Ancestors

Written by Rich Puchalsky ⩜⃝ on 2025-02-01 at 14:32

I was surprised and then dismayed to find out that "if you mobilize 3.5% of the population, you win" and "nonviolent movements are more successful than violent ones" are from the same Chenoweth research. I had thought that these two beliefs were independent bad beliefs afflicting contemporary social movements, but they're connected.

The "nonviolent movements" claim is from data misclassification. "3.5%" is from confusing correlation with causation.

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Written by Rich Puchalsky ⩜⃝ on 2025-02-01 at 14:39

I'm not even sure where to start with the 3.5% one. I could read the publications in question and go over them bit by bit but I have far too much to do, and I suspect that "3.5%" is about to die as a belief anyway.

There is an entire contemporary social science theory about revolutions that is not from hopeful leftists who may be experts in economics (Marx, etc.) It says that revolutions happen when the essential structure supporting the state fails.

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Written by Rich Puchalsky ⩜⃝ on 2025-02-01 at 14:44

In this view, in some sense revolutions are always waiting to happen and a certain kind of state failure causes them -- not merely immiserating the population, but the system changing so that elites can no longer be supported by it.

Imagine that this theory is correct. Wow you'd see 3.5% of the pop in the streets just before each big social turnover.

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Written by Rich Puchalsky ⩜⃝ on 2025-02-01 at 14:49

Does that mean that the chain of causation could go the other way? No it doesn't. According to this theory, if the basic mechanism of the state is still supporting the elites they will crush whatever popular movement is there.

Contemporary communications are really good at getting a large % of the population into the streets for a couple of days. Will that work by itself? No.

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Written by Rich Puchalsky ⩜⃝ on 2025-02-01 at 14:52

If communications make it easy to turn people out, they also make it easy to turn counter-people out.

The US Iraq War protests involved, by some measure, 5% of the US population making some public demonstration against the war. They also involved 20% of the population making some demonstration for the war.

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Written by Rich Puchalsky ⩜⃝ on 2025-02-01 at 14:57

At any rate I have to get back to work. I understand why people like this theory: it's an easy "numbers go up" theory. But i don't know of any successful movement that took this correlative description as a goal and then succeeded.

/fin

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Written by Red on 2025-02-01 at 15:13

@richpuchalsky

Thank you. So that proportion is not the goal and in any case there must be clear demands for a movement to succeed at anything. But assuming a clearly stated demand and enough solidarity to sway the financial class to abide by the terms of the demand, the logic is sound and it has succeeded in plenty of cases. Union strikes are maybe the clearest example. So you are pointing this out because we need to know the actual numbers we need and a low goal like 3.5% is likely being used as a means of misleading activists into movements that will easily be suppressed like Occupy Wall Street was, right?

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Toot

Written by Rich Puchalsky ⩜⃝ on 2025-02-01 at 15:20

@resl

"Clear demands" are not it -- many movements have succeeded with unclear demands. "Solidarity" isn't really it, although it may be necessary though not sufficient: movements with good solidarity have been crushed. What's needed is leverage. What is the critical point supporting the current state of affairs?

For instance the US Civil Rights Movement. The critical point was US/USSR ideological competition. US couldn't be seen as despotic to its satellites.

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Descendants

Written by Rich Puchalsky ⩜⃝ on 2025-02-01 at 15:27

@resl

Parenthetically, "union strikes" are not really a good example. They succeed in winning better wages and conditions for the workers involved, and have broad social effects if a large % of the pop is unionized. But they don't change the basic relationship between worker and employer. Successful unions win their workers a higher percentage of profits, then settle down to defend their employers and industry against the rest of the public.

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