ABSTRACT
The rationales offered by the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) leadership on the necessity for democratic centralism and its continued viability despite changes in ideology and political strategy varied, but they generally revolved around two notions. One of these was that the existence of factions was tolerable or natural only in a multi-class party and not in the party of the working class whose political homogeneity had to be maintained. The other, that as the fusion of revolutionary will and action, the PCE could not, as Santiago Carrillo said in Demain l'Espagne, "permit itself, through an excess of democratisme, to lose the opportunity to act". PCE spokesmen rationalized their party's shift on the State and on the means to be employed in its transformation by pointing to changes in the role of the Spanish State and in the structure of Spanish society.
