Spontaneity Now! Prelude To the Impossible
Spontaneity Now! Prelude To the Impossible
From anarchists to liberals to Stalinists, spontaneity is seen as impossible across the pseudo-left spectrum. Spontaneity is an important idea for council communists! The belief in planning is written deep into individualist and institutionalist programmatism. While the individualists will claim that individual actions can be planned and effective propaganda of the deed (individually via motive), they doubt the collective manifestation of consciousness. While institutionalists avoid the ruse of the atomized subject, they think groups cannot spontaneously manifest consciousness. Both underestimate how consciousness emerges in groups (but not through language, that would be Hegelian). Phenomenologists like Maurice Merleau Ponty have a concept of how this might work in books like Phenomenology of perception where sex is treated as an atmosphere.
Pannekoek’s notion of spontaneity such as in his essay Five Theses On Class Struggle similarly implies that an environment or local set of conditions has the possibility of resulting in spontaneous action! Pannekoek believes the wildcat strike to be the most powerful spontaneous worker action but he does not suggest that such actions be planned! Instead Pannekoek reminds us that unions typically suppress such spontaneity because their goal is to use the threat of political strikes to garner benefits in bargaining. Pannekoek like his comrade Gorter believes the spontaneous form of revolution that is born in the wildcat will only become popular after the worker learns the reformist ends that all mainstream trade unions lead to! But this conclusion was not arrived at on-mass during the first 100 years of liberal trade unions organization. Only in disparate locations in a few fleeting moments have workers organized spontaneously outside the reformist ends of both political parties and mainstream unions! The binary of individualist incoherent anarchism and social Democratic Party wonk Leninism has kept anti capitalist militants in one of two camps of either individualism or militant welfare nationalism.
The maturation of the working class is predicted by Gorter in Letter To Lenin as a process that obeys a trial and error structure in that workers must fail in liberal unions before they can triumph in spontaneity. But the long 20th century and neoliberal style capitalist policies have resulted in many workers losing practice with even liberal unionism. Spontaneity can be said to be a demand for the impossible because even internet mediated movements proclaim spontaneity but get lost in nominalist wormholes of redefining previously radical words to describe acts of impotence or mere passivity within the capitalist state! Instead of internet offering the populace easier communication, the internet ensures that all communication is rife with interference from many propagandistic misunderstanding of history. This the internet exists as a new barrier to class spontaneity!
When we dream of spontaneity we hope for a mass cognition that is truly local! Not directed by national, linguistic or political hijacking! A mass awareness of worker power not lost in ideological constraints but just in a material realization of a specific situation. Staughton Lynd hoped like Gorter did that the IWW could be a vehicle for this! The IWW is not free of the biases of our current moment however! Perhaps its iteration in the 1920s was more effective toward these ends