The continually changing response to continually developing productive forces moves without leadership toward chaos and anarchy. 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 the 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 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 of the day-to-day 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
53
