Vanguard party

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A vanguard party is a political party or grassroot organization at the forefront of a mass action, movement, or revolution. The idea of a vanguard party was developed by Vladimir Lenin because he believed that a mass uprising of the proletariat, without organization, would be too weak to stand up to counter-revolutionary mobilizations by the acting government and bourgeois.

Writing in What is to be Done?, the political pamphlet first published in 1902, Vladimir Lenin explored the role of the "revolutionary vanguard" party. The pamphlet explores the way in which class consciousness is generated, and Lenin points out that the proletariat does not spontaneously arrive at revolutionary conclusions; he argues, instead, that

Class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without, that is, only from outside the economic struggle, from outside the sphere of relations between workers and employers. The sphere from which alone it is possible to obtain this knowledge is the sphere of relationships of all classes and strata to the state and the government, the sphere of the interrelations between all classes.^[1]

Lenin argues that the role of the revolutionary vanguard is to nurture the appropriate awareness, and serve as the collective memory of the class - i.e., to help foster not only the class consciousness, but also the political direction, needed to foment proletarian revolution. However, the exact role of the vanguard party as outlined by Lenin is disputed by the modern communist movement.

Leon Trotsky, a contemporary of Lenin, further established the idea of a vanguard party through the creation of the Fourth International. Trotsky, a believer in the worldwide permanent revolution, thought that a vanguard party must be a global coalition from many nations if it was to be successful in its fight against capitalism. While the Fourth International faded from the public eye after Trotsky's death, various efforts have been made to revive it, or some sort of resembling international vanguard party.

[edit] See also

Vanguardism

[edit] References

1. ^ Lenin, V. I. What is to be Done? London: Penguin, 1988. (143-4). Also available at the Marxists Internet Archive: http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/iii.htm