(en) Portugal, Colectivo Libertario Evora - The counterrevolutionary role of the Marxist-Leninist vanguards is increasingly evident to many insurgents around the world by Raul Zibechi (pt)

Powerful demonstrations that traverse the world are challenging both democracies and 
dictatorships, regimes born of elections or by coups, governments first or third world. 
But not only. Challenge the retaining walls of the left and social democratic parties in 
its various variants. Also challenge the knowledge accumulated by emancipatory practices 
with more than a century, at least since the Paris Commune. ---- Naturally this produces 
confusion and mistrust between the old revolutionary armies, claiming a more solid, a 
program with achievable goals and ways to achieve them. In short, a strategy and tactics 
that pave the unity of movements that would be doomed to failure if they persisted in 
current dispersion and improvisation.

This is said to frequently by persons involved in these movements are satisfied and that 
they exist but do not accept that they can move by themselves without there being a 
mediator intervention to set a certain orientation and direction.

However, the movements present a radical questioning of the idea of the vanguard, that 
requires an organization of specialists to think, plan and direct the movement. This idea 
was born, shows us how George Haupt in the book "La Commune as a symbol y as an example" 
(Siglo XXI, 1986), with the failure of the Commune. The reading was made ??by a part of 
the revolutionary camp was that the Parisian experience failed due to the lack of one 
direction: it was the lack of centralization and authority that killed the Paris Commune, 
Engels said the Bakunin. What was agreed at that time.

Haupt contends that from the failure of the Commune new themes emerged in the socialist 
movement: the party and making the state apparatus. In German Social Democracy, the 
leading party workers of the time, it opens the way for the idea that the Commune of 1871 
was a model to refuse, as Bebel wrote a few years later. The ensuing wave of workers' 
revolutions, which had its high point in the 1917 Russian revolution, the fire was marked 
by a theory of revolution that made the hierarchical organization and specialized central 
axis.

In the last half century succeeded by new movements from below: the revolutions of 1968 
and the present, which probably have their starting point in Latin American movements 
against neoliberalism in the 1990s. In this half century ensued, integrated into two 
cycles, some facts which radically changed those principles: the failure of Soviet 
socialism, decolonization of the third world, and especially the revolts of women, youth 
and workers. The three processes are so new they often do not notice the depth of changes 
that close.

Women made into crisis patriarchy, that does not mean it has disappeared, breaking one of 
the cores of domination. Youngsters challenged the authoritarian culture. The workers and 
the workers dismantled Fordism. Of course, the three movements belong to the same process 
that we can summarize in the crisis of authority: the male, the hierarch and the foreman. 
In its place was installed a large disorder that forces the rulers to seek new ways to 
dominate the low-to impose an order increasingly ephemeral and less legitimate, as it 
often is just violence: macho state, from above .

At the same time, the low-appropriated knowledge that before were denied, since the field 
of writing to modern communication technologies. But more importantly, they learned two 
facts intertwined: as acts of domination and how to dismantle or at least, as it 
neutralizes. A century ago the workers who mastered these techniques were a tiny minority. 
The rebellions such as that inspired the Commune, were made of other loopholes that opened 
in the walls of domination. Now the low-learned to open gaps for ourselves, without 
relying on the sacrosanct revolutionary conjuncture, whose knowledge was the work of 
specialists who mastered certain abstract knowledge.

In some poor regions of the world gave up the recovery of ancestral knowledge from below, 
which had been crushed by progress and modernity. In this case the indigenous peoples play 
a decisive role in giving a new life to a set of knowledge related to health, to 
education, to the relationship with the environment and also to the defense of 
communities, ie the war. Here are the Zapatistas, but also the communities of Bagua, in 
the Peruvian jungle, and endless experiments showing that those knowledges are valid for 
forms of resistance.

This set of learning and new skills acquired resistance put out of use and the existence 
of some operative vanguards of groups which are intended to send because think they know 
what is best for others. At present, entire peoples may know how to conduct themselves, 
some based on obeying, but also inspired by the principles we have been able to listen and 
practice in recent years: walk at the pace of the slowest step, between all know 
everything and walked asking.

This does not mean that you no longer need to organize ourselves in collective militants. 
Without this kind of organizations and groups, formed by activists or whatever you like to 
call people who devote their best energies to change the world, change will never come, 
because she does not fall from the sky, nor is offering enlightened statesmen and 
warlords. The revolutions that we are experiencing are the result of these multiple 
energies. We are many and many to detonate them. But once set in motion, pretend to drive 
them in a centralized manner can only produce results opposite to those desired.

From: 
http://colectivolibertarioevora.wordpress.com/2013/03/25/as-revolucoes-contra-as-vanguardas/
source: http://metiendoruido.com/2013/03/las-revoluciones-contra-las-vanguardias/