Skocpol compares and contrasts the French, Russian, and Chinese Revolutions to find what causal factors they held in common. She considers all three to be social as well as political revolutions. “What is unique to social revolution is that basic changes in social structure and in political structure occur together in mutually reinforcing fashion. And these changes occur through intense sociopolitical conflicts in which class struggles play a key role…. An adequate understanding of social revolutions requires that the analyst take a nonvoluntarist, structural perspective on their causes and processes…. Social revolutions cannot be explained without systematic reference to international structures and world-historical developments…. It is essential to conceive of states as administrative and coercive organizations.”
Skocpol stresses that while the State is often aligned with the dominant class, the two are not the same and in times of crisis, particularly, their interests do not always overlap. In France, by the end of the eighteenth century, she quotes Francois Furet, “Tied to the development of commercial production, hostile to local powers, promoter of national unity, the state was—along with money, at the same time as money, and more than money—the decisive source of social mobility. Progressively the state had undermined, encroached upon, and destroyed the vertical solidarity of the estates, especially the nobility…. By the eighteenth century, the new groups [of elites] make up the majority of the nobility. Culturally, the state had offered to the ruling groups of the kingdom, assembled henceforth under its aegis, another system of values than that of personal honor: the fatherland and the State… creating a parallel and contradictory social structure: an elite, a governing class.” This fits in with Turchin’s thesis that it is intra-elite competition, particularly from disaffected marginal elites, that is the impetus for cycles of revolution and turmoil. Skocpol explains, “The distinction between the First (ecclesiastical) and Second (Noble) Estates, on the one hand, and the Third Estate, on the other, was by the eighteenth century more a fluid zone of transition than a barrier.”
Skocpol next describes her view of the Qing Dynasty’s class structure right before its collapse. The dominant class was the landed gentry. “Was it fundamentally an Imperial state with a unique Confucian culture and educational system? Or was it fundamentally a class-stratified agrarian society? My view is that old-regime China was an inextricable amalgam of both of these. The dominant agrarian class depended upon the administrative/military backing of, and employment opportunities within, the Imperial state. And ruling dynasties depended upon local class dominants to extend controls over and appropriate resources from the huge, unwieldy agrarian expanse that was China.” The intra-elite struggle came about when the educated Han elite came to break with their Manchu imperial overlords. “Modern-educated students and military officers developed radical nationalist views that synthesized provincial loyalties with hostility to the “alien” Manchu dynasty…. Professionally trained officers had only the most tenuous loyalties to the Manchus and to the Imperial system…. The newly established representative assemblies were rapidly transformed by groups of local and provincial gentry and merchants into formal platforms from which to advocate a “Constitutionalist” program of liberal, politically decentralized reforms…. By 1910 many organized gentry groups were prepared ideologically and organizationally to assert their decentralizing program against the Manchus.” E.P. Young would claim, “The politicization of the gentry is perhaps the outstanding feature of [Chinese history in] the early twentieth century.”
In Russia, the elites had a subservient position to the Tsarist state apparatus. “Over a period of centuries the lands of independent nobles and princes were expropriated and passed out as rewards for official careers to a new class of service nobles. As this happened, the tsars took pains to ensure that no new groupings of independent landed aristocrats could arise. Service nobles were given rights to serf “souls” and to landed estates. Yet typically, their possessions were not concentrated in one locality or even one province, but were scattered over different regions of the empire…. Lifelong military or civil service careers [were] mandatory for every adult male noble…. During the eighteenth century Russian nobles were finally released from lifelong state service, and their private-property rights were fully and officially confirmed…. Russian nobles still gravitated toward state employments as the one sure site of opportunities to reside in the cities and to earn salaries and rewards to supplement the very meager incomes that most obtained from the serf estates.” Intra-elite competition again played a role in upsetting the balance of society. The change was spurred by the State’s goal of rapid industrialization, as Russia sought to catch up to the great powers of western Europe, especially after its defeat in the Crimean War. In turn, however, “the processes of financing rapid industrialization tied the Russian state and economy more closely to Western Europe.” Arthur Mendel contends, “Besides dangerously concentrating a proletariat, a professional class, and a rebellious student body in the centers of political power, industrialization infuriated both these new forces and the traditional rural classes.” The end was brought on by the crisis of World War I. “[Tsar] Nicholas would not sacrifice the autocratic principle: and so upper- and middle-class civilian and official disgust with him grew. Public criticism flourished especially because it could be couched in nationalistic terms…. Once the initial rebellion was underway, it spread irrepressibly from military unit to military unit, from factory workers to railway men, from the capital of Petrograd to Moscow and to the provincial cities.”
Skocpol contends, “In both ancien regime France and late Imperial China, relatively prosperous landed-commercial upper classes gained collective political leverage within and against the administrative machineries of monarchial autocracies…. Escalating international competition and humiliations particularly symbolized by unexpected defeats in wars (such as the Seven Years’ War and the Sino-Japanese War) inspired autocratic authorities to attempt reforms that they believed would facilitate the mobilization and coordination of national resources to meet the external exigencies…. [However,] the French privilegies and the Chinese gentry were attracted by the association between parliamentarism and national power in more modern foreign competitors…. Autocratic attempts at modernizing reforms from above in France and China—specifically, tax reform in France and railroad reorganization in China—triggered the concerned political resistance of well-organized dominant class forces…. And as dominant class groups based in various institutional and geographical locations (e.g., parlements, provinces, representative bodies, and municipalities in France; and provinces, armies, and assemblies in China) competed in endeavors to define new political arrangements, the monarchial administrations and armies were broken irretrievably apart.” She continues, “Revolutionary political crises emerged in all three Old Regimes because agrarian structures impinged upon autocratic and proto-bureaucratic state organizations in ways that blocked or fettered monarchial initiatives in coping with escalating international military competition in a world undergoing uneven transformation by capitalism…. The ultimate effect of the impediments to state-sponsored reforms was the downfall of monarchial autocracy and the disintegration of the centralized administrative and military organizations of the state.”
Skocpol makes the case that “peasant revolts against landlords were a necessary ingredient in all three Revolutions, whereas successful revolts by urban workers were not.” However, “peasants participated in these Revolutions without being converted to radical visions of a desired new national society, and without becoming a nationally organized class-for-themselves. Instead they struggled for concrete goals—typically involving access to more land, or freedom from claims on their surpluses.” There were differences in the three Old Regimes. “A peasant revolution against landlords did ultimately occur in China as in France and Russia, but the peasants of China lacked the kind of structurally preexisting solidarity and autonomy that allowed the agrarian revolutions in France and Russia to emerge quickly and relatively spontaneously in reaction to the breakdown of the central governments of the Old Regimes. In contrast, the Chinese agrarian revolution was more protracted…. The peasant contribution to the Chinese Revolution resembled much more a mobilized response to a revolutionary elite’s initiatives than did the peasant contributions in France and Russia.”
Skocpol next focuses on the similarities in State capacity building that consolidated the permanence of the three Revolutions. Franz Borkenau states, “Every great revolution has destroyed the State apparatus which it found. After much vacillation and experimentation, every revolution has set another apparatus in its place, in most cases of quite a different character from the one destroyed; for the changes in the state order which a revolution produces are no less important than the changes in the social order.” Skocpol contends that the new State structures were even more all-consuming and all-controlling than the monarchial regimes they replaced. “Autocratic and proto-bureaucratic monarchies gave way to bureaucratic and mass-incorporating national states…. Under the Old Regimes, the privileges and the institutional power bases of the landed upper classes had been impediments to full state bureaucratization and to direct mass political incorporation…. Political consolidation was possible in large part because revolutionary leaderships could mobilize lower-class groups formerly excluded from national politics, either urban workers or the peasantry…. The new state organizations forged during the Revolutions were more centralized and rationalized than those of the Old Regime.” Many of the marginal elites of old, who survived the turmoil and purges, could be coopted as technical experts to the new State machinery. Whereas, “all such agrarian states as France (after the consolidation of royal absolutism), Tsarist Russia, and Imperial China… more or less continuously generated surpluses of aspirants for participation in state employments”, the new revolutionary regimes could recruit all of the surplus-elites crafty and able enough to have stuck around.
Finally, it was not any particular ideology that made these three Revolutions successful. The impetus to success was more structural and impersonal. Skocpol states, “It cannot be argued… that the cognitive content of the ideologies in any sense provides a predictive key to either the outcomes of the Revolutions or the activities of the revolutionaries who built the state organizations…. The Jacobins accomplished instead more mundane tasks—of state building and revolutionary defense—indispensable to the success of the revolution that devoured them. In Russia, the Bolsheviks were pummeled by the exigencies of the attempt to take and hold state power in the name of Marxist socialism in an agrarian country shattered by defeat in total war. They found themselves forced to undertake tasks and measures that directly contradicted their ideology. In the end, triumphant Stalinism twisted and upended virtually every Marxist ideal and rudely contradicted Lenin’s vision in 1917 of destroying bureaucracies and standing armies. In China, the Communists set out in proper Marxist-Leninist fashion to take power through proletarian risings in the cities. Not until well after these were crushed and new and viable peasant-oriented movements had taken root in military base areas in the countryside did “Maoist” doctrine develop to sanctify and codify what had been done…. In short, ideologically oriented leaderships in revolutionary crises have been greatly limited by existing structural conditions and severely buffeted by the rapidly changing currents of revolutions.”
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