Revolution – An Instructional Manual

[alanjjohnstone]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Zq4f6WYmHU

 

I wondered if it should be included on the unity thread as it indeed involves many similar issues.

 

I found i agreed with much of the video and other parts i could also accept with certain caveats. Not too much for me to actually disagree with on principle. It is based on the writings of Gene Sharp (who i have a little of) and Gustave Le Bon (who i never heard of)

 

Not only is it an interesting video to watch, it is also an instructional manual for simple video for ourselves to produce. A clear voice-over narrator and appropriate  photos and video clips . Technically very easy to do (but i may be wrong)

 

I particularly like the idea of interjecting a question on the video which may switch you to another video depending on the answer you click to address that issue. We could build upon that  and make it a trade mark of our future videos. 

[ALB]

Gene Sharp was once the editor of Peace News. His book From Dictatorship to Democracy was reviewed in the March 2012 Socialist Standard:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2010s/2012/no-1291-march-2012/book-reviewsIt has some relevancy to what has subsequently happened in Egypt and Syria.

[norm_burns]

Here's some reference to 'Le Bon'. From 'The Origin and Meaning of the Political Theory of Impossibilism' : S. Coleman.Once stripped of the scientific guise which Durkheim and Croce claimed need not be part of Marxist socialism, the British socialists were able to entertain new concepts into socialist thought which had been excluded hitherto because they conflicted with the scientific claim. By the late 1903 ethical, religious, gradual and even national socialism were gaining popularity in Britain. It is important to recognise, firstly, just how different these ideas were from the British Marxism of the 1880s, and secondly, how much their theoretical justification conflicted with the Marxist theory outlined in section I.It seems that towards the end of the nineteenth century there was a significant change in the general socialist perception of 'reality'. No one event or historic point can be pointed to and no single cause can be detected which accounts for the change, yet the change was profound and can be defined. Whereas in the 1880's social reality was seen to be a totality, accessible to intellectual comprehension and malleable by the force af rationality, by the mid 1890's socialists tended to externalise social reality: it was something to be worked within, for it was beyond the total manipulation of men or movements. This sense of having to come to terms with social alienation and the limitations of rationality is reflected in the literature of the period. In 1895 Gustave Le Bon's The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind was published. (21) In the book he attempted to describe the inherent irrationality of crowd or mass behaviour – "Amorphous crowds" he wrote, are motivated by "exaggerated sentiments", a "rage for unanimity", an "incapacity for moderation and delay", an "absence of judgement" and an "inability to reason". Mussolini was influenced greatly by Le Bon and claimed that fascism was a consequence of "anonymous and multitudinous masses". (22) The theory of "the amorphous masses" was to profoundly influence such fascist intellectuals as A.O. Olivetti (23) and Paolo Orano (24), but it was not the fascists who were the first to perceive the apparent irrationality of  'the masses'; similar ideas were being developed at the turn of the century by the possibilist wing of the socialist movement.As has been stated, pre-possibilist Marxists saw propaganda as an essentially educative process. The feeling that theoretical education was not enough led the possibilists to two conclusions: firstly, that the recipients of the education – the workers – lacked sufficient intelligence to grasp the message, and secondly, that practice rather than theory was required in order to awaken the masses of the need for socialism.It was frustration that led socialists to develop a theory based upon contempt for the class whose interests they claimed to serve. Ramsay MacDonald, whose belief that socialists should not talk about socialism to workers lest they disgust them was quoted in the last chapter, admitted to have been influenced considerably by Wilfred Trotter's 'Le Bonist' Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War. (25) Stuart Macintyre (26) has shown how this frustration with the ordinary working man was manifested in working-class literature of the first decades of this century by such characters as Henry Dubb (27) and Robert Tressell's Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. As a result of the change in socialist ideas about consciousness, the image of the typical worker changed from that of the potentially all-powerful world-changer of Marx's positivism to the "common, courageous, good-hearted, patient, proletarian fool" (28) of Henry Dubb.

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