I repeat; there is no excuse today for babbling nonsense about Leninism, the Vanguard Party and the totalitarian state. In 1917 the Bolshevik Party consisted, I believe, of 78,000 members. And the majority of them were not very good Bolsheviks, not even good proletarians. In a population of over 150 million what else could they be but a vanguard ? Lenin saw that and drew the conclusions. In 1945 in Italy the Communist Party had over three million members. It completely controlled the organised trade union movement, In France the situation was not too different, and for a time the French Communist newspaper, L’Humanité, was the most widely sold daily newspaper in France.
(...) To believe that Bolshevism, or to be more precise, Leninism, would under the circumstances advocate or preach the theory of the vanguard party is to continue slander of Leninism, but not to his theory of the party (that is no longer viable) but to his central doctrine – the role o| the proletariat in the preservation of society from barbarism. To interpret Leninism as the advocacy of a vanguard party of three million is nearly as bad as the doctrine of Goebbels that Christ was not a Jew.