The integration of the vanguard in the class is politically expressed as the Communist Party, and historically as the class movement towards the politic position of the vanguard, the political position of Communism.
The C.P. does not emerge, then, from the masses or the spontaneous movement of the proletarian masses, but it does, necessarily, from the proletarian class. A conceptual distinction must be made between the ideas of masses and class. The masses are part of the class, but they are not all of it. The vanguard is one of its essential components. The C.P. emerges when the vanguard, which bears the vanguard ideology, integrates with the Class and unites with the mass movement. That is why we say that this party is product of the proletarian class, but not of its spontaneous movement of the masses. That is why we say that there is no Communist Party without this synthesis between vanguard and masses inside the Class, although the vanguard can previously be present -as it happens nowadays, which can be confirmed from the great number of marxist-leninist circles today organized, product of the disintegration of the revisionism- disconnected from the worker movement, and, therefore, without being an organic part of the class. In fact, this situation is a necessary stage, prior to the creation of the C.P.: it is the stage in which the Party is reconstituted, and it is characterized by the vanguard trying to be an integrant part of the class, which can only be accomplished by constituting the C.P.
The proletariat is a unity between conscience and movement. As stated before, in its appearance stage, the proletariat was not yet a class. Those were the times of the disintegration of feudalism, of the peak of commercial capital and the incipient manufacture. The proletarians exist separated, they are a subproduct of the dissolution of the feudal relationships, and they tend constantly to go back to the old forms of familiar or guild production. But when the capitalism appropriates more and more the productive spheres of the economy and begins to domain all the social production and, moreover, when the capital introduces machines in the production, the trend towards the proletarization of the producers becomes dominant, and the resistance of the wage-earning people, more or less organized, begins. At the beginning, this struggle is local or individual, but it spreads and organizes at a national scale. The proletarians begin to become conscious that they are a class with special interests and that they are opposed to another class, the one of the employers. The clash becomes more and more a confrontation between classes and, more and more, this clash adopts political dimensions. In this stage of the movement, the proletariat constitutes and organizes politically as a class (trade unions, worker parties). This grade of development of the movement corresponds to certain type of organization and political conscience. The proletariat is at that moment a fully configured class, and their actions obey to a determined independent political conscience. It acts, therefore, as a political party. However, this conscience and this political organization point out that the proletarian movement is still within the bourgeois frame, as they still presuppose the capitalist social relationships as unquestionable; the movement of the proletariat based on the “class against class” struggle is still limited to the reproduction of the conditions of this struggle, with no other exit but its infinite development. Because of that, the political struggle of the proletarian class focuses only on acquiring advantages for this struggle, focuses on reforms and makes use of strikes or the parliamentary legality in order to obtain or endorse these reforms. The proletarian movement can only give a new qualitative leap and obtain a new course, in tune with the possibilities of its political action and its historical goal, when the revolutionary conscience becomes part of its movement and adds new and real political targets, and when this crystallizes in a new type of political organization of the worker class; in short, when the proletarian movement directs towards the Communism, when the worker class that acts as a bourgeois political party tends to turn into a communist political organization, when the class, as a political movement of resistance, turns into a revolutionary movement, at first in an incipient way (CP), then in a way that comprises the whole Class (communist society).
In its class struggle against the bourgeoisie, the proletariat strives constantly to get this new type of organization, which goes together with the gradual awareness of its revolutionary role. In this struggle, the permanence of the reformist organization type expresses that, in the first place, the process of conscious elevation of the masses towards the place of the communist vanguard is necessarily gradual; it is not achieved instantly, through an unique political act for the whole class (the constitution of the CP, for instance) but through several historical events (the constitution of the CP, plus the revolutionary conquest of power, plus the fulfillment of the tasks of the dictatorship of the proletariat). In the second place, it expresses that the bourgeoisie, with the support to these organizations, tries to contain and break the transformation and the change of both the conscience and the organization of the workers from its reformist stage to the revolutionary one. This means that the old worker organization turns, objectively, into its opposite, for it stops defending the strategic interests of the worker class and begins defending the ones of the bourgeoisie, carrying out the historical betrayal of the social democracy to the proletariat through its revisionist and political leaderships. Because of this, and regardless of the tactical manoeuvres which every revolutionary process may demand in particular circumstances, the social democracy and the revisionism have turned into the main enemy of the revolution, both in its first stage or the constitution of the CP, because they try to distort the vanguard ideology and to make difficult the demarcation of fields with the bourgeois ideology, and in the stage in which the masses have to be won and the power has to be conquered, because they represent the link with the bourgeoisie within the worker class, and because they try to neutralize the transformation and the revolutionary organization of the masses.
While the conversion of the proletariat into class and worker party takes place through the “class against class” dialectics or struggle, through the struggle against the bourgeoisie for the defense of the proletariat´s immediate demands, the conversion of the proletariat into a revolutionary class and CP takes place through the dialectics between the vanguard and the masses within the class; for the vanguard is the one who transforms and the only one who is able to turn the general class struggle of the proletariat into revolutionary conscience and organization.
In other words, if the motor of the proletarian movement in its stage of formation as a class was the direct confrontation with the other class (the bourgeoisie), which allows the delimitation of the social or political fields between both classes and the unity of the proletariat as an economic subject, in the stage of transformation of the worker movement into a revolutionary movement (Proletarian movement), the reciprocal action between the vanguard –already integrated in the class- and the masses of the proletariat becomes the motor; in summary, the CP becomes the motor of the elevation of the Class towards the Communism.
The CP is not something placed apart from the class, and it is not something given to the class from outside of it, or something that directs to the class from outside of it. The CP is the relation that exists between the vanguard and the masses of the class in the Revolution, a relation that finds a unity and a different organic crystallization in each one of the stages of the Revolution. The concepts of class and party can not be understood in separate ways, with a relation of exclusion, in a metaphysic way, but as two aspects of a dialectical unity, two aspects of a concrete historical entity, the proletariat. Its historical role takes part with the movement of that dialectical unity: First, when, in the historical phase of the preparation of the revolution –until the end of the 19 th century-, the proletariat becomes a class, and, therefore, this organic condition becomes the main aspect, for we are dealing with its organization as a social unity, while the political aspect plays a secondary role; that is so because worker parties are only parties which brings together the class and defends its economic and social identity as the mentioned class. Second, when in the era of the Revolution –until the Communism- the proletariat must turn itself in CP, which implies that this elevation to this new political condition is the main thing, for it must accomplish its historical mission of eliminating the class society; doing so, and once achieved the communism, the proletariat overcomes its social and economic condition of class and the contradiction Party-Class, which defines the proletariat, disappears in a new synthesis.
In the era of the Proletarian Revolution, the movement of the class towards its party is expressed through the contradiction between the vanguard and the masses of the class. It is not then a matter of consolidating in a quantitative way the proletariat as a particular class, nor of defending its moral identity as an independent political class, that is to say, of politically and socially defining and separating itself from the bourgeoisie; the matter is about overcoming, precisely, the conditions that determine the proletariat as a political class. This transformation of the tasks of the proletariat explains why its vanguard organization is not, and can not be, a mass organization, whose vocation would be the one of comprising the whole class, as it happens with the reformist party or tradeunion, because it would mean that the organization would rest lethargic at the economic or tradeunionist level in its political development; the vanguard organization must have the vocation of elevating and taking the class towards the Communism. The organization which takes the responsibility of fulfilling the task of elevation of the proletariat till this new state of civilization must be a organization which has a qualitatively superior ideology, a vanguard ideology (the Communism), because it is about going beyond the material determination as a class; it is about, in some way, denying the present empiric condition of exploited social class, in order to transform oneself and emancipate in the Communism, transforming and emancipating, at the same time, the whole humanity and elevating it towards a new state of civilization. Those who proclaim they are communist, and, at the same time, are against the leninism, adducing that, in the present society, in the capitalism, there is a “socio-cultural barrier” that can not be exceeded, are renouncing to what essentially defines the Communism as ideology, are exercising the most shameless electioneering opportunism, are showing the most evident and recalcitrant anti-communism.
Because of that, the ideology is the main characteristic which defines the new vanguard organization, because that thinking is what promotes the proletarian movement and what projects its being towards a revolutionary horizon; it is what opens up the proletariat´s conscience and removes the postration of its economic determination as a class which produces added value and other people´s richness. Because of that, the proletarian vanguard must approach to the rest of the class from the ideology: this is its first step and its premise as vanguard, and this is the first step and the first premise of the movement of the proletarian class towards its Party, of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat.
The Party is the revolutionary movement of the class "for itself" The class which transforms itself from exploited class to emancipated humanity is the Party as the expression of the movement of the class in that transformation. This has different solutions, depending on the current stage of the movement. When, in a first moment, a part of the society obtains the communist conscience, but invests the majority of its efforts in adopting it completely and in organizing the way to take it to the worker class, there is not Party yet, and, in consequence, nor the revolutionary movement, because it is about the ideological vanguard becoming part of the class. Let us say at this point that, in order to become part of the modern revolutionary class, sharing its material situation and its position in the productive process is not a demanding requirement; one can be part of the class by sharing its ideology – which is, in the essential, revolutionary-. This is the first trail which must be traveled by the (ideological) vanguard in order to be part of the class, and, therefore, to fulfill its (revolutionary) vanguard role. As long as this task is not finished, there will not be a real, practical vanguard, there is no revolutionary orientation for the class, nor, therefore, movement towards the Communism, nor CP.
In a second moment, when the vanguard has adopted the ideology and has come into contact with the masses of the class, having created an incipient movement towards that thinking, the conditions for the existence of the CP as a specific political organization are fulfilled, for the class, once having integrated the vanguard in its bosom, can begin to turn its spontaneous movement into a conscious (revolutionary) movement towards the ideological and political position of the thinking and the program of that Party, the Communism. In that moment and in that sense, the CP is born as the vanguard organization plus the movement of the masses towards it.
After that, that movement must extend to the whole masses of the class, and the vanguard must use each and every political instrument that the development of that process may demand and allow: mass organizations to strengthen the revolutionary movement and the political position of the vanguard, i.e. strengthen the CP; Proletariat Dictatorship, in order to sweep every obstacle that the old society may oppose to the extension of the movement; construction of the new social relationships, in order accelerate the elevation of the class towards the Communism, etc.