In the rival camp, one could cast an eye on a genocidal Pol Pot or the beloved leader Kim Il-Sung, or, in Eastern Europe, the gray Brezhnev lookalikes, patriarchal Miss Margaridas, imposing their bureaucratic socialism.

Socialist Alternative advocates socialist democracy as an alternative to both the bureaucratic socialism of the former Soviet Union and the capitalist democratic model which it considers designed only to benefit the ruling class and disenfranchise working people.

"All the vertical structures of managing the economy were destroyed, but the horizontal system of market relations had not been established," he said, retaining the vocabulary of bureaucratic socialism.

But in an interview, he said proposals being considered by her committee looked like "washed-over old-time bureaucratic liberalism, or centralized bureaucratic socialism."

Anti-authoritarian leftism and the critique of bureaucratic socialism had of course been well established before the foundation of the SI in 1957.

Mr. Gingrich said then that Mrs. Clinton's proposal looked like "washed-over old-time bureaucratic liberalism, or centralized bureaucratic socialism."

The party defines its ideology as "New Socialism of the 21st century", but emphasises that it does not wish to return to "Soviet bureaucratic socialism".

As such, council communists oppose state-run "bureaucratic socialism".

But in the end, much of the attention went to the spectacle of Mrs. Clinton sharing the stage with Mr. Gingrich, a man who once said the ideas of the task force she led on health care were "washed-over old-time bureaucratic liberalism, or centralized bureaucratic socialism."

Marcel Rigout, a prominent dissident, said the ouster of Mr. Marchais was "a necessary condition" for the party to be able to confront what he called "the complete failure of bureaucratic and statist socialism."