Page:Michael Velli - Manual For Revolutionary Leaders - 2nd Ed.djvu/90

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their self-powers to the organization, the individuals become instruments or media through which the powers of the organization are exercised. —The decisive factor is the leadership proper. If two bodies of troops battle one another, not that will be victorious in which each individual received the highest strategic training, but that which has the most superior leaders and at the same time the best disciplined, blindly obedient, best drilled troop. —In order to establish this, U.S. workers must adopt as their own the slogan of the right to self-determination for the nations oppressed by U.S. imperialism, which means the right to secession and the formation of an independent national state. —Correct strategy is based on an understanding of the class nature of this society; on an understanding that the sharpest struggles against the ruling class are being waged by the oppressed nations against U.S. imperialism, and that all our actions must flow from our identity as part of an international struggle against U.S. imperialism. —The Party will win and we will support whatever they want us to do. We owe them our best effort because as long as they fight they give us an example of the best and most passionate all over the earth.

The technical specialization that inevitably results from all extensive organization renders necessary what is called expert leadership. —Because war is political, political tasks—the international communist revolution—must guide it. Therefore the centralized organization of revolutionaries must be a political organization as well as military, what is generally called a 'Marxist-Leninist' party. —Consequently the power of determination comes to be considered one of the specific attributes of leadership, and is gradually withdrawn from the masses to be concentrated in the hands of the leaders alone. —The Marxist-Leninist Party is the general staff of the working class struggle. The individuals who occupy the offices of the Marxist-Leninist Party collectively personify the entire spiritual life of modern industrial society. —The whole of historical development consists in those theoretical abstractions which originate in the heads of all the revolutionary leaders of the age, and since it is impossible to put all these heads together and induce them to take counsel and register their votes, there must of necessity be one central head, the spearhead, in a word the speculative unity of all these heads, the leader. —The organization applies Marxism-Leninism, as it has developed through Mao, to the concrete situation within the United States, in order to prepare the conditions for the liberation of working people and mankind.

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