47 If one remembers the place that the working-class system of values grants to virtues such as integrity (‘being wholehearted', 'being cut and dried*, etc.), keeping your word, being loyal to your own people, being self-consistent (‘that’s just the way I am\ 'I’m not going to have my mind changed for me\ etc.), all of them dispositions which, in other universes, would appear as a form of rigidity or even stupidity, it becomes easy to understand how the effect of loyalty to one’s original choices - a loyalty which tends to make membership of a political party an almost hereditary property, one which is capable of surviving changes in condition within or between generations - is particularly powerful in the case of the working classes and benefits especially the parties of the left,
48 Although it includes invariant characteristics, the opposition between the party officials and ordinary supporters (or, a fortiori occasional voters) can be interpreted in very different ways depending on the parties. The key factor here is the distribution of capital and. above all perhaps, of free time among the classes. (Il is. after all. well known that if direct democracy cannot resist economic and social differentiation, this is because, through the unequal distribution of free time which results from it, administrative responsibilities are concentrated in the hands of those who have at their disposal the time necessary to fulfil these functions for little or no remuneration.) This simple principle could also help to explain the differential participation of the different professions (or even of the different levels of status within a single profession) in political or trade-union life and, more generally, in all semi-political responsibilities. Thus Max Weber notes that directors of great institutes of medicine and the natural sciences are neither particularly inclined nor suitable to occupy the post of rector, and Robert Michels points out that scientists who have taken an active part in political life 'find that their scientific faculties undergo a slow but progressive atrophy* (Michels, Political Parties^ p, 221). If one also notes that the social conditions which favour or authorize people’s refusal to give their time to politics or administration also frequently encourage a certain aristocratic or prophetic disdain for the temporal profits that these activities might promise or procure, it becomes easy
to understand some of the structural invariants of the relation between intellectuals in the different kinds of apparatus (political, administrative or other) and the 'free' intellectuals, between theologians and bishops, or between researchers and deans, rectors and scientific administrators, etc.
49 Lacome. Les notables rouges* p. 114.
50 Weber. Economy and Society* vol. 2, p. 1149.
51 Robert Michels, who notes the close correspondence between the organization of the ‘democratic party of combat’ and military organization and the numerous respects (particularly in Engels and Bebel) in which socialist terminology is indebted to military jargon, observes that leaders, who. as he remarks, are closely attached to discipline and centralization (Michels. Political Parties* pp. 189, 208), never tail to appeal to the magic of common interest and to ‘military-style arguments’ every time their position is threatened: 'They maintain, for instance, that, if only for tactical reasons, and in order to maintain a necessary cohesion in the face of the enemy, the members of the party must never refuse to repose perfect confidence in the leaders they have freely chosen for themselves’ (ibid., p. 237). But it is doubtless with Stalin that the strategy of militarization - which, as Stephen Cohen notes, is probably Stalins sole original contribution to Bolshevik thought, and thus the principal characteristic of Stalinism - finds its fulfilment: sectors of intervention become ’fronts’ (the grain front, the philosophy front, the literature front, etc.); objectives or problems are ‘fortresses’ that ‘theoretical brigades' have to ‘storm \ etc. This ‘military* thought is evidently Manichean, celebrating a group, a school of thought or a conception set up as an orthodoxy in order the belter to destroy all the others (see Cohen. Nicolas Boukharine* pp. 367-8. 389).
