A Revolutionary People & the Problems at Its Periphery

There are times when a determined, revolutionary section of the people emerges. It is a rare and precious thing.

by Mike Ely

I think that the success and development of a revolution rests heavily on the emergence of a “revolutionary people” and its development, renewal and maturation through different stages of a complex revolutionary process.  By revolutionary people, we have generally meant a section of the people that is, one way or another, to one degree or another, consciously for a revolutionary change — and increasingly willing to fight for that. In the great revolutions of the past, such forces have been “militant minorities” — when viewed against the whole of the population, but they have been real popular forces of many hundreds of thousands or millions, who are the core social basis for revolutionary parties, for new revolutionary ideas and for the revolution itself.

Part of the discussion of the Soviet purges (in the 1930s) is the story of the exhaustion, cooptation, demoralization and depoliticization of what had previously constituted a “revolutionary people” within the Soviet revolution. And similarly there is a story to tell, within the Chinese Cultural Revolution, about how an enthusiastic new “revolutionary people” emerged (and was “unleashed) in the early stages of the Maoist cultural revolution (1966-68) — and how the complexities of that struggle left them dispersed, bewildered, divided and unable to act as the 70s progressed, and as the capitalist roaders tightened their garrot-hold on the revolution.

In the process of a revolution there is, inherently i believe, a center and periphery — a central area (geographically and democraphically) where a revolutionary people sets the tone, influences broadly beyond their numbers, and actually reaches for the seizure of power. In Russia that was the urban working class areas of Petrograd, Moscow, and a few other major centers of revolutoinary working class activity. In China, this revolution arose from the great peasant storms of central China where the red army and the recurring red zones sprang up and spread (and connected with a broader revolutionary mood among anti-feudal and anti-imperialist intellectuals, merchants, students and workers).  In the 1960s U.S., such a revolutionary people was emerging among Black people, and those from many nationalities who were awakened and energized by that Black Liberation struggle.

And then, there is inevitably a periphery to every such historic development — edges to the zones of revolution beyond which the masses have not been touched deeply, and where the revolution walks on very wobbly legs. In some ways we can see this great storm arising in the core areas of China — and see as its epiphenomena the events of Tibet and Xinjiang (but also in Korea and the secondary revolutionary aftershock in Indochina that became the Vietnam War.)

One of the contradictions that arises from this, is the contradiction facing the revolution (the revolutionary people and their organized parties) when they feel compelled to extend revolutionary powers to, or beyond, their own periphery. Clearly it is difficult to have revolutionary popular power in areas where there are few revolutionary people — and so “the revolution” at times (and this is not just occasionally) takes the form of the entry of the revolutionary army into sharply divided, or indifferent, or hostile areas.

And you can’t have a revolution without that — new revolutionary societies require contiguous land, and a new state and defined borders. And there are inevitably whole areas within the revolutionary state where the people themselves are indifferent or hostile to the change that has happened. At best, this breaks out as some polarization (where the wealthy and most backward are hostile, but where there are even if only in weak or embryonic ways the beginnings of a mass revolutionary movement). But there have been times in history where strategic areas of territory were seized by revolutionary forces — where they felt they couldn’t just be “ceded” to the encircling reactionaries — but where the population as a whole had no real sparks of revolution or where the revolutionary movement had only the barest foothold.

Examples from Soviet history:

There were many stretches of the Soviet Union’s countryside (in the civil war and 1920s) where there were literally no communists. Often there had been sympathy among peasants for the radical land reform (“land to the tiller”) — but not always. But such unorganized and low-level support often didn’t transfer to supporting the needs of the new revolutionary state (including the supply of grain to urban areas, helping to finance industrialization, or supporting the collectivization process). So in quite a few areas (within the soviet union, the revolution appeared as something external (and even alien). And that wasn’t only in the Central Asian Muslim areas.

The most important example is western Ukraine (which was (a) very conservative, (b) rooted in agriculture that was small family farming, not big feudal estates, and (c) among the most crucial and productive breadbasket regions of the new USSR). On one level, the Soviet revolution should perhaps have “let the western ukraine go” (i.e. let it merge with Poland) — on the simple basis that the revolution was not popular or supported there. But on a different level, it was very hard — because much of Russia is a very cold and very agriculturally unproductive, and the few “breadbaskets” of the southern areas are absolutely crucial for sustaining (and increasing) an urban working class population for socialist industrialization.

Similarly, it did not matter all that much what how the complex national-grid of “Transcaucasia” felt about the Soviet revolution — for strategic reasons, the central Soviet government was not going to allow the British interventionists to control the Baku/Caspian oil fields.

In every revolution, the parties and armies built among the “revolutionary people” face the problem of emerging as (essentially) occupiers of some areas that are politically inhospitable — and where the basis for “popular agency” (and even collaboration) are weak.

If there is a powerful revolution on the western and eastern coasts of North America, and in the big industrial ‘heartland” around the Great Lakes…. it is possible to imagine that the great “empty” and mountainous areas of Nevada, Montana, Idaho etc. might well becompe part of a new socialist society — even if (by themselves) the small populations of those areas incline toward rightwing republicanism (especially among the white people there).

In such situations, the revolutionary forces have a few options:

* They can work as rapidly as possible to create and empower an “indigenous” revolutionary movement — using the many instruments available to a state and army. (Education, patronage, backing of struggle by oppressed groups, encouraging of class consciousness among the exploited, building new pro-revolutionary political networks around the structures of food distribution and production, and so on.)

* They can administer from without, in the meanwhile, bringing in cadre and resources to direct the affairs of non-supportative.

* They can slow the pace of revolutionary change — so that the new society is not imposed on the people (in ways that produce backlash, longterm resentments, etc.) In other words, there will be one pace of revolutionary change in the storm centers of the revolution (changes in education, property, social relations, laws, prisons etc.), but quite possibly a much more relaxed pace in the more backward areas. (Or, in the case of Tibet from 1949-59, a virtual freeze on the transformation of some very basic things — like the political and social dominance of the parasitic lamaist monestaries).

And again: this is not just a matter of nationalities (whether “internal” or “external”). It will be a contradiction that emerges throughout a “checkerboard” of counties, suburbs, townships, key institutions, and whole regions in any large revolution.

And then the problem becomes particularly acute, when new revolutionary forces don’t arise (within these areas) to take up and lead the transformations there (and overthrow the hegemony of the backward).

At the time of the Chinese revolution, there were no communists in Tibet. By the time of the disturbances of 1959, and the overthrow of the Dalai Lama, some communists had been trained (often from among serfs, sometimes from among former monks etc.) — but accounts question whether among them too there weren’t still a great deal of reverence for the lamaist customs and beliefs. And it proved very hard in many areas (western Ukraine is a big example) to develop revolutionary movements in time to serve the needs of the revolution. In other words, there was a dilemma in Russia’s “breadbaskets” of how to build popular revolutionary movements, if at the same time the revolution had decided to undergo neckbreak industrialization (with all the demands that raised for grain surpluses moving to the cities and new workers). The communist structure (the state, the party, the army) all appeared to the farmers as taxmen seeking their grain — and seemed unrelated to views a great many of the farmers’ had of their personal interests or of what society should be.

In short, revolution requires “popular agency” — and when that has been extinguished, the hopes for revolutionary advancement (or survival) are very dim.

But that is extremely uneven: because the enthusiastic support for the revolution varies:
a) depending on social group
b) depending on the unevenness of geography (and historical areas, like the U.S. Deep South).
c) depending on nationality (in the USSR, there were even cases where some nationalities could be generally considered “progressive” and others were rather harshly counterrevolutionary).
d) depending on what stage the revolution was at (”land to the tiller”? Sure! End the veiling of women? Ah, that’s another question.)
e) depending on the needs and methods of the core revolutionary forces.

And there is often an ongoing need to GENERATE new “popular agency” (new “revolutionary people”) — first in those areas relatively untouched by the revolutionary storm, and then throughout society at each stage of the revolution, as new polarizations and new social opposition emerge.