Number and Quality in Representative Régimes

One of the more banal commonplaces which people go about repeating against the elective system of forming organs of State is this, that “number is the supreme law in this” and that “the opinions of any idiot who knows how to write (and even illiterates, in certain countries), are valid, in effectively determining the political course of the State, to exactly the same extent as those of the people who devote their best powers to the State and the nation, etc.” But the fact is that it is not in any way true that number is the “supreme law”, nor that the weight of the opinion of every elector is “exactly” the same. In this case also, numbers are simply an instrumental value, which offers a measure and a relationship and nothing more. What then is measured? What is measured is precisely the effectiveness and ability to expand and persuade of the opinions of a few people, of the active minorities, of the élites, of the advanced guards, etc., that is to say, their rationality, historicity or concrete functionalism. This means that it is not true that the weight of the opinions of single individuals is “exactly” the same. Ideas and opinions are not “born” spontaneously in the brains of each individual; they have had a centre of formation, of radiation, of propaganda, of persuasion, a group of men or even a single individual who has elaborated and presented them in their actual political form. The counting of “votes” is the concluding manifestation of a long process in which the greatest influence belongs precisely to those who “devote their best powers (such as they are) to the State and the nation”. If this presumed group of patriarchs, despite the overwhelming material forces which it possesses, does not have the consent of the majority, it will have to be judged either inept or not representative of the “national” interests which are bound to be predominant in inducing the national will in one way rather than in another. “Unfortunately” everyone is led to confuse his own “particular” interests with those of the nation and therefore to find it “horrible”, etc., that it is for the “law of numbers” to decide; surely it is better to become an élite by decree. The question therefore is not one of people who are intellectually "well off" and feel themselves reduced to the level of the last illiterate, but of those who presume that they are well off and want to take away from the "ordinary" man even that small fraction of power which he possesses in deciding the course of State life.

From a criticism (originating in an oligarchy and not an élite) of the parliamentary régime (it is strange that it has not been criticised because the historical rationality of numerical consent has been systematically falsified by the influence of wealth), these banal statements have been extended to every representative system, even those which are not parliamentary and not fashioned according to the canons of formal democracy. These statements are all the more incorrect. In these other regimes consent does not reach its final stage at the time of voting, on the contrary.¹ Consent is supposed to be permanently active, up to the point where the consentors could be considered as “functionaries” of the State and the elections as a means of voluntary enrolment of State functionaries of a certain type, which in a certain sense could be linked (on different planes) with self-government. As the elections take place not on general vague programmes but on programmes of immediate concrete work, those who consent pledge themselves to do something more than the ordinary legal citizen in order to realise them, that is, to be a vanguard of active and responsible labour. The “voluntary” element in initiative could not be stimulated in any other way for the largest multitudes, and when these are not made up of amorphous citizens but of qualified productive elements, one can understand the importance which the expression of the vote can have.²

The proposition that "society does not set itself problems for whose solution the material preconditions do not already exist". The problem of the formation of a collective will depends directly on this proposition. To analyse critically what the proposition means, it is important to research into how precisely permanent collective wills are formed, and how these wills set themselves direct and indirect concrete ends, that is, a line of collective action. We are dealing with more or less long processes of development, and rarely with unforeseen "synthetic" outbursts. Synthetic "outbursts" do occur, but looked at closely it is seen that they are more destructive than constructive, they remove external mechanical obstacles to an aboriginal and spontaneous development: the Sicilian Vespers can be taken as an example.

One could study concretely the formation of a collective historical movement, analysing it in all its molecular phases, which is usually not done because each treatment would become burdensome: instead, currents of opinion are assumed already constituted around a group or a dominating personality. It is the problem which in modern times is expressed in terms of a party or of a coalition of allied parties: how the constitution of the party begins, how its organised force and social influence develop, etc. We are dealing with a very detailed molecular process, one of extreme analysis, capillary, whose documentation consists of an overwhelming quantity of books, pamphlets, articles in reviews and journals, verbal conversations and debates which are repeated infinitely and which in their gigantic totality represent this long labour from which is born a collective will with a certain degree of homogeneity, that certain degree which is necessary and sufficient to determine an action co-ordinated and simultaneous in the time and geographical space in which the historical fact occurs.

The importance of utopias and of confused and rationalistic ideologies in the initial phase of the historical processes of formation of collective wills: utopias, abstract rationalism, have the same importance as the old conceptions of the world elaborated historically through the accumulation of successive experiences. What is important is the criticism to which this ideological complex comes to be subjected by the first representatives of the new historical phase: through this criticism we have a process of distinction and change in the relative influence which the elements of the old ideologies used to possess: what was secondary and subordinate or even incidental comes to be assumed as foremost, becomes the nucleus of a new ideological and doctrinal complex. The old collective will breaks up into its contradictory elements, because from these elements the subordinate ones develop socially, etc.

Since the formation of the party régime, an historical phase tied to the standardisation of large masses of the population (communications, newspapers, big cities, etc.), the molecular processes happen more rapidly than in the past, etc.

Notes

1. An allusion to the Soviet system of permanent control of the electors over the elected. —Trans.↩
2. These observations could be developed more fully and organically, pointing out the other differences between the different types of electionism, according as the general social and political relations change: relationship between elective and career functionaries, etc.↩