The

Awesome
Responsibilities
of
Revolutionary
Leadership
 This article was originally published in the

April 1970 Monthly Review under the title "The

Role of the Vanguard Party", as one of a group

of articles commemorating the hundredth anniversary

of the birth of Lenin.

For its republication in pamphlet form, we

have chosen the title "The Awesome Responsibilities

of Revolutionary Leadership" in order to emphasize

the absolute and urgent necessity to build a van-

guard party which accepts the responsibilities

not only of the struggle for power but for develop-

ing the vision of how the revolutionary party will

meet the material and human needs of the entire

society when it comes to power.

Published by:

Committee for Political Development

Box 8244, Harper Station

Detroit, Michigan 48213

 James and Grace Boggs

The Awesome Responsibilities

of Revolutionary Leadership

All over the world this spring, wherever Marxist-Leninist

parties have come to power, there will be mammoth celebra-
tions of the hundredth anniversary of Lenin's birth. Where
Marxist-Leninist parties are still striving to win power, often
struggling with each other over how to achieve it, celebrations
will also take place. There will even be celebrations by parties
that call themselves Marxist-Leninist but have never even con-
ceived of themselves taking power. Liberals also will take ad-
vantage of the occasion to try to discredit Lenin, exposing what
they call the "bureaucratic tendencies" inherent in his concept
of the vanguard party and trying to make him responsible for
everything that has taken place in Soviet Russia since his death.
Whatever one's political complexion, everyone is compelled to
recognize that what Lenin thought and did has fundamentally
altered the course of the world in which we live.
Today many people talk about Marxism-Leninism without
any understanding of the historical development of Marxist
thought which Lenin represents, much less of the historical
developments in revolutionary politics that have taken place in
other parts of the world since Lenin .
Marx, writing in nineteenth-century Western Europe where
the rapidly advancing industrial revolution was creating a pow-
erful capitalist class and a burgeoning working class, developed
a scientific, i.e., historical and dialectical, method for analyzing
the conflict of social forces developing inside capitalist produc-
tion, projecting the working class-disciplined, united, and or-
ganized by the process of production itself-as the social force
to overthrow capitalism and institute a new mode of socialized
production. Lenin, tackling the problems of backward Tsarist
Russia a generation later, utilized Marx's method to analyze the
development of Russian capitalism, to anticipate the class strug-
gle inseparable from this development, and to project the social-
ist revolution as the only solution. But when the Russian work-
ing class began its economic struggles, Lenin did not wait upon
its "inevitable" revolt to bring about the socialist revolution .
Instead, practically single-handedly, he assumed the awesome
responsibility of building the kind of tightly disciplined organi-
zation which would be able to take state power at the head
of the Russian working class and all the other oppressed and
discontented strata of Russian society. Without this party which
it took Lenin seventeen years of unpublicized, protracted strug-
gle to build, the power which lay in the streets in 1917 Russia
might have ended up in the same kind of hands which picked
it up in 1968 France. What few people realize is that until 1917
Lenin rarely addressed himself to a mass audience, either in
writing or speaking, or appeared on the public platform . Instead,
he concentrated his extraordinary abilities and energies on the
task which he had concluded was decisive to the success of the
Russian Revolution : the building of an apparatus of dedicated,
disciplined revolutionists to lead the masses in the struggle for
power.
For the revolutionary movements developing today in every
country; the great contribution of Lenin was the clarity with
which he put forward and acted upon his fundamental con
victions regarding the vanguard party : (1) that the purpose of
a revolutionary party is to take absolute power in order to rev-
olutionize the economic and social system as the only way of
resolving fundamental popular grievances ; (2) that it is ab-
solutely essential to build a revolutionary vanguard party if you
are serious about taking power and not just playing with the
phrase ; and (3) that a revolutionary party can only be built
by (a) unceasing ideological struggle, (b) strict discipline, (c)
organized activity of every member, and (d) merciless self-
criticism.
In the United States, as the black movement struggles to
define its goals and the means to achieve them, the question of
what constitutes a black revolutionary party is going to become
increasingly the center of discussion and controversy. In order
2
for this discussion and controversy to be meaningful, the black
movement will have to make a serious study of the concept of
the vanguard party as developed and practiced by its originator.
To believe that the black revolutionary movement can evade
such a study because Lenin was white and European would be
just as ridiculous as for an African freedom fighter to refuse
to fly an airplane because the Wright brothers were white Amer-
icans. Blacks don't refuse to drive Cadillacs because they are
made by General Motors or to watch television because Philco
(Ford) manufactures TV sets. Whatever has been achieved in
human history, whether technological or political, blacks have
a right to inherit. The very high development of the theory
and practice of the vanguard party as originated by Lenin in
Russia, and subsequently developed by Mao and Ho in Asia
and Amilcar Cabral in Africa, belongs to all the oppressed peo-
ple of the world, providing those who seek to end the domina-
tion of man by man with guidelines which they ignore at their
peril. It must be borne in mind at the same time that these guide-
lines can be applied only in relation to the specific conditions of
a particular country and only by an organization that has de-
veloped out of indigenous forces and is not totally dependent
upon external or foreign aid for its existence.*

* In the last period because of the understandable concentration on

black pride and black consciousness, there has been a tendency among
black would-be revolutionaries to refuse to have anything to do with any
thing or anyone that was not all-black. The result in some cases has been
ludicrous, e.g ., black militants unable to discuss theoretical and political
questions among themselves because the only language they have in com-
mon is English, or black history teachers glorifying African rulers of the
past who were no less abusive of their subjects than white tyrants of the
same epoch.
As Black Nationalism undergoes the necessary transition into Black
Revolutionary Nationalism, what is and what is not historically relevant
to black people will have to be redefined. Black revolutionary historians
cannot limit themselves to studies that inspire black people with pride and
consciousness . They must also give the black movement that sense of his-
torical continuity with a revolutionary past which every revolutionary move-
ment needs in order to develop a sound basis for its present theory and
practice . In the very difficult period ahead, every source of theoretical
and political strength must be mined. The richest source, apart from the
ongoing struggle of the masses, is undoubtedly what has been attempted
by other revolutionists in this and other countries. Thus black revolutionary
historians must provide the movement with critical studies in two main
arenas :
 Fifty years ago the Old Left tried to adapt Lenin's view
of the vanguard party to party-building in the United States.
However, they were responding more to revolutionary mo-
mentum in Russia and Europe than to conditions in the United
States. It was therefore impossible for them really to under-
stand Lenin's concept of the vanguard party which had been
developed to resolve the specific historical contradiction rec-
ognized by Lenin in the Russia of 1900, namely, the narrow
or superficial scope of revolutionary work by Russian militants
in comparison with the breadth of the spontaneous movement
of Russian workers. The dilemma of white radicals in this coun-
try has been and still is the exact opposite, namely, their own
intensive theoretical and organizational activity compared with
the narrow scope of the spontaneous movement in the Amer-
ican working class which, nevertheless, in their theory remains
the chief social force for the American revolution. Only for a
brief period during the thirties was this not the case. But by that

First, with regard to black liberation leaders of the past (from Tous-
saint L'Chiverture, Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, Frederick Douglass, Mar-
cus Garvey, W. E. B. DuBois, to Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Stokely
Carmichael, Rap Brown, and Huey Newton), what each achieved, what
each was unable to achieve, and how much this falling short of the goal
of black liberation was due to objective conditions of the time and how
much to subjective factors, i.e ., inadequate revolutionary theory and prac-
tice. In this respect the black movement in the United States has an in-
calculable advantage over white radical groupings because it has this
tremendous wealth of historical experiences to draw upon and evaluate.
By contrast, white "revolutionaries" throughout American history from the
Founding Fathers to the present, with the sole exception of the Aboli-
tionists, have always defined the American problem in terms of white-white
relations, dealing with white-black oppression, if at all, only as an after-
thought.
Second, with regard to revolutionary movements and the theory and
practice of revolutionary leaders of the whole world, and particularly those
of that part known as the Third World. Until the black revolutionary
movement is ready to take seriously the scientific approach to revolution
developed by Marx, Lenin, Ho, and Giap, it will still be depending upon
mystical or external guidance to achieve the power which can only be
achieved by the most rigorous scientific appraisal of social forces. Mao, Ho,
and Cabral did not reject the necessity for a scientific approach to revolu-
tion because the founders of this approach were white. They used the
method of Marx and Lenin, being careful at the same time to distinguish
between the specific conditions of their own countries and those of Europe
and Russia.
 time the Marxist parties in this country had oriented their pol-
itics so completely around what was happening in Soviet Rus-
sia. that they had not developed any perspective or program for
taking power in the United States . Having occupied themselves
for so long in proving a theory rather than programing
for revolution, they were unpreparee . for anything more than
militant trade-union leadership when the industrial workers
erupted in the thirties.
Today black revolutionaries are confronted with a con-
tradiction very similar to that faced by Lenin when he first
began to lay the foundations of the vanguard party. Ever since
1964 the black masses in every Northern city have been either
in, or on the verge of, spontaneous eruption. Every year mil-
lions of black people, and particularly black youth, are made
"ready for anything" by the worsening conditions in every black
community, the obvious inability of white power to cope with
the critical social problems of an advancing technology, the
mushrooming of white counter-revolutionary groupings, and the
growing division among whites and within the ruling class as
to which course to pursue to overcome the crisis . As in Lenin's.
day (and in his words) the movement has already produced
"enormous numbers of people . . . who desire to protest, who
are ready to render all the assistance they can in the fight
against absolutism. . . . At the same time we have no people,
because we have no leaders . . . no talented organizers capable
of organizing extensive and at the same time uniform and
harmonious work that would give employment to all forces . . . ."
(What Is To Be Done?) The scope of spontaneous activity
among the black masses has been growing far beyond the ca-
pacity of the black movement to provide revolutionary political
leadership.
For the black movement and the black community the
necessity for rapid development of a party able to give revolu-
tionary leadership to the masses is not an abstract question . It
is a matter of the utmost urgency. Every day thousands of blacks
are made "ready for anything," often by a "routine" incident
of police, foreman, school-principal, or social-worker brutality.
Periodically a major "incident," such as the murder of Martin
Luther King or Fred Hampton, transforms millions of blacks
5
into potential revolutionaries. Just because a vanguard party
with a revolutionary perspective, program, and trained cadres
is not at hand to give direction to these rebels does not mean
that they disappear from the historical stage . Rather they find
other outlets for their rebellious energies. They drift from one
Black Nationalist grouping or Black Power street gang to an-
other, going "wherever the action is," or engage in different
forms of hustling or banditry which as often as not are directed
-against other members of the black community. The result in
the black community is a sense of unending crisis, chaos, and
desperation from top to bottom . The situation in Northern cities
is thus beginning to resemble more and more that of the Chinese
countryside before the Communist Party and the Red Army
under Mao were able to develop the revolutionary perspective,
the cadres, and the program to politicize and incorporate the
unemployed or underemployed youth who were pillaging the
peasants in independent gangs or as part of the numerous war-
lord armies.
Before the black movement can summon up the profound
theoretical and practical energies to create a vanguard party, it
must fast destroy-root and branch-the illusion that the spon
taneous eruptions of the black masses are sufficient to achieve
revolutionary change . Not until this illusion has been completely
eliminated can black would-be revolutionaries apply themselves
to the task of building a vanguard party with the urgency and
energy that are required. Only then will they be ready to face
up to the awesome responsibility which Lenin faced, of build-
ing that structure without which there can be no successful
revolution. To destroy every remnant of this illusion in himself
and those around him was the task Lenin set himself in What
Is To Be Done?
It is only since the Watts rebellion in 1965 that the black
movement and black leaders have begun to rely upon the spon-
taneous eruption of the masses. Prior to 1965, when the action
was chiefly in the South, black militants recognized the need
for organization as the only means for initiating mass action
and as the necessary condition for survival in a society where
open dictatorship and violence by whites left no room for dem-
ocratic illusions. (Organization in the South in that period did
6
not, of course, take the form of building a revolutionary party,
since the aim of the movement was not Black Power but in-
tegration.)
In the last five years, however, side by side with the talk
of Black Power, black leaders have acted as if all they had to
do in order to advance the revolution is to act as spokesmen
for the "brothers on the street." This is due, first of all, to the
speed with which the brothers on the city streets have exploded,
as if in a chain reaction, from city to city, giving the move-
ment the assurance that "something is always going to happen."
Secondly, the pride, aggressiveness, and unity which these erup-
tions have unleashed in all segments of the black community
have created a sense of increasing excitement and momentum.
And, finally, the skill with which a threatened white power struc-
ture has manipulated TV exposure of black militants and black
salesmen for the American Way of Life (commercials), fund-
ing of community projects ("reparations"), highly visible and
highly paid jobs for black careerists, and a steady stream of black
publications, has created the widespread illusion that the actual
and/or threatened spontaneous eruptions of the black masses are
bringing Black Power closer.
Meanwhile, in fact, overall conditions in the black com-
munity have been deteriorating, while at the same time the
spontaneous activities of the black street masses and the much
publicized but futile reform efforts of the white power structure
have aroused the "white backlash," which is only another name
for the fascist counter-revolution .
There is little point in complaining about the skillful use
of the Almighty American Dollar to co-opt Black Power or the
rise of the fascist counter-revolution . In confusing, undermining,
and mobilizing to repress the black movement, white power is
only doing what its self-interest dictates. If the fault lies any-
where, it is with the black movement for failing to arm the
black community theoretically and politically against the pre-
dictable strategy and tactics of the enemy and to make clear
that fascism cannot be stopped short of a total revolution de-
dicated to ending man's domination of man and his fear of
those whom he dominates.
To do this, the black movement must recognize and keep
7
pointing out the limits of what can be achieved by the black
masses, for the same reason that Lenin insisted on the limits
of what could be achieved by the spontaneous eruptions of
Russian workers. The spontaneity of the workers does not take
them beyond the level of the immediate, palpable, concrete in-
terests of the everyday economic struggle, as Lenin kept pointing
out. In a similar vein, black revolutionists must realize that the
spontaneous eruptions of the black masses do not take them
beyond the demand that white power alleviate their accumulat-
ed grievances, no matter how angry or explosive the masses are
or how much Black Power talk and symbolism accompany their
actions . Reliance upon spontaneity is, therefore, a form of lib-
eralism because, in effect, it increases the illusion that the issues
and grievances of the masses can be resolved without taking
power away from those in power.
A revolutionary party becomes historically necessary and
justified when the contradictions and antagonisms of a par-
ticular society have created a mass social force whose felt needs
cannot be satisfied by reform but only by a revolution which
takes power away from those in power. In addition to mobiliz-
ing this mass social force around its own grievances, the rev-
olutionary party must then be ready to fulfill two additional
tasks: (1) it must be able to project the vision of a new so-
ciety which will solve these grievances by destroying the sys-
tem that has created the domination of man over man, thus
making life more human for everybody ; and (2) it must have
developed cadres of leaders with whom the masses can identify,
and programs of struggle that will take the masses stage by
stage to ever higher levels of political struggle, political conscious-
ness, and actual control of facets (or bases) of power. Thus
the revolutionary vanguard party serves the function of escalat-
ing the vision and leading the masses from a sense of grievance
or unsatisfied wants to an awareness of social needs, or what is
necessary to remedy their grievances . By escalating the struggles
of the masses, it raises their consciousness beyond the point of
blaming the enemy for their plight and/or depending on him
to alleviate it, to the point of depending upon their own ef-
forts and their own power and responsibility to effect real
change. At this stage, when the masses are already in motion,
8
any party or organization which simply keeps them in a high
state of agitation, confrontation, or mobilization, is not a rev-
olutionary party, no matter what its claims. A revolutionary
vanguard party cannot limit itself to the demands of the masses ;
it begins to make demands upon the masses themselves to exert
greater power and greater responsibility .
"The greater the spontaneous uprising of the masses, the
more widespread the movement becomes, so much the more
rapidly grows the demand for greater consciousness in the theo
retical, political, and organizational work" of the revolutionary
leadership, Lenin insisted . At this point militancy without ideolo-
gy becomes as dangerous as theory without practice. Lenin ac-
cused those who passively adapted themselves to spontaneity of
tailing or degrading themselves to the level of the masses instead
of raising the masses to a higher political and social level. He
called them "opportunists," professing to lead the masses when
in fact they were only taking advantage of the masses' spon-
taneous activity to speak for the masses . To the counter-accusa-
tion that he was setting up a centralized apparatus to control
the mass movement, he replied that a tight organization is nec-
essary not only to combat the opportunists and moderates but
to safeguard the movement against the premature actions un-
dertaken by those who mistake the beginning of a struggle for
its end.
The polemical style of Lenin's politics has turned off black
revolutionaries because their chief acquaintance with it is in the
form which it has assumed in the American Marxist groupings,
of debates and discussion about what should be done in other
countries, or in relation to the black movement to which white
radicals cannot in any case give leadership. It is only when you
recognize that Lenin's opponents represented real tendencies and
real dangers to a spreading mass movement needing revolution-
ary direction that you can understand why he waged such a
merciless ideological struggle against opportunists, liberals, and
anarchists.
In the United States black militants have shirked the re-
sponsibility for this kind of ideological struggle, partly because
of the deep hunger for unity which exists in all sections of the
black movement, and partly because of the general political
9
backwardness of this country which makes it much easier to
deal with one's political opponents by character assassination and
physical force than by political criticism and ideological strug-
gle . The fact is that, ever since the emergence of the Black Power
stage in 1966, serious political differences over the meaning of
Black Power have been inevitable. Because these differences have
not been clarified politically, they have tended to appear per-
sonal, and the movement has declined accordingly. Tendencies
which could easily have developed a practical working rela-
tionship with one another in action have tried to live together
within the same political organization until the political dif-
ferences have festered into bitter antagonisms. What the black
movement has not understood is that the clarification of pol-
itical differences through ideological struggle by no means im-
plies that there should be disunity in action, particularly on ques-
tions of defense against the common enemy or in the struggle
for community control of various institutions inside the black
community, objectives on which all tendencies in the black
movement are agreed . The creation or encouragement of a
United Front or Fronts to implement this unity in action and
the development of the proper relations between the revolu-
tionary party and the United Front are critical to the success
of any revolution . But the first step in creating correct relations
is a clear distinction between the purposes and organization of
the vanguard party and the purposes and organization of the
United Front.*
"We must first divide and then unite," Lenin kept saying.
"Better fewer but better." A revolutionary party cannot be built
on the quicksand of ideological confusion. Obviously there are
a lot of people in the black movement whose political positions
are dead wrong, and someone has to have the courage to say it,
even if it busts wide open the facade of unity. A political split,
like a divorce, is often healthier than trying to live together in
the same house when you have fundamental differences. Blacks
* To learn more about the theory and practice of building the United
Fronts which, in the course of protracted popular struggles over concrete
issues and the control of social institutions, develop into dual-power struc
tures or parallel hierarchies, we have to look, not to Lenin and the rev-
olution in Russia, but to the revolutions which combine national and social
struggle, e.g., in China, Vietnam, and Guinea-Bissau.

10
 don't all think alike just because they are black any more than
Africans or Chinese or Vietnamese do. There are political dif-
ferences inside the black movement representing different socio-
economic layers inside the black community. It is better to start
the vanguard party from scratch with the serious few who are
committed to the perspective of making the revolution that is
necessary to meet the needs of the deepest layers of the black
community than with many assorted persons who are all going
in different directions and who are therefore bound to split at
the moment of crisis, just when the need is for maximum orga-
nizational strength and unity. This does not mean that those
who cannot or will not accept the ideology and discipline of
the vanguard party cannot play a role in the movement or
in concrete struggles for liberation that will culminate in the
taking of power. But their place is in the various organizations
of mass struggle, not in the vanguard party.
At the present time, among those who have been active in
the movement over the past few years, there are quite a few
people who are considering the formation of a black revolution
ary party. Many of them believe that their past record of de-
dicated struggle in the movement is sufficient qualification for
membership or leadership in a revolutionary party. They do
not understand that with the emergence of Black Power the
black movement left behind it the old stage of reform and in-
tegration and entered on a new stage of revolutionary struggle.
As long as the black movement and black people were seeking
primarily to reform or integrate into the system, what was re-
quired from black leadership was relatively simple. It was the
outspoken, relentless condemnation of racism, in all its forms,
arousing the black masses to a heightened sense of indignation
and grievance against the society. This is something that black
leaders have always done well and which the Black Power
spokesmen of the past period have done superbly. However,
ever since the movement changed direction, from being essen-
tially an attempt to reform the system to a revolutionary strug-
gle for power, what has been required from black leadership
has been much more difficult because it is something for which
blacks have had little previous training. Revolutionary struggle
for power requires less rhetoric and more calculation. It re-
quires a different kind of organization with a different, more
scientific ideology ; different, more disciplined, and committed
members who are so convinced of the need for Black Revolu-
tionary Power that the concept could be erased from their minds
only by death itself ; different, more strategically developed pro-
grams for escalating struggles ; different, more carefully worked
out structures to implement these programs; and different, less
flamboyant leadership.
When Lenin first began to build the party in the early
1900s, intellectuals like Martov who had been active and out-
spoken wanted to be members, but they did not want to break
with their past ideas, practices, and associates, and accept the
discipline of a party branch or unit . This refusal to break with
the politics of the past was the issue around which the split
took place at the 1903 Congress of the Russian Party, between
the Bolsheviks who stood for a tightly disciplined organization
and the Mensheviks who wanted a loose structure which would
leave members free to speak, write, and move about as they
had been doing. The same question is bound to arise in the
organization of any black revolutionary party today. It has al-
ready surfaced in a number of black organizations, usually dur-
ing or after a crisis when the opportunities to take the center
of the public stage are most numerous and most difficult to
resist. This is not because of the lack of sincerity or dedication
of any one individual but because the transition to a new stage
of political struggle usually requires new people who can meet
the new tasks and/or old experienced people who can make a
serious self-criticism of their previous political habits and trans-
form their political personalities to meet the new needs. This
kind of self-evaluation and transformation is not easy for most
people to make . As the objective situation becomes more rev-
olutionary, an increasing number of militants begin to feel the
need of an organization to help them make the many decisions
that now become pressing. How to respond to the growing de-
mands from the masses for leadership or to the provocations
and opportunities proffered by the enemy to render one useless;
what to do, what not to do, how to organize one's time and
energies most effectively-all these become decisions beyond the
capacity of a single individual to make. On the other hand, these
12
same individuals can find the discipline of the party constrain-
ing or "bureaucratic" unless they are continually internalizing
through criticism and self-criticism the urgent necessity for a
highly organized, disciplined structure as the key to black libera-
tion at this stage.
Recent revolutionary history in Asia, Africa, and Latin
America has demonstrated that the most effective revolutionists
are those who insist upon this kind of self-criticism and transfor
mation as a normal procedure inside the organization, because
they understand that the political energy generated thereby can
itself become a force for rapid political development. On the
other hand, where nationalist leaders have not insisted upon
building self-criticism into the operations of the political orga-
nization, political weaknesses have become entrenched, and the
masses and the new elite have become more vulnerable to neo-
colonialist subversion .
Black people are not only powerless, which is the condition
of any oppressed people ; they are also undeveloped, because of
the national character of their oppression which is similar to
that of a colonial people . It is no accident that the concept of
rapid political development through self-criticism, originated by
Lenin in backward Russia, has achieved its highest development
do colonial, i.e., systematically exploited and systematically un-
developed countries like Vietnam, China, Cuba, and Guinea-
Bissau. To build the party that is necessary to take power and
revolutionize society, the members of the party themselves must
undergo rapid political development into new people. The only
means available to them to achieve this is also the best means,
i.e., the method of constant struggle, constant criticism and
constant transformation, utilizing the energy created by the dy-
namic of error to advance the political maturity of the organi-
zation, getting rid of every vestige of liberalism, opportunism,
sectarianism, adventurism, egoism, and every tendency towards
"militarism" or the separation of military from political struggle.
The ideological struggle against other political tendencies and
against remnants of these tendencies in every member removes
political education from the sphere of abstract generalizations
about other revolutions which come so easily to intellectual rev-
olutionaries. It compels the revolutionary organization to de-
13
velop its own revolutionary concepts from its concrete experi-
ences and practices in party-building, internally and in relation
to the masses and. other organizations.
In this article we have tried to point out some of the im-
portant lessons in building a revolutionary party that the black
movement in the United States can learn from Lenin. But ev
erything that Lenin said and did cannot be applied automatical-
ly and mechanically to the American Revolution . Black revolu-
tionaries must analyze for themselves the specific situation in
the United States in this, the last third of the twentieth century.
They must determine for themselves the critical contradiction in
this country, which is at one and the same time the techno-
logically most advanced and politically most backward country
in the world . From this determination they must project the
fundamental goal of a revolution in this country: to create a
society of politically conscious, socially responsible individuals
able to use technology for the purpose of liberating and devel-
oping humanity. They must arrive at their own appraisal of the
revolutionary social forces available to achieve this revolution-
ary humanist objective and of the interrelation between these
revolutionary social forces and other social forces in the country.
They must make their own appraisal of the present stage of
struggle and the programs necessary to advance the struggle
towards the projected objective . (See James Boggs, Racism and
the Class Struggle, Monthly Review Press, forthcoming; also
Manifesto for a Black Revolutionary Party, Pacesetters Publish-
ing House, P.O. Box 3281, Philadelphia 19121 .)
Scientific, i .e., dialectical and historical, method requires
the systematic examination of the specific conditions, contradic-
tions, and antagonisms in one's own country and one's own
time ; the projection of fundamental solutions to these contradic-
tions ; and programs of struggle to achieve these solutions. It is
only because he understood this, which is the essence of the
scientific method, that Lenin was able not only to build the
party which led the Russian masses to victory over Tsarism, but
also to make the analysis of imperialism and of the colonial strug-
gle (neither of which had matured in the time of Marx), and
from this analysis to recognize the revolutionary character of
14
the nationalist movements in Ireland, Asia, Africa, and among
black people in the United States .
Most old radicals thinking about Lenin in the United
States today are still thinking of what he did in Russia and the
concepts he evolved to achieve the Russian Revolution . In that
sense they have become dogmatists, not recognizing that Lenin
was building a party for his time, to change intolerable condi-
tions in his country, based on the analysis of the specific con-
ditions in that country. Lenin is not relevant to us unless we
have done the same for this country and for our time. Similarly
they do not recognize that Marx was writing at a specific stage
in Western history and that, if he were living today, he would
have advanced his theory far beyond what he wrote in the
middle of the nineteenth century, for the simple reason that
society itself has advanced to another historical stage.
The Russian Revolution, like every successful revolution
since then, took place in a country where the working class was
a small fraction of the population . Lenin would have been the
first to recognize that a revolution not led by the working class
could take place because he recognized that the rising colonial
world was composed primarily of oppressed peoples who were
not proletarians but who were nevertheless compelled because of
their dual oppression by native and foreign rulers to overthrow
their oppressors and institute a new economic, social, and polit-
ical order. The one thing which Lenin was firm about, regard-
less of the conditions varying from country to country, was the
need for a vanguard party whose members recognize the neces-
sary difference between themselves and the revolutionary masses
in terms of a firm ideology, programmatic commitment, and
discipline, before they go to the masses to interact with them
and give them leadership . If this distinction is blurred, what
comes into being is not a revolutionary vanguard party but a
mass party, however small in actual size, which incorporates into
its membership those who should in fact be its followers and
supporters . Such a party cannot lead the masses ; it can only
tailgate or follow after them.
For revolutionists all over the world, the study of Lenin is
relevant, not from the standpoint of his analysis of the Russian
working class as the main social force for the Russian Revolu-
15
 vanguard
tion, but for his concept of building a revolutionary
parry on the basis of that section of the population of a given
and the chief rev-
country which is both the most oppressed
constitutes the chief
olutionary social force. If the working class
revolutionary social force in a particular country, the revolu-
revolutionary
tionary party must be built on it. If the chief
social force is the peasantry, as in China, then base the party on
in the United States,
the peasantry. If it is the black masses, as
the basis of the black
then build the revolutionary party on
revolutionary social forces .
 RECOMMENDED READING

BY JAMES BOGGS:

The American Revolution : Pages from a Negro

Workers Notebook. Paperback $1 .65

Racism and the Class Struggle : Further Pages

from a Black Worker's Notebook. Cloth $6 .00

Manifesto for a Black Revolutionary Party $ .50

BY DAN ALDRIDGE :

Politics in Command of Economics $ .25

BY DEGINGA:

What Does It Mean to be Black? $ .25

What is Freedom?--Who is the Enemy? $ .25

Concurrent Nationalism $ .25

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