Poland’s self-limiting revolution in 1980

 

Military coup, Poland, December 1981

Poland is an important example of the paths taken by the citizens of satellite states within the former Soviet Union. Soviet domination of the governments of Poland, Hungary, East Germany (GDR), Czechoslovakia, and other satellite states led to uprisings in several states, resulting in violent military interventions by the Soviet Union in East Germany (1953), Hungary (1956), and Czechoslovakia (1968), as well as threats of intervention and other forms of political pressure against others (Poland in 1956 and 1980-81).

The Polish pathway from Communist authoritarian rule to democracy included the rise of a large mass-based social movement, Solidarity. One telling of the story of the rise of the Solidarity movement is the pragmatic tactics and goals pursued by its leaders, including Lech Wałęsa. By carefully crafting goals and plans around labor union goals rather than an overtly “anti-communist” uprising, the Solidarity movement avoided a violent clash with the Polish military and General Jaruzelski. This is the line of interpretation offered by the Center for Nonviolent Conflict Research in its 2009 report on the movement (Maciej Bartkowski, link). According to Bartkowski, the movement illustrated an intelligent mobilization and marshaling of support from over ten million union members, and it avoided a violent showdown with the armed forces of the state. It was, in other words, a striking success for “people power” in the face of a vastly more powerful military and state apparatus. And it was an outcome worth celebrating by activists and organizations (like the CNCR) who advocate for the power of mass nonviolent action. Bartkowski writes:

With its self-limiting philosophy of nonviolent struggle and the support of the Catholic Church, Solidarity was in a position to consider the offer of negotiations and accept a pacted transition, even though that meant a preservation of the economic and social status of the ruling elites.

But this description uses a phrase that points to the limitations of the Solidarity movement as well, the idea of a “self-limiting” strategy of struggle. This phrase originated in the writings of the outstanding Polish sociologist Jadwiga Staniszkis, who was both an observer and a participant in the Solidarity movement and the political struggles it brought about. She was one of Poland’s leading academic sociologists in the 1970s and 1980s, and she was also asked to serve as a member of the Inter-Factory Strike Committee, a small group of advisers to the Solidarity union in Gdańsk about strategies for negotiations with the government. Her book, Poland’s Self-Limiting Revolution, was written during and immediately following the rise of the workers’ movement and the imposition of martial law in 1981. It is notable for her objective and clear-eyed account of the movement. She does not romanticize the movement. She had brought an early draft of the book to the United States during an academic visit in 1980, and in 1981 it found a receptive reading at Princeton University Press. Jan Gross, another exceptional Polish sociologist who had emigrated to the U.S. in 1969, agreed to edit the manuscript and to add an historical section providing an account of the background events leading to the emergence of Solidarity, and the book was published by Princeton in 1984. In the editor’s preface to the book Jan Gross describes his reaction to the book as one of the initial readers for the press:

Staniszkis’s book is the best, most original, thought-provoking analysis of an East-Central European society and its politics that I have read in a long time. It goes beyond analyses derived from the totalitarian model approach and it is also more sophisticated than analyses using the interest group approach to study ‘socialist’ societies. The book is an attempt to describe and understand the authoritarian regime in Poland as a sort of corporatist society. As a sociologist of organizations the author succeeds in analyzing an intricate system of mechanisms that have been generated by a social system in order to compensate for irrationalities due to ideological restrictions placed upon it. She has been sensitive to the manifestations of symbolic manipulation in the process of social control and able to analyze such phenomena as simulation of interest group representation or ritualization of periodic crises of the regime. In these analyses she has demonstrated how the system succeeded in incorporating and, as it were, domesticating what would be seen by a less astute observer (or a traditionally thinking social scientist) as developments disrupting and threatening the system’s stability. (x)

Staniszkis describes the core concept of a “self-limiting revolution” in these terms:

Self-limiting revolution. The most striking characteristic of the initial period of the movement’s history was the painful process of cramming that radical wave of protest and class war into a ‘trade union” formula. Nearly all other features of the movement stemmed from this self-limitation of the Polish revolution. For instance, its symbolic politics (which took the form of attacks on local PUWP bosses and did not try to undermine the political institutions as such) provided a peculiar alibi for regional Solidarity leaders who had to pay with their own authority for the policy of moderating the movement, persuaded by its top authorities and experts from the intelligentsia. (17)

Staniszkis’s account differs substantially from that of Alain Touraine, discussed in earlier posts (link, link). Touraine emphasized (or perhaps over-emphasized) the substantial agency and purposiveness of the Solidarity movement, whereas Staniszkis emphasized the structural limitations to which its “pragmatic strategies” subjected it. There were clear limits to the scope of what could be demanded and achieved through the Solidarity social and political mobilization, according to Staniszkis, and this left the authoritarian capacity of the Polish state substantially unchanged. And Staniszkis’s view of the rank-and-file workers who made up the constituency of Solidarity is markedly different from Touraine’s. Touraine regarded Polish workers as having a high level of political consciousness and agency; whereas Staniszkis’s view is that workers were not especially ideological or militant in their support for the union. In her view, the interests motivating a substantial portion of the union members were primarily economic; and in fact, the union had very little concrete economic power (19 ff.). She writes: “Also almost all the victories won by Solidarity during this stage of the conflict were superficial, the ruling group made promises that it did not intend to keep, and hence Solidarity victories were pointless. The deadlock of the self-limiting revolution was also due to the narrow trade-union formula used to label the movement’s activity” (21).

Analysis of a social movement requires providing an account of the motivations and mental frameworks of the potential followers of the movement. Staniszkis considers the content and determinants of “working-class consciousness” in some detail:

Three thresholds must be mentioned when talking about the development of the consciousness of working class in Poland. The first is the barrier created by the limited semantic competence of the workers, which in the past has led to articulation of interests only in restricted, situation-specific, terms. In the first part of this chapter I will try to show how this limited semantic competence made the workers’ protest less efficient. This is a good example of a situation in which the structure of speech (rather than its content) plays an ideological role because it reinforces and stablizes the political system. However, this same limited competence sometimes served as an advantage by reducing the areas of possible communication during negotiations, as a result making the working class less vulnerable to manipulation and in a sense more radical. In this context, I will discuss radicalism as a problem of imagination as well as of attitude and the events of August 1980 as a type of cultural revolution. (113)

She refers also to the barrier of “reification” — the mental attitude according to which “power relations are perceived as painful but natural and without alternative” (113), and what she calls the “peculiar self-image of Solidarity activists” (113).

As suggested by the first barrier, Staniszkis takes a fairly negative view of the role of intellectuals and experts in the Solidarity struggle. She writes of the disconnect between the language and “semantic power” wielded by the intellectuals which rarely resonated with the political consciousness or goals of the rank-and-file union leaders and members. And she suggests that this semantic advantage sometimes worked to derail the more radical demands made by some activists and union leaders.

Most interesting in this chapter is her articulation of how she understands “ideological functions” in a social situation:

By ideological functions of forms of consciousness I mean:

• 1) their participation in measures to stabilize present social relations;
• 2) their influence on the opportunities of individuals, social groups, and classes in conflict situations;  
• 3) their impact on the ability to defend against the tensions generated by the system;
• 4) their role in the techniques of domination and manipulation applied by the ruling group. (115-116)

This is not a theory of the content of an ideology (as Marx attempts to do); rather, it is an effort at diagnosing the “functions” or “social effects” of a social ideology. So the book doesn’t give much attention to what Polish workers thought about the political structures within which they lived, and how they made sense of them. Instead, she places most of her attention on what she calls “semantic competence” — the concepts and vocabulary through which workers, leaders, unionists, farmers, and other members of Polish society expressed their thoughts about the political forces around them.

In fact, she seems to find the concept of “ideology” somewhat vacuous. Instead, she suggests the term “mentality” as a way of framing the “sense-making” thought processes of various segments of Polish society. (She cites Juan Linz’s use of these concepts in his analysis of authoritarianism.)

I use the term “mentality” as a synonym for a framework of cognitive forms actually operative in political life that is action-oriented and loaded with emotions. This term seems more useful in our case than the concept of ideology. (135)

In the end, Staniszkis’s assessment of the impact of the Solidarity movement in Polish political and social transformation is somewhat negative:

It may sound like heresy, but Polish political life and especially the flow of ideas after August 1980 and the creation of Solidarity has been impoverished as a result of the impact of the populist and solidarist perspective pressed upon society by Solidarity. This view contrasts with the segmented, often morally ambiguous but nevertheless less uniform and less aggregated course of society in the 1970s. (145)

And indeed, the military coup and martial law regime of December 1981 provided a striking parenthesis to the idea that Solidarity was a powerful social movement capable of transforming Polish society. She describes the final weeks in November and December leading up to the coup in these terms:

1) Solidarity leaders believed that the power vacuum (the ruling group’s inability to control the real processes in society and the economy) was synonymous with the ruling group’s inability to use repression. Interestingly, this assumption closely paralleled the position of the ruling group itself. Ironically, the latter has also mistaken the ability to repress for an ability to govern.
2) Leaders of Solidarity also assumed that, even if confrontation were to come, the ruling group would begin with mild and legal methods and that its options would be limited by the present form of the institutional regime, with its characteristic situation of stalemate. At worst a “state of emergency” would exist with the delegation of extraordinary powers to the government by Sejm, not a “state of war,” preceded by a military coup. (326)

These were grave mistakes. The Solidarity organization was outlawed and forced underground, its leaders were arrested and imprisoned, and the strategies of mass demonstration and protest were no longer feasible. So the repressive power of the state succeeded in blocking Solidarity as a political force for at least a few years. But Staniszkis argues that internal contradictions within the union itself presented another large obstacle to continued resistance:

Another mistake of Solidarity leaders was rooted in their underestimation of the problems within Solidarity itself. Recent surveys made by the sociological research center of Mazowsze Region” show among members of Solidarity not only a low willingness to strike (even if the right to strike were in danger), but also deep differences within the union, the ambiguous relationship between the rank-and-file members and their national leaders, and, above all, the increasing passivity of Solidarity members. The ruling group appears to have read this evidence much more carefully; especially the data showing the relatively high prestige of the army among Solidarity members as well as their ambivalence toward at least some proposals popular among Solidarity activists. (326-327).

The third mistake of the national leaders of Solidarity was in accelerating a “paper war’’ (an exchange of statements and resolutions) without any real preparation for the eventual consequences of such an escalation of claims. A feeling of strength based on its membership of nearly 10 million was one of the basic reasons for the ‘‘safe game” attitude of most of Solidarity’s leaders. They did not take into account how easily the union could be paralyzed by cutting off communications and arresting activists. (328)

For some reason Staniszkis’s account of this fairly short period of social conflict makes me think of Marx and Tocqueville in their treatment of the events leading up to the June Days in Paris, 1848. Here are Alexander Herzen’s recollections of the class warfare that occurred in the streets of Paris on those days:

I listened to the thunder and the tocsin and gazed avidly at this panorama of Paris; it was as though I was taking my leave of it. At that moment I loved Paris passionately. It was my last tribute to the great town; after the June days it grew hateful to me. On the other side of the river barricades were being raised in all the streets and alleys. I can still see the gloomy faces of the men dragging stones; women and children were helping them. A young student from the Polytechnic climbed up on to an apparently completed barricade, planted the banner and started singing the Marseillaise in a soft, sad, solemn voice; all the workers joined in and the chorus of this great song, resounding from behind the stones of the barricades, gripped one’s soul. . . . The tocsin was still tolling. Meanwhile, the artillery clattered across the bridge and General Bedeau standing there raised his field-glasses to inspect the enemy positions. . . . (From the Other Shore, After the Storm, 46)

Gilbert on social facts

I am currently thinking about the topic of "organizational actors", and Margaret Gilbert's arguments about social actors are plainly relevant to this topic. It seems worthwhile therefore to reproduce a review I wrote of Gilbert's book On Social Facts (1989) in 1993. It is a tribute to the power of Gilbert's ideas that the book has much of the same power thirty years later that it had when it was first published. I also find it interesting that the concerns I had in the 1990s about "collective actors" and "plural subjects" expressed in this review have continued in my thinking about the social world through the current date. I continue to believe that constructs like collective actors require microfoundations that establish how they work at the level of individual "socially constituted, socially situated" individual human beings. I refer to this view as "methodological localism"; link.

I also find it interesting that my own views about social action derive, not from philosophy, but from immersion in the literatures of contentious politics and the concrete pathways through which individuals are led to mobilization and collective action. Unlike the methodological individualism associated with rational choice theory and neoclassical economics, and unlike the social holism that all too often derives from purely philosophical considerations, this literature emphasizes the actions and thoughts of individuals without making narrow and singe-dimensional assumptions about the nature of practical rationality. I learned through my study of the millenarian rebellions of late Imperial China that rebels had many motivations and many reasons for mobilization, and that good historical research is needed to disentangle the organizations, actors, and stresses that led to mobilization and rebellion in a particular region of China. The participants in the Eight Trigrams Rebellion or the Nian Rebellion in North China were not a plural subject. (For exposition of these ideas see chapter five of my Understanding Peasant China: Case Studies in the Philosophy of Social Science (1989), "Theories of peasant rebellion".) I have included an excerpt from that chapter on the topic of collective action at the end of this post because it illustrates an "actor-centered" approach to collective action. It presents a clear counter-perspective to Gilbert's views of "plural subjects".

Readers may also be interested in a post written in 2009 on the topic of "Acting as a Group" (link).

***

[1993]

Margaret Gilbert’s On Social Facts is an intelligent, closely argued and extensively analyzed treatment of the problem of social collectivity. What is a social group? What distinguishes a group from a random set of individuals—e.g. the set consisting of W. V. O. Quine, Madonna, and Napoleon? Is a social class—e.g. the English working class in the 1880s—a social group? Gilbert’s primary contention is that the notion of a collectivity—individuals constituting a group—is the central feature of social ontology and the chief focus of empirical social science. And she maintains that this concept can best be analyzed by the idea of a “plural subject”—the referent of the first-person plural pronoun, “we”.

The core of Gilbert’s theory of social groups involves the idea of the mutual recognition by a set of persons that they are engaged in some joint actions or beliefs. “A set of people constitute a social group if and only if they constitute a plural subject”; and a plural subject is “a set of people each of whom shares with oneself in some action, belief, attitude, or similar attribute” (p. 204). Gilbert argues that the pronouns “us” and “we” are the linguistic elements through which we refer to plural subjects in English. And she believes that plural subjects exist; they are not fictions or constructions, but agents which have beliefs, perform actions, and succeed or fail in carrying out their intentions. In later chapters Gilbert extends her conception of collectivities and plural subjects by considering several other important social notions: the idea of a social fact in Durkheim’s sense, the idea of a collective belief, and the idea of a social convention. In each case Gilbert argues that the concept of a plural subject supports a plausible and intuitively convincing analysis of the social concept in question. According to Gilbert, “social groups are plural subjects, collective beliefs are the beliefs of plural subjects, and social conventions are the ‘fiats’ of plural subjects” (p. 408). Gilbert’s account of social conventions is developed through extensive discussion of David Lewis’s influential formulation of this concept.

Gilbert argues against the individualism of Max Weber (and by implication, the premises of rational choice theory), by arguing that collectivities are the central subject of the social sciences, and that collectivities cannot be subsumed under (narrowly) individualist concepts. Thus Gilbert suggests that her theory offers support for holism over individualism (p. 3). Does it? I think not. An individualist is free to acknowledge that individuals have beliefs that refer to other persons and groups of persons; the position permits reference to shared purposes and actions involving a collection of persons deliberately orienting their actions towards a shared purpose. What individualism requires is simply that these are all the aggregate results of individual states of mind, and that the behavior of the ensemble is to be explained by reference to the beliefs and intentions of the participants.

An important test case for Gilbert’s account is the problem of collective action. Rational choice theory places much emphasis on public goods problems and the phenomenon of free-riding. How does Gilbert’s conception of plural subjects treat the problem? It appears to this reader that Gilbert makes collective action too easy. Plural subjects (groups) have purposes; individuals within these groups express quasi-readiness to perform their part of the shared action; and—when circumstances are right—the group acts collectively to bring about its collective goals. “The people concerned would be jointly ready jointly to perform a certain action in certain circumstances” (p. 409). She speaks of group will or communal will (p. 410). But the actions of a group are still the result of the choices made by constituent individuals. And however much the individual may align him- or herself with the collective project, the collective behavior is still no more than the sum of the actions taken by particular individuals. Moreover, it is necessary to acknowledge the endurance of private, individual interests that remain prominent for individual agents—with the result that we should expect individuals’ actions to sometimes involve free-riding, defection, and favoring of private over collective interests. It seems to this reader, then, that Gilbert leans too far in the direction of the Rousseauvian “general will” interpretation of social action.

How important for the social sciences is the notion of a social group or collectivity? Gilbert’s view is that this concept is foundational; it is the basis for a unitary definition of the subject matter of the social sciences. This overstates the importance of collectivities, it seems to this reader: there are important instances of social explanation that do not involve analysis of groups in Gilbert’s sense, and whose explanatory frameworks do not refer to groups, their behavior, their shared beliefs, or their collective intentions and self-understandings. A few examples might include neo-malthusian analysis of the relation between economic change and demographic variables; analysis of the effects of changes of the transport system on patterns of settlement and economic activity; and explanation of patterns of historical processes of urbanization in terms of changing economic and political institutions. These examples explain social phenomena as the aggregate result of large numbers of rational individual actions. They commonly refer to impersonal social structures and circumstances that function as constraints and opportunities for individuals. And they make no inherent reference to the forms of group collectivity to which Gilbert refers.

This is a rich book, and one that repays careful reading. It will be of particular interest to philosophers of social science and social philosophers, and the level of philosophical rigor will interest philosophers in other fields as well.

***

Here is a relevant excerpt from Understanding Peasant China, published in the same year as On Social Facts, on collective action as the composition of individual actors who are mobilized around a shared set of goals.

Rebellion is an example of collective action; but this concept requires some analysis, for not all forms of mass behavior constitute collective action. A collective action involves at least the idea of a collective goal (that is, a goal which participants in the event share as the aim of their actions), and it suggests some degree of coordination among individuals in pursuit of that goal. Thus a mass demonstration against the government is a collective action, whereas the panicked retreat through the streets after troops have dispersed the demonstration is not. Both are forms of mass behavior, but only the demonstration has the features of collective intentionality and coordination that would constitute a collective action. We may define a collective action, then, as the aggregation of a number of individuals performing intentional, coordinated actions that are intended to help attain some shared goal or purpose. This account distinguishes collective action from other forms of mass behavior in which the individuals do not intend to contribute to a group effect—for example, a panicked stampede in a football stadium, a run on a bank, or a cycle of hoarding food during a famine.

Collective actions can be classified according to the kind of shared goals that guide the individuals who participate in them—private interests and group interests. In some cases a collective action is inspired by the immediate gains available to each participant through coordinated action; in others, the action is inspired by the shared belief that the action will lead to an outcome that will benefit the group. An example of a collective action motivated by private interest would be a coordinated attack on a granary during a famine. No individual family has the strength to attack the granary by itself, but through coordinated efforts a group of fifty families may succeed. Each participant has the same goal—to acquire grain for subsistence—but the participants’ aims are private. By contrast, a demonstration by Polish workers in support of the Solidarity movement would appear to be motivated by a perception of group interest—in this case, the interest that Polish workers have as a group in representation by an independent labor union.

…

As we have seen in other contexts, the prospect of collective action raises the possibility of free riding: if the benefits of collective action are indivisible and undeniable to nonparticipants, it would be rational for the self-interested individual to not participate. To the extent that the potential benefits of a collective action are public rather than private, and to the extent that the action is designed to produce distant rather than immediate benefits, collective action theory predicts that it will be difficult to motivate rational individuals in support of the action.

Another important factor in the success or failure of collective action, besides the character and timing of benefits to members, is the idea of assurance: potential contributors’ confidence in the probability of success of the joint enterprise. As Elster, Hardin, and others show, the level of assurance is critical to the decisions of potential contributors. If success is widely believed to be unlikely, potential contributors will be deterred from joining the collective action. An important dimension of assurance is the likelihood that other potential contributors will act. Each must judge the probability that enough people will support the action and so make success more likely. One central task of leadership and organization is to bolster the assurance of each member of the group in the likely support of other members. (UPC 147-149)

The Kerner Commission report

The Kerner Commission released its report in 1968, following months of intensive study of the series of major race riots and rebellions that had occurred in 1967. Here is the executive summary (link), and here is a detailed review of the context and reception of the report in Boston Review (link).

It is enormously important for us today, almost fifty years later, to reread the report with an eye to the diagnosis the commissioners arrived at -- the underlying structural and experiential conditions that had set the stage for 164 riots, rebellions, and disturbances across the country during 1967 -- and the recommendations they made for healing these fundamental contradictions within our American democracy. Newark and Detroit were the most destructive during 1967, but there were many others during that year, and equally destructive uprisings took place in many major American cities in the following year as well. The Commission's "most basic conclusion" is stark, unblinking, and profoundly troubling: "This is our basic conclusion: Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white -- separate and unequal."

The Commission was careful and deliberate in its assessments of causation of individual rebellions, and they identified broad standing conditions as crucial parts of the causal pathway to the eruption of violence:

Disorder did not erupt as a result of a single "triggering" or "precipitating" incident. Instead, it was generated out of an increasingly disturbed social atmosphere, in which typically a series of tension-heightening incidents over a period of weeks or months became linked in the minds of many in the Negro community with a reservoir of underlying grievances. At some point in the mounting tension, a further incident-in itself often routine or trivial-became the breaking point and the tension spilled over into violence.

"Prior" incidents, which increased tensions and ultimately led to violence, were police actions in almost half the cases; police actions were "final" incidents before the outbreak of violence in 12 of the 24 surveyed disorders.

What the rioters appeared to be seeking was fuller participation in the social order and the material benefits enjoyed by the majority of American citizens. Rather than rejecting the American system, they were anxious to obtain a place for themselves in it.

(6)The report considers the nature of the grievances and demands that motivated participants in these uprisings, and classifies them according to urgency:

First Level of Intensity 

1. Police practices
2. Unemployment and underemployment
3. Inadequate housing 

Second Level of Intensity 

4. Inadequate education
5. Poor recreation facilities and programs
6. Ineffectiveness of the political structure and grievance mechanisms 

Third Level of Intensity 

7. Disrespectful white attitudes
8. Discriminatory administration of justice
9. Inadequacy of federal programs
10. Inadequacy of municipal services
11. Discriminatory consumer and credit practices
12. Inadequate welfare programs

The Commission report is also explicit about the severity of the gap between black and white citizens with respect to crucial elements of life quality:

Social and economic conditions in the riot cities constituted a clear pattern of severe disadvantage for Negroes compared with whites, whether the Negroes lived in the area where the riot took place or outside it. Negroes had completed fewer years of education and fewer had attended high school. Negroes were twice as likely to be unemployed and three times as likely to be in unskilled and service jobs. Negroes averaged 70 percent of the income earned by whites and were more than twice as likely to be living in poverty. Although housing cost Negroes relatively more, they had worse housing--three times as likely to be overcrowded and substandard. When compared to white suburbs, the relative disadvantage is even more pronounced. (7)

To this list of racial gaps we must now add the health disparities gap, including disparities by race in infant mortality, disease incidence, and longevity.

And consider these troubling observations about hopes and expectations by young African-American men and women that the Commission discovered. These lines were intended to describe conditions in the late 1960s; but they have great relevance for today's environment in many American cities:

Frustrated hopes are the residue of the unfulfilled expectations aroused by the great judicial and legislative victories of the Civil Rights Movement and the dramatic struggle for equal rights in the South.

A climate that tends toward approval and encouragement of violence as a form of protest has been created by white terrorism directed against nonviolent protest; by the open defiance of law and federal authority by state and local officials resisting desegregation; and by some protest groups engaging in civil disobedience who turn their backs on nonviolence, go beyond the constitutionally protected rights of petition and free assembly, and resort to violence to attempt to compel alteration of laws and policies with which they disagree.

The frustrations of powerlessness have led some Negroes to the conviction that there is no effective alternative to violence as a means of achieving redress of grievances, and of "moving the system." These frustrations are reflected in alienation and hostility toward the institutions of law and government and the white society which controls them, and in the reach toward racial consciousness and solidarity reflected in the slogan "Black Power." (9)

The second point is particularly salient today in a political environment in which racial antagonisms have been encouraged by leading presidential candidates, and an encouraging nod has been offered to adherents willing to use violence against peaceful demonstrators at political rallies.

The report's observations about failures of public school systems in segregated cities are particularly relevant to the city of Detroit, and a partial explanation of the growing sense of separation between white and black Michiganders and between Detroit and Lansing:

Education in a democratic society must equip children to develop their potential and to participate fully in American life. For the community at large, the schools have discharged this responsibility well. But for many minorities, and particularly for the children of the ghetto, the schools have failed to provide the educational experience which could overcome the effects of discrimination and deprivation.
This failure is one of the persistent sources of grievance and resentment within the Negro community. The hostility of Negro parents and students toward the school system is generating increasing conflict and causing disruption within many city school districts. But the most dramatic evidence of the relationship between educational practices and civil disorders lies in the high incidence of riot participation by ghetto youth who have not completed high school.

What have the succeeding five decades brought us? The twelve sources of grievance listed above are entirely relevant to today's realities in Detroit, Chicago, or Cleveland. Youth unemployment, crisis conditions in public school systems, highly visible and recurring instances of excessive use of deadly force by police across the country, and ineffective political institutions are high on the list today in African-American communities in virtually all large American cities, including especially Detroit.

If we are honest about the facts of race in America, it is hard to claim that there is substantial progress in the key concerns of the Kerner Commission report. Here is one key finding in 1967: "Segregation and poverty have created in the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to most white Americans." And in cities throughout the United States, this devastating reality persists. Racial residential segregation continues; there are continuing racial gaps in education, health, employment, and quality of life; and there continues to be a pattern of police violence against young black men. And, predictably, there is a rising level of anger and disaffection among many millions of young people whose lives are limited by these basic facts. We need to re-read the Kerner Commission report; and we need to act on its wise recommendations.

ABM approaches to social conflict

Source: Pfautz and Salwen (link)

An earlier post addressed the question of the dynamics through which a stable community consisting of multiple groups may begin to polarize and fission into antagonisms and conflict. I speculated there that the tools of agent-based modeling might be of use here. What I had in mind was something like this. Suppose we have an urban population spread across space in a distribution that reflects a degree of differentiation of residence by income, religion, and race. Suppose religion is more segregated than either income or race across the region. And suppose we have some background theoretical beliefs about social networks, civic associations, communication processes and other factors influencing a disposition to mobilize. Perhaps ABM methods could allow us to probe different scenarios to see what effects these different settings produce for polarization and conflict.

There is a fair amount of effort at modeling this kind of social phenomena within the field of social simulation. Carlos Lemos et al provide an overview of applications of ABM techniques in social conflict and civil violence in "Agent-based modeling of social conflict, civil violence and revolution: state-of-the-art-review and further prospects" (link). Here is an overview statement of their findings about one specific approach, the threshold-based approach:

Social conflict, civil violence and revolution ABM are inspired on classical models that use simple threshold-based rules to represent collective behavior and contagion effects, such as Schelling’s model of segregation [7] and Granovetter’s model of collective behavior [15]. Granovetter’s model is a theoretical description of social contagion or peer effects: each agent a has a threshold Ta and decides to turn “active” – e.g. join a protest or riot – when the number of other agents joining exceeds its threshold. Granovetter showed that certain initial distributions of the threshold can precipitate a chain reaction that leads to the activation of the entire population, whereas with other distributions only a few agents turn active. (section 3.1)

Here is a diagram of their way of conceptualizing the actors and the processes of social conflict into which they are sometimes mobilized.

Armano Srbljinovic and colleagues attempt to model the emergence of ethnic conflict in "An Agent-Based Model of Ethnic Mobilisation" (link). Their original impulse is to better explain the emergence of polarized and antagonistic ethnic conflict in the former Yugoslavia; their method of approach is to develop an agent-based model that might capture some of the parameters that induce or inhibit ethnic mobilization. They refer to the embracing project as "Social Correlates of the Homeland War". They believe an ABM can potentially illuminate the messy and complex processes of ethnic mobilization observed on the ground:

Our more moderate goals are based on a seemingly reasonable assumption that the results observed in a simplified, artificial society could give us some clues of what is going on, or perhaps show us where to centre our attention in further and more detailed examination of a more complex real-world society. (paragraph 1.4)

They describe the eighties and nineties in this region in these terms:

So, by the end of the eighties and the beginning of the nineties, the ethnic roles in the society of the former Yugoslavia, that were kept toward the middle of Banton's social roles-scale for more than forty years, now under the influence of political entrepreneurs, increased in importance. (paragraph 2.5)

And they would like to explain some aspects of the dynamics of this transition. They single out a handful of important social characteristics of individuals in the region: (a) ethnic membership, (b) ethnic mobilization, (c) civic mobilization, (d)grievance degree, (e) social network, (f) environmental conditions, and (g) appeals to action. Each actor in the model is assigned a value for factors a-e; environmental conditions are specified; and various patterns of appeals are inserted into the system over a number of trials

The algorithm of the model calculates the degree of mobilization intensity for all the agents as a function of the frequency of appeals, the antecedent grievance level of the agent, and a few features of the agents' social networks. If we add a substantive hypothesis about the threshold of M after which group action arises, we then have a model of the occurrence of ethnic strife.

The model uses a "SWARM" methodology. It postulates 200 agents, half red and half blue; and it calculates for each agent a level of mobilization intensity for a sequence of times, according to the following formula:

• mi(t+1) = mi(t) + (miapp + misocnet + micool)Δt    (paragraph 3.8)

This formula calculates the i^th individual's new level of mobilization intensity m depending on the prior intensity, the delta created by the appeal, the delta created by the social network, and the "cooling" for the current period. (It is assumed that mobilization intensity decays over time unless re-stimulated by appeals and social network effects.)

This is a very interesting experiment in modeling of a complex interactive social process. But it also raises several important issues. One thing that is apparent from careful scrutiny of this model is that it is difficult to separate "veridical" results from artifacts. For example, consider this diagram:

Is the periodicity shown by Red and Blue mobilization intensities a real effect, or is it an artifact of the design of the model?

Second, it is important to notice the range of factors the simulation does not consider, which theorists like Tilly would think to be crucial: quality of leadership, quality and intensity of organization, content of appeals, differential pathways of appeals, and variety of political psychologies across agents. This simulation captures several important aspects of this particular kind of collective action. But it omits a great deal of substantial factors that theorists of collective action would take to be critical elements of the dynamics of the situation.

Here is a second example of an attempt to simulate aspects of ethnic mobilization provided by Stacey Pfautz and Michael Salwen, "A Hybrid Model of Ethnic Conflict, Repression, Insurgency and Social Strife" (link). Pfautz and Salwen describe their work in these terms:

Ethnic Conflict, Repression, Insurgency and Social Strife (ERIS) is a comprehensive, multi-level model of ethnic conflict that simulates how population dynamics impact state decision making and, in turn, respond to state actions and policies. Population pressures (e.g., relocation, civil unrest) affect and are affected by state actions. The long term goal of ERIS is to support operations development and analyses, enabling military planners to evaluate evolving situations, anticipate the emergence of ethnic conflict and its negative consequences, develop courses of action to defuse ethnic conflict, and mitigate the second and third order effects of U.S. actions on ethnic conflict. (211)

They refer to theirs as a hybrid model, incorporating a macro-level "systems dynamics" model and a micro-level ABM model. Their model thus attempts to represent both micro and macro causal forces on ethnic mobilization, illustrated in the diagram at the top. This model increases the level of "realism" in the assumptions represented in the simulation. Agents are heterogeneous, and their decision-making is contextualized to location on a GIS grid.

Agents represent 1000 individuals and are uniform with respect to religious affiliation. Agents are sampled with respect to age and sex ratio; however, skew sampling is used to create agents with different demographic profiles with respect to these attributes. Agents also have attributes to capture propensities to conflict and tolerance, which affect agent behavior and interact in the aggregate with the macro-level model to localize reports of conflict. (212)

Key variables in their simulation are religious identity, demographic change, population density, the history of recent inter-group conflict, and geographical location. The action space for individuals is: move location, mobilize for violence. And their model is calibrated to real data drawn from four states in Northwest India. Their basic finding is this: "Conflict is predicted in this model where islands or peninsulas of one ethnicity are surrounded by a sea of another (Figure 2.1)."

Kent McClelland offers a computational model that responds to Randall Collins' concepts of "C-Escalation" and "D-Escalation" in inter-group conflict. McClelland's piece is "CYCLES OF CONFLICT A Computational Modeling Alternative to Collins’s Theory of Conflict Escalation" (link). Here is how he describes his approach:

In this paper, I use a variation of systems theory to construct a multi-agent computational model of dynamic social interaction that shows how the conflict-escalation processes described by Collins can be generated in computer simulations. Like his, my model relies on feedback loops, but the mathematical formulas in my model use negative feedback loops, rather than positive feedback loops, to generate the collective processes of positive feedback described in Collins’s model of conflict escalation. My analysis relies on perceptual control theory (PCT), a dynamic-systems model of human behavior, which proposes that neural circuits in the brain are organized into hierarchies of negative-feedback control systems, and that individuals use these control systems to manipulate their own environments in order to control the flow of perceptual input in accordance with their internally generated preferences and expectations. (6)

Lars-Erik Cederman uses an ABM approach to model geopolitical boundaries (link). Here is how he describes his goals:

A decade ago, the Soviet Union ceased to exist, Yugoslavia started to disintegrate, and Germany reunified. Marking the end of the Cold War, these epochal events illustrate vividly that change in world politics features not just policy shifts but also can affect states' boundaries and, sometimes, their very existence. Clearly, any theory aspiring to explain such transformations or, more generally, the longue durée of history, must endogenize the actors themselves.

The current paper describes how agent based modeling can be used to capture transformations of this boundary transforming kind. This is a different argument from that advanced by most agent-based modelers, who resort to computational methods because they lend themselves to exploring heterogeneous and boundedly rational, but otherwise fixed, actors in complex social environments (1, 2). Without discounting the importance of this research, I will use illustrations from my own modeling framework to illustrate how it is possible to go beyond this mostly behavioral agenda. The main emphasis will be on the contribution of specific computational techniques to conceptualization of difficult to grasp notions such as agency, culture, and identity. Although a complete specification of the models goes beyond the current scope, the paper closes with a discussion of some of their key findings.

Cederman's model incorporates three primary dynamics: "Emergent Polarity" (the idea that boundaries result from a process of conquest); "Democratic Cooperation" (the idea that "Democracy" functions as a tag facilitating cooperation among subsets of actors); and "Nationalist Systems Change" (the idea that boundaries result from actors seeking locations placing them in proximity to other actors possessing the same ethnic identity).

Here is a diagram representing stylized results of the simulation.

Epstein, Steinbruner, and Parker offer a model of civil violence (link). Here are the parameters that are assigned to all actors (population and cops): grievance, hardship, perceived legitimacy, risk aversiveness, field of vision, net risk, location, and decision to act. This is a very simple analysis of collective action, plainly derivative from a rational-choice approach. Each actor decides to act or not depending on his/her calculation of risk and hardship/grievance. These assumptions are vastly weaker than those offered by students of contentious politics like McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly; but they generate interesting collective results when embodied in a generative ABM.

This research is specifically interesting in the context of the question posed here about fissioning. Consider this series of frames from an animation reflecting the results of random fluctuation of densities in an ethnically mixed community:

Peaceful coexistence

Animation of process leading to ethnic separation / ethnic cleansing

With "peace-keepers" the results are different:

These are interesting results. Plainly the presence or absence of peace-enforcers is relevant to the extent of ethnic violence that occurs. But notice once again how sparse the behavioral assumptions are. The simulations essentially serve to calculate the interactive effects of this particular set of assumptions about agents' behavior -- with no ability to represent organizations, communication, variations in motivation, etc.

All these models warrant study. They attempt to codify the behavior of individuals within geographic and social space and to work out the dynamics of interaction that result. But it is very important to recognize the limitations of these models as predictors of outcomes in specific periods and locations of unrest. These simulation models probably don't shed much light on particular episodes of contention in Egypt or Tunisia during the Arab Spring. The "qualitative" theories of contention that have been developed probably shed more light on the dynamics of contention than the simulations do at this point in their development.

Deacons for Defense

Most of the story we remember of the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s centers around the philosophy of non-violence espoused by Martin Luther King, Jr. and the major civil rights organizations like the NAACP and the SCLC.  A few historians give emphasis to a very different part of the movement in the South, however -- a movement that was based on armed self-defense by local people.  An earlier post discusses the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, another organization that featured armed self-defense against white violence as part of the struggle for political and civil rights.  Here I will reflect on the Deacons for Defense and Lance Hill's history of this movement The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement.

First, the silence surrounding armed self-defense.  The primary narratives of the Civil Rights movement do not give attention to the Deacons or the LCFO in the early years of the movement (the early 1960s).  Taylor Branch gives great attention to the civil rights struggles in Mississippi in Parting the Waters : America in the King Years 1954-63, including the extensive occurrence of Klan violence against civil rights workers and activists.  But the Deacons for Defense are not mentioned at any point.  There are occasional references to readiness for armed resistance to white violence; for example, following the cold-blooded murder of civil rights activist Herbert Lee, Branch notes that SNCC activist Bob Moses was uncomfortable with the guns stockpiled by E. W. Steptoe in Mississippi.

Steptoe continued to let Moses stay with him in his house across the highway from the Hurst home, but Moses felt uncomfortable there because of the guns. The Steptoe farm always had been a minor arsenal, and Steptoe had a reputation as a magician who knew how to conceal an extra pistol or two. Now, after the Lee murder, Moses kept finding new guns under pillows and in bedside tables. The atmosphere was thick with the anticipation of a frontier shoot-out. Moses, not wishing to impose his own nonviolence on Steptoe, nor to have his own presence ignite the violence, retreated briefly to McComb. The aftershock of the Lee murder was pervasive there too, and it added to the tension that was building over the continued jailing of the four young sit-in students. (511) 

But there is no discussion of the self-defense movement in Mississippi and the ideas that underlay the philosophy of self-defense that were the core of the Deacons for Defense. One possible reason for this has to do with how the narrative was framed at the time.  The mainstream civil rights movement itself did not approve of the self-defense movement, and its leaders shaped the narrative towards moral protest and the philosophy of non-violence.

Another possible reason for neglect of the self-defense organizations that emerged in the South early 1960s is the idea that these organizations were harmful to the progress of the struggle for political and civil rights, and that violent conflicts between police, national guard, klansmen, and deacons were likely to lead to a bloodbath throughout the black population.  (This is roughly the view that Doug McAdam offered when I asked him why there was no discussion of these movements in Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970, 2nd Edition.) The idea here is that the balance of power so greatly favored the forces of white supremacy that armed self-defense was likely to produce horrible retaliation.

Lance Hill's view is different from both of these.  He believes that the Deacons had a measurable and positive effect on the struggle to break open the system of white supremacy in Mississippi and Louisiana, and that, absent this force, there is a likelihood that Jim Crow would have prevailed.

Real victories for the civil rights movement at the local level were scarce in the Deep South and virtually nonexistent in Louisiana up through 1964. Severe repression by local authorities and the Klan, combined with economic pressure by white business elites, made it difficult to end segregation and discrimination even after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. But at the beginning of 1965 the Deacons and the Jonesboro movement stood posed to accomplish something that no other local or national organization had done before in the Deep South: force a segregationist governor to directly intervene to the benefit of the civil rights movement. (63)

Hill refers to the "myth of nonviolence" in his conclusion. His point isn't that the strategies of nonviolence that were pursued by the NAACP, SCLC, and SNCC were inherently ineffective; instead, his view is that they were fundamentally incomplete.  If the reality of armed self-defense didn't exist, then the moral authority of protest and civil disobedience would have been insufficient to change the political and economic realities of the Jim Crow South.

Nonviolence as the motive force for change became a reassuring myth of American moral redemption -- a myth that assuaged white guilt by suggesting that racism was not intractable and deeply embedded in American life, that racial segregation and discrimination were handily overcome by orderly, polite protest and a generous American conscience, and that the pluralistic system for resolving conflicts between competing interests had prevailed. The system had worked and the nation was redeemed. 

It was a comforting but vacant fiction. In the end, segregation yielded to force as much as it did to moral suasion. Violence in the form of street riots and armed self-defense played a fundamental role in uprooting segregation and economic and political discrimination from 1963 to 1965. Only after the threat of black violence emerged did civil rights legislation move to the forefront of the national agenda. Only after the Deacons appeared were the civil rights laws effectively enforced and the obstructions of terrorists and complicit local law enforcement agencies neutralized. (259)

Lance Hill's work is the primary source that other scholars use when writing about the Deacons; but what is at issue here is precisely the validity of Hill's overall judgment about the critical role played by this movement.  Other careful historians have come to the opposite conclusion -- that the force of the civil rights movement came from its effectiveness as a mass movement grounded in local mobilization and led by leaders committed to nonviolence. So how would we try to sort out the actual impact of the Deacons and other such movements?

The answer, it would seem, is that we need further detailed historical research by other historians to uncover more of this hidden story.  Annelieke Dirks makes an important contribution to this part of the story in "Between Threat and Reality: The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Emergence of Armed Self-Defense in Clarksdale and Natchez, Mississippi, 1960-1965" (link). Dirks focuses the account on local mobilization in Mississippi, which provides a vantage point from which to assess the relative importance of national leaders' commitment to nonviolence and local use of armed self-defense. Here is how Dirks puts the approach:

In what follows, I focus on how local branches of the NAACP in Mississippi used a combination of nonviolent protest, economic pressure, radical speech, and armed self-defense to further their political goals and defend their communities during the height of the modern civil rights movement, between 1960 and 1965. Two different towns, Clarksdale in the Delta in the Northwest and Natchez in the Southwest, and two different NAACP branches receive detailed attention. I show that the emergence and usage of informal and formal forms of armed self-defense in these towns was not just a question of violent or non- violent ideology within the civil rights movement, and that self-defense was not embraced only by organizations like SNCC or CORE. Ultimately the feasibility of armed self-defense was related to economic, political, social, and per- sonal factors in local communities, and its use was also considered or employed by NAACP chapters. By demonstrating this, I hope to counter the portrayal of the NAACP as a moderate, middle-class, and nonviolent civil rights organization, as well as stress the complex and localized dynamics of the modern civil rights movement. (75-76)

And Dirks argues that the armed self-defense posture of activists in these parts of Mississippi made a material difference to the outcomes:

The protection of the Deacons gave the civil rights campaign in Natchez a much needed boost because the Deacons also organized internal movement discipline. While the boycott in Clarksdale was enforced through calling out names of violators during mass meetings, the Deacons organized vigilante groups of Black women—and some men—who attacked shoppers and destroyed their groceries. These female vigilantes also beat up domestic workers who gave information to their white employers. This internal disciplining made the boycott almost completely effective. In December 1965, after just four months of boycotting and broad-scale community organizing, city govern- ment and local businessmen decided to give in and agreed to all of the demands of the Black community. Evers called it “the greatest concession” of the civil rights movement, and he was right as far as Mississippi was concerned. While the movement in Clarksdale quietly phased out and needed federal intervention to open voter registration to African Americans, Natchez had managed to exert enough—armed—pressure on the white power structure to create a total collapse of Jim Crow. “The Natchez campaign was the single greatest community victory for the civil rights movement in Mississippi, though historians have never given it the credit it deserves,” asserts Lance Hill. “The organizers united and inspired a community to courageous action . . . and secured dramatic legal and economic reforms. In comparison, the projects in McComb, Clarksdale and Jackson failed to win any significant demands and frequently left the black community demoralized and in disarray.” (91)

 There is a clear logic to the idea that the non-violent movement needed support from men and women who were willing to face armed attackers with their own guns, and Hill offers a number of strong examples of incidents where klan and police thugs were forced to back off. But the question of whether, all things considered, we need to reassess the way the civil rights movement succeeded in cracking Jim Crow really needs more detailed and careful research, to follow on upon the groundbreaking case that Lance Hill has made.

How Jim Crow worked

Understanding history is partly about understanding some of the dry facts of social sequence and cause and effect in the making of various periods of historical change. But it is also about coming to a more visceral understanding of the human realities of the events that historians describe.  This is particularly true in the history of the American Civil Rights movement. How can we come to have a more vivid understanding of those events and social unfoldings?

Most white Americans have a very limited understanding of the real social setting in the South of the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 60s. We know it was a struggle for equality and freedom, and we know that racism and segregation were key elements of the situation of African Americans in their everyday lives. But mostly we don't know the systematic violence and racial hatred that served to stabilize those social relations of inequality in cities, towns, and rural areas throughout the South.

And yet a social order based on subordination and degradation of a whole people requires a heavy use of coercion to survive.  This coercion was provided by the local and regional organizations of white supremacists who enforced the social order of the Jim Crow South.

White supremacist organizations are today an extremist fringe in American politics. They are dangerous and violent, but they do not appeal to the great majority of the American population. But in the 1950s white supremacy was a viable and widespread ideology, and white supremacist groups were mass-based and powerful organizations that were very explicitly devoted to maintaining segregation and the subordinate status of African Americans. They were explicitly racist and they were also explicitly committed to using all means necessary to resist integration and the extension of full equality to African Americans. These organizations were key to enforcement of the rules of racial separation and behavior in the South.  Key among these were the White Citizens' Councils in various southern states. And many southern politicians were open advocates of the ideology and rhetoric of WCC in the 1950s and 1960s -- often under the rhetoric of "states' rights."  (Former Mississippi governor Haley Barbour created a stir in 2010 when he recalled his own perceptions of the WCCs in nostalgic terms; link.)

Here is a description of the WCCs from an encyclopedia on the Civil Rights movement maintained at Stanford:

In response to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision ending school segregation, white segregationists throughout the South created the White Citizens’ Councils (WCC). These local groups typically drew a more middle and upper class membership than the Ku Klux Klan and, in addition to using violence and intimidation to counter civil rights goals, they sought to economically and socially oppress blacks. Martin Luther King faced WCC attacks as soon as the Montgomery bus boycott, began and was a target of these groups throughout his career.

(It is interesting that I. F. Stone began writing about the violent and racist nature of the WCC almost as soon as it was formed (link).)

What this shows is that at a relatively recent time in the history of the United States these organizations competed in the full light of day, without embarrassment, and with a rhetoric that encouraged violent enforcement of the racial status quo. To see video of the faces of the young men and women who opposed the integration of the Little Rock schools following the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, is to see a kind of widespread, committed hatred of another social group that is more familiar to us from Rwanda or Bosnia. (Here is a short clip of the integration of Central High School from Eyes on the Prize; link.) The murder of Emmett Till in 1955 is just the most extreme example of this kind of murderous hatred and ferocious defense of the racial order. (The murderer of Medgar Evers was a member of the Citizens' Council.)

There are several hard and important questions raised by this history. How could an otherwise decent society have created the willing participation of so many millions of people in such a cruel and unjust system? Where did the virulence of the emotions of racism and aggression come from? How is it that the moral culture of the American south was such a fertile and welcoming ground for organizations like the White Citizens Councils and the Ku Klux Klan? And most crucially -- can these strands of hated, intolerance, and violence emerge again?

This last question is perhaps the most urgent one.  Are racism and white supremacy once again threatening to become parts of mainstream politics? The NAACP has tracked connections between the modern descendant of the White Citizens Councils, the Council of Conservative Citizens, and the Tea Party (link). There are some very notable connections. This suggests that white supremacists continue to attempt to achieve their goals through politics and political mobilization.  The anti-immigrant rhetoric of some strands of contemporary conservative thought, the hyperbolic opposition to Federal legislation for equality of rights, and the equation of a politics of equality with "Communism" all have enormous resonance with the racialized platforms of the WCCs of the 1960s.

(The Southern Poverty Law Center does very important work in monitoring these hate-based organizations.  Here is their report on the Council of Conservative Citizens. The Anti-Defamation League also does great work in this area. Here is their report on the role of the Ku Klux Klan during the 1950s and 1960s.)

Protest in Wukan

A period of demonstration and protest in the Chinese village of Wukan has caught the attention of world media in the past several weeks (link, link). The village is in Guangdong, the dynamic coastal province.  The demonstrations began in September against major land seizures by local government in alignment with developers, and became more intense in the past week when leader Xue Jinbo died in police custody.  (Here is a good Wikipedia article on the village.)  Land seizures seem to be the most volatile issue in China today, producing a large proportion of the roughly 90,000 civil disturbances the country currently faces a year.

Analysts are interested in probing the causes and dynamics of protest and resistance in contemporary China, including C. K. Lee (Against the Law: Labor Protests in China's Rustbelt and Sunbelt) and Kevin O'Brien (Rightful Resistance in Rural China).  Here, though, it may also be interesting to compare the current situation with the occurrence of similar incidents during the Qing Dynasty.

Fortunately, it is possible to do so on the basis of a recent relevant study. Ho-Fung Hung's recent Protest with Chinese Characteristics: Demonstrations, Riots, and Petitions in the Mid-Qing Dynasty addresses exactly this issue in historical context. He looks at the period 1740-1839 and finds that the character of protest and resistance varied throughout the period. This is the early modernization period of Chinese history, and Hung believes that the subject of popular unrest has been overlooked in this period. The grasp of the central power of the state increased during this period, and it also represented a major advance in commercialization of Chinese society.

The main source of data on protests during this period that Hung analyzes is the Veritable Records of the Qing, a compendium of shortened versions of edicts and memorials from the emperor and other officials. Out of the 2,096 volumes of this archive Hung identifies 514 events of popular protest and 450 events of petitions to higher officials (55).  His empirical work involves coding hundreds of contentious events during the period, classifying them, and looking for patterns of change over time.  But how to categorize?  Here is his overview description of his approach:

I classify the documented protest events into different types according to their claims and repertoires. A protest's claim is a set of articulated demands advanced by the participants. The repertoire of a protest is the set of learned or invented acts that the protesters performed to attract the attention of potential participants and the authorities, as well as to persuade or force the authorities to meet their demands. (58)

One distinction between events that he draws from the existing literature on contention and rebellion is between backward looking and modernizing protests. Essentially the former represent demands to secure existing rights (or re-establish recently extinguished rights). The latter take the form of proactive protests aimed at creating new opportunities and rights within an emerging set of economic or social institutions. Hung rightly rejects the idea that European experience can provide a full theory of contentious politics. So he insists on using the evidence of non-western movements as an alternative basis of analysis and theory. China's experience in the mid-Qing provides an ample basis for arriving at such a scheme.

Hung doubts the utility of the concept of "backward-looking" protest in the mid-Qing period. Instead, he argues that protests throughout the period were proactive and aimed at securing better outcomes in the future for the protesters, in light of changing political and economic conditions. The large distinction that Hung favors as a way of categorizing contention has to do with the purpose and style of the mobilization. "Filial protest", or "state-engaging" protest, involves collective action intended to implore the state to honor its obligations. "State-resisting" protest involves action deliberately designed to challenge the authority and power of the state, often with the threat or reality of violence (58). And Hung believes this scheme is valuable for China, in part, because some surprising patterns emerge through these lenses. In particular, he finds the frequency of state-resisting protest varies significantly along this timeframe, from a high point in 1600-44 of 94% to a low in 1740-59 of 40%, rising again between 1776 and 1839 (figure 6.1).

Hung's account highlights several important things about Chinese protest. First is the point that protests exist within a set of material social arrangements that provide the interests that lead to mobilization. So an important dimension of analysis for uncovering the causes of a wave of protests is to analyze the changing economic and political circumstances that created new pressures and opportunities for ordinary people.  Second is the point that culture and repertoires of resistance give form to the protests that emerge.  Here he gives causal importance to Confucian ideas about the state, but also to heterodox ideas stemming from non-Confucian traditions (for example, White Lotus Buddhism).

A very old feature of Chinese protest involves the delivery of petitions to the central government (emperor) to protest abuses by local officials, tax farmers, or other scourges of peasant life.

In Qing times (1644-1911), a common remedy for powerless subjects abused by local officials was to travel all the way to Beijing to appeal to the emperor as their grand patriarch, hoping he would sympathize with their plight and penalize corrupt local officials. (1)

And, as Hung points out, this tradition continued through 1989 and beyond.

So what about Wukan?  Does Hung's analysis of mid-Qing protest shed any light on the nature of protest there?

Accounts make several things clear.  First, the cause of popular unrest that precipitated the first round of protest in Wukan had to do with an important material issue (land seizures) and the actions of potentially corrupt local officials in collusion with powerful developers.  Second, the protest intensified dramatically in the past 10 days after security officials took violent action against elected leaders of the protesters, leading to the seizure of Xue Jinbo and his death in police custody. Third, it appears through news reports that protests took the form of non-violent appeals for relief against corrupt officials -- similar to the tradition of filial protest.  The tradition of taking the protest to higher officials is also illustrated here, with the stated intention of marching to Lufeng, the local administrative center. Here is an indicative passage from the New York Times:

Almost to a person, the villagers are holding out hope that leaders in Beijing will intervene to settle the dispute and to investigate what they contend is widespread corruption in local affairs, including land sales. Saturday’s rally, laced with chants like “We love the Communist Party,” stressed the villagers’ loyalty to the central government. One prominent banner begged the central government to come to their aid. (link)

But the same article raises the possibility that this protest may move from state-engaging to state-resisting as villagers come to believe that they have no recourse from the central government:

“Our original intent was just to get our land back,” a 29-year-old homemaker who identified herself only as Mrs. Zhu said as she stood under a Chinese flag, mounted on a makeshift pole at a protesters’ checkpoint on the village outskirts. “We never intended that things would get into such a situation.”Asked what could be done, she replied: “We have to fight to the end. That’s the only way out. If we retreat now, all the hardships the government imposed on us will come true.”

Hung provides an interesting tabulation of several important characteristics of protests in mid-Qing China that I've reproduced below. I've supplemented the table in two ways.  First, I've included in this table the data Hung reports on the incidence of state-resisting protests, which vary significantly throughout the period he studies (figure 6.1). Second, I've added an additional column of my own indicating how Wukan seems to measure up on these criteria.  The finding that I've come to is that Wukan began as a "filial protest" through which villagers sought to engage the state to obtain relief from local officials.  The protest has been pushed into a more "state-resisting" posture, however, as a result of the violence and intransigence of local and county officials, and the fact that Beijing has so far ignored the villagers' demands.