What can leaders do?

Chris Dillow asks What can leaders do?.

Jeremy Corbyn's victory has prompted Corbynmania from his fans and talk of the collapse of the party from his critics. Both reactions beg an important question: how much difference do leaders make?

There's a famous quote from Warren Buffett:

When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact.

What he's getting at is that companies have organizational capital — cultures and ways of doing things — which are very difficult to change. The same might be true of political parties. It is rare for big established ones to collapse, Pasok and the Canadian Liberal party being notable exceptions: the thing about the Strange Death of Liberal England is that it was strange. And it is rare for them to be utterly changed: as Archie Brown points out in The Myth of the Strong Leader, transformative leaders are rare, and require especial circumstances. Those who complain about Blair moving to the right understate his orthodox social democratic achievements in, for example, reducing pensioner poverty and NHS waiting times.

In fact, Buffett is echoing something Marxists have long pointed out, that Labour is fundamentally a social democratic party which has only limited ability to change capitalism: Mr McDonnell's aspiration to transform it might be over-optimistic. One thing Miliband and Poulantzas agreed upon in their famous debate was that there are big constraints upon what parliamentary parties can do. As Miliband wrote:

Social-democrats have tended to be blind to the severity of the struggle which major advances in the transformation of the social order in progressive directions must entail. (Socialism for a Sceptical Age, p163-4)

Emphasis Mine

This is why a political party outside of the mainstream is needed to wage revolutionary struggle. This party has to be grounded in the realities of workers' lives, but develop their revolutionary consciousness.