The issue of “spontaneity versus organisation” has provoked constant controversy within labour movements, at least since the polemic between Lenin and Luxemburg in the first years of this century. The rise of mass social-democratic parties and national industrial unions generated a familiar dilemma for the left: an apparent contradiction between direct, localised and immediate collective expressions of working-class experience and aspirations – with the virtues of authenticity and self-activity – and the centralised, co-ordinated and disciplined institutions which strategic efficacy seemingly required. Experience of the particularly bureaucratic and authoritarian German movement helped inspire Michels' eloquent thesis that hierarchical organisational structures were unavoidable, yet inevitably resulted in conservative and anti-democratic outcomes. Others – most notably, perhaps, the Webbs – insisted that oligarchy could be avoided by appropriate organisational engineering; yet others, implicitly endorsing Michels' equation, proposed syndicalist strategies for avoiding institutional discipline. Subsequently the Third International, with its concept of “democratic centralism”, sought to dissolve the whole issue by what critics regarded as a definitional sleight-of-hand.