New type of party
As a new type of party are communist parties within the meaning of Lenin referred.
A new type of party is a cadre party of professional revolutionaries who see themselves as the vanguard of the proletariat . The party is organized according to the principles of democratic centralism and committed to the ideology of Marxism-Leninism . The declared goal is overcoming capitalism and establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat , in which the party in turn takes the central position of power.
Historical examples of a new type of party are the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED). At present there are still ruling communist parties such as B. the Communist Party of China , organized according to these guidelines.
Soviet Union / Russia
In his writing What to do? Lenin described his ideas about building a communist party. The main idea was to organize the party as the vanguard of the proletariat . The practical implementation of the theory of the “avant-garde of the proletariat” was aimed at by the party organization based on the principle of democratic centralism . Lenin outlines this principle in Chapter IV of the book “What to do?”, In particular under point e) (“Conspirators” organization and “democracy”). In contrast to the structure of “normal parties”, in which the upper party branches were elected by the lower ones, all branches of the RSDLP (B) were subordinate to the Central Committee in hierarchical order .
Here, the upper sections were given the task of guiding the lower sections and intervening in their personnel decisions, so that only those candidates are admitted to party offices who were trained in Marxism to the extent deemed necessary . In other words, a form of structural discrimination was created that favored theoretically trained party members over untrained ones and was intended to result in the occupation of party offices by a socialist elite. This structure served Josef Stalin , who was General Secretary at the top of the party organization from 1922, to undermine a collective leadership and to build a personal dictatorship.
The formulation of a new type of party was adopted in 1934 in the preamble of the statute of the CPSU . The Soviet constitution of 1936 formulated the submission of the state organs to this state party with the words "The party directs all organs of the proletarian dictatorship ".
Germany
In Germany, the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) was organized according to the Stalinist party model of the CPSU from 1925 at the latest and was therefore a party of a new type . This character took a backseat in 1946 with the compulsory unification of the SPD and KPD to form the SED ( Socialist Unity Party of Germany ) in favor of equal occupation of the party offices. However, the SED was transformed into a new type of party in the course of the 13th meeting of the party executive committee (15/16 September 1948) and the 1st party conference (January 1948) .
At this party conference, this decision was passed under item 4 of the agenda “The development of the SED into a new type of party” . In it, the party expressly committed itself to Marxism-Leninism , to the political-ideological education of its members in its spirit and to democratic centralism: management and functionaries should be elected by the members, but at the same time they were subjected to strict party discipline . This was particularly evident in the stipulation that “the toleration of factions and groupings is incompatible with their Marxist-Leninist character”. With this provision, which was made in a very similar way to the Xth Congress of the Communist Party of Russia (Bolsheviks) in March 1921, any internal party opposition to the course of the Politburo was declared illegitimate. The declaration of the SED as a new type of party was accompanied by extensive political cleansing of the party: 150,000 non-conforming members, mainly former Social Democrats who remained after the forced unification of their party with the KPD , were expelled from the party. This process is known as the Stalinization of the SED.
The Marxist-Leninist Party of Germany (MLPD), which has existed since 1982, also describes itself as a new type of party .
literature
- Andreas Malycha: Party by the grace of Stalin? The development of the SED into a new type of party in the years 1946 to 1950 . Dietz Verlag, Berlin 1996.
Web links
- New type of party. Overview in the LeMO ( DHM and HdG )
Individual evidence
- ↑ cf. Lenin, WI: “Selected Works”, Volume I, Dietz Berlin 1963, pp. 229–279
- ^ Günter Heyden: Introduction to Lenin's work “Was tun?” , 5th edition, Dietz, Berlin 1989, ISBN 3-320-00628-2 .
- ↑ Peter Haberle (Ed.): Yearbook of Public Law of the Present. New episode; Volume 40 of The Public Right of the Present, 1992, ISBN 9783161459030 , p. 193, online
- ↑ http://www.mdr.de/damals/artikel75252.html#anchor1
- ↑ a b Christoph Kleßmann, Building a Socialist State on the website of the Federal Agency for Civic Education , accessed on December 13, 2010
- ↑ From the resolution of the 1st party conference of the SED (January 28, 1949) on the website German History in Documents and Pictures , accessed on December 13, 2010
- ^ Hermann Weber , Die DDR 1945–1990 , Oldenbourg, Munich 2006, p. 177.