Итог полностью

18 The paradigmatic form of this structural duplicity is probably represented by what the revolutionary tradition of the USSR calls ‘the language of Aesop¹, that is, the secret, coded, indirect language to which revolutionaries resorted to evade the Tsarist censorship and which reappeared in the Bolshevik party, on the occasion of the conflict between the supporters of Stalin and those of Bukharin, that is, when it was a matter of preventing, by ‘party patriotism’, conflicts within the Politburo or the Central Committee from leaking out of the party to the outside world. This language conceals, behind its anodyne appearance, a hidden truth which ’any sufficiently cultivated militant¹ can decipher, and it can be read, depending on its addressees, tn two different ways. See S. Cohen, Nicolas Bou khan ne. La vie dun bolchevik (Paris: Maspero, 1979).

19 Hence the failure of all those who, like so many historians of Germany

after Rosenberg, have attempted to define 'conservatism’ absolutely, without seeing that its substantia] content had to change continuously in order to conserve its relational value.

20 Gramsci, Selections from Political Writings (1921-1926), pp. 139-40.

21 Among the factors creating this effect of closure and the very special form of esotericism that it generates, one must include the frequently observed tendency among the party officials of political apparatuses to restrict their sphere of social interaction to other party officials,

22 Gramsci, Selections from Political Writings (1921-1926), p, 191 (my emphasis),

23 Failure to acknowledge what these concepts owe to history debars one from the one real possibility of freeing them from history. As tools of analysis but also of anathematization, instruments of knowledge but also instruments of power, all those concepts ending in '-ism' that the Marxological tradition eternalizes by treating them as pure conceptual constructions, free of any context and detached from any strategic function, are frequently linked to particular circumstances, tainted with premature generalizations, and marked by bitter polemics' and generated 'in divergence, in violent confrontations between the representatives of the various different currents’ (G. Haupt, ‘Les marxistes face a la question nationale: I’histoire du probleme*, in G. Haupt, M. Lowy and C, Weill, Les marxistes et la question nationale, 1848-1914 (Paris: Maspero, 1974). p. 11).

24 It is well known that Bakunin, who imposed absolute submission to the leadership in the movements he constituted (for example the National Fraternity) and who was basically a supporter of the ‘Blanquist* idea of ‘active minorities’, was led, in his polemic with Marx, to denounce authoritarianism and to exalt the spontaneity of the masses and the autonomy of the federations.

25 J, Maitron, Le mouvement anarchist? en France (Paris: Maspero, 1975), vol. 2, pp. 82-3.

26 The position (more or less central and dominant) in the party appar* aius, and the cultural capital possessed, form the source of the different and even opposed visions of revolutionary action, the future of capitalism, relations between the party and the masses, etc., which confront each other within the workers* movement. It is, for instance, certain that economism and the propensity to accentuate the detenuin-ist, objective and scientific side of Marxism is more closely associated with ‘scientists’ and ‘theoreticians* (for example, Tugan-Baranowski or the ‘economists’ in the social-democratic party) than with ‘militants* or ‘agitators*, especially if their theory of economics is self-taught (that is doubtless one of the sources of the opposition between Marx and Bakunin). The opposition between centralism and spontaneism or, to put it another way, between authoritarian socialism and libertarian socialism, seems to vary in an altogether parallel way, the propensity to scientism and economism inclining people to entrust those who possess

knowledge with the right to define, in an authoritative way, the line to be followed (the biography of Marx is traversed by these oppositions which, as he grows older, are decided in favour of the Scientist’).

27 Voting strategies also have to face the alternative between an adequate but powerless representation, on the one hand, and an imperfect but, by virtue of that very fact, powerful representation, on the other. In other words, the very logic which identifies isolation with powerlessness forces one to make compromise choices and confers a decisive advantage on stances already confirmed with regard to the original opinions.