A couple of weeks ago I started a discussion about the socialist vanguard: what it is, what it does. I asked for feedback and was delighted by the response. Thanks to Snowball, A.C. and Sebastian Lamb for contributing to the debate. It clarified some things for me and raised new questions. So I went back to an old book I hadn’t picked up in years: Party and Class, a collection of essays by Socialist Workers Party heavyweights from the early 1970s. The first piece, by Duncan Hallas, was brilliantly clear, so I’m going to quote a lot of it – not an ideal enticement for reading a blog entry, I realize, but bear with me, Hallas has a lot of good things to say.

From More Years for the Locust: The Origins of the SWP, cartoon by Phil Evans

Once more, what’s a vanguard?

Hallas calls it:

An organized layer of thousands of workers, by hand and by brain, firmly rooted amongst their fellow workers and with a shared consciousness of the necessity for socialism and the way to achieve it, has to be created.

This states clearly what a vanguard does. But when Hallas says ‘organization’, does he mean a party?

Yes and no. He doesn’t conflate party and class, nor does he specify in advance whether all members of a vanguard should be party members. He does, however, see a vital role for the party:

The relevance of a party is, firstly, that it can give the real vanguard, the more advanced and conscious minority of workers and not the sects or self-proclaimed leaders, the confidence and the cohesion necessary to carry the mass with them.

Its job is education, fighting the war of maneuvre that Gramsci theorized.

Communist education - surprisingly like my tutorials...

It follows that there can be no talk of a party that does not include this minority as one of its major components…. It must be a substitute for those institutions, special schools, universities, clubs… through which the ruling class imbues its cadres with a common outlook, tradition and loyalty. And it must do this without cutting off its militants from their fellow workers.

So, although he’s a little unclear, I think Hallas is saying a party grows within and acts with the vanguard, it doesn’t substitute itself for the vanguard. A party’s job is leadership and creating a culture of resistance.

Historically, during radicalizations the party is to the right of the most militant workers. So a vanguard organization needs to be as big as possible, to learn from those workers. Should it come time for revolution, then a strict separation of party and state must be maintained. But no one would dispute the most radical workers should be at the forefront of smashing the old structures and building new, socialist ones.

Hold on a sec…

The first response of many genuine radicals is that this is elitist. Those vanguard workers aren’t like their fellow workers; they’re “rooted amongst” them, teaching them. ‘Separate’ and ‘advanced’ are nice words for ‘we’re better than you are’.

Hallas agrees that this separation exists; however, he denies it’s elitist:

It is clear that any substantial revolutionary socialist party is necessarily, in one sense, a ‘vanguard’. But there is no substance in the argument that the concept is elitist. The essence of elitism is the assertion that the observable differences in abilities, consciousness and experience are rooted in unalterable genetic or social conditions and that the mass of the people are incapable of self-government now or in the future. Rejection of the elitist position implies that the observed differences are wholly or partly attributable to causes that can be changed. It does not mean denial of the differences themselves.

Differences exist, but they’re descriptive, not inherent. They change as people change, through their open participation in the class struggle.

We're not better than you, we just shovel more coal... Soviet Stakhanovites

In fact, Hallas argues the elitism vs. spontaneism debate is misguided:

it is strictly a non-question because it assumes the existence of a more or less autonomous working class world-outlook into which something is injected…. Workers are not automata responding passively to the environment. Everyone has to have some picture of the world, some frame of reference into which data are fitted, some assumptions about society….

That “frame of reference” is bourgeois ideology:

The assumptions convenient to the ruling class are the daily diet of all of us. Individuals, whether bus drivers or lecturers in aesthetics, can resist the conditioning process to a point. Only a collective can develop a systematic alternative world-view, can overcome to some degree the alienation of manual and mental work that imposes on everyone, on workers and intellectuals alike, a partial and fragmented view of reality.

What about Russia?

Even if this sounds reasonable, many people think that, in practice, a vanguard turns into a corrupt dictatorship. This idea, while it may sound democratic, actually conceals elitism:

The equation ‘centralized organization equals bureaucracy equals degeneration’ is in fact a secularized version of the original sin myth. Like its prototype it leads to profoundly reactionary conclusions. For what is really being implied is that working people are incapable of collective democratic control of their own organizations. Granted that in many cases this has proved to be true; to argue that it is necessarily, inevitably true is to argue that socialism is impossible because democracy, in the literal sense, is impossible.

Oh well, it was inevitable - Stalin receives accolades from the downtrodden

However, Hallas lambasts those groups who invoke the ritual mantra ‘build the vanguard party’, as if that answers everything. A vanguard isn’t an abstract concept:

Useful argument about the problems of socialist organization is impossible at the level of ‘universal’ generalizations. Organizations do not exist in a vacuum. They are composed of actual people in specific historical situations, attempting to solve real problems with a limited number of options open to them.

Each vanguard – like each class, nation and anything else Marxists care to look at – has to be look at in its historical specificity. The vanguard is a guide, not a plan.

Taken as a map, a vanguard becomes a fixed, ahistorical concept, what Hallas calls ‘vanguardism’. This assumes “that the answers to all problems are known in advance… that there may be new problems which require new solutions, that it is necessary to learn from one’s fellow workers as well as to teach, are unwelcome ideas.”

The vanguard is here! And we got flags! - Montreal Maoists show their true colours

Where is the vanguard?

Good question. Even in 1970, Hallas could pinpoint the destruction of the vanguard layer in the working class:

A new generation of capable and energetic workers exists but they are no longer part of a cohesive movement and they no longer work in a milieu where basic Marxist ideas are widespread. We are back at our starting point. Not only has the vanguard, in the real sense of a considerable layer of organized revolutionary workers and intellectuals, been destroyed. So too has the environment, the tradition, that gave it influence….

Which side were you on? - British dock strikers, 1926

How do we start again? We find those ‘conscious tools of history’ (I’m paraphrasing someone, I’m sure):

The elements of a working class leadership already exist. The activists and militants who actually maintain the shop floor and working class organizations from day to day are the leadership in practical terms. That they are… under the influence of reformist or Stalinist ideas or ideas more reactionary still, is not to be explained in terms of betrayal… [but] in terms of their own experience and in terms of the absence of a socialist tendency seen as credible and realistic.

We have to prove in practice that a vanguard organization can get tangible results for and by workers.

Back to the future

Hallas starts by recognizing: “The events of the last 40 years largely isolated the revolutionary socialist tradition from the working classes of the west.” He means the impact of Stalinism and reformism: the former by crushing genuine socialist struggles, the latter by providing incremental gains for working people, so the question of revolution never came up.

However, the terrain of class struggle in 1970 looks lush and verdant compared to today: speaking of class struggles, he writes:

The experience is familiar to active rank-and-file trade unionists. Slogans and demands that were yesterday acceptable only to the more conscious people can quite suddenly be too limited for the majority when a struggle develops beyond the expected point.

Hallas describes radicalization in terms not used in our defensive era, when the Canadian Auto Workers can negotiate a 3 year contract with Ford that includes 1100 lay-offs and call it a victory. We have a long way to go before shop floors resonate again with calls of ‘wildcat’. Which is why I was so excited at the wildcat Gate Gourmet strike, and how British Airways handlers went out in solidarity, by the way.

OK, it's apolitical, but it's cute and it's got cats (click to enlarge) - from Alleged Literature, by Jeremy Dennis

Hallas’ theoretical approach dates badly as well:

the case rests on the analysis of the world crisis… in the changing conditions of capitalism, reformist policies will be less and less able to provide those partial solutions to the problems confronting the working class.

I’m leery of ‘crisis’ analyses; socialists have been seeing the last crisis of capitalism ever since the Third Period in 1928. Capitalism is prone to crises, but it manages to profit off of them, by devaluing assets or going to war. So far it’s proved a remarkably flexible system. Socialists need a positive, grounded analysis of class struggle, not a call to arms that grows quickly stale.

However, his second point is more interesting: that reformism can’t deliver. This is true: social democrats in every country have ended up being the best practitioners of neo-liberalism, by softening the blows of cutbacks and restructuring, and disorienting their traditional allies in labour and progressive movements. Here, I think we’re finally reaching the turning point that Hallas predicted. Capitalism is unable to afford the perks of the welfare state: it can’t even buy off its richest workers, let alone their poorer cousins in the 3rd World. It risks an explosion of class struggle as a result, and I think we’re seeing the results across Europe and Latin America right now: Germany’s refusal to vote for the CDU’s ‘flat tax’, Bolivia’s wars against privatization, and others.

Not just slick, but counter-revolutionary - NDP leader Jack Layton

It’s important to note: the left has made the most political headway against these measures where socialist organization still exists. Germany and France have long traditions of socialist vanguards, and those organizations have been able to (forgive the expression) capitalize on the resistance to neo-liberalism. In a less formal sense, the community assemblies of Bolivia could be seen as vanguard groups: not party organizations, but bringing together the most advanced class elements to plan the fightback.

As long as we have capitalism, I think we’ll need a vanguard organization in response. People’s consciousness and actions develop differently, and there needs to be tangible evidence that conscious class struggle gets results. I think that has to be organized. The ‘objective conditions’, much maligned in postmodernism or ridiculed by liberalism, may finally be swinging our way again. I hope we’re ready for the challenge.

Anti-flat tax, anti-neoliberalism - Germany's Left Party celebrates its 8.6% vote