traditional legitimacy are losing it rapidly. The political vacuum is filled by a
central executive power which attempts to rise above the contending groups
by playing them off against each other. Those who traditionally held power
were often the beneficiaries of the market forces that eventually destroyed
traditional forms of authority in the peasant village (Migdal, 1974, p. 135).
A further political crisis occurs for the peasantry when the market forces
at work in the economy make the reciprocal supports between peasants and
landlords redundant. New economic groups may be responsive to market
forces, but they are unresponsive to the disrupted population because they
are ignorant of or indifferent to its plight.
These factors make the peasantry rebellious. ‘Rebellion’ refers to extra-
constitutional action, perhaps involving violence, when the rural or urban
poor take direct action against the governmental authorities or local power-
holders in an attempt to resist the intensification of exploitation through
higher workloads, declining real wages, victimization of trade unionists,
police harassment, loss of land, or the raising of rents and taxes. Here the
political activism is short term. The objective is to redress a wrong. There is
no long-term programme or ideology for fundamental change in social and
economic relations.
What turns the peasantry into a revolutionary force? First, before discon-
tent can be turned into a revolutionary movement, an ideologyis needed to
redirect and focus political activism. However, it is important not to assume
that the outcome of a revolution, when it reflects the ideology, is necessar-
ily one of its causes. And ideology is not always given prominence so as not
to alienate important members of the revolutionary coalition or attract state
repression. Tactical considerations may be more important than ideology.
Nor will a revolution necessarily be characterized by a single, coherent
ideology – no single ideology united the entire population in Iran, the
Philippines or Nicaragua, for example (Parsa, 2000, pp. 8–9, 288).
Secondly, peasants need outside leadershipto make a revolution. The
importance of a coalition between peasants, intellectuals, students, profes-
sionals, clerics and industrial workers, whose class distinctions may be very
fluid, in providing a forward-looking revolutionary consciousness in place
of the peasant’s inclination to seek inspiration from a lost ‘golden age’, is
confirmed by White (1974) in the case of Vietnam, and Goodwin and
Skocpol (1989) for Iran, Cuba and Nicaragua. Revolutionary leadership
generally takes the form of an ‘intelligentsia-in-arms’, either as a military
organization or a paramilitary political party. In Mexico and Algeria it fell
to the army to stabilize the new regime. In Russia, China and Vietnam it was
the party which reorganized the state and the social order.
Instability and Revolution 245