Vanguard party

A vanguard party is a political party at the fore of a mass-action political movement and of a revolution. In the praxis of political science, the concept of the vanguard party, composed of professional revolutionaries, was first effected by the Bolshevik Party in the Russian Revolution of 1917. Lenin (Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov), the first leader of the Bolsheviks, coined the term vanguard party, and argued that such a party was necessary in order to provide the practical and political leadership that would impel the proletariat (urban workers and peasants) to achieve a communist revolution. Hence, as a political-science concept and term, vanguard party most often is associated with Leninism; however, similar concepts (under different names) also are present in other revolutionary ideologies.

Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx presented the concept of the vanguard party as solely qualified to politically lead the proletariat in revolution; in Chapter II: “Proletarians and Communists” of The Communist Manifesto (1848), they said:

The Communists, therefore, are, on the one hand, practically the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the lines of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement. The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all other proletarian parties: Formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.

The purpose of the vanguard party is to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat; supported by the working class, the vanguard party would lead the revolution to depose the incumbent Tsarist government, and transfer government power to the working class. The change of ruling class, from the bourgeoisie to the proletariat, makes possible the full development of socialism. In the book What is to be Done? (1902), Lenin said that a revolutionary vanguard party, mostly recruited from the working class, should lead the political campaign, because it was the only way that the proletariat could successfully achieve a revolution; unlike the economist campaign of trade-union-struggle advocated by other socialist political parties; and later by the anarcho-syndicalists. Like Karl Marx, Lenin distinguished between the two aspects of a revolution, the economic campaign (labour strikes for increased wages and work concessions), which featured diffused plural leadership; and the political campaign (socialist changes to society), which featured the decisive revolutionary leadership of the Bolshevik vanguard party.

History

Marxist uses

Lenin

As he surveyed the European milieu in the late 1890s, Lenin found several theoretic problems with the Marxism of the late 19th century. Contrary to what Karl Marx had predicted, capitalism had become stronger in the last third of the 19th century. In Western Europe, the working class had become poorer, rather than becoming politically progressive, thinking people; hence, the workers and their trade unions, although they had continued to militate for better wages and working conditions, had failed to develop a revolutionary class consciousness, as predicted by Marx. To explain that undeveloped political awareness, Lenin said that the division of labour in a bourgeois capitalist society prevented the emergence of a proletarian class consciousness, because of the the ten-to-twelve-hour workdays that the workers laboured in factories, and so had no time to learn and apply the philosophic complexities of Marxist theory. Finally, in trying to effect a revolution in Tsarist Imperial Russia (1721–1917), Lenin faced the problem of an autocratic régime that had outlawed almost all political activity. Although the Tsarist autocracy could not enforce a ban on political ideas, until 1905 — when Tsar Nicholas II (1894–1917) agreed to the formation of a national duma — the Okhrana, the Tsarist secret police, suppressed every political group seeking social and political changes, including those with a democratic program.

To counter such political conditions, Lenin said that a professional revolutionary organisation was necessary to organise and lead the most class-conscious workers into a politically coherent movement. About the Russian class struggle, in the book What Is to Be Done? (1902), against the “economist” trend of the socialist parties (who proposed that the working class would develop a revolutionary consciousness from demanding solely economic improvements), Lenin said that the “history of all countries bears out the fact that, through their own powers alone, the working class can develop only a trade-union consciousness”; and that under reformist, trade-union leadership, the working class could only engage spontaneous local rebellions to improve their political position within the capitalist system, and that revolutionary consciousness developed unevenly. Nonetheless, optimistic about the working class’s ability to develop a revolutionary class consciousness, Lenin said that the missing element for escalating the class struggle to revolution was a political organisation that could relate to the radicalism of political vanguard of the working class, who then would attract many workers from the middling policies of the reformist leaders of the trade unions.

It is often believed that Lenin thought the bearers of class consciousness were the common intellectuals who made it their vocation to conspire against the capitalist system, educate the public in revolutionary theory, and prepare the workers for the proletarian revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat that would follow. Yet, unlike his Menshevik rivals, Lenin distinguished himself by his hostility towards the bourgeois intelligentsia, and was routinely criticised for placing too much trust in the intellectual ability of the working class to transform society through its own political struggles.

Like other political organisations that sought to change Imperial Russian society, Lenin's Bolshevik Party resorted to conspiracy, and operated in the political underground. Against Tsarist repression, Lenin argued for the necessity of confining membership to people who were professionally trained to combat the Okhrana secret police; however, at its core, the Bolshevik Party was an exceptionally flexible organisation who pragmatically adapted policy to changing political situations. After the Revolution of 1905, Lenin proposed that the Bolshevik Party "open its gates" to the militant working class, who were rapidly becoming political radicals, in order for the Party to become a mass-action political party with genuine roots in the working class movement.

In the 20th century, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) continued regarding itself as the institutionalization of Marxist-Leninist political consciousness in the Soviet Union; therein lay the justification for its political control of Soviet society. Article 6 of the 1977 Soviet Constitution refers to the CPSU as the "leading and guiding force of Soviet society, and the nucleus of its political system, of all state organizations and public organizations". The CPSU, precisely because it was the bearer of Marxist-Leninist ideology, determined the general development of society, directed domestic and foreign policy, and "imparts a planned, systematic, and theoretically substantiated character" to the struggle of the Soviet people for the victory of Communism.

Nonetheless, the political role of the vanguard party, as outlined by Lenin, is disputed among the contemporary communist movement. Lenin's contemporary in the Bolshevik Party, Leon Trotsky, further developed and established the vanguard party with the creation of the Fourth International. Trotsky, who believed in worldwide permanent revolution, proposed that a vanguard party must be an international political party who organised the most militant activists of the working classes of the countries of the world. Although the Fourth International faded from the public upon the death Trotsky, there continued some efforts to revive the concept of an international vanguard party.

Non-Marxist uses

Although Lenin developed the term and it is used to describe Marxist-Leninist parties, the term is also sometimes used for some Islamist parties. Islamist writers Abul Ala Maududi and Sayyid Qutb both urged the formation of an Islamic vanguard to restore Islamic society. Qutb talked of an Islamist vanguard in his book Ma'alim fi al-Tariq (Milestones) and Maududi formed an Islamist party Jamaat-e-Islami whose goal was to establish an ideological state, administered for God solely by Muslims "whose whole life is devoted to the observance and enforcement" of Islamic law. The party members formed an elite group (called arkan) with "affiliates" (mutaffiq) and then "sympathisers" (hamdard) beneath them. Another elite or vanguard Islamist party is Hizb ut-Tahrir, which seeks to take power for a pan-Islamic state not by a vanguard-led armed struggle, but by a Coup d'état. The party seeks to obtains "support from army generals, leaders, and other influential figures or bodies to facilitate the change of the government."

According to Roger Eatwell, some fascist parties have also operated in ways similar to the concept of a vanguard party.

See also

• Vanguardism
• Democratic centralism
• Antonio Gramsci
• Blanquism

References

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"A Country Study: Soviet Union (Former)". Retrieved 2006-12-04.