Taking Gramsci’s approach to collective organisms seriously entails first of all distancing oneself from the idea that they are simply ‘parts of society’ as opposed, on the one hand, to single individuals, and, on the other, to the State as ‘monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force’.22 On the contrary, collective organisms are both a projection of the ‘social’
characteristics of individuality and a projection of the very organization of the State. This dual nature gives rise to a fundamental question, namely, that of the connections, the procedures and the relationships that emerge between individuals and the collective organisms, and also within the same organisms. Gramsci deals with this question through his analysis of ‘organic centralism’ and ‘living philology’, which shall be examined in Chapter 3, section ‘Organic centralism and living philology’. However, a preliminary observation should be made with regard to the question of bureaucratization as a defining feature of the process of formation of increasingly large and complex apparatuses.
With the advent of mass politics, in fact, bureaucratic organization became a characteristic of all collective organisms, raising a series of problems not only in technical-administrative terms, but also from the strictly political point of view when it overlaps with questions of repre-sentation, decision making and freedom. As was seen with the formation of collective organisms, reconstructed from the advent of the modern State, once again Gramsci deals with the problem by tracing its origins:
As political and economic forms develop historically, a new type of official is increasingly being produced – what could be described as
‘career’ officials, technically trained for bureaucratic work (civil and military). This is a fact of prime significance for political science, and for any history of the forms taken by the State. Has this process been a necessary one, or, as the ‘pure’ liberals claim, a degeneration in respect of the ideal of self-government? Certainly every type of society and State has had its own problem of officials, which it has formulated and resolved in its own way; every society has had its own system of selection, and its own type of official to be trained. The reconstruction of how all these elements have evolved is of capital importance.23 The argument regarding the new type of Man is taken further here as far as regards the relationship with collective organisms, to become a discourse on the ‘new type of official’ who imposes himself socially, and who must guarantee, within bureaucratic organizations, the reproduction of relations among individuals.
It was Max Weber, some of whose writings Gramsci knew of,24 who pointed out that the unique characteristic of the modern State was the emergence of the professional official as the result of the quantitative and qualitative evolution of bureaucracy. This type of official represented a new form of domination (authority),25 or rather, a specific form of the legitimization of such. This was no longer of the traditional variety, that is, guaranteed by the historical continuity of royal lineage, but of the rational-legal variety, that is, based on the formal legality of procedures (Weber’s third type of legitimate domination, the charismatic variety, lacked in continuity, which is indispensable if the State’s organization is to be preserved). The legal-rational form of legitimacy consequently results in certain persons being vested with powers of command on the basis of the provisions of law, thus creating a specific type of official.
Organized as such, bureaucratic domination ‘inevitably accompanies modern mass democracy’, insofar as it ‘usually come[s] into power on the basis of a levelling of economic and social differences’.26
The interest in the concept of ‘official’ – a concept insofar as for Gramsci it ‘is a fact of prime significance for political science’27 – emerges from the question as to whether the formation of said officials is a necessity or simply a perversion of historical development. In this case, it may be asserted that the creation of a group of officials whose task it is to administer organized living is a necessity in Gramsci’s view,
as shown by his assertion that ‘every type of society and State has had its own problem of officials’.28 Gramsci reiterates this stance in another note when, no longer dealing with the question of the necessity of the bureaucracy – having already stated that ‘Bureaucracy […] has become a necessity’ – he examined the question of the relationship between bureaucracy and politics: ‘the issue that needs to be raised concerns the formation of an honest and impartial bureaucracy that does not abuse its role in order to make itself independent from the control of the represen-tative system’.29 This problem arises further in a note in Notebook 14, in regard to the criticism of parliamentarianism:
That the representative system may politically ‘be a nuisance’ for the career bureaucracy is understandable; but this is not the point. The point is to establish whether the representative and party system, instead of being a suitable mechanism for choosing elected officials to integrate and balance the appointed civil servants and prevent them from becoming ossified, has become a hindrance and a mechanism which operates in the reverse direction – and, if so, for what reasons.
Moreover, even an affirmative reply to these questions does not exhaust the problem. For even allowing (as it must be allowed) that parliamentarianism has become inefficient and even harmful, it is not necessary to conclude that the bureaucratic system must be rehabili-tated and praised.30
The question of the relationship between the representative form of politics and the bureaucracy thus transcends that of the crisis of the liberal system and of parliamentarianism, and as such is something that those wishing to construct a new order also have to deal with.
In this sense, Weber’s analyses are further, and rather unexpectedly, in keeping with those of Gramsci. Weber believed that the process of democ-ratization that levels out differences is both upstream and downstream from bureaucratic development, and constitutes both a precondition for, and a consequence of, such development, even if the two phenomena may find themselves opposed to one another once they become rooted in specific apparatuses of power:
the democratization of society […] is an especially favourable basis of bureaucratization […] [but] ‘democracy’ as such is opposed to the
‘rule’ of bureaucracy, in spite and perhaps because of its unavoidable yet unintended promotion of bureaucratization.31
Thus, the two powers may find themselves in a struggle against each other, while there is a substantial affinity between the two processes, consisting in the levelling effect of the shared submission to an authority.
For Weber, this ‘levelling of the governed in face of the governing and bureaucratically articulated group’ is the key feature of democratiza-tion, which ‘does not necessarily mean an increasingly active share of the subjects in government’.32 His analysis focuses on what he calls the
‘process of “passive” democratization’.33
Gramsci’s use of the term ‘passive revolution’ – originally coined by Vincenzo Cuoco34 – is widely known. He employed this expression throughout the Prison Notebooks to describe those historical changes that had occurred in the absence of any strong popular action, as a form of transition managed and guaranteed by those classes already holding power.35 The phenomenon that most interests both Gramsci and Weber would thus appear to be the passivity of the masses that makes history, as the result of that powerful process of ‘social disciplining’ involving all aspects of human existence; and perhaps it is a coincidence, albeit a revealing one, that both writers use the term ‘passivity’ to describe this process.
However, the difference between Weber’s passive democratization and Gramsci’s passive revolution is a reminder of the difference in the two writers’ field of discourse. In Weber’s case, the problem remains, in fact, that of democracy, a problem that unfolds within the context of an
‘unstoppable […] advance of bureaucratization’, in the attempt ‘to salvage any remnants of “individual” freedom of movement in any sense’.36 In Gramsci’s case, on the other hand, the question is one of revolution: that is, it is the problem of how to break with the association of bureaucracy with passivity, starting from an awareness of the processes leading to the development of the bureaucracy, but offering to a collective organism, rather than to individuals, the opportunity to be agents, and not just passive subjects, of the historical process.37
In Weber’s work, the impossibility of escaping from the confines of the bourgeois order in the attempt to conciliate liberalism with increasing bureaucratization – thus resolving this contradiction by remaining within the liberal tradition – becomes clear when the extreme edge of such tradition is recouped with the reactivation of charisma, as shown by
the proposal in favour of a presidential, plebiscitary republic for post-war Germany.38 In this regard, Gramsci, on the other hand, shows that he has fully embraced the shift in focus concerning the subject of political action, which can no longer take the form of individuality – each single individual, vis-à-vis society, in fact can only suffer the coercive pressure of that society, as witnessed in Durkheim’s analysis – but only that of a collective organism. The revolutionary problem thus manifests itself as the type of relationship to be established between the leading element within this organism and the masses composing such, in the context of the gradual decline of this distinction during the course of the revolu-tionary process, ‘until the demise of political society and the advent of regulated society’.39
Despite focusing on the same transformations, Gramsci’s and Weber’s respective analyses produce different outcomes. In Weber, the political man capable of dealing with the transformations of the existing is described in tragic terms, and is basically the heroic man capable of conciliating the apparently incompatible charisma and bureaucracy.
In Gramsci, the party, as the only possible political actor, is willing to promote the construction of a non-fetishistic relationship between the individual and the collective organism, thus creating a new ‘mass intellectual’ capable of combining technical qualities and strictly political ones.