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Same As It Ever Was: The Future of Revolution at the End of the Century
Eric Selbin
Southwestern University
International Studies Association
March 1998
Prepared for Delivery at the 1998 International Studies Association Meeting, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. This paper was influenced by, among others, Helen Cordes, John Foran, Mark Gasiorowski, Jeff Goodwin, Michael Hickey, Karen Kampwirth, Amber Love, Misagh Parsa, Timothy Powers, Annie Richard, Ken Roberts, Sidney Tarrow, and Timothy Wickham-Crowley. Some of these people will be underwhelmed by my interpretations or disagree with them; I am most appreciative of their efforts to show me the error of my ways and thus these fine folks are obviously not responsible for my bad judgement in ignoring their wisdom and sage advice.
It's the end of the world as we know it 1 seems to be the mantra of a variety of folks declaiming, among other things, the end of history; with liberal democracy the final form of human government 2 ; the looming clash of civilizations; 3 the demise of good ol' liberal democracy; 4 and, not surprisingly, the end of revolutions, 5 their vogue passed, 6 not least in their 20th Century bailiwick, Latin America and the Caribbean. 7
The extent of these presumptions is significant if not entirely intuitive. For example, the loose talk of democratic capitalism conceals the contradictory forces at work in liberal democracies that have opted for free markets. Democratic institutions and free markets are not, in any broad historical perspective, natural allies. 8 Nonetheless, the triumph of some sort of (liberal) democratic capitalism has brought us to the retirement of non-capitalist ideologies or systems and the demise of principled attacks on the status quo, certainly phenomena such as revolution; henceforth they will serve as footnotes in capitalism's victorious march since supplanting feudalism. To the extent these continue to exist, they have been consigned to the margins of history, the province of only a very few and recalcitrant hardliners--the Cubans, the North Koreans, assorted Islamic fundamentalists who dare resist the inevitable neo-liberal tide. 9 In Latin America and the Caribbean, we are assured, neo-liberalism holds sway, and revolution is a thing of the past; any apparent instances such as this month's major defeat of the Colombian Army at the hands of the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC)--representing either inexplicable remnants of the Cold War or historical relics fallen into the hands of nefarious drug traffickers.
This paper will not endeavor to address some of the larger issues alluded to above the end of history, the fearsome coming clash of civilizations, the tragedy of liberal democracy. The contention here is that with regard to things revolutionary, things are the same as they ever were. 10 Revolution is arguably as likely, perhaps even more likely than ever before; as global gaps between the haves and the have-nots increase and neo-liberalism fails to deliver on its promise, revolution will be more likely and the advent of the New World Order (which appears neither new nor particularly orderly; the former refers to globalization which appears strikingly similar to what was once called imperialism) will likely offer more space for such activities rather than diminishing their likelihood due to an alleged lack of funds, support, etc. from the rotten commies of the world, who have more or less taken a powder. All that has changed is the perception of such possibilities among policy makers and academics, both inclined to trendiness, the former to wishful thinking we want these things to go away and the latter given to fanciful thinking, remaking the world. 11 Real people in the real world will continue to struggle for justice and dignity regardless of whether we choose to recognize it as such, whether we define it as revolution. While revolution may have lost its teleological dimension, 12 I suspect that in that place a thousand flowers may bloom; the question that thus remains is whether it is still useful to define these phenomena as such and whether we will continue to encounter them.
Canon, Tradition, Revision
We are nowhere near the end of history in any meaningful sense; rather, for the immense majority of humanity, billions of poor and exploited, history conceptualized thus has not even begun. The intensity and immediacy of our age has resulted in the failure to appreciate the longue durJe, a point we will return to later. And the notion that the period of 1989-1991 represents some sort of endpoint which began in 1789 is hard to justify (except perhaps in the sense of teleos noted above); since the end of World War II, there has not been a single day in which there was not an armed revolutionary process underway somewhere recently invoked a Dutch study that found that in 1995 of the 58 significant armed conflicts underway, 57 were internal many of them wars of independence or regional autonomy, or contention for state power. 13 And in many cases these groups and others like them, perhaps as many as 268 (Gurr)--share the sort of radical visions, the dramatic notions of fundamentally transforming their societies that we associate with revolutionary processes. For these people, and others, revolution remains a meaningful and powerful option by which they might reshape their world. Which leads to the next point: with apologies to Mark Twain, John Foran, Karen Kampwirth, and I are doing our best to suggest that the reports of the death of revolution as a theoretical construct of use to social scientists have been greatly exaggerated, and a spate of forthcoming books and articles, including some by those who now proclaim the death of the concept, suggest we might be right. 14
The long term perhaps even short term--prospects for revolution are as alive today as ever before. While there may be less international support--although such international support has always been heavily overblown, as documents now available from the former Soviet Union and other former rotten commies make clear 15 there is more space without the intense bipolarity of the Cold War years and therefore more permissiveness (although revolutionaries have rarely if ever sought permission). Moreover, the primary causes of revolution in most every conceptualization of the term, with apologies for some gross generalization on a heated debate, remain profoundly extant: it is a time of great global change (replete with potential for systemic upheaval), people are hungry and resent the widening gap between the rich and the poor, people are confronted by the failed promises of neo-liberalism and/or liberal democracy, and, people have a model--themselves, overflowing with historical narratives of rebellion and revolution and the possibilities inherent in creating a new world--and opportunity, as everyone struggles to define and decipher the (not-so)new world (dis)order.
A surprising number of people under an array of circumstances have left the private space of their homes and fought in public space for public goods in pursuit of private desires. 16 How and why they cross that threshold from the inside to the outside in an effort to transform their world remains the central puzzle for us all. Students of revolution need to take seriously the notion that theories of revolution are rooted in and driven by individuals and the culture that they create and transmit. This occurs primarily through the mechanisms of collective memory, symbolic politics, and the social context of politics they create. 17 As long as people(s) confronted with profound inequities and unable to redress their grievances through the system extant articulate compelling stories with engaging and empowering plots, revolutions will be made.
If You Have Ghosts, Then You Have Everything 18
Collective memory, symbolic politics, and the power and potential of that tool kit in the social context of politics is critical to our understanding of the state and future of revolution. We moderns, Mayerfeld Bell has suggested, despite our mechanistic and rationalistic ethos, live in landscapes filled with ghosts. 19 While Mayerfeld Bell has a slightly different notion of ghosts the sense of the presence of those who are not physically there 20 than I mean to employ here, there are critical meeting points. The first is that, despite what might be deprecatingly referred to as cultural phenomoenology, 21 the way(s) in which we construct history and our understanding of it is heavily peopled, populated by the constructs we put there and how we understand them; places both real and imagined are personed. 22 People tell and retell stories of resistance and rebellion, stories which are imbued with great meaning, freighted with import and full of ghosts of the past who still haunt and perhaps interact with our present. Thus people outside of Cuernavaca, Morales, Mexico who speak of revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata murdered in 1919Bin the present tense still.
Which relates to the second meeting place. Mayerfeld Bell cites Griswold's compelling estimation that the meanings attributed to any cultural object are fabrications, woven from the symbolic capacities of the object itself and from the perceptual apparatus of those who experience the object. 23 While I appreciate McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly's concern that some of us run the risk of broadening conflict until, in Hegelian fashion, all politics becomes enmeshed in meaning, 24 I think Griswold captures something profound and important: There is, apparently, an old Andean tradition, specifically female, which conceives of history as a woven cloth; it consists in recognizing the warp and weft, the texture, the forms of relationships, in knowing the back from the front, the value and significance of the detailed pattern, and so on. In other words, we are trying to read in the book of life that which has never been recorded in written form; we are attempting to capture the image brought to mind and revealed in the moment of the interview before it is lost again to silence. 25 The point is that all of our understandings are derived from who and what we are, particularly as revealed by the stories we tell and the ideology and ideas that they reflect, facets deeply embedded in the culture(s) we create.
What both of these elements mean, in part, is that we not only have to pay attention to people and the stories that they tell, but that we have to appreciate the context in which they tell them. What this means in addition, then, is a recognition that many of the world's people live in a time of their own 26 a time which is far more acutely mythological as opposed to chronological. 27 Nowhere is this more evident than when the EZLN's Commandante Ramona notes that her people have struggled for five hundred years and more and will think nothing of struggling for five hundred more years or longer. While such phrasing seems little more than rhetoric to many, I would contend it reflects a different understanding of both time and place, of a world that is, perhaps, just outside of our usual social science and/or rationalistic realm. It is in this sense, as I will touch on below, that an alien concept such as magical realism a literary concept commonly associated with some Latin American and Caribbean literature may be of some use in understanding what in the context of the New World Order might be seen as magical revolutions.
While North Africa Algeria is particularly intriguing--may be the most compelling case, we need look no further than Latin America and the Caribbean with the region's nearly five hundred year old tradition of rebellion and revolution 28 to find the revolutionary situations of today--there are guerrilla movements operating in at least Bolivia, Colombia, Mexico and Peru--and tomorrow, especially as the increasingly less than democratic procedures used to implement neo-liberal reforms have done little or nothing to promote the social welfare of profoundly impoverished populations. More people in Latin America and the Caribbean live in poverty today than did twenty years ago, according to the executive secretary of the United Nations Commission on Latin America and the Caribbean, the levels [of poverty] are still considerably higher than those observed in 1980, while income distribution appears to have worsened in virtually all cases. 29 The numbers remain simply staggering: nearly half the region's 460 million people are poor--an increase of 60 million in one decade. Meanwhile, the number of Latin American billionaires rose from six in 1987 to 42 in 1994, a figure that is widely reported and resented. 30 The social and economic deprivation is stultifying. And political reforms not only have yet to make meaningful differences in the material conditions of people's everyday lives but have failed to transform their ideological conditions either and as a result undercut the very democratic processes it is claimed that they portend.
It is important not to exaggerate. Democracy--specifically Western democratic procedures--has been far more successful in Latin America and the Caribbean this go around; democracy is certainly wider--if not necessarily deeper--than in any of the previous cycles. During the 1980s the trend toward democracy was strong and steady; almost every country in the region had a free, open, and fair election, a norm that has held firm over the last decade. While one election does not a democracy make, most of these countries have had more than one election and have even witnessed the peaceful transfer of power between opposing parties. In a region notoriously cool toward democratic procedures and the relinquishment of office, these are no small feats. Equally striking has been the attention and at least nominal commitment to, if not respect for, human rights and dignity and some of the tangible efforts made in these areas.
Yet even a cursory examination of the state of the hemisphere shows that meaningful democratic practices remain weak. Few of these democracies are inclusive, based instead on elite pacts and the continued marginalization of the region's indigenous population, and there have been notable setbacks over the last ten years: the autogolpe, dubbed a Fujicoup, in Peru; the coup in Haiti; the popularly supported coup attempts in Venezuela; Paraguay's non-coup; 31 Ecuador's constitutionally dubious congressional coup (in which the military served as final arbiter and king maker), and continuing popular calls for a coup in Panama; the role of Guatemala's military in first supporting then destroying an effort to emulate the Fujicoup with a Serranazo; intimations of continuismo by Fujimori in Peru and Menem in Argentina; and ominous noises from the military and its partisans in both Brazil and Chile, where General Pinochet has moved into the Senate. As for human rights, while the generals are back in their barracks, they have left their legacy and retain their minions. A palpable sense of justice has not yet taken hold in much of the region and death squads remain active in a number of countries, most notably in El Salvador, Peru, Guatemala, and Brazil, and resurgent in others. While democracy in Latin America and the Caribbean is arguably institutionalized, although I would be remiss not to note that countries across the region find themselves with corrupt and ineffective judiciaries, weak and often aimless political parties, subservient legislatures, and militaries that remain out of the reach of civilian control, the instantiation of democracy, democratic consolidation, remains elusive. 32
The ever more apparent failure of neo-liberalism to redress the grievances of the region's poor and dispossessed and the resurgent death squads of an apparently vacuous right presents the region's progressive forces a historical moment into which they might step. Again, it is important not to exaggerate. Just as the advent of neo-liberalism was driven at least in part by the paucity of credible alternatives for solving the wide-spread economic failures which had become endemic to Latin America and the Caribbean, the region's revolutionaries have not produced a markedly better record for confronting the monumental inequities that are commonplace throughout the region. Profound political, economic, or social transformation anywhere in the region has remained elusive for all sides. But if revolutions have not created the utopia that some perhaps unrealistically dreamed of, neither did it leave the world unchanged. Thus while armed revolution has declined for the moment, it seems premature, at best, to sound the death knell for either the concept of revolution or the revolutionaries of Latin American and the Caribbean who remain.
But will revolution as we are used to it be the path they take? Social movements seem to have center stage at this point, enabled and ennobled by transnational issue networks that have clearly had real influence. And communalism, especially related to indigenous peoples, continues to expand. Associations around gender, ecology, and religion appear vibrant. But successes to date are shallow and few and frustration seems to be mounting. The potential and possibility of revolutionary activity as a plausible method of redressing the grievances of millions of people in the region remains real. Real too is the extent to which the modern revolutionary mythos-the commitment to political, economic, social, psychological, and cultural justice-resonates with embattled and embittered populations whom the global tide of neo-liberalism is drowning, driving and inspiring people to seek to change the material and ideological conditions of their everyday lives. It strikes me as extremely unlikely that the current lull (in relative terms) in what might be considered revolutionary activity will last. Although very uncomfortable with the deterministic undertones, I am reminded of Thomas Jefferson's dictum that revolutions are as inevitable in the political world as storms in the natural; the people of Latin America and the Caribbean will create their future with the tool-kit their culture provides them and revolution remains a ready tool.
A Few Words About Revolution
Over two hundred years ago, the French revolution provided the paradigm for future revolutionaries--advancing the new cause of democracy in the very belly of the beast, offering the world the powerful ideals of liberty, equality, fraternity; the Rights of Man (sic); and the sovereignty of the people, principles that stand yet and created the revolutionary tradition that has dominated since and may yet. In the second half of the 20th Century, the victory of the Chinese revolution proved the ability of committed social revolutionaries working in the countryside to weather two world wars and countless defeats. Ten years later, in 1959, the Cuban revolution managed to both inspire the rise of the revolutionary option for the peoples of the Third World and fascinate scholars and intellectuals in the West. In the 1970s the myriad of Third World revolutionary movements reinvigorated or inspired by the Cuban revolution began to mature across three continents; 1979 witnessed major revolutions in Grenada, Iran, and Nicaragua.
Nonetheless, today the legacy of the French revolution is ever more ambiguous, albeit still shrouded in the quasi-mythical stature in which it is held, buffeted about by an ever growing array of politicians, battered and beaten by its most prominent contemporary scholars, Francois Furet and his galaxy who have sought to reconceptualize the French revolution as more or less another day at the office in the unfolding drama that is France. 33 In China the headlong rush into the worst excesses of free-market capitalism while retaining a brutal authoritarian structure has faded the successes revolutionaries there did achieve. Approaching forty, the Cuban revolution no longer needs to trumpet its successes 34 and Fidel Castro is a somewhat respected elder statesman (or perhaps simply a historical curiosity) in Latin America and the Caribbean; albeit one holding on too long and perhaps thereby endangering the very legacy he may have hoped to bequeath. And the generation of 1979? The revolution in Grenada survived a scant four years before a spectacular immolation aided and abetted by the U.S. Government; Iran's revolution fairly quickly--and brutally--turned away from its leftist inclinations 35 and focused attention on the Islamic World, seeking to resurrect a bygone, Islamic-dominated era; and beyond the perhaps idiosyncratic argument that events have proved the success of that country's revolutionary process, it is hard to claim Nicaragua a success story. 36
Revolutions, as I belabor elsewhere, are distinct processes 37 --they are not, pace McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly and others, social movements plus, they are not protest cycles plus; 38 cycles of organizing, uprisings, and violence do not simply on occasion beget revolutions among their other effluvia. 39 While all such events and processes may of course segue into or occur within the larger social revolutionary processes, they rarely, if ever, are revolutionary in and of themselves and have neither the staying power nor the domestic or international impact we have come to associate with revolutionary, especially social revolutionary, processes.
Claiming the distinctiveness of revolutions is not meant to deny the importance or significance of clearly related phenomena such as cycles of protest, social movements, coups d'etat, or rebellions. Such events and processes clearly have resulted in significant socio-political change and often leave lasting legacies within their community and on occasion their society. Yet over two hundred years after it began, the French revolution remains a focal point of controversy in France and elsewhere, battled over in academic circles and claimed by revolutionaries across four continents. Approaching ninety, the bases of the Mexican revolution remain relevant and in play in Mexico and throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. Debates over the Russian revolution some eighty years after its initiation remain complex, convoluted, and earnest around the world. Almost forty years after its triumph, the Cuban revolution still manages to evoke intense feelings on many sides in a myriad of places.
As the above examples suggest, revolution clearly denotes more than a simple transition. The term implies that, first, revolutionaries acquire control of the state structures and, second, in the period after they will seek to fundamentally transform at least some major facet(s) of society. It is the latter, the devotion to the creation of a new orientation for society, rather than the former, acquisition of state power, which defines the great revolutions. Social revolution thus refers to those relatively rare cases that include conscious efforts--this is not to deny the obvious profusion of concomitant unintended consequences as well--by at least an active minority of the participants to profoundly transform the entire society.
Thus, Arendt argues, the course of history suddenly begins anew, that an entirely new story, a story never known or told before, is about to unfold. 40 People, she avers, believe that they are agents in a process which spells the end of the old order and brings the birth of the new world. 41 In the estimation of Collins, the rare elation that accompanies a revolutionary uprising is probably due to there being no apparent boundary between one's own micro-situation and that prevailing anywhere else; 42 as formulated by Sewell with regard to France 12-23 July 1789, an extraordinary period of fear, rejoicing, violence, and cultural creativity that changed the history of the world. 43 In seeking to explain 200 years later what was so revolutionary about the French revolution, Darnton refers to possibilism, 44 evoking the nineteenth-century French historian, Michelet, who said of France in 1789: On that day everything was possible...the future was present...that is to say time was no more, all a lightening flash of eternity. 45 People find themselves presented with what seems like boundless opportunities to reshape their world and by extension themselves. While the heuristic provided by the French revolution may no longer serve us well although this remains to be seen who is really prepared to claim that people will no longer seek to transform themselves and their world?
Toward a New Vocabulary for Revolution
Attempting to link the future of revolution in Latin America and the Caribbean with the literary concept associated with the Latin American and Caribbean literary concept of magical realism is perhaps not intuitive and it is not at all clear to me that it works; Franco points out that Magic realism, the term coined by Alejo Carpentier in the 1940s, has become an advertising gimmick, a word synonymous with exoticism; 46 Cabrera Infante denies that this was Carpentier's term or is the appropriate term or even Latin American. 47 The use here was prompted by Kapu-ci'ski's brief description of Latin America: fact is mixed with fantasy here, truth with myth, realism with rhetoric. 48 Thus a magical revolution is meant, however inelegantly, to invoke a magical realism, the literary style denoted by blending fact and fiction.
There is, in some sense, a recurring plot line with regard to revolutions in Latin America and the Caribbean: revolutions happen, practically part of the region's romantic flora and fauna. 49 Moreover, as Snchez Lira and Villarreal point out, we all know that many North American leftist intellectuals have a tendency to romanticize the violent social processes south of the border. It seems that, for them, we will always be curious and exotic subjects in need of redemption. 50 Certainly North American and European scholars have displayed such a penchant since the Mexican revolution and popular fascination in those regions with the Mexican revolution and especially the heroic presentations of Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata and certainly since the Cuban revolution and the mythologizing of Che, a process which thirty years after his death appears apace, even renewed. Yet Mexico's modern Zapatistas, the Zapatista Army for National Liberation (EZLN) consciously sought to evoke the romanticism of revolution in choosing their name; it was Zapata, after all, who is credited with declaring that it was better to die on one's feet than live on one's knees, 51 a phrase rivaled in its romanticization of revolution only by Che's proclamation that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love.
Peru: "Deng Xiaoping, Sonofabitch" and The Ghost of Tdpac Amaru
In 1980, at the same time Peru ended twelve years of military dictatorship and returned to civilian rule, people in the capitol of Lima awoke one morning to find dead dogs strung up from traffic lights and lamp posts with placards proclaiming a variety of slogans relating to internal Chinese politics of the time; Deng Xiaoping, Sonofabitch was a particularly popular placard. The magical realist world of the Communist Party of Peru, most commonly known by its nickname Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), had arrived. 52
Sendero is unique among Latin American revolutionary movements. While there are any number of issues we could explore, let me just mention a few here: Sendero's disdain for allies internal or external, 53 the significant role played by women in both the rank and file and the leadership of the organization, and the enshrinement of violence sort of buckets of blood approach which they see as in line with the French Revolution via Saint Just and Rabat St. Etienne whose intellectual heirs they claim to be and Mao's Cultural Revolution and Pol Pot's Cambodia, both of whom are seen as having failed to go far enough. It is a surreal crowd.
The Revolutionary Movement Tdpac Amaru (MRTA) starts from a much more familiar place, invoking Che and the Cuban Revolution, Andean revolution, and Uruguay's Tupamaros, especially in their Robin Hood phase...but they too have their with magical realist allusions. Manco Inca's rebellion against the Spanish occupiers in 1536 lasted until 1572, when his last surviving son, Tdpac Amaru was captured and beheaded. In 1780, Tdpac Amaru II, along with Tdpac Katari in Bolivia, spearheaded the Great Andean Rebellion until his capture and quartering by the Spanish. Fused in popular memory, these Tdpac Amaru's became the basis for a variety of folktales and legends as well as other revolutionary movements in the 1920s and 1960s before the emergence of the MRTA. Primarily the focus of this version of Tdpac Amaru has been the seizure of state power and the promise of social justice.
Mexico: Pre-Modern/Post-Modern Zapatistas and Guevarist Modernistas
Even as the instantiation of the new world order was in process and the ink still drying on assorted triumphalist declarations of the end of history, the end of revolution, Mexico's Zapatista Army for National Liberation (EZLN) seized headlines in January 1994 with a decidedly revolutionary looking event that generated a flurry of discussion about what it means to be revolutionary in the new world order. Focusing less on conventional revolutionary targets such as the acquisition of state power--the EZLN presented war as performance with its non-leader leader, Subcommandante Marcos, as the consummate performancero, his persona was a carefully crafted collage of twentieth-century revolutionary symbols, costumes, and props borrowed from Zapata, Sandino, Che, and Arafat as well as from celluloid heroes such as Zorro, and Mexico's movie wrestler, El Santo. 54 Marcos, it seems, owes as much to Groucho as Karl, to John as Vladimer.
While this may have led the New York Times (and others) to declare him the first postmodern guerrilla leader 55 and the uprising the first rebellion of the 21st Century, Marcos' accouterments--the mask and pipe, the bandoliers with ammunition that rarely if ever matched the weapon in hand--and demeanor are remarkable modern and even, in some sense, decidedly premodern, evocative of some of the region's millenarian/chiliastic movements of a hundred years ago. 56 A sense reinforced by the perspective of their Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle that set their uprising in a tradition at least 500 years old and with allusions to struggles even older. Reading their documents and considering their demands, however, there seems little question that the EZLN are self consciously a piece with the decidedly modernist sensibilities that their intellectually (and emotional) compatriots espoused in France over two hundred years ago.
The EZLN has certainly consciously played the romanticism card, not only in their choice of name, as noted above, but in their decision to largely renounce violence, in the intentional marketing, if you will, of El Sub, Commandante Ramona, and the quasi-mythical Clandestine Revolutionary Committee-General Command (CCRI-GC) whose command they and others operate under, and in their denial of any vanguard party and contention that it is not state power that they seek, although here again they sound positively modernist, calling upon civil society to do so Rostow, Huntington, et al. would be proud. Their vision appears to be one of a retrofitted Mexico simultaneously modernized and antiqued. 57 The EZLN may offer us, as Foran suggests, a new and hopeful model of revolutionary change 58 -- we will see.
The People's Revolutionary Army (EPR) are arguably classic Cuban-style Latin American revolutionaries; their June 1996 Manifesto of Agua Blancas announced their intention to overthrow the government by arms and bring people's democracy and social justice to Mexico, led by a vanguard party. The EPR is a merger of 14 smaller groups, akin in this sense to organizations such as the FSLN in Nicaragua and the FMLN in El Salvador; the most important of these groups appears to be the armed wing of the early 1970s leftist group Party of the Poor (PROCUP), perhaps the regions only remaining focistas. The EPR's vision of state socialism imposed form the top by a revolutionary elite does read more like Stalinist North Korea than I suspect they would like to hear, but overall the tone and the project are familiar ones; certainly the Mexican government has responded to them in the familiar way in Latin American a real contrast with their granting combatant status to the EZLN and willingness off and on to negotiate with them. It is interesting too to note that the EZLN rejected the EPR's offer to link militarily and that the EPR's response was to note that we fight for power...not...to negotiate with a government which assassinates people. 59
Conclusion: Not So Magical Revolutions in a Decidedly Magical World
The end of the 20th century, often referred to as the century of revolutions, finds us at a time and in a place redolent of a magical realist novella replete with forking paths, mystical spirits, and things not what they seem: the co-occurrence of realism with the fantastic, the mythic, and the magical seems commonplace. And it is the commonplace which most merits our attention. As Markoff suggests, if we are to seize the moments of social creativity, we need to study the messy details of historical processes and not just the grand trends. 60 While we may have seen the last revolutionary conflict of the Cold War era-[an era opened by the Allied invasion of Russia during its revolution 61 ]Band arguably marked the end of a cycle of at least nominally Marxist-Leninist-Maoist revolutions that began in October 1917 [if not 1848 or 1871...hmmmm, how do we date all this and what does it mean that such groups are still extant?], does anyone really believe that the assorted events and processes identified by at least three (four?) generations of scholars of revolution and innumerable generations of revolutionaries will disappear? While Tdpac Amaru in various guises may reappear from the dead, from the mists of the jungle and time, a different person or persons occupying the same space, echoing Marcos' contention that behind the ski masks are different Marcoses--Marcoses creating neuroses for the Mexican government?--reality for most remains largely the same.
Carpentier suggested that in the cultural universe of Latin America the prevalence of myth, magical practices and diverse cosmogonies facilitate the expression of the marvelous in everyday life. 62 What must seem more magical, more marvelous, than the possibility of creating a new life, a new world? The stretch is not entirely unreasonable. Often imbued with a mythic resonance, the story of most revolutionary processes in Latin America and the Caribbean have a highly fanciful semblance to reality but matched by a marked, if vague, feeling of surrealistic authenticity.
Are we at the end of history? Hardly. The end of revolutions as we know them? Perhaps, certainly if by revolution we mean a process which accords neatly with the great revolutions of the past two hundred plus years. But the pronouncement of the end of revolutions might be news to those in the mountains of Latin America and the Caribbean as well as parts of Africa, Asia, and Oceania. You don't have to be Fellini to figure this out. I concur here with Goldfrank, who has argued that we are clearly in a period in which the century-plus of Marxism [I'd amend to Marxist-Leninist] as a world movement and a set of world parties has ended, and the new overarching vision has barely begun to be enunciated. [Yet] Earth-destroying, militaristic, patriarchal, racially inflected capitalism continues to generate mind-numbing inequalities and dangers to human livelihood. 63 In seeking to resist, rework, and reform their lives, there is every reason to think that revolutions will persist, perhaps in forms we have yet to consider, made by real people living in a real and at times surreal world.
Notes:
Note 1: REM, It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine), Eponymous, 1988. Back.
Note 2: Francis Fukuyama, The End of History, The National Interest, vol. 16 (Summer 1989); see also, Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Avon Books, 1993). The end of history Fukuyama proclaims is denoted by the triumph of liberal democracy and free-market principals, not necessarily in that order. Back.
Note 3: Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the New World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). Back.
Note 4: Fareed Zakaria, The Rise of Illiberal Democracy. Foreign Affairs, vol. 76, no. 6 (November/December 1997). Back.
Note 5: Robert Snyder, The End of Revolution? (San Diego: ISA, 1996); Arthur Gilbert, Revolution, War, Genocide: The Assault on the Idea of Revolutionary Progress (Toronto: International Studies Association, 1997); Jeff Goodwin, Is the Age of Revolution Over? (Guadalajara: Latin American Studies Association, 1997). Back.
Note 6: Forest Colburn, The Vogue of Revolution in Poor Countries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). Despite the other song references contained herein, this is not meant to either invoke or evoke Avoguing as immortalized by Madonna (19XX) several years back.... although there may in fact be a connection worth pondering between the fascination as revealed by the song with posing and both the issue of guerrilla poses (see, for example, the discussion of Subcommandate Marcos below) and the many guerrilla poseurs, most notoriously European and North American students in the 1960s/1970s. Amber Love has recently pointed out to me that Madonna co opted (exploited?) this style of dancing from the bath houses built by gay men in New York years before when the drag queens held voguing contests. Voguing represents a whole complex world in and of itself, little or none of which made the transition to the mainstream despite the success of the song redolent, it seems to me, of the very process by which non-revolutionaries appropriate the trappings of revolutionary commitments without embracing the reality. Love recommends bell hook's piece about the white upper class lesbian who directed Paris is Burning; hooks expresses her skepticism and criticizes not only the narratives that made it possible for Madonna to do what she did and the hidden consequences for the people who originated the concept of her actions and the "reality" of their lives but also the imperialist/ racist/classist, etc. assumptions implicit in the way the director constructed their stories and what it meant in the first place for the cultural, in theory, exchange, but really conquest, she would probably say took place. See bell hooks, Is Paris Burning, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press 1992), pp. 145 156. Back.
Note 7: Carlos Figueroa Ibarra, Shipwreck and Survival: The Left in Central America. Latin American Perspectives, vol. 24, no. 1 (January 1997): Michael Powelson, The Failed Promise of Guerrilla War in Latin America (New Orleans: Southwestern Social Science Association, 1997). Back.
Note 8: John Gray, Global Utopias and Clashing Civilizations: Misunderstanding the Present, International Affairs, vol. 74, no. 1 (January 1998), p. 154. Back.
Note 9: Some U.S. conservatives rather bizarrely include the current U.S. administration among these. For a fairly coherent example of a fairly wacky argument, see, J. Gray, The Left's Last Utopia: Amerika (sic) the Beautiful, National Review, vol. 45 no. 14 (19 July 1993). Back.
Note 10: Talking Heads, Once in a Lifetime, Remain in Light, 1980 Back.
Note 11: With regard to North American academics and their romanticization of revolution and revolutionaries, see Mongo Snchez Lira and Rogelio Villarreal, Mexico 1994: The Ruins of the Future, in Elaine Katzenberger, ed., First World, Ha, Ha, Ha! The Zapatista Challenge (San Francisco: City Lights, 1995), p. 223. This is also discussed below. Back.
Note 12: A compelling point recently made to me by Ken Roberts. Back.
Note 13: Ted Robert Gurr and Will Moore, Ethnopolitical Rebellion: A Cross Sectional Analysis of the 1980s with Risk Assessments for the 1990s, American Journal of Political Science, vol. 41, no. 4 (October 1997), p. 1079. Back.
Note 14: These include volumes by Jeff Goodwin, State and Revolution 1945-1991 (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1998), Mark Katz, Revolutions and Revolutionary Waves (New York: St. Martin's, 1997), T. David Mason, Revolution in the Countryside: Repression, Revolution, and the Rational Peasant (Boulder: Westview, forthcoming), important chapters/articles such as Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly, Towards an Integrated Perspective on Social Movements and Revolution, in Mark Lichbach and Alan Zuckerman, eds., Comparative Politics: Rationality, Culture, and Structure (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1997), as well as edited volumes by Daniel Castro, Guerrilla Warfare in Latin America (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, Inc., 1998), John Foran, ed., Theorizing Revolutions: New Approaches From Across the Disciplines (London: Routledge, 1997) and S.N. Eisenstadt and B.Wittrock, Revolutions and Social Theory . Back.
Note 15: Classic examples of the Soviet/Cuban export model of Latin American and Caribbean revolution include Mark Falcoff "Struggle for Central America," Problems of Communism vol. 33, no. 2 (1984), pp. 63-6; Henry Kissinger, Report of the National Bipartisan Commission on Central America (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1984), p. 25; and Howard Wiarda, ed., Rift and Revolution: The Central American Imbroglio (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 1984). Back.
Note 16: Eric Selbin, Revolution in the Real World: Bringing Agency Back In in John Foran, ed., Theorizing Revolutions: New Approaches From Across the Disciplines (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 129. Back.
Note 17: Selbin, Revolution in the Real World, p. 123; 130-132. Back.
Note 18: Roky Erickson, If You Have Ghosts, The Evil One 1981 Back.
Note 19: Michael Mayerfeld Bell, The Ghosts of Place, Theory and Society, vol. 26, no.6 (December 1997), p. 813. Back.
Note 20: Mayerfeld Bell, The Ghosts of Place, p. 813; emphasis in original. Back.
Note 21: Sidney Tarrow, forthcoming. Back.
Note 22: Mayerfeld Bell, The Ghosts of Place, p. 813 Back.
Note 23: Mayerfeld Bell, The Ghosts of Place, p. 831; he cites Wendy Griswold, The Fabrication of Literary Meaning, The American Journal of Sociology, vol. 92 (1987). The actual title is The Fabrication of Meaning: Literary Interpretation in the United States, Great Britain, and the West Indies and the journal number is 5 from May 1987; this particular quote is drawn from page 1079. Back.
Note 24: Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly, Toward An Integrated Perspective on Social Movements and Revolution, in Mark Lichbach and Alan Zuckerman, eds., Comparative Politics: Rationality, Culture, and Structure (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 142. Back.
Note 25: Andean Oral History Workshop (THOA)/Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, "Indigenous Women and Community Resistance: History and Memory" in Elizabeth Jelin, ed., Woman and Social Change in Latin America (London: Zed, 1990), p. 180. Back.
Note 26: Roky Erickson, She Lives (In a Time of Her Own), The Thirteenth Floor Elevators, Easter Everywhere, 1967 Back.
Note 27: Paul Mojzes, Yugoslavian Inferno: Ethnoreligious Warfare in the Balkans (New York: Continuum, 1994), p. 40. Mojzes defines this as Concepts of the past and present are so intermixed that a grievance of long ago is perceived as a present affliction. Likewise...a present action may not only vindicate but actually eradicate and reverse a past defeat. Back.
Note 28: In 1519 on the island of Hispaniola native chieftain Enriquillo took up arms against his encomendero and the colonial authorities. Castro, Guerrilla Warfare in Latin America, p. ii. Back.
Note 29: Gert Rosenthal, quoted in David Schrieberg, Dateline Latin America: The Growing Fury, Foreign Policy no. 106 (Spring 1997), p. 165. Back.
Note 30: Ibid., pp. 165-6. Back.
Note 31: Arturo Valenzuela, Paraguay: The Coup That Didn't Happen. Journal of Democracy, vol. 8, no. 1 (January 1997). Back.
Note 32: For a more in-depth exploration of this issue, see Jennifer Mathews and Eric Selbin, The Generation of Darkness: The Failure of Democratic Consolidation in Chile (Tampa: Southern Political Science Association, 1995). Democratic consolidation has become a popular catch phrase, used knowingly--if vaguely--by students of transitions/transformations to democracy to cover a multitude of contexts and processes. Most often consolidation is encountered as either synonymous or conflated with institutionalization, i.e., Consolidation of the state apparatus and state power. This is a serious mistake and fails to recognize that in any case of transition to democracy there are at least two analytically distinct processes: institutionalization and consolidation. Institutionalization is a familiar concept, a process which may be readily measured by such factors as the status or function of key government structures. Consolidation is an elusive concept, related to people's perceptions of the material and ideological conditions of their everyday lives and their relationships with each other, with the new government, even with the democratic process itself, and is not as smoothly measured as institutionalization. The process of democratization would seem to demand more than simply the reinvigoration, reordering and reconstruction of moribund institutions. Deepening democracy requires people making a commitment to democracy, a commitment that is only likely if and when democratization is reflected in their lives and the life of the society around them--a popular political culture of democracy. This is where the concept of consolidation comes into play. This distinction was first proposed in the context of social revolutionary processes in Eric Selbin, Modern Latin American Revolutions (Boulder: Westview, 1993), pp. 13-27. Back.
Note 33: It is Pierre Chaunu, a scholar not part of Furet's galaxy, who takes this notion to its most extreme with contentions, according to Kaplan, such as if one reinserted the Revolution into the progression of forty-five thousand years of history >that leaves 44,994 years that merit equally our attention. Steven L. Kaplan, Farewell Revolution: The Historians Dispute, 1789/1989 (Ithaca: Cornell, 1995), p. 31 (Chaunu is discussed pp. 25-41). For the concept and description of Furet's galaxy, see Kaplan, pp. 55-60. Back.
Note 34: There are few who begrudge the successes of the Cuban revolution, even the myriad of scholars who decry Cuba's domestic political structure. See, e.g., such hostile scholars as Rhonda Rabkin, Cuban Politics: The Revolutionary Experiment (New York: Praeger, 1991), pp. 53-5; Tad Szulc, Fidelismo, Wilson Quarterly, vol. 12, no. 5 (1988), p. 57 or Hugh Thomas, George Fauriol, and J.C. Weiss, The Cuban Revolution, 25 Years Later (Boulder: Westview, 1984), p. 56; the latter concede in a highly critical assessment that it would be churlish not to recognize some social changes in Cuba since 1959 which must be said to be positive....Some Cuban medical and educational achievements have been quite impressive. Such churlishness exists: Eberstadt describes such views as fundamentally unsound and laments that even critics of Cuba such as President Reagan's Commerce Department and the Organization of American States recognize Cuba's claims: Irrespective of their political inclinations, it seems, the consensus of virtually all informed observers is that Cuba has made model progress against disease and ignorance, those two basic scourges of low-income nations. Nicholas Eberstadt, Did Fidel Fudge the Figures? Literacy and Health: The Cuban Model, Caribbean Review, vol. 15, no. 2 (1986), p. 5. Back.
Note 35: Iran's leftist guerrilla movements, inspired in part by the Cuban revolution and particularly the writings of Che Guevara, began battling the Shah in 1963 and played a decisive role in the victory of the Iranian revolution. See, e.g., Ervand Abrahamian, the Guerrilla Movement in Iran, 1963-1977, in Haleh Afshar, ed., Iran: Revolution in Turmoil (Albany: SUNY Press, 1985). Although Iran's secular leftist groups were brutally repressed by Khomeini and driven underground by 1981, in the spring and summer of 1979 one of the most popular items in Teheran were Che t-shirts. On the attack on the left, see Valentine Moghadam, The Left and the Revolution in Iran: A Critical Analysis, in Hooshang Amirahmandi and Mahoucher Parvin, eds., Post-Revolutionary Iran (Boulder: Westview, 1988); on the t-shirts, see Amir Taheri, The Spirit of Allah: Khomeini and the Iranian Revolution (Bethesda: Adler & Adler, 1986), p. 254. Back.
Note 36: A claim I made several years ago; Selbin, Modern Latin American Revolutions. Support for this position can be found in Thomas Walker, Nicaragua Without Illusions (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, Inc., 1997), especially p. 303. Back.
Note 37: Eric Selbin, Contentious Cartography: A Response to Contentious Politics, Mobilization, vol. 2, no. 1 (April 1997). Back.
Note 38: Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow and Charles Tilly, To Map Contentious Politics, Mobilization vol. 1, no. 1 (March 1996), p. 24. Back.
Note 39: For a response to this charge, see Charles Tilly, Kings in Beggar's Rainment, Mobilization vol. 2, no. 1 (April 1997), p. 110. Back.
Note 40: Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1965), p. 28. Back.
Note 42: Randall Collins, Weberian Sociological Theory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 261. Back.
Note 43: William Sewell, Jr., Historical Events as Transformations of Structures: Inventing Revolution at the Bastille, Theory and Society vol. 25, no. 6 (December 1996), p. 845. Back.
Note 44: Robert Darnton, What was Revolutionary About the French Revolution? New York Review of Books (19 January 1989), p. 17. Back.
Note 45: Cited in Kimmel, p. 186. Back.
Note 46: Jean Franco, Remapping Culture, in Alfred Stepan, ed., Americas: New Interpretative Essays (New York: Oxford, 1992), p.179. Back.
Note 47: Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Alejo Carpentier, A Shotgun Cuban, Mea Cuba (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994), p. 386. Back.
Note 48: Ryszard KapuŃci˝ski, The Soccer War (New York: Vintage, 1992), p. 152. Back.
Note 49: See, for amplification on this topic, Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattleart, How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialism Ideology in the Disney Comic (Amsterdam: International General, 1971) or George Black, The Good Neighbor: How the United States Wrote the History of Central America and the Caribbean (New York: Pantheon, 1988). Back.
Note 50: Snchez Lira and Villarreal, Mexico 1994: The Ruins of the Future, p. 223. Back.
Note 51: We now know he lifted it from his fellow revolutionary martyr, Prxedis Guerrero. See, Ward Albro, To Die on Your Feet: The Life, Times, and Writings of Prxedis G. Guerrero (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University, 1996). Back.
Note 52:
The term came from the subtitle of their party newspaper, by the shining path of Comrade JosJ Carlos Mari
Note 53:
Some of Sendero's earliest public activities in 1980-1981 included attacks on the Soviet, Chinese, Cuban, and Nicaraguan embassies in Lima [N Manrique, Time of Fear, NACLA Report on the Americas, vol. 24, no. 4 (1990/1991), p. 29.] The Soviets had betrayed people's interests and the Chinese were capitalist-imperialist dogs, in part because the Cultural Revolution did not go far enough [the Soviets and the lament about the Cultural Revolution are from Rosenberg, Dialectic, p. 150; the remark about the Chinese is from Patrick Symmes, Out To Lunch with Sendero, The American Spectator, (1991), p. 27. ] Other Latin American revolutionaries, notably the Cubans and the FSLN in Nicaragua, have been excoriated...as petty bourgeois reformists' [Dietz, p. 132.], Castro a traitor, a revisionist servant of the United States and Guevara a chorus girl.[traitor is from Wickham-Crowley, Guerrillas and Revolution, p. 298; revisionist servant from Symmes, p. 27; Guevara from Rosenberg, p. 151.] The failure of the Nicaraguans as revolutionaries was evident in their willingness to turn over power after losing the 1990 election [Fokkema, There is No Other Way, p. 25; Rosenberg, p. 150.] Back.
Note 54:
Guillermo G\mez-PeZa, The Subcommandante of Performance, in Elaine Katzenberger, ed., First World, Ha, Ha, Ha! The Zapatista Challenge (San Francisco: City Lights, 1995), p. 90-1. Back.
Note 55:
New York Times January/February 1994. This perspective has been articulated by any number of scholars as well as folks writing in popular magazines. Back.
Note 56:
I have in mind here the Canudos rebellion at the turn of the century in Northeast Brazil. Back.
Note 57:
Raphael Samuel, Theaters of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (London: Verso, 1994), p. 70. Back.
Note 58:
See, e.g., John Foran, The Fin-de-SiPcle Revolution in Latin America: Predicting the Future From the Lessons of the Past, Third World Quarterly vol. 18, no. 5 (December 1997), pp. 813-14. Back.
Note 59:
Dan La Botz, Mexico at a Turning Point, Part 2: Deeper Crisis and Blocked Reforms, Against the Current, no. 66 (January/February 1997), p. 33. Back.
Note 60:
John Markoff, Peasants Help Destroy an Old Regime and Defy a New One: Some Lessons from (and for) the Study of Social Movements, American Journal of Sociology, vol. 102, no. 4 (January 1997), p. 1139. Back.
Note 61:
Tens of thousands of troops from Canada, Czechoslovakia, France, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, Poland, and the U.S., and elsewhere spent some three years supporting the White Army's efforts to unseat the revolutionary government; the Allied intervention in Russia was one of the major joint, multinational military operations of this century. Back.
Note 62:
William Rowe and Vivian Schelling, Memory and Modernity: Popular Culture in Latin America (London: Verso, 1991), p. 89. And it is interesting to note that the marvelous, on which twentieth-century magical realism is based, has its origins in the colonial period, and was transmitted above all by women. The transmission occurred in the gap between tactical obedience and pragmatic evasion, obedezco pero no complo (>I obey but I do not accept).... (Ibid., p. 23). From such subversive notions much may follow. Back.
Note 63:
Walter Goldfrank, Praxis, Shmaxis: Commentary on Wager, Journal of World Systems Research, vol. 2, no. 2-e (1996), p. ? Back.
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