The biggest political obstacle today to independent working-class political action—not just in the United States—is lesser-evil thinking. Every working-class vote for the lesser-evil bourgeois politician is another step away from building a real working-class alternative. And every vote for a bourgeois politician helps reproduce bourgeois politics. Many a sincere revolutionary in the United States and elsewhere thought that support for Barack Obama over Mitt Romney was in the interest of the international working class. Aside from what the cold facts about the new Obama administration have already revealed—“what thou doest, do quickly”—what such support in fact did, as always with such strategies, was to drain precious time and energy away from what needs to be done. It’s impossible to calculate, but much of the energy of the Occupy move- ments in the United States, with all their strengths and limitations, was siphoned off into the reelection of Barack Obama—a pattern seen with earlier mass movements in the run-ups to presidential elections, such as the Vietnam antiwar movement. The justification is always that failing to support the lesser evil allows the “greater evil,” the reactionaries, to win. reaction actually is and how it advances. One thing is certain: the logic of capital dictates that unless there is a real working-class alternative, boureois politics will keep moving to the right—especially in the context of the still-unfolding crisis. Every delay in the pursuit of independent working-class political action only emboldens reaction.

• August H. Nimtz, The Ballot, the Streets—or Both: From Marx and Engels to Lenin and the October Revolution (can't find the fused book online, so here are the two separate books)