Итог полностью

The fact remains that the Bolshevik-type organizational model that was imposed on most communist parlies enables the tendencies inscribed in the relation between the working classes and the parties to be taken to their ultimate consequences. As an apparatus (or total institution) designed for the purpose of the (real or represented) struggle, and based on the discipline which allows a group of agents (in this case, militants) to act 'as one man* for a common cause, the communist party finds the conditions of its functioning in the permanent struggle that takes place in the political field and that can be re-activated or intensified at will. Indeed, since discipline, which, as Weber observes, ensures "that the obedience of a plurality of men is rationally uniform',⁵⁰ finds its justification, if not its basis, in struggle, one need only mention the real or potential struggle, or even re-kindle it more or less artificially, in order to restore the legitimacy of discipline.⁵¹ It follows that, more or less as Weber says, the situation of struggle reinforces the position occupied by the dominant members within the apparatus of struggle and relegates militants from the role of popular orators responsible for expressing the will of the base (a role that they can sometimes claim by virtue of the official definition of their function) to the function of mere 'executives’ responsible for executing the orders and commands coming from the central leadership and forced by competent comrades’ to devote their energies to a ‘democracy of ratification’.⁵² And there is no better expression of the logic of this organization designed for combat than the ‘who is against?’ procedure as described by Bukharin; and as they are all more or less afraid of being against, the individual designated is appointed secretary, the resolution proposed is adopted, and always unanimously.⁵³ The process

called ‘militarization’ consists in assuming authority on the basis of the ‘war’ situation which confronts the organization - a situation which can be produced by working on the way the situation is represented, so as to produce and reproduce, continuously, the fear of being against, the ultimate basis of all militant or military disciplines. If anti-communism did not exist, ‘war communism’ would not fail to invent it. Since all opposition from within is bound to appear as collusion with the enemy, it reinforces the militarization it combats by reinforcing the unanimity of the besieged ‘us’ which predisposes people to military obedience. The historical dynamic of the field of struggles between the orthodox and heretics, those for and those against, gives way to the mechanism of the apparatus which annuls all practical possibility of being against, by a semi-rational exploitation of the psychosomatic effects of the euphoria caused by the unanimity of adherence and aversion, or, on the contrary, of the anguish caused by exclusion and excommunication, turning the ‘party spirit’ into a real esprit de corps.

In this way, the very ambiguity of the political struggle, this combat for ‘ideas' and ‘ideals' which is inseparably a combat for powers and, whether one likes it or not, for privileges, is the source of the contradiction which haunts all political organizations designed to subvert the established order: all the necessities which weigh down on the social world work together to ensure that the function of mobilization, which calls for the mechanical logic of the apparatus, tends to supplant the function of expression and representation claimed by all the professional ideologies of those who occupy the apparatus (the ideology of the ‘organic intellectual’ as much as that of the party which ‘acts as midwife' to the class) and which cannot be really ensured other than by the dialectical logic of the field. ‘Revolution from above’, a plan hatched by the apparatus, and one which presupposes and produces the apparatus, has the effect of interrupting this dialectic, which is history itself: initially in the political field, that field of struggles about a field of struggles and about the legitimate representation of those struggles, and then within the political enterprise, party, trade union or association, which can function as a single individual only by sacrificing the interests of a part, if not all, of those whom it represents.