On Strategy and Tactics: Marxism and Electoral Politics

摘要

This essay explores the place of electoral politics within Marxist political theory through the lens of a critique of August Nimtz's two-volume study of Lenin's electoral politics. The problem of how the Marxist left should relate to electoral politics has come to the fore in recent years in, for instance, Egypt, Greece, Spain, the UK and the USA. The debates occasioned by these movements would do well to be informed by a clearer understanding of the history of the revolutionary left's approach to electoral politics. For this reason, Nimtz's study of Lenin's practical and theoretical engagement with this subject is a welcome and timely intervention. However, Nimtz's interpretation of the relationship between strategy and tactics in Lenin's thought and the position of elections therein can be challenged, and this paper does so through a discussion of Lenin's notebooks on Clausewitz. Understood through the lens of these notebooks, Lenin can be shown to have held a much more rigorous and flexible approach to electoral strategy than Nimtz supposes.