“Your mum!” “You smell!” “You Pabloite vanguardist!” are the among the most common insults that are daily heard in the nation’s playgrounds. I’ve been mulling over the vanguardist idea since a comment on another site last week where it was used in a less than approving manner. My conclusion is that political vanguards exist, evolve and are necessary.

Let’s begin with an example. Last night we had one of our very irregular Bethnal Green Hands Off Venezuela meetings. The 12-14 people present had the agony of choosing between five socialist papers and magazines, four of them of an explicitly Trotskyist leaning. Jesus! How depressing you might think. Yes and no. There was no headbanging, pointscoring or hectoring. Everyone who spoke and who attended was interested in having a serious conversation about the Bolivarian revolution and taking whatever opportunities present themselves to solidarise with it. By opting to leave home and take part this makes them part of a political vanguard. This coming Sunday the coaches travelling to the Manchester demonstration will be filled with more people who are explicitly or implicitly defining themselves as a political vanguard.

What does this mean in practice? Not so much that these people are some type of pseudo-Bolshevik ninja with special powers that allow them to be right all the time. Only that they are willing to give up some time, some money in order to sustain a higher than average level of political activity. They may have been intellectually persuaded that imperialist war is barbaric, that you have to take part in your union, that capitalism is changing the environment that will most severely the world’s poor or that the Venezuelan revolution is progressive. Then they decide to convert that conviction into some level of activity that connects with other people and not just by using the Internet.

Sometimes this refusal to accept the established order leads quickly to a dead end. The Irish Green Party’s decision to go into government with Fianna Fail is a pitiful example of this. Having only a very partial grasp of the problems of their society they decided that having a couple of ministers would be an effective way to improve the country’s environment. They were shafted because their understanding of where the real power lies in Irish society was minimal and they lacked any appreciation of the class power that Fianna Fail represents. In Britain you see the same thing with the single issue anti-debt campaigners who know that a crime is being committed against the developing world but can’t locate the inevitability of this type of criminality in an imperialist dominated world.

For all their multitudinous faults the small Marxist currents try to keep alive a more rounded understanding of the nature of society and a memory of effective means of struggle and organisation. They appreciate that levels of industrial militancy and social struggles ebb and flow and because of this they seek to hold together a small group of people who study and try to apply the experiences of previous class conflicts. Thus when new generations start to organise around issues that they identify as important, such as climate change, the lessons that have been acquired by previous groups of people sitting in meetings, arguing and organising can be transmitted. This is my working definition of vanguardism. The ruling class has dozens of vanguard organisations stretching from New Labour to the CBI. They think, they plan and they organise. That being the case it is right and necessary that socialist, environmentalists and anti-capitalists also seek to create their own vanguard organisations.