Page:Michael Velli - Manual For Revolutionary Leaders - 2nd Ed.djvu/83

 ''methods of struggle and forms of organization as will make it easier for the masses to learn from experience to recognize the correctness of the revolutionary slogans. —What we try to do is take stuff like Marx and Lenin and try to translate it into street language: '''—SUPER-PIG-CAPITALIST-IMPERIALIST-UNITED STATES! PEOPLE'S SOLIDARITY FOREVER! —UNITE WITH REAL FRIENDS AGAINST REAL ENEMIES!''' —Maybe they can't catch what Marx is saying, but when one of us runs it down to them, they can dig on dialectical materialism. —The question arises, what are these masses? It has already been shown that a general sentiment of indifference towards the management of its own affairs is natural to the crowd, even when organized to form political parties. The very composition of the mass is such as to render it unable to resist the power of an order of leaders aware of its own strength. —Great theorists are only in the rarest cases great organizers, and the greatness of the theorist and the program-maker lies primarily in the recognition and in the establishment of abstractly correct laws, while the organizer has to be primarily a psychologist.'' The organizer possesses this specific virtue or potency, this special field in which his powers are developed to the level required by the task to which he is assigned. He is able to articulate perfectly the thoughts of the movement. ''He is able to evaluate whether he finds himself in front of one or another of a given set of constituencies, to choose the approach suitable to the given constituency, and to correct himself if he errs. When he evaluates, chooses or corrects himself, he is not exerting his own powers but the powers of his office: his forms of evaluation, choice and self-correction are integral parts of the party program. He has to take man as he is, and for this reason he must know him. He must not over valuate him just as he must not underestimate him in the mass. On the contrary, he must try to take account of the weakness and of the bestiality equally, so that, all factors considered, he will create a formation which as a living organism is filled with the strongest and most constant force, and is thus suitable for carrying an idea and paving its way to success.''

''t is a fact of everyday experience that enormous public meetings commonly carry resolutions by acclamation or by general assent, whilst these same assemblies, if divided into small sections, say of fifty persons each, would be much more guarded in their assent. —The very process of massing into a movement contributes to a sense of personal power and thereby makes possible further steps in the ORGANIZING and FOCUSING of the aggregate power. —The individual disappears in the multitude, and''