Writing in 1904, Luxemburg observes that the conditions of a highly developed bourgeois society that made the German Social Democratic Party organizationally possible are absent in Russia. Russia lacks the formal guarantees of assembly and press through which the masses can acquire political experience via participation in public life. Luxemburg points out that Social Democracy grew because Germany’s bourgeois democratic conditions allowed for the direct and independent actions of the masses. A class-conscious proletarian vanguard capable of organizing itself into a party, the heart of the German Social Democratic experience, is simply not present in Russia. Russian proletarians are atomized and isolated, not yet having educated themselves through class struggle. The problem with Lenin, Luxemburg argues, is that he proceeds as if he could simply command a vanguard into being by concentrating all party authority in the Central Committee. Rather than grasping the ways proletarian consciousness changes in the course of struggle, Lenin “mechanically subordinates” the class to the party and the party to the Central Committee. The Central Committee thinks and decides and everyone else carries out its commands. The few dominate the many.
Continuously repeated today, the charges of centralism and authoritarianism, the domination of the many by the few, are damning, striking at the very heart of people’s struggle. If the few dominate the many, then working-class struggle merely replaces one set of oppressors with another. The very organization indispensable to people’s political struggle stifles and deforms it.
Charges of centralism and authoritarianism, however, have not been confined to socialist and communist parties or even to the party form as such. Already at the beginning of the twentieth century, Michels levels these charges against democratic political participation most broadly: democracy itself leads to oligarchy. The conditions that make democracy possible also make it impossible, whether one is talking about a polity, a party, a union, or a council (syndicate or soviet). Michels’s analysis, which I consider in detail below, reminds us that it is a mistake to proceed as if critiques such as Bakunin’s and Luxemburg’s, critiques repeated ad nauseum on the Left, identify problems unique to Marxism or the party. On the contrary, we need to recognize them as attacks on mass, democratic, and people’s politics more generally. The charge of the few dominating the many thrown about so vigorously on the Left illuminates nothing specific to Marxism, Marxism–Leninism, socialism, or communism. Rather, it points to the challenges of organization, duration, and extension that persist after the dissipation of the crowd. The gap of politics is unavoidable. Repeating the critique of centralism and authoritarianism time after time, in setting after setting, reinscribes fantasies of a politics without politics, fantasies of a beautiful moment when the many immediately know and realize their desire. To the extent that the Left fails to recognize and take responsibility for the enabling condition of political collectivity, it will remain trapped in its own self-critique, unable to build or seize the organizations it needs.
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