There’s a bitter joke that circulates among historians of failed utopias: the revolution always wins, and the revolution always loses. The bastards are overthrown. The people take power. And within a decade, a fresh crop of administrators is stamping forms, scheduling meetings, and explaining to you why your petition for bread requires three levels of approval. This isn’t cynicism. It’s sociology.
In 1911, a German-Italian political scientist named Robert Michels published a devastating analysis of what he called the “Iron Law of Oligarchy.” He had spent years watching Europe’s socialist parties—organizations explicitly dedicated to equality and mass participation—slowly transform into bureaucratic machines run by small cliques of professional politicians. The parties didn’t fail because of bad people. They succeeded because of good organizing. And good organizing, Michels argued, inevitably produces new bosses.
The logic is almost mathematical. Any group large enough to accomplish something meaningful is also too large for everyone to participate in every decision. Somebody has to schedule the meeting. Somebody has to draft the agenda. Somebody has to remember what was decided last time. Before long, you have a class of people whose job is the organization itself—not the cause that brought everyone together in the first place. These coordinators accumulate knowledge, relationships, and institutional memory. They become indispensable. They become, in effect, the ruling class of your little liberation project.
The French Template
Napoleon understood this before Michels was born. After the French Revolution had exhausted itself in factionalism and terror, Bonaparte didn’t restore the aristocracy. He built something more durable: a professional civil service. Within months of seizing power in 1799, he created the prefectural system—prefects, sub-prefects, mayors arranged in strict pyramidal hierarchy. No elections for administrators. Merit-based selection. Clear chains of command. The revolutionary doctrine of equality became the foundation for the most efficient administrative machine Europe had ever seen.
What’s striking isn’t that Napoleon betrayed the Revolution. It’s that he fulfilled it. The Jacobins had wanted unity and indivisibility of the Republic. Napoleon gave them unity so thorough that the same bureaucratic structures survived until 1982. The kings never managed that. It took a revolutionary to build a state capable of taxing, conscripting, and regulating at industrial scale.
The Russian Revolution repeated the pattern. The Bolsheviks arrived with manifestos about soviets and workers’ control. Within a few years, they had produced one of history’s most elaborate bureaucratic states. The Chinese Communist Party promised to serve the people and delivered a civil service examination system that would have impressed the Ming Dynasty. Every successful revolution generates paperwork. The ones that don’t generate enough paperwork tend to collapse.
This isn’t because revolutionaries are hypocrites—though some are. It’s because running a society is genuinely complicated. Someone has to allocate resources. Someone has to resolve disputes. Someone has to make the trains run on time, or at least explain why they’re not running at all. The romantic phase of collective assemblies and direct democracy crashes against the sheer logistics of governing millions of people who need food, shelter, and healthcare on a predictable schedule.
Michels was pessimistic but not entirely hopeless. He suggested that the only partial remedy was the “circulation of elites”—regular replacement of one group of managers with another. Not because the new managers would be fundamentally different, but because the act of replacement itself would prevent the worst ossification. New blood, new perspectives, new parasites eating the old parasites. It’s not liberation, exactly. More like controlled rot.
The uncomfortable truth is that organization is power. The moment you build something capable of coordinated action, you’ve created a machine that rewards the people who understand how to operate it. Those people will always have interests that diverge from the masses they nominally serve—not because they’re evil, but because their position in the system gives them different information, different incentives, different problems. They stop asking “what does the movement need?” and start asking “what does the organization need?”
So yes: every revolution installs new middle managers. The question isn’t how to avoid this. The question is whether the new managers are better than the old ones, whether the new bureaucracy serves broader interests than the old aristocracy, whether the paperwork at least points in the right direction. That’s a lower bar than utopia. But it might be the only one we can clear.