Page:Michael Velli - Manual For Revolutionary Leaders - 2nd Ed.djvu/65

 ''phase to organizing for struggle as a class. However, all one's efforts would be predicated on the eventual necessity of linking various constituencies in common struggles against the common enemy—waging a self-conscious class struggle. On the other hand, when organizing within a constituency, an intermediate strategy would attempt to engage people in struggles around issues aimed at certain specific goals. First, issues should be chosen that clearly reveal the corporations and the government as the enemy. —Any issue around which we organize a national program should be seen and felt as a critical problem by a great number of ordinary people. The issues should enable us to broaden and/or deepen our base in the student, poor, and/or working class communities.''

''hould we not recognize that almost no one in the Movement has a constituency or 'base' off the campus, almost no one belongs to a community which has mandated leadership to him? and that hence the patient building of regional structures from below remains our first task? The peculiarity of a resistance movement is to combine life-and-death struggle with reaching-out to new constituencies. —An organization which claims to speak for the needs of a community must speak in the tone of that community. —To be effective the organizer can and must minimize certain traits that make it easy for new acquaintances in the neighborhood to write the organizer off as a kook or hippy (a label bestowed for many ways of being different other than just hair style or clothes). There will be many things in common, many pleasures, hardships and achievements shared between the 'radical organizer' and the radicalized or organized, but it will not happen overnight. Very simply, it takes time, care, thinking, re-thinking, a lot of feeling silly; ignorant, lonely, isolated, and self-conscious to grow into a community and have a whole lot of people know you and trust you. —Our activities and our ideas in meetings with other community groups raise movement questions about the direction that community organizing should take. —The questions asked by the better new left tacticians are: Did the action (and its tactics) expose power? Were the activists divided from their constituents? Did the action achieve a conscious polarization between the enemy and the constituency? Was the enemy's authority and respect in the eyes of those we want to reach decreased? Was ours increased? Were other groups which might be our future allies alienated from the action? Neutral? Turned on? Was sufficient propaganda work done prior to the action? Did our constituency grow, either in numbers or in depth of radical understanding? Did the action enhance —our ability to be seen as an alternative force for change?''