And yet in spite of the few positive things contributions Mao made, and some of the things he got right, he still positioned himself culturally to take up the position 'benign and distant emperor. Much as the contemporary regime prefers to pin all the horrors of the Cultural Revolution on the Gang of Four, many of Mao’s ideas themselves were harmful (such as wholesale and universal destruction of old culture).

Marxism-Leninism and its party structure has shown itself, in practice and historically, as being unable to resist this impulse to corruption and autocracy. It was Bolshevik counterrevolution that destroyed the power of the Worker’s and Soldier’s Soviets in Russia, Soviet counterrevolution that invaded Ukraine during its revolution, and then again Leninist party counterrevolution that prevented any of the (few) positive aspects of the cultural revolution from blossoming into anything useful.

Vanguard parties are counter productive, and counter revolutionary. The French revolution gives us the same lesson, as the Jacobin counter-revolutionary terror (with the oh-so-popular guillotine mostly used on the poor) created the space for reactionary backlash.

The centralization of power is, therefore, a counter-revolutionary impulse. Humans being are not suited for the rule and management of others. Only a revolution that truly returns power to the people has any chance of lasting. That’s why even the flawed and imperfect Kurdish revolutionaries of Rojava are sustaining the social and cultural infrastructure for revolution, while Marxists, Maoists and other authoritarian communists world-wide consistently either degrade into bandits and terrorists, or form corrupt and reactionary power-structures.