Fighting Fascism: Lesser Evils, United Fronts, and Leftist Strategy
A companion FAQ to ‘The French Left, Le Pen, and the 2002 Presidential Runoff’
These FAQ can be read alongside our article on lessons for today from the French presidential run-off. These questions set out, at greater length, the argument the article makes about the defensive vote.
1. What is the ‘lesser evil’ debate in the fight against fascism, and how is it best illustrated?
In the abstract, the question is meaningless. Trotsky said so in December 1931, writing against the German Communist Party’s paralysis before Hitler: asking whether Brüning or Hitler is the lesser evil is like asking which note of the scale, do, re or sol, is the ‘better’ one. There is no answer until you know the piece being played and which key the moment demands.
His illustration is the one this FAQ turns on. Picture two enemies. One sets out small daily portions of poison; the other is about to shoot you. You knock the revolver from the second man’s hand first, because surviving him is what gives you the chance to deal with the poisoner at all (Trotsky, For a Workers’ United Front Against Fascism, 8 December 1931). The part most often dropped is the part that matters: this does not make the poison a ‘lesser evil’, and it makes the poisoner no ally. Brüning and Hitler, Trotsky wrote, were component parts of one system; the revolutionary exploits the conflict between them without lending either any support. Translated into a vote, that means a defensive ballot cast to keep fascism from power, carrying no endorsement of the candidate’s programme and entering no bloc with him.
The analogy is genuine, and it is the most abused argument in anti-fascist strategy, because it holds only where there is actually a revolver. Most appeals to the ‘lesser evil’ are not revolver situations. They ask you to treat a marginal, symbolic or merely unpleasant threat as though it were existential, and that is the road by which the left is conscripted into voting, election after election, for a bourgeois candidate as the price of stopping something worse. Trotsky’s gunman describes the rare case. He gets quoted to license the routine one. Whether a real revolver is present is precisely what the companion article tests: a defensive vote is defensible only where the threat is a qualitative leap in the form of the state rather than a marginal shift, where the left casts it from independence it has already built and has something of its own to defend, and where it is welded from the day after to the struggle against the winner. Miss any of the three and there is no revolver, only a poisoner being called a gunman to hurry you into the booth.
2. What was the ‘Third Period’ of Stalinism, and what did it do to the fight against fascism?
The ‘Third Period’, running roughly from 1928 to 1934, was the ultra-left turn in which Stalinist doctrine declared every capitalist party, the social democrats included, to be a species of fascism. Calling all of them fascist drained the word of meaning at the moment it was most needed, rather as naming every bitter thing the deadliest poison leaves you unable to identify the one that will actually kill you. The ‘class against class’ line ruled out any defensive alliance with the reformist workers’ parties against Hitler. Poulantzas later traced this, in Fascism and Dictatorship, to an instrumentalist and economistic reading that could not see the political autonomy of the fascist movement, treating it as a straightforward tool of capital rather than a force with a dynamic of its own. A divided workers’ movement was the result, and an open road for the Nazis.
3. What is a ‘united front’ against fascism?
A united front brings different working-class forces, with real disagreements between them, into common action against an immediate threat, none of them surrendering their politics or endorsing the others. It is a bloc for action, not a bloc of programme. The distinction that keeps it honest is the one the article insists on: a united front is struck with the reformist workers’ organisations, the parties and unions the mass of workers still follow, and it is not a bloc with bourgeois parties. That latter thing is a popular front, a different animal, and historically a disastrous one. Unity in the street and the workplace against the fascist; no political support for the bourgeois candidate; no dissolving of the revolutionary organisation into a cross-class front. In 2002, the LCR pitched its answer to Le Pen in these terms, calling for the broadest mobilisation against the far right and the employers while refusing Chirac any political credit.
4. How did the revolutionary left divide over the runoff, and why?
Two answers, and the argument between them is the whole subject of the companion piece. Lutte Ouvrière refused any vote for either candidate: both were servants of the bourgeoisie, Le Pen would be beaten in the streets or not at all, and to imply a ballot could do that work was to mislead the class. The LCR, after an initial hesitation, called to bar Le Pen at the polls while refusing Chirac political support and tying the vote to immediate mobilisation against the government it was helping to return. The article argues that LO was stating the default the whole tradition holds, and that the LCR’s vote was a narrow, heavily conditioned exception to it, not a general licence for lesser-evilism. The two positions are closer than the shouting suggested: both refused a bloc with the bourgeoisie, and both located the real defeat of Le Pen in struggle rather than at the ballot box.
5. What did the 2002 result mean for the left and the fight against the far right?
Le Pen reaching the second round landed as a shock, and the shock was the point: it broke a complacency that had treated the far right as a manageable feature of the landscape. Hundreds of thousands went into the streets between the two rounds. The official left, the Socialists and Communists and the union federations, threw itself behind Chirac under the banner of the republican front, which conveniently spared its leaders any reckoning with their own part in Le Pen’s rise. The argument that mattered among activists was never only how to mark the ballot. It was how to build and sustain the anti-fascist opposition after polling day, with the far right still standing and Chirac now in office. That is the question the vote leaves open, and it is the one worth carrying forward.