SOURCE: "Introduction: Authentic Leninism," in Lenin and the Revolutionary Party, Humanities Press International, Inc., 1990, pp. 1-13.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was the foremost leader of the world's first working-class socialist revolution, which swept Russia in 1917 and continues to reverberate down to our own time. People throughout the world—longing for an end to injustice, war, and oppression—have looked hopefully to the example of the Russian Bolsheviks and to the ideas of Lenin as a guide for liberation struggles and social change in their own countries. As another leader of the Bolshevik Revolution, Leon Trotsky, explained: "The main work of Lenin's life was the organization of a party capable of carrying through the October revolution and of directing the construction of Socialism." Because of this, revolutionary-minded men and women have given special attention to Lenin's views on the revolutionary party.

With the triumph of the Bolshevik Revolution, Lenin and his comrades turned their attention to the task of helping revolutionaries in other countries mobilize the workers and the oppressed for the purpose of overthrowing capitalism on a global scale to establish a worldwide cooperative commonwealth in which, as Marx and Engels had written in the Communist Manifesto, "the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all." Renaming their own organization the Communist party, the Bolsheviks established the Communist International in 1919 in order to advance this expansive goal.

Millions of people—from a rich variety of cultures, traditions and experiences—responded to the revolutionary appeal of Bolshevism and the Communist International. One of these was James P. Cannon, a veteran of the American Socialist party's left wing and of the militant and colorful Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Cannon helped to found the American Communist party in 1919, and he was one of its central leaders until his expulsion in 1928 as the Communist International became increasingly bureaucratized. Yet he never abandoned his revolutionary convictions, and in a remarkable essay written in the 1960s continued to affirm:

The greatest contribution to the arsenal of Marxism since the death of Engels in 1895 was Lenin's conception of the vanguard party as the organizer and director of the proletarian revolution. That celebrated theory of organization was not, as some contend, simply a product of the special Russian conditions of his time and restricted to them. It is deep-rooted in two of the weightiest realities of the twentieth century: the actuality of the workers' struggle for the conquest of power, and the necessity of creating a leadership capable of carrying it through to the end.

Recognizing that our epoch was characterized by imperialist wars, proletarian revolutions, and colonial uprisings, Lenin deliberately set out at the beginning of this century to form a party able to turn such cataclysmic events to the advantage of socialism. The triumph of the Bolsheviks in the upheavals of 1917, and the durability of the Soviet Union they established, attested to Lenin's foresight and the merits of his methods of organization. His party stands out as the unsurpassed prototype of what a democratic and centralized leadership of the workers, true to Marxist principles and applying them with courage and skill, can be and do.

These perceptions have been shared by innumerable workers and peasants and students and intellectuals of every continent. They consider themselves Leninists because they are animated by "the categorical imperative to overthrow all conditions in which man is a de-based, enslaved, neglected, contemptible being." They are Leninists because they are committed, in a very real and practical way, to replacing the tyranny of capitalism with a socialism in which the immense economic resources of society will be the common property of all people, democratically controlled in order to ensure that the free development of each person can be possible.

1. WHAT LENINISM IS NOT

Lenin's ideas on the revolutionary party have been greatly distorted by many different kinds of people. It may be useful to survey some of these interpretations.

From the triumph of the Bolshevik Revolution down to the present, liberal and conservative ideologists of the capitalist status quo have utilized immense resources to spread the notion that Lenin and his works—especially his concept of the revolutionary party—constitute a hideous threat to law, order, simple human decency, and Western civilization. One of the clearest expositions of this viewpoint was offered by the late director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover. In Masters of Deceit, the FBI chief gave this explanation to millions of frightened readers: "Lenin conceived of the Party as a vehicle of revolution. … The Party must be a small, tightly controlled, deeply loyal group. Fanaticism, not members, was the key. Members must live, eat, breathe, and dream revolution. They must lie, cheat, and murder if the Party was to be served. Discipline must be rigid. No deviations could be permitted. If an individual falters, he must be ousted. Revolutions cannot be won by clean hands or in white shirts; only by blood, sweat and the burning torch. … The skill of Lenin cannot be overestimated. He introduced into human relations a new dimension of evil and depravity not surpassed by Genghis Khan or Attila. His concept of Party supremacy, girded by ruthless and ironclad discipline, gave communism a fanaticism and an immorality that shocked Western civilization."

This basic interpretation is also offered—frequently in a more sophisticated and scholarly form—by many influential academics and intellectuals who are engaged in the defense of "Western civilization." Essential components of that civilization are a myriad "unavoidable" inequalities and "regrettable" injustices, not to mention the immense power of the big corporations and, of course, the aggressively procapitalist thrust of U. S. foreign policy. Although undoubtedly sincere, many of these ideologists have like J. Edgar Hoover, been in the pay of the U. S. government or have been conscious participants in government-controlled or corporate-funded operations designed to generate and spread anti-radical, anti-revolutionary propaganda. They are not objective commentators—they have an axe to grind. And yet their biased interpretations have a substantial impact among many who do not share their particular commitments to U. S. corporate-government power.

Other powerful distortions emanate from a quite different source—the Communist movement itself. Many people drawn to it over the years have absorbed interpretations of Lenin's ideas that have little to do with the experience of the Bolsheviks as, in the years leading up to 1917, they grew into a revolutionary party. Instead, these individuals have been trained in more rigid and stilted conceptions that became dominant particularly after Lenin's death, in 1924. Such conceptions gained currency as a rising bureaucratic layer, led by Joseph Stalin, sought to consolidate its control and privileges within the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics from the 1920s onward. The "Leninism" fashioned in this period assumed dominance among revolutionary-minded activists, but it proved to be more useful for enhancing the authority of the new ruling group in the Soviet Union than for duplicating the successes of the Bolsheviks for the peoples of other countries.

A shrewd and somewhat cynical observer in the Soviet Union during this period was New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty, who was sympathetic to Stalin—though with a decidedly nonrevolutionary detachment. He noted that a growing number of old Bolsheviks "were showing signs of restiveness, partly because they saw that Stalinism was progressing from Leninism (as Leninism had progressed from Marxism) towards a form and development of its own, partly because they were jealous and alarmed by Stalin's growing predominance." Duranty wrote as follows: "When Lenin died what ignorant mortal could know whether Stalin or Trotsky was the chosen son? Only results could prove that. … Stalin rose and Trotsky fell; therefore Stalin, inevitably, was right and Trotsky wrong. … Stalin deserved his victory because he was the strongest, and because his policies were most fitted to the Russian character and folkways in that they established Asiatic absolutism and put the interests of Russian Socialism before those of international Socialism."

Stalin portrayed his "progression from Leninism," however, as nothing more nor less than the most uncompromising defense of Leninist principles. At Lenin's funeral, he religiously intoned: "Leaving us, comrade Lenin enjoined on us to hold high and keep pure the great calling of member of the party. We vow to thee, comrade Lenin, that we will with honor fulfill this thy commandment. Leaving us, comrade Lenin enjoined on us to keep the unity of our party as the apple of our eye. We vow to thee, comrade Lenin, that we will with honor fulfill this thy commandment. … Leaving us, comrade Lenin enjoined on us loyalty to the principles of the Communist International. We vow to thee, comrade Lenin, that we will not spare our lives to strengthen and extend the union of the toilers of the whole world—the Communist International." Instead, Stalin sought to destroy politically (and, eventually, physically) all Communists—including most of Lenin's closest comrades—who challenged his authority, to drive out of the Communist party of the Soviet Union and Communist parties throughout the world all who were unprepared to abandon the "old Leninism" of the Bolsheviks' heroic period, and to subordinate the revolutionary aspirations of parties belonging to the Communist International to narrowly defined foreign policy considerations of the Soviet Union. He went so far as to formally dissolve the Communist International during World War II in order to reassure his wartime capitalist allies. Yet a typical, even obligatory, comment by Communist ideologists while such things were happening was that "the Party is training its cadres in Bolshevik ideological intransigence, is rallying its ranks still more closely around its Leninist Central Committee, around its leader and teacher, Comrade Stalin." Communists throughout the world were lectured that "a study of the history of the Bolshevik Party is impossible without a knowledge of the chief works of its founder and leader, Lenin, and of his best disciple, Stalin, who is continuing his work."

The organizational norms propagated in this period, peppered with fragments from Lenin quoted out of context, stressed "the Bolshevik conception of the Party as a monolithic whole." This was elaborated for the world Communist movement in such works as Lenin's Teachings About the Party, by Stalinist ideologist V. Sorin, and circulated widely throughout the Communist International in the early 1930s. Excerpts from that work are quite revealing:

The Party is governed by leaders. If the Party is the vanguard of the working class then the leaders are the advanced post of this vanguard. … The special feature of the Communist Party is its strictest discipline, i. e., the unconditional and exact observance by all members of the Party of all directives coming from their Party organizations. … The Party must be sure that each of its members will do what the Party tells him even if he disagrees with it. … Discipline, firm and unrelenting, is necessary not only during the period of underground work and struggle against Tsarism, not only during civil war, but even during peaceful times. … The stricter the discipline, the stronger the Party, the more dangerous is it to the capitalists.

Such follow-the-leader conceptions of Leninism helped to overcome the danger of a critical-minded revolutionary membership questioning the policies developed by the Stalinist leadership of the Communist movement. But they had little in common with the organization that actually made the world's first socialist revolution. These conceptions continue to influence would-be Leninists of our own time, however. The pamphlet Lenin's Teachings About the Party, for example, was reprinted in the 1970s by former "new left" activists who, influenced by the Chinese and Vietnamese revolutions, believed that "a new communist party is essential for the revolutionary movement in the United States." Revolutionary-minded people throughout the world have mistaken such distortions for genuine Leninism.

Attentive readers may have noticed that the anti-Communist and the Stalinist descriptions of the Leninist party have much in common. Sometimes they are blended together, as in the case of Wolfgang Leonhard, a Stalinist functionary and instructor at the Karl Marx Political Academy of the German Communist party who defected from East Germany in 1949 and became a critical commentator on Communist affairs. Leonhard refrained from adopting the bitterly reactionary orientation of many who went through similar breaks, continuing to identify with what he calls humanist Marxism. Yet he offers the following as an objective description: "Instead of a democratically organized body representing the interests of all workers who engaged in free discussion, Lenin's doctrine of the Party now envisaged an elite led by professional revolutionaries, organized on the principle of democratic centralism, with restricted stricted freedom of discussion, and making great demands on Party members, who must operate in unity and with closed ranks in order to lead the working class." Not surprisingly, many revolutionary-minded people have concluded that if this is Leninism, then Leninism is not for them.

Within the broadly defined socialist movement there is a particularly influential source for the notion that Leninism is basically authoritarian. This is the moderate-socialist current of post-1917 Social Democracy, many of whose spokespersons refer to themselves as "democratic socialists" in order to distinguish themselves from "authoritarian Communism." They tend to perceive democracy as electoral politics within a capitalist framework, to favor the implementation of reform legislation as a means for gradually eliminating the evils of capitalism, and to recognize a kinship with Lenin's moderate-socialist rivals in Russia. In many countries they can boast of mass parties (for example, the Labor party in Britain, the Socialist party in France, the Social Democratic party in Germany), which have sometimes taken office and implemented positive social reforms but have never even attempted to overthrow capitalism. Their current orientation in the United States, as Michael Harrington, of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), has put it, holds that "the American social democracy" is an "invisible mass movement" consisting of the liberal-labor alliance in the Democratic party with its "ranging program for the democratization of the economy and the society." It is natural that the adherents of this position would find intolerable Lenin's "dogmatic" insistence that it is impossible to peacefully and gradually reform capitalism out of existence. They are inclined to echo, with varying degrees of sophistication, the interpretation articulated for many years within DSA's predecessor, the Socialist Party of America, when it was led by Norman Thomas. Thomas portrayed Leninism as "an authoritarian dogmatism which boasts that it is scientific." In 1931 he explained that Lenin's party was "organized with military discipline, exacting an unquestioning obedience from its members worthy of the order of Jesus." Twenty years later he continued to explain: "In Lenin's theory the Party was to be a dedicated group bent on serving the interests of the workers and the peasants, which it understood better than the masses themselves." Asserting that Stalin's policies were a continuation of the Leninist commitment to "the eventual world-wide triumph of communism," Thomas wrote that Stalin "emphasized Lenin's use of any tactics, including unbounded deceit and violence, to achieve that result." This interpretation of Leninism—remarkably similar, in important ways, to those offered by apologists for Stalinism, on the one hand, and for capitalism, on the other—is widely propagated even by formerly new-left adherents of "democratic socialism" who are not inclined to share Norman Thomas's support for U. S. Cold War policies.

Recently there has evolved another source from which a distorted interpretation of Leninism has arisen. Among new Western scholars studying the history of the Soviet Union, there is an innovative current that, while yielding some valuable new research, has also begun to fashion what Sheila Fitzpatrick has delicately termed "a less judgemental approach" to the Stalin era. Quite similar in temperament and in some of their perceptions to such earlier admirers of Stalin as Walter Duranty, these scholars are also inclined to be somewhat more aloof. "There was a wildly impractical and Utopian streak in a great deal of Bolshevik thinking," writes Fitzpatrick. She adds the following, however: "No doubt all successful revolutions have this characteristic: the revolutionaries must always be driven by enthusiasm and irrational hope, since they would otherwise make the commonsense judgement that the risks and costs of revolution outweigh the possible benefits." Fleetingly entertaining the question "of whether in some cosmic sense it was all worthwhile," she draws back with the warning that this is "dangerous ground for historians," who should restrict themselves simply to determining "what seems to have happened and how it fits together."

From this standpoint, Fitzpatrick dispassionately summarizes the Russian Revolution's meaning as "terror, progress and upward mobility." By "upward mobility" she means the many thousands of workers who rose above their class to get relatively good and high-status jobs in the massive postrevolutionary bureaucracy (which she sees as a perversely nuts-and-bolts realization of the revolutionary socialist goal of working-class rule). By "progress" she presumably means the leap forward into industrialization and modernization, the elimination of the backward and inefficient semifeudal and tsarist order, the establishment (despite bureaucratic distortions) of a planned economy, the great strides in spreading education and health care to all, and so forth. And by "terror" she means the disruption and destruction of millions of lives, the violence against and coercion of peasants and workers during the "revolution from above" of collectivization and industrialization under Stalin, the purges and labor camps, and other authoritarian measures. Fitzpatrick asserts that there were "important elements of continuity linking Stalin's revolution with Lenin's," and that one element of this continuity was that "Stalin used Leninist methods against his opponents." (Here one is again reminded of Duranty, who wrote: "Stalin is no less of a Marxist than Lenin, who never allowed his Marxism to blind him to the needs of expediency. … When Lenin began a fight, whether the weapons were words or bullets, he showed no mercy to his opponents." Stalin was thus following Lenin in "the brutality of purpose which drove through to its goal regardless of sacrifice and suffering. ")

This approach has obvious implications for how one interprets the nature of the Leninist party. Fitzpatrick suggests that "Lenin's dislike of looser mass organizations allowing greater diversity and spontaneity was not purely expedient but reflected a natural authoritarian bent," adding that "Lenin usually insisted on having his own way." She characterizes the Bolshevik party in this way: "It was a party with authoritarian tendencies, one that had always had a strong leader—even, according to Lenin's opponents, a dictatorial one. Party discipline and unity had always been stressed. Before 1917, Bolsheviks who disagreed with Lenin on any important issue usually left the party. In the period 1917-20, Lenin had to deal with dissent and even organized dissident factions within the party, but he seems to have regarded this as an abnormal and irritating situation, and finally took decisive steps to change it."

We will see that this interpretation does not correspond to historical realities. More insightful historians argue that the common thesis of a Lenin-Stalin continuity "rests upon a series of dubious formulations, concepts, and interpretations a n d … whatever its insights, it obscures more than it illuminates," as Stephen Cohen has put it. E. H. Carr has attempted to demonstrate the fundamental discontinuity with this argument:

The Communist Manifesto recognized the role of leadership exercised by Communists as the only full class-conscious members of the proletariat and of proletarian parties. But it was a condition of the proletarian revolution that Communist consciousness should spread to a majority of the workers. … Lenin's conception of the party as the vanguard of the class contained elitist elements absent from Marx's writings and was the product of a period when political writers were turning their attention more and more to the problem of elites. The party was to lead and inspire the mass of workers; its own membership was to remain small and select. It would, however, be an error to suppose that Lenin regarded the revolution as the work of a minority. The task of leading the masses was not, properly understood, a task of indoctrination, of creating a consciousness that was not there, but of evoking a latent consciousness; and this latent consciousness of the masses was an essential condition of revolution. Lenin emphatically did not believe in revolution from above. … After Lenin's death, Lenin's successors lacked the capacity or the patience to evoke that measure of mass consciousness and mass support that Lenin had had behind him in the period of the revolution and the Civil War and took the short cut—always the temptation that lies in wait for an elite—of imposing their will, by measures of increasingly naked force, on the mass of the population and on the mass of the party. … The need, with which Lenin wrestled and which Stalin contemptuously dismissed, of reconciling elite leadership with mass democracy has emerged as a key problem in the Soviet Union today.

This general approach, regardless of imperfections one might find in Carr's specific formulations, captures important aspects of the historical reality that allow a fundamentally different and more perceptive approach to the question of the Bolshevik party's actual organizational structure and functioning. Thus, Moshe Lewin recounts the following:

Leninism, one of the Russian versions of Marxism, developed by Lenin, was shared by the Bolsheviks who had acquired their ideological formation before the revolution and who maintained an openmindedness, an institutional flexibility in pursuing the struggle of ideas in particular, but not exclusively in the areas of strategy and tactics that made up the core of Leninism. It is important to recall that bolshevism had gone through quite a number of internal debates before 1917, that it had functioned in a multiparty environment, especially after the revolution of 1905, and even after the takeover of power, until 1920. Starting with the revolution of February 1917, in particular, and until the prohibition of factions by the Tenth Party Congress in March 1921, various wings and tendencies, opposing factions and platforms presented before and during the congresses [of the party], coexisted within the party; these were not only tolerated but were actually used as widely accepted modus operandi [procedure].

This authentic Leninism—qualitatively different from the grotesque distortions of Leninism that are so widely circulated—will be the subject of the present study.

2. A LIVING ORGANISM AND PHASES OF DEVELOPMENT

Like any living organism, the Bolshevik organization was characterized by a particular set of tensions within itself as well as between it and the larger social reality. These tensions gave it a vibrancy and generated growth, causing the organization to go through quite different phases of development. The organization cannot be adequately understood as a revolutionary force unless it is understood in this way. Lenin's views on the revolutionary party, which reflected and were part of this evolution, must likewise not be approached as if they were a finished and self-contained schema. The Leninist conception of the party is animated by certain essential principles and a definite methodological approach; there is an underlying continuity in Lenin's organizational perspectives from the 1890s up to 1917 and beyond. At the same time, there are important shifts in Lenin's thought, flowing from an accumulation of experience and also reflecting changes in the context of the Bolsheviks' activity.

A potential problem, even among revolutionaries who recognize a distinction between authentic Leninism and Stalinism, is a failure to grasp this dialectical aspect of Leninism. Leninist organizational principles are seen as an established organizational schema. This schema typically involves a constricting organizational tightness that supposedly constitutes "Leninist centralism and party discipline." It is something that "Leninist" leaders sometimes attempt to superimpose on the membership, often inflexibly, regardless of the actual situation. This is contrary to Lenin's own method, and it has often had destructive consequences for left-wing groups that glorify an abstract (and therefore non-Leninist) "Leninism." It may be appropriate for the consolidation of a small sectarian group, but it short-circuits the process of building a working-class party capable of leading a successful struggle for socialism.

The present study seeks to recover the actual meaning of Leninist organizational principles by locating them in the specific history of Russia's revolutionary socialist movement. Initially, the organized expression of this movement was the Russian Social Democratic Labor party (RSDLP), and especially its Bolshevik faction from 1903 to 1912; then it was concentrated in the independent Bolshevik party, which became the Russian Communist party after 1917. Within this context, the Leninist organizational perspective can be said to have gone through six phases of development from 1900 to 1923.

1. 1900-1904. Lenin and other Marxists struggle to establish the RSDLP around the revolutionary program and centralized organizational concepts expounded in the newspaper Iskra. The Iskraists and the RSDLP split into bitterly counterposed majority/minority (Bolshevik/Menshevik) factions, with Lenin's Blosheviks advancing the most consistently centralist and uncompromisingly revolutionary orientation. In this period, however, the RSDLP consists mostly of radicalized intellectuals; it has a small minority of workers and a very weak base in the proletariat.
2. 1905-1906. The revolutionary upsurge of 1905 catches both Bolshevik and Menshevik factions by surprise. Both factions are swept along by the revolutionary enthusiasm of the workers. Lenin's centralism is tempered by the understanding that looser and more democratic norms can help root the RSDLP in a dramatically radicalizing working class. A convergence of Bolshevik and Menshevik orientations and factions appears to be in process.
3. 1907-1912. The defeat of the revolutionary wave and a triumphant reaction destroy the RSDLP mass base within Russia. The new situation reverses the convergence of Bolshevik and Menshevik factions as a fundamental programmatic difference, already visible in 1905, pulls the two factions apart. In the struggle to overthrow tsarist absolutism, the Mensheviks put greatest weight on an alliance of the working class with the "progressive" bourgeoisie, while the Bolsheviks counterpose to this a revolutionary alliance of the workers and the peasants. Among the Mensheviks an increasingly strong impulse develops to liquidate the revolutionary workers' party into reformist labor organizations. Among the Bolsheviks an ultraleft sectarian impulse arises, which threatens to draw them into an abstentionist course in the face of opportunities to participate in the actual class struggle. Lenin conducts a bitter war against both liquidators and abstentionists. He drives the latter out of the Bolshevik faction and attempts to drive the former out of the RSDLP altogether. Many nonliquidationist Mensheviks and even some nonabstentionist Bolsheviks fear that Lenin is being too "hard," and they seek "conciliation" with both liquidators and abstentionists in order to preserve the unity of the RSDLP. Lenin forces a decisive organizational split, constituting his faction as a separate party—the Russian Social Democratic Labor party (Bolsheviks).
4. 1912-1914. The Bolshevik party, unified on the basis of a revolutionary class-struggle program, outstrips the incohesive and squabbling remnants of the non-Bolshevik RSDLP—particularly in the face of a dramatic new wave of working-class militancy.
5. 1914-1917. The eruption of the First World War diverts the rising wave of militancy into patriotic hysteria and slaughter. The Bolsheviks and the minority of Menshevik-Internationalists vehemently oppose the Russian war effort and are savagely repressed. The reformist and prowar majority of the Mensheviks are able to assume a dominant position in the workers' movement.
6. 1917-1923. The devastation of the First World War has a profoundly radicalizing impact on the Russian masses, and the severely weakened tsarist regime is overthrown by a spontaneous revolutionary upsurge. In the new and volatile situation, the reformist and vacillating Mensheviks are once again outstripped by the Bolshevik party, which is able to lead the masses forward to a socialist revolution. The effects of war, civil war, and foreign blockades and interventions result in economic collapse and disintegration of the working class as a political force. The Bolsheviks feel compelled to adopt increasingly restrictive measures, in Russia as a whole and within their own party, while waiting for a revolutionary socialist triumph in the industrially advanced West that will end the desperate isolation of their impoverished and bleeding country.

This highly condensed sketch of the six phases of "Leninism under Lenin" does little more than suggest the shifting contexts within which Lenin's various (and sometimes seemingly contradictory) statements on the organizational question can be understood. There are obvious general points that must be kept in mind regarding the situation in tsarist Russia—the economic backwardness, the predominance in population of the peasantry, the peculiarities of Russian capitalist development, and the repressiveness of tsarist absolutism. This last factor, above all, compelled Russian revolutionaries to develop organizational forms that would be consistent with the realities of underground work and exile politics. There is much in all of this that necessitated the incorporation into the "Leninism of Lenin" of qualities that—at least at this point—have little immediate relevance to the situation of revolutionaries functioning in different contexts (for example, what are sometimes termed "advanced capitalist democracies").

Certain aspects of the Leninist organizational orientation, however, have universal applicability. One is the absolute primacy of the revolutionary program—the principles, general analysis, goals, and strategic and tactical orientation that can lead the class struggle to a revolutionary socialist conclusion. Another is the concept of the revolutionary vanguard party, made up only of activists committed to the revolutionary program. Such a party doesn't attempt to embrace into its ranks the entire working class, but rather seeks to interact with the working class in order to influence it in a revolutionary direction. (Obviously, in order to do this the vanguard party must be predominantly working-class in composition—but these must be revolutionary working-class activists.) Finally, organizational centralism and organizational democracy must be combined in such a way that makes the vanguard party most effective in applying the revolutionary program to living reality. Given the complex, dynamic, and ever-changing character of reality, it is necessary to be flexible in determining the weight to be given to democracy and centralism in different situations and in different periods.

To be true to Lenin's method, revolutionaries must be prepared to apply this orientation creatively to their own specific and changing situations, and to be as innovative as Lenin was from one period to another. …