Vanguard

Alan Shandro

The word “vanguard” derives from late Middle English and originally denoted the foremost part of an advancing army or naval force. Etymologically, it is a shortening of the Old French “avan(t) garde” (meaning “before guard”). Current political usages date from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is sometimes used interchangeably with “avant-garde,” though the two terms carry distinct (if overlapping) connotations.

The idea that communists might play the role of vanguard in the class struggle can be traced back to the Communist Manifesto, in which they are said to constitute, “practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all the others” while having over the mass of the workers, theoretically, “the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement” (Marx and Engels 1976b, 497). Here “understanding the line of march” establishes a connection between theory and practice in the leadership of the working-class movement. Where “the line of march” is construed teleologically, the corresponding “understanding” has tended to be disparaged as an oracular vision, with the vanguard playing the role of prophet. In line with the Manifesto’s hardheaded rhetorical stance against the illusions of utopian socialism, however, the formulation is perhaps more reasonably read as an appreciation that placating the bourgeoisie could never advance the workers’ struggles. It was thus incumbent upon those in the vanguard to establish principles of solidarity on a class foundation and dispel the illusion of supra-class solidarity. But if Marx’s writing suggested a link between working-class movement practice and the development of theory (and if he thus established a matrix within which political agency could be situated and political leadership exercised), the link would become more rigid with the turn to orthodoxy within the Second International (1889–1914).

For example, Karl Kautsky associated the vanguard with the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), its Marxist theory, and its activists, while at the same time associating it with particular sections of the working class based on their position in the most advanced (productive, concentrated, socialized) forms of capitalist production. According to this position, since the logic of capitalist production transforms particular struggles into a universal one, the position of these most advanced strata bears—in organization, consciousness, and discipline—the universal interest of the whole working class. In contrast, the rear echelons of the movement struggle to disengage from the particularistic claims that diffuse their efforts. Nevertheless, the former were seen to embody the future of the latecomers. It is almost as though, as a result of their consciousness, members of the vanguard transcend their particular circumstances. However, the most advanced strata of the Social Democratic proletariat were not simply workers. They were, for instance, by and large skilled, urban, Protestant, German, male, and so on. For his part, Kautsky failed to address these concrete features. As a result, the “universality” of socialist consciousness donned the particular lenses of the advanced workers. When counterposed to the narrow particularism of the backward strata of the movement, such unity fueled tensions and resentments between workers and abetted bourgeois efforts to divide the movement by separating particular short-term interests from the general interest of the class. Ultimately, the SPD failed to address the latent contradictions within the working-class movement.

Though the metaphor of an advancing column en march infused Marxist self-understanding, it is notable that the word “vanguard” (Avantgarde in German) did not often figure in Marxist writings. Indeed, the leader-movement relation was more frequently conveyed through the term “representative.” In 1898, SPD leader August Bebel counterposed SPD leadership as “the political representative of [a] proletariat” to the individualistic understanding of agency that anarchist “propaganda of the deed” shared with liberalism. Similarly, the word “vanguard” does not appear in the text of the Communist Manifesto. However, it does figure (albeit without reference to “consciousness”) in the preface to the Russian edition of 1882. There, in the context of the assassination of Alexander II by members of the populist Narodnaya Volya, Marx and Engels note that the tsar no longer figured as the “chief of European reaction” since, holed up in his summer home at Gatschina, he had effectively become a prisoner of the revolution. In contrast, Marx and Engels found that “Russia forms the vanguard of revolutionary action in Europe.” This relation is spelled out as follows: “If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West . . . the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development.” In this usage, “vanguard” denotes the first clash of forces, which gives the signal for a wider revolutionary explosion. Such a role perhaps calls more for courage than for foresight.

The question of the vanguard would come to be posed with particular acuity in tsarist Russia. It is in this context that Lenin could assert in What Is to Be Done? that “the role of vanguard [Russian: avangardnyy] fighter can be fulfilled only by a party that is guided by the most advanced theory.” In this formulation, the spontaneous working-class movement figured as both the mainspring of socialist agency and as a target of bourgeois ideology and strategy. Contending for hegemony required not only conscious resistance to bourgeois influence but also the capacity to rally potential allies (peasants, oppressed nationalities, etc.) around the workers’ struggles. If the logic of the class struggle is refracted through the struggle for hegemony, then shifting circumstances demand that the vanguard readjust theory and adapt practice to account for the shifting terrain of battle. Indeed, for Lenin, the working class constitutes itself as a political force by rallying other forces around itself.

Such an analysis implies that vanguard political agency is multidimensional. Marx tried to understand the struggle for socialism through the construction of the “political form[s]” needed “to work out the economical emancipation of labor.” He might have added that the “working out” would always need to be revised in view of altered needs, capacities, and circumstances. As understood by Lenin, the function of the vanguard might be characterized as generating “concrete analysis of the concrete situation” and orchestrating diverse fractions in the political process of “working out.” With the advent of the First World War, and as a result of Lenin’s analysis of imperialism (1952), the logic of the struggle for hegemony became generalized. And with the Bolsheviks establishing a socialist beachhead in Russia, Lenin’s approach spread through working-class and progressive movements worldwide.

Lenin argued that the vanguard’s effective intervention in the class struggle depended upon its organization into a political party distinct from the spontaneous working-class movement—hence, “vanguard party,” as formulated in The State and Revolution: “By educating the workers’ party, Marxism educates the vanguard of the proletariat, capable of assuming power and leading the whole people to socialism, of directing and organizing the new system, of being the teacher, the guide, the leader of all the working and exploited people in organizing their social life without the bourgeoisie and against the bourgeoisie” (Lenin 1964a, 409). The distinction between class and party and the apparent identification of the vanguard with the latter elicited criticism from Lenin’s adversaries. Invoking a Marxist trope, these responses would come to shape how ideas about the vanguard would be received in much wider circles. The critique involved two claims: first, that the working class, unlike previous exploited classes, was capable of autonomous revolutionary activity. Second, not only does the working class come to understand its emancipation as entailing the end of capitalism and the construction of a socialist society, this end can be accomplished only through the independent activity of the working class itself. When this thesis is counterposed to the notion of “vanguard,” the latter is seen as providing a rationale for the subordination of workers to the authority of revolutionary intellectuals. Trotsky famously outlined this position when he argued that, when followed to its logical conclusion, “the party organization substitutes itself for the party [which at the time he equated with the class], the Central Committee substitutes itself for the party organization, and finally a dictator substitutes himself for the Central Committee.”

Framed in this way, the Leninist vanguard party appears to be central to the development and degeneration of the Bolshevik revolution and the Soviet Union. However, much of the rhetorical force of the critique depends upon an ambiguity that can be discerned once the question is raised as to whether proletarian self-emancipation is a generalization of individual self-consciousness or requires distinct concepts (e.g., “vanguard” and “masses”) to come to grips with the collective character of the process. In the former case, self-emancipation is inconsistent with any attempt at influencing the direction of workers’ movements. If, however, self-emancipation refers to a collective process, the notion of a vanguard refers fundamentally not to a particular organization or group of individuals, but to the performance of certain political functions in the movement of the class. In principle, any member of the masses could perform such functions.

In Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?, for example, Lenin praises the soviet as “an organizational form for the vanguard, i.e., for the most class-conscious, most energetic and most progressive section of the oppressed classes, the workers and peasants . . . by means of which the vanguard of the oppressed classes can elevate, train, educate and lead the entire vast mass of these classes” (Lenin 1964b, 103–4). Correlatively, the socialist consciousness that informs the vanguard is to be understood not as a set of propositions belonging to a certain group but rather as the capability of adjusting the socialist project to the changing circumstances of the class struggle—something that could only develop through the dynamic interaction of vanguard and masses, consciousness and spontaneity.

While “vanguard” and its variants are sometimes employed (usually, though not always, pejoratively) in the context of other social movements, these usages are largely derivative of Marxist debates. The recent neologism “vanguardism” (carrying the sense of sectarianism) reflected disillusion with the failure of would-be Maoist and Trotskyite “vanguards” formed during the social and political upheavals of the 1960s (see Camejo 1984). But where “sectarianism” invoked a distinction between self-absorbed sect and mass-oriented party, “vanguardism” insinuated that sect-like narcissism was implicit in the very notion of a vanguard project. Again, Gramsci is praised in Hardt and Negri’s Occupy-era Commonwealth for supposedly understanding that “the vanguard of industrial workers can no longer serve as the subject of an active proletarian revolution” and for questioning “the desirability of the worker vanguard” (Hardt and Negri 2009, 366). In this view, revolutionary agency is no longer consistent with any type of representation, any vanguard acting on behalf of others. In its place, what’s now required is the direct action of the multitude. The tension between representation and direct action informing the Negri-Hardt stance echoes both the anarchist positions critiqued by Bebel and the objections addressed to Lenin’s conceptualization of the vanguard.

Since the mid-nineteenth century, the term “avant-garde” has been applied to cutting-edge artists or works of art that take a critical stance vis-à-vis the conformism of mainstream art and culture. Incorporated into the critique of consumer capitalism by Theodor Adorno and others, this connotation might suggest a fusion of artistic provocation and political commitment. As Adorno wrote in “Commitment,” “Even ‘vanguard’ critics . . . accuse so-called abstract texts of a lack of provocation, of social aggressivity” (Adorno 1982, 301). To the extent that both the Leninist injunction to concrete analysis and the notion of self-emancipation might convey a sense of politics as artistic practice, they share an affinity with this sense of “avant-garde,” especially in bohemian and artistic circles. Established in Greenwich Village in 1935 (the Popular Front era), the Village Vanguard became a venue for jazz, blues, and folk music as well as politically conscious poetry, comedy, and commentary. The venue also enabled Black, white, and Latino people to mix and mingle and evoked both the affinity and the tensions underlying the artistic and political senses of the term. During the 1960s, the Village Vanguard featured a Monday “Speak Out” on controversial political and social subjects of the day, though the tenor of political controversy had lost its radical edge in the wake of McCarthyism.

Where the distinction that informs the Leninist notion of “vanguard” contrasts the spontaneous movement of the workers to the conscious agency of those at the forefront of their class, the distinction at work in the artistic sense of “avant-garde” is between the critically thinking (and therefore anti-authoritarian) artist-­intellectual and the passively conformist or even authoritarian masses. If the relation between spontaneous and conscious activity permits us to think of leadership as a process of weaving together disparate forces into a community of struggle and thereby inflecting the direction of the struggle, the avant-garde acts out its critically innovative character not really as leadership at all but as a kind of internal exile from the stifling conformism of capitalist society. When the former is read in terms of the latter’s connotations, the notion of leadership simply vanishes in a puff of smoke and mirrors—hence the lyrical cynicism of David Rovics’ satirical song “Vanguard”: “I am the vanguard of the masses / And all of you should just follow me / And if you doubt my analysis / You must be in the petty bourgeoisie” (Rovics 2003).

See also: Agency; Conspiracy; Demand; Leadership; Representation; Revolution; Victory; Violence