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.
During his lifetime, Karl Kautsky was such an influential theorist he was called the “Pope of Marxism” — but he was also famously branded “the renegade Kautsky” by Lenin for his betrayals of revolutionary socialism. In recent years there have been efforts to revive Kautskyism in order to justify reformism and electoralism. This approach is as wrong as it always was: Kautskyism remains a renegade socialism that is fundamentally opposed to revolution.
Most on the broad left view electoral activity as all-important to progressive reform and even the advance of socialism. They focus almost exclusively on elections, inevitably to the benefit of parties of the liberal bourgeoisie, like the Democrats. By contrast, revolutionary socialists recognize the electoral system as a weapon in the hands of the ruling class that can never be used to transform the system in any lasting way.
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