“As of the early twentieth century, capitalism’s capacity for survival-unexpected from a Marxist standpoint – had the effect of strengthening reformist tendencies within working-class movements in industrialized countries. In his theoretical effort to adapt to this state of affairs, Lenin, for one, tried to redefine the prospects for both revolution and capitalism’s development in its “imperialist” stage, and to integrate the peasantry into Marxist theory and strategy as a revolutionary ally. But without doubt, his major contribution was his theory of a vanguard party: a party made up of professional revolutionaries, intellectuals, and semi-intellectuals. “The workers, we have said, ‘could not yet have’ (1) social democratic consciousness. That could come only from outside.The history of all countries shows that through its own efforts, the working class can arrive only at trade-union consciousness, that is, at the conviction of the need to get together in unions, fight the bosses, demand that the government pass such and such laws required by the workers, and so on… As for Socialist doctrine, it is the product of philosophical, historical, and economic theories elaborated by the educated representatives of the propertied classes, that is by intellectuals. The very founders of scientific socialism themselves, Marx and Engels, were by their social position bourgeois intellectuals”. From this Lenin concluded that what was needed to get the working class going was a vanguard party, distinct from the majority of the proletariat and embodying its real class consciousness” [Gérard Chaliand, ‘Revolution in the Third World’, New York, 1989] [(1) Lenin’s emphasis in ‘What Is to Be Done?’] [Lenin-Bibliographical-Materials] [LBM*]
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- Articolo pubblicato:22 Luglio 2015