A final note on Marx from me, since as you probably recognize, I don't feel a need to cite Marx or justify differences with the old man for my beliefs:
Marx also said [in that period] that generally the revolution would not be achieved by electoral means, but by force. If you don't expect serious change from electoral work, of course a few reactionaries in a parliament you expect to overthrow by force is largely irrelevant.
But Marx also argued in later years that in countries with universal suffrage, revolutionary change might come through non-violent electoral means. On Sept 8, 1872 Marx delivered an address at The Hague following a Congress of the First International. While noting that much of Continental Europe would still need violence to achieve workers ends, he said: "Someday the worker must seize political power in order to build up the new organization of labor; he must overthrow the old politics which sustains the old institutions, if he is not to lose heaven on earth, like the old Christians who neglected and despised politics.
But we have not asserted that the ways to achieve that goal are everywhere the same.
You know that the institutions, mores, and traditions of various countries must be taken into consideration, and we do not deny that there are countries - such as America, England, and it I were more familiar with your institutions, I would perhaps also add Holland - where the workers can attain their goal by peaceful means."
Now, that is not an argument against third party work but it is an argument against exactly the kind of rote rules of political engagement that Louis quoted. And Marx's gibe about "old Christians" could easily be read forward as a gibe about puritanical Marxists who maintain such political purity that they fail to engage in the reality of politics as "the institutions, mores and traditions" find them in our society.
I could also quote Marx's praise of Lincoln and other bourgois politicians in the US, but I will leave the old boy alone. Marx is a wonderful thinker precisely because the dogmatic quotes usually attributed to him are the rhetorical side of a thinker of much broader and nuanced distinctions than his disciples in name would grant him.
--Nathan Newman