ciro wrote:from you link and
December 2025 › Forums › General discussion › Marx, socialism and Democracy › ciro wrote:from you link and
Yes, Marx did argue that under certain conditions (control of the government by an elected parliament) a socialist-minded working class would be able to gain control of political power peaceably via elections. As he said in a speech in The Hague in Holland in 1872:
It is a measure of the extent of Leninist and insurrectionary ideas in Italy that it is not easy to find an Italian version of this on the internet, but this might work.At the end of the more readily available Preface that Engels wrote to the English translation of Capital that came out in 1886 Engels confirmed this when he wrote that
This is more easily available in Italian and can be found here.Having said this, our position does not rest on what Marx said (we don’t slavishly accept him as an infallible authority) but on our own analysis of the facts which in our view confirm Marx’s point of view.Lenin argued that since 1872 conditions in England and America had become more like what they were in Europe in 1872 (where Marx saw insurrection as the only way) and so a peaceful winning of political power had become impossible in England and America too. We argue that, on the contrary, today conditions in Europe and many other parts of the world have become more like conditions in England and America in 1872 and so a peaceful revolution is possible in them too.
