Page:Michael Velli - Manual For Revolutionary Leaders - 2nd Ed.djvu/101

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To be good at translating the Party's policy into actions of the masses, to be good at getting not only the leading cadres but also the broad masses to understand and master every movement we launch—to be good at making the ideas of the ruling class the ruling ideas—this is an art of Marxist-Leninist leadership. —The class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore , the ideas of its dominance. —In order for the Party to succeed at this task it will take tremendous self-consciousness and discipline from the membership. —The Party is a disciplined organization in expecting members to participate in study and self-defense and be responsible to the organization for carrying out decisions made by the entire body. —From the very beginning, it is important to introduce blind discipline into our meetings and absolutely to safeguard the authority of the meeting's leaders. —The Party can no longer have a double standard , making major political demands outside its ranks which are not only not supported, but attacked by persons within its ranks. The existence of that contradiction within hamstrings the organization. While the battle remains to be fought out across the country, the organization should now be able to move forward in the fight against imperialism.

We must be able to distinguish between bureaucracy and administration. Successful revolutionary struggle depends to a large extent on good administration—on better organizational ability and a superior use of intelligence. —If it is true that important decision-making should be concentrated, then the execution of those decisions should be decentralized. —The division of labor, which we already saw above as one of the chief forces of history up till now, manifests itself also in the ruling class as the division of mental and material labor, so that inside this class one part appears as the thinkers of the class (its active, conceptive ideologists), while the others' attitude to these ideas is more passive and receptive. —The development of revolutionary Marxist-Leninist-Maoist collective formations which undertake the application of the lessons of our work

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