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professional revolutionaries «are not wholly illusory, but as theory they do not take us very far. Both
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widespread oppression and inflammatory agitation occur with far greater frequency than revolution, or
even rebellion».
4.
The great capitalist powers, furthermore, obviously cannot prevent — or reverse — all Third World
65
revolutions, as seen in the difficulties confronted by France in Vietnam and Algeria and by United States in
Vietnam, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Iran. Imperialist interests certainly exist, but they must operate through
local regimes or through private agents whose activities are underwritten and strongly shaped by the local
70
regimes. And particular types of regimes in the Third World do not always reliably produce the sort of
antirevolutionary stability desired in Paris or Washington, D.C. — any more than local revolutionaries can
always produce the changes desired by Moscow, Havana, or Teheran.
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5. Recent academic analyses of Third World insurgencies have helped to dispel myths such as the ones
we have just criticized, yet the academic analyses have not replaced the myths with completely adequate
arguments. Much of the recent comparative and theoretical literature on Third World revolutions
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including the important work of Wolf, Paige, Migdal, Scott, and Popkin — investigates the role of peasants
in these upheavals. This body of work examines the specific grievances and motivations for peasant
rebellion or peasant support for avowedly revolutionary guerilla movements, emphasizing that much more
85
than poverty or the activities of professional revolutionaries alone is involved. These writings argue that
certain sorts of peasants — not usually the poorest — are more willing or able to rebel than others.
6. To be sure, the scholars who have recently analysed Third World revolutions as peasant-based
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conflicts have their disagreements. At least two important and ongoing debates have come out of this work:
the Wolf-Paige debate about just what sort of peasants are revolutionary, and the Scott-Popkin debate on
the relative weight of economic, organizational, and cultural determinants of peasani behavior, and on the
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nature of peasant psychological motivations for rebelling. We do not propose to rehash these debates here,
however, because we believe that they have overemphasized the situation of the peasantry alone. Although
the debate about peasants and revolution enriched our understanding of agrarian socioeconomic relations
100 and peasant political behavior, these debates have focused insufficient analytic attention on two other
issues— themselves closely related — which can take us further toward an understanding of revolutionary
105 movements and transfers of power in the contemporary Third World. The first issue is the formation of
revolutionary colalitions that invariably extend well beyond peasants alone. The second issue is the relative
vulnerability of different sorts of political regimes to the formation of broad revolutionary coalitions and,
110 perhaps to actual overthrow by revolutionary forces. Drawing from our own recent comparative studies, as
well as from political analyses by other scholars, we can explore these matters and suggest a fruitful
theoretical approach to explaining why revolutions have happened in some Third World countries but not
in others.
FROM PEASANTS TO REVOLUTIONARY COALITIONS
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7. Although peasants have undoubtedly been as central to most Third World insurgencies as they were
for the classical social revolutions, the characterization of Third World revolutions as peasant wars or
agrarian revolutions a characterization that sometimes carries an implication of homogeneous peasant
120 communities rebelling spontaneously — has shifted our attention away from the role of other actors in
revolutionary dramas. Revolutionary outbreaks and seizures of power are often carried through by
125 coalitions, alliances, or conjunctures of struggles that cut across divides between urban and rural areas and
among different social classes and ethnic groupings. (Of course, such revolutionary coalitions tend to break
apart or recompose in new ways if and when they actually seize state power, but this is a subject that lies
beyond the scope of this article).
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8. With some notable exceptions, the literature that emphasizes the role of peasants in revolutions tends
to ignore the role of professional revolutionary organizations, groups that tend to be disproportionately
middle class in social composition. This tendency is understandable in partas a reaction against the myth
135 that revolutions are simply the work of small conspiratorial groups of subversives. But even professional
revolutionaries cannot simply make revolutions where they will, they have obviously played an important
role in organizing, arming and leading many revolutionary movements. This role, moreover, is often a
140 necessary one. Indeed, except for those peasants who happen to live in relatively autonomous and solitary
villages, as did peasants of France, Russia, and central Mexico, rural cultivators simply do not have the
organizational wherewithal to rebel in the absence of outside leaders. Professional revolutionaries,
145 furthermore, have usually been successful precisely to the extent that they have been able to work with