The Fractured Vanguard

When you mention the word “vanguard” or talk about a “vanguard party” people imagine you want to build some kind of tiny sect on the margins of the working class. The dictionary definition of vanguard is “a group of people leading the way in new developments or ideas” or “the foremost part of an advancing army or naval force”. A vanguard exists in every class whether organised into a party or not. Building a real working class “vanguard” party means engaging in mass politics to win over the already existing vanguard, to organise and educate them, preparing them to lead a revolt against capitalism.

At the moment this organic vanguard is fractured, atomised and separated - not just from one another but separated from socialist politics. Red Network activist James O’Toole coined the phrase “fractured vanguard” and it accurately describes the state of our class at the moment and helps outline the tasks ahead. There needs to be a “merger” between socialist politics and the best fighters in the working class. This merger must include recognition of and attempts to overcome the “fractured vanguard” - which means fighting ideas, strategies and tactics that stand in the way of bringing the fractured vanguard out of it’s pre-party state and into class conscious organisation.

This understanding - of the fractured vanguard and the necessity of a merger - is what distinguishes real revolutionary politics from sect politics. It’s a reminder that real revolutionary politics is mass politics, even when our forces are small we must have an orientation towards mass politics. That means building in the main unions, standing in elections to promote socialist politics and engaging in broad united front movements. But it also means understanding that revolutionary politics should aim to be populist.

The Irish working class is made up of those who are first to call a strike but also those who scab, with most workers sitting somewhere in the middle. Alienation, atomisation, feelings of powerlessness and different experiences of struggle, all while living in a capitalist culture swamped with ruling class ideas, impacts workers differently. There are always advanced, middle and backward workers.

The unevenness in consciousness in the working class has nothing to do with formal education - many poorer workers know to never pass a picket line, something many “educated” people in the bureaucracies of our trade unions seem to have forgotten. You can have class consciousness without formal education. There are many well educated white collar workers who don’t care about Irish neutrality for example. For us consciousness is about class consciousness.

Even in the same worker’s head there are contradictory ideas. There are elements of what the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci called “good sense” - ideas that represent a correct, even if partial understanding, of how the system oppresses us. And there are elements of “common sense” - unquestioned ruling class ideas, those that aid the system. But even advanced workers don’t automatically combine our correct “good sense”, correct but partial insights, into an overall understanding of the capitalist system. You need a party to fight for that.

Good sense and common sense are “mashed” together in varying proportions in each worker’s head and in varying proportions in the different layers of the working class - advanced, middle ground and backward. Workers can also change positions - those that have been beaten can retreat to the back, those that were backward can be compelled by circumstances to fight and then find themselves disoriented, reaching out, grasping for the correct forms of consciousness to aid their fight. The vanguard is a process - it’s not just one set group of workers.

Workers who are already won over to revolutionary socialism need to use authority they’ve won in struggle to lead other workers to a socialist understanding - this growth of a conscious minority is vital in building towards a people power revolution that can actually challenge the Irish state. Without a conscious socialist minority organically leading the working class from inside our own ranks no future Irish revolution can ever succeed. The socialists need to be merged with the organic vanguard.

To repeat: this organic vanguard exists whether you organise it or not. The choice is to leave that vanguard fractured, separated and subordinate to ruling class ideas or to organise and enlighten it. In the past socialists described the different levels of consciousness in the working class using the idea of “circles of awareness” - firstly, there was the class conscious socialist working class, next you had what they called the “worker movement” which was made up of all those workers who were fighting back but not yet socialists, then you had the rest of the working class followed by all those oppressed by capitalism.

The working class was seen as the class that by virtue of its exploitation and power over production would be the most receptive to socialist ideas. Workers had to be at the heart of every movement against the system. Socialists had to argue for the centrality of workers in all movements. The job of socialists was to increase the size of the organic socialist minority within the working class by recruiting the organic vanguard that already existed in every worker movement. If socialism was articulated by workers who were seen as the natural leaders in workplaces and communities then those ideas would be transformed, gain authority and become more attractive to other workers.

The process of vanguard formation includes the battle of political parties. We organise a party to aid the emergence of the vanguard from a fractured state into coherence. Other parties intervene to keep the working class in a “pre-party” state. Even on the left there are parties that consciously and unconsciously disorganise the working class. The Russian revolutionary Lenin in his short book “Left Wing Communism An Infantile Disorder” wrote:

“It is common knowledge that the masses are divided into classes, that the masses can be contrasted with classes only by contrasting the vast majority in general, regardless of division according to status in the social system of production, with categories holding a definite status in the social system of production; that as a rule and in most cases—at least in present-day civilised countries - classes are led by political parties; that political parties, as a general rule, are run by more or less stable groups composed of the most authoritative, influential and experienced members, who are elected to the most responsible positions, and are called leaders. All this is elementary. All this is clear and simple.”

Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael represent the capitalist bosses, the developers and landlords. Labour represents the union bureaucracies - timid, traitorous and torn between tailing the ruling class and the working class. Fianna Fáil fight for the class they represent. Fine Gael too. Labour betrays the working class in the name of the union bureaucracies and Labour’s middle class, careerist politicians.

Sometimes a disparity exists between the class composition of a party and the class it truly represents. For example, Margaret Thatcher was the daughter of a greengrocer, she was “petty bourgeois”, middle class. But she was a ruthless warrior on behalf of British capitalism. Her politics and entire ideological framework were in service to the capitalist class. Antonio Gramsci wrote about how the political leaders of a class could be recruited from the pool of regular intellectuals or from the “organic intellectuals” - intellectuals from the ranks of the class itself.

Leadership is vital - somebody has to call a strike, write the flyers, call meetings, take on the ideas of our class enemies. As Lenin wrote: “Not a single class in history has achieved power without producing its political leaders, its prominent representatives able to organise a movement and lead it. And the Russian working class has already shown that it can produce such men and women.”

Hierarchies exist under capitalism and within the working class. There are negative and positive hierarchies. Management and union hierarchies exist to prevent vanguard formation. But without leadership strikes fail. Without leadership protests don’t get organised. That the most farsighted and class conscious working class people should unite to fight for socialist ideas has been a staple of the socialist movement since Karl Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto in 1847. He wrote:

“The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.”

But those who hold socialist ideas and the “most advanced and resolute” workers aren’t always the same people. The left has to fight to make it so that the advanced workers are socialists and can exercise a pull on other workers. Socialist ideas need to merge with the advanced workers and merge the advanced workers with one another. In Ireland now most workers who fight aren’t yet socialist and the left is often “external” to struggles of the working class, supporting the workers from the outside. This has been true on many of the strikes that have happened over the last decade including at Thomas Cooks, Coca Cola and the MTL dock strike - up to the Debenhams strike during Covid lockdown and the Iceland occupations. The picket line is where most of these workers first met socialists.

There are some exceptions - the great water movement was initiated by the socialist left. The movement grew through direct action in the working class estates, organised both by activists who had no previous political affiliation and those of us who were members of parties. The “Right2Water” umbrella, which included unions and left parties, gave a focus to all the anger in the estates and enabled us to get over 100,000 out to protest on a dozen occasions.

But we had no transmission belt into the unions. Such a transmission belt, made up of socialist activists spread across the rank and file of all the unions, could have fought for the water movement to connect with wider economic and political dissatisfaction and mobilise strike actions in defiance of the water charges, even challenging the anti-worker 1990 Industrial Relations Act.

The movement opened a window of opportunity to escalate to a wider challenge to Irish capitalism but the lack of socialist, organic worker leaders in every workplace placed limits on how far such a mass movement could go. The movement became a site of battle between different political forces who all could be judged from how they aided, deflected or opposed the necessary process of vanguard formation.

The union leaders wanted the movement to tail Sinn Féin, thereby curtailing vanguard formation and diverting the movement into safe channels - the election of a left reformist (but still capitalist) government. Parties like People Before Profit and the Socialist Party (as the Anti Austerity Alliance) lowered their sights and stood in elections as water charges candidates, failing to merge the emerging vanguard with socialist politics. The fractured vanguard remained fractured, reflected in loose political formations that lost new members as quickly as they won them.

In fact in the case of People Before Profit the “pre-party” state of the fractured vanguard was imported into definitions of their own party as a “broad space” and “non-revolutionary”. Their unconscious role was to capture the potential vanguard and trap it in an early developmental stage - and keep it there. Workers who grew frustrated with this would leave as individuals and fall into inactivity. There was no revolutionary force that engaged in real mass politics - the water movement and the subsequent elections - in order to aid the fractured vanguard and the process of vanguard formation.

Sectarian or ultra left stances taken by various small socialist groups were cut off from vanguard formation. They refused to aid the broader movement failing to connect broad work to the necessity of vanguard formation, or even understanding vanguard formation as a complex organic process. The “external” and episodic nature of the connection between the socialist left and the working class prevented the escalation of the mass movement - but outside of the immediate needs of the movement the “fracturing” increased as struggle fell back. Advanced members of the working class expressed dissatisfaction with the establishment at the ballot box in 2016 and afterwards working class mobilisations dramatically fell away. Many workers who had been at the forefront of struggle now dropped back, some even opened up to the far right in their demoralisation.

Imagine this process of “blocking” of vanguard formation taking place in a revolutionary situation. The promise many left groups make (particularly People Before Profit) is that the intensity of struggle will automatically lead the working class to revolutionary conclusions. But this has never been the case in history. If the working class enters a revolutionary situation without a class conscious expression of its own interests the result has always been defeat. The blocking of vanguard formation evident in the water movement and subsequent years, if repeated during a revolutionary process would have devastating consequences for our class.

This is evident if you compare the Russian Revolution of 1917 to the German Revolution of 1919. The Bolsheviks had spent 20 years building up a reputation as the best class conscious fighters in the Russian working class. Lenin also wrote that in no other country had the revolutionaries spent decades exposing the middle class left. The Russian workers recovered quickly from the disorientation of the war and the Bolsheviks became one with the most militant workers over the course of the 1917 revolt.

By contrast in Germany the working class was sold out by its own socialist leaders, who supported the war effort in 1914. No one had built a revolutionary organisation and even the best activists, like Rosa Luxemburg, attacked Lenin’s conception of the vanguard party. In many pre-war polemics Luxemburg defended the Mensheviks against Lenin. When the Germans eventually formed a revolutionary party it was raw and inexperienced, took an ultra-left attitude to participation in the major unions and couldn’t restrain a premature uprising. Thousands paid with their lives and the subsequent course of German politics led to the rise of fascism.

Over the austerity years here in Ireland the socialist left built an electoral base in particular working class communities which mostly involved passive working class support. But that doesn’t take away from the clear task ahead - of using any electoral profile we can win to leverage struggle and recruit working class leaders. The failure of the mass movements of 2008 to 2017 to break through, the drop in struggle and subsequent swing to the right, saw some on the far left move to ultra left rejections of mass politics or to the embracing of liberal identity politics as a substitute for Marxist politics.

This isn’t new - despair always takes hold of the left when the working class retreats from activity. Reformism, ultra leftism and identity politics are all forms of despair because they represent pessimism about the viability of the task of vanguard formation within the working class. They all block vanguard formation. Many of the best workers are not yet socialists, while many of the best socialists are not workers. This demonstrates the need to return to the “merger theory”. The merger theory was advanced as a key idea in the socialist movement before the split between reformists and revolutionaries. In 1845, in his book “The Condition of the Working Class in England”, Frederick Engels wrote:

“Hence it is evident that the working-men’s movement is divided into two sections, the Chartists and the Socialists. The Chartists are theoretically the more backward, the less developed, but they are genuine proletarians all over, the representatives of their class. The Socialists are more far-seeing, propose practical remedies against distress, but, proceeding originally from the bourgeoisie, are for this reason unable to amalgamate completely with the working-class. The union of Socialism with Chartism, the reproduction of French Communism in an English manner, will be the next step, and has already begun. Then only, when this has been achieved, will the working-class be the true intellectual leader of England. Meanwhile, political and social development will proceed, and will foster this new party, this new departure of Chartism.”

The Chartist movement declined after 1848. Most British socialists at the time were “utopian socialists” like Robert Owen. The mass movement of “genuine proletarians” failed because it didn’t have socialist politics. The socialists, on the other hand, were mostly “bourgeois” and incapable of connecting socialist ideas to the day to day needs of the working class. The separation of the working class from socialist ideas weakened both.

Lenin’s “What Is To Be Done?” was a call for the merger. He wrote: “Hence, we had the spontaneous awakening of the working masses, their awakening to conscious life and conscious struggle, and a revolutionary youth, armed with Marxist theory and straining towards the workers.” Lenin clarified his thoughts in a letter from the same year: “In order to take the lead in whatever goes on in the workers’ midst, it is necessary to be able to have access to all quarters, to know very many workers… The committee should, therefore, include… all the principal leaders of the working-class movement from among the workers themselves.”

We need to discard ideas that damage the emergence of the vanguard out of its fractured state. We need to reject any idea which implies that this happens automatically. This just leads to downplaying the need for recruiting and training up working class leaders and creates a left that remains in the hands of non-working class layers. We can’t play down socialist ideas if our job is to enlighten and inspire other workers to fight for and articulate our vision.

This framework - the idea of merging the socialists with the working class vanguard, the idea of focusing on organic leaders and the idea of a “fractured vanguard” should act as a framework to inform our attitudes to class struggle. This transforms your approach to your day to day work and engagement with social movements. When you take an action, protest or stand in elections you have to ask “am I conducting this work in a way that aids the merger of socialist politics and the advanced workers?” We have to insert all day to day work into the framework of aiding the process of vanguard formation - by engaging in struggle and by being honest about our revolutionary politics.

This is why the Red Network adopted a party programme that uses the minimum/maximum method. Minimum demands indicate the immediate fight you are going to undertake alongside the working class, whereas the maximum demands indicate where you want that fight to lead. This approach forces you to engage with the necessary moments of vanguard formation - mass work and revolutionary politics combined. The Red Network doesn’t make the mistake a million and one sects have made - we don’t think our small group is the “vanguard” - we are a political force that aims to do everything we can to assist vanguard formation.

The organic vanguard of the working class in Ireland is a “fractured vanguard” - fractured ideologically, politically, organisationally - broken into working class individuals in dozens of groups, parties, unions and spread across many campaigns. Many workers out there right now think that sitting back and voting in Sinn Féin will challenge the capitalist establishment. The level of class struggle is very low. The overall level of class consciousness and combativity is low too. But we have to prepare for any coming leftward swing of the pendulum of struggle.

The fractured vanguard doesn’t exercise a pull on the middle ground. This means the backward workers are loud at the moment. When the advanced workers exercise a pull on the middle ground they can marginalise reactionary voices. The fractured vanguard is prey to capitalist and petty bourgeois (middle class) influences. We need our own voice. The Red Network knows that the advanced workers are out there. They have not yet been won over to socialist politics. They are atomised and fractured.

But the working class is objectively the most powerful class in history. The whole system is in our hands. We need to awaken our class and fight to build a real vanguard party that engages in mass politics and involves thousands of organic worker leaders inspiring others to fight until capitalism is no more. It’s going to take hard work to get there. But workers aren’t afraid of that.