I'm re-reading "What Must Change in the Party," a 1978 essay by Louis Althusser, and I still think it's one of the best documents ever produced about socialist organization. The context is the collapse of an alliance between the Communist Party and the Socialist Party in France.
The PCF's leadership refused to take any blame for what happened, and moreover merely gestured towards self reflection. They denied the chance to have party-wide dialogue. Althusser believed this was a structural problem: bureaucratism stifled democracy and debate.
When the Party leadership changed strategies, they had to conceal the new strategy behind the language of the old, because to admit this change would be to admit an error, and this they could not do.
Such failure to reconcile errors structurally produces Party "troublemakers," branded as intellectuals for trying to swim against the tide and promote honest self-reflection.
The Party's bureaucratism derives from its dual character as a political and a quasi-military organization.
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