> If I understand Julio's conception it
> calls for reaching a huge number of
> the population to acheive anything. It
> would have to nominate and elect a
> majority in both the House and the
> Senate. No left movement has ever had
> that kind of electoral support. The left
> has achieved things by "persuading"
> non-leftist (and even anti-leftists)
> politicians to make changes they (a)
> personally did not want and (b) which
> they did not need to make in order to be
> reelected.
Well, if the ultimate goal is to build a communist society, and we view our actions here and now as steps in that direction, then I don't see how anything lasting can be achieved without the full, conscious involvement of the people who are supposed to be the agents building the new society.
That said, I do understand that you don't need everybody to be a Capital-carrying Marxist to bring the troops home or enact single payer health care in the U.S. How many people have to be involved to achieve this or that, how involved they should be, to which degree, with which kind of fighting disposition, we don't yet know. We'll try and then see what works.
There are all sorts of factors, some of them endogenous, that facilitate or make it hard to change the political and legal landscape at a given point in time, more conspicuously the ideological and political climate, the temperament of the people occupying the apparata, the mood up and down society (consent, cooperation, or resistance to change among different strata).
In the jargon of economists, "endogenous" is a variable with a chicken-and-egg relationship with the dependent variable, in this case mass motion. More clearly said: mass motion doesn't only depend on the ideological climate in society. It can itself alter the ideological climate, shifting people's attitudes towards towards sympathy and cooperation or towards fear and entrenchment of the status quo.
It's a complex military equation. Who do we need to defeat with a big stick? Who do we need to neutralize with some carrot/stick combo? Who do we need to persuade and get on board? We don't know all this in advance. Past experience is guide, but things can always turn out to be different. An example: I never expected the Soviet political apparatus to yield so easily. The coup attempt against Gorbachev failed, because of many reasons. In part, I guess, officers and troops were unwilling to follow orders. In part, the leaders themselves were hesitant and didn't know what they could or wanted to achieve. The Zeitgeist can be altered when enough people move, but also the existing Zeitgeist engulfs the people, the bureaucrats, the troops, etc. and makes it more or less conducive for people to move in the first place.
My question now is how to initiate things, because popular movements have inertia. We can deal with the other issues later. For now, the basic principle of military theory, which says that one should apply overwhelming force on key narrow targets, suffices. Conclusion: we must build up as much force as possible. And, as Napoleon well knew, forces can only be built by fighting. And idle army is a decaying army. The more force, the better. We need victories, small and big. Victories to reinforce the confidence of people in their ability to win. We'll know much if we "just" (1) identify the best targets and (2) determine how to prompt mass actions to the point of making them overwhelm the general resistance to change.
It's a long rambling answer, because I don't have time to edit.