personification of certain social powers. —The preponderant elements of the movement, the men who lead and nourish it, end by undergoing a gradual detachment from the masses, and are attracted within the orbit of the 'political class.' —On the one hand there are ordinary employees, members of the Party, who are not invested with any power, who govern nothing and nobody, who cannot give orders or make decisions which have the force of law. On the other hand, there are functionaries who are invested with authority and who rule enterprises, institutions, whole branches of the economy, politics, culture, daily life and the State itself in its internal and external relations—not to speak of the Party which directs and organizes all these. They can give orders and make decisions which have the force of law. They form the ruling stratum of this socialist society, which leads every domain of life and monopolizes the totality of power. A portrait of the Leader adorns every government office and industrial enterprise. —Marx and Lenin both contended that working-class consciousness was measured by the degree of hegemony of revolutionary socialist parties over the majority of workers.
Without a revolutionary vanguard, capitalism may gain a new lease on life by default. —This implies real confidence in people. —The revolutionary vanguard is able to analyze objective conditions correctly, engages in revolutionary as well as parliamentary politics and is able to lead workers to the left. —These phenomena would seem to prove beyond dispute that society cannot exist without a 'dominant' or 'political' class, and that the ruling class, whilst its elements are subject to a frequent partial renewal, nevertheless constitutes the only factor of sufficiently durable efficacy in the history of human development. According to this view, the government, or, if the phrase be preferred, the state, cannot be anything other than the organization of a minority. It is the aim of this minority to impose upon the rest of society a 'legal order.' The state is the personification of the power of community, the estranged power of individuals to decide collectively the methods, means and purpose of their social activity. It is the specific office of the state to use all available means to ensure that the power of community remains estranged. —As with streams and their sources, it is axiomatic that the political level of a movement cannot rise above that of its leadership, in this case, the radical vanguard. It devolves upon them to educate and organize, to instill class consciousness in the others and to bring them to life, so to speak, in the political-historical sense, as a self-conscious part of the class struggle. —The majority is thus permanently incapable of self-government. Even when the discontent of the
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