Why the Vanguard?

The entirety of the US left, including its most advanced organizers, is disjointed, doing their work in a variety of organizations and formations to advance only a small set of ends that they can attempt to address. As the task of the party is to create a vanguard for the working class out of these sections, Red Star emphatically believes in recruiting other communists, effective organizers, and skilled workers of all kinds into DSA to be a part of the manifestation of an American working class expression of Marxism. This party cannot be formed from the ideological commitment of a few alone, it needs the unity of those who lead in each sphere of struggle working alongside one another, to cohere a vanguard to protect the class.

Red Star Points of Unity

What is the Vanguard?

To begin, we’ll dispense with mischaracterizations around a buzzword we use readily in our Points of Unity: the vanguard. In What Is To Be Done?, Lenin uses this phrase in two ways, each of which elucidate the core uses of the idea. In the first case it is used collectively to speak of an organization at different scales of struggle, making it an analytical mantle that is bestowed upon an organization for practically leading the efforts at various scales: the working class in their country, the active revolutionary war in their country, or having the most daunting work cut out for it in the whole of the global Socialist struggle. The other definition is individually applied: a member of the vanguard is a revolutionary political actor who has developed political consciousness, who is pointed against the present political regime and in any context is able to direct complaints and discontent towards criticism and agitation against the state as-such. It is a practical, and not ideological, distinction. 

Some Marxist groups – both American Trotskyists and members of the Western Marxist tradition – have twisted the word in the modern canon, construing it as an empty counterweight to “mass” politics and drastically mishandling its meaning. This first misuse takes vanguardism to identify an ideologically-narrow set of individuals who want to secure the leadership of a political struggle. To claim being the “vanguard” in this way is to say “I lead this revolution”, and attempt to position oneself at the head of decision making to preempt struggle by guaranteeing results fall in line with their ideology. A second, more innocuous-seeming mishandling is that everyone is the vanguard, that politics is composed of the action of majorities alone, and that through thought-leadership of these majorities, the will of the people is transformed. Both of these interpretations are dishonest to the historical basis of the concept, and in each case, a conflation of the claimants’ current petty operations with the title they wish to hold. It’s not quite correct to say just any individual fighting for the working class is the vanguard, nor that every organization fighting for the working class is the vanguard. 

The first interpretation, of vanguard-as-sect, claims that any organization can take the mantle of “vanguard” merely by proclaiming it. We see the failures of this mode of operation through the long and branching history of failed American Trotskyist organizations, each of which claimed to be the vanguard with little to no connections to the broader class or socialist movement. But we can also see the acceptance of the vanguard-as-sect among reformist socialists, those who reject the vanguard out of fear of self-marginalization of the political project, and falsely contrast it to a model of so-called mass politics, a model that seeks to build an organization for the class through a stack of ever-comforting reforms out of a mistaken belief that this will inch us closer toward socialism. Both misunderstandings contribute to the same end: the marginalization of a listless project.

The second interpretation seeks to dilute the meaning of a vanguard such that it can encompass everyone. In this vision, constructing the vanguard is as simple as leaning outside our organization to tap on some mythical proletariat waiting for political activation. But this leads to an over-indexing on economistic reforms, fetishizing labor unions or tenants unions for their ability to reach the mythical, just out of reach proletariat with minimal political activation.

It is abundantly clear that Red Star does not, despite recent crowing, work to enforce an ideological sectarianism in DSA. Nor are we interested in seeing DSA stay in its current rut: a “mass organization” with no mass membership, and only limited ability to make political interventions. This piece aims to explicate our understanding and vision of a vanguardist politics that we believe will be necessary to usher the organization & US revolutionaries into any serious confrontation with capital.

Given this corrective against the anti-communist use of the word, we see that vanguard is not a label but a function. To our read, the vanguard is both present, in that the revolutionary wings of many organizations and even individuals can pass muster, but also insufficiently cohered: there are dozens of distinct struggles that mobilize organizers to be against the present state of things, but they do not operate as a vanguard, they do not operate together to combine their demands to deliver and act on the class’s grievances. Most current socialist organizing is split into disparate organizations along racial, social, and political priorities. Further, no political organization makes an active effort to transcend this lack of coordination across the left more broadly: all alliances, even in socialist organizing, are built upon a liberal framework of alignment around one minimum demand and for one action rather than the revolutionary integration of these demands into one organization. 

Revolutionary organizing in this shattered state has absolutely no hope of posing a serious challenge to the most enriched and entrenched capitalist empire known to man, but understanding this state of things leads directly to the Red Star modus operandi: if the vanguard is the organized force that can turn the discontent in all social strata into revolutionary opposition, if it is the unity of the militant and disciplined under one strategy, if it is capable of protagonizing struggles beyond reform or simple defense of the class, then we must create of ourselves a vanguard. We must draw up every revolutionizing struggle into one organization best suited for it, and consciously, continuously nurture the coordination of disparate political and social concerns into one combined fighting force. We choose to set about this by thoroughly rejecting the recent sectarian errors of US Marxists before us, and instead operating democratically within the Democratic Socialists of America, a real potential home for this vanguard-to-be that we see waiting to be cohered, to be represented in one tent and coordinated for the defense of the class.

DSA’s Political Character as the Radical Intelligentsia 

With our vocabulary sorted, there is reason to pause and examine the present nature of DSA’s ability to represent and recruit these potential vanguard actors. Have we integrated the demands of, say, the inspiring number of newly protagonized workers who have protested for the end of the genocide in Palestine? To date, we have not. In our estimation, there is an inertial listlessness of political mobilization that arises from DSA’s present strategic impasse between labor reformism, Democratic Party realignment, and a revolutionary focus. This listlessness is either born from or gives way to a common anxiety about our own character: about our present size compared to the abundant tasks to come, about our composition of organizers or lack thereof; and it is both limiting our efficacy and creating room for eclectic theories of what to do next.

It is easy, in such an environment, to fearfully make assertions around the working class as an unreachable monolith, and to treat our work as external to and disconnected from that monolith. All three of the present strategies in the impasse have, in their own ways, set aside the question of the creation and utilization of a vanguard in favor of this anxious headcanon, satisfied to joust with the windmills of mass absorption and impossible transformations of external organizations rather than concretely engage in the conditions of the class war in the United States. In reality, it is not so easy to remove oneself from the puzzle, as DSA is naturally an extension of the class character of our origin. Nascent socialism in our exact form – in WFP's exact form, in PSL’s exact form, etc – each represent the present state of the politically activated, and how could they not? We are each a portion of the real movement necessarily, there doesn’t need to be this great consternation about our character or who we must activate. There is only who we have now, who we can cohere into our forces next, and what we set about to do together. 

We do, however, have to confess to being only a portion of the American left and working class. DSA is not a to-scale representation of the working class, nor is it the Left in its entirety. It is far closer to an articulation of the shared principles of one strata of the Left: a finally-reconvening radical intelligentsia, one that has been cut off from our comrades but is now finding its footing again. DSA - both as the historical vestige of the New Left and the political home of the post-Occupy, post-Bernie left, is just this sort of formation of the intellectually radicalized. This isn’t to decry DSA, or to say none of us are working class – far from it: the political operation of members from all social classes is highly desirable and in fact necessary. Naming the class composition and make-up is intended to identify the overwhelming socioeconomic character of the organization, in order to outline a desperately needed rectification with another portion of the Left who sorely lack political representation in the organization. In any honest attempt to build a revolution, to cohere the vanguard we’ve identified, we must seek the unity of everyone who intends to protect the class.

Political actors from these ranks – and even some outright class traitors for the ranks of the bourgeoisie – have the resources to engage in careful study, and have realized the truth of the class conflict by some combination of free time, education, terror for the future, or a leftward slide of dissatisfaction with bourgeois political mobilization. The distinct shared commonality between them is that their radicalization is by choice (even if they see the political or social necessity), and not necessarily a condition of immediate livelihood.

Now, let’s briefly examine the US “middle-class”, and DSA’s place within it. “Middle-class” is a cover-up piece of political technology meant to reference those sections of workers who are supposed to have a secure future, who benefit from the consumption growth-pattern enabled by sitting as the primary (though now contested) economic engine of a world capitalist system designed for one unipole, itself. This is a strata that has somewhat enjoyed a pause in their exposure to the class-war since the New Deal era, though this deal has soured as the economic crises have compounded, and the current capitalist consolidationist logic is to open as many fronts against this secured strata as possible. The radical intelligentsia emerged when it realized that this position was untenable and contingent on the stability of the capitalist system, and DSA is self-aware of its political character as part of this class strata. This is readily apparent any time someone speaks of how DSA is made up of the “downwardly mobile” – both an identification of the reality of US decay in the present, and an admission of DSA’s hegemonic route to a radical character, one of a disaffected middle-class self-realization.

The impulse is often to shy away from this reality, or to feel guilt about it. But this is a self-defeating error that leads to currents such as anti-intellectualism, crippling white guilt and deference politics, and pessimism about DSA as a revolutionary vehicle. It is not a hindrance for DSA to contain elements of the radical intelligentsia. To engage in the socialist project willingly is a virtue; to engage at all is a virtue. It is a great value to the socialist movement to have the kinds of organizational and administrative skills born from the intelligentsia’s placement in this class position: to have lawyers, programmers, union bureaucrats, and so on, and especially to enjoy their financial contributions. We should acknowledge this and utilize these strengths for the benefit of Socialism!

The problem comes when DSA represents only this class strata, and fails to engage others. This is no new problem. Turning to Lenin again: 

The best representatives of the younger generation of the educated classes are coming over to us…A basic political and organisational shortcoming of our movement is our inability to utilise all these forces and give them appropriate work. The overwhelming majority of these forces entirely lack the opportunity of “going among the workers”, so that there are no grounds for fearing that we shall divert forces from our main work... In order to be able to provide the workers with real, comprehensive, and live political knowledge, we must have “our own people”, Social-Democrats, everywhere, among all social strata, and in all positions from which we can learn the inner springs of our state mechanism…

DSA seems to find itself guilty of the same problem Lenin argues with his economists against, though in reverse. Rather than huge strength in the trade unionists, DSA has an extremely strong basis in this “downwardly mobile” middle, in the radicalized intelligentsia born through participation in critique of a failing empire. But in similar fashion, we must work to exist in all social strata.

It’s clear DSA wants to reach the wider class that currently exists outside of ourselves. The organization, in sweeping convention resolutions, internal discourse, caucus communication, makes this incredibly clear, but what we’ve been handed is not unions to lead or militant masses to direct: we primarily have potential vanguard revolutionaries and socialists interested in becoming them. To use the strengths of the intelligentsia toward vanguardist protagonism means ensuring we jettison their associated weaknesses: moralism, social rootlessness born from long ingrained white-flight, petit-bourgeois individualism. Until DSA is able to operate past these failings, it will continue to fall short in connecting with the class outside itself. 

The Besieged Worker

The separated sector of the class we seek is the actualization of a second path to political mobilization: those political actors from the ranks of besieged workers themselves, who had no choice in the matter and are ratcheted into vanguard development by their existence being directly in opposition to the US political economy. The nature of their conflict with the state directs them into an opposition to the political regime, whether that be by exclusion from the labor pool given immigrant status, the declaration of war on their race by proxy, their nation of origin, their gender identity, or any number of intersectional combinations of these types that the increasingly white Christian nationalist state has determined are ills to be rooted out and marginalizes via a racist, misogynist, cis, settler-nationalist political system.

This second route, of organizers shaped by struggle primarily, does exist within DSA in part, but their struggle is historically marginalized by the organization. There is a mile-wide gap in the organizing coverage on a few of these intersections in particular, which happen to be the largest vectors of domestic political opposition to the US: race and internationalism. Black and brown workers’ struggles, immigrants struggles, and now the ongoing genocide in Palestine, are much larger scale, much more direct, and much more vicious conflicts at present than any given policy pressure campaign we can put ourselves up to.

To focus on these explicitly is not to commit the Third Worldist error of minimizing class struggle, nor is it going to scare off potential future recruits. It is the necessary work to rectify a historic split in the US left, to battle against a long arc of racial divide in the left that was only ever partially mediated during the 20 years of the CPUSA’s peak, which led to shaking the establishment enough that we got the McCarthyism the organized left still reels from. Let it not hold us back any longer. 

The besieged workers are not intrinsically virtuous, just as the intelligentsia are not intrinsically damned. They can tend towards a defensive mode of organizing, preoccupied with their survival and the immediate terms that can be won as a reprieve. Further, they fight uphill even in the organized left as well – marginalized by organizations who refuse their cause. This results in political underdevelopment in contrast to DSA’s refined discourse and caucus-driven political overdevelopment, dealing wholly in principles and theoretical sparring while often lacking the material reality to match. However, as conditions worsen and DSA stays the same, even this is changing: the genocide in Palestine has been a flashpoint, and spurred on a more organized and mobilized anti-imperialist left than the US has seen in decades. But DSA is being left behind by refusing to center this work, tighten our tent on anti-Zionism, or associate closely with the movement. BIPOC workers in this besieged sector in particular need a systemic change that DSA is not so far offering, so, whether actively suppressed or accidentally elided, they slip through the cracks of the organization and find other homes, or worse, find the organized Left an unsuitable vehicle for their concerns entirely. 

Unity and Protagonism

For both the besieged worker and the intelligentsia, it takes a conscious mediation with the other and a found unity to build the revolutionary movement. Our role is not to lead the besieged workers, but to arm them with our advantages while they arm us with theirs: to form the unity of the intelligentsia’s resources and knowledge with the clarity of where to direct struggle, and the urgency to carry it out. If you are facing eviction you could benefit from a tenant lawyer, and likewise the lawyer needs your grounding in direct conflict to move past study and into struggle – the vanguard emerges from such a functional unity.

To consciously combat our slippage into middle-class reformism is to change our strategy to one that acknowledges who we are, what we offer, and what we can do. It is to say, “We are the radical intelligentsia, reunified, we’re coming back into the fold. Our internal struggle and development has led us right back to the stage of conscious combat against settler-capitalism being necessary for further political effectiveness. Let us unite again and now, win.” To actively center these split-off struggles and integrate them into our program necessarily creates the vanguard who will be capable of overturning the present system. 

DSA has the seeds for the kind of unity project necessary for a correction, as it closely mirrors the creation of our own ideological shared lines. A new program, focused on reaching out to the disorganized elements of the besieged workers and making their work our own. Not to supersede their work or speak for it, nor to take their organizing forms and attempt to run them as DSA outreach, but to integrate their demands into our own, to build the points of unity necessary for the creation of a new and durable party superstructure for the working class. We must neither romanticize nor abandon those most crushed by the present order, but consciously work to center them in our program and draw them up into revolutionary action. Actively, there are clear changes DSA can embrace immediately to this end. First, the centering of race and internationalism not as the disparate concern of a committee or caucus, but as a praxis. It must become a core principle that no work deviates from and all work interconnects to, to our very core in exactly the same way as our Electoral scope brushes with every part of the organization, from NPC deliberations to the activities of chapter working groups with electeds in their city. A DSA that fights as fiercely against Black mass incarceration or the genocide in Palestine as it has for Medicare for All, and one that integrates in both directions. Reforms can be a tool for the offensive, and will be all the more effective having integrated the militancy and urgency of the advanced-by-struggle elements of the Left.

Finally, combat both the class-anxiety that plagues the organization and relegates all work towards the progressive consensus by discarding real struggle, and the class-reductionism that demands externality to our organizing and a decentering of racial concerns in favor of class-as-labor myth. DSA is a political actor, you can be a political actor – it is not so impossible as the long-digested white anxiety has made it out to be. You and your chapter can make a difference in your city, and this organization has room for all struggles to unite. The agitation of a revolution by a vanguard is built in this conscious work; not in the flipping the whole majority of the class via a slate of gradual wins, or the narrow control of an inner circle delivering the most perfect statements and precise orders, but in direct intervention into and support of struggle that strengthens both the organization and that struggle.

This relationship between the cadres of both the theoretically and practically opposed is the idea of the revolutionary integration of the “advanced elements” we’ve expressed in our Points of Unity – that is, workers and worker organizations who are already opposed to the US being brought up into the revolutionary struggle by the effort of the vanguard. All organizations represent a broad commitment to certain demands or prefigurative principles, and the task of the vanguard party is to find the strongest possible demands that already exist, and tie them into the demand for revolution. If the vanguard is to become the weapon of the class, the tool they entrust to organize its liberation, then it must represent them and their struggles – it must protagonize the sections of each class who are ready to be agitated and connect them into the political realm.

The party that must be, the party everyone in DSA is now for and in the process of shedding our old roots towards, will only come about from correcting the historical racial and class-strata divergence of Socialist consciousness in the US left, and then using this as a springboard to the unity and revolutionary consciousness of the whole class. DSA’s new partyism will begin to take shape if it can rectify the shear cut through the middle of the US left along these divides and begin to operate as the organized will of the working class in full-formation. Our task is clear: unite the opposition to the state of things, strengthen ourselves together, and point ourselves at the enemy.

Further Discussion

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