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French Protestant village of Le Chambon risked annihilation by the Nazis during the Second World
400 War in order to shelter Jews. As Protestants in a Catholic country, their ancestors had endured centuries of
persecution, and almost instinctively the Chambonnais came to the aid of others who suffered this fate.
405 «Things had to be done, that's all, and we happened to be there to do them», was one typically matter-of-
fact explanation. That selflessness can come to seem ordinary and mundane is itself a telling point against
those who persist in giving sanction to greater indulgence of the self.
6.An old tailor in his eighties once recalled what had given him the most satisfaction in his work:
enabling the poor people in his neighborhood to buy well-constructed clothing that would keep them warm.
«A coat is not a piece of cloth only», he explained. «The tailor is connected to the one who wears it and he
410 should not forget it». Our colleagues in the psychology profession should not forget it either. They should
encourage more thinking about the people who will wear the coat — those affected by our daily thoughts
and actions — and less about how we feel while making it, or about the personal rewards.
EXPLAINING REVOLUTIONS IN THE CONTEMPORARY THIRD WORLD
by Jeff Goodwin and Theda Skoopol
(An Edited, Theoretically-Based Academic Article)
In this article, we point to what we consider the most promising avenues for comparative analyses of
contemporary Third World revolutions. In particular, we shall oner some working hypotheses about the
distinctively political conditions that have encouraged revolutionary movements and transfers of power in
5 some, but not all, Third World countries.
SOME PROBLEMS WITH EXISTING EXPLANATIONS
1.
Two myths have long colored popular views about revolutions in the Third World: that
destitution, professional revolutionaries, or perhaps both are sufficient to precipitate revolutions; and that
10 local events in Third World countries are easily manipulated by imperialist Great Powers. Thus, in at-
tempting to explain Third World insurgencies, many people point to the incredible poverty found in large
parts of Latin America, Africa, and Asia — the sort of sheer misery that capitalist industrialization and
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redistributive welfare states have largely eliminated, contrary to Karl Marx's expectations, in the advanced
capitalist countries. Others have emphasized the role that professional revolutionaries, often backed by
foreign powers, have played in «subverting» Third World regimes with the «organizational weapon» of the
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disciplined revolutionary party. Indeed, many see the hand of Moscow (or Beijing, Havana, or Teheran)
behind Third World insurgencies, exploiting the social problems of these societies for their own nefarious
purposes. Still others see the prime foreign influences on Third World nations as emanating from capitalist
25 powers, especially the United States. When revolutions do not occur in poor nations, it is often suggested,
it is because the United States has artificially propped up local agents of capitalist imperialism.
2.
These ideas, however, do not take us very far toward an explanation of just why and where
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revolutions have occurred in some countries of the contemporary Third World, but not in others. Very
many Third World countries are poor, for example, but revolutions have occurred in only a few of them,
and not necessarily in the poorest. Why did China and Vietnam have social revolutions, but not India or
35
Indonesia? Why Cuba, one of the more developed Latin American countries when Castro seized power, but
not Haiti or the Dominican Republic? Why Nicaragua, but not Honduras? One need merely raise these
questions in order to realize that the «misery breeds revolt» hypothesis does not explain very much. Leon
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Trotsky once wrote that «the mere existence of privations is not enough to cause an insurrection; if it were,
the masses would be always in revolt». His point is still relevant for much of today's Third World.
3.
Similarly, although professional revolutionaries have certainly helped to organize and lead many
Third World insurgencies, revolutionary groups in many, perhaps most, countries remain small and
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relatively insignificant sects. The Third World may be the principal threater of revolutionary conflict in this
century, but much of it remains quiescent. And when political passions have flared in developing countries,
they have more often taken the form of ethnic or subnationalist movements than revolution. Would-be
revolutionaries, Tilly has written, «are almost always with us in the form of millenarian cults, radical cells,
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or rejects from positions of power. The real question», he emphasizes, «is when such contenders proliferate
and/or mobilize». As Goldfrank argues, explanations of revolution that focus on human misery and