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Theories of Revolution
and
Industrialized
Societies
EDWARDS. MALECKI
SOCIETIES
949
in some, but not all, industrialized societies. Revolution is inevitable for the most advanced industrialized capitalist states,
but evolutionto communismis the coursefor industrializedsocieties
which have already advanced to the first stage of socialism by
previously overthrowing the bourgeoisie.' On the other hand,
Americantheories of political development, while divided on the
exact course that political development follows, sound a united
chorus in their belief that realisticallyit is a contradictionin tenns
to speak of revolutionand modern industrialsocieties in the same
breath.
The case for the Americanview has been most succinctly and
stronglyargued by SamuelHuntington. After distinguishingsocial
revolution from palace coups and other lesser forms of political
violence he notes that:
Revolutions are rare. Most societies have never experienced revolutions and
most ages until modern times did not know revolutions. . . . [R]evolution is
characteristic of modernization. It is one way of modernizing a traditional
society.2
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Revolution,then, from the Americanviewpoint of political development, is confined to transitionalsocieties and absent from traditional and modem societies.
The theoretical reasons for the contrasting conclusions on the
possibility of revolution in industrial societies can be drawn into
sharperfocus if one views the Americanthought as a form of neoHegelianism.4 Just as G. W. Hegel viewed capitalismin his time
as the terminalpoint in humanprogress,there is a strongconceptual
tendency to view the economicallymost advancedsocieties of one's
own time as the ultimate in achievement. Both ages see society
as sharply differentiatedfrom the state or political institutions.
Both see the development and transition of society to its modem phase as marked by the unleashing of tremendous economic
production and potential freedom but also by the destruction of
existingpolitical instruments,resultingin a vacuumof authorityand
the chaotic mass mobilization of society based on terror and
violence. Hegel saw a strong centralizedstate separate from civil
society as the necessary embodimentof unity and reason in channeling the new individual freedom of the mature civil society he
envisioned.
Americanshave an increasingtendency to view strongcentralized
bureaucraticpolitical institutionsdifferentiatedfrom society as the
sources for rationalizing and integrating the expanded political
participationembedded in political modernization.5 Contemporary
see Ivo K. Feierabend and Rosalind L. Feierabend, "Aggressive Behaviors
Within Politics, 1948-1962, A Cross National Study," in When Men Revolt
and Why: A Reader in Political Violence and Revolution, ed. James Chowning Davies (New York: Free Press, 1971), 229-249; and William H. Flanigan
and Edwin Fogelman, "Patternsof Political Violence in ComparativeHistorical
Perspective,"ComparativePolitics, 3 (October 1970), 1-20.
4 This is not to say that the Americans rely directly on Hegel's thought.
On the contrary, at a conscious level of reference to classical thought Americans are apt to ignore Hegel while making favorable references to Aristotle,
Plato, Hobbes, de Tocqueville, and Weber coupled with critical references to
Marx. See, for example, Huntington, Political Order, 37, 50-51, 80-81, 102;
Gabriel A. Almond and G. Bingham Powell, Comparative Politics: A Developmental Approach (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1966), 13, 17-18,
300-321, and Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man: The Social Bases of
Politics (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday & Co., Anchor Books, 1960), viiviii, 4-11, 449-456. Lipset is the only one who mentions Hegel and he makes
only a single sentence reference. See Political Man, 3.
5 As an advanced representative of American theorists on political develop-
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rather than its causes. . . . [T]he typical habitat of communist revolution has
been a country of precapitalist or at most semi-capitalist economic formation.
... The communist revolution-insofar as we can draw a generalization concerning its nature on the basis of these facts-is a revolution of underdevelopment.11
Tucker goes on to note that the two exceptions to the general rule,
that the Communist "revolutions" occur in preindustrial rather than
in industrialized societies, deviate significantly from classical Marxian theory because the Communist regimes installed in East Germany and Czechoslovakia were externally imposed by the Soviet
Union rather than products of an internal proletarian revolution.L2
Apparently, then, the Marxian revolutionary idea does not fit the
facts of the political life of industrialized societies, and at least
by default the neo-Hegelian view of American developmental
theorists does fit the case.
Although Tucker's conclusions about the empirical adequacy of
Marxian revolutionary theory are plausible and widely shared
among American scholars, let me commit academic heresy by
arguing the other side of the case. The major point of arguing in
favor of the Marxian view is that of demonstrating the necessity
for each scholar to make a conscious and reasoned choice between
the Marxian and neo-Hegelian views of the future of industrial
society. If the Marxian viewpoint on revolution is empirically
plausible, then no longer can American scholars let the external
"facts" make the decision for them. Where two courses of action
are empirically plausible alternatives, the choice is not resolved by
gathering more facts but by a normative evaluation of the consequences associated with those alternatives.13
A
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REVOLUTIONAND INDUSTIIUALI:ZE
SOCTS
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If Lenin and the subsequent revisionists have substituted conscious political choice for historical determinismin terms of the
occurrenceof revolution,they have also moved the transitionfrom
the initial or lower stage of socialism-that is, the dictatorshipof
the proletariat-to communism. The deterministicforces of Marx
and Engels' theory of history are dropped, and the successful
transition to communismis made dependent on appropriate decisions by the revolutionaries. Lenin, in extending Marx'sanalysis
Cultural Revolution," both in National Liberation: Revolution in the Third
World, ed. Norman Miller and Roderick Aya (New York: Free Press, 1971),
214-296.
17 Political Order, 336.
18Tucker, Marxian Revolutionary Idea, 149-152. Lenin quite explicitly
rejects the idea of spontaneous revolution in "What is to be Done?" in Essential Works of Lenin, 72-85.
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TE
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ing the bourgeois ruling class and its institutions, including the
nation-state.25
26
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peasant-based revolution establishing the dictatorship of the bourgeois intellectuals, who become increasingly more and more nationalistic as they consolidate and institutionalize their power.
If one focuses on those aspects of classical Marxism related to the
explanation and elaboration of a theory of historical development,
there is little doubt that the Communist revolutions of the twentieth
century are capitalist revolutions. Engels gives an apt description of
twentieth century Communist revolutions. After noting that the
urban middle class brought on the Calvinist revolution in Germany,
the Puritan revolution in England, and the French revolution,
Engels points out: "Curiously enough, in all three great bourgeois risings, the peasantry furnishes the army that has to do the
fighting, and the peasantry is just the class that, the victory once
gained, is most surely ruined by the economic consequences of that
victory."29
Not only have the peasants formed the bulk of the fighting forces
in all Communist revolutions, but when the industrializing plans of
the urban intellectuals who lead the revolutionary movement are
carried out, the peasants as a petit bourgeois class are eliminated in
the collectivation of agriculture and the shift to industrialization.
While Mao and Castro may reverse the priorities of the Russian
model of development-which emphasized industrialization first,
then equalization-they do share the common point of view that the
peasant as a petit bourgeois class must be stamped out.30 The peasants, like the rest of the population in Communist states, become
wage-laborers. There would be no doubt of the capitalist nature of a
bourgeois led revolution resulting in the institutionalization of wagelabor throughout society if Marx and Engels had not also written
in the capacity of political activists.
While a socialist revolution is a necessary consequence of their
theory of historical development, it seems quite clear that the role
of the bourgeois intellectual in that revolution grows out of Marx
and Engels' political commitments. They wanted capitalism to fall
and to fall quickly. They saw or wanted to see that the time was
ripe for the socialist revolution,31 but they also saw that the leadership of socialist movements was frequently bourgeois in back29
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economic crises and their role in bringing on the revolution, but this is not to
say that the market is the defining characteristic of capitalism.
42 "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific," 103-104, 110-111.
43 On the theoretical distinction between precipitants and causes of revolution, see Harry Eckstein, "On the Etiology of Internal War," in Struggles in
the State, ed. George Armstrong Kelly and Clifford W. Brown, Jr. (New
York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1970), 168-195; see, also, Lawrence Stone,
"Theories of Revolution," in Why Revolution: Theories and Analyses, ed.
Clifford T. Paynton & Robert Blackey (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman Publishing Co., Inc.), 270-271, who summarizes Eckstein's argument and aptly
notes that Eckstein himself confuses the distinction in practice.
44 "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific," 103-104, 110-111.
965
47John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State (New York: Signet
Books, 1967).
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of the class system which guarantees that transition to the classlessness of Marx's communist society will not occur automatically.
Beginning with Milovan Dijlas' critique of Communist societies
as incipient class systems-with a new class composed of the Communist party's full-time managerial bureaucrats filling the role of
the bourgeoisie in capitalist societies-there has been increasing
awareness among both Marxist and non-Marxian students of Communist societies that the initial period of the revolution, in which
the distributive system sharply moved in an egalitarian direction, is
not necessarily followed by an increasing movement toward communism.48 Paul Sweezy notes that he has shifted his position and
no longer regards state ownership of the decisive means of production and centralized planning of the economy as essential
criteria of the socialist society or as the necessary and sufficient conditions for the automatic transition to communism. While Sweezy
hedges on whether Communist societies with the new class are
reversions to capitalism (as the Chinese maintain), he does see
this new ruling class as a "state bourgeoisie."49 Sweezy declares
that ownership and inheritance of property are not the only ways
that class position can be transmitted between generations. Systematic differential access to education is another way, a way that
is increasingly important in all eastern European Communist
societies as the basis for admittance to the elite positions in those
societies.50 The state bourgeoisie "rules not through private ownership of the means of production, as in capitalist society, but through
occupying the decision-making positions in the party, the state, and
the economy; and it is a class and not simply a stratum because
its sons and daughters have a much better chance of occupying
the same positions of power t-han do the children of the rest of the
population."51
What we are seeing is a new forn of capitalism in which, at least
in the initial stages of the revolutionary period as in previous
capitalist revolutions, changes in the distributive system are rela-
48 For a summary of Dijlas' views and other views on the matter, see Frank
Parkin, Class Inequality and Political Order: Social Stratificationin Capitalist
and Communist Societies (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1971), 137-159.
49 "Toward a Program of Studies," 1-13.
50 See Parkin, Class Inequality, 149-154, for supporting data.
51 Sweezy, "Toward a Programof Studies," 6.
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What we find in Communist societies is not wide-spread collective ownership of the means of production but, rather, state
ownership. More particularly,given the role of the Party in Communist societies, the Party is legal owner in de jure sense while the
rankingParty elite are de facto owners. The Party elite have possession of the means of production, and it is they who determine
how those means of production will be put to use, not the great
mass of wage-laborers at their command.59 It is in this context that
recruitment to the Party elite becomes decisive for determining the
character of the distributive systems for Communist societies.
Unlike the classical capitalist societies, which use different criteria
for transferring property power and political power, Communist
societies use a single path based on a combination of achievement
and political loyalty. The result is quite similar to the recruitment of the power elite for United States institutions, with education as a primary measure of one's achievement and commitment
to the ideology of the Communist party as one's measure of political
loyalty. So long as political loyalty remains an important ascriptive
criterion for inclusion in a very select group-one with de facto
ownership of the means of production-Communist societies will
have a crucial mechanism for perpetuating an ownership class
which has a distinctive conception of the rights and duties involving ownership of the means of production.ff
The distinctive character of the neocapitalism of Communist
societies is not a difference in the mode of production. They share
this difference with classical capitalist societies. But they differ
in the relations of production and their effect on the distributive
system. While the ownership classes of both feudal and Communist societies combine political and property power in the hands
of a small elite, paradoxically the degree of inequality in the Communist distributive system is smaller than those of the partially
decentralized capitalist societies and much smaller than those of
the feudal era.,' It is true that ownership in the basic means of
of property as rights and duties see Lenski, Power and Privilege, 58, 83, 341345.
59 Cf., Sweezy, "Toward a Programof Studies," 7-8.
60 Richard Cornell, "Students and Politics in Communist Eastern Europe,"
Daedalus (Winter 1968), 166-171.
61f See Parkin, Class Inequality, 103-159, and Lenski, Power and Privilege,
243-345.
970
So long as loyalty to an egalitarianideology is one of the prerequisites to elite Party positions in Communist societies and so
long as the Party owns the means of production, the secondary
variations in the distributive system of the classical and neocapitalist systems will remain quite clear. But the differencesare
secondary in relation to differencesin modes of production. Just
as Stanley Elkins noted the greaterrepressivenessof slavery in the
United States as comparedto slavery in Latin America,"3one can
note the differencesare, however, only secondaryvariationswithin
the basic slave-laborand wage-labormodes of production.f64 While
Communistregimescan partiallyrevertto the inequalityof classical
capitalism, as Yugoslaviaand the Soviet Union have done, these
regimes retain a distinctive feature of neocapitalismin that de jure
ownershipof the means of production remain with the Party and
62Parkin, Class Inequality, 137-159, and John Goldthorpe, 'Social Stratification in Industrial Society," Sociological Review, 8 (October 1964), 97-112.
63 "Slavery and Personality" in When Men Revolt, ed. Davies, 152-164.
64 See Lenski, Power and Privilege, 46-50, 90-93, 434-441, for a discussion
of distributive systems in terms of primary and secondary variations. In the
present case, Marx's modes of production are viewed as the primary variation
in the distributive system because changes in the mode of production mark
revolutionary changes in productivity, surplus, and the social and political
superstructures of societies. It is also possible to distinguish tertiary variations, such as those within classical capitalistic societies, which vary between
one another in terms of whether or not a labor or social-democraticparty has
been elected to power. In those societies like England, Norway, and Sweden,
where a social-democraticparty has held power, the mobility system is much
more open than in societies like West Germany and France, where a social
democratic party has not held effective power. (Parkin, Class Inequality,
107-114). It should be pointed out that this tertiary variation in the type of
authorities in power does not have a significantrelationshipto income inequalities.
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tem but notes that it was unable to deal effectively with the dissolution of the empire in the 1950s, a fault that resulted in a
military rebellion putting De Gaulle in power. De Gaulle shifted
the regime to a strong centralized presidential system which controlled both parliament and the bureaucracy. Presumably, this
too was modernization. Paradoxically, Huntington also argues
that a modern political system for future France and other modem
political systems will involve a movement toward the decentralized
traditional Tudor forms of the United States.76 At this point it appears that any shift in regimes within a modem political system
results by definition in another modern political system. In spite
of the ambiguity of neo-Hegelian theories as applied, it is reasonably clear that occurrence of rebellions in modem political systems
is inconsistent with the defined attributes of modem political institutions.
If rebellions and wars of independence in modem political systems are inconsistent with neo-Hegelian theories of political development, ideological revolutions in modern states flatly contradict
the theories. The type of revolution which is explicitly rejected as
a possibility in a modem political system is defined by Huntington
as "a rapid, fundamental, and violent domestic change in the
dominant values and myths of society, in its political institutions,
social structure, leadership, and govemment activity and policies."77
These are exactly the same social factors which change in a fascist
type of ideological revolution.78
76
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lends support to this view. These events do not clearly negate the
neo-Hegelian thesis that revolution is not possible in a modem
political system, but placed together with the successful fascist
revolutions of the twentieth century the evidence casts such considerable doubt on the validity of the thesis that only the dogmatic
neo-Hegelians would assert that the facts require its acceptance.
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consciousness and the ethnic minorities by national consciousness.8Rather than creating conditions for the socialist revolution, their
efforts to bare the repressive nature of the state in advanced industrialized societies are likely to create the conditions for establishment of martial law or a successful fascist revolution.87
The student-worker general strike in France in 1968 represents
the closest approximation to a Marxian revolution in a modem
political system. But even here the movements represented clear
minorities of the French population, and the joint efforts were more
the results of the commonality of their target-the De Gaulle
of their similarity in goals. Student demands
regime-than
focused on university reform. Workers were concerned about unemployment and the general decline of workers and unions vis~-vis the increasing nexus of power between corporate interests and
the De Gaulle regime. The centralization of French education
required the students to strike at the central government. The decline of parliamentary power and the marriage between political
executives and corporate interests in increasing pursuit of a favorable political-economic climate by joint govemment and industry
co-operation created a situation in which direct.confrontation between workers and the government would occur wheti economic
problems arose for the workers. Without an effective veto in
parliament and with the inadequacy of narrow trade union tactics
against a joint govemmental-coxporate complex, the workers will
predictably confront the government during economic crises.88
88For an elaboration of this line of argument, see Edward Malecki, "The
Myth of Openness: Consensual Elites in U. S. Policy Making" (paper read at
the 67th annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, Ill., September 7-12, 1971); Gilbert Merkx, "Revolution in America?"
Monthly Review, 23 (January 1972), 25-42, distinguishes similar phenomena
in terms of cultural consciousness, which he sees as a diversion from class
consciousness.
87 Moore, "Possibility for Revolutionary Change," 547-549; Maurice Duverger, "An Impossible Revolution," in Kelly and Brown, eds., Struggles in the
State, 507-511.
88 For a partial breakdown on the number of students and workers including
distinctions in class background and academic major for students, see Stanley
Hoffman, "The French Psychodrama: De Gaulle's Anti-Communist Coup,"
and Jaques Ellul, "The Psychology of a Rebellion, May-June, 1968" in Kelly
and Brown, eds., Struggles in the State, 486-506; for a class interpretationof
the French worker's involvement, see also Myers, "Social Class and Political
Change," 408-412.
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