i wrote this in september 2023, thinking back on the lessons of the previous few years (and of my many more years of movement work). this seems like the moment to put it in the world, incomplete as it is.

one of the left/progressive snarl words of the moment is “spontaneous”. we’re told that our struggles can’t rely on “spontaneity”, on “spontaneous revolts”. we’ve heard this again and again over the past few years. the grassroots mutual aid that sustained many of us and saved untold thousands of lives during the first two years of the pandemic was “too spontaneous” to last. the george floyd uprising’s “sponteneity” was its fatal flaw. that spectre of unreliability is used to push the idea that we should “build organizations” – on a centralized and hierarchical model (choosing only among the basically indistinguishable variations of the vanguard party, the 501(c) corporation, the trade union, and the membership organization) – “not movements”, to use the alinskyites’ phrase for this dogma.

but if we look at the material realities as we all experienced them, while we still have them fairly fresh in our minds, we see a very different picture. “spontaneity”, in the 2020s as always, is a fiction. what’s being decried, dismissed, and declared useless are projects that are or were self-organized and self-managed by the people participating in them. every one of them drew on deep experience (whether shared by people involved or through lessons passed on in a variety of ways) to plan its work and develop the structures its participants felt it needed based on the context where they were working. none of this came out of thin air in an instant – that’s a fantasy projected by people who cannot imagine anything happening without Someone In Charge except by some form of incomprehensible magic.

“spontaneity” is what you call self-organization and self-management if you’re against it.

what limited the success and sustainability of these projects was precisely the intervention of the organizations and people now putting the blame on “spontaneity”. rather than redirecting material resources into self-organized mutual aid structures, they created shoddy copies that they could tell their funders were “scalable”, or offered supposed support that in practice put them in control, or persuaded people to adopt their models of work. rather than find concrete ways to strengthen the effectiveness and sustainability of increasingly militant street actions, they actively worked to make them less militant, promoted “peaceful” and “nonviolent” tactics, intervened physically and in the media to divert people from effective direct action towards symbolic gestures, and steadfastly pushed fantasies of legislation and electoral campaigns as the properly “serious” channels for creating change. predictably, these kinds of poison pills were damaging or deadly.

this same pattern played out over the last sixteen months of work in solidarity with the palestinian resistance, with the same results: opportunistic cooptation and demobilization through wheel-spinning activity, by both 501(c) corporations and vanguard parties. the flattening of tactical and strategic imagination into paths that decades of experience have clearly shown to be ineffectual. hierarchical organizations strengthened at the expense of the movement. and very little critical assessment of the successes and failures of the work.

as we in the u.s. head deeper into an overtly fascist regime’s rule (a meaningful and terrifying change in degree and tone, but not a shift in the state’s structure or priorities) we need to not do this same fucking thing again. our resistance will not – cannot – be effective unless it is self-organized and self-managed by its participants. let’s be spontaneous. together.