Proletarian Party of a New Type

A revolutionary party of the working class, distinct from the reformist parties of the Second International, in respect to party building —founded on the principles of Marxism-Leninism.

During 1895-1896, a workers’ mass movement led by Marxist social-democrat organizations emerged in Russia, opening up a new stage in the history of the Russian revolution in which Marxism was combined with the workers’ movement. And in March 1898, the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party was founded. The economists, the opportunist faction of the party, influenced by Bernstein’s revisionism, one-sidedly exaggerated the significance and role of the economic struggle, worshipped the spontaneous strike movement, and wanted to establish the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party as a mere reformist party. Faced with the fact that the world was beginning to enter a new revolutionary era and that Russia was encountered with all the current tasks of the proletariat more revolutionary than any other major country, Lenin stressed that the first and most urgent practical task for the proletariat to overthrow feudal autocracy and the bourgeoisie, bring the proletariat to power and to organize a socialist society was to build the party as an organization of revolutionaries which would lend energy, stability, and continuity to the political struggle of the proletariat. Such a new type of organization was to put an end to the ideological confusion, political wavering, and laxity and non-professionalism in the organizational aspect of the party at that time, and was a new type of proletarian revolutionary party completely different from the reformist parties of the Second International active in various countries. The new proletarian party should be organized on a nationwide scale, to be broad, diverse, resolute and flexible, to have a strict and detailed division of labor, and to be able to carry out its work consistently in any situation, at any “juncture of change” and under unexpected circumstances. This new type of proletarian party, guided by Marxist theory, is an advanced detachment of the working class, a leader and organizer, a party capable of maintaining constant and genuine contact with the masses, a party adept at leading the masses as well as it should be both the advanced detachment of the Russian proletariat and the “vanguard of the revolutionary international proletariat”.