info at pulpculture.org wrote:
>
> > I'm never sure why you reject my approach to this issue. I see building
> social movements, organizing, figuring out ways to create alternative
> institutions as necessary, not simply so we can keep striking up a match,
> tossing it on the timber and hoping the conditions are right, but to
> actually create the infrastructure we'll need. I.e., one of the things
> people don't know how to do very well sometimes is work together in groups
> where they negotiate the rules by which they work together. They are used
> to relying on the rule of the market (individual choice is said to be such
> that an invisible hand will make things turn out all good in the end-- a
> simplified adam smith if you will) or by turning to the law or state to
> solve problems.
I do accept this, and it is central, but I think complementary rather than opposed to my argument. Even in my limited experience over 40 years I have seen the process you describe develop several times, produce results in increased coordination of both action and thought, and die away, as 'opportunities' for its exercise disappear, as members move, die, become jaded or cynical, lose their job, join Jehovah's Witnesses,* change their views (sometimes, not too accurately, called "selling out"), and so forth. Then with more favorable conditions that experience you speak of has to be rebuilt with _mostly_ new people (and with most of those new people _at first_ suspicious of those 'left over' from earlier struggles.)
To go back to Lenin's pamphlet, the attack on spontaneism in it is extremely limited: it applies to the internal organization of a cadre responding to spontaneous developments within the society (or working class) as a whole. His argument first _assumes_ that such developments are the result of countless more or less spontaneous reactions of workers here, there, and elsewhere, _then_ argues that such spontaneous 'uprisings' will never go further without a more deliberate strategy at the center. There are flaws even in that argument, but it is idiotic on the part of so many non-Leninists to assume that he was against spontaneity of any kind when the whole theory in WITBD depended on widespread spontaneous action as its context.
Carrol
*This actually happened in a union-organizing struggle with which I am familiar. The best person on the organizaing committee became a Jehovah's Witness, and with expressed reluctance resigned from the organizing effort.