the only means. Revolutionary leaders can no longer afford to overlook any of the means in the capitalist arsenal. Whatever advances the bearers of revolutionary consciousness is a revolutionary instrument.
Conditions for the establishment of revolutionary leadership are part of the fabric of capitalist social life. Intelligent use of these conditions requires behavior identical to that required for the seizure of the State apparatus. If the degree of sacrifice were the sole measure of a leader's revolutionary aspirations, then nothing short of the absolute seizure of the State apparatus could live up to the leader's expectations. But one cannot take into account only subjective factors. One must also recognize objective circumstances. And objective circumstances may be such that the absolute seizure of State power is not immediately realizable. Aspiring leaders may have to absolve their lives by establishing forms of power which, though they appear less total, are identical to the seizure of the State apparatus in terms of their consequences. There is no need to regard alternative forms of power as less rewarding than the sole duty of a revolutionary. In view of the single-minded devotion and self-sacrifice that characterize a revolutionary leader's lifelong struggle, there is no need to designate the available alternatives as one step forward, two steps back. The classical language of dialectical materialism gives revolutionary leaders a method with which to depict the available alternatives much more dialectically, namely positively. The first step toward the re-evaluation of the contemporary situation of revolutionary leaders is to realize publicly, namely in such a way as to make constituents realize, that the great revolutionary leaders of this century were not dogmatic. The great revolutionary leaders were not Talmudists. Their relation to the revolutionary ideology was not wooden, it was not inflexible. The dialectical materialism of the great leaders has nothing in common with bourgeois rigidity. The great revolutionary leaders were above all great dialecticians. They recognized that the negation of the negation always led to a new and higher level. In the style of the great revolutionary dialecticians, and in view of available alternatives, the aspiring leader may reason as follows: In case of the negation, or temporary postponement, of the victory of the revolutionary ideology which represented the first negation, the task of the revolutionary is to negate the second negation by raising the ideology to a qualitatively higher level of struggle. Since the negation of the victory is due to objective circumstances, to the imperialist last stage of capitalism which was negated by anti-imperialist ideology in the first instance, the revolutionary leader must adapt the tactics of the struggle to the changed circumstances. The leader must make it clear to his constituents that, in a period of ideological struggle, one who fails to adapt the revolutionary coherence of the ideology to the historical circumstances of the class struggle has not learned to use the materialist dialectic in a
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