The Function of Leaders in a Mass
Movement
To what extent do "mere agitators" determine the course
of a revolution? Would it be possible to suppress all such upheavals by the
judicious and timely action of a few people? Or is a change of nature
inevitably the inner contradictions of a system are manifested in leadership
inevitable too? Dialectical materialism leads to the latter conclusion, but
the nature of this inevitability has be closely examined, even from a
dialectical point of view.
This view claims that a change of quantity inevitably leads to a
change of quality. Water cooled indefinitely remain a fluid, but must
solidify into ice when enough heat been lost; the same liquid, when it has
absorbed no will be transformed into a gas, steam. Similarly,
contradictions latent in any form of production develop, the form of
society will inevitably change. This is simple enough, but the
circumstances that prevail at the critical point need further examination.
First, there is a minimum or threshold value below no transformation
can possibly take place. Secondly, this threshold value can be surpassed,
sometimes to a surprising extent, if certain conditions, which are
otherwise insignificant do not obtain. To give an illustration: we can
never get the solution of a given salt to solidify, i.e., change of a mass
of crystals, unless the solution is concentrated. But supersaturated
solutions can always be obtained with a 1ittle care. If a small crystal be
added to such a supersaturated solution, the whole mass will crystallize,
often with amazing rapidity. The small parent crystal, which does not
appreciably increase percentage of supersaturation of the total solution,
is necessary for the crystallization. Moreover, some substances can exist
in several distinct crystalline forms; then the crystal added will
determine the form of crystallization for the whole mass.
I submit that this analogy explains the position of leadership in
a social movement. Below the threshold level of objective conditions in the
society as a whole, little can be done. But good leadership recognizes when
this level has been surpassed, and can produce the desired transformation
with very little supersaturation. Of course, if the social forces are
strong enough, they can overcome the handicap of an indifferent or even bad
leadership, but the entire process of transformation must naturally take
place at a correspondingly later stage of development.
It is this postulation that explains why the communist revolution
was successful in Russia, but failed in Germany where Marx and Engels
expected it to occur first because of greater concentration of
productivity. Trotsky, in his history of the Russian revolution, says,
"Lenin was not a demi- urge of the revolutionary process, ...he merely
entered into a chain of objective historic forces. But he was a great link
in that chain." Our present analogy seems to me more constructive than
that of a chain. Lenin recognised that the war of 1914 was a purely
imperialist clash; he alone insisted upon carrying out the resolution of
the second international which suggested the conversion of such an outbreak
into civil war. It was he, of all the socialists in Russia, who first recognised the
true function of the soviets as the organ of the proletariat, and brushed
aside the wobbling theorists who postulated an intermediate
bourgeois-liberal democratic stage in the development of the revolution.
His letter drove the communists to armed insurrection on November 7, 1917; the time was ripe for such procedure in the seizure
of power, and probably no other method could then have been as effective.
Not only in the beginning, but even in after years, when the revolution had
to be saved by strategic retreats such as unfavourable treaties with
hostile aggressors and the New Economic Policy, Lenin showed what
leadership can really accomplish. The other revolutions in Europe, i.e. Hungary, Germany, Italy etc., were lost not
simply because the social conditions were relatively less favourable but
because the guiding spirits were less able. On the other hand, we may note
that Lenin himself, in his Geneva exile, could not shake the
complacent inertia of the Swiss working class.
Now there is another type of leadership (that we have often seen
in history) which does not itself participate in the upheaval in a manner
similar to the above example. We see this in most religious movements,
which gain head suddenly, become revolutionary for a while, put a new set
of rulers in power, and then settle down to a parasitic routine, all
without the least apparent change of ideology. Of course, the change is
there in practice, if not in theory. One can hardly expect the poor of any
era to understand and to fight for abstract theological problems which even
learned bishops could not settle. Why should the people of one age fight
for Athariasius against the Arians while, a couple of centuries after the
creed was established, their descendants fought with much less vigour
against Islam? The fact is not that there are periods of sudden theological
understanding for the masses, but that the religious leadership knew how to
stand firm on some point in a way that suddenly activated the social
discontent. The analogy here is not with our supersaturated solutions, but
rather with the position of catalysts in chemical reactions. Many reactions
take place very slowly, or not at all unless substances like
sponge-platinum or kaolin are present. These substances remain
unassimilated and undiminished after the reaction has been completed, but
their presence does materially accelerate the reaction.
Finally, we have seen cases of leadership by dispersion as well
as leadership that concentrates social forces. This often happens when a
class not in power gains its predominance by uniting with a lower class
which it must normally exploit. In that case, methods have to be devised
for the dissipation of the excess of energy available; methods that usually
come with the label of "restoration of law and order." Some
Marxists (of whom I am one) claim that a part of the leadership of Mahatma
Gandhi must fall under this head. When the 1930 Satyagraha got out of hand
and was about to be transformed into a fundamentally different movement by
the no-rent and no-tax campaigns in 1932, he discovered the need for the
uplift of our untouchables, and the whole movement was neatly sidetracked.
At Rajkot this year, he put himself at the head of a
campaign that would have lighted a fire not easily put out in the kindling
of our social discontent and that too was effectively sidetracked by newer
and finer points in the theory of non-violence-points of a purely
theological minuteness. Both of these had a pre- cursor in the cancellation
of the first civil disobedience movement after Chouri-Choura. But in the
two later cases, it was quite clear that the forces of social change were
scattered precisely at a stage when their continued focussing would have
been dangerous to the class that wanted power, the Indian money-owners.
This is not to say that the leadership was a deliberate, conscious act.
That is why the Congress movement had its periods of glum depression. Its
usefulness to the class mentioned was low in just those times.
At least one difference exists between a social group and the
solutions that we have used for the purposes of analogy: the lack of
uniformity. The concentration in a social movement need not be the same
throughout the whole region affected. This leads to two distinct types of
development after the initial stages. Either the transformation that has
taken place in a small portion will spread over the rest of the social
group-which again implies the existence of a minimum threshold value over
the entire aggregation, or there will be produced a deconcentration, a
rarefaction as it were, over the untransformed portion. In the latter case,
the transformed portion must temporarily isolate itself, or again dissolve
into its surroundings. I take it that this will explain why the Marxist
revolution in one part of the world did not spread with the rapidity that
was expected of it. Its very occurrence in that part sharpened the
contradictions that existed elsewhere; but it threw hesitant leaders back
into a reactionary attitude, because they had not themselves developed to
the necessary level.
Fergusson and Willingdon College Magazine, (Poona) 1939, pp. 6-9.
One of the obvious conclusions is that when the major, immediate
objective of the mass movement has been gained, both the people and the
leadership must remain vigilant against the ripening of inner
contradictions by studying the needs of the next stage. Class-reaction and
the cult of personality can be avoided only by the broadest active
participation of the whole people in the transformed movement, e.g. after a
revolution, in self-government and in national planning. On the other hand,
the very success of national planning and resultant increase in the
quantity of production-even socialist planning and socialist
production-must inevitably lead to a change of quality in the leadership.
This accounts at least in part for the 'de-Stalinization' policy of the USSR, which is now the second
greatest industrial country in the whole world, with the greatest output of
trained technicians, engineers, and scientists.
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