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The embarrassing predicament of the Regional Delegate, perhaps possible but hardly plausible in any presently known historical circumstances, nevertheless points toward two tentative conclusions: a revolutionary situation such as the one described is not necessarily the most fertile field for the development of revolutionary leadership, and such a situation may contain elements which might prevent a revolutionary organization from transforming the situation into one suitable for the seizure of State power. It not only appears that the situation fails to thrust power on the organization's leaders, but also that it prevents leaders from taking power. However, before regarding these conclusions as final, we might pause to examine yet another possibility. Perhaps the circumstances underlying all the hypothetical scenes presented until now unduly exaggerate the elements unfavorable to revolutionary leadership, while at the same time placing members of the revolutionary organization at particularly poor vantage points from which to realize their goal. After all, every one of the scenes depicts militants who are completely divorced from the new productive activities as well as the experimental social relations developed by the self-organized population, militants who are not only pathetically behind the times but also alien to the liberating spirit of the new social activities, militants who are almost, in a sense, reactionaries. The prominence of such circumstances in the hypothetical scenes would of course exaggerate the likelihood that a revolutionary militant might not succeed. Since such circumstances bias all the earlier scenes, we cannot as yet draw the conclusion that there is nothing at all about self-organized and independent activity that lays the ground for the success of a revolutionary organization. Nor can we as yet conclude that as soon as self-organized activity takes root among a population it will prevent the successful seizure of power by a revolutionary organization.
Therefore, before concluding that self-organized and independent creative activity is not a sufficient condition for a revolutionary organization's success but rather for its failure, we would do well to push our question yet further. We would do well to construct a
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