Politics & Power Quote by Herman Gorter

Gorter’s line reads like a poet trying to sand down the romance of “the people” into something hard enough to build with. The verb pair “find and rear” is doing quiet but crucial work: leaders aren’t discovered like geniuses in a crowd; they’re made, trained, disciplined. That’s a pointed correction to both bourgeois hero-worship and the left’s occasional craving for the charismatic savior who will spare everyone the messy labor of self-rule.

The phrase “really one with the masses” is the moral hinge. It’s not just about leaders who claim working-class roots; it’s about leaders structurally tethered to collective life, accountable to it, shaped by it. Gorter’s subtext is suspicion of a party apparatus that floats above workers while speaking in their name. Coming out of the early 20th-century socialist ferment - and Gorter’s own current as a council communist critic of parliamentary gradualism and party bureaucracy - this is a warning flare: representation without fusion curdles into domination.

Then he tightens the screws: “This can only be accomplished by the masses, the political parties and the Trade Unions.” He refuses a single vehicle. Mass initiative matters, but so do institutions; the catch is that institutions must be fought over, not merely inhabited. “Most severe struggle, also inwardly” is the clincher. The revolution isn’t only street-level confrontation; it’s internal warfare against careerism, compromise-as-habit, and the seductive convenience of letting others think and decide. A poet’s sentence, but a strategist’s demand: no real unity without organized friction, including the kind that hurts your own side.