Why do anarchists oppose a revolutionary vanguard?

Question

What's wrong with the formation of an anarchist vanguard? What exactly constitutes a vanguard? Does a group of anarchists revolting in a space before anyone else there does make them a vanguard?

Answer 1

A group of people having a more developed analysis and plan(s) isn't necessarily a bad thing for anarchists; most anarchists would probably describe themselves similarly.

The anarchist swear-word "vanguardism" derives from the history of self-selecting groups of professional revolutionaries (usually Leninists) who try to substitute themselves for oppressed people. Lenin famously quipped that, on their own, working class folks could only attain "trade-union consciousness," meaning having a defensive posture toward capitalists in their struggle for bread and butter issues in the workplace. A combative, insurrectionary, revolutionary consciousness could only be injected into the proles as a  class from the outside - by which Lenin meant himself and his buddies.

There's a difference between helping to organize people to get what they want, and organizing them to get what you want.

Comments

I'd started writing a much longer answer, but really, this does the trick.