The delegation of political capital presupposes the objectification of this kind of capital in permanent institutions, its materialization in political ‘machines’, in jobs and instruments of mobilization, and its continual reproduction by mechanisms and strategies. It is thus the result of already established political enterprises which have accumulated a significant amount of objectified political capital, in the form of jobs within the party itself, in all the organizations that are more or less subordinate to the party, and also in the organs of local or central power and in the whole network of industrial or commercial enterprises which live in a state of symbiosis with these
pans The objectification of political capital secures a relative dependence from the electoral sanction by replacing the direct domination of people and personal investment[strategies (’self-sacrifice') by the mediated domination which enables one to keep a tasting hold over those who hold jobs by holding those jobs open for hem in the first place.43 And it is easy to see that this new definition of positions brings with it new characteristics in the dispositions of those who occupy them: political capita) is increasingly institutionalized in the form of available jobs, and it becomes more profitable to enter the apparatus - quite the opposite of what happens tn the initial phases or in times of crisis (in a revolutionary period, for example) when the risks are great and profits reduced.
The process often designated by the vague word ‘bureaucratization’ can be understood if one sees that, as one advances tn the life cycle of the political enterprise, the effects on recruitment produced bv the supply of stable party jobs begin to exacerbate the frequently observed effects44 produced by access to such jobs (and to the -relative - privileges that they make available to militants from the working class). The more advanced the process of institutionalization of political capital is. the more the winning of ‘hearts and minds’ tends to become subordinated to the winning of jobs; and the more militants, linked by their ‘devotion’ to the ‘cause’ and by nothing else, have to make way for the ‘prebendaries', as Weber calls them, lastingly linked to the apparatus by the benefits and advantages that it grants them, and holding on to the apparatus as long as the apparatus keeps them in its grasp by redistributing to them part of the material or symbolic booty that it wins with their help (as in the case of the spoils of American parties).45 In other words, as the process of institutionalization advances and as the apparatus of mobilization grows, so the weight of the imperatives linked to the reproduction of the apparatus and the jobs it offers, tying to itse those who fill those jobs by all sorts of material or symbolic interests, continues to grow, both in reality and in people s heads; and this grows faster than the weight of imperatives that would be impose by the realization of the declared aims of the apparatus. It is thus easy to understand how political parties can be brought in this way to sacrifice their programmes so as to keep themselves in power or simply in existence.
‘As FAR AS I'm concerned. you're either a communist OR YOU’RE NOT.’