March 30, 2006: The "Crisis of Leadership"
To explain-away the TI legacy of disaster, the Trot movement relies on an incantation called "The Crisis of Leadership".
It's a simple one. The program is good, the strategy is good. We lost because the leadership was inadequate.
The handy thing about this one is that it's so all-purpose. Name your struggle, here's your alibi. Perhaps the only left wing incantation with greater reach is that masterpiece "The Objective Conditions."
The question begged by "The Crisis of Leadership" -- the obviousness made invisible -- is, What were the conditions which produced an inadequate leadership? Or, inverted, what was it about certain other circumstances which produced adequate leaderships?
I believe that a large part of the answer is that the strategy was in fact not good. Leaderships produced by a fundamentally flawed project were fundamentally flawed. A healthier project would have produced better leaders.
I also believe that it's important to stress how conflicted the Bolshevik leadership layer was. Read Lenin's writings from 1917. Over and over and over, the struggle to free the party from the inadequate strategy put forward unanimously by the entire leadership, save Lenin. Lenin was a minority of one for much of the revolutionary period. He eventually won the battle over strategy by appealing over the heads of the leaders directly to the party rank-and-file -- in a period when that rank-and-file consisted overwhelmingly of new recruits thrown into struggle by the revolutionary upsurge.
In my opinion the crisis of leadership is a product and symptom of a flawed project. Not just a symptom: a signpost, a blinking neon arrow saying, "Look this way -->". The catch-22 is that a better and braver leadership is required to break from the bad old project.
