Итог полностью

Representative assemblies are a kind of spatial projection of the political field and. through this, of the field of class relations of which the political scene is a theatricalized representation. In other words, the structure according to which these assemblies are organized * and, in particular, the opposition between left and right - lends to impose itself as a paradigmatic manifestation of the social structure and to function in people’s heads as a principle of di-vision of the social world and, in particular, of the division into classes. (The tradition in France which prescribes that, in all parliaments, the conservatives sit on the right and the liberals on the left of the President goes back to the Constituent Assembly: after the reunion of the three orders, one began to distinguish the members of the assembly who, having abandoned distinction by dress, grouped themselves according to their ideas, with the partisans of the monarchy on the right and the partisans of the Revolution on the left or, more simply, on the right-side and the left-side, then right and left.)

The same dyadic or triadic structure which organizes the field as a whole can be reproduced tn each of its points - that is, within the political party or splinter group - according to the same double logic, both internal and external, which relates the specific interests of professionals to the real or presumed interests of their real or presumed supporters. It is probably within the political parlies whose supporters are the most deprived, and thus most inclined to depend on the party, that the logic of internal oppositions can most

clearly be demonstrated. Hence nothing can explain better the stances adopted than a topology of the positions from which they are expressed. ‘So far as Russia is concerned, I have always known that in the topography of the factions and tendencies. Radek. Trotsky and Bukharin occupied a left position. Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin a right position, while Lenin was in the centre and acted as arbiter in the whole situation. This, of course, in current political language. The so-called Leninist nucleus, as is well known, maintains that these "topographic” positions are absolutely illusory and fallacious.’" It is just as if the distribution of positions in the field implied a distribution of roles; as if each of the protagonists were brought to or forced to assume his position as much through competition with the occupants of both the most distant and the closest positions, which threaten his existence in very different ways, as through the logical contradiction between the stances adopted.-³

Thus, certain recurrent oppositions, such as the one established between the libertarian tradition and the authoritarian tradition, are merely the transcription, on the level of ideological struggles, of the fundamental contradiction within the revolutionary movement, which is forced to resort to discipline and authority, even violence, in order to combat authority and violence. As a heretical protest against the heretical church, as a revolution against ‘established revolutionary power*, the ‘leftist' critique in its ‘spontaneist’ form seeks to exploit, against those who dominate the party, the contradiction between ‘authoritarian* strategies within the parly and the ‘anti-authoritarian’ strategies of the party within the political field as a whole. And even within the anarchist movement, which reproaches Marxism with being too authoritarian,²⁴ one finds a similar opposition between, on the one hand, the kind ol demagoguery associated with the political platform which, aiming above all at laying the foundations for a powerful anarchist organization, treats as secondary the demands made by individuals and small groups for unlimited freedom and. on the other hand, a more ‘synthesizing’ tendency which aims at ensuring that individuals maintain their full independence.²⁵

But even in this case, internal conflicts are superimposed on external conflicts. It is thus in so far as (and only in so far as) each tendency is inclined to appeal to the corresponding fraction of its clientele, thanks to the homologies between the positions occupied by the leaders in the political field and the positions occupied in the field of the lower classes by their real or presumed supporters, that the real divisions and contradictions of the working class can find a