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social activity in a situation where society's decision-making authorities have been removed but not replaced, we might enrich our understanding of numerous facets of this question by imagining a revolutionary organizer in yet another social situation. We might, for example, imagine a revolutionary organizer who poses precisely these questions during her lunch break; we might even suppose that this militant takes it for granted that social activity without a decision-making organization is simply impossible (since it is this assumption that accounts for her service and devotion to the revolutionary organization).
In pre-revolutionary days the restaurant where the militant is eating was extremely expensive and catered exclusively to wealthy patrons. At the outbreak of the insurrection it was transformed into a free, self-service neighborhood restaurant. After the battles at the barricades, newly-built neighborhood restaurants were set up on the model of the equipment, cleanliness and quality of meals in this restaurant.
Let us assume that the revolutionary militant, who eats at this restaurant daily because of the superior quality of its meals, never before asked herself about the structure of decision-making in the restaurant itself. She might simply have assumed that the restaurant had an extremely well organized staff, namely a workers' council, as well as a council committee, namely a smaller group who coordinated and organized the well defined tasks of the various staff members. Or she might have assumed that the restaurant's activity had simply continued to be supervised and directed by some of the pre-revolutionary managers and chefs. At any rate, at this particular lunch break she decides to find out which of the two alternatives is actually the case. She decides that, after the meal, she'll enter the kitchen to get a full picture of the restaurant's political structure from the manager or director.
Access to the kitchen is free to anyone. In fact, a poster next to the kitchen door specifically asks guests to visit the kitchen in order to learn one or another of the various arts of food preparation
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