La représentation politique

Political Representation. Within a representative organization, the more dispossessed the groups it represents are of capital, especially cultural capital, the greater the tendency towards the concentration of political capital. The autonomy of the political field, which increases whith the development of permanent organisations of professionals, means that the positions adopted by the agents are primarily determined in relation to the universe of competing political positions. Consequently, the correspondence between the mandators and the mandated is based not so much on direct transaction as on the homology between the political scene and the field of the class struggle of which it is the representation. In the struggle which goes on in the political arena, the professionals have political weight in proportion to their power to mobilize, i.e. in proportion to the credit and belief which they receive, either directly from their mandators or from the apparatuses which invest them to the extent that they invest in the apparatuses. A whole set of factors tends to cause the organizations representing the dominated classes to function as apparatuses (or «total institutions»). The militarization of the active membership is merely the systematic exploitation of the tendencies inherent in the relationship between the dominated classes and the parties and in the logic of the political field.