The American Workingmen's Parties in the 1828–32 period occupy a distinctive place within the history of socialism: they were the first to embrace a strategy of organizing a working-class political party and seizing the democratic state for their collective self-liberation. With universal suffrage, a working-class majority could take political power electorally and expropriate the rich. Karl Marx read about these workers’ parties through works by Thomas Hamilton and Thomas Cooper in the period of his early political development. Like the American workers, he was stringently in favor of robust political rights and conceived of socialism as a democratic mass movement. Unlike the antipolitical socialists predominant in his day, Marx saw the northern United States as uniquely situated for socialism precisely because it had already solved the basic political problem facing Europe: the workers could vote.