In point of historical fact, the last time that Marx thought about proletarian revolutionaries making alliances with a bourgeois party was in the German revolution of 1849, which aimed to unify the state and crush the landed aristocracy and church. But in the course of seeing this supposedly revolutionary bourgeoisie refuse to "do its duty", Marx decided that such alliances were not worth it and raised a new idea: permanent revolution. This concept stated that the proletariat would abolish absolutism and capitalist rule in one fell swoop. It is the very same approach that Trotsky advocated for Czarist Russia.
Flowing from this analysis, Marx was quite specific about the electoral approach the workers must take. In his 1850 "Address to the Communist League", he said:
"workers' candidates are [to be] nominated everywhere in opposition to bourgeois-democratic candidates. As far as possible they should be League members and their election should be pursued by all possible means. EVEN WHERE THERE IS NO PROSPECT OF ACHIEVING THEIR ELECTION THE WORKERS MUST PUT UP THEIR OWN CANDIDATES TO PRESERVE THEIR INDEPENDENCE, TO GAUGE THEIR OWN STRENGTH AND TO BRING THEIR REVOLUTIONARY POSITION AND PARTY STANDPOINT TO PUBLIC ATTENTION. THEY MUST NOT BE LED ASTRAY BY THE EMPTY PHRASES OF THE DEMOCRATS, WHO WILL MAINTAIN THAT THE WORKERS' CANDIDATES WILL SPLIT THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY AND OFFER THE FORCES OF REACTION THE CHANCE OF VICTORY. ALL SUCH TALK MEANS, IN THE FINAL ANALYSIS, THAT THE PROLETARIAT IS TO BE SWINDLED. The progress which the proletarian party will make by operating independently in this way is infinitely more important than the disadvantages resulting from the presence of a few reactionaries in the representative body."
How interesting. In 1849, there were also people counseling "lesser evil" support for bourgeois politicians. But Marx would have none of this. He argued that "empty phrases" about stealing votes from the democrats should not lead revolutionaries astray. Marx was above all interested in drawing the class line on all fronts, at the ballot box or on the barricades. The attempt to invoke Marx as some kind of "lesser evil" strategist is an assault on everything that Marx stood for.
This class-independence approach to electoral politics remained the bed-rock foundation of communist strategy until, as Burford correctly points out, the 1935 Comintern. Dimitrov put forward the notion of the popular front, which meant that Communist Parties would either form coalitions with bourgeois parties when they were strong enough, or simply urge votes for bourgeois candidates when they were not. In Cuba, this translated into CP support for Fulgenzio Batista, who was perceived as "pro-working class". In the US, this meant that the CP began functioning as a wing of the Democratic Party, which it does until the current day in the mode of an "external faction". This strategy has not led to socialism anywhere. In the name of defeating the "lesser evil", the capitalist system as a whole gets whitewashed by so-called Marxist parties.
It may be difficult to appreciate how universally accepted this was until the 1960s. Just before I transferred up to the Boston branch of the Trotskyist SWP in 1970, my father confessed to me that he was a member of the CP briefly. My mom explained what this probably meant. He was a truck-driver who had just spent 4 years in Europe fighting the German army. At a local rally of the American Labor Party in upstate NY, they passed around membership cards and he filled one out. In his mind this meant joining the CP. The ALP was formed by the CP as a way to convince radicalized workers, especially NY Jews who had a deeply radical tradition, that there was an alternative to the Democrats. The ALP is an interesting historical phenomenon, but suffice it to say it was only a sideshow. The CP was deeply entrenched in the Democratic Party. When the Democrats shifted to the right after WWII, they made a 3rd party bid in the form of Henry Wallace's Progressive Party, but returned to the fold when cold-war excesses died down a bit.
So at the beginning of the Vietnam War, progressive politics--except for the tiny Trotskyist movement--broadly accepted the need for supporting the Democratic Party. Two things helped to smash this illusion. One was the betrayal of LBJ, who began escalating the war almost immediately after taking office. In fact it was learned that he had such plans while stumping around the country promoting illusions in his "peace" candidacy. The other important event was the refusal to seat the Lowndes County Democrats at the 1964 Democratic Party convention. This pro-civil rights group had been popularly elected, but the Democratic National Committee decided to seat the Dixiecrats as well. In the documentary "Eyes on the Prize", we see CP favorite Hubert Humphrey explaining to the civil rights workers why the Democratic Party had to maintain its alliance with the likes of George Wallace and Orville Faubus.
So this led to a radicalization.
Unfortunately, the radicalization took the form of an extreme "antithesis" to the CP's "thesis". The solution to class-collaboration was Maoist or Trotskyist purism. The Maoists denounced elections as a bourgeois trap, while the Trotskyists utilized them only as a recruitment tool. It viewed 3rd party initiatives not of their own making as a threat and denounced them as "petty-bourgeois," the favorite epithet for this segment of the Marxist subculture.
Attempting to break free of the subculture, party leader Peter Camejo urged the SWP to join forces with other left formations, including the Puerto Rican Socialist Party, to run a campaign against Edward I. Koch, who had the backing of both the Democrats and Republicans in 1978. The SWP leadership considered this to be a heresy of the most petty-bourgeois nature and Camejo was driven out of the SWP. In reality all Camejo was trying to do was apply the approach of the Central American revolution to the United States. The FSLN and FMLN, learning from the Cuban revolution, believed in the need to unite all forces in struggle against the capitalist system either in elections or on the barricades. As it turned out, there is negative proof of what happens when electoral opportunities are not taken advantage of. Koch ran unopposed and this opened up a period of racist reaction in the city that went hand in hand with the Reagan counter-revolution nationally. Instead of having an ongoing electoral front that could help organize day-to-day fights in the neighborhoods, we have had an urban politics that is disunited and ineffectual.
The most urgent task facing radicals and Marxists today is to find a way to advance the class struggle independently of the Democrats and Republicans. This means breaking with the past. The CP has been an important part of the American radical movement, whose achievements outshine the IWW's or Debs's SP. But on the crucial question of class independence, Marx is still correct: "the workers must put up their own candidates to preserve their independence, to gauge their own strength and to bring their revolutionary position and party standpoint to public attention."
Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)