There are essentially three distinctions to be made in differentiating between revolutionary service and community service. The first is to examine the modus operandi of the organization to see if it is self-replicating or self-eliminating. Community service organizations, for the most part, function with an eye towards maintaining a foothold in the communities they serve, in a sense, to legitimate their own role. This is self-regarding and it results in the creation of a proverbial service or "vanguard" elite that hoards the organizational training and resources over the heads of the "masses." The problem with this model, in addition to the fact that it is undemocratic, is that it can never truly lead to revolution, for the relevant populations remain perpetual subjects of liberation rather than initiators of liberation, and a revolution cannot come from the top and the bottom.
Revolutionary service, in stark contrast, emphasizes the dissemination of the methods, resources, and techniques of revolutionary organization to the population it desires to liberate from some type of oppression. Consequently, revolutionary organizations and their leaders are always to be perceived as short-term facilitators for the community's liberation. This requires a sacrifice in terms of ego and individual aspirations to become a member of some revolutionary elite. The motivation behind this temporal nature of a revolutionary organization lies in the corruption inherent in power relationships. This effect can only be minimized by minimizing in turn the amount of time any particular organization or individual has a monopoly on the implements of revolutions. Accordingly, the best revolutionary organizations are those that emphasize tool-building projects like the development of alternative, independent, and non-exploitive economic ventures, literacy and community-regarding education for all, alternative media, etc.
The second difference between the two forms of interaction is between outreach and in-reach. Outreach results as a consequence of the community service perspective whenever the "vanguard," by virtue of its monopoly of the tools of the revolution, begins to distinguish between itself and the population it is attempting to serve. Whether you agree with their economic theories or not, Marx & Engels hit the nail on the head in "The Communist Manifesto" when they said that the true communist agitator could have no interest apart from the proletariat, the class he/she sought to the tools of revolution. The revolutionary ideology, the physical movement, and the human resources must be constituted and operated by the population itself.
The third and final distinction between revolutionary service and community service is drawn out of the second. The community servant and the "true" revolutionary inevitably have different views about the outcome of their work. The best case scenario for the former is that he or she be able to perpetually institutionalized a response to the needs of the population being served. Even if systematic change renders this desire meaningless, the community servant takes pride in the act of service. As such, the enthusiasm of community servant is cyclical and their actions tend to lack unity of purpose. There is no dominant goal that integrates them. For the revolutionary, however, the revolution is perceived as inevitable, needing only the sufficient distribution of the tools. As such, revolutionary organizations tend to thrive "underground" despite cyclical fluctuations in popular "liberal" opinion, and have a much higher degree of understanding of purpose between individual actions, in relation to the actions of the whole group, and in relation to the relevant population.
Given the rising tide of fascism in the United States, I believe that it will be critical for the liberal establishment not to become co-opted as were some French and Austrians in WWII, nor to try to reform the system which will bring only brutal repression. We must strike the beast that is the system where it lives, in the hearts and minds of the masses of people and to do that we must be revolutionaries and not just community servants.
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