Although the dynamic of politics is to be sought in the tension level of the individuals in society, it is to be taken for granted that all individual tensions are not removed by political symbolization and exertion. When Y hits a foreman in the jaw whom he imagines has insulted him, Y is relieving his tensions. But if the act is construed by him as a personal affair with the foreman, the act is not political. Political acts are joint acts; they depend upon emotional bonds. Now people who act together get emotionally bound together. This process of becoming emotionally bound is dependent on no conscious process. Freud said that he was made clearly aware of the emotional factor in human relations by observing that those who work together extend their contact to dining and relaxing together. Those with whom we work are endowed with rich meanings on the basis of our past experience with human beings. Since all of our motives are going concerns within the personality, our libido is more or less concentrated upon those with whom we come in touch. This reinforces the perception of similarities, and supplies the dynamic for the identification process. Even the negative identification is a tribute to the extent to which the affective resources of the personality become mobilized in human contact. People who are emotionally bound together are not yet involved in a political movement. Politics begins when they achieve a symbolic definition of themselves in relation to demands upon the world. The pre-political phase of the labor movement as sketched by Nexo in his _Pelle the Conqueror_ is an able characterization of what the facts may be. The workers had plenty of grievances against their employers, but individuals took it out in sporadic acts of violence, and in frequent debauchery. It was not until a new “set” of mind was achieved with the appearance of socialist symbols, and their adoption, that the tension found an outlet in political form. When J hits a foreman on the jaw because the foreman swore at him, J is not acting for the working classes; but after J becomes a socialist, his acts are symbolically significant of the expanded personality which he possesses. Acts cease to be merely private acts; they have become related to remote social objects. The conception of the self has new points of reference, and points of reference which interlock with those of others.