Selecting a National Leadership Team

Written in 1998
By Doug Lorimer

Doug Lorimer is a member of the National Executive of the DSP. This is an edited version of a talk presented to a Resistance leadership training school held in Melbourne, July 7-9, 1992.

In this talk I want to look at how the Democratic Socialist Party selects its national leadership team, the National Committee. The general concepts and methods used by the party are also applicable to the selection of the national leadership body of Resistance – the National Council – since Resistance shares the same goals, political perspectives and organisational principles as the DSP.

The most important of questions

Forty years ago, in a speech to the National Committee of the US Socialist Workers Party on “Factional Struggle and Party Leadership”, which is published in the book Speeches to the Party, James P. Cannon observed that the “only barrier between the working class of the world and socialism is the unsolved problem of leadership”. Expanding on this statement, Cannon added:

…until the working class solves the problem of creating the revolutionary party, the conscious expression of the historic process, which can lead the masses in struggle, the issue remains undecided. It is the most important of all questions – the question of the party.

] But Cannon went on in the same speech to note that “the problem of the party is the problem of the leadership of the party”. The leadership of the party, Cannon explained, “plays the same decisive role in relation to the party as the party plays in relation to the class”. That is, the construction of the leadership of the party is the key to the construction of the party itself.

In discussing the problem of the construction of the leadership of the party – the most important of all questions – we have to begin by looking at what our conception of leadership is.

What is leadership in our party? Our answer to that question cannot begin with party leadership itself, but with the character of the party we seek to build. And the character of the party we seek to build is, in turn, determined by our strategic aim. Our strategic aim is to educate and mobilise the workers and their allies to bring into being a working people’s government as the first step in abolishing the capitalist social order and constructing a classless, socialist society.

The kind of party that is needed to lead that social transformation is a party that is working class in its political program, outlook, methods, and experience, and that is composed of individuals who, regardless of their class origins, strive in a disciplined way to help the party lead the working class in carrying out a socialist revolution.

The sort of party we’re trying to build is one in which every member is a leader. We strive to maximise the leadership capabilities of every single party member. That’s what we mean by a cadre party – a party in which all members are trained as political leaders and are prepared to train others as political leaders.

So, for us, leadership development is not an individual question. It is a question of the development of the party itself.

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