If you go out into the real world, you cannot miss seeing that the poor are poor not because they are untrained or illiterate but because they cannot retain the returns of their labor. They have no control over capital, and it is the ability to control capital that gives people the power to rise out of poverty.

No reform is possible unless some of the educated and the rich voluntarily accept the status of the poor, travel third, refuse to enjoy the amenities denied to the poor, and instead of taking avoidable hardships, discourtesies, and injustice as a matter of course, fight for their removal.

You can't do much for the poor, as they are not in with the right people.

Enthusiasm and adventure

In all cases, propaganda of agitation tries to stretch energies to the utmost, obtain substantial sacrifices, and induce the in­dividual to bear heavy ordeals. It takes him out of his everyday life, his normal framework, and plunges him into enthusiasm and adventure; it opens to him hitherto unsuspected possibilities, and suggests extraordinary goals that nevertheless seem to him completely within reach. Propaganda of agitation thus unleashes an explosive movement; it operates inside a crisis or actually provokes the crisis itself. On the other hand, such propaganda can obtain only effects of relatively short duration. If the proposed objective is not achieved fast enough, enthusiasm will give way to discour­agement and despair. Therefore specialists in agitation propa­ganda break up the desired goals into a series of stages to be reached one by one.

To be effective, propaganda must constantly short-circuit all thought and decision. It must operate on the individual at the level of the unconscious. He must not know that he is being shaped by outside forces...but some central core in him must be reached in order to release the mechanism in the unconscious which will provide the appropriate - and expected - action.

"Government use of agitation propaganda

Governments also employ this propaganda of agitation when after having been installed in power, they want to pursue a revolutionary course of action. Thus Lenin, having installed the Soviets, organized the agitprops and developed the long campaign of agitation in Russia to conquer resistance and crush the kulaks. In such a case, subversion aims at the resistance of a segment of a class, and an internal enemy is chosen for attack. Similarly, most of Hitler's propaganda was propaganda of agitation. Hitler could work his sweeping social and economic transformations only by constant agitation, by overexcitement, by straining energies to the utmost. Nazism grew by successive waves of feverish enthusiasm and thus attained its revolutionary objectives. Finally, the great campaigns in Communist China were precisely propaganda of agitation. Only such propaganda could produce those "great leaps forward.

Our poor people are great people, a very lovable people, They don't need our pity and sympathy. They need our understanding love and they need our respect. We need to tell the poor that they are somebody to us that they, too, have been created, by the same loving hand of God, to love and be loved.

Poor people have poor habits.

My experience with Jobra’s deep tubewell convinced me to turn my focus on the landless poor. Soon I started arguing that wherever a poverty alleviation program allowed the nonpoor to be copassengers, the poor would soon be elbowed out of the program by those who were better off. In the world of development, if one mixes the poor and the nonpoor in a program, the nonpoor will always drive out the poor, and the less poor will drive out the more poor, unless protective measures are instituted right at the beginning. In such cases, the nonpoor reap the benefits of all that is done in the name of the poor.

Naturally, the educated man does not believe in propa­ganda; he shrugs and is convinced that propaganda has no effect on him. This is, in fact, one of his great weaknesses, and propa­gandists are well aware that in order to reach someone, one must first convince him that propaganda is ineffectual and not very clever. Because he is convinced of his own superiority, the intellectual is much more vulnerable than anybody else to this maneu­ver, even though basically a high intelligence, a broad culture, a constant exercise of the critical faculties, and full and objective information are still the best weapons against propaganda.

The poor don't know that their function in life is to exercise our generosity.

Do we know our poor people? Do we know the poor in our house, in our family? Perhaps they are not hungry for a piece of bread. Perhaps our children, husband, wife, are not hungry, or naked, or dispossessed, but are you sure there is no one there who feels unwanted, deprived of affection?

That propaganda is good which leads to success, and that is bad which fails to achieve the desired result. It is not propaganda’s task to be intelligent, its task is to lead to success.

I believe that people today think the poor are not humans like them. They look down on them. But if they had a deep respect for the poor, I am sure it would be easy for them to come closer to them, and to see that they have as much right to the things of life and to love as anybody has. In these times of development, everybody is in a hurry and rushing about, and on the way there are people falling down, people who do not have the strength to run. It is these that we want to help and take care of.