Relations Between the Communist Vanguard and the Mass Movement

Written in July 1955, Livio Maitan's 'Relations Between the Communist Vanguard and the Mass Movement' addresses the central problem of Marxist politics: how does a revolutionary organisation relate to the class it seeks to lead? Maitan was thirty-three years old and working under conditions of deep entry into the Italian Communist Party when he wrote this document for the Fourth International's internal discussion. The result is one of the clearest systematic treatments of the vanguard question in the Trotskyist tradition: historically grounded, tactically concrete, and honest about both the achievements and the failures of the FI's post-war strategy. Part One reconstructs the tradition from Marx and Engels through the First International to Lenin and the Communist International, showing how each generation addressed the fusion problem under different structural conditions. Part Two draws the tactical conclusions for 1955, working through specific national situations in Italy, Britain, the United States, and Argentina. The argument is directed against two symmetrical errors. The sect preserves its doctrine at the cost of political relevance, isolated from the actual movement of the class. The liquidationist dissolves into whatever broader formation commands working-class loyalty, abandoning independent revolutionary organisation in the name of proximity to the masses. Maitan's method — what he calls 'fortiter in re, suaviter in modo', firm on the principles and flexible on the forms — charts the course between them. The document sits at the foundation of the theoretical framework Maitan developed across the upheavals of 1968, the Portuguese revolution of 1974-75, and the long decomposition of the European left that followed. For readers approaching his later work on the Italian Communist Party, the 'historic compromise', and the FI's debates on broad parties and mass formations, this text supplies the theoretical foundations: the broad vanguard, the transitional forms, the tension between independent organisation and entrist work. This edition presents the first English translation, introduced by Duncan Chapel (Red Mole Substack).