>Whether to win an election or organize a successful direct action, it is
>not necessary to appeal to a majority.
well, I think Marx was right about the history of class warfare. It would be an endless repeat of the same, as long as the class that takes up arms to revolt is a minority. What made capitalism different, he argued, was that it would inevitably reduce everyone to wage-slaves and impoverish them. But, because the move to overthrow capitalism was taken up by a majority, it wouldn't reinscribe class society yet again.
<....> All the preceding classes that got the upper hand sought to fortify their already acquired status by subjecting society at large to their conditions of appropriation. The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive forces of society, except by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation, and thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation. They have nothing of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous securities for, and insurances of, individual property.
All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air. http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/classics/manifesto.html
But this issue gets conveniently ignored every time you and Carrol bring up the revolutionary 1/3 proposition.
Kelley