The
virtual alternative political leadership of the proletariat The
dynamics between social reality and
political self-imaging in the epoch of crisis of capitalism Labros Kostopoulos Athens, February 28, 2010
The failure
of the leadership The essential
task of the leadership of a revolutionary organization is to direct
its development towards the formation of a mass party. So, the final
criterion of success of an alternative political leadership is the degree
in which it has built and the rate in which it is building the mass
party. In the past
two decades this task has been facilitated by the fall of the soviet
bureaucracy and its associated Stalinism. Further, this task has been
facilitated by the social movements that have developed in Latin America.
Finally, the current world crisis of capitalism facilitates incredibly
this task but also imposes a quick pattern in the building of the mass
party. Has the leadership
contributed to the achievement of this aim either in quantity or in
quality? No, it has not on any criteria and at any rate. So, the leadership
has been proved to be completely incapable to do what is supposed to
be the reason for its existence. This conclusion is simply a fact of
life. Further more,
the leadership has been proved also to be incapable to maintain the
unity of the organization. Concretely,
the sections in Greece, Pakistan and Venezuela have been split from
the organization. The sections in Spain and Mexico have left the organization.
The Russian and Turkish connections have disappeared mysteriously from
the scene. So, this conclusion
is also a simple fact of life. The irresponsibility
of the leadership Has the leadership
recognized these elementary facts of life? No, it has not and still
does not! The leadership does not interest in what happens in reality
as well as in the organization. Instead, it is exclusively interested
not to take any kind of responsibility for its obvious failure. The way for
diverting responsibility is very well known and familiar to all of us:
the failures are due to some “bad guys” who hate the leadership,
have betrayed the revolution, do not respect the collective discipline
defined by the constitution and the principles of democratic centralism,
etc, etc. This is a childish
reaction when caught out in front of the teacher: “Sir, I didn’t do it.
S and L did it in Greece. M did it in Pakistan. Etc, etc. … Any other
person did it, except myself!”. This irresponsibility
of the leadership leads it to “the restoration of the disturbed order
by the expulsion of every one who is fount to be guilty by it each time
of political failure”. The negation
of the internal discussion and collective decisions
from the part of the leadership But this “restoration
of order” by the leadership is not done on collective terms, openly
and in the framework of the established procedures of the organization.
Oh, no! It is done “privately”, in the framework of a parallel informal
network established by the leadership for its defense against its own
rank and file. So, a part of the leadership has substituted the proper
operation of the whole organization by its parallel informal network. So, instead
of discussing with the comrades, the leadership expels the comrades
who dare to put it in the corner of reality and responsibility. The negation
of any internal discussion is proved by the fact that the leadership
has not be able and willing till now to establish an internal discussion
bulletin / internet forum for the members of the organization. It seems that
the leadership thinks that the political participation of the rank and
file is incompatible with their employment as fulltime wage-earners. The gradual
silent destruction of the organization by the leadership Of course,
the leadership’s expulsions and splittings do not restore any order.
In reality the leadership sacrifices each time of failure a part of
the organization without being able to replace it with new recruits.
So, the leadership continuously reduces the organization. In the final
step of this diminishing process the leadership will be indentified
with the organization. Leadership and organization will be one and the
same thing. But for this reason there will be neither leadership nor
organization. There will be only independent journalists and columnists
striving to get a retirement from anywhere it seems to them to be possible. The political
content of the leadership’s failure Why is the
leadership irresponsible and consequently destructing the organization
as well as self-destructing? Is its attitude due to the “foulness
of grandeur”, to the ill belief that it is the “reincarnation of
Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky all together in one collective person”,
to the “professional incompetence for the task to be wage-paid revolutionaries”
or to the fact that it is composed simply by “bad guys”? All these factors
as well as others not included in the above list can be valid or not.
But also in this symmetrical case, it is not a question of others’
faults. All these factors are not the causes of the actual leadership
failure but the effects of leadership’s incapacity to formulate a
revolutionary program of political action, a historically updated transitional
program. The leadership’s
complete political incapacity to lead anybody to anywhere is extremely
flagrant in the case of Venezuela. “Bolivarian
revolution” is considered by the leadership to be the nucleus of the
of the contemporary world revolutionary process. Consequently, the first
mass revolutionary party has to be built in the context of the ongoing
revolution in Venezuela. Has the leadership built this mass party after
a decade of revolutionary mobilization of masses? No, it has not! And
that’s not all: not only the leadership has failed to build a mass
revolutionary party but it has also achieved to split the small organization
in Venezuela in two mutually competitive parts! This is not building
something, this is destroying everything. The leadership
can not engineer in a ten years period of time a transitional set of
slogans to overthrow Chavez’s Bonapartist regime! Lenin was
politically capable to overthrow Kerensky in about 3½ months and the
leadership can not overthrow Chavez in ten years! On the top
of that some comrades think to join in the 5th International
proclaimed in the end of the last year by Chavez! These comrades fail
completely to understand that the revolution is against Chavez and not
in association with him. The evident
inability of the leadership to transit politically from February to
October in Venezuela is the historical cause of the actual disarray
in its state of mind and conduct. The major political issue to discuss
openly and thoroughly in the organization is this unfinished transition
and not either the “civic rights of revolutionaries in privacy”
or “what democratic centralism is in theory and how it is applied
in practice”. The organization can not intervene politically anywhere in the world. Its ideas and principles have not the least appeal on the proletarian vanguard, the intellectuals and the rebelling youth. For this reason, now in the epoch of crisis and of the associated mass action, the organization is disintegrating under the leadership of its leadership. Only politics, a brand new transitional political program of social action, can save it from the fatal end already coming to us very quickly. |
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