Rebellions and Revolutions

Central Power versus Local Power

Paradoxically, the very communities whose rebellions lead to revolution may experience its success as a new imposition. Rebels often want community control over their affairs, an end to what they believe to be unfair demands (such as taxation) from the central government, or an end to elite privileges that are supported by the rules and power of the existing government. Revolutionaries, on the other hand, seek large-scale, often sweeping, transformation, and are motivated by a grand vision or ideology, such as liberalism or Marxian socialism. To this end, revolutionaries direct their efforts to the seizure of power at the center, and the assertion of the now-revolutionary power over local communities. Thus although revolutionaries often envision the creation of a new community comprising a whole nation (excluding counterrevolutionary persons or groups) or even the world, their strategy of seizing and exercising central power sets them against local communities. The policies demanded by economic development and industrialization usually increase this tension further, as will be discussed below. While several revolutions could illustrate these dynamics, the Russian Revolution offers especially poignant examples.

The soviets, or councils, that appeared in rebellious Russia in 1917 were for Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) and other Russian revolutionaries (Bolsheviks) the very embodiment of revolution, as they emerged spontaneously from neighborhoods, workplaces, military units, and rural communities. The Bolsheviks, following Karl Marx (1818–1883), had idealized the Paris Commune, which emerged in the 1871 aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War as a purely democratic—indeed organic—revolutionary form. The manifesto drawn up by the Commune Central Committee had proclaimed that the proletarians (working classes) of Paris “have understood that the hour has struck for them to save the situation by taking into their own hands the direction of public affairs … that it is their duty and their absolute right to render themselves masters of their own destinies” (quoted in Marx [1871] 1972, pp. 551–552). The Commune lasted only months, but its policies, which included the abolition of the draft and the standing army in favor of the people in arms, the abolition of capital punishment and the burning of the guillotine, the abolition of night work for bakers, and the closure of pawnshops, were lasting inspirations. Even more important was the character of the Commune, its organic relationship to working-and middle-class Paris. Its deputies were subject to instant recall; their salaries were workingmen's salaries. Marx and his collaborator, Friedrich Engels (1820–1895), saw in the Commune the answer to the problem of the state, an entity that even in nominally democratic (but class-divided) societies was the master of society rather than its instrument. In “State and Revolution,” an essay written during the Russian Revolution, Lenin honored the Commune as well, arguing, “It is the political form … by which the smashed state machine can and must be replaced (Lenin [1918] 1975, p. 350).

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