Spontaneity not enough

Of course, if there was a spontaneous uprising by masses of people the means of distinguishing majority from minority wouldn't exist and wouldn't be necessary.

The inhabitants would declare what they wanted by the simple act of getting up and going after it—an idea which exercises a great fascination over some minds, which are always trying to reduce politics to a state where that is all that happens.

But, as Lenin pointed out as vigorously as anyone ever has, no revolution is carried through by spontaneous mass action and nothing else. You go through a phase—perhaps you never come out of it—in which there has to be conspiracy, co-ordination, organisation, leadership.

At this point the iron law of oligarchy comes into play. The leadership and the organisation have to be the work of some sort of co-ordinating elite—the commonest word for this is "party"— and the problem now arises of the relations between the elite and the masses.

If the organising party is the directing intelligence, popular action will become less spontaneous and more directed; popular action may become only such action as the party directs; the party decides what popular action shall be undertaken, and may even decide what is popular action and what is not. At this stage, nearly all revolutionary parties adopt a populist ideology of which Leninism is merely the best known and most effective.

Professor [unclear: J. G. A]. A Cock, of Canterbury

University, presented [unclear: aper] to the Vietnam teach-in on [unclear: "Cold] strategy and the domino theory."

Following the [unclear: collection] cole of the project to publish the teach-in [unclear: teach] speeches, Professor Pocock has permitted [unclear: client] to publish his paper.

This will be done in [unclear: deneio] parts "Revolution-ary War" and "[unclear: Regul]eglwar, deterrance, and negotiation."

Although written in [unclear: en] July 1965, this paper has a continuing [unclear: relence] to the Vietnam situation.

A populist ideology defines [unclear: an] entity called "the people" which is always defined as wanting certain things; it then defines a leadership—usually "the party"—which is defined as getting for the people the things it wants.

This solves the problem, at ideology level. The people want what the party wants; the people do what the party does, the party knows what the people want, and all that it does is done by the people.