What is a Vanguard?
4.25 Minute Read
by Ken Barrios
Origin and definition
According to Merriam-Webster, the English word "vanguard" comes from the Old French "avant-garde," meaning "before guard" or "forward guard." It was a military term referring to the soldiers at the front of the army.
While "front" and "back" sound easy to understand, it does raise the question: how far toward the front does one have to be to count as part of the vanguard? Is it only the people literally on the front line, but not the soldiers immediately behind them? What if the vanguard is something like a tapered spectrum, like a spearhead?
The everyday vanguard
How could we apply this concept of the vanguard as a spearhead to other aspects of society? Let's look at music.
At the widest end, virtually everyone enjoys listening to music—playing it at home while working or relaxing, singing along in private or among trusted friends. Moving along this spectrum, fewer people take the step of learning to play an instrument. Fewer still commit their free time to sustained practice and improvement. Further along, a smaller group of individuals become professional musicians. At the furthest and narrowest end of the spectrum, a rare few reinvent entire genres or produce platinum albums.
While these genre-defining artists might seem like the obvious musical vanguard, the concept is actually relative. In a community without formally trained musicians, someone who can play an instrument at all occupies the vanguard position within that context.
Understanding the vanguard as a matter of degrees—rather than an absolute category—makes it universally applicable. The same spearhead exists in other fields, including sports, cooking, mathematics, fashion, technology, and other domains of human activity. In a word, we are describing "specialization."
How would we apply this specialization to politics? At the widest end, everyone has political opinions. Fewer people will take the time to vote. Moving along the spectrum, fewer people will take the time to participate in a one-off protest. Fewer people than that will use their free time regularly to educate and organize politically. At the narrowest end, fewer people will commit so much time to a political organization that it becomes a second, unpaid job.
This narrowing of people who consistently educate themselves about politics and participate in them forms the spectrum of a political specialization.
Competing leaderships
In politics, the purpose of the vanguard is to propose ways forward to address whatever political crisis society is facing. These proposals influence public debate (at workplaces, dinner tables, on social media, etc.) as humans try to find a collective way forward.
However, it is important to note that, while the term "vanguard" is usually associated with socialists, anyone along the political spectrum of Right and Left can specialize in politics. This is consistent with the military origin of the term: any army on the field will have its own vanguard of soldiers.
In other words: liberals, centrists, conservatives, fascists, and any other point along the political spectrum will produce a layer of people who specialize in politics, and they will be putting forward their ideas in the hopes of influencing "the masses."
Listening vs. leadership?
The concept of a political vanguard is disparaged by some for deliberately trying to provide leadership. As a binary, some folks who misunderstand the concept of a vanguard will instead counterpose leadership with "listening." To be clear, listening is extremely important, but in a dialectical fashion.
For example, 33rd Ward Alderwoman Rossana Rodríguez Sánchez won office thanks to the leadership of 33rd Ward Working Families, which asked her to run and organized her campaign. In turn, she used her leadership as the alder to institute a "participatory budgeting" program. While listening to constituents in participatory budgeting, the alderwoman realized that the Horner Park basketball courts did not have lights.
With this knowledge, a coalition was built of Roosevelt High School students, the local HANA Center, Rossana's office, and various other groups (including 33WF), to push the park district to install lights at the basketball courts. After a long pressure campaign, they did!
This victory was not one of listening vs. leading, but of the two coming together.
There are also times when listening takes on a different form. For example, during the 2020 Uprising: police, racism, and public safety were top of mind. If Rossana had simply asked neighbors how to improve public safety, the response would have been "hire more cops," because this is the "common sense" idea of safety under capitalism.
But in listening to the uprising, to the people in the streets, Rossana realized we needed an alternative. Through her political leadership and research, she connected with and built a coalition alongside the Collaborative for Community Wellness. The coalition began drafting what would become Treatment Not Trauma: a plan to create a non-police emergency response system coupled with the re-opening of public mental health clinics. The process of making this idea a reality includes hosting several educational events like forums and panels. It also required hosting rallies and a referendum to build support. Finally, it required organizing research, reports, and hosting hearings to win over other elected officials to support it. This was listening and leadership at the level of social movements.
A class as a vanguard
So far, the bulk of this analysis has focused on how vanguards form in everyday life, mostly at the level of individuals or organizations. But as Karl Marx pointed out in the Communist Manifesto, entire classes can become a vanguard of human society, leading to a "revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes."
The victory of the French and English capitalists over feudal lords demonstrates a "revolutionary reconstitution," while the failure of a similar revolution to take place in Ancient Rome led to the Dark Ages.
In 1917, the Russian working class led the fight against the nobility and the capitalists by organizing protests, which escalated into a general strike, which was organized through workers' councils (i.e. soviets). In concretely demonstrating their determination to fight to the end, and to do so with mass democracy via the soviets, large sections of the more numerous peasant classes joined the workers in the revolution. They were also able to pull in sections of the middle class, which had essential expertise in science, engineering, etc.
The leadership of the working class would not have been possible without the previous decades of class struggle to learn from, much of which was distilled and kept in the collective memory by the vanguard parties of the Russian Left.
Once again, a vanguard is not inherently left-wing. In "Bourgeoisie, Petit Bourgeoisie, and Proletariat," Leon Trotsky pointed out that, while the middle class had formed the base of the revolutionary Jacobin movement at the "dawn of capitalist development," the middle class would go on to form the base of the counter-revolutionary movement during "the decline of capitalism." Under Mussolini and Hitler, we would see the middle class take leadership over society, setting the world backward and throwing it into right-wing chaos.
Conclusion
The human condition is one of not having all the answers and, as social animals, having to discuss with each other the best way forward. Politics is the field through which we attempt these discussions regarding the society we live in. The existence of a political vanguard flows from the all-too-human tendency for people to specialize, with the politically-minded shaping the boundaries of these discussions.
The political vanguard is not something to fear or revere, but simply a natural part of human society that attempts to give order to political discussion, just as other vanguards give order to their respective fields. The question is not whether vanguards should exist, but which ones we choose to actively or passively support or oppose to shape the future we want.