  Luxemburg interpreted the demand for a dictatorship of the proletariat in the same way Marx and Engels had done, as a transitional emergency institution required to realise democracy in a society rigged by class struggle (see for a broader discussion of the concept Ypi 2020). She strongly believed that the dictatorship of the proletariat should be brought about by the masses of the oppressed in their effort to liberate themselves, and that it should not be inflicted on them by a small circle of revolutionary elites. This commitment to freedom as reflected in the practical activity of the working class movement rather than a static goal to be approximated with the right tools was also reflected in her criticism of centralized models of political organization, motivating her scepticism towards the idea of a vanguard party championed by Vladimir Lenin. For Lenin, the political vanguard consisted of a selection of the most disciplined, intellectually sophisticated, and motivated revolutionaries whose role was to cultivate “agitation” with the aim of transforming workers’ mobilisation to achieve short-term goals into a wide ranging struggle aiming to secure their access to political power. Only a party guided by a small elite of revolutionaries aware of the twin dangers of both opportunism (too much compromise) and sectarianism (too little compromise), Lenin argued, was capable of giving the working class movement a compass with which to orient itself in the long-term (Lenin 1929 [1987: 95]). As Lenin puts it, the professional revolutionary is not merely a trade union secretary but a “tribune of the people”, able to react to injustice regardless of where it takes place or which group of people it affects so as to “group all these manifestations into a single picture of political violence […] in order to explain to everyone the world-historical significance of the struggle” (Lenin 1929 [1987: 113]).