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207
various sorts of rural folk. This is another point that tends to get lost in debates about just what sorts of
150 peasants are most rebellious. The most successful revolutionary organizations — including those in
Vietnam, Zimbabwe, and Nicaragua — have won the support not just of poor or middle peasants, but also
of landless and migrant labourers, rural artisans, rich peasants, and even landlords.
155    9. What is more, as Gugler and Dix have recently emphasized, urban groups have also played important,
even crucial, roles in a number of Third World revolutions. Indeed, the 1978-1979 overthrow of the Shah of
Iran was quintessentially an urban revolution. In Cuba and Nicaragua as well as in Iran, students,
160professionals, clerics, and even business people, as well as workers and the urban poor, joined or supported
broadbased coalitions against dictatorial regimes. Gugler and
Dix suggest that the participation of such
people may be essential to the success of revolutionaries in all of the more urbanized countries of the
contemporary Third World.
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10. How can professional revolutionaries put together broadly based coalition? Not surprisingly,
revolutionary coalitions tend to form around preexisting nationalist, populist, or religious discourses that
legitimize resistance to tyranny and, just as important, are capable of aggregating a broad array of social
170 classes and strata. Nationalism, in particular, has proven to be a more inclusive and powerful force for
revolutionary mobilization than class struggle alone. Revolutionaries have fared best where they — and not
conservative or reformist leaderships — have been able to harness nationalist sentiments. Ironically then,
175 Marxist groups in the Third World have generally been most successful when they have deemphasized
class struggle and stressed the goal of national liberation instead — or, at least, when they have attempted
to mobilize different types of people through the selective use of both nationalist and class appeals.
180
11. Nevertheless, it should be emphasized that revolutionary movements are much more than simply
ideological movements. As Popkin and Wickham-Crowley have recently argued, revolutionary 
185 movements have won broad popular support when they have been willing and able to deliver state-like
collective goods to their constituents. These may include public education, health services, law and order,
and economic reforms such as tax and interest reductions, the elimination of corvee labor, and land
190 reforms. Popkin notes that revolutionaries have been particularly effective in winning popular support
when they have initially focused on «local goals and goods with immediate payoffs» before attempting to
mobilize the population for more difficult tasks — including, ultimately, the overthrow of the incumbent
195 regime. In Vietnam, for example, peasants «in the late 1960s still laughed about the early attempts by
young Trotskyites and Communists to organize them for a national revolution, for industrialization, or even
for a world revolution! Only later, when peasants (and workers) were organized around smaller and more
immediate goals, were larger organizational attempts successful». During the 1960’s, a number of Latin
200 American revolutionary groups, which attempted to replicate the Cuban Revolution — including the
Sandinistas of Nicaragua — failed to make headway, largely because they were too quick to engage
incumbent regimes in armed struggle, well before they had solidified bread popular support through 205 
205 the provision of collective goods.
In addition to collective goods, revolutionary organizations may also oner selective incentives to
encourage participation in various sorts of activities, particularly dangerous ones like actual guerilla 
Figure 1.
210 warfare. Such incentives for actual or potential cadres and fighters, and their families,
may include extra tax or rent reductions or an additional increment of land beyond that
allocated to supporters in general. In any event, it is the ongoing provision of such collective
and selective goods, not ideological conversion in
215 the abstract, that has played the principal role in solidifying social support for guerrilla armies.
13. The argument we have just made does not, however, support Tilly’s claim that the sudden
withdrawal of expected government services drives people to revolt. In many Third World countries, few
220 government services have ever been provided to the bulk of the population. In fact, the evidence suggests
that those governments that do not deliver collective goods in people, and then repress reformers who try to
do something about the absence of such services, are the governments most likely to generate support for
225 revolutionaries. This analysis, moreover, accords with what we are beginning to leam about ruling
revolutionary parties. Walder has recently shown that such parties obtain popular support or compliance not
230 simply through coercion or through impersonal ideological appeals to atomized individuals (as the
«totalitarian» image would have it), but through patronage and the development of networks of loyal
clients. Revolutionary movements that have to build social support over a long period of time operate in a
similar way. In terms of what they are actually doing (and not simply what they are saying), revolutionary
235 movements can usefully be viewed as proto-state organizations, or what Wickham-Crowley calls «guerilla
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