'When someone says to me: “We can’t understand you communists: you don't have different tendencies - there aren’t any right-wing communists, there aren’t any left-wing communists, there aren’t any moderates. So there’s no freedom!”, I reply: “What do you call a right-wing communist, what do you call a left-wing communist, what do you call a moderate? As far as I’m concerned, you’re either a communist or you’re not, and in the communist organization, when we’re discussing things, everyone gives his point of view about the day’s agenda, and when it’s something important, we take a vote. It’s the majority that decides.” What do you call democracy? In my view, democracy is 50% of the vote plus one - that’s easy to understand! It’s the majority that decides. If you join the communist party in order to combat the directives that have been freely discussed and debated in a session of congress, in order to have your point of view carried - reformist without reforms, since that’s what naturally suits your state of mind (you have a sensitive backside, you need a nicely-padded armchair so as not to get it overheated) - well, then you’ll sit back in your armchair and say: “Aha! 1 don’t agree with the party leadership - I'm a right-wing communist. I’m ... a moderate." If you're an electioneering sort. I’ll tell you right away: “Go somewhere else; we don’t need you here, because you may perhaps have brains, you may perhaps be very clever, but your arguments are very poor and above all your facts are all wrong. So despite all your cleverness and your gift of the gab. workers in your section may well never choose you to carry the flag of the organization. They naturally prefer a worker who has proved himself and they prefer a communist, even if he is an intellectual, since there are good ones and bad ones . . . just as there are good ones and bad ones in the working class - that’s a fact!’”
(Blacksmith’s mate, miner, then chainmaker, born in 1892 in Saint-Amand-des-Eaux; he was secretary of the Saint-Nazaire section of the French Communist Party in 1928. and the CGTU union representative for the Saint-Nazaire region.)
Field and Apparatus
While it is true to say that there is no political enterprise which, however monolithic it may appear, is not the site of confrontation between divergent tendencies and interests,46 the fact remains that parties are more likely to function in accordance with the logic of the apparatus capable of responding instantaneously to the strategic demands that are part and parcel of the logic of the political field when the people they represent are more deprived culturally and more attached to the values of loyalty, and thus more inclined to unconditional and lasting delegation. The same is true when the parties are older and richer in objectified political capital, and thus more powerfully determined, in their strategies, by the need to •defend their gains'; when, likewise, they are more deliberately arranged for the purposes of the struggle, and thus organized in accordance with the military model of the apparatus of mobilization; and when their officers and party officials are more deprived of economic and cultural capital, and thus more totally dependent on the party.
The combination of inter- and intragenerational loyalty, which ensures that parties will always have a relatively stable clientele, thus depriving the electoral sanction of a large part of its effectiveness, with the
In the same way. the party officials never depend on the party so much as when their profession allows them to participate in political life only at the cost of sacrificing lime and money. They can then expect to receive only from the party the