Vanguard Socialism

Vanguard Socialism, when the party is always right.

Proponents and subideologies

Note: People marked with an asterisk are their countries' starting leaders.

Subideology	Description	Adherents
Leninism	The Leninist school of communism, introduced to the world through the Hungarian revolution, stands firm on the left flank of the international socialist movement. Formulated first by the eponymous former leader of the RSDRP, the ideology favours a harsh, doctrinaire interpretation of Marxism, a fundamentalist reading that decries others as compromised revisionism. The core principle is that of vanguardism: the revolution brought about by a group of disciplined professional revolutionaries, who are meant to form the first guard of the proletarian army in the final battle with bourgeois forces. To truly understand Leninism, one has to understand its history. Lenin was not a prophet in his own country; outplayed by Alexander Bogdanov and the Vpered faction, accused of an attempt to take dictatorial control over the RSDRP, and forcefully expelled from its ranks. Yet in the West, his ideas found a fertile ground plowed by the Great War. The fiery orator gained followers in Germany and Hungary, always being there where the most radical of the socialists gathered, and in recognition for his work during the Eurasian Revolution he was appointed foreign minister of the new German government. It was his continued criticism of not only other international socialists, but also the German ruling party itself, that gave him a global audience - apostles of revolution who saw the SPD as turning away from the goal of communism. By the final rupture of the cabinet in the late 1920s, Leninism had a corpus of theory and flock to follow it. With a wedge thus driven into social democratic parties the world over, Leninism has become an international vanguard of its own — castigating those on its right as renegade, and those on its left as infantile. Binding a strictly materialist ethos to an ironclad party, state-managed economy, and policy of national self-determination, it has created a doctrine of loyalty to the science of Marxism, unwilling to let the goal of communism be besmirched by petit-bourgeois falsifiers. With the apparent stagnation of the world revolution in the 1920s, many disillusioned workers may soon hear the call, deciding to take history into their own hands.	Kun Bela* Antonín Janoušek* Stefan Foris* Karl Radek Lev Kamenev
National Vanguardism	From the first articulation, communism held that the worker had no country. For all that Marx and Engels appreciated the revolutionaries of the 18th and 19th centuries for destroying the feudal system, the nation that the bourgeois had created was an obstacle to international working-class cooperation. Though this ideal influenced the broad spectrum of leftist politics, not every adherent abandoned nationalism completely. Some, like Vladimir Lenin, would argue communism needed to be a liberator of the small nations. Others conceived of their people as inherently proletarian when compared to the more powerful empires. The outbreak of the Great War would prove the ultimate test of solidarity for the European working class, and for the most part, it failed. The revolutions of 1918 were also not solely led by revolutionary social-democrats — in Germany, it would elevate all manner of dissident voices against the Kaiser who did not follow the orthodox social-democratic line, even some who saw a wartime sense of national community replace the false promise of international brotherhood. While it remained a marginal and fractured tendency in the aftermath of the war — consider 1922's failed proletarian-nationalist putsch in Italy — the nationalist movements within socialist states had time to refine their theory and agitate within new bounds. No party has claimed adherence to a singular doctrine of National Vanguardism, but it is noticeable enough to be given a name by observers, just as they once did Accelerationism. Decades after the German Revolution, it remains uncertain whether the Spartakist model is what will overthrow the rot of international capitalism. As the counterrevolutionary regimes gather strength, a new and assertive breed of communist declares that if the revolution is to survive, it must use all means at its disposal to rally the proletariat, from the militant vanguard party to lead the workers, to the national ideal that will bind them together. Will this prove an invigorating force for socialism? Or will it be the gravedigger of its soul?	Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev* Thabo Edwin* Ernst Reventlow Ōkawa Shūmei Tan Malaka
Social Republicanism	The word Republic derives from the Latin phrase Res Publica, meaning public affair. Yet for so many so-called \"republicans,\" the states they construct are not truly of the people, but simply a license for license. A freedom to be left alone. What a farce! How can a citizen be free when their neighbor, their city, their nation, and their world is enslaved? This is the downfall of the \"civil republic,\" which, in reality, is nothing more than machinations of capital and false liberty. Social Republicanism emerged out of a dissatisfaction with the notion of a civil republic, as well as the cosmopolitan stain it left on socialism as a whole. The term finds its origins in the revolutionary left of 1848, those brave Communards and patriots who pushed back against the liberal wings of the revolutions across Europe. These often maligned heroes were those who stood valiantly against the states of yore, attempting to set up a republic truly made of and ruled by the peoples of a nation, not one of a nation ruling the peoples. Opposed to the simple application of universalist principles, Social Republicanism emphasizes the need to look at the traditions of liberty among a national body, following the thread of justice through the fabric of time. A social republic is not a state, nor a polis of Plato, but the organization of the entire national demos as rulers of themselves. Because of its ties to particular histories and nations, its manifestations are as numerous as countries, yet all hold common principles such as a commitment to democracy, a focus on national romanticism, and the need of a vanguard of, by, and for the people to guide the republic. Nevertheless, in all cases, it weaves a story of liberation and anti-domination throughout the ages, one in which the living are no more privileged than the dead, and which the flame of the ancestors is brought forward, leaving the ashes of the past behind.	Zaki al-Arsuzi* Joseph Goebbels Mirza Kuchik Khan Vicente Uribe
State Socialism	The struggle does not simply end once the revolution is victorious. For regimes recognized as practicing forms of State Socialism, they know that to relax the control of the party at this crucial juncture would jeopardize everything — to economic backwardness, bourgeois deviationism, or worse. Cannot the growing administrative state, having become more sophisticated over the years, be used for good before it is discarded? In a sense, and though Marx and Engels would decry him as disconnected from the proletariat, these statist forms of socialism have a resemblance to the theory of Louis Auguste Blanqui. His model of change involved a revolutionary organization taking power, then forming a transitional dictatorship to construct the conditions of socialism. While "Blanquism" became a pejorative in his lifetime, there was a certain pragmatism to the concept. And so — whether as a reflection of the militant group that carried out the revolution, or due to a lack of a mass socialist party in the area it controls — there are forms of socialist governance that revolve around a centralized, authoritarian state, one that wields its bureaucratic capabilities to build the road to communism. State Socialism exists as a catch-all term for socialist governments that are of the vanguardist persuasion, without being directly connected to a recognized global tendency such as Leninism or Vperedism. There is a vanguard party that controls the government, and the government controls the economy toward the ultimate ends of communism. Though sometimes decried as entrenching a new hierarchy, the ability of the state bureaucracy to make real material improvements and modernizations can give it legitimate popular appeal. In short, the State Socialist model treats a revolution like a cure, and like any cure, it must be administered even if the patient objects. After the proletariat is raised up from the mud and educated for the task ahead, and when the machinery of the means of production gleams in the night, the people can walk the road ahead themselves.	Ramón Grau San Martín* João Amazonas Gleb Bokii
Stratocratic Socialism	TThe socialist revolutionary and the state's military are traditional enemies — the purging of the Paris Commune, the defeat of the left in the Russian Civil War, and the myriad socialist-aligned revolts sabered down by colonial garrisons have left their scars. However, under certain conditions, an avowed socialist finds themselves in charge of the army and the state at the same time, often due to the collapse of the civilian government's authority. Whether political power has passed to the army, or a warlord has ambitions of governing a socialist republic, the regime that emerges is characterized as Stratocratic Socialism. To some extent, the Great War provided a theoretical pretext for this political arrangement. Even though the concept of "total war" was being explored and glorified by Prussian general staffers who sought a complete militarization of society, similar ideas were discussed in the civil wars of the late 1910s, including by socialist officers in Russia. Elsewhere, such as in revolutionary Mexico, some generals would struggle in the battlefield while implementing land and social reforms in the territories they controlled. Somewhere between social banditry and military junta, the avowedly red military commander has ultimate authority over an area and governs accordingly. Under this particular form of socialism, the vanguard party is either subordinate to the military, or the military itself serves the same purpose. At times, military buildup and warfare prioritizes an outsized amount of the state's focus and resources. At others, the army is an effective, if forceful, means of clearing the ground for socialist policy via putting immediate force to state designs. Many of the advantages traditionally ascribed to a conventional military dictatorship apply here, but it is open to fears that the Red Army, or People's Militia, or whatever governs the state becomes an end in itself rather than a means — a Red Prussia governed by a privileged in-group of officers. Still, they would counter — with some justification — that when the revolution must go to war to survive, there is nobody better suited for the task.	Filinto Müller* Damdin Sükhbaatar* Alexandros Papanastasiou Leon Trotsky