams, is not the most important thing to do. More important is what it takes to actually exercise the right to vote. How else to explain why those who once couldn’t vote got the right to do so?

Though the concept of voting fetishism that I’m proposing is arguably original, does it have utility in any way in making sense of politics?(8) Exhibit A, I contend, is the Bolshevik triumph in 1917-1919, one of modernity’s singular and most consequential moments.

Exactly because of Lenin’s realist understanding of the electoral and the concomitant parliamentary process — the bequest of Marx and Engels — he was successful in realizing his vision. He had thus been inoculated from that all so common affliction to which his Right Socialist-ReVolutionary opponents had succumbed and, hence, his success.(9)

Lenin’s summary claims in 1919-1920 about Bolshevik triumph were not, it’s to be emphasized, self-serving hindsight or the making of virtue out of necessity. Again, of utmost importance, he previewed in 1906 the strategy that he by and large later employed.

Voting fetishism, owing to its language, has the potential utility, as labels can, for bringing quick clarity and sobriety to the essence of the political process: the actual exercise of power with all that matters.

Raymond Geuss, who seeks to wean political philosophy away from its normative/ethical bent and toward the actuality of politics, particularly, its power dimension, considers — not surprisingly for readers of Part One of this essay — Lenin to be a paragon of political realism. Most exemplary about Lenin, Guess argues, was his penchant for and ability to hone in on what he calls the “who whom” question, effectively, “Who (does) what to whom for whose benefit?”(10) In other words, as Geuss underscores, the sense of “partisanship” that Lenin brought to “the class struggle,” and complemented by his understanding of “timing in political action.”(11)

Though it is unlikely that Geuss was familiar with Lenin’s 1919 article on the Constituent Assembly elections, specifically his concluding 10 theses, the ninth of them captures his points perfectly:

“To achieve victory, the proletariat must, first, choose the right moment for its decisive assault on the bourgeoisie, taking into account, among other things, the disunity between the bourgeoisie and its petty-bourgeois allies, or the instability of their alliance, and so forth. Secondly, the proletariat must, after its victory, utilise this vacillation of the petty bourgeoisie in such a way as to neutralise them, prevent their siding with the exploiters; it must be able to hold on for some time in spite of this vacillation, and so on, and so forth.”(12)

Contrary to Geuss’s claim that Lenin had “no theory” about timing, what he offered in the ninth thesis, along with above quoted comment in 1918 about how the soviet elections in September and October in 1917 informed the Bolsheviks about when to take power, comes awfully close to being one.(13) That Lenin ended his article with a set of “theses’’ lends credence to the point.

Not to be forgotten, lastly, is the tenth thesis, namely, about voting in the revolutionary party itself. Democratic centralism for Lenin enabled, to employ the language proposed here, the majority not only to register its preferences but, most importantly, impose its will, that is, exercise power.

Consequential Lessons from Elsewhere

While Marx and Engels were being initiated into electoral politics, abolitionists on the other side of the Atlantic, where universal white male suffrage had uniquely long been in place, were grappling, as noted in Part One of this essay, with the lesser/evil electoral conundrum. For the abolitionist leader and former slave Frederick Douglass the priority was emancipation in order that most Black men, namely, those who resided in the slaveholding South, would be able to exercise the right to vote for the first time. “Slavery is not abolished,” he declared shortly after the surrender of the Confederacy, “until the black man has the ballot.”

A year later, as the Reconstruction process was underway, “give to,” he demanded, “every loyal citizen the effective franchise — a right and power which will be ever present, and [it] will form a wall of fire for his protection.” Suffrage for Douglass was “the keystone to the arch of human liberty.”(14)

A one-time Georgia slave owner but loyal Unionist had a different opinion about what was required to reconstruct the South. Together with Black activist Aaron Bradley, a Boston migrant, Charles Hopkins sought to forge an alliance of poor whites and the once-enslaved to confiscate plantation lands and redistribute them amongst the toilers themselves.

Hopkins, who knew the former slave-owning class better than anyone, was prescient in November 1865 in an interview. “Give a man a piece of land, let him have a cabin of his own upon his own lot, and then you make him free. Civil rights are good for nothing, the ballot is good for nothing, till you make some men of every class landholders.”(15)

Subsequent events tragically confirmed Hopkins’s forecast. Except for Thaddeus Stevens in the House of Representatives, and perhaps Charles Sumner in the Senate, no other liberal voices in the North, including Douglass’s, championed what Hopkins and Bradley sought to realize.(16)

The consequences of the failure of a land reform for the formerly enslaved became painfully clear to Douglass decades later. How to explain, he asked in his 1893 autobiography, why Reconstruction had been overthrown and the Jim Crow regime established?

“I will tell you. Our reconstruction measures were radically defective. They left the former slave completely in the power of the old master … To the freedmen was given the machinery of liberty, but there was denied to them the steam to put it into motion … They were called free but left almost slaves. The old master class was not deprived of the power of life and death which was the soul of the relation of master and slave. He who could say to his fellow-man, ‘You shall serve me or starve’ is a master and his subject is a slave. This was seen and felt by Thaddeus Stevens, Charles Sumner and leading Republicans; and had their counsels prevailed the terrible evils from which we now suffer would have been averted.”(17)

Douglass, afflicted with voting fetishism, had mistaken the democratic right to vote with the actual exercise of political power and apparently recognized, when it was too late, the error of that assumption.

Marx, on the other hand, would have understood the import of Hopkins’ warning about the nexus between power and private property. “Communism,” as he and Engels explained in their Manifesto almost two decades earlier, “deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labor of others by means of such appropriation.”

So long, in other words, as former slaveowners continued to own their plantations they would have “the power to subjugate” the formerly enslaved. “You shall serve me or starve,” as Douglass later admitted about the power of property. Sometime in 1917 Lenin wrote, “in politics, it’s not intentions that count, but deeds, not good intentions but facts, not the imaginary but the real.”

To be fair to Douglass, Marx had another head start advantage on the abolitionist when chattel slavery ended in 1865. Fifteen years earlier, the 1848 Revolutions clearly and soberly revealed the limits of the ballot. In June 1848 (see Part One of this essay), thousands of the Parisian proletariat were slain for staging an insurgency.

The termination of the world’s first unemployment program, instituted by the first iteration of a social-democratic government, the one that issued from the February Revolution, provoked the uprising. That same government ended the program as well as organized the slaughter.

Many if not most of the slain, no doubt, had recently voted in the April/May elections for the Constituent Assembly, the first elections — at least in any major country — conducted on the basis of universal manhood suffrage. The irony could not have been more instructive.

“Universal suffrage,” Marx declared two years later in his first balance sheet on the French edition of the European Spring, provided “the terrain” for the proletariat’s “revolutionary emancipation, but by no means the emancipation itself.”

Though valuable, the ballot was only a means for proletarian liberation and not the end. But the subsequent constitutional establishment of universal male suffrage, Marx argued, created an inherently unstable political situation in France.

“The fundamental contradiction of this constitution . . . . consists in the following: The classes whose social slavery the constitution is to perpetuate—proletariat, peasantry, petty bourgeoisie — it puts in possession of political power through universal suffrage. And from the class whose old social power it sanctions, the bourgeoisie, it withdraws the political guarantees of this power. It forces the political rule of the bourgeoisie into democratic conditions, which at every moment help the hostile classes to victory and jeopardize the very foundations of bourgeois society. From the first group it demands that they should not go forward from political to social emancipation; from the others that they should not go back from social to political restoration.”(18)

Suffrage for the proletariat, at least in that moment, was, therefore, incompatible with the constitutional inviolability of the private ownership of the means of production.

Something had to give, and Marx was prescient. Two months later France’s parliamentary representatives of its bourgeoisie, no longer fearful of an insurgent Parisian proletariat, effectively ended the world’s first experiment in universal male suffrage. The slaughter and the end of universal suffrage, Marx contended in his more famous balance sheet, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, paved the way for the end of France’s Second Republic in 1852.

The real world of politics, Marx argued, taught that working class access to the ballot was not to be mistaken for the actual exercise of political power as long as bourgeois property relations prevailed.

It’s doubtful, however, that even if Douglass had known of Marx’s realist insight about suffrage,  he would have embraced it. Though adamantly opposed to “property in persons,” Douglass never ceased his liberal endorsement of the sanctity of private property.(19) Tellingly, it was the “counter-revolution of property,” both “North and South,” explained W.E.B. Du Bois in his Marxist-inspired magnum opus, that brought Reconstruction to a bloody end.(20)

Limitations of the Ballot

Almost exactly a century later during the Second Reconstruction, the reality of the ballot challenged the Frederick Douglass of his day. In the last year of his life Martin Luther King, Jr. declared on several occasions that racial equality in the United States would require “a radical redistribution of economic and political power.”(21)

King didn’t live long enough to elaborate on his epiphany but a speech eight months before his assassination suggests the trajectory of his thinking. To the American Psychological Association in September 1967, King chided recent political science research which concluded that “voting is not the key that will unlock the door to racial equality because ‘the concrete measurable payoffs from Negro voting in the South will not be revolutionary.’”

Other research about the North had also concluded that owing to ‘the structure of American politics as well as the nature of the Negro community, Negro politics will accomplish only limited objectives.’ King commented on these findings:

“If their conclusion can be supported, then the major effort Negroes have invested in the past 20 years has been in the wrong direction and the major pillar of their hope is a pillar of sand. My own instinct is that these views are essentially erroneous, but they must be seriously examined.”(22)

Like Douglass, then, King too seems to have suffered from voting fetishism. But less than a week before his assassination, King, as if channeling the latter-day Douglass, offered his explanation for why the ballot had not been the expected panacea for racial equality.

“In 1863 the Negro was told that he was free as a result of the Emancipation Proclamation being signed by Abraham Lincoln. But he was not given any land to make that freedom meaningful. It was something like keeping a person in prison for a number of years and suddenly discovering that that person is not guilty of the crime for which he was convicted. And you just go up to him and say, ‘Now you are free,’ but you don’t give him any bus fare to get to town. You don’t give him any money to get some clothes to put on his back or to get on his feet again in life.”(23)

Had Douglass been alive to hear King’s complaint, discomfort would likely have been his reaction. After all, little did he do, if anything, to ensure that the once enslaved be “given any land to make [their] freedom meaningful.

Unlike Douglass, King, the social democrat, however, was open to limited nationalization of private property. But in another speech in the last year of his life, August 1967, he made clear what that did not mean.

It’s worth reproducing in full what he had to say to the responsive audience at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, according to the full transcript, given that in some quarters today the claim is made that at the end of his life King had become a revolutionary with his call for “a radical redistribution of economic and political power.” King demurred.

“Now, don’t think you have me in a bind today. I’m not talking about communism. What I’m talking about is far beyond communism. (Yeah) My inspiration didn’t come from Karl Marx (Speak); my inspiration didn’t come from Engels; my inspiration didn’t come from Trotsky; my inspiration didn’t come from Lenin. Yes, I read [the] Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital a long time ago (Well), and I saw that maybe Marx didn’t follow Hegel enough. (All right) He took his dialectics, but he left out his idealism and his spiritualism. And he went over to a German philosopher by the name of Feuerbach and took his materialism and made it into a system that he called ‘dialectical materialism.’ (Speak) I have to reject that.”(24)

The civil rights leader, apparently, rejected the Marxist project — at least as he understood it at that moment — and, thus, a revolutionary road to racial equality, not unlike Douglass. Indisputable about King’s political trajectory in his last years was the reality of a political system rooted in the private ownership of the means of production that sobered him about the limits of voting — what Lenin’s realist understanding of elections teaches. Whether King would have eventually embraced, unlike Douglass,(25) the revolutionary implications of that sobriety, we’ll, alas, never know.

Ninety miles away at almost the same time that King joined the fight for the Second Reconstruction, a project to abolish social inequality had recently begin in a Caribbean country where, as in the United States, racial slavery once prevailed.

The armed attack that Fidel Castro led on July 26, 1953, was in response to the March 1952 coup d’état that overthrew an elected government, carried out by one-time Cuban president and general Fulgencio Batista. After 25 months of guerrilla warfare that culminated in a mass strike of more than a million Cubans on January 1, 1959, Batista’s dictatorship was finally overthrown. Within two years, Cuba’s working class effectively constituted its new ruling class.

At first glance, Lenin’s strategy for employing the electoral/parliamentary process for proletarian ascent — again, only as a means rather than as an end — was inapplicable in Cuba’s case where armed struggle proved determinant. But a close read of his 10 theses in his 1919 “Constituent Assembly Elections” article says otherwise.

Rather than rely on an election to determine majority will, “let the revolutionary party first overthrow the bourgeoisie… [and] then gain the sympathy and support of the majority of the non-proletarian working people by satisfying their needs at the expense of the exploiters” — the fifth thesis. Elections, as Engels once taught, were an invaluable “thermometer” to take the temperature of the class struggle to determine when to employ armed struggle.(26)

Lenin previewed his perspective in 1906, namely, the employment of the parliamentary arena to determine “the right moment for an insurrection . . . to prepare for a military offensive” for “the overthrow of the autocratic government and the transfer of power to the revolutionary people.” What transpired in Cuba between the first of January 1959 and the end of summer 1960 was, I contend, the essence of Lenin’s strategy without the electoral/parliamentary trappings.

Three decades later on the anniversary of the beginning of that process, Castro explained what had taken place.

“How did our people become a socialist people? It was the revolutionary laws more than words, preaching, or reasoning that made our people socialist. When rents were cut, which profoundly affected the interests of those landlords, the entire people supported the measure. When the agrarian reform was carried out the entire people supported the decision. The interests of the workers were taken care of. Social justice was implemented with a strong hand from one end of the country to the other. For the first time in our country’s history, the state and the government ceased being on the side of the rich and put themselves on the side of the poor. When the vast majority of our population saw that the government resolutely attacked the interests of the rich and the bourgeoisie to support the people, little by little all those lies and that whole antisocialist and anticommunist campaign came tumbling down like a house of cards. In this way a new political thinking, a true political awareness was created among our people.”

Armed with state power, the new Cuban government began within months of the overthrow of the old regime, as Lenin would have put it, “satisfying” the “needs” of the toilers “at the expense of the exploiters.” Therefore, when it came time for them to defend their gains with the most efficacious kind of voting, their feet, they enthusiastically did so — not unlike what Russia’s workers and peasants did four decades earlier in successfully defending their conquests against the Western-backed White counter revolutionary armies. The mercenaries that Washington backed in 1961 to overthrow the new government, the infamous Bay of Pigs invasion, were soundly defeated in less than 72 hours.

The newly enfranchised toilers — substantively and not just formally with their newly won social rights — were able to do something more profoundly consequential than merely registering their preferences. Rather, they were exercising power, imposing their will in defense of their revolution.

Exactly because what occurred in Cuba was done without knowledge of the Bolshevik road to power makes its outcome all so significant. The two most consequential, arguably, revolutions of the twentieth century were done in a remarkably similar way: the armed overthrow of the bourgeoisie followed immediately by measures to win over most of the toilers by “satisfying their needs” — the essence of Lenin’s fifth thesis.

The process that Castro led never employed the electoral/parliamentary arenas to take power. To do, as Lenin had done — the political education and “count[ing] forces” to determine the most opportune moment to wage armed struggle — was excluded under Batista’s dictatorial rule.(27)

But even if that option had been possible, Castro was right to think, as Lenin had pointed out in the fifth thesis, that taking power via the electoral road was “the rare exception in history and even in such an exception the bourgeoisie can resort to civil war, as the example of Finland showed.”(28) Castro could have pointed to at least three examples in Latin America in which Washington’s CIA was involved, between 1948 and 1973 — Colombia, Guatemala, Chile — in either preventing the election of, or overthrowing, democratically-elected progressive governments.(29)

Noteworthy in the latter two was the failure of the progressive forces once in office to “overthrow the bourgeoisie, break the yoke of capital, and smash the bourgeois state apparatus” and then move “rapidly to gain the sympathy and support of the majority of the non-proletarian working people by satisfying their needs at the expense of the exploiters.” The failure to do so facilitated the counter-revolutionary forces.

To recognize what happened in Cuba is not to make virtue out of necessity. Numerous opportunities did exist in Cuba and elsewhere in the hemisphere to do what Lenin advocated. The efficacy of the revolutionary process could have been enhanced had those opportunities been taken advantage of. It also would have lowered the human toll that came with the fetishization of the guerrilla road to power, as in Colombia.

Tragically, the precious lessons that Lenin bequeathed were unknown — owing to the betrayal of both Social Democracy and Stalinism — to radicalizing youth not only in Cuba but those elsewhere who were later inspired by Cuba’s example.(30)

Sobered by the limitations of voting, Martin Luther King, Jr. had an epiphany at the end of his life. For the first time he clearly stated that only the “radical redistribution of economic and political power” would ensure racial equality in the United States. That’s exactly what had taken place about five years earlier in Cuba.

For Cubans of African descent, the results of the “radical redistribution” were unprecedented, opportunities available to them they had never had. Nothing was as consequential for that achievement than the new government’s abolition of private ownership of the means of production.

Coupled with eliminating barriers to education and healthcare, Afro-Cubans made advancements that qualitatively exceeded those of their distant relatives 90 miles to the North — and continue to do so.(31) No wonder that a vanguard layer of African Americans responded positively to what was in progress on the Caribbean Island, requiring King to issue a warning.

In the same speech in which King rejected “communism,” Castro’s guerrilla road to power, he declared, would not work in America. “Only through parliamentary activity,” the not-so-subtle message, could radical social transformation be achieved in America. Social democracy à la Kautsky, hence, accurately describes King’s politics at the end of his life if not before.

King could be forgiven — perhaps — for thinking that there was no alternative to the “parliamentary road to socialism.” Just as for progressive forces and aspiring revolutionaries inLatin America, their cohorts to the north knew nothing about Lenin’s “revolutionary parliamentarism.”

Debs, whose four Socialist Party presidential campaigns became the template for most subsequent socialist-like electoral campaigns in America, embraced, to his credit, the Bolshevik Revolution to the end. “I need not say,” he famously wrote from prison in 1920, “that I am heart and soul with our Russian comrades and the Soviet Republic. Lenin and Trotsky are colossal figures and their marvelous achievements have struck terror to the ruling class and inspired the workers of all the world.”(32)

But informing, alas, Debs’ understanding of the Marxist position on how the working class should take power was Kautsky’s “catechism,” wisdom, that is, before the Bolshevik ascent in 1917.

Debs had been insistent, also to his credit, as he explained in a 1911 speech, that socialist campaigns should not simply be about “a bait for votes,” “vote-seeking for the sake of votes” but rather for “a means of education. . . [a way] to register the actual vote of socialism, no more no less . . . Voting for socialism is not socialism any more than a menu is a meal.”

Exactly for those reasons, Socialist Party campaigns needed to be honest about its politics in order to make clear how it differed from “capitalist parties.”(33) Marx, Engels, and Lenin would have been in agreement with all that Debs said, including his realist sensibility about the ballot.

But missing in Debs’ admonishments was any indication of how elections would lead to the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” namely, the working class in power, imposing its will as Lenin would have expressed it. By omission, therefore, Debs ended up subscribing to Kautsky’s parliamentary road to socialism nostrum.

This author’s The Ballot, the Streets or Both?,(34) purports to present a comprehensive account and defense of Lenin’s electoral and parliamentary strategy. Unlike for Social Democracy, both arenas, it argues, should be only, as for Lenin, a means rather than an end for proletarian ascent.“Revolutionary parliamentarism” as opposed, in his language, to “reformist parliamentarism.”

The kernels of wisdom that Marx and Engels bequeathed in the “Address of 1850” — elections as a means to an end, to do political education and “to count their forces” — informed, the book also argues, Lenin’s perspective. But in making that case, the book tends to short-shrift the end that Lenin sought: the overthrow of the bourgeois state in order to ensure the rule of the proletariat. This was exactly what was missing in Debs’s Kautskyist-informed understanding of the electoral/parliamentary process.(35)

A reread of The Ballot, the Streets or Both? reveals that amidst all the rich details about Lenin’s electoral and parliamentary activities between 1906 and 1917 there were two all-so-rich dots I failed to connect. Specifically, Lenin’s preview of his revolutionary parliamentary perspective in 1906, namely, Duma work as a means “to prepare for a military offensive,” and his 1919 theses about the same task, the indispensable continuity that informed the Bolsheviks and, thus, explaining their success in leading the working-class ascent to state power for the first time anywhere in the world.(36) That’s the intended key takeaway for those who are inspired to do the same.

Debs can surely be forgiven for not knowing about Lenin’s revolutionary parliamentarism and its necessarily concomitant realist perspective about the ballot. How Debs would have responded had he known can only be a subject for speculation.(37)

This essay is probably the first serious treatment, in any language, that connects Lenin’s theses to Marx’s and Engels’s historical program. Most importantly, it offers evidence for their continuing validity.(38) Independent of what had taken place in Russia, they were realized in practice 9,000 miles away and four decades later — with continuing consequences.

As well as presenting what is intended to be an original Marxist perspective on the suffrage, this essay corrects, hopefully, an unintended rendering of communist politics by the author about how the proletariat can employ the electoral and parliamentary arenas. Both were, as the Communist Manifesto puts it, “weapons” the bourgeoisie had once employed for its ascendancy that the proletariat could do the same for itself.

Notes

1. Geuss, “Realism, Wishful Thinking, Utopia,” Political Uses of Utopia, eds. S.D. Chrostowska and James D. Ingram (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).
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2. Lenin Collected Works (LCW), 30: 265-67.
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3. Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics (Princeton University Press, 2008), 42-50.
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4. Geuss (2008) points out that what someone like Abrams may be doing here is ideological, the misrepresentation of political reality for political ends, the co-optation, as in this case, of a mass movement into the mainstream political process (50-55).
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5. LCW, 30: 265-67.
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6. I recognize that those who vote may do so for reasons other than the intent to exercise power, for example, to be a good citizen — the answer to “the paradox of voting” (see W. Phillips Shively and David Schultz, Power and Choice [Langham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2022], 252-53).
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7. Jacob S. Hacker and Jonathan D. Cohen, “GDP and the Dow are Up. But What About American Well-Being?,” Wall Street Journal, April 27-28, 2024.
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8. I’m indebted to my colleague, political economist James Hollyer, who thinks that the concept is original, first introduced in my 2014 Lenin’s Electoral Strategy, vol. 2 (NY: Palgrave Macmillan), 182 — thus, three years before Noah Rothman’s “The Left’s Voting Fetish,” Commentary, May 23, 2017.
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9. See, Part One, ATC #231, 34-35 for details.
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10. Geuss 2008, 25.
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11. Ibid, 29-31.
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12. LCW 30, 274.
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13. See Part One, ATC #231, 34.
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14. Nimtz and Edwards, forthcoming, 209, 231.
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15. Robert Braxton, Revolution and Counterrevolution in Georgia, 1865-1870: Charles Hopkins, Aaron Bradley, and the Union Leagues, M.A.Thesis, Georgia State University, 2023: 89. Braxton’s Thesis, as of this writing, is being readied for book publication.
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16. Eric Foner notes “Bradley emerged as one of the few black leaders from the North to become actively involved in freedmen’s land struggles,” Reconstruction (New York, 1988: 290. Though Wendell Phillips, as early as 1863, supported land confiscation and redistribution, that demand, in his mind, took a back seat to voting rights by the time the 15th Amendment was ratified. See James Brewer, Stewart Wendell Phillips (New York, 1986): 247-94.
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17. Henry Louis, ed. Frederick Douglass (New York, 1994: 932-3. See Philip Foner, The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass (New York, 1955: 32). For the “heavily edited” speech included as an appendix in Douglass’s Life and Times, see Gates 1994: 925-37. For the contemporaneous account of the speech and details about the version included in Life and Times, see John Blassingame and John McKivigan The Frederick Douglass Papers (New Haven, Conn., 1991: 562-81).
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18. Marx-Engels Collected Works (MECW), 10: 45, 79.
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19. And perhaps for good reason. See “Frederick Douglass, Slum Landlord?” New North Star, 2023:5.
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20. W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, Ch. XIV https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/umn/reader.action?docID=5824856&ppg=509
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21. Southern Christian Leadership Conference leadership meeting at Frogmore, South Carolina, May 1967: King 1967b and online at https://kairoscenter.org/mlk-frogmore-staff-retreat-speech-anniversary/. See also, King’s interview with NBC News in May 1967, King 1967a and online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xsbt3a7K-8. As well, his speech to the SCLC Convention in Atlanta in August 1967, Washington 1991, 245-52.
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22. https://www.apa.org/topics/equity-diversity-inclusion/martin-luther-king-jr-challenge. That none of the researchers who King cited ever bothered, it seems, to discuss their findings with him speaks volumes about the then academy and political science in particular.
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23. https://www.dc1968project.com/blog/2018/3/31/31-march-1968-mlk-speaks-at-national-cathedral
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24. https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/where-do-we-go-here. This seems to be the trans­cript of the entire speech. Other versions omit the details reproduced here as, for example, Howard-Pitney, 154. The speech is conspicuously absent in Peniel E. Joseph’s The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr, but it provides evidence that King did read what he claimed when a student at Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, Joseph 2020, 60. Membership, past or present, in the Communist Party USA was incompatible, King made clear in a letter to Jack O’Dell, with a staff position in his network. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/19/us/jack-odell-dead.html
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25. On Douglass’s rejection of the Marxist project, see August H. Nimtz and Kyle A. Edwards, The Communist and the Revolutionary Liberal in the Second American Revolution: Comparing Karl Marx and Frederick Douglass in Real-Time (Leiden: Brill 2024), Appendix A.
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26. See Part One, 31.
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27. At the time of Batista’s coup in March 1952 Castro was a National Assembly candidate of the Orthodox Party, thus precluding a future electoral career for him.
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28. LCW 30, 273. For details about the Finnish events, see note 81, 552-53.
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29. In 1948 in Colombia, events that the 20-year old Castro actually witnessed, 1954 in Guatemala, and 1973 in Chile.
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30. To understand why see Joseph Hansen, “The seven errors made by Che Guevara (1969),” Dynamics of the Cuban Revolution: A Marxist Appreciation (New York, 2023): 323-32.
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31. See Nimtz, “Natural versus Social Phenomena: Cuba and the Lessons of Katrina.” The Black Scholar, Winter 2006, Vol. 36, No. 4; “Why There Are No George Floyds in Cuba,” Legal Form (Blog), June 17, 2020.
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32. https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/parties/spusa/1920/1115-debs-whynotstronger.pdf
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33. https://www.marxists.org/archive/debs/works/1911/danger.htm
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34. Nimtz, The Ballot, the Streets or Both: From Marx and Engels to Lenin and the October Revolution (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019).
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35. The author’s “The Bolsheviks Come to Power,” Science & Society (Oct. 2017), purports to be a corrective.
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36. Lenin’s 10 theses in the 1919 article are included as an appendix in the book (Appendix H) but their significance gets lost in a welter of other details in the main text. Appendix I consists of the 1920 Comintern Theses on Parliamentarism which is exclusively about “revolutionary parliamentary,” that is, how communists should conduct themselves once elected to parliaments and other bourgeois representative bodies.
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37. An important topic about Debs that can only be mentioned here was his failure to see the need for a Bolshevik-like combat party — exactly the point Lenin makes a case for in his 10th thesis in his 1919 article. In the opinion of critics like Farrell Dobbs, Revolutionary Continuity, 1918-1922 (New York, 2007: 163-65), Debs could have sorely benefited from that advice.
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38. Neither foe nor friend, as far as I can tell, has ever done so. In, for example, the third volume, Revolution Besieged, 1917-1923 (Chicago, 2012: 36-37) of Tony Cliff’s “friendly” homage to Lenin, the theses merit about a page and a half but without any reference to Lenin’s 1906 article that previewed his argument. In foe Robert Service’s three volumes, Lenin: A Political Life (Bloomington, Indiana, 1985-1995), nary a mention.
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September-October 2024, ATC 232