Weak parties yield a bureaucracy that becomes a political party in its own right

Evidence

Hence, scarcity of State and government personnel; squalor of parliamentary life; ease with which the parties can be disintegrated, by corruption and absorption of the few individuals who are indispensable. Hence, squalor of cultural life and wretched inadequacy of high culture. Instead of political history, bloodless erudition; instead of religion, superstitition; instead of books and great reviews, daily papers and broadsheets; instead of serious politics, ephemeral quarrels and personal clashes. The universities, and all the institutions which develop intellectual and technical abilities, since they were not permeated by the life of the parties, by the living realities of national life, produced apolitical national cadres, with a purely rhetorical and non-national mental formation. Thus the bureaucracy became estranged from the country, and via its administrative positions became a true political party, the worst of all, because the bureaucratic hierarchy replaced the intellectual and political hierarchy. The bureaucracy became precisely the State/Bonapartist party. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 873

Categorization

• XREF: Resonates with Weber on bureaucracy as a ruling stratum and with the Frankfurt materials on the ‘authoritarian state’. — connects to: A party that decentralizes power to stalwart regional organizations handicaps its post-transformation reform effort — Anna M. Grzymala-Busse, Redeeming The Communist Past: The…, 461