Left Communism and the Vanguard

I am against the idea and I imagination the Left-Communist movement would feel the same. I mean, the Left-Communists are generally Anti-Bolshevik and the Vanguard Party is a product of Bolshevism and Lenin's organizational philosophy.

Left communists are and have always been for a vanguard party.

The revolutionary political organization constitutes the vanguard of the working class and is an active factor in the generalization of class consciousness within the proletariat. Its role is neither to ‘organize the working class’ nor to ‘take power’ in its name, but to participate actively in the movement towards the unification of struggles, towards workers taking control of them for themselves, and at the same time to draw out the revolutionary political goals of the proletariat’s combat.

The historically determined form of organ­isation which groups together the most conscious and prepared proletarian fighters is the Party. Since the historical task of the proletarian rev­olution is communism, this party, in its prog­ramme and in its ideology, can only be a commun­ist party. The communist party must have a thor­oughly worked out programmatic basis and must be organised and disciplined in its entirety from below, as a unified will. It must be the head and weapon of the revolution.

The class Party is the indispensable organ for the proletarian revolutionary struggle. The Communist Party consists of the most advanced and resolute part of the proletariat, unites the efforts of the working masses transforming their struggles for group interests and contingent issues into the general struggle for the revolutionary emancipation of the proletariat. Propagating the revolutionary theory among the masses, organising the material means of action, leading the working class all along its struggle, by securing the historical continuity and the international unity of the movement, are duties of the Party.

Allow me to clarify on my post after Leo's statement:

I am for a workers' party to lead in revolutionary activity, but I am against the Bolshevik concept of this. I thought with statement "vanguard party" we were speaking explicitly of the Leninist party and the "professional revolutionaries" theory and all that.

To further clarify the left communist view on the degeneration of the Russian Revolution and the role of the party; left communists see this revolution as proletarian as it was the councils, not the party that took power. However, as the revolution did not spread, it got isolated and according to the left communists this is the root of the degeneration of the revolution and the counter-revolution. Because of this, we see that the party became identified with the state, the revolution degenerated and then the bourgeoisie, in another form finally took power again.

So according to left communists today, the main problem was not the Bolshevik concept of party but the isolation of the revolution. Lenin's concept had faults, some of which he admitted were wrong (such as the bits from What is to be Done? about consciousness being brought to the proletariat by bourgeois intellectuals) and some of which he did not as far as I'm aware of (such as the idea of taking the best militants from the workplaces for them to be able to work full-time). However the concept of the Bolsheviks and the third international, although not perfect, was nothing anywhere near what the 'Leninists' made out of it and 'applied' it. After all, Lenin's concept had some very clear ideas, such as this:

[T]he chief task of the Communist Parties in countries where Soviet power is not established are: 1.To explain to the broad masses of the working class the historical meaning of the political and practical necessity of a new proletarian democracy which must replace bourgeois democracy and parliamentarianism.
2. To extend and build up workers� councils in all branches of industry, in the army and navy, and amongst agricultural workers and small peasants

3. To win an assured, conscious communist majority in the councils

Notice that Lenin too was calling for workers' council power, not party power. Not everything is as it's represented by it's 'followers'.

To quote the ICC basic positions again, vanguard is the revolutionary political organization and is an active factor in the generalization of class consciousness within the proletariat which aims participate actively in the movement towards the unification of struggles, towards workers taking control of them for themselves, and at the same time to draw out the revolutionary political goals of the proletariat’s combat.

On centralization in general, all left communists have been for centralism, but not "democratic centralism". To quote the ICC on this:

Today the idea of 'democratic centralism' (a term we owe to Lenin) is marked by the seal of Stalinism which used it to cover up the process by which any revolutionary life in the parties of the CI were stifled and liquidated. Moreover, Lenin himself bears some responsibility for this in that, at the Tenth congress of the Russian Communist Party (1921), he asked for and won the banning of fractions which he - wrongly, even on a provisional basis - considered to he necessary in the face of the terrible difficulties the revolution was going through. Furthermore the demand for a "real democratic centralism", as practiced in the Bolshevik party, has no sense either, in that: certain conceptions defended by Lenin (notably in One Step Forward, Two Steps Back) about the hierarchical and 'military' character of the organisation, conceptions exploited by Stalinism to justify its methods, should be rejected and the term 'democratic' is itself not the most appropriate, both etymologically ('power of the people') and because of the meaning it has acquired under capitalism which has turned it into a formalistic fetish used to cover up and justify the bourgeoisie's domination over society.

This is the basis of our criticism to democratic centralism. Centralism itself means to us a united organization of revolutionaries who share the same politics discussing and deciding on all the issues, be it practical or theoretical, collectively on an international level. It means a collective organizational body in which whole is not the sum of the parts and in which the parts are resondible in front of the whole organisation to carry out a particular activity (territorial publications, local interventions, etc).