I regularly see trots being memed about because “they do nothing apart from writing newspapers”, but to me from their viewpoint (and as an anarchist) it totally makes sense and is a sympathetic view how it should be the workers leading the fight towards a revolution and the vanguard should stand aside and take the role of advisors (hence the newspapers) rather than leaders.
I feel like i’m missing something but i don’t know what.
If the vanguard party advances the most radical ideas of the working class, and its membership is largely the most radical members of the working class, then who are they advising? If it is the average less radical worker, who should lead the revolution instead of the most radical ones, then the party has become tailist. If it is the most radical workers who are for some reason kept outside the party but still follow their advice, is this difference between leading and advising just a matter of who has a membership card in their wallet? If it is other non-party worker organizations, then what can the party do that those orgs can not do by themselves if leadership is out of the question? why not just join them instead?
Well i think in that scenario having the party would be more for guidance than organizing purposes so yeah, being a member would be rather a formality and most revolutionary activities wouldn’t be carried out by party members but workers themselves.
Why wouldn’t the workers be allowed to become part of the party?
I didn’t mean they wouldn’t be allowed to, i meant they wouldn’t be required to, since the party is just a formal guiding light but the decisionmaking takes place out of the party.
But this was explained in another comment about how workers will likely be more busy fighting their local fights which is a fair assessment.
A leader is directing things, setting priorities, assigning resources, maintaining focus on a goal and bearing a chunk of the responsibility for the results.
An advisor gets to make suggestions but doesn’t have to suffer consequences if they’re wrong, telling somebody what I think they should be doing doesn’t mean I have to bear any responsibility for being wrong. Advisors don’t have as much “skin in the game” as a leader would. Feels a bit like this qualifies as tailism.