Page:Michael Velli - Manual For Revolutionary Leaders - 2nd Ed.djvu/142

 possibility might of course result from the fact that a group of people in a railway station is not in fact a working collective. To see if such an outcome would not be likely in working collectives actually engaged in productive activity, we might try to imagine the organizing efforts of a different militant of the revolutionary organization—say, for example, at a construction site where building activity is actually in progress.

In this illustration we might imagine, not a militant who drops out of the blue into a crowd of strangers, but a militant whose organizing activity is persistent and continuous. He might, for example, return to the construction site every day, and on the occasion when we observe his organizing activity he might already be known by several workers on the site. Let us assume that, in a perfectly friendly spirit, a worker once nicknamed him 'Trotsky' and that those who had come to be acquainted with him greet him with this 'name,' although there are no grounds for assuming that the militant's organization is in fact a Trotskyist organization, or even oriented in that direction.

Let us assume that the fact that only a few of the construction workers are personally acquainted with the militant is not the militant's fault, but is due, for example, to the very same circumstances which might explain why the individuals at this particular workplace might already be engaged in working activity. The militant's limited acquaintance with the individuals on the site might be due to the constantly changing composition of the working collective. Both the changing composition and the fact that productive activity is going on might be due to the peculiar role the construction site played during the height of the insurrection: when the military attacked, all construction sites became sources of materials and equipment for the construction of barricades. Since on numerous occasions the barricades had to be built on the spur of the moment, many individuals who had not been construction workers, many who had not previously even visited a construction site, were forced to learn to use the equipment and the materials in a hurry. Many of the individuals who had mastered these arts during the insurrection