Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> [Bill Gross is the world's biggest bondholder. He's not a standard-
> issue Wall Street hack, but he's far from an oddball...]
>
> <http://www.pimco.com/LeftNav/Featured+Market+Commentary/IO/2010/Let’s+Get+Fisical+January+2010.htm
> >
>
> Investment Outlook
> Bill Gross | January 2010
>
> Let’s Get Fisical
>
> A recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal
> poll reported that over 65% of Americans trust their government to do
> the right thing “only some of the time” and a stunning 19% said
> “never.”
Let's play with that figure.
Let's assume that 15% are from a reactionary perspective.
That leaves 4% of the population oppose state olicy from a leftists perspective. Also lets assume that about 2/3 of the u.s. population consists of mentally and physically active persons (excluding nursing home residents, for example, but including prison populations). So we have a potential for left organizing of 8 million people.
How many people, (in the period from Rosa Parks to the defeat of ERA) participated actively in the movements of the '60s? Note I say movementS, plural. And I include among those active partiicpants everyone from Martin Luther King and Malcolm X to some stray 15-year old who went to one Anti-Wardemonstration in 1971. (All these have both a right and an obligation to refer to "Waht WE accomplished in the '60s: For the central achievement of that decade was the temporary creation of a WE of tha inclusiveness, so that that 16-year old has a right and an obligation to say "We smashed Jim Crow in the Southh," eventhough he had not been born when Rosa Parks said No. The creation of such an inclusive "WE" is one of the measures of a serious mass movementfor social change.
So how many people were involved in that movement (that coalescnce of those movementS)? I can't imagine it was much over a million. And probably less than 100,000 were in the various activities that created the sparks that caused a prairie fire. The total population was smaller then, but my guess is (experts in demographics can correct me here) that counting activists and the more enthusiastic of the passviie supporters on the sidelines, from one too two percent of the population constituted the Movment which changed u.s. socie5ty more profounly than anything since the Civil War.
Someone said of slogans I had introduced that they would turn off 98% of the population. I'm not that optimistic -- I would guess between 99 and 99.5$ would be turned off. But that .05$ would represent a larger number than those who _triggered_ the events of the '60s!
Obviously all these numbers are sort of wild guesses, but I think they accurately gesture towards the order of magnitude involved. There would seem to be (say) at least three or four million people in the U.S. today that have sufficient passive agreement or potential agreement with seriously radical left politics that if they could be mobilized (as bodies and intellects) in a more or less compatible collection of movments for this or that -- enough to generate a Movement that would shake the nation to its roots, gatherrng both increasing numbers of passive supporters AND increasing numbers of hysterical opponents (whose hysteria would make intelligent governing more difficult) as to ccreate a social context frighteningly and joyfully open to the future.
All that, incidentally, is what I have meant over the years in isisting that left agitation appeal primarily to those who already in some way or other agree with us. The mobilizing of that potential constituency is a necessary preconditon of reaching any larger population.
But, as we know from ealier surges of the left in the U.S. and elsewhere, the effectiveness of such organizing is dependent on conditons that are unpredictable and that cannot be artificially brought into existence. The political question, then, within an interim period such as our own since 1975 is what kind of work and thought in the present does the hypothesis of such a period in the future demand.
Carrol