Apparent spontaneity is merely un-documented conscious leadership in subaltern movements

Evidence

Meanwhile it must be stressed that “pure” spontaneity does not exist in history: it would come to the same thing as “pure” mechanicity. In the “most spontaneous” movement it is simply the case that the elements of “conscious leadership” cannot be checked, have left no reliable document. It may be said that spontaneity is therefore characteristic of the “history of the subaltern classes”, and indeed of their most marginal and peripheral elements; these have not achieved any consciousness of the class “for itself”, and consequently it never occurs to them that their history might have some possible importance, that there might be some value in leaving documentary evidence of it. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 803

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines spontaneity as the label history gives to subaltern activity that left no documentary trace of leadership.
• XREF: Feeds directly into how silenced or marginalized groups are written out of history — a concept Islamophobia scholarship reuses.
• QUESTION: Gramsci ties subaltern consciousness-of-self to record-keeping; worth chasing how literacy and archival access condition historical agency.