Seem to be a lot of people posting this so I’ll just repost what I wrote elsewhere :
The 3.5% theory is extremely questionable. The first paragraph of (the BBC) article is problematic if you know like 3 things about Philippine politics.
I’ve dug deeper into the data and it is very opinionated how it defines “success” and violence/nonviolence.
I’m not a pro-violence guy, i defend liberation struggles, but work to create educational/political/cultural revolution. Also the 3.5% mobilized population would be rad AF in USAmerica.
I haven’t read the whole book the study is based on, though I was working on it for a while. But IMO it misrepresents historical fact to make a nice-sounding abstraction, and I’m not sure how people will react to its failure, which would be based on a faulty premise.
We need to be more focused on what we will do with the power that will come from mobilizing like 12 million Americans rather than hoping some members of the political class notice and decide to fix things. The actual problem is that power is kept out of the hands of workers. The thought of building that power and giving it away would be a catastrophic blow to our movements.
The political system is empowered to fix problems, but not equipped. As far as I can tell, the only people who have ever created or fixed a goddamn thing in all of history have been workers.
Seem to be a lot of people posting this so I’ll just repost what I wrote elsewhere :
The 3.5% theory is extremely questionable. The first paragraph of (the BBC) article is problematic if you know like 3 things about Philippine politics.
I’ve dug deeper into the data and it is very opinionated how it defines “success” and violence/nonviolence.
I’m not a pro-violence guy, i defend liberation struggles, but work to create educational/political/cultural revolution. Also the 3.5% mobilized population would be rad AF in USAmerica.
I haven’t read the whole book the study is based on, though I was working on it for a while. But IMO it misrepresents historical fact to make a nice-sounding abstraction, and I’m not sure how people will react to its failure, which would be based on a faulty premise.
We need to be more focused on what we will do with the power that will come from mobilizing like 12 million Americans rather than hoping some members of the political class notice and decide to fix things. The actual problem is that power is kept out of the hands of workers. The thought of building that power and giving it away would be a catastrophic blow to our movements.
The political system is empowered to fix problems, but not equipped. As far as I can tell, the only people who have ever created or fixed a goddamn thing in all of history have been workers.