The sterility of vanguardism

Is nicely expressed in the following quote from Morris Stein, one of American Socialist Workers Party’s bigwigs back in 1948, as presented by Louis Proyect in his ongoing critique of vanguardiasm and democratic centralism:

We are monopolists in the field of politics. We can’t stand any competition. We can tolerate no rivals. The working class, to make the revolution can do it only through one party and one program. This is the lesson of the Russian Revolution. That is the lesson of all history since the October Revolution. Isn’t that a fact? This is why we are out to destroy every single party in the field that makes any pretense of being a working-class revolutionary party. Ours is the only correct program that can lead to revolution. Everything else is deception, treachery. We are monopolists in politics and we operate like monopolists.

This idea that there’s only one road towards the Revolution and that the Party is the guardian of this Truth and needs to vanquish its rivals before it can leads a passive working class to the promised land is unfortunately still around in stronger or weaker form today in most, if not all radical leftwing groups and grouplets. You see the results in the dreary unending feuds between various parties whose only real difference lies in such esoteric questions as to whether the USSR was state capitalist or a deformed workers state, or in the obsessive need for every event or development to be neatly slotted into a theoretical framework handed down from GodTrotsky on high. This severly limits the appeal of those parties to people who aren’t Marxist nerds and does nothing to help them create a strong, broad, militant left capable of taking on capitalism.

What too many Marxist groups and grouplets seem to forget is that it isn’t the workers who have to prove themselve worthy to be led by the party, but that the party has to be proven worthy to help the workers. No revolution has ever been won by a vanguard (no, not even the Russian revolution).