University of Virginia Library

1. CHAPTER I
PSYCHOLOGICAL METAMORPHOSIS OF THE LEADERS

THE apathy of the masses and their need for guidance has as its counterpart in the leaders a natural greed for power. Thus the development of the democratic oligarchy is accelerated by the general characteristics of human nature. What was initiated by the need for organization, administration, and strategy is completed by psychological determinism.

The average leader of the working-class parties is morally not lower, but on the whole higher, in quality than the average leaders of the other parties. This has sometimes been unreservedly admitted by the declared adversaries of socialism. Yet it cannot be denied that the permanent exercise of leader-ship exerts upon the moral character of the leaders an influence which is essentially pernicious. Yet this also, from a certain point of view, is perhaps good. The bitter words which Labruyère applied to the great men of the court of Louis XIV, that the imitative mania and veneration exhibited towards them by the masses would have grown into an absolute idolatry, if it had occurred to any of them to be simply good men as well as great ones—these words, mutatis mutandis, could be applied with equal truth to the leaders of the vast democratic movements of our own days. [146]

In the majority of instances, and above all at the opening of his career, the leader is sincerely convinced of the excellence of the principles he advocates. Le Bon writes with good reason: “Le memeur a d'abord été le plus souvent un mené. Il a lui-même été hypnotisé par l'idée dont il est ensuite devenu l'apôtre.” [147] In many cases the leader, at first no more than a single molecule of the mass, has become detached from this involuntarily, without asking whither his instinctive action was leading him, without any personal motive whatever. He has been pushed forward by a clearer vision, by a profounder sentiment, and by a more ardent desire for the general good; he has been inspired by the elasticity and seriousness of his character and by his warm sympathy for his fellows. It is obvious that this will be true above all where the leader does not find already established a solid organization capable of offering remunerative employment, but where his first step must be to found his own party. But this must not be taken to mean that wherever a well-organized party already exists the leader seeks at the outset to gratify his personal interests.

It is by no means always by deliberate desire that people become officers of the masses. Using familiar French terms we may express this more clearly by saying that not every arrivé was at first an arriviste. But he who has once attained to power will not readily be induced to return to the comparatively obscure position which he formerly occupied. The abandonment of a public position obtained at the cost of great efforts and after many years of struggle is a luxury which only a “grand seigneur” or a man exceptionally endowed with the spirit of self-sacrifice can afford. Such self-denial is too hard for the average man.

The consciousness of power always produces vanity, an undue belief in personal greatness. The desire to dominate, for good or for evil, is universal. [148] These are elementary psychological facts. In the leader, the consciousness of his personal worth, and of the need which the mass feels for guidance, combine to induce in his mind, a recognition of his own superiority (real or supposed), and awake, in addition, that spirit of command which exists in the germ in every man born of woman. We see from this that every human power seeks to enlarge its prerogatives. He who has acquired power will almost always endeavour to consolidate it and to extend it, to multiply the ramparts which defend his position, and to withdraw himself from the control of the masses. Bakunin, the founder of anarchizing socialism, contended that the possession of power transformed into a tyrant even the most devoted friend of liberty. [149] It is certain that the exercise of power produces a profound and ineffaceable change in the character. This is admirably described by Alphonse Daudet when he writes: “Bien vite, s'il s'agit de l'affreuse politique, nos qualités tournent au pire: l'enthousiasme devient hypocrisie; l'éloquence, faconde et boniment; le scepticisme léger, escroquerie; l'amour de ce qui brille, fureur du lucre et du luxe à tout prix; la sociabilité, le besoin de plaire, se font lâcheté, faiblesse, et palinodie.” [150] To retain their influence over the masses the leaders study men, note their weaknesses and their passions, and endeavour to turn these to their own advantage.

When the leaders are not persons of means and when they have no other source of income, they hold firmly to their positions for economic reasons, coming to regard the functions they exercise as theirs by inalienable right. Especially is this true of manual workers who, since becoming leaders, have lost their aptitude for their former occupation. For them, the loss of their positions would be a financial disaster, and in most cases it would be altogether impossible for them to return to their old way of life. They have been spoiled for any other work than that of propaganda. Their hands have lost the callosities of the manual toiler, and are likely to suffer only from writer's cramp.

Those leaders, again, who are refugees from the bourgeoisie are used up after having devoted a few years to the service of the Socialist Party. It was as youthful enthusiasts that they joined the organized workers and soon attained to dominant positions. The life they then had to lead, however great may have been its advantages in certain respects, was one full of fatigue and hardship, and, like all careers in which fame can be acquired, was extremely exhausting to the nervous system. Such men grow old before their time. What are they to do? They have become estranged from their original profession, which is altogether out of relation with their chosen vocation of professional politician. A barrister, indeed, can continue to practice his profession, and may even devote almost all his time to it, without being forced to abandon the party. The political struggle and the life of the lawyer have more than one point of contact, for is not the political struggle a continuous act of advocacy? The barrister who plays a leading part in public life will find many opportunities for the gratification of his love of oratory and argument, and will have no lack of chances for the display of the power of his lungs and the expressiveness of his gestures. It is very different with men of science. These, if they plan an active part in the life of the party, be it as journalists, as propagandists, or as parliamentary deputies, find that their scientific faculties undergo a slow but progressive atrophy. Having become absorbed in the daily political round, they are dead for their discipline, for they no longer have time for the serious study of scientific problems and for the continuous development of their intellectual faculties.

There are, however, additional reasons for the mental transformation which the leaders undergo as the years pass.

As far as concerns the leaders of bourgeois origin in the working-class parties, it may be said that they have adhered to the cause of the proletariat either on moral grounds, or from enthusiasm, or from scientific conviction. They crossed the Rubicon when they were still young students, still full of optimism and juvenile ardor. Having gone over to the other side of the barricade to lead the enemies of the class from which they sprang, they have fought and worked, now suffering defeats and now gaining victories. Youth has fled; their best years have been passed in the service of the party or of the ideal. They are ageing, and with the passing of youth, their ideals have also passed, dispersed by the contrarieties of daily struggles, often, too, expelled by newly acquired experiences which conflict with the old beliefs. Thus it has come to pass that many of the leaders are inwardly estranged from the essential content of socialism. Some of them carry on a difficult internal struggle against their own scepticism; others have returned, consciously or unconsciously, to the ideals of their presocialist youth.

Yet for those who have been thus disillusioned, no backward path is open. They are enchained by their own past. They have a family, and this family must be fed. Moreover, regard for their political good name makes them feel it essential to persevere in the old round. They thus remain outwardly faithful to the cause to which they have sacrificed the best years of their life. But, renouncing idealism, they have become opportunists. These former believers, these sometime altruists, whose fervent hearts aspired only to give themselves freely, have been transformed into sceptics and egoists whose actions are guided solely by cold calculation.

As we have previously seen, these new elements do not join the party with the declared or even the subconscious aim of attaining one day to leadership; their only motives have been the spirit of sacrifice and the love of battle. Visionaries, they see a brother in every comrade and a step towards the ideal in every party meeting. Since, however, in virtue of their superiority (in part congenital and in part acquired), they have become leaders, they are in the course of years enslaved by all the appetites which arise from the possession of power, and in the end are not to be distinguished from those among their colleagues who became socialists from ambition, from those who have from the first deliberately regarded the masses as no more than an instrument which they might utilize towards the attainment of their own personal ambitions.

It cannot be denied that the factor of individuality plays its part in all this, for different individualities react differently to the same environment. Just as women and girls in similar erotic situations act differently in accordance with their varying degrees of congenital sexual irritability and with the differences that have been induced in them by moral education, remaining immaculate, becoming demi-vierges, or yielding to advances, so also the specific qualities of the leaders, in so far as these are acquired and not immanent, manifest themselves differently in different individuals in face of the numerous temptations to which they are exposed in party life. The sense of satiety which arises in those who have attained their end varies greatly in intensity from person, to person. There are similar variations in adaptability to a new and anti-democratic environment, or to an environment hostile to the ideas which the individual has at heart. Some socialists, for instance, are so greatly intimidated by the parliamentary milieu that they are ashamed in that milieu to make use of the expressions “class struggle” and “collectivism,” although it is to the unwearying insistence upon these ideas that they owe their present position. Others among their comrades find amid all the circumstances of their new life that right feeling and that old courage of conviction which cannot be prescribed by any formal rules. It is absurd to maintain, as does Giuseppe Prezzolini, that in the parliamentary atmosphere it is as impossible for a deputy to preserve his socialist purity as it would be for a Joseph to remain chaste while frequently visiting brothels. [151] Such a view is false, if only for the reason that here, as in all social phenomena, we have to consider the personal as well as the environmental factor. It is nevertheless true that in the course of party evolution, as the led becomes a subordinate leader, and from that a leader of the first rank, he himself undergoes a mental evolution, which often effects a complete transformation in his personality. When this happens, the leader often sees in his own transformation nothing more than a reflex of a transformation in the surrounding world. The times have changed, he tells us, and consequently a new tactic and a new theory are necessary. A greater maturity of judgment corresponds to the greater maturity of the: new age. The reformist and revisionist theory in the International Socialist Party is largely the outcome of the psychological need to furnish an explanation and an excuse for the metamorphosis which has taken place in the leaders. A few years ago, one of the leaders of the Italian clericals, after declaring that triumphant reformism, having an evolutionary and legalist character, was in these respects preferable to strict syndicalism, went on to say that in his view the basis of reformist socialism was still the materialist conception of man, of life, and of history, but further corrupted by contact with the utilitarian and Epicurean spirit of the free-thinking bourgeoisie, and that it was consequently even more profoundly anti-Christian than the ideas of the ultra-revolutionists. [152] There is a kernel of truth in this idea. However much we are forced to recognize that reformism sometimes manifests itself as a sane rebellion against the apriorism of orthodox Marxist dogma, and as a scientific reaction against the phraseology of pseudorevolutionary stump-orators, it is nevertheless incontestable that reformism has a logical and causal connection with the insipid and blasé sociolism and with the decadent tendencies which are so plainly manifest in a large section of the modern bourgeois literary world. In many instances, in fact, reformism is no more than the theoretical expression, of the scepticism of the disillusioned, of the outwearied, of those who have lost their faith; it is the socialism of nonsocialists with a socialist past.

It is above all the sudden passage from opposition to participation in power which exercises a powerful influence on the mentality of the leaders. It is evident that in a period of proscriptions and persecutions of the new doctrine and its advocates on the part of society and of the state, the morality of the party leaders will maintain itself at a much higher level than in a period of triumph and of peace, if only for the reason that in the former conditions those of egoistic temperament and those inspired by narrow personal ambition will hold aloof from the party since they have no desire for the martyr's crown. These considerations apply, not merely to the old leaders who have been members of the party during its days of tribulation, and whose qualities, if not completely corrupted by the sun of governmental favor (so as to lead them to abandon the cause of the proletariat), are yet so greatly changed as to render them almost unrecognizable by the masses; but it is equally true of the new leaders who do not put in an appearance until the sun has begun to shine upon the party. As long as the struggle on behalf of the oppressed brings to those engaged in it nothing more than a crown of thorns, those members of the bourgeoisie who adhere to socialism must fulfil functions in the party exacting great personal disinterestedness. Bourgeois adherents do not become a danger to socialism until the labour movement, abandoning its principles, enters the slippery paths of a policy of compromise. At the international congress of Amsterdam, Bebel exclaimed with perfect truth, in answer to Jaures: “When a socialist party forms an alliance with a section of the bourgeoisie, and institutes a policy of cooperation with the government, not only does it repel its own best militants, driving them into the ranks of the anarchists, or into isolated action, but it also attracts to itself a swarm of bourgeois of very dubious value.” [153] In Italy, during the period of persecutions, all scientific investigators bore striking witness to the high moral qualities of the socialist leaders. No sooner, however, had the Socialist Party (towards 1900) begun to display friendship for the government than voices were heard on all hands deploring a deterioration in the composition of the party, and denouncing the numerous elements entering the party simply because they regarded it as the best means by which they could secure a share in the loaves and fishes of public administration. [154] Wherever the socialists have gained control of the municipalities, wherever they run peoples' banks and distributive cooperative societies, wherever they have remunerative posts at their disposal, we cannot fail to observe a notable decline in their moral level, and to see that the ignorant and the self-seeking now constitute the majority among them.