While Alexis de Tocqueville described America as the 'absolute democracy, ' Karl Marx saw the nation as a 'defiled republic' so long as it permitted the enslavement of blacks. In this insightful political history, Nimtz argues that Marx and his partner, Frederick Engels, had a far more acute and insightful reading of American democracy than Tocqueville because they recognized that the overthrow of slavery and the cessation of racial oppression were central to its realization. Nimtz's account contrasts both the writings and the civil action of Tocqueville, Marx and Engels, noting that Marx and...

According to Nimtz, no two people contributed more to the struggle for democracy in the nineteenth century than Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Presenting the first major study of the two thinkers in the past twenty years and the first since the collapse of the Soviet Union, this book challenges many widely held views about their democratic credentials and their attitudes and policies on the peasantry, the importance of national self-determination, the struggle for women's equality, their so-called Eurocentric bias, political and party organizing, and the possibility for socialist revolution...

This book explores the time in which Lenin initiated his use of the electorate, beginning with the Marxist roots of his politics, from his leadership of Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in the First and Second State Dumas to Russia's first experiment in representative democracy from 1906 to 1907.

This is the first book length study of the sorely neglected side of Lenin's politics-his use of the electoral arena to shape a revolution. This aspect of Leninist politics was intimately linked to his better known party-building project and writings on the

This book is the first full-length study of Lenin's party building project and writings on elections, looking in detail at his leadership of the Bolshevik wing of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in the four state Dumas from 1906 to the beginning of the First World War.