Today the idea of 'democratic centralism' (a term we owe to Lenin) is marked by the seal of Stalinism which used it to cover up the process by which any revolutionary life in the parties of the CI were stifled and liquidated. Moreover, Lenin himself bears some responsibility for this in that, at the Tenth congress of the Russian Communist Party (1921), he asked for and won the banning of fractions which he - wrongly, even on a provisional basis - considered to he necessary in the face of the terrible difficulties the revolution was going through. Furthermore the demand for a "real democratic centralism", as practiced in the Bolshevik party, has no sense either, in that: certain conceptions defended by Lenin (notably in One Step Forward, Two Steps Back) about the hierarchical and 'military' character of the organisation, conceptions exploited by Stalinism to justify its methods, should be rejected and the term 'democratic' is itself not the most appropriate, both etymologically ('power of the people') and because of the meaning it has acquired under capitalism which has turned it into a formalistic fetish used to cover up and justify the bourgeoisie's domination over society.