Reply To: Review of book about the CNT’s integration into the State
“Not that there’s anything to disagree with”
If the blurb is accurate, there’s plenty to disagree with.
“… as people engage in activity, they simultaneously change the world and themselves… the means that revolutionaries propose to achieve social change have to involve forms of activity which transform people into individuals who are capable of, and driven to, both overthrow capitalism and the state and build a free society.”
This hasn’t worked in the past, it isn’t working now and there’s no reason to suppose that it will be more successful in the future.
ALB here https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/topic/a-comrade-of-may-1968/#post-206377 framed the matter basically as revolution preceding ideas vs ideas preceding revolution. I.e. the SPGB notion of majority-socialist-consciousness necessary *before* revolution can occur, *not* something that comes about through/during class struggle and/or the act of revolution itself.
Amusingly, the Western Socialist in 1948 published an article by Pannekoek in which he says: ‘The strikers themselves may not be aware of it — neither are most socialists– they may have no intention to be revolutionary, but they are. And gradually consciousness will come up of what they are doing intuitively, out of necessity; and it will make the actions more direct and more efficient.’