'The history of all existing society is the history of class struggles... Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antagonism. Society as a whole is more and more splitting into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other, Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.'

'Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of modern industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product.'

These quotations from the Communist Manifesto show the nature of the class struggle and explain the revolutionary nature of the Proletariat. Marx taught that capitalism creates the seeds of its own destruction. The class struggle results in its overthrow and its replacement by communism.

However, the transition to communist society does not happen automatically, as dawn follows night. Socialism is not inevitable.

As Lenin pointed out in What Is To Be Done, 'Socialism and the class struggle arise side by side and not one out of the other ... Modern socialist consciousness can arise only on the basis of profound scientific knowledge ... The vehicle of science is not the proletariat but the bourgeois intelligentsia; it was in the minds of individual members of this stratum that modern socialism originated, and it was they who communicated it to the more intellectually developed proletarians who, in their turn, introduced it into the proletarian class'. So, socialist consciousness does not arise spontaneously in the working class, but originates from outside.

Marxism-Leninism unites scientific socialism with the working class movement. Lenin's concept of the revolutionary party, for that reason, begins with his understanding of the role of the conscious element in the revolutionary struggle. The spontaneous development of the class struggle results only in the domination of the proletariat by the ideology and practice of opportunism. Without the guidance of scientific theory, the proletariat has no ideology but that of the reactionary bourgeoisie. As Lenin put it. '...the spontaneous development of the working class movement leads to its subordination to bourgeois ideology.' The concept of the conscious and spontaneous elements in the revolutionary struggle was the basis for Lenin's polemics against those who believed that the 'Social-Democrats should not march ahead of the movement, but should drag along at the tail-end'

The crucial importance of the fusion of the advanced workers with the revolutionary Marxist movement is repeated throughout many of Lenin's works. He showed the necessity for training class-conscious worker revolutionaries, and side by side with this, the importance of uniting them in a strong, centralised organisation of professional revolutionaries in which all distinctions between intellectuals and workers would be eliminated, 'Attention must be devoted principally to raising the workers to the level of revolutionaries', wrote Lenin. It was to be a party where all would stand together as communists, possessing a profound scientific knowledge of the class struggle and with highly developed skills on questions of organisation and agitation.

In order for such an organisation to function, the party paper, the principal organ of the revolutionary party, must be devoted to raising the level of the advanced workers. It acts as the 'scaffolding' which facilitates the training of the class conscious workers in the ideas of scientific socialism and which unites their activities. The link between the party paper, the concept of the vanguard party and that of the advanced worker become clearer when we consider the different levels of political consciousness in the working class.

Please refer to the article "The role of the revolutionary newspaper in the struggle Today" for Lenin's views on this subject.

None of the so-called 'vanguard' parties which exist today can claim any understanding of the Leninist principles described in the article (above). In 1981, the New Worker stated that those who argued Lenin's position on the advanced workers had in fact argued the following (this is from that paper): ' ...the problem was to find Supermen . . 'advanced workers' they called them in a parody of Leninism ... To the precise contrary, Congress believed, the issue was to advance Britain's lamentably backward working class.'

The New Communist Party is on record for throwing out those who argued for Lenin's theories, but they are not untypical of the groups and so-called 'parties' in Britain today. All devote themselves to work among the lower strata, and each claims the tradition and appearance of Leninism while denying its substance. One might say the ruling class could not do better if it ran these groups and parties itself. In any case, these groups are incapable of taking the lead and, in practice, trail behind the working class movement. To quote Lenin in 1899: "The task of Communism is to bring definite socialist ideals to the spontaneous working-class movement, to connect this movement with socialist convictions that should attain the level of contemporary science, to connect it with the regular political struggle for democracy as a means of achieving socialism - in a word, to fuse this spontaneous movement into one indestructible whole with the activity of the revolutionary party...'

We, the workers, will never be fooled by declarations from groups and parties that they are the vanguard. We will want them to prove themselves, and more, to act according to the principles of Marxism-Leninism, not in a dead, formal way but dialectically, in their connection with a changing historical reality. Not a single party or group in Britain today has made a single step in this direction.