Page:Michael Velli - Manual For Revolutionary Leaders - 2nd Ed.djvu/67

 ''alternative strategies and programs; and encourage organizers collectively to come to grips with their problems; for example, a union of organizers. Besides providing organizers a common forum to share problems and techniques, the union spawns other institutions. One, a school for community organizers, represents a collective attempt to respond to the critical shortage of effective organizers. —As organization develops, not only do the tasks of the administration become more difficult and more complicated, but, further, its duties become enlarged and specialized to such a degree that it is no longer possible to take them all in at a single glance. In a rapidly progressive movement, it is not only the growth in the number of duties, but also the higher quality of these, which imposes a more extensive differentiation of function. —The rearguard, in a sense, is just as important as the vanguard and should not be seen as a caboose or as a group of lesser or inferior people. In any guerrilla war the rearguard is as important as the vanguard, and the rearguard in this case is the people who do the door to door organizing, the explaining, the interpretation through writing, speaking, appearances before the mass media.''

''t should be clear that the aim of the resistance strategy is to transform itself into a class-conscious revolutionary socialist movement—a state of things in which relationships become independent of individuals, in which the persona! relationships of individuals are subordinated to general class relationships. —Students, teachers, factory workers, welfare recipients, case-workers, migrant workers and tenants are only a few examples of the constituencies open to creating a base of resistance and radical struggle within the institutions of power in this society. —How are we to transform today's radical movement into a revolutionary movement? History shows that revolutionary movements are successful only when they are guided by highly-organized well-disciplined revolutionary parties. History also shows that revolutionary parties are only successful when there are revolutionary masses. The people need the party and the party needs the people: neither can succeed without the other. —Every movement with great aims has anxiously to watch that it may not lose connection with the great masses. It has to examine every question primarily from this point of view and to make decisions in this direction. Further, it has to avoid everything that could diminish or even weaken its ability to influence the masses; perhaps not for 'demagogic' reasons, no, but because of the simple realization that without the enormous power of the masses of a people no great idea, no matter how sublime and lofty it may appear, is realizable.''