A Brief Discussion on Spontaneity (I): The Collective Mentality of Revolution and the Sieve of History, or on the Opportunity of Spontaneity

1. Sieving, collective memory, and the Great Panic

There is an ancient method of panning for gold, which is to apply gold sand on a wooden board with jagged edges like a washboard, place it in a relatively stable water flow, and let the power of water separate the gold from the mud and sand. The torrent of history often seems to have the power of this ancient sifting method, which makes the initially chaotic masses gradually differentiate under the impact of one event after another. However, the effectiveness of the gold panning sifting method does not lie in the value difference between gold and mud, but only in the density difference between gold and mud. To the historical torrent itself, each class or group is neither good nor evil, it just makes these people who were originally entangled in a ball to differentiate internally and externally. Political nature will not emerge from inert differentiation. People with the will and ability will create a number of cognitive devices for this purpose. Through the outward perspective and outward refraction of these devices, the vague area will gradually be eliminated in cognition and eventually shrink into a clear boundary. However, although it is impossible to pre-position the differentiated groups in terms of value, they can be roughly distinguished in terms of form according to the different levels of organization.

In his report "Group Violence and Social Relations - Revolutionary Masses (1789-1795)", Albert Soboul, a historian of the French Revolution, distinguished two different forms of "revolutionary masses", namely aggregates and collectives, based on his teacher Georges Lefebvre's research on the psychology of revolutionary masses. The so-called aggregate refers to the spontaneous but unconscious gathering of people. For example, people walking and playing in the park, farmers from various villages rushing to the county town to attend the market, housewives queuing in front of the store, etc. In the case of aggregates, the crowd gathers either occasionally or regularly, so that they all have the same purpose (purchasing living materials or exchanging goods), but this gathering is not political. Because when they are active, they do not regard themselves and others as members of a community, they are just free people in a certain group.

But even so, the aggregation of aggregates still poses a potential risk. Sobel said:

There is a kind of suppressed group consciousness latent in this kind of aggregation, which can be transformed into a clear consciousness by external events, so that everyone will have a feeling of solidarity. A strong emotion and a strong psychological stimulus suddenly awaken the group consciousness, thus turning the aggregation into a revolutionary collective and ready to take action.

…

This is how the revolutionary mentality is formed. All it takes is an external event, the arrival of the tithe collector, the announcement of the approach of robbers, a quarrel between buyers and sellers in the market, or a quarrel between women in a queue, and the aggregate will immediately turn into a revolutionary collective, either for the sake of attack or for self-defense.

Admittedly, such aggregates are no longer simply ordinary people gathered for the needs of daily life, but "semi-conscious aggregates" that have formed a certain, although vague but real collective mentality due to social pressure from all sides. Otherwise, one or two accidental external events will not necessarily directly stimulate the aggregate to become a collective that can act in unison. For example, the accidental death of a student in school may trigger a large-scale rally of parents of all students in the school, or it may be that only the parents of the student cry in front of the school gate. There are many reasons for this difference, but the most important one should be the accumulation of large-scale panic or dissatisfaction. For example, in the death of Hu Xinyu, the rumor of organ harvesting, as a potential belief, was activated as an explanatory knowledge due to Hu Xinyu's strange disappearance. In the fall from the building of Chengdu No. 49 Middle School, the dissatisfaction accumulated from many previous government notices became a fatal move to activate the previously formed short-term and medium-term memory through another similar notice from the Chenghua District Education Bureau. In these two examples, the stimulation of accidental events activated the semi-conscious aggregate into a collective with "political risks", but before that, we should see how the general aggregate gradually became a semi-conscious aggregate:

It is based on folk tradition: memories of past struggles, passed down from generation to generation through gossip, evening conversations, and widely disseminated through songs, speeches, and even printed materials. Of course, the masses of the people cannot access books and periodicals (almanacs, songbooks, and pictures should be valued). But within the urban and rural bourgeoisie, books and periodicals have a great influence. Popularization and extension are carried out under such conditions.

Collective mentality is based on collective memory, which should be regarded as a kind of local community internal knowledge. This kind of knowledge does not meet scientific standards, but it is a medium for people to move freely in the life world, and it often contains scientific discourse (for example, the convenience store virology doctor exaggerates the harmfulness of new strains after the release). It spreads in the form of gossip, exists in the form of rumors, and is spread through songs, pamphlets, tabloids (and their "multimedia combination": short videos). There is the initial differentiation of social groups here, which is centered on class and roughly divided by urban and rural areas: the people in towns use short videos, secret knowledge belonging to local traditions, and word of mouth in neighbors and families, and the people in cities use written materials and workplace relationship networks (for local citizens, they also have a certain "local cultural knowledge"). The people in the county have both.

We can also go further and trace it back to the entire social structure. For example, the rumor of organ harvesting was formed at the latest during the Boxer Rebellion, that is, the legend of "missionaries digging out children's eyeballs to refine silver." After the founding of the People's Republic of China, there was also a story about a hairy water monster cutting off male testicles and sending them to the Soviet Union to make atomic bombs. The spread of these rumors and the time period when they took effect often show the characteristics of increasing social pressure and a growing atmosphere of anxiety. This can be illustrated by both the uneasiness about the penetration of foreign religions into the countryside during the Boxer Rebellion and the social unrest in the early days of the founding of the People's Republic of China. Lefevere also discussed the great panic on the eve of the French Revolution:

At 2 a.m. on July 13-14, it was announced that 15,000 men were stationed at the Fortress of Saint-Antoine. On the morning of the 14th, panics broke out one after another: at 7 a.m., the Royal German Guards were said to have set up a barricade around the throne, and soon there were rumors that the Royal German Guards and the Royal Hussars had massacred the people in the suburbs. Then the troops stationed at Saint-Denis marched towards La Chapelle. At 8, 10, and 11 a.m., the Hussars and Dragoons were said to have been seen at the Fortress of Saint-Antoine. Similar disturbances occurred during the night of the 14th and 15th. The Chronicle des Forêts recorded: "It is rumored that the Prince of Condé is preparing to attack Paris tonight, with the intention of slaughtering 40,000 or perhaps 100,000 people." The Annales de Paris recorded that between midnight and one o'clock, "the Hussars, who were undoubtedly only on sentinel duty, advanced to the barricades, causing the greatest panic. More than a dozen panicked people rushed to the Hôtel de Ville to warn the authorities of the impending attack." On the rue Saint-Jacques, Adidi saw five or six hundred French guards marching to repel the alleged attack. At 11 a.m. on the 15th, the Electoral Assembly was in a panic again, because a coachman sent by a district of Paris to get information hurriedly came to announce that he saw troops preparing to launch an attack in Saint-Denis. - The Great Panic of 1789, Part II, Chapter 1: Paris and Conspiracy Theories

Lefevere very accurately attributed the atmosphere of panic in society to the combined effects of rural famine and urban unemployment at the time, namely the emergence of a large number of unemployed people who were excluded from the social network, and the image of "foreign bandits" on the faces of these unemployed people. The rising cost of living, on the one hand, created a large number of unemployed "wanderers" in the city, and on the other hand, it also made those with property and business angry. When the latter faced an imminent survival crisis, the emotions of defending the existing life and identifying and excluding members outside the community would rise along with the anxiety:

Beggars, vagrants, rioters, everywhere were accused of being "bandits". During the harvest season, uneasiness and anxiety were brewing all the time. The harvest season became a dreaded period, and local alarms increased. - Ibid., Conclusion

This is an important part of the so-called "pre-revolutionary collective mentality". One or two iconic events, or the periodic appearance of many similar local alarms, will constantly shape and strengthen the public impression of "enemies hidden in the dark" and their "hidden conspiracies". For China today, this is manifested in the widespread spread of the image of "unemployed loyalty" due to the surge in indiscriminate murders in the public mind, the "500,000 playing house" on various social platforms, and the large number of highly nervous parents caused by the increasingly serious low birth rate and aging population and the rising burden of childbearing, etc.

2. Spontaneous Collectives and Conscious Collectives

What has been discussed above is only the most extensive, fastest-appearing, and shortest-lasting of all possible spontaneity. This spontaneity is the contingency that flashes across the night sky like lightning, and it is often described as a "mob" by minor writers who follow Le Bon. Ironically, although Lefevere and Sobel's research on the collective mentality of revolution follows Le Bon in terms of problem-solving, their purpose is to find opportunities for revolution. Opportunities can be roughly divided into two categories: first, can these accidental thunderbolts blast a gap in the old order? Second, can a more highly organized collective be born from these semi-conscious aggregates? It should be emphasized that it is not the sudden events that cause damage to the order, but the sudden events themselves are the result of the weak points of the order that has already collapsed being broken by social pressure. It is not "where there is oppression, there is resistance", but "where there is space for resistance, there is resistance". In this way, the question is not how to take advantage of the opportunity to impact the weak link of the order (because a single person or group cannot "create" an event, they can only let the event "happen"), but how to maintain and expand the space displayed by this weak link. In other words, take advantage of the opportunity to make a short-lived accidental gap into a stable social fact. Sobel therefore defines two different kinds of collectives: spontaneous collectives and conscious collectives.

The spontaneous collective evolved directly from the semi-conscious aggregate. Its motivation is:

After some purely negative actions, such as denouncing the rule of law, undermining the authority of traditional leaders, and destroying the existing order, the collective will soon spontaneously establish a set of institutions. In the process of action, leaders will suddenly emerge and establish their authority. In order to coordinate the movement, the framework of new institutions will gradually be established.

At first glance, the spontaneous collective seems to be a new system organization that is deliberately created to replace the old order and the old authority. However, as we said before, emergencies that can only "happen" but cannot be "created" are the result rather than the cause of the collapse of order. Therefore, the new order constructed by the spontaneous collective is not so much a replacement for the old order as it is a forced filling of the vacuum left by the decline of the old order. Although the old order still exists and even wants to re-declare its universality, it has either lost the objective conditions for maintaining itself or is completely unable to meet or even grasp the new universal demands of the masses. During the French Revolution, the spontaneous collective of the market masses forced the city government to implement comprehensive price management or simply designate a new authority; the peasants demanded to arm themselves to deal with the "bandits" who might attack the village at any time; during the Cultural Revolution, local rebels, under the banner of political leadership, tried to seize power in the party committee to realize their demands for improved work benefits, and so on. In the wave of large-scale birth of spontaneous collectives, conscious collectives can only gain space for their expansion. Sobel believes:

The "conscious collective" was secretly organized in advance. It used the institutional framework established by spontaneous revolutionary actions, such as the battalions of the National Guard and the districts established in May 1790 to replace the counties. The uprisings of 1792 and 1793 were prepared in this way. The struggle to overthrow the throne on August 10, 1792 was organized by the insurgent municipality. The action to eliminate the Girondins of the National Convention from May 31 to June 2 of the same year was organized by the Episcopal Committee.

The word "utilization" points out the ambiguous relationship between conscious collectives and spontaneous collectives: conscious collectives can certainly emerge directly from the big tent of spontaneous collectives, such as leaders who stand out in the movement and begin to hold the power to decide matters on a regular basis, or the sifting of history allows the spontaneous collective to further produce internal differentiation, thus giving rise to small groups within the group, etc. However, it is entirely possible that conscious collectives emerge before large-scale spontaneous mass movements, and in the tide of the movement, they "seize power" (guide, discipline, or lead based on these two) over the spontaneous mass movement itself with their degree of organization and a complete set of programs. This is the relationship between the various factions that have successively come to power in the French National Assembly and the citizens of Paris, especially the sans-culottes.

3. Spontaneity and Consciousness in the Tide of History

In What is to be Done?, Lenin formulated the relationship between conscious and spontaneous collectives as a conscious organizational strategy:

We say that it is impossible for workers to have a social-democratic consciousness. This consciousness can only be instilled from the outside. The history of all countries proves that the working class can only form a trade union consciousness by its own strength... Socialist doctrines developed from the philosophical, historical and economic theories created by the educated people of the bourgeoisie, the intellectuals. Marx and Engels, the founders of modern scientific socialism, were also bourgeois intellectuals according to their social status. The situation in Russia is the same. The theoretical doctrines of the Social Democratic Party also emerged completely independently of the spontaneous growth of the workers' movement. Its emergence was the natural and inevitable result of the ideological development of the revolutionary socialist intellectuals. - What is to be done? Chapter 2: The spontaneity of the masses and the consciousness of the Social Democratic Party

However, this statement only applies to the following situation: that is, systematic knowledge or the ability to formulate a program is only mastered by a few intellectuals, while the majority of the masses, due to their "lack of education", cannot quickly form a complete program in a stormy and short-term movement, and then use it, a cognitive device, to quickly and clearly "realize what they want." But we know that consciousness is nothing more than a person's relationship to his surroundings, and self-consciousness is nothing more than the understanding of this relationship. If the masses themselves have been educated for a long time, or at least can understand this relationship by themselves through previous collective memory (through the story-telling of revolutionary traditions and revolutionary spirit), then in fact there is no need for intellectual activists to seize this position of understanding on their behalf. Even if the masses are "lack of education", their revolutionary needs are clear, at least not shaped by others, but have their own certain direction, and are fundamentally determined by historical events rather than simple propaganda. In fact, Lenin wrote What is to be Done? Although the motivation of "The Social Democratic Party" was to demand that the Social Democratic Party "seize power (leadership)" from the mass movement, the actual reason for this motivation was that the "consciousness" of these conscious collectives outside the mass movement was far from keeping up with the radical "spontaneity" of the masses:

The spontaneous upsurge of the masses in Russia came so rapidly (and continues to develop so rapidly)... It grew and expanded continuously and successively... But the revolutionaries lagged behind this upsurge both in their "theory" and in their activities, failed to create a continuous, continuous organisation capable of leading the entire movement.

This means that the conscious collective (the "party") can gain power at critical historical moments, that is, it "leads" the mass movement at that stage, only because the party is able to timely name the vague intellect of the masses through cognitive devices at these moments and thus make it clear self-consciousness. Sometimes, only a few or even one of these intellectual activists can produce the appropriate cognitive devices. More often, no one can do this. Spontaneity continues to exist, but consciousness is inexplicably absent. For example, when Lenin just published the "April Theses", even within the Bolshevik Party, the leaders headed by Stalin and Kamenev still supported the "two-stage theory" and then supported the provisional government that emerged from the February Revolution. The editorial board of Pravda stated to its readers that the "April Theses" were only the personal views of Comrade Lenin because they "arise from the assumption that the bourgeois-democratic revolution is over and expects the democratic revolution to directly transform into the socialist revolution." Neil Harding summarizes:

He was uncompromising in the face of public sentiment, in the face of the objectionable leaders of other parties, and even in the face of the hostility and deep distrust of almost all of his comrades. Lenin had almost no support from any prominent leader in his own party... Even Lenin's wife Krupskaya concluded, according to the memoirs of one of her friends, that "I am afraid it looked as if Lenin had gone mad."... Opposition to Lenin came not only from the leaders of his own party, but also from the Mensheviks, the socialist revolutionaries, the leaders of the Soviets, the masses of the workers, and especially the soldiers. - Leninism, Chapter 4: The Russian Revolution

It is particularly worth emphasizing that the "seizure of power" by the conscious collective from the spontaneous collective and its movement does not mean that the conscious collective has to carefully design an opportunistic political program to cater to the "mainstream mood" of a certain time and place. The universal opposition that Lenin encountered at the time, and the subversive universal support later, show that the key to gaining leadership is to grasp the long-term trend of the revolutionary mentality rather than a certain moment or time period. This grasp requires the members of the conscious collective to have the ability and courage to judge the development of events and the direction of history. The key to Lenin's support lies in his judgment of the future situation that Russia's politics and military will inevitably collapse, and this judgment is based on the situation of class and political differentiation in Russia. The most powerful reversal of the trend of the revolutionary mentality was first the call to resolutely withdraw from the war, then the program of the land revolution, and finally the judgment that the provisional government would betray the revolution. The many events that occurred from April to October connected the contingency into a sequence of inevitability that constantly confirmed Lenin's judgment:

On the crucial question of war and peace, each month brought further developments in support of the Bolshevik contention that the Provisional Government was determined to bring the war to victory. … It was obvious that the Soviet position, which demanded an end to the war on the basis of a fair peace without annexations or reparations, was unreasonably ignored by the government. … The anti-war sentiment that began to sweep the country (and the army) was everywhere vigorously resisted by the government, even after the Social Revolutionary Kerensky became Minister of War in May.

In mid-June the government decided to launch a major offensive in Galicia, which for three weeks was a great success. However, by the end of the first week in July the Russian army was retreating in disorder. The Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, who were now prominent in the government, inevitably suffered humiliation. Only the Bolsheviks cried out for an immediate end to the war... However ambiguous the Bolshevik views on the war were, however unpredictable the international situation on which they were based, there was no doubt that the Bolsheviks were gaining more and more credibility in the hearts of the people as the only radical anti-war party.

…

Political principles and local and personal interests here coincided with each other in such a way that the slogans "All power to the Soviets" and "All land to the peasants" were closely linked. Once again, the Bolsheviks alone adopted these slogans as their own, while all other parties were vainly opposing them.

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More than any single event, it was the Kornilov rebellion at the end of August that accelerated the rise in the prestige and organizational strength of the Bolshevik Party. By the same token, its humiliating defeat showed how weak the right-wing counter-revolution had become. … The Bolsheviks were the beneficiaries of the Kornilov affair. Everyone knew that the Provisional Government was weak. Worse, there were widespread rumors (not without basis) that Kornilov’s actions were, if not authorized, at least reported to the Prime Minister who had appointed him, Kerensky. On the other hand, the event showed that the Soviet Central Committee was the only real protector of the gains of the revolution and the only institution capable of inspiring and mobilizing the masses.

…

By early September it was clear that the Provisional Government was doomed. The Bolsheviks had gained a majority in the soviets of Moscow and Petrograd. In the crucial and nationally respected Petrograd Soviet, Trotsky had replaced the moderate Menshevik Zizek as chairman. —Leninism, Chapter 4: The Russian Revolution

He could not have foreseen that it was Kornilov who had rebelled, but he believed that the Provisional Government would betray the revolution in some way. He could not have foreseen that the government would launch an offensive in Galicia and retreat after three weeks, but he believed that Russia could no longer win the war, but the Provisional Government would inevitably insist on this. In short, Lenin could not have predicted all the events that would happen from April to October, even if it was only two or three landmark events. All he believed was that according to class analysis and materialism, the development of history would push the Soviets and the masses of workers and peasants towards the Bolsheviks, and that these programs, which were inappropriate when they were proposed, would gradually gain the trust of the Soviets and the masses of workers and soldiers. Because history, while different in its content, will repeat itself in its structure. It is like the relationship between the performers and the conductor in a symphony performance: we know that in a performance, it is neither the performers who follow the conductor nor the conductor who follows the performers, but the performers who play their instruments according to the score, and the conductor who constructs the overall style of the performance and the appropriate cooperation of each performer based on his understanding of the score, etc. Politics is then not a "manufacturing" skill like carving marble sculptures, but a "performing" art like dancing or playing the flute.

Trotsky further confirmed this in both positive and negative ways. When Trotsky, with his outstanding eloquence, skillfully carried out agitation and propaganda in Petrograd, and made the garrison openly declare that they would only obey the orders of the Soviet and the Military Revolutionary Committee and became an "armed prophet", from the perspective of historical screening, this was just the process of the proletariat identifying Trotsky as the representative and spokesman of the Bolshevik spirit and deciding to grant Trotsky authority on the basis of the clear program proposed and widely disseminated by Lenin. Of course, this granting of authority would not have happened if Trotsky had not chosen to support Lenin at the critical moment and agitated the masses in time. However, this granting of authority would not have happened if Trotsky had not adjusted the strategy of the uprising from "revolting alone in the name of the Bolsheviks" to "defending the Soviets" based on the actual situation of the revolutionary masses. And the latter is more important than the former. After all, although a mass movement that is not effectively organized will inevitably dissipate, it must first abandon those leaders who cannot resonate with the torrent of the movement before it dissipates. Although the political influence of the Sans-culottes was completely destroyed by the Thermidorian Reaction, it had already abandoned the Constitutionals, Girondists and Jacobins before that.

This was confirmed from the opposite side when Trotsky gradually became a "disarmed prophet" after 1923:

However, things are completely different now than in 1917: for the Bolsheviks, who have moved towards a dominant position in social production, it is unacceptable to abolish these powers; for the workers who have been hurt by the civil war, they cannot actively convey their collective will without organizational strength. Although the policies that later became Stalinism certainly cannot tolerate "Trotskyism that inherits the spirit of the October Revolution", in the absence of the organizational basis of the workers, they have actually become a struggle between different directions among the powerful. Before being expelled from the Soviet Union, Trotsky was still able to speak directly to the workers as he did in 1917, and his speeches were still as magnificent and eloquent as in 1917, but the reason why the speeches at that time could be heard was because they were in line with the collective will of the workers' organizations that held real power, which no longer exists.

From this perspective, when the "prophet" Trotsky commanded the Red Army to defeat the White Army, he was disarmed. The political struggles in the following years were just a prelude to his exile. His eloquence, theoretical talent and military talent would never shine as brightly as they once did without the power of the masses. ——Zheng Ziyan, "Eighty Years after Trotsky's Death | Beyond "Demonology" and "Theology"