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Wikipedia: vanguardism

In the context of revolutionary struggle, vanguardism is a strategy whereby an organization (usually a vanguard party) attempts to place itself at the center of the movement, and steer it in a direction consistent with its ideology.

History

Lenin pioneered political vanguardism, detailing his thoughts in one of his earlier works, What is to be done?. Lenin explained that Marxism's complexity and the hostility of the establishment (the bourgeois state or, in the case of Imperial Russia, the feudal state) required a close-knit group of individuals—the vanguard—to safeguard the revolution. While Lenin clearly wished for a revolutionary organization akin to the contemporary Social Democratic Party, which was open to the public and democratic in organization, contemporary Russian autocracy prevented this:

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"The members of the Party are they who accept the principles of the Party programme and render the Party all possible support,” reads Clause 1 of the Rules of the German Social-Democratic Party. Since the entire political arena is as open to the public view as is a theatre stage to the audience, this acceptance or non-acceptance, support or opposition, is known to all from the press and from public meetings. Everyone knows that a certain political figure began in such and such a way, passed through such and such an evolution, behaved in a trying moment in such and such a manner, and possesses such and such qualities; consequently, all party members, knowing all the facts, can elect or refuse to elect this person to a particular party office. The general control (in the literal sense of the term) exercised over every act of a party man in the political field brings into existence an automatically operating mechanism which produces what in biology is called the “survival of the fittest”. “Natural selection” by full publicity, election, and general control provides the assurance that, in the last analysis, every political figure will be “in his proper place”, do the work for which lie is best fitted by his powers and abilities, feel the effects of his mistakes on himself, and prove before all the world his ability to recognize mistakes and to avoid them.

Try to fit this picture into the frame of our autocracy! Is it conceivable in Russia for all “who accept the principles of the Party programme and render the Party all possible support” to control every action of the revolutionary working in secret? Is it possible for all to elect one of these revolutionaries to any particular office, when, in the very interests of the work, the revolutionary must conceal his identity from nine out of ten of these “all”? ^[1]

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Instead the vanguard would be, by necessity, highly secretive. The vanguard's main purpose would be to educate the workers in the theories of Marxism. Not to talk down to the workers and have a few dozen men mount the revolution; rather the vanguard would educate the ignorant masses and mold them into revolutionaries in their own right.

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Our task is not to champion the degrading of the revolutionary to the level of an amateur, but to raise the amateurs to the level of revolutionaries. ^[2]

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Thus the ultimate goal of the vanguard would be to spread the ideology, in its pure and untainted form, throughout the working class so they could mount a revolution. If the vanguard is successful, the night before the revolution, the entirely of the working class population would be enlightened, Marxist revolutionaries. (This would mean that they had achieved a sort of "taught"-class consciousness, Marxism's precursor to a true proletarian revolution.) Furthermore a great number of them, namely their most intelligent members, would belong to the vanguard's inner circle as full-time revolutionaries. Thus the organization, at least in open societies, would quickly include the entire working class.

Current Use

Vanguardism continues to be used as a political strategy by Leninist parties of just about all varieties -- Trotskyist, Stalinist and Maoist.

Although most anarchists and radical libertarians reject vanguardism as inherently authoritarian, the practices of some anarchist groups have been criticized by their peers for constituting vanguardism of the intellectual, if not organizational, variety.

Vanguardism may more generally refer to cooperation between avant-garde individuals advancing in any field. Innovative writers and artists are often described as being in the vanguard in development of new forms and styles of art.

Notable Groups

Aside from the entire Marxist-Leninist movement and its component communist parties
The Guerrilla Girls, a group of anonymous feminist artists who promote women in the arts.
United Anarchist Artists, a group of anarchists/artists who create short online videos, usually about politics and the George W. Bush administration.

vanguard	Motorola Vanguard 320
Vanguard Briefcase	Vanguard 6430 Snmp

		Dictionary. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2007. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. Read more
		Antonyms. © 1999-2008 by Answers Corporation. All rights reserved. Read more
		WordNet. WordNet 1.7.1 Copyright © 2001 by Princeton University. All rights reserved. Read more
		Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Vanguardism". Read more
		Translations. Copyright © 2007, WizCom Technologies Ltd. All rights reserved. Read more

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vanguard

History

Current Use

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