Page:Michael Velli - Manual For Revolutionary Leaders - 2nd Ed.djvu/63

 ''that lies within our means. In fact, the critics who make these points are unable to recommend any more promising direction. —The point is what aspects of American economic and political life give organizing and educational space to radicals. —Jobs are not the best issue around which to organize.'' The continuing development of society's productive forces has become a fetter to the social relations sought by radical organizers. Therefore organizers turn to the ''more-or-less permanent underclass whose abrasive contacts with the ruling elites are less at the point of production than outside it —The key importance of Appalachia as an area for organizing is its character as a technological backwater, and the consequent gap between the promise of opportunity and Appalachia's ugly reality. —When the rhetorical glow fades and we stand judged by our own lights, as activists, this is how, so far, we must be judged: as organizers of the poor.''

''e may as yet know little about building a resistance or liberation movement; the one thing about which we can be certain is that it grows when individuals stand up and say 'No' the moment repression occurs. —Protests are valuable only insofar as they advance the process of creating radical cadres and of politicizing. —An essential ingredient is a demand which will probably be denied. —This type of politics weighs the value of campaigns by their success in building a movement with a radical analysis of society and a strategy for changing it. —If our community activity is to have any real value, we have to relate to issues within a radical perspective. This means radical leadership and politics no matter how small the beginning. Some can relate to that, and those are the people with whom we will be working. —The problem is how to engage in a struggle around reforms in such a way as to develop revolutionary class consciousness. —Surely, one does not make a revolution without offending people. The question is whether we have the political capital that enables us to afford this cost right now. —Part of the process of developing a strategy is learning the crucial lessons of the movement's past, understanding its failures and successes in the light of several criteria: Did the strategic line build the movement—that is, were new people recruited for organized struggle, did many others accept left leadership, was the enemy weakened, were the class relations hidden behind slogans unmasked? —While we share the same reasons for political involvement as all the new left groups, this burning moral thing, we have adopted a realistic means of changing society.''