Michael Velli (Fredy Perlman)

II. Rise to Leadership

    Rebellions are spontaneous and undirected - That is, they are closer to being riots than they are to being insurrections. Rage fades and is replaced by that much deplored �carnival atmosphere�.- This is very serious for at least two reasons. One, that the development of leadership in the struggle is fundamental to victory. It is as necessary as it is difficult for the working class to bring forth leaders from its ranks who stay with the people and sum up the experience of struggle, learning from mistakes to refine the tactics and strategy of the struggle. There is a� contradiction between leadership and the people, but this contradiction has to be resolved by supervision of leadership by the people and by their criticism  it cannot be glossed over simply by an anti leadership neurosis; rather it needs patient and prolonged training of leaders through the many twists and turns, the victories and setbacks, of the mass movement. Secondly, an anti�-leadership policy will not really prevent the creation of leaders; it will only guarantee that the leadership is always superficial and quixotic. Without leaders developing over a long period of struggle, there can be no theoretical growth, and every struggle is ad hoc - unrelated to past or future development and the strategy and tactics of victory remain undiscovered. Organizational �leadership must run fast to keep up with the troops. That leadership seeks to accomplish this is a positive development,� though merely� though merely trying to keep up with the followers is not a political virtue.

    What develops under the hegemony of the dominant form of behavior, at the centers of production of Capital, is not a consciousness, an ideology, or even an organized revolutionary movement, but rather a practice. Marx was clear about the fact that revolutionary consciousness did not rise spontaneously among the Workers, but had to be imported from the outside, chiefly by intellectuals:  Class political consciousness can be brought� to the workers only from without - it is also unlikely that a revolutionary party will develop strictly as a result struggles of the working class.  Mere spontaneity will never suffice. It is not possible for U.S. workers, in their great majority, to join the fight unless their class consciousness is heightened through the political work of revolutionaries.  The notion of control and the idea of community are central to the� radical program; however, people will not naturally organize to gain control and create community unless radicals describe the possibilities.  To create a new generation of radicals means to be the arena in which they, as individuals, can grow to become that new generation.  The socialist movement must be able to define and articulate the goals of the immediate post�revolutionary period because these goals cannot be developed through spontaneous activity.

    The potentialities of the productive forces which are reflected by revolutionary consciousness are the potentialities that have been historically realized. The world revolutionary movement has produced a body of ideas drawn from objective reality and tested in political struggle. 

    Neither that experience nor its language should be rejected out of hand. Those phrases are laden with the historical experience of the revolutionary socialist movement.  Every revolution is different, because every country has a different history and different sets of conditions. But some revolutionary principles are valid beyond the bounds of particular countries.  In short, the function of a revolutionary is to understand the direction and 'laws of motion' of society in order to change it.  All great move�ments, whether they be of religious or of political character, have to ascribe their enormous successes only to the realization and to the application of these Principles, but especially all durable successes are unthinkable without considering these laws.

    The key issue is the development of consciousness, confidence and leadership. However, at a high level of development of productive forces, responses to the social order have not been conducive to the application of the modern revolutionary model, they have not given rise to leadership and the struggle for state power, or even to minimally defined revolutionary organizations. That is slow and difficult when you are working with people who are not radical intellectuals.  We need to come to grips with our historic function.  Our contribution to the general popular movement is that (1) we name the system; (2) we explain why the capitalist system needs wars of intervention to survive; (3) we point to the necessity of a revolutionary transfer of power in all capitalist institutions; (4) we discuss openly the road to power, including the shape of the alternative society we wish to build, (5) we build our independent forms of organization which can present our views.  To make a revolution in the U.S. you can't be just good guys who want to relate to people. You need a correct analysis.  There is a role for leadership, for those best able to foresee the course of events, to articulate the general principles of a movement  The task of building a revolutionary alternative in the heart of the empire is not an easy one. It means the presentation of a clear alternative which can win the vast majority of the American people to our side. Part of that task is proving to them that we have a new life to offer and a new future to build.  We become increasingly the only people who have political, economic, social or human answers to the questions that are increasingly going to confront the great masses of students, the great mass of middle class and professional people, the mass of poor and working people.  The success of the revolution depends to a great degree upon the quality of the revolutionary leadership.

    Revolutionary theory is not spontaneously generated by political practice. Considerable human effort is required, particularly the efforts of those immediately Involved in political work. Waiting for theory somehow to emerge from the grass roots (or descend from the heavens) amounts to little more than an antitheoretical copout. Administrative and ideological activities  �organization and theory  are the modern forms of revolutionary activity, archetypes of political engagement, synonyms of radicalism and movement. The duty of the revolutionary historian is to keep alive a relevant revolutionary tradition, and to tell us what went wrong in the past so that old mistakes need not be repeated  Revolutionary theory is not the source of truth, but an approximation of reality serving as a guide to action. This can be clarified by an analogy. A roadmap can be seen as an analytical description of a given historical reality  the transportation network in a given geographical area at a certain time. It also serves as a guide to action; you can use it to get from one place to another without getting lost.  There are times when the only protection available to a nascent revolutionary movement is the ability to stay one step ahead of its class enemy  through its understanding of the dialectics of its own development to foresee and thus hasten the transition to new forms of action. These tasks can no longer be left to spontaneity, to the undirected activity of independent individuals. The current historical tasks are the proper tasks of leadership, organization, ideology. An organizer's ability to sustain his work over seemingly unrewarding periods often rests on his having a developed ideological perspective. If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life process.  Ideology, then, should not be a mechanical thing  but flexible, able to change with conditions: and the product of study, analysis, and re analysis of Me actual situation. This is what needs to be done  the development of an analysis and theory to give us a basis for understanding what is happening in society, why it Is happening, and what are the best methods to bring about change. We must begin to talk about short and long term strategy and the development of a political theory on which to base our actions.  

    Very few activists besides utter neophytes and a few sundry anarchists doubt Me eventual need for a Radical Ideology. If none were evolved, what strategy could ever be worked out for social change? How could we tell people the 'why' of our activism? Most important, what real alternative could we offer to those, present and future, who are fed up with the emasculation and depravity of the present system?  Underlying all our work should be the intensification and growth of the consciousness of unfreedorn and the desire for liberation among millions of ordinary Americans. Our job is to destroy the false consciousness of the U.S. middle�class ethos, to remedy the failure of most Americans to perceive their situations in terms of oppressive class relationships.  Radicals should seek to develop programs and activity that increase people's awareness and build a vision of a better society.  People up to now have always formed a concept of man, and then won freedom for themselves to the extent that was necessary to realize this concept; the measure of freedom that they achieved was determined each time by their idea of the ideal of man at the time.  People must find their way out of the restricted perspectives imposed by their condition and toward the light of overview, of understanding.  It is necessary to begin the theoretical work on which such a movement can be based.

    We have to expose the American forms of alienation from the dominant values and ideas of corporate society, and translate these into class struggle terms so that  the idea, the conception of the people in question about their real practice, is transformed into the sole determining, active force which controls and determines their practice.  What we need to be doing at this stage of the game is building radical or revolutionary consciousness.  Hitherto men have constantly made up for themselves false conceptions dons about themselves, about what they are and what they ought to be. They have arranged their relationships according to their ideas of God, of normal man, etc. The phantoms of their brains have got out of their hands. They, the creators, have bowed down before their creations. Let us liberate them from the chimaeras, the ideas, dogmas, imaginary beings under the yoke of which they are pining away. Let us revolt against the rule of thoughts. Let us teach men to exchange these imaginations for thoughts which correspond to the essence of man; to take up a critical attitude toward them; to knock them out of their heads, and existing reality will collapse. There is no socialist perspective for our country without the clear understanding that a socialist conscious working class is an essential precondition for fundamental changes in the social relations. Consciousness can be important in bringing about new material conditions that might be more conducive to more basic and far reaching social change. Life is determined by consciousness, not consciousness by life. The struggle for mass democracy against the illusions of representative government and benevolent bureaucracy cannot be abandoned if the transition from reform to revolution in popular consciousness is to be secured Since the New Left considers conceptions, thoughts, ideas, in fact all the products of consciousness, to which they attribute an independent existence, as the real chains of men (just as the Old Left declared them the true bonds of human society) it is evident that the New Left has to fight only against these illusions of that consciousness. Since, according to their theory, the relationships of men, all their doings, their chains and their limitations are products of their consciousness, the New Left logically puts to men the moral postulate of exchanging their present consciousness for human, critical or revolutionary consciousness, and thus of removing their limitations. This demand to change consciousness amounts to a demand to interpret reality in another way, i.e., to recognize it by means of another interpretation.

    Strategy can no longer be based on material demands alone. Rather, it must be based on a more encompassing projection of the social and economic alternatives to the status quo. Briefly, we propose a strategy that posits, on the one hand, a critique of the reality of meaningless jobs, manipulated consumption and growing maldistribution of wealth, and on the other hand, a vision of the liberating potential of a fully automated, fully communist society. The point here is not that the vanguard shall realize the impossibility of preserving the old order of things and the inevitability of its overthrow. The point is that the masses, the millions, shall understand this inevitability. But the masses can understand this only from their own experience. We must devise mass Programs which have meaning and make people more radical. The march can best be used if it is seen as a tactic to involve people more extensively in the movement; the demonstration don as a tool for organizing.  The task is to enable the vast masses to realize from their own experience the inevitability of the overthrow of the old regime, to promote such 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. �The alternative to liberalism is showing people the necessity to join our struggle  involving people in experiences which develop a new under�standing of the society which denies them opportunities and fights; and which will open possibilities for more insurgent activity in the future. This requires connecting the immediate local issues with the major political issues so that people have something worth fighting for. We must confront the questions of power and violence head on to initiate a level of tactics sufficient to generate concern and recognition of our seriousness  through a serious national program designed to eliminate gaps in political consciousness.  Although we recognize value in the publicity our movement receives in the commercial media, since all publicity, even negative, at least gets part of the message across and to that degree is propagandistic, we also understand the very distinct limitations. In spite of the fact that we expect to get screwed by any and all parts of the establishment press system it is possible to use TV coverage to the advantage of the movement. We must see films, hear radio programs, and read newspapers produced by people whose interests, experiences, and objectives are roughly similar to our own. Unless this common understanding is established between audience and producer, we will continue to have a dangerously partial and distorted idea of the way things are.  The existence of constituencies of people with radical consciousness would be important in using those con�ditions for democratic and revolutionary ideals.

    There exist incredible opportunities to build Power out of the rebellions if organizers can find ways to reach leadership that is drawn from the snipers, the gang cats, and looters. Hundreds of People who get a 'piece of the action' were never involved in organization but are now searching for next steps. They will flock to or organized activity that is directed towards gaining per_ permanent bases new legitimacy Power  They can speak with a� within the community and beyond because of the potential power we all know they have. The ghetto rebellion constitutes a new source of power which makes possible new organizing  Despite the fierce response of the Establishment, we should not permit ourselves to be placed on the defensive. We should recognize that repression itself will bring us new allies offended by the erosion of accustomed freedom, and that the urgent task of our movement is to work directly with those who have rebelled.  If any such movement is to succeed, it must develop a long range perspective that will aid in building a constituency.

    For us being a revolutionary means working to build radical constituencies acting in their own self interest. This is the basis, the possibility, for creating major social change here in America, and providing breathing room for revolutionary movements around the world. But the beginning constituency for such a movement is among those who have no real organization to define them politically. We see two general types of potential constituencies that should be analyzed and explored as potential components in a new radical coalition, or ideological center. First are class or social groupings: students, industrial workers, urban poor whites and working poor, the aged. The second type of constituencies are those built around issues or areas of social concern.  Workers and lower middle class people are the groups that need to be 'radicalized' and brought around to our viewpoint. Why is it important for professional radicals to consider these people?  The most sublime theoretical insight has no value and no purpose unless the leader moves the masses toward it.  Pragmatically, the reasons are very clear: They are the common Americans, and without at least their support we cannot build a democratic movement. We do not know that all, or any, of these groups will be sources of radical consciousness. Certainly they will not be if left to chance. Before such groups are abandoned to continued manipulation and use as producers or consumers in our welfare state, we should at least examine the possibilities for organizing them and developing a radical consciousness among them.

    The problems the middle class faces are distinguished by alienation, powerlessness, psychological repression, and their being manipulated by forces which too often seem (but never really are) impersonal. The key concept here, I think, is powerlessness and the lack of a feeling of integrity of one's self. Our task is to organize these people around these issues for two reasons. First, because to a great extent they are the future society  the wave of the future, if you will  and we believe in changing the lives of everyone, and in participatory democracy for everyone. Second, because that is the social class or psychological pattern from which we come and which we best understand  The social importance of students is increasing at a much greater rate than indicated simply by their numerical growth. In our highly industrialized society, the rate of scientific knowledge and technological innovation is growing at a logarithmic rate. These statistics not only demonstrate the present (absolute) growth of the new working class (the new, highly educated, technical state) but also demonstrates that the rate of growth in this direction is rapidly increasing. The powers of average offices become as infinitely divisible as money. Students, in that they will by and large constitute this new working class are becoming the most structurally relevant and necessary component of the productive processes of modern American capitalism. There is a student movement. Something is afoot on the nation's campuses. What can we do with it? The purpose of student confrontation is to force the administration to make 'blunders' which can be used to move students into action. Educational work, petition campaigns, dorm canvassing, films, rallies, demonstrations, a pie in the face of the director, a disruption  all are important in raising critical issues. Once the students are organized, connections are pointed out between campus issues and the revolutionary ideology. Questions concerning the nature of the university and society are asked, and we are present to supply some answers. In this manner, through radical education, we begin to build a movement including others like ourselves who better understand America.

    Radicals have the responsibility to explore the possibilities for the development of mass radical consciousness and attempt its organization among several Other groups in the society. For the activist concerned with organizing a massive opposition movement, draft counseling really has two purposes: to reach people and politicize them. We must not simply act and react (becoming slaves to spontaneity). We must build a movement which sees the draft as one part of its perspective, a movement which can alter our own political effectiveness by organization and strategy and our understanding by analysis and education, a movement which sees the draft in relation to both larger and smaller problems. At that point draft counseling becomes an effective tool for a resistance movement. The issue of the draft suggests a whole range of possibilities for direct action. The induction center is an ideal and logical focus for discussion, leafleting, picketing, rallies, teach ins, and general disruption. Furthermore, our experience has indicated that the point of pre induction physicals and/or induction is a time when inductees are most open and receptive to critical discussions of the draft, the war, and U.S. foreign policy in general. Draft resistance (among other issues) is certainly a relevant political program. Its implications, in forms of developing radical consciousness and reaching into vital constituencies go far beyond the issue of the war and the draft themselves.  We must learn how to organize the victims of the war around a program. We must encourage people whose distaste for military service has not been transferred to broader forms of political protest or acts of resistance to engage in those acts. Whether the military operates on or off the campus should not be the primary focus of our concern. What is more important is the kind of consciousness raised in the process of the struggle.

    Other battlefields we have chosen as organizers, and organizers of organizers, are the communities of the under America: cities and towns and rural spreads where people live materially deprived, politically alienated and used, and victimized by social and economic institutions beyond their comprehension and reach. Working with people around their own self interests is important because it creates consciousness and an understanding of power relationships. In addition to touching people's moral sensibilities, the issue should appeal to their self interests. The approach is one of helping people, with clothes, food, problems concerning the police, welfare, housing, employment or schools. At the same time, however, questions about the nature of problems, the structure and control of the society are raised. Organizers concentrate on specific issues or individual problems, in an effort to raise questions about the overall society, and in the hope that by helping people out they would start to trust the organization. Included in this organizing should be organizing of poor communities in terms of their own exploitation.  The poor know they are poor and don't like it. Hence they can be organized to demand an end to poverty and the construction of a decent social order. The idea is for radical organizers to create local movements of poor people by raising those issues most salient, dayto day, to the people concerned. As for the reputed marginality of slum institutions: it is not a question of which elements of the American system are central and which auxiliary, but a question of which elements are at this point in time most vulnerable to the movement� 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.

    We 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.

    The old methods of work and forms of action fail to capture the imaginations of the constituencies we are trying to reach. Why advocate an intermediate strategy, a transitional analysis of how we should fight? Primarily because of the character of the times. Should we continue demonstrations and teach ins? Organize the poor? Fight for student power? Organize within the working class? Resist the draft? Run radical candidates in the elections? Turn the hippies into Provos? The answer to all these questions is 'Yes.' (No little doubt remains that America needs to be fundamentally changed.) We need to move from protest to resistance, to dig in for the long haul; to become full time, radical, sustained, relevant. In short, we need to make a revolution.  Had we been organized along continuous lines since our beginning, we may not have lost 100,000 members over the years. With the political situation in America today we cannot afford to lose people because we do not treat their needs organizationally. On this point, at least, Mao is relevant to our movement. There can be no revolution without a revolutionary organization.  We should be leading large numbers of young people on the campuses and in the streets In struggles that focus on fighting for power.  If modern history demonstrates little else it is the absolute need for a broad, anti imperialist and anti racist organization of the radical left, a grouping which would develop a long�range strategy for taking power in America and would devise tactics within such a strategic context  tactics, needless to say, which would not always be dictated by the vicissitudes of the day.  Clearly the missing ingredient is a broad, radical organization which would include many thousands of individuals and some organizations of the left who are isolated or so fractured as to have no impact. The organization we have in mind would provide independent radicals with a base to work from, a grouping within which to find revolutionary relevance. Since we are far from the answers which must be attained before being in a position to say, 'we have the theory, the practice, the strategy, the tactic,' we do not envision a revolutionary party at this point But we can envision an anti imperialist, anti�capitalist organization, at first containing many already existing elements of the left, broadening to include a diversity of Americans  workers, students, blacks, minorities, the poor. Although it is hardly likely all independent radicals would fit comfortably into a multi issue movement, we are convinced a great many could do so with ease  and profit for the movement for revolutionary change. It should be understood that a resistance movement is by no means a coherent and consistent totality. It is not a revolutionary party, nor does it see itself as such. A resistance strategy would emphasize constituency organizing as a prior and transitional 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 stu�dent, poor, and/or working class communities.

    Should 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 fife 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   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?

    If we are serious about Power, we must recognize that organization is necessary not only to assist people, but to organize around and give political content to all the alternatives. �Style and methods of organizing must always flow out of ideology and political strategy. If we don't keep that clearly in mind, we'll tend toward reformism or mere populism. �New Left resistance federations in urban and regional� areas across the country would solve many of our problems of isolation, communication, coordination and the need for collective forms of work. One could find the discipline of collective work concurrently with the autonomy of a federated form. If certain organizers or their constituents find irrelevant or disagree with a certain program or action� on agreed on by others within the structure, they simply do not associate themselves with it Since the structure is transitional rather than permanent, the whole apparatus would at some time dissolve itself with many of its constituent parts forming the basis of a revolutionary party.  At this early stage, the organization exists primarily to exchange information between groups and individuals already engaged in organizing. Our eventual goal is to assist� in creating a revolutionary mass organization with a working class perspective which will at the appropriate time join with similar organizations to forge a revolutionary party in this country. To move toward this goal, we must form collectives organized around a revolu�tionary program and series of demands.  What kind of relationships should exist between the collectives? At first the relationship will involve little more than exchange of information and expert experience,� and perhaps some joint regional political activity when it seems useful. Eventually, however, the collectives should relate to each other on the basis of democratic centralism.

    I have tended to regard national demonstrations as relatively insignificant in comparison to the task of creating permanent local organization. I see us moving from strong local projects to regional structures to some kind of functional equivalent to a radical national party.  A new kind of organizer and a new kind of project must be supported: an or�ganizer who reinforces existing organizers,  a project the purpose of which is to serve exist�ing projects. There is a need for city, county, and regional institutions which create an atmosphere sensitive to the needs of organizers,� help them to break down their mutual isolation, enlarge the range of 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.

    It should be clear that the aim of the resistance strategy is to transform itself into a classconscious revolutionary socialist movement a state of things in which relationships become independent of individuals, in which the personal 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.

    Usually people who are brought political awareness initially through a confrontation with the System sink into political inactivity because there is no organization into which they can be integrated which has a total analysis of Amer�ica. The further an individual's daily activity is removed from society's productive forces, the less the individual's response depends on the level of development of the productive forces, the more it depends on organization, leadership and ideology.  The left cannot effectively operate without a coherent ideology capable of explaining our own country. From this ideology should flow a program of action to build a constituency capable of forming an alliance with the most radical sections. �The degree of unified class consciousness among the oppressed necessary for engaging in organizing efforts based on a revolutionary class analysis does not yet exist. The antiimperialist organization we envision would see as one of its major functions the development of radical political consciousness on a broad scale. This means that independent radical forces would have to deal with socialist political theory and elevate theory to the respectable position to which it is entitled. Without a theory of social change events are perceived in a vacuum, unrelated to other events.  The socialist movement must struggle against those things that continue to divide the proletariat.  Who are our friends and who are our enemies? This is the question of fundamental importance to the revolution.  What is needed is a theory of imperialism.  It is part of the genius of a great leader to make adversaries of different fields appear as always belonging to one category only, because to weak and unstable characters the knowledge that there are various enemies will lead only too easily to incipient doubts as to their own cause.  Proceeding from this assumption, the logical starting point for any discussion of American foreign policy is the classical Marxist interpretation of imperialism, as formulated by Lenin in 1916.  The principal contradiction in the world today is that between U.S. imperialism and the nations it oppresses.  The name of the system we live within is imperialistic monopoly capitalism. We have labeled the official rhetoric of that system 'corporate liberalism.'  U.S. imperialistic ventures have served to radicalize the dissenters.  It is essential to translate 'anti draft consciousness' into an understanding of the social and political manifestations of imperialism.  The function of a revolutionary in a prerevolutionary period is to move people into action, to raise their revolutionary and class consciousness, to move them into new forms of action based on a new consciousness.  For to lead means: to be able to move masses.  Here we need to be clear: dogmatism is not a matter of rigidly and aggressively fighting for a particular political analysis or position.  The efficiency of the truly national leader consists primarily in preventing the division of the attention of a people, and always in concentrating it on a single enemy.  This is both necessary and often helpful in developing a correct understanding of contested political problems within a mass organization.  The basebuilding approach argues that before militant action can be taken, lots of educational work and organizing should be done to get the majority on our side. Then we should hit hard.  The more uniformly the fighting will of a people is put into action, the greater will be the magnetic force of the movement and the more powerful the impetus of the blow.

    Unless the movement seeks to elevate the political consciousness of the mass of its supporters, it faces the continual danger of the withering away of numbers when the moral basis of protest has been undermined.  If a movement has the intention of pulling down a world and of building a new one in its place, then there must be absolute clarity about the following points in the ranks of its own leaders: Every movement, at first, will have to divide the human material it has won into two great groups: into followers and members.  The central theoretical task of revolutionary collectives is to analyze the economic and political status of U.S. classes and their attitudes toward the revolution.  If a significant movement is to be built it must be around a coalition large enough, at least in theory, to contest for political power. Every group of potential allies should be explored. Programs of action should be developed to facilitate connections between the various components, including the poor, when they become sufficiently conscious to engage in explicitly political action.  The key to social change in America is a concrete examination of the forms of oppression which are specific to this country.  Because the goals of a socialist movement in advanced industrial capitalism are to redefine the purpose of production, to develop new social relations, they require deep understanding of the needs of various sectors of the proletariat.

    The job of radicals is to find leaders, and help make them radical.  The task of propaganda is to attract followers,  the task of organization to win members.  These should accept a collective discipline, carry out criticism and self criticism of their political work, and apply the most advanced revolutionary concepts to all their common efforts.  A follower of a movement is one who declares himself in agreement with its aims; a member is one who fights for it. As followership demands only a passive appreciation of an idea, while membership demands an active presentation and defense, there will be ten followers for every one or two members at most. The follower is inclined to like a movement by its propaganda. The member is induced by the organization to help personally towards acquiring new followers who then, in turn, can be trained to become members.  The new role is made explicit by calling for members to develop themselves as organizers of a mass movement for change.  Therefore propaganda will have to see to it that untiringly an idea wins followers, while the organization has to watch most sharply that from the followers only the most valuable ones are made members.  The members have to develop a greater political consciousness and sophistication if they are to help provide leadership to the movement.  By doing this, we hope to move toward the development of a revolutionary party. We encourage revolutionaries in other areas to build collectives for this purpose.

    The antitheoretical and pragmatic period of the movement's development the idea of libertarian socialism which requires small, autonomous councils 'doing their own thing' without centralized controls has ended. During that time many organizers believed that revolutionary theory would 'grow out of' practical struggles.  Those projects that remain and go forward are no longer experimental 'projects' but organizations with roots in their communities, a substantial measure of local support, and a fairly stable kernel of hard core community people who share a radical analysis with the ex�students.  Mass meetings provide a place for new people to come and be organized (initially, at least) into cells. A second place for organizing new people and providing a positive presence are external educational meetings which deal with a wide range of subjects.  The answers constitute ammunition.  Most of the speakers need money for travel expenses and some want honorariums. These needs are created by the level of development of the productive forces and by the form of the social relations. In specific instances the weight of the productive forces or the social relations in conditioning an individual's needs depends on the individual's daily activity within the social division of labor. Don't be turned off by these facts. It is not difficult to get most schools to pay honorariums to speakers sponsored by campus groups, so don't be hesitant in asking. At any speech, large audience or small, someone should pass the hat.  For as soon as the distribution of labor comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, 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.

    Organizing 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 a base  and theory as pre requisite for both. Without such 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 into practice. The ideological officials are not as efficient as they were thought to be. The ideological superstructure loses contact with its base.  One of the challenges to organizers is how the enormous energy and numbers of people who are opposed to the war can be directed towards building organization which has permanency, power end radical posture.  About majority support: We need to analyze comparatively the resistance movements which took power.  The next historical stage which develops in the next 5 to 10 years out of what will be a blossoming movement at that time is the necessity to move from a Protest to a new Political Party. A party that completely severs from the two capitalist parties and provides a socialist alternative to the American scene. At this point we should not just confine ourselves to talk of building a movement  but also of integrating this with our perspective of building a party which will give meaning and coherence to the grassroots organizing we must do day by day. It is important that we begin to talk in terms of 5, 10, 15 years because that is the time and energy it will take to build a revolutionary movement and socialist political party able to take power in America.  We have begun to reach a period when this can be done only with coordinated, national, cadre organization. �In such a movement, the hard, unromantic work of organizing people as radicals would become as important as periodic demonstrations. Members of this movement would define themselves as organizers  whether on the job, in schools, the army or communities.  Propaganda, therefore, needs not to rack its brain about the importance of each individual it enlightens, about his ability, achievements, and understanding of his character, while the organization has most carefully to collect from the masses of these elements those who really make possible the victory of the movement  In a sense, we are at the beginning of a new era; we are changing from a militant minority to a political force drawing its strength from a variety of social groups.  It is increasingly clear that to make the revolution we must share the socialist goal of developing a shared revolutionary consciousness and a sustained movement (organization) embodying that consciousness.

    Participatory democracy is no solution for the problems of a large, complex society. Democratic assemblies are particularly ill equipped to receive and utilize complex information in an efficient or even useful way.  While we oppose anarchism ideologically, and consider that, all in all, it does a disservice to the revolution and objectively aids the enemy, we are not alarmed by it. It has picked up no base in the working class, so that its harm is minimized. And even in the student movement, most activists are past that stage, and are searching for concrete answers to what they recognize as the protracted nature of the struggle. The healthy development of the movement over the last decade indicates the growing capability to overcome error and, through struggle, achieve a more correct strategy and tactics, and a higher level of theory.  If the small and scattered movement of today can become a mass revolutionary party, unity between the best elements of Old and New Left is ultimately assured.  It is no surprise that there is a great deal of romantic anti leadership sentiment, though the majority consistently vote for a national organization with a national program and leadership.  People have a pretty good idea of some of the things they want, but whether they are willing to work out the means to achieve their ends is another matter altogether, especially if it becomes apparent that they can be assisted by people more knowledgeable and experienced than themselves.  Hence the need for delegation, for the system in which delegates represent the mass and carry out its will.  Most people at most times are willing to delegate authority to someone who they believe shares their views and who is competent at putting them into practice.  The failure of the left in the last 100 years to unite the majority of the population in a successful struggle for socialism and the success of the capitalist class in maintaining its power and extending its ideological hegemony have been due to the errors of socialist leadership and to the powerful resources and cleverness of the ruling leadership.  The fact that we have often had irresponsible political leadership is not necessarily an adequate reason for attacking the idea of leadership itself.  The leadership is represented by the central committee (or steering committee) which is formed by electing one member of each cell to the committee. The Central Committee has two primary tasks: first, to function as a decision making body in emergency situations and to serve as an information channeling center between cells. The coordinating function gives continuity to cell operation. In some cases, it may be the Central Committee's task to suggest things for cells to do, like catching up with other cells. The decision making process within the cell structure would probably best be named participatory democratic centralism.

    In a polemic against Proudhon, Louis Blanc asked whether it is possible for millions of human beings to carry on their affairs without accepting what the pettiest man of business finds necessary, the intermediation of representatives. He answered his own question by saying that one who declares direct action on this scale to be possible is a fool, and that one who denies its possibility need not be an absolute opponent of the idea of the state.  If we took seriously the task of imagining how we, had we the power, would manufacture automobiles and settle priorities concerning allocation of resources and synthesize local and national decision making, I believe it would help us find our way through current organizational dilemmas. And it might just help to persuade other Americans that we are capable of governing.  We are now a major campaign issue and we must see ourselves accordingly.  Leadership articulates the goals of the revolution, the methods by which those goals will be attained, while at the same time embodying the ideals of the revolution itself.  What would be the meaning of all leader genius and of all leader impetus unless the brainy theorist were to establish the goals for the human struggle? The combination of theorist, organizer, and leader in one person is the rarest thing to be found on this globe; this combination makes the great man.  A revolution cannot surpass the quality of its leadership.  The most sublime theoretical insight has no value and no purpose unless the leader moves the masses towards it  Those upon whom the revolutionary leadership falls assume an awesome responsibility. The office of the leader is experienced as a personal power, particularly the entire magnitude of the organization is personified by the leader.  The words and actions of the revolutionary leader must always advance the revolutionary consciousness and revolutionary effectiveness of the people. As the organization grows, its history becomes less the history of anarchic rebellion, and more the familiar history of the party and the leader.  To coin a phrase, 'our day will come.' But it will only come when a great amount of the population see us and themselves as part of a serious alternative to existing American institutions. That will be our second coming. One of the key problems of a revolutionary movement in a situation that at best is pre revolutionary becomes that of our rhetoric versus the reality that we are nowhere near taking power anywhere. (Not to mention united goals, strategy and tactics.)  We speak as a new American left, committed to the achievement of political power in our time. We seek political power so that men may at last prevail over the arrangements of society in which a few control the destinies of all.

    An organization of socialist intellectuals is historically incomplete. By right it should be a section of a party in alliance with other forces including working class organizations. The or�ganization must represent not only the power of community, but also productive power, living creative energy.  Our base is so small that all working people must be considered potential allies.  Although there are individuals and groups in the United States playing a revolutionary role, there is no revolutionary party which actually has its base among working people.  The most valuable lesson for us is that our real allies will always be in the rank and file, and among the unorganized workers. Committed to a Marxist position, we should give ourselves all the room possible to make our developing ideology responsive to the needs of the people.  We come on hard about our politics, telling guys that the organization is interested in workers taking power, the right of workers to control the production process of the state.  Power comes to the people when we have done our work to get the people ready to take it.  It is therefore the primary revolutionary duty of the people of the U.S. to build a militant united front against U.S. imperialism. The main force and leader of the united front must be the working class.  We will never be able to destroy U.S. imperialism unless the proletariat is brought solidly into the anti imperialist movement  We grant that their condition will have to deteriorate much farther before that will happen on a large scale, but we must be laying the political groundwork now for that possibility if it is ever to be actualized. LEARN FROM THE PEOPLE, SERVE THE PEOPLE, BECOME ONE WITH THE PEOPLE.

    We will build a socialist U.S.A., with all power in the hands of the working people and their allies; build a revolutionary organization with the participation and support of millions of working men and women as well as those students, artists and intellectuals who will join with the working class to end the profit system.  Marx and Lenin both contended that working class consciousness was measured by the degree of hegemony of revolutionary socialist parties over the majority of workers.  The working class is absolutely necessary in order seriously to challenge capitalist power. Recognizing just how far this class is from political consciousness, it would seem wise first to develop a base among constituents already in motion.  We think it necessary for individuals with a revolutionary perspective to form collectives which link up with working people and serve their class interests.  The opportunity is that we will see that the liberation movement has succeeded in infusing its energy into the labor movement, and has thus created a force in embryo which, if we understand how to relate to it, can serve as the real base for the transformation of the character of the whole Labor movement in our country, an indispensable prerequisite for making the Revolution.  Although our work is with the working class, we recognize the crucial importance of a revolutionary student movement and of linking this movement up with the working class. Our experience has shown that this can be done and that far from retarding the development of revolutionary struggle and ideology among workers, it can help to push that development forward.  Just as on campus we must do the hard work of base building, so radicals in factories will develop an anti imperialist base through day to day struggles. The point is to develop a student movement rooted in struggles against the ways Imperialism oppresses students, increasingly pro working class, more and more consciously allied with workers in a struggle.  The student movement is in a position to begin carrying anti�imperialist ideology to the working class.  On the job organizing begins in a variety of ways. Some organizers simply take jobs in strategically chosen factories. Once on the job, among the blue collar industrial working class, they work to engage themselves in and eventually lead struggles.  Yet going into the shops requires discipline, a strong sense of goals, and adjustment to boring, repetitive and often dangerous work.  It would be foolish to expect that workers will be open to the same actions which attracted middle class college hippies, but their interests can be made into political issues.  Working class youth do not have the options of dropping out of work or of remaining permanent students. But if they can be socialized into a new ideology, the makings of a radical industrial working class is both theoretically and practically possible.  If nothing else is gained, many workers learn to respect the students. Out of wildcats emerges a cadre of revolutionary workers who see their role as organizers laying the ground work for a mass based working class movement.  Bringing young working people into the new left would change the 'middle class' character of the movement. This expanded and more classconscious movement could then be a critical political force, not only on the campus but in the community and trade union struggles as well.  A few categories change. Very few activists talk about organizing 'the poor.' The discussion shifts to 'the working class' (or 'the underclass/ the unemployed or underemployed sector of the working class). The term 'middle class' likewise becomes taboo and is replaced by a variety of conceptual categories such as 'new working class,' 'university trained workers' and 'radicals in the professions.'

    As with all institutions in class society, the class that holds state power determines the nature of that institution. We want to lead workers and their allies in overthrowing the bourgeois state that controls, exploits, and takes our people's lives, and we say so openly. We want socialist revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat in order to destroy and bury imperialism.  True revolution in America is concerned with running this country and having programs to turn over the wealth and resources of the U.S. to the creative energies of the masses of the people. And until we are able to see ourselves, or some of us, governing this nation and having the capacity and the skills to do it, then no one else will either. As a form of personified power, the Movement finds it necessary to reconstitute the personified power of community, the State, and to magnify this power by enriching it with productive power.  Many are becoming conscious of the need to transform the protest movement into a revolutionary movement  a movement that would be more than a thorn in the side of the ruling class,  a movement capable of destroying that class and creating a new society,  a movement that is not primitive, fragmented and directionless, but one guided by a revolutionary party based on Marxist/�Leninist principles.  Marxist Leninist principles are phrases laden with the historical experience of revolutionary parties based on Marxist Leninist principles. These principles do not belong to the period when scientific communism was being evolved, the period when Marx wrote his works on alienation, division of labor, commodity production and ideology, the period when Marx wrote that "the conditions of life which different generations find in existence decide whether or not the periodically recurring revolutionary convulsion will be strong enough to overthrow the basis of the entire existing system. And if these material elements of a complete revolution are not present (namely, on the one hand, the existing productive forces, on the other the formation of a revolutionary mass which revolts not only against separate conditions of society up till then but against the very 'production of life' till then, the 'total activity' on which it was based), then, as far as practical development is concerned, it is absolutely immaterial whether the idea of this revolution has been expressed a hundred times already, as the history of communism proves." These early works only represent an important stage in the development of the philosophical and theoretical foundations of the Marxist party,� they come before the fully mature works of Marx and Engels. The Marxist Leninist principles are based exclusively on the fully mature works, which treat Imperialism as the Last Stage of Capitalism, which deal with Revolutionary Ideology, and which point out the necessity and historic inevitability of the party's seizure of state power. These fully mature works are the source of the phrases laden with historical experience that constitute Marxism Leninism; they provide the foundation for the insight that  conditions are never premature for a revolutionary party, if it has the right political and organizational strategy.  These conditions for the development of a revolutionary party in this country are the main 'conditions' for winning.  A popular radical party should be organized in this country with a distinct anti imperialist and anticapitalist� point�� of view.

    As the peoples of the world increasingly seize the initiative in their global confrontation with U.S. imperialism, the ability of monopoly capitalism to resolve Its contradictions with the U.S. working class becomes progressively limited, setting the stage for the seizure of state power by the working class.  Perhaps the central problem of Marxists in the 20th century, from Lenin's time to the present, is how to make a revolution when the historical Marxist revolutionary force, the working class, is clearly not a revolutionary agent  There could not yet be revolutionary consciousness among the workers. This consciousness could only be brought to them from without. The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness.  Look at organized labor: it is still a force in the society, although probably a reactionary one.  We cannot end racism, capitalism, colonialism and imperialism unless state power is In the hands of those people who understand that the wealth, the total wealth of any country and the world, belongs to all people. Those who understand can speak for and decide for the entire community only when the state is accepted as the equivalent of the community.  Unless liberation movements from the very beginning are dedicated to socialist principles or evolve into movements with socialist principles while the fighting is going on, we cannot assume that those who fight will assume state power and implement decisions that appropriate the wealth of countries for the entire people.

    The control and use of the wealth of the Em�pire for the people of the whole world is also in the interests of the vast majority of the people in this country.  The most important aspect to grasp and grasp firmly is the VAN�GUARD ROLE played by oppressed peoples in general and the most oppressed sectors of the international working class in particular. The principal contradiction in the world today is that between U.S. imperialism and the nations it oppresses. The sharpest blows against U.S. imperialism are being dealt by the nationally oppressed peoples of Asia, Africa, Latin America and within the U.S.  The Liberation Fronts are a vanguard force that is leading this struggle. The role of others is to join with the vanguard.  It is possible and necessary to build an anti imperialist, working class movement in the mother country,, a movement that allies with and provides material aid to all oppressed people of the world.  The main task for our organization is to unite the struggles of oppressed and exploited people. The anti imperialist movement must serve the people. Only in this way can we bring the mass of people in this country to oppose U.S. aggression and fascist repres�sion.  The struggle for women's liberation represents a major and integral part of the overall movement for the defeat of U.S. monopoly capitalism and its replacement by a socialist America. Within the revolutionary movement, the women's liberation struggle will be led by working women.  Combine this with the special oppression of black and brown women, the relation of their oppression to the oppression of white women and whether a 'united front of all women' can be formed. First, while all women are oppressed by all men, cutting across class and national lines, the principal oppression of black and brown women is their oppression as black or brown people. Thus, before there can be unity among all women, black, brown and white, in the struggle against male supremacy, white women have to establish as a first principle of unity the struggle against white supremacy and the repudiation of the white skin priv�ilege.  And more. We must build struggles not only because they are the way to build our own movement, but also because they are the only concrete way to relate to the vanguard struggles of black and brown people in this country, and of colonized people throughout the world.

    The sharpest struggles in the world today are those of the oppressed nations against imperialism and for national liberation. A nation is an irreducible plural. The liberation of a nation is a known social relation. Within this country the sharpest struggle is that of the colony for its liberation, it is a struggle which by its very nature is anti imperialist and increasingly anticapitalist. Within the liberation movement the vanguard force is the Party. Its development of an essentially correct program for the community, and its ability to organize around this program has brought it to this leadership. The fundamental reason for the success of the Party is that it has a correct analysis of American society.  The power of wealth will thus be overthrown and replaced by the power of the people, led by the working class, led by a Marxist Leninist revolutionary party.

    UNITE WITH REAL FRIENDS AGAINST REAL ENEMIES!

    U.S. GET OUT OF THE COLONY, RECOGNIZE THE PARTY!

    END FASCIST REPRESSION OF THE OPPRESSED COMMUNITIES!

    FREE ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS!

    SUPPORT FOR LIBERATION!

    FREE THE LEADER AND ALL POLITICAL PRISONERSI

    NO MORE SURTAX!

    INDEPENDENCE FOR THE COLONY!

    SOLIDARITY WITH THE CONSPIRACY 8!

    LEARN FROM THE PEOPLE,

    SERVE THE PEOPLE,

    BECOME ONE WITH THE PEOPLE!

    As Lenin writes, a revolutionary party can be formed as soon as a revolutionary line has been developed. But not before. The time has come for conscious application of energy toward the development of that line. Now. Without it, the despair of many in the movement will increasingly be felt in the separation of politics from struggle. Militancy without politics will move us away from the conscious direction of our movement  To have a unified centralized organization it is necessary to have a common revolutionary theory which explains, at least generally, the nature of our revolutionary tasks and how to accomplish them. It must be a set of ideas which have been� tested� and developed in the practice of resolving the important contradictions in our work. In order for this fighting force to grow from an agitational movement to a movement capable of destroying imperialism, it is essential that the movement develop an international ideology which holds as its essential principles the fight against anti communism, the fight against white supremacy and male supremacy, and the fight for the key role of the proletariat. One of the most glaring deficiencies is the gulf between leadership and membership, a circumstance which creates a danger that even if a theoretically correct revolutionary communist ideology is developed on the national level, there may be no membership to put it into practice.  Putting forward our politics in an aggressive way is the ONLY way to organize the masses of people in this country. Only by challenging the consciousness of the people could we ever develop a movement capable of helping topple the imperialist state.  The most striking success of the revolution of a view of life will always be won whenever the new view of life is, if possible, taught to all people, and, if necessary, is later forced upon them. In every really great revolu�tionary movement propaganda will first have to spread the idea of this movement. That means, it will untiringly try to make clear to the others the new train of thought, to draw them over to its own ground, or at least to make them doubtful of their own previous conviction. Since the propagation of a doctrine  that means this propaganda  has to have a backbone, the doctrine will have to give itself a solid organization. The organization receives its members from the followers in general won by propaganda. The latter will grow the more quickly, the more intensively propaganda is carried out, and the latter in turn is able to work the better, the stronger and the more vigorous the organization is that stands behind it.  In addition to exchanging information, the organization will focus on two areas: study and action. A steering committee prepares a reading list and several study plans for use as each area needs focusing on the works of Marx, Lenin and Mao.  'Politics'  revolutionary socialist politics  becomes a question of using the right words. It is not enough that one be outraged and passionate and effective: one must also cite the correct texts.

    Ideologies, whether bourgeois or proletarian, serve the interests of their respective classes, but that is as far as the similarity goes. Proletarian ideology, Marxism Leninism, is true social science; it is both partisan and, at the same time, an objective, true reflection of the real social process. It cannot become a new exploiting class, and it has, therefore, no interests which are ultimately directed against any section of society. Its ideology must be 'objectively true' or it cannot liberate itself.  Hereby the following realization must never leave us: since the so called program of the movement is certainly absolutely correct in its final aims, but as in its formulation it had to take psychological momenta into consideration, there can well arise, in the course of time, the conviction that in individual instances perhaps certain leading propositions should be framed differently, or should receive a better formulation. But every attempt in this direction has, in most cases, catastrophic effects. For thereby something that should stand unshakably firm is given free to discussion which, once a single point is deprived of its faithful, dogmatic determination, does not result immediately in a new, better, and above all a uniform determination, but which will rather lead to never ending debates and to general confusion. In such a case there remains always the reflection of what is better: a new, more fortunate formulation which causes a dispute within the movement, or a form which at the moment is perhaps not the best one, but presents an organism that in itself is complete, unshakable and entirely uniform. Every examination will show that the latter is preferable. �You cannot eliminate even one basic assumption, one substantial part of this philosophy of Marxism (it is as if it were a solid block of steel) without abandoning objective truth, without falling into the arms of the bourgeois reactionary falsehood.  With a doctrine that in great lines is actually correct, it� is less harmful to retain a formulation, even if in reality it were no longer quite up to date, than to deliver, by its correction, to general discussion and all its most evil consequences, a principle of the movement that so far has been looked upon as made of granite. This is impossible above all as long as the movement itself is still fighting for victory. For how does one think to fill people with blind faith in the correctness of a doctrine if by continued changes in its outward construction one spreads uncertainty and doubt? This is the secret of philosophical language, in which thoughts in the form of words have their own content. The point here is not that the vanguard shall realize the impossibility of preserving the old order of things and the inevitability of its overthrow. The point is that the masses, the millions, shall understand this inevitability. But the masses can understand this only from their own experience.  Therefore, if, in order to lead a view of life to victory, we have to transform it into a fighting movement, the program of the movement has logically to consider the human material that it has at its disposal. As immovable as the final aims and the leading ideas must be, just as ingenious and psychologically correct must the method be, by which the propaganda program is orientated at the souls of those without whose help the most sublime idea would forever remain only an idea. If the people's idea wants to proceed to a clear success from the unclear intentions of today, then it has to single out certain leading principles from its large world of thought, principles which, according to their nature and contents, are suitable for obligating a broad mass of people, namely, that mass which alone guarantees the fight for this idea. This is the mass of workers.

    We must build a movement oriented toward power. Revolution is a power struggle, and we must develop that understanding among people from the beginning. A major focus in our work is the pigs, because they tie together the various struggles around the state as the enemy, and thus point to the need for a movement oriented toward power to defeat it.  For this reason, the program of the movement is summed up in a few articles. They are destined primarily to give the man in the street a rough picture of the movement's intentions. They are in a way of speaking a political creed which on the one hand campaigns for the movement and which on the other hand is suited for uniting and welding together those who have been attracted by a generally acknowledged obligation.  The task is to enable the vast masses to realize from their own experience the inevitability of the overthrow of the old regime, to promote such 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.

    It 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 therewith disappears also personality and sense of responsibility. �Personi�fications of social power seem to animate the world. Only expected, official activity is experienced as real activity. The unofficial projects of an individual human being seem to happen in a social vacuum, cut off from the real life of humanity; they are experienced as empty Intervals of inactivity. Estranged power is experienced as the only real community. Personified power is internalized as the only form of human power.  The mass meeting is necessary if only for the reason that in it the individual, who in becoming an adherent to a new movement feels lonely and is easily seized with the fear of being alone, receives for the first time the picture of a greater community, something that has a strengthening and encouraging effect on most people. The same man, in the frame of a company or a battalion, surrounded by all his comrades, would set out on an attack with a lighter heart than he would if left entirely to himself. In the crowd he always feels a little sheltered even if in reality a thousand reasons would speak against it. The community of the great demonstration, however, strengthens not only the individual, but it also unites and helps in creating esprit de corps. The man who, as the first representative of a new doctrine, is exposed to serious oppression in his enterprise or his workshop, urgently needs that strengthening that lies in the conviction of being a member and a fighter of a great embracing body. But he only received the impression of this corporation at the first common mass demonstration. If he steps for the first time out of his small workshop or out of the big enterprise, in which he feels very small, into the mass meeting and is now surrounded by thousands and thousands of people with the same conviction, if while looking around he is carried away by the powerful effect of the suggestive intoxication and the enthusiasm of three or four thousand others, if the visible success and the approval of thousands confirm the correctness of the new doctrine in his mind and waken for the first time the doubt about the truth of his previous conviction  then he himself succumbs to the magic influence of what we call mass suggestion. The will, the longing, but also the force of thousands accumulates in every individual. The man who comes to such a meeting doubting and hesitating, leaves it confirmed in his mind: he has become the member of a community.  When an organization is rooted in the needs of the people, attacks on that organization or on its leaders are understood and resisted as a more visible form of the daily oppression of the entire people.  Thus the mass defense of the Party can be viewed as an opportunity to unite fragments around support of the group which is in the vanguard.  As the movement recognizes the enemy and the serious terms of the struggle, we view our own defense as part of the people's defense  a fight for survival.  We continue to speak about repression on and exploitation, all the time relating that back to Me repression of the Party and oppression of the people. Repression, thus, can be turned around and used as an offense, as, for example, in the slogan: FREE THE 21, JAIL THE REAL CRIMINALS.  People understand the symbolism in the attack and identify with it because of their own desires, often latent, to strike back. This is in symbolic miniature form the dynamic of militant action by a vanguard and then mass identification. It is not a hallucination but a fact of modern life that individuals relate to each other and to the material environment through the mediation of personified powers.  It becomes clear that setbacks to the vanguard are tremendous setbacks to the people's movement as a whole.

    There is a burning need for a revolutionary socialist party which has absorbed the key lessons.  The fundamental political question of the day is: which class is to hold state power, how is it to achieve it, and what ideology will guarantee victory.  There is a general consen�sus amongst us that what comes next is the creation of a functional equivalent to a revolutionary party, or to say the same thing differently, the creation of a long term strategy for achieving a socialist America which disciplines and coordinates the work of individuals and local groups.  We must take seriously the job of helping to build the party which both represents the interests of the proletariat and has a mass base among the proletariat  a governmental party, that is to say, a party which, organized itself like a government on a small scale, hopes some day to assume the reins of government upon the large scale. The revolutionary political party is a state within the state, pursuing the avowed aim of destroying the existing� state in order to substitute for it a social order of a fundamentally different character.  The primary reason for such an organization is our responsibility as radicals and as revolutionaries to organize for the overthrow of the capitalist system and to replace capitalism with a socialist system.

    We recognize the need for organized armed struggle against the power of the state, and assume the responsibilities of revolutionaries in the preparation of that struggle.  The movement can play a role in the development of the party by fighting anti communism, developing communist ideology, and taking communist ideology to the mass of the people. �The people must be armed, organized and under the direction of a revolutionary party serving the working class.  The Movement must lead to the effective organization needed to survive and to create another battlefield of the revolution. A revolution is a war; when the movement in this country can defend itself militarily against total repression it will be part of the revolutionary war.  Out of this movement, revolutionary cadre must develop which will aid the development of the vanguard party necessary to lead the struggle for socialism.  This will require a cadre organization, effective secrecy, self reliance among the cadres, and an integrated relationship with the active mass based movement. Most important, there must be the same revolutionary mass base mentioned earlier, or (better) revolutionary mass movement. It is clear that without this there can't be the practical experience to know whether or not a theory, or a leader, is any good at all. Without practical revolutionary activity on a mass scale the party could not test and develop new ideas and draw conclusions with enough surety behind them to consistently base its survival on them. Especially, no revolutionary party could possibly survive without relying on the active support and participation of masses of people.  The revolutionary principle must be that the majority of the American people can be won to the revolution  not suddenly, but if they can be brought to see an alternative to their layers of privilege.  Propaganda tries to force a doctrine upon an entire people; organization embraces in its frame only those who for psychological reasons do not threaten to become a brake to a further spreading of the idea. Propaganda works on the community in the sense of an idea and it makes it ripe for the time of the victory of this idea, while the organization conquers victory by the permanent, organic and fighting union of those followers who appear able and willing to lead the fight for victory.� That principle must not be obscured by a smug and incredibly elitist assumption that the movement is already the revolution  an assumption which contains contempt for the people who are presumably to fight a people's war.  When propaganda has filled a whole people with an idea, the organization, with the help of a handful of people, can draw the consequences.

    In carrying out propaganda and trying to move the struggle to a higher level we are guided� by Mao's strategic advice: The masses in any given place are generally composed of three parts, the relatively active, the intermediate, and the relatively backward.  Great respect must be paid, not only to new members, but also to possible adherents, to those who in Germany are termed mitlaufer, in Italy simpatizzanti, in Holland geestverwanten, and in England sympathizers.  The leaders must therefore be skilled in uniting the small number of active elements around the leadership and must rely on them to raise the level of the intermediate elements and to win over the backward elements.  Propaganda and organization  that means followers and members  have thus a definite mutual relationship. The better propaganda has been working, the smaller may be the organization, and the greater the number of followers is, the more modest can be the number of members, and vice versa: the worse propaganda is, the greater must and will be the organization, and the smaller the host of followers of a movement remains, the greater must be the number of members, if it still wishes to count on success at all.  Our strategy is to carry on propaganda that will help unite the greatest number of forces against imperialist companies, while at the same time, appealing especially to the more advanced workers.  The first task of propaganda is the winning of people for the future organization; the first task of the organization is the winning of people for the continuation of propaganda.  The task of revolutionaries is twofold: spread the anti imperialist movement to the working class, and develop Marxist Leninist cadre who can integrate with the most exploited sector of the working class, the industrial proletariat. In both these ways, the movement can aid in the development of a revolutionary united front against imperialism, led by the working class, and of a vanguard Party based on the most oppressed and exploited.  The second task of propaganda is the destruction of the existing condition and the permeation of this condition with the new doctrine, while the second task of the organization must be the fight for power, so that by it, it will achieve the final success of the doctrine.  This will involve organizers consciously organizing among the lowest tracked. It will involve organizers consciously developing bases in communities. And it will involve disciplined cadre entering the armed forces and work places as organizers.  The victory of an idea will be the more possible the more extensively propaganda works on the people in their entirety, and the more exclusive, the stricter, and stiffer the organization is which carries out the fight in practice. From this ensues the fact that the number of followers cannot be too great, whereas the number of members can more easily be too large than too small.  Real revolutionaries have a sense of true discipline combined with gentleness and enormous toughness. They are about a revolution which can give more of what is noble to their people. This call to a sense of honor and to the highest moral principles is the source of their invincible strength.  The followership is rooted only in recognition membership, in the courage to present personally, and to spread further what has been recognized. Recognition in its passive form corresponds to the majority of humankind, which is inert and cowardly. Membership requires an effective mind and thus corresponds only to the minority of men.  Thus the strategy of the Movement for developing an active mass base, tying the city wide fights to community and city wide anti pig movement, and for building a party eventually out of this motion, fits with the winning the revolution, builds a movement world strategy for oriented toward power, and becomes one division of the International Liberation Army, while its battlefields are added to those which will dismember and dispose of U.S. Imperialism. LONG LIVE THE VICTORY OF PEOPLE'S WAR!

    It has been remarked that in the lower stages of civilization tyranny is dominant. Freedoms and privileges, and among these latter the privilege of taking part in the direction of public affairs, are at first restricted to the few. Democracy cannot come into existence until there is attained a subsequent and more highly developed stage of social life. Recent times have been characterized by the gradual extension of these privileges to a widening circle. This is what we know as the era of democracy.  Originally the chief is merely the servant of the mass:  We are camels to be ridden upon by the people.'  The organization is based upon the absolute equality of all its members. At the outset, the attempt is made to depart as little as possible from pure democracy by subordinating the delegates altogether to the will of the mass, by tying them hand and foot:  Why do you come to us? Why don't you ask the people? They're the ones that are making this movement. We can�t speak for them.'  Nominally, and according to the letter of the rules, all the acts of the leaders are subject to the ever vigilant criticism of the rank and file:  'The revolutionary collective serves the working people: both their immediate and long term interests, it does this by linking up with them, learning from them, fighting in their ranks for better conditions or in resistance to an attack upon them.'  But in actual fact, as the organization increases in size, this control becomes purely fictitious.  In working with these guys, and with the workers as a whole, we try to keep in mind Mao's basic instruction on how to become one with the people without getting lost among them. �We may observe that as democracy continues to develop, a backwash sets in. With the advance of organization  by helping to develop a more advanced revolutionary theory for the advancement of the struggle to a higher stage  democracy tends to decline. Democratic evolution has a parabolic course. At the present time, at any rate as far as party life is concerned, democracy is in the descending phase.  To win a war with an enemy as highly organized and centralized as the imperialists requires a (clandestine) organization of revolutionaries, having also a unified general staff, that is, combined with discipline under one centralized leadership.  Thus the leaders, who were at first no more than the executive organs of the collective will, soon emancipate themselves from the mass and become independent of its control.  There is one enemy, monopoly capitalism, and to defeat it we need a unified �general staff�.  It is indisputable that this is a matter of technical and practical necessity. It is the inevitable product of the very principle of organization. Not even the most radical wing of the various socialist parties raises any objection to this evolution, the contention being that democracy is only a form of organization and that where it ceases to be possible to harmonize democracy with organization, it is better to abandon the former than the latter. Organization, since it is the only means of attaining the ends of socialism, is considered to comprise within itself the revolutionary content of the party, and this essential content must never be sacrificed for the sake of form.  It may be enunciated as a general rule that the increase in the power of the leaders is directly proportional with the extension of the organization.

    The principle of division of labor coming more and more into operation, executive authority undergoes division and subdivision. There is thus constituted a rigorously defined organization. The individual becomes a more or less efficient instrument of the organization.  The army itself is the working class, defined in terms appropriate to advanced industrial society. This class alone has the power to transform this society. The key to its organization is the party, which represents the ideological alternative to capitalism.  In this way there is constructed a powerful and complicated edifice.  Initiative and capacity for decision thus become what may be called a professional specialty, whilst for the rank and file is left the passive virtue of discipline.  The strength of a political party lies by no means in a mentality, as great and as independent as possible, of the individual members, but rather in the disciplined obedience with which its members follow their intellectual leadership.  The ability of the working class of the U.S. to carry the struggle against U.S. imperialism through to the end and win its own freedom depends on its recognition that the U.S. is one thing and the nations oppressed by it are another, and its ability to link up its struggles with those of the oppressed peoples. The organization and its leaders become legitimate only when the authority of the organization is internalized by all other individuals.  The mechanism of the organization, while conferring a solidity of structure, induces serious changes in the organized mass, completely inverting the respective position of the leaders and the led. As a result of organization, every party or professional union becomes divided into a minority of directors and a majority of directed. As soon as individuals delegate their self powers to the organization, the individuals become instruments or media through which the powers of the organization are exercised.  The decisive factor is the leadership proper. If two bodies of troops baffle one another, not that will be victorious in which each individual received the highest strategic training, but that which has the most superior leaders and at the same time the best disciplined, blindly obedient, best drilled troop.  In order to establish this, U.S. workers must adopt as their own the slogan of the right to self determination for the nations oppressed by U.S. imperialism, which means the right to secession and the formation of an independent national state.  Correct strategy is based on an understanding of the class nature of this society; on an understanding that the sharpest struggles against the ruling class are being waged by the oppressed nations against U.S. imperialism, and that all our actions must flow from our identity as part of an international struggle against U.S. imperialism.  The Party will win and we will support whatever they want us to do. We owe them our best effort because as long as they fight they give us an example of the best and most passionate all over the earth.

    The technical specialization that inevitably results from all extensive organization renders necessary what is called expert leadership.  Because war is political, political tasks  the international communist revolution  �must guide it. Therefore the centralized organization of revolutionaries must be a political organization as well as military, what is generally called a 'Marxist Leninist' party.  Consequently the power of determination comes to be considered one of the specific attributes of leadership, and is gradually withdrawn from the masses to be concentrated in the hands of the leaders alone.  The Marxist Leninist Party is the general staff of the working class struggle. The individuals who occupy the offices of the Marxist Leninist Party collectively personify the entire spiritual life of modern industrial society.  The whole of historical development consists in those theoretical abstractions which originate in the heads of all the revolutionary leaders of the age, and since it is impossible to put all these heads together and induce them to take counsel and register their votes, there must of necessity be one central head, the spearhead, in a word the speculative unity of all these heads, the leader.  The organization applies Marxism Leninism, as it has developed through Mao, to the concrete situation within the United States, in order to prepare the conditions for the liberation of working people and mankind.

    The triumph of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the Soviet Union in 1917 was the beginning of the end of world imperialism. The fight for smashing the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, and the establishing of the dictatorship of the proletariat, is what distinguishes com�munists from others who may claim the honor of being communist. This battle is the essence of Marxism-Leninism which class will hold state power?  When imperialism is defeated in the U.S., it is replaced by socialism nothing else. One revolution, one replacement process, one seizure of state power the anti-imperialist revolution and the socialist revolution, one and the same stage. �The recognition of class struggle leads inevitably to the recognition of the necessity for violent revolution and the political rule of the working class. The organized repressive violence of the state is met with the organized revolutionary violence of the people. POWER TO THE PEOPLE!

    The new democratic revolution and new democratic state consist of a united front  an alliance� of all revolutionary classes that can be united against imperialism, including the patriotic bourgeoisie but led by the working class.  It is the task of the revolutionary party of the working class, guided by Marxism-Leninism, to lead the people to victory.  The party is neither a social unity nor an economic unity. It Is based upon its program. In theory this program may be the expression of the interests of a particular class. In practice, however, anyone may join the party, whether his interests coincide or not with the principles enunciated in the party program. The socialist party is the ideological representative of the proletariat This, however, does not make It a class organism. From the social point of view it is a mixture of classes, being composed of elements fulfilling diverse functions in the economic process. But since the program has a class origin, an ostensible social unity Is thereby conferred upon the party. All socialists as such, whatever their economic position in private life, admit in theory the absolute pre eminence of one great class, the proletariat. Those non proletarians affiliated to the party, and those who are but partial proletarians, 'adopt the outlook of the working class, and recognize this class as predominant'. The internalization of the party program is best exhibited by individuals whose daily activity separates them from the social means of production, who do not have daily contact with society's productive forces.  It is tacitly presupposed that those members of the party who do not belong to the class which the party represents will renounce their personal interests whenever these conflict with the interests of the proletarian class. On principle, the heterogeneous elements will subordinate themselves to the 'Idea' of a class to which they themselves do not belong. In practice, the acceptance of the program does not suffice to abolish the conflict of interests between capital and labor.

    The tasks of the national democratic revolution can be fulfilled only through long and tortuous struggles. In the struggle against imperialism and its lackeys, it is necessary to rally all antiimperialist patriotic forces, including the national bourgeoisie and all patriotic personages. All those patriotic personages from among the bourgeoisie and other exploiting classes who join the anti imperialist struggle play a progressive historical role; they are not tolerated by imperialism but welcomed by the proletariat.  It was Lenin who first advanced the need, and carried out the policy of bribing the petty bourgeois group of administrators, technicians and specialists to work for socialism.  Or as Mao put it, 'In wars of national liberation, patriotism is applied internationalism.' The principle at stake is socialist internationalism. Revolutionaries in oppressor nations especially must uphold the principle of equality among nations and the right of self determination and full equal rights of nationally oppressed peoples. They do this particularly among the working class of the oppressor nation, as the precondition for international proletarian unity and as the key weapon in the struggle against opportunism in the ranks of the working class. On the other hand, revolutionaries in oppressed nations have the obligation of struggling against and isolating reactionary nationalism in their ranks, while supporting progressive nationalism. They must fight for solidarity with other oppressed nations and class solidarity with the working class of the oppressor nations.  We commence from the concept of the Nation, which is for us a fact which cannot be cancelled or surmounted. We are therefore antithetic to all the internationalisms. The dream of a great humanity is founded on a Utopia and not upon reality. Nothing gives us the authority to affirm that the millennium of universal brotherhood is imminent. In spite of the dreams of the Internationale, when the great hours strike  PATRIA 0 MUERTE!   those who deny their country die for it. Starting from the Nation, we arrive at the State, which is the government in its tangible expression. But we are the State: by means of a process we wish to identify the Nation with the State.  The revolutionary is characterized by an analysis of the state, which differs from the radical's view of the 'power structure,' which differs from the liberal's notion of the 'power elite,' and posits the seizure and maintenance of that power as necessary to destroy it. This differentiation of consciousness is fundamental to every political question we face.  It is not the nation which generates the state; that is an antiquated naturalistic concept. Rather it is the state which creates the nation, conferring volition and therefore real life on a people made aware of their moral unity. Indeed, it is the state which, as the expression of a universal ethical will, creates the right to national independence.  In wars of national liberation patriotism is applied internationalism To be a revolutionary nationalist, you must of necessity be a socialist.  This distinction became even more important after the victory of socialism in several countries, which changed the nature of national and class relationships all over the world and particularly underlined the importance of national libera�tion struggles in colonized countries. Before the victory of socialism Marxists considered anti imperialist, national democratic revolutions in oppressed nations as part of the bourgeois revolution, although they supported many of them as progressive. The victory of socialism ushered in a new era. Anti colonial, national democratic revolutions are now seen as part of the new world revolution, the proletarian socialist revolution. The link between national democratic revolutions and socialist revolutions in oppressed nations was developed in its clearest form by Mao Tse tung's theory of the 'new democratic' revolution and by the example of the Chinese revolution itself.  It is a movement diametrically opposed to the elitist idea that only leaders are smart enough or interested enough to accept full revolutionary conclusions. It is a movement built on the basis of faith in the masses of people.  The first foundation for forming authority is always offered by popularity. However, an authority that is based solely on this foundation is still extremely weak, unstable and vacillating. Any supporter of such an authority, resting purely on popularity, must therefore endeavor to improve and to safeguard this authority by creating power. In power, therefore, that means in force, we see the second foundation of all authority. This is far more stable, more secure, but not always more vigorous than the first one. If popularity and force unite, and if thus combined they are able to last over a certain period of time, then an authority on an even more solid basis can arise, the authority of tradition. If finally popularity, force and tradition combine, an authority may be looked upon as unshakable.

    Capitalist society, divided into classes, has need of the state as an organization of the ruling class, whose purpose is to maintain the capitalist system of production in its own interest in order to effect the continued exploitation of the proletariat.  Hence, the strategic goal of the U.S. proletariat can only be to destroy the bourgeoisie and replace it by the dictatorship of the proletariat, as the pre condition for building socialism.  The U.S. working class with its allies from other classes, together constituting a vast majority of the people and led by a Marxist Leninist revolutionary party smashes the existing state apparatus (in fact a dictatorship of the monopoly capitalist class) and sets up its own form of state: the dictatorship of the proletariat.  Generated to overthrow the centralized power of the state, starting from the idea that the working class need merely secure a sufficiently vast and solid organization in order to triumph over the organization of the state, the party of the workers has ended by acquiring a vigorous centralization of its own, based upon the same cardinal principles of authority and discipline.  The proletariat is the class which has the power to defeat the imperialists, to carry the fight through to the establishment of socialism and to guard against the resurgence of capitalism. It is the only class which in ending its own exploitation ends the exploitation of all classes. The proletariat leads with a party that represents the interests of the proletariat and has a mass base among the proletariat  a Marxist Leninist party.  To put the matter less euphemistically, there exists a dictatorship in the hands of those leaders who have been sufficiently astute and sufficiently powerful to grasp the sceptre of dominion in the name of socialism, and to wrest it from the hands of the expiring bourgeois society.  Revolutionary warfare or armed struggle resulting in state power is the logical, inevitable, answer to the political, social, and economic situation which confronts us. The solution to our problem is total control of the politico military apparatus of this country. We do not have the luxury of an alternative, for we are faced with dire necessity.  EVERYTHING FOR THE STATE; NOTHING AGAINST THE STATE; NOTHING OUTSIDE THE STATE.  The People's Liberation Army triumphantly sets up the People's Revolutionary Government, proving that it can be done here in Amerika  establishing a people's party and a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.  Political organization leads to power.

    The key is the party, which represents the ideological alternative to capitalism.  The Party Is the mirror of the new society. The Party represents the politics of modernization.  In order for the U.S. proletariat to play its historic role, it is led by a party of revolutionaries, organized on the basis of democratic centralism, guided by the science of the proletariat, the teachings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao. The party is able to apply these teachings to the specific conditions of the U.S. in order to import class consciousness into the spontaneous struggles of the proletariat  No political party can possibly lead a great revolutionary movement to victory unless it possesses revolutionary theory and a knowledge of history and has a profound grasp of the practical movement  Lenin fashioned concrete principles for the nature and functioning of the vanguard party as a disciplined detachment of the proletariat, practicing criticism and self criticism.  In the land where the dictatorship of the proletariat is in force, no important political or organizational problem is ever decided by our councils and other mass organizations without directives from our party. In this sense, we may say that the dictatorship of the proletariat is substantially the dictatorship of the party, as the force that effectively guides the proletariat.�  Socialism means political power in the hands of oppressed people. We who constitute the vanguard social force in this country possess the necessary governmental machinery to express our needs and aspirations.

    The organization of the idea, that means the movement, has to embrace only so many people as are absolutely necessary for the occupation of the nerve centers of the State involved.  To have a centralized party requires a centralized leadership tested in practice, specific individuals with the understanding and the ability to unify and guide the movement in the face of new problems and be right most of the time.  The leadership develops the organizational forms that have made the people and their armed forces the most invincible fighters against imperialism. The leader knows when to seize an opportunity and when to forego an advantage. He has a long view of the struggle that can help him set priorities for a current moment. His is also the ability to separate a 'main enemy' from a future or past one and often make them hostile to each other to the advantage of the people. Most important, he builds a cadre of men who share those beliefs and principles and who are the new helmsmen. Therefore, it is very necessary that out of pure instinct of self preservation the movement  as soon as it is crowned by success  immediately limits the admission of members, and further carries out the enlarging of its organization only with the utmost caution and after the most thorough examination. Only by this will it be able to preserve the nucleus of the movement unspoilt, fresh and sound.  The Party is part of the working class, namely, its most advanced, class conscious, and therefore most revolutionary part.  It has to see to it that solely this nucleus continues to lead the movement, that means directs the propaganda which is to lead to its general recognition and which, as the incorporator of power, carries out those actions which are necessary for the practical realization of its ideas.  The Party is formed of the best, most intelligent, self sacrificing and far seeing workers. The Party is the organized political lever by means of which the more advanced part of the working class leads all the proletarian and semi proletarian mass in the right direction. By internalizing the power of the party, by conferring on it the legitimacy of authority, human beings simultaneously internalize their own powerlessness. Every act which lies within the sphere of influence of the party is out of bounds for an individual. Individuals not only view the wielding of their own powers over the environment as illegitimate; they come to feel themselves unable to wield these powers: the party is able to do everything, the individual is unable to do anything.  Only a cadre form of organization can maintain the discipline necessary for political work under present conditions while simultaneously developing creative new approaches to struggle.  Out of the basic stock of the old movement, the party has to fill not only all the most important positions of the conquered structure, but also to form the entire leadership. And this has to be continued until the previous principles and doctrines of the party have become the foundation and the content of the new State.  Exactly that is what Lenin called for in What is to be Done! (a centralized party of professional revolutionaries and anti-autocratic agitation among all classes).  Now it is manifest that the concept of dictatorship is the direct antithesis of the concept democracy.    The dictatorship of the proletariat, whose theoretical foundations were,, laid by Marx and Lenin, rapidly becomes a dictatorship of the top group of the Party leadership.  Leadership depends upon what we may term the PSYCHOLOGY OF ORGANIZATION ITSELF, that is to say, upon the tactical and technical necessities which result from the consolidation of every disciplined political aggregate.  A revolutionary (read negation of the negation) understands not only the pattern of social oppression, and recognizes the evil, but also has defined more carefully the way to overcome it.

    The power of the Marxist Leninist theory lies in the fact that it enables the Party to find the right orientation in any situation, to understand the inner connection of current events, to foresee their course and to perceive not only how and in what direction they are de�veloping in the present, but how and in what direction they are bound to develop in the future.  Before key decisions are made the best minds in the organization are brought together.  The same can be said of the deputies who are elected to the Supreme Council, and take part in its sessions. They attend the sessions and make speeches on problems which have previously been posed and decided on by Party circles. Their mission is to support the powers that be and use their eloquence in applying the decisions in their territorial or professional spheres.  Top decisions and organi�zational objectives are made in close cooperation with all important organization members.  Every branch of labor is directed by the most skilled worker, who himself takes part in it, and in the realm of enjoyment�� every branch is guided by the merriest member, who him�self participates in the enjoyment But as society is undivided and possesses only one mind, the whole system is regulated and governed by one man  and he is the wisest, the most virtuous and the most blissful.  Mao Tse tung occupies the same relation to the revolutionary movement that Lenin did In