What is the Vanguard

What is the Vanguard?

Vanguard...a military term! As is Picket, Strike too. It's locked in peoples minds as...VANGUARD PARTY, the Communist Party. Notions of vanguardism have been repudiated by many communists in Britain. An enlightened minority leading ignorant masses anywhere cannot stand scrutiny.
Of course, individual workers are capable of behaving in a way that invites instruction and command. Religious adherence is an example that springs to mind. This is a voluntary suspension of responsibility for independent thought, a description that applies to all religious-like behaviours, some of which may describe themselves as 'political'.

Any behaviour guided by any form of idealistic thought is susceptible to the process of command by those further along the path towards the attainment of the ideal state. The racially pure shall rule the world and remove the contamination of the inferior. Those closer to God shall rule the less enlightened and those most pure in their 'socialist' ideals can do anything they like to anyone. None of this has been the history of workers in Britain. We fought the Nazis. We are the least religious class in the world and have consistently rejected all political idealisms.

Lenin was wrong to put so much emphasis on the PARTY. The phrase, vanguard party, could be best described as a home for armchair generals, largely self-proclaimed. Still I don't expect the term or concept to vanish....wherever a self appointed 'elite' gathers, it will have its admirers.
Lenin made a better job of Democratic Centralism, he studied the structures and organization of British Trade Unions whilst in London and saw the strengths that form might take in forging the Proletarian Party.

WORKERS, MAY 2010 ISSUE

In 1968 Reg Birch and comrades from the Engineers’ Union, and from other unions, founded the Party. But to understand how this came about, we have to look far further back, into the history of the British working class.

The British working class created our unique trade unions: in Britain the birth of the trade unions was the birth of dignity for our class. Ever since engineering workers founded the Associated Society of Engineers (ASE) in 1851, they led in organisation and in the struggle for wages and conditions. They were the vanguard of the working class for over a century.

In the ASE, ideas and policy flowed from the Districts to the Regions to the 52-strong National Committee. This was democratic centralism in practice. When Lenin was in Britain, in 1902-3, he learnt from our trade unions, especially from the ASE, how to build the Bolshevik Party.

Marx worked with the TUC General Council, comprised of the leaders of the ASE and others, which helped to create the First International. This meant that this International was based on the trade unions. As we said in our Congress ’79 statement, “We should remember that the First International was the most proletarian in composition and character, a forum for workers of different countries to learn from and aid each other. It is worthy of study by all workers.”

Marx wrote Capital and Engels wrote The Condition of the Working Class in England out of their experience of the struggles and trials of the British working class. So Marxists across the world know the history of British workers and their trade unions.


Reg Birch, who founded the Party with engineering worker comrades.

In July 1920, the ASE and nine other unions merged to form the Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU). From the 1930s, the AEU led the whole class, always being the first union to put in its wage claim, and always being the best organised, acting as the spur and inspiration to the rest of the trade union movement. London engineers, with our founding Chairman Reg Birch playing a leading part, led the way by winning shorter hours and paid holidays, raising the right to work, challenging and sometimes defeating the employer’s right to sack.

Birch’s 1966 address for election to the post of Executive Councilman for Division No. 7 said, “the high standard of integrity of our members, their militancy and courage has ensured that we the AEU have led the working class in Britain.” He continued, “the prosperity and stable economy of this country depends on engineers. British engineers are second to none. If we are not to fall behind, not to become a third rate ‘tourist’ country, we as a union must ensure that this skill, this labour, is used efficiently, economically and rewardingly. Only thus as a nation will we survive. The new industrial revolution to bring real prosperity to the working class can only be won by you brothers and sisters.”

The ideas developed from Birch’s industrial experience were refined in discussion with party comrades from the AEU and others. They applied their collective intelligence and experience to the job of applying Marxism to Britain. The Party programme, The British Working Class and its Party, adopted by our second Congress in April 1971, brought together all these ideas.

What kind of a party was it to be? We knew the dangers of dividing organisations into thinkers and doers. All party labour was and is voluntary, so there can be no division between paid full-timers and the “ordinary” members. We rejected Engels’s and Lenin’s idealist notion of a “labour aristocracy”, which was always an attack on skilled workers and a way of dividing the class.

As we wrote in Burning Questions for Our Party, “Any attempt to separate a political arena or phase of development from an economic arena or phase is to invite a division of the Party into two wings – the ‘intellectuals’ and the ‘workers’, as has happened in other parties with disastrous results. The results would be equally disastrous whether the alleged ‘intellectuals’ dominated the professed ‘workers’ or vice versa. A split, inherited from historic development of a class, which the process of proletarianisation has virtually eliminated from the working class as a whole, would have been artificially created within that section of the class that claims to be the most advanced – the Party. …

“Those who take this incorrect stand maintain that there is a Middle Class in Britain – not just a handful of shopkeepers but a class strong enough to be a significant political force. They are seen as a sector which has been detached from the working class – ‘privileged’, ‘bribed’, either with the crumbs of imperialism or with some other beneficent dispensation from capitalism. They include students, teachers, ‘intellectuals’ in general, ‘better paid workers’, trade union officials, ‘white collar’ and ‘professional’ workers in general, all women, workers who have been promoted, foremen, ‘bosses men’, etc. The list being subjective in origin can be extended indefinitely.”

For us, the safety of our working class is the supreme law. Workers need state power to save themselves from destruction by capitalism. Workers in power must do what is necessary to retain power; otherwise the capitalists will overthrow them, as they have done in Russia, Eastern Europe and China.

http://theredphoenixapl.org/2011/08/...anguard-party/ This is an excellent and quick read. There is also ''What is to be done'' by Lenin http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/

THANKS ROACH, THAT LOOKS INTERESTING, I am a reader of RP...INTERESTING TO SEE STATESIDE TAKE ON THIS IMPORTANT SUBJECT.

What is the Vanguard?

Mostly what Lenin is asking for is a trained group of leaders, or people who understand how to fix the problems of the poor. If you look at the US today main of the leader could not leaded their own life let alone their country.

Mostly what Lenin is asking for is a trained group of leaders, or people who understand how to fix the problems of the poor. If you look at the US today main of the leader could not leaded their own life let alone their country.

Yes comrade, was this attitude from WORKERS similar to what you had in mind? The splitting of the movement or party into 'doer' and thinkers has produced neither. I think the approach below has produced better results certainly capable cadres and people that one can at least find dialogue. Not incessant hectoring and patronizing.

Party of a new type

WORKERS, April 2012 ISSUE

Our Party is unlike any other in Britain, a new type of political body wedded to a different destiny, one of workers taking control and refashioning the world.

Founded in 1968, fresh and confident from the then revolutionary revival in the world, the CPBML was the special, dedicated creation of a group of industrial engineers led by our founding chairman, Reg Birch. From birth, our Party has had one unshakeable purpose – to change the thinking of the British working class – to secure the understanding that our survival with dignity is impossible under a declining capitalism, that only revolution and working class rule will assure work, peace, security – civilisation – for all.

We do not seek to instruct or command the working class. Workers are thinking beings who must be convinced themselves of the need for any course of action. Our party is of the working class, not a set of special people above it, external, doling out an alien theory. We attempt from the conditions of material existence to refine the strategic thinking of a working class and return it to its proper owners in pristine form. In our founder’s metaphor, the working class is the seed, the communist party the fertiliser, enabling the class to flourish more expansively.

We are an unpaid, voluntary community of doers and thinkers with everyone expected to take responsibility and play a full part in developing the party. We attend regular meetings, we study together, we pay our financial commitments, we reflect on and analyse current affairs in Britain and the world, we develop a strategy and tactics that not only make sense of the predicaments we face in the world but also chart a way out of the mess. We produce our own publications, website and public meetings from the ideas we generate after collective exchange. Without rich or foreign backers, our financial resources are either self-generated or come from workers’ donations.

We have democracy within our party with members always expected to think and contribute. Our highest authority is our three-yearly representative Party Congress, which sets out a direction for progress and elects a leadership to administer and safeguard our precious jewel. Discussion establishes the political line, but once established it is adhered to and embellished. We have no factions.

All party members are workers first and foremost, sharing the weal and woe of our class. We have no full-time professional revolutionaries and never will have. We operate on the willing, equal commitment of members.

Proud of our achievements over 44 years, we readily admit the greatest challenges lie ahead. We aim to grow and prosper in these difficult times.

Interested in these ideas?

http://www.workers.org.uk/thinking/party.html


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