Abstract
In the immediate aftermath of the bolshevik Revolution in 1917, Lenin engaged in a heated debate with what would be the intellectual forebears of today’s social democrats. He accused them—especially Karl Kautsky, the one-time “Pope” of European socialism—of misrepresenting Marx and Engels’s politics. Kautsky, he protested, “has turned Marx into a common liberal … [he] has beaten the world record in the liberal distortion of Marx.”1 Of particular concern was how, in Lenin’s estimation, they portrayed Marx and Engels’s views on parliamentary democracy and the related issue of involvement in the electoral arena. These were vital questions, he argued, that went to the very heart of the significance of what the October Revolution had just instituted, the process by which it was achieved, and the potential lessons for aspiring revolutionaries elsewhere.
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Notes
V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 28 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1978), pp. 241–42.
Jonathan Sperber, Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life (New York: Liveright, 2013), p. 221.
On the discussion within the worker’s movement on this question, see Oscar Hammen, The Red ‘48ers: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969), pp. 360–61.
David Riazanov, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: An Introduction to Their Lives and Works (New York: Monthly Review, 1973), p. 100.
Donald Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century (New York: New Press, 1996), p. 10.
Contrary to what David McLellan, Karl Marx: His Life and Thought (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), p. 438, suggests, Marx did have an opinion of Bernstein and company, at least in September 1879, which was not very flattering: “They are poor counter-revolutionary windbags” (Ibid., p. 413).
Regarding Jacoby’s biography, see Hal Draper, The Marx-Engels Glossary (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), p. 103.
Karl Kautsky, The Class Struggle (Erfurt Program) (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), p. 2.
See also Sheri Berman, “Social Democracy’s Past and Potential Future,” in What’s Left of the Left: Democrats and Social Democrats in Challenging Times, ed. James Cronin, George Ross, and James Shoch (Chapel Hill, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).
Maximillien Rubel and Margaret Manale, Marx without Myth: A Chronological Study of His Life and Work (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), p. 251.
Institute of Marxism-Leninism, The General Council of the First International, 1868–1870: Minutes (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974), p. 220.
On some details about Zasulich’s close relationship with Engels, especially after she moved from Geneva to London in 1894, see Jay Bergman, Vera Zasulich: A Biography (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983), ch. 4.
For details, see Draper and E. Haberkern, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, Vol. V: War & Revolution (New York: Monthly Review, 2005), especially ch. 8.
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© 2014 August H. Nimtz
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Nimtz, A.H. (2014). What Marx and Engels Bequeathed. In: Lenin’s Electoral Strategy from Marx and Engels through the Revolution of 1905. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137389961_1
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