This process of concentration of power in the hands of delegates is a sort of historical realization of what is described by the theoretical model of the process of delegation. People are there and speak. Then comes the party official, and people come less often. And then there is an organization, which starts to develop a specific competence. a language all of its own. (Mention might be made here of the way the bureaucracy of research develops: there are researchers, and there arc scientific administrators who are supposed to serve the researchers. Researchers do not understand the administrators’ language, which may be bureaucratic - 'research budget', ‘priority’, etc. - and, nowadays, technocratic-democratic - ‘social need’. They immediately stop coming and their absenteeism is denounced. But certain researchers, those who have time, do stay. The rest of the story is easy to predict.) The party official
followers, without militants ... They have their permanent status to protect them from discontinuity; they have their specific competence, their own language, a culture which belongs to them, apparatchik culture, based on its own history, that of their own petty affairs (Gramsci says this somewhere: we have debates of Byzantine complexity, conflicts between tendencies, trends which nobody understands the slightest thing about). Then, a specific social technology emerges: people become professionals of the manipulation of the only situation which could create problems for them, namely, confrontation with their mandators. They know how to manipulate general assemblies, transform votes into acclamations, etc. And in addition, they have social logic on their side because, although I do not have time to demonstrate this here, they need do absolutely nothing and yet things will lend to go the way that suits their interests, and their power often resides in the - entropic - choice not to do. not to choose.
It is thus easy to understand that the central phenomenon is that sort of reversal of the table of values which ultimately enables opportunism to be converted into militant dedication. There are jobs, privileges, and people who take them; far from feeling guilty about having served their interests, they will claim that they are not taking these jobs for their own benefit, but for that of the Party or the Cause, just as they will invoke, so as to hang on to those jobs, the rule that says you do not give up a position you have won. And they will even go as far as to describe as abstentionism or culpable dissidence any ethical reservations that might be expressed concerning the concentration of power.
There is a sort of self-consecration of the apparatus, a theodicy of the apparatus. The apparatus is always right (and the self-critique of individuals provides it with a final defence against any questioning of the apparatus as such). The reversal of the table of values, together with the Jacobin exaltation of the political and of the political priesthood, has meant that the political alienation to which I was referring at the beginning has ceased to be noticed; it has also meant that, on the contrary, it is the priestly vision of politics which has imposed itself, to the point of viewing as guilty all those who do not play the political games. In other words, the view which decreed that the fact of not being a militant, of not being involved in politics, was a kind of sin for which one had eternally to make amends has been so strongly internalized that the final political revolution, the revolution against the political clericaturc and against the usurpation which is always potentially present in delegation, is yet to be carried out.