Great leadership
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Great leadership, also known by its Spanish name, Jefatura, is a theoretical concept in Marxism–Leninism–Maoism which was developed by Chairman Gonzalo. Great leadership holds that with each instance of revolutionary struggle, a smaller group of great leaders emerge from the most advanced elements of the proletariat who are able to apply Marxism to their country and spearhead the communist party.
These leaders are chosen by the lower members of the party, can be criticized by the masses, removed by the party members, and have their leadership legitimized by the people. The great leadership of the party and government is democratically elected by the lower ranks, democratically decides on policies that affect the entire party and its supporters, and implements them in a centralized way in accord with democratic centralism.[1]
Theory
In socialist countries undergoing capitalist restoration, the Great Leadership of a country is usually denounced or have their role in the revolution otherwise falsely reduced. This can be observed with Joseph Stalin in the USSR during Nikita Khrushchev's "Secret Speech".
Criticism
Critics of Great Leadership hold that it is anti-materialist and is a rendition of bourgeois great man theory. This comparison is erroneous, as Great Leadership holds that great leaders are made not through chance but by material conditions in a country. Great Leadership is furthermore the observation that in every historical revolutionary movement, a selection of the most advanced members of the vanguard are chosen by the people to represent them (see list below).
"Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past." —18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx, 1852 [Emphasis added]
Other critics hold that Great Leadership encourages cults of personality surrounding the great leadership. Beyond appropriate celebration of revolutionary figures, this is untrue in that the leaders of the party are still fully accountable and not above the party.
Instances
- Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in Germany
- Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union
- Mao Zedong in the People's Republic of China
- Enver Hoxha in the People's Socialist Republic of Albania
- Abimael Guzmán in Peru
See also
References
- ↑ Interview with Chairman Gonzalo (1988).
"Here we must remember how Lenin saw the relationship between the masses, classes, the Party and leaders. We believe that the revolution, the Party, our class, generate leaders, a group of leaders. It has been like this in every revolution. If we think, for instance, about the October Revolution, we have Lenin, Stalin, Sverdlov and a few others, a small group. Similarly, in the Chinese revolution there's also a small group of leaders: Chairman Mao Tsetung, and his comrades Kang Sheng, Chiang Ching [Jiang Qing], Chang Chun-chiao, among others. All revolutions are that way, including our own. We could not be an exception. Here it's not true that there is an exception to every rule because what we're talking about here is the operation of certain laws. All such processes have leaders, but they also have a leader who stands out above the rest or who leads the rest, in accordance with the conditions. Not all leaders can be viewed in exactly the same way. Marx is Marx, Lenin is Lenin, Chairman Mao is Chairman Mao. Each is unique, and no one is going to be just like them.
In our Party, revolution, and people's war, the proletariat, by a combination of necessity and historical chance, has brought forth a group of leaders. In Engels' view, it is necessity that generates leaders, and a top leader, but just who that is is determined by chance, by a set of specific conditions that come together at a particular place and time. In this way, in our case too, a Great Leadership has been generated. This was first acknowledged in the Party at the Expanded National Conference of 1979. But this question involves another basic question that can't be overlooked and needs to be emphasized: there is no Great Leadership that does not base itself on a body of thought, no matter what its level of development may be. The reason that a certain person has come to speak as the Leader of the Party and the revolution, as the resolutions state, has to do with necessity and historical chance and, obviously, with Gonzalo Thought. None of us knows what the revolution and the Party will call on us to do, and when a specific task arises the only thing to do is assume the responsibility."