> The bulk of the race? What does that mean?
It is, obviously, subject to historical contingency. Historically, classes or groups of people, victimized under particular social conditions, transform things through organizations, with the mediation of social formations that they develop. Each of these formations has its own rules and roles. Suppose that people in motion were to conduct their struggle through a liberal democratic structure -- and I'm using here the term "liberal democracy" in the classical sense. Then the decisions of a representative body of these folks, made through the designated deliberative mechanisms, made by those that under the given structures are granted full "citizenship" (so to speak), would carry a lot of weight. This is, of course, to illustrate my point by reference to liberal democracy. Actual historical struggles are more rough-and-tumble phenomena. But I think you get the idea.
I'll give you an example I'm a bit familiar with: At the peak of the Mexican revolution of 1910-1918, those actively involved (directly or supporting those directly involved) in the revolutionary struggle -- i.e. the *revolutionaries* -- were at most 50,000 out of a population of 5-7 million able adults (15 million total pop) or 80bp +-. As a Mexican historian once put it, most Mexicans in the 1910-1918 period were not "revolutionaries" or "counter-revolutionaries," but "revolutioned" people. In any case, Mexican society was dramatically and irreversibly transformed by the struggle of these revolutionaries.
One way or another, distorted to some extent, the demands raised by the revolutionaries translated into legal and political structures that ushered a vast economic and social transformation. The legitimacy -- let alone the historical depth and objectivity -- of this transformation is virtually undisputed (except by a few conservative diehards). Today's Mexico is a completely different society, in part due to that revolution. It has 110 million + people, 65 million + able adults. Nowadays, an effective social transformation of similar scale or proportion would be unthinkable if its motive force were to be confined to half a million revolutionaries using methods akin to those used by the revolutionaries in 1910-1918. The social backdrop, not so much of passivity as of individual and collectively powerlessness, proportional to that pervasive at the time, is not there now.
This organization alone, to which I once belonged, has over half a million people organized and in action today, a substantial portion of whom are tested, willing, and able to endure great personal sacrifice, yet they are a long way away from becoming the leading social and political force in the nation: http://www.antorchacampesina.org.mx/