Consciousness and the Tasks of a Revolutionary Vanguard

(Quote of the Week)

The 1905 Russian Revolution was the dress rehearsal for the successful proletarian socialist revolution in October 1917. Resisting all-sided pressures to adapt to the existing level of consciousness was crucial to leading the working masses to victory. Writing amid the tumult of 1905, Lenin argued that education of the proletarian vanguard by the Bolsheviks (who then considered themselves a wing of the Social-Democrats) could mean the difference between victory and defeat.

We have quite a few Social-Democrats who give way to pessimism every time the workers suffer a reverse in single battles with the capitalists or with the government, and who scornfully dismiss all mention of the great and lofty aims of the working-class movement by pointing to the inadequate degree of our influence on the masses. Who and what are we, they say, to strive towards such things? It is purposeless to speak of the role of Social-Democracy as vanguard of the revolution when we do not even really know the mood of the masses, when we are unable to merge with them and to rouse the working masses! The reverses suffered by the Social-Democrats last May Day have considerably intensified this mood. Naturally, the Mensheviks, or new-Iskrists, have seized this opening to raise anew the special slogan “To the masses!”...

That comparisons are odious is an old axiom. In every comparison a likeness is drawn in regard to only one aspect or several aspects of the objects or notions compared, while the other aspects are tentatively and with reservation abstracted. Let us remind the reader of this commonly known but frequently ignored axiom and proceed to compare the Social-Democratic Party to a large school which is at once elementary, secondary, and collegiate. The teaching of the ABC, instruction in the rudiments of knowledge and in independent thinking, will never, under any circumstances, be neglected in this big school. But if anyone sought to invoke the need for teaching the ABC as a pretext for dismissing questions of higher learning, if anyone attempted to offset the impermanent, dubious, and “narrow” results of this higher learning (accessible to a much smaller circle of people than those learning the ABC) to the durable, profound, extensive, and solid results of the elementary school, he would betray incredible short-sightedness. He might even help to pervert the whole purpose of the big school, since by ignoring higher education he would simply be making it easier for charlatans, demagogues, and reactionaries to mislead the people who had only learned the ABC.

—V.I. Lenin, “On Confounding Politics with Pedagogics,” June 1905, Collected Works, Vol. 8