When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called “the People’s Stick”.
Statism and Anarchy by Mikhail Bakunin
A concern is the vanguard party ruling over the prolitariate thereby exchanging capital ownership from one minority to another.
Engels argued the imbalance of ownership is natural because a mill is subject to the authority of the water to operate. There is a lack of imagination in justifying a ruling minority after the revolution by saying that’s how capitalist technology works.
What good are my electric tools if I am unable to get electricity from the centralized power plant of the vanguard party? I will need to subject myself to the minority and pay rents. How does Lenin’s vanguard party differ from capitalism in terms of ownership? Does it only work if the vanguard party are benevolent towards the prolitariat?
What we are discussing here is not whether Lenin was correct but rather whether he had an accurate interpretation of Marx and Engles. If you want to argue that Marx and Engles were wrong, and that Lenin was wrong because he was following in that tradition, that’s a completely different position from that of the person I replied to, that Marx and Engles were right and that Lenin was wrong because he deviated from that position.
I’m not really interested in getting sidetracked here from this point into this much broader discussion. I’d be happy to discuss it another time, but for now, we’re talking about whether Lenin correctly interpreted Marx’s writings and followed in his tradition or not.
Lenin had contemporary critiques.
A concern is the vanguard party ruling over the prolitariate thereby exchanging capital ownership from one minority to another.
Engels argued the imbalance of ownership is natural because a mill is subject to the authority of the water to operate. There is a lack of imagination in justifying a ruling minority after the revolution by saying that’s how capitalist technology works.
What good are my electric tools if I am unable to get electricity from the centralized power plant of the vanguard party? I will need to subject myself to the minority and pay rents. How does Lenin’s vanguard party differ from capitalism in terms of ownership? Does it only work if the vanguard party are benevolent towards the prolitariat?
Then you agree with me.
What we are discussing here is not whether Lenin was correct but rather whether he had an accurate interpretation of Marx and Engles. If you want to argue that Marx and Engles were wrong, and that Lenin was wrong because he was following in that tradition, that’s a completely different position from that of the person I replied to, that Marx and Engles were right and that Lenin was wrong because he deviated from that position.
I’m not really interested in getting sidetracked here from this point into this much broader discussion. I’d be happy to discuss it another time, but for now, we’re talking about whether Lenin correctly interpreted Marx’s writings and followed in his tradition or not.
Trotsky argued for The Permanent Revolution as a counter to the vanguard. Might be interesting to read.