Crowds and Party · 第 112 页

Great class movements have hitherto been initiated in history solely by the simple reflection: it is not we alone, belonging to the masses without education and without legal rights, who believe ourselves to be oppressed, but that belief as to our condition is shared by those who have a better knowledge of the social mechanism and who are therefore better able to judge; since the cultured people of the upper classes have also conceived the ideal of our emancipation, that ideal is not mere chimera. 43

Bourgeois detachments, as a matter of fact comprising the majority of European socialist leaders, serve psychological as much as technical purposes: they enable workers to reflect on themselves; they provide a standpoint from outside the workers that workers can take toward their own condition.

This perspective that comes from without is also generated within the workers’ movement. Leaders come from among the workers, pushed up involuntarily by chance and circumstance. Michels quotes Le Bon, “The leader has usually been at one time the led.” Party work can separate the worker from the class to the extent that party functionaries are paid (and hence have a new source of income), to the extent that they acquire goals specific to the activities of the party, and to the extent that prestige attaches to leaders—the functionary is felt to stand for the many. Michels uses the party newspaper to illustrate the point: “the editorial ‘we,’ uttered in the name of a huge party, has a much greater effect than even the most distinguished name.”⁴⁴ The article or editorial is no longer linked to a single person. It is backed by the force of a collective to which it gives voice.

Michels concludes, “who says organization, says oligarchy.” Political enthusiasm— the joy of self-sacrifice, the thrill of struggle—inspires the crowd, but it can’t endure. The crowd disperses and people go home. Keeping the fight alive requires dedicated, professional cadre, a few who devote themselves to the cause. This very requirement separates the few from the many.

The socialist party is not identical with the working class. Workers are not automatically socialists and socialists are not necessarily workers. The party can have bourgeois and working class members (not to mention other classes). These members may be active or not, leaders or led. The class fragments into various interests, personal as well as political. Michels writes, “The party, regarded as an entity, as a piece of mechanism, is not necessarily identifiable with the totality of its members, and still less so with the class to which these belong.”⁴⁵ The party is more than the sum of the particular interests of its members. The very non-identity of class and party, the gap between few and many, produces something new.

We have hints about this “something new” in the ideas of prestige, identification, and that exterior point from which the working class can reflect back on itself. These ideas suggest that the party is a psychic space irreducible to its members and excreted out of the technical needs it fulfills. Michels recognizes this space, marking it with the party program. He writes, “A party is neither a social unity nor an economic unity. It is based upon its political program.”⁴⁶ The program sets out the party’s principles, ostensibly providing the missing point of unity in the “idea” of the working class. To be sure, this theoretical unity cannot eliminate the more fundamental class conflicts that express themselves in the party. “In practice,” Michels observes, “the acceptance of the program does not suffice to abolish the conflict of interests between capital and labor.” Put more broadly, the collectivity incorporated in the party will always be in excess of, never fully reconcilable with, a particular interest. A degree of alienation, of non-identity, is ineliminable. The very fact of a party—or any few carrying out some kind of organizational work—exerts a force counter to personal desire. If personal desire were enough, if it could simply be aggregated into happy outcomes, if the crowd had the capacity to know and get what it wanted, leaders wouldn’t emerge. But the gap is irreducible, a repetition in the party of the antagonism rupturing society.

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