Star Quality

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There's an idea under capitalist ideology that leaders are specially gifted. Because if they weren't, they wouldn't be leaders, right?

There's also the corollary that when someone gets thrown out from their leadership position, their special giftedness always turns out to have been an illusion - and suddenly everyone knew it all along.

It's related to the idea that the rich deserve to be rich and the poor deserve to be poor - with the same corollary that when a poor person becomes rich, their poorness is rewritten as a temporary aberration - a brief failure of the universe to recognise that they deserved to be rich.

There's another idea that intellectual work is superior to manual work - and thus intellectual workers are superior to manual workers, and thus if a person is superior, it must be because they're a skilled intellectual worker. In other words, if someone is admirable, they must also be smart, because how did they get to be admirable if they weren't smart already, right?

When these two ideas collide, they produce an offspring: the idea that leaders are intellectuals. Thus Lenin was a great thinker, and although Plekanov was his mentor in theoretical matters, Plekanov was somehow less brilliant because, well, Lenin was the man in charge.

George Bush Jr was an idiot, and the left attacked him for it, saying a idiot like him should never be permitted political power. Which means, following the logic through, they were saying if he hadn't been an idiot, he would have deserved his power, and his policies been more justified. They were a lot kinder to the smart and educated Bill Clinton, whose policies weren't that different.

Now, it generally is better to have intelligent people than dumb ones in power, simply because they're more likely to understand the situation and be competent to deal with it. In fact that's almost a tautology, because that's largely what 'intelligent' means.

But to flip the correlation from "Intelligent people tend to make better leaders" to "Leaders are all intelligent" is a logical blunder a child could spot - and most do, before they grow up and lose their clarity.

Marxists ought to be able to see through this ideological trainwreck, but the reality is they can't. And that includes their leaders - who are always hailed as great intellectuals, and who always see themselves in that way.

Indeed, they tend to see themselves as great thinkers in all areas, whether they know anything about the subject or not.

Max Eastman was educated in science - Leon Trotsky was not. Karl Liebknecht and Nikolai Bukharin knew about science and philosophy - Rosa Luxomburg and Vladimir Lenin did not. Indeed, they both claimed to be uninterested in such matters - when they weren't writing about the errors of bourgeois scientists.

So of course it was Trotsky who spent hours shouting his "corrections" at Eastman, Lenin who remarked on Bukharin's ignorance of "real science", and Luxomburg who tells us Liebknecht didn't grasp Marx's philosophical insights.

While writing his aborted biography of Lenin, Trotsky found himself obliged to read Hegel. He managed thirty pages of Phenomenology of Spirit before giving up in exasperated incomprehension. This didn't stop him explaining the limitations of Hegel's genius in ABC of Dialectics - in terms lifted unattributed from Plekhanov.

It seems even the greatest marxists have trouble applying their insights to themselves, but it also goes for those who aspire to be leaders within marxist groups.

Those of us who've spent years sitting in rooms with a dozen revolutionaries know the type - the one whose ambition is to run their own branch (or party), who has a confident, decisive opinion on everything despite knowledge that's usually minimal and often just plain wrong.

I once had a comrade who liked to lecture on how higher mathematics and quantum mechanics proved marxism. Eventually I saw the one science book on his shelf - The Physics of Star Trek.

Sometimes I'm ashamed to call myself a marxist.

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