Democratic success required communist parties to adopt undemocratic organizational means

Evidence

Even with the advantages of elite political resources, party regeneration was far from inevitable. It required an enormous transformation of the communist parties’ organizations from tools of authoritarian rule to instruments of democratic competition. Once they were forced out of power, these parties now had to signal their new intentions, obtain strategic flexibility, and steel themselves for further programmatic, electoral, and parliamentary transformation. To that end, early and rapid centralization of the organization and a symbolic break with the past were crucial. One resulting irony was that success in democracy often involved profoundly undemocratic organizational means: weakening or eliminating party membership, abolishing internal debates, and reducing local autonomy. — Anna M. Grzymala-Busse, Redeeming The Communist Past, 376

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader question of whether groups survive by reshaping themselves rather than by identity continuity — mirrors post-1989 transition literature and organizational adaptation theory. — connects to: Communist organizational legacies paradoxically enabled successor parties’ democratic survival; Bureaucratic party rule can develop into a dictatorship masking capitalist development — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 180; Pre-democratic organizational practices shaped successor parties’ post-regime survival capacities — Anna M. Grzymala-Busse, Redeeming The Communist Past: The…, 88 (+3 more)
• SEED: The paradox — democratic success via internal authoritarianism — could anchor an essay on how organizations survive constitutive-threat loss by trading internal democracy for external credibility.

Broader Connections

• Pre-democratic organizational practices shaped successor parties’ post-regime survival capacities #corroborates (0.80) — Anna M. Grzymala-Busse, Redeeming The Communist Past, 88
• Authoritarian-era institutional choices can shape political behavior after democratic openings. #expands (0.78) — Johan Brosché and Hanne Fjelde and Kristine Höglund, Electoral violence and the legacy of…, 13
• Bureaucratic party rule can develop into a dictatorship masking capitalist development #exemplifies (0.75) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 180