The constraints of the market weigh first and foremost on those members of the dominated classes who have no choice but to abdicate or hand over their power to the party, a permanent organization which has to produce the representation of the continuity of the class, which always risks lapsing into the discontinuity of atomized existence (falling back into private life and the quest for individual paths to salvation) or into the particularity of strictly protest struggles.6 This means that, more than the members of the dominant classes, who can satisfy themselves with associations,
pressure groups or party associations,7 they need parties understood as permanent organizations whose aim is to win power, and offering their militants and their electors not only a doctrine but a programme of thought and action, and thereby demanding in advance total support. As Marx notes in The Poverty of Philosophy, one can date the birth of a social group from the moment the members of its representative organizations do not struggle merely for the defence of the economic interests of their supporters and members but for the defence and development of the organization itself. But how can one fail to see that, if the existence of a permanent organization, relatively independent of corporate and conjunctural interests, is a precondition of the permanent and properly political representation of the class, it also carries the threat that the ‘ordinary’ members of the class will be dispossessed? The antinomy of the ‘established revolutionary power', as Bakunin calls it, is quite similar to that of the reformed church as described by Troeltsch, The/ides implicifa, a total and comprehensive delegating of power through which the most deprived people grant, en bloc, a sort of unlimited credit to the party of their choice, gives free rein to the mechanisms which tend to divest them of any control over the apparatus. This means that, by a strange irony, the concentration of political capital is al its greatest -in the absence of a deliberate (and improbable) intervention against this trend - in parties whose aim is to struggle against the concentration of economic capital.
Gramsci often referred to the tendency observable in communist parties to treat the party and iis bosses with a kind of millenarian fide ism, as if they were to be as revered as providence itself: ’In out party, we have had anol her aspect of the danger to lament: the withering of all individual activity; the passivity of the mass of members; the stupid confidence that there is always somebody else who is thinking of everything and taking care of everything.* ‘Disturbed by their condition of absolute inferiority, lacking any constitutional education, the masses abdicated completely all sovereignty and all power. The organization became identified for them with the organizer as an individual, just as for an army in the field the individual commander becomes the protector of the safety of all. the guarantor of success and victory.'“ And one could also quote, a contrario, Rosa Luxemburg, when she describes (with a good deal of wishful thinking) a party which itself limits its own power by the conscious and constant effort of its bosses to strip themselves of power so as to act as the executors of the will of the musses. ‘The only role of the so-called "leaders" of social-democracy consists in enlightening the masses concerning their histone mission. The authority and
influence of the “bosses" in a democracy increase only in proportion to the educative activity they perform towards this end. In other words, their prestige and their influence increase only in so far as the bosses destroy what was hitherto the function of the leaders, the blindness of the masses, in so far as they strip themselves of their status as bosses, and in so far as they turn the masses themselves into the leaders and turn themselves into the executive organs of the conscious action of the masses.'M It would be interesting to determine what, in the positions on this problem adopted by the different ‘theoreticians' (who. like Gramsci, can swing from the spontancism of Ordine Nuovo to the centralism of his article on the Communist Parly)10 stems from objective factors (such as the level of the general and polilical education of the masses), in particular from the direct experience of the attitudes of the masses in a given set of historical circumstances, and what stems from effects of the field and from the logic of internal opposition.
