Date: Tue, 2 Jul 1996 19:20:34 -0400 (EDT)
From: Louis N Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: Vanguards?


In this post, I will discuss:

1) Lenin's concept of a "vanguard".

2) The view commonly held by the "Marxist-Leninist" movement
today.

3) My own view which is much closer to Lenin's.

The most elaborated presentation of Lenin's concept of a vanguard
occurs in the section of "What is to be Done" titled "The Working
Class as Vanguard Fighter for Democracy". The notion of a vanguard
emerges out of Lenin's struggle with the "economists", *not* the
"Mensheviks". This is often neglected by those "Marxist-Leninists"
who use the pamphlet as some kind of organizing handbook.

As opposed to Martynov the Economist who expects the class political
consciousness of workers to develop from within their economic
struggle, Lenin argues that "class political consciousness can only be
brought to the workers from without, that is, only from outside the
economic struggle, from outside the sphere of relations between
workers and employers."

The Social Democrat should not aspire to be a trade union secretary,
but instead the "tribune of the people." This tribune will "react to every
manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears,
no matter what stratum of people it affects; who is able to generalize
all these manifestations and produce a single picture of police violence
and capitalist exploitation; who is able to take advantage of every
event, however small, in order to set forth before all his socialist
convictions and his democratic demands, in order to clarify for all and
everyone the world-historic significance of the struggle for the
emancipation of the proletariat."

Lenin's example of one such tribune is the German Social Democratic
leader Karl Liebnecht. The German Social Democracy was Lenin's
*model* for what was needed in Russia. This type of party did not
exist in Russia and it was his goal to build one.

Social Democracy would fulfill the role of vanguard insofar as it was
able to act as such a tribune and develop class political consciousness
among the proletariat. Rather than relying on spontaneous struggles at
the plant gate over economic issues to generate such consciousness,
the Social Democracy would import these political lessons into the
class struggle from the *outside*.

The clearest statement Lenin makes on behalf of this approach is the
following: "Why is there not a single political event in Germany that
does not add to the authority and prestige of the Social-Democracy?
Because Social-Democracy is always found to be in advance of all the
others in furnishing the most revolutionary appraisal of every given
event and in championing every protest against tyranny...=85It intervenes
in every sphere and in every question of social and political life; in the
matter of Wilhelm's refusal to endorse a bourgeois progressive as city
mayor (our Economists have not managed to educate the Germans to
the understanding that such an act is, in fact, a compromise with
liberalism!); in the matter of the law against 'obscene' publications and
pictures; in the matter of governmental influence on the election of
professors, etc., etc."

So the vanguard in Lenin's view would embrace bourgeois
progressives in a fight with a royalist, the rights of artists to publish
smut and the power of the academy to choose its own academicians.
What this sounds like to me is a prescription for a militant Socialist
Party that fights on all fronts in the most uncompromising and non-
sectarian manner. I agree with this concept of a vanguard.

Now some enterprising young graduate student could do the left a real
service by tracing the manner in which this concept of a vanguard
evolved into what we see today on the left. My guess it would require
an ability to read Russian and a willingness to pour over  documents of
the Comintern. It would also require close attention to the early
writings of people like William Z. Foster and James P. Cannon who
translated Comintern strictures into canonical law. In the process, the
original kernel of the idea was lost.

A vanguard in the world of contemporary Marxism-Leninism is above
all a group that adheres to a fully evolved ideological program that
takes into account historical and international questions. Now small
groups such as Jim Miller's, Adam Rose's, Walter Daum's, Hugh
Rodwell (have I left anybody out?) would not call themselves a
vanguard *right now*. They are instead the "nucleus" of the vanguard.
All they need to do is add recruits. That is what they are on this list
for.

This means that a group of several hundred in a nation of over a
quarter-billion citizens claims that it will lead this nation to socialism
on the basis of some correct ideas it has right now. This is not
Marxism. It is petty-bourgeois idealism.

Each small group has the core set of ideas that separate them from
"opportunists" and "revisionists". In the case of Miller's SWP, it is
adherence to Lenin's theory of the democratic-dictatorship of the
proletariat. They used to adhere to Trotsky's Permanent Revolution
theory, but now the scales have dropped from their eyes. Permanent
Revolution is now seen as a "sectarian" deviation from Lenin's more
noble and profound doctrine.

Adam Rose's SWP clutches to the state-capitalism theory. You can not
be part of the vanguard unless you stick to this philosophy. Skeptics
might ask how proletarian revolutions keep occurring in countries
where there is not a single state-capitalist genius in residence. That's
easy, Adam would say, the proletarian revolutions are just a mirage.

Hugh Rodwell believes fervently in the doctrines of a Fourth
International founded by an Argentinean who went by the name of
Moreno, (Spanish for "skinny" I believe.) This group is Trotskyist to
the core, as far as I can tell. They have the inside track to state power
in Great Britain where Hugh and some several dozen co-thinkers hold
sway. He views Adam Rose and Jim Miller as impostors.

What this ideological squabbling has to do with Lenin's vision of the
Russian Social Democracy is anybody's guess.

My own view of what a vanguard would look like in the United States
is inspired much more by Lenin's original conception. This vanguard,
first of all, would *never* call itself such a thing or even a "nucleus"
of a vanguard until it had won mass influence. How massive? Well,
the Debs Socialist Party and the CPUSA of the 1930s had begun to
muster some of the mass influence that would have qualified them.
Unfortunately, Debs party was subsumed by the CP and the CP itself
never could break free from Stalin's conservatising influence and its
own "vanguardist" distortions.

The type of vanguard that we need in the United States would have
some of the following features:

1)  It would strive for a revolutionary program that was centered on
the tasks of the American class-struggle. Disagreements over the
Spanish Civil War and the class-nature of Grenada under Maurice
Bishop would be secondary and not a cause for a split.

2)  It would fight in all of the movements: labor, women, gays,
students, environmentalism, Blacks, Latinos, etc. It would try to
link these movements together in a common fight against
capitalist oppression. It would also draw the class line in all of
them. In the environmental movement, for example, it would
struggle against the accomodationist path of groups like the Sierra
Club and fight alongside communities of color that are being
assaulted by toxic dumping.

3)  It would fight in the electoral arena. It would support electoral
initiatives by working people and oppressed minorities. The fire
would be directed against Democrat and Republican alike. No
liberal Democrat would ever be endorsed by this type of vanguard.

4)  It would participate in anti-imperialist struggles. It would take up
the cause of Peruvian peasants, South African miners, Cubans
fighting against economic blockade, etc.

5)  It would develop fraternal relations with like-minded parties
around the world. The relations would be built on the basis of
mutual respect and camaraderie.

This is the type of vanguard I advocate.



Louis Proyect



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