The vanguard of the proletariat is a Marxist notion made more famous, and relied upon heavily, by Leninism. It refers to the communist party in any society, and especially in a revolution or a post-revolutionary period. The basic Leninist thesis is that the ordinary mass of the industrial proletariat cannot come to a true consciousness of their situation, and cannot develop a fully revolutionary spirit, spontaneously and without leadership. Consequently a party of professional revolutionaries must be formed from those who do have the capacity to escape from false consciousness and ideological manipulation.
This party will raise the revolutionary consciousness of the masses, and lead them in the revolution, hence being the ‘vanguard’. The more important extension of this doctrine, in itself plausible, is that, after the revolution, there will still be a need for direction and control of the efforts of the proletariat in building the truly socialist society. Thus the initial revolutionary leadership becomes institutionalized into a dictatorship of the proletariat via the rule of a single dominant communist party. Here there is a considerable strain between the original thought of Marx and Engels and the subsequent interpretation of how a post-revolutionary society should be run, as developed by Lenin and taken to extremes by Stalin. Inside the Marxist tradition Trotsky’s theory of ‘permanent revolution’ avoids at least this institutionalization, as did Mao Zedong’s doctrine of how communism should develop in China, as best exemplified by his cultural revolution in the 1960s.
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