Vanguard or mass party? What did Marx and Engels think?

[redux]

Does anyone have any sources where Marx or Engels talked about the need for a communist party to be made of the majority of the class? Or did they agree that the party should be an organ of the advanced workers who lead the rest of the class in revolution? I've looked through various works to no avail.

The formation of the SPD leads me to think they supported the former but I can't back it up.

[Dimentio]

I believe that their idea was that the party should propagate, while the workers should conduct the revolution.

[LOLseph Stalin]

Marx and Engels believed that the working class should lead themselves into revolution. Vanguardism was the creation of Lenin.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Does anyone have any sources where Marx or Engels talked about the need for a communist party to be made of the majority of the class? Or did they agree that the party should be an organ of the advanced workers who lead the rest of the class in revolution? I've looked through various works to no avail.

The formation of the SPD leads me to think they supported the former but I can't back it up.

The definition of "vanguard party" changed by 1920-1921 to have more minoritarian implications. Until then, that term should be seen as being applicable to even the SPD, since vanguardism was nothing more than the "merger of socialism and the worker movement" (to use Karl Kautsky’s definition which repeats the basic ideas of the Communist Manifesto).

[robbo203]

Does anyone have any sources where Marx or Engels talked about the need for a communist party to be made of the majority of the class? Or did they agree that the party should be an organ of the advanced workers who lead the rest of the class in revolution? I've looked through various works to no avail.

The formation of the SPD leads me to think they supported the former but I can't back it up.

Here is a quote from Engels in his 1895 intorduction to Marx's Class struggles in France

The time of surprise attacks, of revolutions carried through by small conscious minorities at the head of masses lacking consciousness is past. Where it is a question of a complete transformation of the social organisation, the masses themselves must also be in on it, must themselves already have grasped what is at stake, what they are fighting for, body and soul.
The history of the last fifty years has taught us that. But in order that the masses may understand what is to be done, long, persistent work is required, and it is just this work that we are now pursuing, and with a success which drives the enemy to despair.


Regarding the SPD Marx and Engels made it abundantly clear that they would not cooperate with individuals in that organisation who advocated a vanguardist perspective ( as the Leninists subsequently did). They insisted that the emancipation of the working class has to be carried out by the working class itself

[TC]

A vangaurd party is by definition a mass party of workers: workers and their agents who are actively involved in self-aware class struggle are by definition the vanguard.

The majority of any class are never heavily involved in active agitation and there is no need for the majority to participate actively in order to confer mystical legitimacy...nor can Marx and Engel's practice in the specific historical context they found themselves in be meaningfully extrapolated to their views on the range of appropriate practices in any other historical context.

[mikelepore]

Does anyone have any sources where Marx or Engels talked about the need for a communist party to be made of the majority of the class? Or did they agree that the party should be an organ of the advanced workers who lead the rest of the class in revolution?

Does this mean before or after the majority of the working class have become communists? If it means before, why would a lot of conservatives who believe in capitalism want to join a communist party, of, if they did apply for membership for some reason (probably to raid and ruin it), why would the party consider accepting them? If if means after, why does the question make the distinction at all? At that time, the terms "communists" and "the majority of the class" would refer to the same group of people.

[robbo203]

A vangaurd party is by definition a mass party of workers: workers and their agents who are actively involved in self-aware class struggle are by definition the vanguard.

The majority of any class are never heavily involved in active agitation and there is no need for the majority to participate actively in order to confer mystical legitimacy...nor can Marx and Engel's practice in the specific historical context they found themselves in be meaningfully extrapolated to their views on the range of appropriate practices in any other historical context.


This has been discussed before. There are two senses in which you can talk about the "vanguard", one legitimate the other not. Some workers are more communist minded or active (in your sense) than others and can be construed as a vanguard i.e. prefiguring a communist future.

The other notion of the vanguard is a group of professional revolutionaries (to quote Lenin) who set themselves up to lead the working class to communism, irrespective of whether the workers are communist minded or not. In fact, this notion of the vanguard does not attach much importance to whether workers are communist minded or not and even holds that workers exclusively by their own efforts cannot come to a communist consciousness. They therefore need to be lead and the role of the vanguard is to lead them. Of course since the workers are not communist minded this means that you cannot have communism which, in turn, means that you have in fact is a form of capitalism which the vanguard then take upon themselves to administer supposedly in the interests of the workers. In so doing, inevitably, they (the vanuguard) constitute themselves as a new ruling class and try strenuously to obscure this fact by hiding behind such patently obvious fictions that they constitute a "proletarian government"

That is the inevitable outcome of that kind of vanguardism and that is why it has to be vigorously opposed and exposed for the sham that it is

[ZeroNowhere]

Some workers are more communist minded or active (in your sense) than others and can be construed as a vanguard i.e. prefiguring a communist future.
Though technically, for this sense, the metaphor makes even less sense.
I suppose that I should contribute, then...
"Yet our programme is a purely socialist one. Our first plank is the socialisation of all the means and instruments of production. Still, we accept anything which any government may give us, but only as a payment on account, and for which we offer no thanks. We always vote against the Budget, and against any vote for money or men for the Army. In constituencies where we have not had a candidate to vote for on the second ballot, our supporters have been instructed to vote only for those candidates who pledged to vote against the Army Bill, any increased taxation, and any restriction on popular rights."
-Engels.

[Tower of Bebel]

We need a vanguard mass party comparable with the Bolshevik party of 1917 :).

In what relation do the Communists stand to the proletarians as a whole?

The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other working-class parties.

They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole.

They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mould the proletarian movement.

The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only: 1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. 2. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.

The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others [= a vanguard]; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.
The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.

The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer.

They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle , from a historical movement going on under our very eyes. The abolition of existing property relations is not at all a distinctive feature of communism.
The part in green argues against an elitist notion of a vanguard while the part in red represent a truely revolutionary meaning of the vanguard.

[Die Neue Zeit]

^^^ That's the textbook answer, compared to "ultra-mass" revolutionary "parties" implied by the comrade mikelepore above, combining the "ultra-mass" character of more prominent social movements with the organizational cohesion of traditional parties and with socially revolutionary aims. ;)

[redux]

I think vanguard party is made up of workers who are already communists in non-revolutionary periods (minority) which leads the proletariat as a whole in a revolutionary situation toward taking power. But that's not what I'm asking at all. I know there are many opinions on this. Maybe I wasn't clear. I'm asking if someone can quote something or link to something in which either Marx or Engels said whether they thought a communist party should be made up of the majority of the members of the working class. I'm not looking for speculation but their actual words. I very much thank you for help if you can provide.

[Die Neue Zeit]

In presence of an unbridled reaction which violently crushes every effort at emancipation on the part of the working men, and pretends to maintain by brute force the distinction of classes and the political domination of the propertied classes resulting from it;

Considering, that against this collective power of the propertied classes the working class cannot act, as a class, except by constituting itself into a political party, distinct from, and opposed to, all old parties formed by the propertied classes;

That this constitution of the working class into a political party is indispensable in order to ensure the triumph of the social revolution and its ultimate end – the abolition of classes [...]

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/09/politics-resolution.htm

[mikelepore]

Redux, I wonder whether you are asking about whether a minority might make up the dues-paying convention-attending membership of the party, even when the working class majority adopts that party as their own cause and votes it into political office. I don't know of any Marx-Engels quotations to cover that. I could give you quotations about how the workers must "emancipate themselves", how the revolution has to be carried out by the "whole nation", etc., but such quotations don't really answer it what I think you're asking, and readers would still need to interpret the intention.

[BobKKKindle$]

The other notion of the vanguard is a group of professional revolutionaries (to quote Lenin)Lenin never supported a party comprised of professional revolutionaries, at least not in the sense that you understand the concept of a professional revolutionary - a full-time party worker or functionary, devoting all her time to party activity. Lenin always emphasized that the vanguard party should be a party of the working class, involving the most militant and politically advanced section of that class, and not a group of intellectuals who seek to impose their vision of how liberation should take place on the rest of society without the active participation of those who suffer oppression and exploitation under capitalism. In this context, a professional revolutionary is a worker who is a member of the vanguard party and devotes most of her spare time to party work, in addition to agitating within her workplace.

To answer the question, posing the vanguard party in opposition to a mass party is a false dichotomy. The ultimate objective of the vanguard party should be to transform itself into a mass party by winning a sufficient majority of the working class over to a revolutionary position, and this is exactly what happened in the case of the Bolsheviks in the months and weeks immediately before the October Revolution. In a non-revolutionary period, a vanguard party is distinguished from other working-class organizations such as trade unions and centre-left parties in that the latter involve workers drawn from every section of the working class and are therefore liable to contain a mixture of progressive and reactionary ideas, leading to wavering praxis, whereas the vanguard party is able to maintain a consistently revolutionary line because it is limited to the vanguard.

[robbo203]

Lenin never supported a party comprised of professional revolutionaries, at least not in the sense that you understand the concept of a professional revolutionary - a full-time party worker or functionary, devoting all her time to party activity. Lenin always emphasized that the vanguard party should be a party of the working class, involving the most militant and politically advanced section of that class, and not a group of intellectuals who seek to impose their vision of how liberation should take place on the rest of society without the active participation of those who suffer oppression and exploitation under capitalism. In this context, a professional revolutionary is a worker who is a member of the vanguard party and devotes most of her spare time to party work, in addition to agitating within her workplace.

To answer the question, posing the vanguard party in opposition to a mass party is a false dichotomy. The ultimate objective of the vanguard party should be to transform itself into a mass party by winning a sufficient majority of the working class over to a revolutionary position, and this is exactly what happened in the case of the Bolsheviks in the months and weeks immediately before the October Revolution. In a non-revolutionary period, a vanguard party is distinguished from other working-class organizations such as trade unions and centre-left parties in that the latter involve workers drawn from every section of the working class and are therefore liable to contain a mixture of progressive and reactionary ideas, leading to wavering praxis, whereas the vanguard party is able to maintain a consistently revolutionary line because it is limited to the vanguard.

You are missing the point. While Lenin might have insisted until he was blue in the face that the the so called vanguard party must be working class in character the fact is that the relationship between this vanguard and the the rest of the working class was based on the notion of leadership whereby the latter should be induced to follow IRRESPECTIVE OF WHETHER OR NOT THEY WERE COMMUNIST MINDED. In fact Lenin pointedly made the remark that he did not think workers by themselves were capable of arriving at a communist consciousness and this is rather at odds with his claim that the vanguard party - which too him of course, embodied communist consciousness (supposedly) - must be a party of the working class. This is the fundamental contradiction at the heart of Leninism and sheds much light on why Leninism in so many ways is against marxism and certainly the marxist notion of how a communist revolution is to be carried out.

Here incidentally is an interesting peice I came across of the WSM (www.worldsocialism.org (http://www.worldsocialism.org)) which goes into the subject in more detail. I think it is a reprint from an article in the Socialist Standard:



Marxism versus Leninism

Marx’s theory of socialist revolution is grounded on the fundamental principle that “the
emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself”. Marx
held to this view throughout his entire forty years of socialist political activity, and it
distinguished his theory of social change from that of both those who appealed to the
princes, governments and industrialists to change the world for the benefit of the
working class (such as Robert Owen and Saint Simon) and of those who relied on the
determined action of some enlightened minority of professional revolutionaries to liberate
the working class (such as Buonarotti, Blanqui and Weitling).

Conscious Self-emancipation

Marx saw that the very social position of the working class within capitalist society as a
non-owning, exploited, wealth-producing class forced it to struggle against its capitalist
conditions of existence. This “movement” of the working class could be said to be
implicitly socialist since the struggle was ultimately over who should control the means
of production: the minority capitalist class or the working class (i.e. society as a whole).
At first the movement of the working class would be, Marx believed, unconscious and
unorganised but in time, as the workers gained more experience of the class struggle and
the workings of capitalism, it would become more consciously socialist and
democratically organised by the workers themselves.
The emergence of socialist understanding out of the experience of the workers could thus
be said to be “spontaneous” in the sense that it would require no intervention by people
outside the working class to bring it about (not that such people could not take part in this
process, but their participation was not essential or crucial). Socialist propaganda and
agitation would indeed be necessary but would come to be carried out by workers
themselves whose socialist ideas would have been derived from an interpretation of their
class experience of capitalism. The end result would be an independent movement of the
socialist-minded and democratically organised working class aimed at winning control of
political power in order to abolish capitalism. As Marx and Engels put it in The
Communist Manifesto, “the proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent
movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority”.
This in fact was Marx’s conception of “the workers’ party”. He did not see the party of
the working class as a self-appointed elite of professional revolutionaries, as did the
Blanquists, but as the mass democratic movement of the working class with a view to
establishing Socialism, the common ownership and democratic control of the means of
production.

Lenin’s Opposing View

This was Marx’s view, but it wasn’t Lenin’s. Lenin in his pamphlet What Is To Be Done?,
written in 1901-2, declared:
“The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own
efforts, is able to develop only trade union consciousness, i.e., the conviction that
it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers and strive to compel the
government to pass necessary labour legislation, etc. The theory of socialism,
however, grew out of the philosophic, historical and economic theories that were
elaborated by the educated representatives of the propertied classes, the
intellectuals” (Foreign Languages Publishing House edition, Moscow, pp. 50-51).
“Class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without,
that is, only from outside of the economic struggle, from outside of the sphere of
relations between workers and employers” (Lenin’s emphasis, p.133).
“The spontaneous working class movement by itself is able to create (and
inevitably creates) only trade unionism, and working class trade unionist politics are
precisely working class bourgeois politics” (pp. 159-60) .
Lenin went on to argue that the people who would have to bring “socialist consciousness”
to the working class “from without” would be “professional revolutionaries”, drawn at
first mainly from the ranks of the bourgeois intelligentsia. In fact he argued that the
Russian Social Democratic Party should be such an “organisation of professional
revolutionaries”, acting as the vanguard of the working class. The task of this vanguard
party to be composed of professional revolutionaries under strict central control was to
“lead” the working class, offering them slogans to follow and struggle for. It is the very
antithesis of Marx’s theory of working class self-emancipation.

The Bolshevik Coup

The implication of Marx’s theory of working class self-emancipation is that the immense
majority of the working class must be consciously involved in the socialist revolution
against capitalism. “The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent
movement of the immense majority in the interest of the immense majority”.
The Bolshevik coup in November, 1917, carried out under the guise of protecting the
rights of the Congress of Soviets, did not enjoy conscious majority support, at least not
for socialism, though their slogan “Peace, Bread and Land” was widely popular. For
instance, elections to the Constituent Assembly, held after the Bolshevik coup and so
under Bolshevik government, gave them only about 25 per cent of the votes.
John Reed, a sympathetic American journalist, whose famous account of the Bolshevik
coup, Ten Days That Shook The World, was commended in a foreword by Lenin, quotes
Lenin as replying to this kind of criticism in a speech he made to the Congress of
Peasants’ Soviets on 27 November, 1917:
“If Socialism can only be realized when the intellectual development of all the
people permits it, then we shall not see Socialism for at least five hundred
years...The Socialist political party - this is the vanguard of the working class; it must
not allow itself to be halted by the lack of education of the mass average, but it must
lead the masses, using the Soviets as organs of revolutionary initiative…” (Reed’s
emphasis and omissions, Modern Library edition, 1960, p.15).
Compare this with a passage from the utopian communist, Weitling: “to want to
wait...until all are suitably enlightened would be to abandon the thing altogether!” Not, of
course, that it is a question of “all” the workers needing to be socialists before there can
be Socialism. Marx, in rejecting the view that Socialism could be established by some
enlightened minority, was merely saying that a sufficient majority of workers would have
to be socialists.

Lenin’s Legacy

Having seized power before the working class (and, even less, the 80 per cent peasant
majority of the population) had prepared themselves for Socialism, all the Bolshevik
government could do, as Lenin himself openly admitted, was to establish state capitalism
in Russia. Which is what they did, while at the same time imposing their own dictatorship
over the working class.
Contempt for the intellectual abilities of the working class led to the claim that the
vanguard party should rule on their behalf, even against their will. Lenin’s theory of the
vanguard party became enshrined as a principle of government (“the leading role of the
Party”) which has served to justify what has proved to be the world’s longest-lasting
political dictatorship.
The self-emancipation of the working class, as advocated by Marx, remains on the
agenda.
(March 1990)