on the party

1. In James C. Scott’s Seeing Like the State, there is an appreciation of Lenin as a modernist figure, in particular like Le Corbusier. Scott takes Lenin’s text, What is to be Done, as his starting point for discussing the organization of the Communist party as a classic modernist project: the use of military metaphors, a planning structure based on an elite command center, the distrust of spontaneity, the whole nine yards. But more than that, Scott compares Lenin’s notion, in 1903, that a party such as he envisions it, and only a party such as he envisions it, can really bring about a revolution, with what happened in 1917, when the spontaneity that Lenin believed to be doomed by its lack of goals and viable mechanisms actually did the task that the Bolsheviks couldn’t do in fifteen years – overthrew the Czar. Revolution, it turned out, was very different from Lenin had envisioned it.

I think Scott is a little to narrow in his tying Lenin’s theory of the party simply to the Communist party. What Lenin saw was how the party would function in a nation-state. Any party. Republican, Democrat, Socialist, Fascist, Menshevik, Bolshevik – and this is a curiously underemphasized thing.

To get to this, turn to an associate of Weber’s, Robert Michels, who wrote the text book on the nature of the party in 1910, eight years after Lenin’s book, formulating the ‘iron law of oligarchy.’

Michels is an interesting figure. He was a political activist in the Social Democratic party – near the anarchic edge – as well as a sociologist. Later, after WWI, he moved towards fascism, teaching in Italy. But we are concerned with just a few of his notions.

Robert Michels contrasted two ways of comparing democracies and monarchies/aristocracies. One was to compare the frequency of elections as the index of popular participation – and by this criteria, democracies were clearly more ‘democratic’. But the other way – comparing length of tenure of the officials – gave a more paradoxical result. In Germany, an official – in the legislature, in the party, as a minister – had much greater chance of having a longer tenure, or at least a more frequent one, then they did during the aristocratic/monarchical time.

Michels came up with certain psychological reasons for this unexpected datum. For instance, the democratic representative often is the recipient of gratitude for what he has done. An appointed official or an aristocrat, on the other hand, does what he does evidently for – his king or his family, thus arresting the impulse of gratitude. I’d say gratitude is a word whose correlate is very material favors, a whole exchange system full of them. In general, the frequency of election actually puts a greater stress on those factors that are ignored in the notion that leadership would change significantly with each election. Instead, it leads again and again to the successful longevity of the representative. The reason is that the cost of entry goes up, the longer the representative endures in office, and the more the gratitude/favors logic works to ensure the closeness of supporters and the officeholder.

There are also, according to Michels, external reasons that help ensure length of tenure. For instance, “…the party that changes its leaders too often runs the risk of finding itself unable to contract useful alliances at an opportune moment. The two gravest defects of genuine democracy, its lack of stability (perpetuum mobile democraticum) and its difficulty of mobilization, are dependent on the recognized right of the sovereign masses to take part in the management of their own affairs.”

The idea of an alliance is very important. Because the party is so often considered as an instrument, as something that is designed completely to accomplish a purpose, it is hard to see it standing for itself. It must stand for an idea, represent a class, an ethnic group, etc.

2. Imagine, then, Lenin.

In 1900, when Lenin began his second tour of exile in Europe, he was in his thirties, and had been active in clandestine revolutionary activity in Russia for the last decade. He came out of that experience of organizing, writing and prison with two ideas. One was a newspaper – which became the Iskra – and one was a party.

Lenin’s second objective is the whole point of 1902’s What Is to be done? I am not interested so much in the infinite ins and outs of the history of Bolshevism, proper, but rather in trying to understand the idea of a highly intelligent man from a state in which there was little to no experience of parties, as they developed in the 18th and 19th centuries, re-inventing the whole concept. Lenin, then, is dreaming. Not that the dream is uninformed by the historical experience of parties in Europe – most notably, the Social Democrats in Germany. But he is dreaming of a party that will play a different role than any party has played before. In Lenin’s dream, the party will found the revolution – and, beyond the ultimate question of the state’s always to be put off dissolution , that means it will found the state.

Of course, as James Scott points out, Lenin is wrong in the case of Russia – the revolutions came about spontaneously, just as the people he denounced said they would. And in 1905 and 1917, Lenin quickly accommodated to that fact – but the party he founded acted as though they had created the revolution. The thing that is important is that this conception of the function of the party is something new, something that theorizes the way parties will be throughout the twentieth century.

This role is new. No revolution in the past came about through the organization of a party. Parties formed as secondary political characteristics of the state. The change, perhaps, comes first in the U.S. –one could argue that the Republican party, under Lincoln, is the first party to expand its role to something more than a loose confederation of likeminded people seeking the power of office, becoming a nation-builder.

But Lenin was the one who saw the party most clearly as a new dispositif, to use Foucault’s term: there was a new dialectic of agent and percipient set up by Lenin’s notion of the party. It is as if the ventriloquest’s dummy took on life, became a Frankenstein’s monster.

The Lockean-Rousseau-ian state had been founded on a semi-magic relationship between the people and the state. The people were the Agent, sending their thoughts to the great state, the Percipient. The thoughts are, of course, not natural phenomena, but the phenomena of a will – and just as the agent is controlling, in some small way, the percipient, so, too, the Agent people is controlling the state Percipient, which represents the people’s will.

Into this duality, Lenin introduces the party, which is again shaped around an agent/percipient relationship. But by this time the constants had been loosened – the agent’s will might well actually reflect the work of the percipient, who is not simply the naïve, the mind-controlled subject, but a subject who has woken up and reversed the flow of suggestion. The party becomes both instrument and theorizer, dropping its own suggestions into the mind of the agent, or rather making the agent, the people, choose not the desires of its heart, but the desire for one or the other party.

3. Each election, under this interpretation, is a magic show gone wildly wrong.

This is not to say that refusing to vote is not wildly wrong too. The parties may be part of a circus, but it is the only one in town - in fact, it is the town. You can't get away from it, in this scenario, by an act of quietism.