There’s a weird misunderstanding of what a “vanguard” is, in both left anti-communist and communist circles.

A vanguard is not a self-defined group that rules over the proles and directs them towards a revolution and governs once it’s won.

Vanguards are not things that exist in the present. Vanguard is just a term to help understand a revolution after it happens.

When a revolution happens, the most politically advanced (in class consciousness and left theory) individuals and groups that participate will steer the people towards socialism. They will lead, by example, on who to fight, how and why.

During the revolution, they aren’t called anything and specially not by themselves.

But after the revolution, when analyzing it, those people are then called the vanguard of the revolution.

Any communist that says they want to “form and participate in a vanguard party” has no understanding of revolutions and left theory.

Any left anti-communist that derides vanguards for being authoritarian and “replicating state oppression” also have no understanding of revolutions or left theory.

Honestly we would all be better off just not using the term vanguard at all anymore.

This assumes that a vanguard is a separate class, when what it really is, is an advanced segment of the working class. That said, I wanna inject some good faith complexity here.

A Maoist critique of a a vanguard would assert that, by being the most advanced segment of the working class, a petty bourgeois element can exist within a party.

In the maoist view, since class struggle persists under socialism, that petty bourgeois element can, wittingly or otherwise, lead the socialist state back to capitalism. And as such, this needs to be struggled against.

The solution to this isn't to discard the concept of a vanguard, after all most socialist revolutions, which have seized power, have featured them.

Rather, Maoism has the concept of The Mass Line, wherein the party seeks to intimately involve itself with the masses. And the Cultural Revolution, where the class conscious masses are unleashed on the party itself, to keep it in check. Hence the Cultural Revolution slogans like, "its right to rebel" and "Bombard the headquarters"

I'm not a Maoist (I find the maoist position on AES to be lacking), but it's a tradition I have respect for. There's this big emphasis on the dialectic between top-down and bottom-up power that's really worth exploring, I think. I once heard it jokingly called "Anarcho-stalinism" and I hope you can see why lol

According to whom?

According to Marx, Engels, Lenin and any other respectable communist.

Capitalism is a historical progression rather than something you adopt willy nilly, and it has expanded productive forces significantly allowing us to produce stuff far more efficiently in far higher quality and complexity. With feudalism, it's mode of production was far more individualized, with peasants essentially producing for their and their family's subsistence only, and artisans in guilds would only work in small groups, limiting to what they can produce.

Therefore, this expansion of productive powers in capitalism in theory leads to better life quality, less socially necessary labor time to provide for everyone, less mortality given how we can now produce things like insulin in complex labs, etc.

Keyword is in theory - in practice, everything else in the system goes against that, leads to overproduction and having us proletariat work for much higher hours than is socially necessary, it concentrates wealth to private owners giving them immense political power. That's what communists are trying to do - progress forward so we produce not for profit, but for use based on need which would solve these issues.

Btw, comparison between feudal peasantry and proletariat is flawed - peasants were based in countryside and essentially were the middle class of it, owning a small amount of land that they worked for themselves. Proletariat are urbanized, work in factories they don't own and produce for thousands of people. A more apt comparison in work hours would be proletariat vs guild apprentices - their exploitation and work hours were essentially the same and this system was precursor to capitalist wage labor.

Even though you're getting shit on with downvotes, you are half right. Communism hasn't been tried before, but it's also very difficult to achieve due to opportunism (or what you call power hunger).

For communism to be achieved, the working class has to take down the dominance, or dictatorship of the capitalist class (also called dictatorship of the proletariat), then productive forces have to be reorganized to produce to satisfy everyone's needs rather than for profit, and then abolish commodity production entirely and replace it with planned economy, distributing goods via labor vouchers or "according to their need" in later stages.

So far we got only to dictatorship of the proletariat (which manifests as state capitalism, not communism as many steps are missing) in USSR, and the Bolsheviks under Lenin were genuinely disciplined, but the country wasn't industrialized, with hundreds of millions of peasants. Can't provide for everyone when theres no factories to build enough stuff in!

However, capitalism and state capitalism breeds opportunism, meaning that if you don't replace it quickly then even under proletariat class control opportunism will rear it's ugly head, as seen in USSR. Of course there's also other factors, but for communism to have a chance to work, it has to happen in an already developed country with international spread so capitalism over and done with quickly.