Reply To: What is a majority?
It’s clear that for Marx, and thus for anyone claiming to be influenced by Marx, that the overwhelming majority of humanity is what is meant by ‘a majority’
Yes socialism requires a significant majority in order to be established but I think we ought to be clear, that in the process of obtaining that a majority the type of opposition that socialists are likely to encounter en route to that objective will itself begin to change and mutate and in the direction in which social opinion itself is moving and adapting.
That is to say, if you have 50 % of the population, say, who are committed or “full” socialists this would imply , in my view that a further , say, 30% are what I would term “semi-socialists”. Semi-socialists are not quite convinced about the need for socialism but wouldn’t stand in the way of its establishment, leaving only 20% who definitely oppose socialism.
By the time full socialists achieve a figure of say 60% , socialism’s overt opponents will have shrunk to pretty much negligible proportions.
What I am trying to say is that you have to visualise the (as yet hypothetical) growth of the socialist movement in historical terms. It cannot but have a profound (and ever expanding) impact on the broader social climate. As the latter changes this will help accelerate the growth of the movement in a positive feedback loop.
This is why I find the typical Leftist scenarios about the capitalist class clamping down on the socialist movement (once it starts growing) by withdrawing elementary democratic rights and installing a fascist dictatorship, quite unconvincing and ahistorical. Capitalist governments operate within, and adapt to, a given social context if only to shore up their legitimacy. They dont have a free hand to mould developments as they might want. If they did , if they could shape society in whichever way they chose, the workers would never revolt or have obtained the vote. We would still be living in the pre-Chartist era or Rotten boroughs lorded over by rotten capitalists.
Change is essentially a bottom-up process. The capitalists and their representatives have power only because we give it to them. When the writing is on the wall and their time is clearly up, there will precious little they could do about it. For the most part even they will fall in line with the will of majority, grudgingly or otherwise