Nous Ne Sommes Pas L’Avant Garde
Many perpetuators of the glorious Party-Form, particularly those of the Leninist ilk, will often look to the party to be the forefront, the driving force, the guiding force, the leading force into the new revolutionary era. The lighting force, those who shine the flashlights in the cave we descend into from the rubble that we created, the rubble of the dead and empty monuments to capital, class, governance, and power that we so despised: these are not the forward thinkers of the class-that-desires-classlessness. The pall bearers for capital and its desolation are not named, they don’t exist. Not yet, anyhow. We won’t create them. They will be created by the rupture.
First, I should clarify what I mean by the party form. There are many differing definitions of the party: party is the (proletarian) class, party as (the proletarian) class, party above the (you get it) class, party within the class, party as the political expression of the class, party as the formal organization representative of the class, the party as the cadres, the historical party, and finally, the party as the conscious members of the almighty class. When I reference the Party-Form, I do so to indicate the ludicrous expressions of the party with banal and abstract formulations, from the Bordigist, to the Marxist-Leninist, to even the party that hangs in the dialectical atmosphere of Damenite philosophy. However there are aspects of the left-communist partido-sphere that are relevant to our conception of the party. We agree with the party being the conscious element of the class, those who know what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, who we’re doing it for, etc. In the introduction to To Our Friends, the ever lovely Invisible Committee (Tiqqun round 2) puts forth their own understanding of “our party”:
While it’s obvious that those in power scheme to preserve and extend their positions, it’s no less certain that there’s conspiracy everywhere — in building hallways, at the coffee machine, in the back of kebab houses, at parties, in love affairs, in prisons. Through capillary channels and on a global scale, all these connections, all these conversations, all these friendships are forming a historical party in operation — “our party,” as Marx said. Confronting the objective conspiracy of the order of things, there is a diffuse conspiracy of which we are de facto members. But the greatest confusion obtains within it. Everywhere it turns, our party stumbles over its own ideological inheritance. It gets caught up in a whole tangle of defeated and defunct revolutionary traditions, which demand respect nonetheless. But strategic intelligence comes from the heart and not the brain, and the problem with ideology is precisely that it forms a screen between thinking and the heart. To put this differently: we’re obliged to force open a door to a space we already occupy. The only party to be built is the one that’s already there. We must rid ourselves of all the mental clutter that gets in the way of a clear grasp of our shared situation, our “common terrestritude,” to use Gramsci’s expression. Our inheritance is not preceded by any will or testament.
This understanding of the party shows a clear inheritance from the ultra-left’s very own Invariance and its most famous member, Jacques Camatte, and his continuing work in the field of diffusing the party to mean as little in the realm of formality as possible. I assume I’ll receive derision for deriding the left-communists’s divisive definitions of the party form and subsequently damning myself for demonstrating an understanding similar to theirs, but it’s necessary for the discussion. While there is an alignment with a form similar to the left-communist tradition and some of their offshoots (like the autonomists and communisateurs), we reject any other traditions of the party that come with it. Our party form is, as previously stated, those who know, and in particular, those who know each other.
In a similar fashion to how Marx utilized the term gemeinwesen to define his terminology for communism as a human community, we find our party’s etymological roots in the Bible as well. Specifically, as the conception of our party as us acting as the party, through insurrection, direct action, mutual aid, and through terror. When we meet in the name of abolishing the present state of things. We conceive of our party like Yeshuah conceives the church in Matthew 18:20:
For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.
Finally, our identification of the party is as those who act or wish to act, those who destroy, those who hope to rebuild, those who want to eliminate capital, governance, civilization, those who revolutionize, those who insurrect, and those who meet. But this is not yet the vanguard.
The vanguard is not our party. The vanguard is not just those who act, because our actions lead our groups of interest to act. Those who have been subjected to racism and/or colonization, those who have been subjected to class, and those who have been subjected to queer suppression all fit in these categories, among other groups. Among these our party tends to grow. As our party grows our lines begin to be drawn. Our hard lines are bootlickers and class defenders. We, when we insurrect, when we revolutionize, belong to no class. In these few moments of insurrectionary pleasure and destructive potential, we form the anti-class. We are not the flipping of the dialectic, not the negation of the negation, but the spear that drives itself through the dialectic, and the revolution is when the dialectic bleeds dry. But what does this have to do with the vanguard?
It is not the first reached objective that defines that vanguard. It is not who passes the baton first. There’s still things to communize. Even still, who communizes fastest is also not the vanguard. As Marx’s refrain from his Manuscripts dictates, the quantitative change leads to a qualitative change. This qualitative change can direct us to the vanguard. But only once it has been achieved can we list something so unknown, so abstract. Who determines the qualitative change? Who determines the qualitative change? I don’t know.
You don’t know either.
The point being: the vanguard exists in the future. A world that people haven’t explored yet. It is a post hoc category, dreamt of before the fact. There hasn’t been a vanguard to identify. It is foolish to plan the vanguard, to attempt to identify it when we often still fail to identify our own party. We are not the vanguard. If you’re reading this, however, there’s a good chance you’re apart of our party. Don’t worry about playing with propaganda and with abstract placements of primacy on the vanguard, or the vanguard’s autonomy from the class. Stop worrying about it. The party exists when we exhibit it. The vanguard will exist when history exhibits it. The vanguard is not the party, nor will it be, as the party will become superfluous as the time to transition or communize comes about.
Being agitators doesn't mean we have led the insurrections-revolutions anywhere. We merely are trying to light the fuse and continue the flame that erupts all foundations, all dialectics, and all -archies. As we act we must learn that we cannot vilify nor praise either the party-form, as our party form is both concrete and nebulous. We don’t necessarily want a party with boundaries, nor do we want to place boundaries on it. We don’t want a vanguard bound with The Task of Being the Vanguard. The vanguard will do what the vanguard will do, and it will be the jobs of orators and history books to identify the vanguard.
Self-identification with the vanguard, and the conflation of the vanguard-as-the-party, is a masturbatory effort. We don’t seek glory, and we don’t nonchalantly affirm our glory matter-of-factly when we engage with our fun party. When we engage in our party we engage with a joy that the dialectics we seek to destroy could never recreate. We also engage without preconceptions and without prescriptions on what our party is and does. This should be our attitude with the vanguard.
It will be what it will be, we will not be it.
