Extolling spontaneity as a method masks a bid to replace existing leadership

Evidence

The fact that every “spontaneous” movement contains rudimentary elements of conscious leadership, of discipline, is indirectly demonstrated by the fact that there exist tendencies and groups who extol spontaneity as a method. Here one must distinguish between the realm of pure “ideology” and that of practical action, between scholars who argue that spontaneity is the immanent and objective “method” of the historical process, and political adventurers who argue for it as a “political” method. With the former it is a question of a mistaken conception, whereas with the latter what is involved is an immediate and vulgar contradiction which betrays its manifest practical origin—i.e. the immediate desire to replace a given leadership by a different one. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 805

Categorization

• XREF: This distinction between intellectuals who theorize spontaneity and political adventurers who weaponize it will recur in how Islamophobia discourse routes around Marxism — a ‘spontaneist’ framing of anti-Muslim sentiment as purely popular and unled.