On 2011-01-14, at 5:22 PM, Wojtek S wrote:
> 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.
Of course, I understand that. But in your haste to agree with Carrol, you ignore his view that social struggles, even as they triumph, "never involve a majority", which is profoundly ahistorical. Carrol may or may not be familiar with Blanqui, but that is his ideological pedigree, and it is well outside and opposed to the classical Marxist and social democratic traditions. "Blanquism", Lenin wrote scornfully, "expects that mankind will be emancipated from wage slavery...through a conspiracy hatched by a small minority of intellectuals."
> 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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