Our novelty is perhaps in tracing these problems back to a preference for immediacy – namely, the kernel of contemporary ‘folk politics’. (In fact, a better name for ‘folk politics’ might be ‘the politics of immediacy’.) It is this valorisation of immediacy – and the way in which it has become a common sense – that we see played out in various ways across the left, both in the explicit statement of political theorists and in the implicit assumptions of various practices.

The vanguard-function differs from the teleological understanding of the vanguard whose sway over the Marxist tradition helped engender vanguardism