I should probably give it a rest tonight, but from Kelley:
Great book since, otoh, he does recognize what you're talking about and I belief he called it ecstasy as well. Sociologists call it effervescence. Anyway, more anon. K
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(caution. probably too long and rhetorical to read)
Indulge me and let's call it the dialectics of revolution.
Effervescence. I suppose I deserved that for my romanticism?
But, moving on. The problem, which is really inside this business of shaming the masses into following the party line, and turning solidarity into a mere slogan, or normative ideal, the handmaiden of picket monitors--this problem has always been pivotal. How to come down to earth and build it to last? You read the same thing over and over and read the historical results over and over. But for some reason most interested people don't quite realize what they are reading, I mean the flesh of it.
If you have to depend on something like an externally imposed discipline, call it shame, call it rules, call it the party line--what did you call it, the enforcement central to social solidarity--then what usually occurs is an internal police state, toe the line or get out, or get shot. Why is that? This is the part about the leadership of the intelligencia (Lenin?), the officials, the embodiment of the party as a leadership cadre--the dictatorship of the mostly missing proletariat. This is the division between classes, between workers and intellectuals.
Such a dictatorship evolves naturally out of those who have lead at some point or another and have demonstrated the personal chrisma to manage crowds. But this is a profound mistake. It is exactly this business of leadership, rules, psychological manipulation in guilt, shame and submission that destroys the very thing that has to happen next. On the other hand, re-read Nathan's section here:
Catch 22- since they would have rejected the "fact" of the possibility of success initially, they would have rejected the boycott, thereby undermining it and thus never have learned of the possibility of success and ever consented to it. But because they were socially coerced into supporting it, they could then learn "facts on the ground" that would later illicit consent. (NN)
There is more here than a coercive learning facts on the ground and gaining consent. This more is the process itself, the internalization of how to organize, but also the practical awareness and articulation of a potential solidarity. This awareness of a potential solidarity was the core of the early so-called identity movements. It coheres. But there are still other aspects that need to be pulled in to open out into the idea of coalition. Coalition building. This again is critical and got twisted up in the US over all the stupidities of our own cultural themes on race, sex, blah, blah. So that same sense of solidarity has to grow and one of the means to grow is building coalitions between groups co-evolving along separate tracks. It is very hard to keep a 'party line' from becoming its own worst enemy, but it is more or less essential that it disolve in the process of puting together a coalition. It disolves only to reform again around a coalition. You have to have faith this will work, faith enough to abandon each phase of a solidarity to regain another one that is ever more inclusive. That is you have to give up your identity and regain it in another form. This is part of what collectivization means or points to. You can also call it learning, because that is what it is. You learn and become different. The reason solidarity will reform, reconstitute itself is because everyone involved is dispossessed.
What I am pointing to are the years of formation that went on in say the Polish Solidarity Movement or the US civil rights movement, or the union movements before WWII. At a point these were developed, because there were enough people who had become educated by the process of organizing, to be able to carry out the infrastructure of organization spontaenously, which is really the potential of a proto-state. But at the same time, the kind of solidarity I was trying to descripe, comes somehow out of the air, prepared in advance by this other formation process. The old line communists used to talk about 'conditions' and others say history.
How to describe this? Call it Sancho Panza for governor.
There has to be embedded in the cohesiveness of solidarity, the proto-state that will evolve when this heady cloud finally bursts. That means that a shifting and ex-temporaneous bureaucracy already exists, coheres out to get the everyday business done in that selfless mode of commitment that is never bothered by ego (Sancho himself). But that proto state, that collective committee of constantly changing members also has to be shared as the temporary contingency it is--its existence as shared work is the root of the idea behind democracy, behind public service, certainly behind communism--and that has to be honored by those who are doing other things, particularly those who have taken on what have to be temporary leadership roles. It is no accident that for example, the Sandanista government was a committee. But again, such a committee has to change, has to be a temporary formation that sorts through all the elements, all the people, who have brought this solidarity into being in the first place. Of course that becomes physically impossible, but something very close to that has to occur over and over. It perpetuates the (excuse the word), it perpetuates the ontology of solidarity and then of revolution, and then finally of State.
You have to sit down and write a constitution, eventually. But these things are never over, so in the writing, in the laws that follow, in the committees charged to create these laws that same formation of solidarity recapitulates its own ontology. If it was exclusive, if it was managed by experts, if it was ruled, then that's what dries in the ink. But if it was more than that, if it embodied and formed the concepts together as a representation of, for, and by the people as old Tom said, than that's what you get when the ink dries.
Chuck Grimes
Speaking of Machiavelli, here is a little title from Reflections on Livy:
"A prince does not live secure in a principality while those who have been despoiled of it are living." (III,4) Now think of Bill Gates.