The vanguard revolutionary path created by Lenin is completely different from the labor union struggle, and Lenin himself criticized the labor union struggle.
The term "dictatorship of the proletariat" does not mean that the proletariat rules, but rather that a group of professional revolutionaries - generally from the left-wing intellectuals - mobilize the workers or other oppressed classes for revolution and establish a dictatorial rule.
Dictatorship itself is different from democracy, as Lenin said, "It is better to let me be a dictator than to let you be a dictator." In other words, it is better for the proletariat to rule over other classes than for the bourgeoisie to rule over other classes, thus transforming society towards the socialist stage.
And these proletarians must unite with the left-wing intellectuals who have high cultural legitimacy in order to achieve this.
It needs to be explained that because Marx believed that communism could only be established in a society with high productivity, it led to the widespread technological superstition among later Marxists, resulting in this high cultural legitimacy being seen as a modernization myth, and the specific manifestation of this modernization myth is the superstition of engineers. Under this doctrine, the proletariat should obey the call of these engineers who have high cultural legitimacy - the "red engineers" - and gradually achieve communism under their plan.
To put it more vividly, the dictatorship of the proletariat actually often manifests as the industrial expert governance advocated by Saint-Simon, a pre-socialist era philosopher.
This is different from the labor union struggle, which is most famously represented by the Korean labor movement. It is difficult for labor union struggles to establish a left-wing political power like the Paris Commune or Soviet Russia.
On the contrary, labor union struggles have a demand for reform that is in line with the capitalist production order. The reason why workers are called upon to go on strike or resist capitalists is not to overthrow the government itself, but to improve working conditions and protect workers' rights. Once these demands are met, it is difficult for them to move forward.
In the binary opposition of "workers-capitalists," it is difficult to form a demand for workers to organize and overthrow the government to establish a new society. Because in such struggles, the reactionary subject is the capitalist, and the clever government often has ambiguous relations with both sides, either being seen as a tool that both sides can use or maintaining a paternalistic position.
In short, labor-capital struggles can indeed overthrow capitalists, but they cannot overthrow the government. The roles of capitalists and the government in capitalist society do not completely overlap or even overlap at all.
In conventional authoritarian capitalist countries, the biggest threat they face is not the labor movement but the civic movement, and these two movements have the greatest power in these civic movements.
One is the democratic movement of the middle class united with student citizens, and the other is the national sovereignty movement agreed upon by the majority of business, academia, and the military.
In many modern authoritarian capitalist countries, when they cannot meet the demands of the middle class for nationalism or democracy, such as becoming a comprador government or trampling on human rights, their regime faces the risk of collapse.
The situation of the Polish color revolution is even more special. It is not a conventional democratization movement, but a labor movement that overthrew the rule of the Polish United Workers' Party.
This is because of a logic that is easy to understand.
The labor-capital contradiction in Poland is not the contradiction between "workers-capitalists". As an ally of the Soviet Union under the Stalinist red expert governance system, Poland as a whole presents an economic structure dominated by state-owned enterprises.
The sense of deprivation that most workers can directly feel comes directly from the cadres of the United Workers' Party in factories and daily life. These cadres not only control economic power but also political power. Therefore, the establishment and capital in Poland are highly integrated.
As a result, the Polish United Workers' Party satisfied three conditions that would definitely lead to its overthrow. It played the role of a comprador in national contradictions and was a puppet regime supported by the Soviet Union. It played the role of authoritarianism in the contradiction between authoritarianism and democracy, and its rule was an extremely corrupt and dictatorial system in the late stage of the Warsaw Pact system. It directly played the role of capital in the labor-capital contradiction.
The result is that the people, citizens, and workers of Poland were united and called upon by labor unions. And eventually, the "reactionary" rule of the Polish United Workers' Party was ended.