Page:Michael Velli - Manual For Revolutionary Leaders - 2nd Ed.djvu/62

 ''discussion, leafleting, picketing, rallies, teach-ins, and general disruption. Furthermore, our experience has indicated that the point of pre-induction physicals and/or induction is a time when inductees are most open and receptive to critical discussions of the draft, the war, and U.S. foreign policy in general. Draft resistance (among other issues) is certainly a relevant political program. Its implications, in terms of developing radical consciousness and reaching into vita! constituencies, go far beyond the issue of the war and the draft themselves. —We must learn how to organize the victims of the war around a program. —We must encourage people whose distaste for military service has not been transferred to broader forms of political protest or acts of resistance to engage in those acts. —Whether the military operates on or off the campus should not be the primary focus of our concern. What is more important is the kind of consciousness raised in the process of the struggle.''

ther ''battlefields we have chosen as organizers, and organizers of organizers, are the communities of the under-America: cities and towns and rural spreads where people live materially deprived, politically alienated and used, and victimized by social and economic institutions beyond their comprehension and reach. —Working with people around their own self interests is important because it creates consciousness and an understanding of power relationships. —In addition to touching people's moral sensibilities, the issue should appeal to their self-interests. —The approach is one of helping people, with clothes, food, problems concerning the police, welfare, housing, employment or schools. At the same time, however, questions about the nature of problems, the structure and control of the society are raised. Organizers concentrate on specific issues or individual problems, in an effort to raise questions about the overall society, and in the hope that by helping people out they would start to trust the'' organization. ''—Included in this organizing should be organizing of poor communities in terms of their own exploitation. —The poor know they are poor and don't like it. Hence they can be organized to demand an end to poverty and the construction of a decent social order. —The idea is for radical organizers to create local movements of poor people by raising those issues most salient, day-to-day, to the people concerned. As for the reputed marginality of slum institutions: it is not a question of which elements of the American system are central and which auxiliary, but a question of which elements are at this point in time most vulnerable to the movement''