Leninism ~Red The starting point of Lenin’s conception of organization was the class struggle itself. Lenin saw that, as struggles developed, there spontaneously appeared dedicated and committed leaders among those suffering exploitation and oppression. Out of these more politically advanced elements he sought to mold a genuine vanguard that could unify and lead in action the working class, along with other social strata suffering oppression. Lenin opposed building a party of all workers. He saw that such a formation would have a rather confused political orientation. Instead, he argued for building a party based on the more advanced leaders and activists generated by the ongoing struggles. By 1905, Lenin characterized the class struggle in Russia as the world’s most advanced revolutionary mass movement ever. He set as his task the consolidation of a revolutionary vanguard, unified around a class-struggle orientation. Lenin functioned within the framework of the mass movement unfolding in Europe at that time, the Second International and its affiliated socialist parties. To Lenin, both the party’s program and the organisation of the revolutionary vanguard were directly tied to involvement in the mass movement. Lenin also emphasized that both programmatic and organizational norms evolve with circumstances in the class struggle. Those who separate Lenin’s conception of a vanguard from its roots in mass work turn Leninism into sect building based on abstract ideology. No “vanguard” in the United States is currently leading any mass movement. In most cases, our “vanguards” don’t even participate in them. Yet they like to insist that they have “the” program and a disciplined cadre that, taken together, qualify them for recognition as “the” Leninist vanguard or, at least, the “embryo of the vanguard”.
Posted on: Sun, 27 Jul 2014 14:27:20 +0000
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