In opposition to the power of money stands the power of the many – at least in theory. In practice, things are more complicated. As Hume noted long ago, power does not flow from sheer numbers alone. What matters is not merely absolute numbers but organised numbers. Without solidarity and organisation, numerical advantage doesn’t mean much. It doesn’t matter if there are thousands of workers and only a handful of bosses if those workers lack a union, or if there are millions of citizens and one dictator if people are too atomised and afraid to try to topple the regime.
Yet history has shown time and again that even a proportionally small number of people, if they are well organised, can have an outsized effect. People getting organised is what brought down slavery and Jim Crow, outlawed child labour in the US and elsewhere, and overthrew the legal subjugation of women. If it wasn’t for people acting in concert, universal suffrage would not exist, and neither would the eight-hour workday or the weekend. There would be no entitlement to basic wages, unemployment insurance, or social services, including public education. It would still be a crime to be gay or trans. Women would still be under the thumb of their husbands and at the mercy of sexist employers, and abortion would never have been legalised, however tenuously. Disabled people would lack basic civil rights. The environment would be totally unprotected and even more polluted. Without collective action, colonised people would never have ousted their oppressors, Indigenous people would not have survived attacks from genocidal settlers, and apartheid would not have been overthrown.
Often, the powerful like to take credit for social change after the fact, portraying progress as the inevitable result of economic development and enlightened, beneficent leadership. We praise President Franklin Delano Roosevelt for forging the New Deal, with its wealth of social programmes and labour protections, instead of paying tribute to the militant labour movement that forced his administration’s hand, inflicting real costs on bosses and investors through thousands of work stoppages, picket lines and strikes. Similarly, the civil rights legislation of the 1960s did not come about because of Lyndon B Johnson’s bravery, but rather because a militant and well-organised minority fought boldly against a hostile and often violent majority, pushing them to shift their behaviours, if not their beliefs.