Why do one-party states still have a party at all?

Question

In single-party states like the former eastern bloc (Soviet Union, East Germany, ...), there is only one dominant party. One thing that has always bothered me is that this is a contradiction in itself: a party is a part of the whole, it is by definition partisan or partial. If there is one organisation for everybody, then it is no longer a faction or a party, it is just an institution of the society.

Why do they bother keeping around the legal "machinery" for having multiple parties, when the ideology or even the constitution of the country says that other parties can't be registered (or are marginalized)? Wouldn't it make more sense to say, OK, we won the revolution, now we merge the party with the state? Or we rename it to, say, "politicians guild": Everybody who wants to take part in politics joins the official guild, and then you just ban all political parties and factions altogether?

This question is distinct from Why do one party states hold elections? , as you can have elections in a one-party state, and you can have elections without parties. I'm not so much interested in why there is sometimes a charade of elections, but rather why they keep the paradoxical "fraction that represents all". Is it e.g. for tradition, or is the party thought of not as universal, but as a fraction against the class enemy, etc.. A justification from the communists / socialists themselves would be most interesting.

Answer 1

While it needn't be this way, per se, political parties and the government are often separate institutions as a matter of having different operational objectives.

The job of the government is to run the state. The job of the party is to recruit, evaluate, groom, and train future officers for the government, as well as make decisions about political agendas.

For one-party states, you can view the political party as the Human Resources department of the government, but it operates more like a staffing agency.

There may also be traditional, historical, and cultural reasons for the existence of a party and scholarship into political institutions tells us that they are loathe to be dismantled once established - and if they rise to power they are extremely likely to carry on existing.

Essentially these parties perform the same function as parties in other states, except perhaps doing oppo-research. Having those functions separated (at least somewhat) from the day to day operations of the government allows for both organizations to focus on their specialization.

Answer 2

In addition to William's spot-on answer, a cynical person might say that, instead of holding elections, a single-party state uses hidden top-of-party infighting to run purges and determine who is going to be in power, all the while ignoring the rest of the country's citizens' opinions. This activity might be a bit unsightly and dysfunctional if carried out within a government.

• Gang of Four
• Trotsky
• Xi Jingping purges
• Saddam's rise

Quoting Churchill

“Kremlin political intrigues are comparable to a bulldog fight under a rug. An outsider only hears the growling, and when he sees the bones fly out from beneath it is obvious who won.”

Also, party memberships can in some countries be a prerequisite, or at least major boost, to holding high positions in non-government organizations such military, health care, large companies, etc... Think of as a badge of trust or vetting. Something the US disastrously failed to understand when they undertook De-Ba'athification - people might be party members because of convenience or because they had to be for their jobs, not necessarily because were enthused about the ideology. Another rationale for party existence next to the government proper.

Answer 3

To understand the situation in socialist one-party states, I think it is important to understand the meaning and significance that "the Party" has in communist/Marxist theory and ideology. Communist theory doesn't just prescribe an ideal society, but has very much to say about the means and strategies to reach it. One of the most influential ideas to the formation of Eastern block socialist states is the Marxist-Leninst vanguardism. It posits the communist party as a vanguard leading the working class in a revolution to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat. The one-party socialist state is (at least originally) thought of as transitional phase on the path towards communism, where supposedly neither the state nor the party is needed anymore. The communist party is the agent of the communist revolution, the state is just a tool for it to achieve communism. To turn the title of the question into a Russian reversal: Socialist one-party states don't have a party, the party has a state.

The question assumes that party should be understood to have the same meaning as it has in multi-party liberal democracies, where the party only serves a purpose within the political framework set up by the state. But this is quite different from how a communist party view its role in a socialist state.

Answer 4

One point worth remembering is that many one-party states such as the former GDR (East Germany) were/are in theory multiparty democracies which just don't allow parties that campaign to do unacceptable things. That's not entirely unknown in countries generally classified as democracies, such as FRG (West Germany, and modern reunified Germany) where they use it to ban fascist and communist parties and those which want to alter unalterable sections of the constitution (which AfD has to dance around very carefully).

Where they differ is that in those effective one party states, the criteria keep getting narrower until there's either no other parties or they're all indistinguishable.

Answer 5

The question and some of the existing answers are based on a fundamental misconception of the role of the main party in a socialist/Marxist-Leninist regime. In the Soviet Union and its satellite states, the party is not there to compete to gain control of some other institutions where the power lies, the party is - among other things - where decisions are made. In some cases (e.g. the German Democratic Republic), other parties and institutions including a parliament, cabinet, president (at the beginning of the GDR), etc. are allowed to exist but the real center of power has always been the party itself and especially its central committee (and power struggles happen inside the party rather than between the party and other parties/institutions).

The line is blurry because many people were member of both sets of institutions and it was difficult or impossible to have any professional career without party membership but the duality was always present. Continuing with the GDR, the office of the president was abolished in the 1960 and replaced by a “State Council” whose membership always included some people who weren't members of the main party. Throughout, the most important position however always was that of “General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party”. The “National Defense Council” was also fully in the hand of Central Committee members.

When Honecker pushed Ulbricht out in 1971, he didn't immediately become Chairman of the State Council but he assumed control of the Central Committee. Prior to that, he was already influential and a full member of the Politbüro of the Central Committee but not a member of the State Council or Parliament. Importantly, Erich Mielke (head of the Ministerium für Staatsichereit, the Stasi) immediately started giving Honecker weekly briefings, even though the latter wouldn't formally become head of state for another five years.

This structure repeats itself, with some variation, at the local level and provides a check on the loyalty of the leadership in all important organisations. Thus a military unit will have a commanding officer accountable to a traditional military chain of command but also a “political commissar” or political officer who can overrule the CO's decisions. A nationalised business will have a hierarchical management structure and a director accountable to the state planning commission but also a company-specific party group (Betriebsparteiorganisation in the GDR) reporting to the party's sectional directorate and having a great influence on management and personnel decisions inside the business.

Answer 6

@user1567459 is quite right that a lot of single-party states are technically a multi-party democracies.

In Bulgria, along with the Bulgarian Communist Party, we used to have 2 other parties - the Bulgarian Agricultural People's union and the Patriotic Front (itself started as a coalition dominated by BCP). Not that everyone was aware of their existence.

@William answer is excellent. One could not really get any significant management position without an approval from the Party and generally being a member. And of course, becoming a member was not trivial.

There is one more thing about this single party:

Even if there is only one party, there is a profound difference in regard to both representation and a wide array of privileges between a Party member and a non-member.

A party member was entitled for higher salary and out-of-order buying of deficit goods (there was a separate order for the Party members that had an absolute priority).

In general, it was a caste system as well.

Answer 7

A political party an ideological organization: it develops, curates, regulates, and ultimately expresses an assortment of political ideals, principles, convictions, agendas, and other assertions about how the social, political, and economic aspects of the nation ought to be. With that in mind:

• In multi-party nations, different parties form to represent different ideals and principles for and within the population. These differentiated parties contest with each other through elections to gain political power, because political power allows them to implement aspects of their own worldview.
• In single-party nations, the party represents the ideals and principles that the citizens (or at least some group thereof) have chosen for the nation to follow, and the party persists to ensure that leadership conforms to those ideals and principles. There is no competition between divergent ideals, and so there is no place for other parties.

Often single-party states arise as a consequence of a successful revolution, where the newly empowered revolutionary group sees the old governmental systems as corrupt. They distrust putatively 'democratic' systems which might allow corrupt officials to retake political leadership through popularity, as this would undercut the political reforms the new leaders have in mind. And even if the revolutionary group has no idealistic agenda of reforms (i.e., if it is merely interested in power for power's sake), power still needs to be wielded through a set of functionaries within bureaucratic departments. Those functionaries need to be vetted, selected, or indoctrinated to conform to the ideology of leadership, and a political party is the best mechanism for accomplishing that.

Answer 8

A point none of the other answers have addressed is that in a typical one party state, not many people are party members. In a typical case, 1%-5% of eligible voter are members of the sole recognized political party, which is along the same lines as the percentage of people in multi-party democracies who actively participate in person in the activities of a political party.

Entry into the sole, or dominant, political party is not open. One has to apply, be vetted for membership in a fairly involved review and background check by party officials, and be found worthy, to become a party member.

Once you are a party member, you have heightened levels of responsibility to toe the party line in public in order to continue to maintain your status as a loyal party member, and have a duty to do participate in your share of party activities and tasks, commensurate with your position within the party.

In exchange, party members, collectively, have a monopoly on political power, to the complete exclusion of non-members of the party. Party members also often get perks in other aspects of life, somewhat akin to the proverbial "old boy's network" or the nepotistic favors that people give their relatives in clan based societies.

From an institutional perspective, this is a way to keep lazy, stupid, and troublesome people out of the political process, allowing the party to maintain a united consensus in favor the policies it seeks to implement, and to arguably make better choices about which policies to favor than it might if all adults were meaningfully included in that process.

This can be particularly important in a state with many people who are ill informed or functionally illiterate, where there is not a historical tradition of democratic self-government by a mass franchise, and where the workings of government and the implications of different kinds of policies are not widely understood by the general population.

Put another way, while it is legitimate to worry about one faction having unfair control of the political process to the exclusion of other political factions, often, an equally pressing problem for a state is finding some way to develop enough of a consensus to build majority support in favor of conducting any activities of government at all to meet the people's needs in a halfway sensible manner. Typically, not long before the one party state was established, these issues were left in the hands of an externally imposed and controlled colonial regimes chosen through a nominally merit based civil service hiring process, or in the hands of a hereditary monarch with a supporting aristocracy that owes duties of loyalty to that monarch, all of whom were trained their entire lives to fill these roles that they knew they would have to fill someday.

For non-monarchies to function, every year, there needs to be majority support in favor of some leadership team with some budget to carry out some set of policies that meet the needs of the people of the state in a manner sufficiently to prevent the state from collapsing. In many newly self-governing non-monarchies, this bare minimum threshold is a non-trivial and daunting challenge, in and of itself, for anyone trying in good faith to achieve it, even in the absence of factious and time consuming infighting between numerous small interest groups within the society over the right course of action to take at a big picture level.

Also, with rare exceptions like North Korea, most one party states are not de facto monarchies. The party leadership is still selected on a non-hereditary basis within the party as vacancies emerge, typically with rank and file members electing delegates to the next level, for multiple levels of the party organization, until the process culminates in the party's central committee at the top. The upper levels of the party aren't necessarily entirely neutral and indifferent towards competing party members seeking to move up to the next level of the party organization in this process. But as a simple matter of logistical reality, the upper levels of the party don't have the capacity as a practical matter to determine precisely who ends up in intermediate level posts within the sole political party's organizational structure, like the local government central committee, or a regional government central committee, or subject matter committees tasked with dealing with some particular issue or specialized function of the party's responsibilities.

From the point of view of the people who establish the system in the first place, it insures that the legacy of their initial (usually revolutionary) agenda is carried on in continual succession by people who are more or less loyal to and believe in that agenda (or at least pretend to believe in it) long after they leave the political scene, while still implementing that agenda through groups of human beings who are living in whatever the current situation may be, affording the agenda a flexibility going forward that it might otherwise lack. Without the corps of carefully recruited party members needed to operationalize the party's vision, the party might be rendered too rigid to deal with changing circumstances over time.

Answer 9

A historical/practical reason for the party/state duality is that after winning a revolution, the party has people with political and (some) military skills but not the skills needed to run the government and industry: finance, diplomacy, technology, a big army. So they leave in place many of the existing managers, but for each one there is a party member to watch them and sometimes overrule them. The party member reports up the party hierarchy. The party member's key qualification is loyalty to the party, though hopefully they know or learn some of the technical skills of their department.

It's a way of dealing with the problem democracies have of "the bureaucracy resisting the political leadership". The downside is that the party member may be ignorant of the area he is supervising and force bad decisions.

Later on in the Soviet Union and China, all the managers in the government and industry would be party members, but the dual hierarchies persisted. Owileke's answer (about the first 5 paragraphs) is a good explanation of how and why they persist.

Answer 10

One of the things people seem to forget is that even in single party states, you can have people with a variety of different policies that fit within the framework of a particular parties' ideology, so an election will still serve some kind of purpose even if it is more restrictive than a multi-party state. While authoritarian, the USSR had local elections that mattered to decide who could even be a part of the Communist Party, with those who don't get at least 50% of the vote getting removed. This helped the Soviets provide an air of legitimacy and, as described in the book Soviet Elections Revisited: Voter Abstention in Noncompetitive Voting by Rasma Karklins, could allow citizens to implement local changes/remove local officials whose policies may meet the party's standard but are despised by the local populace.