that they possessed before joining the party was slight. This explains the fact that party officials from the working class feel that they owe the party everything - not just their position, which frees them from the servitudes of their former condition, but also their culture, in short, everything that constitutes their present way of life: ‘The fact is that the person who lives the life of a party like ours can only rise in status. I started out with the baggage of a primary-school pupil and the party forced me to educate myself. You have to work, slave over your books, you have to read, you have to put yourseif in the picture ... It’s a real obligation! If not... I'd have stayed the same donkey as I was fifty years ago! What I say is: "a militant owes his party everything.’" '^ It also explains the fact that, as Denis Lacorne has demonstrated, ‘the party spirit' and ‘partisan pride' arc significantly clearer among the party officials of the Communist Party than among those of the Socialist Party, since the latter are more frequently from the middle and upper classes, especially from the teaching profession, and thus depend far less completely on the party.
Discipline and training, so often overestimated by analysts, would remain completely powerless without the complicity that they find in the dispositions to forced or chosen submission which agents bring to the apparatus, and which are themselves continually reinforced by the confrontation with similar dispositions and by the interests that are part and parcel of the jobs in the party apparatus. One can thus say both that certain kinds of habitus find the conditions of their realization, indeed of their blossoming, in the logic of the apparatus; and. conversely, that the logic of the apparatus 'exploits’ for its own profit tendencies that are inscribed in the different kinds of habitus. One could mention, on the one hand, all the procedures, common to all total institutions, by which the apparatus, or those who dominate it. impose discipline and bring into line heretics and dissidents, or the mechanisms which, with the complicity of those whose interests they serve, tend to ensure the reproduction of institutions and of their hierarchies. On the other hand, there would be no end to an enumeration and analysis of the dispositions which provide militarist mechanization with its cogs and wheels: this is true whether we are talking about the dominated relation to culture which inclines party officials from the working class to a form of anti-intellectualism which is bound to serve as a justification or alibi for a sort of spontaneous Zhdanovism and workerist corporatism; or about the resentment which draws on the Stalinist (in the historical sense of the word) vision of ‘fractions’ — in other words, the policeman’s vision —
and on the propensity to think of history as ruled by the logic of the conspiracy; or even about the sense of guilt which, as an essential part of the precarious position of the intellectual, reaches its maximum intensity in the intellectual from the dominated classes, a renegade and often the son of a renegade, as Sartre has magnificently shown in his preface to