Mark Phillips: The American Question

There's a sense in which the origin of the SWP marked the elevation of the party's speakers bureau to its own organization.

I spent many years inside or around the American Trot movement. In hindsight I find it striking that the memberships elected leaders with similar qualities. They were incompetent, but they spoke well.

Once upon a time these people would have been thought of as agitators. They had a specific role to play within the organizational division of labor. Other people with vastly different qualities became the leaders. People who could lead.

I spoke to a colleague not long ago about one of these people. The answer was, "She was a good leader." I was astounded. Was it because she was a capable organizer? Had a strategy that made sense? Knew how to build consensus? Was good at recruiting? Knew how to raise money? Had a plan? Had a clue? No. "She was a good speaker."

We often talk about "the crisis of leadership". At what point is that crisis actually a crisis of membership? In which an incompetent rank and file select unfit leaders for inept reasons?

Ultimately, I think it's strongly likely that leaders and ranks were all hampered by allegiance to a false project, based on an organizational form which was inappropriate to our circumstances, governed by a distorted understanding of a mythologized experience which was never relatable to American conditions, at least in the way in which the TI tried to relate it. That we ended up saddled with goofy leaders is hardly surprising.

Still, I remain baffled about why verbal eloquence was the criterion which was decisive in the election to leadership positions. The only thing I can think of is that there was always an inherently verbal quality to the political commitments of many of the members. That's a snotty way of saying they were talkers, not doers. Which was certainly the truth.