Mila Volkova, Canberra
Firstly, I would like to thank comrade Fox Luces for their complements on my article. I find the lack of serious attention paid to the Arab Spring by the heirs of the International Socialist Organisation quite frustrating. Instead of truly investigating whether their strategy really turned out to work in practice, they have a habit of continuously appropriating it for the purposes of surface-level propaganda aimed at first-year university students who don’t know any better. Indeed, would such recruits come to eventually know better, they will inevitably be thrown out of their respective undemocratic organisations.
Secondly, and in response to the comrade’s criticism of my “ideological tunnel-vision”, I think comrade Fox is a little confused. I respect their attempt to take the strategy of spontaneity seriously on its own terms. I expect that some of those who read my article may perceive my criticism of this strategy as unfairly dismissive and trapped inside my own theoretical frameworks. However, there is a lack of clarity here, and I would welcome further correspondence from comrade Fox to clear this up.
What is spontaneity, in your mind? I cannot tell. On the one hand, you seem to argue that the vanguard of the working class must always be working to raise consciousness, even outside of the “critical moment” that you refer to. We agree on this much. On the other hand, you remain committed to the notion of an innate revolutionary creativity of the working-class. This is a fuzzier claim, in my mind. I would like to put to you that Socialist Alternative et al are completely in accordance with the strategy of spontaneity. I do not believe they are contradicting it by talking down to the class, as you have acknowledged they have a habit of doing.
If the working class can come to revolutionary consciousness “all on its own”, which is what spontaneity really means after all, then what would be the purpose of spreading those ideas beforehand? Indeed, Socialist Alternative would be right that avoiding alienating potential future supporters in the here-and-now is of higher priority. This is epitomised by their attempt to construct the Socialist Party on the broadest possible basis. But if, as you seem to acknowledge comrade, it is only through the pre-preparation efforts of a hypothetical communist party that turns crises and revolts into revolutions, then what is the spontaneous element, exactly?
If all that is meant by spontaneity here is that great leaps in consciousness among the working class become more possible during periods of crisis and revolt, then we are in complete agreement. But this basic definition transforms the term spontaneity into something meaningless. All communists are ‘spontaneists’, by this definition. We would then need a new term to distinguish the RCO’s “strategy of revolutionary patience” from that of Socialist Alternative’s movement-of-the-squares obsessed version of the Stalinist “party of a new type”. We believe that there is a need to forge a mass communist party immediately. They leave this to the distant future of “revolutionary circumstances”. We see the sect form as compromising the democratic mandate of the working class to determine and control its leaders and politics. They see it as protecting them from opportunism. We want the socialist party to be an openly revolutionary one united around a minimum-maximum program. They think that doing so would limit the size of the project. We think that limiting the size of the project in the short-term is a necessary step for constructing a real vanguard, and that they are structurally empowering the rightist/reformist wing of the party. I see no use in turning spontaneity into a new metric of assessing who is the truest and red-ist commie – doing so would mystify more than it reveals.
PARTISAN! 