The vanguard is just the formalized and democratized segment of the most trained professional revolutionaries in the working classes. It isn’t distinct from the working class, that’s like saying electricians are different from the working class. The vanguard is formalized and democratized so as to be accountable and transparent, and doesn’t “rule over” the working classes but is the representative body chosen by the working classes. The vanguard doesn’t sieze the means of production, the working class does, led by the vanguard they have chosen.
The working class is a spear. The vanguard is the spearhead, and the rest of the working class forms the actual mass that drives the spearhead through the capitalist machine. A spear with no spearhead isn’t very effective, a spearhead without a base even less so. Together, though, they form an effective revolutionary force that can kill the most violent fascist machines.
Like white male landowners? They represent our interests!
Not sure what you’re getting at.
There’s a weird misunderstanding of what a “vanguard” is, in both left anti-communist and communist circles.
A vanguard is not a self-defined group that rules over the proles and directs them towards a revolution and governs once it’s won.
Vanguards are not things that exist in the present. Vanguard is just a term to help understand a revolution after it happens.
When a revolution happens, the most politically advanced (in class consciousness and left theory) individuals and groups that participate will steer the people towards socialism. They will lead, by example, on who to fight, how and why.
During the revolution, they aren’t called anything and specially not by themselves.
But after the revolution, when analyzing it, those people are then called the vanguard of the revolution.
Any communist that says they want to “form and participate in a vanguard party” has no understanding of revolutions and left theory.
Any left anti-communist that derides vanguards for being authoritarian and “replicating state oppression” also have no understanding of revolutions or left theory.
Honestly we would all be better off just not using the term vanguard at all anymore.
Hm, so if you don’t want to use the term vanguard anymore, how are you going to talk about the seizing of power by a small authoritarian group during a revolution? And what would be your solution to prevent this from happening?
So what you’re describing is a concept called Blanquism, which predates the concept of a vanguard party.
That doesn’t happen though. What we saw were rightwing counterrevolutionaries taking over the USSR, China etc.
But historically it’s a great mischaracterization of all socialist revolutions to say they were “overtaken by authoritarians”.
All revolutions are “authoritarian”.
This assumes that a vanguard is a separate class, when what it really is, is an advanced segment of the working class. That said, I wanna inject some good faith complexity here.
A Maoist critique of a a vanguard would assert that, by being the most advanced segment of the working class, a petty bourgeois element can exist within a party.
In the maoist view, since class struggle persists under socialism, that petty bourgeois element can, wittingly or otherwise, lead the socialist state back to capitalism. And as such, this needs to be struggled against.
The solution to this isn’t to discard the concept of a vanguard, after all most socialist revolutions, which have seized power, have featured them.
Rather, Maoism has the concept of The Mass Line, wherein the party seeks to intimately involve itself with the masses. And the Cultural Revolution, where the class conscious masses are unleashed on the party itself, to keep it in check. Hence the Cultural Revolution slogans like, “its right to rebel” and “Bombard the headquarters”
I’m not a Maoist (I find the maoist position on AES to be lacking), but it’s a tradition I have respect for. There’s this big emphasis on the dialectic between top-down and bottom-up power that’s really worth exploring, I think. I once heard it jokingly called “Anarcho-stalinism” and I hope you can see why lol
as long as they gwt seized
If the Vanguard seize the means of production, then the Working class still need to seize the means of production or we’re still at square one.
i think this would be the proper way. ideally the vanguard would slowly transition power to the Working class willingly. i think the working class in its entirety is not conscious enough to organize a revolution.
oh look, another communist vs anarchist meme… yep, they should fight each other, not the capitalists….
and of course i need to mention that the USSR was only communist in name and are nearly the worst possible example of communism….
Elmer Fud strikes again
