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A mass meeting in the Putilov Works in Petrograd during the 1917 Russian Revolution.

Interchange – Voting for Revolution: Lenin At the Ballot Box

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It’s become increasingly clear that the American Dream is dead.  Good riddance. Long ago Friedrich Engels identified economic mobility (said “dream” of wealth) in the US as a key barrier to class consciousness. Welcome to your waking hours, America.

Today we explore the question, “Can Electoral politics lead the way to Revolution?”

Marx, Engels, and Lenin insisted on the value of revolutionary parliamentarism; a lesson learned from the 1848 European Spring, the Paris Commune of 1871, and the spontaneous creation of Workers’ Councils or Soviets in 1905. Running independent workers’ party candidates would educate the people about alternative ways to organize their lives, but would also allow a party to measure support and how many people would be willing to take up arms for revolution. That is, it is a means to get us to a much different end than swearing in the capitalist status quo.

Revolutionary Parliamentarism stands in stark contrast to Parliamentary Cretinism, defined by Engels as

an incurable disease, an ailment whose unfortunate victims are permeated by the lofty conviction that the whole world, its history and its future are directed and determined by a majority of votes of just that very representative institution that has the honour of having them in the capacity of its members.

According to our guest, the honor of the greatest example of this in the university goes to his own discipline, that of Political Science.

That GUEST is August Nimtz, a professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota and the author most recently of a two volume work published by Palgrave Macmillan on Lenin’s Electoral Strategies, subtitled, “The Ballot, the Streets – or Both.” The books track Lenin’s use of electoral politics as a tactic to bring all power to the Soviets. Volume one shows Lenin’s deep knowledge and indebtedness to Marx & Engels, specifically the 1850 “Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League” which he’s said to have memorized, while Volume Two shows the ways he put these lessons into practice to get from the first revolutionary stirrings of 1905 to the success of October 1917.

We begin with Lenin as a student of Marx & Engels in the realization that it’s not The Ballot OR the Streets…but both.

RELATED
Bringing Marx and Engels into the picture by August Nimtz
Taking elections seriously by August Nimtz
Triumph of ‘revolutionary parliamentarism’ by August Nimtz
Lenin, the Bolsheviks, and the electoral arena (a review by Todd Chretien)
The Future Cannot Be Capitalist: Michael Yates on the Working Class

MUSIC – Ornette Coleman
“Forerunner” – Change of the Century
“European Echoes” – At the Golden Circle (live in Stockholm)
“Bourgeois Boogie” – Virgin Beauty
“Law Years” – Science Fiction
“Trouble In the East” – Crisis

CREDITS
Producer & Host: Doug Storm
Executive Producer: Wes Martin

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