Marx-Engels |  Lenin  | Stalin |  Home Page

  Organisation and Structure of the Communist Party

Guidelines on the Organizational Structure of Communist Parties, on the Methods and Content of their Work Adopted at the 24th Session of the Third Congress of the Communist International, 12 July 1921

 

II. ON DEMOCRATIC CENTRALISATION 
 

6. Democratic centralization in the Communist Party organisation must be a real synthesis, a fusion of centralism and proletarian democracy. This fusion can be achieved only on the basis of constant common activity, constant common struggle of the entire Party organisation. Centralization in the Communist Party organisation does not mean formal and mechanical centralization, but a centralization of Communist activities, that is to say, the formation of a strong leadership, ready for war and at the same time capable of adaptability. A formal or mechanical centralization is the centralization of the ‘power' in the hands of an industrial bureaucracy, dominating over the rest of the membership, or over the masses of the revolutionary proletariat standing outside the organisation. Only the enemies of the Communists can assert that the Communist Party, conducting the proletarian class struggle and centralizing the Communist leadership, is trying rule over the revolutionary proletariat. Such an assertion is a lie. 
 

Neither is any rivalry for power, nor any contest for supremacy within the Party at all compatible with the fundamental principles of democratic centralism adopted by the Communist International. 
 

In the organisation of the old, non-revolutionary labour movement, there has developed an all-pervading dualism of the same nature as that of the bourgeois state, namely, the dualism between the bureaucracy and the ‘people'. Under this baneful influence of bourgeois environment, there has developed a separation of functions, a substitution of barren, formal democracy for the living association of common endeavour and the splitting up of the organisation into active functionaries and passive masses. Even the revolutionary labour movement inevitably inherits this tendency to dualism and formalism to a certain extent from the bourgeois environment. 

 

The Communist Party must, fundamentally, overcome these contrasts by systematic and persevering political and organizing work and by constant improvement and revision. 

 

7. In transforming a. Socialist mass party into a Communist Party, the Party must not confine itself to merely concentrating the authority in the hands of its central leadership while leaving the old order unchanged. 
 

Centralization should not merely exist on paper, but be actually carried out, and this is possible of achievement only when the members at large will feel this authority as a fundamentally efficient instrument in their common activity and struggle. Otherwise, it will appear to the masses as a bureaucracy within the Party and, therefore, likely to stimulate opposition to all centralization, to all leadership, to all stringent discipline. Anarchism is the opposite pole of bureaucracy. 
 

Merely formal democracy in the organisation cannot remove either bureaucratic or anarchical tendencies, which have found fertile soil on the basis of just that democracy. Therefore, the centralization of the organisation, i. e., the aim to create a strong leadership, cannot be successful if its achievement is sought on the basis of formal democracy. The necessary preliminary conditions are the development and maintenance of living associations and mutual relations within the Party between the directing organs and members, as well as between the Party and the masses of the proletariat outside the Party.