Potemkin wrote: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.