History is a chain of development of unending causes and effects, and of the growth and decline of social forces that change the rules and forms of society. The most basic of these forces is the economy — how people relate in the production of the necessaries of life. New social forces create organizations and institutions through which they express themselves and their need to control their lives.

As the economy changes, people react spontaneously to the conditions of daily life. Movements arise, and they fight against conditions that have become intolerable – practical groups of people, taking one step after the next, without knowing the final outcome. We call aspects of social motion “spontaneous,” because they proceed as a natural reaction to conditions.

Such struggles can only be successful if leadership can infuse the movement with an achievable goal and consolidate victories. The rebels at the Boston Tea Party, angry and aroused, wanted to achieve certain goals in their personal and collective lives. Samuel Adams’ Sons of Liberty in Boston, and later the Committees of Correspondence throughout the colonies, organized to oppose British control of the colonies. Determined to achieve a specific political goal, they brought “conscious” leadership to the spontaneous struggle and were able to tie popular anger to the cause of independence.

The innumerable actors in the American Revolution were not consciously concerned with the intricacies of setting up an independent republic to allow the development of an American economy.  Abolitionists were not aware of the complex economic and social forces that would eventually result in the Civil War and end slavery. The millions of workers who fought to establish unions in the United States were fighting for wages and living conditions. They weren’t conscious that provisions of what became the Wagner Labor Relations Act were necessary to reform society to correspond with assembly line production. Millions fought for human dignity and equality in the African-American liberation struggle.  Most weren’t conscious that it was the mechanization of Southern agriculture that had pulled the props out from under the old way of life and made their struggle possible.

Large-scale, permanent changes only happen when changes in the economy and society make them possible. People don’t like drastic change.  Powerful vested interests fight to preserve the existing order, so there has to be strong pressure for change.  When new forces develop to the point that society can’t keep functioning in the old way, change can’t be held back indefinitely. The economic and social changes that lead up to crisis and formal changes in society happen over periods of years and decades, then break out into the political sphere to be fought out.

The steam engine and the industrial revolution laid the basis for revolutionary change in the 1700’s and early 1800’s. Economic and social change led to the U.S. Civil War, the 20th century’s socialist revolutions, the union movement of the 30’s and the Civil Rights movement. All these changes reflected and were spurred on by changes and developments in the way human labor and electro-mechanical machines combined in capitalist industrial production. Society was drawn into struggle when things no longer functioned in the old way.  The owners of productive property, the capitalists, had the economic strength and social power to see that the outcome went their way.

Until the 20th century, class forces that came to power in revolutionary situations had an advantage.  Their economic position was gaining strength: for example, in the Reformation (non-ecclesiastical landowners), in the American Revolution (the colonial property owners), in the English and the French Revolutions (the merchants, manufacturers and industrialists) and in the Civil War (the northern industrialists). As the industrial economy grew and expanded, the capitalists were able to gain power and maintain control by accommodating demands for social and economic reform. Movements fought for and won social reforms as society adjusted to developments in the relations between human beings and machines.

Over the last 50 years the world economy has changed from an industrial economy based on wage labor to a global economy based on electronics. Electronic technology, digital computer automation, is replacing human labor in production. Reforms like those of the past – that reflected developments in the old industrial system – are no longer possible. Millions who once sold their labor power in order to live, find themselves without jobs, homes, medical care, education, civil rights and hope for the future. A fundamental change in the economy has created the basis for – and made necessary – a fundamental transformation in the way human beings live and govern themselves.

Spontaneous Struggle and Conscious Leaders

In past struggles for reforms, fighters usually organized around some aspect of their identity such as employment, race and gender. They won reforms and concessions through bitter struggle, but without having to understand the power dynamics of the class system in which they lived. Today, in the fight against the destruction of society, the natural tendency of the spontaneous movement is to fall back on what worked in the past and to fight based on social identity.  Without an understanding of history and their class, they are drawn to follow leaders who step forward with plans that reflect the past and support the institutions of the old order (or their own personal gain). People fight in the hope that, if they fight hard enough, society can be reformed to accommodate their needs.

But the era of accommodation and reform is past. Our fight today is to change the economic and social system under which we live from one that serves the private needs of a small class of capitalists to one that serves the broader needs of humanity. The spontaneous mass movement needs leadership that understands the social and class forces that are defining this moment in history. It needs leadership that understands that this is the end of one period of history and the beginning of a new period. Without this leadership, the spontaneous movement is reduced to an outcry against the constantly worsening conditions.  The objective nature of this struggle and the fact that the old assumptions are no longer working pushes many fighters to confront the need for a new understanding and to look for a new and revolutionary path.  The spontaneous movement gives rise to revolutionaries searching for an understanding of the world and a strategy to change it.

Only leadership that understands and responds to the current reality — that works to unite the movement with and in its own class interest — can move it in a constructive direction. That leadership is developed as conscious revolutionaries unite with the sometimes diffuse and disorganized revolutionary demands of the masses. They don’t attempt to divert the movement from its path or win it to some abstract set of ideas, but help clarify and focus its objective revolutionary intent.

The spontaneous movement will be diverted and flounder without leadership that understands the role of the revolutionary class and the possibility and necessity of building a new society. As intolerable conditions draw more and more people into motion, misleaders will work to hide the class nature of the struggle, to turn one section of the class against another, and to convince the movement that its hope lies with one or another group of capitalists.

The first step is for our class to understand that it is a class, not just a conglomeration of groups based on old ideas of social identity.  The old social relations – a stable industrial working class and its ties to the capitalists through the “middle” – are crumbling.  A new class of dispossessed is in the beginning stage of forming itself. The program of that class — sharing the wealth of society for the benefit of all — represents the future and is the direction in which we must fight.

With conscious leadership to fight for a class program, a strategy to break with the capitalist class, and an independent class party, the spontaneous movement can become the force able to secure a future of abundance and peace.

 

October.2006.Vol16.Ed6
This article originated in Rally, Comrades!
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