Dead on. I just happened to be looking for some analysis of how ideas/movements are born, spread, and evolve, and here it is! Thank you. You guys are amazing.

Pete, I actually have to do a little presentation to Stengers in some workshops in a couple of weeks. No doubt I’ll end up talking about fairy dust and get laughed out of the room but I’ll put the point you make about the normative uses made of complexity/chaos theory to her and report back.

The spontaneity vs organisation debate is often played out in a really sterile way: I can remember anarcho-syndicalists back in the 1980s deriding ultra-leftists for believing “it’ll be alright on the night” (when of course they should have been building rank-and-file workers’ groups). And the ultra-leftist critique was just as bitchy.

It’s probably more useful to think of spontaneity/‘organisation’ as two poles around which we shape ideas and practices of organising — even the most ‘spontaneous’ action has a hidden history, just as formal organisations have to break free of their structures. So maybe we should talk about organising (a verb) rather than organisation (a thing). Organising can take many forms, some permanent, some more temporary. And there can be movement between those two poles tactically as well as strategically.

Perhaps this sterile opposition between two modes of organising is itself bound up with a particular period of capitalist development, and therefore a particular period of workers’ self-organisation. With the partial collapse of neoliberalism (and bearing in mind the whole immaterial labour debate), perhaps we need to develop new, more fluid forms of politics appropriate to our times.

Of course it’s also possible that I am a mystic, with the secretly-held thought that I am talking nonsense… 😉

Needing to hold onto this idea of fairy dust i went away thinking and only later did it occur that similar discussions were had in the olde-worlde by the council communists in the 20s and 30s.

Paul Mattick had this to say on the matter; which, if you replace ‘spontenaity’ with ‘fairy dust’ (and you can wade thru the painfully opaque phraseology in places) could still be relevant to this discussion!:

“In the matter of organisation this, then is the dilemma of the radical: in order to do something of social significance, actions must be organised. Organised actions, however, turn into capitalistic channels. It seems that in order to do something now, one can do only the wrong thing and in order to avoid false steps, one should undertake none at all. The political mind of the radical is destined to be miserable; it is aware of its utopianism and it experiences nothing but failures. In mere self-defence, the radical stresses spontaneity always, unless he is a mystic, with the secretly-held thought that he is talking nonsense. But his persistence seems to prove that he never ceases to see some sense in the nonsense.

Taking refuge in the idea of spontaneity is indicative of an actual or imagined inability to form effective organisations and a refusal to fight existing organisations in a ‘realistic’ manner. For to fight them successfully would necessitate the formation of counter-organisations , which, by themselves, would defeat the reason for their existence. ‘Spontaneity’ is thus a negative approach to the problem of social change and only in a purely ideological sense may it also be considered positive as it involves a mental divorce from those activities that favour the prevailing society. It sharpens critical faculty and leads to disassociation from futile activities and hopeless organisations. It looks for indications of social disintegration and for the limitations of class control. It results in a sharper distinction between appearance and reality and is, in brief, the trade mark of a revolutionary attitude. Since it is clear that some social forces, relations and organisations tend to disappear and others tend to take hold, those interested in the future, in the new forces in the making, will emphasise spontaneity; those more intimately connected with the old ones will stress the need for organisation.”