by education, that is until the masses have lost theirfalse consciousness,
democratic procedures would be worse than useless. Their argument was that
people cannot be left to choose their own leaders, or make their own political
choices, until their vision is genuinely free of distortion and they can identify
their real needs. This version of democracy has a close connection with the
theory of positiveliberty.
One way of making sense of this diversity of usages is to suggest that a claim
to being democratic is, in a sense, a ‘negative’ claim. That is, a democratic
society is one that will not accept the right of any e ́lite to rule except when it
can justify itself in terms of mass approval or especial emergency. For example,
a claim to rule simply because one was of superior birth, race, religious
perception or intellectual power would be negated by the demand for
democracy. Democracy is, almost inevitably, negative in this sense, because
its basic principle, the right of a majority over any minority, is not capable of
justification as a good in itself.
Democratic Centralism
Democratic centralism is the doctrine, espoused byLenin, according to which
theCommunist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), and most other
communist parties, was traditionally run. It lays down that conflicting opinions
and views should be freely expressed and widely discussed at all levels of the
party hierarchy, and that the central committee should take them into account
when making any decision, but once a decision has been made, the policy must
be unquestioningly accepted and carried out by all party members. Accord-
ingly, the CPSU was organized on strict hierarchical lines, but with consider-
able control over the committees at each level by the one directly above, thus
allowing very little upward flow of views and opinions to take place, while
the ‘centralist’ aspect of the doctrine is fully utilized. Were the freedom to
argue fully before the policy decision a reality, there would in fact be relatively
little difference between democratic centralist communist parties and such
organizations as the British Conservative Party, where policy is ultimately
made by a party leadership which expects to be loyally supported by all
rank-and-file members. The authority of the CPSU was justified in terms of
its own ideology by the need for adictatorship of the proletariatto build
communism.
It was in the early days of the party, and especially under Lenin just after the
1917 Revolution, that central control of the party was particularly problematic,
and hence from this time that the linking of the two values, democratic
participation with central command authority, dates. Democratic centralism’s
proven inability to allow the filtering of opinions up, as well as down, the
hierarchy, eventually contributed to the downfall of the CPSU. Mikhail
Democratic Centralism