Crowds and Party · 第 108 页

which many adhere.²³

Michels orients his account of the inevitability of oligarchy in a theory of the crowd reminiscent of Le Bon’s. The crowd is suggestible, incapable of serious discussion or thoughtful deliberation, and susceptible to the influence of orators. Michels finds evidence of the crowd’s incapacity in the fact that most people avoid going to meetings unless the event promises some kind of spectacle or someone famous is speaking. Deindividuation is likewise a primary feature of Michels’s version of the crowd: “The individual disappears in the multitude, and therewith disappears also personality and sense of responsibility.”²⁴ And as we already learned from Le Bon, a crowd can go off in a panic or a flight of “unreflective enthusiasm.” It can be easily dominated, hypnotized, and intoxicated. Conversely, the crowd may be politically indifferent, hard to arouse, and a barrier to action. Number itself undermines direct democracy: thirtyfour million people cannot “carry on their affairs without accepting what the pettiest man of business finds necessary, the intermediation of representatives.” The crowd, Michels argues, needs “someone to point out the way and to issue orders.”²⁵ Tens of thousands of people can’t deliberate together directly and immediately. Basic considerations of space, amplification, and the time, duration, and frequency of meetings, not to mention preparing the agenda and carrying out decisions, point to the unavoidability of delegation.²⁶ So the crowd’s very nature makes it vulnerable to oligarchy. Not only can it not protect itself from bold power-seekers, but it relies on them. It needs leaders to get things done. It even enjoys them.

Michels narrates the slide into oligarchy as an ersatz “story of the Fall” as technical tendencies to oligarchy come to dominance in a group. This story applies to “every organization,” whether party, union, or other kind of association. From an initial equality, wherein delegates are chosen by lot or rotation, gradual change sets in as delegates’ responsibilities become more complicated:

some individual ability becomes essential, a certain oratorical gift and a considerable amount of objective knowledge. It thus becomes impossible to trust to blind chance, to the fortune of alphabetic succession, or to the order of priority, in the choice of a delegation whose members must possess certain peculiar personal aptitudes if they are to discharge their mission to the general advantage.²⁷

Demands arise for “a sort of official consecration for the leaders.” Leaders need to be vetted and trained, their expertise established. Accordingly, a system of examinations, and hence courses and schools, emerge. Educational associations produce elites with both skills for and aspirations to office. Michels concludes, “Without wishing it, there is thus effected a continuous enlargement of the gulf which divides the leaders from the masses.”²⁸ Even leaders originating from the masses become separated from them in the course of their acquisition of expertise, validation, responsibility, and experience.

Although the division of the leaders from the masses is particularly vexing to socialist parties, syndicalism and anarchism encounter similar problems with oligarchy, again, for technical reasons. By syndicalism, Michels means that socialist current which would replace the duality of party and trade union with “a completer organism”

108