Category Archives: Revolution

Rebellion, Part One

25 Monday Jun 2018

Posted by in Politics for Worldbuilders, Revolution, War, Writing

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(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series.)

Many fictional stories are built around rebellions against some sort of tyrannical overlord. Such stories provide readymade underdogs to root for and compelling conflict with high stakes; they also mesh well with American culture, and the cultural memory of any society that has ever broken free from external rule (which is most of them, these days).

But as I’ve noted before, these stories often have very little to do with how rebellions actually work. That’s not necessarily a problem, per se; good fiction does not require realism. But it does require a consistent internal logic, and some stories violate their own rules when discussing rebellions, simply because the author had a particular mental model for how rebellions are “supposed” to work that was a poor fit for the story.

Again, the purpose of studying real rebellion is to allow you to tell more stories, broadening your range. If it also dissuades you from writing wildly unrealistic rebellion stories, I’d take that as a win; but that’s because I’m a polisci nerd, so don’t worry about it overmuch.

First, let’s arbitrarily distinguish between four types of rebellions, each with very different goals. These are: violent contention, secession, government overthrow, and revolution.

In violent contention, as I’m using the term, the initial goal is not necessarily to overthrow the government, or to create your own country (although these things could become goals later). Instead, all the rebels want is to improve their own condition. It could be a peasant movement groaning under the tax burden, or agitating for a cancellation of debts, or simply desperate for food which the regime is keeping for itself; it could be a local militia that wants official recognition and a royal salary. It could be the local longshoreman’s union trying to get more sick days.

Such outbreaks of violence could be planned in advance; the Zapatista rebellion in Mexico would be a good example, or any number of large-scale mutinies in the Congo—led by generals who want a government ministry or a promotion. Or, the rebels could coalesce spontaneously, without prior planning or even intent; riots often start this way. The key point is that the initial goal is not to break free of the government or overthrow it, but simply to improve your own condition.

Think of it as a form of bargaining. If the regime or the local moneylenders are oppressing you and refuse to listen to your appeals, you might decide that violence is the only way to get their attention. By taking up arms, you give the regime the choice between meeting your demands, or incurring the costs necessary to put down the rebellion.

Consider the situation in the American Colonies before the Battle of Lexington. Most of the colonists did not want a full-blown war; the very idea was novel. For a colony to break free of its mother country entirely was almost unprecedented in history. (And when Carthage broke free from Tyre, it was because Alexander the Great had wiped Tyre out—not because the Carthaginians had rebelled.) But the colonies had over a hundred years of precedent for small-scale rebellions again the royal governors, launched by people suffering from mistreatment such as dispossessed farmers and slaves. (Few people are taught of these episodes, but you can find a good discussion of them in Murray Rothbard’s “Conceived in Liberty,” starting with Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676.)

So the colonists used violence to make their case. They had very specific grievances they wanted addressed by King George: taxation without representation, arbitrary rule by military officials, restraints on trade, et cetera. Had Britain developed some way to include the Americas in Parliament, it is possible that America would have remained part of the British Empire to centuries to come.

But Britain did not compromise, and instead declared the Colonies to be in rebellion, to be crushed by force. At this point, the rebels faced a decision: either they accept defeat, submit, and try to avoid punishment (the fate of many episodes of violent contention), they continue their relatively low-level campaign of violence and hope that Britain reconsiders, or they broaden their goals into a true rebellion. To take this last option, the rebels typically would need to be strong enough and well enough organized to have hope, however faint, for victory—which the Americans were.

Thus, we come to the second type of rebellion, secession. I call the American Revolution a secession because its goal was not to overthrow King George, or to conquer Britain itself, but merely to break free of it and form a new country. Secession is the kind of full-scale rebellion we see the most of in the real world, probably. And it is the one that best illustrates a key feature of rebellions: they often take the form of competitive state-formation.

What does this mean? In rebellions, each side is trying to project power over a given populace. Both sides want to collect taxes, to control behavior, to deny resources and free movement to the enemy, and to recruit soldiers and inspire loyalty. In short, rebellions feature all the usual problems of wielding political power, but magnified and sharpened because you are competing against an enemy that is trying to do the same thing, to the same populace. Battles and strategies are important, of course, but for a rebellion to even get that far, it must first have managed to build competing state institutions, with all that implies, to raise and support its army. That whole process is what usually gets called “insurgency.”

Secessions usually take place in a peripheral part of the state, where the regime’s control is weak; this gives the insurgents the opportunity to build institutions of their own. And the populace is faced with two would-be rulers, each of which wants to be obeyed; setting aside ideology or ethnic ties, individuals will tend to listen to whichever side offers the more compelling mix of threats and benefits. Assuming of course that the individuals don’t try to play one side off against the other for personal benefit!

Rebellion and Authority by Leites and Wolf is a fantastic, free examination of insurgencies and counterinsurgencies, written by scholars at the RAND Corporation during the Vietnam War; they thus had strong incentives to get their analysis right, and the resulting study is fascinating. Authors will find it invaluable for the richness of detail it provides; definitely check it out.

Later, we will discuss government overthrows and revolutions.

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When Do Societies Face Unrest?

02 Thursday May 2013

Posted by in Better Fantasy, Economics, History, Politics, Revolution, Self-Promotion, War, Writing

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I have just read a recent journal article by the brilliant scholar Peter Turchin, in which he elaborates on his theory of the dynamics of social instability over time and tests it on the United States from 1780 to 2010. Put briefly, his theory holds that one can expect a society to suffer greater social violence (such as riots or lynchings, as opposed to routine crime) in a relatively predictable cycle. The larger “secular” cycle occurs every 150 years; a smaller cycle of violence occurs roughly every 50 years, superimposed on the secular cycle. Thus in the United States, we had peaks of societal violence near the years 1870, 1920, and 1970, with the Civil War being the peak of the secular cycle. Turchin forecasts that the next secular peak should hit sometime around the year 2020. Turchin’s previous work has detected the same sorts of cycles in societies from ancient China to revolutionary France.

Of course, detecting a pattern does not tell you what has caused it. Turchin’s theory for when violence intensifies depends on two major factors. Both of these factors might derive from excessive population growth; in the early version of Turchin’s work, he was focusing on agrarian societies in which population growth leads directly to food shortages. But now that he is considering Industrial societies, Turchin is focusing more on the immediate causes laid out below.

First, whether from excessive population growth or technological disruption or whatever, there emerges a labor glut. The average wage drops in response, leading to diminished standards of living. Thus you see larger segments of the populace who are in a precarious situation, with the potential for violent outbreaks such as labor struggles, or ethnic competition with minorities, or political upheaval.

Second, there emerges “an oversupply of elites.” This can happen for a few reasons, and Turchin focuses on the economic one. The low cost of labor means that it is easier for those on the top to become far wealthier than they might have done in a more normal setting, leading to the accumulation of vast fortunes and a polarization of society. A consequence of this is that there is much more competition for the leadership positions in society, such as control of government offices. Politics becomes more nasty and partisan, leading in extreme cases to violent rivalries between elite factions struggling to secure their hold on power. Such violence is made easier by the larger number of poor, desperate people in society who can serve as a demagogue’s muscle.

In Turchin’s research, he finds that oversupply of elites has the strongest association with societal violence. This is easy to understand when one looks at places like the Philippines, in which politicians routinely employ armed militias to attack competitors (a horrifying example was the Maguindanao Massacre of 2009), or the Congo, which has been wracked with coup after coup. But even in the United States, a surplus of would-be leaders will tend to produce extreme ideologies, such as militant unionism in the 1920s, or the present upsurge in eco-terrorism.

I think many people, writers among them, mistake the relationship between cheap labor and exploitative rich. Often, a super-wealthy class emerges as a result of lots of poor people, who make it easier to be rich—that is, to benefit from the production of lots of other people. This is not to say that an exploitative class won’t try to keep everyone else poor, once it emerges. But the dynamics are complex here, and societal violence is one of the things keeping them in check.

(How might such violence be averted? Full discussion will have to wait for another post, but I find it rather interesting that the Biblical institution of Jubilee, in which land was returned to its ancestral owners and debts forgiven, follows a 50-year cycle.)

(Have I mentioned lately that my new book is available on Amazon Kindle? It’s called The Best Congress Money Can Buy: Stories of Political Possibility. You can read the first story for free here, and then buy it if you like. Enjoy!)

On Revolutions in (Some) Fantasy Fiction

03 Sunday Jun 2012

Posted by in Better Fantasy, History, Politics, Revolution, State Formation, War, Writing

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Traditionally, fantasy has lent itself to stories of heroic uprisings or revolutions, as the Evil Overlord is swept out of power by the brave protagonists and their loyal army of oppressed commoners. That can be a good story, and sometimes the stories are indeed quite good. It feeds directly into some of our cultural loves: rooting for the underdog, the reestablishment of justice and defeat of evil, and so on.

But what makes this literature trying for a student of comparative politics is how infrequently revolutions are handled with any degree of realism. Not that I demand absolute realism in all books touching on politics—far from it. Often we simplify the mechanics of a story to distill its essence. Still, what annoys me is that people end up telling the same bloody story over and over and over again. And this is so, I think, because the mental model most fantasy authors have of revolutions is so impoverished.

From what I’ve read, most fantasy authors have two archetypes for how a revolution goes off: Robin Hood (as refracted through Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe), or the French Revolution and the various other Parisian dustups. Egregiously, I haven’t read any fantasy modeled after the American Revolution,* and only a single work of science fiction (Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, a fun read). And most published fantasy writers live in the United States, for Heaven’s sake! And of course, the American Revolution is by no means the only other model you could look to.

The example that spawned this post is Steven Brust’s novel Teckla. (This is not, I hasten to add, because I have anything against Brust in particular, but only because it’s the book I happened to read.) In the book, an oppressed, illiterate underclass is being organized by a group of revolutionaries with the goal of blocking commerce into the capital city, in order to force reforms. To do so, the revolutionaries first endeavor to teach everyone how to read, so that they could then publish propaganda in newspapers.

This was the first point where I was tempted to throw the book across the room. In a real illiterate society, no one would have had the daft idea to publish a mass-market newspaper in the first place. It’s a bit like writing and selling manuals on how to use an iPod in the 1960s. Worse, written material would not be the most effective way to organize untutored masses anyway. Far more effective would have been using actual people to spread the message and organize more revolutionaries where they went, as was done by revolutionaries from Spartacus to Mao.

It got worse. The favored tactic of the revolutionaries was to build Paris-style barricades across the main road into the capital city. All well and good, except that a major mechanic of Brust’s entire series is that the ruling class knows how to teleport with magic. Barricades, or any static defense not augmented with its own magic, would be worse than useless.

So why did Brust rely on such tired tropes, even when they went counter to the very logic of his fantasy world? I suspect that the only model he had for how revolutions work was revolutionary France. And because he had no other mental model to work with, Brust did not have the building blocks that would have fit his story better.

And this is my point. When you study real historical revolutions with an eye toward fiction writing, you quickly find the potential for all sorts of stories that have rarely been told in Western fantasy. More realistic treatment of revolutions can be used to explore themes of divided loyalty, or how governments structure their environment to better exert their power, or how revolutionaries end up doing the same thing, or—and this is particularly fascinating—how civilians will often exploit the conflict between government and rebel, by extorting aid from both sides, or by denouncing resented neighbors as traitors to the cause (so that they will be executed and you can take their stuff).

At any rate, new stories, with new possibilities. This doesn’t mean that the old classics need to be chucked out; Robin Hood will always be a good story. But a creative author can take the old building blocks and mix in a few new things from real life, to make something original. A good place to start (not least because it’s free) is the 1970 classic by Leites and Wolf, Rebellion and Authority (PDF). It’s a study they carried out in the middle of the Vietnam War for the RAND Corporation, and has details from the history of Western counterinsurgency. Much recommended.

Oh, and if there is actually good fantasy or sci-fi out there that handles rebellions well, please let me know in the comments. I’d like to read it.

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* Which was not technically a revolution in the political-science sense, since the American social structure and forms of government remained more or less intact, and no one tried to extend the revolution to Great Britain. Really, you could best describe the colonial uprising as a war of secession from Britain.