Who was Leon Trotsky?

Leon Trotsky was something of a hero for a part of the anti-Stalinist left from the 1930s through at least the 1970s. Sidney Hook and John Dewey offered substantive support to Trotsky and his reputation during and after the end of his life through Dewey's role in the "Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials". Trotsky was a theoretician of communism, a strategist, a man of letters, and the merciless chief of the Red Army immediately following the success of the Boshevik Revolution (represented by the character of Strelnikov in Dr. Zhivago!). Expelled from the USSR by Stalin in 1929, he spent the rest of his life in exile in a series of countries and was assassinated by Stalin's agent in 1940 in Mexico City. The Trotskyist left opposed Stalin's policies long before other segments of the European left did so.

There is a narrative that places a lot of the history of the USSR into the framework of personality and character of its early leaders, including Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin. The legend is that Trotsky was a principled revolutionary but a poor street fighter, and that Stalin was a power-hungry and ruthless opportunist who out-maneuvered his primary opponent after the death of Lenin. And Trotsky was too full of amour-propre to fully engage in the battle with Stalin. But it wasn't all about personality; Trotsky and Stalin differed substantially about the future course of Communism, and Trotsky's was the more radical view (permanent revolution versus socialism in one country). So who was Trotsky, and how would we know?

Trotsky himself addresses these topics in his autobiography, and indicates that he thinks they are unimportant: personality and character have less to do with his life than theory and the inevitable currents of history, in his own telling of his story. Here are a few lines from My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography:

My intellectual and active life, which began when I was about seventeen or eighteen years old, has been one of constant struggle for definite ideas. In my personal life there were no events deserving public attention in themselves. All the more or less unusual episodes in my life are bound up with the revolutionary struggle, and derive their significance from it. This alone justifies the appearance of my autobiography. But from this same source flow many difficulties for the author. The facts of my personal life have proved to be so closely interwoven with the texture of historical events that it has been difficult to separate them. This book, moreover, is not altogether an historical work. Events are treated here not according to their objective significance, but according to the way in which they are connected with the facts of my personal life. It is quite natural, then, that the accounts of specific events and of entire periods lack the proportion that would be demanded of them if this book were an historical work. I had to grope for the dividing line between autobiography and the history of the revolution. Without allowing the story of my life to become lost in an historical treatise, it was necessary at the same time to give the reader a base of the facts of the social development. In doing this, I assumed that the main outlines of the great events were known to him, and that all his memory needed was a brief reminder of historical facts and their sequence.

...

I am obliged to write these lines as an émigré— for the third time— while my closest friends are filling the places of exile and the prisons of that Soviet republic in whose creating they took so decisive a part. Some of them are vacillating, withdrawing, bowing before the enemy. Some are doing it because they are morally exhausted; others because they can find no other way out of the maze of circumstances; and still others because of the pressure of material reprisals. I had already lived through two instances of such mass desertion of the banner: after the collapse of the revolution of 1905, and at the beginning of the World War. Thus I know well enough, from my own experience, the historical ebb and flow. They are governed by their own laws. Mere impatience will not expedite their change. I have grown accustomed to viewing the historical perspective not from the standpoint of my personal fate. To understand the causal sequence of events and to find somewhere in the sequence one’s own place —that is the first duty of a revolutionary. And at the same time, it is the greatest personal satisfaction possible for a man who does not limit his tasks to the present day. (preface)

So it is all about ideas, political commitments, and the march of history (as well sometimes as the personal weaknesses of others). But biographers need more than this.

A key source for the past fifty years has been the magnificent biography of Trotsky in three volumes by Isaac Deutscher, beginning publication in 1954 (The Prophet: Trotsky: 1879-1940 (Vol. 1-3)). Deutscher was a Polish writer and historian who was more or less miraculously posted to England at the time of the Nazi conquest of Poland; so he spent the rest of his life in England, while almost all of his family perished in the Holocaust. Deutscher's work is an admirable piece of historical writing, with appropriate attention to historical detail and available historical sources, including a major archive at Harvard University. The book is favorable to Trotsky as a tragic and outcast leader, but is not sycophantic. It weaves together the biographical narrative with the great struggles in the USSR and Europe that took place during Trotsky's life and to which he was an important contributor. (Here is the Google Books link to the first volume, The Prophet Armed.)

Deutscher puts the arc of Trotsky's revolutionary leadership at the end of the Civil War in 1919 in these theatrical terms:

At the very pinnacle of power Trotsky, like the protagonist of a classical tragedy, stumbled. He acted against his own principle and in disregard of a most solemn moral commitment. Circumstances, the preservation of the revolution, and his own pride drove him into this predicament. Placed as he was he could hardly have avoided it. His steps followed almost inevitably from all that he had done before; and only one step now separated the sublime from the sinister -- even his denial of principle was still dictated by principle. Yet in acting as he did he shattered the ground on which he stood. (486)

This step was the decision to establish a system of dictatorship by the Communist Party. And this step led to some of the worst atrocities of the twentieth century, including Stalin's war on the Kulaks.

When Trotsky now urged the Bolshevik party to 'substitute' itself for the working classes, he did not, in the rush of work and controversy, think of the next phases of the process, although he himself had long since predicted them with uncanny clear-sightedness. 'The party organization would then substitute itself for the party as a whole; then the Central Committee would substitute itself for the organization; and finally a single dictator would substitute himself for the Central Committee.' The dictator was already waiting in the wings. (522)

In these three volumes Deutscher provided a detailed account of Trotsky's actions and theorizing as well as their impact on history. But what were Trotsky's motivations? Not much of the character, personality, or singularity of Trotsky emerges from Deutscher's treatment.

In 2011 Robert Service published a new biography of Trotsky (Trotsky: A Biography), making use of sources that were not available to Deutscher in the 1950s. This book of more than 600 pages presents itself as the most historically authoritative treatment of its subject yet.  But the book has created great controversy about some of its most basic claims. Service has previously published biographies of Lenin and Stalin.  But the Trotsky book has generated huge criticism. A well documented but scathing review of the book was published by Bertrand Patenaude in the American Historical Review (AHR (2011) 116 (3): 900-902), and the review is summarized in Inside Higher Education (link).  Patenaude asserts that Service makes dozens of important errors of fact in the course of the book, and that it sets out to "thoroughly discredit Trotsky as a historical figure;" and Patenaude concludes that the book falls woefully short of the standards of historical rigor that it should have met. "[The publisher] has placed its imprimatur upon a book that fails to meet the basic standards of historical scholarship." (902)  Patenaude also reviews David North's In Defense of Leon Trotsky. North is himself an American Trotskyist and Patenaude was prepared to find a hatchet job in North's treatment of Service. Instead he finds a powerful and well founded critique of the many errors, distortions, and bias in Service's treatment of Trotsky. So the partisan gives a more faithful account of the facts than the professional historian!

Patenaude's own treatment of Trotsky's life in Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary is restricted to the Mexico years, and is very detailed and interesting.  His narrative moves back and forth between Mexico and earlier periods as needed, but is focused on the final years of Trotsky's life. Trotsky's personality and behavior are made very clear in the narrative: socially difficult, harsh to those closest to him, dogmatic, committed, egoistic, and courageous. (Patenaude provides details of Trotsky's affair with Frida Kahlo that were unknown to Deutscher at the time of writing The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky 1929-1940. Deutscher doubts the existence of the affair, whereas Patenaude provides the evidence.)

So thousands of pages have been written, but we still don't really have a clear answer to the question, "Who was Leon Trotsky?". The Service biography appears to be thoroughly discredited for the most basic faults a historian can possess: lack of attention to the historical facts, and bringing an axe to grind to the subject matter. The Deutscher biography is less about the person than the actions he took. And the controversies about Trotsky persist.

Here is a fascinating discussion with Christopher Hitchens and Robert Service about Trotsky's life and impact.



(There are many other reviews of Service's book, and some are more favorable and some even more negative. Here is a detailed discussion by Paul Le Blanc in the International Journal of Socialist Renewal (link), and here is a review by philosopher John Gray in Literary Review (link). Baruch Knei-Paz's The Social and Political Thought of Leon Trotsky is a generally respected treatment of Trotsky's thought as an organized system.)

Mobilizing the masses

One of the books on the Chinese Revolution that I particularly respect is Odoric Wou's 1994 Mobilizing the Masses: Building Revolution in Henan.  As noted in an earlier post, histories of the revolution have gone through several waves, and a general trend has been towards more focused regional studies.  Wou's book belongs in what I categorize as the third wave (along with Chen Yung-Fa's Making Revolution: The Communist Movement in Eastern and Central China, 1937-1945). Here is how Wou characterizes this evolution:

Communist revolutionaries always operated under local conditions, were involved in certain local power politics, and addressed certain needs of the local peasantry. It is imperative to pay particular attention to localities, if possible at the county, the subcounty, and even the village level. Mass politics are invariably related to community issues and community politics. (14)

Here I want to focus on Wou's title itself: Mobilizing the Masses.   Both parts of the title are important: the idea that the Chinese revolution was a mass-based revolution, and the idea that the Chinese Communist Party succeeded because it pursued successful strategies of mobilization.  The Russian Revolution, by contrast, was not mass-based; Lenin's revolutionary group was able to seize power without mass support, and the Bolsheviks did not develop effective strategies of mass mobilization.  So the Chinese Revolution is different. We have historical examples of revolutions that did not involve the masses in contemporary society; and perhaps we could imagine a mass-based revolution that succeed without the deliberate strategies of mobilization that emanated from a revolutionary party.  (Lucien Bianco doubts the latter possibility, however; he argues that spontaneous uprisings by peasants or workers are doomed to failure (Peasants Without the Party: Grass-Root Movements in Twentieth-Century China).)

So why was the committed support of the masses crucial to the success of the Chinese Revolution? Why is mass support difficult to achieve for an emerging revolutionary movement? And what were some of the strategies of mobilization that the CCP used in the 1930s and 1940s to bring about that mass support?

Mass support for a revolutionary movement is in one sense unlikely. The risks of being a supporter are great, and the a priori likelihood of success is small. The forces of order are generally powerful and pervasive, whether warlords or a central government. So peasants and workers are asked to assume great risks for little prospect of success.  As James Scott has emphasized in many writings, there are always options of everyday coping and everyday resistance that allow ordinary people to make do in the context of a repressive state and an exploitative society (Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance). (I particularly enjoy the scene that Scott describes of Malaysian villagers gathering and laughing as the hired mechanical harvester sinks inexorably into the flooded rice paddy.) These facts imply that mass support for a revolutionary movement will not arise spontaneously; rather, it is necessary for a revolutionary organization and a set of leaders to pursue an effective bundle of strategies aimed at mobilizing the masses.  This means possessing a compelling set of strategies, and it means developing a large and pervasive organization that will be capable of placing "brokers" or cadres in local settings where they can influence ordinary villagers to support the strategy.

So why was the CCP forced to turn to the peasant masses in the first place?  One part of the answer is Mao's own political theories of how revolution could succeed in China based on the support of the population; and the population was overwhelmingly rural and poor in the 1920s and 1930s.  (It is interesting that Mao's theories of peasant revolutionary potential continue to propel a large Maoist movement in India; post.) But a more material reason has to do with a stunning defeat suffered by the CCP at the hands of the Guomindang Republican forces in 1927 -- the massacre of the urban-based Communist organization in Shanghai.  From that point forward the strategy of bringing communist revolution to China on the strength of an urban revolutionary movement was untenable, and resort to China's peasantry was the only option available.

So how did the CCP attempt to mobilize the rural masses? What political ideologies did the CCP settle on as being the most promising for arousing the emotions and political commitments of ordinary peasants throughout rural China? How did the CCP use local organizations and cadres to effectively communicate those messages and solicit political engagement by peasants? More specifically, what were those strategies in Henan, the focus of Wou's book?

Two strands of mobilization ideologies have been emphasized by historians of the revolution. The first is class mobilization -- a deliberate attempt to emphasize the exploitativeness of rural land relations, and the conflicts that exist between landlords, rich peasants, and poor peasants. Here the idea is that poor peasants can be energized by a clear recognition of the ways in which their livelihoods are harmed by the social privilege of rich peasants and landlords, and they can be motivated to take on the risky business of revolution. The second is a nationalist appeal in the context of the Japanese occupation of China, and the claim that the Red Army was more effective than the Guomindang military in fighting the Japanese. Here the idea is that peasants of all strata can be motivated to defend their families, their villages, and their region against the imperialistic (and harsh) Japanese invaders.  Wou documents both strategies in Henan.

First the class-based strategy:

After three executive committee meetings, the Eyuwan party decided to reformulate and radicalize the land reform program. The new policy was to "use the agricultural laborers as the base. Form a solid alliance with the poor peasants. Stabilize the middle peasants. Shake up and eliminate the rich pesants." Politically, the new program called for the discharge of rich peasnts from all Communist mass organizations, including the Red Guards, Youth Vanguard, and Children's Corps. (125)

And here is the nationalist strategy:

It was during the Sino-Japanese War that the Communists began to revitalize their revolutionary movement. By skillfully playing the game of coalition politics, the party took steps to rebuild its bases and consolidate its power in eastern Henan. Japanese imperialistic intrusion into China offered the Communists a new political opportunity. The war eroded Guomindang state power, changed the political balance, and created a political vacuum in the region. In these favorable conditions, the Communists identified themselves with the nationalistic cause and issued a patriotic appeal to the people. (207)

Finally, Wou emphasizes throughout the necessity for political skill and compromise on the part of party leaders. It was necessary to form coalitions with other non-revolutionary organizations in order to carry forward the objectives of the party, and the CCP leadership in Henan was fully prepared to enter into such coalitions.

These details are of interest chiefly because they illuminate the nuts and bolts of radical social change in a large country.  It is plainly not enough to observe that a large group of people have interests that are in conflict with the policies and social relations of their country or region.  In addition, several things are needed: a sustained and locally implemented strategy of mobilization and a revolutionary organization that acts intelligently and opportunistically as the balance of forces shifts at various times.

These observations have implications for China's current realities as well.  It is evident that there are millions of Chinese people who have serious grievances -- work conditions, environmental pollution, corrupt officials, etc. But the Chinese government has been very adept at preventing the emergence of organizations that might attempt to mobilize that discontent into effective efforts to challenge the state's policies.  Without organizations, the current level of grievance in China is unlikely to pose a serious challenge to the policies of the state.

France 1848

The revolutions of 1848 have gotten renewed attention in light of this year's "Arab Spring" uprisings. (The amazing photo above depicts the barricades in Paris, 1848.) The parallels are obvious -- uprisings in a number of countries, similar grievances across countries, and a degree of cross-communication among the movements and leaders. And, of course, widespread optimism among progressives and activists about the prospects for fundamental social and political reform. The outcomes of 1848 were discouraging to progressives -- repression and authoritarian governments were usually successful in turning back the progressive tide. So one hopes that the prospects for democracy and equality are better in the MENA uprisings.

Particularly interesting, of course, is the example of France. So it is intriguing to look back at the causes and processes of demonstrations and resistance in May and June, 1848, in Paris and in other parts of the country. Roger Price's Documents on the French Revolution of 1848 (Documents in History Series) is worth reading for a number of reasons. First, it provides an astute analysis of the economic, social, and political situation of France in the first half of the nineteenth century, and the events that unfolded into the revolution of 1848. But second, it is a genuinely interesting book from an historiographical point of view. The analytical text takes up roughly 50 pages of an introductory essay. The remainder of the book consists of short extracts from primary documents of the period. The extracts are selected and ordered according to the author's conception of the factors and turning points that were historically central to the moment; so they constitute a narrative of an unusual kind. Price presents his analysis and framing of the events entirely through the extracts he provides; the participants tell the story.

Price's framing essay begins with the point that France was a backward country in the first part of the nineteenth century, compared to Britain. The population was overwhelmingly rural, the economy was primarily agricultural, and the infrastructure of roads and railroads was underdeveloped. Industry was in the most embryonic state of development, and markets were primarily local because of the weakness of the transport system.

The great weakness of the system, however, lay in its transport infrastructure. Communications by water and, particularly, road were slow and costly. Only the first unconnected lines of the future railway network had been constructed before the 1850s. (12)

And, unlike Britain, there were few signs of an emerging proletariat in large factories and industrial cities, along the lines of the Manchester documented decades earlier by Engels:

The typical French worker would be the artisan working in a small workshop rather than the factory worker. This was true in Paris, for example, where the majority found work in industries catering for the material needs of the population -- food, clothing, furniture and housing -- or in the typically Parisian luxury industries, all traditionally operating on a small scale. (18)

These factors had social consequences. Hunger in the countryside was a recurring possibility. Landlords and gentry had great power over the rural population. Social inequalities in both town and countryside were visible and extreme. And neither peasant nor urban worker had a strong social basis for resistance.

The contrast in the living standards of rich and poor that daily greeted the eyes of the urban populations, especially in the larger towns, was often extreme. For as long as such a contrast was felt to be inevitable, it could be accepted only with resignation, or with a resentment that might burst out in violence. But new ideas and the diffusion of a more critical outlook were bound to erode this attitude. (20)

At the same time as economic inequalities were increasing the power of a small sector of elites was increasing as well.

The grand notables -- landowners, financiers, major industrialists, but also politicians and administrators -- collaborated in extending their economic power and safeguarding their social and political authority. This was a group given unity not simply by shared material interests, but by an entire style of life. (23)

Of course it is clear that this is one particular framing of the historical episode, and another historian would have highlighted other issues and other turning points. So the book doesn't serve as a broad repository of documents, potentially relevant to many different interpretations; instead, the documents have been specifically selected to serve as waypoints on a particular path through Price's interpretation. That said, the documents are fascinating to read, from observations by elite participants, to government announcements, to confessions by activist leaders and followers.

Was this a social revolution? Some of the goals of the activists involved radical social transformation; but these goals were entirely unsuccessful. The balance between the propertied and the property-less did not change in any meaningful way. Was it more successful as a political revolution? Again, not really. Universal suffrage was established before the June repression; but what followed was autocratic rule and eventually the election of yet another dictator, Napoleon III. So it is hard to see that the revolution of 1848 in France had much effect on the conditions of freedom and well-being of the majority of the poor in France.

It would be very interesting to have a similar compilation of documents and framing social descriptions for Egypt, 2011. I'm sure that researchers and observers in Cairo have been collecting interviews, posters, and other kinds of documents that will shed more light on the social and political grievances offered by ordinary Egyptians as they participated in the demonstrations and collective resistance that led to the fall of Mubarak. And, likewise, it will be valuable to document the timeline of reaction by the state during these crucial several weeks, including repression, accommodation, and eventually capitulation by the ruling circles in favor of -- the army.

England's Glorious Revolution

Earlier posts have remarked upon the interesting fact that large historical events are often significantly reconsidered and re-understood through the passage of time.  China's Cultural Revolution is one such example (link), as are the revolutions of 1848 (link).

A truly stunning example of this kind of historical recasting of something that we think we've fully understood is Steve Pincus's 1688: The First Modern Revolution. Pincus sets up his argument beautifully: there has been a dominant and eventually unquestioned narrative about the English Revolution of 1688-89, and in detail and in broad outline -- this narrative is incorrect. Here is the thrust of the standard story:

According to this dominant story,

The revolution was unrevolutionary. Unlike other subsequent revolutions, England's revolution was bloodless, consensual, aristocratic, and above all sensible. The English had no desire to transform their polity, their society, or their culture. Instead they worried that James II had intended to do just that. Second, the revolution was Protestant. James II had tried to reinstitute Catholicism in England. The revolution insured that England would remain a Protestant polity. Third, the revolution demonstrated the fundamentally exceptional nature of English national character.... Fourth, there could have been no social grievances undergirding the Revolution of 1688-89 because English society had changed little in the modern world. (kindle loc 134)

According to Pincus, this account fundamentally misrepresents the nature of the transformation that 1688 represented in English history, and it defines the scope of the historical question incorrectly in profoundly misleading ways. Pincus wants to tell a more accurate and revealing story; and he also wants to provide a political historiography that attempts to explain how these misrepresentations have come to define the dominant view of this revolution -- the political ins and outs of Establishment Whigs, Conservatives, and Opposition Whigs in the ensuing century and a half of debate and historical interpretation.

His own approach to the historical problem is to start over: to reassess the materials and archives that exist today that allow the historian to gain fragmentary glimpses into the complex social reality that 1688 represented.  As he points out, there are substantial materials available today that were not available in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries when the master narrative was pieced together.  But he also observes that even materials available to Macaulay and Trevelyan can be read to a very different conclusion from those drawn by the eighteenth and nineteenth century historians.

Pincus's interpretation disagrees with the standard narrative in every major respect. First, he believes that the English Revolution was "the first modern revolution" -- the result of conflicts created by the process of state modernization that James II had undertaken. Second, he believes that the English Revolution was fundamentally located within a European context -- not a purely sui generis English affair.

The Revolution of 1688-89 is important not because it reaffirmed the exceptional English national character but because it was a landmark moment in the emergence of the modern state. (kindle loc 184)

Just as in the French and Russian Revolutions, there was extensive and violent crowd activity. And just as in other modern revolutions, the revolutionary events resulted not in consensus and compromise but in deep ideological cleavages. (kindle loc 3450)

Third, fourth, and fifth, Pincus refutes the idea that the revolution was "bloodless, aristocratic, and consensual". He documents that mass mobilization and violence were just as striking in England, Scotland, and Ireland as in the first year of the French Revolution (chapter 9), that segments from all levels of society were actively involved in these conflicts (chapter 8), and that the Revolution and its aftermath involved deep and abiding disagreements about the directions that the English state and society should take (chapter 10).  So -- not bloodless, not aristocratic, and not consensual.

Instead Pincus tells a new story:

In this book, then, I retell the story of the Glorious Revolution, but I retell it in significantly new ways.  Instead of a story of triumphant English exceptionalism emphasizing the far-seeing actions of a few men, I tell a story about a wide range of actors reacting not only to developments in English high politics and in the English church but to changes in society, in the economy, and on the broader European scene. (kindle loc 210)

The Revolution of 1688-89, then, like all modern revolutions, was a struggle ultimately waged between two competing groups of modernizers. The revolution did not pit defenders of traditional society against advocates of modernity. Both Whigs and Jacobites were modernizers. It was the Tories who wished to defend a version of the old order. The Tories were placed in the unpalatable position of having to choose between two very imperfect political outcomes. (kindle loc 7542)

So how is it that a great historical event could be so fundamentally mis-construed and mis-remembered? Pincus refers to a number of factors that have distorted the historical understanding of the English Revolution over intervening centuries. One is an English belief in "English exceptionalism." There was a powerful desire on the part of English intellectuals -- for example, Burke and Hume -- to see England as being very different from France -- more civil, more consensual, and more constitutional.  Second is the intellectual framework of "revolution as conflict between a decaying traditional state and a challenging modernist opponent" (see an earlier post on this conception of revolution).  This led historians to narrow the focus of the events they highlighted, and to give primacy in their accounts to the debates and positions of the great figures inside and outside of government.

Third and most important is a feature of English political ideology, as expressed in the political conflicts between Tory and Whig parties and between establishment and opposition Whigs.

Walpole and his political allies now claimed that the revolution had instantiated parliamentary rather than popular sovereignty and that it had established a constitution rather than a blueprint for further reform. (kindle loc 310)  

Opposition Whigs insisted that the revolution's principles should continue to drive a reformist agenda. In short, by the 1720s the establishment Whigs were emphasizing the immediate tyrannical causes of the events of 1688-89, whereas the Opposition Whigs were highlighting long-term structural causes and the revolutionary consequences of 1688-89. (kindle loc 394)

The works of Burke, Macaulay, and Trevelyan reasserted the establishment Whig interpretation of the revolution. ... Their interpretations became hegemonic not because they had uncovered new, irrefutable historical evidence but because in the face of contemporary political events their interpretative opponents had abandoned the field. .... Burke, Macaulay, and Trevelyan did not so much refute the arguments of the Opposition Whigs as assume that in the contemporary political climate their claims were irrelevant. (kindle loc 470)

These passages perhaps represent the key to Pincus's own perspective on the English Revolution -- we might argue that the book contributes to an unfettered "Opposition Whig" account of the revolution. And Pincus seems to support this interpretation: "It is now time to find answers to the questions that the Opposition Whigs raised in the eighteenth century" (kindle loc 503).

So we have the makings of a partial answer to the historiographic question -- why did several generations of historians so badly misunderstand the nature of the English Revolution? Ideology played a role; mental frameworks about "being English" played a role; and concrete political conflicts about what the state should do played a role. And, of course, these sorts of factors are still with us.

New thinking about the Red Guards

Andrew Walder has spent almost all of his academic life, on and off, studying the Chinese Cultural Revolution.  In Fractured Rebellion: The Beijing Red Guard Movement (2009) he offers some genuinely new insights into this crucial and chaotic period of China's revolutionary history.  Some historians have focused on the political motivations of Mao and other top leaders in the party; others have examined the economic and social cleavages that existed in China only a decade and a half into its Communist Revolution.  Walder is interested in a much more grass-roots question: what were the motivations, calculations, and states of mind of the "foot soldiers" of the CR, the Red Guards in the earliest years of the upheavals?  And why did the political activism of the CR devolve almost inevitably into intense factionalism between groups whose ideologies seemed virtually indistinguishable -- loyalty to Mao, defense of the revolution, attacks on treacherous leaders?  Walder is a political sociologist, and he wants to understand the dynamics of mobilization and affiliation that led to the group violence and inter-group factionalism in the early years of this period.

Here is an example of the kind of factionalism that most interests Walder:

Chapter 8 examines the puzzling disintegration of the rebel movement in January 1967, soon after the decisive victory over its opponents.  Why did the victorious rebel coalition rapidly split into two opposing camps?  In their earlier attacks on ministries and commissions, rebels stayed within separate bureaucratic hierarchies.  Work teams were dispatched down these hierarchies to the schools under them, and the pursuit of work teams led rebels directly back up this hierarchy to the ministry or commission that sent them.  When these rebels moved to seize power in national and municipal agencies, however, they crossed into different bureaucratic hierarchies.  Rebel groups from different schools who went to the same organs of power turned quickly from allies into competitors.  These competitive rivalries were exacerbated by deep splits that had earlier developed among rebel forces in the two largest and most important campuses, Beijing and Quinghua universities.  The splits at Beida and Qinghua served as a wedge to divide rebel forces citywide, as factions of different schools aligned themselves with one or another faction at these two large campuses.  The resulting split between "Heaven" and "Earth" factions crippled the student movement and frustrated the CCRG until the very end. (26-27)

Walder suggests that earlier scholars have sought to understand the motivations and factions of China's young people in terms of the class position of the participants and the pervasive political indoctrination of youth that had been ubiquitous in the 1950s and 1960s.  Factions existed, according to this line of thought, either because different groups had different interests, or they had different political theories and ideologies ("conservative" and "radical").  Walder finds these explanations unsatisfactory, since they apply equally to both sides in all the factions -- and so he wants to identify some other feature of the political landscape that would explain the behavior and the factionalization.  And, unlike the scholars of the 1970s and 1980s who had to largely speculate about these issues, Walder takes advantage of primary sources that allow the researcher to get a great deal of information about the participants in their own words, and in their relationships to other activists.

Walder also questions the relevance of the core assumptions of social mobilization theory for the Cultural Revolution -- the idea that social movements need to be understood in terms of grievances, resources, and the state's ability to resist group demands.  Fundamentally his objection is that this theory doesn't help to explain the early months of the Cultural Revolution because all the postulated conditions were present in 1966, and mobilization did in fact occur (14).  But it occurred in a very distinctive way that resource mobilization theory seems not to prove a basis for explaining -- the constant fissioning of a group of activists into two or more factions, bitterly opposed to each other.  It appears, then, that resource mobilization theory lacks the tools necessary to explain this specific pattern of mobilization -- radicalization followed by bitter factionalism.

Walder's explanation is a novel one.  He argues that factionalization was a consequence, not of class differences or ideological disagreements between individuals, but simply of the early choices that various individuals made early in the period.  A central feature of this period was the fact of denunciation -- denouncing past or current leaders for disloyalty to the revolution or other ideological errors.  And these denunciations within the universities were highly consequential: "by mid-July 55 percent of all university party first secretaries and 40 percent of all general branch secretaries had been labeled anti-party reactionaries and placed in category 4" (57).  The rapid proliferation of denunciations meant that persons close to the denounced leader needed to decide -- should they join the denunciation or should they refrain?  The work teams that were sent into Beijing's elite universities in June 1966 (Peking University, to begin with) were forced to make choices in light of radical students' denunciation of top university officials; lower officials had to make similar choices; and activist student leaders had to decide whether to support or oppose the activities of the work teams.  And, Walder argues, this choice was fateful and enduring.  It meant that the individual would be shunted into this group or that group, with further decisions cementing the affinity with the group.

Another way of stating the argument is that factional identities and the common interests that define them are the product of political interactions rooted in specific contexts whose properties must be researched, not simply assumed.  Individual decisions -- to join factions, to oppose or support a work team -- are not the product of prior socialization or social ties but are actdively shaped by political encounters.  The focus is on the interactions that generate choices and outcomes, not the prior statuses of individuals or their preexisting social and political ties. These processes determine when prior social statuses or network ties are activated in a conflict, and when they are not. (13)

In other words, Walder argues that the fact of pervasive factionalization in the Cultural Revolution does not reflect fundamental underlying disagreements or contradictions between the factions; it does not reflect prior sociological distinctions among the participants; but rather reflects the emergence of separate networks of political affiliation from which there was no exit.

Chapter 3 describes how the work teams split university power structures into warring factions, with a focus on the issues that bred conflict between work teams and militant students.  Only in rare and fleeting circumstances were the issues of contention about attacks on the incumbent power structure -- a question that might distinguish "conservative" from "radical" political orientations.  Instead, they were usually about the work team's authority over student actions and the physical control of officials held for interrogation, and about heavy-handed work-team punishment of students who proved hard to control. (24)

This is a fascinating micro-sociology of a crucial span of a few months of violent upheaval in a single city.  It helps to explain a particularly pervasive feature of a broad and chaotic period of political unrest in China -- the constant factionalism that occurred at virtually every level of conflict.  It introduces an innovative model of political behavior (path-dependent choices by individuals leading to a durable configuration of political affiliations).  And it provides a new avenue through which the methods of network analysis can be fruitfully used to explain complex social processes.  It is a valuable contribution to the new wave of scholarship that is currently underway about the Cultural Revolution.  (Other contributions to this new scholarship are included in Esherick, Pickowitz, and Walder, eds., China's Cultural Revolution As History.)

A side note, not crucial to Walder's argument but interesting nonetheless, is the apparently simple question of when the Cultural Revolution took place.  It is conventional by many historians to date the CR to the years 1966-1976.  In 1966 the Red Guard movement erupted with wall posters and virulent activism in Beijing, among high school and university students.  And in 1976 Mao died, the Gang of Four were arrested, and the disruptions of the decade were decisively put aside.  But Walder dates the CR to a much shorter period, 1966-68, beginning with the same Red Guard explosion that occurred in 1966 but ending in 1968 when Mao unleased the military to put down the radical activists: "Not until August 1968 were the flames of China's Cultural revolution extinguished by the imposition of a harsh regime of martial law" (1).

Steve Pincus on revolution

Steve Pincus offers a sweeping and compelling reinterpretation of the English Revolution in 1688: The First Modern Revolution. Along the way he provides a review of existing theories of revolution -- Skocpol, Huntington, Barrington Moore, and Goldstone, in particular (chapter 2). Pincus's definition of revolution goes along these lines:

Revolutions thus constitute a structural and ideological break from the previous regime. They entail changes to both the political and socioeconomic structures of a polity. They involve an often violent popular movement to overturn the previous regime. Revolutions change the political leadership and the policy orientations of the state. And revolutionary regimes bring with them a new conception of time, a notion that they are beginning a new epoch in the history of the state and its society. (kindle loc 549)

Pincus criticizes each of the prevailing theories of revolution. Fundamentally Pincus's criticism is that these theories share a common error of conceptualization: they work on the assumption that revolutions are the outcome of a conflict between a rigid, conservative, and exhausted state, on the one hand, and a movement of modernizers, on the other. Tocqueville embodies this assumption in his own history of the French Revolution -- the defenders of the Ancien regime are defeated by economic and social reformers (Ancien Regime and the French Revolution). But Pincus argues that the historical reality was quite different, in France, Russia, China, the Ottoman Empire, and England.

In all cases the old regime had ceased to exist before the revolution. Revolutions, then, do not pit modernizing elements against defenders of the traditional order. Instead revolutions occur only after the regime in power has set itself on a modernizing course. State modernization itself cannot occur without prior socioeconomic modernization. But that socioeconomic modernization is a necessary though not a sufficient cause of state modernization. It is for that reason that revolutions are the often-violent working out of competing state modernization programs. (kindle loc 613)

So it is fissures and catalysts created by the state's own processes of modernization that create the impetus towards revolution, according to Pincus. But what is modernization? Here is Pincus's brief account:

By state modernization I mean a self-conscious effort by the regime to transform itself in fundamental ways. State modernization will usually include an effort to centralize and bureaucratize political authority, an initiative to transform the military using the most up-to-date techniques, a program to accelerate economic growth and shape the contours of society using the tools of the state, and the deployment of techniques allowing the state to gather information about and potentially supporess social and political activities taking place in a wide range of social levels and geographical locales within the polity. (kindle loc 613)

But not all modernizing states result in revolution; so what factors make revolution more likely? Pincus mentions Sweden, Denmark, and Meiji Japan as historical examples of societies with modernizing states and no revolution. Pincus thinks the answer lies in the degree to which the modernizing state is able to keep credible control of the apparatus of social order.

Revolutions are more likely in situations in which the modernizing regime is not clearly perceived to have a monopoly of the forces of violence.... When the modernizing state quickly demonstrates its control of resources and disarms the opposition, as in seventeenth-century Denmark and Sweden or late-nineteenth-century Japan, revolutions do not occur. (kindle loc 699)

So the causal narrative the Pincus offers goes along something like these lines:

• The state initiates a process of reform and modernization.
• There are multiple visions of what "modernization" ought to look like for the polity, both within the state and outside the state.
• These multiple visions have the capacity to create advocates and processes of collective mobilization outside the state within civil society.
• One or more parties in civil society gain the intention and the resources to challenge the state.
• The state marshalls its forces to repress opposition.
• If it lacks sufficient capacity to intimidate or repress opposition, revolution occurs.

What this narrative discounts is quite a bit of what other theories of revolution place in the foreground -- under-class revolt, state breakdown, demographic change, ideological conflict, the disruptive social effects of war, and fiscal crisis, to name several. Pincus is too good a historian to truly overlook these factors, and they all come into his narrative of the English Revolution. But when it comes to offering a "theory" of revolution, Pincus is led down the same rhetorical path as the authors he criticizes: he wants to identify a single factor that "explains" the occurrence of revolution. Within the viewpoint of that single factor, he is willing to interweave the "secondary" factors mentioned here; but there is an intellectual desire to identify a single, most-important factor. And this seems misguided.

Better is the approach taken by McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly in Dynamics of Contention. Fundamentally, they reject the impulse towards any kind of single-factor theory of revolution or any other kind of contentious politics. They argue that these large social outcomes are the result of the concatenation of a diverse range of social mechanisms and processes, none of which is paramount.

To call the events of 1789 "contentious politics" may seem to demean a great revolution. This book aims to demonstrate that the label "contentious politics" not only makes sense but also helps explain what happened in Paris and the rest of France during that turbulent summer. ... Further [the book] shows how different forms of contention -- social movements, revolutions, strike waves, nationalism, democratization, and more -- result from similar mechanisms and processes. It wagers that we can learn more about all of them by comparing their dynamics than by looking at each on its own. Finally, it explores several combinations of mechanisms and processes with the aim of discovering recurring causal sequences of contentious politics. (4)

Revolution is an instance of what McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly call "transgressive contention" (7), but there are important examples of transgressive contention that are not revolutionary -- for example, the American civil rights struggle, cycles of protest in Italian cities, the Mau Mau rebellion, and other examples.

So Dynamics of Contention offer a serious methodological alternative to all of the theories of revolution mentioned here: rather than looking for a small number of structural characteristics that "cause" or "inhibit" revolution, we are better served by moving down to the meso- and micro-levels of mobilization, claim-making, repression, state building, tax collecting, and ideological competition that constitute the real causal stuff of revolution and contention.

It is worth observing, further, that the Dynamics of Contention approach -- identifying discrete mechanisms and processes of contentious politics -- offers vastly better resources for investigating and explaining the wave of revolts, uprisings, and popular movements that are taking place today across the Middle East than any single theory of revolution would provide.  The processes of grievance-making, group mobilization, communication, escalation, brokerage, and state tactics of repression that MTT describe are of obvious relevance in trying to understand the last few months of unrest in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Libya, and other countries. In particular, none of the macro-theories -- class conflict, state breakdown, or crises of the modernizing state -- seem to shed much light on these events.  What is occurring seems to be much more akin to the path-dependent, multi-causal kind of process that McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly describe.

(McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly have been discussed several times here, including link, link.)

Is there a revolution underway in Egypt?

source: Guardian, February 8, 2011

Is what is going on in Egypt today a "revolution"? What about Tunisia? And how about the Georgian "Rose" Revolution (2003) or the Philippine Yellow Revolution of 1986? Do these social and political conflicts and outcomes add up to a "revolution" in those societies? Are they analogous in any way to other revolutions in the post-World War II period -- e.g. Cuba, Nicaragua, Zimbabwe?

In the case of Tunisia, the world witnessed several things: large, sustained street demonstrations by tens of thousands of people demanding the resignation of Tunisia's president; tactics of repression and intimidation by the state intended to quiet the protests; an unexpected ability of the population to sustain its demonstrations; and the eventual flight of the president from the country. We also witnessed the establishment of an interim government that was nominally committed to free elections within a reasonable timeframe -- though we don't yet know how that process will unfold. So we saw a popular movement aiming to topple a dictator and demanding institutional changes in government; we saw the downfall of the dictator; and we saw an apparent commitment to establish the institutional reforms that had been demanded. Does all of this add up to a "revolution"?

This is as much a conceptual question as it is an empirical one. What do we mean by "revolution"? Is there a reasonably clear and uncontroversial definition that would allow us to classify various uprisings and changes as governments as "revolution" or not? Let's look at the way that a number of recent theorists have dealt with the concept of revolution. Here are three, with rather different approaches: Samuel Huntington, Theda Skocpol, and Jack Goldstone. Each of them seems to capture something important about the way we think about the idea of revolution.

Samuel Huntington offers a very clear definition of revolution in "Revolution and Political Order", collected in Jack Goldstone's Revolutions: Theoretical, Comparative, and Historical Studies:

A revolution is a rapid, fundamental, and violent domestic change in the dominant values and myths of a society, in its political institutions, social structure, leadership, and government activity and policies. Revolutions are thus to be distinguished from insurrections, rebellions, revolts, coups, and wars of independence. (39)

A full-scale revolution thus involves the rapid and violent destruction of existing political institutions, the mobilization of new groups into politics, and the creation of new political institutions. The sequence and the relations among these three aspects may vary from one revolution to another. (40)

In Huntington's view, revolution usually unfolds from collapse of the state to the emergence of a new political group or elite capable of seizing and institutionalizing power.

If no group is ready and able to establish effective rule following the collapse of the old regime, many cliques and social forces struggle for power. The struggle gives rise to the competitive mobilization of new groups into politics and makes the revolution revolutionary. Each group of political leaders attempts to establish its authority and in the process either develops a broader base of popular support than its competitors or falls victims to them. (41)

The two prerequisites for revolution are, first, political institutions incapable of providing channels for the participation of new social forces in politics and of new elites in government, and secondly, the desire of social forces, currently excluded from politics, to participate therein, this desire normally arising frlom the group's feeling that it needs certain symbolic or material gains which it can achieve only by pressing its demands in the political sphere. (45)

Huntington's approach to revolution, then, emphasizes the grievances and demands of the population and the rigidity or flexibility of political institutions, and it highlights the sweeping character of the changes, political, social, and ideological, that resulted.

Next, consider Theda Skocpol conception of a "social revolution" in States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China:

Social revolutions are rapid, basic transformations of a society's state and class structures; and they are accompanied and in part carried through by class-based revolts from below. Social revolutions are set apart from other sorts of conflicts and transformative processes above all by the combination of two coincidences: the coincidence of societal structural change with class upheaval; and the coincidence of political with social transformation. In contrast, rebellions, even when successful, may involve the revolt of subordinate classes -- but they do not eventuate in structure change. Political revolutions transform state structures but not social structures, and they are not necessarily accomplished through class conflict. And processes such as industrialization can transform social structures without necessarily bringing about, or resulting from, sudden political upheavals or basic political-structural changes. What is unique to social revolution is that basic changes in social structure and in political structure occur together in a mutually reinforcing fashion. And these changes occur through intense sociopolitical conflicts in which class struggles play a key role. (4-5)

Several things are evident in this paragraph. First, Skocpol is not offering a general definition of revolution here, but rather a sub-category, the "social revolution." A social revolution involves both significant transformation of political structure and major change of social structure. It is both political (having to do with the institutions of the state) and social (having to do with the basic relations of property and class that exist in society). She does presuppose that there is such a thing as a purely political revolution; but she indicates that she is not particularly interested in this category of change. Second, she postulates that social revolutions derive from a duality of types of grievances as well: grievances about the economic structure (property, class, and inequality) and the political structure (the institutions through which a dominant group exercises power and coercion over the rest). So a social revolution derives from demands for social as well as political change, and it results in largescale structural changes in both social and political institutions.

Jack Goldstone is a historical sociologist who has written very extensively on revolution in the past decade or so. His Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World (1991) offers an innovative interpretation of several modern revolutions -- the English Revolution, the French Revolution, and state breakdowns in the Ottoman Empire and Ming-Qing China. So let's look at Goldstone's way of conceiving of revolutions.

It turns out that Goldstone doesn't really place much weight on "revolution." Instead, he gives conceptual priority to the idea of "state breakdown" over the more complex concept of revolution.

I shall refer to the revolutions and rebellions examined in this book as cases of state breakdown. By state breakdown I mean a particular combination of events, but not quite a revolution. (7-8)

He frames his intellectual task as that of explaining why there were waves of periods of state breakdown in modern European and Asian history. Revolution is a consequence of state breakdown rather than an event having its own historical dynamic. So what is state breakdown? Goldstone doesn't give a developed analytical discussion of this concept; but it presumably encompasses fiscal breakdown (inability to collect sufficient taxes to maintain the state's actions); military and police breakdown (inability to marshall sufficient manpower to quell foreign and domestic enemies); and ideological breakdown (inability to maintain the loyalty and adherence of the subject population).

Here is Goldstone's definition of the state:

By "the state" I mean the institutions of centralized national-level rule-making and rule-enforcing power, including the individuals who controlled those institutions when acting in their official capacities. (4)

And "breakdown":

State breakdown generally involved the collapse of the central authority's ability to dominate in a confrontation with other politically powerful actors, rather than the breakdown of all political institutions. (4-5)

So -- what about Tunisia and Egypt? It seems that none of these three conceptual frameworks for revolution would classify Tunisia and Egypt as revolutions. Neither is a "social revolution" by Skocpol's definition. There is no indication of major change in the system of property and class, either demanded or forthcoming -- even if there are economic reforms that make life a little better for poor people. And the anti-government popular movement does not seem to have been largely driven by under-class interests; rather, the demands seem largely to be centered on grievances about the misuse of government power and corruption of the state that are of interest across almost all segments of society.

Second, neither appears to represent the situation of "state breakdown" in Goldstone's sense. Up until the street demonstrations began to grow and to represent a credible and sustainable social movement of opposition, no expert observer would have said that Tunisia or Egypt was suddenly losing its ability to control society, collect taxes, or run the government's operations. So the dramatic political events in Tunisia and Egypt did not result from "state breakdown."

Finally, Tunisia and Egypt do not appear to fit Huntington's definition either. These movements have not been particularly violent -- instead, they depend on "people's power" for their political force. And they don't seem to have resulted in the kinds of sweeping changes of social, political, and ideological structures that Huntington postulates either. We don't know precisely where things will end up in either Tunisia or Egypt; but the case of the Philippines is well known, and only fairly superficial political institutional changes have persisted, with virtually no change in the basic social-property relations that govern ordinary people's lives. What is more congruent to Tunisia and Egypt is Huntington's observation about the rigidity of certain political systems: in neither Tunisia nor Egypt was there an avenue for effective political expression and change for non-elites, over a three-decade period. So these regimes were neither inclusive nor accountable; as a result, they had no way of containing the growing discontent in the population.

Perhaps the most we can say about Tunisia and Egypt is fairly descriptive: these were instances of governmental change forced by a largely spontaneous social movement that erupted into the streets, with very little organization or leadership. Promises of political reform were made in response to the demonstrations, and if these promises are kept, then the movement will have produced some degree of political reform in addition to the successful ouster of the dictator. So popular movements can push the governments of Tunisia and Egypt in the direction of more inclusive democratic political institutions. But this process, and these limited outcomes of political change, seem to fall far short of the idea of "revolution." And, along with the realism that Huntington often expresses about this sort of process, it is entirely possible that these transformations will be hijacked by other groups as events unfold, so that their progressive political goals will be frustrated.

Unfortunately, though, we don't have a convenient umbrella term for this kind of political transition. The closest I can come is something like this: these are people-powered processes of forced political reform, intended to lead to institutions that are more inclusive and more accountable than the dictatorships they replace. They are "people-power" political transformations, not revolutions.

India's Naxalites

India is the world's largest democracy.  It also is home to one of the more persistent and deadly Maoist insurgencies in the world, the Naxalite movement in eastern India (Communist Party of India (Maoist) (CPI/M)).  The Naxalites were a splinter group that separated from India's Communist Party in the 1960s, and their hallmarks have been a commitment to violent revolution and a determined effort at mobilizing India's most disadvantaged rural people.  Here is a review article about the movement from The Economist in 2006 and a review in the New York Times in 2009, and here are several updates from The Economist (link, link, link).  (The Hindu provides frequent coverage of the Naxalite insurgency; for example, here.)

The 2006 Economist article was occasioned by a deadly attack against a police camp by Naxal guerillas in Chhattisgarh State. The attack signalled the fact that this movement continued to possess organization, followers, and deadly intent.  This map (reproduced from the Wikipedia article on the Naxalites) indicates the regions where the Naxalites currently have organizational presence; it is a large swath of rural India.  Estimates of the number of active fighters range from 14,000 to 20,000, with several times these numbers of local supporters and militias.

Naxalite attacks have continued since 2006.  Here is a chronology of attacks since 2006 compiled by NDTV (link).  Particularly widely noted in the world press was an April 2010 attack against Central Reserve Police Force, killing 75 police personnel, also in the forests of Chhattisgarh (link).  And the insurgency appears to be growing; in 2009 just under 1000 people were killed in Naxalite attacks -- almost triple the 2008 figures.

The leadership of CPI(M) has focused its mobilization efforts almost exclusively at the poorest of the poor and the most disadvantaged people within the caste system; and they have had particular success among tribal people living in India's forests.  But extending back to the 1960s the movement also has had some appeal to educated elites in cities and universities -- people on the left who believe that India has made no serious efforts to ameliorate poverty or caste.

What is surprising about this 40-year history is the fact that a violent revolutionary movement has managed to survive and conduct operations within the interstices of a democratic India.  Atul Kohli provided some context for this question in his 1991 Democracy and Discontent: India's Growing Crisis of Governability.  Here is how Kohli summarized his assessment twenty years ago:

India is still, of course, a functioning democracy, but increasingly it is not well governed.  The evidence of eroding political order is everywhere.  Personal rule has replaced party rule at all levels -- national, state, and district.  Below the rulers, the entrenched civil and police service have been politicized.  Various social groups have pressed new and ever more diverse political demands in demonstrations that often have led to violence.  The omnipresent but feeble state, in turn, has vacillated; its responses have varied over a wide range: indifference, sporadic concessions, and repression.  Such vacillation has fueled further opposition.  The ineffectiveness of repression, moreover, has highlighted the breakdown of the civil machinery intended to enforce the law and maintain order. Inorder to protect themselves, citizens in some parts of the country have begun organizing private armies. The growing political violence has periodically brought the armed forces into India's political arena, whereas the armed forces were considered apolitical. (3)

The main national parties in India, Congress and the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), have contested for control of the national government.  But India's states have consistently demonstrated a wider range of parties and politics.  West Bengal has been governed for decades by the Communist Party Marxist (CPM).  Kerala has been governed through left-coalitions including the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI(M)).  Both these parties have renounced revolutionary violence and pursue a poverty-oriented set of economic and political policies.  Other states are governed by right and center-right coalitions, with a rhetoric that is much more focused on Hindu nationalism and pro-market ideology.

Kohli's study of governability focuses on West Bengal, Gujarat, and Bihar, and his goal is to identify some of the political and social processes that have led to a national and regional governability crisis.  Kohli finds substantial inter-state variability in governability across the three states he studies.

The situation of total breakdown of order in Bihar, for example, has resulted from corrosion of the authority vested in the social structure and absence of cohesion in political structures.  Increasing power struggles in the society and a highly factionalized elite have provided a combustible political mixture that ignites periodically, and in Bihar even the forces of repression are ineffective. Political violence in Gujarat has had a more purposive quality than in Bihar.  It results not primarily from a breakdown of social order but from the calculated mobilization strategies employed by competing elites.

In contrast to the situations of these two states, the case of West Bengal demonstrates how the presence of a cohesive party can bring stability even in a highly mobilized political environment: Strong leaders and disciplined ruling parties -- forces that can impart a degree of cohesion to state structures -- can help moderate the impact of corrosion of authority in the social structure.  The emergence of incoherence in both state and social structures, however, is a sure recipe for a breakdown of order. (15)

So how is it possible for a violent rural insurgency to survive and grow in a modern democracy?  There seem to be several primary factors.  One is the familiar fact that insurgents establish their bases of operations in remote, lightly-policed regions.  The Naxalite movement has managed to secure its "base areas" in forests and other poorly developed rural areas.

(The Hindu)

A second factor is the fact that Indian rural society is generally only lightly policed by professional police forces.  India is a "weak state" when it comes to local presence in the countryside.  The local presence of police is very thin on the ground, and easily overrun by trained guerillas.  Third, the Naxalites direct their mobilization efforts to the most disadvantaged and disaffected segments of rural Indian society; so their anti-state message is relatively well received.  And, finally, it would appear that the ideology of class and class antagonism has its own resonance in Indian political culture, far beyond the violent extremism of the Naxalite party.  This movement was a splinter from the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPM), which now governs West Bengal on the basis of its electoral successes (at least up until the present).  But CPM rhetoric sounds many of the same themes of anti-capitalism and anti-globalization that the Naxalites advocate.  So it is possible for elements of the left to become frustrated with the electoral program of CPM and develop new resonance with the radical program of the Naxalites.

The consensus view seems to be that the national and state governments in India have failed in efforts to suppress the Naxalite insurgency to date out of a failure of will, a degree of conflict of political interests in several states, and a failure to arrive at a winning strategy of police and military force combined with significantly more successful delivery of rural development successes.  Villages that lack roads, clean water, education, and health clinics are certainly more likely to find a radical program of change more appealing, and India's states have had little success in improving the quality of life for India's poorest rural people.

Re-reading Chalmers Johnson

Chalmers Johnson, one of the key contributors to Asian studies since the early 1960s, died on November 20, 2010. (Here are several notices -- link, link, link.)  Johnson has been an important contributor to Asian studies since the appearance of his first book in 1962, Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power: The Emergence of Revolutionary China, 1937-1945, based on his doctoral dissertation at Berkeley.  The book created a long debate about the causes of the Chinese revolution -- patriotism or class? -- which shed new light on the nature of Communist mobilization.  

Johnson was a brilliant thinker who was exceptionally attuned to language -- both in his own writing and in the importance of making nuanced use of Chinese and Japanese sources in studying Asian history.  And he was a figure who seemed to relish controversy, from this early debate about the Revolution to his focus on American empire in the past half dozen years (Dismantling the Empire: America's Last Best Hope).  

Here is a posting on the debate about Johnson's theory of peasant nationalism and current thinking about the Chinese Revolution that I provided for ChinaBeat.

Chalmers Johnson, co-founder and president of the Japan Policy Research Institute at the University of San Francisco and long-time professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley and University of California, San Diego, died on November 20, 2010. (Here are several notices -- link, link, link.) In the past ten years or so Johnson has become widely known for his critical books about American empire (Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (2004), The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (2005), Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic(2008), and Dismantling the Empire: America's Last Best Hope (2010)). The bulk of his career, however, was devoted to the study of China and Japan, and this posting examines one of his most notable contributions to these areas.

His earliest contribution to China studies was his 1962 book, Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power: The Emergence of Revolutionary China, 1937-1945. The core of the book was written as a Ph.D. dissertation at Berkeley, making use of archives of secret Japanese wartime materials collected by Robert Scalapino. (Johnson describes the origins of the book in "Peasant Nationalism Revisited: The Biography of a Book"; link.) The book was one of the early efforts to provide a more systematic explanation of the success of the Chinese Communist Party in mobilizing mass support during the Anti-Japanese War. The book became one of the linchpins of later debates about the Chinese Revolution. As a political scientist, Johnson was mindful of the inherent unlikelihood of a successful revolution anywhere, and this seemed particularly true in China in the 1920s and 1930s. Large-scale mobilization is inherently difficult to sustain, and local discontents rarely escalate to national scale. (Lucien Bianco made this point about China, writing in Peasants Without the Party: Grass-Roots Movements in Twentieth-Century China that "The essential difference between chronic peasant agitation and revolutionary action is that the latter is deliberately offensive in nature, whereas the former resembles the defensive reaction of a beleaguered organism. If peasant agitation was chronic ... , it was because the occasions for such conduct were endemic in rural China" (4).)

Johnson's book is based almost entirely on secret Japanese archives, and Johnson takes special care to attempt to validate these sources as legitimate indications of the nature of events in China during these war years. He believed that the fact that these documents were "secret" gave them an evidentiary status they would lack if they had been produced for the sake of propaganda or political influence by the army or other officials; but rather than representing an effort to spin events in one direction or another, they were intended as "realistic appraisal of military and political developments in China by Japanese leaders" (x). So Johnson is emphatic in arguing that these secret wartime archives provide a valid window of knowledge into both Japanese and Chinese strategies and actions.

So what structural or institutional factor was present in China that permitted mass mobilization by the Communist Party during this period? According to Johnson, it was nationalist identity and a patriotic desire to resist the Japanese invaders on the part of millions of rural Chinese people. The Communist Party was able to offer itself as the most effective force available to achieve the patriotic goals of defeating the Japanese and restoring China's peace and security. The central thesis of the book, then, and the element that generated the greatest controversy, is Johnson's view that the Communists succeeded in the crucial period because they mobilized a mass following around patriotic resistance to the Japanese invaders.

On the basis of a study of wartime resistance in China, the view advanced here is that the Communist rise to power in China should be understood as a species of nationalist movement. (ix)

It is the thesis of this study that the rise to power of the CCP and YCP [Yugoslav Communist Party] in collaboration with the peasantry of the two countries can best be understood as a species of nationalism. (19-20)

Johnson's definition of nationalism is what he labels "functionalist". What he means by this, however, is not a Mertonian "structural-functional" analysis; rather, it is closer to a behavioral-causal analysis. "This study employs a functional definition of nationalism -- in other words, one which identifies specific physical pressures that by acting upon given political environments give rise to nationalist movements" (ix). He draws largely from Karl Deutsch's Nationalism And Social Communication: An Inquiry Into The Foundations of Nationality (1953) in laying out a definition of nationalism and mass mobilization. Johnson identifies social mobilization of the masses around a national myth as the heart of modern nationalism. This is what nationalism is, according to Johnson; and the causes that brought it about in China were Japanese invasion and subsequent harsh treatment of rural people, and skillful mobilization of the countryside by Communist political officers in enhancing a sense of shared cause.

In essence, the Party is seen as the leader of a war-energized, radical nationalist movement.... The Chinese masses, the peasants, were unified and politicized as a concomitant of the drastic restructuring of Chinese life that accompanied the Japanese conquest of north and east China.... This wartime awakening became the basis for a new order in China following Japan's collapse. (ix-x)

Since patriotic nationalist mobilization is primary, then radical mobilization around peasant interests must be secondary. So Johnson is particularly concerned to refute the idea that it was economic issues and class exploitation that led to peasant support. (Mark Selden's The Yenan Way in Revolutionary China (1971) was a central advocate of this position.) Johnson expressly rejects the idea that the Communist Party's overall strategy depended on a class appeal to poor peasants during these years. One key argument to this conclusion is the markedly different fortunes of the Communist movement in China in the 1920s versus the wartime years. The Communist movement in the 1920s was plainly based on a mobilization strategy around revolution and social change, and, according to Johnson, it failed in achieving mass following. The Japanese invasion and subsequent brutality in attempting to govern the rural areas, however, coincided with a massive increase in the movement's following in the countryside; and, according to Johnson, the mobilization rhetoric of Communist leaders of that period was about patriotic self-defense rather than social upheaval.

Although the Communists were in effective control of various small enclaves in the Chinese countryside from 1927 on, their painful efforts during that period to set up rural "soviets" were incomparably less successful than their activities during the blackest period of the Sino-Japanese War. (1)

During the Anti-Japanese War period the Party abandoned the radical land program altogether and carried out a policy designed to create maximum unity for national defense. All plans for agrarian reform were abrogated during the war while a mild policy of rent reduction and general rationalization of debts was carried out. (19)

Later historians have largely taken a critical view of this central theoretical argument. Some historians -- notably Donald Gillin in a 1964 review in the Journal of Asian Studies (link) -- have argued compellingly that Johnson mis-estimates the importance and persistence of class strategies during the period. (Johnson had harsh words for Gillin in his retrospective article in China Quarterly (link).)

Probably the most consistent line of response to Johnson's peasant nationalism theory in the intervening years is that it is too comprehensive and couched at too high a level. The concept of nationalism paints too broad a brush when applied to tens of millions of Chinese rural people in many different settings. Conditions varied across the many base areas where the CCP held power, and subsequent historians have concluded that patriotism and village self-defense played a highly variable role across China. As Odoric Wou writes, "In a recent article, Tony Saich called our attention to the fact that the Chinese Communist revolution was a series of 'local revolutions.' Unless we go deeply into the localities, carefully examining the social structure and networks, patterns of elite dominance, and local politics of these communities, it is not likely that we can obtain a clear picture of the actual process and dynamics of the Communist base building and the reasons behind the success in its revolutionary mobilization" (link). 

Subsequent historians such as Chen Yung-fa (Making Revolution: The Communist Movement in Eastern and Central China, 1937-1945), Odoric Wou (Mobilizing the Masses: Building Revolution in Henan), Pauline Keating (Two Revolutions: Village Reconstruction and the Cooperative Movement in Northern Shaanxi, 1934-1945), and others have argued instead for a more differentiated and local approach to the success of Communist mobilization in the 1937-1949 period. Tony Saich summarizes much of this consensus in these terms:

Writing on the Chinese revolution has always attracted proponents of the "Grand Theory." This is not surprising, for the revolution itself was on a grand scale in both time and space. New research has made the field more hesitant to put forward bold ideas to encapsulate the majestic sweep of the revolution and has contented itself with compiling details and hammering away at previously held explanations. The debate between those who argued that the Communist success was primarily a result of its nationalist appeal in the anti-Japanese war and those who stressed the CCP's capacity to mobilize the peasantry through its socio-economic programmes, while stimulating, has been left behind by recent research. There is now an infinitely more complex picture of the Party's policies and its relationship to the different social forces in China than was possible previously. (link)

Joseph Esherick puts some of the current understanding of the Chinese Revolution into a series of theses (link), and several are particularly important in the context of Chalmers Johnson's argument:

1. The triumph of the CCP was the product of a series of contingent events.
2. The revolution was produced by a conjuncture of domestic and global historical processes among which the worldwide depression and Japanese imperialism were particularly important.
3. The larger structures of China's state and society did not make revolution inevitable, but they imposed significant constraints on the agents of revolution and counterrevolution.
4. The CCP was a social construct of considerable internal complexity, not an organizational weapon of obedient apparatchiks commanded by the Party Center.

So the nationalist hypothesis has not prevailed as a comprehensive explanation of Communist success at mobilizing revolution. In fact, even the project of providing a single theoretical framework for explaining this success has largely been abandoned.

What is not often recognized, however, is the fact that Peasant Nationalism also contains a substantial empirical historical core that is valuable whether or not we accept the overriding nationalism interpretation.

First, Johnson provides a detailed accounting of Japanese military-political strategies and failures that could not have been conceived of without Johnson's deep and extended immersion in the Japanese secret archives. He makes sense of the very complex and confusing story of Japanese invasion and occupation of north and east China, with multiple military commands and a difference of opinion within high leadership about the best way of defeating Communist opposition.

Equally interesting and important is his lengthy narrative of Communist military and political strategies during the period. This narrative takes up almost half the book, and it is still one of the most detailed and clear expositions of this complex story. (There is also some detail on Guomindang strategies as well.) Johnson pieces together the complicated military movements of Communist armies in north and central China in a masterful way.

In short, Johnson's narrative of military and political developments of the Anti-Japanese War is an important permanent contribution.

So we might say that the theoretical framework of the book has run its course; whereas the empirical and historical findings continue to be an important source of knowledge about the period. And in an ironic way, this suits rather well Johnson's later polemics against rational choice theory and his insistence on the primacy of close, factual research in area studies. (These arguments are found in "A Disaster in the Making: Rational Choice and Asian Studies" (with E.B. Keehn) (link) and "Preconception vs. Observation, or the Contributions of Rational Choice Theory and Area Studies to Contemporary Political Science" (link).) Here is how he characterizes these issues in a 2005 interview with Hidenori Ijiri:

What we mean by areas studies, however, it seems to me, is simply empirical, inductive research about other cultures. Not research that is theoretically driven but driven by knowledge of the culture and a proficiency in the language. In that sense, it is mor einthe classical anthropological mode of trying to understand a culture that is alien to you by personally, inductively getting inside of it, reading the main classics in the field, being able to talk with felllow scholars in the area, and in some cases, doing field research in a particular topic for which your research may very well have theoretical implications. But such research was not driven by a theoretical issue at first. (link)

The more serious challenge to area studies -- one that I have been deeply involved in fighting against and that has affected above all my own field of political science -- is the influence of mathematical economics. The charge is that area studies are un-theoretical, that they do not partake of grand systems of theory. Moreover it is argued that the amount of time spent learning a language like Chinese or Japanese is a waste of time. According to this fad, what a good scholar needs is an education in abstract theory. If he understands theory he can study any place.... Today, political science departments have very elaborate models, often mathematical, and formal ones from which you can supposedly deduce outcomes.... A political science Ph.D. today has been increasingly defined in terms of an ability in rational choice theory, game theory, the manipulation of economic models, and the formal creation of models in which the mode of analysis is deductive rather than inductive. (link)

The central point here is that theory can only be a support for concrete historical and social research, not a substitute. But this is no less true in the study of Communist mobilization in China than in Japanese technology policies. And perhaps there is a larger point here as well: Chalmers Johnson did a great job of "area studies" in his Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power: The Emergence of Revolutionary China, 1937-1945, in spite of his adherence to the single theoretical framework of nationalism.