The Oligarchic Tendencies of Democracies: An Analysis by Robert Michels

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[...] The effects of power on the psychology of the leadership. Thus, the advent of the 'professional leadership' marks the beginning of the end of democracy. Michels emphasizes the psychological transformation that accompanies a change in status. In fact, the author highlights the fact that as the interests of specialists clashed with those of the 'mass', important decisions of the socialist party were made during secret meetings of party committees. However, the main contradiction comes from the fact that the revolutionary socialists at some point accepted legitimizing the central bourgeois institution and respecting the rules established by this class that they had previously fought against. [...]

[...] According to Marxian theory, members of a social class are equal among themselves and endowed with identical needs. If they actively associate, the initial relationship among them must be democratic. Ideally, the practice of choosing representatives should not produce any kind of hierarchy within a democratic organization, particularly in the socialist party. Indeed, pure democracy entirely subordinates delegates to the will of the masses. However, according to the author, as the organization grows, the struggle for the great principles of democracy becomes impossible." The structural necessity of possessing certain skills forces political parties to stratify in a hierarchical manner. [...]

[...] The mass is not composed solely of a homogeneous social class. On the one hand, there are organized proletarians who succeed in enriching themselves, and these latter 'do not feel in the least bound to be solidary with the non-organized, even in cases of common misery, unemployment.' On the contrary, they erect barriers to 'isolate themselves as much as possible from the rest of the working-class mass and obtain privileges from which they alone will benefit'. At the level of their social origin, socialist leaders are not only from the proletariat, but also from the bourgeois class and more precisely from the intellectual stratum. [...]

[...] « The apathy of the masses and their need for direction have as a counterpart in the leaders a natural thirst for power. The consciousness of power always communicates to the one who possesses it the vanity of believing oneself to be a great man.' This mass tends to entrust the care of their interests to people who have had a regular bureaucratic career, rather than to someone from their own sphere, considered less experienced. Moreover, according to the author, it is the growing number of party members demanding a bureaucratic spirit that, by definition, corrupts the character of the leaders. [...]

[...] When workers choose their leaders, they create new masters whose primary means of domination lies in their higher level of education. As a result, a division emerges between the ex-proletarian captains and the ordinary proletarian soldiers. The gap between the leaders and the rest of the party widens, until the leaders lose all solidarity with the class from which they originated." Thus, according to the author, leaders are not simple employees of the party, as socialists tend to suggest. When democracies have reached a certain stage of development, they gradually transform, adopting an aristocratic spirit. [...]