National Bolshevism originated during a brief, disastrous moment in the 1920s when the German Communist Party attempted to appeal to working-class Nazi supporters with nationalist or even anti-semitic rhetoric. As Marxist historian Doug Enaa Greene shows, this shameful chapter still resonates today. Marxists should never be tempted to set aside our internationalism or anti-oppression principles in hopes of reaching the most backward workers.

The upcoming US presidential election is once again provoking arguments from liberals about the “lesser evil” amid widespread concern about the reactionary right. Revolutionary socialists never support capitalist parties or their candidates — our class enemies — and we reject lesser-evilism as a justification for doing so, even when the “lesser” evil isn’t complicit in genocide. Here, we outline the history of this fundamental Marxist principle.

The current civil war in Sudan, with rival factions backed by foreign imperialist powers, has resulted in a terrible humanitarian crisis. The social and economic causes of the war are storied and complex — but are also the result of Western imperialism and the neoliberal capitalist order leaving an African nation with desperately limited resources, crippling austerity, and ethnic division.