As noted above, anarchists oppose vanguardism for three reasons, one of which is the way it recommends how revolutionaries should organise to influence the class struggle.
So how is a "vanguard" party organised? To quote the Communist International's 1920 resolution on the role of the Communist Party in the revolution, the party must have a "centralised political apparatus" and "must be organised on the basis of iron proletarian centralism." This, of course, suggests a top-down structure internally, which the resolution explicitly calls for. In its words, "Communist cells of every kind must be subordinate to one another as precisely as possible in a strict hierarchy." [Proceedings and Documents of the Second Congress 1920, vol. 1, p. 193, p. 198 and p. 199] Therefore, the vanguard party is organised in a centralised, top-down way. However, this is not all, as well as being "centralised," the party is also meant to be democratic, hence the expression "democratic centralism." On this the resolution states:
"The Communist Party must be organised on the basis of democratic centralism. The most important principle of democratic centralism is election of the higher party organs by the lowest, the fact that all instructions by a superior body are unconditionally and necessarily binding on lower ones, and existence of a strong central party leadership whose authority over all leading party comrades in the period between one party congress and the next is universally accepted." [Op. Cit., p. 198]
For Lenin, speaking in the same year, democratic centralism meant "only that representatives from the localities meet and elect a responsible body which must then govern . . . Democratic centralism consists in the Congress checking on the Central Committee, removing it and electing a new one." [quoted by Robert Service, The Bolshevik Party in Revolution, p. 131] Thus, "democratic centralism" is inherently top-down, although the "higher" party organs are, in principle, elected by the "lower." Without this, of course, there would be no "democratic" aspect to the party. The real question is whether such democracy is effective, a topic we will return to. However, the key point is that the central committee is the active element, the one whose decisions are implemented and so the focus of the structure is in the "centralism" rather than the "democratic" part of the formula.
As we noted in section H.2.14, the Communist Party was expected to have a dual structure, one legal and the other illegal. The resolution states that "[i]n countries where the bourgeoisie . . . is still in power, the Communist parties must learn to combine legal and illegal activity in a planned way. However, the legal work must be placed under the actual control of the illegal party at all times." [Proceedings and Documents of the Second Congress 1920, vol. 1, p. 198-9] It goes without saying that the illegal structure is the real power in the party and that it cannot be expected to be as democratic as the legal party, which in turn would be less that democratic as the illegal would have the real power within the organisation.
All this has clear parallels with Lenin's infamous work, What is to be done?. In that work Lenin argues for "a powerful and strictly secret organisation, which concentrates in its hands all the threads of secret activities, an organisation which of necessity must be a centralised organisation." This call for centralisation is not totally dependent on secrecy, though. As he notes, "specialisation necessarily presupposes centralisation, and in its turn imperatively calls for it." Such a centralised organisation would need leaders and Lenin argues that "no movement can be durable without a stable organisation of leaders to maintain continuity." As such, "the organisation must consist chiefly of persons engaged in revolutionary activities as a profession." Thus, we have a centralised organisation which is managed by specialists, by "professional revolutionaries." [Essential Works of Lenin, p. 158, p. 153, p. 147 and p. 148]
This does not mean that these "professional revolutionaries" all come from the bourgeoisie or petit bourgeoisie. According to Lenin:
"A workingman agitator who is at all talented and 'promising' must not be left to work eleven hours a day in a factory. We must arrange that he be maintained by the Party, that he may in due time go underground." [Op. Cit., p. 155]
Thus the full time professional revolutionaries are drawn from all classes into the party apparatus. However, in practice the majority of such full-timers were/are middle class. Trotsky notes that "just as in the Bolshevik committees, so at the [1905] Congress itself, there were almost no workingmen. The intellectuals predominated." [Stalin, vol. 1, p. 101] This did not change, even after the influx of working class members in 1917 the "incidence of middle-class activists increases at the highest echelons of the hierarchy of executive committees." [Robert Service, The Bolshevik Party in Revolution, p. 47] An ex-worker was a rare sight in the Bolshevik Central Committee, an actual worker non-existent. However, regardless of their original class background what unites the full-timers is not their origin but rather their current relationship with the working class, one of separation and hierarchy.
The organisational structure of this system was made clear at around the same time as What is to be Done?, with Lenin arguing that the factory group (or cell) of the party "must consist of a small number of revolutionaries, receiving direct from the [central] committee orders and power to conduct the whole social-democratic work in the factory. All members of the factory committee must regard themselves as agents of the [central] committee, bound to submit to all its directions, bound to observe all 'laws and customs' of this 'army in the field' in which they have entered and which they cannot leave without permission of the commander." [quoted by E.H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, vol. 1, p. 33] The similarities to the structure proposed by Lenin and agreed to by the Comintern in 1920 is obvious. Thus we have a highly centralised party, one run by "professional revolutionaries" from the top down (as we noted in section H.3.3 Lenin stressed that the organisational principle of Marxism was from top down).
It will be objected that Lenin was discussing the means of party building under Tsarism and advocated wider democracy under legality. However, given that in 1920 he universalised the Bolshevik experience and urged the creation of a dual party structure (based on legal and illegal structures), his comments on centralisation are applicable to vanguardism in general. Moreover, in 1902 he based his argument on experiences drawn from democratic capitalist regimes. As he argued, "no revolutionary organisation has ever practised broad democracy, nor could it, however much it desired to do so." This was not considered as just applicable in Russia under the Tsar as Lenin then goes on to quote the Webb's "book on trade unionism" in order to clarify what he calls "the confusion of ideas concerning the meaning of democracy." He notes that "in the first period of existence in their unions, the British workers thought it was an indispensable sign of democracy for all members to do all the work of managing the unions." This involved "all questions [being] decided by the votes of all the members" and all "official duties" being "fulfilled by all the members in turn." He dismisses "such a conception of democracy" as "absurd" and "historical experience" made them "understand the necessity for representative institutions" and "full-time professional officials." [Essential Works of Lenin, p. 161 and pp. 162-3]
Needless to say, Lenin links this to Kautsky, who "shows the need for professional journalists, parliamentarians, etc., for the Social-Democratic leadership of the proletarian class struggle" and who "attacks the 'socialism of anarchists and litterateurs' who . . . proclaim the principle that laws should be passed directly by the whole people, completely failing to understand that in modern society this principle can have only a relative application." [Op. Cit., p. 163] The universal nature of his dismissal of self-management within the revolutionary organisation in favour of representative forms is thus stressed.
Significantly, Lenin states that this "'primitive' conception of democracy" exists in two groups, the "masses of the students and workers" and the "Economists of the Bernstein persuasion" (i.e. reformists). Thus the idea of directly democratic working class organisations is associated with opportunism. He was generous, noting that he "would not, of course, . . . condemn practical workers who have had too few opportunities for studying the theory and practice of real [sic!] democratic [sic!] organisation" but individuals "play[ing] a leading role" in the movement should be so condemned! [Op. Cit., p. 163] These people should know better! Thus "real" democratic organisation implies the restriction of democracy to that of electing leaders and any attempt to widen the input of ordinary members is simply an expression of workers who need educating from their "primitive" failings!
In summary, we have a model of a "revolutionary" party which is based on full-time "professional revolutionaries" in which the concept of direct democracy is replaced by a system of, at best, representative democracy. It is highly centralised, as befitting a specialised organisation. As noted in section H.3.3, the "organisational principle of revolutionary Social-Democracy" was "to proceed from the top downward" rather than "from the bottom upward." [Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 7, pp. 396-7] Rather than being only applicable in Tsarist Russia, Lenin drew on examples from advanced, democratic capitalist countries to justify his model in 1902 and in 1920 he advocated a similar hierarchical and top-down organisation with a dual secret and public organisation in the Communist International. The continuity of ideas is clear.