Re: [Marxism] Marxism and anarchism!

[J.M.P.Cloke@xxxxxxxxxxx]

?Leadership is a moment in the division of labor, not a 
hierarchy of worth.?
The desire for leadership and the desire to lead are (at 
this moment in our evolution) tendencies of the human 
condition and they are not a technical artifice, any more 
than they designate a hierarchy of worth. Humanity is not 
only gregarious by nature (which is why the 
fastest-growing area of IT innovation is social networking 
technology, everything from mobile phones to face-book, 
bebo and latterly twitter) but it tends towards hierarchy. 
Even in the depths of lumpenproletariat reality, say, 
prison, if you are a child molester and I am ?only? a 
murderer, I am higher up the prison hierarchy than you are 
however desperate our joint situation may be.
Hierarchical development (the development of leaderships 
and ?leadships?), which is a fluid process by which 
relationships of power are broken down, restructured and 
then dissolved again, tends almost inevitably towards 
concentrations of power, which is to say not just that 
people want power but that people want leadership and the 
stable social structures which they construct, and, once 
concentrated, that power gets harder and harder to 
disseminate (?all power corrupts..?).
The counterforce to those tendencies is that set of 
processes, institutions, arrangements and educational 
movements which seek to devolve power toward impermanent 
and accountable constructs, whether they be purpose-built 
international and national governments or courts, elected 
officials, publicly accountable functionaries, policemen 
operating inside functional disciplinary systems, or 
whatever. This is what makes the argument about the state 
more or less irrelevant, because it tends to concentrate 
on the two-dimensional, temporary construct of 
power-expressed-as-state through the reification of that 
state, rather than focusing on what is important, which 
are the flows and processes of power themselves.

?At any one time, people differ in their capacity to lead. 
This is not elitism, it is respect for human labor in 
study, organizing, teaching.?
This is absolutely true, however it misses a critical 
point. An essential component of leadership is the 
conviction of self-worth, or rather self-superiority; very 
few leaders have to be forced to lead and a rare few 
recognise their own limitations. The capacity to lead, the 
potential for leadership, which may be present in all 
human beings in different situations, goes hand-in-hand 
with the pathology of leadership, which is to say a 
widespread tendency not to recognise the limitations of 
one?s potential and to see in one?s capacity a superior 
ability in respect of leadership itself, pure and 
unrefined, rather than an ability to recognise the 
limiting factors of one?s potential. Structures and 
processes leading towards the devolution of power to the 
lowest functional levels, which I shall generically refer 
to as democracy, recognise just that weakness in the human 
condition and, whilst seeking to use the beneficial 
aspects of individual leaders and leaderships, seek 
simultaneously to control the pathological ones.

?Different people can lead in analysis of the structure of 
society, grasping of current balance of forces, speaking 
to unconvinced communities, negotiating with the police, 
training leaders, composing leaflets etc. The leadership 
role is needed, not the freezing of leaders into 
all-purpose command. Different collectives can take on 
leadership for particular tasks.?
Yes indeed they can. However, in once again reifying the 
role of leadership, this too misses an important point ? 
what is the function of leadership? What needs to be done? 
Because what is critical here is how given tasks 
(analysing the structure of society, negotiating with the 
police etc.) are to be performed, not making a priori 
assumptions that, because there is a task, the first thing 
to do is to find a leader to accomplish it. And given that 
many tasks that are vital to the running of a modern 
economy cannot be conceived, planned, implemented and 
successfully carried out without the active participation 
of the citizens upon whom they will be imposed, then there 
is an essential contradiction between selecting (or 
allowing to self-select) a leader or small group of 
leaders whose self-belief, being centred on the self, must 
lead to inevitable conflicts with the mass of inchoate and 
conflicting opinions and desires of those to be lead.

?A major task of leaders is to prepare new leaders.?
Perhaps this should be: ?A major task of leaders should be 
to prepare new leaders.? In reality, of course, like a 
firm that has developed a competitive advantage in a 
particular market, the tendency of leaders and leadership 
is towards establishing the dominance of its own brand. 
Leadership uses the advantages of power to increase its 
hold on power and to quash dissent. Leadership does indeed 
prepare new leaders, but it takes care to try and ensure 
that the successor leadership is made in its own image, 
the most concrete expression of which is nepotism, putting 
members of your own family into positions of power so that 
your brand of leadership is inter-generational. Which is 
of course what Richard Dawkins would say is the impulsive 
force driving natural selection ? and since humanity is on 
the brink of stepping outside evolution, then it needs 
must seek ways to curb its genetic intemperance, which is 
to say by devising ever more sophisticated and effective 
processes of democracy.
  
Jon Cloke

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