Counterrevolution

How Revolutions Die

James H. Meisel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351525572
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The flow and counter flow of revolution and counterrevolution have become the norm of the twentieth century. In this fascinating and well-rounded volume, the author illuminates the revolutionary process as it has developed from antiquity to the present day, from the vantage points of political science, history, and sociology.

Meisel's work is presented in the form of twelve absorbing episodes in the history of Western civilization. His remarkable for the detail with which he approaches a subject often difficult to define and even more difficult to explain. He suggests a new and highly useful perspective of history by viewing it as a process of revolution and counterrevolution and their transitional stages. As it is the nature of revolutions to fall short of their objectives and to enjoy only a brief heyday that becomes the stereotype accepted by posterity, the author emphasizes their antithetical closing phases--whose lessons posterity tends to forget.

Meisel's belief is that second-echelon figures teach us more about the natural process of revolution than the atypical "men of destiny, " and he illustrates his account with many portrayals of comparative unknowns who lived through all the stages of revolution and counterrevolution. But revolutions can also be aborted or be preceded by counterrevolutions, as Meisel demonstrates by enlightening analyses of Mussolini's coup d'utat, the origins of the Spanish Civil War, and General de Gaulle's defeat of a potential army insurrection in behalf of French Algeria.

In this profound and wide-ranging work, Meisel achieves an admirable balance between theory, action, and biography. The result is a unique survey of revolutionary history, in which a sophisticated thinker provides on almost every page a deepening understanding of the problems of revolution for the scholar and student of political processes, political theory, and comparative politics. The reader with a lively interest in the modus operandi of history will also find this book compelling reading.

1 The Action and the Actors

Revolutionology

Even though we know that we should not expect a century to coincide with a historic period, we still tend to do so. We call the eighteenth century the Age of Reason, only to be thrown by the non sequitur of the French Revolution; surely it did not turn out to be what the Voltaires and Diderots—and even the Rousseaus—had wanted and expected.¹ To fit that explosive surprise into the scheme of an ordained advance to ‘‘higher and higher heights,” the latter-day philosophers of history had to resort to Hegelian dialectics and to introduce the laws of contradiction and the concept of the sudden leap.

The nineteenth century is celebrated as the age of liberalism but also known as the epoch of the industrial revolution. Few contemporaries paid attention to the antidemocratic countercurrents which did not emerge until our time. Progress, liberal democracy were the idées maîtresses; the intermittent chain reactions of the so-called bourgeois revolution, the upheavals, in the wake of 1789, of 1830, 1848, and 1870, were duly noted. But nevertheless the nineteenth century is not called the age of revolution.

It is the twentieth century—as of 1914—that may receive the title, Age of Revolution, par excellence. Not only has the number of successful radical upheavals much increased, but, as the vast, still growing literature on the subject demonstrates, so has our awareness that revolution in our time is not an intermittent break of continuity, not the exception but the rule, our normal condition. Such a term as Helphand-Trotsky’s “permanent revolution,” originally coined for Marxian use, has now become common currency.

The literature concerned with revolution is of two kinds. One tries to tell the story of a revolution. If the account is sympathetic, the “great,” epic features of the revolution will emerge; if told with revulsion, as most histories of German or Italian fascism are, it will be a study in pathology. In either case, the narrative will focus on the human cadres, the conspiracies, organizations, revolutionary parties, and above all on the personalities and motivations of the revolutionary leaders.² Bertram Wolfe’s work, Three Who Made a Revolution, the pioneer study of Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin (although Boris Souvarine preceded him with his Stalin biography) is a good example of the “cult of personality” dominating the most impressive writings of this school of thought.

The other school, of much more recent date, most of it not older than ten years, although some pilot works go back to World War II and even farther, takes the factual evidence, the revolutionary story more or less for granted. Here the purpose is to understand the fundamental nature of laws assumed to underlie all revolutions. The sociologist replaces the historian; he is interested not so much in the psychology of leading men or groups of men as in the social mechanism of the revolutionary process. He is looking for the regularities controlling most irregular events.³

The dichotomy between “concrete” and “abstract” revolutionology is only a reflection of the general dichotomy afflicting a civilization of increasingly impersonal relationships for which it tries to compensate by forced repersonalization, to make the dehumanized world bearable again. The Fuehrer, Duce, Vozhd, and, in the democracies, Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Kennedy become the mediators between the collective and the individual, creations rather than creators of the popular imagination.

On this point the Marxist and non-Marxist scientists of revolution are agreed: The great man has his place in history, provided he knows how to keep his place. In fact, the Western theorist will frequently out-Marx his Eastern counterpart in playing down the imprecision of the all-too-human element. Not for him to write of Three Who Made a Revolution, for the Revolution must, by definition, have made them.

He will be right, up to a point. For Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin did not make a revolution as one might make a cake. They were expecting the upheaval, to be sure, and they prepared and organized for it. But when the revolution came, first in 1905, then in 1917, they and the leaders of the other revolutionary parties were surprised by the event and unprepared for its particular demands. They made the revolution only in the sense that once the spontaneous combustion of revolution had occurred, they then could try, unsuccessfully in 1905, and successfully in 1917, to channel and control the flow of revolutionary energies. Although their political machines had failed to start the revolution, once it had begun they thrived on its momentum until it was spent.

From Intellectual Mastery to Masterminding: Counterrevolution

Control does not at first sight seem to be the aim of Western revolutionologists. Crane Brinton’s seminal Anatomy of Revolution is one of the first contemporary ventures in the field, providing a rough model for a periodization of revolutionary history. His work has both the primitiveness and the sturdiness of a Model-T automobile. Those who followed him, with more sophisticated tools at their disposal, having absorbed both their Parsons and their Simmel, concentrated on the interplay of social-equilibrium and social-conflict theories. In this view, revolution is a mere part of a general system of change, which can be closely analyzed and even measured in terms of mass and velocity.

Many writers stop here, satisfied that they are, popularly speaking, “on top of the situation”: in intellectual, theoretical control. But from there it is only one more step to thinking about ways and means of actually controlling revolutionary situations. Indeed, much of the writing on guerrilla and “counterinsurgency” warfare, which is pouring from the presses in a seemingly unceasing stream, has the distinctly practical objectives of the manual: It is meant as a guide for action, to instruct political and military specialists how to control, or still better, to arrest, the course of revolution. Most of these studies, directly commissioned or else subsidized by government agencies, have a declared preventive purpose. The authors seem to be aware that a counterrevolution, to be successful, must itself be another revolution; that, distinct from a mere turning back of the historic clock, it partakes of the revolutionary current. Although counterrevolution moves in a different direction, it is fed by the identical hopes and frustrations as the revolution. The counterrevolutionary program competes with the panaceas of the revolutionaries. Although negating their specific means or ends, it cannot afford to be merely negative. The counterrevolution cannot win unless it weakens the hold the competition has on its adherents and presents to them objectives more attractive and—this is important— easier to realize. The counterrevolution cannot, in the age of masses, go against them. Hence the failure of the French to wean the natives of Algeria away from the revolutionary Liberation Front with anything less than the grant of complete independence or, short of that, a radical restructuring of the economy and social system. The irony of the French failure is that it was not due to ignorance. Their military men had studied revolutionary tactics; they were well aware of Mao’s “first principle”: that the red army should move among the people “like fish in the water” —in other words: the people must be on your side.

The Vietnamese situation too is, at this writing, so unpromising, because the forces trying to arrest the communist rebellion likewise have failed to draw the peasant masses to their side. But then, it is not reasonable to expect the present ruling class of Vietnam to act like revolutionaries, and though our own foreign-policy-makers sometimes seem to endorse democratic socialism abroad, they are not likely to fight a war on two fronts: against the Vietcong and the Vietnamese “establishment.”

Inasmuch as a counterrevolution usually is a reaction to a revolutionary action already in progress, it is likely to be the result of conscious intent, of a carefully mapped plan. Complete surprise of the opponent, his elimination by a coup d’état performed with lightning speed, is the identifying feature of most counterrevolutions, although they do sometimes generate spontaneously. By contrast, revolutions seem to start with what to the contemporary witness looks like a mere accident, and only afterwards comes the realization that it had been “in the cards” for a long time, that the combustible materials had only been waiting for the accidental spark to light the revolutionary pyre. But the explosion cannot be timed in advance: “Revolutions are no conspiracies. They do not erupt because a few men in disguise are plotting in some basement, or because some misguided people agitate among the soldiers at the front or scatter leaflets in the streets. That is the philistine’s idea of a revolution. What distinguishes it from a plot and a revolt is its lack of purpose. All contribute to it but without intending to. One cannot agree to make a revolution. Nor is it necessary.” ⁴

Fusion and Diffusion

In speaking of the “incubation stage” of revolutions, it is hard to avoid thinking of their outcome; the term “revolutionary situation” is fraught with a teleological fallacy. To read into a stage in which the revolutionary forces are still latent the overt form they will take in the future is the wisdom of hindsight.

We commit an even graver error in assuming that the “preconditions” of a revolution could have only one result—the one we know to have materialized. But such prediction after the event is patently unjustified. The “revolutionary situation” will, on close inspection, be found to be fraught with many conflicting possibilities. The way in which it finally unfolds is often the one least to be anticipated. Only the historicist fanatic will insist that it had been inevitable.

Shunning labels such as pre-, proto-, or ancillary revolution, let us start simply by saying: Something is going on. Something, or, rather, “a variety of things,” threatens the continuity, the orderly performance of the system. What the solution might be, how and by whom it will be found, remains for the time being a moot question. Most contemporaries may not even be aware of the problem.

A variety of things, we said, may underlie the faint malaise or the sporadic and erratic unrest which may already be exploding in such spurts of violence as mass strikes, or public meetings leading to disorders and police repression. But at that stage opposition, criticism of the system, is as yet discordant. That may be because the revolution is already in process, speedily transforming the status quo, but it is still a revolution of things, not yet of men. The human enemy is still invisible; he cannot as yet be identified. One example is the English industrial revolution in its early stage. It had its Luddites, venting their despair on the demonic new machines, but not until the factory was recognized as a mere part of a distinct political ensemble could the Chartist movement come into existence. Even then class consciousness, in Marx’s and Lenin’s sense, was still too inchoate to have the one result that would have justified the Marxian expectation: the revolution in the most developed capitalist country did not take place.

Even when “the enemy” has been identified, unification of the groups opposing him cannot be assumed to follow automatically. Peasants will not easily see eye to eye with urban workers; even the same “class” may turn out to be badly split. At an initial stage of an already overt revolution, there is yet no telling which of the contending forces will prevail. The superficial unity of the first days soon wanes, for the removal of the obstacle they all agreed upon marks also the beginning of new discontents, this time directed against their temporary brothers-in-arms. The revolutionary era of good feeling is succeeded by a rough awakening: Behind the hastily erected screen of compromise, the cleavage between ultimate aims widens, soon to reach the breaking point. The revolution now moves from its “open,” pluralistic phase into the “closed,” or monolithic, stage.⁵ Enter the Great Unifier, making an end of diffusion and achieving fusion by either attracting (by persuasion) other revolutionary groups or else eliminating them by force. Sometimes this process of elimination does not result from any purposive activity on the part of the ascending group but from natural erosion, the often noted polarization process that drives the large masses, now apathetic, from the revolutionary stage, and leaves only the extremist few to fight it out. The winning party will attempt to maintain fusion, but a new diffusion is all but inevitable. Now the revolution must be “saved” by terror, all and any opposition is declared dysfunctional, endangering consolidation. The triumphant revolution cannot allow any further revolution—at least none originating from below; to avoid this, it explains the new system as still on the revolutionary move, thus making it palatable to disgruntled old militants, as a revolution directed from above in the name of The Nation, or “the Soviet toilers.”

At this point the whole sequence has come full circle. It had started with the alienation of a small minority composed of various groups converging temporarily in order to remove the assumed causes of their discontent. Then, as alienation led to revolution, so the revolution, via the polarization and elimination of most revolutionary actors, led again to alienation, this time of the great majority.⁶ The alienators of the first part were the representatives of the ancien régime, those of the second, the new revolutionary rulers. The trend is from conspiracy to movement, and back to conspiracy again. In the opinion of the new conspirators, the revolution has not solved the problem of dysfunetionality; in fact, it may have aggravated it. This judgment may lead to two opposite conclusions: On the one hand that the revolution was not radical enough, not “carried out”; it was arrested. On the other hand, it might have gone too far, “gone off the rails” and “fallen into the wrong hands.” The first view would explain why the French revolution had to continue for another century, until the system finally equilibrated in 1875, when France adopted the constitution of the Third Republic. (Even that date may be wrong, because the system did not really function until the “Republic of the Notables” was displaced by the middle-class regime that came to power through the Dreyfus revolution of the 1890s.) The second view, rejecting the excesses of the Jacobins, confirms the perspective of the permanent French revolution, which could not resolve the problem until the initial claimant to the throne, the middle class, had overcome the thrusts and counter-thrusts of other groups presenting claims, now premature, now obsolete, and giving France two Bonapartes. (The third one may be Charles de Gaulle, which might be proof that the French revolution still continues.)

All of which is merely saying that a revolution is not necessarily progressive. It may very well be regressive, in deliberate reaction to progressive movements of the time or to reforms enacted by the government.

Another example can be found in Martin Luther. His religious revolution was directed against a regime, the Papacy, which in our sense was, if not liberal, then at least enlightened, certainly a far cry from medieval orthodoxy. Luther’s protest, like so many others that preceded it, was an attempt not to dismantle or modernize the church but to restore its early Christian purity. His break with Rome was unpremeditated; he was dismayed by the explosion it caused and horrified by the rebellious uproar of the peasants and millenniarists who rushed on where the monk of Wittenberg refused to follow.

Similarly, England’s great rebellion of the 1640s had originally been aimed not at establishing Parliament’s supremacy but at reversing the trend for absolute royal control; this trend, under way throughout Europe, had existed in England ever since the reign of James I and was there advancing rapidly in the 1630s when Charles I ruled without Parliament. The conscious aim of the rebellious leaders, Pym and Hampden, was the restoration of the—assumed—previous equilibrium between the executive and legislative branches: “King in Parliament.” But the rebellion went beyond that, overshooting the limits acceptable to those who had started it.

Conservative revolutions of this kind, intent on bringing back “the good old times,” can be so aggressive because they are based on an initial broad consensus. Almost everybody rallies when strong interests (such as, in England, those of London and the landed gentry, reinforced by Puritan dissent) identify themselves with a hallowed tradition. When the consensus fades, the time comes for the Lord Protector to step in. His historic task is twofold: first, he must consolidate the revolutionary gains until a new advance is possible, and second, in order to do this, he must obtain the broadest support possible or at least a pretense of unity. However, once the mass basis is lost beyond recall, the Lord Protector or First Secretary will have to resort to coercion. Cromwell found himself in that frustrating situation; so did Robespierre. With the difference that Cromwell died in bed while Robespierre met his own lethal “Thermidor,” both dictators presided over an “arrested revolution.” ⁷

The concept, which applies to “progressive” revolutions be they “conserv...