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Democratic Centralism
Democratic centralism was a term widely associated by Cold War anti-Communists with the alleged totalitarianism of Russian revolutionary Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Political scientist Alfred G. Meyer’s influential Leninism described it as Lenin’s ruse for imposing his own will in the revolutionary party since “all discussion was suspect to him, because it was a waste of time and because it might threaten the unity of the party in action.” In a similar vein, J. Edgar Hoover asserted in Masters of Deceit: “Democratic centralism is the basic principle of communist organizational structure—a term meaning, in actual practice, simple, naked, and unadulterated dictatorship.” This is how the term is still commonly understood.
Actually, the term arose in the left wing of the German labor movement in the 1870s, ...
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