The Phony Revolution

Most of us think that working class movements are socialist and that socialism means the state direction of the economy.
However, early working class movements were not so in love with the state. They saw private conglomerations of wealth and state power as two heads belonging to the same monster. Landlords and government figures were often interchangeable.
The defining characteristic of the working class and the peasantry is powerlessness. Only in very limited spheres, perhaps in their families or their immediate localities can most people exercise the remnants of natural authority. Otherwise a working person is powerless throughout their lives.
The overseer class and the ruling class possess the expropriated authority of the working class and the peasantry, like the officer class possesses the expropriated power of the poor bloody infantry.
In the late nineteenth century socialism split. Marxists decided that somehow the ‘working class’ would take over the state, that somehow the oppressed could be the oppressor and the oppressed  at one and the same time.
Of course, many did not buy this line.
Lenin and his gang went further, deciding that, since the working class themselves were too primitive and childlike to be responsible for their own actions, a ‘vanguard’ would have to take over the state for them. If ordinary folk showed any signs of independence they were to be slapped down, or shot.
Of course, the ‘Vanguard’ were members of the bureaucratic overseer class. They weren’t the powerless workers at all. They were part of the class that had expropriated the power of the workers.
These phonies claimed they had acquired working class consciousness!
Yes, they were more working class than the working class itself, so they took upon themselves the right to lead the working class to the promised land.
But what Lenin really brought about was a Bureaucratic Revolution where the People Who Know Better Than Us extended their control into every aspect of our lives.
The bureaucrats are still at it today. They expand their business at every opportunity, stealing our power whenever they may.
The bureaucrats claim to be for the people, but every bit of natural authority that an ordinary person possesses, as a parent, as a spouse, as a son or a daughter, as a prominent figure in a club or church, as a tradesman, as a skilled worker, is under attack from the bureaucrats who wish to monitor, to regulate, to take control of every aspect of our lives.
In that way ‘the economy’ grows and the centralization of expropriated power marches onwards.