Agitate, educate, organize?
Nah.
The Left is plagued with the unspoken and implicit premise that revolution is a matter of consciousness-raising or ideology-spreading. Consciousness-raising (or the ideological model) is the idea that revolutions are made by communists/socialists agitating and organizing the masses until a critical mass of the working class population adopts socialist ideas (of the correct party line, of course), and that only then can the socialists/communists lead the masses into a revolution. The consciousness-raising model is shared by (most) anarchists and (all) Leninists alike, and the consciousness-raising model finds its logical culmination in the vanguard party, in which the most advanced members of the working class (in reality, mainly progressive members of the petty-bourgeoisie and middle classes) organize together to preserve revolutionary theory, inject socialist consciousness into the masses of the working class, and lead the proletariat to begin struggling against and then vanquish capital.
theanarchistlibrary.org
libcom.org
These two links are to an article and book (which I've uploaded as PDF here for convenience too), respectively, that provide a good critique of the consciousness-raising model, which is in fact an ideology-centric model and thus an idealist perspective on how revolutions happen (because it says that revolutions are made by spreading ideas until a critical mass of ideas emerges).
In contrast to the idealist consciousness-raising model, I claim a materialist perspective (as I believe Marx and Engels would) in which revolutions are made by material circumstances (such as economic crises or war exhaustion) and ideology develops spontaneously (without the need for intervention by conscious communists) around revolutionary events, as seen by the independent emergence of councilism in Russia 1905, Germany 1917, and Hungary 1956. There is no need for a vanguard party to inject socialist consciousness into the masses. Nor is there a need for voluntarism in which a party is somehow able to jump ahead of material circumstances and force a revolution to happen. Neither is there a need for communists to preserve revolutionary theory, aside from perhaps intellectual self-amusement, because the proletariat will re-invent revolutionary theory when it is pushed into revolutionary action. In any case, there is no need to read Marx or understand all three volumes of Capital in order to make revolution, because revolutions are not made by ideologies, but by material circumstances forcing a class into action.
Here's some Engels (Principles of Communism) refuting both the vanguard party and the consciousness-raising model, as well as giving more evidence for the materialist model of revolution:
Even if the consciousness-raising model is wrong and the materialist model of revolution is right, the role of communists is not to sit in their armchairs and let the revolution just happen. As Engels mentioned, communists will participate in the revolution and "defend the interests of the proletarians with deeds", which means that communists should participate in militant working class actions at least as much as any worker. In revolutionary circumstances, communists should also aim to combat all organizations that aim to lead the proletariat and thus co-opt the energy of the workers' movement, with an eye towards crushing those who would instate a state capitalist coup with red flags, in the name of the working class.
What you've just read is the revolutionary perspective of council communism, communization and "nihilist communism".