Date: Thu, 25 Oct 2001 04:55:09 +0100
From: Andrew Flood <andrewflood-AT-eircom.net>
Subject: Re: AUT: Dude, where's my vanguard?


> There are obviously a number of ways in which to interpret the idea
> of a vanguard, but my understanding of the Leninist interpretation
> is that the vanguard does indeed refer to a 'party' consisting of the
>most 'advanced' > intellectuals and workers.

This is pretty much the leninist meaning of vanguard, after all the idea that
at any time some sections of workers have more 'advanced'  ideas then others
is so obvious that even most anarchist would acknowledge it.  The SWP/ISO
tradition has always had an internal/external presentation on this
question, here are details of one example from a couple of years back

"This pattern of organisation occurred because the key thing for the
authoritarian left was the relative strength of their organisation and not
the level of self-activity of the class or even the strength of the class.
Historical and current defeats of the working class were analysed as being
due to the absence of a strong enough vanguard that was equipped with the
right slogans, rather than due to a weakness of self-organisation and a
reliance on minority leadership by the class. An excellent recent example
of this logic was provided by Tony Cliff, the leader of one of the
surviving Leninist groups, the British Socialist Workers Party. In 1993
mass demonstrations took place all over Britain aimed at preventing the
Tories closing the remaining coal mines. These demonstrations however
remained firmly under the control of union bureaucrats and Labour MPs with
workers playing the role of a stage army to be marched up and down hills
under their control.

To the SWP though, the weakness of this movement was that they did not have
enough members to control it. As its leader, Tony Cliff, said at the time

"If we had 15,000 members in the SWP and 30,000 supporters the 21 October
miners' demonstration could have been different. Instead of marching round
Hyde Park socialists could have taken 40 or 50,000 people to parliament. If
that had happened the Tory MPs wouldn't have dared to vote with Michael
Heseltine. The government would have collapsed."[3]

This sort of logic, which can only see the strength of the struggles of the
working class in terms of the strength of the party, is precisely the same
logic that kept Leninists defending policies they knew to be rubbish year
after year. It was what kept Communist Parties all over the world together
as the Russian tanks rolled over the working class of Hungary in 1956 and
of Czechoslovakia in 1968. To go further back again it was what caused the
Workers' Opposition [4] , in the process of being purged from the Bolshevik
Party in 1921, to be to the forefront of attacking the revolutionaries who
had risen in Kronstadt. This despite the fact that these sailors they were
massacring had a programme far more in common with their platform than that
of Lenin and Trotsky, who directed the massacres!

This is putting the party first, so well described by Trotsky in 1921 when
he rounded on the Workers' Opposition declaring

"They have come out with dangerous slogans. They have made a fetish of
democratic principles. They have placed the workers' right to elect
representatives above the Party. As if the Party were not entitled to
assert its dictatorship even if that dictatorship temporarily clashed with
the passing moods of the workers' democracy !". [5]

This is the logic behind the decades of sabotage of working class struggles
by Leninists, justified by the recruiting of a few extra people into the
party. This is also why gaining positions of power is so central to
Leninist doctrine, so that through these positions they can control
struggles - even if they lose popularity within them."

The footnotes are to be found in the article on the web at
http://struggle.ws/rbr/rbr3_organise.html

Andrew

      ***************************
      International anarchism
     http://struggle.ws/inter.html

Issues-> http://struggle.ws
Me ->  http://struggle.ws/andrew.html




     --- from list aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---