A "solar system of organizations" around the Communist Party

While reading the Wikipedia entry on Otto Wille Kuusinen, I came across a very interesting comment in the section titled "Legacy" about his concept of a politically organized "solar system of organizations" around the Communist Party:

We must create a whole solar system of organisations and smaller committees around the Communist Party, so to speak, smaller organisations working actually under the influence of our Party (not under mechanical leadership).

This is definitely the tactic communist parties all around the world followed during the Cold War. They either set up or got involved in organizations of all types that, while formally independent or autonomous from the party, were in one way or another influenced by it. For a while, they were known as "satellite organizations" that revolved around the "sun" which was represented by the party itself. This happened, particularly, with organizations in the pacifist movement during the years of the Cold War. To this day, plenty of communist militants still behave this way. On the one hand, it clearly opens up these organizations (any organization that becomes popular enough, truly) to be manipulated for their own partisan purposes. On the other (more positive) view, it keeps the party far more connected to popular causes and social struggles than their socialist and socialdemocratic rivals, which tend to quickly become too institutionalized.

Ironies of History in regards to the "time telescope"

The introductory remarks to the book start by asserting not only the inherent truth to Marxism-Leninism, but also affirming its materialism, its supposed accordance with science and, ironically enough, its capacity to predict the future through its understanding of the laws of nature and society. For example:

Hence, bourgeois ideologists wage war on the Marxist conception of history not because it is wrong, but precisely because it is true.

By revealing the laws governing the operationg and development of the forces of nature and society, genuine science can always foresee the new. The Marxist science of the laws of social development enables us not only to chart a correct path through the labyrinth of social contradictions, but to predict the course events will take, the direction of historical progress and the next stages of social advance.

Thus, Marxism-Leninism gives us an instrument with which to look into the future and see the outlines of impending historical changes. This "time telescope" has revealed to us the magnificent future of humanity freed from the yoke of capitalism, from the last exploiting system. But when progressive science invites bourgeois scientists (who claim that "nothing can be predicted") to apply the Marxist "time telescope", they simply shut their eyes —they are afraid to look into the future.

(pp. 16-17)

Ah, the irony! It seems as if the "time telescope" failed the Marxist-Leninists when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and, subsequently, one communist regime after another fell under the pressure of reality and its own citizens.