Democratic Centralism
민주집중제
The Bolshevik organizational principle combining free debate with unity in action once a decision is made. The gap between genuine freedom of discussion and bare centralism was the heart of every inner-party democracy fight, and after the 1921 ban on factions the balance tipped rapidly toward the latter.
In depth
Content of the principle
Democratic centralism is formulated as the joining of two elements. Members and organizations must be free to debate and to submit alternatives up to the point of decision, and once a decision is taken the minority is bound to carry it out. In organizational structure it appears as lower bodies electing higher ones while the decisions of higher bodies bind the lower.
Lenin treated the principle as a problem of organization under conditions of illegal work. The account of an organization of professional revolutionaries in What Is To Be Done? (1902) and his argument for extending internal elections once legal space opened after 1905 are different phases of the same principle, and the shifting of emphasis with circumstances became material for later interpretive dispute.
The turn of 1921
After the revolution the balance of the principle moved sharply. During the civil war the party was recast as a centralized chain of command, and after the disputes with the Workers' Opposition and the Democratic Centralists in 1920 the Tenth Party Congress of 1921 adopted a resolution banning the formation of factions. Once groups holding programmatic views could not organize, freedom of discussion shrank to the level of individual statements.
The resolution was introduced as an emergency measure and was never withdrawn. Every opposition dispute of the 1920s was disposed of on the ground of the ban on factions, and after 1927 the expression of an opposing view was itself grounds for disciplinary action. By the 1930s democratic centralism meant centralism alone.
A continuing argument
Democratic centralism remained a central question of communist organizational theory. On one side it was defended as the organizational form a party needs when it works under repression by a capitalist state. On the other it was criticized as the institutional condition of bureaucratization once centralism is combined with a ban on factions.
The argument returned to the foreground in the organizational debates of the European communist parties in the later twentieth century. That parties in the Eurocommunist current introduced formal recognition of internal tendencies and opened up internal electoral procedure followed from taking the second side of the question seriously. The underlying problem, how unity of organization and internal democracy are to be reconciled, was not resolved.