Page:Michael Velli - Manual For Revolutionary Leaders - 2nd Ed.djvu/152

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The scene in the restaurant still fails to clarify how a revolutionary situation lays the ground for the seizure of power by the revolutionary organization. In fact, the militant of an organization which was not an established part of the previous social order fares almost as badly as the authorities of the former social order. This may, once again, be due to the assumptions built into the scene, and thus need not alarm aspiring revolutionary leaders. The militants of all the previous scenes were presented as outsiders to the productive activity of the people they were assigned to organize. This assumption of course creates unnecessary obstacles to the successful establishment of power by the organization. If we drop this assumption, if we imagine a militant who is himself involved in the activity of his constituency, might there still be obstacles to the rise of a revolutionary organization capable of seizing power?

We might, for example, imagine an organizer who became personally involved in the productive activity of a printing plant. He might have been assigned to the plant in order to print the organization's newspaper. Such an assignment would have been an extremely important one in the days of chaos and disorganization which immediately followed the success of the insurrection. After the fall of the old order the revolutionary organization would undoubtedly consider it of capital importance to use all the media of communication to implant in the population the slogan 'All Power to the Organization of the Working Class.'

Of course those early days of 'spontaneous' activity and revolutionary euphoria would not be the best time for the organization to find an individual ready to assume such a responsibility. Undoubtedly a large number of members would have been lost to the organization during the insurrection—individuals who took an active part in one or another 'spontaneous' activity and then simply stayed with the group of people with whom they had fought and worked. Let us imagine that the given militant was ready to assume the assignment because, unlike those who ran to take part in one or another 'spontaneous' struggle, he did not abandon himself to the anarchic activities taking place in his immediate vicinity. He waited until the organization developed a clear line, a coherent strategy—and as soon as the line was formulated after the fighting ended,

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