AN EXPERIMENT THAT FAILED ? 19 particular country. There is however need for contacts, exchanges of views, between one fraternal party and another and among groups of parties with a view to developing solidarity of action in common movements. This is all the more necessary now, since, after the surrender of the Soviet leadership to American imperialism, the latter attempts to impose its economic and political domination over the whole world. While there is no question of a guiding centre for the world communist movement, proletarian internationalism continues to operate in the form of solidarity of every fraternal party for the struggles undertaken by its sister parties. DEMOCRATIC CENTRALISM This again is one of the heritages of the Communist International which has been subjected to distortions. Centralised leadership on the basis of inner-party democracy, effective leadership of the party centre based on inner party democracy—these are the two elements of democratic centralism. Like many other things however, the integral connection between these two concepts has been distorted in practice. The centralised leadership began to grow at the expense of inner-party democracy. Of late, however, a systematic struggle is being unleashed to reestablish inner-party democracy which however would not operate at the expense of the centralised leadership. We may now sum up the discussion : recent developments not only in the Soviet Union and the East European countries, but throughout the world communist movement have made it inevitable on the part of Marxist-Leninists throughout the world to have a second look at the fundamental concepts of Marxism-Leninism which unfortunately have been distorted in practice. There is, at the same time, need to guarantee that the 'second look* would not be at the expense of, but by way of developing, the basic premises of Marxism-Leninism—class struggle, the leadership of working class in progressive movements, proletarian internationalism and the variegated ways of building socialism in various countries.