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governments.» The presence of revolutionary movements offering collective services in territory claimed
by the official state implies a situation of «dual power», in Trotsky'’ classic phrase.
240
14. Revolutionaries are most effective in creating such situations of dual power when they are willing
and able to organize precisely those social groupings that the incumbent regime has not incorporated into
its own political system. Moreover, the breadth of revolutionary coalitions is determined, not just by how
245 many groups the revolutionary cadres try organize, but also by the political space the incumbent political
regime makes available to revolutionaries because of the regime’s structural characteristics and strategies
of
250 rule. Other things being equal, the narrower the regime and the more repressive, the broader the coalition
potentially available to be mobilized by revolutionaries.
15.
This brings us to the second issue largely neglected in recent work on peasants and revolutions,
255 namely, the relative vulnerability of different sorts of political regimes to revolutionary-coalitions.
Revolutionary movements, needless to say, do not form in a political vacuum. Indeed, political context is
absolutely crucial in determining whether such movements will or not prosper. Recent work on Third
260 World revolutions has not convincingly demonstrated that any one class, class fraction, or class alliance is
any more consistently revolutionary than the industrial proletariat was supposed to have been. Exactly who
becomes revolutionary, and when, is a pre-eminently political question. Revolutions are ultimately «made»
265 by revolutionaries, but not of their own free will — not within political contexts they themselves have
chosen, to paraphrase Karl Marx, but within very specific sorts of political contexts that are not the same
for all who would make revolutions.
WHICH REGIMES ARE VULNERABLE TO THE GROWTH OF REVOLUTIONARY COALITIONS?
16.
Revolutionary movements, history suggests, typically coalesce in opposition to closed or
270 exclusionary, as well as organizationally weak (or suddenly weakened), authoritarian regimes. By contrast,
multiparty democracies or quasi-democracies, even those in very poor countries like India, Malaysia, the
Dominican Republic, and Honduras, have not facilitated the growth of revolutionary coalitions. The ballot
275 box has proven to be the coffin of revolutionary movements. Thus far, in fact, avowedly socialist
revolutions which according to classical Marxism were supposed to follow after and build upon the
achievements of bourgeois-democratic revolutions — have occured only in countries that never established
280 liberal-democratic political systems in the first place.
17.
In addition to liberal democracies, so-called «inc-lusionary» authoritarian regimes — including
fascist and state socialist regimes, as well as single-party corporatist regimes found in some nations of
285 Africa and Asia — have so far been immune from revolutionary transformations. Although these regimes
lack civil rights, they either sponsor mass political mobilization or regulate the official representation of,
and bargaining among, various social groups, including working-class and other lower-strata groups. They
290 impose controlled forms of political participation on key social groups, coopting leaders and handing out
certain benefits in the process; this tends to undercut possibilities for political action independent of the
existing regime.
18.
Many authoritarian regimes do not, however, bother to mobilize social groups into politics, even in
controlled ways; they leave the prerogatives of the state and benefits of politics entirely in the hands of
rulers and narrow cliques. Such exclusionary authoritarian regimes are conducive to the formation of broad
300 revolutionary coalitions for a number of related reasons. The first of these reasons is that the economic
grievances groups excluded from the political system tend to be quickly politicized. Another reason is that
closed authoritarian regimes provide a highly visible focus of opposition and a common enemy for groups
305 and classes that may be nursing very different sorts of economic and political grievances (including
grievances about one another). Political legitimacy is usually very problematic for authoritarian rulers,
especially when religious authorities distance themselves from, or even outright oppose, such regimes,
310 after having previously accepted them. Similarly, the political legitimacy of authoritarian rulers has
sometimes been undermined simultaneously in the eyes of many groups when the rulers have orchestrated
blatantly fraudulent elections in an effort to justify their continuing power.
315 19. Most importantly, perhaps, exclusionary regimes tend to radicalize, or at least neutralize, moderate
and reformist politicians, including those choose to participate in proforma elections. Such moderates
might compete with revolutionaries for popular support, or else initiate a gradual transition to a more open
320 or inclusionary political system, typically through alliances with the armed forces. But exclusionary