LENIN ON ORGANIZATION
vidual electoral districts used, even formerly, to
“come to a friendly agreement” with the Party
leadership as to what candidate was to be put forward.
 But the Party has already become too large
for this tacit customary right. A customary right
ceases to be a right when it ceases to be recognized
as something self-understood, when its limits, and
even its very existence, is disputed. It then becomes
absolutely essential to formulate that right definitely,
 to codify it, to proceed to ‘“an exact statutory
formulation* (statuarische Festelgung) and to introduce
 greater strictness (grdssere Straffheit) of
organization.”
We here see under other circumstances the same
struggle of the opportunist and the revolutionary
Party wings on the question of organization, the
same conflict between autonomism and centralism
and democracy and “bureaucracy,” between the
tendency to undermine strictness and the tendency
to increase strictness of organization and discipline,
between the psychology of the unstable wavering
intellectual and that of the tried proletarian, between
 intellectual individualism and proletarian
solidarity. It will be asked, what was the attitude
of bourgeois democracy towards this conflict—not
that bourgeois democracy which capricious history
* It is extremely instructive to contrast this remark of
fautsky’s regarding the replacement of a tacitly recognized
Justomary right by a right laid down in the statutes with
that “transformation” which our Party in general, and the
Party editorial board in particular, have been passing through
since the Party Congress.

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