[lbo-talk] [LBO] Surowecki on unions

[Carrol Cox]

I argued that liberals also wrongly assume one must begin in the present.
Blanuists also tend to assume that, revealing their liberal stripes. There
is also another error: Failing to note that a huge bulk of the population is
more or less passive. U.S. presidents are elected by roughly  25% of the
citizens. Studies show that _if_ the other half voted, they would split the
same way. But they don't vote. A 100% turnout would only occur in a 'world'
unimaginably different from the present. I can not imagine what monstrous
events would have to have occurred to bring about such a condition.

And Wojtek's metaphor of measuring  clouds is, I think, a good one. I am
willing to assume that polls measure accurately whatever it is that they
measure. I reject out of hand that  polls indicate their own meaning. Asked
"Are you for or against X" by a stranger on the phone, they answer
truthfully. Of course there are almost an infinite number of ways of asking
_any_ question. I think loaded questions (which are unethical if asked by
someone who is only a pollster) probably give a much better sense of
"opinion" that studiously "fair" questions. And in a conversation, such as
goes on (when things are going right) between movement activists and those
at the 'margins' of the movement, that is what you get: an exchange of
loaded questions and answers to them, both questions and answers changing
as the conversation goes on. It is utterly unrealistic to ground political
thinking in current passive opinion.

Carrol

-----Original Message-----
From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org]
On Behalf Of Wojtek S
Sent: Friday, January 14, 2011 4:22 PM
To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] [LBO] Surowecki on unions

Marv: "a tiny core of activists and revolutionaries are all that is needed
to effect even the most profound social change, without the corresponding
need for majority support."

[WS:]  I think you look at it too statically.  Initially it is only a small
core of revolutionaries, but they they eventually draw more and more people
and at the end they get majority support.  Is not it how it happened in
Cuba?

In other words, it is not that majority support does not matter but that it
is an outcome rather than a cause of a revolutionary process.

Wojtek

On Fri, Jan 14, 2011 at 5:10 PM, Marv Gandall <marvgand at gmail.com> wrote:


>
> On 2011-01-14, at 4:23 PM, Carrol Cox wrote:
>
> > "Working Class Opinion" (working class in general) is irrelevant to a
> given
> > union drive..At the beginning of a war the only relevant  opinions are
> the one or two percent who say
> > (without any qualification) Get Out Stop the war. No other opinion is
> > relevant. And so forth. Struggles are always concrete and involve only a
> > tiny number of people to begin with and even as they (sometimes) triumph
> > they never involve a majority.
>
> On 2011-01-14, at 4:42 PM, Wojtek S wrote:
>
> > Marv, I think Carrol is right on this one, even though I would not argue
> it
> > the way he does.
>
> Right. We've been over this ground many times before. Carrol is one hard
> Blanquist dude. He thinks a tiny core of activists and revolutionaries are
> all that is needed to effect even the most profound social change, without
> the corresponding need for majority support. It hasn't happened before,
> neither in 18th century France nor in the USSR or China in the 20th or
> anywhere else, and I'm ready to eat crow if that's how it happens next
time.
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