[Unthinking Majority]

Lenin didn't care about what the working class wanted. He just wanted to create a society in his own vision and dictate to the working class what was best for them. This is what tyrants do. They are driven by power and control.

[Unthinking Majority]

In theory, the “powerful elite” who take over after a successful proletarian revolution would be the working class themselves. This may or may not be what happens in practice, of course.

They wouldn't be elites then. Beware the small cadre of know-it-alls.

[ckaihatsu]

On 20 December 1917 (2 January 1918, N.S.), the Cheka was created by Lenin's decree.[46] These were the beginnings of the Bolsheviks' consolidation of power over their political opponents. The Red Terror began in September 1918, following a failed assassination attempt on Lenin. The French Jacobin Terror was an example for the Soviet Bolsheviks. Trotsky had compared Lenin to Maximilien Robespierre as early as 1904.[47]

The Decree on Land ratified the actions of the peasants who throughout Russia had taken private land and redistributed it among themselves. The Bolsheviks viewed themselves as representing an alliance of workers and peasants signified by the Hammer and Sickle on the flag and the coat of arms of the Soviet Union. Other decrees:

• All private property was nationalized by the government.

• All Russian banks were nationalized.

• Private bank accounts were expropriated.

• The properties of the Russian Orthodox Church (including bank accounts) were expropriated.

• All foreign debts were repudiated.

• Control of the factories was given to the soviets.

• Wages were fixed at higher rates than during the war, and a shorter, eight-hour working day was introduced.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_R ... al_reforms

[Rich]

In theory, the “powerful elite” who take over after a successful proletarian revolution would be the working class themselves. This may or may not be what happens in practice, of course.

But it never happens in practice. And when you start looking at Communist organisations that are not in power its not hard to see why.

Even in the places where Communist Parties had mass manual working class membership, their leaderships were nearly always dominated by middle and upper class intellectuals. And when you look at the smaller groups its almost complete student and middle class domination and many of the manual workers they do have should probably be defined as lumpen according to Marxist categorisation. For example the Nazis lower class membership is always casually dismissed as lumpen, well I wonder how the German KDP membership would stand up to such severe Marxist categorical scrutiny.

And then there's people like Stalin. You sure can't accuse Stalin of having a privileged upbringing and unlike Lenin he knew what it was to do a proper day's manual labour. But the other perspective is that he was a Grammar School boy who had spent most of his adult life in prison / exile or in a administrative / mangerial role as a party activist. He was probably even less inclined to grant real autonomous power to shop floor workers than a minor noble, someone born into / brought up in the bottom of the upper class like Lenin.

[ckaihatsu]

Stalin

The Left Opposition was a faction within the Russian Communist Party (b) from 1923 to 1927[1] headed de facto by Leon Trotsky. The Left Opposition formed as part of the power struggle within the party leadership that began with the Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin's illness and intensified with his death in January 1924. Originally, the battle lines were drawn between Trotsky and his supporters who signed The Declaration of 46 in October 1923 on the one hand and a triumvirate (also known by its Russian name troika) of Comintern chairman Grigory Zinoviev, Communist Party General Secretary Joseph Stalin and Politburo chairman Lev Kamenev on the other hand.

The Left Opposition argued that the New Economic Policy had weakened the Soviet Union by allowing the private sector to achieve an increasingly important position in the Soviet economy while in their opinion, the centrally planned, socialised sector of the economy languished (including the mostly state-run heavy industries which were seen as essential not only for continued industrialisation but also defence). The platform called for the state to adopt a programme for mass industrialisation and to encourage the mechanization and collectivisation of agriculture, thereby developing the means of production and helping the Soviet Union move towards parity with Western capitalist countries, which would also increase the proportion of the economy which was part of the socialised sector of the economy and definitively shift the Soviet Union towards a socialist mode of production.[2]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left_Opposition