Five Minute Polemic №10: Against False Vanguards!
The Avakianite RCP-USA. The Trotskyite-Dengite PSL and PFP. The Trotskyite-Castroite SWP. The Castroite PLP. The Browderite CPUSA. The Kautskyite MUG. These are a few of the political parties in the US today that claim, or lead their followers to believe, that they are the Leninist democratic vanguard party of the workers in this country- or whatever mutilated distortion of that concept they believe in.
All of them, of course, are frauds and charlatans- though some are frauds that believe their own lies.
It is worth addressing, though, the phenomenon at play: the plague of the false vanguard. These nonsensical organizations, tiny sects claiming to lead a whole class like minnows claiming to be sharks, proliferate in spite of their uselessness. They prey upon the good intentions of immature students of Marxism, drawing them away from sincere effort to build a real Party and into impotent nonsense that is at best neutral and at worst actively antagonistic to the workers in the war of classes.
Of course, they are all devoid of any political legitimacy. Far from democratic centralism, the resolution of the contradiction between central command and democratic justice, their leadership is either leader-cultism and commandist centralism or anarchic and undirected ultrademocracy. Their ideological lines are eclectic and without direction, and tend to manifest various forms of the AES doctrine: picking a revisionist regime (most often China’s or Cuba’s) and clinging to it like a life raft, in the sea of their own dearth of genuine dialectical materialist understanding. Often, these parties seem to go on limping around in the political milieu merely as advertisers for their in-house publishers, which eke out a modicum of surplus value from the “cadres’” labour to grow a sum of capital- i.e., explicitly as petit bourgeois capitalist institutions. Their small size in itself is not necessarily indicative of political illegitimacy, for good organizations can also be, and also are, small, but the fact that they all tend to get smaller and not larger is relevant- if one has the correct line that has been forged in the class struggle, then following one’s line should advance that struggle and grow the movement to wage it; if following one’s line does the opposite, one probably has the wrong line.
Yet these parties manage to limp along by preying upon a particular kind of immature student of Marxism, of a kind I recognize because I once was one- these are the victims of the plague of false vanguards. These well-meaning individuals have read What is to be Done? and some chapters of The State and Revolution by Lenin; perhaps they have read Stalin’s Foundations of Leninism. What they have understood from this study is an early and rudimentary- but not altogether wrong!- understanding of Leninist Democratic Vanguardism: there must be a Party of the working class, it must lead that class to seize state power and in so doing establish socialist political-economy and abolish capitalism, developing toward world communism. Quite true! And, understanding these rudiments of Marxism-Leninism, and eager to be Communists, these well-meaning students eagerly rush to join the first organization that presents itself to them as “the Party” so that they may say to themselves “I am a Communist, a member of the Party! I am leading the working class forward!” But in reality, our poor young comrades have found themselves furloughed into politically impotent and backward sects with no relevance at all to the broadest working class and their struggle.
The cause of this confusion and misguidedness in attempting to apply a genuinely correct theoretical concept in waging the struggle today is insufficient study of Marxism- and further propagation of such study is the cure. The victims of the plague of false vanguards have made cursory study of the source texts of Marxism-Leninism, but not those of its presently existing state as the modern ideology of the proletarian cause, Marxism-Leninism-Maoism; their failure to understand Democratic Vanguardism properly is owed to a lack of study of the lessons of, above all, Mao and Gonzalo, and also of course of all other MLMist communist leaders and thinkers and all communists waging revolution today.
The true revolutionary and scientific ideology of the communist movement, today Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, understands that, exactly as Lenin said, the Party must be intimately of the proletarian class it leads as the organized democratic-centralist leadership of the most advanced segment of that class. To be such, to be the leading head and brain of the mighty tiger of the People bounding forward toward liberation, the Party must have or actively work to create an intimate leading connection to the whole of the proletarian class and all other social strata united with it in fighting to overthrow class society- the tiger cannot run without its head being connected to its limbs!
The key to building a proletarian party of a new type, the democratic vanguard Party, lies today with the further theoretical advancements of Marxism made in the modern synthesis of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, in the lessons of the Chinese and Peruvian revolutions and their great leaders.
The vanguard Party must be built with a thorough application of the theory of Mass Line leadership. The Party must draw its Guiding Thought from the concrete experiences of the masses’ struggle, and must bring its ideological lessons to bear on those experiences in a way that refines their waging and directs them further toward their goals. The leadership of the Party must flow from and to the masses, inciting them to liberate themselves. If the Party does not come from the masses, it is worthless. If the Party does not go to the masses, it is worthless. Every genuine Marxist-Leninist- i.e., Marxist-Leninist-Maoist- vanguard Party or organization or movement working to constitute one, today, operates by the principle of the Mass Line and by the dictum of “from the masses, to the masses.” Only thusly can they take their place as democratic and central leaders of the masses’ struggle. But the revisionist sects, the false vanguards, abhor this principle of genuine revolutionary and scientific Marxism. And the immature students they prey on do not understand it, so they become attracted to these groups- groups whose thought comes from not to the masses but from the idle and impotent fancies of do-nothing “leaders,” and goes not to the masses but to a dead end. Thus, the plague of false vanguards.
In application of the Mass Line doctrine, the Party must also be built up at the head of a United Front, in line with the theory of the Three Weapons, as outlined by Mao and Gonzalo, and demonstrated in China, Peru, and elsewhere. All that have interests contrary to those of the backward big capitalists and can be united with must be brought into the revolutionary movement; many groups must come together in a broad front and the democratic centralist leadership of the Party must forge it together, by application of Mass Line leadership, into the unified body of proletarian and People’s organs of power that will become the Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat, the social and state order of socialism on the road to communism. Thusly is built the revolutionary United Front. This is what the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist Parties of the world, the genuine vanguards of the world proletariat and all oppressed and exploited, are currently doing or working toward doing. But the revisonist sects, the false vanguards, have no capacity to do this. They do not build broad fronts, but narrow ruts. They do not follow the rubric of “unite, don’t split”; they divide along, exacerbate, and make antagonistic unimportant contradictions between themselves and each other instead of uniting together all with common interests to resolve the more important essential contradictions of capitalism-imperialism. Without applying the Mass Line and without building up the United Front, there is no hope for any communist organization to take up the role of a vanguard Party.
Every student of Marxism first setting out to be a communist feels a certain sense that they ought to “join the Party.” And this, again, is not per se wrong- indeed, Gonzalo has affirmed that revolution by the masses is dependent on their communist Parties in every country. But the impulse to “join the Party” does no good if it in fact means over-eagerly joining an impotent sect with no real potential to become the genuine revolutionary Party that builds up behind itself the democratic order of worker rule, that does not practice Mass Line or commit to building up a United Front that presents the embryonic form of the D. of the P. it works to build up around itself, that does not adhere to the modern Marxist-Leninist-Maoist ideology of communism and proletarian liberation. It does no good to join a revisionist sect, a false vanguard totally disconnected from the masses, and not building up connection but rather actively contradicting itself against all other would-be “revolutionary” factions. Such a sect is at best a book club and at worst a cult; it is not the true vanguard Communist Party.
This under-educated over-eagerness is the cause of the plague of false vanguards, which robs so many would-be communists of their potential to be genuinely helpul to the movement. Its antidote is propagation of the thorough study of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, from which these immature students must learn the proper tasks of the Party and the proper means of building it up to achieve them. Through this they may mature, and leave behind these impotent sects in favor of working in many revolutionary groups uniting together to build up a true, Marxist-Leninist-Maoist, Communist Party truly capable of accomplishing its tasks.
Against false vanguards!
Unite under Marxism-Leninism-Maoism!
Build up the movement to reconstitute a genuine Communist Party in the USA, ready to lead its Army and United Front in People’s War for socialism!
