What Is Revolutionary Leadership? by Cliff Slaughter

[p014] What is Revolutionary Leadership? Cliff Slaughter and he died a young man, a few days after his re- lease in 1937. . Neither of these two men, the most original Marxist thinkers since Lenin, is regarded with favour by the official ‘Communist? movement. Despite Khrushchev’s admission that the trials of the 1930s were based on confessions extracted by torture, the slanders about Trotsky’s plot against the USSR, his alliance with Hitler, and so on, are allowed to remain as part of the total censorship on his work that exists in the Communist Parties. In 1957 a small selection of Gramsci’s writings was published by Lawrence and Wishart. However, The Modern Prince, longest essay in this selection, was quite heavily cut, and precious little space was devoted to Gramsci’s major contribution on Workers’ Councils. One appreciates the great effort made by Dr. Louis Marks, the translator, to bring even this much of Gramsci to English readers; at the same time it must be said that the cuts in The Modern Prince are unacknowledged, and that several of the omitted sections (dealing with Rosa Luxemburg, with ‘Caesarism’, etc.) would have posed awkward questions for Stalinists. STALINISM AND HISTORICAL MATERIALISM It is characteristic that these two men should have laid great stress on the role of human con- sciousness, and of political leadership. Stalinism can no more entertain such an emphasis than can Social-Democracy. Reformism and opportunism are tied to the existing structure of power: a con- fused mixture of notions of fair play and expedi- ency is the nearest they ever get to theory. Their political actions are based on an adjustment of the partial and temporary interests of sections of the working class to the existing economy and state power. This is why opportunists abhor theory, for theory insists on an understanding of each problem in terms of the all-round development of society, focused in our epoch on the working-class struggle

[p015] 94 for state power. Nor are the Stalinists in any better position; in the ‘Communist’ movement Marxist doctrine has hardened into an ideology: that is to say, particular phrases are taken from Marx and Lenin and used to justify the particular course taken by the Soviet bureaucracy. The authority naturally accruing to the Russian Communists after the October Revolution facilitated the spread of the degeneration of the Russian to the other Parties in the Communist International. These parties were ‘shaken up’, their leaderships changed, their struc- ture arbitrarily fixed (under the name of ‘Bolshevisa- tion’ of course!) until they were transmission belts for the international policies of Stalin’s bureau- cracy, rather than revolutionary parties of the working class.* In latter years, despite the ‘ex- posure’ of Stalin by Khrushchev, the political con- Sequences of this relationship have even deepened, though of course they will inevitably produce a reaction inside the foreign parties, and eventually in the Soviet Party. Peaceful competition between the Soviet and the U.S. economies is now clearly Stated to be the major form of the conflict between