Social Revolutions a Routledge Collection

R O U T L E D G E . TAYLOR & FRANCIS Social Revolutions A Routledge Collection www.routledge.com/history Contents Theories of revolution 4 From The Causes of the English Revolution by Lawrence Stone Living Revolution 29 From Trotsky and the Russian Revolution by Geoffrey Swain Reform or Revolution, 1787-89? 49 From The French Revolution 1787-1804 by P. M. Jones A Decade of Revolution in Cuba 62 From Latin America since Independence by Alexander Dawson Introduction 100 From 1848: The Year of Revolutions by Peter Wilson Venezuela: In the Eye of the Storm 114 From The Class Struggle in Latin America by James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer www.routledge.com/history Viva La Revolution! Cutting edge scholarship from Routledge Enjoy a 20% discount across our entire range of history books. Simply add discount code SR20 at online checkout.* *This discount code cannot be combined with any other discount or offer and is only valid on print titles purchased directly from www.routledge.com. www.routledge.com/history 4 1 THEORIES OF REVOLUTION In attacking the problem of revolution, as most others of major sig- nifi cance in history, we historians should think twice before we spurn the help offered by our colleagues in the social sciences, who have, as it happens, been particularly active in the last few years in theorizing about the typology, causes, and evolutionary patterns of this particular phenomenon. The purpose of this chapter is not to advance any new hypothesis, but to provide a summary view and critical examina- tion of the work that has been going on. The fi rst necessity in any inquiry is a careful defi nition of terms: what is, and what is not, a revolution ? According to one view, it is change effected by the use of violence in government, and/or regime, and/or society.1 By society is meant the consciousness and the mechan- ics of communal solidarity, which may be tribal, peasant, kinship, national, and so on; by regime is meant the constitutional structure – democracy, oligarchy, monarchy; and by government is meant specifi c political and administrative institutions. Violence, it should be noted, 5 PART I: HISTORIOGRAPHY is not the same as force; it is force used with unnecessary intensity, unpredictably, and usually destructively.2 This defi nition of revolution is a very broad one, and two historians of the French Revolution, Crane Brinton and Louis Gottschalk, would prefer to restrict the use of the word to the major political and social upheavals with which they are familiar, the ‘Great Revolutions’, as George S. Pettee calls them.3 Even the wider defi nition allows the historian to distinguish between, on the one hand, the seizure of power that leads to a major restructuring of government or society, the establishment of a new set of values for distributive justice, and the replacement of the former élite by a new one, and on the other hand, the coup d’ état involving no more than a change of ruling personnel by violence or threat of violence. This latter is the norm in Latin America, where it occurred thirty-one times in the ten years 1945–55. Merle Kling has arrived at a suggestive explanation of this Latin American phenomenon of chronic political instability, limited but frequent use of violence, and almost complete lack of social or institutional change. He argues that ownership of the principal economic resources, both agricultural and mineral, is concentrated in the hands of a tiny, very stable, élite of enormously wealthy monoculture landlords and mining capital- ists. This élite is all-powerful and cannot be attacked by opposition groups within the country; externally, however, it is dependent on foreign interests for its markets and its capital. In this colonial situ- ation of a foreign-supported, closed plutocracy, the main avenue of rapid upward social mobility for non-members of the élite leads, via the army, to the capture of the government machine, which is the only accessible source of wealth and power. This political instability is permitted by the élite on the condition that its own interests are undisturbed. Instability, limited violence, and the absence of social or institutional change are therefore all the product of the contradiction between the realities of a colonial economy run by a plutocracy and the façade of political sovereignty – between the real, stable power of the economic élite and the nominal, unstable control of politicians and generals. 4 6 THEORIES OF REVOLUTION The looser defi nition of revolution thus suits both historians of major social change and historians of the palace coup. It does, however, raise certain diffi culties. First, there is a wide range of changes of government by violence which are neither a mere substitution of personalities in positions of power nor a prelude to the restructuring of society; second, conservative counter-revolutions become almost impossible to fi t into the model; and last, it remains hard to distinguish between colonial wars, civil wars, and social revolution. To avoid these diffi culties, an alternative formulation has recently been put forward by a group of social scientists working mainly at Princeton. They have dropped the word ‘revolution’ altogether and put ‘internal war’ in its place.5 This is defi ned as any attempt to alter state policy, rulers, or institutions by the use of violence in societies where violent competition is not the norm and where well-defi ned institutional patterns exist.6 This concept seems to be a logical con- sequence of the preoccupation of sociologists in recent years with a model of society in a stable, self-regulating state of perpetual equi- poise. In this utopian world of universal harmony all forms of violent confl ict are anomalies, to be treated alike as pathological disorders of a similar species. This is a model which, although it has its uses for ana- lytical purposes, bears little relation to the reality familiar to the historian. It looks to a society without change, with universal consensus on values, with complete social harmony, and isolated from external threats; no approximation to such a society has ever been seen. The crude opposite model is based on pure interest theory and pos- tulates that the social order rests on physical coercion of the majority by a minority in order to distribute material rewards and power in an inequitable way. The state claims a monopoly of violence, and the consequent suppression of internal disorder is its raison d’ être. Societ- ies become unstable only because the relation between authority and force becomes unstable. It is obvious that this model bears no more relation to reality than its opposite, since society is in fact both a moral community held together by shared values, which give the state legit- imacy, and also a system of control, employing in the last resort the 7 PART I: HISTORIOGRAPHY force necessary to prevent deviance and disorder. A more reasonable model is one which accepts that all societies are in a condition of uneasy equilibrium, whose stability is always threatened by a host of political confl icts, but which is usually held in balance partly by social norms and ideological beliefs and partly by physical sanctions.7 Insta- bility may arise from material confl icts over the distribution of scarce economic resources or political power; or from a breakdown of values due to inadequate socialization of the young, exacerbated confl ict between mutually incompatible roles, or group dissensus over norms. Such confl icts are usually settled by suitable adjustment mechanisms, and it is only in rare moments that a society is suffi ciently shaken to undertake major structural alterations. The fi rst objection to the all-embracing formula of internal war is that, by covering all forms of physical confl ict from strikes and ter- rorism to civil war, it isolates the use of violence from the normal process of societal adjustment. Though some of the users of the term express their awareness that the use of violence for political ends is a fairly common occurrence, the defi nition they have established in fact excludes all times and places where it is common. It thus cuts out most societies the world has ever known, including Western Europe in the middle ages and Latin America today. Second, it isolates one particular means, physical violence, from the political ends that it is designed to serve. Clausewitz’s famous defi nition of external war is equally applicable to internal war, civil war, or revolution: ‘War is not only a political act, but a real political instrument; a continuation of political transactions, an accomplishment of them by different means. That which remains peculiar to war relates only to the peculiar nature of its means.’8 It is perfectly true that any means by which society exercises pres- sure or control, whether it is administrative organization, constitutional law, economic interest or physical force, can be a fruitful fi eld of study in its own right, so long as its students remain aware that they are looking at only one part of a larger whole. It is also true that there is something peculiar about violence, if only because of man’s highly ambivalent attitude towards the killing of his own species. 8 THEORIES OF REVOLUTION Somehow he regards physical force as different in kind from, say, economic exploitation or psychological manipulation as a means of exercising power over others. But this distinction is not one of much concern to the historian of revolution, in which violence is a normal and natural occurrence. The concept of internal war is too broad in its comprehension of all types of violence from civil wars to strikes, too narrow in its restriction to normally non-violent societies, too limited in its concern with one of many means, too arbitrary in its separation of this means from the ends in view, and too little con- cerned with the complex roots of social unrest to be of much practi- cal value to him.

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