Mass enthusiasm converts to force only when pre-existing organizations supply it structure and follow-through

Evidence

It is reasonable to assume that people joining a Fridays for Future rally, or participants in Black Lives Matter demonstrations, have kindred trance-like experiences; one finds loudspeaker trucks, possibly someone is playing music from an iPhone over a Bluetooth speaker. And yet the mass march described by Hobsbawm nonetheless took place in a completely different environment. The then fifteen-year-old had not joined the march to Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz on his own but did so together with comrades from the SSB, a Communist-linked paramilitary organization. A Party representative had selected songs for the occasion, printed, and disseminated them. Reading the (auto)biographies of German socialists of Hobsbawm’s generation, such as the aforementioned Wolfgang Abendroth or Comintern valkyrie Olga Benario, it is striking how much time, energy, and creativity they devoted to building class consciousness and organizing their fellow students, neighbors, and coworkers. — Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics, 247

Categorization

• SEED: Essay angle: same trance, different plumbing — why the aesthetic of protest survived but the institutional machinery that once made it politically productive did not.
• XREF: Core of the hollowed-out-institutions thesis: emotion needs organizational scaffolding to become political force.