Essay on Revolutions ⋆ Sociology Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Revolutions have helped define the modern age, associated with the emergence of democracy, capitalism, and socialism. Inspiring attempts to make a better world, they have typically fallen short of the goals of their makers.

”Social revolutions are rapid, basic transformations of a society’s state and class structures . . . in part carried through by class-based revolts from below” (Skocpol 1979: 4). Thus the great revolutions combine deep political and socioeconomic change with mass participation, whether violently, with little violence, or even through elections. In political revolutions, social struggles change governments but not the underlying social structure.

Karl Marx saw revolutions as the product of class struggles leading to a new mode of production (feudalism to capitalism, and ultimately, to socialism). Since Marx, three main ”generations” of approaches have arisen. The 1930s ”Natural History School” identified stages through which all revolutions supposedly passed. In the 1960s, social scientists posited aggregate psychological states — frustration at relative deprivation — or rapid social changes compelling people to embrace radical ideologies. In the 1970s Theda Skocpol insisted that ”Revolutions are not made; they come” (1979: 17); her structural approach argued that the French, Russian, and Chinese monarchies could not cope with military defeat or economic pressure because of a limited agricultural base.

Since the 1990s, a ”fourth generation” of scholars has balanced structure and agency, and political, economic, and cultural factors in multi-causal models of revolution. What the causes of social revolutions are is still not settled.

Who, precisely, makes revolutions, and why? Classically, the answer was a single key class: for Marx, industrial workers; for others, peasants. Contemporary scholarship stresses the significance of multi-class coalitions of most social classes, representing ”the people.”

Recently, scholars have acknowledged the roles of women and diverse ethnic and racial groups. Julie Shayne (2004) shows how women act as ”gendered revolutionary bridges,” bringing ordinary people into the movement. People of color have been active across revolutions too. In the twenty-first century, indigenous people are leading revolutionary struggles in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Mexico’s Zapatista insurgency.

But why would people take great personal risks in revolutions that shatter the fabric of their everyday routines? Eric Selbin (2010: Revolution, Resistance, Rebellion: The Power of Story) stresses shared stories — folk tales, myths, and symbols extolling past or present resistance to oppression, turning Skocpol’s aphorism on its head: revolutions do not come, they are made by people. Jean-Pierre Reed and John Foran (2002) emphasize ”political cultures of opposition,” an amalgam of lived experiences, common understandings, and effective social networks.

The great social revolutions produced stronger, more centralized states better capable of competing economically with their rivals. Many of the twentieth century’s revolutions have considerably improved people’s lives, especially in China and Cuba.

Measured against the hopes they unleash, revolutions have generally disappointed their makers, and virtually no revolution has delivered both long-lasting economic gains and political rights.

Two factors might explain these mixed outcomes: the pressure put on revolutionary societies by powerful external enemies (often the USA), compounded by fragmentation of revolutionary coalitions, concentrating authority in the state and military. This in turn undermines economic improvements.

National revolutions will persist, since neoliberal globalization exacerbates inequality and poverty. Radical reformers and revolutionaries may take electoral democratic routes to power, as in Latin America. Both armed and peaceful resistance to foreign occupations will continue. The Zapatistas have created new forms of community governance and local economy rather than seeking national-level power. The global justice movement, organized around climate activism, communal alternatives to capitalism, and deeper participation, seeks a new form of world revolution across borders, that may bring the old revolutionary dream of social justice closer to reality. Revolutions will be with us to the end of human time, offering hopeful possibilities for humanly-directed social change.

Bibliography:

Reed, J.-P. & Foran, J. (2002) Political cultures of opposition: exploring idioms, ideologies, and revolutionary agency in the case of Nicaragua. Critical Sociology 28 (3): 335—70.
Shayne, D. (2004) The Revolution Question: Feminisms in El Salvador, Chile, and Cuba. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick.
Skocpol, (1979) States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.