Итог полностью

Up to now I have been emphasizing the relation between mandators and delegates. I must now examine the relation between the body of delegates, the apparatus, which has its own interests and, as Weber says, its 'own tendencies’, such as the tendency to reproduction, and particular delegates. When the body of delegates, the priestly body, the Party, etc., asserts its own tendencies, the interests of the apparatus take precedence over the interests of individual delegates who, therefore, cease to be the delegates of their mandators, and become responsible to the apparatus: from then on, the properties and practices of the delegates cannot be understood without an understanding of the apparatus.

The fundamental law of bureaucratic apparatuses is that the apparatus gives everything (including power over the apparatus) to those who give it everything and expect everything from it because they themselves have nothing or are nothing outside it; to put it

more bluntly, the apparatus depends most on those who most depend on it because they are the ones it holds most tightly in its clutches. Zinoviev, who understood all this very cleverly, and for good reason, but who remained trapped in value judgements, said in The Yawning Heights: ‘The source of Stalin’s success resides in the fact that he is an extraordinarily mediocre person.’ Here he comes very close to staling the law that operates in such cases. Still talking about the apparatchik, he also talks about ‘an extraordinarily insignificant and thus invincible force’. These are very fine formulae, but they are somewhat false, since the polemical intention, which gives them their charm, prevents one from grasping the facts as they are (which is not the same as accepting them). Moral indignation cannot understand the fact that the ones who succeed in the apparatus are those whom charismatic intuition perceives as the most stupid, the most ordinary, those who have no value in themselves. In fact, they succeed not because they are the most ordinary but because they have nothing outside the apparatus, nothing which would authorize them to take liberties with regard to the apparatus, to try to be smart.

There is thus a sort of structural and non-accidental correspondence between the different kinds of apparatus and certain categories of people, defined above all negatively, as having none of the properties that it is advantageous to possess at the moment under consideration in the field concerned. In more neutral terms, one might say that the apparatus will consecrate people who are reliable. But why are they reliable? Because they have nothing they might use to oppose the apparatus. This is why in the French Communist Party of the 1950s, as in the China of the Cultural Revolution, the young frequently served as symbolic warders and watchdogs. Young people, after all, do not just represent enthusiasm, naivety, conviction, everything which one associates somewhat unthinkingly with youth; from the point of view of my model, they are also the people who have nothing. They are the new entrants, those who are arriving in the field without any capital. And from the point of view of the apparatus, they are cannon-fodder against their elders who, now starting to have capital, either through the Party or through themselves, use this capital to take issue with the Party. The person who has nothing is an unconditional supporter; he has all the less to oppose in that the apparatus gives him a great deal, befitting the unconditional nature of his support and his own nothingness. This is why in the 1950s this or that 25-year-old intellectual could have, ex officio, by delegation from the apparatus, the kind of audience which

only the most established intellectuals could enjoy, though in the latter case this was, so to speak, because of their status as authors.

This sort of iron law of the apparatus is coupled with another process which 1 will mention very briefly and which I will call the ‘organization effect’. I refer you to Marc Ferro’s analysis of the process of Bolshevization. In the district soviets, the factory committees and other spontaneous groups of the beginning of the Russian Revolution, everyone was present, people talked, etc. And then, as soon as a party worker was chosen, people started to come less. With the institutionalization incarnated in the party worker and the organization, everything is inverted: the organization tends to monopolize power, the number of participants in the assemblies diminishes. It is the organization which calls meetings and the participants serve, on the one hand, to demonstrate the representativeness of their representatives and. on the other, to ratify their decisions. Party workers start to reproach ordinary members for not coming often enough to meetings which reduce them to these functions.