>>> Joanna
The principle and its misuse is probably common to any political organization.
Joanna
^^^^^ CB: Truly, any "democratic" organization. Democratic Centralism is the ruling principle of the Democratic Party or Republican Party, trade unions, the PTA. Democracy is "majority rule". In practice , that means the minority, the losers in a vote, agree to respect the vote of the majority by uniting with the winners in any actions by the organization before the next vote. After the US parties pick their candidates this year, the losers will unite with the winner and agree to support them in the election and ,if they win the election, support them in office. That's democratic centralism. "Democratic centralism " is a long name for democracy.
By the way," bolshevik" means majority in Russian ("Menshevik" means minority). Bolshevism is "majorityism". Lenin was smart enough to get the factions in the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party to take their names at a point when his faction had the majority. The Menshiviks demonstrated sort of Old Country/Old regime intellectual elitism and ignorance of democracy in allowing themselves to be tagged "the Minority".
By the way, "centralism" or "the center" is a metaphor of the sphere or circle or _the whole_. The center of a circle or sphere is equidistant from _all_ the points on the circle or sphere. So, it is a symbol for the whole circle or sphere. The "center" of an organization or country or economy is a reference to the whole of an oganization, or to the leadership of an organization, the leadership as the representative of the whole group. This is a reference to the republican principle of representation. The reference to the "center" means that the whole group agrees to act in whole group unity behind the leadership that has been elected by the majority to represent the whole.
Centralized planning means planning for the whole economy, not that the economy is in the physical center and Moscow or wherever is at the geographic "center" of the Soviet economy. Rather the planners in the "center' plan for the whole. This is a philosophical issue of the nature of "the whole" and the relationship between "the whole and the parts".