Revolution, Rebellion, Resistance: The Power of Story 9781350222366, 9781848130166, 9781848130173

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Acknowledgments

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his book involved a small army; I only wish it better reflected the knowledge and talents of so many amazing people. Any errors here are all mine, and odds are those who helped tried to avert them or show me the error of my ways and were blithely ignored; I ask their forgiveness and yours. No one could have a more supportive family; my appreciation for my parents, siblings and partners, in-laws, and nieces and nephews is profound. Leery of arboreal models, thanks are long overdue to Mrs Guerin, who in 1969 in Louisiana encouraged a fifth-grader’s interest in the Cuban Revolution, and Mary Francis Ragland King, who believed in me long before I did. Henry Dietz at Texas and Greg Gullickson, Brooks Clapp, and Senator George McGovern in Washington DC helped me realize my real interests; Cecil Eubanks and Cal Jillson helped refine those at LSU. At Minnesota, my greatest debts are to Kathryn Sikkink, Brian Job, Mary Dietz, Ron Aminzade, and an extraordinary graduate student cohort; Kathryn Hochstetler remains my dearest critic. Tom Walker, John Dunn, and Jack Goldstone were generous with their time, and in Nicaragua incredible people shared their stories with me. I was fortunate early in my career to fall in with Tim Wickham-Crowley, through him John Foran and Jeff Goodwin, through them Sid Tarrow and Chuck Tilly, and (again) Jack Goldstone; somewhere Karen Kampwirth joined in – they are inspiring colleagues and I regret Chuck is not here to see this book. During a summer

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at Cornell, Sid forced me to take the French Revolution seriously and Misagh Parsa did the same for Iran. Summers in Grenada and Chihuahua, Mexico, introduced me to yet more stories of resistance, rebellion, and revolution. Southwestern University has been generous in its support through the Cullen Faculty Development Fund, Brown Distinguished Research Professor program, and University Scholar position; my thanks to presidents Roy Shilling and Jake Schrum and provosts Michael Rosenthal, Dale Knobel, and Jim Hunt. A joint appointment with the Department of Peace and Conflict Studies at Umeå University was an exceptional experience and particular thanks are due to Cindy Kite, Torbjörn Bergman, Katerina Eckerberg, Susanne Alldén, Svante Ersson, and Malin Wimelius. My thanks to Southwestern colleagues who have discussed various bits and pieces of this: Cristina Alcalde, Shana Bernstein, Daniel Castro, Suzanne Chamier, Steve Davidson, Teena Gabrielson, David Gaines, Alisa Gaunder, Traci Guliano, Georgeianne Hewett, Laura Hobgood-Oster, Melissa Johnson, Jim Kilfoyle, Lisa Leff, Erik Loomis, Maria Lowe, Thom McClendon, Helene Meyers, Jacqueline MuirBroaddus, Jimmy Smith, and Bob Snyder; Shannon Mariotti’s insights and encouragement were invaluable. Shannon Winnubst and Jennifer Suchland are family, not colleagues, and their insights, support, and encouragement the essence of love and friendship. Thanks as well to some brilliant students (some now professors): Dr Margaret Dorsey, Jennifer Mathews, Amy McKee, and Dr Jennifer Suchland; Dr Meghana Nayak and Dr Annie Richard; Jenny Carlson and Ashleigh DeSoto; Rakhee Kewada, Mary Kierst, Alison Kuo, and Brian Gingrich; Meagan Elliott. Toni Nietfeld and Callie Paige made the world’s greatest fiveminute, dozen-person film about the Paris Commune and provided vast encouragement. Zed Books is a special place. I am grateful to Ellen Hallsworth, who sought this book out, and Ken Barlow, who kindly picked up when she left off and gave the manuscript a thorough reading. Robin Gable’s deft copyediting and Lucy Morton’s typography vastly improved the book, and Professor Harald Wydra’s close, careful, and thoughtful reading was all an author could hope for. The experience of working on a long project only to discover work which covers similar ground and seems to obviate the work undertaken

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is daunting. With luck, a closer reading provides aid and sustenance for one’s project. A community of scholars stands not only on the shoulders of those before us but is steadied by those who toil alongside in pursuit of the cumulation of knowledge and holy grail of understanding. Noel Parker’s provocative Revolutions and History: An Essay in Interpreta­ tion (1999), Thomas Benjamin’s delightful La Revolución: Mexico’s Great Revolution as Memory, Myth, and History (2000), and Francesca Polletta’s compelling It Was Like a Fever: Storytelling in Protest and Politics (2006) are exactly such inspiring works. This book is dedicated with all my love, admiration, appreciation, and more to my family. The world’s two most nearly perfect human beings, Jesse and Zoe Cordes Selbin, love stories and are both, in their different ways, gifted storytellers who always wanted to ‘tell’; that they played such a key part in what you see here and make crucial cameos is a particular delight. The lovely and talented Helen Cordes has once again done more than her share of parenting, housework, and homeschooling, schlepped various places, worked more than full time, read all my work, and kept me on track. She tells great stories we all love and I remain in awe of her love and devotion.

one A prolegomenon, an apologia, and an overture

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no doubt apocryphal story, which is commonly taken to signify the end of the old and the beginning of the new, tells that on being told of the fall of the Bastille by his adviser the Duc de la Rochefoucauld, King Louis XVI of France asked ‘C’est une révolte?’, to which the clear-eyed and perceptive Duke replied, ‘Non, Sire, c’est une révolution’ (Cumberlege, 1953: 407). This is the most famous instance of the Duke’s rather remarkable prescience, though it merits note that over the years even such a redoubtable repository of ‘fact’ as the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations has been unable to resist improving the story a little. Thus, in the fourth edition, almost forty years later, the King, perhaps feeling the weight of history and his sensibilities prompted by the Revolution’s recent bicentennial, now asks ‘C’est une grande révolte?’; the Duke, now a ‘French social reformer,’ assures his liege that these events are no mere revolt but, indeed, ‘une grande révolution’ (Parrington, 1992: 411; emphases added). Mindful, perhaps, of his own aphorism that ‘there is a kind of revolution of so general character that it changes the tastes as well as the fortunes of the world’ (La Rochefoucauld, 1896: 143), the Duke drew such a distinction and, presumably in somber and sonorous tones, portentously pronounced the fall of the Bastille ‘une révolution.’1 C’est vrai – and most modern notions of revolution remain deeply in his debt. Here is a more recent story, really little more than a vignette, and doubtless also apocryphal. A student studying in Mexico City attended



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an organizing meeting where a speaker sought to communicate the commitment to struggle with a story. A reporter asked the late Comandante Ramona of Mexico’s Zapatista Army for National Liberation (EZLN), who was leaving a meeting with Mexican officials, how long the Zapatistas were prepared to fight. The diminutive woman shrugged her shoulders and replied to the effect that, since they had been struggling for some five hundred years, if they had to struggle for another five hundred years, then it was really no big deal. Is the story true? It calls to mind Steffens’s comment about a purported exchange between British Prime Minister Lloyd George and Italy’s Duce, Mussolini: ‘Authentic? I don’t know … Like so many rumors, it was truer than the records … but somebody said it, somebody who understood what it was all about’ (1931: 809). What this story conveys is that their struggle, the struggle, was operating according to another timetable in a whole different realm. During the Renaissance in what would become Italy, Burckhardt relates, a town thought to be Siena had a particularly brave and talented military leader who ‘freed them from foreign aggression.’ Anxious to reward their hero and desiring to be as generous as possible, the townspeople met daily to consider a reward appropriate enough for this great man. Having determined that even making him ‘lord of the city’ would not be sufficient, they decided to kill him so they could ‘“worship him as our patron saint”. And so they did, following the example set by the Roman Senate with Romulus.’ What is of note here, according to Burckhardt, is that it is ‘an old story – one of those which are true and not true, everywhere and no where’ (Burckhardt, 1958: 40). 2 That is, there are times when the greater or deeper truth might be arrived at whether or not the story faithfully captures ‘what really happened.’ These brief stories are different and distant, varying in scope and scale, tone and tenor, intensity and subtlety. All can be condensed to little more a critical essence, meant to capture a larger meaning and transmit a message, albeit not always the one intended: that is, what becomes of the story as it is heard and understood is beyond the control of the storyteller. Such stories define a moment that does not end, suggest that there are concepts and matters that transcend time, and remind us that, in the end, if we have nothing else, we have our stories and hence each other to rely on.

Prolegomenon, apologia, overture



What’s the story? If ‘Once upon a time’ are magical words for a child of any age, initiating a sequence with which they are broadly familiar, it is because the story they introduce is in some small way an elucidation of who, what, why, when, where, and how we were, are, and will be. Sometimes such stories are little more than descriptions of the details of daily life, deployed to share with others or perhaps simply our self what constitutes the material and ideological conditions of our everyday lives. But often we use them not just to narrate our lives – and narration and story are not identical – but to tell, to share news, information and much more: to guide, to warn, to inspire, to make real and possible that which may well be unreal and impossible. Stories allow us to imagine the transformation of our lives and our world. The transformation of the material and ideological conditions of our everyday lives, not to mention the grander ways of the world that often seem well beyond our province, is often framed in terms of resistance, rebellion, and revolution. And it is revolution in particular that captures what we mean, what we seek when we speak of transformation. While definitions and explorations of revolution come and go, decades of social science research have done little to bring us closer to understanding why revolutions happen here and not there, now and not then, among these people and not those. The proposition here is that the crucial factor in explaining how and why revolution persists is the stories of revolution, rebellion, and resistance we tell. In particular, by using the concepts of myth, memory, and mimesis, it is possible to identify and illuminate four basic stories of revolution which show up in a surprising number of places and cultures across impressive stretches of time. These are not the only stories of revolution and something is doubtless lost in the effort to group them as such. Nevertheless there is much to be gained in recognizing what such stories tell us about who we are and how we behave, what we are willing to do and in what circumstances. It is thus necessary to encourage the systematic return of stories to social science methodology, to argue for the powerful and pervasive roles of myth, memory, and mimesis, and to identify the basic stories which fundamentally undergird people’s conscious efforts of resistance, rebellion, and revolution. Central to this is recognition of the myth and



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memory of revolution and of the power of mimesis for the mobilization and sustenance of revolutionary activity. These are reflected in four basic stories of revolution which are legible, enduring tales that speak to the human condition, stories that exist not ‘simply’ to report on that condition but as catalysts for changing it. The contention here is that both to deepen our understanding of revolution and to maintain the utility of such a concept, we need a new approach that focuses on the thoughts and feelings of the people engaged in the revolutionary process, a perspective that seeks to tie the stories they relay (and perpetually rework) of past injustices and struggles to the struggle for a better future. These four stories are the Civilizing and Democratizing story of revolution, the Social Revolution story, the Freedom and Liberation story, and the Lost and Forgotten story. Each represents an attempt to pull together disparate strands which nonetheless have enough in common to be usefully read as one way in which people seek to make sense of the past, explain the present, and envision and enable a future. These amalgamations are not meant to be ideal types and no one revolutionary situation or process fits any one of them; many revolutionary processes find themselves in several stories, depending on who is telling the story, where and when, and to whom. What is imperative, as I have argued elsewhere (Selbin, 2003: 84), is that along with the material and structural conditions which have guided our investigations of popular resistance, rebellion, and revolution, we must find a place for the role played by the stories (and narratives) that have animated and emboldened generations of revolutionaries across time and cultures. The return of story to social science’s exploration of fundamental human actions such as resistance, rebellion, and revolution seems overdue; hence the time might be ripe for a ‘storied turn’ in the discipline. The rejection during much of the twentieth century of neat narratives and palliating stories in the search for greater understanding, admirable enough in principle, opened up a distance from people’s actual lives. In consequence, in the late industrial/postindustrial age, story and storytelling have been enjoying a renaissance of sorts, perhaps spurred by new technologies that simultaneously allow more people to tell stories than ever before and address the ancient human need for connection, to each other and to ourselves.

Prolegomenon, apologia, overture



The return of stories Scholars as diverse as Byatt (2001: 166), McNeill (2000: 9), and White (1984: 19–20), have challenged what might be read as modernist and post-modernist fixations with matters of consciousness and intentionality and sought to emphasize the human desire for stories. This is not to suggest that people ‘simply’ want description; stories are about far more than that. For they can open up for us people’s attitudes and assessments, their conceptions of how the world works and why, as well as their sense of power and possibility. This and much more is on display in work such as Polletta’s compelling It Was Like a Fever: Storytelling in Protest and Politics (2006), Tilly’s delightfully challenging jeremiad ‘The Trouble with Stories’ (2002) or engaging Why? (2007), Smith’s insightful Stories of People­ hood (2003) and edited volumes such as Berger and Quinney’s Story­ telling Sociology: Narrative as Social Inquiry (2005a) or Davis’s Stories of Change: Narrative and Social Movements (2002a). Whatever their differences, these works call for an examination of the rich resources represented by stories even as they are chary of their use and aware of their complexity and limitations. They help lay the groundwork for much of what follows here. There has also been some attention, albeit limited, within the study of revolution. For example, historians such as Sewell (2005) and Furet (1981) and his associates, most notably Ozouf (1991) and Baker (1990), have to varying degrees afforded a place to stories. Also, the leading scholars of revolution have not completely ignored story: Goldstone’s superb Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World (1991) devotes a chapter to some of the factors that constitute stories; Parker’s provocative Revolutions and History: An Essay in Interpretation (1999) makes a persuasive case for the place of narrative; and story and narrative are among the impressive array of factors that Foran marshals in his magisterial effort to cumulate the very latest on matters revolutionary, Taking Power: On the Origins of Third World Revolutions (2005). Less explicitly, recent work by Holloway (2002) and Khasnabish (2007) also stresses the importance of the articulation of compelling narratives and stories in any meaningful effort at change. Several suppositions are central to this endeavor. Chief among them is that people are storytellers and that the stories we tell define



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us as people (a people or even the people); we create, understand, and manage the world through the stories we tell. If it is our biology that makes us human, it is our stories that define us as people; in particular the common and simple stories that manage to seem both ‘universal’ and ‘timeless,’ even as we conjure them as particular to our specific circumstances, stories that are surprisingly pervasive, evoking the past and our predecessors even as we conjure them in the service of the present and with an eye to the future. The proposition here is that who and what we are are inseparable from the stories we tell. That is, in the end, stories are everything; and everything, in some form or another, is a story. Our stories are arranged and deployed for as many purposes as we can imagine, and for others we may not yet have discerned. They are the way we explain the world to ourselves as it is and how we hope it will be. Stories may be our most enduring evidence for many of the beliefs and values that matter most to us; a critical piece of the puzzle without which any answer is incomplete. Scientists purportedly do not pose hypotheses to which they already have the answers – though I think a far more accurate rendition of scientific enterprise would acknowledge the reputed lawyer’s verity that one never asks a question to which one doesn’t already know the answer. The answer proposed here is but one among many. For answers, of varying quality and degrees of satisfaction, seem to come and go; it is the questions that remain. This work is driven by the questions that lead so many to the study of revolutions: why do revolutions happen here and not there, now and not then, among these people and not those? It is the articulation of compelling stories, as will be explored at length in the pages to come, that allows people to deploy them in ways which resonate with others and empower them to seek to change the material and ideological conditions of their everyday lives. The proposition is that through in-depth interviewing and the collection of instruments of popular culture such as folk tales, songs, plays, televisions shows, and so on, it may be possible to ascertain the extent to which the collective of resistance, rebellion, and revolution is possible in any given society and time.

Prolegomenon, apologia, overture



What is to be done? Bringing story back in In the early days of the social sciences, there were two major projects. One was the post-World War II effort to distinguish the social sciences and escape the thrall of ‘great men,’ epic empires, and the myths and fables attendant to both. The other reflected the increasing sway of Northern/Western liberal bourgeois conceptions in which the basic unit of analysis was the atomistic individual. As a result, it was deemed necessary to divvy up our understanding of the world into discrete and manageable packages, framing social (sociology), political (political science), economic (economics), psychological (psychology), and even cultural (anthropology) matters atomistically as well. Story was the first casualty, relegated to the margins and regarded warily with distrust. Three brief comments are warranted here. First, ‘History’ is the term commonly used to label our knowledge reservoir; once it was lore, stories, tales. While History has traditionally told stories of fact mixed with fiction, in the flush of the Enlightenment and, particularly, nineteenth-century rationalism, this was suddenly viewed with horror. Much was invested in the notion that historians were craftsmen (not a gender-neutral term) who dealt only with ‘facts.’ While storytellers were free to invent at their pleasure, historians were bound to the Truth, a conviction subsequently picked up in the pursuit of ‘science’ that has dominated the social sciences to this day (Selbin, 2008: 132). We need not only the skills of modern scholarship but also the traditional tool of scholars, as well as of revolutionaries, rebels, and resisters: namely, powerful and purposive stories. Second, those of us trained and/or living in the Northern/Western outposts have an inordinate amount invested in the notion that there are those things we designate as fact and those we denote as fiction. Stories are presumed to be largely the province of fiction. Yet the separation of the myriad stories we tell into fact and fiction is a relatively modern conceit, with the former seen as useful and important and the latter derided as entertainment or fluff, and certainly not a trustworthy guide to anything of import. Yet it is often in story that greater truths or hidden histories are revealed and made accessible. Matters have finally begun to shift. The at times grudging recognition since the 1950s that perhaps ‘native’ informants had something useful to tell us began a process that has most recently been represented by the



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rehabilitation of Herodotus (Strassler, 2007; Romm, 1998; Thompson, 1996). Herodotus, though renowned as ‘the Father of History,’ was also long regarded as a fabulist and condemned for his ‘lies,’ but there is a growing sense that the baby may have been thrown out with the bathwater and therefore increasing appreciation for what he had to tell us. For now, it is enough to note that whatever the attractiveness of binaries such as ‘fact’ and ‘fiction,’ they are of little use in answering the kinds of questions being posed here. This is not to suggest that we can invent facts. Hobsbawm, in his persuasive formulation, argues that ‘either Elvis Presley is dead or he isn’t. The question can be answered unambiguously on the basis of evidence, insofar as reliable evidence is available, which is sometimes the case. Either the present Turkish government, which denies the attempted genocide of the Armenians in 1915, is right or not’ (1993: 63). Yet matters are rarely so simple, and neither at times are the questions. For much of what we ‘know’ with varying degrees of certainty or wish to query, there is little in the way of ‘reliable evidence.’ Even when there is, it may be that as much is to be gained from seeking to understand those for whom Elvis is not dead and why he is not dead for them as there is in ascertaining that, in fact, Elvis has left the building for good. Of real importance is what people have done with the evidence and information, including when they choose to disbelieve what is presented to them as ‘fact.’ This is complicated and messy and real. The messy reality is that despite our best social-scientific efforts to categorize and analyze, people are ultimately unsystematic (complicated and contradictory), making choices which might seem to belie their own interests, behaving in a manner we may well deem ‘irrational.’ To aggravate the situation, it is not at all clear that their views, their understanding of the world and their place and possibilities in it, are always apparent to themselves, much less discernible to others, particularly outsiders. ‘Poor history,’ Galeano lamented, had ‘stopped breathing: betrayed in academic texts, lied about in classrooms, drowned in dates they had imprisoned her in museums and buried her, with floral wreaths, beneath statuary bronze and monumental marble’ (1985: xv).3 Marcus worries that ‘our sense of history, as it takes shape in everyday culture, is cramped, impoverished, and debilitating; that the commonplace assumption that history exists only in the past is a mystification powerfully

Prolegomenon, apologia, overture



resistant to any critical investigations that might reveal this assumption to be a fraud, or a jail. The suspicion is that we are living out history, making it and unmaking it – forgetting it and denying it – all of the time, in far more ways than we have really learned’ (1995: 3–4). Yet capturing it is no mean task; Steffens, frustrated covering the revolution unfolding in Russia, complained: ‘How can you get history in the making, on the spot, as it happens? There were several histories going on together, unconnected, often contradictory narratives that met and crossed, and – they were all “history.” We heard aplenty of them; we must have missed many more. Nobody could, nobody will, ever hear them all. History is impossible’ (1931: 749). And yet its uncovering and recovering have been a source of fascination to people; witness the heroic efforts to report it. Traditionally, history has been constructed from above, composed by the victorious, orchestrated by the powerful, played and performed for the population. There is another history, rooted in people’s perception of how the world around them continues to unfold and of their place in that process. This is a history informed by people’s ideologies, the views they have, and it reflects the context, material as well as ideological, of people’s everyday lives; a history revealed and articulated by the various instruments of popular political culture. The supposition here is that this history is accessible to us in people’s narratives of their lives and the popular political culture of their society and that these create the possibility – or lack – of fundamental change. Recourse to the role of stories and what they can tell us should help social scientists better explain fundamental human actions such as the collective behavior commonly found under the rubrics resistance, rebellion, and revolution. We need to find a way to focus on the thoughts and feelings of people engaged in revolutionary processes, a perspective which binds the stories they convey of past injustices and struggles as they fight for the future. Along with the material or structural conditions extant – the factors we commonly use to guide our investigations – it is imperative to recognize the role played by stories and narratives of popular resistance, rebellion, and revolution which have animated and emboldened generations of revolutionaries. To borrow an old trope: hic sunt refragatio, rebellio, et revolutio – ‘here be resistance, rebellion, and revolution.’4

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‘Resistance,’ ‘rebellion,’ and ‘revolution’: a necessary if parenthetical intervention ‘Revolution’ remains a handy descriptor for a rather surprising number of events and processes that take place in society and culture. Terms such as ‘resistance,’ ‘rebellion,’ and ‘revolution,’ for their part, remain most closely associated with socio-political matters and collective behavior, and hence are the starting point of this intervention. What do we mean by revolution and related terms such as ‘resistance’ and ‘rebellion’? Many of us have invested much time and effort in defining the differences between resistance, rebellion, and revolution, differences that matter, even as some have proposed that the overlap is substantial among most forms of contentious politics (see McAdam et al., 2001). It is important to be clear from the start that resistance and rebellion are neither necessarily nor even often revolutionary. Yet both contribute to revolution far more often than has commonly been supposed, not least via stories of resistance and/or rebellion that contribute to a revolutionary milieu within which revolution begins to seem possible. Thus the revolutionary ‘imaginary,’ to borrow and tweak Parker’s clever term (2003: 46),5 provides a shared space within which these different forms reside and can be drawn on for our purposes. Resistance Resistance,6 like revolution, is commonly bandied about with recognition and cognition but little attention to detail. The very concept is somewhat problematic. Hollander and Einwohner lament that resistance is often invoked ‘in an unfocused way’; much of the time it is more of ‘a political stance … [than] an analytical concept.’ Nonetheless, across myriad definitions and discourses what they identify are two ‘core elements: action and opposition’ (Hollander and Einwohner, 2004: 547, 538).7 Lahiri-Dutt (2003: 13) points to four criteria that characterize authentic resistance in the ‘mainstream literature’: ‘it must be collective and organized rather than private and unorganized; it must be principled and selfless rather than opportunistic and selfish; it must have revolutionary consequences; and it must negate rather than accept the basis of domination.’ Yet Scott (1985) argues persuasively that resistance is most often rooted in everyday material goals rather than

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revolutionary consciousness. Still, he warns against overestimating what ‘everyday resistance’ is capable of and recognizing the complicated lives most people lead. So discerning resistance may well be no easy task. Resistance can also refer to a form of insurgency denoted by the refusal of people to cooperate actively with, or express support for, the current regime or authority figures; even when this may appear passive, it is an activity, an ‘action.’ Thus it is imperative to recognize that there exists what Kampwirth (2002: 11) has called a ‘tradition of resistance’ which ‘plant[s] seeds that … germinate many years later, when the structural, ideological, and political conditions [are] right.’ 8 Kindred to but distinct from related notions such as ‘political cultures of opposition’ and ‘the relationship between culture and agency in revolutionary politics,’ the focus according to Kampwirth is on the role played by the family in ‘socializing’ children. The contention here is that the most common and fundamental mechanism for this is stories. Women often play a critical role here. Take Scheherazade, the woman who holds together The Arabian Nights, night after night weaving her thousand and one stories as she struggles to at least defer her death, perhaps even live a life of sorts – as it turned out, a life far longer than she or her storytellers might ever have imagined. Or take the form Parelli (1989: 104–5) describes as ‘an ant-like resistance, made of patience, words, gestures, and especially marked by the absence of silence. Women talked, women criticized, women protested, as they had always done, as they still do … At a time when silence was ordered, they spoke.’ This is an accepted role for women and one which can provide a locus of resistance. Either form reflects fortitude, pluck born in part from millennia bound in patriarchal cultures and reflected in what might be thought of as the ‘gap between tactical obedience and pragmatic evasion, obedezco pero no cumplo (“I obey but I do not comply”)’ (Rowe and Schelling, 1991: 23) combined with the willingness to speak, to occupy the silences, and to tell the stories. These inherently subversive notions and concepts – patience, finding a way to adhere to the letter of the law but not the spirit, and willingness to speak – often form the basis of resistance. In most cases, resistance reflects the actors’ conception of their actions as part of some long process of struggle that most societies hold in their collective memory. If such collective memory is usually long on the grand and glorious, it often features the implicit and the informal

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as well; this ‘shared memory,’ reflects a ‘community’s understanding of their … origins, purpose, development, and group life’ (K’Meyer, 1996: 219). Establishing what constitutes a strategy of resistance is difficult at best, but we often know it when we see it; the greater challenge is how we recognize it when we do not. However elusive resistance may seem, it is powerful. Rebellion ‘I hold it,’ Thomas Jefferson (1955a: 93) wrote, ‘that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical … It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.’ Leaving aside its deterministic overtones, Jefferson’s quip is compelling. It also reflects the ubiquity of rebellion,9 a type of insurgency or uprising which rarely seeks to change the entire system, but rather aims to strike at specific locations within the established system of government or to reorganize the government to address specific grievances or alter particular situations. Distinct from similar such efforts such as revolt, coup d’état, or political revolution, rebellions are often spontaneous uprisings aimed at changing leaders, policies, or even political institutions, but only rarely involve efforts to affect larger societal structures and norms/values directly. What is arguably one of the classic examples of a rebellion is often misleadingly inscribed as a revolution, even as it is notable by its absence from any lists of the ‘Great Revolutions.’ The ‘American Revolution’ could be more accurately described as a successful rebellion (perhaps, more generously, a political revolution) in Great Britain’s North American colonies. None of this is to diminish what was one of the most tumultuous periods in US history, but it was not in any meaningful sense of the word a real revolution. Rather, the conflict in question was a rebellion because it was a show of defiance toward an authority, the British government. In addition, it sought to redress a specific grievance by altering the polity though not necessarily the political structure. As a fillip, this example also suggests that resistance, such as that of the colonists to their British overlords, can well be the precursor to or handmaiden of rebellion. Rebellions themselves can obviously be precursors, quasi-revolutionary moments which can and do lead to revolutions;10 D.E.H. Russell argued that ‘rebellion is defined as a form of violent power struggle

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in which overthrow of the regime is threatened by means that include violence’ (Russell, 1974: 6). Walton (1984) demonstrates how rebellions in the Philippines (1946–53), Kenya (1952–56), and Colombia (1946–58) resulted in significant, if limited, economic and political reforms and argues that the term ‘revolution’ has lost its utility and proposes the term ‘revolt’ in its place. I concur with Bell (1976: 5) that ‘a revolt is a quite different matter, and a much less complex one. A revolt is narrower than a revolution.’ In any case, rebellion is an extreme decision usually made under extreme conditions by people who believe their options are few. Revolution People across the world and throughout time have their own understanding of revolution, rooted in stories of revolution we – meant broadly here – tell. Few concepts are as pervasive in time and place and across cultures as ‘revolution.’ It is not simply that people know it when they see it, but that people carry around in their heads a fairly coherent set of understandings about what revolution is and is not. Revolution is not something people consider lightly and inevitably with fear and trepidation; it is also associated for many with struggles for food, land, peace, justice, access to resources and to opportunity – a home, healthcare, and education. For many, revolution suggests ‘better must come’11 and it is among that category of terms that is instantly recognizable as a dramatic upheaval involving a group of united people overthrowing their government and, if successful, making profound and significant changes to their society. Common reference points include the revolutions in America (1776), France (1789), Mexico (1920), Russia (1917), China (1949), and Cuba (1959). The persistence of ‘revolution’ as a topic is hardly surprising given the rather impressive array of factors that the term evokes. ‘Revolution’ remains vibrant, today signifying not only the ‘traditional’ (for want of a better term) conceptions, where the ultimate goal is state power for the purpose of fundamentally transforming society, but also the more nuanced cases of the past two decades: the complexities of the 1989–91 Eastern European ‘color revolutions’ (see Goldstone, 2009), the ongoing saga of Chiapas since 1994 (Khasnabish, 2007), the ill-defined but still active struggles in Colombia, the various shades of what have come to be construed broadly as ‘Islamic’ revolutions (correctly or not), as well as the various anti-globalization movements (Holloway, 2002);

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‘anti-globalization’ may be a handy term, but is perhaps something of a misnomer as well. As I have argued elsewhere, revolutions are fundamentally about people: they are ‘created by people, led by people, fought and died for by people, consciously and intentionally constructed by people’ (Selbin, 2008: 130). This is not meant to ignore the profound influence of social, political, and economic structures (Selbin, 1997b: 133), the role of ideologies, the international context, meta-narratives such as the Enlightenment or globalized capitalism which shape the environment, tropes such as modernism or progress, or the grand sweep of History. Yet, if the question is why revolutions happen here and not there, now and not then, and among these people and not those, we must focus on those selfsame people and their worlds. In terms of academic study, the long dominant ‘third generation’ theories of revolution (Skocpol, 1979; Goodwin, 2001) seem to be giving way to the ‘fourth’ (Goldstone, 2001; Foran 2005; Goldstone 2009; Selbin, 2009a, 2009b; and Foran et al., forthcoming),12 though as with previous generations, the insights remain powerful and useful, each generation building on the best of the work which preceded it. Here, I draw from several sources: Skocpol’s still commanding formulation of social revolutions as ‘rapid, basic transformations of a society’s state and class structures … accompanied and in part carried through by class-based revolts from below’ (1979: 4); the work of Goldstone (2001), Kumar (2001), and, particularly, Foran (2005), as well as my own previous work to argue that we need to deepen the human and cultural aspects of our thinking about revolution; and Tilly’s (1978) focus on mobilization with people and what Paige (2003: 24) describes as their ‘metaphysical assumptions.’ Thus, revolution is the conscious effort by a broad based, popularly mobilized group of actors, formal or informal, to profoundly transform the social, political, and economic institutions which dominate their lives; the goal is the fundamental transformation of the material and ideological conditions of their everyday lives. This reflects a process of origination and subsequent struggle, and an outcome, the effort at fundamental transformation. When both elements are realized, we are more likely to consider them ‘great’ or ‘social’ revolutions; lesser instances are often labeled political revolutions, rebellions, revolts, resistance, or other types of collective action. (Selbin, 2008: 131)

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In terms of both academic and popular conception, there has been a surprisingly clear narrative of revolution for some 220 years;13 the chapters to come will suggest that this may be pushed back considerably further. Despite Tilly’s reproach that ‘no natural history of all revolutions, specifying necessary or sufficient conditions that are not true by definition, is possible’ (2006: 159), here the guide is Higonnet (paraphrasing Barthes), who frames revolution as scriptible (‘writable’), with a narrative quality; ‘juxtaposed and interwoven, these strands reinforce one another, and then become more compelling,’ but ‘like Sisyphus, we write and rewrite the script of revolutionary history, although we know that we can never grasp it fully.’ ‘Some frameworks,’ he continues, ‘help us understand, just as others hinder us hopelessly’ (1998: 324). The aim is to grasp what we can in the name of understanding a little better. Still by far the most common trope, labeled here the Story of Social Revolution (Chapter 6), begins with the 1789 French Revolution as archetype: it is grand, epic, and sweeping; its (brutal) failure as lost to the mists of time as its more radical elements. This saga wends its way through the nineteenth century to Russia 1917, which never realized its better hopes and almost as quickly as France came to be seen as the grand failure or betrayal – who by the time of its ignoble end (or even by 1939) wanted to claim Russia? After World War II there were glimpses of what might be possible:14 Guatemala 1950–54, Bolivia 1952–54, British Guiana 1953–64, Vietnam and Algeria in the 1950s, were among the tantalizing possibilities. But China and Cuba form the mid-century portion of this tale, which often concludes with Iran and Nicaragua in 1979. One last note with regard to how we might best understand revolution. People do not fight, risk their lives and those of their families, or put their hopes and dreams on the line lightly; dry, distant, theoretical concepts alone are unlikely to move them. In Trotsky’s compelling admonition, people turn to revolution only when there is ‘no other way out’ (1957: 167). Even if one is not quite prepared to go that far, it is self-evident that revolutions require profound commitment and deep passion. In contrast to resistance, which presumes a defensive posture, or rebellion, with its focus generally on redressing a specific grievance, revolution is at root driven by dreams and desires; desperation alone is not enough. Such dreams and desires are not the sole province of the

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left or the popular; monarchists and conservatives cherish imaginings of the past, and fascists may also be grounded in the popular and in visions of the future.15 Revolutions are at least as much cultural as social or economic in their ‘origins,’ and are about the individual as much as they are about the group or community.16 Faced with the exigencies of everyday life and intolerable conditions, fueled by demands for justice, and driven by a dynamic of hope, people seek to change their world, the material and ideological conditions of their everyday lives. Hence, the impetus for revolution derives from injustice, impoverishment, the disenfranchisement of people, and the stories people tell of the liberty, freedom, and social justice they deserve and which promise them a voice in their present and future lives, those of their children and grandchildren, and of their culture and society.

Stories of revolution17 How do disparate factors – hopes, dreams, and desires; anger, resentment, and grievance; fears, commitments, and passions – begin to coalesce? How is it that revolutionary imaginations of various sorts (Billington, 1980; Parker, 2003; Saldaña-Portillo, 2003; Khasnabish, 2007) are fired and the revolutionary sentiments (Firchow, 2008) they may produce deepened and whence are revolutionary situations (Tilly, 1978) created? How does the Sisyphean journey from the impossible to the possible to the plausible to the probable unfold? Whatever the various phases of the revolutionary process – there would seem to be at least three (struggle, triumph, transformation; see Selbin, 1999) and perhaps as many as five (from imagination and sentiment to situation followed by triumph and transformation) – it is possible at any point in the progression to identify the stories of resistance, rebellion, and revolution that caution, inspire, and guide people throughout the process. If all this seems far more linear and ‘progressive’ (as in implying a progression through the stages) than is likely in the real world, it is largely a reflection of how it is we tell the story. Revolutions are ultimately about passionate commitment and great willingness to sacrifice. What overlooked or underappreciated factor might allow us to capture this? The proposal here is what might be construed as a mythopoetic component that offers a glimpse into

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people’s hearts and minds. ‘Globalization’ has brought millions of us to a time and place redolent of a magical realist novel: forking paths, mystical markets, and liberal democracy, not at all what it had seemed. Where will we go and what will we do? The fantastic, the mythic, and the magical seem commonplace; indeed, it hardly seems possible to believe ‘six impossible things before breakfast’ (Carroll, 1946: 76). Hence people find it plausible to discuss the reappearance of eighteenth-century Andean revolutionaries Túpac Amaru and Túpac Katari in various guises in the jungle mists, a different person or persons occupying the same space. Others see (or sense) the fabled white horse of early-twentieth-century Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, at times near his campfire. And revolution’s most ubiquitous figure, Che Guevara, has been spotted long past his death in various parts of Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, Nepal, and Palestine, echoing the contention of modern-day Zapatista leader Subcomandante Marcos that behind the ski masks he favors are different people who animate the struggle, all of them Marcos; indeed, as he suggested and people chanted in Seattle, Genoa, Davos, and uprisings elsewhere, ‘we are all Marcos,’ all Zapatistas, everywhere and everywhen.18 There are obviously innumerable stories of revolution to be found, far more than we can know. For all the myriad variations, it is possible to discern a surprisingly timeless story told and retold, of brave, valiant, and committed people, often youth, who, realizing the gross inequities of their situation rise up to demand freedom or equality or justice. It is an enduring tale that seemingly stretches back as far as we can know and as far forward as we can imagine. While various people may tell the story, what seems critical is that people hear a story that they in some profound sense already know, with familiar characters – especially heroes – and action they anticipate (with fear or delight; see Bates, 1996: 72). It is a story that in some form or another is reinscribed from generation to generation, across cultures in a surprising array of places strewn across staggering reaches of times and an even more compelling panoply of peoples.19 These stories are determined by no one person 20 and are written by everyone, pitched both within and outside of time, and structured by the socio-cultural strictures extant, though not the more narrowly political ones. They provide a ‘reality’ that people can use in song, in plays, in stories, and

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their compelling articulation is what moves people into, if not always through, a revolutionary process. One further matter merits brief mention here: my position in all this. To pretend that who and what I am does not influence what you read here would be disingenuous, and I am well aware of the dangers of a white, male, North American social scientist ‘playing’ travel guide to the world. Nor do I subscribe to the notion that historians and social scientists are somehow able to stand outside of what they are considering and provide ‘objective’ analysis; at best, it seems to me, we must endeavor to present everything we can even as we are cognizant of the inevitable editing, cultural and otherwise, that occurs. While all of this has implications for what is to come, optimistically the ramifications will be slight.

The rest of the story Presumably, few people would argue that the world has conveniently unfolded in ‘coherent stories endowed naturally with central subjects, highly organized plot structures, thematic integrity, and moralizable conclusions’ (Graziano, 1992: 2). The next chapter provides a story of the story to come, albeit one that is open to interpretation. What this means in practice is that some critical components of the project at hand will be discussed, but that the way they are framed here need not be adopted by the reader for later parts of the book to work. 21 After some further preliminary considerations of story that will augment and deepen what has been discussed so far, concerns with story as method and vehicle will be addressed, including the complicated issues of transmission and translation. The role of narrative as both a distinct element within and a component deeply integral to story will also be considered, as will the storytellers who weave the magic. While people and events come and go, stories persist. Chapter 3 proffers three heuristics: myth, memory, and mimesis. These help situate story in general and are of particular use for framing the discussion to follow with regard to the four stories of revolution. Myth, memory, and mimesis are powerful and pervasive guides to the elements that fundamentally undergird people’s conscious and intentional efforts of resistance, rebellion, and revolution. Exploring myths and memories and recognizing the power of mimesis (and the place

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of history in it), for the mobilization and sustenance of revolutionary and related phenomena allows us to discern the four stories. These are legible, enduring tales that speak to the human condition, stories that exist not ‘simply’ to report on that condition, but as catalysts for changing it. Chapter 4 makes the case for what, after Benjamin (1999b: 846), we might call the ‘uprising of the anecdotes.’ There is no denying that in an important sense every case of resistance, rebellion, and revolution is distinct. And yet every case may also be seen as sharing something – however elusive or ephemeral – with all others. The social sciences are no more immune than the natural sciences in their determined desire to discover ‘universal laws,’ some sort of unified field theory which will cover an extensive gamut of events and processes, and the study of the types of collective behavior under consideration here are no exception. 22 At the same time, we share the appetite of many historians for specific detail and minutia. These multiple wishes can be realized by mapping out several basic stories which capture many, perhaps even most, instances of resistance, rebellion, and revolution. Seeking both breadth and depth, some must start from above, elite stories which feature famous ‘heroes,’ reflect large processes, and are generally characterized by major events. Other stories rooted in the popular come from below and feature minor stories, local people (or ‘common people’) and place great stock in small events and ongoing processes. The four stories seek to capture all of these and much more. Having made the argument for story, explored how myth, memory, and mimesis might help us, and considered how together meaning is manufactured and people may be mobilized, the next section of the book comprises four chapters that explore at length the respective stories of revolution. Chapter 5 examines the Civilizing and Democratizing Revolution story, which is built around notions of civilization (which in this story denotes the ‘Western,’ or perhaps ‘North–Western,’ civilization associated with the familiar Greco-Roman/Judeo-Christian triad), progress, democratization, and, somewhat incongruously, nobility, in the sense of noblesse oblige on the part of elites. This story tracks with the triumph of the Enlightenment and is often used by elites to provide an imprimatur – legitimacy and hence authority – to their processes. In effect a ‘liberal’ tale, it is hence both cautionary and an encomium

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to reform. The common models are England (1688), America (1776), and France (1789), and these are the three reviewed here. The Social Revolution story is the best-known story, to some extent encompassing both the elite notions in the previous story and the popular variants to come. Here France 1789 takes pride of place, transforming the very concept of revolution. As the story we began illustrates, from this time forth revolution would no longer refer to another turn of the wheel but rather to profound socio-cultural, political, and economic transformation of the nation, the state, and perhaps even the world. People win a world of possibilities to transform the material and ideological conditions of their everyday lives and thereby their world. The focus here is most nearly that of the definition of revolution proffered earlier: the struggle for state power, and fast and fundamental transformations of state and class structures driven in part by class-based revolts which alter the political, economic, and social systems in a contemporaneous and mutually reinforcing fashion. Following France, the most common examples here are Russia (1917), China (1949), and Cuba (1959), though Mexico (1920), Iran (1979), and Nicaragua (1979) often appear as well. Here we will revisit France, albeit with a decidedly different tone and tenor, Russia as a twentiethcentury update, and then Cuba, which brings revolution into the ‘modern’ (or at least contemporary) world; to help situate these, the Paris Commune, China (revolution’s extension in the ‘Third World’), and some of Cuba’s progeny appear. If these first two stories may reasonably be read as to varying degrees elite or at least top-down, Chapter 7 introduces the mid-level approach captured by the Freedom and Liberation Story of Revolution. In contrast to the preceding stories, this longer, looser saga may begin as early as Spartacus’ slave revolt against the Romans in 73–71 bce, or the biblical Exodus story, and focuses on various anti-slavery, anti-colonial, and anti-imperialist revolts and rebellions across the globe in which people sought their freedom or liberation from sundry oppressors and overlords. There is attention to egalitarianism, to faith, and to ‘self-determination,’ the hollow promises of which are all too familiar to millions. Some of the most notable examples here are Haiti (1791), the Sepoy Rebellion (1857), the Mahdi Rebellion in Egyptian Sudan (1880s), and China’s ‘Boxer Rebellion’ (1900), and the myriad anti-colonial struggles of the twentieth century. Representative of this

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story are cases such as Haiti, perhaps the world’s most important and most ignored revolution, and Mexico, the first great social upheaval of the twentieth century, rivaled only by China and Vietnam as a truly sprawling, multi-act process. And this is a story that foreshadows the early-twenty-first century resurgence of indigenous resistance, rebellions, and even revolution. And then there is the micro-level story, albeit one with weighty implications at the macro- or even meta-level, the tenuous if sturdy story ‘revolutions of the lost and forgotten.’ Whether brief and tight or long and loose, the other stories offer a largely chronological and sequential tale which builds towards an end and features a discernible plot. This is obviously convenient and, in any telling, inevitable – but it is also illusory. Here we find the smaller, more obscure, more local, narrower, and insular stories. It is not that familiar faces are absent: France, Mexico, and Russia are here, albeit as specific and local moments lost rather than as the larger well-known processes. This vaguer, more impressionistic story of struggles ‘lost’ to us reflects tales of everyday resistance, rebellion, and revolution. Examples are incalculable and reflect only the ones we know – it is impossible to know what we are missing. But consider the 1534–35 Anabaptist reign in Münster, the massive seventeenth-century slave revolt which resulted in the roughly seventy-year Republic of Palmares in northeast Brazil, the nine-day Revolt of Masaniello in 1647 Spanish Naples, the 1741 ‘New York Conspiracy’ of sailors and dock workers, nineteenth-century North American ghost dancers, the 1911–14 Red Battalions of the Casa del de los Obreros Mundial in Mexico City, the 1927 Guangzhou ‘Three-Day Soviet’ (‘the Paris Commune of the East’), the 1967 (and ongoing) Naxalit uprising in India, or the 1980 People’s Republic of Greenwich Town in Jamaica. The connections among these lost and forgotten episodes and the larger processes of which they may be part are not simply borne on the breezes but, whether hierarchical or lateral, direct or indirect, active agitators or more passive communicators, by people who walk the walk and talk the talk. Finally, with these stories in mind, we consider how they might help us understand not only why revolutions happen and in what circumstances, but when and where they might occur. While stories clearly serve many purposes for people, they are, at base, tools by which we build and organize to maintain and develop our future.

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Thus it seems reasonable to construe them as a form, even the primary form, of socio-political struggle. This entails taking the stories in their contexts but also out of it; it also means recognizing in ways too often elided that context denotes more than ‘simply’ ‘situation.’ McAdam et al. warn against ‘broadening conflict until, in Hegelian fashion, all politics becomes enmeshed in meaning’ (1997: 142). Recognizing that stories are text and conceding that sometimes, perhaps even generally, more ‘truth’ may be found in stories than in history books does not mean we are diving down the rabbit hole with Alice. In all the ways that matter most, these stories provide us with information, and as a result lead us to answers, although the caution stands: while answers come and go, it is the questions that remain. Well, the questions and the stories…

two The case for stories: stories and social change

O

nce upon a time, in a land far away but nearer than you might imagine, there were people just like us – or perhaps a little different. They knew the hardships arising from bad crops, of strange weather, of children dying and old people starving, of grave injustices visited by indifferent or cruel ministers or masters and their distant kings and queens, of being treated as little more than slaves on their own land. And then the days grew darker and times grew worse. One day a youth appeared who had once lived there, but as a baby or young child had been sent to live with an aunt or uncle or apprenticed to someone in a distant place. The youth asked questions about why life was so. He (and in most versions it is a he) began to talk to people about the whys and wherefores, at which point the elders or the shamans or the local minions of the powers-that-be warned him to stop lest he run afoul of those in power. Sometimes the youth listens but rarely does he heed the warnings, and if so only for a time; but more often he does not, and he (or someone near and dear) pays a steep price. Nursed back to health, perhaps by an older woman living alone (with rare or esoteric knowledge that makes her an outcast or at least alienated), or by a group of women living together, some or one of whom may possess arcane knowledge, or by a young girl living with her grandparent (who remembers when…), or by an uncle (who is befuddled but kindly and helpful), he regains his strength and begins to consider what is to be done to right the wrongs that have become the

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order of the day, pressing down upon these good people… And they all, at least for the last few hundred years, by and large live happily ever after – or so we like to imagine. The ‘truth’ of this awkwardly cobbled together story in its many variations is of little relevance; in some ways, its fictionalization only adds to its luster and makes it more real, more powerful. A salutary admonition comes from the seventeenth-century French salonière Ninon de l’Enclos. When asked if she believed that Paris’s patron saint, the martyred Saint Denis, had indeed walked two miles carrying his head under his arm, she replied: ‘La distance ne vaut rien. Ce n’est que le premier pas qui coute’ (‘The distance means nothing. It is only the first step that counts’; Gray, 1872: 34 n1). What matters is that people acknowledge the significance of the story and are prepared to take lessons, or inspiration, or encouragement from it. Several centuries later, on the two hundredth anniversary of France’s Revolution, another Parisienne, the French film star Miou-Miou, recalled what she heard in Paris 1968. A teenage upholstery machine operator when the students and workers came powerfully albeit briefly together, Miou-Miou remembers that ‘I didn’t understand any of it, but it stirred me.’ ‘Ordinary people like me,’ she said, ‘started thinking that somehow our lives might somehow change’ (Marcus, 1995: 16). This is the power and premiss of story, opening up the realm of the possible.1 This chapter seeks to deepen our understanding of story and its role in society. Stories do critical, necessary social work. Most stories undoubtedly serve to reinforce the status quo (Polletta, 2006: x). Some might suggest that is their primary purpose: according to Tilly they ‘help account for puzzling, unexpected, dramatic, problematic, or exemplary events’ (Tilly, 2006: 93). Yet Tilly also notes that they ‘help confirm, redefine, or challenge social relations’ (2006: 93), which is where areas such as resistance, rebellion, and revolution come into to play. Thus we will look more into story itself as well as consider some of the most significant problems it presents. This necessitates a digression about the creation of stories and the role of storytellers, which in turn will prepare our consideration of the difference between story and narrative. Every age has its stories, as does each individual, stories that shape and form the world we know. A surprising number, historically and globally, mirror the kind of neat outline depicted above. There is

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the familiar ‘beginning–middle–end structure that describes some sort of change or development, as well as a cast of dramatis personae’ (Steinmetz, 1992: 490) with which we are all too familiar. Familiar too are the story lines and plot devices and even the spaces in which they may be able to place themselves or their lives. Discussing narrative, to which we will return below, Sewell argues people experience a ‘sense of themselves … as protagonists in stories – of love and marriage, of success, of stoic self-sacrifice, of family obligation, of collective struggle, of religious renewal’ (1992: 483). Above all, Somers contends, these reveal ‘constellations of relationships (connected parts) embedded in time and space, constituted by … causal emplotment … connecting (however unstable) parts to a constructed configuration or a social network (however incoherent or unrealizable)’ (1992: 601). 2 As we will see, this is not uncomplicated and it is important to guard against over-reading connections. Yet it also represents an opportunity for us to find common ground, to identify aspects which recur with enough regularity to denote a story. This is not meant to suggest that stories are inherently timeless or necessarily bespeak ‘universal’ cultural values. Stories essentially reflect the cultural values of their time and place as well as of those who tell them.3 It could not be otherwise, since the particulars are as varied as the stories and storytellers, and the disjunctures may reflect different storytelling patterns or less concern with Northern/Western conventions of narrative, metaphysical elements peculiar to the people, place and time, and unfamiliar characters from canons we do not recognize. Still, stories are reservoirs of views and values, a way for people to know themselves and associate themselves with (or distinguish themselves from) others, and are reflective of the past, present, and future their culture holds ‘true.’4 This last is particularly crucial: classic stories are those which resonate with our origins (‘real’ or, perforce, imagined/created) and would seem to foreshadow our future as we hope it will be; at their most powerful, they dissolve past and future into one.5 The promise of the most compelling stories is the creation of a present in which the past and future exist simultaneously and thus everything seems possible. In contrast to history, whose ‘constructions … commandeer the true life and confine it to the barracks,’ Benjamin offers ‘the street insurgence of the anecdote’ (1999b: 846). Stated differently, no matter

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what ‘history’ teaches us, the possibility of resistance, rebellion or revolution is intrinsic to the very conception of story, regardless of the intentions of the storyteller or the societal context. Stories, Appiah (2003: 46) argues, serve to ‘enmesh people in a single society by transmitting shared pictures of how the world is or ought to be.’ They unite people in a shared society in which certain symbols, themes, and characters provide recognition, knowledge, and understanding. As a result, ‘the common problems of humanity take common narrative forms in different parts of the world’ (Appiah, 2003: 46) Across time and space, one finds seemingly timeless tales that speak to some sort of human condition. Hence it is reasonable to assume that these same stories might exist not ‘simply’ to report on that condition but as catalysts for changing it. Thus the most compelling stories are likely to be those which reveal to us tried and true aspects and characters. We can find these deployed in the celebrated compendiums of human storytelling, collections of various ilk and assorted provenance: The Arabian Nights,6 the Chinese Shan hai jing (Book of Mountains and Seas), Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Aesop’s Fables, the Sanskrit Panchatantra,7 the holy books of the major monotheist traditions (the Torah, the Christian Bible, the Koran8), Boccaccio’s Decameron,9 Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales,10 the fairy tales collected by the Brothers Grimm.11 And these are simply the better known conventional written sources, disregarding, as so often happens, the abundant oral collections, most familiar today as sagas, cognate tales (e.g. trickster tales such as Br’er Rabbit or the spider Anansi in all his guises), and song cycles found in all living cultures.12 Working out the lineage or provenance of any particular tale seems a fool’s errand at best and is well beyond the scope of this project. Nevertheless, we can find a staggering amount of overlap and commonality among the variegated stories we humans possess in our multifarious cultures. These stories present a panoply of aspects: they are discursive, rational and irrational, a performance and an interpretation; even as they are told in one or more ways by the tellers, they are heard in countless ways by the hearers.13 But the identities of people are rooted in common culture, language, ethnicity, economy, collective memory, symbols, common enemies, and shared experiences and understandings. These myriad dynamics conspire to constitute the conscious and unconscious ‘“tool kit” of symbols, stories, rituals and world-views’ (Swidler, 1986:

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273) that people carry in their heads and that come to constitute ‘repertoires of collective action’ (Tilly, 1978: 143). People, intentionally or not, rely on these ‘tool kits’ to construct and interpret their world in general and specifically the past, the contemporary situations they confront, and the future they envision and the ways in which they might get there. Stories provide a way for us to access these realms. Stories are perhaps people’s greatest inventions, social or otherwise; Tilly likens them to the advent of the plow in agriculture (Tilly, 2006: 95). Stories weave in and out of discourses written, oral, and seen, and come to be influenced, inevitably, by popular culture in all its manifestations. This relationship is a complex one and more than a little fraught, since stories are clearly embedded in the very cultures they help to (re)create. And so, once subsumed (even as they subsume popular culture), they may come to seem little more than attendant aspects of popular culture; in the modernist and post-modern ages, material to be manipulated at will, buffeted by the exigencies of moment and place, flights of whimsy. All of this is almost certainly ‘true’ – but it is not the whole truth. If Tilly was no fan of stories as a method, he nonetheless conceded that ‘when most people take reasons seriously, those reasons arrive in the form of stories’ (2006: 95). As noted earlier, stories serve to unite people within a shared society in which certain symbols, themes, and characters provide recognition, knowledge, community, and at times plans of action.

Pre-theory: a quick methodological dodge No single definition of story is being offered here. Nor is there a systematic or readily replicable plan for the accumulation, interpretation, and presentation of stories. Having bemoaned the failure of the methods extant, I am mindful that ‘it is easier to define what methods to avoid than propose a set of methods for systematic use’ (Clark, 1973: 10). Hence what we have here might be most usefully construed as pre-theory: an exercise providing an orientation about the way the world works and proffering raw materials for theorizing. In the process, we will encounter a range from micro-level working hypotheses that evolved during fieldwork to macro-level efforts to explain the patterns and processes discernible. Pre-theories can serve as guides to other types of investigation and inquiry as well as foundations for theories at

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other levels. Thus pre-theory is an effort to map the terrain that some of us will, despite the warnings, seek to navigate, while others tramp across it and still others simply avoid the effort. Hopefully we might clear some brush or cut a path or two along the way.14 Defining this aspect of the work as a pre-theory leaves it open to modification and alteration as the book unfolds, and ideally involves the reader in the process. It would be naive, even disingenuous, to ignore the fact that any effort at theory-building presumes a metanarrative. The focus here is not on familiar metanarratives such as modes of production, the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the emergence of the modern state system, or the dichotomy between modernization and dependency. The metanarrative here might best be construed as a modernist/materialist constructivism, denoting an obligation to the empirical, the ‘real,’ and reflecting the conviction that most of this is nevertheless constructed, intentionally or otherwise, by us moderns. Among other implications is the abandonment, already discernible, of the strict, ‘traditional’ social science format, or at least that extant since the ‘behavioral revolution’ of the 1960s. Rather, the supposition here is that, chary of the myth (or ‘chimera’; see Chartier, 1991: 4) of origins, there is no clear ‘beginning’; that we are in some profound sense almost always in ‘the middle,’ as Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 25) suggest, a most interesting place where ‘things pick up speed’; and that ‘the end’ is an ever-moving notion constantly being rewritten. Whatever problems this causes, it is nevertheless a more accurate reflection of the world. If stories are in part profound societal memory, meaning and message, it merits our time and attention to explore them, and illustrate their complex and labyrinthine aspects. Despite the all too real challenges they present as ‘data,’ stories also afford us access that may simply not be available otherwise into people’s hearts and minds. None of this is meant to suggest some simple substitution of stories for rigorous intellectual analysis. Yet there is no reason not to incorporate them and even rely on them as heuristics, guides to matters of interest. Recognizing the power and importance of stories and the information they may provide should not diminish our ability to report our findings (what we ‘know’) in the quasi-objective analytical terminology that defines social science today. But that is our story; inevitably our whole language of understanding, the very essence of the social science project, and what we know is limited by what we

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can extract from the stories we collect and then (re)tell. The critical point is that stories offer us a way in; they are another tool of the trade which can be turned to building a better understanding of who we are and where we are going. Many stories are familiar to millions of people around the world; they cut across time and place and cultures while sharing core elements (see the discussion of narrative below) and enshrining many broad and familiar principles. Discerning exactly what these stories are is often in the eye of the beholder, upon whom it is then incumbent to convince others of the authenticity, or at least the plausibility, of their interpretation. In addition, it is obviously a challenge for those of us who are interlopers from a modernist age for whom measurement and naming are a form of control and references to our own time are given. We have come late and there is simply no way at this point of telling whether, for example, the many stories about great and devastating floods or holy and divine men and women or epic heroes or noble people(s) are generations, even millennia, old, or just garbled versions of extant traditions, or indeed both. We will consider in the pages to come whether this even matters. Regardless, by ‘denationalizing’ these stories we can also internationalize them and find common themes which suggest that while matters revolutionary are profoundly local, they also reflect broader and deeper rules we write across time and space and culture about who we are, how we behave, and what is possible in our world. And this matters a great deal. The point is neither to privilege stories to the exclusion of other sources nor to suggest that it is only stories that compel people to act; the intention is not to turn stories and culture into things as abstract as economic processes and political forces. The sheer number of factors that one might reasonably consider in assessing the where, when, and why of revolutions is overwhelming and there have been many efforts with varying success. People obviously go through an array of experiences ranging from oppression to hunger to emotional response. What far too few of these analyses have considered, mediated as they often are by elite or intellectual discourse – charges to which this project too is vulnerable – is the extent to which the articulation of compelling stories may provide the key. Any given story may have multiple meanings for both tellers and listeners, all of whom speak with many voices and listen from many positions.

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Back to our story People want to hear a story that they already know, with familiar characters and action they anticipate, with fear or delight (Bates, 1996: 72). It seems apparent that there is a desire for heroes, quasi-mythic or otherwise endowed with some special or arcane knowledge even as they are fully and recognizably human. Often they are asked to rise above their present, often dreary circumstances and imagine a new future, to set out a new vision to which they can aspire and yet which somehow is made to seem within reach, even if there are at times substantial demands for self-abnegation and sacrifice. People rely on stories to make sense of their world, their place in it, and their (im)possibilities. Through stories people are able to produce (and perhaps thereby create at least the illusions of both control over and direction in) their lives, bringing to bear not just their own knowledge and experiences, but those of their communities. As a result, stories reflect and refract people’s lives in a way that almost no other text can, making the abstract concrete, the complex more manageable, and rendering matters ‘real.’ Stories reduce the immense complexity of the world, involving our daily lives, to human-sized matters, adding information to stores that are already stocked, fitting by and large into familiar pathways. Often stories are dramatizations, narratives, of matters not in the present, though they are commonly used to illuminate exactly that – the present – in a more or less organized expression of social ‘reality’ which simplifies the world. People can try out a world different to their own. Few vehicles of transmission are so common, so complete, so compelling, so fulfilling – or so ill suited to comprehension by social-science methods.

‘The trouble with stories’ The social sciences, as a rule, do not look kindly on stories, which are not unproblematic. They are most commonly disparaged with the term ‘mere’ and referred to as ‘description,’ ‘journalism,’ or, most damning of all, ‘history.’15 This last is a particularly odd charge since we rely to such a great extent upon historians and the materials they develop for much of our data. Yet, as Polletta (2006: x–xi) observes, stories occupy a conflicted space, ‘commonly thought of as authentic and as deceptive

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… seen as universal in their implications and as dangerously particularistic – idiosyncratic even. Storytelling is appreciated, enjoyed, and distrusted.’ Still, there is an increasing (if as yet grudging) recognition that social scientists tell stories too and that perhaps we need at least to consider the implications of this: what does it mean that, even as we sneer at ‘stories,’ we ourselves are dependent on them and use them to develop and share our work?16 What follows, inspired in large measure by the recent work of Tilly (2002, 2006, 2007, 2008) on the (mis)use of stories, even as he concedes their power and promise, is a brief survey of some major concerns about the use of stories, coarsely categorized as issues of truth, methodology, transmission, and translation. Telling truth through fiction The first question asked about stories is almost always whether or not they are ‘true.’ To answer the question with a question, ‘does it matter?’ Certainly many are true, depending on what one means by this difficult term recognizing that the issues of whose truth, for whom, when and where are complicated. But it is equally certain that most, in some detail, in some telling, in some form or another, are not true, for how can they be? Is it ever possible for any report or rendition to be wholly accurate? Isn’t any such account inevitably interpreted first by the teller and then reinterpreted by the listener? That is not to say that it is intentionally fictionalized – though it may well be – but rather to recognize the human propensity for telling a good story, by which we mean a familiar one that will be recognized and understood and therefore must fit certain patterns and parameters to be made comprehensible. That a rather startling number of similar stories are to be found in so many different times and places suggests either their fundamental or foundational nature or that there was far greater contact between our ancestors than is commonly credited. While this is most readily seen in religious traditions with their extensive borrowings from each other, not least in the realm of origin myths, it is apparent as well in stories about animals, inter- and intra-familial relations, rulers and the ruled, and the struggles of the old to teach the young and vice versa; often these are constructed as ‘just-so’ stories that mix truth with whimsy to explain things such as how the tiger got its stripes or the leopard its spots. So, is any given story true? Does it matter? Perhaps not.

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Whether or not a story is ‘true’ may be less important than whether or not it could or should be so. We have long known that much that is designated ‘fact,’ not least societally sanctioned versions of history bolstered by ‘official’ government (and other) documents, is often little more than thinly veiled fiction in which ‘fact’ is that which serves the purpose of the author and/or their benefactor.17 Concomitantly, much of what we ‘know,’ much that has come to be regarded as truth, has come to us by what we label ‘fiction.’ In both cases, we must recognize what might be most usefully thought of as ‘social truth,’ the truth arrived at in a sort of broad consensus which serves various interests to varying degrees. Yet representations of reality and reality itself are not easily torn asunder, and presumably stories reflect people’s perceptions, perhaps even their motivations. None of this is to ignore that people are ‘capable of all sorts of dissembling – in everyday conversation as well as considered composition’ (Foley, 1993: 231).18 Still, these ‘considered compositions’ are an incalculable resource. Since the issue of truth will be returned to in the discussion of memory in the next chapter, for now just three further observations could be made. First, there are some cultures in which veracity is deeply rooted in the words of others and how those words are heard; for example, for the Bemba ‘the organ of truth is the ear. The criteria of truth the words of others’ (Maxwell, 1983: 11). This obviously raises a number of issues, but most immediately it reminds us that while words are themselves imbued with significance, so too is how they are heard and thus presumably who says them and how. The same words may be uttered, even in the same circumstances, but it may be that some people have the authority and some do not. Every society and culture has those whose words are privileged. Second, much discussion about ‘truth’ is bound up in questions of ‘authenticity.’ Here, too, authority is at play as well as issues of legitimacy: who can speak? This can be particularly critical when ‘the truth’ is hotly contested. As Griswold notes, ‘authenticity is always a product of human action, and the difference between the authentic and the fake is a matter of context: An authentic Warhol is a fake soup can’ (1998: 274). Still, she assures us that there is ‘an authentic authenticity against which the manufactured one could be compared and found wanting.’ Stated differently, people presumably have an

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ability to differentiate between those who lay claim to authenticity and the real deal. Third, as these points suggest, stories must both be taken at their face value and not. Here is where Burckhardt’s notion of stories ‘which are true and not true,’ the Bembas’ interest in the words we hear, Griswold’s attention to authenticity, and Steffen’s quip about rumors ‘truer than the records’ from ‘somebody who understood what it was all about’ meet. Stories must be considered carefully, conscientiously, and whenever possible from multiple sources. Even then, we may well regard them as suspect and we probably should – is it what really happened? Was it the Spanish who blew up the USS Maine in Havana’s harbor in 1898? Did the Poles provoke the Germans in 1939? Was the 1964 attack on US ships in the Gulf of Tonkin conducted by the Republic of Vietnam? Were people across the United States in favor of civil rights? Did Iraq (or even Afghanistan, for that matter) attack the United States on 11 September 2001? The list is endless and the ‘truth’ in some sense both unknowable and irrelevant. What matters is what, at a given moment and for posterity, however debatable, becomes the truth at hand. A method to the madness?19 Methodological concerns about stories abound. Despite their antiquity in many cases, and to some degree their ‘standardization,’ stories often appear to be evanescent, and profoundly localized. Different, even adjoining, neighborhoods in a town or city may have slightly different versions of the same story, especially in societies where people’s identification is deeply rooted in their neighborhood rather than in their city or state. There is undeniably a sense in which many stories, regardless of their provenance, are fleeting glimpses passed along among and between people in a variety of settings. Yet, as Tilly (2002: 26) so well articulates (of which more below), there are what might be usefully thought of as ‘standard stories’: ‘sequential, explanatory recounting of connected, self-propelled people and events that we sometimes call tales, fables, or narratives … explanatory accounts of self-motivated human action.’ If this depiction of stories is too narrow and impoverished, the existence of standard stories marks their permanence. Folklorists have even created typologies for classifying myths and fairy tales; the most common of these is the numbered and lettered Aarne–Thompson type

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index, which relies on both the story and the motifs within it to assign designators. 20 Stories, it seems, are both ephemeral and surprisingly long-lived; contingent, as they are, on people, this should come as no surprise and provides an excellent base. As for ‘localization,’ stories are in a profound sense ‘versioned.’ In León, Nicaragua, for example, there are countless stories of the city’s rebellion and resistance in 1978–79 against the dictatorial regime of Anastasio Somoza. These actions varied not just from neighborhood to neighborhood but sometimes even from block to block, with several claiming the starring role, sometimes focused on a single individual or event. In some cases, the stories featured competing claims, all of which may have been true even as it seemed they could not possibly be. For example, Comandante Omar Cabezas hid among these people in this barrio, rallied these people in another, was hidden by these folks here, ate with some other people in yet another, was actually really hiding in this neighborhood, and had lauded the people of another for their leadership and bravery – sometimes at the same time! When asked about all these stories, he laughed and with a wide grin asserted that, of course they were all true (Cabezas, 1989). In each barrio, the local heroes emerged and the story of León’s and the Leónese heroic role in the Nicaraguan Revolution shifted a little, even as the cast of characters and larger story – not to mention essential truths – remained largely the same. Another dilemma is the propensity in many settings for stories predicated upon a totalizing rhetoric designed to eliminate uncertainty and promote inevitability. Such stories seem particularly likely to be articulated by people seeking to lead and therefore in search of a compelling story. Thus a story is often deployed in an effort to iron out seemingly incoherent or contradictory dynamics and present a clear and unified vision; as Maurice Bishop (1982), following Marx and Engels, suggested in Grenada, a line of march. 21 The endeavor is both to keep people from pulling in multiple directions and from being distracted by the opacity of actions they might find contrary or offputting. Such stories require great effort to put into context, and to pare away the tale told with a sensitivity and nuance is difficult for any but the most adept. Obviously stories are largely predicated upon people’s perceptions of their context, of the world. Thus it is not only an issue of assessment.

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It is also a question of how they can be accessed with the rigor and replicablity so valued in the social sciences. Currently, the theories, much less the instruments to measure the impact of a story, a song, a dance, a symbol on societies and cultures, are lacking; even more narrow and bounded studies about how, for example, a song or television show might affect a government are scarce. 22 This is a challenge but one worth taking up, given the wealth of insights into our psyche, individual and collective, on offer. Transmission Transmission troubles of various sorts are a daily occurrence, from simple directions to more complicated communications. Something is lost and something gained in almost any transmission: there will be interruptions, corruptions, and discontinuities, the vast majority of them unintentional, many imperceptible. Consider the children’s game of many cultures in which a phrase is whispered from ear to ear until it returns to the originator, who then, usually to much laughter, announces what has been transmitted and reveals the original message. Such ‘corruptions’ are rarely intentional, but in the ‘real’ world some, inevitably, are deliberate, as the teller seeks to mediate the tale being told or the listener seeks to make sense of a story on their own terms or even make the story their own. This is even more likely to be the case when transmissions occur across cultures and across time and when translation is involved. How Mexico’s most famous revolutionary figure Emiliano Zapata became a hero both to the Mexican government and to their implacable revolutionary foes the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, EZLN) is interesting but not difficult to discern (see, among others, Brunk, 2008). Zapata has long played a dual role in Mexico (Martin, 1992); people adapt stories to their own purposes. Mapping how Zapata became an important revolutionary figure elsewhere in Latin America and the Caribbean may be more challenging, but his presence – and even that of his beloved and fabled white horse, a symbol yet of popular resistance and struggle – for revolutionaries beyond the region is fascinating. Still, it is possible in many cases to trace the transmission, direct or indirect. Imagine the following plausible, though speculative, scenario. It is relatively easy to imagine that the young Cuban revolutionaries (and

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odd Argentine interloper) being trained in Mexico in the mid-1950s (by an exiled Spanish Republican air force colonel, Alberto Bayo23) heard a great deal about Zapata and may have met and interacted with some of the aging Zapatistas. Twenty years later, some of these same Cubans trained and fought alongside revolutionaries in Africa, carrying with them tales of, among others, Zapata. Ten years after that, then foreign minister, later president, of Mozambique, Joaquin Chissano, hearing about a study of revolutions in Latin America, mentioned among other things (with evident delight) ‘the white horse of Zapata’ (1985). But what does this mean? What did the Mozambicans, or for that matter the Cubans, know of Zapata? How did they fit him into their revolutionary cosmology? Who was he and what did he mean to them? It is conceivable that in both these cultures – Cuban and Mozambican – Zapata’s horse, particularly if read as a stallion, not least an all-white and presumably large one, may have been more important than the man. A brave man, fighting for his people and a just cause, on a large white horse resonates with a number of stories in numerous cultures in an array of times and places. How is history shared and how is it heard, and what is lost in translation? Even within one country, it can be a challenge to assess what such connections mean and for whom and how. In Nicaragua there are stories of aging Sandinistas from the 1920s and 1930s presenting themselves to the modern-day Sandinista National Liberation Front (Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional), reporting for duty. 24 Yet some of the ‘original’ Sandinistas were confused by what they encountered, what they saw and heard. Both sides had trouble communicating their vision and understanding of the situation; rapprochements were rarely reached, though remaining original Sandinistas seem to have largely supported the modern-day Sandinistas, especially as the struggle culminated. Still, questions about the transmission of stories, especially when there may be competing stories which bear apparent albeit cursory similarities to each other, can be illuminating. Translation If transmission represents one sort of difficulty, translation is another. We are familiar with the obvious problems of translation; one need do no more than read a ‘familiar’ book in its original language (or use an on-line translator) to see them. But words are hardly the only

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material that requires translation. Virtually anything that can be ‘read’ as ‘text’ – artwork, music, movies, television shows, news coverage, architecture, and so one – may necessitate translation. And translation is a difficult task; even a poor translator, in Benjamin’s estimation, is all too well aware that it requires something ‘unfathomable, the mysterious, “the poetic”’ (1999a: 253). At least part of the problem is that even if we set aside everything but the words, ‘even words with fixed meanings can undergo a maturing process. The obvious tendentiousness of a writer’s literary style may in time wither away, only to give rise to immanent tendencies in the literary creation. What sounded fresh once may sound hackneyed later; what was once current may someday sound archaic’ (Benjamin, 1999a: 256). Hence, ‘all translation is only a somewhat provisional way of coming to terms with’ the material at hand and ‘the task of the translator consists in finding the particular intention toward the target language which produces in that language the echo of the original’ (1999a: 257, 258). This is, obviously, no small task and may be more than is reasonable to ask. 25 These are neither small nor isolated matters, but they are far from the only problems. In general, issues of translation of any material confront two dilemmas, which might be termed sins of commission and sins of omission. The three most common sins of commission are ‘simplifying’; dragging concepts and even contexts out of their turf onto one’s own; and the rearrangement or even the dropping of complex characters, settings, or behaviors that do not resonate in a particular time, place, or culture. The three common sins of omission are nuance; experience; and, per Benjamin, a deft touch. These multifaceted issues converge in particular around what might be usefully thought of as ‘cultural re-editing.’ ‘Cultural re-editing’ refers to one culture’s integration of another’s story or symbol into its own. 26 While this offers an opportunity for scholars in terms of comparison and finding a familiar story, it also presents a formidable array of problems. To take one obvious example: cross-cultural/multicultural renderings of Che Guevara have been rife for some forty years, encouraged by his steady rise to iconic, pop star status, which even now shows little signs of abating. 27 Yet it is not clear how helpful it is when Amilcar Cabral of Cape Verde/GuineaBissau, among others, is dubbed ‘the Che Guevara of Black Africa, 28 when Subcomandante Marcos of Mexico’s EZLN is christened ‘the

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Che Guevara of his generation,’ when Palestinian activist Mohammad Al-Aswad is designated the ‘Guevara of Gaza,’ or indeed when Tom Paine, the European and North American revolutionary is retrospectively characterized as ‘the Che Guevara of his time.’ Such appellations afford a shorthand of sorts and, for some, a kind of legitimacy and thus authority, or perhaps even, oddly, a mark of authenticity. Even if they are illuminatory, they just as often prove obfuscatory and limiting, encouraging us to interchange, even interpolate, people, places, events, and processes. The all too real risk is thus in drawing inappropriate and diverting parallels which may mislead more than elucidate and conceal more than explicate. Mostly they create the illusion of categorization and hence control.

Tilly’s challenge: his ‘trouble with stories’ Charles Tilly, one of the most influential and brilliant social scientists of the last fifty years, addresses in his late work what he sees as ‘trouble with stories.’29 Along with his adroit analysis Tilly himself tells a great story. His somewhat disingenuous querying of whether ‘any credible versions of realism remain’ (2002: 4) aside, there is much to recommend in Tilly’s analysis. People, he allows, commonly understand their lives as stories which ‘do crucial work in patching social life together’ (2002: 26). He importantly rediscovers ‘the centrality of social transactions, ties, and relations to social processes and to investigate connections between social relations, on the one side, and social construction on the other’ (2002: 5). In addition, the proposition that stories capture ‘compelling accounts of what has happened, what will happen, or what should happen’ and thus ‘do essential work in social life, cementing people’s commitments to common projects, helping people make sense of what is going on, channeling collective decisions and judgments, spurring people to action they would otherwise be reluctant to pursue’ (2002: 27) fundamentally resonates with the essential premiss of this book. Still, despite, or perhaps because of, a body of work awash in stories, Tilly has determined that while storytelling is central to human life, the ‘causal structure between most standard stories and most social processes’ is simply incompatible (Tilly, 2002: 32). Regardless of their

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antiquity and some degree of ‘standardization,’ Tilly warns that what he construes as ‘standard stories,’ ‘sequential, explanatory recounting of connected, self-propelled people and events that we sometimes call tales, fables, or narratives … [provide] explanatory accounts of self-motivated human action’ (2002: 26), and are most often transitory and profoundly localized. While there may be ‘superior stories’ (Tilly, 2002: xiii; 39–40; 2006: 171), denoted in part by being ‘true,’ these too fall short, unable ‘to represent a series of incremental, indirect, un­anticipated, and otherwise complex causes’ (2002: xiv). Thus, for Tilly, ‘in most circumstances, standard storytelling provides an exe­ crable guide to social explanation … Most social processes involve cause–effect relations that are indirect, incremental, interactive, unintended, collective, and/or mediated by the nonhuman environment’ (2002: 35). Tilly’s formulation is complex and rich, and features telling anecdotes effectively deployed to enliven and make real his compelling claims. In the end, stories are of relatively little use. That stories are problematic guides to social analyses is common sense; ‘even when they convey truths, stories enormously simplify the processes involved’ (Tilly, 2002: 65). But such simplification is often an illusion, and in any case it is in no small part their role and place as conveyance that makes them so valuable. Given that social processes are inherently storied, our understanding and telling of them most often corresponds to the familiar ‘beginning–middle–end’ structure and trajectory. Whether we prefer them or not, our worlds overflow with stories which do not conform to the nineteenth-century novel model circumscribed by logical plot progressions and tidy closures. Rather, they are often open-ended, at times disturbingly so, and not just open to interpretation but expecting it, demanding it, indeed in some ways dependent on it. People bring their stories into conversation with the story being proffered, broadening and deepening the discussion. As a result, they reflect exactly the cause–effect relations Tilly describes; the stories here are precisely those which reflect people’s recognitions of the indirect, incremental, and often unintended elements and aspects of their stories and lives, people’s consciousness (and unconsciousness) of the profoundly interactive and collective nature of their stories and lives; and the often exceptional degree of contingency people afford to their environment. This is what we seek to explore here.

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Creating and telling stories: the art of bricolage The number of stories is incalculable, and stories of revolution are legion, greater even than the histories of revolution (no mean feat) and more widely shared than we usually consider. People ‘rework and simplify social processes so that the processes become available for the telling’ (Tilly, 2008: 39). But who ‘makes’ these stories and how and why? If the answers are obvious – we make them, and for all the reasons elucidated so far – the process remains something of a mystery. The contention here is that people ‘remember’ their pasts, often in mythic terms, and they borrow from each other; we are mimetic. As a result, people often confront the world as would a bricoleur, a word which in this context should convey the ability to perform a large number of diverse tasks with whatever tools or materials are at hand, often things saved or collected as one’s life unfolds for the moments when they might be of use.30 Neither practical scientist (or engineer) nor abstract theoretician, the bricoleur is thus prepared and able to deal with whatever the circumstance, by whatever means necessary.31 Hence a bricoleur might reasonably refer to someone who creates their own strategies for understanding and working with the reality at hand. This does not happen in a vacuum. Not only are there the conditions extant but, as Polletta astutely notes, listeners are active, ‘filling in the blanks, both between unfolding events and between events and the larger point they add up to … closure is never complete. The possibility remains that the same events told differently would have yielded a different normative point … we expect to have to interpret stories’ (Polletta, 2006: viii, emphasis in the original). What this means is that just as leaders can go no further or faster then their followers will allow, and indeed must bargain, compromise, and negotiate in the effort to win them over, so too storytellers necessarily take their audience, setting, and situation into account. Being able to fashion clear, compelling, and authentic stories, no matter how familiar, is no small feat. Cobbling together a more or less coherent whole from a grab bag of materials and concepts might easily be designated the handiwork of bricoleurs, those adept ‘at the magic art of bricolage: new stories crafted out of recycled pieces of old stories’ (Doniger, 2000: 26; Apter, 2006: 791 similarly links magic and bricolage). This is what people do in an inordinate number of situations, few of them extraordinary in themselves

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but made more meaningful in particular situations due to the context, perhaps never more so than in uncommon circumstances that arise as revolutionary imaginations give way to revolutionary sentiments and perhaps revolutionary situations. People make the old new, a refashioning as necessary to meet the exigencies of the moment, creating the new when confronted with the unfamiliar or unprecedented. People, then, are likely to construct a revolutionary bricolage, a vocabulary of words and concepts from a variety of sources forged by people into some sort of practical ideology with which they confront the inequities and exigencies of their time and place, crafting new stories, new visions out of old, while retaining important contextual links to the past. Bricoleurs ransack their minds and their culture for concepts and practices that will help them deal with the matter at hand. All of culture and society is fair game. Thus memories of oppression, sagas of occupation and struggle, tales of opposition, myths of once and future glory, words of mystery and symbolism are appropriated from the pantheon of history of resistance and rebellion common to almost every culture (and borrowed from others) and fashioned into a usable past which confronts the present and reaches out to the future; myth, memory, and mimesis provide a picture of the world as it was, as it is, and as it could and should be. While working out the lineage or provenance of any particular tale seems a fool’s errand and well beyond the scope of this project, it is nonetheless the case that we can find a surprising amount in common among the various stories we humans seem to possess in our varied cultures and societies. Both written and oral collections of stories provide us with at least partial access to the histories of their respective worlds. The contention here is that as part of the process of revolution, old stories are told and heard and thereby updated and made real and usable. Just as revolutions are not some random or inexorable force of nature, neither are stories just discovered lying about.

The role of narrative: the story of story Narrative, like story, is ubiquitous; we cannot function without it. Indeed, an astute reader has pointed out that the stories told later in this book are themselves redolent of the very type of narrative I will seek to distinguish them from here.32 While story has only recently begun

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to return to the social sciences, the utility and importance of narrative have been established at least since the work of Bertaux (1981) and perhaps the pioneering work of White (1973). In the hands of its many capable exponents, narrative has proved to be more than description, reflecting the extent to which people are embedded in complex social networks across time and space. This enables a mapping of the degree to which traditions of revolutionary activity and struggle broaden the array of possibilities that oppressed citizens view as accessible to them. Narrative is the critical core of stories, at least as we in the North/West most commonly understand them, but it is not a one-to-one mapping. The story can be more than its narrative. Separating narrative from story is not meant to be either tendentious or disputatious, or to suggest that these terms in daily usage are not interchangeable. Part of the purpose of such exercises is to enable us to reflect more accurately what transpires in the ‘real’ world. To this end, the contention is that narrative, as described below, is a subset of story; that is, stories are narratives, but narrative alone is not a story (see Glassie, 1982: 39; for a contrary view, see Tilly, 2006: 64). For the purposes of this project, the focus is on story, meant here to capture the broader, deeper, more sprawling ‘mess’ that encompasses what it is people tell, that which matters most to them. But it would be impossible to investigate or explicate story without seriously considering narrative. In Barthes’s compelling portrayal, the world’s narratives are myriad, to be found in articulated language, spoken or written, fixed or moving images, gestures, and the ordered mixture of all these substances … present in myth, legend, fable, tale, novella, epic, history, tragedy, drama, comedy, mime, painting … stained glass windows, cinema, comics, news item, conversation … under this almost infinite diversity of forms, narrative is present in every age, in every place, in every society; it begins with the very history of mankind and there nowhere is nor has been a people without narrative. (Barthes, 1977: 79)

Lest there be any confusion, he adds: ‘all human groups, have their narratives … narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself ’ (Barthes, 1977: 79). Following Barthes, in Byatt’s more succinct formulation, narration ‘is as much part of

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human nature as breath and the circulation of blood’ (2001: 166). So what is narrative and how is it different from story? Narrative can obviously signify a number of different things. Cognizant of the dangers of ‘dilut[ing] the meaning,’ Sewell nonetheless sees narrative as ‘a universal category of human cultures, conventions of storytelling, epistemological and ontological assumptions, accounts of life experiences, ideological structures intended to motivate the rank and file of social movements’ (1992: 486). Perhaps less grandly, Tilly (2002: 17) sums up narrative as entailing ‘claims to reasonably reliable knowledge of actors, motives, ideas, impulses, actions and consequences … [and] also 1) postulation of actors and action as more or less self-contained, 2) imputation of cause and effect within the narrative sequence.’ More prosaically, Hinchman and Hinchman argue that for the social sciences, narratives ‘should be defined provisionally as discourses with a clear sequential order that connects events in a meaningful way for a definite audience and thus offer insights about the world and/or people’s experiences of it’ (1997: xvi). While these conceptions present pitfalls, they help frame narrative as distinct from story. This is not a case of hubris but rather recognition of the universality of stories and that we are most likely to relate those stories in/as a narrative – narrative, if you will, as method. While I am uncomfortable with White’s contention that narrative and narration are ‘simply data,’33 his suggestion that narrative presents a vehicle for translating ‘knowing into telling, the problem of fashioning human experience into a form assimilable to strictures of human meaning that are generally human rather than cultural specific’ (1981: 1; emphasis in the original) is compelling. This is not to suggest that we can necessarily or readily fathom the intricacies of other cultures, but to observe that ‘we have relatively less difficulty understanding a story coming from another culture, however exotic that culture may appear to us.’ Building on Barthes again, White notes that, ‘as Barthes says, narrative is trans­ latable without fundamental damage, in a way that a lyric poem or philosophical discourse is not’ (1981: 1–2; emphasis in the original).34 While narratives generally conform to those with which we are familiar, due to our predilection for telling stories in the way we like hearing them, they need not and do not always do so. In the most ambitious explicit effort to discern a revolutionary narrative, Parker (1999: 113) describes narrative as ‘an ordered sequence

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of events and actions located in its own time-span.’ Narrative, he goes on to say, provides links across time and hence possesses ‘an internal coherence which lends a certain kind of necessity to the sequence’ (1999: 113); in other words, it could only have happened in this way. Narratives do ‘not require evidence of causality’ nor ‘the possibility of repetition’ and they do include ‘human roles, hopes, and experiences’ (1999: 113). The narrative ‘holds together’ and ‘maps out’ what is to come by ‘specifying end-states, determining powers and agents of change, offering justifications and providing a time-frame for change’ (1999: 115). People create and make their own world and ours; the narratives we construct and rely on provide connections, coherence, compression, and concreteness. Bowing to Parker’s impressive formulation of narrative, I will not belabor the point further. However, several comments are in order. First, cognizant that different understandings of the world may rely on contradictory presuppositions, it is less important that we arrive at a specific definition of narrative than we concede the extent to which we rely on narrative to provide order to the chaos, as it were. Stories abound and we are inclined to seek a way to give them a form, a shape, we recognize and to imbue them with meaning. As will become evident in the next two chapters, this story work is the terrain upon which those who seek to resist, rebel, and make a revolution must engage both those they seek to work with or lead and those they challenge, all of whom – those who seek change, those who resist it, and those whose choices determine the outcome – have a story to tell. Second, narrative, at the core of story, not surprisingly reflects the same elements proposed at the start of the chapter to denote story: there is a classic ‘beginning–middle–end’ structure with standard plots and familiar characters; people are endowed with the sense that they are actors in their stories and thus their world; and narratives provide both a map of the world in which they live and a veritable star chart of the larger world, offering a deep and broad sense of connection to time and place as well as beyond them. Thus what narrative does for story is offer a sequence of events (but see Berger and Quinney, 2005b: 4), reflect the social context extant, and to a large extent imbue the story with meaning, why it matters. Third, as the preceding suggests, at any given point there exist an infinite number of alternative narratives, competing versions often

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available (or at least discernible) in what might be considered less conventional formats such as folk tales, songs, plays, and other instruments of popular culture.35 While such formats can be used to convey and instantiate the historical record, they can also present alternative constructions of history, constructions that may be said to represent what Biersack refers to as ‘local history,’ in a nod to Geertz’s notion of ‘local knowledge,’ which seeks to capture the ‘significant worlds and the indigenous outlooks that give them life’ (1989: 74). People create their own history and they tell that history as they themselves perceive it; perceptions ‘grounded in their material and social situations and past experiences, they are continuously reshaped in interactions with new experiences and with the claims of others’ (Foley, 1993: 485) as they seek to make sense of their world. Fourth, then, is that not only do people most often opt for narrative to make sense of their stories, necessarily rooting them in a particular language and place, but we seek to do the same, searching for ‘our’ narrative that makes ‘their’ narrative meaningful to us even as ‘we’ search for its meaning for ‘them.’ As articulated by Sewell, ‘the narratives in which historical actors emplot themselves is crucial for understanding the course and dynamics of historical change’ (1992: 483). With Davis (1987: 4), ‘I am after evidence of how … people told stories … what they thought a good story was, how they accounted for motive, and how through narrative they made sense of the unexpected and built coherence into immediate experience.’ How we might gain entrance to this world is the focus of the next chapter.

Our story so far People have built infrastructures for as long as we know, reshaping land, making roads, erecting buildings and dams. So too have we constructed institutions, for example, systems of justice, information and healthcare. These and innumerable other structures undergird and enable our lives on a daily basis. Similarly, long before people existed, plants, animals and minerals developed what might be termed an eco-structure roughly analogous to infrastructure and equally foundational/fundamental to daily life.36 The contention here is that, in much the same manner, people have created a story structure, a repository of stories which undergirds and shapes our daily lives. We (re)compose stories and (re)configure

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them in an effort to (re)connect with each other and to build community. These stories largely feature stock plots and characters, and tend to be both redundant (lest the point be lost) and repetitive, so that people learn. They may be short and sweet or meandering, taking hours or even days to tell. Storytellers balance an array of elements and aspects, weaving characters and events into a more or less coherent whole that interacts with the context of those listening. Truth, direct or otherwise, is less important than the extent to which stories represent people’s perceptions or capture what they feel. They form a collection of who we were and where we came from, where and who we are now, and guide us to where we are going and who we wish to be. In every culture, every society, there are stories large and small, mythic though not necessarily epic, that do everyday duty and are saved for special occasions. As the novelist Harry Crews (2005) said of his youth, ‘stories were everything and everything was stories. Everybody told stories. It was a way of saying who they were in the world. It was their understanding of themselves. It was letting themselves know how they believed the world worked: a right way and a way that was not so right.’ Such stories are inevitably predicated upon relatively timeless concepts and are in a profound sense tools, told and retold and used in the ways described here; thus it seems fair to construe them as a form, perhaps even the primary form, of socio-political struggle.37 Stories and songs help develop, maintain, rewrite, (re)valorize, (re)inculcate, (re)instantiate, rework, renovate, reconfigure history/ memory, both popular and personal. This is not to suggest that there is some sort of coherent core from which all this flows; rather it is a vast web with innumerable entrances and exits, nexuses and nodes, and myriad points of socio-political and cultural organization rife with instances of social organization and awash with culture. The most plausible way to try to capture this labyrinth is by recourse to stories. This entails taking these stories in their contexts but also out of them; it also means recognizing that context denotes more than simply situation. By ‘denationalizing’ these stories, we can also internationalize (but not globalize) them and find common (but no universal) themes which suggest that while all matters revolutionary are profoundly local, they also reflect broader and deeper rules we write across time and space and culture about who we are, how we behave, and what is possible in our world.

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There are stories of the past that are, somehow, held in common. These often resemble richly woven tapestries of myth and ‘fact’ (or the officially sanctioned myths), are demonstratively and even intensely mimetic, and draw on a reservoir of memories which themselves may be real or imagined but in either case are created. It is not History or even the past itself which binds us together (or, just as surely, splits us asunder) but the stories of that history, of the past that we recount to ourselves and others in the present; stories about the past inevitably in the service of the present and the future. These shared stories rooted in and reflective of collective memories, are creations that express conscious and intentional choices regarding what is to be included and what omitted. The creation of these stories and thus of usable and hence manipulable pasts – as History or history – is as essential as it is inevitable. Myth, memory, and mimesis provide both the framework and the entry point.

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tories, as suggested in Chapter 2, are cobbled together from various bits and pieces in conscious acts of bricolage. The assumption is that the earliest storytellers wove their magic from assorted parts simply lying about, flotsam and jetsam. Those which resonated or proved useful served a purpose, and fairly quickly story­ tellers and those who sought to use and benefit from their stories became more intentional and more purposive, less inclined to be hit-or-miss affairs. Thus the creation of a story is not some haphazard process reliant on either serendipity or coincidence, though either (or both) may affect when and where story is deployed. But make no mistake: stories, like revolutions, are made, and like resistance, rebellion, and revolution, made with and for a purpose; part of our job is to discern it. Stories are designed and deliberate, at least broadly scripted (though at times meticulously and minutely so) and deployed in pursuit of particular objectives, which may be large or small, immediate or lasting, direct or indirect. The goal may be to teach a lesson, to pass on history, to show a path, or to provide a cosmology, in each case often with layers and levels that may be revealed as learning occurs, events warrant, processes unfold, and time passes. Any given story, certainly those under consideration here, is contrived, not in the sense of artificial (though they may be), but rather the extent to which the process reflects what can fruitfully be considered as the mining and manufacturing of

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meaning. In this formulation, people set out to mine, in the sense of excavate and extract, the past and the present, for materials with which they can manufacture stories that are then freighted with meaning and thus useful to move people into and through a process. What this means in practice is a reliance on two familiar topics, myth and memory, and the presumption of mimesis. Myth and memory are ineluctably twinned in ways that, to some extent, elude us yet. How myth and memory work, separately and together, and why are difficult questions, and somewhat beyond our scope here. These terms are loaded, overdetermined to the point that their utility is limited; here I will seek to recuperate them for the purposes of understanding the particular kind of stories that are our focus, those of resistance, rebellion, and revolution. The challenge is for us to use them as heuristics while not allowing their complexity to obfuscate matters. Mimesis represents a different sort of enigma, but one even more thorny. No element matters more for stories of resistance, rebellion, and revolution than people’s conviction, often hard won and sometimes tentative, that they can emulate others. It is the addition of mimesis that is critical here: knowing the story is one thing, the memories it invokes (and validates) another; but it is only when people identify with the story, when they believe that it represents, them that stories such as the ones discussed here become central. To guide us through the stories to come, myth and memory provide the context and mimesis can supply the catalyst. People rely – consciously or not – on a complex combination of myth, memory, and mimesis which they use to tell stories, none more important than that of who they were and where they have been; who and where they are now and who they want to be; where they want to go and how they might get there. This should not be confused with History, the myth created by the powerful to explain how it is that we have arrived at the place we find ourselves and why things are how they are and should be; history, as will be discussed, is another matter entirely. As the chapters that follow will delineate, these stories, related in various ways to the instigation of, engagement in, and maintenance of revolutionary activities, are deeply rooted in the matters considered here: predicated on myth (or mythic/al aspects and dimensions), shifted, shaped, and sustained by memory, and finally, often consciously and intentionally emulative – that is, mimetic.

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Cinderella: on ‘the chimera of origins’ Each of the three categories that follow is often, in different ways, associated with the notion of origin: origin myths or the notion a myth derives from an original source; people often have a great deal invested in the notion of what might be called ‘original memory’; and mimesis obviously presumes an original event that is being copied. ‘Origin’ suggests not only a fundamental or foundational point or locus, selected by someone for some purpose, but also a beginning of existence, the font from which all future versions and variations flow. It is the point of conception and inception. Yet I am very skeptical that we can locate such, and even wary of charting a particular path or history for any given story. Hence, there is little reward in pursuing ‘the chimera of origins’ (Chartier, 1991: 4; he invokes Foucault, 1977a) even as there is much to be gained from recognizing the antiquity, indeed ‘tradition,’ of stories of resistance, rebellion, and revolution. Every story is, in some sense, ongoing, written and rewritten anew across and through time and cultures. While the arboreal model has its attractions and is of some utility here, so too is the rhizomic model of Deleuze and Guattari (1987). There seems little question, following the former, that we can dig deeply and discern the Cinderella story some ten thousand years ago in China, which despite its differences is palpably familiar to an audience today. At the same time, it is striking to discern the breadth of the same story – across cultures and societies as well as time. Such a story unites people across time, space, and place with symbols, themes, and characters that provide recognition, knowledge, and understanding. Thus it is no surprise ‘that the common problems of humanity take common narrative forms in different parts of the world’ (Appiah, 2003: 46). Across time and space, one finds seemingly timeless tales that speak to some sort of human condition. It is reasonable to assume these stories might exist not ‘simply’ to report on that condition but as catalysts for changing it. As mentioned in Chapter 2, such stories weave in and out of discourses of every type, and are inevitably influenced by popular culture. This relationship is clearly quite complex and overdetermined, which is not surprising given that stories and culture are bound in a deeply dialectical relationship, each helping to create and maintain the other. One result of this is that stories can come to be regarded as simply

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elements among many, and not even terribly important ones, of popular culture. In this regard, then, they seem to exist as little more than bits and pieces easily manipulated for the purposes and moment at hand. It is, as noted earlier, also the case that stories serve to unite people within a shared society in which certain symbols, themes, and characters provide recognition and knowledge. Consider the following example from popular culture, an instance which has little to do with matters revolutionary (though perhaps at the right time and place and in the right hands), at least in its most recent and familiar forms.1 There are a number of broadly popular (‘beloved’) ‘fairy tales’ which show up in a surprising number of places and cultures across impressive stretches of time. 2 One of the most famous is the story of Cinderella, a tale – as we are most familiar with it these days – of a young woman once wealthy but now poor (or at least made to live in somewhat penurious circumstances) who manages to capture the heart of a prince and regain her former (and rightful) place in society. This is a tale which has known some 700 versions (Dundes 1982: xiii; Heiner, 2007 claims 1,500; and Snuggs, 2007, claims 3,000)3 over a period of at least 2,000 years in myriad cultures and subcultures, and become a story that everyone knows as part of the mainstream, one of the ‘heirlooms of humanity’ (Ralston, 1982: 32; see also Appiah, 2003: 47). ‘A Cinderella story,’ in the vernacular, is a resonant phrase in much of the world with fairly readily shared meaning.4 As a result it has also been amenable to adoption and adaptation in sundry circumstances for varied purposes by a range of people and institutions. What is most important here is that, regardless of the ‘official stories’ (those sanctioned by society and culture as well as those endorsed by states), there exists a folk tradition which is both in conversation with and in contravention of official stories.5 This popular tradition has relatively little use for and is fairly autonomous from the mainstream and those who maintain it, though those charged with such maintenance may at times, for various reasons, seek to dip into it when it serves their purposes. Still, in times and places that are not quite out of time and space as they are ‘normally’ conceived (and often ‘kept’ by women; see Tatar, 2002), there are stories that are not as amenable to co-optation. However the stories may be adapted in the face of changing times, there is a striking degree of persistence of characters, situations, beginnings and endings. 6

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Thus it is that for every Cinderella story, there are countless other tales told which may incorporate elements we are familiar with, which may or may not have been shared with or stumbled upon by collectors of stories (and related ephemera), and whose layers and levels may be beyond our ken. Consequently, we may or may not be able to recognize, interrogate, categorize, and, perhaps most intriguingly, interpolate ourselves, as we are prone to do. Faced with the unfamiliar, we find it harder to explore them and, as is our wont, make them ‘ours.’ There are no compilations of ‘classic’ or archetypal revolutionary tales such as those compendia listed in the preceding chapter, though tales contained in The Arabian Nights, Aesop’s Fables, holy books, or the Brothers Grimm can be and have been read as subversive stories of resistance and rebellion, if not revolution. Nor are revolutionaries without guidebooks of their own, though these too are weighted to the North/ West. For over 5,700 years people have looked to the ‘Exodus’ story (itself an echo of older tales), and for some 2,000 years to the ‘Sermon on the Mount’ (preached by a poor carpenter’s son killed by the rich and powerful due to his efforts on behalf of the poor and dispossessed), and to the injunctions of the Koran. There is Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, Thomas Jefferson’s ‘Declaration of Independence’ promulgated by some of Great Britain’s North American colonies, and the French revolutionary refinement, ‘The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.’ And we live in an age profoundly influenced by Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto. And then there is Lenin’s What is To Be Done?, the 1917 Mexican Constitution, Mao’s On Guerrilla Warfare (and the once ubiquitous Quotations from Chairman Mao), Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Bayo’s 150 Questions for a Guerrilla, Che’s Guerrilla Warfare, Tanzania’s ‘Arusha Declaration,’ Rodney’s How Europe Under­ developed Africa, Debray’s Revolution in the Revolution, and collections of modern-day Zapatista Marcos’s works (online and off), and more. If some of these may not be stories in the conventional sense, like the stories collected in literary ana, they are but samples of the innumerable stories extant. The stories of resistance, rebellion, and revolution that people know and tell are countless and at times, under certain circumstances, guide people into and through such processes. As will be considered below, it is such materials and so many more in the popular culture that are mined by those who wish to bring about change and seek the means to do so.

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Myth: once upon a time… Myth is most often understood as some sort of untrue and perhaps fantastical story; at best, myth might be read as historically based allegory or parable, meant to symbolize or convey meaningful information, albeit unreliably. Like Lincoln (1999: ix), the focus here is less on what myth ‘is’ than on its utility, most conspicuously the preservation into the present, as Lévi-Strauss (1966: 16) suggests, of those observations and reflections that seem to remain useful.7 There is, as Lincoln notes, the need for ‘considerable care and caution,’ in no small part because ‘it is not always the case that myths are the products and reflection of a people who tell stories in which they effectively narrate themselves. At times, myths are stories in which some people narrate others, and at times the existence of those others is itself the product of mythic discourse’ (1999: 211); put differently, myth is ‘to tell a story about the stories others have told about the stories of others still’ (1999: ix). Myths are no less powerful for this being the case. Myths serve to bring meaning, even value, into our contemporary lives and guide what is possible (Eliade, 1953: 2). Myths may and do function conservatively; they also function imaginatively (Doty, 1996: 450). Myth is, fundamentally, information that people should know (Veyne, 1983: 45) and, indeed, know collectively, since it is laden with ‘meaning and purpose, and for that reason it speaks truth to those who take it seriously’ (Hughes, 2004: 2). For example, most cultures have a creation/origin myth, and myths in general often feature heroic figures, (semi)divine beings, or anthropomorphized animals (usually of unusual intelligence) in epic settings. Seen in this light, myth is meant to stand in opposition to, and indeed juxtaposed to, History, which is designated as the true and accurate body of ‘facts.’ This is disingenuous at best and pernicious in ways that matter, including serving to elevate the stories of the elite and powerful while diminishing and even denying the popular. Despite pretensions to the contrary, separating history (or, perhaps, History) from myth is no simple task; it may not even be a useful one. Cohen argues that it is the mythic that dominates our understanding of the past, and that while separating myth and history in theory may seem easy, ‘good historians write … as accurate and truthful understanding of the past as possible. Mythologizers, in a sense, do

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the reverse’ – in practice, in the real world, ‘the distinction between history and myth … is much less clear cut’ (1992: 82). Knowledge, by which we generally mean history, represents enlightenment, but myth and enlightenment are dialectically connected, not in opposition (Adorno and Horkheimer, 2002: xviii). Thus it is the case that myths exist to convey important information and are accepted by most people most of the time as more or less realistic chronicles of events (or, more rarely, processes) that occurred in the past but have meaning for their present and foreshadow their future. 8 While it may be a bit much to claim that ‘myth’ is largely (‘wholly,’ according to Stigliano, 2002: 33) a Northern/Western construct in the theoretical and analytical sense, it is incumbent upon us not to wrench myths out of context to render them a ‘timeless discourse’ (Stigliano, 2002: 37) and simply use them for one’s own purposes; the time and place of myths matter, though they are also profoundly mutable. In addition, it is crucial to recognize that myth is, as Barthes (1972) suggests, a discursive practice which at the very least reflects and often helps to reinscribe a particular ideology (see also Barbosa, 2005: 190). Indeed, Barthes (1972: 146–8) even argues that myth is more conservative than radical and essentially antirevolutionary if for no other reason than, revolution having made the world new, there can be no myth. This seems an impoverished reading of myth and a failure to recognize the power of memory discussed below. To some extent myths reflect the conditions of people’s everyday lives and provide a resource upon which they may draw as they confront a world most often hostile to their interests and desires. They are produced, or arrived at, communally and it is often the case that they combine to varying degrees people’s actual experiences and the lessons passed on to them orally as part of their family’s or community’s collective memory. While myths perform ‘lesser’ daily functions such as providing lessons, admonitions, and guidance, ‘grand’ ideas which might be read as human rights, social justice, or rights to property can be discerned. They may seem to complicate life, hinting that things are not always what they seem – for example, the drudge is a princess, the lost and confused boy a king, the crone a powerful magus. But just as often myths provide a means by which to organize the tremendous complexity of the world into something fairly simple and intelligible,

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as well as reasonably reliable guides to daily behavior and notions of how and who to be in the world. This is not to suggest that myths represent a coherent belief system akin to ideology.9 Neither wholly independent sets of ideas nor sets of justifications dependent on the exigencies of political power, myths nonetheless provide a loosely knit world view that people bring to bear on the events and processes around them. This role of myths is not confined to the popular classes: elites too read history through their myths, and these provide a world-view on which they rely. The key here is that myths facilitate exploration of the possible, even if they lay dormant for long periods until they are remembered – sometimes quite literally, in the sense of pieces put back together in ways that are at once old and new, the bricoleurs at work once again. So myths are not independent of society and culture; they both exist in and help create and reflect what people bring to bear on the events and processes around them. Many myths articulate, if indirectly, ideals of justice, liberty, equality, democracy, opportunity, and freedom (from fear, from hunger, from disease; of assembly, of speech, of religion) in ways that can avoid the eyes and ears of the powerful and others inimical to their interests. As a result, myths reveal what people feel society and the world once was and should be like and how that vision might be acquired. More importantly for our purposes here, they can also be deployed either to discourage or to enable people’s efforts at bringing about a fundamental transformation of the material and ideological conditions of their everyday lives. Well aware of the risks of seeking to topple those in power, people in a wide array of places, in different times, under various circumstances, have shared myths, some of which have helped provide the framework for their capacity and willingness to organize. Given this, myths are almost always contested to some extent. More importantly, those in power seek to organize them and make their versions of them the standard or central myths of society, which is commonly called History (not always, it must be said, to the delight of historians). Such history often focuses on what might be construed as justifications and rationalizations, both sometimes tortured; such myths are usually fundamentally predicated upon the notion that the past has led to this point and these people and their policies. It is not unusual for those in power to seek to construct their own myths or at

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least to rewrite to their benefit those that are extant. In this they are often no different from the revolutionaries that may confront them, and so there may be battles for control of the myths (as well as memories; see below). Consider, one hundred years on, the ongoing struggle in Mexico over the figure of Emiliano Zapata (Harvey, 1998; Benjamin, 2000; Stephan, 2002; Brunk, 2008). If it remains fairly commonplace to dismiss myths and the roles they might play, there is growing recognition of their utility and universality. Over thirty years ago, having dutifully noted that they ‘are, or seem, arbitrary, meaningless absurd,’ Lévi-Strauss allowed that ‘they seem to reappear all over the world’ (1979: 11–12), and slowly the social sciences seem to coming around. Without dispensing with the ‘uniqueness’ inherent to any local myth, Lévi-Strauss’s notion of their ubiquity is key, as is his notion that ‘the simple opposition between mythology and history which we are accustomed to make – is not at all a clear-cut one’ (1979: 40).10 Regardless, while myths may block or slow down change, they can also serve in multifarious ways to motivate, rationalize, and authenticate the actions of people and societies in revolutionary processes. People have been hungry, poor and watched their children suffer and die in many places at many times and not revolted. The wealthy and powerful have long been with us and land, goods, and services unfairly distributed, without prompting revolutionary situations. Simple or complex, structural conditions cannot alone initiate or sustain revolutionary and related processes. People can and do and will. Myths are part of the reason why. The story of resistance, rebellion, and revolution is teeming with myths. Various of these stories, are implausible, any number incredible, even inconceivable, not least since some travel better than others. Some are, or at least seem to be, impossible: the young Vietnamese revolutionary Ho Chi Minh in Paris meeting and discussing the United States’ Declaration of Independence with future US President Franklin Roosevelt; Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau’s revolutionary hero Amilcar Cabral visiting people in Mozambique in their sleep, after his death; and the appearances of the dead revolutionary figure Che Guevara in every corner of the globe. Perhaps it is in the very impossibility read by those of us outside that lies the seeds of possibilism (Darnton, 1990; Selbin, 2009b; on the possibilities inherent in the impossible, see Rabas, 1997). This is not to romanticize revolution or frame it as simply a

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timeless and mythic ‘tradition.’ Most modern notions of resistance, rebellion, and revolution are rooted firmly in the post-Enlightenment, often in 1789 and the putative end of ‘the old order’ in France and the beginning of the new; this looms large in the stories to come.11 As with most myths, the end confers legitimacy on the means. Many of a people’s most cherished myths are collective myths; and collective myths have a surprising tendency to become (by which I mean are made) ‘true.’ It merits note again that this is not some top-down process dictated by the elite and their minions; purely manufactured myths designed to manipulate and control are hard to instantiate and harder still to sustain. When a society’s dominators can marry their myths with popular conceptions and desires, the combination is powerful and hegemony comes into play. Appleby (2001), for example, points out that the first generation to come of age in ‘America,’ those who dominated US life in the 1830s, worked to create a myth of the country as the land of ‘enterprising, innovative, and equality-loving Americans.’ This myth has only been questioned by subsequent generations sporadically and at some risk, and has supported many other myths that shaped the second half of the twentieth century and continue: World War II was a ‘good war’ fought to stop the Nazis’ wholesale murder of the Jews, to protect and defend democracy, and it was won by the US’s entry and efforts; in the early 1960s most US citizens supported civil rights for African-Americans, and opposed the US’s war in Southeast Asia; the US has always supported broad-based popular democracy at home and around the globe. The US is not alone. Austrians tell themselves tales of being Hitler’s ‘first victims’; the British and French refer to their noble colonial roles and endings; and the Swedes recommend the munificent benevolence of their northern European empire. Furthermore, such myths are hardly the province of those in the North/West. Afghanis, Egyptians, Iraqis, Persians, and others (some outside the ‘Near East’) frame themselves as the cradles of ‘civilization.’ Sub-Saharan Africa is rife with collective myths that cover the ages, not least of lost grandeur destroyed by Europeans, a tale which resonates as well with those in North Africa. In Israel, Masada looms large. In Southeast Asia the modern myth of invincible white Europeans was upended, thereby reanimating a far older myth of Vietnamese martial prowess. South Asia is rife with myth and likely the source of many modern myths, not least those

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which relate to resistance.12 Powerful myths related to pre-European conquest societies in the West such as the Inca, Mexica (Aztecs), and Maya redound to this day and legends old and new abound; many of these celebrate resistance, rebellion, and revolution (though others discourage it) and feed more recent myths around figures such as Zapata in Mexico and Che Guevara throughout the region.13 These myths, sometimes more palatably framed as ‘heritage’ (Lowenthal, 1998), become an integral part, of ‘collective memory.’ Indeed, it is their ‘communal and popular’ character (Brunk, 2008: 4) which makes them so significant for understanding the power of the stories. Remember, myths not only reflect common understandings of the past, but are deeply influential in people’s conceptions of what is possible. This inexorably leads to issues of who and what becomes the stuff of legend. We can expect to find those people, places and things – whether symbols or events – residing at the intersection of myth and memory as mediated by culture at any given time; myth, according to Veyne, ‘is a copy of the past’ (1983: 68). Thus, it is memory, in its many and muddled manifestations, that is crucial to any understanding of what is or is not possible, and indeed what is probable. If ‘past performance is no guarantee of future results,’ it is clear that memories of the past can and do play outsize roles. As Faulkner cleverly observed, ‘the past is never dead. It’s not even past’ (1951: 92). But it may well be mythic.

Memory: ‘we must remember this…’ People are complicated, and perhaps no aspect of who we are is more complex than memory – it ‘is how we know the world,’ Halpern suggests, what we rely on to ‘walk and dream and talk and smell and plan and fear and love and think and learn and more and more and more’ (2008: x). Thus, ‘our memories are indispensible’ (Assmann, 2006: 212), and so, perhaps not surprisingly, memory has become a critical concept in a variety of fields. We are all, in many societies and cultures across many places and times, most inclined to represent memory as if it were akin to ‘a movie reel,’ rather than ‘a highly fallible and subjective reconstructive process’ (Muir-Broaddus, 2005). Our brains do not record in real time, and our individual memories are inescapably ‘selected, self-serving, and sometimes invented’ (Tilly, 2008: 125, in a succinct summarization of Kandel, 2006). In addition, memories are

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‘not an archive’ but rather live, a word charged with implications and ramifications, in our brains, residing ‘in chemical traces … [which] can fade … [and] can be augmented’ by observation and experience (Halpern, 2008: 66). Accuracy would appear to be haphazard at best and memory, however powerful (and it is), should almost certainly be regarded as deeply unreliable as a guide to what happened with whom, when, where or how. And these substantial and serious shortcomings are inevitably exacerbated when we consider collective memory with its competition among individuals and groups (Lee and Yang, 2007: 5) and its predictable and unavoidable additional layers of complexity. Few topics are more contested from various angles than memory. Despite our proclamations (and our celebrations) of memory and notwithstandingour proclivity to conceive of it as some sort of single, neatly embodied ‘thing’ (Halpern, 2008: 21), we still have remarkably little understanding of how memory works. Setting aside the monumental (for some, insuperable) issue regarding the extent to which memory is about chemicals or cognition, part of the problem lies in the diversity of types of memory: social memory, collective memory, shared memory, common memory, cultural memory (Assmann, 2006: 220), deep memory, ‘collected’ memory (Young, 1993: 6), public memory, political memory (Assmann, 2006: 215), dominant memory, prosthetic memory (Landsberg, 2004) and the array we might think of as ‘individual’ memory, itself an increasingly and deeply contested concept14 – can one have memories of one’s own, isolated from the impact of others, culture or society? All of these forms of memory presume both its universal nature and, to varying degrees, that it necessarily has a historical context except, arguably, individual memory, also reflect that ‘a collective concept – ‘historical memory’ – which is an abstraction and simplification of the plurality of memories that exist within any given society’ (Aguilar, 2002: 6). In light of this, the primary attention here will be on what is most commonly considered collective memory and how people remember together, whether the accuracy of those memories matters, and if certain memories, no matter how deeply personal or particularly local, may nonetheless have ‘global’ or ‘universal’ resonance.15 This is not to ignore the fact that collective memory may be associated at times with governments or ideologies16 and that it allows room for both social and cultural memories at play. In addition, Assmann (2006: 213)

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astutely notes that memories are ‘transient, changing, and volatile,’ and further that ‘the step from individual to collective memory’ is not easily analogized (2006: 216). Nonetheless, ‘collective memory,’ Lee and Yang (2007: 19) persuasively argue, is ‘a cultural force’ and one to be reckoned with, in particular when it can be ‘integrated into the semantics of a heroic or martyriological narrative’ (Asssmann, 2006: 218) – in other words, when it becomes part of the story. History as we most commonly know it and encounter it may be reasonably read as the ‘official story,’ the narrative – for it is always (re)presented as a narrative – which enjoys a sort of socio-political imprimatur bestowed by the powerful and their minions. It is, as discussed previously, an essentially top-down process, perhaps never more so than when it seeks to incorporate stories from popular culture, tales told from what for them represents ‘below.’ Collective memories, then, may be seen as the antithesis of, or at the very least distinct from, history. While it is understandable and may be most useful to frame ‘collective memories … [as] reconstructions from below by people living through history’ (Lee, 2007: 142), there is another way to think about the issue. In the common conception, there is a clear and coherent narrative presented as objective and chronological (and leading ineluctably to this moment), sometimes even framed as the ‘national story.’ This is constructed from the top and people are expected to buy into it. This is juxtaposed to ‘visions of the collectively experienced past,’ which forms a sort of ‘social memory’ composed of ‘“social fact” … that … “often makes factual claims about past events”’ (Lee, 2007: 142, cites Fentress and Wickham, 1992: 26),17 and which is held and shared by those below. Such unsanctioned ‘shared’ memories can be particularly powerful for opposition and hence for resistance, rebellion, and revolution (Watson, 1994: 9), not least since ‘these pasts frame collective ideas of what actions are generally possible, permissible, and desirable’ (Tilly, 1994: 247). Yet this configuration ignores reality. Collective memories are communal, held by most if not all people – those few at the top, the immense majority at ‘the bottom,’ and those relatively few (often beholden to those at the top) strung out in-between. They are, in a profound sense, to borrow a delightful concept from Cvetkovich (2003), an ‘archive of feelings.’18 Within this archive we can find all the possible pasts that any one of us is able to remember

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and which thus provides us with the information we rely on to build today and imagine the future. It is possible to see in this Assmann’s concern that ‘collective memory … is too vague and conflates important distinctions’ (2006: 211),19 but for the purposes of those seeking to build on those memories, that seems actually to be a strength and provides more opportunities and greater possibilities. Revolutionaries and other radicals seek to animate shared memories in order to justify and validate the work they seek to do, while those who oppose them endeavor to use the same or similar memories. In both cases, the goal is the reminder, enhancement or, if need be, production of powerful constructions that will enable and ennoble their position. 20 Rather than the ‘thin relations’ of (relatively) superficial connections such as skin color, sex, or class – all of which, as we will see, have immense power – memory offers what Margalit (2002: 5) describes as ‘thick relations … anchored in a shared past or moored in shared memory.’ It is in this tangled web we weave (and reweave on a daily basis) that we find what in the arboreal model we might consider the roots of revolution, resistance, and rebellion. Memory is often written – inscribed – as ‘traditional’ and hence the enemy of change and invention. Yet there is also ready acknowledgment that those who control memory, usually phrased as ‘the past’ in homage to Orwell, are in a position to control the present (and, according to Orwell, vice-versa). 21 One mission of some who find themselves in service to the powerful is to provide legitimacy, and hence authority, for the positions the powerful occupy and the most common method to anchor it in events (and processes) of the past (Margalit, 2002: 11). Governments and elites must seek to control collective memory to explain how they rightfully came to be, why they should hold the positions of power, and why they alone are best placed to lead into the future. Those who seek change must obviously challenge the collective memory, most commonly framed as History, and question the elite’s formulation of the national story. Memory is crucial, especially when those seeking change deploy ‘cultural symbols, heroes, and myths’ with ‘foreign entities, governments, classes, groups, and others, as they attempt to exert cultural dominance and legitimacy’ (Whisnant, 1995: 4). The most common battleground for the struggle over these memories are History and histories, often in popular culture. This raises three issues: nostalgia, History, and truth/accountability.

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The allure of nostalgia is strong: a form of memory that is most often encountered in the hands of the powerful, who use it to legitimize their privileges and persuade that the present is what is meant to be. But nostalgia also influences revolutionaries, who perhaps seek to deploy a heroic–mythic time to legitimate their struggles. The role and place of nostalgia seems to be a particular problem, captured by Geertz (2000: 22) as ‘willed nostalgia – declamatory, a pretense, worn and seen through,’ in Northern/Western societies, which sometimes find their increased ‘literacy’ (in the post-Enlightenment sense) and their own ‘sophistication’ overwhelming and long for a romanticized past when things were better. Many of us, and not just in the North/West, for many reasons, have a great deal invested in the illusion that the History which dominates our societies and cultures is in some way ‘objective’ or ‘impartial,’ even though it is impossible for us to tell the past as it was; for, at best, we can only tell it as it is now. Any discussion of the past is heavily freighted and should be approached with great caution; though it is obviously possible to discuss ‘what actually happened’ so long as we are clear that it is often a matter of interpretation. And, of course, in the process of putting the past in the service of the present – and we cannot help but do so – we impute, even demand, a verity and certain inevitability: it had to happen that way. Thus the compendium of stories we designate as History (or ‘the past’) is simply a series of stories, necessarily edited for clarity, brevity, and purpose, that we tell one another about the past in the present. No matter how rigorous and systematic our investigations or how scrupulous our presentations, all of which we ascribe to History, they are little more than some combination of what we remember, what we forget, what we invent (consciously or not), and what we need at any given moment relative to who, where and when we are. These factors also fundamentally shape our conception of the future. Historical maintenance is, in an array of ways, an expensive proposition – not that the effort is ever spared. Governments and societies, especially elites, go to great lengths to create and maintain their legitimacy and authority – the very factors that are most directly under attack by rebels or revolutionaries. The directors and producers of historical maintenance are the usual suspects; some of them appear in the camp of those seeking to upset the applecart. For all sides, the

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likelihood of success is almost directly proportional to their ability to understand and manipulate the ideological conditions and mythological propositions which fundamentally guide society and often form the bedrock of legitimacy and authority. But it would be a mistake to read this as small sets of people acting upon some large and passive population, regardless of the attempts by those selfsame people to manufacture and control what is unfolding. People have their stories, their narratives, their heroes, their versions. One of my old professors of English argued that ‘every good story has plenty of T & A’; with apologies, let me replace the terms he (and we) had in mind with words relevant to our purposes: truth and accountability. There are times when greater or deeper truths might be arrived at, whether or not the story ‘faithfully’ captures ‘what really happened.’ Debates and discussions about ‘what really happened’ are important, although in a significant, perhaps even profound, sense misguided. We must, as Higonnet (1998: 10) cautions, be wary about our efforts – ‘cautious and modest in our hopes of recapturing the past “as it really was.”’ We would also be remiss not to attempt both to fathom the past as much as we can and explore why it is ‘the past’ that interests and ‘speaks’ to us. ‘What really happened’ is, ultimately, less important than what was felt and, perhaps more importantly, how those experiences and feelings were/are internalized, processed, and then expressed/understood by those who ‘were there’ (another powerful totemic phrase) and those who would learn from them. 22 Thus it is less important whether any story is ‘true’ or ‘false’ (a binary rife with problems) than whether the story resonates with conditions extant and helps us to understand both the more immediate and the larger ‘truths’ of any given situation or process. While ‘true facts’ are available in books, they may or may not shed light on what matters, on what is of interest, on what is ‘real’ for many or most people; this is a ‘reality,’ as I will argue below, defended, maintained, and extended by people in stories. What is imperative, as Passerini (1989: 197) argues, is that ‘all auto­ biographical memory is true. It is up to the interpreter to discover in which sense, where, for which purpose.’ This is just as true for collective memories. With an ‘archive of feelings’ held jointly and alone (albeit maintained in no small part through its collective nature), it is necessary to consider the extent to which people’s efforts to re-create their

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past and explain their present involve the intentional or unintentional suppression or distortion of their thoughts and actions. Since present concerns and attitudes influence the selection and emphasis people place on both the past and the present, such alteration is inevitable, but, since the process under consideration here is primarily about people’s perceptions of themselves and the world around them, this is not a significant problem. It does call upon us to sample various people’s understanding of their and their society’s and cultures’ past. The concern is whether people represent things in such a way that they fit, at least broadly. Memories remain a problem for those who seek to manipulate them and scholars who seek to study them; they are essentially beyond our ken in vital ways – how they are made, how they are stored and how storage affects them (their maintenance or deterioration), and how they are recalled (when and why) all elude us. 23 While we have some sense of how they are shared – and, hence, unavoidably, bargained over and thus necessarily compromised – we as yet do not really grasp how it is that ‘they tie individuals to groups; nor do they agree whether those ties are somehow archaic or, in fact, quite modern.’ Moreover, ‘the guiding assumption that collective memories are constructed or constructable raises vexing questions about the historical contexts and the structures of temporality that make such construction work possible’ (Fritzsche 2001: 91–2). Gildea’s formulation of memory as ‘a collective construction of the past by a given community’ (1994: 10) seems apt. This is not to suggest it is some sort of (quasi-mystical) ‘groupthink.’ Halbwachs, arguably the progenitor of the concept of collective memory, contends that, ‘while the collective memory endures and draws strength from its base in a coherent body of people, it is individuals as group members who remember’ (1980: 48). The transmission of these memories across generations occurs in an array of ways. Whatever those may be, the result is that we can infer the shape of the past, at least in its broad outlines, from collective memory. This assumes we can access it and have some notion of how best to understand/interpret it – and so are back to issues of transmission and translation, among others. So, who or what ‘makes’ memories, when, where and how? On the one hand, there are those we might inscribe as ‘the memory makers.’ This includes not only the obvious, such as historians, public intellectuals, or state managers, but also essayists, novelists, film-

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makers, the media, and, increasingly, those of us with access to computers and the Internet, which portends an even further democratization of the manufacture of memories. On the other hand is the propensity, fading but still real (even vibrant) in which rural, indigenous, or isolated people(s) are privileged as some sort of unsullied repository of the ‘authentic’ past; whatever truth there may be in this trope, it is disingenuous, even pernicious. Although we must be chary of any such binaries, the contention here is that in practice there are multiple collective memories embedded in, ‘written’ by, and articulated through the variety of groups, institutions, and other aggregations extant in society: ‘it is in society that people normally acquire their memories … [and] that they recall, recognize, and localize their memories’ (Halbwachs, 1992: 38). 24 Together our use of memories (‘participation’) brings into existence ‘collective memory and social frameworks for memory’ (Halbwachs, 1992: 38). History is thus ‘neither the whole nor even all that remains of the past. In addition to written history, there is a living history that perpetuates and renews itself through time’ (Halbwachs, 1992: 64). This is a salutary reminder that History is thus both distinct from and inseparable from collective memory. For the moment, it is enough to remember that memory, no matter how individual, is in a profound sense a cooperative, perhaps even synergistic act, produced from and between and among a variety of sources, webs of relationships, and the existing or at least perceived context. Our collectively held and shared memories not only serve to bind us together but also enable us to make every story personal and tailor it to the moment. Context matters fundamentally, 25 to the extent that the ‘same’ experiences, even if they are arguably embedded and universal – birth and death both come to mind here – will be ‘understood,’ that is constructed and construed, by different people of different cultures for an array of reasons, ‘not least being that descriptions of the self are always culture-bound’ (Zur, 1998: 19). 26 Clearly memory is powerful, pervasive, and purposeful, which is not to say it is always intentional but that, rather, it is full of purpose, and is of course laden with meaning. That memory plays a role in stories is commonsensical, as storyteller and audience rely on memories to provide history and context, fill in parts, and construct a larger, more nuanced, often deeper, and unspoken tale than can be proffered – as well as resonate in sometimes surprising

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ways and places. For revolutionaries in particular, Benjamin (2003b: 394) suggests, whatever visions of liberated children and grandchildren may move them, their deepest inspiration is drawn from their image – indeed, the memories – of their ‘enslaved ancestors.’ Such memories, individual and collective, are ultimately not only pieces of stories but indeed the deep structure upon which meaningful stories of resistance, rebellion, and revolution are built.

Mimesis: adoption and adaptation In a sense, there is perhaps no more fundamental human action than mimesis. Our adoption and adaptation of the actions of others seem almost hard-wired into our brains – language, movement, and more are learned in no small part this way. But part of our humanity would appear to be that such learning is far more than mimicry. Feminist scholarship in particular has drawn a critical distinction between ‘mimesis’ and ‘mimicry,’ which positions the latter as politically useful and/or strategic and the former as inherently and dangerously conservative. 27 While most conceptions of mimesis reflect some version of imitation, here the consideration is broader and more collective. It is not hard to see where the charges of conservatism come from. ‘Culture is elusive’ (Cantwell, 1994: 80), no more so than with regard to what Foran has dubbed ‘political cultures of opposition and resistance’ (Foran, 1992, 1993b, 2005: 21; Reed and Foran, 2002). Cantwell, with his focus on culture, offers insight into how mimesis might represent inertia, or at least be a force for such. Tradition, as noted previously, can often be a bulwark against change, and when it is passed on quietly, even secretly, within families (and communities), it can create a mind-numbing, mechanistic story which appears ‘unintended, often unconsciously, in dreams, suddenly and unexpectedly to reveal itself … in the narratives we construct about ourselves and others or to which we turn for understanding’ (Cantwell, 1994: 80–81). While Cantwell seemingly means to open up the possibilities – a matter to which we will return below – it would be foolish to ignore the extent to which culture uses stories and, more specifically, mimesis to attempt to control and delimit. We tell stories over and over again largely as a means to instantiate and reinforce social norms and mores to ensure continuity.

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We like our stories familiar, so there is relatively little mystery to the tales: mythopoetic visions surprisingly basic and enduring, replete with stock characters and familiar situations, the structure enshrining many of our most basic fears, dreams, and desires. For eons such stories were memorized, one generation learning to say, or sing, from another in a formulaic system. In some parts of the world this is still the case, and even in those societies whose cultures are now dominated by the written word, one need go back only a century or so to find the great majority of people learning and conveying information in such a fashion – repetition, imitation, recitation. While the setting may change (though in some cases its very sameness is crucial to the tale) and the teller may vary (though, again, a certain sameness may be integral to what is to be revealed), familiarity is important. Memorization, particularly of long tales or sagas, repetition, and the need to hew to characters and plots that will feel familiar, hinder creativity, forestall the development of new stories, and preclude new possibilities. This underestimation of human invention and ingenuity merits more attention; suffice it to say here that the point is not the creation of new stories, but rather the degree to which stories already extant are brought to bear on the matters of the moment, are made new. The stories are kept circulating and rewrought to deal with the exigencies at hand – and, of course, to risk repeating the mistakes of the past. Thus mimesis raises the ‘mysterious possibility of kindling fire by rubbing dry sticks … in those relations between creative minorities and inert majorities’ (Toynbee, 1934b: 247). In other words, people are able to deploy compelling stories in ways which resonate with others in their drive to fundamentally transform their lives. When that happens ‘the readjustment in the life of the majority which is required for the performance of this act of mimesis is sometimes so drastic that it can only take the form of revolution’ (Toynbee, 1934b 369). Here, then, is what Foran (2005: 21) is after: the ways in which people mobilize for change through a combination of ‘organizational capacity, lived experiences, culture, and ideology.’ Yet there are other concerns with the invocation of mimesis, other pitfalls to be wary of. Two that merit mention here are the connection to a sort of mindless, slavish mimicry and to often ill-considered conceptions of contagion – mimesis as some sort of disease, perhaps a virus, passed through the body politic.

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‘Mimesis’ is most often used in a manner which fundamentally reflects imitation or mimicry, words which commonly imply some disparagement. Here, guided by Toynbee (1934a: 191 n1), the aim is to dispel such denigration. Toynbee asserts that he uses mimesis specifically ‘in order to avoid the connotations of “unintelligent imitation” or “satirical imitation” which attach to the derivative English word mimicry … [it] denotes social imitations “without prejudice.”’ Rather than reduction to a simplistic, ‘discredited’ notion of mimicry ‘that carries connotations of naïve realism, mindless imitation, mechanical copying, and even animality’ (Gaines, 1999: 93), the goal here is to restore mimesis as a ‘way of knowing.’28 Such a (re)formulation of mimesis ‘as a form of knowledge’ will be met ‘with resistance in the First World,’ she concedes, ‘especially because the concept has long been associated with not-knowing, or ‘only imitating,’ reproducing without adding anything, and learning by means of the body without engagement of the mind’ (1999: 93–4). As she contends, it is time to move beyond such an impoverished view of mimesis; while an element of mimicry is present – and often easily identified – it is not what matters in the process and may be misleading. The third concern with mimesis which merits wariness is to read it as ‘contagion.’ Such analyses are rooted in the study of the spread of disease and generally framed as a harmful (or corrupting) influence; however, contagion more broadly captures the idea that patterns of behavior or ideas (or emotions) move from person to person or group to group. This overly naturalistic and deterministic conception is readily seen in Brinton’s formulation of revolution as fever (1965: 16), in the concept cordon sanitaire, which has been applied to revolutionary situations, and even in some sense the ‘domino theory,’ in which the working assumption is that should one instance occur, others will simply follow, falling like dominoes. While it may be that ‘contagious behavior … can fuel a sudden outbreak of revolutionary activity’ (Walt, 2000: 36), this would more likely take the form of resistance or rebellion (which themselves may be precursors to or part of revolutionary situations; consider Eastern Europe’s various ‘velvet’ or ‘color’ revolutions). However compelling such a formulation is, it posits mimesis as a non-human process. While in no way wishing to diminish or discount any of these concerns, we observe that mimesis can reflect much more conservative

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consolidation or that which we are inclined to associate with either imitation (not too mention the often attendant concerns about authenticity) or simple contagion. People talk a great deal about change, in particular whether or not change is possible. Often, in spite of daunting odds, people believe it is possible; more rarely, they seek to make such change. Circumstantial evidence suggests that when people do choose to resist, rebel, or take up the revolutionary banner, it is in part because they are aware that other people in other places at other times under other circumstances have done so. Sometimes those situations are closer – similar place, time, or circumstances, and perhaps those ‘other’ people are their ancestors or even family. Thus they know change is achievable and they have seen how it is done, and hence it seems real and possible. While this may at times include the appropriation of songs or symbols, these are mostly superficial. But inspiration is there, learning may occur, and there is great power in a story of what is possible. A Nicaraguan revolutionary from the earliest years told me how he and others were inspired by ‘the triumph’ in Cuba. Their reasoning, he told me, was simple: ‘If they can do it there, we can do it here.’ The ‘they’ and ‘we’ in that statement are important. Mimesis, as with memory and myth, is much more fully and productively understood as a collective or ‘cultural’ concept. In all three cases, it is in the communal that these factors are most wholly alive and it is their vibrancy that is vital to their power. This is captured well in Cantwell’s formulation of ‘ethnomimesis,’ in which ‘ethno’ is meant to convey ‘groups and the forces that constitute them and mimesis ‘is complicated but not occult’ (1994: 5). He goes on to outline three ‘senses’ of mimesis: ‘“imitation,” which according to Aristotle was the primary form of learning,’ and, Cantwell notes, via Hume, not just from other humans but from the world; from Havelock, ‘impersonation,’ though mostly as ‘unconscious and spontaneous and thoroughly ubiquitous in human social relations’; and, perhaps most intriguingly, ‘the figuring-forth or summoning up that produces our elite and popular culture’ (Cantwell, 1994: 5–6). Taken together, the result is that ‘all mimesis, then, is ethnomimesis’ (Cantwell, 1994: 6; emphasis in original). It is in the reflection of others that mimesis, like myth and memory, is most important here. The conscious and intentional adoption and adaptation of the actions of one group of people by another is critical in illuminating the potential for socio-political change. Degrees of intentionality may be usefully

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debated, and there are almost certainly unconscious imitations as well, which is not to suggest that these are interchangeable: conscious and intentional imitation and learning are almost certainly different in important and meaningful ways from unconscious and unintentional imitation. Mimesis is a feature of all cultures and societies. Oftentimes people draw from earlier periods, sometimes from current events. The former are often denoted by visions of some heroic/epic past or perhaps a time, real or imagined, when life was ‘good’ – just, equitable, food plentiful, with little to fear. The latter more often reflect what Martin Luther King, Jr (2004: 234) succinctly captured as ‘the fierce urgency of now’: there’s something happening here and now; people are acting, making an opening, and that we too can do. People may also draw their sense of possibility from other people, cultures, and times, usually indicated by stories from elsewhere which people connect to their particular time and place and the notion that ‘if they can do it there, we can do it here.’ It is this last – the conscious identification with and emulation of other people – that has been particularly critical for resistance, rebellion, and revolution. As will become clear in later chapters that review the stories of revolution, in modern times no event or process has loomed larger than France’s 1789 revolution. One of that revolution’s most influential analysts, François Furet, observes that it had a ‘birth but no end … a promise of such magnitude that it becomes boundlessly elastic’ (1981: 3), ‘an unlimited promise of equality and a special form of change’ (1981: 5) that became a legacy which succeeding generations have, perhaps inevitably, adopted as a promise, though, at least for Furet, ‘it was a pledge that no event could fully redeem’ (1981: 7). Mayer goes even further, contending that ‘the mimesis of the emblematic French Revolution may have been as important a driving force as ideology in the Russian Revolution, notably in the years 1919–21’ (2001: 591). A similar sentiment undergirds Octvaio Paz’s connections: ‘It was if though the Mexico of 1968 were a metaphor of the Paris Commune or the attack on the Winter Palace: Mexico was Mexico and yet also another time and another place – another reality’ (1975: ix). Myth and memory combine and recombine in powerful ways to profoundly mimetic effect. The mimetic effect of revolutions has long been discussed and the ‘demonstration effect’ oft cited, albeit these days most commonly

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with regard to the (putative) triumph of ‘liberalism,’ ‘free markets,’ and liberal democratic institutions around the world, a view far less sanguine a decade into the twenty-first century than at the end of the twentieth. Still, the concept of demonstration effect has some utility for our purposes, applied to instances of resistance and rebellion as well as revolutionary situations. While profoundly skeptical about the state of matters revolutionary, Knight (2001: 150 n11) nevertheless allows that, with regard to both democracy and revolution, there exists ‘the well known demonstration effect which seems to breed political emulation throughout Latin America (perhaps the world).’ The formula seems simple enough: in one place or more, people who perceive themselves oppressed learn of others who they can identify with who have sought to change the material and ideological conditions of their everyday lives; duly inspired, they too seek to make such fundamental and transformational changes. Again, it is worth noting that these may be their own ancestors, their contemporaries, or people in other places, perhaps nearby but at times far distant – one need look no farther than the great swath cut by the Paris Commune or the incredible resonance of the Cuban Revolution. While uncomfortable with the naturalistic and deterministic overtones, as well as the concept that it is rooted in ‘universal appeal’ (Walt, 2000: 38), the trope of contagion is resonant. Sohrabi unequivocally states that ‘the contagious effect of revolutions can not be denied’ (2002: 45) and points to both immediate mimetic effects, such as ‘the constitutional revolutions of the early twentieth century’ (Russia 1905, Iran 1905, the Ottoman Empire 1908, Mexico 1910, and China 1911), and a broader one (the period bracketed by the American 1776 and Russian 1917 revolutions). 29 Arendt (1965: 43) offers a still broader mimetic frame, arguing ‘that there is only one revolution, self-same, and perpetual,’ in what Girard (1996: 10) might describe without disparagement as ‘appropriative mimicry,’ all of them, presumably, drawing upon and copying one another. Whatever the problems with mimesis, the benefits of recognizing the extent to which people draw on themselves and each other is too useful to ignore. As Benjamin (1999d: 720) argues, ‘we must suppose the gift for producing similarities … and therefore also the gift in recognizing them, have changed the course of history.’ Further, Huyssen (2000: 67), drawing on Benjamin, persuasively contends

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that ‘multivalence of mimesis’ positions it well as a locus for the discussion of exactly the sort of collective matters such as myth and memory under discussion here. Though I would replace ‘class’ with ‘revolutionary,’ with Gaines (1999: 92) I am chary of claims that ‘the process of developing class consciousness is involuntary or imitative,’ while cognizant that there may be an ‘unconscious’ that impacts on an already developed political consciousness. What is critical for the argument put forth here is discerning not just the point at which people begin to think and act like revolutionaries but when they begin to tell themselves and embrace stories of resistance, rebellion, and revolution, stories that ennoble them and their actions and carry them through the revolutionary process.

Myth, memory, and mimesis: three is the magic number ‘Triune,’ derived from ‘trinity,’ is a term that can mean both three and one at the same time. While myth, memory, and mimesis are clearly distinct aspects or elements, each more than worthy of the immense bodies of literature and research they generate, it is also the case that together they form a sort of iron triangle which serves to undergird the process by which people move into and through resistance, rebellion, and revolution. Three factors combine to make them even stronger and more likely to provide a base from which a story builds and that people buy into and see themselves as a part of. First, myth, memory, and mimesis are all more powerful and more authoritative when they move from people’s individual dreams and desires to become collective. Second, it is in the collectivity that these can coalesce in a mutually reinforcing fashion. Third, having become public, people then ‘adapt and utilize’ these aspects ‘in a variety of ways and for a variety of purposes: confirming their own earlier views, managing relations with others, rationalizing their choices, and providing themselves with the means to organize their own motives’ (Foley, 1993: 231). Together, myth, memory, and mimesis provide the basis for building and sustaining a story of resistance, rebellion, and revolution. This is not to ignore the structural factors which contribute to the conditions, the context, in which such stories are related. Nor is it to deny the place of History, though it merits mention once more that, as Burckhardt (1979: 35) argues, ‘our historical pictures are, for the most part, pure constructions

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… mere reflections of ourselves’; the materials for that construction are a mass of highly selective data given elite/state imprimatur. At the risk of forcing matters somewhat, myths in their various public forums (see Cohen, 1992: 83)30 are a particular form of collective memory (see Barbosa, 2005: 190); both in turn provide the basis for the mimetic faculty, which, far from simply being imitation (Benjamin, 1999d: 720), is a place of representation, exploration, and possibility. Myths large and small, memories and the mimetic – the knowledge that others have changed their lives and changed the world – can combine in an exhilarating, if also overwhelming, concatenation in which issues of fact or fiction are irrelevant; it may even be the case, as suggested in Chapter 2, that it is only in fiction that the truth can be found. Myth, memory, and mimesis provide us with a means through which to explore some of the more notable and, in a relative sense, bestknown glimmers of hope, nurtured and kept alive as revolutionaries and radicals seek to make the world they wish. Most of the world’s population at any given time, even in the twenty-first century, spend their days bound up in the exigencies and complexities of everyday lives that all too rarely rise above the ‘mundane’ struggles to survive. In their reality, often dominated not by evil or darkness but by varying degrees of oppression and repression, people find themselves living in times and places where the dominant shade is gray. Most wish for something better for themselves, their neighbors, their children and grandchildren; to honor their ancestors (and perhaps avoid their fate). The offer of clarity, most often in the form of a story, from whomever or wherever it might come, is incredibly seductive. Most of the time, such stories provide not only the comforting beginning–middle–end narrative which seems to resonate in so many times and places, but also ‘explanations,’ however tenable, for where things were, how they reached the point where they are now, and what might be done to change matters. The chance to reshape one’s world and one’s place in it is an impossible possibility. What moves a people into and, more rarely, through a revolutionary process, is the articulation of a compelling story from the past which frames the current struggles and promises a better world to come.

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evolutions are intentionally made by people consciously seeking to change their world and often that of others. This turns around how revolutions have often been conceived: as uncontrollable, unstoppable, often violent forces of nature; in abolitionist Wendell Phillips’s memorable declaration, ‘revolutions are not made; they come’ (Skocpol, 1979: 17). Notwithstanding its determinism, Phillips’s succinct summation nonetheless is also a pluperfect example of the kind of maxim or aphorism which becomes part of a story we tell. And people are storytellers, narrators of their own lives and others, as well as of the world around them, and hence the makers and purveyors of history and the world in which they live. People make revolutions; it is the stories they tell that enable them to do so. People make revolution. If there are unintended consequences and circumstances over which they may have little or no control, it is still their history that they seek to make. Obviously, they are not the only ones trying to make history: so too are those they oppose, who presumably have a vested interest in forestalling their efforts and who not surprisingly have stories of their own. Whether it be resistance, rebellion, or revolution, the arena for this struggle by all concerned is story. Stories, as will become clear, can obviate economic disadvantage, surmount socio-cultural mores, and even triumph over military might. The articulation of powerful and persuasive stories with (dis)engaging and (dis)empowering storylines and narratives delineates what is pos-

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sible to the extent it can be imagined at the time; possibilities become evident as the process unfolds. Demands for change are profound and any change will almost certainly be highly contingent, perhaps even ephemeral. This is less significant than it might seem. Actions which seem failures at the time can be productive in the long term, both for the change around the edges which is nonetheless meaningful for many, and for what they add to the store of revolutionary tales – as with so much in the lives of so many, little is left to waste – whose universal premiss and basic promise is cogently expressed in the slogan associated with Michael Manley’s radical social-democratic political program in 1970s’ Jamaica, ‘better must come.’1 Along with people’s hopes and dreams, a crucial component of the revolutionary potential in any population is their conception of what is imaginable and thus at least theoretically feasible. These interwoven perceptions reside in both Cvetkovich’s ‘archives of feelings’ (2003) and Parker’s revolutionary ‘imaginary’ (2003: 46). They provide the basis for Swidler’s ‘tool kits’ (1986: 273) and Tilly’s ‘repertoires of collective action’ (1978: 143), and are most commonly articulated as stories. Sometimes we refer to these as History (or history) and sometimes we designate them as myth; as discussed earlier, inevitably it is some mix of the two. People maintain this body of knowledge on their own (the vagaries of individual memory aside) and collectively, and, as with myth and memory, it is the inherent community, the shared recognition, which is critical. Most societies have stories of resistance, rebellion, and revolution in the face of deprivation, oppression, or tyranny, and many of these are celebrated in popular culture. When movements are able to either bring these stories to bear, it is more likely such activities will be undertaken and receive broad popular support for at least part of the struggle; whatever degree of success or failure, it will be written and read as the latest chapter of the story in play. It is stories that define us as people; they are the tools we use to create, see, and manage the world. Resistance, rebellion, and revolution are made to seem possible when people articulate compelling stories that provide those anxious to change the material and ideological conditions of their everyday lives with the belief that such change is achievable, with the energy to do so, and in some cases even with strategies and tactics that can be utilized. Most often people (re)create and unite around a dominant, authoritative story,

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commonly a heady concoction and concatenation of names (usually heroes and martyrs), dates (perceptively described by Cabrera Infante (1994: 148) as ‘incantatory ephemera’2), places, grievances, and even means and methods, woven together into some sort of working narrative.3 These pieces are culled from tales told, songs sung, places or objects represented, and cobbled together quietly, confidently, with commitment, conviction and sometimes passion. And often there is something harder to capture: the expression on someone’s face, a look in their eyes, even small gestures with one’s head or hands or a shift in posture; a tone or tenor in a person’s voice, a swell or catch, particularly when caught up in reverie or frustrated at how to convey something profound, perhaps beyond words, not least to an interloper. Working to weave together a useful and usable story, people draw on and refashion the past to explain the present and predict a future, a future ineluctably predicated on the present and the daunting conditions they confront. As a result, these stories reflect a reliance on myth, memory, and mimesis – consciously or not – to articulate who they are, where they want to go, and how they will get there. The endeavor here is to identify the primary stories of revolution and related phenomena, mainly resistance and rebellion. This is not a claim that there are inherently universalist or globalized stories. Every case of revolution is unique, even as every case shares something, however tenuous, with all the others. At the very least it is possible to identify broad outlines, critical aspects of collective action or behavior; to discern decision-making processes; and to investigate considerations, or at least choices, of strategies and tactics. All this merits some attention and care: the desire for nomothetic explanations that manage to answer ‘all’ our questions, a sort of unified field theory, in this case for radical collective behavior, is deep. At the same time, we indisputably crave idiographic accounts that deepen and ground those covering laws. Short of that, efforts to capture the breadth and depth will continue, and one possible approach might be to consider the identification of basic stories of revolution discernible across time and place. What are the tales that are told and retold; songs sung, hummed, or played; places or objects that are shown, sometimes discreetly, often with an assurance that bespeaks a promise and earnestness, and sometimes with ardor? This last is elusive, but talk to someone who

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has engaged in acts of resistance or rebellion, or in a revolutionary process: it can be seen, heard, and felt. How does one articulate to a stranger, an acquaintance, or even a friend or loved one a matter which may be simultaneously complex and simple? The answer is often simply by having to ask, repeatedly, if their tale makes any sense, if it is clear, even as they know it never really will be. In a real sense, you have to be there; stories are our best efforts to bring those who were not to that time and place. With regard to resistance, rebellion, and revolution, stories play a multifarious role. These events and processes are simultaneously embedded in and construct cultures of resistance, rebellion, and revolution, in effect genealogies or webs of resistance, rebellion, and revolution which in turn are used to construct stories.4 It is possible to construe several basic stories of revolution which capture most revolutionary activity. Some of these are, in essence, elite stories from above which most often feature famous characters, reference large processes, and are denoted by big, even epic events; it is not unusual for those telling them to attempt to make the people and matters at hand ‘fit’ these tales. Others are more popular stories that emerge from below, often ‘smaller’ stories, built around local or lesser-known figures or, if famous, figures who are plausibly read as popular rather than elite; they less commonly mention or recognize processes as such, and often imbue small events with great significance. As discussed in Chapter 1, the issue is how potentially incongruent elements such as hopes, dreams, and desires; anger, resentments, and grievances; and commitments, fears, and passions find common ground and together become something more than any one of them. How are people’s revolutionary imaginations stirred, their revolutionary sentiments aroused, and thus revolutionary situations created? Once again, as has happened for as long as people have told stories, the story begins, a journey from the impossible to the possible to the plausible to the probable. Yet how this unfolds and why and where and when remains a challenge. Across the revolutionary process, there are along the way stories of aspiration, inspiration, and prudence which help people navigate their way. Perhaps most of these stories do not end well; ‘the people’ are often defeated by one means or another, not least themselves. And, of course, stories are deployed by those on the other side, counterstories if you will, sometimes with the same or similar features. The

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world is awash in stories; while they may caution and restrain, where there are stories there is hope and there are possibilities. By what mysterious means do people move into and through revolutionary processes across all the phases and in the face of daunting odds and disheartening prospects? The ‘familiar’ response to this, with allowances for those more or less hostile to revolutionary processes, suggests relatively little mystery and a reasonably clear pattern and process: a set of revolutionaries with a unified ‘leadership’ – latterly often framed as some sort of vanguard party – mobilizes and then leads a population of followers (most commonly inscribed by the revolutionaries or their opponents as ‘the masses’) against the small elite and their foreign allies who have immiserated them; the middle class, to the extent that they exist, are presented as caught in the crossfire. In those rare instances where state power is seized, the revolutionaries then reconstruct state and society along new material and ideological lines, pleasing enough people that the process continues; failing that, they may begin to suppress them. Regardless of its accuracy, this narrative is the story of revolution we have latterly often framed, regardless of the circumstances, forcing cases to fit. No story is sufficient in and of itself. But stories are the reason why revolutions are made. Stories are central to all of these processes; they are not the only factor, but without them there is no resistance, no rebellion, no revolution. Thus people may see Nicaragua 1979 as another iteration of Cuba 1959, which may in turn be read as Russia 1917, itself famously read by many as a replay and updating of France 1789 – indeed, this is the ‘social revolutionary story’ most familiar to many of us (explored in Chapter 6): epic struggles for the very soul of the people and marked by efforts at fundamental transformation of their material and ideological conditions. Yet this obscures as much as it illuminates and can be badly misleading. There is obviously utility in construing the Nicaraguan Revolution as descended from the French Revolution almost two hundred years before; it provides a context, points to the parties most likely to be involved, suggests causes and consequences as well as interests and goals, and highlights the issues and dynamics at play. And yet doing so ignores not only matters of time, place and culture, but also the change inevitable over so many generations. Matters of transmission and translation aside, even the much closer and to some extent consciously emulated 1959 Cuban Revolution is no easy fit, since

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it emerged at a time when a ‘third way’ still seemed possible for many in the ‘tri-continental’ world of the non-aligned.5 This is not to suggest that such comparisons may not be useful or privilege any revolution as sui generis. What is imperative to keep in mind is that even when it is possible to identify shared stories that, each case is its own story, even as it adds to the rich repository of revolutionary tales.

The trouble with stories redux: a few caveats Despite the repeated invocation of resistance, rebellion, and revolution as a (holy) trinity of sorts, they are not the same and are rarely fruitfully interchangeable; much time and energy has been expended in defining the differences (see Chapter 1). While there are similarities – think of a continuum of collective behaviors – neither resistance nor rebellions is necessarily revolutionary and their stories are commonly different in fundamental ways. To generalize, resistance stories are usually smaller in scale (though on occasion epic in scope), local, and involve ‘weapons of the weak’ (Scott, 1985); whereas stories of rebellion tend to be somewhat narrow, focused on specific grievances, and prone to end badly – gains are often lost and must be struggled for again. That said, both types of story, as will become clear in the chapters ahead, can and do contribute to a revolutionary milieu, firing the revolutionary imagination, heightening revolutionary sentiments and intensifying the revolutionary situation to the degree that revolution seems not only possible but even inevitable. The construction of such inevitability is no small task given that there is a significant sense in which stories as they are most commonly conceived are conservative. Just the time and energy spent memorizing may deter the imagination and consideration of other possibilities. Further­more, consider that most fairy tales are congenitally traditionalist and designed to provide cautionary advice to children and to reinforce prescribed behaviors. Yet the intrinsically subversive element lurking in many stories is not hard to discern: elders are often at best fools and at worst mendacious killers; little in the world is as it seems and only those who are special or taught can see what is really happening. Thus there are stories, and then there are stories within them. Much depends on who tells the tale, the context if its telling, and the life experiences of the listener.

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Historically, revolution has often been presented as a paroxysm of violence or eruptions of uncontrollable passions, at times fueled by conspirators unable to control the legions they have roused, who, inevitably, in what is often a thinly veiled morality play, ruin all that is good and decent, akin to a devastating disease or horrific natural disaster. This is, in essence, the ‘fire in minds of men’ perspective. 6 It would be foolish to suggest that ‘fire’ may not be necessary for combustion; in the context of matters revolutionary it is evocative7 and may be a useful descriptor, rather than a guide. There is no question that within many revolutionary processes much violence occurs (much of it from counterrevolutionaries), and in the aftermath of political victory it is not uncommon for there to be more. Only rarely in revolutionary processes is there violence simply for its own sake, a radical immersion in blood, but excesses have been committed. This is not surprising in times of dramatic change and possibility. People’s fervor is often palpable, something they remember and talk about for generations, and it is certainly possible to see and hear the passion in their actions, and recognize the warmth of their tales. It is also deeply misleading, ignoring the complexity of how people are in the world, evoking the (inevitably ‘regrettable’) ‘heat of the moment’ which destroys. Revolution as ‘fire’ obscures more than it illuminates. The argument here is about neither paroxysms, nor spasms, nor small conspiracies of quasi-professional revolutionaries passing on arcane and covert secular ideologies (transubstantiated into a ‘revolutionary faith’) which have replaced lost religious faith. While impassioned people and fervid moments appear early and often in the myriad tales that make up the stories here, they are but a part of the story. ‘Uprising of the anecdotes’ The claim here should be clear by now: revolutions do not simply come, however romantic and dramatic the notion, but are intentionally made by people consciously seeking to change their world – albeit inevitably with consequences none is likely to imagine and under circumstances over which they may have little control. The primary vehicle for this is the articulation of compelling stories with plots that are engaging and empowering. Such efforts are no less important for being highly contingent and all too often ephemeral. Failures – that is, the inability to realize the goals sought – are the norm, but even so often bring

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about some change; of greater import, they add to the aforementioned lore, that storehouse of revolutionary tales. As with so much in the lives of so many in a great deal of the world, little is left to waste. Successes, failures, and much that is betwixt and between all become part of revolutionary lore. The population’s perception of the options available is the crucial component of revolutionary potential. The repository of knowledge that people maintain collectively is the basis for what is imaginable and hence feasible: ‘“tool kits” of symbols, stories, rituals and world views,’ which provide resources for constructing ‘strategies of action’ (Swidler, 1986: 273) and ‘repertoires of collective action’ (Tilly, 1978: 143). In the diverse cultures of every society, people learn from various sources how to live, love, buy, speak, listen; that is, who and where to be. In societies where revolution is considered a viable response to oppression – due to a history of rebellious activities celebrated in folk culture, or to revolutionary leaders having employed such traditions in the local culture – revolutionary activities are more likely to be undertaken, receive broad popular support, and conclude successfully.

Who tells the stories and who hears them? How can such stories be animated and by whom? Let us consider one easy but nonetheless evocative example. In 1958 during the revolutionary struggle in Cuba when matters still seemed to hang in the balance, Fidel Castro, the head of the main revolutionary movement, made a critical decision designed to draw on a story from the 1895 War of Independence, of which the modern revolutionaries consider themselves heirs. In Cuban lore, two of the struggle’s greatest heroes, Antonio Maceo and General Máximo Gómez, possibly at the behest of Cuba’s greatest national hero, José Martí, set fire to the island’s profitable sugar cane fields as a signal of commitment, defiance, and the readiness of the Cuban people to sacrifice everything for their independence from Spain. Some sixty years later, faced with a critical juncture in the struggle and eager to evoke Cuba’s struggle for independence and capture the popular imagination, Castro astutely paired his two most charismatic lieutenants, Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos, and had them replicate what had become the ‘famous’ 1895 ‘incendiary march’ of the War of Independence when the rebels torched the sugar cane

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fields. It proved to be a brilliant tactical stroke which succeeded on several levels: militarily, psychologically, and culturally. A revolutionary theme is not necessary for actions to be meaningful, though what may count as revolutionary in any given society or culture can vary widely. Every culture has mythic stories which resonate over time with different people under different circumstances. While particulars may differ, these stories are invariably predicated upon the ideals mentioned in the discussion of myth: namely, justice, liberty, equality, democracy, opportunity, and freedom. Such ideals and idealizations are powerful and compelling in a world where people’s daily lives reflect relatively few of these. While the scale and scope of the stories can vary wildly, seeking these ideals inevitably involves great adversity as well as privation, and the struggle is arduous and often intense, though it may be mediated by lulls, even boredom, and patience can be crucial and sometimes decisive. In these tales, not everyone makes it through; the losses and setbacks render the outcome bittersweet. The power and promise in such stories are immense, and making connections to them, sometimes even explicitly adopting them, can be critical for those seeking social change. Consider, for example, the Exodus story from the Hebrew Bible, which has served as a reference point for revolutionaries and rebels, not least in the slave revolts – indeed in almost any place that Christianity has swept through. The basic outlines are familiar and we are, by and large, conversant with the story’s implications: an evil king, a ‘lost’ and embattled people, some brave leaders, at least one of whom motivated by a vision but who may not get to join those who follow in the promised land of milk and honey, a crisis of faith at a critical juncture, an injunction to ‘never forget’ and to tell the story so others may understand and dream and undertake their own struggle. 8 While the Exodus story might be most plausibly read as a fundamentally liberatory story in which an outside force rather than the people themselves plays the decisive role, it is surely no accident that revolutionaries in various places and times have constructed themselves as the modern biblical Israelites in their struggle against the latest incarnation of the Pharaoh. Certainly the key plot elements are likely to be present or easily ascribed to the struggle at hand. People develop their stories and these serve to define their community, their place, and even what is possible. Thus it is that leaders

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of revolutionary processes consciously set out to construct narratives predicated upon aspects of the stories that are likely to emphasize the nexus of local and universal relevance. Their ability to articulate compelling stories is critical to the success of the revolutionary enterprise. Connecting to stories of previous struggles (be it Castro in Cuba, Nicaragua’s Sandinistas, or the modern-day Zapatistas in Mexico), to the traditional culture (1960s’ African socialism), or to ‘national narratives’ (most recently the Eastern European ‘color revolutions’) offers leaders and followers a familiar context. Leadership is crucial, though at times overestimated as a factor; it is nevertheless indispensable (Foran et al., forthcoming, Chapter 6). But leaders do not articulate the stories they seek to adopt or adapt to a passive audience; as Freire notes, ‘dialogue with the people is radically necessary to every authentic revolution’ (1970: 122). ‘Authenticity’ is an issue touched on earlier, most directly in Chapter 2; suffice it to say here that the authenticity of any given revolutionary process must reside in the estimations of those at the center of it. Critical is the profoundly dialectical nature of the relationship between ‘leaders’ and ‘followers,’ neither of whom can succeed (nor even sustain their efforts) without the other. Both leaders and followers must be actively involved to make change happen. While leadership is critical and necessary, it is no guarantee of resistance, rebellion, or revolution. Without the involvement of those in whose name the leaders purport to act, meaningful action is not possible; revolutionary activity will result in futile and inconsequential ‘groupuscules.’ 9 Should they come to power, revolutionaries who do not act in dialogue with the people are not only prone to replicate the very repressive conditions they fought against, but are destined to become simply another chapter (perhaps just a paragraph or even a footnote) in popular stories. Rather than the liberators and visionaries they set themselves up as, committed to bettering people’s lives, they find themselves written and read as isolated, estranged, or even oppressive leaders, another cruel turn of the wheel in lives that have seen so many. As a result, it is crucial for revolutionaries to find a story that they can adopt. The population, in turn, either responds to these stories or not; often they may begin to write their own versions or appropriate the revolutionaries’ narrative into their own. People always have their

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stories, their narratives; revolutionaries, or the counter-revolutionaries who oppose them, either find a way to accord with these or they don’t. When they succeed, it is more likely that a revolutionary situation can be forged from people’s imaginations and sentiments; occasionally they will triumph. Revolution is not made for people by revolutionaries; on the other hand it cannot occur without them. Communication must flow both ways and stories are the key. Stories, in their myriad manifestations, reconfigure history and memory, popular and personal. In a sense, revolutions are a vast web with innumerable entrances and exits, multiple points of socio-political and cultural organization. Thus revolutions have been judged on the basis of the relationship of the population with the revolutionaries, with each other, and arguably with the very revolutionary process itself. If Hobsbawm (1986: 21) is right that ‘great revolutions’ such as France 1789, Russia 1917, and China 1949 are defined not by the acquisition of state power, but by the creation of a new orientation for society, what becomes of the story of the revolution is absolutely crucial. A revolution that is unable to establish a clear and compelling story is unlikely to join the list.

Revolutionary romanticism and revolutionary tradition In his 1960 Independence Day Speech, Indonesia’s President Sukarno, a key figure in the country’s independence and a self-styled revolutionary, proclaimed: I belong to a group of people who are bound in spiritual longing by the Romanticism of Revolution. I am inspired by it, I am fascinated by it, I am completely absorbed by it, I am crazed, I am obsessed by the Romanticism of Revolution. And for this I utter thanks to God Who commands all nature (1970).10

This ‘romanticism of revolution’ taps into a seemingly timeless tradition. Most modern discussions of revolution start with the postEnlightenment period, usually with France in 1789, commonly framed as the end of ‘the old order’ and beginning of the new.11 Nevertheless, there were recognizable, meaningful acts of resistance, rebellion, and even revolution thousands of years before 1789. While we should be chary about rewriting Spartacus’ slave revolt, the Bible’s Exodus story, or an array of indigenous and later slave revolts in the Americas as

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modern-day revolutions, we would be remiss to ignore the revolutionary element in such tales, the romanticism that they foster, or the extent to which they inspire others. Revolutionary romanticism is complicated and, at best, a mixed bag. Many people have been lured into revolutionary processes by idealism; so too have many died and even more been disappointed and disheartened. This is to be expected: for how could events in the real world, the actual existing practice of resistance, rebellion, or revolution, possibly live up to our imaginations and the stories told? Yet for revolutions even to begin, for the hopes and dreams to start to coalesce, there must be passion and commitment; there must be a degree of romanticism which captures people’s hearts and minds. Despite such charges, the romanticization of armed struggle, the concomitant beneficence of blood spilled, and the valorization of heroes and martyrs are not just a parlor game engaged in by ‘Western romantics and political scientists,’ as Geertz (2000: 22) suggests about Indonesia, by ‘North American leftist intellectuals’ with regard to ‘violent social processes south of the border,’ identified by Sánchez Lira and Villarreal (1995: 223), or by youth fascinated by revolution habitually dismissed as naive and foolish. Cubans no longer enamored with the results of the revolutionary process remain proud of what they did and why, and recall the romance of the barbudos; Nicaraguans wax poetic about heroic guerrillas in the hills and the rural peasantry who nurtured them (even though the urban poor did much of the fighting and dying; Massey 1987: 20–21), and even in Russia it is possible to find those once or twice removed from the events wistful for the ambition and grandeur of the revolution. Whatever the hardships and trauma, there is about the process a degree of drama and excitement, including fear, that is rare, exhilarating, and even mythic. Much of this finds its purchase in the focus on individuals, revolutionaries framed as romantic heroes. As Almond (1996: 19) suggests, ‘stories of individual courage tend to be more inspiring than abstract ideals … People who believe fervently in something are often very appealing – even if their beliefs do not tally with our own.’ Add to this their often tragic fates and you have heroes who live fast and die before their time, leaving a beautiful story – martyrs to the cause, ennobled by self-sacrifice and beloved by the gods who take them and those they leave behind.

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The Italian Giuseppe Garibaldi was one of the first great romantic revolutionaries. He fought for the unification of Italy, for Brazilian and Uruguayan independence, and returned to fight in several of the 1848 revolutions in the regions that would eventually unite as Italy, a struggle in which he participated for the rest of his life – he was the Che Guevara of the nineteenth century. The Mexican Revolution provided one of the twentieth century’s most enduring such figures, Emiliano Zapata, the agrarian radical who declared that it was ‘better to die on one’s feet than live on one’s knees’ (perhaps borrowed from fellow revolutionary martyr, Práxedis Guerrero; see Albro, 1996). At the other end of the twentieth century Mexico’s Zapatista Army for National Liberation (EZLN) intentionally sought to evoke the romanticism of revolution by their very name, which resonated globally. No one embodies the romantic revolutionary figure like the Argentine doctor and Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara. Che was the ‘romantic adventurer, Red Robin Hood, the Don Quixote of communism, the new Garibaldi, the Marxist Saint-Just, the Cid Campeador of the wretched of the earth, the Sir Galahad of the Beggars, the secular Christ, the San Ernesto de la Higuera revered by the Bolivian peasants’ (Löwy, 1973: 7). If Che is the avatar of the romantic revolutionary,12 his inspirational proclamation that ‘a true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love’ (1967a: 136) would seem to be the sine qua non of revolutionary romanticism.13 Each of these snapshots reinforces the notion that revolutions are intrinsically storied processes, and hence that there is a story of revolution to be told, a revolutionary tradition. However oxymoronic the formulation may appear, there is a tradition of revolution teeming with stories, many of them unlikely at best and at times seemingly impossible – though in that very impossibility may well lie the seeds of ‘possibilism,’ or the raising of hopes.14 As noted previously, sightings of Che in various locales well after his death in 1967 helped people feel part of a larger struggle. While the young Vietnamese patriot Nguyen Tat Thanh, later known as Ho Chi Minh, seems to have gotten no closer to US officialdom than his petition for Vietnamese self-determination, which landed in the hands of President Woodrow Wilson’s chief aidede-camp Colonel House at the 1919 Versailles Conference, stories of him meeting with Wilson (or Franklin Roosevelt, at that point a young Assistant Secretary of the Navy) and discussing the Declaration of

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Independence (cited in his petition; Duiker, 2001: 59–60) in New York, Boston, London or Paris, stories of his supposed meetings are read as a testament to conviction and commitment to struggle. Whether or not any given story is true, what matters is the import and the contribution the story makes to the lore, to the tradition of revolution. ‘Tradition’ is commonly associated with preservation of the status quo and with a longing for earlier, generally more conservative times – hardly the stuff of revolution. Yet despite what Shils (2006: 2) dubs our proclivity for ‘pervasive changefulness,’ he astutely points out that we invest a great deal in living in harmony with and are often guided by ‘long-enduring institutions … with rules inherited from a long past … an inheritance which has been passed down through many generations.’ Part of what 1789 represented was the end of ‘traditionality’ and the onset of progressivism (Shils, 2006: 5–6). Still, tradition is ‘that which is handed down’ (Shils, 2006: 12), and hand it down we do, almost anything one can imagine except ‘particular concrete actions,’ which cease to exist once there are performed, as they are ‘the most evanescent of things’ (Shils, 2006: 12). Yet even as we associate tradition with conservatism, stolidity, even inertia, it is also the case that it can provide both inspiration and grounding, reassurance, at the same time and it is surprisingly malleable, ‘traditional cultural symbols and concepts’ proving ‘quite flexible in practice’ and thus helping ‘determine the range of possibilities’ open ‘to a given revolutionary coalition’ (Burns, 1996: 352). Indeed, as Evans, invoking Foucault, points out with regard to French resistance to France’s war in Algeria, ‘there was a whole tradition of struggles which were transmitted orally, or in writing or songs etc.’ (1997: 10; Foucault, 1977b: 21–2). It is hardly surprising that revolutionaries build on their own often lengthy (but see Hobsbawm, 1983: 2) traditions of struggle, seeking to cobble together (bricolage again) words, dates, symbols, and more into a legible and usable ‘tradition’ which legitimates their efforts. But in addition the tellers of tales adopt and adapt freely from broader cultural traditions, and hence these stories while ‘traditional … are not timeless; that is, the form and the content of the tales may change in the telling’ (Roseberry, 1989: 27, emphasis in the original; he cites Taylor and Rebel, 1981). While ‘“invented” traditions’ are no doubt suspect (Hobsbawm, 1983: 2), even the most traditional tales, in capable hands and the right context, can be made

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to serve the purposes of resistance, rebellion, and revolution. This brings us back to history.

‘Secret’ histories, or the parts we ‘forget’ to tell Taking history seriously is easy; what to do with it, how much credence and import to give it is far less clear. ‘Articulating the past historically,’ Benjamin (2003: 399) argued, ‘does not mean recognizing it ‘the way it really was.’’15 Indeed, McGranahan, in a phrase that captures the experience of most of us, contends that for Tibetans ‘history is caught between what “really happened” and the epistemic murk of historical memory’ (2005: 570; she cites Daniel, 1996; Taussig, 1984); history, for them, she says, ‘is truth and fear. And some lies.’ While we have already rehearsed at various points the thin and exceedingly mutable line between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction,’ it merits mention yet again. The sort of accuracy we in the social sciences and the academy in general are wont to demand is illusory at best and may simply not really be necessary. Traditionally, history has been constructed from above, composed by the victors, orchestrated by the powerful, played and preformed for the population. As any number of scholars concede, history not only can be but inevitably is invented. As Hobsbawm (1983: 13) points out: ‘the history which became part of the fund of knowledge or the ideology of the nation, state, or movement, is … what has been selected, written, pictured, popularized, and institutionalized by those whose function it is to do so.’ Carr’s declaration that, ‘by and large, the historian will get the kind of facts he wants. History means interpretation’ (1961: 26) hardly seems controversial anymore. Still, there is, Cohen (1997: xiii–xiv) argues, ‘tension between the history that people make, which is in some sense fixed, and the histories that people write and use, which seem forever to be changing.’ Those who write history engage in the process of (re)creation, intentional or not, as they engrave the record, a record which needs regular updating since, as Lewis (1975: 11) suggested with regard to Rome’s embrace of Christianity, ‘a new future required a different past.’ State-sanctioned, societally reinforcing, monolithic16 history must be kept up to date and the official story must turn out the only way it can and be as simple, clean, and clear as possible, with little room for interpretation or question.

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There is another history, rooted in people’s perception of how the world around them has continued to unfold and their place in that process. This is a history informed by people’s practical ideology and which reflects the context, material as well as ideological, of people’s everyday lives; a history revealed and articulated by the various instruments of popular culture. This history is in some ways tattered and torn; in the Andes there is a tradition that history is cloth woven by women, who are able to recognize ‘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’ (Andean Oral History Workshop, 1990: 180). This is the history that is often most important and must be told for those engaging in resistance, rebellion, and revolution. It is possible that language itself may be part of the problem. What if we lack the language to describe or capture the moments? Perhaps more problematic, what if the language we do have limits possibilities, narrows understanding, restricts explanation? McGranahan (2005: 580) stresses that ‘events are real not because they happened, but because they are told in culturally meaningful ways.’ Telling, even if imperfect, matters; ‘the stories that succeed most compellingly in accounting for the “facts” of a people’s past become the core of that people’s political community’ (Thompson, 1996: 1). Nevertheless, much of what lies ahead, particularly in Chapters 7 and 8, is extremely difficult to capture in the languages of the social sciences and History, as is so often the case, the really interesting stuff lies betwixt and between, outside the scope of History. One result of traditional approaches to history – which thanks to the impressive number of dissertations produced in the late twentieth century may no longer hold – is Hegel’s (2009: 51) contention that ‘revolutions, nomadic wanderings, and the strangest mutations’ are not in the history books. These records have not ‘accidentally perished; rather, because they were not possible, do we find them wanting’ (Hegel, 2009: 51). While they lack the imprimatur of ‘History,’ real things that really matter to real people in the real world (who make choices that matter) happen outside its scope; ‘the great ruptures and oppositions are always negotiable, but not the little cracks and imperceptible ruptures’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 1983: 84). Since it is the state – largely via intellectuals – that constructs the historical record, such

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phenomena are simply written out of existence; since most battles over the meaning of history are driven by the events the state has deemed important, proponents of (alternative) histories rarely receive notice, and when they do are marginalized. But this does not mean that people do not know. Rather, it reflects a standard approach to History overly reliant on the vertical and the chronological. Here the effort is to restore the horizontal, and to resist not just the impetus but the demand for sequence, to the extent such might even be possible.17 The obligation is to uncover, explore, and illuminate our pasts from a wealth of voices and from an array of sources. Our pasts conspire to shape who we are. This in turn guides what we imagine is possible and the way those things might be achieved, and what they will mean. All these pasts are here in the present, as Fuentes has argued, and we have no ‘living future with a dead past’ (1996: 16, 124). Hence History or any effort to explore the past, or speculate on the future, is inevitably preconditioned by the present and efforts to explore our present; are unavoidably conditioned by the past and, perhaps, our expectations for the future. While it is clear that the conditions are unlikely if ever to be the ones that they choose, people will make their own history.18

Making history and making connections without exoticizing and fetishizing others In 1919, To Duc Thang, a French sailor (and future president of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam as well as the first president of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam), shinned up the mast of the battleship operating as the flagship of the French fleet in the Black Sea, and, to the cheers of the sailors, unfurled the flag of the Paris Commune, the red flag of revolution, thereby postponing French participation in the Allied intervention against nascent Soviet Russia.19 The red flag had recently been revived by the Russians, who would claim in a famous 1921 poster that ‘The dead of the Paris Commune rose again under the red flag of the Soviets’ (Almond, 1996: 19). In 1871 the Communards had considered their red flag ‘the flag of the World Republic’ (Engels, 1978: 623). Whether significant or a mere coincidence, the red flag was also carried in the 1786 Shay’s Rebellion in the US (albeit sometimes with a green pine tree, sometimes with a snake and the motto ‘Don’t Tread on Me’), nearly a century before the Paris Commune; an earlier

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form appeared in Savannah, Georgia, in March 1736 when an uprising of indentured Irish identified each other by a red string around their wrist in an event dubbed the ‘Red String Conspiracy.’ The story of To Duc Thang and the French fleet illustrates what can be construed as a sort of secret history of resistance, rebellion, and revolution, arguably perhaps even an alternative history of our times and those before, told by way of what History, inadvertently or not, often excludes. This is not to imply that only those seeking to change the world make history or that they have some special hold on stories. Everyone can play, and does. While most of the stories of interest in this context reside with those we variously describe as ‘the proletariat,’ ‘the masses,’ ‘the workers,’ ‘the peasants,’ ‘the people,’ or indeed the more recently resurrected ‘multitude’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000, 2004), 20 it is also the case that ‘the middle class,’ ‘the bourgeoisie,’ ‘intellectuals,’ and even ‘the elite’ can be part of the process and get in on the act. Despite contentions over the last few hundred years, there is nothing special about the rich or propertied, nothing distinctive about the middle class, nothing significant about the working class, and nothing particular about the poor. Rather, in this context, what matters are the stories, the struggle, and making meaning. The rallying of anti-globalization protesters in North America and Europe to the cause of Mexico’s modern-day Zapatistas and sharing their stories is no less powerful because of the differences involved. If it is a stretch, in a variety of ways, the powerful notion that ‘we are all Zapatistas’ nonetheless resonated and served to link largely middle- and upper-class youth in Seattle to Mayan campesinos in Chiapas and through them to distant times and struggles – Zapata in the Mexican revolution, indigenous resistance to the European conquest of the Americas, and beyond. This reflects the conviction of persons that they are part of the great legacy of names, places, and dates that evoke stories of resistance and struggle and that this time in this place they will triumph. And that is perhaps what stories most directly call our attention to: the intensity and immediacy that are often, accurately or not, associated with resistance, rebellion, and revolution do not necessarily serve us well in our investigations. This is why the bigger picture, the longue durée, the greater context called for by historians such as Braudel or social scientists such as Tilly, continues to matter. 21 This is not meant

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to invoke overly structuralist explanations. To some extent, the longer the scope, the larger the process, the bigger the picture necessary. The big, large, and huge (Tilly, 1984) are central to how and why stories spread, gaining some elements and losing others, and influencing people and places far beyond their particular instances. At the same time, this thin list of thick events and processes must be abetted by what Hunt (1984: 21) calls ‘revolutionary incantations,’ words that ‘uttered in a certain context … [bespeak] nothing less than adherence to the revolutionary community.’22 There is the macro and there is the micro and to understand the connections discussed here we need both. This is not the only conundrum that is neither easily nor readily adjudicated. There is also the dilemma of ‘the other.’ ‘The other’ can be read in a variety of ways and at an array of levels. Critical to the project here is that other people in other times are not us. Darnton (1984: 4) reminds us that ‘other people are other. They do not think the way we do. And if we want to understand their way of thinking we should set out with the idea of capturing otherness … We constantly need to be shaken out of a false sense of familiarity with the past, to be administered doses of culture shock.’ White (1998: 13) concurs: ‘any good history begins in strangeness. The past should not be comfortable. The past should not be a familiar echo of the present for if it is familiar why revisit it? The past should be so strange that you wonder how you and people you know and love could come from such a time.’ Our best hope for gaining some insight to the strange is through the stories that pass down, stories that incorporate the community and allow us to identify shared beliefs and bonds. They may be strangers, but they are our strangers. This raises another important aspect for the stories to come as we meet these ‘others’ who are and are not strangers. As mentioned, the foundations of a culturally monolithic History have been weakened over the last several decades, not to the delight of all, as notions of ‘objective’ history have been challenged and ‘great man’ theories appropriately called into question. In their stead has developed a valuable, if thorny, effort to seek the subjective viewpoint and to write history from perspectives other than those which have dominated for most of the last several millennia. Yet an overemphasis on the local or the romanticization of ‘real’ people, however salutary, is not a corrective to the problem if it still presumes the same parameters as the ‘traditional’ History.

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This means that none of the stories deployed here is part of some aging, white, North American social scientist’s well-intentioned attempt to ‘rehabilitate’ people from the past or indulge in Orientalist fantasies (here I am guided by Said, 2003; Getson, 2002). 23 All too often, in their laudable efforts to recover the histories of the poor, the dispossessed, the oppressed, and the defeated, scholars and activists have been prone to the specious assumption that indigenous peoples are almost by definition good, wise, and benevolent, specimens of ‘simpler’ communities living in harmony with themselves and with nature. Such romanticization and inherently paternalistic notions (‘we will give voice to the voiceless’) enhance ‘otherness’ in ways that serve no one well and carries the seeds of its own damaging dynamic. This is not to deny that people may have been or are munificent, beneficent, and more, but a recognition that they can live in stupid and malevolent societies based on complicated hierarchies and caste systems of great cruelty; some indigenous peoples were once the superpowers and imperialists of their worlds. Collier, a highly respected early scholar of Chiapas, notes his wariness ‘of idealizations of peasant and indigenous communities. I see such communities as much less egalitarian and more differentiated by class and politics than do many analysts. The appeal to collective sentiments is often combined with maneuvering for personal power’ (1999: x). All human communities are complex; none is likely to be more or less ‘noble’ than any other. In the Americas, for example, the Inca developed one of the most socially and politically sophisticated societies in the world; their protowelfare state pre-dated Europe’s by more than five hundred years. The early years of their empire were also marked by a penchant for invading and conquering their neighbors. The Aztecs/Mexicas, for their part, created an empire marked by a complex agricultural economy as well as their conquests and politico/religious practices, which featured a proclivity for human sacrifice, often centered on beating hearts and at times practiced on a rather grand scale. The Maya and other related ethnic groups, highly ‘developed’ and increasingly recognized as very sophisticated in many areas, considered warfare central to their culture; the powerful found, on occasion, reasons to sacrifice humans. Whatever the explanations, each was ‘once upon a time’ a (super)power in their particular world and, with due allowance for cultural differences and constructs, suppressed parts of their own populations or those they

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conquered. We have also learned that there was opposition to each of these powers and hence might reasonably assume that, in the face of these oppressors or invaders, various people may have fought for social justice within these societies well before the badly behaved Europeans showed up with their perversities and practices. All this and variations thereof to be found throughout the world and across time might lead one to conclude that, despite our considerable charms, humans are a rather nasty bunch. 24 Even more damaging than the reinscribing of peoples of the past in flat, two-dimensional ways has been the continuing temptation on the part of ‘educated’ post-Enlightenment Westerners and their allies to give them an exotic and enigmatic persona – the poor, the dispossessed, the ‘losers’ of history. Such formulations also comfortably allow for their representation as unfathomable or ‘inscrutable,’ intended to signify incomprehension verging on the sinister. Through the former optic, the story is that for these exotic and mysterious people life is a struggle that they face stoically, as the ‘salt of the earth’ blessed with the common sense, nobility, and valued wisdom; through the latter, such people are marked as implacable and evil. 25 In the stories to come it is imperative that we recognize these tendencies and temptations and that the differences between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ to the extent they exist at all, are slim or nonexistent.

The four stories of revolution: a final thought before we go Mornet’s (1933: 471) classic admonition that the origin of the French Revolution is one story and its history another may be contested, 26 but it provides a salutary reminder: stories of revolution are legion, more numerous even than the histories, which is no mean feat. In addition, these stories in their various forms are far more widely shared than we usually consider. While we can discern patterns among them, taken together they represent a compendium beyond imagination, rhizomic in character, an underlying grid. At the risk of seeming trite, every case of revolution is at once unique and yet shares something, however tenuous, with all the others. It is not surprising that every instance impels us to dig deeply and develop idiographic accounts – these are fascinating processes strewn with often

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intriguing events, for those of us trespassing. Yet the social science demand for nomothetic explanations drives us to aggregate in order to explicate those covering laws. In short, we want it all. Cognizant that this is unlikely, we struggle to capture the breadth and the depth. The proposition here, then, is to consider the basic stories of revolution that are discernible across time and place. One final thought on this enterprise. 27 The social sciences – and, to some extent, the humanities – have well served our efforts to shed light on the myriad formal and institutional arrangements that structure our lives; some of our greatest successes have come in the areas we might identify as the political. But what are the implications of shifting our attention to the intelligence and creativity of people who experience the political as but one part of their lives? The contention is that we seek to base our investigations on human experience, the people who make and live resistance, rebellion, and revolution. Rather than focus, for understandable reasons, on the procedures and institutional arrangements that ‘define’ revolution, our attention will be on their values and beliefs, and on their praxis, shared in an effort as a community to obtain what individuals cannot. Such an approach is far from perfect; it may be a mess. How can it be otherwise given the imposing mix of idealism, as people seek to realize their private dreams and desires in public forums, and pragmatism, how do we get from here to there, now, today, leavened with voluntarism and action. The watchword is humanity and the heuristics justice and truth; actual deeds are the moving force. In all of these cases, we encounter history both horizontal and vertical, history that may be chronological but also mythological; myth, memory, and mimesis matter as we seek to broaden and deepen our understandings and explanations. The broadly drawn stories to come, even at their most abstract, reflect and represent small, daily actions taken by singular human beings bound together by their common humanity and commitments; these stories honor them and allow those of us who look some insight into revolutionary processes.

five The story of civilizing and democratizing revolutions

T

here are in essence two elite stories of revolution. The first of these is the Story of Civilizing and Democratizing Revolutions. The second is the Story of Social Revolution (the subject of Chapter 6). The latter is almost certainly the best known of all these stories and also has a popular, or at least populist, version. In modern renditions of revolution – those which tend to either start from or privilege 1789 in France – these two stories in some sense vie for pride of place. In the Story of Social Revolution, 1789 France is the ur or echt revolution,1 the foundational moment from which both the modern world and all future understandings and conceptions of revolution spring, at least for the roughly the next two hundred years. In contrast, for the Story of Civilizing and Democratizing Revolutions, while this same process in France also presages the modern world, the French revolution connotes a conclusion, a culmination, and even a warning, a cautionary and admonitory case of matters gone too far and whiffs of what might have been. The central tropes here are of civilization, progress, democratization, and, somewhat ironically, nobility. The notion of nobility lurks both in the sense of sacrifice of one’s position and, concomitant with this, in the sense of a certain noblesse oblige on the part of elites who extend the franchise. This civilizing and democratizing revolutionary narrative tracks with the triumph of the Enlightenment and is often employed and deployed by states and elites in pursuit of the legitimacy

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and authority it presumably connotes. It is, in the end, a fundamentally ‘liberal’ story of revolution and hence a tale at once cautionary about radicalism and revolution and a paean to moderation and reform. Here we will focus on this tale’s three core cases: the political revolutions in Great Britain (1688); subsequently in some of its North American colonies, the nascent United States (1776); and France (1789), in this story ultimately a reproving case. France’s place as the world’s first great social revolution is central to the next chapter (and makes cameo appearances in the others). This story takes as its starting point a rather heavily constructed saga of ‘Western civilization’ which is long on notions of citizenship and democracy. Needless to say, numerous books have been written on the subject, which denotes a eurocentric culture rooted in Greece and juxtaposed to a constructed Orient represented by Persia and the Near and Middle East. Here early ideas about democracy are attributed to the Greeks, a nod is made to Rome’s Senate and on occasion to local heroes and struggles throughout post-Middle Ages Europe, reflecting efforts to break the grip of the Church and hold sovereigns more accountable – the Protestant Reformation is thus of some moment. This story involves at least passing mention of England’s seventeenthcentury ‘Glorious Revolution’ (albeit with little or no mention of the Levellers, Diggers, and others of their ilk) and then culminates in the twin revolutions in ‘America’ in 1776 and France in 1789. In the story, these three ‘liberal’ and, for their time, democratic revolutions share a great deal. In particular the focus on liberty and democracy is seen as instrumental in bringing ‘civilization’ in its modern (European/North American) formulation. Having thus been brought to the very belly of the beast (Europe’s patchwork quilt of earldoms, duchies, principalities, kingdoms, and empires), the revolution was complete, the adaptations and adjustments of the next hundred and fifty years or so notwithstanding. With the US revolution venerated as the liberal revolution, and hence the standard or measure, almost all subsequent revolutions are found wanting. This is not to ignore some noteworthy sightings. Some versions of the story include the 1848 ‘springtime of the peoples’ (or ‘springtime of nations’), the crop of liberal revolutions across Europe, 2 which prominently featured demands for the broadening of the franchise and the deepening of democracy (though there are, as we will see, more

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radical interpretations). It is not unusual in this story to encounter modernizing revolutions such as Japan’s 1868 Meiji Restoration and Turkey’s ‘Young Turks’ (1919), though the focus in these cases is on ‘civilizing’ rather than democratizing.3 This story also produces laments regarding the possibilities of cases such as the 1905 revolutions in Iran and Russia, Sun Yat Sen (Sun Zhongshan) in the early years of the Chinese revolution (1911), and the squandered potential of Mexico’s revolution from 1917 or 1920 onward. More recently, versions of this story plausibly inscribe the 1989 Eastern European ‘color revolutions’ as instances, a claim which raises the thorny issue of whether these European states were in need of ‘civilizing.’ Our main concern here, though, is the story of England, ‘America,’ and France as the three great bourgeois revolutions.

The Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian base The Civilizing and Democratizing story is very much on the arboreal model and rooted in the Northern/Western civilization associated with the familiar Greco-Roman/Judeo-Christian basis of Western culture. Western culture, so the story goes, is a distinctive complement of arts, sciences, political practices, and philosophical and religious principles which set it apart from other civilizations. Accurate or not, the story has been pervasive for hundreds of years, carried far and wide by imperialism and globalization. In this tale, civilization and democracy first emerge among the Greeks, are modified by the Romans, and added to in critical ways by the Hebrew Bible, particularly as it comes to be read by a set of Christians in central Europe; as we will see, this same Bible, the Old Testament, and some of the same key stories within it, will be important for other stories of resistance, rebellion, and revolution. Regardless of one’s interpretation and notwithstanding the many problems with this particular conceptualization, the Civilizing and Democratizing story is no less powerful for its inherent contradictions. The Greeks were hardly a homogeneous entity; rather, there were hundreds of city-states. Much of what we associate with them is derived from our knowledge of Athens; and it is from Athens circa 400–500 bce that our earliest notions of democracy derive. Democracy was suspect, seen as perhaps inclining to mob rule, and labeled by Aristotle as a

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perverted form of government. In his view a constitutional republic is the best attainable form of government; however, given population growth, democracy is almost inevitable. While for Aristotle this is better than an oligarchy or tyranny, he all but says that in practice it would be a disaster – the rule of the needy, who have neither the time nor the inclination. The democracy practiced was exclusive (male citizens only) and direct, with distinctive features (such as the practice of ostracism), but is readily recognizable in terms of form;4 it certainly provides a plausible base from which Western liberal democracy may be dated. Contemporaneous with democracy’s emergence in Athens was a flowering of the arts and literature, which came to be identified as a sort of golden age, the heyday of many of those we associate with the plays (Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Euripides, Sophocles), histories (Herodotus, Thucydides) and philosophy (Socrates, Aristotle, Plato) that are seen to underpin ‘Western civilization.’ While the critiques of Aristotle and Plato were critical to the demise of democracy, the early period of democratic practice and ‘civilized’ behavior is crucial to this story. Based largely on the democracy practiced by the Greeks, the key piece of this story provided by the Romans is representation and the role of the Senate. While the constitution was largely unwritten and passed down by word of mouth, and the Senate composed of the powerful, citizens’ rights were enshrined in the ‘twelve tables.’ In addition, they were able to create tribes and assemblies upon which representation was based. There was an enormous bureaucracy, which somehow came to be seen as a mark of civilization, and an impressive array of officials and offices. Rome, too, was a place of culture and more welcoming to outsiders than was Athens; Greek culture in particular was very influential in all areas. Roman architecture, civil engineering, and building practices came to be seen as indicators of civilization. As with Athens, desire for stability and strong rule led to the demise of democracy, but the story of democracy had grown. ‘Judeo-Christian’ is a term used most commonly in North America by Christians anxious to anchor themselves in the tradition of the Old Testament. In terms of the Civilizing and Democratizing Story of Revolution, the most important part is the second book, Exodus, which tells the story of the flight from tyranny to freedom. Walzer (1985: 5) goes so far as to say that invocations of Exodus are so common ‘in the political history of the West (or, at least, of protest and radical

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aspiration in the West)’ that he notices it only when it is missing. While the Exodus story, at least for Walzer, is not a theory of revolution,5 it is ‘one that became part of the cultural consciousness of the West – so that a range of political events (different events, but a particular range) have been located and understood within the narrative frame that it provides. This story made it possible to tell other stories’ (1985: 7). And telling stories is, for revolutionaries, central. Another aspect of the Christian tradition or story merits mention in this context: the Protestant Reformation. This started as an earlysixteenth-century attempt to reform the Roman Catholic Church and is commonly dated from theologian Martin Luther’s 1517 nailing of his ninety-five theses on the doors of All Saints’ Church, the university chapel in Wittenberg, Saxony, where he was a professor (though some date it from his excommunication some four years later). Ecclesiastical and doctrinal issues aside, the Reformation was important in several ways for what would become the Civilizing and Democratizing story. First, it supported and extended the nascent liberal (and capitalist) privileging of the individual – individual faith alone mattered. In addition, despite Luther’s intentions, the reformation fueled the rise of Protestant sects and the separation of church and state; newly emergent states found it convenient to ally with leaders of Protestant sects. Finally, there are the guarantees (in theory) of free religious practice in the 1648 treaties of Westphalia that close the Reformation and substantially reduce the Pope’s cultural and political sway over Europe. Together these three facets – the Greeks, the Romans, and the Judeo-Christian tradition – provide something of an iron triangle on which the Civilizing and Democratizing story erects its edifice. Many parts of this construction are up for debate, some parts do not fit, and much of it reflects history not only read backward but liberally interpreted for more contemporary purposes. They are ideal material for stories.

‘The Glorious Revolution’ or not: England’s liberal moment of 1688 Seventeenth-century England occupies a curious place in the stories of revolution. England is scarcely noted for revolutionary activity; indeed, ‘there is no evidence of a real “revolution” in England in any specific

The story of civilizing and democratizing revolutions 101 century’ (Macfarlane, 1986: 163). Yet it is plausible to read the English Civil War as a revolutionary situation and, as subsequent chapters will note, that era’s Levellers and Diggers possessed of revolutionary imaginations and sentiments. But in the Civilizing and Democratizing story, it is the 1688 Glorious Revolution that matters, primarily for the revolutionary activity it brought to a close. And 1688 presents a conundrum. To the extent that England had a real revolution, or at least something approximating to one that most would recognize, it is the 1640–60 English Civil War, referred to by some as the ‘Puritan Revolution’ (e.g. Walzer, 1982) and by others as ‘the English Revolution’ (particularly Hill, 1940, 1961, 1984, 1997a, 1997b). In short, precipitated by struggles between Scotland and England (and to some extent Ireland) for dominance and issues of religious conformity (or, perhaps, tolerance), a rather epic struggle emerged between the King, with his notion of absolute power, and Parliament, which sought to assert its rights and privileges. The Parliamentarians and their allies, not least the radical Levellers and proto-communist Diggers, called for ‘no taxation without representation’ and an end to arbitrary imprisonment (the right of habeas corpus), lifted censorship, opened up the court system, and eventually, in 1649, killed a King. The 1640–49 period was, Lachmann contends, ‘anomalous in English history for its radicalism and the significant involvement of popular forces’ (1997: 86); in the words of Halliday it was a ‘mass revolt from below’ (1999: 47). While the popular forces lost out to the merchants and middle class, and most of the more radical achievements were rolled back, across the twenty-year span until the monarchy was restored in 1660 it is possible to identify radical democratic aspirations and discern the first liberal revolution, the defeat of which in the 1659–60 counterrevolution led many to decamp for the ‘New World’ with dreams and desires intact (Hill, 1985: 173–4). Whether the period 1640–60 represented a ‘real revolution’ is debatable, but there were certainly revolutionary aspects to it. What, then, is the import of 1688? The specific events of 1688 matter relatively little in the context of this story. Once again the royals and Parliament were in conflict and again issues of religion swirled, but now with the added fillip of a stirring nationalism. The Catholic King James II’s ascension to the throne in 1685 raised concerns about religious conformity and he quickly became embroiled in battles with Parliament over his prerogatives. But the clincher seems to have been

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the popular opinion that he was increasingly falling under the sway of France’s Louis XIV, a fellow Catholic, who was perceived to be pursuing a Europe-wide empire. Cries for restoration and a return to earlier times arose – it was in this sense a conservative moment. In a move to restore Protestant supremacy, the Dutch, at that point France’s primary opposition, were essentially invited to invade. The Dutch were backed by English funds, included English and Scottish forces, and were welcomed as a nationalist movement. James II fled to France and was considered to have abdicated. The negotiated settlement, an elite pact, was part-restoration and part-modernization, particularly in three areas where Parliament seemed influenced by John Locke’s liberal ideas: royal power was restricted to actions Parliament sanctioned; a Declaration of Rights (later to be the Bill of Rights) was promulgated, in effect the first (proto-) constitution; and Parliament’s right to replace rulers in orderly fashion was clarified. If this was the denouement of a revolutionary process begun almost fifty years earlier, it would seem to have been an ending closer to a whimper than to a bang. Yet for liberalism (and to some degree capitalism, as it further broke down feudal relations), it was a triumphant moment. Just fifty years later, a French writer would describe it as a ‘great revolution … which astonished Europe’ (Baker, 1990: 207, citing Jurieu). Indeed, according to Baker, it was the French who first ‘describe[d] the events of 1688 as “la Révolution d’Angleterre”’ (1990: 207). Importantly for our purposes, Baker notes a sense in which the French reading of the events was revolutionary, in the emergent sense of something dramatically new even as it saluted the restoration of earlier times, ‘a true return … to the fundamental laws … simultaneously the dawn of a new era, heralding the recovery of liberty’ (1990: 207). Finley goes so far as to posit the Glorious Revolution as a sort of Rubicon: hitherto, the term ‘revolution’ had no political content, and it thus ‘underscores the great divide separating modern revolutions from all previous “revolutions”’ (1986: 50). Perhaps this is so, as Malia (2006: 6) suggests, because it was the closing episode of England’s earlier revolution and reassuringly represented a ‘restoration’ (duly noting that ‘the original meaning of revolution is a return to a point of origin’). Nevertheless, he concludes that it is ‘valid’ to interpret it as revolution (2006: 137) and even proposes that the entire period of 1640–88 could be read as a ‘long-term revolution.’ Such a conception,

The story of civilizing and democratizing revolutions 103 of a long process in which reason plays a role, accords well with the Civilizing and Democratizing Story of Revolution. The ‘Glorious Revolution’ leaves its mark on this story in several critical ways. While it was most clearly ‘a restoration of monarchical power to its former righteousness and glory,’ Arendt points out that it was also ‘the event through which very paradoxically the term [revolution] found its definite place in political and historical language … [and] which to us appear to show all evidence of a new spirit, the spirit of the modern age’ (1965: 43). This is captured as well by Dunn, who notes that their ‘dreams were revolutionary enough in their sense of what was possible’ (1989: 5; emphasis in original). In this, then, Huntington’s claim that it was ‘the forerunner of the modern revolution … their purpose and effect … radically modern’ (1968: 265) seems sensible. The year 1688 clearly marked the consolidation of bourgeois rule and limned the lines of authority between royalty and Parliament; no longer could English monarchs govern without Parliament’s consent. The results were not lost on those nearby; ‘well aware of the liberal character of English constitutional arrangements’ some in France ‘proposed them as something of a model,’ albeit aimed at (limited) reform (Malia, 2006: 160). Closer to home, Parker (1999: 146) suggests that the view among English radicals came to be that ‘the settlement of 1688 constituted the only “revolution” that was necessary, and hope (with some validity) that the liberal principles of that movement could be successfully extended in a more gradual reform movement to realize the full implications of the revolution that was already past.’ Malia’s conviction that the Glorious Revolution ‘could not serve as a revolutionary model for the rest of Europe … [because] it was not exportable’ (2006: 160) failed to recognize the power of a story of a liberal revolution committed to what was increasingly written as civilization and, however limited in scope, democratization. There were those who took note both in Europe and across the Atlantic in Great Britain’s North American colonies.

A revolutionary tradition of opposing revolution: America in 1776 and since The so-called ‘American Revolution’6 of 1776 may well be the most famous non-revolutionary revolution, at least as we most commonly use the term; in a variety of ways this makes it the perfect showpiece for

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this largely cautionary story of liberal revolution. While the American Revolution stands intriguingly as one of the great revolutionary moments, if not processes, one searches in vain for it in most academic studies of revolution, where it is most commonly written as a political revolution and, perhaps most profitably, often understood as a war of independence; for, however technically correct it may be, it would seem that framing it as a ‘national liberation’ or an ‘anti-colonial’ struggle risks wrenching it out of context to no good purpose. The paradox is highlighted by Kumar (2008: 225), who, following Brinton (1965: 4–5), refers to the American Revolution as ‘great,’ including it (along with England) with the ‘big three,’ France, Russia, and China, but then remarks that ‘we are prepared to call the forcible American secession from the British state a revolution (the “American Revolution”)’ (2008: 229), a statement that hardly suggests greatness. In marked contrast to France, Russia, and China – but akin to England – the Americans made no real effort to fundamentally transform their European social and economic (as well as psychological or cultural) inheritance, while seeking to deepen certain European ideas. Repeatedly in these stories we will return to questions of what was revolutionary about a particular case and why it matters. It seems churlish to ignore that the American Revolution was revolutionary, in new and important ways with regard to the rejection of restoration and reformulation of the polity. Sakwa (2001: 154) posits it as ‘the exemplary case,’ later joined by the French Revolution, of what he calls ‘Enlightenment revolutionism.’ In addition, it is easy to discern ways in which it mattered and that strongly influenced others; there are reverberations in all the stories yet to come. So here we need only rehearse the familiar narrative of what is commonly referred to as the 1776 American Revolution. For a decade or so prior to 1776, most of the efforts of the American colonists were aimed at greater representation and independence within the British system. The primary focus was on the repeal of onerous taxes, lifting of the growing debt, and the reform of existing political institutions to bring them more in line with what were increasingly seen as American needs and interests distinct from those of the ‘mother country.’ Attentive to English law and with the English Revolution as inspiration (Kumar, 2001: 72), seeking above all the replacement of recalcitrant or unresponsive leaders, America’s popular classes began

The story of civilizing and democratizing revolutions 105 to agitate and some elites sought to build popular support to redress their grievances, or, failing that, to demand their independence. As the British Crown reorganized and tightened its rule, increased taxes, and kept more troops in place, tensions rose. These imperial measures were increasingly met with liberal and republican rhetoric which invoked the British constitutional arrangement, was used to organize opposition to British demands, and encouraged mob violence to signal the seriousness of the challenge. Matters came to a head around the 1773 Tea Act, which prompted the famous ‘Boston Tea Party,’ which in turn engendered the Coercive Acts (to punish the Bostonians), which in turn prompted the 1774 First Continental Congress. Some seven months later, on 19 April 1775, British troops fired on the Massachusetts militia, the shot heard ‘round the world’ (Emerson, 1994: 125). Weeks later, the Second Continental Congress convened; in a little over a year, 4 July 1776, they would adopt the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration of Independence remains one of the most radical public documents of any age. Written largely by Thomas Jefferson, the Declaration claims the right to self-determination; articulates a brief, powerful case for fundamental human rights (‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal … with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness’); and levels charges at the King and justifies the colonists’ need to dissolve their ties and attain their independence. Jefferson’s Declaration introduces the idea of democracy into government, granting ‘the people’ the right to ‘alter or abolish’ a government that becomes ‘destructive’ of their shared and equal rights to ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ (the last, drawn from Rousseau, a striking twist on the liberal Locke’s ‘life, liberty, and property’), and proclaiming the revolutionary ideal that governments ‘deriv[e] their just powers from the consent of the governed.’ It is a liberal clarion call and manifesto, which is in no way diminished by its subsequent taming in the US Constitution, where liberty is entwined with property rather than democracy, still suspect with its hint of mob rule, which might bode ill for those with money and privilege anxious to take advantage of their new position. A myriad other interpretations are possible, of course (see, inter alia, Nash, 2005; Zinn, 2005), though alternative perspectives on how the American Revolution unfolded and what it represented have been

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present since the early twentieth century (Beard, 2004, 1965; Hofstadter, 1948). As later chapters will detail, most notably in discussion of the Freedom and Liberation revolutionary story and the Revolution of the Lost and Forgotten story, there are a number of other dimensions to the revolutionary process in what will become the United States. In the former story the role of the early radicals is particularly important; in the latter, the revolutionary struggles that continue after the triumph are brought to the fore. There is a twist in this tale: having made its revolution and shocked the world, America promptly embarked on what would become a lengthy tradition of opposing revolution in almost any form, in any place, at any time. Following a momentous revolution, Toynbee marveled, America seemed ‘embarrassed and annoyed when … reminded,’ and moreover had chosen the role of Rome, ‘consistently support[ing] the rich against the poor in all foreign communities that fell under her sway; and, since the poor, so far, have always and everywhere been far more numerous than the rich, Rome’s policy made for inequality, for injustice, and for the least happiness of the greatest number’ (1962: 92). Arendt (1965: 216) worried that by failing to ‘incorporate the American Revolution into the revolutionary tradition,’ America was damaged not only abroad, ‘when even revolutions in the American continent speak and act as if they knew by heart the texts of revolutions in France, in Russia, and in China, but had never heard of such a thing as an American Revolution,’ but also at home, the ‘intense fear of revolution’ due to the ‘failure to remember that a revolution gave birth to the United States and that the republic was brought into existence by no “historical necessity” and no organic development, but by a deliberate act: the foundation of freedom.’ Whether out of fear or secure in its conviction that the slow, reformist, liberal revolution was the way, the United States came to be seen as the primary anti-revolutionary power in the world. There is, then, some irony that the American Revolution is the centerpiece, the bright and shining example for liberal revolution, the core of the Civilizing and Democratizing Story of Revolution. In this story, a brave and committed band of ‘new men’ (and they are all men and all white; see, e.g., Nash, 2005: xvi and passim; Linebaugh and Rediker, 2000: 211–47) in the ‘new world’ throw off the shackles of the ‘old’ and begin anew. It is a revolution at once beholden to older

The story of civilizing and democratizing revolutions 107 notions and defiantly looking forward, albeit neither too far nor too fast. The focus was on liberty, protected by laws and maintained in a system of checks and balances. The ‘republicanism’ that emerged came to be seen as the new democratic statement, and democracy was no longer mob rule but rebranded as the rule of the civilized. In this powerful formulation, ‘America’ would now be a beacon to the nations of the world and its compelling message would cross the Atlantic back to France.

When good revolutions go bad: France’s cautionary tale of 1789 The French Revolution gets relatively short shrift here – its star turn comes in the Social Revolutionary story in the next chapter. Yet it is a central piece of this story and certainly critical to the story arc. It is worth returning to Mornet’s (1933: 471) observation, invoked in the last chapter, that the origin of the French Revolution is one story and its history another, though here the emphasis should be on stories. For even a cursory survey of the truly remarkable scholarly and popular literature on 1789 reveals that there was not one French Revolution but many. In the Civilizing and Democratizing story, 1789 France is the good revolution gone bad: ‘good’ in its early, liberal years; bad as the people move beyond what had been previously mapped out and matters ‘go too far.’ Any story of France’s revolution must begin with three factors. First, whatever its troubles, and there were plenty, 1789 France was one of the world’s two most important, powerful, and influential states, and Paris the world’s capital. Second, France was denoted by the relatively repressive nature of the Ancien Régime and its still largely feudal status, with all that implied for social, political, and economic relations. Finally, while France’s incalculable aid to the American revolutionaries had enabled the defeat of their antagonists, the British, victory proved to be a double-edged sword: not only was the regime all but bankrupted, but soldiers and statesmen returned with ‘radical’ ideas of republican self-government.7 Despite a somewhat stout appearance, all was not well. Here the story begins to bifurcate, and little attention is paid in the Civilizing and Democratizing story to the plight of France’s enormous

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peasantry or the growing urban poor – their stories reappear in the chapters ahead. Faced with an intractable financial situation and rising discontent, in 1787 the King summoned an ‘Assembly of Notables’ – his officials and representatives from the aristocracy and clergy – but they could not agree on the way forward. Stymied, and arguably bereft of options, the King considered summoning the Estates General, a body which would represent the people of France. In keeping with late feudalism, France’s highly ordered patriarchal society was arranged with regard to one’s place and function in society; and this was broadly reflected in the three ‘estates’: the First Estate, the clergy; the Second Estate, the aristocracy; and the Third Estate, everyone else. Historically the first two estates had dominated any such proceedings and must reasonably have assumed they would still do so; and the King, well aware he might have to redress their grievances (Sewell, 1985: 67), must have calculated that such a move was worth that risk. So in this particular story, with some allowance for generosity of spirit, the King, cognizant of the need to do something and with the support of some of the nobles or under duress from the aristocracy and some of their new allies among the emergent wealthy bourgeoisie, convened the Estates General in an effort to modernize the French state, and perhaps better position the aristocracy and their allies. As Sewell notes, it marked the end of an era of absolutist monarchy (1985: 67). While there seems little doubt that the King, the clergy, and the aristocracy imagined this convocation would work to their mutual benefit, they had seriously underestimated the unexpectedly independent-minded and powerful Third Estate, which would confound them all. When one considers the mechanisms of the process, it should not have. During a time of great tension, a basic electoral system was put in place and lists of grievances (cahiers de doléances) drawn up. It hardly seems surprising, then, that some six weeks after the Estates General was convoked in early May 1789 for the first time in 175 years, the Third Estate, with some supporters from the other two, would refashion itself as France’s National Constituent Assembly and, in the face of the King’s efforts to suppress them, set out to write a constitution. A month later, on 14 July, the fall of the Bastille (a story told in the next chapter for its powerful social revolutionary symbolism) marked the collapse of meaningful royal authority, though there remained a certain fondness for the King for a few weeks yet. A mere two months after

The story of civilizing and democratizing revolutions 109 meeting for the first time, the National Assembly voted on 4 August to abolish feudal rights, though this was more symbolic than real, and some three weeks later adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. The liberal reform of France had begun and the King’s recalcitrance boded ill. 8 The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen is a direct descendant of the US Declaration of Independence, with several critical additions and a novel twist: this equality and these rights were the province of all men everywhere (women and slaves, as in the US, were excepted). The people are front and center; they are, in their guise as the nation, the repository of sovereignty and thus legitimacy and authority. Rights included ‘liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression’ as well as liberties that would be covered in the US Bill of Rights such as freedom of speech and religious worship, and freedom from arbitrary arrest – and in an effort to reverse specific abuses of the Ancien Régime – to be presumed innocent until proven guilty, just punishments, fair taxes for the common good, armed forces that must serve society, the expropriation of property for public good with just compensation, and the holding of public officials accountable. It is a remarkable – albeit in effect reformist (at least in this story) – document, which would become the preamble to the 1791 French Constitution. Thus the first year of the revolution was largely one of moderate if nonetheless dramatic reform, following the recognizable lines of 1688 and 1776. In the Civilizing and Democratizing story, the tale recounts a well-meaning if overwhelmed king struggling to accept his loss of absolute power but impatient to reconcile with ‘his’ people as they work together toward some form of constitutional monarchy. During the ‘October Days,’ disaffected and hungry women brought the royal family and Assembly from Versailles back to Paris where they set about establishing free trade (including the suppression of workers’ associations), moved the country from province to districts, held elections, instituted a uniform system of judicial courts and legal practices, and, in a controversial move, nationalized Church properties and salaried priests, both to break the power of the Church and for financial reasons. It is here that the two stories really begin to separate. In the Social Revolutionary story to come, this first year of reforms leading to the 1791 Constitution, in the face of an obstinate aristocracy, is in a sense

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the point at which matters take off. For the story of Civilizing and Democratizing, it was the beginning of the end. In this tale, the ‘left’ – for there was now ‘left’ and ‘right,’ reflecting simply where people had sat during the initial meetings of the nascent National Assembly – wanted more, not least republicanism and a referendum on the fate of the royal family. Pope Pius VI’s February 1791 condemnation of the revolution may have encouraged the King to look to his relations and friends outside of France; undoubtedly his June attempt to flee the country with his family confirmed the left’s worst suspicions and likely sealed the fate of the monarchy. The King’s sanction of the Constitution in September rang hollow. With its work done, the Constituent Assembly dissolved itself, elections were held, and in October 1791 the new Legislative Assembly convened, to be met by Prussian and Austrian threats that they would restore France’s monarchy. Fearful of invasion, in April 1792 the Assembly declared war on Austria (audaciously, in this story, in the name of all men against all kings), and the revolution took a much more radical course. The royal family was accused of treason, the revolution seen to be in danger, and on 10 August 1792 an insurrection in Paris toppled the monarchy and called for a constitutional convention, which on 22 September declared the French Republic. In December the King was tried for treason and found guilty. He was guillotined on 21 January 1793, against the opposition of the moderates, who within six months would find themselves driven out of government and by October, along with the Queen, facing the guillotine as well. To the moderates, it seemed, the revolution had begun to devour its children, and henceforth efforts at rapid, dramatic, transformation would only increase.9 France thus brings the Civilizing and Democratizing story to an end on a reproving note: too much, too soon, too far, and too fast and the liberal dream will be destroyed, burned up by fires (or perhaps, per Brinton, 1965: 16, a fever) beyond their control. Nevertheless, 1789 represents the birth of a people (later it will be seen as the birth of ‘the people’), updating the idea of democracy associated with Ancient Greece and Rome, each of which is often invoked in this story, and plants the liberalism and democracy of ‘America’ in the very belly of the beast, monarchical Europe. It is here that a crucial set of terms – civilization, progress, democracy – take on a new meaning, one familiar to us today.

The story of civilizing and democratizing revolutions 111 Indeed, as Wydra (2008: 29) observes, the French ‘popularized democracy by weaving the egalitarian Christian notion of the value of human beings into the Enlightenment tradition of the emancipation of man … [it] is the birthplace of democratic politics,’ though, as he also astutely notes, it was in a sense not yet the time of democrats, who were then only starting to develop (Wydra, 2008: 32). The admonitory tale told here is succinctly summarized by Negri (2008: 253), who frames the accounts of ‘revisionist schools’ as a version of the revolution which evolved from ‘libertarian insurrection’ (the liberals) to ‘Jacobin terror’ (centralization and the willingness to employ terror) to ‘bourgeois Thermidor’ (a time of moderation, or perhaps even a return to pre-revolutionary times). And that is the preferred end to this story, with the French, chastened by their own excesses and having seen the error of their ways, finding their way back to civilization and forward to liberal democracy.

Back to the future: revolutionary returns of the liberal revolutions Whether conceived of as ‘Enlightenment’ or ‘liberal’ revolutions, the 1688 ‘Glorious Revolution’ in England, the 1776 American Revolution, and the 1789 French Revolution form the core of the Civilizing and Democratizing Story of Revolution. Each imagined its roots in Greece, Rome, and the Judeo-Christian tradition, and each gave rise to resistance, rebellion, and revolutions elsewhere, just as Europe’s monarchs feared. Among the upheavals which more or less fit this rubric and might be included are the 1789–90 revolts in Belgium (which led to a very short-lived United States of Belgium), the 1791 Haitian Revolution, the 1794 Polish Revolt (Kościuszko Uprising), Grenada’s 1794 Fédon Rebellion, and the 1798 Irish Rebellion. Only rarely are Latin America’s sundry wars of independence included, though liberal elements were in evidence throughout. The next moment that resonates strongly with the liberal revolutions of the Civilizing and Democratizing story is that of 1848 Europe. As with much here, we will see the revolutions of this year in several guises. They were essentially liberal or ‘bourgeois’ revolutions largely aimed at gaining a larger role for the region’s growing middle class and instantiating democratic capitalist norms. Whatever the ‘true’

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goal of the uprisings, they were astoundingly widespread and rapidly so at a time when news still travelled relatively slowly: Palermo and Naples as well as most of the states that would become Italy, Paris and other parts of France; Berlin (Prussia), Bavaria, and most of the states that would become Germany; Denmark (Schleswig); throughout the Habsburg Empire (Austria and Hungary in particular); Switzerland, Poland, and Romania; as well as lesser revolts among the Czechs, in the Ukraine, Slovakia, Bulgaria, and Serbia and even Brazil.10 If Trevelyan’s analysis that ‘1848 was the turning point at which modern history failed to turn’ (1922: 292) is correct, it is only in the sense that it did not turn revolutionary; ‘But for their occurrence,’ Hobsbawm (1996b: 10) suggests, ‘and for fear of their recurrence, the history of Europe in the next twenty-five years would have been very different. Eighteen forty-eight was very far from being “the turning point where Europe failed to turn”.’ While too many demands and tensions weakened the revolutions, there is little question that more civilization and more democracy followed in their aftermath. From the center of Europe the Civilizing and Democratizing story starts to move outwards, usually with mention of the 1905 Constitutional Revolution in Russia, which failed, and in Persia, which partially succeeded. There is occasional reference to the 1910 republican revolution in Portugal, which saw mixed results, and to the Mexican Revolution, destined over the next ten years to become the first great social upheaval of the twentieth century. One might plausibly argue that Bolivia’s complicated 1952 nationalist revolution and Portugal’s ‘Carnation Revolution’ in 1974 also work in the context of this story; the former degenerated into a series of military regimes, while the latter produced a successful constitutional and democratic government, in some ways presaging the Eastern European ‘color revolutions’ of 1989. The events of 1989 fit better with the Civilizing and Democratizing story than any other, through they are recent and somewhat troubled additions. In part this arises from their nature, fruitfully captured by the portmanteau term ‘refolutions,’ connoting ‘a non-revolutionary revolution’ and conveying democratic-minded, largely urban events with little or no violence, marked by acts of civil disobedience led by opposition or ‘reformed’ elites adept with media and technology and willing to negotiate (see Garton Ash, 1989a: 1; 1989b: 9).11 These cases

The story of civilizing and democratizing revolutions 113 do not seem to resonate particularly well with 1789 France; indeed Wydra (2008: 44) suggests that they turn it on its head. Nor would they seem to comport with the American or English examples, though Kumar (2001: 132, citing Bozóki, 1992: 166–7) argues that ‘the majority of the East Central European countries experienced “democratic transition” in 1989–1990, on the model of the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688–89 in England (“the first successful transition”).’ He has subsequently extended this claim, noting that ‘the revolutionaries of 1989 sought to avoid the somewhat unruly and disorderly examples of the twentieth century and return to the more staid and respectable principles of the older generations, the people who made the revolutions of 1688, 1776, and, at least in its earlier phases, 1789’ (Kumar, 2008: 225). While the comparison here makes intuitive sense (likewise the fear of militaries), the greatest consonance would seem to be with Europe’s 1848 revolutions, at least in their liberal or bourgeois formulation. The 1989 ‘color revolutions’ have been referred to as the ‘autumn of nations’ in seeming direct reference to the ‘springtime of nations,’ a comparison that seems apt, though one notes that to date they have met with far more success than their compatriots did 140-odd years before them. This is clearly an area that merits greater consideration in terms of the study of comparative revolution, and will increasingly be incorporated into the story. Ultimately, the Civilizing and Democratizing Story of Revolution is a suspicious, skeptical one in which revolution is ‘good bad but not evil,’12 at least when liberalization is the goal. It tells of fundamentally political revolutions, which seems apt; revolution, after all, ‘had until the mid-nineteenth century a preeminently political meaning,’ since it was ‘the main legacy of the English, American, and French revolutions’ (Kumar, 2001: 220). Kumar (2001: 220, echoing Brinton, 1965: 250) contends compellingly that the goals of the three revolutions at the core of this story may be ‘more or less adequately summed up’ by the widely recognized ‘slogan of the French revolution, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”.’ He goes on to suggest that, while this bold declaration of principles is open to interpretation and ‘could take on utopian dimensions,’ ‘for most revolutionaries the historic examples of England, America, and France suggested achievable ends and something of the institutional means towards them’ (Kumar, 2001: 220) The focus here is on the destruction of old and outdated concepts and institutions

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and structures of governance, and the construction of the appropriate political (and, in this story, attendant economic) institutions to achieve the goals of liberalization and democratization. The revolutions of the Civilizing and Democratizing story are presented as broadly, and at times deeply, democratic. This is highlighted by the contrast with the inequities and inequality that had preceded them; there was little approaching democracy in Europe’s monarchial regimes. In addition is the proposition that a people could not only put limits on the powers of the elite but hold them accountable – that is, have the right and the ability to remove those in power when they lose the support of the people – because it is now with the people that authority, legitimacy, and sovereignty reside. It is a powerful story and one that retains a following; one might even suggest that it has guided early-twenty-first-century US foreign-policy decision-makers with regard to US actions in Iraq and Afghanistan. At the same time, the tellers of this story seem to shy away from the broader and deeper social and cultural implications of such a tale. It is those aspects, the socio-cultural implications and ramifications, which are in an important sense the core of the Social Revolutionary Story of Revolution.

six The story of social revolution

T

he story of social revolution is arguably the story of revolution, the one by which we know the term. For over two hundred years, this has not only been the dominant story of revolution as we tell it, but it has been the defining story, the standard by which all others are measured and by which almost all are found wanting. This familiar story is beloved by many people around the world, who may be hazy (at best) on the details but find in it the promise of deliverance from their current conditions. The Social Revolutionary story, with some variation, is also the paradigmatic story for generations of scholars of revolution, holding sway as theories come and go. And, for reasons explored below, this story is also a locus of sorts for both Francophiles and Francophobes: the former are inclined to see the 1789 French Revolution as the practical start of the modern world and the medium by which democracy arrived in royal Europe (the very belly of the beast) and ‘the people’ began to realize their possibilities; the latter, meanwhile, are disposed for essentially the same reasons to see it as the root of as the root of much mischief and even modern evil in the world. As it is most commonly articulated, centered on France’s clarion call of liberté, égalité, fraternité (‘liberty, equality, fraternity’), it is a powerful and compelling story.1 In the Story of Social Revolution, revolution had heretofore meant restoration, at one time perhaps a noble enough cause, especially when it was believed that what was being returned to was something better,

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purer, even a golden age. This story rejects such fantasies (which, in most cases, they assuredly are) and represents France’s 1789 revolutionary process as transforming the very conception of revolution. As we saw in Chapter 1, it was King Louis XVI’s adviser la Rochefoucauld who assured his lord and master that the events were no mere revolt but a revolution – and the import is clear. 2 No more was revolution perceived simply another turn of the wheel; henceforth it meant profound socio-cultural transformation of the nation, the state, perhaps the world. Karl Marx, the most important theorist of social revolution, argued that revolution could no longer ‘take its poetry from the past but only from the future’; the past must be stripped away so that it will not smother the revolution, which ‘in order to arrive at its content … must let the dead bury their dead’ (1978a: 597). What is done is done and it is time for the new. The focus in the Story of Social Revolution is threefold (drawing in part on Skocpol, 1979: 4):3 first, the emergence or creation of revolutionary situations and the struggle for control of state power, driven in part by class-based revolts; second, the actual seizure of power and control of the state; and, third, the fundamental effort to transform profoundly not simply a state’s political and economic institutions and structures but also the social, psychological, and cultural systems as well in a contemporaneous and mutually reinforcing fashion. It is this package of elements that is critical for the Social Revolutionary story, and as such distinguishes it from the political and economic transition that features in the Civilizing and Democratizing story. Change is meant to be fast and fundamental, far-reaching and consequential – a new world aborning. Hence it is that people find themselves presented with boundless opportunities to transform the material and ideological conditions of their everyday lives and reshape their world in a stunning moment of possibility. This story is one which is broadly popular at an array of levels, to some extent encompassing both the somewhat elitist previous story and the more populist stories to come, and which retains resonance and currency around the world, the ubiquity of Bastille Day celebrations being a rather surprising testament. There is no doubt that the 1789 French Revolution, at least as the story is most commonly told, is the archetype: it is grand, it is epic, it is sweeping, its brutal failures as lost to the mists of time as its more radical elements. So here we will revisit France, although the tone and

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tenor in this story are decidedly different from those in the previous chapter; while there is some attention to Rome and Greece, the focus now is on the new with no looking back. For the next hundred-plus years, the inspired tell the tale of the struggle and wrestle with how best to proceed, while the elites and their state managers tell horror stories of excesses, seemingly inevitable, wrought. On occasion the failures of 1848 are mentioned and the semi-obscure but extremely influential Paris Commune (1871) noted, though in defeat the Commune assumes a powerful mythopoetic position. Mexico in 1910–20, the twentieth century’s first great social upheaval, is more commonly found here, though its peripatetic peregrinations present a challenge (its complexities more ably reflected and comfortably ensconced in the stories to come). There is no question that the 1917 Russian Revolution, for many some sort of extension of 1789 into the twentieth century, is next; China (1949), largely passed over here, for its part, is always included in this story, its somewhat sprawling saga (1911–49) interrupted by two world wars, but crucially representative of social revolution’s expansion into what was soon dubbed the ‘Third World.’4 And then the story moves to 1959 Cuba, which brings social revolution into the modern world, establishing what remains the most compelling, if now dated, touchstone. For many, this is where the grand story of great social revolutions ends. At one time, it was not unusual to find Vietnam (1975), another expansive case (1945–75), or Algeria (1954–62) included here, though both came to be seen somewhat more usefully as wars of national liberation. More recently, versions of this story have often included two of 1979’s revolutionary trio, Nicaragua, Iran, and Grenada (the odd one out here, having burned none too brightly and all too briefly; see, among others, Heine, 1991; Selbin, 1999). Nicaragua occupies a somewhat complicated place in this story, as arguably the last successful armed revolution in the tradition that starts with 1789, and sometimes cited in relation to a certain degree of degradation or debasement of the concept. Nicaragua’s revolutionaries were defeated at the ballot box in 1990, though the 2008 return of at least some of them suggests matters are still in play. The final outcome in Iran, considered by some the last great revolution (almost certainly a premature accolade), also remains in doubt. No one questions that something important, for Iran, the region, and the world happened. The final outcome of

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Iran, considered by some the last great revolution (almost certainly a premature accolade), also remains in doubt. There is little question that something important happened there, yet too often Iran falls prey to academic Orientalism or ethnocentric ‘puzzlement,’ as the contested 2009 elections remind. Useful distinctions may be drawn between the Iranian and Islamic revolution, but the latter seems likely to be the great legacy and it does fit, albeit in complicated ways (touched on below), the basic premiss of the Social Revolutionary story. Two other points merit mention before we turn to our tale. There seems little question that social revolution is a persistent and omni­ present fear among elites, state managers and policymakers. While acts of resistance or rebellion garner their immediate attention, the drama of social revolution lurks as a threat. By the same token, this is the story, the form of revolution, that most inspires the many. Even though means and methods differ, it is the momentous aspects, events which together form an even greater whole, that epitomize the epic Story of Social Revolution, as can be observed in its three key exemplars: France, Russia, and Cuba.

The foundational moment: 1789 France and the new meaning of revolution The 1789 French Revolution is widely represented as the ur or echt revolution,5 the epitome of social revolution (but see Higonnet, 1990: 69). More than a legend or a myth, its status is that of a ‘world historical event’ whose repercussions are still being experienced today. Notwithstanding cautionary statements about the ‘chimera of origins’ (Chartier, 1991: 4; he invokes Foucault, 1977a) the French Revolution clearly stands as an epochal moment, whose momentous character formed the focus of the next two-hundred-plus years of revolutionary thinking, critical socio-political concepts, and conceptions of the modern world. In contrast to the Civilizing and Democratizing Story of Revolution, here the details, the ‘facts,’ matter little, though some are touched on below. Rather, the real import is the emergence of ‘the cult of revolution as the way history works’ (Malia, 2006: 6), a perspective in which the French Revolution is the model of progress. The veneration in this story and the general high esteem in which the French Revolution is now almost universally held (signified, bizarrely,

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in part by its Disneyfied bicentennial, which skirted dangerously close to being an embarrassing caricature) do not mean that the legacy is either uncontested or unambiguous. There are less sanguine versions, albeit still shrouded in a quasi-mythical aura, where the process is credited with unleashing terror into a largely unsuspecting world (see, e.g., Chaliand and Blin, 2007: 92, 95–112). This representation of the Revolution has also latterly been buffeted about by a growing array of politicians and taken a battering at the hands of prominent contemporary scholars François Furet and his galaxy, who have sought to reconceptualize the event as more or less another day at the office in the unfolding drama that is France (Kaplan, 1995: 54–60). Pierre Chaunu, a scholar apart from this group, takes this notion to its most extreme, contending, for example, according to Kaplan (1995: 31), that ‘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.”’ And we would do well to remember a pointed, amusing, and almost certainly apocryphal anecdote: one of the twentieth century’s most astute political observers, Chinese Prime Minister Zhou Enlai, asked in the early 1970s about the importance of France’s revolution, responded that it was too early to tell. 6 Thus 220-plus years after the revolution began, it remains a daunting challenge. In the Social Revolutionary story, the date 14 July 1789, the fall of the Bastille, looms large. The nineteenth-century French historian Jules Michelet contended that ‘on that day everything was possible … the future was present … that is to say time was no more, all a lightening flash of eternity’ (cited in Kimmel, 1990: 1860. Sewell broadens the moment to some ten days, 12–23 July 1789, and suggests that it represents ‘an extraordinary period of fear, rejoicing, violence, and cultural creativity that changed the history of the world’ (1996: 845). Arendt, with France clear in mind, for her part detects ‘an entirely new story, a story never known or told before … about to unfold’ (1965: 28), the people the ‘agents in a process which spells the end of the old order and brings the birth of the new world’ (1965: 42). That moment, in Darnton’s compelling formulation, opened a world of ‘possibilism’ (1990: 17, 19). In the Civilizing and Democratizing Story of Revolution, the dramatic events of July 1789, and indeed of the first year or so, pass as what Dunn (1989: 6) suggests is an ‘aristocratic reaction, the révolte

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nobiliaire.’ In the Social Revolutionary story, the focus is more on the new beginning suggested above, guided by Paine’s assertion of just a few years earlier in Common Sense that ‘we have it in our power to begin the world over again’ (Paine, 2000: 44). In addition, here the self-empowered people, the nascent ‘nation’ of France, are seeking to find their way forward in the face of ever more hostile forces from within and without. So while reforms proliferated, they were neither far-reaching nor soon enough for a people increasingly enamored with notions of liberty, freedom, equality, and justice. The King’s seemingly inexplicable and ill-fated decision to flee with his family in June 1791 sounded the death knell for the fragile constitutional monarchy, his apparent plotting with erstwhile allies in Austria and Prussia adding to the sense of foreboding. France went to war in April 1792, whereupon radicalism quickly escalated as the royal family’s treason seemed ever more evident to those keeping an eye on such matters. On 10 August 1792, the people of Paris, on behalf of the nation, toppled the monarchy and called a Constitutional Convention, which, some six weeks later (22 September 1792), just days after the war began to turn in France’s favor, declared the new French Republic. All that remained was to tidy up the reformist era; thus in December the King, now known simply as Louis Capet, was found guilty of treason and guillotined on 21 January 1793 (his wife would meet a similar fate later that year), over the objections of moderates in the government, now seen to be far too hesitant to throw off the shackles of the old order. Thus the Social Revolutionary story begins, with verve, creativity, and élan unleashed as the revolutionaries sought to remake their world, at home and abroad, and ours. It is a decidedly one-sided story; far less generous interpretations focus on the ‘Terror’ – the ten months (September 1793–July 1794) of intense, often violent struggles over the excesses of the revolutionary process and its direction. Though these latter events do indelibly mark the story of Civilizing and Democratizing Revolution, inflecting the story with a degree of pessimism and with dismay, nevertheless some of the events are recuperable as ‘lost moments’ or sparks of possibility. These belong in the Story of the Lost and Forgotten Revolutions. However, in the Story of Social Revolution, these events in France were a unique and unprecedented effort to change the world. Having already transformed the landscape and redrawn the map of France to render it neat and orderly – simplifying

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could well have been a revolutionary watchword7 – the revolutionaries turned their attention elsewhere. People called for representation, rules, redistribution and more. Throughout spring 1793, popular demands increased for both social and economic controls and greater safety and security for the revolution. Committees for Public Safety and General Security were created and a Revolutionary Tribunal was set up to deal with ever growing concerns about treason. These would produce and even guide the Terror. Price controls (the ‘Maximum’) were instituted and further economic measures discussed. In late May the more radical members of the government ousted the moderates, and in August drafted yet another new constitution, which included universal male suffrage, though this would never be implemented; the new ‘General Maximum’ set price controls on a wide range of goods and set strict new guidelines for society. Internecine battles continued among the various revolutionary factions. In October the Queen and many moderate revolutionary leaders were killed as the radicals moved to centralize the revolutionary process and consolidate their position. As if to put their stamp on this process, in early October they took their most audacious step yet and introduced an entirely new calendar. It is hard to underestimate the impact of the new calendar and attendant efforts to transform the material and ideological conditions of people’s everyday lives; the revolutionaries, Darnton (1990: 5) points out, sought to re-create ‘time and space.’ This is the French Revolution at the heart of, the inspiration for, the Social Revolutionary story. Reflecting the turn to nature and away from the Church, the new calendar was divided into four seasons of three months, with names considered appropriate to the time and season; for example, the period from late October to late November was Brumaire, ‘fog’; Nivôse, ‘snowy,’ lasted from late December to late January; the season late April to late May was Floréal, ‘flower’; and Thermidor, ‘heat,’ spanned mid-July to mid-August. Each thirty-day month was composed of three weeks, each of ten functionally named days (first, second, third, and so on) – thereby effectively dispensing with the biblical unit of seven days; the five extra days were holidays of civic virtue. 8 The new calendar was backdated to 22 September 1792 (the declaration of the republic) and would remain in place until 1805 (and see a revival during the weeks of the 1871 Paris Commune).

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Inspired by and in some cases in advance of their leaders, people had already begun to remake France and themselves. In a society awash in names which paid direct and indirect homage to the royal family and the Church, people renamed their towns (some 6,000, according to Darnton, 1990: 6), public squares, churches (the cathedral Notre Dame de Paris was rebaptized the Temple of Reason), and streets, 1,400 in Paris alone (Darnton, 1990: 6). People changed their own names and for good measure the names of things they used and encountered in their daily life – for example, chess pieces and playing cards – and the ‘queen bee’ became the ‘laying bee’ (Brinton, 1965: 179; Darnton, 1990: 7). The new spirit extended even into interpersonal relationships: monsieur became citoyen (citizen) in greetings, as they ‘discarded innumerable titles for the uniform “citizen,” “brother,” and “tu”’ (Billington, 1980: 24). This last raises perhaps the most dramatic and revealing effort to regulate even the popular use of language and our ‘most intimate relationships,’ as Darnton (1990: 8) explains; ‘intimacy in French is conveyed by the pronoun tu as distinct from the vous employed in formal address … under the Old Regime they reserved [tu] for asymmetrical or intensely personal relations … The French Revolution wanted to make everybody tu.’ 9 One departement in the south-west banned use of the vous form, Darnton points out (1990: 8), and in 1794 the National Convention was petitioned to do the same. The efforts were arduous, impassioned, committed and profound. At the Revolution’s height, and crucial to its legacy, virtue was at the center of everything; this was intended to be a new world much better than the old. France was meant to be an egalitarian and democratic society (at least for men) and slavery was abolished. The economy would be free and open, taxes placed on the wealthy, and property redistributed. Social welfare policies were enacted so that life for the great majority would no longer be as described by Hobbes (2008: 94) not so very long before, ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.’ A better world seemed tantalizingly within grasp. It is easy to read history backwards; indeed, the challenge is not to. We know of the Terror, the brutal internal struggles that peaked in 1794, when Robespierre and the other Jacobin leaders struck first against the ‘left’ (the enragés or Héberists) in March, and then in April against the ‘right’ (the somewhat more moderate radicals led by Danton). In May the cult of the Supreme Being was launched in an

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effort to fashion a new, secular religion, but it gained little traction and alienated many. In July wage controls were introduced as part of an effort to deal with the continuing economic crisis. Together these measures seemed to seal the unpopularity of the government and led to the collapse of the Terror and the end of Robespierre and Saint-Just on 27 July 1794. The ‘Thermidorian Reaction,’ named for the revolutionary month in which it had begun, would henceforth give its name, Thermidor, to a phase in the revolutionary process associated with a moderate or even conservative rectification or even backlash (Malia, 2006: 303; Brinton, 1965: 205–36). While Thermidor may mark ‘the end of the forward surge of revolutionary change’ (Malia, 2006: 91), matters were not quite so simple. Radicals remained in charge, and in September the separation of church and state was formalized. While truces were brokered throughout France to bring assorted resistance and rebellions to an end, the government still had to put down radical uprisings demanding ‘Bread and Constitution of 1793’ as well as contend with ‘White Terror’ in places where conservatives sought revenge. However, the moderates that remained were welcomed back into the revolutionary fold and a new path forward for a more tempered if still resolute revolutionary process sought. And here the French Revolution’s star turn in the Story of Social Revolution comes to an end. Little is made of the conservative (or moderate, depending on one’s perspective) reaction which defined much of 1795 and culminated in yet another new, essentially liberal, constitution and bicameral legislature indirectly elected by male taxpayers. who in turn elected a five-man executive ‘Directory.’ In 1796 Babeuf ’s proto-socialist Conspiracy of Equals10 was crushed before it really got started; this may have contributed to the monarchists’ somewhat surprising electoral success in 1797, which led in turn to their purging and a 1798 electoral resurgence by the radicals. Tacking back and forth between these poles and confronting myriad challenges, in 1799 moderate republicans turned to their most accomplished general, Napoleon, who on 18 Brumaire (9 November) ousted the Directory and in fairly short order turned most of the revolution’s achievements on their head, ending representative government, instituting censorship, suppressing what rights people did retain, to varying degrees restoring the rights of the Church and aristocracy, and creating a new monarchy in many ways far more powerful, this despite his commitment to liberal

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principles of rationality and private property. Yet this is not the aspect of the French Revolution at the center of this story. The French Revolution at the center of the Social Revolutionary story is captured by an unlikely (and almost certainly untrue) story. The Prussians having been defeated by the French revolutionary army at a critical juncture for the revolution in 1793, Goethe claimed to have reassured his defeated compatriots that ‘from this place and from this day a new epoch in world history begins and you can say you were there to see it’ (Boyle, 2003: 128). Furet, one of the most influential and astute scholars of the French Revolution, though skeptical of its importance and universalist appeal, notes its incredible promise of ‘unlimited … equality and a special form of change’ (1981: 3, 5), a legacy developed by those to come, notably the Mexican and Russian revolutions (Mayer, 2001: 591; and Paz, 1975: ix, respectively), those in China, in Cuba, and indeed many more. It is not hard to see why this ‘world historical event’ (Wallerstein, 1990; Skocpol and Kestnbaum, 1990; but see Higonnet, 1990) profoundly shaped the next two hundred years and does so still. On the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution, Darnton (1990) posed an excellent question: what was so revolutionary about the French Revolution? This is not a simple question, even though Darnton deals with it deftly. Dunn (2008: 17) helps with the scale, pointing out that ‘in a few short months, in the year 1789, the people of France set their stamp ineffaceably on a political idea which has loomed over the history of the world ever since.’ Despite associating the French Revolution with ‘revisionist schools,’ Negri (2008: 253) centers it as what becomes the story of revolution, an ‘evolutionary account of … libertarian insurrection, Jacobin terror, bourgeois Thermidor.’ His misgivings aside, Furet (1981: 79) casts it as ‘the first experiment with democracy.’ For Callinicos (2008: 159), it begins the ‘political project of human emancipation … but left [it] unfinished.’ Sewell (2004: 95), in an effort to provide some sense of the scope, the magnitude, the impact, suggests we ‘imagine how the rest of the world would respond today if an astoundingly radical revolution were to take place in the United States. When Paris rose in 1789, the world could only watch in rapt attention.’ Whenever this story is told, it commands such attention, directing the imagination to what Darnton tells us is the key: nameley, the possibilities.

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What was so revolutionary about the French Revolution, in Darnton’s estimation, and why it matters yet was its palpable sense of possibility; the opportunity to create a new world. Unlike in the Civilizing and Democratizing story, this is not about a return to a golden age. It is this profound sense of possibilism that made the French Revolution so revolutionary and likewise marks the other cases on which we are most inclined to agree. In the Social Revolutionary story, people, the people, as a conscious group capable of intentional actions bound together by their dreams and desires, found themselves with what seemed like a boundless opportunity to transform the material and ideological conditions of their everyday lives and to reshape their world and themselves. The revolution is no less astonishing for what it was not or never could be, its renown due less to its reality than to its legacy. Perhaps it is just too early to tell.

Revolution in the ‘real’ world: Russia in 1917 If the 1789 French Revolution, with its demands for liberty, equality, and freedom can be said to have ushered in the nineteenth century, Russia’s revolution in 1917 left no doubt that a new century had begun, with its insistence on social justice for all and the collective ownership of the means of production. It is easy to read Russia’s revolutionary process through the lens of France (or the reverse; see Furet, 1981: 6), for its ‘adherents and opponents … understood the events as immediate consequences of 1789’ (Arendt, 1965: 50), but such facile analyses, however tempting, obscure more than they illuminate. Unlike in the case of France – and the stories we all prefer – there is no clear beginning–middle–end structure: the ‘libertarian’ insurrection is there, but it segues into some seventy years of ‘Jacobin Terror’ married to stultifying bureaucracy, and never really arrives at ‘Thermidor’ at all (see Malia, 2006: 6). Far more useful is to start with Russia 1917 as the world’s first avowedly socialist and self-proclaimed Marxist revolution. For over a hundred years, the French Revolution alone formed the core of the Social Revolutionary story. Europe’s 1848 revolutions failed, except in the sense that some of them helped move along liberal democratic and bourgeois ideas, eventually leading to somewhat more open economies and the relatively meager extension of the franchise to middle-class men. While Japan’s 1868 Meiji Restoration may have

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been a ‘revolution from above’ (Trimberger, 1978), little about it was very revolutionary. Persia’s 1905 Constitutional Revolution briefly led to a constitutional monarchy but little more and Russia’s 1905 constitutional revolution failed utterly, except perhaps in a broader sense, discussed below. The 1910 republican revolution in Portugal had mixed and limited success. The 1910 Mexican Revolution began as a bourgeois liberal process and in important ways that is how it concluded; although it clearly had social revolutionary and radical aspects (discussed in the chapters to come), it never really attains that status. Finally, while the 1911 Chinese Revolution led to the 1912 Republic of China, this is perhaps most generously read as a weak, bourgeois liberal revolution which opened up an era of restoration, rebellion, and revolution, which would only eventually culminate in a social revolution almost four decades later. It merits note that in Mexico and China, whatever their limitations, the flag of revolution was raised early in the twentieth century in parts of the world that will be later identified as ‘Third World.’ Some see a direct link, for good or ill, from 1789 France to 1917 Russia. And, as with France, many people believe that Russia not only failed to realize its greatest hopes and visions but in fact betrayed them, tragically and all too readily. Certainly by the time the Russian Revolution was formally put to rest in 1991, few were willing to claim the body, an ignoble end to a revolutionary process that, as in France, had promised to transform the world for the better. If Steffens (1931: 799) superficial pronouncement that ‘I have been over into the future, and it works’11 seems particularly regrettable, it nevertheless captures a sentiment about the possibilities that seemed evident at the time and that play a role in the Story of Social Revolution. Whether or not Russia’s revolution faithfully approximates the three stages most commonly identified within the 1789 French Revolution, it can plausibly be read as three distinct but related revolutions: the 1905 failed constitutional revolution, the bourgeois liberal democratic 1917 February revolution, and the famous 1917 October revolution, which is the focus here.12 Lenin (1980b: 566) certainly saw the three revolutions as related and read them as a single process.13 Conversely, there is much to be gained by reading the three revolutions as distinct events. In the stories of revolution, they are most commonly separated, the first two seen as little more than footnotes. The 1905 constitutional revolution

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is usually accorded a minor role as a failure in the Civilizing and Democratizing story, a bourgeois liberal democratic attempt to create a highly attenuated quasi-constitutional monarchy in a backward society not ready for such a transition. A vital event, ‘Bloody Sunday,’ the 9 January 1905 massacre of over a hundred peaceful protesters outside the Tsar’s Winter Palace in St Petersburg, can sometimes be found in the Revolutions of the Lost and Forgotten story. In any event, while no lasting or significant change occurred, arguably a revolutionary situation emerged, a moment when, for Lenin, those on the top are no longer able to rule in the old ways, the exploited classes are in greater need and more dire misery, and those below will no longer submit. He stresses that these in no way guarantee a revolutionary outcome (1918b: 97).14 If 1905 was, as Lenin (1980b: 521) suggests, a ‘dress rehearsal’ for 1917, there seems little question it contributed to the way events unfolded. The 1917 February revolution makes remarkably few appearances, usually being simply subsumed into, or perhaps overwhelmed by, the larger story that would follow in less than a year, a ‘first stage’ of the revolution. Even so, it can appear in the Civilizing and Democratizing story as an example of ‘what might have been.’ In such a reading, this is more than a spontaneous explosion which overthrew Tsar Nicholas II, ended Imperial Russia, and paved the way for the Bolsheviks. This process began in St. Petersburg with women demanding bread on International Women’s Day and fomenting a general strike; when the Tsar’s troops, most notably his loyal Cossacks, refused to disperse the crowds, the monarchy collapsed. Into this vacuum stepped a broadbased coalition which included a range of liberals of various stripes and a diverse array of socialists committed to creating a popularly elected constituent assembly, a democratically elected executive, and seeking to reform politics and the economy. A first effort dominated by uppermiddle-class and elite liberals, conservatives, and industrialists was watched warily by ‘soviets,’ councils of workers, soldiers and sailors and a situation of ‘dual power’ began to coalesce. Soon moderate socialists (most famously the Mensheviks) took over and attempted to continue the reform process and the creation and instantiation of democracy. This, then, in the Civilizing and Democratizing story, is the nascent liberal-socialist (bourgeois, to its left opponents) government, which was overthrown in essentially a coup d’état by the Bolsheviks.

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Regardless of their importance, neither of the first two revolutions features in any real sense in the Social Revolutionary story, which as it is usually rendered is strikingly sparse on details, at least with regard to the actions of the revolutionaries as opposed to the opposition it engendered. In this framework, 1905 is a moment of epic failure that makes clear that more radical measures will be required – the Tsar, his ministers and minions are not to be trusted – and February 1917 overthrew the despotic Tsar and his corrupt ruling clique and ineptly sought to replace the monarchy with a bourgeois liberal democratic republic. It is when the liberals and moderate socialists are ousted in ‘Red October,’ and workers, soldiers, sailors come to power in a proletariat–peasant alliance, that the revolution proper, the social revolution, begins. Sewell, remember, argues that the core of the French Revolution resides in ten days in July 1789 ‘that changed the history of the world’; US journalist John Reed (1990), who covered Russia’s revolution, similarly suggested that there were ‘ten days that shook the world’ in October 1917. These accounts capture key moments in this story: the fall of the Bastille in the former, and the storming of the Winter Palace in the latter. This raises the issue of the French Revolution–Russian Revolution dynamic. The Russian revolutionaries were anxious to (re)present themselves part of an ‘inexorable revolutionary tradition’ (Corney, 2004: 8) in which ‘the French Revolution’ had become a ‘concept’ or a ‘thing’ (Corney, 2004: 10),15 its very date alone enough to identify it, freighted with significance. They wanted 1917 to become the same sort of ‘world-historical event’ and many saw 1789 as their progenitor and sought intentionally to map themselves onto that process; ‘the Bolsheviks self-consciously proclaimed themselves as the architects of the only real revolution since the French Revolution’ (Rees and Donald, 2001: 3; see also Soboleva, 2008). As a result, many people began to look at Russia 1917 as the child of 1789 France. Over time this view would shift among the revolutionaries themselves, many of whom regarded 1789 as a bourgeois liberal democratic revolution; they would increasingly turn their focus on the 1871 Paris Commune (which plays a small role in this story, if at all, but looms large in the story of the Lost and Forgotten in Chapter 8). As early as 1917 Lenin (1918a: 24) was associating the soviets with the Paris Commune (Roman, 2003: 39) and Corney (2004: 6) points out that the revolutionaries were making

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such links even earlier.16 This was important at least in part because the revolutionaries were anxious to avoid the failures of their predecessors. Thus, as Lenin (1980a: 84) was at pains to point out, they were not interested in slavish imitation; they had no intention of adopting the ‘views, program, slogans and methods of action.’ Their program was ‘new’ not ‘old’ and they ‘have a new slogan: the revolutionarydemocratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry’ and ‘new methods of action’ in pursuit of ‘a complete socialist revolution’ (Lenin, 1980a: 84). Still, the connection was recognized and it was deep. Regardless of who was imitating whom in October 1917, Dunn (1989: 26) points out, ‘a surprisingly small group of men ‘seized power in a great, if crumbling, empire’ in an insurrection Malia (2006: 270) describes as ‘derisory,’ paling next to other more storied revolutionary moments. In the Social Revolutionary story, the bourgeois liberal democratic government of the February Revolution in various coalitions, even when in the hands of moderate socialists (the Mensheviks, in particular), failed to meet workers’ demands for bread, the redistribution of land to the peasants, to stem the economic collapse, and not least, end Russia’s ruinous role in World War I, all captured in the revolutionary slogan ‘Peace, Bread, Land.’ Soldiers, sailors, workers, and peasants wanted their needs met and the new world they had been promised realized, or at the very least to see steps taken. As the Mensheviks lost popular support and more critically that of the military, the soldiers and sailors of the Petrograd (formerly St Petersburg) Soviet under Trotsky (a former Menshevik) took matters in hand and the Bolsheviks declared themselves in charge (for several months they required assistance from the Left Social Revolutionaries).17 The Bolsheviks’ promise to end the war, form a worker–peasant government, redistribute land, and provide worker control proved popular, particularly in the cities (rural areas still favored the Social Revolutionaries). All power was passed to the soviets, meaning that in essence only the military, the workers, and the peasants had the right to vote – and thus now had the right to make a revolution and set about building a new world in what would prove to be in the face of unrelenting opposition. Civil war erupted, replete with multiple volte-face interventions by the major powers.18 For four years the revolutionaries struggled against heavy odds to defend their power. While they were ultimately successful, whether they defended the revolution they had set out to make or did great damage to their

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vision remains an open question, one explored to some extent in Chapter 8 through consideration of the brutal suppression of the 1921 Kronstadt Rebellion of radical sailors (and civilians) demanding free elections and a multi-party state, freedom of speech and assembly.19 Reminiscent of the French revolutionaries, the Russians set out to dramatically remake their society. The 1918 Code on Marriage, the Family, and Guardianship was the most progressive family code the world had seen, though little of it would be realized in ways meaningful for most. In addition, children’s institutions were created, education made public, and social welfare provisions initiated. Banks and trains were nationalized, followed shortly by all heavy industries. Fashion, art and architecture all began to change to reflect the new ‘soviet’ sensibilities. And in keeping with the French Revolution, there was both a need to eradicate some of the old language – all titles, for example, were abolished and ‘comrade’ became the new term of art – and to create new words which would allow people to make sense of the new world they were in the process of making; the darker side of this was the concomitant effort to eliminate ‘enemies,’ real and perceived, of the revolutionary process. 20 Little of this or of subsequent events make it into the Social Revolutionary story. As Corney (2004: 2) ably demonstrates, the ‘telling of October’ was a highly charged and tremendously fraught affair, ‘a sprawling process of suppression and creation’; it is no less so today. Despite the implications attendant to it, 1917 stood for some seventy years as a date which referenced a world-historical event laden with meaning, even if the events themselves were largely pedestrian. The standard narrative, still open to controversy, does little to capture the import or impact of this process for the Social Revolutionary story. This was in some sense the challenge the revolutionaries faced – how to turn what reasonably could be seen as a coup d’état into the world’s second great revolution. Thus the focus shifts from what and how they acted to their struggles just to exist and for social justice in a world that was hostile to both. The Social Revolutionary story ultimately buys into and promotes what Furet (1999: 62) calls ‘the universal spell of October.’ Discerning the exact character and qualities of that ‘spell’ is no easy task, but several elements are identifiable. First, ‘Red October’ appeared to conclude a ‘grand revolutionary series’ (Malia, 2006: 288), which,

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even if largely a succession of failures, nonetheless profoundly transformed the ways people thought about what was possible and helped to fuel the explosion of struggles not only for social justice and rights but for the self-determination of peoples. Second, as the intellectual, psychological, and perhaps emotional heirs to the French Revolution, the Russian people’s essential contribution to this story can be found in a felicitous phrase of Lenin’s: ‘Revolutions are festivals of the oppressed and the exploited’; and moreover, in Russia, he continues, ‘at no other time are the mass of the people in a position to come forward so actively as creators of a new social order, as at a time of revolution. At such times, people are capable of performing miracles’ (1980a: 125). Finally, the Russian Revolution inspired millions around the world to face up to the elites and their allies inimical to their interests and desires; whatever its myriad failures, and the list is long and tragic, the inspiration was real. Lenin, for his part, believed they were building the basis for world revolution. 21 An epilogue of sorts is in order. Malia (2006: 288) detects the irony that ‘Red October,’ having concluded the ‘grand’ series of revolutions (he dismisses China as ‘conceptually … an encore’), is today little more than a marker on the way ‘to the grand collapse of 1989–91,’ the revolution’s ‘irreversible conquests’ eradicated by ‘the most successful counterrevolution in history.’ For many, he suggests, it is ‘as if 1917 had never occurred … its results … repealed and its presuppositions refuted.’ One could add that it is remembered as much if not more today for the horrors and excesses of Stalin, even if ostensibly in pursuit of world revolution. That said, it is also the case that in 1917 and beyond, how one saw the October Revolution depended a great deal on who and where you were. As Rosenberg and Young (1982: 55) point out, to Clydeside workers in England, to mutinous French troops at Verdun, to Karl Liebknecht and radical German workers in Berlin, to Chinese radicals in Peking and Shanghai, Bolshevism reflected the triumph of the oppressed, the power of the ordinary man and woman, the historically and socially powerless. Almost instantly the heroism of Lenin and October became symbolic. The long shadow of mobilized Russian workers signaled the capabilities of ordinary people everywhere.

For the Story of Social Revolution, then, the lasting image in much of the world even today features passionate, committed, and self-

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abnegating revolutionaries who believed they served a greater good, working with and sustained by heroic soldiers and sailors, workers and peasants, who announced to the world that now everything belonged to everyone in the name of everybody for the good of all and the goal of social justice.

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If there is a single case that has shaped most contemporary understandings of revolution, it is the 1959 Cuban Revolution. Today the revolution is at times presented as a Hollywood-like scenario: a small, dedicated band of freedom fighters battles its way out from the hills against a repressive authoritarian dictatorship, gaining the following of the people as they go; seizing power, they go on to create a bold new society unlike any the world had seen, where everything is possible. What is often forgotten is that more than any other single event or process, it was the Cuban Revolution that provided this Hollywood scenario. For a variety of reasons, not least the advent of the media age, Cuba’s revolution is the picture most people carry in their heads, a ready reference point. If the revolutions of the past are no predictor of the future – contrary to the claims made after 1789 and 1917 – they are nonetheless the events and processes which provide the language and the concepts to understand the future. Just as surely as France shaped our understanding of Russia and Russia our understanding of China, so too has Cuba shaped how we imagine the revolutions of the future, what they will look like, how they will play out, whether they will matter. Even as recent struggles have moved beyond the model offered by Cuba’s revolutionary process, the Cuban Revolution remains integral to the Social Revolutionary story. It is important to note here the obvious missing case from the Story of Social Revolution: China. China is crucial in several respects: it brings revolution into the ‘Third World’; it was a true forward-looking peasant revolution (in contrast to that in Mexico for example) (Dunn, 1989: 70–71); it was China which recentered nationalism (though Russia had been quietly abandoning its universalist illusions as well); and it was China, as a social and ‘anti-colonial revolution’ (Foran, 1997b: 236), which most directly inspired the post-World War II anti-colonial struggles. Paige (2003: 27) goes so far as to suggest that China was a

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revolution ‘in a way that the Bolshevik revolution never was.’ At the same time, China is tricky to categorize: the revolution lasted some thirty-eight years (‘the longest revolution’; Foran, 2005: 46); its clear social revolutionary character was arguably secondary to its status as ‘supremely a nationalist revolution’ (Dunn, 1989: 70) ; and understanding the place of the two world wars in the whole complex process represents a formidable analytical challenge. Foran ultimately concludes that it was a deeply nationalist (‘China for the Chinese’) social revolution committed to social justice (2005: 53; he cites Lomparis, 1996: 142). Yet he begins where we end, with Dunn’s observation that the ‘Chinese revolution is probably harder to characterize convincingly (and therefore harder also to explain) than any other historical revolution; vast in scope, bemusingly protracted in time, enduringly diffuse in focus, politically still very much unresolved, and formidably occluded and opaque throughout’ (1995; 389). The Chinese Revolution cast a long shadow; however, in this story it is a ghost haunting the tale. And it is Cuba, not China, which became the modern avatar of revolution, with a plot of great expectations and big disappointments, failure and triumph, shot through with themes of renewal, redemption, and hope. Even if less may have been realized than many people once dreamed possible, it is nevertheless the case that Cubans from every part of society not only made a revolution but made it seem possible to others in very different places. Elsewhere I have claimed that ‘no event of the past fifty years has affected so many people, in so many places, for so much time and continues to do so as the Cuban Revolution’ (Selbin, 2009a: 21). This is a very big claim when one considers what has transpired. But consider some key events – the Cold War, anti-colonial/anti-imperial/liberation struggles, the events of 1968, Eastern Europe’s 1989 ‘color revolutions’ – or even lesser ones, such as the Zapatista uprising in Mexico or the anti-World Trade Organization upsurge: central to each of these developments is the Cuban revolutionary process as model and practice, in each case for both good and bad, and most importantly as potent inspiration for what can be accomplished in the face of daunting odds. In the Story of Social Revolution, there had been tantalizingly brief hints of other worlds possible after World War I, inspired in no small part by Russia’s revolution; most of these are now consigned to the Revolutions of the Lost and Forgotten story (Chapter 8), but

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include Berlin 1918, short-lived 1919 soviets in Munich and Hungary, the biennio rosso (‘two red years’) in Italy 1919–20, and ‘Red Vienna’ 1918–38. There were even more exciting glimpses after World War II: the communists who had led the anti-fascist opposition seemed poised to take power in Italy and Greece; there was China, as noted above; and radical and ground-breaking processes of various stripes unfolding in Vietnam 1945–75, Indonesia 1945–49, Malaysia 1948–60, Guatemala 1950–54, Iran 1951–53, Bolivia 1952–54, Kenya 1952–60, British Guiana 1953–64, and Algeria 1954–62 – most of these more usefully located within the Freedom and Liberation Story of Revolution (Chapter 7). None of these, however, is where the Social Revolutionary story leads next: Cuba. The legacy of the Cuban Revolution is prevailing and ubiquitous; it can be seen everywhere. Notwithstanding France’s introduction of the modern concept of revolution and the importance of Russia’s revolutionary process for the twentieth century, it is Cuba that brought revolution to the modern global community and made it seem plausible to the immense majority of humanity. Cuba seemed to suggest as never before that any determined body of people willing to engage in the struggle, make the sacrifices, and take the risks could make revolution. It was about will and determination, pluck, and perhaps a little luck. In the Story of Social Revolution, revolutions are about the commitment of people and their communities, about passion and desire, and about a vision of a better world. 23 The assumption is that no one decides to fight, risk their lives and those of their families, or put their hopes and dreams on the line lightly. In Cuba many people chose to struggle. The vagaries of revolutionary rhetoric and ideals meeting the reality of the actually existing revolutionary process make any clear view of the Cuban experience a challenge, but the bare bones are readily identifiable. In an effort to spark a rebellion against Cuba’s venal dictator, Fulgencio Batista, Fidel Castro and some colleagues launched an ill-conceived attack on the Moncada Barrracks on 26 July 1953; this led to Castro’s famous defense, ‘History will absolve me,’ and, after a brief prison term, to Mexico where he recruited and organized a small group of rebels who would seek to make the revolution. In 1956 these men returned as the 26th of July Movement (named after the failed Moncada uprising) and, having sustained heavy losses, made their way to the mountains and entered into dialogue with the peasantry, which would

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prove transformational. The next two years would prove to be more a war of position (ideological struggle) than war of maneuver (military struggle); the struggle was, from its earliest days, primarily about the construction of a new society. 24 The seizure of state power came as something of a surprise when, after a seemingly inconsequential defeat, Batista fled on 1 January 1959 and his regime crumbled, a departure welcomed by people in much of the country. The victory of the wildly popular revolutionaries, los barbudos (the bearded ones), over the dictator and his allies captured the imagination of people around the world. Faced with more or less an institutional and structural vacuum, 25 and broad-based support, 26 the young revolutionaries’ notions of building a new state, society, and indeed world seemed that much more plausible. They had won, as Castro would suggest, the right to build a new world – that would be the real revolution. To borrow a phrase Castro used about another revolution, one of the many inspired by Cuba (Grenada 1979), it was ‘a big revolution in a small country’ (Sunshine, 1988: 168) and people everywhere took notice. Their country having long been shaped by an imposed Spanish model and then dominated by an imported United States one, the Cubans, like the French and the Russians before them, warmed to the task of remaking their society. Patria, ‘fatherland,’ was the new all-encompassing watchword, and the pride formerly placed in owning goods from the United States was invested in Cuban goods, services, and styles. Fashions changed (the guayabera, a men’s dress shirt was in; men’s suits were out), film, ballet, music, and writing were reconceived in nationalistic frames; and new laws were passed changing all manner of things large and small (some 1,500 in the first year alone; Paige, 2003: 24), not least the banning of discrimination based on race or gender. Military barracks were turned into schools, hospitals and clinics, and private clubs and beaches were opened to the public. Illiteracy was targeted with great success and land reform undertaken. In a decided echo of France, the Cubans even sought to change the language, anxious to ‘de-Americanize’ their Spanish, and to add to it, as the Russians had, to cover new notions and concepts. 27 People sought to change, to ‘revolutionize,’ themselves. This story runs roughshod over some critical issues, not least that there were several groups of revolutionaries in action (though only Castro’s was already planning for the new society), 28 obviates the key

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role played by urban revolutionaries (see, in particular, Sweig, 2004), and ignores a certain amount of luck at decisive junctures. Yet, just as the Russians sought to create a unified, compelling narrative of ‘October’ (see, e.g., Corney, 2004; von Geldern, 1993), so too did the Cuban revolutionaries have a deep investment in the ‘myth of the Sierra,’ especially as it came to be articulated by the revolution’s most mythic and emulated character, the asthmatic Argentine doctor Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, a figure to whom we will return in the chapters ahead. What matters most in this story is that whatever versions of the story they heard, some of those people who took notice found their way to Cuba where Guevara, his and Castro’s mentor Alberto Bayo, and other veterans trained them and sent them back to spread the revolution. Millions more who could not come were emboldened in their struggles already under way – in Algeria, Vietnam, Colombia, Malaysia, Central America, and sub-Saharan Africa. Far more than the training (or meager support), what mattered was the story told around the world: a small, committed band of revolutionaries who cared about and for the people and counted on those people for support had vanquished not only a more powerful foe but the United States, one of the world’s two superpowers. Having achieved their objective, they set about transforming the country exactly as they had promised in areas such as health, education, food, and housing, improving the lives of millions. This action popularized and romanticized revolutionary struggle, energizing the world’s dispossessed at a critical juncture – if they can do it there, why not us here? Thus Cuba’s revolutionary process became, in Guevara’s assessment, ‘this “bad example” of national and international dignity, … Each time that an impudent people cries out for liberation, Cuba is accused; and it is true in a sense that Cuba is guilty, because Cuba has shown the way … the way of struggle … in a word, the way of dignity. The Cuban example is bad, a very bad example … defying danger, advancing toward the future’ (1969: 123). Not content simply to be an example, Cuba ‘walked the walk,’ sending armed revolutionary guidance to others, most notably in Southern Africa; but of more lasting importance for people’s popular perception of Cuba’s revolutionary process, they also sent doctors, nurses, teachers, engineers, and construction workers. As these people became the face of the Cuban Revolution to the majority of the world, the stature of the revolution grew.

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There are several other matters important for the Story of Social Revolution. First, Cuba was a post-colonial/post-imperial revolution in the global South. Except for Mexico, more a dramatic social cataclysm then a coherent social revolution, revolutions were written for the global North, where, it seemed, the only change of any consequence happened. The Cuban Revolution made clear that revolution could be authored in the South for those in the South. This was no mere importation of European (or Chinese) ideas, but rather a new struggle for a new world using the new strategies and new tactics developed from the new Cuban process – if it was an old story, it was one made new again. 29 Second, Cuba seemed to offer compelling proof that good can triumph over evil, even in the face of great adversity. A broad-based, popular revolution defeated a brutal dictator who was popularly perceived to enjoy the support of the United States (whose ill-timed defection, from Batista’s perspective, is little remarked upon in most versions of this story30) and potent organized crime syndicates for whom Cuba was little more than a playground. The lore was only enhanced when United States opposition increased and the new Cuban society withstood ever greater efforts at its destruction by determined enemies. In a world system deemed by many hostile to Cuba’s existence, survival was a badge of honor. Finally, and for the Social Revolutionary story perhaps most importantly, Cuba offered people a model of actually existing revolution that seemed, even in the face of opposition, to work and present an opportunity to realize their revolutionary right to change the material and ideological conditions of their everyday lives. Nevertheless, as with France, Russia, and China before them, it is hard to argue that the Cubans were fundamentally successful, although of course much depends on how and what one chooses to measure. Yet clearly they accomplished a great deal. If the Cuban revolutionaries have not lived up to the enormous task they set out for themselves – in the finest tradition of the Story of Social Revolution, to remake not just themselves but the world around them – it would seem disingenuous, at the very least, to deny or denigrate the very real successes achieved on the ground. While there are reasonably hesitations over the degree to which civil liberties have been respected and, at times, the determining of people’s needs by the state, the story within the story is that people sought to build a better world for themselves and

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their children, and to share their ambitious visions of social justice with others elsewhere. In the end, Cuba’s revolution ushered in a new episode of the Story of Social Revolution, in several senses. Social revolution was now firmly grounded in the South and solidly rooted in the post-World War II period. If the French Revolution had signaled the demise of feudalism and its attendant relations and began a struggle for social justice, the Cuban Revolution brought that battle to the very belly of the contemporary beast, Latin America and the Caribbean under the watchful eyes of the United States. Perhaps even more was at stake: according to Pérez (1999: 482), ‘the dominant paradigm of “civilization” was in transition. The power of the revolution was in its capacity to rearrange in usable form the standards by which to measure civilization and in the process summon a vision of an alternative moral order.’31 Thus the Story of Social Revolution begins with the efforts of the French to re-create the world, moves to Russia and China and the visions of what they sought to be and do in the face of what would prove to be insurmountable challenges, and arrives at Cuba, which brings revolution into the present day and makes it seem real, accessible, and meaningful – a story that can told by anyone, anywhere, at any time.

The story of revolution The Cuban Revolution is the contemporary epitome of the Social Revolutionary story, and Che Guevara its very personification. Dunn (1989: 200) even contends that it ‘resuscitated the plausibility of the revolutionary role as an option for the future and not merely a glorious embellishment of a vanishing phase of history.’32 For decades it has encouraged and inspired revolutions, rebellion, and resistance around the world, albeit few instances of successful social revolution. Sometimes this has taken the form of direct imitation, successfully in the case of Nicaragua’s 1979 social revolution (and, arguably, briefly in Grenada 1979) and the anti-colonial revolutions in Angola and Mozambique, and less so in Bolivia, Peru, Venezuela, El Salvador and elsewhere. At other times the influence has been more indirect, for example in Zanzibar (1964), Benin (1972), Ethiopia (1974), and Burkina Faso (1983), none of which was a social revolution. There have also

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been hazier connections, more to do with spirit and encouragement, in cases as diverse as 1975 Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, 33 Afghanistan (1978), Iran (1979), or simply the sense of possibility Cuba has stirred in electoral situations, for example Chile (1970) and Jamaica (1972). Perhaps most nebulous but nonetheless real and powerful was the importance of the example of Cuba to the students, workers, and intellectuals in 1968 around the world. If only Nicaragua and Iran among these rose to the standard of social revolution, all of these cases and many more aspired to such, in part, because the Cuban Revolution had become part of their repertoire, the latest chapter in the compelling Story of Social Revolution itself. Arendt (1965: 43) argued ‘that there is only one revolution, selfsame, and perpetual,’ which accords comfortably with the universalist illusions held by those engaged in the social revolutionary process. Camus suggested in 1946 that ‘1789 and 1917 are still historic dates, but they are no longer historic examples’ (Kumar, 2001: 216). Some twenty years later, Brinton (1965: 249) disagreed, contending that ‘the mid-twentieth-century search for social justice has moved to Asia, Africa, and Latin America’ and that, indeed, ‘in China, in Ghana, in Cuba, they want what they think we in the West wanted when we began our revolutions, something still summarized best by the French Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité’ (1965: 250). Certainly social revolutions sought to establish these principles – and often much more. The goal is worldwide revolution that, through economic, political, socio-cultural, and psychological transformation, will bring about social justice for the current generation and all those to come. There can be no doubt that immense power resides in the Story of Social Revolution, that intense amalgamation of the dreams and desires of what, thanks to 1789, we call the left, and that accordingly represents the worst nightmares of the right. It is, according to Lenin (1980a: 125) the festival ‘of the oppressed and exploited,’ when people long repressed and suppressed in various ways seek control over the material and ideological conditions of their own lives; inevitably this means wresting power from those who currently hold it. Social Revolution would seem, on the one hand, to reflect the promise of the Age of Enlightenment. On the other hand, it is profoundly mediated by elements of the quixotic – consider one of its most influential aphorisms, Che’s hopelessly romantic ‘a true revolutionary is guided

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by a great feeling of love’ (Guevara, 1967a: 136). In this sense, perhaps, social revolution represents a dual revolution, conceivably one that is rare in part because of the need for both elements to be present, the visionary and the organizational, which together make possible the public realization of people’s private dreams and desires. It is arguably this more than anything else, which has led us to declare the revolutions included in the Story of Social Revolution as ‘the great revolutions.’

seven The freedom and liberation story of revolution

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o far the stories of revolution have been long on the epic and grand, endeavors that were framed as great struggles over the very nature of civilization or the advent of worldwide revolution predicated on social justice. These are, in important ways, teleological tales which map onto the classic beginning–middle–end structure with which we are all familiar. The Freedom and Liberation Story of Revolution accords with this structure to a significant degree; it too, after all, is a progressive saga in which people find themselves in arduous circumstances and almost certainly under duress. But this is a story that is also bound up with what might be construed as more prosaic matters: daily issues and dynamics relating to freedom and liberation. This is in no way to suggest that these have lesser value; for those whose lives are at stake, they matter every bit as much and maybe more than struggles over metanarratives. Despite the tendency to conflate them, freedom and liberation are distinct concepts and there is some utility in holding them separate. Arendt, for example, notes that in 1789 France, ‘liberation from tyranny spelled freedom only for the few and was hardly felt by the many who remained loaded down by their misery’ (1965: 74). In this sense, Horsley and Stendahl (2000: 217) suggest, ‘liberation holds out the possibility of the complete overthrow of oppressive structures, the possibility of revolution,’ while freedom is defined ‘by the limits that free people accept for themselves.’ Revolutionaries such as Frantz Fanon (1965) argued

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that when or ‘where freedom is granted or conceded,’ it is ‘false liberation’; ‘true liberation is achieved only when one fights for it’ (Jinadu 1986: 68). From a decidedly different perspective, Horowitz (1972: 90), specifically with regard to modern revolution, argues that liberation is about the ‘absence of restraint and increase in social mobility’ (an intriguing pairing), while freedom is concerned with the ‘political level of life.’1 Arendt (1965: 29) allows that while ‘it may be a truism to say that liberation and freedom are not the same’ it is the case that such axioms may be forgotten ‘because liberation has loomed large and the foundation of freedom has always been uncertain if not altogether futile.’ Nonetheless, liberation theologian Gustavo Guti­érrez (1983: 186), while cautioning that freedom can not be brought by ‘modern liberties and democracy’ (reflecting skepticism on his part regarding Enlightenment ideals; see Bell, 2001: 64), argues that ‘freedom can only be the result of a process of liberation.’ Here the recognition is that while the interplay may be complicated and complex, in the Freedom and Liberation Story of Revolution the pairing is often spontaneous and instinctive. The Civilizing and Democratizing story and the Story of Social Revolution share three important qualities. First, both are to some degree elite stories, at least in the sense of being written largely by the victors, however temporary (as in the case of France), and being essentially foundational stories for their respective societies – because this is where we began, this is who we are today. Consequently, these are the most famous stories of revolution, those most commonly associated with the term. Yet, as we have seen, they are also rare. The Civilizing and Democratizing story is little more than three cases: England 1688, America 1776, and France 1789. The Story of Social Revolution is hardly more expansive – most can agree on France 1789, Russia 1917, China 1949, and Cuba 1959; and to varying degrees on Mexico 1910, Nicaragua 1979, and Iran 1979. Thus, between the two stories, there are a sparse nine cases in a little more than three hundred years. Yet consider how widespread the concept, as well as the practice, of revolution has been. Second, in both stories freedom and liberation are basic themes. In the Civilizing and Democratizing story, these primarily take the form of protection from government, in essence negative rights, such as freedom of speech, the right of assembly, freedom of religion, the

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right to own property, habeas corpus, and so on. The Social Revolutionary story broadens and deepens this, arguing that while these rights are a necessary start, they are not sufficient; people must also enjoy essential positive rights that government can provide them, such as freedom from hunger and disease, the right to shelter, a minimum standard of living, education, and respect for their person (dignity) and culture. In both cases the liberation may be said to be from tradition, particularly feudalism and monarchism (though the latter is not uncomplicated), and fear and superstition (Enlightenment-era rationalism features here), all of which produce societal norms and constraints on people. The third and final shared quality is that, despite their decidedly forward-looking and progressivist tendencies, both stories, Janus-like, cast one face backwards, to the Greeks and particularly to Rome. As Marx (1978a: 595) noted, France ‘draped itself alternately in the guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire,’ and each revolution that followed sought to emulate the French. The Freedom and Liberation Story of Revolution finds its origin in Rome too, at least as most commonly told, and begins from a focus on people’s emancipation, though rights and sovereignty quickly follow. But the perspective here is much broader with a much more expansive array of cases. As a result, this is a longer and looser saga than the two which precede it, in general chronologically but with a surprising degree of variance. Here the more common cases receive more cursory consideration, followed by an in-depth look at two cases that figure prominently in almost every popular version of this story and that capture many of its key elements. Haiti is perhaps the world’s most important revolutionary process, and one that virtually everyone ignores; it is a complex case which highlights many elements of this story. Then there is Mexico, the twentieth century’s first great social upheaval, rivaled only by China and Vietnam as a truly rambling, shambolic, multi-act process which encompasses bits and pieces of everything else found here plus elements of the first two stories and even some aspects of the Revolutions of the Lost and Forgotten. Finally, there is a brief consideration of how the early-twenty-first-century resurgence of indigenous resistance, rebellion, and revolution is deeply rooted in this story.

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A cast of thousands: four broad categories Rome is a significant concrete beginning, whence this story gets its ‘origins’ and its impetus, Spartacus’s 73–71 bce slave revolt against the Romans. While Finley (1986: 54) suggests that, as ‘dramatic and frightening’ as it may have been, there was nothing really revolutionary about the slave revolt, it would prove to have a certain evocative power. 2 Though little is known about the actual event, it appears to have been a fairly large and somewhat successful revolt which garnered some notoriety. Most important for this story is that, centuries later, in 1770, the radical French philosophe Abbé Raynal called for a ‘Black Spartacus’ to end slavery in the West Indies; indeed Toussaint L’Ouverture, leader of Haiti’s slave revolt and revolution, was duly dubbed the ‘Black Spartacus’ (Meltzer, 1993: 120). Not too many years later Marx, writing to Engels, commented that ‘Spartacus emerges as the most capital fellow in the whole history of antiquity. A great general … , of noble character, a real representative of the proletariat of ancient times’ (1861; emphasis in original). Perhaps as a result (the letter was first published in Stuttgart in 1913), the revolutionary Marxist group that began to coalesce around Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg in Germany during World War I called themselves the Spartacist League and saw him as a proto-revolutionary, the ‘fire and spirit … soul and heart … will and action for the revolution of the proletariat … all need and yearning for happiness, all resolution for battle of the class conscious proletariat. The Spartacus, by which I mean socialism and world revolution’ (Liebknecht, quoted in Futrell, 2001: 90).3 By 1920 Spartacus had assumed an important role in Russian celebrations of 1917, in pageantry designed to produce ‘a sense of revolutionary inexorability with its sequence of historical scenes, depicting first the Roma slave revolt under Spartacus’ (Corney 2004: 75). Clearly, the inspiring saga of a slave confronting a great empire has resonance for resistance, rebellion, and revolution. There are innumerable other examples of the Freedom and Liberation Story of Revolution, a reminder of the much wider base it draws on. Many, like the Spartacus story, may be read as principally focused on freedom. Others, like the Exodus story in the Hebrew Bible, found in various forms anywhere that Christianity has been (as we saw in Chapter 4), are more liberatory tales, usually framed as self-liberation

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(though not always; the Exodus story itself involves liberation at least in part from an outside source). Regardless of the focus – freedom, liberation, or some combination of the two – there is a rich repository of resistance, rebellion, and revolt, all of which have revolutionary implications, which are most commonly characterized as anti-slavery, anti-colonial, or anti-imperialist. The common denominator is a people seeking freedom or liberation from masters or tyrants, dominators who control their lives. As a rule, people are particularly in pursuit of equality and ‘self-determination,’ in terms of their own lives and those of their neighbors, and sometimes more generally for their nation or state. There are several generous categories here. One is primarily slave revolts or rebellions akin to that of Spartacus, though many find their home in the Revolution of the Lost and Forgotten story. Notable examples are: England’s 1381 Great Rising, a serf ’s revolt; indigenous resistance to the Spanish conquest of the Americas as early as 1519 4 through Manco Inca’s 1536–72 rebellion, ending with the beheading of his last son, Túpac Amaru, to the 1780 Great Andean Rebellion of Túpac Amaru II and Túpac Katari (all the Túpacs tend to fuse in popular memory and become the basis for folktale); the seventy-year slave revolt in Brazil centered on the Republic of Palmares, which by the 1690s had some 20,000 inhabitants (Meltzer, 1993: 86)5 and whose leaders in 1696 chose to leap to their deaths in the face of Dutch and Portuguese invaders rather than surrender; 6 Haiti’s 1791 slave revolt, often considered the only successful slave uprising, and revolts elsewhere in the Caribbean such as Fedon’s Rebellion in Grenada 1795–96. Haiti established a theme of sorts, as slave revolts (and anti-slavery struggles) in the Americas and nineteenth-century anti-colonial efforts began to weave together, including in the early United States, Prosser’s Rebellion of 1800, the 1811 Andry’s Rebellion,7 and those led by Vesey in 1822 and Nat Turner in 1831 (both of which had the Exodus story as their centerpiece), as well as La Resouvenier in what is now Guyana in 1823, and the improbable saga of John Brown and his anti-slavery rebellion in the pre-Civil War United States, which is more widely known now than when it happened in 1855–59. Another category would be cases with arguably broader aims. Coexistent with the slave revolts and related activities were anti-colonial struggles. In a surprising number of cases, this story includes the

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American revolution, particularly the Declaration of Independence, which has proved a timeless inspiration to anti-colonial activists; for example, the 1945 Vietnamese Declaration of Independence opens with its most famous words: ‘all men are created equal … endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.’ The 1791 Haitian Revolution, discussed further below, appears in this story and some include the wars to liberate South America from Spain. That these are frequently not included is perhaps in part due to the outcomes, which produced remarkably little real freedom or liberation for the majority of the region’s inhabitants (see McAuley, 1997: 174–5). Parker (1999: 34), to anticipate a category to come, suggests that these wars are most usefully construed as a ‘national liberation revolution.’ Regardless, some note was taken; a monument to South America’s greatest liberation hero, Simón Bolívar, in post-revolutionary Namibia is a salutary reminder of what it all seemed to have been about. More often the story picks up again with the 1857 Sepoy Rebellion against British colonial rule of India, a number of heroes and heroines of which have become folkloric staples in India, invoked and deployed in India’s contemporary struggles. 8 Better known regionally than internationally are tales of the 1880s’ Mahdi Rebellion in Egyptian Sudan (under Ottoman suzerainty but administered by the omnipresent British) and contemporaneous revolts against colonial rule in Algeria, Dahomey (Benin), Ashantiland (both the Ndebele and the Shona in Southern Africa), in Sierra Leone and in the Hausa–Fulani states (northern Nigeria). Revolts and rebellions persisted in Africa, since in the 1910s only Ethiopia and Liberia were not colonized by the ‘great powers.’ Another regionally important piece of this story is the Cuban battle for independence from Spain in 1868–78 (the Big War), 1879–80 (the Small War), and, most famously, the Cuban War of Independence 1895–98. The last also brought the United States actively into the region; it is well known in Latin America and the Caribbean that the United States’ three-month intervention at the very end resulted in Cuba being blocked from both the treaty negotiations and Spain’s surrender and that it was the US flag, not Cuba’s, that was raised over Havana. Though it is rarely included in this story, Ireland’s 1919–219 War of Independence from Great Britain has a claim to belong here too.

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A more widely known part of the Freedom and Liberation Story of Revolution is the somewhat transitional one between the anti-colonial and the anti-imperial. The so-called Boxer Rebellion in China’s 1900–01 (I Ho Chuan/Yi Ho Tuan, ‘Fists of Righteous Harmony’), tried to drive out the various foreign powers occupying parts of the country. While China was not, in a traditional sense, the colony of any one country, it was seen to be at the time (and, more importantly for the story told here, by many since) as a colonized place and people, at the mercy of foreign powers who took what they wanted and did what they wished. This was codified at the time for many when after World War I, the German-controlled ‘concession’ in China (Shandong/Qing­ dao) was given to Japan rather than restored to China. This event is commonly seen as the impetus for the 1919 May Fourth Movement, though it was almost certainly one of many stimuli, which was widely understood as an anti-imperialist movement and treated as a critical moment in both the founding of the Chinese Communist Party and the 1949 Revolution.10 The third category includes many of the twentieth-century wars of national liberation, a complicated but fruitful category; as Parker (1999: 40) notes, ‘this is an extraordinarily difficult group to separate out’ but ‘distinctive enough to justify.’ These were often a mix of anti-colonial, as one era died, and anti-imperialist, as another emerged. Such struggles not only sought freedom and liberation for people, but in many cases proposed radically different political, social, and economic agendas as well as concomitant psychological transformation.11 This story picks up speed as the promises of the World War I victors to those in the colonized world of the ‘self-determination of peoples’ proved hollow.12 Dashed by the Great Powers’ reassertion of their prerogatives and fueled in part by events in Russia, in spring 1919 alone (and influencing each other), there were revolts of varying lengths and degrees in Egypt (March), Korea (the March First Movement), Gandhi’s Satyagraha (passive resistance) movement in ‘British India’ (April), and the aforementioned May Fourth Movement in China. These in turn inspired a global surge, from the Dutch East Indies to the British West Indies,13 only to be interrupted by a second, again largely European, ‘world war’ (which to many seemed little more than a continuation of the first European war, which had ended well for few of them). Colonized peoples were called upon again to fight for democracy and freedom

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and, ironically this time, against fascism and subjugation; copious and generous promises were again made. In an eerie replay, the post-war victors once again moved to reassert the jurisdiction and authority, prepared to continue their suppression of their colonies. Struggles of various stripes, but now far more of them armed and more often revolutionary as well as anti-colonial, anti-imperial, or anti-dictatorial, emerged across three continents, Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as in Oceania. With varying degrees of success, struggles arose in Vietnam 1945–75, Indonesia 1945–49, the Philippines 1946–54, Malaysia 1948–60, Kenya 1952–60, Algeria 1954–62, Portugal’s Colonial War 1961–74 (Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique), South Africa 1961–94, and Namibia 1966–90. Furthermore, many telling this tale include what might be usefully construed as anti-imperial struggles by democratic means, such as in Guatemala 1950–54, Iran 1951–53, Bolivia 1952–54, British Guiana (1953–64), Jamaica (1972–80), and Chile (1970–73). Particularly important is the extent to which all these served to reinforce and strengthen each other at a variety of levels, relationships recognized as early as the 1955 Bandung Conference and later in the Non-Aligned Movement and the Tri-Continental. But setting aside meetings among leaders and protestations of solidarity and faith, most striking is the degree to which people in the various locales increasingly came to identify their aspirations with those of others and to reassure themselves that if they can do it there, we can do it here. The Freedom and Liberation Story of Revolution also includes a set of cases that range across several of the stories presented here. France 1789, for example, appears here less for the introduction of democracy than for its liberatory character; egalitarianism is an important theme,14 not least in breaking the back of feudalism and its attendant aristocratic privileges. Similarly, the powerful sense of freedom associated with the Russian Revolution, in particular February 1917, may make it an element of this story. However one chooses to characterize the intriguing and arguably stillborn revolutionary process in Grenada 1979–8315 (and it would seem to have been a moment rife with possibilities), there is surely no finer summation of this story than the proud claim ‘is freedom we making here now’ (cited in Hodge and Searle, 1981: 82; Searle, 1984: 118). And here, too, is where one most commonly finds the enigma that is Mexico’s peripatetic 1910–20 revolutionary process,

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though it crops up elsewhere as well. The Mexican Revolution is told here as a multi-act, multifaceted story, featuring among other things the rise of Emiliano Zapata (and Zapatismo), the transformation of Villa from (social) bandit to revolutionary, and Aguascalientes and Article 27 of the 1917 Constitution.

Haiti and Mexico: moments of freedom and liberation Whatever their many differences, a number of similarities link the revolutionary processes in Haiti and Mexico. In both cases the revolution as a moment retains a spark of deep recognition and meaning, for reasons explored more fully below. This is not surprising when you consider the fundamental underlying premiss of each, at least as they are popularly remembered. Haiti was the first great social upheaval in the New World (new, that is, to Europeans), the first great social upheaval of the nineteenth century, and the world’s first (and, to date, only) successful slave revolt. Mexico’s credentials are almost as impressive: it saw the first great social upheaval of the twentieth century and, notwithstanding its multifaceted character, the world’s first truly successful agrarian uprising (Dunn, 1989: 49–50, 70; Malia, 2006: 305), driven by the demand for ¡tierra y libertad! (land and liberty).16 In both cases, much of the intensity, drama, and import seem to have been lost to some combination of the mists of time, memory, and almost certainly to the outcomes of processes which seemed to promise so much more. Haiti: ‘ behind the mountains, more mountains’ The Haitian Revolution, Popkin (2007: 1) contends, was ‘one of the major events that defined our modern world,’ in part because, in marked contrast to the contemporaneous revolutions in America and France, only Haiti ‘proclaimed that liberty was incompatible with chattel slavery and that equality had to include people of all races.’ Given this and in light of its initiation as a slave revolt, it is no surprise that Haiti plays a central role in the Freedom and Liberation Story of Revolution, particularly for those in the African diaspora. Yet as Trouillot (1995: 98) suggests, the Haitian Revolution seems to have been ‘silenced,’ an ‘unthinkable’ revolution that ‘became a non-event,’ in Popkin’s (2007: 2) words, ‘at best a marginal presence.’17 Perhaps Haiti’s disappearance

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from the revolutionary pantheon is not surprising; certainly the process does not fit neatly with the other stories of revolution. Consider the circumstances: African slaves, uneducated by the Western standards of the time, inspired by the revolution in France – their colonial taskmaster – and the apparent promise of liberté, égalité, fraternité, rose up not only to win their independence but to defeat all three of the world’s great colonial powers (France, Britain, and Spain) to maintain it. Haiti thus stood as the first victorious slave revolt, the first ‘black’ republic and only the second independent republic in the Western Hemisphere, and ‘the first free nation of free men to arise within, and in resistance to, the emerging constellation of Western European empire’ (Lowenthal, 1976: 657). Thus the only black, independent, French-speaking state in the world was not only ‘a spiritual heir to the French Revolution, it also provided a serious challenge as the first non-European postcolonial state in the modern world’ (Fauriol, 1996: 520). By any standards, this was an impressive burden to bear. The 1791 Haitian slave revolt is a relatively clear-cut circumstance, and it seems to have been treated as such in this story.18 The goal was not to break away from France (Dubois, 2004: 3) but rather to lay claim to the promises of 1789 and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. The planter aristocracy in France’s most profitable colony had no intention of honoring the promised new order and seemed bent on an independence that would guarantee their continued domination and prosperity. On 22 August 1791, having watched mixed-race (‘mulatto’) and ‘free people of color’ rejected and brutalized by the small white planter community, slaves across the island rose up to fight against both the cruel practices of the white dominators and the system of slavery. Fairly quickly a free man of color, François-Dominique Toussaint L’Ouverture assembled together the slaves, free people of color, and mulattos, and the battle was joined.19 It was a vicious and violent affair in which many died and there was much destruction of white property; two years after the revolt began, slavery was abolished, in August 1793. The slave revolt had succeeded, at least in terms of the first goal of emancipation; maintaining it would be the next challenge and become the basis of the revolution and the independent republic. The roots of the revolution are entwined with those of the slave revolt and in some ways pre-date it. By 1792 the former slaves con-

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trolled at least a third of the island and had begun to transform the social, political, and economic conditions with the usual concomitant psychological and cultural conversions. The period 1792–1802 was indeed, as Knight (2000: 112) suggests, chaotic: ‘at one time, as many as six warring factions were in the field simultaneously: slaves, free persons of color, petits blancs, grands blancs, and invading Spanish and English troops, as well as the French vainly trying to restore order and control.’ Nonetheless, as the former slaves slowly increased their power and control, their conception of liberty and equality began to take hold across the island. When Napoleon sought to reimpose slavery in 1802, he deceived and imprisoned Toussaint and gained some of his allies, albeit only briefly, and after a quiet few months French troops engaged with the battle-hardened former slaves, who were now fighting for the ideals of the French Revolution to the tune of the Marseillaise. Having decisively defeated the French, on 1 January 1804 the Haitian Revolution’s other great leader, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, declared Haiti a ‘free republic.’ Within a year he would emulate Napoleon and crown himself Emperor. 20 Situating the Haitian Revolution is not easy – it is a complex and convoluted case and racist, ethnocentric prejudices undoubtedly contributed to its marginalization. It seems clear that in the early years there was a dual focus on ‘the sustained development of both liberty and social equality’ (Nesbitt, 2008: 23; emphasis in the original), but there gradually began to emerge a split between those committed to a sort of individualistic bourgeois liberalism and those pursuing a more egalitarian communalism (Nesbitt, 2008: 23). 21 This division was further exacerbated when it became evident that ‘universal emancipation’ had come to mean little more than ‘forced plantation labor’ (Nesbitt, 2008: 20) and the envisaged struggle for ‘an emancipatory social structure that would allow for the free development of all’ (Nesbitt, 2008: 14–15) was not going to happen. At least part of the challenge, McAuley (1997: 177) argues, likely stemmed from ‘the limited vision of the Haitian revolutionary leadership … due in part to its slave origins, the source also of its strength.’ As he notes, ‘the “enlightened” despotism of militarized agriculture … could and did quickly turn into the blind despotism of re-enslavement.’ Thus, he concludes, ‘the leadership of the only anti-colonial struggle that was simultaneously the overthrow of slavery’ failed to bring unconditional freedom or even more liberty

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(McAuley, 1997: 178). And perhaps this explains its absence from both scholarly and popular renditions of revolution. While meant to capture the ‘resigned pessimism’ of Haitians, the maxim dèyè mòn gen mòn (behind the mountains, more mountains) (Ferguson, 1993: 75) could serve as well to explain the failure of scholars of revolution. Fauriol (1996: 517, citing Logan, 1971) offers the explanation that ‘Haiti started out as a ‘power and enigma,’ turned into an ‘anomaly,’ became a ‘threat,’ … and ultimately was an ‘outcast’ among the nations of the earth.’ It remains an ‘outcast’ and largely forgotten instance of revolution. It is important not to ignore the power and place of Haiti’s revolutionary process in the Freedom and Liberation Story of Revolution. The impact of the Haitian revolution was felt throughout the hemisphere and beyond and it remains a touchstone today. In the Caribbean it inspired slave revolts on neighboring islands, particularly the 1795 Fedon’s Rebellion in Grenada, and in South America Bolívar wrote that ‘a slave insurrection was “a thousand times worse than a Spanish invasion”’ (McAuley, 1997: 174); Knight (2000: 113–14) notes that it had an impact on the emerging United States, affecting the ‘language, religion, politics, culture, cuisine, architecture, medicine, and the conflict over slavery.’ And in yet another transatlantic journey of the kind we have seen before, from the United States to France and back to the Americas, 22 this becomes, as James (1989) first argued in 1938, a powerful story for the decolonization of Africa, read and understood by Africans as a story of African slaves standing up to and defeating European masters (see also Williams, 1944; Blackburn, 1989; Genovese, 1992). In all these places and more, Haiti is remembered and invoked as a popular insurgency in which, like bricoleurs, participants relied on ‘creative acts of judgment with whatever materials they might find at hand’ in an act of ‘masterful political improvisation’ (Nesbitt, 2008: 29, 31), ‘part of a continuing struggle for freedom and human rights’ (Forsdick, 2008: 6) that for many people in the world continues apace today. Mexico and its many revolutions23 If the Haitian Revolution has been largely forgotten or ignored, the Mexican Revolution has suffered a different fate, wherein a combination of overexposure, underappreciation, and intentional manipulation has rendered it practically pedestrian, a backdrop for food and beer

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advertisements. This is a peculiar outcome for a gripping event central for so many to the Freedom and Liberation Story of Revolution. Knight wonders provocatively what kind of revolution Mexico had: ‘Bourgeois? Nationalist? Or just a “Great Rebellion”?’ (1985: 1); Gilly’s analysis is that Mexico was one of ‘the first three successful great revolutions of the twentieth century’ which opens up ‘an increasing tide of rural and peasant based rebellions’ which ‘undermine and swallow the colonial empires of the nineteenth century’ (2003: 116). While that observation is hard to refute, it is challenging to identify a singular ‘Mexican Revolution’; certainly in this story there are multiple revolutions. By any reasonable definition, while the Mexican Revolution was hardly a monolithic event or process, it clearly had revolutionary elements. Although it is most notable for its agrarian character and epic sweep, there are nonetheless bourgeois liberal democratic elements, a small but real workers’ role, some characteristics of social revolution, and a constitutional revolution of sorts, all of which are drawn on by those who tell the Freedom and Liberation Story of Revolution. The Mexican Revolution began as little more than a political up­ rising, and arguably an inter-elite one at that. Mexico 1910 was liberal if not democratic; notions of freedom and liberty were vague at best. Mexico’s aging dictator, Porfirio Díaz, and his ministers had spent over three decades of the Porfiriato ruling under the positivist maxim of ‘freedom, order and progress,’ as articulated by his cientificos (‘scientists,’ a nickname for the modernizers around Díaz). What this had meant in practice was freedom for the development of foreign trade and industry, order by pan o palo (bread or the stick), and the progress of railway and telegraph lines. Though rarely part of the tale, increasing campesino uprisings and the emergence of socialist and anarchist opposition made for an increasing reliance on ‘the stick’; it was a period aptly framed as ‘rich in expressions of resistance to Díaz’s rule’ (Foran, 2005: 37). These expressions were also coming from liberals and capitalists, and Francisco Madero, the ‘Apostle of Democracy,’ scion of one of Mexico’s wealthiest families, educated in Europe and the United States, was convinced that what Mexico needed was democracy and political liberty. His 1910 electoral campaign for the presidency garnered a broad coalition which brought together ‘the pro-labor, pro-peasant, nationalistic, and democratic aspirations of a wide segment of society’

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(Foran, 2005: 38) as well as monied North American interests. Díaz had him arrested in early June and handily won re-election later that month. In October Madero escaped from jail to the United States, from where he issued his Plan of San Luis Potosí, an essentially reformist document which promised free elections, made vague references to land reform and the right of workers to bargain collectively, and called for the country to rise up on 20 November 1910. Reformers, radicals, and revolutionaries across the country heeded the call, and thanks in part to uprisings in the south (Emiliano Zapata in Morelos) and the north (Pascual Orozco and Francisco ‘Pancho’ Villa in Chihuahua), Díaz agreed to step down in May 1911; in October Madero was easily elected president. The coalition Madero found himself somewhat unsteadily atop had been bound together by their opposition to Díaz; Díaz is supposed to have quipped, ‘Madero has unleashed a tiger; let us see if he can control him’ (Knight, 1990b: 218). Certainly the collapse of the old regime and the tentative steps of the new, which now included remnants of Díaz’s regime, were a dangerous mix. Emiliano Zapata and the agrarian communalists called for ‘land and liberty’ and demanded serious land reform, the centerpiece of the Plan of Ayala (1911). This was the closest the Mexican Revolution, marked more by generals than intellectuals, had to an ideological manifesto; its radical agrarian program would be influential in 1917 and reappear in 1994. In the north, Orozco and the colorados (reds) agitated for social change and better working conditions. 24 Both groups wanted more than Madero and his allies were willing to concede. Unable to meet the competing demands for maintenance of the status quo, the needs of urban workers, and beset by a multitude of uprisings large and small, the center – if indeed Madero was the center – could not hold. In February 1913, General Victoriano Huerta suppressed a conservative rebellion on behalf of Madero, then ousted and murdered him. This counter-revolution opened the door to four years of intense struggle, Villa’s emergence at the head of the northern coalition, and many of the actions most commonly associated with the Mexican Revolution, particularly as related in this story. Zapata, Villa, Venustiano Carranza’s ‘white-collar’ revolutionaries (Knight, 1990b: 22), and others re-formed the original Madero coalition (Knight, 1990b: 18) to defeat Huerta, but were unable to reach agreement among themselves.

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The ensuing few years contained several developments vital to the story of Freedom and Liberation. The first was the aforementioned Zapatista-produced agrarian revolutionary manifesto Plan of Ayala, which was already being enacted in what might be usefully thought of as the revolutionary south,’ Morelos (Zapata’s home state), Guerrero, and parts of Puebla (Gilly, 2005a: 128–9). Also at this time, the three major forces battled back and forth both for the capital and across wide swathes of the countryside; essentially Villa controlled the north, Zapata the south, and Carranza and (after negotiations) Álvaro Obregón, his most able general, the center. 25 Amidst these battles, in this story, much is made of a moment in December 1914 when Zapata and Villa drive the ‘Constitutionalist forces’ of Carranza out of Mexico City and occupy the capital; the tale is that Villa famously sat in the president’s chair while Zapata demurred. 26 The event has been immortalized in many ways, not least on YouTube, but the important point for this story is that faced with the opportunity to take control of state power, neither man did, the implication being that they fought not for power but for freedom and justice. This is an irresistible image in a story where people often succumb to power for its own sake, even as they promised better. Events continued to swirl. Obregón regrouped the Constitutionalist forces and in a series of battles in 1915 effectively defeated Villa, ending his career as a meaningful force in the revolutionary process. As Zapata consolidated his hold on the south, his national reach was limited by an overwhelmingly local and campesino perspective predicated in part on the restoration of the communalist tradition. 27 In Mexico City, the Constitutionalists, with Obregón playing an ever larger role, passed popular agrarian reform laws and reached out to the increasingly radicalized workers. This did not last and as working-class radicalism grew, it became a threat; a general strike in 1916 was brutally put down by the Constitutionalist government. Though all of these factors have implications, little of this has a direct bearing on the story of Freedom and Liberation. What does always appear is the 1917 Mexican Constitution. A Constituent Congress convened in late November 1916, with various reformist factions represented but the most radical elements absent, having been shut out by the Constitutionalists (Dunn, 1989: 64). It is a measure of the times that the document nonetheless addressed reform of both the agrarian sector and the labor movement (Dunn, 1989: 64;

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Benjamin, 2000: 69), and that a group of reformist, largely middle-class delegates produced a constitution that Gilly (2005a: 233) contends was ‘the most advanced in the world,’ though, he adds, ‘it was not socialist.’28 While that may be true, it was nevertheless a clear refutation of the past and a far more reformist document than any previous bourgeois liberal democratic constitution had promulgated; Foran (2005: 43) succinctly summarizes it as ‘moderate … [with] decidedly revolutionary aims.’ These aims included: the outlawing of slavery and discrimination of any kind (Article 1); celebration of Mexico’s indigenous identity (Article 2); a public education system (Article 3); major land reform, public ownership of oil and mineral rights, and significant restrictions on the ownership of property by foreigners (Article 27); guaranteed and expanded rights for workers, including an eight-hour work day and the rights to organize and strike (Article 123); the separation of Church and state (Article 130). Though Knight (1990b: 329) holds that ‘the new Constitution … has often been given too much attention, invested with too much contemporary significance,’29 it nonetheless remains widely revered today in much of Latin America and is very much part of the Freedom and Liberation Story of Revolution. Between 1917 and 1920 the revolutionary process stumbled to an end. Zapata sought to protect his base in Morelos; tensions increased between Carranza, nominally president, and Obregón, who with his more radically reformist allies was ever more the leader. In 1919 Zapata was assassinated; many in Mexico and elsewhere believe he knew he was being set up and had become convinced he was now more useful as a martyr than alive – certainly his fabled white horse, and even his campfire, live on in popular memory, spotted in Mexico and sometimes elsewhere far beyond in revolutionary imaginations and situations.30 After ten years of resistance, rebellion, revolution and various attendant permutations, a moderate, reformist regime under Obregón held sway; Zapata was dead; Villa was soon to be assassinated (1923) and the voices of social justice relegated to little more than ghosts. Like the contemporaneous Russian Revolution, the institutionalization of the Mexican Revolution (Lázaro Cárdenas’s 1934–40 presidency excepted) produced largely negative results: oppression, conservatism, stultifying bureaucracy and inefficiency, and inertia. At the same time, the demand for social justice was central to the events and processes that history, academic and popular, records as the elements of what we refer to as

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the Mexican Revolution. While buffeted about in the aftermath of the revolutionary process, such claims probably reached their culmination during the Cárdenas presidency, after which state managers’ commitment to matters of social justice amounted to little more than lip service; the 1968 Tlatelolco Massacre represents a clear end.31 What type of revolution this was has been debated endlessly. Bearing in mind Benjamin’s salutary reminder that it ‘was not the French Revolution … seek[ing] to abolish history and begin the nation anew’ (2000: 54), Buenfil (2000: 88) summarizes the three main perspectives as ‘those who argue it was a genuine revolution, those that it was merely a rebellion, and those who see a set of disconnected upheavals with different means and ends,’ and Foran (2005: 44–5) provides a useful primer of the possibilities proffered by most leading scholars. What is not in doubt is that for many people the Mexican Revolution is part and parcel of the Freedom and Liberation Story of Revolution.

‘Keep your eyes on the prize’ ‘The only thing we did wrong, Stayed in the wilderness a day too long,’ goes Wine’s 1956 update of the African-American spiritual ‘Gospel Plow,’ ‘Keep Your Eyes on the Prize,’ continuing ‘But the one thing we did right, Was the day we started to fight.’ This is the Freedom and Liberation Story of Revolution in a nutshell. In this story, a people find themselves slaves (in Rome, in the land of Egypt, in serfdom, in chains, in poverty, to the factories) and no one is coming to free them, but they can and will be free – for themselves, their children, their children’s children. It will be a long and arduous journey, and not everyone will get there, but they will persevere; someday they will live and die in a place of peace and justice they have built. This is the principle and the promise of Spartacus, of Exodus, of slave revolts, of the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles, of the wars of national liberation, and of liberation ideologies centered on the release of groups and individuals from subjugation. The demands are for liberation and freedom, social justice and human rights, land, peace and bread, reflecting the conviction that, as Zapata famously framed it, it is ‘better to die on one’s feet than live on one’s knees.’32 Since Haiti in 1791, the Freedom and Liberation Story of Revolution has largely been understood and represented as one that happens outside

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the North/West. There are exceptions (the slave revolts in the United States, for example, and the struggle in Ireland), but by and large this is a story told ‘over there,’ on the periphery (or semi-periphery), about ‘those people’ in what in recent years has been identified as the ‘third’ or ‘developing’ world. Yet this is also a story located in the very belly of the beast, with sustaining stories in support of the poor, the marginalized, the oppressed in some of the colonial and neo-colonial countries. The most obvious example is the African-American Civil Rights movement in the United States, but there are stories of freedom and liberation throughout Europe, North America, and the world’s various white-settler states, as those marginalized and dispossessed on the grounds of ethnicity, gender, religion, or other markers, are energized and invigorated by the liberation struggles of people elsewhere. There are even those in powerful and developed countries who come to see their freedom and liberation as fundamentally bound up with the liberation of those elsewhere, forging a new story of emancipation. We need look no further than the powerful, almost visceral response across North America, Europe and the rest of the world when the EZLN, Mexico’s contemporary Zapatistas, rose up in revolution or rebellion or resistance – the debate continues apace33 – on 1 January 1994 and made their demands for dignity and justice, asked disturbing questions (‘Why is everyone so quiet? Is this the “democracy” you wanted?’; quoted in Weinberg, 2002: 187), and issued a stirring challenge (‘It is not necessary to conquer the world. It is sufficient with making it new. Us. Today’; Marcos et al., 1998: 19). Quickly the response was Todos somos Zapatistas (We are all Zapatistas); support flowed to Chiapas, Mexico’s most southern and poorest state, and people were emboldened elsewhere – for example, opposition to the World Trade Organization, most famously in Seattle in 1999, has built on the Zapatistas’ struggle. Whether we consider the Zapatistas the last revolutionaries of the twentieth century or the first of the twenty-first century, Gilly (2005b: 41) believes that the 2003 insurrection in Bolivia constituted ‘the first revolution of the 21st century.’ Without concerning ourselves with exactly what kind of revolution this might be, it is clear that Gilly’s language and structure resonate with the story told here: he reminds us of the need to reconcile ‘long memory (anti-colonial struggles, prehispanic ethical order) and short memory (revolutionary power of

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peasant unions and militias since the revolution of 1952)’ (2005b: 47, emphasis in the original; he cites Cusicanqui, 2003) and suggests that ‘a revolution is not something that happens in the State, in its institutions and among its politicians. It comes from below and from outside’ (2005b: 52; emphasis in the original). In particular, Gilly contends that when center-stage is taken over – with the violence of their bodies and the rage of their souls – precisely by those who have come from below and outside: those who are always shunted aside, those who take orders, those whom the rulers look down on as a mass of voters, electoral clientele, beasts of burden, survey fodder. It happens when these erupt, give themselves a political goal, organize themselves in accordance with their own decisions and awareness and, with lucidity, reflection and violence, insert their world into the world of those who rule, and obtain, as in the present case, what they were demanding. (2005b: 52)

In an analysis that accords well with the Freedom and Liberation Story of Revolution, Gilly (2005b: 53) concludes that while it may be more convenient or reassuring in the case of Bolivia ‘to say that this was not a revolution but rather a big riot, a rebellion, an insurrection which made many mistakes, which had no leading party, which was only for gas and for the sowers of cocoa, a people’s movement, a big uprising and little more,’ is to ‘deny it the name is to deny its protagonists – the Indians, the cholos, the women and men of Bolivia’s subaltern classes – their difficult victory’ (2005b: 54). In this long, rambling story of Freedom and Liberation, people work from a rich cultural deposit to fashion various elements into a popular story of liberation and freedom that elites are prone to downplay or invoke only when it is to their advantage. These represented struggles serve to reinforce and strengthen each other, not least as people in various locales and across an imposing span of time increasingly come to identify their aspirations with those of others. Some have suggested that with the putative triumphs of liberalism and capitalism this story has come to an end. This seems unlikely. Despite a lack of attention from politicians, the popular press, and even many academics, millions of people every day struggle to free themselves from oppression and seek to achieve equal rights and social justice. While these efforts are often (mis)read by those in the North/West and their regional allies

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as the inexplicable actions of scared and confused people or, worse, as people obstinately resisting the inevitable neoliberal tide which will lift all boats if only they will allow it. The failure of neoliberal economic policies and neoliberal democracy to transform people’s lives fundamentally for the better means that the Freedom and Liberation Story of Revolution will continue to have relevance. While liberal democratic capitalism continues to dominate conceptualizations of what is possible, we should not let it obscure or mystify the interests and desires of those whom it marginalizes and excludes. As the next story, the Revolutions of the Lost and Forgotten, endeavors to make clear, there is a lot going on out there – and nothing should be taken for granted.

eight Revolutions of the lost and forgotten: stories we don’t know and won’t tell

I

n 1917, in the USA’s south central plains, on the muddy banks of the South Canadian river in rural Oklahoma, the Green Corn Rebellion, a multi-ethnic, multi-class, socialist uprising occurred. During the first third of the sixteenth century in regions that would become Germany, there were large and intense peasant rebellions, and in the north-west, Münster, Westphalia, saw a deeply radical, proto-socialist political movement. There was a major anti-colonial uprising among Igbo women in 1929 in Nigeria. The fleeting anarchist Republic of Baja California (Mexico) in 1911 presaged the short-lived 1919–21 anarchist Ukraine halfway round the globe. March 1921 witnessed the brief Kronstadt Rebellion of anarchist (or Social Revolutionary) sailors, soldiers, and citizens in nascent Soviet Russia, which nonetheless managed to last a few days longer than the evanescent twelve-day 1932 ‘República Socialista de Chile’ led by General Marmaduke Groves. The burgeoning USA saw its share of resistance, rebellions, and revolutions, including Shays’ Rebellion (1786–87), the Whiskey Rebellion (1791–4), and Fries’s Rebellion (1799–1800). In 2009, among many instances of apparently varying import, seemingly popular Iranian protests about deeply contested election results were referred to as a ‘Green Revolution,’ dismayed Latvians derisively dubbed demonstrations about the country’s economic woes the ‘Penguin Revolution,’ and a elite–military golpe d’estado (coup d’état) in Honduras provoked, for that country, a surprising resistance. How these events

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or processes will be remembered in the years to come is impossible to say, but it would be naive to assume they will not become part of the rich fabric we all weave. It would be tempting to assume that the Revolutions of the Lost and Forgotten story is some sort of grab-bag of bagatelles – the island of misfit revolutionary and related moments of little or no importance. In this story are ‘revolutions, nomadic wanderings, and the strangest mutations’ that Hegel believed were left out of the history books, their absence no accident but rather ‘because they were not possible, do we find them wanting’ (Hegel, 2009: 51). Lacking the presence, the rhythm, we associate with ‘History,’ we all too often ignore that real things that really matter happen outside its scope: ‘the great ruptures and oppositions are always negotiable, but not the little cracks and imperceptible ruptures’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 1983: 58). Opting for possibilities and the chance to change their lives, a surprising number of people have chosen to engage in what might reasonably be interpreted as acts of everyday resistance, rebellion, or revolution.1 Such collective behavior is rife with implications and, at least in the context of this story, defined primarily by conscious and intentional practices. 2 These ‘moments of social creativity’ (Markoff, 1997: 1139) are instances where people and society are particularly open to those of us fascinated by such episodes. People’s belief in (im)possibilities and conviction in their intrinsic ability to reshape both the world and themselves is apparently boundless. While we are understandably and necessarily drawn to the large-scale (Tilly, 1984), the metanarratives that help us make sense of the complexity of our lives, Markoff reminds us of the ‘need to study the messy details of historical processes and not just the grand trends’ (1997: 1139). These micro-level moments, often focused on matters of everyday life, can have weighty implications at the macro-level. People’s complex, convoluted, problematic efforts, whose intentionality may not always be evident to those involved, to realize their private dreams and desires in a public forum are often driven by dynamics such as hope, fear, or need. And they can create and embody the place – spatial, temporal, and psychological – and opportunity for counter-hegemonic activities whereby people seek to gain control over the material and ideological conditions of their everyday lives.

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So far we have moved from the relatively brief, tightly choreographed Civilizing and Democratizing Story of Revolution to the somewhat messier but impressively linear Social Revolutionary Story of Revolution, and through the longer and looser Freedom and Liberation Story of Revolution. All offer a largely chronological and more or less sequential tale which has a starting point (the Glorious Revolution; France 1789; Spartacus’s slave rebellion), develops, and reaches an ostensible end (France 1789; Cuba 1959, Nicaragua and Iran 1979; and the at least nominal world-wide commitment to freedom and liberation as common goods). The plot in each case is, arguably, readily discernible. Could it be otherwise? Yet the convenience and collusion of creating a clear and chronological story should not blind us to the illusions we create. All the previous stories are in some important sense made linear, and are as notable for what they omit as for what they include. We are, after all, conditioned to see and hear in the ways we do, and to make sense of things accordingly. The three stories told so far, whether carefully plotted or more loosely structured, are relatively coherent and sturdy. The Revolutions of the Lost and Forgotten story tells an altogether more tenuous, though equally robust story. It involves smaller stories, not framed by larger processes, though these may be antecedents of or follow from such, which may account for their having been lost or forgotten; an example here is the 1936–37 Spanish Revolution, which has been all but buried by the 1936–39 Civil War. So the stories tend to be local and specific in reference, often somewhat obscure, narrower in range, and at times more insular, although such a perspective may not be shared by those whose lives are involved. This of course only reflects the stories we ‘know’; it is impossible to tell what has been lost and what has come down to us in impoverished form due to poor transmission and translation. This vaguer and somewhat more impressionistic story of struggles lost to us or forgotten is concerned with everyday resistance, rebellion, and revolution. Examples are incalculable and those are the ones we know. People in almost every time and place have their own versions. While tenor and tone may be quite different, familiar faces are in attendance: long faded wildcat rebellions in the new United States; in France the 1793 sans-culottes’ demand for popular democracy or the 1871 Commune; the forgotten democratic moments and the Kronstadt

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Rebellion in Russia; the obscure anarchist Ukraine (its leader Makhno buried, ironically, at the side of Lenin’s heroes, the Paris Communards, in Père Lachaise cemetery); the seemingly countless lost and forgotten moments in Mexico, some known to millions, others to perhaps a few dozen. While some of the Revolutions of the Lost and Forgotten are better known than others, none is accorded any special authority. Connecting such stubbornly discrete moments, even in a broad sense, may be misleading and threatens to reduce them to little more than a list. Yet by virtue of their occurrence they do form, in their transitory existence, a vast, open web of durable micro-moments. A few caveats are in order. As has been observed, this necessarily limited attempt to capture lost and forgotten revolutionary moments can only address those we know. Of course, there may well be instances of resistance, rebellion, or revolution that elude those of us embedded in Northern/Western, male, linear, progressivist approaches to knowledge. Second, although these specific moments have been, by and large, crushed and are thus invisible, they may reappear elsewhere and ‘elsewhen’ (Bey, 1991: 101), at times with strong connections, occasionally with more tenuous ones. On some occasions, their evaporation may simply reflect a decision to flee in the face of power and privilege, with plans to fight another day. Finally, the connections between these lost and forgotten episodes are borne not simply on the breeze but, whether lateral or hierarchical, direct or indirect, by people who make history. Every people seem to have their own versions of such stories, passed down from generation to generation. Many represent little more than a record of the places and spaces through which at least a few people pass for a brief period of time.3 Despite their brevity, these moments can leave their traces; take the wide boulevards in Europe’s capitals, created in the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions to enable the maneuvering of cavalry and artillery. Such instances represent persons, places, and times, stories of resistance and struggle, that have been recycled – as Collier and Mazzuca (2008: 479) point out ‘“deep” and “thick” is not necessarily unique or unrepeatable’ – and usually with the conviction that somehow this time, ‘we’ will win. Other messages are clear as well. ‘We’ are part of a great and storied legacy, but one rarely if ever celebrated by those with the power to do so. While few have succeeded, it is better to try; we have to try. Despite the immediacy and intensity

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of the struggle at hand, ‘our’ history, whether the powerful acknowledge it or not, bespeaks the long haul. To the extent that it is possible, then, we are called upon here to look not from above, as with the first two stories, nor from below, as with the last, but alongside. In addition, the challenge is to interrogate matters from both the ‘outside,’ stepping aside from History and our conventional assumptions about history, and the ‘inside,’ seeking out alternative sources that are rarely called or relied upon. Here, more than with any other story, we are in the realm of myth, the poetic, story, and song, even at times mere allusion, much of it intentionally spun to protect and preserve it from those with power and to prevent its access by those of us inherently suspect – for why would we want to know and what will we do with the information? ‘Better to keep it quiet, child – if they have to ask, they don’t know.’4 The Story of Lost and Forgotten Revolutions lurks in our pasts and may well be all around us in the present. It is undoubtedly possible to categorize these profitably by place (Spain, Mexico, Indonesia, Ghana, or Canada), by people (the Maya, the Basque, the Kurds, the !Kung San, Finns), or by type (the pious, social bandits/pirates, the hidden message, the animal spirits, the other or transcendent world) – any number of classifications are possible. Such a taxonomy is beyond the scope of this project, but more to the point it would defeat the idea of this story, seeking to regularize and constrain possibilities. Instead, what follows will largely be a a sampling of ‘lost’ and ‘forgotten’ stories. We will concentrate on those that have managed to gain some status above the purely local and demonstrably obscure and that share aspects with other such micro-tales of individual and collective struggle concerned with decipherable forms of resistance, rebellion, and revolution.

Sparks of hope: vital vignettes of lost and forgotten revolutions One of the surprising things about the Story of Lost and Forgotten Revolutions is just how much we know about as many ‘moments’ as we do. While it is tempting to presume this is a phenomenon of the ‘information age,’ to do so would ignore the world wide webs of earlier ages – ‘explorers’ reporting back, soldiers and sailors writing home,

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letter writers of all kinds (especially those who organized around issues such as the abolition of slavery or to end foot-binding in China), renegados, itinerants, and vagabonds. What it may reflect is openness to information which is not readily categorized and a greater willingness to tolerate loose ends, slippage in the narrative, and a certain openendedness. While most of us tend to live with such ambiguity in our daily lives, it is not as a rule what we seek in the narratives we are inclined to construct; nevertheless story can provide that space. While some details may be known to only a few, many have wide currency. For example, it is not a complete surprise to learn that Namibian revolutionaries know ‘La Marseillaise,’ or to discover the ubiquity of Che T-shirts in 1979 Tehran (Taheri, 1986: 254). But consider that there are those in Mozambique familiar with Zapata’s white horse; that Nicaraguan campesinos, though ‘illiterate,’ by Northern/ Western standards, are nevertheless knowledgeable about the ‘great’ battle of Cuito Cuanavale, a critical turning point for anti-imperialism and revolution in Southern Africa; that Palestinians recognize North American labor activist Joe Hill as someone who ‘fought with Spartacus … was in Chile in the 1970s, and in El Salvador and Guatemala. But right now … Joe Hill is a Palestinian’ (Lynd and Grubacic, 2008: 196); that Mexican revolutionaries are aware of Louis Riel, a multi-ethnic Métis leader of the 1869–70 Red River and 1885 North-West Rebellions in the Canadian plains; or that a young Native American in the United States is conversant with the strategies for resistance adopted by Mexico’s largely indigenous latter-day Zapatistas and by Canada’s Inuit. Such examples are valuable reminders of the associations and connections across time and space that people deploy to construct a revolutionary imaginary comprising symbols, names, dates, places, grievances, stories, and means and methods, which they then draw on as they consider their world and their options.5 This cultural repository of tactics, strategies, and inspiration is hardly uncontested. Those seeking to surmount resistance, shut down rebellion, oppose revolution (or tame it for their purposes) also endeavor to create a social imaginary to support their perspective. The Mexican government, for example, long sought to claim (and control) Zapata as a historical figure to bolster its legitimacy and authority. More successfully, Bolivia’s military government was able to forestall Guevara’s 1967 revolutionary internationalists in part by positioning themselves as

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the heirs of Bolivia’s 1952 nationalist revolution. And perhaps no state or society has so successfully manipulated its revolutionary past as the United States of America, which for two hundred years has used it as justification for opposition at home and abroad to any but the mildest of reforms, resistance and rebellion – forget revolution – which it has effectively rewritten as somehow alien to its shores. Yet in most cases such reactionary efforts are hard to establish and to sustain for any length of time. Indeed, efforts by elites or state managers to assert their popular credentials are likely to be greeted with considerable skepticism. Thus those in power work hard to eradicate or erase revolutionary moments. So what are such moments? We can only concentrate on those that have managed to gain some status beyond the purely local and demonstrably obscure, and that share aspects with other such microtales of individual and collective struggle which reflect decipherable forms of resistance, rebellion, and revolution. The Arabian Assassins of the early Middle Ages have left little more than their name, but they certainly struck terror into the hearts of despots (and any who crossed them). While the statute of Étienne Marcel guards Paris’s Hôtel de Ville (city hall) where it fronts the Seine, few remember the 1357 workers’ strike he fomented (Hussey, 2005: 23), itself part of the largely forgotten Jacquerie, a popular, primarily peasant rebellion in France during the Hundred Years War. Pirate enclaves in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries afforded foretastes of democracy which may well have influenced Europe’s rising democratic tide, early efforts at social welfare, and can even be said to have prefigured the modern insurance system. Multiracial struggles for justice in the Americas, such as the 1741 New York Conspiracy of African-American, ‘Spanish,’ and Irish sailors and dock workers, and poor whites, proffered a model of the dispossessed working together for common goals. 6 The multi-ethnic late-nineteenth-century Farmers’ Alliance across the southern United States demanded fair prices for crops, advocated public control of transportation and communication, set up co-operatives, and called for populist economic policies. During this same period in France, bourses de travail (labor exchanges) were organized, and working-class movements focused on mutual aid, education, and organizing – with the support of some in government; thanks to the wonders of colonialism, these spread throughout France’s still considerable empire.

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An example of carefully tended yet surprisingly durable embers may help before turning to consider some instances in a bit more in depth. The 1914 settimana rossa (red week) workers’ general strike in Ancona, Italy, which led to some communities declaring themselves, à la Paris 1871, ‘communes’ or ‘workers’ republics’ (Harvey, 1994: 429), inspired factory occupations and worker self-management during the 1919–20 biennio rosso (two red years), which in turn produced the 1921–22 Fascist biennio nero (two black years) that led to the Fascist takeover of Italy. A similar dynamic – factory occupations and worker self-management met with quasi- or neo-fascist reaction – was evident in Spain 1936–39, Italy during the 1969 autunno caldo (hot autumn), and Chile 1970–73; perhaps having learned from the past, this time Italy did not heed the siren song of authoritarian rule. Argentina’s early-twenty-first century fabricas recuperadas (‘recovered factories’) movement has not produced a fascist reaction (to date), and in 2005 activists from across the region gathered at an Encuentro Latinoamericano de Empresas Recuperadas (‘Latin American Encounter of Recovered Companies’) in Venezuela. There, a conscious connection was made over a hundred years, across two world wars, the Cold War, a brutal military dictatorship in Chile, a ‘dirty war’ in Argentina, and the advent of neoliberalism, to set this struggle in a historical context. Lost and forgotten stories of resistance, rebellion, and revolution can be and have been recuperated as well. It is necessary to proceed carefully here. Categorization, acclimatization, even definition are the very dynamics this story seeks to reject. Indulging in such an exercise and forcing these moments of actually existing change does irreparable harm, violence really, to the context and content. We are all complicit in this process, taking flashes of profound meaning and deep intent and manufacturing a History, a history, a story well enough known that a North American social scientist deeply embedded in the center is aware of them and can locate information. As a result, this no longer the sort of lush tapestry people have woven together in the other stories. Rather, it reflects all the things that do not, and perhaps cannot, fit but which are no less real – and in some cases, in some ways, more real – for not fitting, for not being readily reducible to the same old story. The short collection of longer stories that follows necessarily involves the process of ordering and consequently controlling them, the creation of a taxonomy that tells you not only what they mean but why

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they matter (or, indeed, why they do not matter, left out because they are found wanting in our folksonomy).7 Such corralling strikes at the very core of their intrinsically romantic nature; for their power lies in their transience and in the fact that no one owns them. For we must remember that these cases of resistance, rebellion, and revolution are in this category because they ‘failed,’ at least by conventional measures of success. The most famous (if you will) Lost and Forgotten Revolution is the 1871 Paris Commune, a great romantic, epic revolutionary failure.

The greatest ‘forgotten’ revolution: the 1871 Paris Commune8 The Commune’s incandescent, fleeting existence is well known and its influence incontrovertible – Marx lauded its achievements; it was Lenin’s ‘festival of the oppressed’ (1980a: 125) and he was buried in its red flag; Mao invoked it early and often; furthermore it is fair to say that for the next hundred years (1968 is, in some sense, its next and arguably last iteration) elites and state managers across Europe were deeply fearful of it. Yet it is exactly this fear and loathing that lead to its inclusion here: perhaps more than with any other such moment, there has been an effort actively to forget the Commune. For example, during the 1989 bicentennial of the French Revolution, France’s many revolutionary moments were celebrated, but the Commune was notably absent. The endeavor has been to eliminate it not just from formal History but from people’s lived experience: to ensure that it does not play a part in the popular repertoire. What was it about the event that has subsequently engendered reactions of both admiration and abhorrence? In 1870, during the Franco-Prussian War, Paris had been under siege for five months. To end the impasse, the French government made substantial concessions which were not entirely well received by the people of Paris. Fearful of a working-class revolt, the government tried to collect the artillery it had provided for the defense of the city and the battle was joined. Parisians refused to let the weapons go and on 26 March 1871 elected the Commune to govern the city; the National Assembly retreated, with no little irony, to Versailles. The Commune promptly abolished the police and the army, opened public

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schools (and in some cases provided school materials, food, and even clothing to students), and announced the separation of church and state. Socialists, anarchists, libertarian republicans, feminists,9 and others organized themselves and also worked collectively. The 1789 calendar was restored, the red flag adopted, night work in bakeries ended, pensions granted to unmarried partners of National Guard members, a guillotine ceremoniously burnt, the Vendôme Column torn down, and great public celebrations and concerts held. This spontaneous outburst was a thoroughgoing rejection of domination and control – Marx (1871) worried they were too ‘scrupulous’ in this regard (and fretted about their ‘good nature’) – and a deep embrace of the myriad possibilities. This fête de l’imagination could not last, not least because those in power could not countenance its implications and ramifications: people were governing themselves, workers and the poor, even women, were stepping into the role of civil servants; and social decorum was perceived to be under grave threat. Almost from the start there had been skirmishes between government forces and Communards. Enraged by the increasingly intransigent Communards and their flouting of convention (and egged on by the newly declared German state), the Versailles forces increased their attacks and on 21 May entered Paris proper, whereupon the slaughter began. In what became known as La Semaine sanglante (the bloody week), tens of thousands were killed in the fighting or summarily executed following surrender, the last 150 or so famously shot against the Mur des fédérés (Communards’ Wall) in Père Lachaise Cemetery; thousands more were executed, jailed, or deported to French penal colonies. Women and children were particular targets. Many decided it was better to die on their feet than live on their knees. Conversely, other European countries offered to send troops; this sort of popular insurrection could not be tolerated and had to be put down with the most brutal show of force possible – salt sown in the earth so nothing would ever grow there again. To a considerable extent it worked. The distinctive Sacré Cœur basilica was erected on Montmartre, symbolically Paris’s highest point, where the Commune had its beginnings, and consecrated to atone for the Communards’ putative sins (Harvey, 1979: 377; 2003: 311–40). Yet Marx’s stirring epitaph resonates still: ‘working, thinking, fighting, bleeding Paris – almost forgetful, in its incubation of a new society, of the cannibals at its gates – radiant in

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the enthusiasm of its historical initiative!’ (1978b: 641),10 long after the Versailles government and the Third Republic have themselves been forgotten. The irony is conspicuous: despite the best efforts of many, the greatest of the lost and forgotten revolutions was neither lost nor forgotten by those most intent on making history. Even as the powerful and privileged sought to exterminate it from history, many took up its red banner and carried it forward. Yet as this ‘festival of the oppressed’ gained currency with the world’s poor and dispossessed, it was ever more written out of History. Marginalized as a footnote for communist revolutionaries and associated first with Russia and then with China, it was really only with the failed 1968 student and worker rebellions that the Paris Commune re-emerged into popular consciousness. Castoriadis (1992: 259; emphasis in original) has compared Paris in May 1968 with the Commune, arguing that in both cases ‘these weeks’ were ‘ for us, no less important and no less meaningful than three thousand years of Egyptian pharaonic history.’11 Restored in this way, the events of 1968 proved no less terrifying to those in power than had the Commune in its day; nevertheless, its interest was short-lived among those looking for other avenues of change. However, within a few years the story of the Paris Commune was once again largely relegated to the margins of history – designated reformist, by Pilbeam (2001: 37), read as not revolutionary but ‘a last, a tragic fluke’ by Malia (2006: 248), though he concedes that ‘it did leave a potent myth for “the next time”.’ Nonetheless, this seemingly impossible moment served to refashion understandings of revolution, and in important ways set the stage for the twentieth-century revolutions (most notably in Russia and China) that would follow. With regard to the Story of Lost and Forgotten Revolutions, the paradox remains. On the one hand this is a story neither lost nor forgotten, notwithstanding conscious and intentional efforts to demean and deny its existence. It was the first urban proletarian revolution, the first to take on the emergent military–industrial state (Billington, 1980: 346), and the first to pose a radically different formulation for the organization of authority. It also marked the shift from national to transnational revolutions (Billington, 1980: 347), symbolized in no small measure by the shift in international revolutionary anthems from France’s ‘La Marseillaise’ to the ‘Internationale,’ written in the

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immediate aftermath of the Commune by a former Communard. At the same time, over the years, the story of the Paris Commune was reduced to arcana, a core part of any secret history of the revolutionary period that followed it, a legacy known to relatively few but seemingly many, its myths and memory living on.

Mexico City’s 1912–16 proletarian revolution12 It is not unusual for Mexico to be considered a social revolution, and in the last chapter it was considered in the Freedom and Liberation Story of Revolution. Few would argue with the standing of Mexico’s 1910–20 revolution as the first great social upheaval of the twentieth century and the world’s first broad-based peasant revolution. Its greatest heroes are the agrarian radical Emiliano Zapata and the rural social bandit Pancho Villa, whose followers included rural workers such as miners, lumberjacks, and railwaymen.13 The revolution’s greatest legacy is agrarian reform and the principle that land and oil and minerals beneath it belong to the people of the country. What it ‘emphatically was not was a workers’ revolution’ (Knight, 1984: 51; emphasis in the original). Knight points out that no workers’ party sought power, no workers’ councils were established, and no efforts were made by workers to control industry; the workers’ contributions were ‘limited and largely reflexive’ (1984: 51). In an increasingly industrial country, where were they? As it turns out, many of the workers were indeed in the thick of things. Mexico’s growing urban working class was primarily located in Mexico City, the major port cities of Veracruz, Tampico, Acapulco, and in the cities proximate to the United States–Mexican border, Chihuahua, Juarez, Cananea. The working class in Mexico was doing relatively well and at the time of the revolution largely aligned with the moderate forces around Madero and his upper-class and elite circle. This is not to ignore the real struggles that were going on or the growth of an anarchist labor movement primarily associated with the Magón brothers and the Magonista.14 It was they who spearheaded the resolutely obscure six-month multinational, multiethnic, anarchist Baja Republic of 1911.15 Nevertheless, the action among the workers was predominantly in Mexico City, which had industrialized greatly under the Porfiriato, the three-decade dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz,

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and it was there that the Casa del Obreros Mundial (‘House of the World Workers’) had been founded at the turn of the century and then shut down by the dictatorship. The advent of the revolution returned workers to the fray, though at least initially ‘as individuals rather than as an organized force’ (Gilly, 2005a: 148). In the summer of 1912 the Casa was reborn. More than a union, the Casa sought to influence the labor movement, the Madero government, and bring an internationalist and anarchist perspective to the events unfolding. According to Hart (1997: xii), the ‘150,000 members wanted workers’ self-management in the factories, land for the peasants, and a greatly reduced role for the government and foreign capitalists.’ They were not, according to Gonzales (2002: 146), interested in the ‘overthrow [of] the capitalist system’ and were supporters of Madero’s largely reformist regime (but see Richards, 2004: 26). Suppressed during the 1913–14 dictatorship of Huerta after he overthrew Madero, the Casa was then recruited, in a stroke of genius, by Obregón to the Constitutionalists’ side, a not uncontroversial decision (Gilly, 2005a: 199). This led to the creation of the fabled and highly successful (and over the years, in memory, ever more mythic) ‘Red Battalions.’ These battalions were a collection of ‘carpenters, bricklayers, stonecutters, tailors, typesetters, etc.’ who opposed Zapata and Villa as ‘forces of reaction’ (McLynn, 2001: 344) with notable success. In part inspired by their successes, and with their allies the Constitutionalists ever more powerful, the Casa began to push their positions more forcefully, unionizing where they went and striking almost everywhere they could. But the Constitutionalists began to push back, dissolving the Red Battalions and conscripting the railway workers, who were then under military discipline, Casa offices were shut down and the pressure on labor stepped up with a mix of promises and threats of reprisal eerily reminiscent of the Porfirato’s pan o palo (bread or the stick) approach to their enemies. In spring 1916 a strike against the government seemed to win important concessions; unmet promises resulted in a second general strike in the summer of 1916. At this point the government turned brutally on its erstwhile allies, declaring martial law, pronouncing them traitors and invoking the threat of the death penalty for strikers. The strike collapsed and with it the Casa.

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From one perspective, labor had made a deal with the Devil, aligning themselves not with the progressive agrarian forces of Zapata in the south or Villa’s radical agrarian and rural workers in the north but, as Dunn (1989: 50) notes, with the moderate Constitutionalist forces (and remnants of the Porfiriato). In the end it proved to be ‘a bizarre alliance for the revolutionary proletariat’ (Dunn, 1989: 68) and the relatively small labor movement discovered it was superfluous and easily shunted aside. Although better remembered than the anarchist Republic in the Baja, this episode within the whirlwind of the Mexican Revolution is largely forgotten. In discussions and descriptions of Mexican labor’s support for the students in 1968 or the relations between the current Zapatistas and labor, it is hard to find any indication of the legacy of the Casa del Obreros Mundial. In 2000, at the Museum of the Revolution in Chihuahua, Mexico, a museum worker was anxious to make clear the multi-class make-up of those who rode and fought with Villa and the División del Norte (Division of the North). Workers, he said, were key, they were organized, they had watches, and they worked hard. They were not, he added, like the workers in Mexico City, who had thrown in their lot with the government and did not know their own minds.16 So, perhaps, for some, the workers are more lost then forgotten.

Socialist rebels in rural Oklahoma: the 1917 Green Corn Rebellion17 The United States is rarely associated with socialism. There were a smattering of utopians in the nineteenth century, mostly in rural areas seeking to create model societies, and later immigrants, primarily German, brought over what were essentially social-democratic ideas rooted in European socialist ideals. By the turn of the century most of the country’s socialists were unified in the Socialist Party of America, a broad-based, multi-ethnic, multi-class group of urban workers, many of them immigrants, who tended to be rural workers, populist farmers, social reformers, and shopkeepers. At the start of the twentieth century there was significant if often localized support and a number of socialists were elected as mayors, to state legislatures, as state officers, and a pro-socialist governor was elected in North Dakota. The Socialist Party candidate for president, Eugene Debs, received over 900,000 votes in the 1912 and 1920 elections. The United States’ Great Plains

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was a particularly fertile ground at this time and, as Burbank (1976) frames it, ‘farmers voted red.’ While not commonly connected with radical or even progressive politics, the southern plains state of Oklahoma was a hardscrabble place receptive to the Socialist Party and affiliated organizations and proved to be one of the most socialist states in the country; in the 1912 presidential election it recorded the highest percentage of votes for the Socialist candidate and ‘had the highest per-capita party membership in America’ (Lipset and Marks, 2001: 135). By building on ‘three of the most radical documents of all time: the Communist Manifesto, the Declaration of Independence, and the Sermon on the Mount’ (Bissett, 1999: 196), Oklahoma socialists made themselves seem part of the community. In the 1914 elections the Socialist Party candidate for governor received over 20 percent of the vote and ‘more than 175 socialists were elected to local and county offices that year, including six to the state legislature’ (Bissett, 1999: 126). With an agrarian-based perspective which read those who worked the land as the working class (Bissett, 1999: 5), and invoking the imagery and language of Christianity (Bissett, 1999: 91) to spread their message, the socialists created a strong base; thousands would gather in late summer after the harvest was over at ‘socialist encampments’ for music, entertainment, and education (Bissett, 1999: 121–2). Everything seemed to be headed in the right direction. And then the United States entered World War I. It was one thing in Oklahoma in the second decade of the twentieth century to call for blacks to be able exercise their right to vote and for women to have the right to vote at all, and it was considered legitimate to criticize agricultural policies and prices and even to work closely with organized labor (Sellars, 1998);18 but it was quite another matter to condemn US involvement in the war and oppose the draft. The Green Corn Rebellion was a multi-ethnic (‘blacks and poor whites and Seminole Indians’; Dunbar-Ortiz, 1997: 14), multi-class, disorganized and somewhat chaotic August 1917 uprising along the banks of the South Canadian river in Hughes County, Oklahoma. The aim seems to have been to protest United States’ entry into the European war and the institution of the draft; maybe it was more. According to Dunbar-Ortiz (1997: 16), the protestors decided to liberate their neck of the woods, march on Washington DC, ‘overthrow President Wilson (Burbank, 1976: 134), stop the war, and reform the domestic economy

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to “restore to the working classes the full product of their labor”.’ They burned bridges, cut telegraph wires, and planned to confiscate property. They were armed (apparently with pistols and small-caliber rifles) and agreed to use force and Dunbar-Ortiz (1997: 16) claims they ‘poisoned food and well water.’ There were also ‘Muskogee Indians’ involved and additional actions were taken: They divided themselves into details, some to recruit all who had not yet joined the rebellion, others to burn barns, another to blow up the Texaco pipeline, several groups to destroy railroad bridges and cut telephone and telegraph wires, and others to tear down fences and free farm animals to trample cotton fields. After a long summer day of destruction the 500 or so rebels congregated in their new liberated zone to feast, celebrate and rest. (Dunbar-Ortiz, 1997: 17)

They were supported by the more radical wing of the Oklahoma Socialist Party and some fellow travelers from the Arkansas-based quasi-socialist Working Class Union. The reaction from their friends and neighbors was swift and fierce. An armed force quickly assembled, several skirmishes took place, and the rebels scattered (Burbank, 1976: 135). Seven died, several hundred were arrested, and seventy-five went to jail. While there is some information on this intriguing event, it was long ago written out of United States’ and even Oklahoma history. Much of what we know now is from newspaper accounts in local papers, from a few articles written for socialist magazines at the time, and from memories like those shared with Dunbar-Ortiz (1997) by her father or recounted in Cunningham and Friesen (1999). Yet the information is out there and it is possible to find people who know tales of what seems impossible – socialists in one of the most conservative states in the United States planning to ‘liberate’ the area where they live, with fanciful notions of taking over the government and transforming the country, even, according to at least one version, being back in time to plant. This is a story forgotten and lost, but one well worth recuperating if only to remind ourselves of the hopes and desires that lurk deep.

Trying to herd cats: a few more evanescent instances The possibilities are clearly endless and attempting to compile them woud be something of a fool’s game. But in an effort to create a sense

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of the breadth and depth of the possibilities, a few more merit mention, grouped here more or less geographically. In some of these cases there is more to be discovered; others seemingly little: a name, a place, a moment imbued with meaning for someone, somewhere. In Latin America and the Caribbean, among the many, there were the Marxist Prestes Column in Brazil 1924–27, Sandino’s nationalist rebellion in Nicaragua 1926–34, and Farabundo Martí’s Marxist revolutionary vision in El Salvador in 1932, which produced the threeday worker–peasant soviet in Tacuba (Paige, 1997: 118). There were Wobblies active in Chile and elsewhere in the early 1920s. La violencia in Colombia began in 1948, but its fraught legacy, tattered and torn with decidedly mixed perceptions, remains alive and active today. Ecuador had a 1944 ‘Glorious May Revolution.’ Curaçao’s 1969 uprising led by the Frente Obrero y Liberacion (Anderson and Dynes, 1975) is obscure, though better known than the 1980 People’s Republic of Greenwich Town in Jamaica, barely even a footnote in that country (Gray, 2004). What is happening in twenty-first-century Venezuela is unclear – is it indeed a Bolivarian Revolution? Meanwhile Gilly (2005b) discerns the first revolution of the new century in Bolivia. Europe is impossible; a few examples will have to suffice. There was the 1525 German Peasant Rebellion (identified by some as perhaps the first Marxist revolution19), and the nine-day Revolt of Masaniello in 1647 Spanish Naples. There were Cossack rebellions in 1670–71 (Razin’s Revolt) and 1707–08 (the Bulavin Rebellion) which demanded a better life for peasants and less government control. In 1910 Portugal had a little-known revolution and almost sixty-five years later the 1974 Carnation Revolution led to independence for Portuguese Africa. There was a meaningful revolutionary moment in Berlin 1918, 20 short-lived soviets in Munich and Hungary in 1919, and in Hamburg in 1923. There were the twenty years of ‘Red Vienna’ between the World Wars (1918–38) and the 1917 Finnish Revolution (Alapuro, 1998). In Spain there is the Asturias miners’ uprising in 1934 and the 1936–39 radicalization in Madrid, ‘Red Barcelona,’ and Andalucía. France’s 1954 defeat at Dien Bien Phu – regarded by most as Vietnam’s victory – and departure from Southeast Asia undermined the country’s imperial position around the world, not least in North Africa; within six months the Algerian War was engaged and within two years Morocco and Tunisia were independent. Hungary in 1956 and the 1968 ‘Prague Spring’ were a

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powerful presence in Eastern Europe’s 1989 revolutions and remain in people’s memory across the continent. The Basque people of northern Spain and southern France are still fighting for self-determination. In the United States there were numerous small wars in the American Revolution, but they are now all melded into one; the innumerable slave revolts mentioned in the previous chapter; the struggles of the indigenous people which were not, and John Brown’s 1855–59 guerrilla-based Constitution for a Free Republic. There were the latenineteenth-century Haymarket martyrs and indigenous ghost dancers. The early part of the twentieth century saw the massacres of workers trying to organize, as well as religious and political movements or experiments such as the socialist Llano del Rio community in California (1914–18) and Louisiana (1918–38). In Los Angeles during World War II there were the so-called Zoot Suit riots between enlisted men and Mexican–American youth. At this time Japanese Americans were being incarcerated in ‘detention camps.’ The year 1970 saw the shooting of unarmed students at Jackson State and Kent State University and Berkeley’s two, three, many ‘People’s Park Riots’ following ‘Bloody Thursday,’ 15 May 1969. New York’s 1969 Stonewall Riots belong here too, as does Seattle’s 1999 anti-World Trade Organization (WTO) mobilization; four more anti-WTO mobilizations have followed in Doha 2001, Cancún 2003, and Hong Kong 2005. April 2001 witnessed massive protests against the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) agreement in Quebec City, Canada. In Asia there was Kasan Mukmin’s 1904 uprising in East Java to oust ‘Europeans.’ Korea’s March 1919 First Independence Movement influenced China’s May Fourth Movement, as well as Gandhi in India, and featured Yu Gwansun, known as Korea’s Joan of Arc. In 1927 there were significant events in Guangzhou (home of the Canton), the ‘Three-Day Soviet’ (‘the Paris Commune of the East’) and in Hunan the Autumn Harvest Uprising. The 1930 Phu Rieng Do labor uprising in Vietnam was a major victory for the newly organizing communist forces. The 1859 Upper Cloth Revolt in parts of India was an early women’s movement. South Asia saw the 1946–51 Telangana movement, a communist-led peasant revolt, in the princely state of Hyderabad (Welch, 1980), and the Naxalbari subdivision of the Darjeeling district of West Bengal in 1967, an insurgency still influential today. In 1920–21 there was in Persia the little known and short-lived

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Soviet Republic of Gilan (sometimes referred to as the Persian Socialist Soviet Republic). The 1971 ‘Siakal Incident’ in Iran is hardly known but may have played a role in that country’s 1979 revolution. Burma’s 8888 Uprising sought democracy in 1988 and was met with bullets. The late-twentieth-century resistance of India’s Baliapal Movement has proved an enduring model. In the Arab world and Africa there are instances such as the Kaocen Revolt of the Tuareg people in northern Niger against the French in 1916–17. The 1962–75 Dhofar Rebellion forced Oman to modernize and only ended with the intervention of Iranian troops. The 1972 Battle of Mirbat involved British and Yemeni forces. The 1962 Yemen Socialist Revolution became a key moment for Arab anti-imperialism and Nasserism; there followed civil war in North Yemen 1962–70. The 1967–70 Nigerian Civil War almost resulted in the creation of a new country, Biafra. Despite their great local influence, the 1964 Zanzibar Revolution and Burkina Faso’s 1983 revolution have received little attention. The revolutionary possibilities in Ghana 1979 remain largely unexplored. The struggle in Western Sahara of the Sahrawibased Polisario (‘Popular Front for the Liberation of Saguia el-Hamra and Río de Oro’) has been going on in one form or another for over a generation. There have been dozens of ‘Bloody Sundays’ around the globe. They include: London, 13 November 1887, a demonstration against coercion in Ireland; 22 January 1905 in St Petersburg, Russia, when unarmed, peaceful demonstrators marching to present a petition to Tsar Nicholas II were gunned down by the Imperial Guard; the Everett Massacre, an armed confrontation between local authorities and members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, the Wobblies) in Everett, Washington, on 5 November 1916; on 21 November 1920 in Dublin, during the Irish War of Independence; on 7 March 1965, 600 civil rights marchers were attacked by state and local police with billy clubs and tear gas outside Selma, Alabama; in Derry, Northern Ireland, on 30 January 1972, 27 civil rights protesters were shot. All of these instances and millions more are part of our shared heritage, part of the struggle people have engaged in to change their world and ours; part of the story of Lost and Forgotten Revolutions. Remember that these struggles are rarely lost or forgotten to those who lived them or who learn about them or seek to keep them alive. While

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many are absent from history books and from national or regional celebrations, that does not mean they are not in our memories, as myths waiting to be activated and perhaps acted upon. So how do these more obscure moments stay alive?

Vectors of revolution: a brief aside21 One other matter merits brief mention here. Connections between and among lost and forgotten episodes (and the larger process of which they may be part) are not simply borne on the breeze. Whether they are hierarchical or lateral, direct or indirect, active agitators or passive communicators, there are people who walk the walk and talk the talk, though sometimes more one than the other. Many are local or national figures, largely unknown but important; Fedon at the end of the eighteenth century in Grenada or the Magón brothers in Mexico come to mind, as do Mustafa Kamil and Muhammad Farid of Egypt’s 1919 uprising. Some became regional or even international figures, as with Cape Verde’s Amilcar Cabral or Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh in the 1970s. There is a cast of thousands over the centuries who, consciously or not, have brought the word of resistance, rebellion, and revolution. Some of these people are those whom Hobsbawm (1988: 12) describes, invoking anti-fascist German playwright Bertholt Brecht, as changing ‘countries more often than their shoes.’22 The modern avatar here is Che Guevara, the Argentine doctor who participated in Guatemala’s democratic experiment, worked with radical social democrats and nascent Marxists in Mexico where he connected with exiled Cubans, helped lead the Cuban Revolution, moved on to the Congo, and finally decamped to Bolivia where he died, in part through the machinations of those in the United States and the Soviet Union who felt his wandering ways and efforts to sow revolution must end. Upon leaving Cuba in 1965, this peripatetic figure wrote to his parents, invoking Don Quixote’s noble quest for places to right wrongs, that ‘once again I feel beneath my heels Rosinante’s ribs’ (1967b: 142). 23 Even more fascinating, as we have seen, is how many places Che seems to have visited after his death. Of course his omnipresence today renders him almost commonplace. Thomas Paine was a Briton who strove to bring revolution to both America and France, and envisioned a global ‘Republic of Man’ liberty

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and democracy extended across the globe. His clarion call – declaring ‘we have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation similar to the present hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand’ (2000: 44) – resonated ‘in towns as different as Dublin and Dubrovnik, Philadelphia and Warsaw, Berlin and Santo Domingo’ (Keane, 1995: x). Paine is still invoked by radicals in Latin America and Asia (Dyck, 1993: 117); most recently by the President of the United States in his inaugural address (Obama, 2009). In the 1830s and 1840s the Franco-Peruvian Flora Tristan fought for socialism, feminism, improved social conditions, and connecting women’s rights with workers’ rights in Peru, France, and Great Britain. Nimtz (2002) suggests that Marx and Engels are in fact the ‘prototypical transnational actors,’ not because of their travels, but because of their effort at worldwide communication and consolidation. The Italian Giuseppe Garibaldi is often referred to as the Che Guevara of the nineteenth century (but see Sinclair, 1998: 113; or Riall, 2007: 8, both of whom turn this around). 24 Garibaldi fought for Uruguayan and Italian liberalism before turning his energies to the Socialist International; for thirty years Garibaldi was involved in every fight that mattered in what would, thanks in part to him, become modern Italy. He was world renowned and passionately committed to justice and to struggle. Once upon a time, for a moment (roughly 1919–39), there really was an actual international communist conspiracy to take over the world, just as many in ‘the West’ feared. The Comintern’s agents were people such as the ubiquitous Indian Marxist M.N. Roy, who led a Marxist rebellion in India, helped found Communist parties in Mexico and India, and played significant roles in places as diverse as Germany, the Middle East, Russia, Indonesia, and China. The German radical Olga Benärio (Prestes) made her presence felt in Germany, Russia, France, Greta Britain, the United States, and Brazil; her first husband Otto Braun (another German Marxist) was active throughout Europe but most famous (as Li De) for his role in the Chinese Revolution. 25 These, of course, are only some of those we know about; far more often it is the people we are not even aware of who spread the news. For example, Linstroth (2000) details how Basques fought in Central America, trained in Cuba and North Africa, and were conversant with the struggles of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, Colombia’s

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Marxist revolutionaries, and the Zapatistas in Mexico, helping to bring stories to three continents, to four or more regions, and to untold numbers of people. Revolutionaries from around the globe have shared their stories in every corner of the world.

Lost and forgotten but only a memory away26 The Story of the Lost and Forgotten Revolutions presented here is not uncomplicated. Many might quibble with the instances listed. The cases we know about, even those just at the edge of our consciousness, are part of our collective memory, lurking just beneath the surface, waiting to be reanimated from the ‘rich trove of stories all … [revolutionaries] hold dear’ (Anderson, 1992: xii). ‘Revolutions,’ Zapata said, ‘will come and revolutions will go but I will continue with mine’ (Womack, 1970: 197–8). Zapata’s revolution hardly ended up either lost or forgotten, but his statement resonates. While the great revolutions, the big rebellions, the large acts of resistance garner the attention, it may well be that at the end of the day it is the smaller, more local, even everyday acts that matter. Do they matter the most? That is less clear. The United States’ Thomas Jefferson, who arguably knew something about revolutions, or at least about important political rebellions, held with regard to Shays’ Rebellion (1786–87) ‘that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical’ (195a5: 93). In another letter, Jefferson similarly opined that ‘God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion’; such events were necessary, in his view, so that ‘rulers are … warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance’ (1955b: 355). ‘Let them take arms,’ he continues a bit more darkly (though its allure for some romantic revolutionaries is evident), ‘the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is its natural manure.’ Much of the Story of Lost and Forgotten Revolutions concerns these revolutions, the ones Jefferson speaks of, and it is most certainly the blood of patriots and tyrants and many others that has been spilled. The type of resistance, rebellion, and revolution captured here may be short on the epic and grand and can even seem risible – Chile’s twelve-day socialist republic; socialist revolutionaries in Oklahoma; a ‘people’s township’ in Jamaica – but is no less real or meaningful for

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those involved, and at times has reappeared with surprising purpose – for example, the socialists elected to power in Chile in 1970 trace their origins to the socialist moment in 1932. This is a reminder as well that more than any of the other stories, this is where one finds testament to patience and an acceptance in the face of power, even as there is a willingness to test that power, with symbols, words, gestures, and sometimes even with silence. Along with the great stories of 1789 France, Russia 1917, or Cuba 1959, these are the stories that people around the world draw on, rewrite, and make their own, as they create a narrative of their own lives and struggles. Even if it does not reconstruct the past, (re)mediate the present, or produce the future, it is nevertheless their story of resistance, rebellion, and revolution.

nine Stories of resistance, rebellion, and revolution unfold

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n search of an authentic leftist hero of the Mexican Revolution, Taibo believes he has found him in the person of Sebastián San Vincente, a Spanish anarchist who tells him stories about ‘the Paris Commune … Red Barcelona and the May 1 Chicago Haymarket Martyrs’ (Taibo, 2000: 12).1 Later, having failed to find ‘any record of … [his] participation in the Asturias revolution in ’34’ (2000: 167), he wonders: The Wobblies in Chile. The Chinese revolution from 1925 onwards? Hong Kong, Canton, or Shanghai in 1927? Germany? Hamburg? Spain? Madrid, Barcelona or Andalucía? Africa? Some other palm trees? Argentina? I look through the 1925–28 collection of La Protesta in Valadés archive. It is like looking for a wild goose on a moving map. Imagination might supply the missing links between the Sebastián San Vincente deported from Mexico in July 1923 and Otto Braun’s (Li-the’s) Spanish friend on the Long March in China in 1934. A bit of fiction might link the man gazing at the Gulf of Mexico with Romero’s Spanish friend in the Huk rebellion in the Philippines. You might even say San Vincente was Sánchez, the Colombian, who helped Durruti to rob a bank in Buenos Aires. But the links cannot take the strain, they just crack up leaving a man standing on the wharf in Veracruz. (2000: 168).

This deft and sophisticated compendium (storytellers ‘authenticate themselves by the way they articulate collective memory’; Apter,

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2006: 7902) captures roughly seventy years of resistance, rebellion, and revolution in a neat and authoritative package. People choose to resist and rebel and people make revolutions. They do this in no small measure by making stories, stories that also make them people.3 It is a seamless web we pull apart at our risk; we are deeply embedded in our stories even as we are busy creating and using them. While stories can and do serve many functions, they are potentially always subversive and, in Okri’s estimation, ‘always a form of resistance’ (1996). Critical to how stories work ‘is memory, myth, and history, organized remembering and deliberate forgetting’ (Benjamin, 2000: 14), to which I would add, despite my discomfort with Brinton’s (1965) disease trope, we ‘live in a contagious world’ (Walt, 2000: 34). As a result, people know the story; they know the plot, though inevitably there are multiple voices, meanings, circumstances, and thus outcomes. Still, there is what Weinstein (2007: 28) describes as ‘remarkable convergence around a set of core beliefs about how insurgency should be organized, and these strategies … have diffused widely across territories and across groups with different motivations.’ So while the plot is surprisingly the same, and notions of how things should happen and when are powerful and persistent, it is also the case that ‘more everyday manifestations of social life highlight how new discourses can be grafted on to old political practices, while new practices can become imbued with old meanings’ (Rodgers, 2009: 86).4 Such a connection of ‘oppositional behaviors of the past with forms of resistance in the present, [creates] spaces of possibility where the future can be imagined differently’ (hooks, 1995: 151).5 Because revolutions have an ‘unfinished agenda,’ they remain relevant ‘whether they continue to occur or not,’ in no small measure due to ‘the need of people – individually and in mass collective movements – to dream’ (Halliday, 1999: 335, 338); ‘revolutions are like migrations to the future … [where] the promised lands exist … in the minds of those who believe in them’ (Nodia 2000: 164). This intentionally borrowed collection of analyses highlights the fundamental premisses of the project here. This book began with three somewhat idiosyncratic, not necessarily intuitive stories, made a brief detour to consider myth, memory, mimesis, and attendant concerns, and then worked through four stories that seek to capture the varied and sundry versions of resistance, rebellion, and revolution that people have created as they have sought

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to guide their efforts to transform fundamentally the material and ideological conditions of their everyday lives. The lessons (for want of a better word) of those stories can be summarized as follows. First, definitions do matter, and revolutions are not revolts. Second, other people are indeed other (Darnton, 1984: 4), whether in the past or present, and often think about things differently; to make sense of them, we will need to embrace that ‘strangeness.’6 Also ‘the truth,’ at least the putative Western, liberal bourgeois conception of such, may be less important than capturing the truth as people understand it on the ground, and mythological time is different from chronological time. Third, while stories are by definition local and particular, there are nonetheless stories, true or not, which are everywhere. Finally, while any given story may be fragile, stories are durable, being told and retold for generations. Together, these four stories offer a snapshot of a surprisingly complex tool. To study these stories it is helpful to have some heuristics. Here the proposal is that they might fruitfully be provided by the concepts of myth, memory, and mimesis, conscious that all of them are fraught and none of them is unproblematic. Myths offer a wealth of information about how people believe the world is, as well as how it should be; memory is a repository rife with ‘what really happened’ and when; mimesis is more than imitation – it may even been innovation, as people adopt and adapt what others have done to fix the exigencies of their lives. The contention here is that what these efforts have produced, through a process of bricolage, are stories of resistance, rebellion, and revolution which people have fashioned and which help explain why revolutions happen here and not there, now and not then, and among these people and not those. The right story in the right place at the right time – could it be any more contingent than this? – enables and ennobles revolutionary activity and increases the likelihood that revolutionary imaginations ripen into revolutionary sentiments which lay the base for revolutionary situations and hence the possibility for revolutionary outcomes. The Civilizing and Democratizing Story of Revolution is an essentially elite story of great power, both for what it promises and what it warns of: revolution is a fearsome thing, enter at your own risk, and expect the worst. This story tracks with the triumph of the Enlighten-

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ment and is most often used by those in power to provide their position with an imprimatur. The Social Revolutionary Story of Revolution is the best-known and easiest to capture, framed as rapid, dramatic, popular demands for fundamental societal transformation in which the old is swept away and the new embraced.7 It is epic, grand, glorious, and a (romanticized) failure. This impossible story is focused on timeless efforts at emancipation from various masters: enslavers, colonizers, imperialists. The Story of the Lost and Forgotten Revolutions seeks to capture flashes of everyday resistance, rebellion, and revolution, the innumerable ‘smaller,’ more obscure, stories of struggle. With these stories in mind, a consideration of how they are unfolded and why should help us understand not only why revolutions take place where and when they do and among whom, but how we might understand likely future events. While stories clearly serve many purposes, they are, at base, tools by which we build and organize to maintain and develop our lives into the future. Thus it seems reasonable to construe them as a form, perhaps even the primary form, of socio-political struggle. This entails understanding these stories in their context but also out of it; it also means recognizing that context denotes more than simply ‘situation.’ Stories are persistent, patient, and surprisingly durable; Arendt (1965: 220) contends that ‘Experiences and even the stories which grow out of what men do and endure, of happenings and events, sink back into the futility inherent in the living word and the living deed unless they are talked about again and again.’ Telling and retelling matters, beause it makes meaning and moves us.

One last story: an intervention of sorts This last story is about stories and their layers and levels. The modern Hasidim are a mystical Jewish movement founded in eighteenth-century Eastern Europe by Rebbe Baal Shem Tov, a man of whom it was said, as it is said of many others in other stories, he knew the great Name of God; that is, he knew and understood things most of us do not. He was also, as is to be found in stories large and small, a magician of sorts, in this case a master of practical kabbalism. And, in what might be thought of as a trifecta in traditional stories of saviors, he was a magus dedicated to his people, to protecting them and improving their lot. These Hasidim reacted against traditional Talmudic

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learning, maintaining that God’s presence constantly surrounded us all and that therefore one’s every word and deed must serve this ever attentive God. To do so faithfully would bring about good results, as the story elucidates. Once upon a time, the Baal Shem had a particularly difficult task, for grave misfortune was threatening the Jewish people. As when he had been confronted with dire situations before, he went to a certain part of a forest to meditate and pray; there he lit a fire of a particular kind, said a special prayer, and, as before, the miracle was done. A generation or more passed and the Rebbe’s disciple, the ‘Maggid’ of Mezritch, faced a similar task. In need of heaven’s intercession, he too went to the woods – he knew the place – but, as he confessed to God, he no longer knew how to light the ritual fire; still, he knew the prayer and he hoped that and his presence there would be sufficient, and it was. Another generation or so passed and yet again the task was at hand; the Jews were threatened once more, and Rebbe Moshe-Leib of Sassov knew what must be done. He in turn went to the woods – he knew the place in the forest – but this time he had to acknowledge that not only did he no longer know how to build and light the fire but that he didn’t know the prayer. But he knew the place and he trusted this would be enough, and it was. More time passed, at least another generation, and once again misfortune arose for the Jews. And Rabbe Israel of Rizhin, as heir to these others, was called upon. He knew what must be done and yet did not know how to do it. Sitting in his house, his head in his hands, he spoke mournfully to God: ‘I am unable to light the fire and I do not know the prayer; I cannot even find the place in the forest. All I can do is tell the story; and this must be sufficient, it must be enough for you to intercede and save your people.’ And it was. The story was enough.

‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live’ The relationship between the story, the storyteller, and the listener or the consumer – albeit not a passive one; Polletta (2006: 10) notes that ‘stories require our interpretative participation’ – of the story, who will in some form or another put it to use, is a complex one, but it need not feel like one has fallen down the rabbit hole with Alice. Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987: 10–11) notion of the ‘wasp-orchid’ is useful, meant to

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capture the ‘melding of personal boundaries between a wasp and orchid in the pollination process … as a metaphor for the relationship between a book and a reader, the former of which cannot find realization except insofar as it is read, and the latter of which cannot be self-actualized as a reader except insofar as there is a book to be read. They thus form the symbiotic entity of “book-reader,” the territory between which is temporarily fused in the process of reading’ (Cordes Selbin, 2009: 35). Stories are not always orderly accounts8 – that is the role I have ascribed here to narratives – and they can be ‘difficult’ (Niemi and Ellis, 2001), but stories tell us who we are (and hence who we were) and are not, how to be and what we should do to get where we want to go. They keep us alive. As Didion (1979) suggests, ‘we tell ourselves stories in order to live.’ We infuse stories with life and in return the stories provide us with understanding and vision about the past, the present, and the future; they are essential. Stories are what we are – they are delightful and they are dangerous – and once you have heard the story, once you know, you know, and you are thus more dangerous, to yourself and others, whether as an agent or a witness (which is a type of agency as well). Nor should silence be read as forgetting; forbidden counter-stories exist, undercurrents of the official history, a popular counterweight to official stories and neat narratives. These may portray heroic armies and noble elites resisting bloodthirsty hordes, but people know better – they know who has the weapons, who has the power. And they know what happened, or least have their story, their knowledge, of ‘what really happened.’ Story is a broad category (Smith, 2003: 44) but a powerfully useful one. Stories weave in and out of discourses written, oral, and seen, and come to be influenced, inevitably, by popular culture in its many and varied manifestations. This relationship is a fraught and complex one, since stories are clearly part of the very cultures they help to create. Once subsumed (even as they subsume popular culture), they may come to seem as little more than attendant aspects of popular culture, in the modernist and post-modern ages little more than material to be manipulated at will. While this may be the case, there is more. Stories unite people into a shared society in which certain symbols, themes, and characters provide recognition and knowledge. Symbolic politics, collective memory, and the social context of politics are central to understanding and exploring revolutionary processes,

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and stories provide us with access, and not just to the local and specific. Revolution is deeply local and profoundly global. Revolution has long been global; while two hundred years or so is the common consensus (1789), the stories above and more recent studies of revolution in general suggest far longer. There is little to be gained by setting local in opposition to global or transnational as opposed to national. Local, regional, and national forms of contention have long been a centerpiece in every society, and the most familiar types of collective action – social movements, civil disobedience, demonstrations – have often attracted attention beyond their immediate locale. If the media or information age has made this particularly true, such internationalization of resistance, rebellion, and revolution is long and storied, spread by nomads, travelers, in letters, stories, songs, and other forms. It is possible to discern in these stories basic themes which make evident that while all instances of resistance, rebellion, and revolution are inherently local, they also reflect broader and deeper truths about what is possible. It is not surprising that such connections are readily discernible. Humans have long built infrastructures of various kinds, canals, roads, and buildings, for example. More recently, we have come to recognize that systems designed to provide information or justice or health are infrastructures as well, shaped in many cases by the local and specific even as they are informed by the transnational. Such infrastructures enable our lives on a daily basis – when they are maintained, sustained, and functioning.9 In much the same manner, humanity has created a story-structure, a repository of stories, which undergirds and shapes our daily lives. We recompose stories and reconfigure them in an effort to connect with each other and to build community – or the opposite. The point here has not been to privilege stories to the exclusion of other sources, nor to suggest that it is only stories that compel people to act. The endeavor is not to turn stories into seemingly distant and somewhat abstract things such as economic, political or social forces or processes at some macro- or meta-level.10 The purpose is not to suggest that we dispense with systematic and rigorous intellectual analyses of identifiable and measurable variables and simply substitute stories in their place, though hopefully this exercise shows that stories themselves may be productively incorporated and even relied on as heuristics and rigorously and systematically analyzed. The number of variables that one might reasonably consider in assessing the fundamental question

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that this entire project flows from – why revolutions happen here and not there, now and not then, among these people and not those – is simply overwhelming: oppression, hunger, emotions, demographic pressure or economic crisis are but some of the more obvious. There have been a wide range of laudable efforts – the study of revolutions is rich – but far too few of these analyses, mediated as they often are by establishment or intellectual discourse, consider the extent to which the articulation of compelling stories may provide the key. Recognizing the power and importance of stories and the information they may provide should not diminish our ability to report our findings in the quasi-objective, analytical terminology that defines social science today. Stories offer us another tool of the trade which can be turned to building a better understanding of who we are, what we are up to, and where we might be going. The key to answering questions about revolutions lies with a focus on both people and structures, and it remains the case that far more attention needs to be paid to people and their conscious efforts to make revolutions (while in no way denying the profusion of unintended consequences). How, why, and where they do so are the question; important answers have to do with the stories that people tell, using myth, memory, and mimesis. There are stories of the past that are held in common, or that are at least recognizable enough to resonate. Often these resemble richly woven tapestries of myth and what we describe as ‘fact,’ which might reasonably be construed as those myths that have been officially sanctioned, are demonstratively and even intensely mimetic, and draw on a reservoir of memories that themselves may be real or imagined but in either case are created, purposively, by us for our use.

Resistance, rebellion, and revolution: people make their own history Regardless of scale and situation, what binds people together is stories. More than simply connecting us, stories, as History or history, as narrative, or as story, are the vehicle by which we provide an account of the past to ourselves and each other. Any such stories about the past are unavoidably in the service of the present and to a vision of the future. And their meaning is dependent on, made real by, their collective nature, by our memories, which are refracted creations of

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conscious choices of what is to be included or omitted. Creation of these stories is as essential as it is inevitable. All the stories look to the past to some extent, whether the story told is of recent vintage (the post-Enlightenment stories of Civilizing and Democratizing Revolution or Social Revolution), situated as part of some more ancient tale (the Freedom and Liberation Story of Revolution), or even the timeless saga (Revolutions of the Lost and Forgotten) that reaches far back. At the same time, all of these stories look as far into the future as we can imagine, even if sometimes there is an eye firmly fixed on the past. Stories are constantly made and added to the repository – Eastern Europe’s 1989 ‘color revolutions,’ the anti-WTO movement, ‘negotiated revolutions’ in Nepal or Timor-Leste, perhaps even ballot-box revolutions in Venezuela or Bolivia (each different from the other), or revolutions that seek to change the world without taking power (Holloway, 2002)11 – and of course there are all the stories yet to be made. Some care needs to be exercised. The endless extension of revolutionary possibilities running in every direction has little utility. For instance, what is the point in searching for new variations of France 1789 or even Czechoslovakia 1989? With all due respect to China’s Zhou Enlai, perhaps it is not so much too early as past time to tell.12 At a different level, it is plain that every case of dumpster diving or nomadic living – ‘lifestyle anarchy’ – may not usefully be understood as resistance, rebellion, or revolution, though of course any instances may contain elements of any of the three. On the other hand, if we are willing to consider a deliberately homeless person living off the grid scavenging stale pizza, or (perhaps more rewardingly) a protester throwing a brick through a plate-glass window at the Bank of America building on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley on a sunny day in 1969 (or 1970) as part of a ‘moment of madness’ when authority seems unclear (Zolberg, 1972) as one end of the continuum, and France 1789, Russia 1917, or whatever major social upheaval comes next as the other, then there is obviously a world of possibilities to study. The best of our social science methods have, at this point, failed to be much more than satisficing, a delightful portmanteau word with a rather disappointing meaning: adequate.13 Despite some exceptional work, we still have few compelling answers to the questions commonly posed about revolutions, regarding their provenance, production, and process. ‘Objective’ (and for many, reassuring) methods of social

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science analysis have not to date provided analysis sensitive enough to fully explore and explicate the puzzle of revolutions. They seem particularly ill-equipped (in some cases, actively hostile) to capturing the look in someone’s eyes, the tone in their voice, the passion with which, for them, Zapata’s white horse; Che’s beret; Sandino’s hat; Ho’s pith helmet, bamboo walking stick, and wispy beard; or Cabral’s knit cap – are redolent with meaning and freighted with significance, their invocation and deployment consequential. Symbols such as these, imbued with meaning, the talismans they invoke, the references they weave, offer us the opportunity to understand how and why. It is possible to access the stories people tell about resistance, rebellion, and revolution and through them decode or at least make ‘scriptable’14 a set of revolutionary matters that are most commonly couched in national terms and make them as legible as they can be to outsiders. This is not, nor can it be, an ‘objective’ enterprise; for no endeavor is genuinely free of bias.15 Cognizant that every one of us starts from somewhere, the commitment must be to rigorous, radically open fairness in our efforts at investigation and explanation. To this end, the endeavor in this book has been to tell a story about stories of resistance, rebellion, and revolution, the tales that are told and retold, the songs that are sung or played, or the places that are portrayed, quietly, confidently, with commitment and conviction. Sometimes there is passion or a quality harder to describe but which you have undoubtedly experienced when you have talked with someone who has been involved in acts of resistance, rebellion, or revolution – an expression on someone’s face, a swell or catch in their voice, a shift in posture, a gesture with head or hands, perhaps a lapse into silence or reverie, or may be frustration at trying to convey to an interloper something so profound. How does one articulate to a stranger, an acquaintance, even a friend or loved one, a matter at once so complex and so simple? Often simply by asking, repeatedly, if their tale makes any sense, if you understand, if it is clear even as they (and you) know it never really will or can be. Stories rooted in cultures, genealogies,16 and veritable webs of resistance, rebellion, and revolution serve to create and extend commitment, deepen collective identity, and empower those who heed the call. These same stories also provide powerful critiques of the way things are and have been, as well as normative or programmatic guides to action.

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Revolutions, rebellion, and acts of resistance do not occur without the articulation of compelling stories that enable and empower people who seek to change the material and ideological conditions of their lives. People draw on the past to explain the present and predict the future, forecast a future predicated on the present, and refashion the past as necessary to fit the exigencies they face.17 The result is an array of stories which compete to become the story of the moment, a process whereby people rely on a combination of myth, memory, and mimesis, to tell a powerful story of who they are, where they want to go, and how they will get there. There is an immense body of stories tht people around the world draw on, rewrite, and make their own. In that process, inevitably, they prune, they edit, they discard things that do not fit cleanly or neatly even as they insert complexity when that is necessary. From 1958 to 1963 there was a television show in the United States, Naked City, at the end of which the narrator would intone: ‘There are eight million stories in the Naked City; this has been one of them.’ Multiply this by a factor of a thousand or so and the enormity of trying to capture them becomes evident; so too do the boundless possibilities. In the early years of the twenty-first century, the model provided by revolutions in France, Mexico, Russia, China, Cuba, Nicaragua, or Iran may no longer serve us well. It is possible that they have never really served us as well as we thought, drawing attention away, perhaps, from the more prosaic processes that make up the lived experience of most people in the name of resistance, rebellion, and revolution. As people continue to seek to resist and refresh their lives, as they seem to have done since time immemorial, there is every reason to think that we will continue to find utility in the basic stories outlined here, even as we encounter them in new forms, as people struggle to defend and improve their lives in accordance with their visions and aspirations. Until those dreams and desires are met, regardless of how we define them, resistance, rebellion, and revolution will persist. And so they lived happily ever after. The end. No, wait. As they often ask in old tales, What do you think happened next? As a preternaturally perspicacious two-year old used to say when posed a question: ‘You tell me.’18

Notes

Chapter 1 1. A slightly different formulation of this opens Selbin, 1997a: 99–106. 2. This authoritative, dense, problematic work was published in 1860 as Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien: Ein Versuch. This passage was retranslated by Marion Kilsheimer Selbin (2003), who suggests ‘one of those nowhere and nevertheless everywhere true.’ She further suggests that ‘murder’ is a more accurate translation of umbringen than ‘kill,’ which might make their intentions and (self-)consciousness even clearer. 3. A sobering indictment precedes this: ‘History classes were like visits to the waxworks or the Region of the Dead. The past was lifeless, hollow, dumb. They taught us about the past so that we should resign ourselves with drained consciences to the present: not to make history, which was already made, but to accept it’ (Galeano, 1985: xv). 4. The allusion here is to hic sunt dracones (here be dragons), which ‘everyone’ ‘knows’ appeared on the edges of early maps of the world. Actually, only the ‘Lenox Globe’ (c. 1505) had such an indication, perched on the edge of Asia. 5. Parker expands upon his evocative phrase in an endnote: ‘By which I refer to a totality of symbolic resources available to a society to represent a real world, the entities within it and their mutual relationships’ (2003: 55 n6). 6. Interesting perspectives on resistance can be found in Scott, 1985, 1990; Virno, 1996; Groves and Chang, 1999; Turiel, 2003; McFarland, 2004; Martin, 1992; Higgins, 2000; Eckstein, 2001; Langley, 2004; and Zibechi, 2005. 7. Hollander and Einwohner (2004: 539–44) also explore two key variables, recognition and intention, and propose a deft typology of resistance categorized as overt, covert, unwitting, target defined, externally defined, missed, and attempted (2004: 544–7).

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8. Kampwirth (2002: 11 n14) cites Foran (1997a: 203–6; 1997b: 227–67; 1993a: 1–17; 1992: 3–27) and Wickham-Crowley (1992: 246) on ‘political cultures of opposition,’ and Selbin (1997: 123–33; 1999) on ‘the relationship between culture and agency in revolutionary politics.’ 9. Interesting takes on rebellion can be found in Walton, 1984; Masters, 2004; Saxton, 2005; Dunér, 2005; Harvey, 1998; Weede and Muller, 1998; Cleary, 2000; Krauze 2001; Cannon, 2004; Armony and Armony, 2005; Schatzman, 2005. 10. Persuasive evidence for this can be found in, inter alia, Wolf, 1969. 11. The succinct summation is that of Jamaican singer Delroy Wilson (1971). His anthemic single was adopted by Michael Manley’s social democratic and arguably revolutionary, People’s National Party. On the revolutionary nature of Jamaica, see the brief discussion in Chapter 4 n1 and Foran (2005: 169); applying ‘revolution’ to Guatemala 1944–54, Chile 1970–73, and Jamaica 1972–80 remains contested. 12. The paradigmatic statement of the ‘third generation’ is Skocpol, 1979; Goldstone 1991, a crucial refinement; and Goodwin 2001, an excellent coda. Goldstone (2001) and Foran (2005) are the most obvious candidates for the paradigmatic statement of the ‘fourth generation,’ but see the latter’s somewhat curious embrace of Skocpol’s definition ‘in full as my own’ (Foran, 2005: 7). The ‘generations’ of theories of revolution is from Goldstone, 1980; the possible ‘fourth generation’ was first posited in Foran 1993a. 13. Here I am guided in part by Parker’s (1999) use of the term ‘narrative.’ Recent post-modern work enshrines narrative in a particular – and helpful – light, but I will, as developed in Chapter 2, distinguish narrative from story to some extent, though the overlap is considerable and too much separation unhelpful. 14. This is not to ignore the myriad (tantalizing) possibilities discernible in Mexico 1910–20 and perhaps again in 1934–40. 15. Though since World War II fascism has commonly been associated with Germany’s Nazis, the early Italian fascists represent a different perspective, which even so lent itself to both Nazi excesses and quasi-monarchist and right-Catholic renderings of neo-fascists such as Franco in Spain, Salazar in Portugal, Peron in Argentina, and Vargas in Brazil. 16. Higonnet (1998: 13) argues that they are ‘more cultural than social or economic in their origins and unfolding, even if social and economic forms were both critical cause and effect of cultural belief ’ and invokes Furet (1999). 17. Much of this section draws heavily on Selbin, 1997b: 88–92. 18. As I have suggested elsewhere (Selbin, 2000: 292; 2003: 89), these multiple Marcoses undoubtedly create neuroses; how do you counter, much less combat, such elusiveness? 19. These stories, Doniger argues, ‘survive for centuries, in a succession of incarnations, both because they are available and because they are intrinsically charismatic’ (2000: 26). 20. For even if it were ‘one,’ that one, inevitably, reflects many; each of us a compendium. See also the discussion in Chapter 2 below on bricolage and bricoleurs.

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21. The ‘book-reader’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 10–11) will form their understanding. 22. An excellent example can be seen in McAdam et al.’s (2001) contentious politics program. In an earlier iteration, they lament that the study of ‘wars, revolutions, rebellions, (most) social movements, industrial conflict, feuds, riots, banditry, shaming ceremonies, and many more forms of collective struggle’ they deem contentious politics ‘has not proceeded as a unified field’ (McAdam et al., 1997: 143).

Chapter 2 1. The finest statement of ‘possibilism’ is Darnton, 1990; see also Selbin, 2009b. 2. Somers’s ‘reframed narrativity’ has four features: ‘(1) relationality of parts; (2) causal emplotment; (3) selective appropriation; and (4) temporality, sequence, and place’ (1992: 601). 3. Roseberry (1989: 27) argues that we must ‘ask who is telling the tales and in what context … [for] while the tales are traditional, they are not timeless; that is, the form and the content of the tales may change in the telling’ (emphases in original; he cites Taylor and Rebel, 1981). Appiah posits that ‘stories are meant to be improvised and embellished, reflecting the point in history when they are told and the consciousness of the storyteller’ (Lee, 2003: 6). 4. The concept of stories as ‘a reservoir of values’ is from Okri (1996: 21), though he understands them as a ‘secret reservoir.’ 5. In Okri’s (1996: 17) estimation, ‘the greatest stories are those that resonate our beginnings and intuit our endings (our mysterious origins and our numerous destinies), and dissolve them into one.’ 6. Also known as One Thousand and One Nights, this classic of world literature is built around the efforts of Sheherazade to keep her husband the king from killing her by entertaining him with stories night after night. The most famous of the stories today are those of Ali Baba, Sinbad, and Aladdin. Many of the stories are set in India, though their ‘origins’ are unknown and the versions most familiar today, thanks largely to Walt Disney’s writers and animators, are often framed as Muslim and Arabic or Persian. 7. Stories compiled, according to Appiah (2003: 46), ‘sometime before 500 ad for the edification of princes … said to have found their way into both Welsh and Chinese folk tales (in the former case by way of Arabic).’ 8. The Koran is structured somewhat differently from either of the other two ‘great books’ of the monotheist traditions and ‘does not offer a sustained narrative of the kind found in the Book of Exodus’ (Cook, 2000: 6). My thanks to Malin Wimelius for pointing this out. 9. A collection of one hundred witty and at times (for the time) rather licentious tales set in the rather more than a little sobering context of the Black Death. 10. Inspired by Boccaccio, this massive, unfinished epic poem concerns a group

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13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

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Revolution, rebellion, resistance of pilgrims journeying to the shrine of St. Thomas à Becket who pass the time telling stories which reflect a variety of medieval genres. Contrary to the traditional view that the Grimms collected their tales from peasant oral traditions, more recent analyses argue they garnered them from existing literary resources and rewrote them. See, for example, Zipes, 2000; and Bottigheimer, 1989. ‘Long before children heard Mother Goose rhymes or “Jack and the Beanstalk,” stories were told in Africa about wise lions, wily snakes, and how the world began. Story tellers passed along these tales orally, embodying ideas about ethics, human nature and the cultures from which they came. Unlike collections of European fairy tales, myths, and legends, which are worldwide, compilations of African folk tales have only recently received mainstream attention outside Africa’ (Lee, 2003: 1). This conception resonates with Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the ‘wasporchid,’ a metaphor for the ‘book-reader’ (1987: 10–11); see also Cordes Selbin, 2009: 32. This paragraph draws on discussions of pre-theory and of mid-range theories in, respectively, Rosenau, 1980: 126; and Merton, 1967: 39. An esteemed political theorist provided first-year political science graduate students with adroit thumbnail depictions of related disciplines. Having run through, in several senses, the social sciences, he proffered that ‘the most penetrating theoretical question historians ever ask is “and then what happened?”’ We were done with history. Our use of history as data and our dependence upon the narratives it provides are taken seriously albeit far too narrowly in Büthe, 2002. Stephen Jay Gould (1981: 21–2) cautioned that ‘socially embedded’ activities such as science inevitably reflect that ‘facts are not pure and unsullied bits of information; culture also influences what we see and how we see it.’ Foley adds that ‘there is considerable evidence that we do not have particularly accurate access to our own motives’ and cites Nisbett and Wilson, 1977. This section is influenced by discussions with students in the International Peace and Violence course at Southwestern University about Crawford (2000). In the AT system, for example, ‘Cinderella’ is Type 510a and includes motifs S31 (cruel stepmother), L55 (stepdaughter heroine), and D1050.1 (clothes produced by magic). See Aarne, 1995. Companion, of a sort, to this is the seven volumes of Thompson, 1955–58; the curious might also consider Ashliman, 1987. Bishop is invoking Marx and Engels’s phrase from the Communist Manifesto used to describe the communist’s coherent vision that suits him or her to take the lead (Marx and Engels, 1978: 494). There have been examinations of reggae in Jamaican politics (Waters, 1985; King, 1998), calypso in the Eastern Caribbean (Regis, 1999), corridos in the USA (Dorsey, 2006) and Mexico (Mulholland 2007), and ‘Louie, Louie’ in the USA (Marsh 1992). Bayo, as Hodges (1986: 167–72) demonstrates, was very nearly a one-man wrecking crew who no doubt accounts for some of the regional connections.

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2 4.

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Forced into exile after the fascists’ destruction of the Spanish Republic in 1939, he trained surviving Sandinistas in the 1940s in Costa Rica as well as members of the noble if ill-fated Caribbean Legion, a collection of progressive fighters in the region dedicated to overthrowing dictators and who sailed against Somoza in Nicaragua in 1948 and the Dominican Republic’s Trujillo in 1949 (see Ameringer, 1974). Bayo subsequently trained Castro’s Cuban exiles in Mexico; his ‘star’ pupil was Che Guevara. In Cuba, Bayo and Guevara helped train thousands of others from around the world, among them a new generation of Nicaraguan exiles, passing on to them lessons from Spain, Sandino, Guevara’s 1954 experiences with the US destruction of democracy in Guatemala, and the Cuban experience. The connections are across time and within time, across cultural bounds and within them. A FSLN miltante told me a story set in the early years of the struggle of an old man leading some tired and dispirited revolutionaries to where he had buried rifles from the 1930s for them standing up straight and announcing he was ‘a la orden,’ at their service. The miltante was too young to have witnessed this exchange and told it almost with an air of catechism. While it is a plausible story, it is also a convenient one on several levels. Benjamin’s own work is no stranger to this problem, a matter highlighted recently by the publication of much of his works in new translations and the inevitable comparisons made to the relatively small body of work previously available in translation. One of his most famous essays, for example, was first interpreted in English as ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (Benjamin, 1968: 253–64) but is now rendered as ‘On the Concept of History’ (Benjamin, 2003: 389–400). Other examples related simply to this one essay include the translation of the term Stillstellung in thesis 17, which is rendered as ‘arrest’ in the two versions cited (Benjamin, 1968: 254; 2003: 396) but as ‘zero-hour’ by Redmond (Benjamin, 1974), whose explanation of his version is an intriguing insight into the mind of a translator; and of Jetztzeit in thesis 14 which Zohn translates as ‘the now’ and annotates (Benjamin, 1968: 261) as follows: ‘Benjamin says “Jetztzeit” and indicates by the quotation marks that he does not simply mean an equivalent to Gegenwart, that is, present. He is clearly thinking of the mystical nunc stans, which is probably most fruitfully understood as some sort of eternal, timeless “now”’; but note that Eiland and Jennings have it as ‘now-time’ (2003: 395), Redmond (Benjamin, 1974) as ‘here-and-now’; while Benjamin biographer Lloyd Spencer renders it a ‘time of the now’ (Benjamin, 2008). I have lifted this notion, with a slight twist, from Geertz, 2000: 23. At the time of writing, yet another movie about Che has been released, T-shirts with his face remain omnipresent among fashion, music, and media cognoscenti as well as students; there are bikinis and socks, and even an action figure. And pop culture and posing aside, his almost ritual invocation remains the norm among radicals and revolutionaries on every continent. See also Casey, 2009. A moniker also bestowed at various times on Pierre Mulele, a revolutionary who continued the Lumumbist struggle in the first Democratic Republic of

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32. 33.

34. 35.

36. 37.

Revolution, rebellion, resistance the Congo, Mozambique’s Samora Machel, and Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso; there may well have been others who were so designated and there will almost certainly be more to come. As do others, obviously. The discussion that follows owes a debt to the participants in the summer 1997 AmSoc discussion prompted by Tilly’s draft version of ‘The Trouble with Stories’ (Tilly, 2002). I especially appreciate Francesca Polletta’s sharing of her file of the entire discussion and some personal communications with Charles Tilly. The description here borrows heavily from Lévi-Strauss, 1966: 17. On the same page, the translator notes that ‘the “bricoleur” has no precise equivalent in English. He is a man who undertakes odd jobs and is a Jack of all trades or a kind of professional do-it-yourself man, but as the text makes clear, he is of a different standing from … the English “odd job man” or handyman.’ See also Apter’s invocation of the term (2006: 791). Most commonly associated with African-American activist Malcolm X, the phrase ‘by whatever means necessary’ is apparently a paraphrase from Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Protz, 1964: 2), and has clearly been a strategy adopted by millions of people for thousands of years when faced with oppression, repression, and the absence of social justice. Harald Wydra, personal communication, May 2009. Here he invokes the omnipresent Barthes’s point that narrative ‘is simply there like life itself … international, transhistorical, transcultural’ (1977: 79), though he flips the quote around; it actually reads: ‘narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there like life itself.’ This is also in Barthes, 1982: 251–95; and in Barthes, 1996: 45–60. A nearly identical version of White’s essay may be found in White, 1987: 1–25. White does not provide a citation to Barthes; it is 1977: 121. My thinking here is informed by Smith’s contentions that: ‘for any particular narrative, there is no single basically basic story subsisting beneath it but, rather, an unlimited number of other narratives that can be constructed in response to it or perceived as related to it’; there are not only ‘versions of it (“for example, translations, adaptations, abridgements, and paraphrases”) but also those retellings that we call “plot summaries,” “interpretations” and, sometimes, “basic stories”,’ none more ‘basic than any others’; ‘for any given narrative, there are always multiple basic stories that can be constructed’ and the ones we do construct reflect our ‘assumptions and purposes’ which ‘create hierarchies of relevance and centrality’ and end up determining what the basic story is; ‘the form and features of any “version” will be a function of, among other things, the particular motives that elicited it and the particular interests and functions it was designed to serve’; and, finally, ‘among any array of narratives … there is an unlimited number of potentially perceptible relations’ (Smith, 1981: 217–18; emphases in original). This is influenced by Warshall, 1998. For a thought-provoking and challenging variant of this notion, see Haraway, 1991.

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Chapter 3 1. There has been a mini-boom seeking ‘original’ versions of such tales or reimagining them. One of the first (and best) of these from the early 1970s is Zipes, 1989; a delightful example therein is the Merseyside Fairy Stories Collective’s (1989) clever vision of Snow White as radical activist and committed revolutionary. 2. There has recently been a debate among some scholars of fairy tales as to whether they are ‘really folktales in origin, a repository of popular wisdoms and oral tradition, which came to rest in the hands of a few compilers in the nineteenth century, or rather highly artificial, manufactured literary productions, pre-distressed, like bluejeans, to look the part’ (Gopnik, 2002: 136; he cites Bottigheimer, 2002 with regard to the ‘artificial, manufactured,’ and Tatar, 2002 with regard to the former, noting her congeniality ‘to the idea that fairy tales represent a long line of vernacular folk … stories’). 3. To give hard figures in either case is a challenge, due partly to deep discussions about what exactly constitutes ‘a Cinderella story.’ An excellent brief overview is Windling, 1997. 4. A readily identifiable version was written down in the middle of the ninth century in China, though its roots appear to be some three hundred years earlier: see Jameson, 1982: 74–5, 77–9; or Heiner, 2007, who offers the more specific ‘850–60 Common Era’; less familiar versions with recognizable motifs ‘were extant 2000 years ago’ in the Balkans (Rooth, 1982: 136). Dundes, 1982 is rife with references to indigenous/‘traditional’ versions of Cinderella throughout the world. Beyond the voluminous, well-documented cases in every European country and almost all of their various cultures and subcultures, these include: India (pp. 40, 65, 259), China (p. 71), the ‘South Seas’ (p. 78), ‘Annam’ (p. 80), Egypt (p. 83), Mongolia (p. 83), Tibet (p. 83), Japan (p. 117), ‘Southern Arabia’ (p. 119), ‘Central Asiatic and Byzantine’ (p. 123), ‘Africa’ (p. 148), Togo (p. 158), Cameroon (p. 158), Nigeria (p. 158), Mauritius (p. 159), South Africa (p. 159), Martinique (p. 160), Malagasy (p. 160), Angola (p. 161), Brazil (p. 161), Morocco (p. 164), Java (p. 169), Zuni in North America (p. 169), Iran (p. 181), and Afghanistan (p. 181); Heiner (2007) adds Vietnam and ‘Algonquin Indians,’ and Brown (1997) proffers the Philippines, ‘West Africa,’ Thailand, Korea, Zimbabwe, ‘Zulu,’ and ‘Ojibwa.’ 5. The distinction here is guided in part by Barbosa’s between ‘popular and official’ which ‘exist in the same discursive field’ (2005: 189 n3; emphases in original). 6. But see Tilly: ‘the dramatis personae of political conflict, collective action and revolutions changed fundamentally between 1492 and 1992’ (1995: 28). 7. They may not and hence he warns that ‘mythical thought … is imprisoned in the vents and experiences which it never tires of ordering and re-ordering in its search to find them a meaning. But it also acts as a liberator’ (Lévi-Strauss, 1966: 22). 8. For Doty (1996: 450), ‘myths anticipate the future; they guide understandings of the past and the future, the traditional and the anticipated.’

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9. See, on this, Selbin (1998; 1999: 80). Social science concepts may also be read as myth. 10. I demur, but he continues that there is ‘an intermediary level. Mythology is static, we find the same mythical elements combined over and over again, but they are a closed system, let us say, in contradistinction with history, which is, of course, an open system.’ 11. Furet (1981: 3) claims that the ‘Ancien Régime is thought to have an end but no beginning, the Revolution has a birth but no end,’ a matter of some import to which we will return. 12. Some of these may have come from Arabia or Persia, or vice versa. 13. Rueschemeyer (2006: 248), invoking Sorel and Pareto, reminds us that social doctrines or theories may well have their ‘greatest social power … as myths.’ 14. There are an impressive array of formulations of what might be loosely grouped as ‘individual memory.’ Halpern (2008: 19–20) lists: ‘declarative memory’ (also known as ‘explicit memory’ or ‘memory with record’ and includes ‘episodic’ and ‘semantic’ memory) of ‘facts and events and people and ideas’; ‘implicit memory’ (also known as ‘memory without record’ or ‘nondeclarative memory,’ which includes ‘procedural memory’) for ‘doing’; ‘working memory,’ related to ‘short-term memory,’ which as she notes raises a whole other way to think about memory in chronological terms, leading some scientists to refer also to ‘long-term memory’ and ‘sensory memory’ (see Assmann, 2006: 212–13) on ‘procedural,’ ‘semantic,’ and ‘episodic’ memory. 15. Here I am guided to some extant by Zur (1998: 19): ‘Universal,’ in the sense that ‘all human beings have the same psychodynamic blueprint and logically, these dynamics follow predictable patterns vis-a-vis certain external stimuli (such as extreme violence).’ 16. My thanks to Harald Wydra for pointing this out. 17. Continuing to cite Fentress and Wickham (1992: 26, emphasis in the original), Lee (2007: 142) goes on to note that, as is argued repeatedly here, ‘the question of whether we regard these memories as historically true will often turn out to be less important than whether they regard their memories as true.’ 18. ‘[A]n exploration of cultural texts as repositories of feelings and emotions, which are encoded not only in the content of the texts themselves but in the practices that surround their production and reception’ (Cvetkovich, 2003: 7). 19. The solution, she suggests, is the substitution of more specific terms ‘“social,” “political,” and “cultural memory”’ (Assmann, 2006: 222). 20. From earliest recorded time, Plumb (1970: 11) argues, people have ‘used the past in a variety of ways: to explain the origins and purposes of human life, to sanctify institutions of government, to give validity to class structure, to provide moral example, to vivify his [sic] cultural and educational processes, to interpret the future, to invest both the individual human life or a nation’s with a sense of destiny.’ 21. Orwell’s (in)famous (and often misquoted) line is: ‘who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past’ (1992: 260). See also the notion that ‘history is continuously rewritten’ and that ‘past events’

Notes

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23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

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lack any ‘objective existence, but survive only in the written records and in human memories’ (1992: 222). What has come to be referred to as the Stoll–Menchú case comes to mind here. On the one hand is Rigoberta Menchú’s compelling testimonio, I Rigoberta Menchú (1987) and on the other the controversial efforts of Stoll (2001) to explore – some say debunk – her personal experiences. This is made all the more intriguing and troubling since testimonio is defined in part as intensely personal description that reflects community experiences; as she wrote, ‘this is my testimony. I didn’t learn it from a book and I didn’t learn it alone … My personal experience is the reality of a whole people’ (Menchú, 1987: 1). One of the most famous meditations on memory remains that of Proust and the memories evoked by a madeleine; see Proust, 1981. The original title in French, commonly translated as In Search of Lost Time, is even more evocative; see Proust (1954). This contrasts with Assmann’s reasonable concern about the ‘imperial dominance of one exclusive “collective memory”’ (2006: 210). Different contexts contribute meaning to any given situation, and in any given situation there are potentially a variety of contexts extant. The feminist adage that ‘context is all’ is worth remembering, if you will, regarding memory. Zur cites Levett (1989: 22): ‘expressions of emotion, self and subjectivity are culturally shaped and are embedded in linguistic repertoires,’ and her own earlier work (Zur, 1996). In addition, Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 11) note, ‘mimicry is a very bad concept, since it relies on binary logic to describe phenomena of an entirely different nature.’ Gaines (guided by Taussig, 1993) borrows from Foucault (1973) to restore mimesis as a ‘way of knowing.’ A third form might be counter-revolutionary mimesis; consider the following, eerily reminiscent of the classic Bastille story included in Chapter 1. In 1905 Russian Minister of the Interior A.G. Bulygin is supposed to have ‘suggested that political concessions might be needed to calm the country, [Tsar] Nicholas was taken aback and told the Minister: “One would think you are afraid a revolution will break out.” “Your Majesty,” came the reply, “the revolution has already begun”’ (Figes, 1996: 186). Cohen posits five forms of what he refers to as ‘mythologization’: ‘“everyday” drawn from the stock of images of the past that people carry around in their heads’; ‘autobiographical mythologization’; ‘the sort of mythologization found in’ the arts; ‘local mythologization … typically embedded in monuments, shrines, stela, memorials, and the like’; and the ‘mythologization encountered in newspapers, periodicals, and books.’

Chapter 4 1. As noted in Chapter 1 n11, this excellent summation of the basic revolutionary premiss is associated with Michael Manley’s semi-radical and innovative (in

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Revolution, rebellion, resistance the Eastern Caribbean context) movement in early 1970s’ Jamaica, which culminated in the 1972 electoral victory of the People’s National Party. Two years later, Manley declared that Jamaica was a ‘democratic socialist’ state committed to the redistribution of wealth and independence from foreign control. It seems a stretch to describe what unfolded as a revolution, but see Foran, 2005: 169; and Foran et al., forthcoming. If the outsize US response suggests it was revolutionary, a more reasonable read might be a rebellion or revolt by a population determined to improve their social conditions in the face of an increasingly repressive political structure. See Panton, 1993: 41, 31; an astute analysis is Ferguson, 1999: 295. ‘Incantatory,’ they may be, according to Cabrera Infante’s clever quip, but the ‘ephemeral’ seems noteworthy. Benjamin (1999c: 476) seems to support this with his insight that ‘to write history means giving dates their physiognomy,’ that is, both their superficial importance and their deeper meaning. But see Marx’s (1978a: 595) famous dismissal of borrowed ‘names, battle slogans, and costumes,’ the ‘traditions of all the dead generations weigh[ing] like a nightmare on the brain of the living.’ Here I have in mind less Foucault on genealogies and their (inherent) articulation of resistance than hooks’s notion of documenting a ‘cultural genealogy of resistance’ which helps us learn from and build ‘on present strategies of opposition and resistance that were effective in the past and are empowering in the present’ (1995: 148). This resonates with that of Philip (1998), who begins with her family tree and, relying on oral histories, rapidly spirals non-chronologically outward to touch on other genealogies such as place names, the legacies of empires and conquerors, races of people and their movements over time, a legacy of resistance, of silences and lost histories, of belonging, and of African history. These terms merit comment: ‘Third way’ in the 1950s–1970s referred to the synthesis of capitalism and socialism that mediated what was read as the US and Soviet ideologies; ‘Tri-continental’ reflects the idea of solidarity among the peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean; and the Non-Aligned Movement emerged indirectly from the 1955 anti-colonial Afro-Asian Conference commonly known as the Bandung Conference. Fire in the Minds of Men is the title of Billington’s (1980) examination of what he refers to as the ‘origins of the revolutionary faith.’ A genre that may be characterized as anti-revolutionary analysis of revolution focuses on this; among the best are Zamoyski, 2000; and Durschmied, 2001. These seem to share a fascination with and disdain or pity for what they construe as a revolutionary faith held by idiosyncratic individuals or small groups passed on in ‘apostolic succession’ (Billington, 2000: 3) which reaps nothing but mayhem, murder, betrayal, death, and destruction. Those who follow are largely dupes. Consider Billington: ‘The heart of the revolutionary faith, like any faith, is fire: ordinary material transformed into extraordinary form, quantities of warmth suddenly changing the quality of substance. If we do not know what fire is, we know what it does. It burns. It destroys life; but it also supports

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it as a source of heat, light, and – above all – fascination. Man, who works with fire as Homo faber, also seems foredoomed in his freedom to play with it as Homo ludens’ (1980: 5). ‘Familiar’ here indicates the conviction of many people in many places that they ‘know’ the broad outlines of the story. A persuasive explication of the Exodus story as a revolutionary tale may be found in Walzer, 1985; see also Dovlo, 2002. This delightful portmanteau word weds ‘group’ with either ‘corpuscle’ or ‘miniscule’ to suggest a very small faction, usually political in nature. The first use of the term of which I am aware is by protestors during a May 1968 march in France (Azenstarck, 2008). This extract from a 17 August 1960 speech was originally published as ‘Laksana Malaekat Jang Menjerbu dari Langit Djalannja Revolusi Kita’ (‘Like an Angel Which Strikes from the Sky: The March of Our Revolution’). Another excerpt includes the above and ‘That is why I … never tire of appealing and exhorting … make the revolutionary spirit surge on, see to it that the fire of our revolution does not die, or grow dim, not even for a single moment. Come then, keep fanning the flames of the leaping fire of revolution! Brothers and sisters, let us become logs to feed the flames of revolution!’ See Higgins and Higgins, 1963: 115; it is this version cited by Myrdal, 1968: 375 n4. Even 1789 gains much of its aura post hoc, from subsequent quasi-revolutionary episodes in France 1830, 1848, and 1871, the rest of Europe 1848, and Russia 1917. The provocative poet Andrei Condrescu (1999: 6) asks what if Che, ‘instead of being longhaired and intensely romantic, had been as ugly as the Cuban Secret Service made him when they sent him to start another revolution in Bolivia. What if Che had been physically loathsome?’ Is the ‘beautiful corpse’ necessary? To which one might add his commendation to his children that a revolutionary’s most ‘beautiful quality’ is the capability ‘of feeling any injustice committed against anyone, anywhere in the world’ (Guevara, 1987: 371). The delightful concept of ‘possibilism’ is Darnton’s (1990); an attempt to use this is Selbin, 2009b; while Rabas, 1997 considers the possibilities inherent in the impossible. The reference here is to Leopold von Ranke’s influential contention that the duty of the historian is to present the past ‘as it really was’ (1887). Not everyone subscribes to this interpretation and some feel it has been misunderstood; see, for example, Iggers, 1962. Daniel would say ‘unitary’ (1996: 53). He astutely notes that ‘History is theoretical discourse that is in the main … simplex. It is underwritten by chronology and a logic of cause and effect. Furthermore, this kind of history … is endogenous to European culture and civilization in a manner and to an extent that it is not to South Asia, especially Hindu South Asia.’ He goes on to note that ‘If myth, as a way of being in the world, is multiplex, then on structural grounds alone the likelihood of its striking up a discordant relationship with a ‘single-minded’ simplex history is greater than that of its

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Revolution, rebellion, resistance generating discordance with a multiplex history. Multiplex histories are more easily accommodated within the multiplexity of lived experience. A simplex history is more likely to assert, with impetuosity, its independence, shrilly proclaiming its exclusive claim to the truth. Its story tends to be unitary’ (1996: 52, 53). Our pasts/presents/futures are all surprisingly fluid (and fraught) in ways that we mostly prefer not to think about. Despite the best post-Enlightenment efforts by those in the North/West and their imperial/neo-imperial outposts to measure and codify it, time is remarkable for its sinuosity, weaving precipitously in and out (as if two dimensions can capture the dynamic), particularly for the immense majority who do not ‘tell’ time the same way we in the North/West do. Millions, for example, live in a time relatively unconcerned with the chronological but deeply indebted to the mythological. There are insightful postmodern protestations to the contrary. One of the most thought-provoking is that of Baudrillard (1994: 23–4), who contends that ‘the fact is that we no longer make history, we have been reconciled with it and protect it as if it were a masterpiece in danger. Times have changed. Today we have a “vision” of a Revolution perfectly pious in the way it alludes to human Rights – not even a nostalgic vision, instead, one that is recycled in postmodern intellectual comfort(ing) terms. A vision that allows the elimination of SaintJust from The Dictionary of the Revolution. “Overrated rhetoric” says François Furet, the perfect historian of the repentance of Terror and glory.’ Still little remarked upon in the West (or Russia), the 1919–21 intervention by the World War I Allies was one of the major multinational military operations of the past hundred years. Tens of thousands of troops from Canada, Czechoslovakia, France, the United States, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, Poland, and elsewhere spent three years supporting the efforts of the sundry White armies to forestall the revolution. See, Willett, Jr., 2003; Moore, 2002; Saul, 2001; Bradley, 1984; Goldhurst, 1978; or Swettenham, 1967. They seem to suggest that the concept starts with Machiavelli, 1985; and appears in Spinoza, 1955; and Hobbes, 1998. Callinicos, 2007: 159–62, is an interesting reflection. Formulated by Fernand Braudel (and others in the Annales School), the longue durée was meant to denote a historical wave of great length, perhaps centuries or more. Braudel called for the study of those aspects of everyday life which he believed structured the potential for socio-political change – this includes climate, geography, biology, and technology; also, concomitantly, what people ate, what they wore, where and how they traveled (and why). The longue durée is, in Braudel’s framework, one of the three temporalities dynamically interacting as history unfolds; the other two are the évenémentielle, short-lived dramatic events and the actions of ‘great men’; and conjonctures, larger, cyclical processes that could last up to fifty years. Braudel, 1979 serves as a precis of his approach. These last few sentences deploy Tilly (1984) and Hunt (1984) for my purposes; Hunt speaks to the French Revolution, while Tilly seeks to instruct on theories of social change.

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23. I would be remiss not to note that such ‘Orientalist’ fantasies can find their counterpart in the fetishization and exoticization of a mythic and monolithic ‘West.’ Said himself argued in a preface to a later edition of his book that ‘neither the term Orient nor the concept of the West has any ontological stability; each is made up of human effort, partly affirmation, partly identification of the Other’ (2003: xii). 24. There are, as always, other ways to interpret this. Given the various cultural and analytical biases no doubt in play, there is much to suggest that oppressed and suppressed peoples will struggle to improve their lot. 25. Thus we live in a time in which we are asked to believe that there are people who do not mind or who are willing to accept their immiseration to have the opportunity to ‘be like us’ (see, for example, Johnson, 1992; Ferguson, 2004; Friedman, 2000), and that some religions or ethnic groups value their lives or the lives of their children less than Christians, Jews, or Hindus. A particularly nefarious creation was the Vietnam-era conviction of US policymakers, ably translated and disseminated to the population by the media (in their role as guardians and protectors of the powerful), that for the indigenous and dispossessed ‘life is cheap.’ Thus death was not to be considered as ‘we’ would in the North/West and was therefore of less concern; life ‘there’ was to be endured, a series of hardships largely unbroken by any heights of joy or, conversely, depths of despair. This has recently been seen again in the US and elsewhere with regard to, for instance, Afghanistan and the Middle East. 26. Higonnet declares ‘that is not the view I take’ (1998: 8; emphasis in the original). 27. This paragraph draws on the work of Thamy Pogrebinschi, only some of which, to date, may be found in English; see Pogrebinschi, 2007a, 2007b.

Chapter 5 1. The former denotes ‘primitive’ or ‘original’ while the latter connotes ‘true.’ 2. The most notable case outside of Europe was Brazil’s 1848 ‘Praieira’ Revolt in the state of Pernambuco; in some cases, such as the Matale revolt in Sri Lanka, connections are less clear, though. Hobsbawm (1996a: 10) says ‘direct influence may be detected … a few years later in remote Colombia.’ Presumably the reference is to the 1860–62 Colombian Civil War which gave rise to the relatively brief United States of Colombia (1863–86). 3. Both of these, along with Egypt 1952 and Peru 1968, might be usefully thought of as ‘revolutions from above,’ in Trimberger’s (1978) helpful formulation. 4. This succinct description is from Thucydides (1951: 104): ‘Its administration favours the many instead of the few; this is why it is called a democracy. If we look to the laws, they afford equal justice to all in their private differences; if no social standing, advancement in public life falls to reputation for capacity, class considerations not being allowed to interfere with merit; nor again does poverty bar the way, if a man is able to serve the state, he is not hindered by

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Revolution, rebellion, resistance the obscurity of his condition. The freedom which we enjoy in our government extends also to our ordinary life.’ Walzer (1985: 7) adds: ‘it would make little sense to try and construct a theory out of the biblical account.’ The rather significant issue of whether or not it merits the appellation ‘revolution’ aside, there is the issue of ‘American.’ While the term can, and obviously does, refer to all of those who live in the Americas, it is also the case that for much of the past few hundred years ‘America’ and ‘American’ have been closely identified with the United States of America and its citizens. Despite my deep discomfort, I will bow to such usage here. The same can be said for other places in Europe and Spain’s colonies in the Americas. As my colleague Lisa Leff gently reminded me, the term ‘liberal’ was not yet in use. Brinton (1965: 121) attributes this famous phrase to ‘the French moderate Vergniaud’ and quotes it as ‘the revolution, like Saturn, devours its children.’ The full quotation, from Girondist orator and leader Pierre Vergniaud, is ‘Citizens, we have reason to fear that the Revolution, like Saturn, will successively devour all its children, and only engender despotism and the calamities which accompany it’ (Bowers, 1950: 340). See note 2 above. Popularly associated with Garton Ash (1989a: 1; 1989b: 9), the term ‘refolution’ is meant to connote ‘a non-revolutionary revolution’; he has similarly floated ‘revorm’ and, over the course of several articles, tried out ‘revelection,’ and ‘telerevolution’ as well. Deane (1990: 48) referred to the phrase as ‘Garton Ash’s neologism,’ which is used throughout Garton Ash, 1990. Some twenty years ago, in May 1988, after seeing each other at a reunion of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Kwame Ture (né Stokely Carmichael) wrote to Mike Miller: ‘as to revolution versus reform, I’m taken with a couple of new formulations: ‘revorm’ or ‘refolution.’ Both may imply that there needs to be a basic change in the relations of power and property, but I don’t want to throw everything out. Pol Pot and Shining Path leave me cold’ (Miller, 1998: 31). ‘Give Him a Great Big Kiss,’ written by George ‘Shandow’ Morton; performed by the Shangri-Las, 1965, Red Bird records.

Chapter 6 1. On this phrase, which only became notable post hoc, see Roberts, 1976; for an interesting consideration exploring why it may not be all it seems, see Ozouf, 1998. 2. Dunn suggests ‘he was not exercising remarkable foresight. What he wished to emphasize was the massive essentially more than human, uncontrollable character of the forces at work. Mere men make revolts. But revolutions are

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to be traced to forces of a more cosmic scale’ (1989: 3). Discomfort with the naturalistic implications aside, this seems right. Skocpol’s paradigmatic formulation of social revolution is ‘rapid, basic transformations of a society’s state and class structures … accompanied and in part carried through by class-based revolts from below’ (1979: 4). Consider that Malia relegates China to ‘conceptually at least’ an ‘encore’ to Russia’s 1917 October Revolution (2006: 288); while Dunn (1995: 389) suggests that while hard to ‘characterize convincingly (and therefore harder also to explain) than any other historical revolution … [i]t is also, palpably, of immense political and historical importance – very possibly, now that the cold war has ended without unleashing full-scale thermonuclear war, the single most important historical event of the twentieth century.’ The former denotes ‘primitive’ or ‘original’ while the latter connotes ‘true.’ Tracking down any sort of authoritative source for this is elusive, perhaps because it never happened; see Gittings, 2007: 61. Most versions attribute the remark to Zhou, some to Mao Zedong; most versions include US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, though some name French ambassador André Malraux. Unsourced accounts are rife, including by respected scholars; see, e.g., Sick, 1995: 145; Prins, 1998: 793; Rosenberg, 1999: 91; Vatikiotis, 2005/06: 27); Fischer, 2006: 340; or Aron, 2006: 443. An early revolutionary slogan, ‘one king, one law, one weight, one measure,’ seems a clear indicator of the desire for simpler and clearer rules and regulations. Despite their universalist claims for the new calendar, Brinton (1965: 179) points out that such a calendar is hardly appropriate everywhere, offering Australia as exhibit A. According to Darnton, ‘Parents said tu to children, who replied with vous. The tu was used by superiors addressing inferiors, by humans commanding animals, and by lovers – after the first kiss, or exclusively between the sheets. When French mountain climbers reach a certain altitude, they still switch from the vous to the tu, as if all men become equal in the face of the enormousness of nature’ (1990: 8). François-Noël ‘Gracchus’ Babeuf, his nom de guerre, a homage to the Roman reformer Gracchi, and the Conspiracy of the Equals is one of the Revolution’s more compelling footnotes; it will be seen again in the Story of the Lost and Forgotten Revolutions (Chapter 8). The ‘Manifesto of the Equals,’ written by Sylvain Maréchal, is an intriguing document. Babeuf proposed the ‘vanguard party’ concept long before Lenin, its most famous proponent (Pilbeam, 2001: 34), and sought arguably to author the world’s first ‘communist’ revolution (see, e.g., Dunn, 1989: 6). A more famous version, ‘I have seen the future, and it works,’ was often used by Steffens and is attributed to him by Winter (1933), to whom he was married. As is widely noted, these months reflect the Julian calendar, Julius Caesar’s reform of the Roman calendar. After the revolution, Pope Gregory XIII’s

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15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

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Revolution, rebellion, resistance Gregorian calendar, a reform of the Julian calendar long in use throughout Europe, was adopted. Lenin makes this point in a variety of places; it is particularly prominent in ‘‘Left-Wing’ Communism – An Infantile Disorder’ and nowhere clearer than the reference cited here: ‘The fundamental law of revolution, which has been confirmed by all revolutions and especially by all three Russian revolutions in the twentieth century’ (1980b: 566). Tilly (1978, 1995, 2002) draws on Lenin for his compelling version of revolutionary situations, while sharing the caution that they are no predicators of future revolutions. Hobsbawm, resonant with the notion of possibilities here, suggests that ‘“revolutionary situation[s]” are thus about possibilities, and their analysis is not predictive.’ He goes on to describe them as ‘a short-term crisis within a system with long-term internal tensions, which offers good chances of a revolutionary outcome’ (Hobsbawm, 1986: 19). He invokes Anderson, 1991: 80; who in turn cites Hobsbawm, 1996a: 169. Billington (1980: 346) goes so far as to contend that ‘the Commune … provided the Russian Revolution with its holy relics.’ Formally the revolution was led by the Military Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet. See Chapter 4 n19 on the great multinational intervention by the World War I Allies in Russia’s civil war on behalf of the counterrevolutionary forces. The critical juncture here, arguably, is the brutal suppression of the 1921 Kronstadt Rebellion (discussed in Chapter 8), ‘the defeat of the workers’ opposition and ban on factions at the Tenth Party Congress’ (Paige, 2003: 26; he cites Furet, 1999: 90). Thanks to Harald Wydra for this useful reminder (personal communication, May 2009). Arendt offers a vignette that, if ‘accurate,’ suggests that more mundane issues weighed on his mind as well: ‘when asked to state in one sentence the essence and the aims of the October Revolution, [Lenin] gave the curious and long-forgotten formula: “Electrification plus soviets”’ (1965: 65). This section draws heavily on Selbin, 2009a. The successes and failures of the Cuban Revolution are hotly contested, more so than perhaps any other social revolutionary case. Much of how one views Cuba and the revolutionary process which has defined it for the last fifty years depends on where one starts from and is situated. It can be as simple as whether your point of departure is Miami or Managua. But it is also complicated and reflects far more about the interests, inclinations, and investments of the analyst. I am well aware of the complexities of my position(s) and of the many possible interpretations of the myriad realities that make up the Cuban revolutionary experience. In Trotsky’s compelling formulation, noted in Chapter 1, people choose revolution only when there is ‘no other way out’ (1957: 167); see also Goodwin, 2001. For example, in 1958 Castro sent his brother Raúl from their stronghold in the Sierra Maestra to open a second front in the Sierra Cristal. After securing

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26. 27. 28.

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the region militarily, the revolutionaries quickly introduced literacy, health programs and education programs, union organization, civic administration, a militia, and agrarian reform. They were careful to remain consistent with social norms, were highly accessible, and generated a high degree of commitment from the population. See Selbin, 1999: 82, which draws on one of the best brief descriptions of these efforts, Judson, 1984: 139–49. During the struggle for power, the old society seemed bent on self-destruction. At the time of the revolution, Pérez (1990: 239) points out, ‘social structures were in disarray, the political system was in crisis, the economy was in distress. National institutions were in varying degrees of disintegration and disrepute, and because they had not served Cuba well, if at all, they were vulnerable.’ When the revolutionaries defeated the repressive regime built on the foundations of the old society, those foundations simply crumbled and the institutions and people that remained were stained, stigmatized by their complicity. According to Pérez-Stable, ‘on January 1, 1959, Fidel Castro, the Rebel Army, and the July 26th Movement were incontestably the liberators of Cuba, and virtually all Cubans supported them’ (1999: 62). An intriguing discussion of the revolution’s influence on Cuba’s Spanish is Pino, 1975. For example, by 1958 there was a significant revolutionary force in Cuba’s central Sierra Escambray, the rebel force of the student dominated Revolutionary Directorate, and the 26th of July Movement itself was to some extent a loose amalgam constantly subsuming other, small, disparate groups, not always without a fight.. Though Parker astutely notes that the Soviet model offered an alternative ‘version of modernity’ which was critical; still, he notes, Cuba ‘sustained a certain independence in relation to both Soviet-style modernity and its alternatives’ (1999: 84, emphases in original; he cites Castañeda, 1993: 74). A useful summary of the United States backing away from Batista is Foran, 2005: 62–3. In contrast, see Pérez-Stable’s provocative (and clever) reflection that actually ‘the Cuban Revolution was not a solar eclipse; it was a traffic jam’ (1998: 180). Somewhat less charitably, he adds that ‘it has bred a kind of vaudeville of revolution’ (Dunn, 1989: 200). All three of which, it should be noted, were deeply inspired by China’s revolutionary process and the lessons they had learned of 1789 as French colonial possessions.

Chapter 7 1. ‘While liberation is consonant with various forms of government,’ he adds, ‘freedom is only possible through a republican form of government’ (Horowitz, 1972: 90).

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2. Finley (1986: 54) contends that the most notable thing about the history of slavery is the absence of revolt, and that at least from ‘the slave revolts of the late Roman Republic, the greatest in antiquity,’ no sort of permanent struggle for freedom emerged. 3. The complete quotation is ‘The Spartacus – by which I mean fire and spirit, I mean soul and heart, I mean will and action for the revolution of the proletariat. And Spartacus – by which I mean all need and yearning for happiness, all resolution for battle of the class conscious proletariat. The Spartacus, by which I mean socialism and world revolution.’ Futrell (2001: 90) adds that ‘the failure of the Spartakusbund and the murder of Liebknecht and Luxemburg added resonance to the value of Spartacus as an icon.’ 4. In 1519 on the island of Hispaniola indigenous chieftain Enriquillo took up arms against his encomendero and the colonial authorities. See Castro, 1999a: xv. 5. Schwartz (1994: 121) puts the figure at 11,000, a still impressive number. 6. Their choice was an evocative one and links the defenders of Palmares with other global radicals across time and places as distant as Masada in ancient Israel, Carib’s Leap in Grenada, and those who chose to die in Paris at the Commune rather than go back to the life they had been forced to lead or would be forced to lead if they submitted. 7. Andry’s Rebellion was led by Charles Deslondes, a Haitian slave inspired by the Haitian Revolution; Andry was the name of the owner of the plantation where the event occurred. 8. While the Sepoy Rebellion was the best known among such efforts, it was preceded by others still known in the region: Kerala 1793–97 and 1800–05; 1808–09 in Travancore which featured the Kundara Declaration of Independence; the 1831 Kol Uprising; the 1855 Santhal Uprising; and the 1816–32 Kutch Rebellion. 9. Both naming and dating of the struggles in Ireland is something of a challenge. The 1916 Easter Rising is most commonly construed as a revolt. The 1919–21 insurrection is often labeled the Irish War of Independence. The years 1922–23 saw the Irish Civil War. 10. With regard to the former, see, among many, Wasserstrom, 2005: 59, who likens its ‘place in China’s political mythology roughly comparable to that of the Boston Tea Party’; and Perry, 2005: 33; on the latter, see Wasserstrom, 2003: 261. 11. On the psychological shift intrinsic to such national liberation struggles, the definitive source remains Fanon, 1965. 12. In the estimation of Manela (2001: 100), ‘for a brief period of time … [it] appeared to millions worldwide as the herald of an emerging new world in which all peoples will be granted the right to determine their own future.’ He defines this ‘tumultuous period in international affairs’ as ‘roughly stretching from the promulgation of the Fourteen Points in January 1918 to the conclusion of the Versailles Peace Treaty in June 1919’ and dubs it the ‘Wilsonian Moment,’ since United States’ President Woodrow Wilson, author of the ‘Fourteen Points,’ epitomized ‘its vision and promise.’ He adds that ‘the vision

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of an international order based on self determination was articulated by other world leaders as well, most prominent among them British Prime Minister David Lloyd George and Soviet Leader V.I. Lenin’ (2001: 119). In a story well known both in the English-speaking Caribbean and among Britain’s ‘martial’ peoples (Gurkhas, Kenyans and Southern African troops who have done much fighting and dying for them), on 17 December 1918 fifty-plus West Indian sergeants fighting as part of British forces in Europe organized the ‘Caribbean League.’ With members from British Guiana in the south and west to the Bahamas in the north and east and most places in between, the League demanded self-determination for the Caribbean and pledged to organize a general strike or more when they got home. In 1919, several did, most notably in Trinidad and Belize. See, among others, James, 1999: 63–4. Including the conception of leveling egalitarianism associated with Saint-Just, Rabaut Saint-Étienne and the radical left of the revolution; in 1790, presiding over the just established French National Assembly, Saint-Etienne insisted that ‘all the established institutions of France only crown the misery of the people; to make people happy it is necessary to renovate, to change the ideas, the laws, the morals … to change the men, the things, the words … to destroy everything, yes everything; for everything must be started anew’ (Almond, 1996: 31; Lasky, 2004: 473). It is this strain which later informs the 1966–76 Cultural Revolution in China, the early years especially; the Khmer Rouge’s approach in Kampuchea (Cambodia), 1975–79; and, perhaps most directly, the vision of Peru’s Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) in 1980–95. Heine’s (1991) edited volume is a fine overview which similarly frames the revolution as prematurely terminated. For a comparative consideration with a subtle and insightful analysis of Grenada, see Meeks, 2001; Selbin, 1999 is similar comparative attempt. This same slogan subsequently appeared during the 1917 Russian Revolution. It seems unlikely the Russians appropriated the phrase from the Mexicans – rural people in both places almost certainly shared such desires independently of each other. Yet the Russian revolutionaries would have been aware of events in Mexico. There were many attempts in the United States to link the two revolutions, especially efforts to lavel the Mexicans as some sort of communist menace (see, Spenser, 1999) or ‘Bolsheviks on the border.’ But see Knight, who in contradistinction to most scholars argues that ‘the Haitian Revolution represents the most thorough case study of revolutionary change anywhere in the history of the modern world’ (2000: 103) and lists some work to support this. The 2004 bicentennial brought more attention, but recently, Dubois, 2004; Blackburn, 2006; Popkin, 2007; and Forsdick, 2008 all continue to suggest otherwise. In a thought-provoking twist worthy of further consideration, Linebaugh and Rediker (2000: 319) refer to Haiti as ‘the first successful workers’ revolt in modern history.’ Dubois (2004: 5) counsels against allowing racial designations to pass for explanations. And in an intriguing nod to the old world he and his compatriots found

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27. 28.

29.

30.

Revolution, rebellion, resistance themselves in, Dessalines referred to his people as ‘the Incas of the Sun’ (Linebaugh and Rediker, 2000: 330). Nesbitt (2008: 25) points out that for the new elite, ‘liberty meant the universal, uncompromised abolition of chattel slavery for the first time in world history, a freedom inscribed through the construction of transcendental social mechanisms (constitutional, juridical, military, religious, paternal, moral) to ensure the enforcement of that prescription within a nation divided between an ‘enlightened’ elite and an ‘unenlightened’ peasantry’ while for others, ‘freedom meant the construction of an undivided, stateless egalitarianism, with its own attendant forms of violence: the systematic suppression of the expression of individuality among its members to assure the reproduction of social equality.’ Linebaugh and Rediker, who rarely miss a connection, suggest a shorter journey in at least some cases, noting that two key figures in Haiti’s revolutionary process, Henri Christophe and André Rigaud, fought with French regiments deployed in North America and may have been what they cleverly call ‘vectors’ of revolution (2000: 241). This section draws heavily on Gilly, 2005a; and Knight, 1990a: 1990b. Orozco’s colorados ‘combined cowboys, miners, lumberjacks, Indians, and farmers’ (Richards, 2004: 26). Gilly (2005a: 124–5) assigns each of these entities a politics as well: Zapata and the Southern Liberation Army are on the left, calling for ‘a deepening of the social content of the evolution and the implementation of the Ayala Plan’; Villa and the Northern Division are defined as ‘moving into an even closer alliance with Zapatism’; Carranza was ‘on the right’; and Obregón was linked to Carranza and Villa. Dunn (1989: 57) similarly describes Villa as espousing ‘the Zapatista agrarian reform programme in a gingerly manner.’ Gilly (2005a: 154) says ‘they took turns sitting in the presidential chair. Newell (1997: 112) concurs, though suggests Zapata sat ‘uncomfortably.’ Katz (1998: 437) puts Villa in the chair and Zapata beside him and notes the impact of global diffusion on the picture. Katz (1998: 436) argues that Zapata was a regional military man with a national, albeit limited, socio-political agenda while Villa was a national military man with at best a regional agenda of local councils and land reform. Knight echoes these points exactly, conceding, despite his conviction it is overly freighted with significance (1990b: 329), that it was ‘one of the most radical of its time’ (1990b: 470) albeit that ‘despite denunciations of its “Bolshevik” character … [it] was not even socialist’ (1990b: 471). Knight (1990b: 470) objects to the ‘many accounts … [where] the 1917 Constitution is seen as the consummation of revolutionary aspirations’ since ‘it only imperfectly represented popular, revolutionary hopes: it was conceived without direct popular participation; it was drawn up in haste and chaos, rather than calm deliberation; and its limpid provisions contrasted with the murky reality.’ The stories go on and on – Cuba, El Salvador, Mozambique, Nicaragua and more; Martin Guevara once remarked that his brother was ‘like the white

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horse of Zapata. He is everywhere’ (quoted in Ryan, 1998: 36). Zapata’s horse is celebrated in a children’s book about revolutionary figures (Thomas, 1998: 37). The Mexican government sought to mediate Zapata; many others exercise Zapata’s ghost. ‘Because of these connections with the past, Buena Vistans view themselves as the custodians of the memory of Zapata and the Zapatista fighters. They are particularly concerned with the authenticity of images of Zapata and the revolutionary fighters that the government tries to use to gain legitimacy. The issue of authenticity became important in the state of Morelos almost immediately after the assassination of Emiliano Zapata. In 1926, six years after Zapata’s death, Robert Redfield recorded a corrido in Morelos that raised the question of whether the government troops killed the ‘real Zapata.’ The corrido ends: ‘It is certain and cannot be doubted, but they were deceived about Zapata, they cannot put Zapata down’ (Martin, 1992: 181–2). Here, we are back in the realm of myth and story, where telling is key. 31. The importance of events at Tlatelolco and the process surrounding the aftermath should not be underestimated; it took thirty years and the electoral defeat of the party that made the revolution, the Institutionalized Revolutionary Party (PRI), for those killed and brutalized to receive their due. In 1968, for the first time in a generation, demands for social justice rang out again in Mexico, largely from students, the country’s future elite and the scions of the ruling party; they were met with bullets. While the numbers of dead and wounded continue to be contested, there seems little argument that, as if in some bad film script in the very place meant to celebrate the three cultures which are considered to constitute Mexicanidad – indigenous (Aztec/Mexica, Maya etc.), colonial (Hispanic), and their cosmic (Vasconselos, 1997) progeny (mestizo) – the Mexican military at the behest of the PRI answered student calls for justice and democracy by massacring a number of them, jailing even more, and perhaps disappearing some. Tlatelolco remains shrouded in secrecy and mystery, an open wound in Mexican society wrapped in an elegiac miasma, a simple protest turned into an act of political martyrdom reminiscent of sixty years earlier. The ghost of 1968 came to join that of Zapata in a socio-cultural and psychological landscape, a collective memory, increasingly populated by people and places which represented vestiges of social justice. 32. As noted in Chapter 4, this evocative, romantic epigram associated with Zapata was likely borrowed from fellow revolutionary martyr Práxedis Guerrero; see Albro, 1996. 33. Perhaps a more apt description would be something like ‘an armed and clever techno-savvy social movement with a sophisticated public relations sensibility and propensity for street/jungle theater, which just happens to include the occasional display of small arms and light weapons (which include their words).’

Chapter 8 1. These terms veer precariously close to losing any utility; nonetheless, their meaning is relatively clear and should become more so. Some sense of the

216

2. 3.

4. 5.

6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

Revolution, rebellion, resistance terms, respectively, can be found in Scott, 1985 (everyday resistance), indirectly in Hadden, 2001: 23 (everyday rebellion), and obliquely in Becker, 1996: 19 (everyday revolution). ‘Everyday revolution’ is not meant to invoke ‘the revolution of everyday life’ (Vaneigem, 2001). This is to in no way ignore the inevitable proliferation of unintended consequences that they are unlikely to imagine and circumstances over which they may have no control. This last is a paraphrase of the title of one of the films, On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time (Sur le passage de quelques personnes à travers une assez courte unité de temps, 1959), directed by Guy Debord, the chief theoretician of the Situationists. This is what a relative of a Grenadian doctor, who had agreed to be interviewed by me about the revolutionary process there, told him in suggesting he not speak with me. The concept of ‘imaginary’ here draws on Castoriadis’s (1998: 3) formulation of it as an essentially radical ‘creation of forms/figures/images’ at both individual and social levels; the concept of ‘revolutionary imaginary’ is borrowed from Singer (1986). Lippens (2003) proffers a compelling analysis of the Zapatista ‘imaginary of justice and punishment’ rooted in the psychoanalytical work of Lacan, often credited with creating the concept. Egerton (2002: xiii) describes it as an ‘escapist rebellion,’ which he considers a ‘less coherent’ and ‘less overtly political’ rebellion. A delightful portmanteau term in increasingly wide use, ‘folksonomy’ was created by Thomas Vander Wal and has come to mean a sort of a collective, usergenerated, non-hierarchical, bottom up taxonomy; see http://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Folksonomy. It merits mention that Vander Wal has rejected this common usage as ‘completely unglued from anything I recognize’ (www. vanderwal.net/random/entrysel.php?blog=1750). His original definition, which does not seem that far from the contemporary usage, can be found at www.vanderwal.net/random/entrysel.php?blog=1750. As Borges (1975: 104) reminds us in a wonderful essay that warns of the perils and pitfalls of classification, ‘obviously there is no classification … that is not arbitrary and conjectural.’ This section draws heavily on Horne, 1965; Tombs, 1999; and Shafer, 2005. My thanks to Leslie Haire. See, in particular, Gullickson, 1996; Eichner, 2004. Arendt (1965: 64) was impressed by Marx’s embrace of the Commune given that it ‘contradicted all his theories and all his predictions.’ Paz (1975: ix) thought Mexico in 1968 was a metaphor of the Paris Commune. This section draws heavily on Gilly, 2005a; Hart, 1997; and Knight, 1990a, 1990b. Knight (1984: 65) refers to them as ‘semi-proletarians,’ which seems apt. Which Benjamin (2000: 54–5) describes as ‘less a revolutionary faction’ than a ‘revolutionary (or anarchist) “voice.”’ In early May 1911 a small army of Mexican and international (primarily from

Notes

16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25.

26.

217

the United States) revolutionaries affiliated with Magón and the anarchosocialist Mexican Liberal Party invaded Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico from the United States, defeated the Mexican military garrisoned there, and established a republic. See, in particular, Blaisdell, 1962; Hart, 1997: 254; 2006: 364; Taylor 1999. Interview with museum worker (2000), Museum of the Revolution, Chihuahua, Mexico. This section draws on Burbank, 1976; Bissett, 1999; Lipset and Marks 2001. It seems worth noting, in light of the topics covered in this chapter, that during this period the Wobblies, who were, after all, meant to be an international workers’ organization, were present in Oklahoma, Baja California, and Chile (Alba, 1968: 47). A somewhat dated notion which had some investment in the former Eastern Europe; see, for example, Ozment, 1981: 272; Zagorin, 1982: 38; Fulbrook, 2004: 40. But see Weber’s description of it as a ‘bloody carnival’ not fit for ‘the honorable name of revolution’ (Mommsen, 1990: 296); my thanks to Harald Wydra for this reminder. This section draws heavily on Selbin, 2008: 142–3. Hobsbawn offers the German: ‘die Länder öfter wechselnd als die Schue’; this translation is my own. The complicated and more than a little fraught move of Quixote, as well as Galahad, to the ‘new world’ is intriguingly considered in Reiss, 1997. For Sinclair (1998: 113) Guevara was ‘the Garibaldi of his age’; and Riall (2007: 8) observes that ‘in global consciousness, the place of Garibaldi, it may be argued, was taken by Che Guevara, a figure of a rather different order, who nonetheless shared with the “hero of two worlds” some important characteristics.’ While it seems unlikely some believe that long before Braun accompanied Mao on the 1934–36 ‘Long March’ in China he was also on the ‘long march’ of the 1924–27 Prestes Column in Brazil with his current wife’s future husband. It seems far more likely that someone from the Comintern who was with Prestes was using the name Otto Braun. This section draws heavily on Selbin, 2008: 143–4.

Chapter 9 1. Much of this section draws extensively on the last section of Selbin, 2008: 144–6. 2. I am glossing over Apter’s useful distinction between ‘agents,’ who ‘differ from more ordinary storytellers … as they become makers of texts,’ and ‘storytellers’ (2006: 791). 3. In Nicolaisen’s view, ‘without stories we could not survive; without stories we would be disoriented; without stories we would be lost; without stories we lack assurance as to who we are or who we could be’ (1990: 10).

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4. This is offered as a corrective of sorts to Selbin’s (1999) focus on ‘enduring legacies of revolutionary philosophies and practices in Latin America’ (Rodgers, 2009: 86), and accepted gratefully. 5. Lenin (1964: 141), however, following Marx’s admonition about revolutionaries not looking to the past, warned that ‘the chief mistake made by revolutionaries is that they look backward at the old revolutions, whereas life gives us too many new things that have to be fitted into the general pattern of events.’ 6. A compelling and salutary reminder can be found in Hayslip (1989: xv), who notes that few in the United States understood during Vietnam ‘the different wars my people were fighting when you got here. For you, it was a simple thing: democracy against communism. For us, that was not our fight at all. How could it be? We knew little of democracy and even less about communism. For most of us it was a fight for independence – like the American Revolution. Many of us also fought for religious ideals, the way the Buddhists fought the Catholics. Behind the religious war came the battle between city people and country people – the rich against the poor – a war fought by those who wanted to change Vietnam and those who wanted to leave it as it had been for a thousand years. Beneath all that, too, we had vendettas: between native Vietnamese and immigrants (mostly Chinese and Khmer) who had fought for centuries over the land. Many of these wars go on today. How could you hope to end them by fighting a battle so different from our own?’ 7. See Goldstone, who describes ‘the myth of revolutions treats them as sudden detonations of popular energy and social change. Dramatic acts on a particular day … When most people think of “revolutions,” they think of a rapid series of events, taking a matter of weeks or months, during which old regimes fall, new regimes are constructed, and the population accepts (or is forced to accept) the new order’ (2009: 18). 8. While they frame story and narrative differently, see also Berger and Quinney (2005a: 4); in contrast, Davis (2002b: 12–13), like most others, sees stories as by and large ordered. 9. While we do not usually conceive of the biological world in terms of infra­ structure, it is not because they do not exist. Plants, animals, minerals, and the elements developed what might be termed an eco-structure roughly analogous to infrastructures and equally foundational/fundamental to daily life. This argument is influenced by Warshall (1998), though I have pushed his argument in new directions. 10. I am indebted to John Foran for these two points. 11. While the subtitle of Holloway’s (2002) clever and compelling, Change the World without Taking Power is The Meaning of Revolution Today, some ninety years before he suggested this Zapata and Villa sought to change the world without taking power in Mexico. 12. See Chapter 6, in particular n6. As noted there, this is likely an apocryphal tale. 13. The word ‘satisfice,’ a combination of ‘satisfy’ and ‘suffice,’ was coined by Herbert Simon in 1947; see Simon, 1997. 14. Borrowed here from Higonnet, 1998: 324, who is paraphrasing Barthes.

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15. As Lévi-Strauss suggested, ‘every civilization tends to overestimate the objective orientation of its thought’ (1966: 3). 16. See hooks’s ‘cultural genealogy of resistance’ (1995: 148), which helps us to learn from and build ‘on present strategies of opposition and resistance that were effective in the past and are empowering in the present.’ See also Chapter 4 n4. 17. Recently, Apter (2006: 791) has similarly suggested that agents articulate stories and ‘re-present the here and now. They give a sense of urgency for the future. Theirs is a culmination of the past whose logic is a self-validating project that takes the form of a master narrative. 18. Zoe Cordes Selbin circa 1995.

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Index

Aarne–Thompson type folk tales, 33 absolute monarchies, 108 active listeners, 40, 188 Aesop’s Fables, 26, 52 Afghanistan, 139 Africa: Cuban fighters, 36; Haiti revolution influence, 152 agrarian rebellions, 149, 153; Mexican communalists, 154–5; see also peasant rebellions agriculture, militarized, 151 Aguascalientes, Mexico, 149 Al-Aswa, Mohammad, 38 Algeria, 1954–62 period, 15, 87, 117, 134, 148 Almond, M., 85 American Revolution of 1776, 12, 20, 71, 97, 103–6; Declaration of Independence, 56, 105, 109, 146 Anabaptist reign, Münster, 21 Anansi, the spider, 26 Ancona, 1914 red week, 168 Andry’s Rebellion, USA 1811, 145 Angola, Cuban impact, 138 anti-colonial struggles, 20, 145 anti-capitalist globalization/WTO/ protesters, 91, 133, 158, 192 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 26 Apter, D., 184 Arabian Assassins, 167 Arabian Nights, 26, 52

‘archives of feelings,’ 60, 63, 75 Arendt, Hannah, 106, 119, 139, 141–2, 187 Argentina, recovered factories movement, 168 Aristotle, 69, 99 Arusha Declaration, 52 Assmann, A., 59, 61 Athens, classical period democracy, 98–9 atomistic individual, as unit of analysis, 7 Austria, Hitler rationalization, 57 ‘authenticity,’ 32–3, 38, 83; stories, 40 Babeuf, Conspiracy of Equals, 123 Baja anarchist Republic, Mexico 1911, 161, 172, 174 Baker, K.M., 5, 102 Bandung Conference, 148 Barthes, Roland, 42–3, 54 Basques, 181 Bastille, fall of, 1, 108, 119, 128; Day, 116 Batista, Fulgencio, 134 Battle of Mirabet, 179 Bayo, Alberto, 36, 52, 136 Belgium, 1789–90 risings, 111 Bemba people, 32–3 Benärio (Prestes), Olga, 181 Benin, 138 Benjamin, T., 157 Benjamin, Walter, 19, 25, 37, 66, 71, 88 Berger, R., 5 Berkeley, ‘People’s Park Riots,’ 178

250

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Berlin, 1918 revolutionary movement, 134, 177 Bertaux, D., 42 Biersack, A., 45 Bishop, Maurice, 34 Bloody Sunday(s), 179 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 26 Bolívar, Simón, 146, 152 Bolivia, 177; ballot-box revolution, 192; Che Guevara’s death, 180; Cuban Revolution impact, 138; 1952–54 revolutionary period, 134, 148; 1952–54 period recuperation, 167; 2003 insurrection, 158–9 Bolsheviks, 127–9 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 123, 151 ‘Boston Tea Party,’ 105 ‘Boxer Rebellion,’ China, 147 Br’er Rabbit, 26 Braudel, Fernand, 91 Braun, Otto (Li De), 181, 184 Brazil: independence struggle, 86; Marxist Prestes column, 177; Palmares Republic, 21, 145 Brecht, Bertolt, 180 bricoleur/bricolage, revolutionary, 40–41, 48, 55, 186 Brinton, C., 68, 104, 139, 185 Britain, colonial rationalizations, 57 British Guiana: democratic antiimperialist movement, 148; revolution possibility period, 15, 134 Brothers Grimm, 52 Brown, John, Constitution for a Free Republic, 178; saga of, 145 Buenfil, N., 157 Bulavin Rebellion, Cossack, 177 Burbank, G.,175 Burckhardt, J., 2, 33, 72 Burkina Faso, 138; 1983 revolution, 179 Burma, 1988 uprising, 179 Byatt, A.S., 5, 42 Cárdenas, Lázaro, 156–7 Cabezas, Omar, 34 Cabral, Amilcar, 37, 180; knit-cap symbol, 193; mythical legacy, 56 Cabrera Infante, Gabriel, 76 Callinicos, Alex, 124 Cambodia, 139 Camus, Albert, 139 Cantwell, R., 66

Cape Verde/Guinea-Bissau, 37 ‘Carnation Revolution,’ Portugal 1974, 112, 177 Carr, E.H., 88 Carranza, Venustiano, 154–5 Casa del Obreros Mundial, Mexico City, 173–4 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 171 Castro, Fidel, 81, 134–5 cause–effect relations, 39 change, as possible, 24, 69, 131; better world vision, 134; demands for, 75; demonstrations of effect, 71 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 26 Chaunu, Pierre, 119 checks and balances, ideology of, 107 Chiapas, Mexico, 13 Chile: Allende government period, 148, 168; ‘República Socialista,’ 161; 1932 revolutionary moment, 183; 1970 election, 139; Wobblies, 177 China, 15, 21; ‘Boxer Rebellion,’ 20; Communist Party, 147; Fourth of May movement, 147, 178; 1911 uprising, 71, 126; 1949 Revolution, see below; revolutionary period, 143 Chinese Revolution of 1949, 13, 20, 84, 104, 106, 117, 124, 142, 181; as anticolonial, 132–3 Chissano, Joaquin, 36 Christianity, 88; egalitarian notion, 111; language socialist use, 175 Reformation, 97, 100 Cienfuegos, Camilo, 81 Cinderella story, 50–52 Civilizing and Democratizing revolution story, 4, 19, 96, 98–101, 103, 106, 107, 112–19, 142, 186, 116, 118–19, 142, 186 Civil Rights struggle, USA, 158 class: -based revolts, 116; consciousness, 72 Cohen, P., 88 Cold War, 133 collective action, ‘repertoires’ of, 81 Collier, R., 93, 164 Colombia: la violencia, 177; rebellion period, 13 color/velvet revolutions, Eastern Europe, 13, 68, 98, 112–13, 133, 178, 192 Comandante Ramona, EZLN, 2 Comintern, the, 181 commitment, 134

Index Communist parties, 181 Congo, Che Guevara in, 180 consciousness, 5 constructivism, 28 ‘contagion,’ questionable metaphorical use, 67, 68 Corney, F., 128, 130 cosmologies, revolutionary, 36 ‘cradles of civilization,’ claims to, 57 Crews, Harry, 46 Cuba, 15; 1895 War of Independence, 81; fighters in Africa, 36; international presence, 136; 1959 Revolution, see below; wars of independence, 146 Cuban Revolution of 1959, 13, 20, 71, 78, 117, 124, 142, 163, 180; cultural impact, 135; imaginative power of, 132–3; influence of, 69, 134; ‘myth of the Sierra,’ 136; precedent-setting, 137–8; 26 of July movement, 134 Cuito Carnevale, Nicaraguan peasant knowledge of, 166 culture: ‘cultural re-editing,’ 37; everyday, 8; Greek influence, 99; popular, 6, 51 Cunningham, A., 176 Curaçao, Frente Obrero y Liberacion, 177 Cvetkovich, A., 60, 75 Danton, Georges, 122 Darnton, Robert, 92, 119, 121–2, 124–5 Davis, N., 5, 45 Debray, Régis, 52 Debs, Eugene, 174 Declaration of the Rights of Man, France, 109 Deleuze, Gilles, 28, 50, 188 Dessalines, Jean-Jacques, 151 Dhofar Rebellion, 1962–75 Oman, 179 Díaz, Porfirio, 154, 172; resistance to, 153 Dien Bien Phu, French defeat at, 177 discrimination, Cuba ban on, 135 ‘domino theory,’ 68 Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne, 175–6 Dunn, J., 103, 119, 124, 129, 133, 138, 174 Ecuador, 1944 Glorious May Revolution, 177 egalitarianism, 20, 111 Egypt: 1919 March revolt, 147, 180 Einwohner, R., 10 El Salvador: Cuban Revolution impact,

251

138; Tacuba soviet, 177 elites, 78, 91; American eighteenthcentury, 105; analyses by, 2; enforced accountability of, 114; myths of, 55, 57, 61; noble self-presentation, 189; noblesse oblige notion, 19, 96; popular credentials assertion, 167; ‘reformed,’ 112; revolutionary stories, 142; selflegitimization, 62; stories of, 77 Encuentro Latinoamericano de Empresas Recuperados, 168 Engels, Friedrich, 34, 52, 144, 181 England: civil war, 101; ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688, 20, 97, 100–103, 111, 113, 163; Great Rising 1381, 145 Enlightenment, the, 7, 19, 186; as metanarrative, 14; ‘revolutionism,’ 104 enragés, 122 Estates General, France, 108 Ethiopia, 138, 146 Eurocentrism, Greece roots, 97 Europe: 1848 uprisings/failed revolutions, 97, 111–13, 125; color/velvet revolutions, see above Evans, M., 87 Everett Massacre, USA 1916, 179 Exodus story, 52, 82, 84, 99–100, 144–5, 157 EZLN (Ejército Zapatista de Liberacion Nacional), 2, 17, 35, 37, 83, 86, 91, 133, 158, 166, 174 ‘fact,’ 15, 53, 191; –fiction mutability, 88; ‘reliable evidence,’ 8; see also truth fairy tales, cautionary, 79 Fanon, Frantz, 141 Farid, Muhammad, 180 Farmers’ Alliance, USA, 167 Faulkner, William, 58 Fauriol, G., 152 Fedon’s Rebellion, 1794 Grenada, 111, 145, 152, 180 ‘festival of the oppressed,’ 169, 171 Finland, 1917 Revolution, 177 Finley, Moses, 144 First Continental Congress, America, 105 folklorists, 33 Foran, John, 5, 14, 66–7, 133, 156–7 Foucault, Michel, 87 France: constitution of 1791, 109; bourse de travail, 167; colonial rationalizations, 57; French Revolution, see below;

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–Prussian War, 169; Third Republic, 171 Free Trade Area of the Americas proposal, protests, 178 Freedom and Liberation Revolution Story, 4, 20, 141, 153–9, 172 Freire, Paulo, 83 French Revolution of 1789, 13, 15, 20–21, 70, 78, 84, 94, 97, 104, 106–9, 111, 115–19, 121, 126, 128, 131, 141–2, 148, 163; chronology, 110; historically privileged, 96; name changing, 122; new calendar, 121; promise of, 124–5, 150; ‘revisionist’ schools, 111 Fries’s Rebellion, USA, 161 Friesen, G., 176 Fuentes, Carlos, 90 Furet, François, 5, 70, 124, 119 Gaines, J., 72 Galeano, Eduardo, 8 Gandhi, Mohandas, 178; Satyagraha movement, 147 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 86, 181 Geertz, Clifford, 45, 62, 85 Germany, 1525 Peasant Rebellion, 177 Ghana, 139; 1979 revolutionary situation, 179 Gildea, R., 64 Gilly, Adolfo, 153, 156, 158–9 Girad, R., 71 Gómez, Máximo, 81 Goethe, Johann von, 124 Goldstone, J., 5, 14 Gonzales, M., 173 Great Andean Rebellion 1780, 145 Greece, communists, 134 Green Corn Rebellion, Oklahoma 1917, 161, 175 Grenada, 1979 revolution, 117, 138, 148; Fédon’s Rebellion, 111, 145, 152, 180 Grimm Brothers, 26 Griswold, W., 32–3 ‘groupuscules,’ 83 Groves, Marmaduke, 161 Guangzhou ‘Three-Day Soviet,’ 21, 178 Guatemala: democratic anti-imperialism, 148; revolution possibility period, 15, 134 Guattari, Félix, 28, 50, 188 Guevara, Ernesto (Che), 37–8, 52, 58, 81, 86, 136, 138–9, 180–81; beret symbol,

193; mythical status, 17, 56; T-shirts ubiquity, 166 Gutiérrez, Gustavo, 142 Haitian 1791 revolution, 20–21, 143–6, 157; African diaspora importance, 149; impact of, 152; marginalized history, 151; pioneering, 150 Halbwachs, M., 64 Halliday, Fred, 101 Halpern, S., 58 Hamburg, 1923 soviet, 177 Hart, J., 173 Hasidim, Jews, 187 Havelock, Eric, 69 Hegel, G.W.F., 22, 89, 162 Herodotus, 8 heroes and martyrs, valorization of, 85 Higonnet, P., 15, 63 Hill, Joe, Palestinian recognition of, 166 Hinchman, L., 43 Hinchman, S., 43 ‘history,’ 7, 30, 32, 49, 55, 62 ; alternative constructions of, 45; as grand sweep, 14; conceptions of, 89; construction from above, 9, 88; ‘facts,’ see above; longue durée, 91; official story, 60; traditional undermined, 92 Ho Chi Minh (Nguyen Tat Thanh), 56, 86, 180; pith helmet symbol, 193 Hobbes, Thomas, 122 Hobsbawm, Eric, 8, 84, 88, 112, 180 Hollander, J., 10 Holloway, J., 5 Honduras, 2009 coup d’état, 161 Horowitz, I, 142 Horsley, R., 141 Huerta, Victoriano, 154, 173 Hume, David, 69 Hunan, 1930 Autumn Harvest uprising, 178 Hundred Years War, 167 Hungary: 1919 soviet, 134, 177; 1956 uprising, 177 Hunt, L., 92 Huntington, Samuel, 103 Huyssen, Andreas, 71 idealism, 95 Igbo women uprising, 1929 Nigeria, 161 imagining: evolutionary, 75; new futures, 30, 131; revolutionary, 10

Index Inca society, 93; -related myths, 58 India: 1859 Upper Cloth Revolt, 178; Baliapal Movement, 179; Naxalite uprising, 21, 178; Sepoy Rebellion 1857, 20, 146; Telangana movement, 178 indigenous peoples, fetishized, 93 Indonesia, 1945–9 period, 85, 134, 148 inevitability, notion of, 34, 62, 79 infrastructures, human, 190 intentionality, 5 International Women’s Day, 127 Internet, the, 65 interviewing, in-depth, 6 Internationale, the, 171 Inuit resistance organizing, 166 Iran: 1905 uprising, 71, 98; 1920–21 Soviet Republic of Gilan, 179; 1951–53 period of democratic anti-imperialism, 134, 148; 1979 ‘revolution,’ 15, 20, 117–18, 139, 142, 163, 166; see also Persia Ireland: 1919–21 War of Independence, 146; Dublin and Derry ‘Bloody Sundays,’ 179 ‘Islamic’ revolutions, 13 Israel, Masada story, 57 Italy: biennio rosso period, 134; ‘hot autumn’ 1969, 168; unification struggle, 86 Jackson State University, USA, 178 Jacobins, 125 Jacquerie, 167 Jamaica, 75; democratic anti-imperialist movement, 148; 1972 election, 139; People’s Republic of Greenwich Town, 21, 177 James II, King of England, 102 James, C.L.R., 152 Jefferson, Thomas, 12, 52, 105, 182 Kabbalism, 187 Kamil, Mustafa, 180 Kampwirth, K., 11 Kaplan, S., 119 Kent State University, USA, 178 Kenya, 1952–60 rebellion period, 13, 134, 148 Khasnabish, Alex, 5 King, Martin Luther, 70 Knight, A., 71, 172

253

Knight, F., 151–3, 156 Koran, the, 52 Korea, 1919 March Independence Movement, 147, 178 Kronstadt Rebellion 1921, 130, 161, 163 Kumar, K., 14, 104, 113 La Resouvenir 1823 Rebellion, Guyana, 145 La Rochefoucauld, Duc de, 1, 116 Lachmann, R., 101 language: Christian, 175; possibilitylimiting, 89; revolutionary transformation, 122, 130, 135; words ‘maturing’ process, 37 Laos, 139 Latin America: wars of independence, 111; Zapata significance, 35 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 53, 56 leadership, vanguard parties, 78; –followers dialogue, 83 Lee, C., 60 L’Enclos, Ninon de, 24 Lenin, V.I., 52, 126–9, 131, 139, 164; Paris Commune evocation, 169 Leon, Nicaragua, resistance stories, 34 Levellers and Diggers, 101 Lewis, B., 88 liberation struggles: anti-colonial, 20, 145, 147; percolation of, 158; processes of, 142–3 Liberia, 146 Liebknecht, Karl, 144 Lincoln, B., 53 ‘line of march,’ 34 Linstroth, J., 181 Llano del Rio community(ies), USA, 178 Lloyd George, David, 2 Locke, John, 102 Los Angeles, Zoot Suit riots, 178 Lost and Forgotten revolution story, 4, 162, 165, 179, 182, 187 Louis XVI (Capet), King of France, 1, 102, 116; execution of, 120 Luxemburg, Rosa, 144 Maceo, Antonio, 81 Madero, Francisco, 153–4, 172–3 ‘Maggid’ of Mezritch, 188 Magon Brothers (Magonista anarchists), Mexico, 172, 180 Mahdi Rebellion 1880s, Sudan, 20, 146

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Makhno, Nester, 164 Malaysia, 1948–60, period, 134, 148 Malia, M., 102–3, 131, 171 Manco Inca’s rebellion, 145 Manley, Michael, 75 Mao Zedong, 52; Paris Commune evocations, 169 Marcel, Étienne, memory recuperation, 167 Marcus, Greil, 8 Margalit, A., 61 Markoff, J., 162 Marseillaise, La 171 Martí, Farabundo, 177 Martí, José, 81 Marx, Karl, 34, 52, 116, 143–4, 169–70, 181 May Fourth Movement, 1919 China, 147, 178 Maya society: militarism of, 93; -related myths, 58 Mayer, A., 70 Mazzuca, S., 164 McAdam, D., 22 McAuley, C., 151 McGranaham, C., 88–9 McNeill, W., 5 measurement and naming, 29 Meiji Restoration, Japan 1868, 98 Mexicas (Aztecs): militarism of, 93; -related myths, 58 memory(ies), 3, 18–19, 32, 49, 76, 194; autobiographical, 63; collective, 60–62, 64–5, 189; indispensable, 58; types of, 59 Mensheviks, 127, 129 Mexico: Baja anarchist Republic, 161, 172, 174; Red Battalions, 1927, 21, 173; Tlatelolco Massacre 1968, 157 Mexican 1910–20 revolution(s), 13, 20–21, 71, 98, 112, 124, 126, 137, 142, 149, 152–3, 157, 164, 172–4, 184; 1916 general strike, 155; 1917 Constitution, 155–6 Michelet, Jules, 119 mimesis, 3, 18–19, 66, 68, 70, 76, 194; as catalyst, 49 ‘mimicry,’ 66–7; ‘appropriative,’ 71 Miou-Miou, 24 mobilizations, of people, 14 ‘moments of madness,’ 192 Moncada Barracks, Cuba, 134

Mornet, D., 94, 107 Mozambique: Cuban impact, 138; Zapata familiarity, 166 Münster, peasant rebellion, 161 Mukim, Kasan, 1904 East Java uprising, 178 ‘multitude,’ 91 Munich, 1919 soviet, 134, 177 Museum of the Revolution, Chihuahua, 174 ‘Muskogee Indians,’ 176 Mussolini, Benito, 2 myth(s), 3, 18–19, 49, 53, 76, 186, 194; battle for control of, 56; collective, 57; –enlightenment dialectic, 54; ‘heritage’ framing, 58; ideals articulation, 55; origin/creation, 28, 31, 50, 53 Namibia liberation struggle, 148; Bolívar statue, 146; ‘La Marseillaise’ familiarity, 166 narrative, 3, 41, 42, 60; definitions of, 44 meta-, 14, 28; Northern/Western conventions, 25; peoples’, 9; role of, 18; translatable, 43 Nat Turner’s 1831 Rebellion, 145 nationalism, China, 132–3 ‘native’ information, recognition of, 7 Naxalite uprising, India, 21, 178 Negri, Antonio, 111, 124 Nepal, ‘negotiated revolution,’ 192 New York Conspiracy 1741, 21, 167 New York, 1969 Stonewall riots, 178 Nicaragua, 69; 1979 revolution, 15, 20, 34, 78, 117, 138–9, 142, 163; Sandino’s 1926–34 rebellion, 177 Nigeria, civil war, 179 Nimtz, A., 181 1968 rebellions, 24, 157, 171 nomothetic explanations, desire for, 76 Non-Aligned Movement, 148 North Africa, independence struggles, 177 North Yemen, civil war, 179 North-West Rebellion, Canada, 166 nostalgia, 61 Obregón, Álvaro, 155–6, 173 ‘official stories,’ 51 Oklahoma Socialist Party, 176 Okri, Ben, 185

Index Orientalism, 93; academic, 118 Orozco, Pascual, 154 Orwell, George, 61 ‘other,’ the, 92 Ovid, 26 Ozouf, M., 5 Paige, J., 14, 132 Paine, Thomas, 36, 52, 120, 180; contemporary evocation of, 181 Palestinians, Joe Hill familiarity, 166; Palestine Liberation Organization, 181 Parelli, C., 11 Paris Commune, 20, 70–71, 117, 121, 128, 163–4, 168–9, 172, 184; flag of, 90; living legacy of, 171; massacre of, 170 Paris 1968, 24, 171 Parker, N., 5, 10, 43–4, 75, 103, 146 Passerini, Luisa, 63 past, the, as strange, 92 Paz, Octavio, 70 Pérez, L., Jr, 138 peasant rebellions, 177; France, 167; Germany, 161 People’s Republic of Greenwich Town, Jamaica, 21, 177 Persia (Iran), 97; 1905 Constitutional Revolution, 126 Peru, Cuba Impact, 138 Philippines: 1946–54, 13, 148 Phillips, Wendell, 74 Pilbeam, P., 171 pirate enclaves, democratic, 167 Pius VI, Pope, 110 Plan of Ayala, Mexico, 154–5 Plan of San Luis Potosí, 154 planter aristocracy, Haiti, 150 Plato, 99 Polisario Front, 179 Polish Revolt 1794, 111 politics, symbolic, 189 Polletta, F., 5, 30, 40, 188 Popkin, S., 149 Portugal: ‘Carnation Revolution’ 1974, 112, 177; Colonial war, 148; 1910 republican revolution, 112, 126 Prague, 1968 ‘spring,’ 177 pre-theory(ies), 27–8 Presley, Elvis, 8 Prosser’s Rebellion 1800, USA, 145

255

Quinney, R., 5 rationalizations, historical, 57 Raynal, Abbé, 144 Razin’s Revolt, Cossack, 177 Rebbe Baal Shem Tov, 187–8 Rebbe Israel of Rizhin, 188 Rebbe Moshe-Leib, 188 rebellion, 10; micro-, 164; specific grievances, 15; types, 12 Red Battalions, Mexico City 1927, 21, 173 red flag, 90 Red River rebellion, Canada, 166 ‘Red String Conspiracy,’ Georgia USA, 91 Red Vienna, 134, 177 Reed, John, 128 religious traditions, borrowings, 31 Renaissance, the, 2 Republic of Baja California, anarchist, 161 Republic of Palmares, Brazil, 21, 145 resistance: defensive posture, 15; everyday, 162; forms of, 11; history use, 41; indigenous, 21; internationalization of, 190; problematic concept, 10; recycled stories, 164; strategy constituting, 12 Revolt of Masaniello, 1647 Spanish Naples, 21, 177 revolution(s): ‘behavioral,’ 1960s, 28; definition attempts, 10, 14; elite stories of, 96; European ‘color,’ see above; fervor, 80; imaginations, 16; models of, 194; ‘negotiated,’ 192; possibility of, 26; ‘romanticism’ of, 84–6; standard narrative, 78; types, 4, 106; willingness to sacrifice, 16 rhizomic model, 50 Riel, Louis, 166 rights, 142–3 Robespierre, Maximilien de, 122–3 Rodney, Walter, 52 Rome: Christianity embrace, 88; Classical period influence, 99, 143–4 Roosevelt, F.D., 56 Rosenberg, W., 131 Roy, M.N., 181 rumors, 33 Russell, D.E.H., 12 Russia: civil war, 129; Code on Marriage, 1918, 130; 1905 uprising/massacre, 71, 98, 112, 126–8, 179; February 1917

256

Revolution, rebellion, resistance

revolution, 127, 148; October 1917 Revolution, 13, 15, 20–21, 70, 78, 84, 104, 106, 117, 124–8, 131, 138, 142 Sánchez Lira, M., 85 Sacré Cœur basilica, Paris, 170 Saint Denis, 24 Saint-Just, Louis de 123 Sakwa, R., 104 ‘salt of the earth,’ fetishization of, 94 Sandinista National Liberation Front, 36, 83 Sandinistas, 1920s, 36 sans-culottes, 1793 France, 163 Scheherazade, 11 scholarship, feminist, 66 Scott, J., 10 Seattle, anti-WTO mobilization, 178 ‘self-determination,’ 20 Selma, Alabama, 1965 Bloody Sunday, 179 Sepoy Rebellion 1857, 20, 146 ‘Sermon on the Mount,’ 52 Sewell, W., Jr, 5, 43, 45, 108, 119, 124, 128 Shay’s Rebellion, USA, 90, 161, 182 Shils, E., 87 ‘Siakal Incident,’ 1971 Iran, 179 Skocpol, Theda, 14 slave revolts, 82, 84, 144, 149–50, 157 slavery: abolition organizing, 166; Haitian abolition, 150 Smith, R., 5 ‘social creativity,’ moments of, 162 Social Revolution story, 4, 15, 78, 96, 115, 118, 126, 131–3, 137, 138–9, 142, 187; France 1789, 120; Russia 1917, 130 social sciences, 4, 19, 28, 89, 95, 191; major projects, 7; methods, 3, 30, 192; stories of, 31 Socialist Party of America, 174–5 Sohrabi, N., 71 Somers, M., 25 Somoza, Anastasio, 34 South Africa, liberation struggle, 148 soviets, Russia, 127–30 Spain, 1936–37 Revolution, 163; Asturias miners’ uprising, 177; selfmanagement, 168 Spartacist League, Germany, 144 Spartacus, 145, 157, 163 Spartacus slave revolt, 20, 84, 145, 157, 163; evocative power of, 144

Stalin, Josef, 131 state, the, 159; struggle for power over, 116 Steffens, L., 2, 9, 33, 126 Stendahl, K., 141 story(ies): celebrated compendiums, 26; Cinderella, 50–52; compelling, 191; competing, 194; counter-, 189; elite, 19, 77; familiar, 30–31, 67; ‘infrastructural,’ 45; lineage, 41; localized, 33–4; of a better future, 16; ‘official,’ 51; open-ended, 39; past injustices, 4; purposes variety, 6–7, 48; resistance, 79; retelling of, 35, 186–8; revolutionary, 4, 40; social science relegation of, 7; standard plots, 33, 39, 44; storytellers, 46; –structure, 190; universality, 29, 43; women’s transmission of, 11 structural conditions, historical, 9, 56 students, USA killing of, 178 Subcomandante Marcos, 17, 37, 52 Sukarno, Independence Day speech 1960, 84 Sun Yat Sen, 98 Swidler, A., 75 Taibo II, P., 184 Telangana movement, Hyderabad, 178 ‘Terror,’ the, 1793–94, 120–25 Thermidorean reaction, 123 Tilly, Charles, 5, 14–15, 24, 27, 31, 33, 38–9, 43, 75, 91 timetables, singular, 2 Timor-Leste, ‘negotiated revolution,’ 192 Tlatelolco Massacre, 1968 Mexico, 157 To Duc Thang, 90 Toussaint L’Ouverture, FrançoisDominique, 144, 150–51 Toynbee, Arnold, 68, 106 tradition, 66; ‘invented,’ 87; revolutionary, 42, 87 translation, problems of, 36 Trevelyan, G., 112 Tri-Continental, 148 Tristan, Flora, 181 Trotsky, Leon, 15, 129 Trouillet, M., 149 ‘truth’(s), 32, 46, 186; /accountability, 61–3; in fiction, 73; war and provocation, 33

Index Tuareg people, 1916–17 Kaocen revolt, 179 Túpac Amaru, 145; mythical status, 17 Túpac Amaru II, 145 Túpac Katari, 145, mythical status, 17 Turkey, –Armenia history disagreement, 8; Young Turks movement, 98 Ukraine, anarchist period, 161–3 ‘uprising of the anecdotes,’ 19, 25, 80 urban proletarian revolution, Paris Commune, 171 Uruguay, independence struggle, 86 USA (United States of America), 136–7; African-American Civil Rights struggle, 158; American Revolution, see above; Constitution, 105; Cuban Revolution impact, 138; Haymarket martyrs, 178, 184; 1830s myths, 57; revolutionary past manipulation, 167; Socialist Party of America, 174–5 USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics), Allied intervention against, 90 vanguardism, 78 Venezuela: ballot-box revolution, 192; Cuban Revolution impact, 138 Versailles Conference 1919, 86 Vesey’s Rebellion, USA 1882, 145 Veyne, P., 58 Vietnam, 21, 139; Declaration of Independence, 146; martial prowess myth, 57; national liberation war, 117 Phu Reieng Do 1939 uprising, 178; revolutionary period 1945–75, 15, 134, 143, 148 Villa, Francisco (‘Pancho’), 149, 154–5, 172–4; assassination of, 156 Villareal, R., 85

257

Vincente, Sebastián San, 184 violence, 80, 159 voluntarism, 95 Walton, J., 13 Walzer, Michael, 100 war of manoeuvre/war of position, 135 ‘weapons of the weak,’ 79 Weinberg, B., 158 Weinstein, J., 185 Westphalia, 1648 treaties, 100 Whiskey Rebellion, USA, 161 White, H., 5, 42–3 Wilson, Woodrow, 86, 175 Wine, A., 157 Wobblies (Industrial Workers of the World), 177, 179 women, resistance loci, 11 words, ‘maturing process’ of, 37 worker self-management, 173; fascist reaction to, 168 Working Class Union, Arkansas, 176 World War I, USA entry into, 175 Wydra, Harald, 111, 113 Yang, G., 60 Yemen, Socialist Revolution, 179 Young, M., 131 YouTube, 155 Yu Gwansun, 178 Zanzibar, 1964 revolution, 138, 179 Zapata, Emiliano, 86, 149, 155, 157, 172–4, 182; assassination of, 156; Mexican government claim to, 166; Morelos uprising, 154; mythical status, 17; struggle for legacy of, 56; white horse symbol, 35–6, 193 Zhou Enlai, 119, 192