Reading 2: Robert Michaels “Organisation and Oligarch”

Cause of Leadership

Need of organization:
o Political necessary
o Mechanically and technically impossible for direct government by mass
o Need for delegation, which represent the mass and carry out its will

Originally the chief is merely the servant of the mass. The organisation is based upon the absolute equality of its entire member, the delegates needs have:
o Individual ability
o Oratorical gift
o Considerable objective knowledge

Heinrich Herkner foresees that …all the labour organizations will be forced to abandon proletarian exclusiveness, and in the choices of their officials to give the preference to persons of an education that is superior alike in economic, legal, technical and commercial aspects. These schools create “elite” of the working class into leadership.

Organization- tendency of oligarchy
Aristocratic exists in all organizations

The principle of division of labour coming more and more into operation, executive authority undergoes division and sub-division.
It is indisputable that oligarchic and bureaucratic tendency of party organization is a matter of technical and practical necessity. It is a product of the very principle of organization.

Leader, professional leaders- Autocratic tendency of leaders

Mass feel the need for leadership, majority forgo their right to public affairs.
With the appearance of professional leadership, the party mechanism, through paid, honorary post as its disposal, offers career to the workers, which is constant attractive force, transform a number of proletarian into bourgeois. This change of condition at once creates the need of acquisition at expense of mass.

While the need of daily life and their occupations render it impossible for the mass to attain to a profound knowledge of social mechanism, and above all the working of the political machine. The leader of working class origin is enabled to make himself intimately familiar with all the technical details of public life, and thus to increase his superiority over the rank and file.

Gulf between the leaders and the mass becomes so wide, until the moment arrives in which the leaders lose all true sense of solidarity with the class from which they have sprung, and there ensures a new-class division between ex-proletarian captions and proletarian common soldiers.

Therefore, when workers choose their leaders, they create new masters with their own hands, whose principal means of dominion is found in their better instructed minds.
Division of labour creates specialism, however, implies authority. The history of production cooperation shows that there is need to submit to the will of one of a few persons, thus lose the character of cooperative.

Does really democracy exist?