For a Leninist Vanguard Party!

(Quote of the Week)

In a 1955 letter written after the release of a new volume by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels titled Letters to Americans, James P. Cannon, the founder of American Trotskyism, underlined the necessity of forging a vanguard party. Cannon especially polemicized against defectors from the then-revolutionary Socialist Workers Party who sought to misuse the authority of Engels against Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin. In his defense of Engels and Lenin, Cannon pointed to the August 1914 betrayal by the German Social Democracy, which supported its ruling class in the interimperialist First World War. He stressed that the course of history demonstrated the correctness of Lenin’s struggle to forge a party made up of advanced workers and the declassed intelligentsia committed to leading the proletariat in the fight for socialist revolution.

They claim his [Engels’] support for their contention—the one thing they all agree on—that it is wrong to try to create a revolutionary party under the present conditions when the number of conscious revolutionists is so limited....

The real issue, as it is evolving, is the attempt to use the authority of Engels to liquidate the conception of a party of socialists, based on a definite program—a party which under present conditions can only be a small one—in favor of some prospective “big” party, to be constructed some time in the future by some people whose names and addresses are unknown, as a result of further development of the spontaneous process. That is dead wrong because the very idea of a party—large or small—presupposes a program and therefore consciousness....

Sixty years have elapsed since Engels laid down his pen. From what he saw and knew at the time he thought the German party of [August] Bebel was good enough, by and large. On the other side, Lenin, in 1907, was content to take the Bebel party for a model. He said—in One Step Forward, Two Steps Back—that he was “not creating any special variety of Bolshevik tendency,” but simply adapting “the viewpoint of the revolutionary Social Democracy,” as represented in the Second International, to Russian conditions.

But the German Social Democratic Party proved inadequate to its historical task and collapsed ignominiously in the test of 1914. Can there be any doubt that Engels would have drawn some radical conclusions from this catastrophe? Lenin, for his part, was compelled later to recognize that his concept of the vanguard party, which he had originally intended as nothing more than a Russian version of the German party, was in fact something new—a development and application of the Marxist theory of the party in the epoch of the actual struggle for power.

This conception was vindicated positively in the Russian Revolution, and negatively by the defeat of the revolution in other countries where the old forms held sway. The leitmotif of Trotsky’s great struggle in the post-Lenin epoch, summed up and restated in his thesis on the crisis of leadership in the Transitional Program of 1938, was precisely this Leninist contribution and extension of Marxism in the theory and practice of the party.

If one merely wants a “big” party, just to have a party, then any kind of a party will do; but nothing less than a Bolshevik party is good enough for war and revolution. That, I think, is the conclusive verdict of historical experience. Moreover, the construction of such a party cannot be postponed until everybody recognizes its necessity. The project has to be started by those who are ready, willing and able. That’s the way it was done in Russia, and nobody has yet discovered a better way.

—“Engels on the American Question,” Letter from James P. Cannon to Vincent R. Dunne, Socialist Workers Party Discussion Bulletin (June 1955)