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Vanguard Parties
by Ernest Mandel
*The article above 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 Mid-American
Review of Sociology, 1983, Vol. VIII, No. 2:3-21.
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).
The socialist revolution is going to be the first revolution in the
history of mankind which tries to reshape society in a conscious way
according to a plan. It does not go into all the details, of course,
which depend on concrete conditions and on the changing material
infrastructure of society. But at the very least it is based on a plan of
what a classless society has to be and how you can get there. It is also
the first revolution in history which needs a high level of activity and
of self-organization of the whole toiling population, that is to say, the
overwhelming majority of men and women in society. It is from these two
key features of a socialist revolution that you can immediately draw a
series of conclusions.
You cannot have a spontaneous socialist revolution. You cannot make a
socialist revolution without really trying. And you cannot have a
socialist revolution commandeered from the top, ordered around by some
omniscient leader or group of leaders. You need both ingredients in a
socialist revolution: the highest level of consciousness possible, and
the highest level of self-organization and self-activity by the broadest
possible segment of the population. All the problems of the relations
between a vanguard organization and the masses stem from that basic
contradiction.
If we look at the real world, the real development in bourgeois society
for the last hundred and fifty years (more or less since the origin of
the modern labor movement), we again see this striking contradiction. It
helps us overcome one of the main disputes about the working class and
the labor movement which has been going on a long time, and which is
right in the middle of the political debate today. Is the working class
an instrument for revolutionary social change? Is the working class
integrated in bourgeois society? What has been its real role for the last
hundred and fifty years? What does the historical balance sheet tell us
about these questions?
The only conclusion you can draw from the real historical movement is
that by and large, in day-to-day life, what Lenin called trade union
consciousness dominates the working class. I would call it elementary
class-consciousness of the working class. This does not lead to
permanent, day-to-day revolt against capitalism, but it is absolutely
essential and necessary, as Marx pointed out many times, for an
anticapitalist workers' revolt to occur sometime. If the workers do not
fight for higher wages, if they do not fight for a shorter workday, if
they do not fight for, let us say it in a provocative way, day-to-day
economic issues, they become demoralized slaves. With demoralized slaves
you are never going to make a socialist revolution, or even to acquire
elementary class solidarity. So they have to fight for their immediate
demands. But the fight for these immediate demands does not lead them
automatically and spontaneously to challenge the existence of bourgeois
society.
The other side of the story is also true. Periodically, the workers do
revolt against bourgeois society, not by a hundred, five hundred, or a
thousand, but by the millions. After all, the history of the 20th century
is the history of social revolutions. Anybody who denies that should read
the history books again, not to mention the newspapers. There has been
hardly a single year since 1917, and in a certain sense since 1905,
without a revolution somewhere in the world in which the workers
participated in a rather important way. It is true that they did not
always constitute the majority of the revolution's combatants. But that
is going to change because the working class has become a majority in
society in practically all the important countries of the world. So
periodically, the workers do revolt against bourgeois society, as the
statistics of the last twenty years in Europe
attest. There was a real workers' challenge against the basic setup of
capitalism in 1960-61 in Belgium, in
1968 in France, in
1968-69 in Italy, in
1974-75 in Portugal,
partially in Spain in
1975-76. And what was going on in Poland in
1980-81, if not a challenge against capitalism, was certainly a challenge
for socialism. So this is a completely different picture from a
permanently passive, integrated, bourgeoisified working class. More than
45 million workers have actively participated in these struggles.
The conclusion you can draw from these characteristics is that you have
an uneven development of class activity and an uneven
development of class-consciousness in the working class. Workers do
not strike every day, they cannot do that the way they function in the
capitalist economy. The way they have to live by selling their labor
power makes that impossible. They would starve if they would strike every
day. And they certainly cannot make revolution every day, every year, or
even every five years, for economic, social, cultural, political, and
psychological reasons which I have no time to spell out. So you have a
cyclical development of class militancy and class activity which is
partially determined by an inner logic. If you fight for many years and the
fight ends with grave defeats, then you will not start fighting at the
same level or a higher level the year after the defeat. It will take you
some time to recuperate; it might be ten years, fifteen years, or even
twenty years. The opposite is also true. If you fight during some years
with successes, even medium successes, you get momentum to fight on a
broader and broader scale and on a higher and higher level. So we have
this cyclical movement in the history of the international class struggle
which we could describe in detail. Very closely combined with that uneven
development of class militancy is an uneven development of
class-consciousness, not necessarily a mechanical function of the first.
You can have high levels of class activity with a relatively low level of
class-consciousness. And the opposite is also true. You can have
relatively high levels of class-consciousness with a lower level of class
militancy than one would have expected. 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. But, unfortunately,
they are not and cannot be there under capitalism. So you need a group of
people who embody a permanently high level of militancy and activity, and
a permanently high level of class-consciousness. After each wave of
rising class struggle and rising class-consciousness, when a turning
point arrives and the actual activity of the masses declines,
consciousness falls to a lower level and activity falls to nearly zero.
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. It serves as the
permanent memory of the class and of the labor movement, memory which is
codified, one way or another, in a program in which you can educate the
new generation which then does not need to start from scratch in its
concrete way of intervention in the class struggle. This first function,
then, is to assure a continuity of lessons drawn from the accumulated
historical experience, because that is what a socialist program is: the
sum total of the lessons drawn from all the experiences of real class
struggles, real revolutions, and real counterrevolutions in the last hundred
and fifty years. Very few people can cope with that and nobody,
absolutely nobody, can cope with that alone. You need an
organization, and given the world nature of this experience, you need
both a national and a worldwide organization to be able to constantly
assess that sum total of historical and current experience of class
struggle and revolution, to enrich it by new lessons coming out of new
revolutions, to make it more and more adequate to the needs of class
struggles and revolutions going on right at this time.
There is a second dimension. It is the organizational dimension, which is
really not solely organizational, but is, in reality, also political.
Here we come to that famous question of centralization. Revolutionary
Marxists stand for democratic centralism. But the word centralization is
not to be taken in the first place as an organizational dimension, and in
no way whatsoever is it essentially an administrative one. It is
political. What does "centralization" mean? It means centralization
of experience, centralization of knowledge, centralization of conclusions
drawn out of actual militancy. Here, again, we see a tremendous danger
for the working class and the labor movement if there is no such
centralization of experience: this is the danger of sectorialization and
fragmentation, which does not enable anyone to draw adequate conclusions
for action.
If we have women militants engaged only in feminist struggles, if we have
youth militants engaged only in youth struggles, if we have students
engaged only in student struggles, if we have immigrant workers engaged
only in immigrant worker struggles, if we have oppressed nationalities
engaged only in oppressed nationalities' struggles, if we have unemployed
engaged only in unemployed struggles, if we have trade unionists engaged
only in trade union struggles, if we have unorganized, un-unionized,
essentially unskilled workers engaged only in their own struggles, if we
have political militants engaged only in election campaigns or in the
publication of newspapers, and if each of them operates separately from
each other, they operate only on the basis of limited and fragmented
experience and they cannot (for basic, I would say, epistemological
reasons) draw correct conclusions from their own experience. They have
fragmented struggles, fragmented experience, fragmented partial
consciousness. They only see part of the whole picture. The conclusions
which they come up with will be, you can say a priori, at least
partially wrong. They cannot have an overall, total correct view of
reality because they see only a fragmented part of that reality.
The same thing is true, of course, from an international point of view.
If you concentrate only on Eastern Europe, you have a partial view of
world reality. If you concentrate only on the underdeveloped,
semi-colonial, dependent countries, you have a partial view of world
reality, If you concentrate only on the imperialist countries, you have a
partial view of world reality. Only if you bring together the experience
of the concrete struggles conducted by the real masses in the three
sectors of the world (which are also called the three sectors of world
revolution), then you have an overall, correct view of world reality.
That is the big advantage of the Fourth International, because it is an
international organization, which has comrades actually fighting, not
only theoretically analyzing, in all these three sectors of the world,
and it is concretely related to the struggles in all these three sectors
of world revolution. This superiority is not due to the great
intelligence of leaders of the Fourth International. It is just due to
that elementary centralization of concrete experience of struggles on a
global scale, added to a correct historical program.
That is what centralization is all about. It means that, I would not say
the best because that is exaggerated, but at least good fighters
in the unions, good fighters among unskilled workers and the
unemployed, good fighters among oppressed nationalities, good fighters
among women, youth, and students, good anti-imperialist fighters, good
fighters in all these sectors of actually militant, oppressed, and
exploited people in each state and on a world scale, come together to
centralize their experiences in order to compare the lessons of their
struggles on a statewide and worldwide scale, draw relevant conclusions,
examine and reexamine in a critical way at each stage their program and
their political line, in the light of the lessons to be drawn out of all
these experiences, in order to have an overall view of society, of the
world, of its dynamics, and of our common socialist goal and how to get
there. That is what we call, in our jargon, a correct program, a correct
strategy, and correct tactics. Given the uneven development of class
consciousness, and the uneven and discontinuous level of class activity,
this cannot be done by the masses in their totality. To believe otherwise
is just a utopian and spontaneist daydream.
This can only be done by those people who claim for themselves the
terribly "elitist" merit of being active in a more permanent
way, in a more continuous way, than others. That is the only quality they
claim for themselves, but it is a quality which is proven in life. And
all those who do not have that quality also prove it in practice by
ceasing political activity. All those who do have that quality, however,
continue to fight even when the masses periodically stop fighting, do not
stop developing class consciousness when the masses do (anybody who challenges
this right challenges an elementary democratic and human right), continue
to elaborate politics and theory, and constantly attempt to intervene in
society in a permanent and continuous way. Out of that "merit,"
however modest and limited it is, grow a series of concrete and practical
qualities which then constitute the basis for the justification of a
vanguard organization.
As I said before, there is a real contradiction in the relationship
between a vanguard organization and the broader masses. There is a real
dialectical tension, if we can call it that, and we have to address
ourselves to that tension. First of all, I used the words "vanguard
organizations"; I did not use the words "vanguard
parties." This is a conceptual difference I introduce on purpose. I
do not believe in self-proclaimed parties. I do not believe in fifty
people or a hundred people standing in Market Square beating their
breasts and saying, "We are the vanguard party." Perhaps they
are in their own consciousness, but if the rest of society does not give
a damn about them, they will be shouting in that marketplace for a long
time without this having any result in practical life, or worse, they
will try to impose their convictions on an unreceptive mass through
violence. 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.
Here we have to bring in another concept. I said before that the class is
not permanently active and permanently on a high level of
class-consciousness. Now I have to introduce a distinction. The mass of
the class is not, but the class is not homogeneous, not only because
there are individuals who are members of different political groupings,
at different levels of political awareness, under different influences of
bourgeois ideology, but also because it has a differentiation going on
within its own massive framework. There is a process of social and of
political differentiation going on in the real working class all the
time. There is a mass-vanguard distillation going on in the working class
during certain periods. Lenin wrote a lot about it; Trotsky wrote a lot
about it; Rosa Luxemburg, surprised as some of you may be, wrote a lot about
it. People who have the ambition of being active in building
revolutionary organizations, as I am, can give you the names, addresses,
and telephone numbers of these vanguard workers in their own countries.
It is not a mysterious question. It is a practical problem. Who are these
vanguard workers in Belgium, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, West
Germany? They are those who are leading real strikes, who are organizing
trade union militant oppositions, who are preparing mass demonstrations
and mass struggles, who are differentiating themselves from the
traditional bureaucratic apparatus.
It is both a social differentiation and a political differentiation,
although one can discuss the exact weight of each element, which is not
identical in each situation. But the layers as such are very real. The
dimension of the layers are different in different periods. The
"Revolutionary Obleute," as they are called in Germany, of the
trade unions and the big factories of Berlin who were leading the
November 1918 revolution and building the Independent Socialist Party,
who afterwards moved to the Communist Party when the left wing of the
Independent Socialist Party fused with the Communist Party at the
Congress of Halle, were a very concrete layer in German society, not only
in Berlin, but also in many of the industrial areas of the country.
Everybody knew them, they were not an unknown quantity. They were tens
and tens of thousands of people. If you look at the vanguard of the
German working class fifteen years later, say around 1930-33, this layer
had strongly decreased in number, but it was still there.
If you study Russia, you see the same thing. In 1905, everybody knew
these people. They were those who were leading the strikes, the real mass
struggles at rank-and-file levels against the czar. They were, in their
majority, outside of Social Democracy before 1905, tended to come to
Social Democracy during the 1905-06 revolution, and again partially left
the party (Mensheviks as well as Bolsheviks) in the period of reaction.
They reentered politics and grew on a massive scale in 1912 and
especially with the beginning of the February 1917 revolution, and then,
the majority of them were absorbed by the Bolshevik Party after April
1917, after the Bolshevik Party took a straight and clear line for
"All Power to the Soviets," that is to say, for the
dictatorship of the proletariat.
One can discuss whether the Bolsheviks became a vanguard party in
the true sense of the word in 1912-13, or only in 1917. I would tend to
say that they became that in 1912-13; otherwise it would have been very
difficult for them to grow as quickly as they did in the spring of 1917.
But that is just a point of historical analysis. 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.
This becomes a third dimension: the self-organization of the class.
Self-organization of the class goes through different forms at different
stages of the class struggle. The most elementary self-organizations are
trade unions. Then you have mass political parties at different levels of
consciousness, bourgeois labor parties, independent labor parties, and
revolutionary workers' parties. Only under conditions of revolutionary
crises do you have the highest level of self-organization; this is the
Soviet type of organization, which is to say, workers' councils, people's
councils, call them what you want, popular committees.
Why do I say highest? Because they engulf the great majority of the
workers which generally, under non-revolutionary conditions, you find
neither in trade unions nor in political parties. Direct
self-organization through a workers' council type of self-organization of
the class is the highest form, not because I have a theoretical or
ideological or moral or sentimental predilection for them—which of course
I have—but for the simple, objective reason: they organize a much higher
percentage of the workers and the exploited masses. Under normal
conditions, unrestricted by bureaucratic apparatuses and leadership, they
should organize up to 90 to 95 percent of the exploited masses, which you
never find in trade unions or political parties. So they are the highest
forms of self-organization.
Furthermore, there is absolutely no contradiction between the separate
organizations of revolutionary vanguard militants and their participation
in the mass organizations of the working class. On the contrary, history
generally confirms that the more conscious and the better you are
organized in vanguard organizations, the more constructively you operate
in the mass organizations of the working class. This means that you have
to avoid the theoretical underpinnings of sectarianism, that you have to
respect workers' democracy, socialist democracy, soviet or workers'
councils' or popular councils' democracy, in a very thorough way. But
this being said, there is no contradiction whatsoever. Again, the only
right you claim for yourself inside the unions, inside the mass parties,
inside the soviets, is to be a more devoted, a more energetic, a more
dedicated, a more courageous, a more lucid, a more self-denying builder
of the unions, builder of the mass parties, builder of the
soviets, defender of the general interests of the working class, without
attributing to yourself any special privilege towards your fellow
workers, except the right to try to convince them.
Our stance for working class democracy, for socialist democracy, for
socialist pluralism, is based on a programmatic understanding that there
are no contradictions between the interests of communists, vanguard
militants, the working class, and the labor movement in its totality.
There are no conditions in which we subordinate the interests of the
class as a whole to the interests of any sect, any chapel, any separate
organization. It is out of a theoretical understanding of that truth that
we can fight enthusiastically, that we can fight with devotion and with
deep understanding for the workers' united front, for a policy of
unification of all different tendencies of the labor movement and the
working class for common goals, because we believe that the victory of
socialism is impossible without the victory of the fight for these common
goals.
There is also a basic theoretical underpinning of this stance. We do not
believe that Marxism is a full, final doctrine, dogma, or Weltanschauung.
We do not believe that the Marxist program, which embodies the continuity
of the experience of the actual class struggle and real revolutions of
the last one hundred and fifty years, is a definitely closed book. If you
would believe that, then the best revolutionary Marxist would be a parrot
who would just read by memory, or expect the answer having fed all the
lessons into a computer. For us, Marxism is always open because there are
always new experiences, there are always new facts, including facts about
the past, which have to be incorporated in the corpus of
scientific socialism. Marxism is always open, always critical, always
self-critical.
It is not by accident that when Marx was called to answer the question in
the drawing room game "What is your main life dictum?"
he gave as the answer, "De omnibus est dubitandum" ("You
have to doubt everything"). This is really the opposite attitude of
the one which is so often stupidly and foolishly attributed to Marx, that
he was building a new religion without God. The spirit to doubt everything
and to put into question everything that you yourself have said is the
very opposite of religion and of dogma. Marxists believe that there are
no eternal truths, and no people who know everything. The second stanza
of our common anthem, The Internationale, starts with the
wonderful words, in French:
Il n'y a pas de sauveur suprème
Ni Dieu, ni César, ni tribun,
Producteur sauvons — nous nous mêmes
Decrétons le salut commun.
In German it is even clearer:
Es rettet uns Kein hoh'ires Wesen,
Kein Gott, Kein Kaiser, Kein Tribun
Uns aus dem Elend zu erlosen,
Konnen wir nur selber tun.
Only the whole mass of the producers can emancipate themselves. There is
no God, no Caesar, no unfailing Central Committee, no unfailing Chairman,
no unfailing General Secretary or First Secretary who can substitute for
the collective efforts of the class. That is why we try simultaneously to
build vanguard organizations and mass organizations.
You cannot trick the working class or "lead" the working class
to do something which it does not want to do. You have to convince the
working class. You have to help the working class understand collectively
and massively the need for a socialist transformation of society, for the
socialist revolution. That is the dialectical relationship between the vanguard
party and the mass self-organization of the working class. And that is
why, for us, socialist pluralism, the debate, even when it takes an
unhealthy and unhappy form of factionalism and bickering which gets on
the nerves of all serious militants (I completely sympathize with them,
because it is largely a waste of time), is an unavoidable price to be
paid for keeping up that self-critical process. If nobody is, in advance,
in possession of the whole truth and nothing but the truth, if each
situation has always to be reexamined in a critical way against new
experiences of working class struggle and of real revolutions, then of
course you need criticism, you need the confrontation of
different proposed solutions, you need variants. It is not a
luxury just in order to be truthful to an abstract formula of workers'
democracy. NO! It is an absolutely essential precondition for making a
victorious revolution which will lead to a classless society.
Revolution is not a goal in itself. Revolution is an instrument, like a
party is an instrument. The goal is building a socialist classless
society. Everything we do, even today, even with shorter term
perspectives like leading the masses in their day-to-day struggles, can
never be done in such a way that it conflicts basically with the longer
term goal which is the goal of self-emancipation of the working class,
and self-emancipation of all the exploited, by building a classless
society without exploitation, without oppression, without violence of men
and women against each other. Socialist democracy is not a luxury but an
absolute, essential necessity for overthrowing capitalism and building
socialism. Let me give two examples.
We understand today the functional aspect of socialist democracy in
post-capitalist society (the societies of Eastern Europe, the Soviet
Union, China, Vietnam, and Cuba). Without socialist pluralistic democracy
you cannot find correct solutions for the basic problems of socialist
planning. No party can substitute for the mass of the people to determine
what the mass of the people want as priorities in the form of
consumption, the division between the consumption fund and the investment
fund, between individual and collective consumption, between the
productive and unproductive consumption fund, between the productive and
unproductive investment fund, and so forth. Nobody can do that. Again, to
believe otherwise is a utopian daydream.
And if the mass of the people do not accept your choice of priorities, no
power on earth, even the biggest terror of Stalin, can force them to do
the one key thing that you need to build socialism: have a constructive,
creative, and convinced participation in the production process. There is
one form of opposition that the bureaucracy has not succeeded in crushing.
It is becoming bigger and bigger: the opposition which expresses itself
by not caring about what is going on in production. You know the famous
joke they tell in Eastern Germany: The journalist comes to a factory and
asks the director: "Comrade manager, how many workers are working in
your factory?" He answers, "Oh, at least half of them."
This is reality in all the bureaucratized so-called socialist countries.
No terror can overcome that. Only socialist democracy can overcome that,
only pluralism, only the possibility of the mass of the producers and the
consumers to choose between different, variants of the plan which
conforms the most to their interests as they understand them.
Socialist democracy is not, a luxury and its need is not limited to the
most advanced industrial countries. It is true of China; it is true for
Vietnam. It is the only way to rapidly correct the disastrous effects of
grave mistakes of policy. Without pluralism, without a broad public
debate, without a legal opposition, it might take 15 years, it might take
25 years, it might, take 30 years before you correct those mistakes. We
have seen the historical record and it shows the terrible price the
working class has to pay if you take such a long time before you correct
your mistakes.
Mistakes in themselves are unavoidable. As Comrade Lenin said, the
real key for a revolutionary is not that he avoids making mistakes
(nobody avoids making mistakes) but how he goes about correcting them.
Without internal party democracy, without the right to demonstrate,
without the non-banning of factions or parties, without free public
debate, you have great obstacles in correcting mistakes and you will pay
a heavy price for this. So we are absolutely in favor of the right, to
different tendencies, full internal democracy, and the non-banning of
factions or parties.
I do not say the right to factions, because that is a false formulation.
Factions are a sign of illness in a party. In a healthy party you have no
factions; a healthy party from the point of view of both the political
line and the internal party regime. But the right not to be thrown out of
the party, if you create a faction, is a lesser evil than being thrown
out and stifling the internal life of a party through excessive
forbidding of internal debate.
It is not an easy question, especially in a proletarian party. The more
revolutionary vanguard organizations are rooted in the working class, the
less is their number of students and other non-proletarian members (I do
not say that it is bad to have students or intellectuals; you need them,
but they should not be the majority in a revolutionary organization). 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 fulfill the
historical role which we want to fulfill: to help the masses, the
exploited and the oppressed of the world, build a classless society, a
world socialist federation.
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