"Working class elite" seems like an oxymoron; (or) a product of apologist superficiality. It doesn't ring true, I'm afraid.
Btw., Lenin wasn't a fan of democracy either. He and his fellows destroyed the democratic grass-root councils ("soviets") and installed a complete un-democratic system.
LOL!
Read
The State and Revolution - it's not the product of some majorly deceptive mastermind. It's pretty cogent; not even Robert Service could discredit it in his "revisionist" anti-Marxist introduction to the edition I have.
After you read that, read Chris Harman's
'How the Revolution Was Lost'; it's an essential read that accounts for the party's post-war substitutionism - where the dislocation of the working class due to the civil war resulted in the party substituting itself for the class.
Lenin foresaw and forewarned of Stalin's rise to power (read Trotsky's
The Revolution Betrayed), and of the dangers of bureaucratism and parliamentarism, even within the party itself - he was able to analyse these honestly because he analysed the objective historical forces at work that led to the decimation of the working class in Russia.
Lenin was a socialist; by definition, then, he was against social democracy. So am I. Social democracy translates to bourgeois reformism - that the transition from capitalism to socialism is a "logical if gradual eventuality". Make that "a stagnant falsity wherein the promise is forever deferred" - "socialism is great in concept but doomed in practice", and "doomed because of its own internal defects, never due to external forces" (then why is it
great in concept if
internally doomed? Ah, the contradictions of bourgeois apologia). Under social democracy, you get tokenistic concessions to "the masses" but everything is designed to maintain the self-interests of the ruling elite, via political inequality. Socialism and all claims of "socialistic policies" are completely vacuous.
Opportunists like Obama thrive under social democracy. Meanwhile, people continue to scratch their heads wondering why the leaders they vote for every four years bear an increasing resemblance to one another: parasites of empty buzz-phrases, false promises and apologists for some of the most inhumane policies currently in circulation. Of course it's the failures of the individuals in office, never of the system itself.
But the System is bigger than the Man; always.
