socialism – a majoritarian revolution?

[alanjjohnstone]

Book Review “This Is an Uprising”

http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/this_is_an_uprising_20160415

When I first joined the members i heard talking about establishing socialism talked about requiring not just a majority but a vast majority understanding and wanting socialism but were vaguer upon the numbers being actually active to achieve it. Later I heard other members talk about that we only require a politically effective majority and that was numerically a lot less than 50 %, as low as possibly 20-25%, and the rest to be cooperatively acquiescent.

A leading scholar of civil resistance, Erica Chenoweth, a political science professor at the University of Denver and a colleague, Maria Stephan, created an extensive database of social movements worldwide uncovered what she called the “3.5 percent rule”: a campaign was practically guaranteed to succeed if 3.5 percent of the population actively took part. Many campaigns won with much less support.

They quote journalist David Roberts’ maxim, “If you want to move the center, you have to pull on one end.” The idea that friction-free progress is possible may be the primary explanation why so many critics who profess to agree with a movement’s aims so quickly condemn their “divisive” approach. They want change in a way that change never comes: easily and without conflict.

Acknowledging that social change work is polarizing doesn’t mean that organizers are free to do whatever feels good without regard to the consequences. The point, after all, is to force people to take sides and eventually shift public opinion to your side. In Oakland, the Occupy movement was initially strong and relatively unified, but after marches continued to end with windows being broken by Black Bloc folks, the crowds shriveled up. Whether breaking the windows of a multinational bank constituted “violence” was immaterial; the point was that members of the public perceived it as violence, or at least something to stay away from.

So what do others think…just what type of support is required for socialism?

[Author]

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