Hi Yhcrana,

I believe there is a lot of truth to what you say, but also some possible misperceptions.

As far as replacing one ruling class with another--well that is exactly what happened in Russia and China.

In Russia and China production was placed under state control but the working class never fully controlled the state. Instead the state was in the hands of a group of people which eventually degenerated and became a new ruling class (as you noted in your question). So this brings up two interesting questions:

1) Is there a way for the working class to control the state in the inevitable situations where state officials lose whatever connection to the working class they may have once had and become hypocritical and corrupt?

2) Assuming that the working class is able to control the state--does this mean that placing production control under state control is equivalent to the working class controlling production?

Here are my answers to these two questions:

1) In order for the working class to control the state it will be necessary that workers have fundamental democratic rights (ie: speech, assembly, the right to agitate and organize). Using these rights, the working class will be able to create independent organizations that will expose corruption within the state. This process of exposure (ie: transparency) will facilitate the development of anti-corruption movements with the ability to win mass support and secure their just demands. Without these rights there is no way that the working class will be able to control the state. With these rights the workers will create powerful organizations that effectively challenge the corruption and the tendencies of corrupt officials to strive for power monopoly. It is as simple as that.

(Why then did the bolsheviks suspend the democratic rights of workers in Russia? See my essay Why did Lenin suppress all competing trends after the civil war ended in 1920?)

2) Does placing production under the control of a state that is controlled by the working class--mean that the working class controls production?

Answer: at best, only partially.

As long as money is used as a basis for making decisions on what goods and services to produce and how to produce them--the economy will have two masters engaged in an unstable tug of war--on one side the working class--and on the other side the laws of commodity production--which act to spontaneously create a new privileged class. Eliminating money in favor of barter will not solve this problem (it will only lower the productivity of labor and the standard of living for everyone). Nor can the problem be solved by creating a "command economy" in which a group of bureaucrats make production decisions for the economy as a whole. Both the use of

(a) money/capital/barter and
(b) a bureaucratic "command economy"

will introduce corruption into society approximately as rapidly as it can be cleaned up.

Rather--the fundamental way out is the development of a moneyless gift economy that will not rely on either a market or all-powerful central planners to make decisions.

Finally, about your use of the phrase "vanguardist communists" to describe the activists who argue as you describe. I think these people have political conceptions which are seriously fucked up. But I don't think their problem is their aspiration to create an organization capable of leading the class struggle of the workers. (Such an organization is very much needed at the present time--and the creation of such an organization should be the primary objective of all serious activists.)

Rather the problem with the people you describe as "vanguardists" (I call them "cargo cult Leninists") is the feudal, paternalistic political conceptions which cripple their ability to give activists today a _r_e_a_l_i_s_t_i_c_ vision of a world not run by the bourgeoisie. Without such a realistic vision there can be no mass movement for the overthrow of bourgeois rule in a country like the US. (The cargo cultists have other problems also--but I want to keep this essay short.)

Interestingly, there has been some discussion (within what is left of the anti-revisionist movement) concerning whether to abandon the term "communism" because of the misuse of this term over many decades by the enemies of the working class who set up fuedal-style regimes in Russia and China. The precedent for abandoning this name is the way that genuine revolutionaries abandoned the former term for communism (ie: "social-democracy") following the great betrayal of 1914--in which nearly all the social-democratic parties of the world sided with their "own" national governments and urged their working class supporters to shoot down workers in other countries in the slaughter known to history as the first world war.

The betrayal by the "communist" parties in Russia and China is no less significant than the betrayal of "social-democracy" in 1914. Suggested alternatives for the term "communism" include "worker communism" (ie: as opposed to "bourgeois communism") as proposed by the late Mansoor Hekmat, associated with the Workers' Communist Parties of Iran and Iraq [-1-] and the term "proletarism" as proposed by Gregory Isayev, associated with a small group in Russia [-2-] that was imprisoned for organizing workers during the Brezhnev era.

[-1-] See the websites of the Workers' Communist Parties of Iran and Iraq at: http://www.wpiran.org and http://www.wpiraq.org

[-2-] For the website of Gregory Isayev's Party of the Proletarian Dictatorship see: http://proletarism.org. See also The life of Grigory Isayev