Tag Archives: revolution

Rebellion, Part Two

29 Sunday Jul 2018

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

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

In our earlier discussion of different kinds of rebellions (and why worldbuilders may benefit from expanding their mental models of rebellions beyond Robin Hood and Parisian riots), we arbitrarily defined four types: violent contention, secession, coups, and revolutions. We then briefly discussed the first two. Now, let’s finish our list by talking about coups and revolutions.

Neither violent contention nor secession intends to totally overthrow the existing government (necessarily); the rebels want to better their own condition or to break away, but to leave the rest of the society more or less as it was. In coups and revolutions, on the other hand, the point is indeed to overthrow the ruler. The difference between them lies in who is doing the overthrowing, and whether they mean simply to take control of the regime or to demolish it and put some other regime in its place.

We’ve discussed before the selectorate model of regimes, in which a subset of the populace is the selectorate, meaning that they could possibly be part of the ruling coalition. In a coup, members of the selectorate decide to replace the current ruler with another one better to their liking, usually so that they themselves have more power within the new ruling coalition. However, they typically do not want to destroy the structures of the government in their coup; rather, coups typically happen swiftly, aiming to paralyze the ruler’s supporters long enough for the plotters to seize the ruler’s person, and then declare their victory a fait accompli. (This is why in most modern coups, the coup plotters will try to capture the country’s media stations—both to present the impression of overwhelming control, and to prevent regime loyalists from coordinating a response.) Then, after a bit of reshuffling and the odd loyalty purge, the bureaucracy and the army are meant to fall in line, and life will go on.

For a coup to work, the ruler and perhaps large parts of his ruling coalition would have to have weak legitimacy and little loyalty among the military; that way, few will object too much if they are replaced. However, the selectorate itself should either still have prestige in society or at the very least enough raw power to stay on top. So for example, if King Gunther the Mad were quietly removed to an asylum by a cabal of noblemen, and replaced by his infant son Rudolph the Tiny (with Chancellor Grise acting as regent, of course!), the plotters might settle scores with a few of Gunther’s supporters; but fundamentally, they do not challenge the idea that noblemen should rule society. Why would they? They are noblemen themselves!

In a coup, the government might change, but the regime persists—the system of elites and state institutions that sustains the power of the government. This is not the case in a revolution. Here, the regime itself has decayed so badly that a broad popular uprising is able to sweep it away entirely. Old elites are dispossessed or killed, old justifications for state power become obsolete; a new group of elites arises at the head of the revolutionary mass, claiming power. 

In a revolution, the old selectorate is replaced by a new selectorate, justified by a new principle of legitimacy (the new selectorate might nevertheless include some of the same people as the old one, but not always). All the old relations between classes and social groups are upended, and new relations form. This is the distinguishing mark of a revolution in the comparative-politics sense. (Which is part of why I prefer to think of the American Revolution as more of a secession; yes, the idea of breaking free of the king was fairly novel, but within American society it was the existing elites who took over.)

For a revolution to succeed, the entire elite stratum has to be losing its grip. In pre-revolutionary France, for example, the French monarchy was deeply in debt and had ceded much of its authority to tax farmers, who harshly oppressed the populace. Worse, the nobility had largely retreated into decadence instead of paying attention to the society around them, where dangerous new ideas about democracy and enlightenment (not to mention the execrable Rousseau, whose philosophy set the stage for modern totalitarianism) were taking hold among the growing middle class, inspired by the example of the United States. A few nobles even became important revolutionaries, such as the lamented “Philippe Égalité,” otherwise known as Louis Philippe II, Due d’Orleans. (This is a common pattern in revolutions: their leaders are often part of the old elite, usually embittered with the old regime and upholding new ideals, or marginalized and seeking more power or personal meaning as part of a revolutionary vanguard.)

Importantly, because the regime is falling apart, several different types of revolutionaries usually spring up to fill the void—and they may not like each other much. In the 1979 Iranian Revolution, not only Khomeinist Islamists rose up but also communists, trade unions, liberals, and business groups. Indeed, Khomeini’s faction seemed to be among the weaker ones, and few expected that they would end up taking power. However, if all of the state’s institutions crumble, power ends up in the hands of whoever is most ruthless. The initial hopes of a new age of Persian freedom were dashed by the rise of Khomeini, who quickly massacred the non-Islamist revolutionaries and imposed a brutal theocracy.

Similarly, the initial group of humanists and liberals who led the French Revolution were quickly displaced by vicious absolutists like Robespierre, driven by fantastic visions of a perfect society and willing to spill rivers of blood to get there. Before long, the overthrow of the monarchy, the nobility, and the Church (the old elites) became only the first stage of a ruthless war by the new French state against its own citizens, where today’s ruling clique became tomorrow’s victims of the guillotine. (You can read a fascinating account of one dimension of the revolutionary madness in the free book Fiat Money Inflation in France—which is also interesting in its own right because of when it was written, when it was republished, by whom, and in what context. But I digress.)

Revolutions usually end badly, because the idealists who begin them are usually replaced by ruthless murderers who smell the chance for power and take it. A similar process, although slower, can happen in the course of some longer revolts such as secessions or violent contention; the history of the Autodefensa movement in Mexico is a good example. (In the famous phrase of Eric Hoffer, “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”) To me, it seems that the only way to reliably defend against the ascension of the vicious is for the rebels to build strong institutions of governance early, and to sustain them over the course of the revolt. This, I think, is the main reason that the American Revolution was so successful in the long run: because the colonial legislatures had a long heritage and political tradition that could resist the rise of extremism. Gestures toward a true revolution such as Shays’ Rebellion never got past the stage of violent contention, and were quickly put down.

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Authors can consider questions such as: What is the goal of the rebels? Is the regime stable enough to defend itself? Are things likely to snowball out of control and become much larger? Who among the rebels is most ruthless, and would they impose themselves on the others? Is this revolt a contest between different groups of elites, or between the elites and groups out of power? Do any of the elites join the rebels anyway? Do the rebels have a competing political principle to justify their rule instead of the existing regime, or several conflicting principles?

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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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(This post has been retroactively made part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series.)

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.