[lbo-talk] Minoritarian revolution (was: who is the most racist?)

[Jim Straub]

Not to mention the other problem with attempting transformative social
change (or even less ambitious goals) with a smallish minority of society---
these projects eventually suffer backlash from the 'silent' majority.  The
silent majority of the sixties didn't initiate a civil war with the
libertory movements of the time (Hoover's assassination squads aside), but
with tools ranging from white flight, the new republican broad right, etc,
combined with the retrenchments that came in industry, urbanity, etc--- not
only laid waste to the radical dreams of the seventies but actually
inaugurated a massive move to the right we still live under.

And sometimes there actually is a civil war.  Allende had the biggest chunk
of society explicitly endorsing revolution to socialism I know of (from a
third of the population in his election to a slim majority in municipal
elections two years later), but they still lost the decisive conflict when
it came to it, and how.  Chile today?  The most capitalistic society in
south america, by far, from the kids clamoring for nike t-shirts to the
privatized social security to the relatively good economic growth under
sustained grim neoliberalism.

I think explicitly advocating only trying to bring a small bit of society
with you on any major social change is a very dangerous prospect.  On the
other hand it squares nicely with US leftists in delusion about how
miniscule their base of support is and unwilling to engage with the other
97% of the country to reverse that trend.


> > A minority of a population becomes active, and by their actions (even
> > before _official_ change of law or institution) they change reality.
> > Example: The black riots of the '60s. The world in which those riots
> > occurred was a different world, institutionally, from the world in which
> > they didn't occur. That changed the attitudes of millions of
> > individuals. As far as I can tell there has _never_ been a really major
> > change that did not follow this pattern.
> ===============================================
> It's inspiring to believe that "a minority can change society" but the
> process of change is more complex than that. The protest movements of
> large
> constituences - particularly those which have formed the base of governing
> liberal and social democratic parties - can accelerate the process, but
> unless their unrest coincides with an underlying systemic need for the
> kinds
> of changes for which they are agitating, it will peter out or be
> suppressed
> by the state.