Leninism Today: The Legacy and Meaning of the “Vanguard Party”

By Brandon Madsen

The Role of a Revolutionary Party 100 Years After Lenin’s Death

The victory of the 1917 working-class revolution in Russia is rightly regarded as one of the most important events in human history. The party that helped more than any other to bring that revolution to success was the Bolshevik Party. No wonder that for generations socialists around the world have attempted to analyze it and discover the “secret sauce” that made this party what it was. 

Beyond the specific case of the Bolsheviks, the general idea of a “vanguard party” is itself strongly associated with Lenin – but it is also arguably one of the most contentious and widely misunderstood concepts in all of Marxism, both among adherents and detractors. Does the “vanguard” refer to the party itself, some aspect or section of the party, or its social base? Is the vanguard a part of the working class or something external to it? Why does Lenin believe it is necessary, and was he correct? A curious person searching in a modern “Google it!” way for quick answers to these types of questions will almost immediately be met by different and mutually contradictory answers from different sources, and authors arguing different sides are all able to find Lenin quotes that seem to support their claims.

According to one interpretation, the Marxist party (or its leadership) is the self-appointed vanguard of the working class, which the workers are then obliged to follow. This is essentially the conception taken up by the Stalinist bureaucracy in the former Soviet Union to identify itself as the sole legitimate voice of the proletariat, attempting to imbue its own top-down edicts with the authority of the working class as a whole. Some latch onto this caricatured version to dismiss the concept of the vanguard party entirely. 

But even aside from the obvious potential for cynical misuse in justifying an already-existing one-party state, going outside of that context doesn’t rescue the situation; it actually leads to still-deeper problems. For example, if you have multiple organizations with different politics and approaches all claiming the title of “vanguard party” (or at least claiming in essence to be building towards creating it, regardless of whether they use that precise phrase), how is one to know which is the “real” vanguard party – if any? How is this tested concretely?

Seeing the vanguard as something inherent to the party itself leads to circular logic and self-justifying conclusions. If we want this concept to be scientific, then we need a more objective basis for it. 

The Vanguard Is Part of the Working Class

A more useful way of looking at the vanguard is as a section of the working class, just as the vanguard of a military force is part of that force, not something external to it or grafted on from above. It is the division which seeks out the enemy and tries to secure ground first, in advance of the main force.

In order for the ruling class to maintain their privileged position, the broad mass of the exploited and oppressed classes cannot act upon the stage of history on behalf of their class interests. Political activity of the majority of society is only allowed to occur in short bursts. Co-option and pressure from above is used to limit the scope and duration of social movements and upheavals, reinforcing their temporary and peaky nature. 

The vanguard of the working class represents the special exception to this general rule: the small but significant layer of organic leaders, pioneers, and trailblazers that becomes politically active and aware before the rest, and more consistently. This is the layer that stays consciously engaged over the longer term, even as individual social movements rise and fall, serving as a collective memory for the class as a whole, assimilating lessons and patterns drawn out through the collective experience of struggle. 

The vanguard party, then, is that political group which is able to concentrate and organize this naturally-occurring layer, to help it learn and lead not only organically but also consciously: growing its size, maximizing its impact, and deepening its understanding, helping to squeeze every last drop of knowledge out of its experiences in the struggle. A vanguard party proves itself as such by demonstrating its ability to win over, retain, and provide useful assistance and guidance to these layers in carrying out and preparing for the historic tasks of the proletariat, ultimately leading up to the conquest of power.

The party acts as a neural center connecting the leadership to the moods, experiences, and struggles of the wider working class and allowing for a dynamic, unifying interchange between the two forces. The only way the party can effectively play this role is if it concentrates and integrates the vanguard of the working class into itself. The working-class vanguard is a thinking and active layer that needs to be convinced, won over through both discussion and common struggle, in order to achieve this concentration. 

What Is To Be Done? 

Unfortunately, Lenin himself played a role in generating some of this confusion via his infamous passage in Part II of What Is To Be Done? (published 1902): 

Social-Democratic consciousness among the workers… would have to be brought to them from without. The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own efforts, is able to develop only trade-union consciousness. 

This passage was itself inspired by previous material along the same lines by Karl Kautsky, whom Lenin later broke with quite decisively as World War I began. (It is also worth noting that “Social-Democratic consciousness” in this historical context essentially meant revolutionary socialist consciousness, not what the “social-democratic” parties of today represent.) 

Lenin himself never used this formulation again, and even within the pages of that same text called it a “blunt formula” and “sharply simplified.” In subsequent years – even long before 1917 (for example, in the preface to the 1907 collection 12 Years) – he characterized this passage as an exaggeration that should not be taken out of its historical context. Lenin argued that this exaggeration was necessary at the time to polemically bend the stick away from the opportunistic ideas advocated by the so-called “Economists” in Russia who denied the importance of a revolutionary party. 

But there is not full agreement among Marxists on whether, by his retrospective comments, Lenin meant to indicate that what he said in the passage was actually incorrect or merely that he placed disproportionate emphasis on it at the time. Some devoted Marxists and DSA comrades – such as Henry De Groot, writing in a piece published in Cosmonaut – have certainly argued the latter. Henry links this to an interpretation wherein the vanguard layer serves as a transmission mechanism for disseminating the ideas of the party into the broader working class, and as a source of promising prospects who can be trained by the party into being intellectuals themselves. 

This interpretation is much better than the Stalinist conception of the vanguard, in that it recognizes the vanguard as part of the class itself, but it is still unbalanced. It puts a lot of emphasis on the need for socialists to resist the ideological pressures of the mass of the workers towards reformism, and to continue educating them with socialist propaganda, meanwhile paying little attention to the positive influences that mass pressure from the working class can have on the party. While making general nods towards dialectics, the view expressed so eloquently in Henry’s article is ultimately rather one-sided, largely missing the other, bottom-up side of the vanguard’s role as a medium that transmits the influence of the working class onto the party and other sections of the wider movement. Even Lenin would not have been able to play the role he did without this influence and bidirectional interplay.

What Was Actually Done?

The working class can be – and at crucial turning points often has been – to the left of even the most conscious and organized Marxist groups. Not long before the October 1917 insurrection, Lenin wrote about how to decide whether to boycott the bourgeois pre-parliament: “Class-conscious workers must take the matter into their own hands, organize the discussion, and exert pressure on ‘those at the top’ [of the Bolshevik Party].” This was not a matter of the party leaders educating the workers, but vice versa.

Around the same time, Lenin wrote on the topic of insurrection, saying that it “must rely not on conspiracy and not upon a party, but upon the advanced class… a revolutionary upsurge of the people… that turning-point in the history of the growing revolution when the activity of the advanced ranks of the people is at its height.” 

The political pressure of the mass of the workers isn’t something to be resisted or shut out by the educated Marxist leadership, but danced with, integrated, surfed like a wave. Numerous partially-correct metaphors abound, but the core idea is that there must be a dynamic exchange and productive tension. And this is precisely the whole point of the vanguard party model: establishing and maintaining a dialectical interplay between these forces. It’s not a question of a one-way transmission – and that’s exactly the factor that made Lenin’s statement in What Is To Be Done a one-sided exaggeration. It may have been useful for winning a specific argument at a specific point in time, but in later years it would prove a hindrance for those who clung to it. 

Lenin himself did not cling to it in 1917. At that time, Lenin was seen by many – both by his own comrades and by his longtime ideological opponents – as breaking with established “Leninism” and falling into a framework of “revolutionary spontaneity” and even “anarchism.” (For a good summary that cites lots of primary sources, see Marcel Liebman’s Leninism Under Lenin, Part II, Chapter 3.) 

The most likely explanation for this apparent change can be found in the different circumstances of struggle – the smaller-scale propaganda work that was necessarily the focus during the years of mostly underground and illegal work under tsarism demanded a different method of party organization than did the much more open period of relative freedom of speech and heightened mass participation linked to the gains of the February 1917 revolution that overthrew the tsar. 

This hypothesis is supported by the timing of the change, which we first see in the aftermath of the February Revolution, when Lenin proposed the April Theses. At that time he said, “We don’t want the masses to take our word for it. We are not charlatans. We want the masses to overcome their mistakes through experience.” Shortly thereafter, in May, he also said that “‘the country’ of the workers and the poor peasants… is a thousand times more leftward than the Chernovs and the Tseretelis, and a hundred times more leftward than we [Bolsheviks] are.”

This was no empty phrase-mongering on Lenin’s part. As if to illustrate his point, a worker came up to the Socialist Revolutionary leader Viktor Chernov at a July demonstration, shaking his fist and shouting, “Take power, you son-of-a-bitch, when it’s given to you!” Though these remarks were addressed to the more moderate socialists of the SRs, on this question a similar sentiment could have applied to much of the Bolshevik Party and its leadership, a significant chunk of which spent the April-to-October period rejecting the need for insurrection and the taking of power up until the last possible moment. Indeed, some important leaders refused to acknowledge its necessity until after it was already done.

The Battle of Ideas: Being Determines Consciousness 

A Marxist analysis of the question of consciousness starts with the declaration: Material being determines human consciousness – not mechanically, but as a framework for the battle over ideas. Ideas reflect material interests in society. The proletariat is “the only class that is consistently revolutionary,” as Lenin writes in State and Revolution, because its material exploitation is central to capitalism, and its only path to liberation lies in overthrowing all class-based property relations and establishing a socialist society. The working class is a product of capitalism, but it can’t fulfill its objective needs within capitalism. Therefore, the only class that has a consistent, unambiguous material interest in socialist ideas – and the potential power to bring them to fruition – is the working class.

How does this relate to Marx’s famous quote that the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class?  Ideas in a class society are a battlefield. The limitations of how far working-class consciousness can develop are not an intrinsic or static property of the class itself but a product of the balance of forces on the ideological battlefield. The dominant ideas even in working-class organizations like unions and parties – even revolutionary parties – are subject to enormous pressures. 

The more influence workers’ organizations win in society, the greater the bourgeois pressure. The union and party bureaucracies act as a transmitting medium for these pressures. Direct and indirect pressures of this sort are the reason the working class often finds it hard (though not, as in Lenin’s 1902 exaggeration, impossible) to find its way to revolutionary socialist understanding.  

It is precisely these ever-present pressures of the ideological battlefield that make the concept of a purely “spontaneous” revolution nonsensical. A conscious and organized force is needed to push back, lest these pressures knock our organizations and movements off-course in decisive and often fatal ways. One can either enter into this battle of ideas or abstain from it, but either way the idea of the movement developing on its own through its own inner logic is off the table from the start. 

What social forces exist, then, that are capable of pushing back against the influence of capitalist ideology within the working-class organizations?

If Lenin were right in 1902 that socialist consciousness must come from outside the working class, then the counterweight to the pressures visible on the Bolsheviks in 1917 would have come from some middle layers of intelligentsia. That, of course, is not what happened.

When the leadership of the Bolsheviks around Kamenev and Stalin trailed the Mensheviks in supporting liberal leaders after the February revolution, Lenin based his opposition to them on the advanced layers of the working class, the party membership, the social-democratic cadre in the factories. 

The working class in Russia was aiming for a revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and tsarism to replace it by a state based on soviets (workersʼ councils) to abolish private ownership of the means of production. That consciousness developed not merely because of intellectuals bringing such ideas to the masses or party leaders educating workers; it developed primarily out of the objective needs of the workers, and their collaborative participation in the class struggle through their own organizations. What an experienced vanguard was needed for was to enforce those ideas in the Bolshevik Party – and, through it, in society at large. 

For a Marxist understanding of the relation of forces in 1917, it’s decisive to not only allow for but to expect that the working class will develop a revolutionary-socialist consciousness, as Lenin thankfully did. Marxists armed with this outlook can then help the working class to fully enforce its interests through a well-educated vanguard and a democratic revolutionary-socialist party that is rooted in this vanguard. 

The Working Class and Revolution 

The February 1917 Russian Revolution demonstrates much about the organic revolutionary dynamics of the working class. Absolutely no party had organized, planned, prepared for, or directly led it. It came as a surprise to leaders in every corner of the political landscape, who then had to rapidly struggle to catch up. In that sense, observers were quick to describe it as “spontaneous.” Trotsky deftly articulates this (and many other features of the situation) in his History of the Russian Revolution (Volume I, Chapter 8). To take one snippet:

The theory of “spontaneousness” fell in most opportunely with the minds not only of all those gentlemen who had yesterday been peacefully governing, judging, convicting, defending, trading, or commanding, and today were hastening to make up to the revolution, but also of many professional politicians and former revolutionists, who having slept through the revolution wished to think that in this they were not different from all the rest.

But at the same time, if one looks at the slogans and policies followed by the masses, these were not improvised on the spot but show clear signs of influence from the socialist propaganda of the whole preceding period since the failed 1905 revolution. It suddenly became clear that the workers had not been asleep since that previous attempt but watching and assimilating. Furthermore, there was in fact leadership, but it came precisely from the organic “vanguard” layer of the workers themselves – those countless, nameless heroes of the movement who were quietly learning and absorbing the lessons and slogans over the past decade, weighing different ideas in their minds, semi-consciously making themselves ready to fill the role of leadership organically as soon as its need became pressing.

Of course, this partial leadership was also lacking in many ways – it was no accident, for instance, that the bourgeois liberals and their right-socialist collaborators were so easily able to co-opt the situation and place themselves at the head of the new bourgeois state despite having no role at all in the upsurge that ousted the tsar. But frankly, all parties, including the Bolsheviks, were lacking in their ability to counter and respond to this adequately. It took the return of Lenin and his April Theses to start to turn the ship around. And when it was turned, it turned decisively towards basing itself on the vanguard of the working class, bringing tens and eventually hundreds of thousands of this layer into the ranks of the Bolsheviks over the course of the year’s developments.

The true historic role of the vanguard party, then, is not to “introduce” the revolution from the outside, but to help guide it to success from within – provided it has trained, prepared, and embedded itself properly within the working-class movement in a way that makes this possible. This is the type of party Marxists should be trying to build toward. 

Contemporary Complications

As difficult and fraught as the questions were during Lenin’s time, today they are even more complicated by the overall state of the workers movement internationally. 

The “vanguard layer” today is largely missing as a distinct force in many places, including the US. There are prominent individuals, and there is the mass, but the vanguard as a coherent layer is only just starting to re-form from primordial beginnings. 

Today’s Marxists therefore have a dual task. We not only have to try to win over and consolidate the vanguard but actually help it to form in the first place by speeding the creation of wider-based working-class organizations like unions and broad left parties. Again, this does not mean that for now we set Marxism aside and put that off until the future, after the vanguard has been built up. It means we have to do both at the same time, to see them as one integrated task with multiple sides to it. This might sound impossible – to build the car while driving it, so to speak – but this is one of those times when metaphors and analogies break down, where one has to look at the situation concretely rather than relying on existing formulas. 

Those same forces of bourgeois ideology that try to stop revolutionary consciousness from developing are also trying to stop the formation of a working-class vanguard. In the union bureaucracy, for example, the rotten deals made between the bureaucrats and the bosses are rotten not only because of their content but also because of how they are secured. Top-down negotiating and backroom deal-making are ways of depriving the working class of gaining much-needed experience in active struggle for their own demands – the very types of experiences that allow a vanguard to start forming. The fight for speeding up the formation of a vanguard will be most effectively carried out with a conscious framework implemented by organized Marxists fighting for their ideas.

Brandon Madsen has been a Marxist and activist since the early 2000s, when he helped organize students at his high school in Bloomington, MN, against the Iraq War and military recruitment in schools. He moved from the US to Copenhagen, Denmark, in September 2022. He serves on the Reform & Revolution editorial board and works in the Hearing Systems labs at Technical University of Denmark (DTU). He is a member of the trade union IDA (Ingeniørforeningen i Danmark).