Dissenting Wren wrote:
> And why bother to try to convince people not to vote?
In 1903, in the aftermath of the 2nd congress of the Russian social-democrats, when Bolsheviks and Mensheviks split, a militant worker from Russia just arriving in London visited Lenin. He told Lenin that comrades in Russia were perplexed by all these fights among the leaders in exile. "In Russia people don't understand and don't care about your differences" -- he said. "People there are busy doing their thing."
Lenin responded by alluding to a scene from a Tolstoyian novel. From a distance, a couple sees a man squatting in a very contrived position and waving his arms in ways that appear very odd and even funny. Clearly, he is a mad man. However, when the couple gets closer to the man, they realize that he's been all along sharpening his knife.
^^^^^^ CB: Also, specifically on voting or even more running for office, Lenin ran for elective office in reactionary Czarist constitutional-monarchical government, as far as the Leninist position on running for office in bourgeois ( or even monarchical) elections.