Marx and Engels's Electoral Strategy: The Alleged versus the Real

Abstract

In a recently published collection of interviews with “the most prominent scholars in comparative politics since World War II,” Adam Przeworski revealed that his writings from the 1980s on Social Democracy served a political end, that is, to defend it from critics such as Lenin, Trotsky, Lukacs, and Luxemburg. His co-authored book, Paper Stones: A History of Electoral Socialism (1986), still a classic in the sub-field, claims that none other than Frederick Engels sanctioned Social Democracy's quintessential stance, the peaceful or parliamentary road to socialism. A close reading of Paper Stones reveals, however, that it misrepresents—sometimes in quite blatant fashion—the views of not only Engels but Marx as well. This involves the omission of contradictory evidence from many places in the Marx–Engels corpus, the same text, the same page or even the next sentence. Przeworski's reinvention of Marx and Engels duplicates what Edward Bernstein did more than a century ago in his quest to revise their views. Paper Stones excludes evidence that challenges its central finding that the reformist outcome for European Social Democracy was inevitable—a claim, therefore, that can only remain hypothetical.