What is a majority?
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I first came across this topic when a now ex-comrade some years ago posted that we are not advocating to wait for a numerical majority but for a politically functional majority which will effectively establish socialism and he judged to be from his readings to be 20%-30%, with the majority of the remainder being passive fence-sitters and just a small minority being actively opposed. It was our position pre-suffragette votes for women. We didn’t require the vote to be given to half the population.
Some members argued if we can get a 20-30% support why not be patient and wait the extra few months more and lessen the possibility of violence, because then the chances are that we would have 40-50% of workers revolutionized.
Our official literature explains
“we use terms such as “majority” and “majoritarian” this is not because we are obsessed with counting the number of individual socialists, but to show that we reject minority action to try to establish socialism – majority as the opposite of minority….a majority (yes, but in the democratic rather than mere mathematical sense)…”
http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/aug04/icc.html
1955 EC Statement, “The overwhelming mass of the people will participate, or FALL IN LINE with, the process of reorganisation” [my emphasis]
So I was interested in Extinction Rebellion’s use of the 3.5% rule expounded by Erica Chenoweth.
My Talk at TEDxBoulder: Civil Resistance and the “3.5% Rule”
Data on all major nonviolent and violent campaigns for the overthrow of a government or territorial liberation since 1900 which covered the entire world and included every known campaign that consists of at least a thousand observed participants, which constitutes hundreds of cases, was analyzed. Nonviolent campaigns worldwide were twice as likely to succeed outright as violent insurgencies, even in extremely repressive, authoritarian conditions where we might expect nonviolent resistance to fail. In fact, no campaigns failed once they’d achieved the active and sustained participation of just 3.5% of the population—and lots of them succeeded with far less than that. 3.5% in the U.S. today means almost 11 million people so it isn’t insignificant as it looks. Every single campaign that did surpass that 3.5% threshold was a nonviolent one.
We should ask ourselves, is this study applicable to a social revolution, an action far greater than any political revolution?
It also leads us to ask: Do we need parliament to vote socialism in?
The ICC link doesn’t resolve. Is this the article?
Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and … the alteration of men on a mass scale is, necessary, … a revolution; this revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.
[my bold]
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’.
Any attempt by a self-constituting ‘elite’ to argue that ‘socialism’ will be brought about by a minority (which just happens to be them) is tantamount to Leninism.
To be clear, we’re talking about 80-90% of humanity here, not 3.5%, not 20-30%, not even 40-50%.
Socialism is the self-emancipation of the proletariat. Anything less will require an elite to lead it.
To specifically address the issue in terms argued by some SPGB members, the generalists will determine ‘truth’, not an elite of specialists.
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
robbo203 wrote “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”
It should also be stressed that any ‘change’ from the ‘bottom-up’, if it is to lead to socialism, will have to be democratic.
Furthermore, these ‘democratic bottom-up changes’ will also involve the social production of our ‘science’, including education, academia, universities, philosophy, logic, maths, physics, nature, reality, truth, objectivity, etc.
There won’t be any ‘specialists’ who supposedly have a non-democratic ‘method’ which allows them, and them alone, to dictate to the ‘majority’ just what ‘is‘.
It’s clear to me that the reason so many self-proclaimed ‘socialists’ look to Engels’ notion of ‘Scientific Socialism’ is precisely because the bourgeois term ‘science’ implies an elite.
I’d be inclined to oppose ‘Scientific Socialism’ to ‘Democratic Socialism’, to draw out the differences in these politically-opposed conceptions of ‘socialism’, and the question of whether it requires a majority to build it, or, on the contrary, that an elite can build ‘nature’, ‘reality’, ‘truth’, etc., and so, ‘socialism’.
“The proletarian movement is the self-conscious independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority.” – The Communist Manifesto
But how is this determined.
The Party and Engels has said the vote is the thermometer to gauge support and adherence to socialist ideas.
But I have pointed out that when we endorsed our Declaration of Principles, the electorate did not include the majority. All women and I think 20% of working-class men were excluded from the franchise. Polling figures were assumed to reflect the will of those unable to vote.
Should the abstentions count as votes for socialism? Robbo says the minority will “For the most part even they will fall in line with the will of majority, grudgingly or otherwise”
Can it also be a case of the opposite as this Erica Chenoweth says it actually is?
In places without a democratic process, it will be necessary to judge support from those who vote with their feet whether its Tahrir Sq or Tiananmen Sq. or Gezi Park.
Are we to assume where the democratic mandate exists, we will wait for the parliamentary constitutional procedures to take their course and then have some Privy Councillor use the Royal Prerogative to over-rule Parliament and the Law as happened with the Chagos Islanders.
The growth of political socialists will be mirrored by the same increased number of socialists in the industrial arena so just what happens when employers are faced with mounting militancy of workers that now has the confidence of a new society being seen on the horizon?
As an aside, I have witnessed that it is a core minority of strikers on the picket line which determines success or failure. Most strikers use a strike as a convenient holiday to have the time to paint and wall-paper their houses.
I think with any increase of involvement in Parliamentary politics through the conduit of socialist parties there will also be the manifestations of workers councils, community committees, cultural clubs and whatever touched on when LBird said “There won’t be any ‘specialists’ who supposedly have a non-democratic ‘method’ which allows them, and them alone, to dictate to the ‘majority’ “…i.e. politicians being entrusted to carry out the peoples’ will. A SOCIAL REVOLUTION, encompasses the whole of society and will express itself in a wide variety of ways.
We have the luxury of speculation because I doubt any of us on the forum will be required to make a judgement call on when a near majority or even 3.5% has been reached. But imagine the WSPUS – 3.5% – A 11 million strong membership of a socialist movement.
alanjjohnstone wrote “A SOCIAL REVOLUTION, encompasses the whole of society and will express itself in a wide variety of ways.”
Indeed. ‘a wide variety of ways’, including ‘science’.
We’d best start preparing now, to explain why ‘science’ has to be democratised. All talk of Stephen Hawking, and his ilk, knowing ‘nature’ better than the rest of us, to the extent that we can’t vote to change ‘nature’, will have to be politically challenged.
Whilst socialists disagree with Marx’s argument that ‘nature’ is a social product, and that we can change it, we’re all hamstrung.
Only a majority can determine ‘nature-for-us’.
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