Page:Michael Velli - Manual For Revolutionary Leaders - 2nd Ed.djvu/71

 ''or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood. —Money collected from cocktail parties and hat-passing can be used to pay for publicity, travel expenses and/or saved for future speaker expenses. —Division of labor only becomes truly such from the moment when a division of material and mental labor appears. —Our legitimacy as revolutionaries need not depend on our ability to create lasting organizations in communities which we set out to organize. Instead, we should be content for the time being to create close-knit organizations of movement people which can reach out to new individuals and create more organizers in these communities. —The cell structure leads, then, to three effects: the formation of democratic chapter structures with a leadership totally responsive to a constituency; a constituency which is politically sophisticated in both theory and practice; and an organizational form which can function in a non- target vacuum and which likewise provides for the more or less total involvement of chapter people in political struggle on a long-term basis. —The only limit to participation in the total democracy of the revolutionary organization is the recognition and self-appropriation of the coherence of its critique by all its members. —Such an organization needs a common view of the existing society, common programmatic demands (or at least complementary ones), a common vision of a new form of social organization designed to satisfy human needs.''

''rganizing in factories, neighborhoods, prisons, high schools, day-labor centers, and the army is generally aimed at doing three things: building consciousness; planting the seeds of organization, and beginning to build cadre. —All of these developments combine to point us in a particular direction. They point toward the creation of different organizational forms than we now employ. They indicate the necessity for developing cadre organization, a mass base—and theory as a pre-requisite for both. Without such an organization we shall be rapidly isolated, and anarchism and opportunism will be the ONLY alternatives for the next period. All that exists in between will be crushed. —We have bits and pieces of a theory of society and of an analysis of our contemporary situation. But we lack a synthesis adequate to the organizing of a mass revolutionary party. So the present period must be viewed as a time of building bridges to workers and other strata. It is a period of education and agitation, to secure the left's position in mass movements—to build an organization that can build mass consciousness and prepare the way for fundamental, necessary changes. —What the U.S. left has never been able to do is to build a revolutionary organization that can put its ideologies''