Revolutionary parliamentarism?
Lenin, the Bolsheviks, and the electoral arena
Review by Todd Chretien
If we do not understand Lenin’s conception of “revolutionary parliamentarism,” as socialist scholar August Nimtz describes it in Lenin’s Electoral Strategy, then we cannot understand how the Bolsheviks came to power, supported by the majority of the Russian working class, in October 1917. Nimtz shines a spotlight on Lenin’s (and to a certain extent Marx and Engels’s) approach to elections, analyzing the choices they faced in the volumes’ subtitle: “the ballots, the streets—or both,” to reveal a little-discussed aspect of political work that was, according to Lenin, an “indispensible” part of the Bolshevik Party’s success.