Название: Английский язык

Жанр: Филология

Рейтинг:

Просмотров: 2939

Explaining revolutions in the contemporary third world

by Jeff Goodwin and Theda Skoopol

(An Edited, Theoretically-Based Academic Article)

In this article, we point to what we consider the most promising avenues for comparative analyses of contemporary Third World revolutions. In particular, we shall oner some working hypotheses about the distinctively political conditions that have encouraged revolutionary movements and transfers of power in

5     some, but not all, Third World countries.

SOME PROBLEMS WITH EXISTING EXPLANATIONS

Two myths have long colored popular views about revolutions in the Third World: that destitution, professional revolutionaries, or perhaps both are sufficient to precipitate revolutions; and that

10  local events in Third World countries are easily manipulated by imperialist Great Powers. Thus, in attempting to explain Third World insurgencies, many people point to the incredible poverty found in large parts of Latin America, Africa, and Asia — the sort of sheer misery that capitalist industrialization and

redistributive welfare states have largely eliminated, contrary to Karl Marx's expectations, inthe advanced capitalist countries. Others have emphasized the role that professional revolutionaries, often backed by foreign powers, have played in «subverting» Third World regimes with the «organizational weapon» of the

disciplined revolutionary party. Indeed, many see the hand of Moscow (or Beijing, Havana, or Teheran) behind Third World insurgencies, exploiting the social problems of these societies for their own nefarious purposes. Still others see the prime foreign influences on Third World nations as emanating from capitalist

25   powers, especially the United States. When revolutions do not occur in poor nations, it is often suggested, it is because the United States has artificially propped up local agents of capitalist imperialism.

These ideas, however, do not take us very far toward an explanation of just why and where

revolutions have occurred in some countries of the contemporary Third World, but not in others. Very many Third World countries are poor, for example, but revolutions have occurred in only a few of them, and not necessarily in the poorest. Why did China and Vietnam have social revolutions, but not India or

Indonesia? Why Cuba, one of the more developed Latin American countries when Castro seized power, but not Haiti or the Dominican Republic? Why Nicaragua, but not Honduras? One need merely raise these questions in order to realize that the «misery breeds revolt» hypothesis does not explain very much. Leon

Trotsky once wrote that «the mere existence of privations is not enough to cause an insurrection; if it were, the masses would be always in revolt». His point is still relevant for much of today's Third World.

Similarly, although professional revolutionaries have certainly helped to organize and lead many Third World insurgencies, revolutionary groups in many, perhaps most, countries remain small and

relatively insignificant sects. The Third World may be the principal threater of revolutionary conflict in this century, but much of it remains quiescent. And when political passions have flared in developing countries, they have more often taken the form of ethnic or subnationalist movements than revolution. Would-be revolutionaries, Tilly has written, «are almost always with us in the form of millenarian cults, radical cells,

or rejects from positions of power. The real question», he emphasizes, «is when such contenders proliferate and/or mobilize». As Goldfrank argues, explanations of revolution that focus on human misery and professional revolutionaries «are not wholly illusory, but as theory they do not take us very far. Both

widespread oppression and inflammatory agitation occur with far greater frequency than revolution, or even rebellion».

The great capitalist powers, furthermore, obviously cannot prevent — or reverse — all Third World

revolutions, as seen in the difficulties confronted by France in Vietnam and Algeria and by United States in Vietnam, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Iran. Imperialist interests certainly exist, but they must operate through local regimes or through private agents whose activities are underwritten and strongly shaped by the local

regimes. And particular types of regimes in the Third World do not always reliably produce the sort of antirevolutionary stability desired in Paris or Washington, D.C. — any more than local revolutionaries can always produce the changes desired by Moscow, Havana, or Teheran.

     5. Recent academic analyses of Third World insurgencies have helped to dispel myths such as the ones we have just criticized, yet the academic analyses have not replaced the myths with completely adequate arguments. Much of the recent comparative and theoretical literature on Third World revolutions

including the important work of Wolf, Paige, Migdal, Scott, and Popkin — investigates the role of peasants in these upheavals. This body of work examines the specific grievances and motivations for peasant rebellion or peasant support for avowedly revolutionary guerilla movements, emphasizing that much more

than poverty or the activities of professional revolutionaries alone is involved. These writings argue that certain sorts of peasants — not usually the poorest — are more willing or able to rebel than others.

6. To be sure, the scholars who have recently analysed Third World revolutions as peasant-based

conflicts have their disagreements. At least two important and ongoing debates have come out of this work: the Wolf-Paige debate about just what sort of peasants are revolutionary, and the Scott-Popkin debate on the relative weight of economic, organizational, and cultural determinants of peasani behavior, and on the

nature of peasant psychological motivations for rebelling. We do not propose to rehash these debates here, however, because we believe that they have overemphasized the situation of the peasantry alone. Although the debate about peasants and revolution enriched our understanding of agrarian socioeconomic relations

and peasant political behavior, these debates have focused insufficient analytic attention on two other issues— themselves closely related — which can take us further toward an understanding of revolutionary

movements and transfers of power in the contemporary Third World. The first issue is the formation of revolutionary colalitions that invariably extend well beyond peasants alone. The second issue is the relative

vulnerability of different sorts of political regimes to the formation of broad revolutionary coalitions and,

110 perhaps to actual overthrow by revolutionary forces. Drawing from our own recent comparative studies, as well as from political analyses by other scholars, we can explore these matters and suggest a fruitful theoretical approach to explaining why revolutions have happened in some Third World countries but not in others.

FROM PEASANTS TO REVOLUTIONARY COALITIONS

7. Although peasants have undoubtedly been as central to most Third World insurgencies as they were for the classical social revolutions, the characterization of Third World revolutions as peasant wars or agrarian revolutions a characterization that sometimes carries an implication of homogeneous peasant

communities rebelling spontaneously — has shifted our attention away from the role of other actors in revolutionary dramas. Revolutionary outbreaks and seizures of power are often carried through by

coalitions, alliances, or conjunctures of struggles that cut across divides between urban and rural areas and among different social classes and ethnic groupings. (Of course, such revolutionary coalitions tend to break apart or recompose in new ways if and when they actually seize state power, but this is a subject that lies beyond the scope of this article).

8. With some notable exceptions, the literature that emphasizes the role of peasants in revolutions tends to ignore the role of professional revolutionary organizations, groups that tend to be disproportionately middle class in social composition. This tendency is understandable in partas a reaction against the myth

that revolutions are simply the work of small conspiratorial groups of subversives. But even professional revolutionaries cannot simply make revolutions where they will, they have obviously played an important role in organizing, arming and leading many revolutionary movements. This role, moreover, is often a

necessary one. Indeed, except for those peasants who happen to live in relatively autonomous and solitary villages, as did peasants of France, Russia, and central Mexico, rural cultivators simply do not have the organizational wherewithal to rebel in the absence of outside leaders. Professional revolutionaries,

furthermore, have usually been successful precisely to the extent that they have been able to work with various sorts of rural folk. This is another point that tends to get lost in debates about just what sorts of

peasants are most rebellious. The most successful revolutionary organizations — including those in Vietnam, Zimbabwe, and Nicaragua — have won the support not just of poor or middle peasants, but also of landless and migrant labourers, rural artisans, rich peasants, and even landlords.

    9. What is more, as Gugler and Dix have recently emphasized, urban groups have also played important, even crucial, roles in a number of Third World revolutions. Indeed, the 1978-1979 overthrow of the Shah of Iran was quintessentially an urban revolution. In Cuba and Nicaragua as well as in Iran, students,

professionals, clerics, and even business people, as well as workers and the urban poor, joined or supported broadbased coalitions against dictatorial regimes. Gugler and Dix suggest that the participation of such people may be essential to the success of revolutionaries in all of the more urbanized countries of the contemporary Third World.

10. How can professional revolutionaries put together broadly based coalition? Not surprisingly, revolutionary coalitions tend to form around preexisting nationalist, populist, or religious discourses that legitimize resistance to tyranny and, just as important, are capable of aggregating a broad array of social

classes and strata. Nationalism, in particular, has proven to be a more inclusive and powerful force for revolutionary mobilization than class struggle alone. Revolutionaries have fared best where they — and not conservative or reformist leaderships — have been able to harness nationalist sentiments. Ironically then,

175 Marxist groups in the Third World have generally been most successful when they have deemphasized class struggle and stressed the goal of national liberation instead — or, at least, when they have attempted to mobilize different types of people through the selective use of both nationalist and class appeals.

11. Nevertheless, it should be emphasized that revolutionary movements are much more than simply ideological movements. As Popkin and Wickham-Crowley have recently argued, revolutionary

movements have won broad popular support when they have been willing and able to deliver state-like collective goods to their constituents. These may include public education, health services, law and order, and economic reforms such as tax and interest reductions, the elimination of corvee labor, and land

reforms. Popkin notes that revolutionaries have been particularly effective in winning popular support when they have initially focused on «local goals and goods with immediate payoffs» before attempting to mobilize the population for more difficult tasks — including, ultimately, the overthrow of the incumbent

regime. In Vietnam, for example, peasants «in the late 1960s still laughed about the early attempts by young Trotskyites and Communists to organize them for a national revolution, for industrialization, or even for a world revolution! Only later, when peasants (and workers) were organized around smaller and more immediate goals, were larger organizational attempts successful». During the 1960’s, a number of Latin

American revolutionary groups, which attempted to replicate the Cuban Revolution — including the Sandinistas of Nicaragua — failed to make headway, largely because they were too quick to engage incumbent regimes in armed struggle, well before they had solidified bread popular support through 205

the provision of collective goods.

In addition to collective goods, revolutionary organizations may also oner selective incentives to encourage participation in various sorts of activities, particularly dangerous ones like actual guerilla

210 warfare. Such incentives for actual or potential cadres and fighters, and their families, may include extra tax or rent reductions or an additional increment of land beyond that allocated to supporters in general. In any event, it is the ongoing provision of such collective and selective goods, not ideological conversion in

215 the abstract, that has played the principal role in solidifying social support for guerrilla armies.

13. The argument we have just made does not, however, support Tilly’s claim that the sudden withdrawal of expected government services drives people to revolt. In many Third World countries, few

220 government services have ever been provided to the bulk of the population. In fact, the evidence suggests that those governments that do not deliver collective goods in people, and then repress reformers who try to do something about the absence of such services, are the governments most likely to generate support for

225 revolutionaries. This analysis, moreover, accords with what we are beginning to leam about ruling revolutionary parties. Walder has recently shown that such parties obtain popular support or compliance not

230 simply through coercion or through impersonal ideological appeals to atomized individuals (as the «totalitarian» image would have it), but through patronage and the development of networks of loyal clients. Revolutionary movements that have to build social support over a long period of time operate in a similar way. In terms of what they are actually doing (and not simply what they are saying), revolutionary

235 movements can usefully be viewed as proto-state organizations, or what Wickham-Crowley calls «guerilla governments.» The presence of revolutionary movements offering collective services in territory claimed by the official state implies a situation of «dual power», in Trotsky'’ classic phrase.

14. Revolutionaries are most effective in creating such situations of dual power when they are willing and able to organize precisely those social groupings that the incumbent regime has not incorporated into its own political system. Moreover, the breadth of revolutionary coalitions is determined, not just by how

many groups the revolutionary cadres try organize, but also by the political space the incumbent political regime makes available to revolutionaries because of the regime’s structural characteristics and strategies of

rule. Other things being equal, the narrower the regime and the more repressive, the broader the coalition potentially available to be mobilized by revolutionaries.

This brings us to the second issue largely neglected in recent work on peasants and revolutions,

namely, the relative vulnerability of different sorts of political regimes to revolutionary-coalitions. Revolutionary movements, needless to say, do not form in a political vacuum. Indeed, political context is absolutely crucial in determining whether such movements will or not prosper. Recent work on Third

World revolutions has not convincingly demonstrated that any one class, class fraction, or class alliance is any more consistently revolutionary than the industrial proletariat was supposed to have been. Exactly who becomes revolutionary, and when, is a pre-eminently political question. Revolutions are ultimately «made»

by revolutionaries, but not of their own free will — not within political contexts they themselves have chosen, to paraphrase Karl Marx, but within very specific sorts of political contexts that are not the same for all who would make revolutions.

WHICH REGIMES ARE VULNERABLE TO THE GROWTH OF REVOLUTIONARY COALITIONS?

Revolutionary movements, history suggests, typically coalesce in opposition to closed or

exclusionary, as well as organizationally weak (or suddenly weakened), authoritarian regimes. By contrast, multiparty democracies or quasi-democracies, even those in very poor countries like India, Malaysia, the Dominican Republic, and Honduras, have not facilitated the growth of revolutionary coalitions. The ballot

box has proven to be the coffin of revolutionary movements. Thus far, in fact, avowedly socialist revolutions which according to classical Marxism were supposed to follow after and build upon the achievements of bourgeois-democratic revolutions — have occured only in countries that never established

liberal-democratic political systems in the first place.

In addition to liberal democracies, so-called «inc-lusionary» authoritarian regimes — including fascist and state socialist regimes, as well as single-party corporatist regimes found in some nations of

 Africa and Asia — have so far been immune from revolutionary transformations. Although these regimes lack civil rights, they either sponsor mass political mobilization or regulate the official representation of, and bargaining among, various social groups, including working-class and other lower-strata groups. They

impose controlled forms of political participation on key social groups, coopting leaders and handing out certain benefits in the process; this tends to undercut possibilities for political action independent of the existing regime.

Many authoritarian regimes do not, however, bother to mobilize social groups into politics, even in controlled ways; they leave the prerogatives of the state and benefits of politics entirely in the hands of rulers and narrow cliques. Such exclusionary authoritarian regimes are conducive to the formation of broad

revolutionary coalitions for a number of related reasons. The first of these reasons is that the economic grievances groups excluded from the political system tend to be quickly politicized. Another reason is that closed authoritarian regimes provide a highly visible focus of opposition and a common enemy for groups

and classes that may be nursing very different sorts of economic and political grievances (including grievances about one another). Political legitimacy is usually very problematic for authoritarian rulers, especially when religious authorities distance themselves from, or even outright oppose, such regimes,

after having previously accepted them. Similarly, the political legitimacy of authoritarian rulers has sometimes been undermined simultaneously in the eyes of many groups when the rulers have orchestrated blatantly fraudulent elections in an effort to justify their continuing power.

     19. Most importantly, perhaps, exclusionary regimes tend to radicalize, or at least neutralize, moderate and reformist politicians, including those choose to participate in proforma elections. Such moderates might compete with revolutionaries for popular support, or else initiate a gradual transition to a more open

320 or inclusionary political system, typically through  alliances with the armed forces. But exclusionary regimes tend to attack and undermine exactly these moderate elements.

Finally, closed authoritarian regimes, without intending to do so, valorize the potential oppositional role of armed revolutionaries. Because such regimes are closed, they readily turn to vicious repression

when faced with demands for even the most moderate political or economic adjustments. Thus closed authoritarian regimes place a premium on the things armed revolutionaries are best prepared to do

namely, provide opponents of a regime with the means of self-defense, such as guns, clandestine networks, safehouses, and even liberated territory within which to survive and carry on oppositional politics. On the other hand, authoritarian regimes that are militarily and organizationally strong and have secure borders

generally do not provide sufficient leeway for armed revolutionaries to mobilize mass support, even though they too tend to radicalize their opponents. Like it or not, then, some of the most brutal and repugnant authoritarian regimes in the Third World, such as those found in Latin America'’ southern cone, in various

East Asian and Middle Eastern countries, and especially in South Africa, are probably too powerful and ruthless to be toppled by armed struggle.

From the viewpoint of would-be revolutionaries, the ideal situation is to face an exclusionary and

repressive authoritarian regime that lacks strong control of its entire territory or borders (or else suddenly loses such control). During World War II, parts of Nazi-occupied Europe fit this formula. More to the point for this analysis of the contemporary Third World, quite a few states in Southeast Asia, Central America,

and Africa fall into this category: they are simultaneously, politically exclusionary repressive, and not fully in control of their nominal territories. Facing such regimes, revolutionaries can build broad coalitions among many groups fundamentally opposed to the existing political arrangements and authorities, because

many groups in society need the coercive means and uncompromising political formulas that the revolutionary cadres have to offer.

Figure 1. A graphic representation of states according to degrees of(l) penetration of national territory, (2) incorporation of socially mobilized groups, and (3) bureaucratization of the state administration and armed forses.

CONCLUSION

22. Our analysis (summarized in Fig. 1) suggests that revolutionaries in the contemporary Third World

are most likely to succeed when civil society as a whole can be politi-cally mobilized to oppose an autonomous and narrowly based direct colonial regime or a Sultanistic neo-patrimonial regime In her recent comparative study of the Iranian and Nicaraguan revolutions, Farhi suggests that the «most

important characteristic of the Iranian and Nicaraguan pre-revolutionary states was their almost total autonomy from internal classes» This has been characteristic, in fact, of virtually all Third World states that have been toppled by revolutions. In contrast, when radicals confront a state with significant social connections — even if the state is authoritarian and its ties are restricted to the middle and upper classes —

then revolutionary coalition building becomes very difficult. Furthermore, if a state traditionally allied with economic elites can politically incorporate at least some popular sectors or organizations, then the prospects for revolutionary success become still more remote.

23. It follows from what we have argued that the Third World has been the principal site of social revolutions in this century, not simply because of the poverty or socioeconomic structures one finds there. The Third World is also where one finds most of the world's exclusionary and repressive political

systems, based in administrative organizations and armies that do not fully penetrate civil society or control the territories they claim to rule.

24. Our analysis of the conditions conducive to the formation of revolutionary coalitions and actual

transfers of power in the Third World has shifted away from the emphases on the peasantry and the effects of commercial capitalism that characterized earlier comparative approaches. Instead, we have suggested that the structures of states, as well as the political relations between states and various sectors of society,

provide the keys to explaining revolutions in the Third World. Revolutionary uoalitions have formed and expanded in countries in which one finds not only poverty, imperialism, professional revolutionaries, and peasants of a certain sort, but also political exclusion and severe and indiscriminate (while not

overwhelming) repression.

     25. Revolutionary movements will undoubtedly continue to emerge in the Third World, where many states are not only exclusionary, but also fiscally, administratively, and militarily weak. And if the past is

any guide, such movements will be  especially likely to triumph where the political regimes they oppose remain narrow as well as repressive.

From: Politics and Society, vol. 17, No. 4, Dec. 1989.