The Vanguard and Democratic Centralism

by Rick Gunderman

Successful revolutionary activism requires the all-around strength and unity of the forces of the people. These forces can be looked at as comprising of three parts, each with its own contributions to make – the masses of people at large, the organized masses in popular, democratic organizations, and the vanguard leadership.

The masses are largely apolitical. They are content to go about their lives without concerning themselves too much with politics, instead limiting themselves to their immediate surrounding and conditions. As such, they are prone to vacillations, supporting whichever idea or person sounds best at the given moment.

The masses of people are mobilized for revolutionary action by campaigns. Petitions, demonstrations, pickets, recreational events, film screenings, pamphleteering, postering – all of these are means by which the masses of people can be injected with revolutionary energy. With this energy, many choose to join mass organizations.

Mass organizations can work around a single campaign and be expedient, or they can be firmly established, ostensibly permanent and working on many campaigns surrounding a single idea or cause.

Mass organizations are where the people who wish to learn about political struggle and activism go. This is because there is no time when the reality of class society is made more apparent than in the heat of battle. It is where a progressive and revolutionary consciousness is developed, where activists can see the bankruptcy of class collaborationism and see the necessity for prolonged, principled struggle of the working and oppressed peoples.

It is where the people can be organized and mobilized, and in the process they learn to take up leadership and develop all of their skills. It is where leadership is made.

It is from this leadership that the central vanguard is composed. The vanguard is made up of those activists with the most experience, the broadest connections among the organized and unorganized masses, and as a consequence of this, the most advanced and developed political consciousnesses.

Anarchists reject this model because it is supposedly “undemocratic”. In their view, only mass organizations should exist, and their purpose is rarely seen as being to provide leadership. Rather, they are to be the source of all power in future society – or rather, they are to be the force that prevents any power from being had by anybody.

So as not to digress, the anarchist vision of a perfect society will not be addressed in depth. General opposition to authority, however, must be dealt with briefly.

Since the demise of the First International, anti-authoritarians has defined itself as the rejection of all authority. In this view, nobody should be able to compel any other person to do anything against their will. Everybody should be free to do whatever it is that they wish, so long as it does not harm another.

In his iconic work, On Authority, Friedrich Engels deals with this undeveloped, primitive view of social relations. His argument is essentially that any time there is a combined action of individuals, the absolute autonomy of the individual must to some degree or another be subordinated to the general will of the group. Engels asks:

Everywhere combined action, the complication of processes dependent upon each other, displaces independent action by individuals. But whoever mentions combined action speaks of organisation; now, is it possible to have organisation without authority?

Engels answers with an emphatic no. The organization of multitudes of people into a series of tasks, each dependent upon the other for the successful completion of the overall goal, requires that each individual submit herself or himself to the task they have been assigned. This task can be assigned in a variety of ways, some ways with democratic character and others with autocratic character, but it does not alter the necessity of the task’s fulfilment to the overall goal.

Engels uses various examples to illustrate the absurdity of the anti-authority bend of the anarchists. Referring to railways:

Here…the co-operation of an infinite number of individuals is absolutely necessary, and this co-operation must be practised during precisely fixed hours so that no accidents may happen. Here…the first condition of the job is a dominant will that settles all subordinate questions, whether this will is represented by a single delegate or a committee charged with the execution of the resolutions of the majority of persona interested.

In either case there is a very pronounced authority. Moreover, what would happen to the first train dispatched if the authority of the railway employees over the Hon. passengers were abolished?

But the necessity of authority, and of imperious authority at that, will nowhere be found more evident than on board a ship on the high seas. There, in time of danger, the lives of all depend on the instantaneous and absolute obedience of all to the will of one.

As Engels heavily infers, the breakdown of order, and particularly the authority that characterizes it, always comes with the threat of unnecessary danger to peoples’ lives. Another inferable position of Engels is that anybody who has ever worked with more than one other human being should be instantly aware of the absurdity of the anti-authority fixation.

Does this mean that Engels and the socialists fetishize authority? Quite the contrary! Engels admits that, “all socialists are agreed that the political state, and with it political authority, will disappear as a result of the coming social revolution, that is, that public functions will lose their political character and will be transformed into the simple administrative functions of watching over the true interests of society.”

The social revolution draws the people in. The people are organized into mass organizations, they learn politics, they elevate themselves to leadership, and before long all of society is buzzing with revolutionary energy. The masses of people evolve into a thoroughly advanced, revolutionary force when they are all or virtually all organized. After a long process of education, campaigning and mobilization, full of varied experiences and requiring the utmost patience and devotion from all those involved, every person is eventually capable of performing the administrative tasks needed for society to function.

A coherent, logical, scientific vision for the development of revolutionary society into an ultimate classless, stateless society. To Engels, this represented the “conversion of political rule over men into an administration of things and a direction of processes of production – that is to say, the “abolition of the state”, about which recently there has been so much noise.”

If Engels’ logic is to be considered sound, that authority is unavoidable until all people are capable of collectively managing society without a division between the leaders and the led, then the anarchist obsession with authority loses its relevance to any serious political movement.

However, as with all central leadership, the vanguard runs the risk of corruption. There is every chance that a vanguard leadership, no matter how pure in origin or intent, if left on its own will develop into a despotic clique of autocrats. This is indisputable – the leaders, to be good leaders, must always be connected to and a part of the masses at large.

There is a structure capable of ensuring the greatest reach of democracy with the most coherent leadership. This is the model of democratic centralism.

Democratic centralism works in a very simple way. In any organization, the rank-and-file elect their leadership from among themselves. They keep this leadership constantly under their watch, issue principled and comradely criticism, and have the power of instant recall.

The leadership is bound by the decisions of the rank-and-file, often expressed in conventions or congresses of the membership. The leadership does the day-to-day work of the organization and ensures that the decisions of the central convention/congress are carried out at all levels of the organization. The leadership is not a source of power or arbitrary authority – it is the force behind the authority of the membership at large, overseeing the implementation of their decisions.

Democratic centralism is not a model exclusive to the vanguard, but can apply to mass organizations as well. Leadership is democratically elected at all levels of the organization, ideally based on their ability and will to lead, and they are always subordinate to the decisions of the membership.

This, the anti-authoritarians would have us do away with. In favour of what? Rarely is anything offered as an alternative, but when it is it usually revolves around the idea that mass organizations can function without defined leadership.

Have these individuals ever been members of an organization? Every organization requires that somebody does work in order for it to function. Every organization requires that decisions be made and plans be formed in kind. Every organization requires that somebody, whether one individual or a committee, oversees the implementation of decisions. You cannot have organization without having some variety of leadership and authority. That is to say, the authority to enforce democratically-reached decisions.

The children of Western society, reared with a thoroughly bourgeois education, are taught the inviolability and indisputability of individualism. They may pay lip service to the words of fictional characters, such as “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one”, but veritably the core philosophy of Western society is to look out for number one.

With this view, a surprising number of individuals have shown the ability to do mental gymnastics. They get jobs working with innumerable numbers of other people; they may take public transit which requires some amount of co-operation and respect from all riders; or they may drive on roads where they must show deference to the speed limit, the lanes and the mandated direction of traffic; they absorb media created by other people; they eat food grown and often prepared by others; they go in and out of buildings built by others; they wait in lines while other people are served before them; they cross roads when it is indicated to be safe; and often, doing this requires that they surrender some of their resources (i.e. money) in order to procure that which they need.

And yet after all this, they exalt themselves as completely sovereign individuals, living in a bubble, their will unrestrained by anything at all.

This may be an extreme interpretation of the anti-authoritarian consciousness, and it may be more philosophical than an explanation of what a vanguard is normally would require, but it highlights the fundamental issue that most have with the vanguard and democratic centralist models – that they are too “authoritarian”.

The petit-bourgeoisie, whether they actually do or not, aspires to work individually. And why should they not? Their nature as a class is rooted in individual competition and in the fantastical illusion of being one’s “own boss”. Why should they conceive of the importance of collective activity?

Those who have had to work for other people, on the other hand, should be fully aware of the value of co-operation and collective activity. In a sense, it becomes a matter of grasping one’s own insignificance and making peace with it. That is something that most petit-bourgeois individuals will roundly fail at, but something that genuine revolutionaries have no problem with.

What does this have to do with the vanguard? When one can let go of their own over-inflated sense of self, they are able to effectively place themselves in the political struggle. It leaves their development from apolitical and apathetic to organized and learning, and ultimately to experienced and wise. Somebody who has not shed her or his obsession with resisting authority is unsuitable to participate in any organized action, let alone lead it.

As such, anti-authoritarians confine themselves to a position of permanent opposition. They best they can do is be a sometimes-logical (but rarely so) voice in the lower ranks of a mass movement, muse on sometimes-valuable (but rarely so) philosophical questions of personal lifestyle decisions like polyamory, and offer sometimes-comradely (but rarely so) criticism of the organization, its line and its leadership.

In order for the vanguard model and democratic centralism to make sense, juvenile and obsessive anti-authoritarianism needs to be rejected in favour of dealing with actual political realities and actual social relations.

Mass Campaigns as an Apparatus for Broadening the Struggle

by Rick Gunderman

The success of every revolutionary movement is at the mercy of its ability to rally large numbers of people behind it. Mass organizations give the people a way to take direct action in a democratic way for causes they wish to take up. On their own, however, mass organizations are still only a means for the core activist vanguard to connect with non-political people and bring them into the struggle.

The simple reality of the matter is that non-political people have existed everywhere, in all phases of history, and it is the furthest thing from a simple task to change their beliefs. Decades worth of effort in many socialist countries still left considerable segments of the population apolitical. Plainly put, these are the people who are content to go about their lives as long as there is political and economic stability.

When there is stability, it is less likely that large swaths of the population will take up political struggle. Political struggle materializes when the people rise up against those aspects of their conditions that they cannot tolerate, and conversely political complacency is the norm  when large enough numbers of people can tolerate their conditions.

One major aspect of the manufactured satisfaction with capitalism is the efforts, especially of neoliberal, ultraconservative and libertarian ideologues, to convince the people that capitalism is the only way. The people are hypnotized by their claims that socialism has “failed” and that capitalism has proven itself to be immutable, unshakeable and  unequivocal.

In order that progressive activists may shake up this false sense of permanency, it is necessary to be cautious, tactful and discreet. Preaching the revolutionary theory of  Marxism-Leninism to people who may think that a parliamentary cabinet is a piece of furniture where legislators store their canned goods is about as useful as trying to fly with cardboard wings.

Explaining all the complexities of the communist movement’s history, philosophy, economics, political structures and the capitalist class’s unceasing disinformation campaign against it cannot be done in one short sitting. Even sustained efforts at educating somebody on this topic are useless if not a part of the learner’s personal growth as a class-conscious fighter for social justice and working class power.

Apolitical people can sometimes be deaf to any talk of politics, but other times they prove to be very open-minded as long as the facts add up and the argument is rational. Focusing on hard, readily verifiable facts and offering intelligent but easy to understand solutions that can be campaigned for is the best way to draw otherwise apolitical people into a political struggle.

This is also the best way to win over to the communist movement people who have pre-existing political inclinations. By solidly demonstrating good leadership in the mass organizations based on decidedly Marxist-Leninist principles and appealing to the common beliefs of the organization’s members, the non-communists can see with their own eyes the effectiveness of an activist armed with genuine revolutionary theory. This offers the best chance to attract even the most committed anarchists, social democrats and libertarians to our ideology.

Put in the simplest terms, actions speak louder than words. Chanting complex and esoteric political slogans with convoluted and tangled theories that make sense only to political science graduate students will advance a movement no further beyond campus pubs. The core vanguard of activists must be have the deepest and most composite understanding of Marxist-Leninist theory to help them guide the struggle for social justice and working class power, but only for this purpose. As a tool for advancing the mass political struggle it is virtually useless.

This is not to say that the masses should not be exposed to communism and some aspects of Marxist-Leninist theory. On the contrary, it is necessary for the relevance of the vanguard to the current struggle and for the constant replenishment of the vanguard with new leadership.

This is one of the major purposes for building the mass organizations, from the vanguard’s perspective. Those in the vanguard do not cherish their leadership as some sort of noble title. They know that their leadership is only legitimate only so long as they are actively carrying out the duties democratically assigned to them by those they are responsible to. While it is important for the leadership to retain stable working relations with each other, the vanguard leadership must keep in mind the value of refreshing their ranks as often as possible.

If the core vanguard leadership is composed of the most advanced and dedicated activists, it is self-apparent how developing the mass organizations is a matter of developing good leadership skills among the people. When all of the people are capable of good leadership, there ceases to be a distinction between the leaders and the led. The ultimate result – far off as it may be – is all of the people running society collectively.

For the replenishment of the vanguard, strong mass organizations are needed. How do the ranks of the mass organizations get replenished, then?

In a word, mass campaigns. A mass organization is not just an organization of the masses – it is an organization for the masses. They must be composed of, as well as constantly among, the people. They must be public and visible, able to attract attention by calling on the people to struggle for the betterment of all of humanity.

A student union federation cannot just stay silent and unperceived to the students it claims to represent. It must get the students involved in campaigns to demand lower tuition fees, better learning facilities and student housing, access to well-paying jobs, a university administration that solicits their opinions, etc. It must ask the students what they want, and as a democratic body reach conclusive plans of action in the name of the students.

To build a student union, clubs and student associations under their umbrella must always be expanded. Their executive and legislative institutions must be democratic to the core, with expansive representation and direct democracy employed and expanded on a constant basis.

Another example is the Palestine liberation movement. Organizations exist that are dedicated to this goal, and for their campaign’s goal to be achieved they must always be out agitating among the people. The activists in the Palestine liberation movement must be patient and sensitive to the masses, working to educate without aggravating the wrong segments. At the same time, they must be vigilant of a powerful, well-organized, resourceful enemy – the Zionist movement. Their task is, through their campaigns, to win the masses away from Zionist ideology and toward the ideology of national liberation.

However the tactics are put into exact practice, the paramount determinant in a student union’s success as a mass organization is its drive to engage every single student in their campaigns for the betterment of all students. The most interested students will become leaders in the student union, building it as a mass organizations. These leaders, if exposed to a core vanguard with a solid revolutionary theory, will be of the highest quality and will be worthy to lead the whole movement to victory.

It is important to understand that although the vanguard is in the leadership, a true revolutionary movement vests all power in the masses – that is, those masses that will participate. The mass organization, in a revolutionary society, is the source of all power. The vanguard simply serves to direct the masses in their development – they are there to elevate the masses.

If a revolutionary movement can be thought of as a tree, the masses are the tree’s sustenance– sunlight, soil nutrients, water, etc. The mass organizations are the leaves and the roots, the means by which the tree absorbs its sustenance and converts it into energy. The vanguard is the trunk and the branches, channelling all of these processes to ensure the healthy development of the tree.

As inexact a metaphor as this undoubtedly is, it shines light on what role the vanguard, the organized masses and the masses at large all play in revolutionary activism. If the tree hopes to absorb sustenance, its leaves and roots must be healthy and open to input – but also capable of filtering out that which harms it.

*originally written and posted on Facebook on January 12, 2012.

Build the People’s Mass Democratic Organizations

by Rick Gunderman

In those countries where organizing is legal enough to allow it, the first task in starting political struggle is to form a core group of leaders that are capable of rallying a periphery of supporters into action. This core vanguard must be politically advanced, class conscious, dedicated to social justice, but above all else must have strong, deep-rooted connections with the broad masses of people. In this way, the vanguard does not condemn itself to political obscurity and irrelevance, but exists with and for the people.

It is of great importance that those in the vanguard are able to effectively marshal people, especially their supporters, into action. When the vanguard is capable of this, this periphery of supporters must be shaped into various mass organizations that are capable of attracting and mobilizing ever-larger numbers of people to achieve political goals.

Mass organizations are the peoples’ progressive forces in the struggle against capitalism, imperialism and reaction. It is in these organizations, where large amounts of people can unite on a common basis to work for a specific and defined set of goals, that the foundations for a socialist society are laid.

Mass organizations are where the people learn what it means to challenge and confront the powerful, and thereby develop class-consciousness in a practical way. It is where information related to political struggle is disseminated and discussed, and the progressive movement as a whole is strengthened by this collective generation of knowledge. It is where democracy is learned and applied, where the will of the people is clearly expressed in concrete ways.

It is not out of thin air that mass organizations appear – they appear naturally in the course of political struggle. This is true universally, although from one country and one historical period to the next they can take on greatly different forms.

Sometimes mass organizations are started by experienced and dedicated activists, other times by regular people inspired to take up arms for a particular cause. Sometimes full-time activists and casual activists work together. This does not change the nature of mass organizations – they are always the seeds of mass, socialist democracy. Whether they yield a good harvest, however, depends entirely on the quality of their leadership.

An example of what mass organizations are and how they work can be found in labour unions. Labour unions can encapsulate whole workplaces of people into a single democratic unit, where all workers are members and where their will is elucidated and their opinions constantly solicited.

The labour union can work for its membership, using their funds not only in the struggle to better their members’ lives but to enrich them as well. Many unions provide or subsidize recreational activities and vacations alongside housing and pensions for their members.

The quality of leadership of a labour union is directly correlated to their success as mass organizations. A union is successful when its members are paid fair wages for their labour, when its members are actively involved in both the decision-making process and the social life of the union, and when it is constantly striving for the education and consciousness development of its members.

A labour union is not successful when its leadership exists above and disconnected from its membership. When its leadership collaborates with the capitalist bosses, when its members are hardly or not at all involved in the decision-making process, and when it fails to bring benefits and good wages to its members, the union is a moribund shell of a mass organization.

Another example of a mass organization is Greenpeace, an international group for environmental activism. Greenpeace unites environmentalists of all political stripes for action on issues like climate change, nuclear waste, whaling and deforestation.

For Greenpeace to be a successful mass organization, its members need to be active participants not only in their actions but in their decision-making process as well. Its publications must be regular, informative and free of charge. The path to irrelevancy is lined with solicited donations and bumper stickers as the primary means of member engagement.

Labour unions and environmental groups alike are flexible and stable mass organizations with broad, long-term goals. Conversely, there are mass organizations that are impermanent and narrow in focus.

One such example is the historic movement for women’s suffrage. While the women themselves were often politically involved on multiple fronts, they united on the basis of winning the franchise for the female sex. Upon winning this, the women’s suffrage movement lots its raison d’être and became a chapter in history.

Impermanency in no way negates the value of these types of mass organizations – although the term “mass movement” may be more accurate if they are not united in a single organization. Rather, they can be a great impetus for expanding the progressive movement as a whole. The women’s suffrage movement was not a fly-by-night act of rebellion, but a part of the wider movement for women’s liberation. From the women’s suffrage movement emerged many great feminists like Nellie McClung, Alice Paul and Emmeline Pankhurst. 

This shows that mass organizations can either be permanent and broadly focused, or temporary and narrowly focused, depending on exact goals and purposes.

In either case, the core vanguard must clearly understand the purpose of mass organizations as they relate to the long-term goal of achieving mass socialist democracy. Mass organizations are the fertile ground where socialism grows. They are the fountains from whose heads spring the waters of democracy. If the core vanguard is the roof of the house of socialism, the mass organizations are the foundation, the frame, the bricks and the mortar.

It is a mistake to view mass organizations as the guiding force in the revolutionary process, or to believe that they need no guiding force at all. Every revolution needs plans, direction, leadership and the ability to replace old state institutions with new and radically different ones. This is the role the core vanguard fills.

A car could not run without an engine, and that engine cannot run without gas. A revolution cannot succeed without a vanguard, but the vanguard cannot succeed without the masses. Herein lies the reason for the importance of mass work, and also of maintaining a solid and effective vanguard.

*originally written and posted on Facebook on January 11, 2012.