Notes from Vanguard Parties by Mandel

Notes from Vanguard Parties by Mandel
http://www.marxists.org/archive/mandel/index.htm

http://www.marxists.org/archive/mandel/1983/03/vanguard.htm

http://help-matrix.blogspot.com/2006/01/vanguard-parties-ernest-mandel-march.html

To approach the problem of parties, party-building, and the necessity of the revolutionary vanguard party, is to point to the peculiarities of a socialist revolution (or if you do not like the word “revolution,” a socialist transformation of bourgeois society)…

I am talking, of course, about class consciousness of broad masses, of millions of people, not class consciousness of small vanguard layers…Coming out of all these basic conceptual distinctions we can conclude the necessity of a vanguard formation nearly immediately. You need a vanguard organization in order to overcome the dangerous potential brought about by the uneven development of class militancy and class consciousness. If the workers would be at the highest point of militancy and consciousness all the time, you would not need a vanguard organization…

The first function of a revolutionary vanguard organization is to maintain the continuity of the theoretical, programmatical, political, and organizational acquisitions of the previous phase of high class activity, and of high working class consciousness…

A vanguard organization is something which is permanent. A vanguard party has to be constructed, has to be built through a long process. One of the characteristics of its existence is that it becomes recognized as such by at least a substantial minority of the class itself. You cannot have a vanguard party which has no following in the class…
A vanguard organization becomes a vanguard party when a significant minority of the real class, of the really existing workers, poor peasants, revolutionary youth, revolutionary women, revolutionary oppressed nationalities, recognizes it as their vanguard party, i.e., follows it in action. Whether that must be ten percent or fifteen percent, that does not matter, but it must be a real sector of the class. If it does not exist, then you have no real party, you have only the nucleus of a future party. What will happen to that nucleus will be shown by history. It remains an open question, not yet solved by history. You need a permanent struggle to transform that vanguard organization into a real revolutionary vanguard party rooted in the class, present in the working class struggle, and accepted by at least a real fraction of the real class as such…

The real notion is that of the fusion in real life between this vanguard layer of the working class, the real leaders of real struggles of workers at factory and neighborhood levels, of woman’s struggles, of youth struggles, of national minority struggles, and the political vanguard organization. When that fusion has taken place, at least in part, you have a real vanguard party, recognized as such by a significant minority of the class. It will then become a majority probably only during the revolutionary crisis itself, on the condition of following a correct political line. If you do not have that fusion, you have only the nucleus of a future vanguard party, you have a vanguard organization, which is a precondition for that fusion at a later stage…

The more workers you have in your organization, the better you are implanted in the working class, the more likely you are to come up with the concrete problems of the class. Within that general framework is to be placed the functional nature of a vanguard organization for the class struggle, for the revolution, and for building socialism. You should never forget that there is a strict dialectical interrelation between the three. Otherwise we get off the track and we do not fulfil the historical role which we want to fulfil: to help the masses, the exploited and the oppressed of the world, build a classless society, a world socialist federation.

Note
1. This article is based on an address made by Ernest Mandel at the Marx Centenary Conference – “Marxism: The Next Two Decades” – held at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, March 12-15, 1983. It was published in Bulletin in Defense of Marxism, No.44 (who reprinted it from the Mid-American Review of Sociology, 1983, Vol.VIII, No.2:3-21).
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