‘The vanguard’ IS the workers driving the revolution. The vanguard party is the most advanced section of the workers, the workers that have read the most theory, have the most experience and have the most developed skills of organization. Saying they should just “act as advisors” is saying they should wait for the workers to spontaneously develop another different organization for them to give suggestions to - but then doesn’t that organization just become the new vanguard, which should also stand aside and act as advisor instead of leading?

Though having just said that, at the moment of revolutionary potential, how is “taking the role of advisors” any different to “leading”? The Bolsheviks didn’t coerce the workers into following them (indeed, how exactly could they have done?), they didn’t grab a magic crown that assigned them the position of “leaders of the revolution” and all the other workers just had to fall in line - the workers gave their support to the Bolsheviks, chose to listen to their ideas and carry out their tactics, because they had proved through their achievements that they were the best and most capable party, in terms of bringing the changes that the workers wanted to fruition.

The conditions of bourgeoise society caused the formation of various organizations claiming to fight for the workers. Out of all these different possible options, only the Bolsheviks gained the support of the mass of workers - and they did so by having the most advanced theories, combined with the most experience of organizing, resulting in their deployment of successful tactics (all of which Trotsky himself was involved in!) So, in retrospect, out of all the other parties that fell by the wayside, we can say they were the vanguard party.

Now, that all said, I can see how there could be a misapprehension of what the vanguard is, mainly because of the state of the current Western left. People talking about and concerned with the “dangers of vanguardism” are themselves most likely Westerners that haven’t read theory or history, and probably still believe Western lies about communist states and communism in general. For such people, the only communists (and probably leftists of any kind) they will have interacted with will be intellectuals and academics, so their understanding will be skewed - they likely assume that ‘the vanguard party’ simply appears fully formed out of communist professors and talking heads and then ‘descends’ to take control of the workers movement, rather than arising from it organically. This is compounded by the fact that, in the west, the workers themselves are likely to be hostile to communist positions because of the advantages they enjoy from imperialism. So to them, the idea of ‘vanguard’ and ‘workers’ being separate entities is natural.

But fundamentally, it infantilizes and steals the subjectivity the workers - a very common problem in the Western and ‘New’ Left, exemplified by George Orwell’s Animal Farm for instance - implying that the vanguard should “choose” to stand aside and “let” the workers do what they want as if the vanguard could stop them! All the vanguard CAN do is point out how the workers can get what they want, and present a compelling enough, evidenced enough argument for their solution that the worker filled with revolutionary zeal, the active burning need to tear down an unjust world, will agree with them.

This ended up a little long because I haven’t got time to make it shorter, but I hope I got the point across without too much repetition. For more reading about the pitfalls of Trotskyism, I recommend this short article as well as the book it’s based on.

If the vanguard party advances the most radical ideas of the working class, and its membership is largely the most radical members of the working class, then who are they advising? If it is the average less radical worker, who should lead the revolution instead of the most radical ones, then the party has become tailist. If it is the most radical workers who are for some reason kept outside the party but still follow their advice, is this difference between leading and advising just a matter of who has a membership card in their wallet? If it is other non-party worker organizations, then what can the party do that those orgs can not do by themselves if leadership is out of the question? why not just join them instead?

Baby brained take from me almost being finished reading Lenin’s, What is to be Done…

The workers first priority, in general is going to be figuring out how to get better working conditions. So there’s a pretty high chance that any organized group or workers are going to find themselves very active around fighting for local economic gains in their particular location but much less active around trying to figure out how get into the political side of things (that has the revolutionary potential to change the entire employee/employer relationship for everybody instead of just a particular shop). Lenin’s not saying that 100% of a spontaneous worker organized movement is going to refuse to involve itself politically but that most workers have more experience with the local economic relations between themselves and their employers and without some outside group laying the groundwork of education and agitation beforehand, the mass worker movement is inclined to follow the path of least resistance and stick to employee/employer relations and avoid getting involved in political change.

Assuming that the organized workers will just spontaneously jump into revolutionary politics after winning concessions with their employers is seen as being a huge risk and very lazy for a revolutionary socialist or communist to just sit back, wait for the workers to “figure it out for themselves” and then take credit for any gains that a mass movement of workers might stumble upon. Lenin critiques this idea and labels it “tail-ism.” He argues that the there’s a huge amount of potential and momentum but that the professional revolutionary should already have been learning theory, paying attention to politics, developing ways of organizing and communicating that are harder for the State to destroy or intercept to help direct that mass movement of workers towards projects that can have a much greater impact for all the workers all at once instead of piecemeal, factory by factory, shop by shop.

I visualize it like a huge trough of water. I can tip that trough to the side and that huge mass of water will come rushing out but the force is expended inefficiently, too fast, un directed, and leaving nothing for later. I put a spigot on the trough and attach a hose to that spigot, the water can be directed in a more efficient and direct way.

So if Trots are saying, “the workers are the drivers of a revolution”, but what they are actually saying is, “the workers will just spontaneously figure things out for themselves”, anybody who read Lenin or later theoreticians who agree with Lenin’s general guidelines and those who’ve learned the history of some workers movements that never expanded their revolution into the realm of politics, are going to view Trots as being ineffective, backwards, primitive.

That’s not a trotskyite thing, that’s a communist thing.

The problem isn’t the the overarching objective, the bigger picture so to speak, but the chosen tactics to get there being why trots are always poked fun at.