[lbo-talk] communists

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Wed Dec 16 10:27:37 PST 2009


Bhaskar Sunkara wrote:
>
> I guess the hundreds of thousands from the Indonesian Communists Party alone
> weren't "hardcore", but had to be exterminated anyway.

About A few hundred harcore activists could account for a movement of hundreds of thousands.

And of course the foolowers had to be exterminated. If you kill only the leaders (and selective killing is always more difficult), more hardcore are apt to move up as it were. (This is not certain at all, but it does sometimes happen.) Probably altogether about 2000 to 3000 people participated in "movement" activities of one sort or another in Bloomington/Normal Illinoisfrom 1965 through 1970. There were not more than 10 or so peole who triggered and kept any sort of continuity in those activites.

Really big social movements are always a small minority of the entire population, and "hardcore" (i.e. continuing while conditons change around them) are a small minority within the movement. The large numbers of course are more important than the feww hardcore, because there are _always_ a number of "harddcore" working their tails off, but the times in history when large numbers responded and became even peripherally involved are remarkably few! So in explaining the large social movments of the past we have to focus not on the leadership but on what kind of conditions generated the larger response to that core. Gramsci was right that a "general staff" can recruit an army but an army cannot recruit a general staff, but he failed to not that that could actually happen only _sometimes_, not any old time. The latter view is called voluntarism -- which never works.

Carrol



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