Page:Michael Velli - Manual For Revolutionary Leaders - 2nd Ed.djvu/156

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apolitical behavior that results from a failure to do this, and calling for people who would represent a revolutionary force in this particular plant. Although he would have liked to return to the plant the following day with numerous comrades, it was decided that all but two of the volunteers should begin similar organizing activity at the point of production in other unorganized plants.

After a critique and self critique of the earlier meeting at which the Workers' Council was formed, the three militants decide not to call for a general meeting to elect the Council Committee. Instead, they take the opportunity of joining a group of individuals who are taking a break and eating. The three militants present the case in favor of electing a Council Committee. No one seems to have a case against such an election. However, one of the individuals eating lunch, a regular user of the printing equipment and an outstanding photographer, says that since most people don't know what such a Committee member is supposed to do, and since he's sure most people wouldn't be willing to devote time and energy to such a Committee, why don't the three proponents of such a Committee simply elect themselves? That wouldn't be democratic, objects one of the militants. Don't worry about that, says the individual; you won't find anyone in the plant who objects to such a procedure. And sure enough, after consulting other individuals who are using one or another instrument that day, the militants find no one opposed to this scheme and consider themselves unanimously elected to the Council Committee.

The three militants become the first regular staff in the plant since pre-revolutionary days. They receive guests, collaborate on the layout and printing of the organization's paper (the quality of which improves somewhat), and they begin to enforce certain minimal regulations, like no-smoking rules. Their enforcement of rules is successful only among newcomers, and then only temporarily; when the newcomers join more experienced persons and learn to execute technical processes on their own, they also learn to disregard even the most minimal rules. However, even the Council Committee doesn't last. The three-member Committee decides that, to acquire the skills needed to teach newcomers and to raise the quality of the newspaper yet higher, the two new militants are to join more experienced

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