97

REVOLUTION IN THE REVOLUTION:

PEASANTS AND COMMISSARS

JAMES C. SCOTT

I. Introduction When we call a complex and momentous historical movement a nationalist or communist revolution we thereby acquiesce in a form of instant analysis and historiography, the implications of which are rarely appreciated. We describe, in shorthand fashion, the motivating ideology of the movement and implicitly ascribe to it both a certain unity at the level of ideas and a certain coherence at the level of organization. Inasmuch as traditional scholarship has been, above all, interested in the elites of such movements and in the ideas which they carry, there may be something to be said for such convenient labels. If, however, we are concerned with the process of revolution or with the range and diversity of ideas which it embodies, those labels conceal more than they convey. It is by no means clear that all or even most of the participants in vast popular movements share the ideas which motivate their erstwhile leaders. There is, in fact, good reason to believe that within most popular rebellions which link a radical intelligentsia to a peasantry one will find both the ideas which may justify the label "nationalist" or "communist" and a popular revolt with quite divergent visions of order and justice which threatens to usurp the rebellion for its parochial ends. This "revolution in the revolution" is typically denounced by radical elites as adventurism, deviation, or anarchy. Just as often, of course, it is this radical intelligentsia which attempts to usurp a rebellion begun by peasants and to put it to ends which its rustic supporters do not recognize and, indeed, might even disavow. The purpose of this paper is to sketch a few of the constituent features of this "revolution in the revolution" and to trace their origin in the structure,

Department of Political Science, Yale University.

98 culture, and history of peasant society. The kind of revisionist, popular history which this analysis encourages seems important for a variety of reasons. First, it promises to uncover the experienced history (what French historians have called mentalites populaires) of a large stratum of revolutionary actors as well as the values which motivated them. ~ Doing justice to radical movements requires not only the analysis of the ideas and activities of radical elites but also the recovery of the popular aspirations which made them possible. Second, a study of the values of "rank-and-f'de" rebels can teach us a great deal about the many occasions when rebellions escape the tenuous control of their would-be leaders and launch out for objectives of their own. Like the society from which it issues, the stratification of rebels embodies its own tensions and contradictions which provide a dynamic and often tragic basis for the internal politics of the movement. Although radical elites and an insurgent peasantry may share a common enemy, their divergent motives, aspirations, and styles make their partnership an uneasy one at best. Finally, a study of popular values which find expression in rebellion often provides the key to the political struggles which engulf the post-revolutionary regime. As heirs to the state, the new elite, while it may satisfy a portion of its followers' demands, acquires an interest in law and order, taxes, conscription, and new privileges. The same popular values which once propelled them to power may now threaten their continued rule. II. Worlds of Meaning That the peasant followers of a revolutionary intelligentsia should entertain a distinctive and unique vision of the stakes involved should hardly occasion surprise. Any transfer of ideas or institutions from one group to another entails a shift in meaning and, in this sense, the disparity is but a special case of a more general process. We do well to recall here the striking differences social scientists have discovered between the character of political beliefs among elites and non-elites even in relatively highly integrated industrial nations. Scepticism of elite values seem to increase markedly as one moves down the ladder of stratification. 2 Philip Converse, in an influential article, 3 has shown that ideas which, among American elites, are "remote, generic, and abstract" become, among the mass public, increasingly "simple and concrete." Ideological principles are often replaced by an identification (positive or negative) with concrete social groups and by political reasoning from the immediate experience of family, job, and friends. Certain issues such as the abolition of slavery and, more recently, McCarthyism, may be the focus of intense debate within the elite

99 but pass virtually unnoticed by the larger public. For our purposes the most important inference from Converse's analysis is that one cannot necessarily assume a consensus of beliefs merely from the joint participation of elites and nonelites in the same movement. As Converse observes, not without a certain condescension, Here it is difficult to keep in mind that the true motivations and comprehensions of the supporters may have little or nothing to do with the distinctive beliefs of the endorsed elite. Yet we believe that such hiatuses or discontinuities are common and become more certain in the degree that 1) the distinctive elements of the elite ideologies are bound up in abstractions or referents remote from the immediate experience of the clientele; 2) and that the clientele, for whatever reason, is recruited from the less informed strata of the population. 4 Converse attributes the discontinuities which he finds largely to the lack of cognitive skills among mass publics - in short, to their ignorance. One might attribute the same phenomenon, following Gramsci, to mystification or false consciousness. Another possibility, one which we shall explore in some detail, is that the discontinuity stems, in large part, from the distinct interests fostered by the rank-and-file's location in the social structure. At any rate, it should be clear that even in a revolutionary movement, the popular vision of what is at issue may diverge considerably from that of its intelligentsia. The project of revolutionaries may have very little or nothing to do with why men rebel. As John Dunn acerbically puts it, The masses of men know what life is like, however nasty it might be, and they do not readily bet such painfully won security as they have mustered on the chicly cut elegance of the dreams of intellectuals, s The fact that these discontinuities afflict the relationship between the socialist intelligentsia and the working class as well as the relationship between the dominant elite and the working classes has not gone unnoticed. Perhaps the most sensitive and sympathetic account of such contradictions is George Orwell's study of the English working class at the depth of the depression. 6 Despite the fact that middle-class leftists and workers shared an indentification with socialism and a common enemy, they were uneasy bedfellows. They were separated by what workers experienced as a vast cultural gap of clothing, language, eating habits, entertainment, occupation, education, and even physical comportment. It was, in part, this cultural abyss which led workers to look on middle-class socialists or communists who presumed to organize

100 them with scepticism and distrust. This cultural gap was compounded by what might be termed an ideological gap as well, as Orwell explained in this notable passage: For it must be remembered that a working man, so long as he remains a genuine working man, is seldom or never a Socialist in the complete logically consistent sense, . . . his conception of Socialism is quite different from that of the book-trained Socialist higher-up. To the ordinary working man, the sort you would meet in any pub on Saturday night, Socialism does not mean much more than better wages and shorter hours and nobody bossing you about. To the more revolutionary type who is a hunger-marcher and is blacklisted by employers the word is a sort of rallying cry against the forces of oppression, a vague threat of future violence . . . . But I have yet to meet a working miner, steel-worker, cottonweaver, docker, navvy or whatever who was "ideologically" sound. One of the analogies between Communism and Roman Catholicism is that only the educated are completely o r t h o d o x ] Part of what we encounter here may be the cognitive defense mechanisms which subordinate classes often develop to insulate themselves from the moral instruction of elites. Richard Hoggart writes tellingly of the working class' "refusal to be taken in," of its innate distrust of the abstractions of intellectuals which appears to hold as much for the symbolic products of the left-wing intelligantsia as for those of the establishment, s We also encounter, I suspect, a natural and salutary difference of real interests which divide an educated counter-elite, with an ambiguous place in the social structure on the one hand, from a subordinate class whose place in that structure fosters a more concrete vision centered on wages, work, food, and small decencies on the other. If we find such sharp disparities, between the beliefs and practices of socialist elites and the working class in advanced industrial nations, we might reasonably expect to f'md even sharper disparities between a radical intelligentsia and its would-be peasant clientele in the Third World. In the absence of the homogenizing influence of national media, high rates of social mobility, and centralized markets, the peasantry is likely to retain a cultural and social autonomy which resists easy incorporation into the normative world of elites whether those elites be conservative or radical. -

Beyond simply noting this disparity, I believe it is possible to discern something systematic about the beliefs and practices of radical elites and those of

101 their "folk" adherents on the basis of their respective social characteristics. The former, taken broadly, come from the larger, differentiated towns where formal organization, law, and contract are influential, are generally middle or upper class, and are masters of a written tradition. The latter, also taken broadly, live in small, relatively homogenous villages where much of their life is governed by local custom, are generally lower-class subsistence-oriented producers, and operate largely within an oral tradition. To the degree that these gross characterizations have validity, they alert us to the possibility that outside ideologies may be transformed in ways which reflect the social characteristics of their folk following. We should also be alert to the fact that the peasantry, unlike the working class which is brought into being by the emergence of capitalism, is an old class whose communal forms, beliefs, and history have envolved over centuries, if not miUenia. The consequences of this fact bear emphasis. While peasants may constitute a class objectively (an sich) they are very likely to experience themselves as much in terms of clan, lineage, community, ethnicity, or religion as in terms of class. Appeals to class Or national loyalties, if they do not actually conflict with these other affiliations, are likely to be mediated through more primordial identities. Furthermore, the peasantry inherits a long tradition of resistence to the tribute, taxes, and corv6e claimed by landlords and officials. Much of this age-old form of class struggle is characterized by passive resistance in the form of foot-dragging, evasion and dissimulation for which the peasantry is justly f a m o u s . 9 On many occasions, however, passive resistence gave way to open rebellion. As Marc Bloch, writing of France notes, "To the historian whose task is merely to observe and explain the connections between phenomena, agrarian revolt is as natural to the seigneurial regime as strikes, let us say, are to large scale capitalism". 1o Such agrarian revolts in the West and elsewhere have often taken their inspiration from the revolutionary themes of equality and justice contained in millenarian religion. Thus any radical elite hoping to mobilize the peasantry confronts not a tabula rasa but a rich tradition of prior identifications, a history of organized struggle, and a set of politico-religious ideas all of which will affect whatever synthesis emerges. In an earlier work, u I suggested that a plausible model for the transformation of political ideas as they percolated down to the peasantry might be derived from the process by which "great tradition" religious doctrine is selectively interpreted and reworked by a peasantry which nominally adheres to the same faith. The folk variants of nationalism and communism would thus stand in a similar relationship to the nationalism or communism of elites as folk religion bears to the doctrines of ecclesiastic authority. Much the same

102 process of localization, syncretization, and reinterpretation in line with concrete local interests, history, and beliefs might be expected. Later on I hope to suggest that the problems which Luther had with Miinzer and the Anabaptists, or which Cromwell had with the Levellers, Diggers, and Fifth Monarchists are not unlike the problems faced by educated nationalists and communists when they attempt to carry their message to the peasantry. It should at any rate be perfectly clear that while elites and peasants may come to share a common religious or political identification, their nominal unity may disguise sharp contradictions in the meaning, content, and practice of their respective faiths.

HI. Dual Society, Dual Revolution: Some Brief Examples Within any revolutionary project (whether that project is religious, nationalist, or socialist) which joins radical elites and peasants, I believe one can uncover what I would call a "little tradition" rebellion whose ideas, structure, and practice diverge from those of its educated leadership. The divergence is, in part, a special case of the inevitable difference in perspective between "center and periphery" - a difference typical even of large bureaucratic organizations with local units in industrial society. Much the same logic, of course, applies to revolution. During World War II, for example, the Vietminh party leadership decided that the new situation required the formation of a National Front that would include patriotic landlords. This decision entailed shelving "temporarily the anti-landlord slogan 'land to the tiller', replacing it with an appeal for rent reduction". 12 To the peasantry for whom the exploitive presence of the landlord was the central issue and for whom nationalism m e a n t a local settling of accounts, this policy reversal was hard to understand, let alone swallow. It appears in fact, that, due to local resistance, much of the effort to return land previously confiscated and to assure landlords their rents was in vain. Those charged with national policy, even in a revolution, are thus likely to see matters differently from those whose interests are local and particular. But the contradictions extend well beyond the issue of center and periphery. Colonialism in much of the Third World has fostered the development of a dual society in which the urban, outward looking elites (conservative or radical) are virtually walled-off from the vast majority of the subsistence peasantry. The social reality of a dual society is likely to be reflected in a duality in those revolutionary movements which attempt to link up with the peasantry. At the level of ideas it may be reflected in local demands for subsistence, land, and autonomy versus elite demands for nationalist rule or a

103 planned socialist economy. At the level of organization it may be reflected in the classic peasant forms of struggle - banditry, secret societies, and millenial movements - versus elite efforts to create a secular, centralized, disciplined party bureaucracy. At the level of tactics it may be reflected in peasant desires for immediate justice through attacks on landlords, moneylenders and officials versus elite attempts to develop a long-term strategy bringing together a winning coalition at the national level. Much like the layers of religious belief and practice found by anthropologists, then, we are likely to fmd layers of revolutionary belief and practice. This becomes most apparent in movements in which there is only a patina of intelligentsia leadership and in which the peasant movement more or less goes its own autonomous way. But even many full scale revolutions such as the French, Mexican, and Russian, are perhaps best analyzed as the almost simultaneous conjuncture of at least two movements: one urban and one rural, each of which display a great deal of autonomy. In the case of the Chinese or Vietnamese revolutions there is obviously a much higher degree of integration brought about, in part, by the fact that in each nation the survival of the revolutionary party was for so long dependent on an association with the immediate demands of the peasantry. 13. Even in these instances, however, the tensions between the party elite's vision and that of its peasant followers, and the periodic crises which they produced, allow us to discern many of the same contradictions.

IV. Three Examples A brief examination of three "revolutionary" movements will illustrate some of the main features of the revolution in the revolution. The movements have been chosen both because they each represent a somewhat different variation on a constant theme and, more opportunistically, because I happen to be somewhat familiar with the literature about them. Following the discussion of these movements we will be in a position to draw some further parallels and conclusions about peasant revolution.

1. Saya San Peasant Rebellion, Burma 1930:14 The Saya San Rebellion, which swept through large portions of the Irrawaddy Delta and as far north as the Shan States was the largest popular anticolonial movement in Burmese history. Roughly 9,000 rebels were arrested or captured, 3,000 killed or wounded, and 350 convicted and hanged. The character of the movement illustrates quite well the kind of folk nation-

104 alism which frequently emerges when there is little or no social linkage between educated, secular nationalists and the peasantry. At the risk of some oversimplification, one can distinguish something of an urban-folk continuum of nationalist sentiment within which to locate the rebellion. The most educated, urban nationalists of the late 1920s (a class produced by British education) focused on the constitutional issues of electoral reform and self-rule, aspiring at least to the pace of self-government accorded to India. They also organized boycotts of British goods and protested the failure of English officials to remove their shoes when entering pagoda grounds. Next, there was the General Council of Buddhist Associations (GCBA) comprised largely of prominent monks and abbots which concerned itself with the defense of Buddhism although it passed resolutions in favor of self-rule and against both the taxes imposed on the peasantry and the draconian methods used in their collection. Unlike the English-educated nationalists, the GCBA had roots among the local clergy and laity by virtue of the village branches or athins which it formed. In 1925 the GCBA split into two factions: the moderate U Chit Hlaing faction and the more radical U Soe Thein faction, many of whose leaders, including Saya San, urged non-payment of taxes. Beneath these elite nationalist associations was a peasantry and local monkhood which had independently participated in violent tax protests and had occasionally enlisted in rebellions led by religious prophets. Saya San, a well known monk and traditional healer, was sent by the Soe Thein GCBA to conduct an inquiry into "excesses in the collection of the capitation (head) and thatameda (poll) taxes." On the basis of widespread resentment to such taxes, he evidently began to plan a nationalist uprising. The structure of the rebellion had at least a patina of "modem" nationalist agitation. It was based on the dues paying clergy and lay members of the nationalist athins; delegates were sent to regional meetings to prepare the revolt; Saya San proclaimed that he was promoting Buddhism and "nationalism" and "complete self-government"; and he took the military precautions of cutting telegraph wires and directing that key railway bridges be destroyed. The patina of orthodox, if militant, nationalism was, however, extremely thin. Saya San openly traded on the Burman folk belief in a setkya - min (a just, avenging king) and in the Buddha Yaza (the divinely sent creator of a Buddhist utopia). To symbolize his claim, he created a miniature royal palace and had himself crowned King of Burma. There is little doubt that he was understood in these terms by his followers. All of the apparatus of traditional rebellions was employed: oaths which promised a grisly death to those who turned back, charms and tatoos which rendered followers immune to the bullets of the colonial forces, promises of high office in the future king's court to local leaders.

105 At the local level, the rebellion appears to have been understood both as the restoration of a just, buddhist monarchy and perhaps above all as the elimination of the colonial state and its taxes. The first order of business, as in "propaganda of the deed" anarchism, was to kill all government servants from the governor down to the hamlet headman. Once this was accomplished, the outstanding feature of the new order was that it would be a world without taxes. Saya San urged his followers in Tharrawaddy to fight the Government "in order to recover the country and get exemption from taxes." Elsewhere he explained what was in store: "When we recover Burma I will declare myself king and exempt you from payment of taxes. You will then be able to live in peace." In the actual rebellion, the two most common acts were the urging of villagers not to pay the impending head tax and the burning of the tax rolls or "tickets," as they were called, in hamlet after hamlet. The mfllenium, as understood by the peasantry, seemed to comprise above all, the end of their most immediate oppressions. From the beginning, the rebellion evaded Saya San's control, lSplanned to begin simultaneously in all the districts, the rebellion erupted at widely different times. Local leaders, not all of whom were acting in Saya San's name, pursued an independent policy and a few veered off into thinly disguised banditry. Taxes were the common thread but local issues such as rights to the forest and to bamboo, hatred of Indian money lenders and laborers, antipathy to Christians of minority tribes or oppressive notables emerged as subsidiary issues. Although Saya San was more closely aligned with the folk tradition of his peasant followers than are many nationalist leaders, the peasant movement which he instigated largely went its own way. What appearance of cohesiveness it retained depended largely on his willingness to combine folk millenarianism with an attack on taxation. Burma's urban, educated political class, of course, willingly denounced the rebellion which threatened them quite as much as their colonial masters. Despite their opposition to foreign rule, both the Chit Hlaing and Soe Thein factions of the GCBA also disassociated themselves from Saya San's uprising. They perhaps realized that the "little tradition" folk nationalism which it embodied was not congenial to the status they had attained as representative of a national, hierarchical, Buddhist "great tradition."

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2. Sakdals in the Philippines: 16 The scenario of folk nationalism diverging from the designs of its intelligentsia sponsors was re-enacted once more in 1935 in the Sakdal Uprising in the Philippines. The Sakdal movement, named after its newspaper, was founded by Benigno Ramos, a schoolteacher, journalist, and poet, after a falling out with his one-time patron, Senate President, Manuel Quezon. The party's platform appealed to the rural poor: equal ownership of land, opposition to political bosses, free lawyers for the poor, confiscation of church lands and wealth, fair elections, and the abolition of taxes. In 1934 it scored impressive victories in the general elections, electing all three of its candidates for the House of Representatives and winning many municipal offices in the rural hinterland around Manila. As a reunified Nationalista party prepared for a referendum on the proposed Commonwealth Constitution, Ramos left for Japan to seek help. During his absence, however, the movement took new directions of which even most of Ramos' deputies were ignorant. As Sturtevant somewhat theatrically puts it, "Village true believers, in fact, were transforming a bourgeois challenge to the Nationalista oligarchy into rampant patriotism of a miUenial variety." Some 68,000 Sakdal insurgents in more than a score of municipalities attempted, and often succeeded, in taking local power. Their victory was shortlived, however, for reinforcements from the constabulary and militia put a bloody end to the Sakdal uprising within two days. What were the goals of the Sakdal rank-and-file? Judging from the interrogations of surrendered Sakdals, the major component of the independence they envisioned was the absence of taxes and, in particular, the hated cedula, or annual poll tax. Thus, one participant told his interrogator, "I don't know anything about the constitution. I don't know what the Commonwealth is. They told me independence would be a good thing. No cedula to pay or a cedula for a peseta." Many of the participants had been too poor, in the midst of the depression, to pay the cedula and the husband of one had been jailed for his failure to pay. Others echoed the theme of taxes and subsistence: "Under independence I would pay no taxes." "Salud Algabre said that if we have independence living will be easy to get." "They told us there wouldn't be any more taxes if we got our freedom." Many of the transcripts of the interrogations come from a single municipality and it may well be that the motives varied from locality to locality. Summing up the account of a surviving heroine of the revolt, called "Generala" by her compatriots, Sturtevant touches on the continuities which link the Guardia de Honor, the Rizalistes, and the Sakdals as forms of folk nationalism: Her basic motives sprang from a popular tradition of resistance and a

107 village view of history which bore little or no resemblance to the scholarly versions... She was driven by faint memories of a golden age - a distant time of freedom and ethical relationships. 17 Even after World War II, as we shall see, the more doctrinal brand of nationalism and communism represented by some of the leaders of the Hukbalahap Revolution did not mix easily with the social vision of the Central Luzon peasantry, x8

3. The Soviets of Nghe Tinh, Vietnam 1930: The rural insurrection in North Central Vietnam, known as the Soviets of Nghe-An and Ha-Tinh (after the provinces in which they were centered), was the first popular rising initiated by the fledgling Communist Party of Vietnam. 19 Nationalist revolts were, of course, nothing new in Vietnam. The earliest revolts were led by patriotic mandarins and scholar gentry in an effort to restore the pre-colonial order. 2o Until 1930 there were innumerable popular uprisings, outbreaks of social banditry, and finally, nationalist secret societies which attempt, in putchist fashion, to take power through terrorism. It is only in 1930, however, that both a secular, communist elite (many of whom came from scholar-gentry families) and large numbers of workers and peasants are brought together. While the leadership is "revolutionary," unlike that of the Sakdals, the movement reflects much the same dualism between the folk adherents and their intelligentsia sponsors. This dualism is, in addition, more apparent, for the rebels of Nghe-Tinh actually seized power for as long as nine months until finally crushed with a loss of roughly 2,000 lives. During that period they managed to fashion an agrarian order which helps us to recreate their values. Against the background of a world depression which deeply affected Vietnam's poorest region, then recent crop failures, and a harsh colonial tax system which threatened subsistence, the rebellion began as a series of massive demonstrations and strikes which demanded higher wages and a postponement or reduction of tax collections. Although it is clear that party members were active in organizing the demonstrations, it is not at all clear that it planned the use of violence to seize power locally or to establish rural "soviets." 21 Once begun, however, the demonstrations escalated into violent confrontations, driving out local colonial officials, and quite escaping the tenuous control of the party cadre. Much of what "folk communism" meant to the villagers may be deduced fairly directly from what they did. In their activities can be read a compre-

108 hensive attack on the state itself. Most administrative offices and their tax rolls were destroyed, post offices, railroad stations, and schools were burned, alcohol warehouses (a hated government monopoly) were plundered, collaborating officials assassinated, forest guard posts (enforcers of forest regulations) destroyed, rice stores seized, and at least one salt convoy (another hated state monopoly) attacked. As one French commentator wrote, It is as a true jacquerie - that one can grasp the peasant rebellion. The archives of the villages, lists of civilians, land records and tax rolls were destroyed by cultivators who believed that by doing so they would free their land of any taxes. 22 In so far as the term jacquerie can be interpreted as the enactment of the moral economy of the peasantry, this assessment is not far off the mark. On the rare occasions when interrogators asked why captured rebels had joined in, the role of taxes seemed first and foremost. "We heard that the communists were for reducing all taxes, had the fight to make their salt, their alcohol, and enjoyed a complete liberty in their public and private actions." 2a The other major action within the rebellion, called "pillage" by colonial officials, makes it clear that we are not dealing with a jacquerie as that term is normally understood. As food became scarce, bands of peasants seized the rice stock of large landowners, rich peasants, and even middle peasants, hauled it to the communal building of the hamlet and distributed it to the poor. As one perceptive official noted, "It is not a question of acts of piracy accompanied by violence . . . They thus look for stocks of paddy which excite the envy of people in need, which are then taken in an orderly fashion (correctement) and distributed." 24 What the party belatedly called "soviets" were nothing more, and nothing less, than the enactment of local autonomy and the vision of an equitable distribution of food and land. Within a few weeks at most the movement and many of its ill-trained cadre had evaded the control of the party. The General Affairs Commission of the party only endorsed armed violence a month after the uprising had begun and the "official" North Vietnamese historian of the movement claims that he found no guidelines in the party archives for the "soviets" which were established. 2s The report of the colonial commission investigating the uprising was quite accurate in its claim that "The leaders appear to have been overwheimed by the rank-and-file." 26 As much of the leadership was arrested or in hiding, the initiative passed to the peasantry whose actions were not at all in keeping with party policy. 27

109 The character of this revolution in the revolution may be seen particularly in the criticisms levelled at the peasants by party historian Tran Huy Lieu: In the countryside, the struggles carried out against the rich peasants, middle peasants, petty notables, and educated people, were the great mistakes which brought discredit on the entire movement, while giving the enemy the propaganda initiative. 2s Seeing the correct struggle as one of anti-feudalism which would unite workers, peasants, and the national bourgeoisie, the party regarded the confiscation of rice from even the moderately well-to-do as a fundamental error. It occurred, Tran Van Lieu claims, because "After the breakdown of communication, the local cadres, left to themselves, let themselves be led by the masses and fell into a policy of adventurism." 29 What looked like "adventurism" to the party was clearly a popular peasant demand that, in times of scarcity, the food be shared equally. What looked like "leftist and sectarian" 3o ideas was a veritable attempt by villagers to destroy the state and to establish autonomous village republics in which their visions of justice would prevail. It was not a question either of "adventurism" pure and simple nor, as the colonial report claimed, of "the extreme credulity of the illiterate peasant;" it was rather a distinct and identifiable vision of the stakes of the revolution. V. The Little Tradition in the Revolution

We are now in a position to bring together some of the salient themes of the revolution in the revolution. While the forms and values embodied in peasant revolt are hardly static and timeless, it is also clear that even the most highly integrated revolutionary movements, bringing together the radical intelligentsia and the peasantry, seldom entirely displace older and local forms of peasant protest. Thus, in the Yenan period the Chinese Communist Party had to contend with banditry, secret societies, millenial tendencies, "leftist excesses," local concepts of family and village, and opportunism, all of which reflected the tensions between the party leadership and its peasant base. 3x The relatively high degree to which these tendencies were both modified and blended into a working accommodation with party policy is something of a tribute to the insight as well as the improvisational genius of Mao-Tse-tung and a few others in the party. In most other revolutionary movements such accommodations have been far more tenuous and incomplete. We must keep in mind that the radical intelligentsia, at least initially, is often as culturally distant, if not more distant, from the peasantry than the dominant elites whom they wish to replace. In structural terms as well, their place

110 in the "hierachy" of revolution, embodying as it does a national and formal ideological perspective as opposed to the local and more concrete perspective of a peasantry, is bound to create systematic differences in interest. The result is likely to be a kind of stratification of issues: some of which are almost exclusively the concern of the radical elites, some of which are shared, and some of which are almost exclusively peasant concerns. Thus, in Ireland during the first decades of the nineteenth century, nationalist elites agitated for Catholic Emancipation which would have permitted the Catholic elite to hold office, the abolition of the Union with England, and parliamentary reform. None of these issues were of great moment to the Catholic peasantry. A few issues such as the abolition of the compulsory tithe and, to a lesser degree, a widened franchise produced the basis of a potential coalition between nationalist elites and the peasantry. Still other issues, such as rent reduction, food relief, and security of tenure were, at the time, of pressing concern to the peasantry but largely ignored by its would-be leaders. The disparity at the level of issues was, moreover, reflected at the level of action. Nationalist elites petitioned Parliament, circulated reformist tracts, or even plotted seizures of power while the peasantry maimed landlord's cattle, assaulted land agents, and organized rent boycotts.

1. Localism and Immediate Concerns: Much of what I have called the revolution in the revolution represents the expression of the purely local and immediate concerns of the revolutionary rank-and-fde. Peasants may constitute a rural class but they are likely to experience themselves first and foremost as community-members of a village. This community represents a local system of status, information, and activity that is distinguishable from the national arena; it promotes a distinct and often parochial set of political perceptions; and it forms a local unit of moral obligation. Inasmuch as the experience of class is formed not on the basis of abstract categories but rather on the basis of daily social life, the effective range of class sentiment among peasants is likely to be quite confmed geographically. If class comes to have meaning phenomenologically, that meaning is likely to be local. The small scale of peasant society thus puts it at something of a disadvantage compared to other classes when it comes to geographical integration. It could be said, for example, of nineteenth century England that the agrarian lower class formed a local society, the gentry a county society, and the aristocracy, with its winter homes in London, a national society. 32 Patterns of acquaintance, marriage, and travel created a distinct social horizon for each group. Peasants are not, of course, entirely village bound. There is a

111 strong case that the social horizon of most peasants is not so much the village but the nearby marketing town and its hinterland which Skinner has called the standard marketing area. 33 The round of marketing, the travels of petty traders and specialists, as well as ritual life, Skinner claims, makes this small economic region the culture-bearing unit of the peasantry. The landowning gentry, by contrast however, are integrated over an intermediate market area which includes several standard marketing areas. Whether we take the village or the standard marketing area as the unit of peasant society, it is clear that peasants will normally experience their interests as local interests, not as national or even provincial interests, and that a revolution will have to contend with this disparity of social horizons and solidarity. The consequences of this peasant localism for both revolutionary and nonrevolutionary movements are enormous. It is likely to promote a sharp moral dichotomy between insiders and outsiders. Much of the traditional peasant violence in the West, as Bloch shows, represents an attempt to enforce what are seen as local rights - an attempt to preserve or restore subsistence rights which are embedded in the local social contract. 34 The purchase of land by outsiders was resisted precisely because they were not expected, as outsiders, to feel bound to honor local obligations. This moral dichotomy also fmds expression in the traditional practice of prohibiting the export of local grain at times of shortage and in assuming no responsibility for the provisioning of outsiders. The ironic effects of the moral distinctions between insiders and outsiders are apparent from Gourou's account of a village in North Vietnam in which only the even distribution of hunger during a famine prevented anyone from perishing. 35 Hunger was not, however, spread evenly across villages. Charity, in a similar way, is largely an intra-village affair. Better-off villagers are under some social pressure to help out their indigent neighbors and kinsmen and to contribute generously to local religious functions, but no one would dream of assisting a stranger from another village. Inasmuch as the vision of justice which motivates peasant revolutionaries is, above all, a vision of local justice, it may be at odds with the interests of peasants from other villages. The peasants of Zapata's village, for example, fought pitched battles with poor peasants brought in to plant what they regarded as their communal land. Throughout the Mexican Revolution their central goal remained the return of their lost village lands. Zapata's forces operated locally, championed local issues, and were relatively indifferent to national issues except as they affected the fortunes of the local struggle. Had their demands been quickly and miraculously achieved, it is doubtful if they would have continued to risk everything for the welfare of workers and peasants outside Morelos. The rural anarchist collectives in Spain during the

112 Civil War illustrate much the same spirit. As impressive as their local performance was ( " . . . the poor lived as in a dream"), it was enormously difficult to persuade them to help other villages, let alone be generous with food and money for men at the front. 36 The guiding vision was one of the autonomous, just pueblo and its result was that rich pueblos had rich collectives and poor pueblos had poor collectives. At a minimum, the impact of localism implies that, as we move down the social structure of the revolution, what we encounter is not so much the local branches of a centralized movement as a series of distinct movements which correspond to local needs as much as to central direction. Adherents in different villages may or may not have similar goals, but these goals are likely to be pursued in a local context. Much the same can be said of the peasant revolution in the revolution as has been said of the sans c u l o t t e movement during the French Revolution: "Communalism" has been described as one of the most characteristic traits of the popular movement and, if it can be taken to mean a strong dose of anarchism, this is certainly true. But it could be put to other, more disguised, uses, and very often "communalism" is simply the rebirth of regionalism or municipalism, in a more respectable, apparently revolutionary, form. 37 The principle of organization followed by the Zapatista forces during the Mexican Revolution took advantage of this fact. Womack calls the local revolutionary army "simply an armed league of the states municipalities" in which village leaders were also the local revolutionary leaders and in which cooperation depended on mutuality rather than command. 3s In Morelos this pattern of organization was old and venerable, but it is frequently necessary as well as traditional. If the revolutionary elite is to secure the active participation of a peasantry whose well-honed capacity for footdragging, deception, and non-compliance can be as effective against the revolution as it has been against the traditional state, it will have to make some accommodation with the local revolution. The problem, of course, is that local revolutionaries fight with more enthusiasm close to home than far away. 39 While the armies of Carranza fought all across Mexico and the lumpen-proletarian bands of Villa ranged far from their original base, the army of Morelos was reluctant to venture far afield. Among the sans c u l o t t e s the problem of supra-regional cooperation was even more serious: "The frontiers of sans c u l o t t i s m were so often confined to a single c o m m u n e and it was very difficult to link up the efforts of section-

113 naires even in two neighboring towns." 4o The military problems posed by peasant localism may often result in a bifurcated revolutionary army with ex-peasants, soldiers, students, and uprooted lumpen elements composing a mobile national force and the peasantry comprising provincial and village units.

Radical elites, insofar as they are considered outsiders, are likely to find themselves regarded initially with scepticism and suspicion, if not outright hostility. Falling outside the moral unit of the community, they, like other outsiders, are treated with circumspection and according to the criterion of self-interest. The initial ties which develop between radical elites and peasants, each representing a different universe of meaning and values, may well mimic the kinds of ties that have typically come to characterize rural elections in the Third World. As Bailey observes for India, These electoral ties are instrumental; they are used by the villagers to gain their ends in the village and by the elite to gain its ends in the elite a r e n a . . , the elite arena and the village arena are, for their respective protagonists, ways of life; the constituency is merely an instrument for the preservation of those ways of life. 41 The result may well be a revolutionary form of "machine-politics." At least one student of the peasantry has taken this parochial opportunism as the basis of a theory of peasant revolution, claiming that initially peasants respond to the immediate material trade-offs they can garner in exchange for their organizational membership. 42 While this is not the whole story, as we shall see below, it is certainly an important truth - one recognized by conservative and radical elites alike. As the head of the Indonesian Communist Party advised, "The first step to be taken in our work among the peasants is to assist them in the struggle for their everyday needs, for the achievement of their partial demands." 43 One danger of adapting to immediate and local demands is that these immediate demands may be at cross-purposes with the goals of the revolutionary elite. The villagers serving under Zapata, unlike some of their urban, anarchist aides, did not envision the liquidation of the plantations which had steadily encroached on their lands. Instead they hoped for an agrarian reform in which their village lands would be restored, but in which plantations would have their place too. *~ The Huk revolution in the Philippines was a more classical case of this tension. While the Huk leadership hoped to establish a socialist state and break the American hold over the Philippine economy, the peasantry, it appears, was pursuing goals closer to home. Even on the land

114 issue, formulated with peasant interests in mind, there was an appreciable gap, as party official Jesus Lava explained: 9 it was the party that propagandized the slogan "Land for the landless." That didn't come from an outcry by the peasants. Few peasants then - or even today - were willing to fight with guns for land. Most really only wanted larger shares of the harvests. 4s An effective, preemptive reform might, in each case, have demobilized the peasantry with measures which fell far short of revolutionary goals. Another danger of a full accommodation to local demands is that the revolutionary party will become encapsulated within a conservative local social structure. This seems historically to have happened especially when radical parties with a peasant base have participated in electoral politics. In Southern Italy, Tarrow 46 has shown how the Communist party (P.C.I.) was gradually captured and incorporated into a left-wing version of clientelism. Its leaders were disproportionately from privileged strata and peasants were often drawn to it as much for the material advantages it provided (cooperatives, local patronage, lending facilities) as for its left-wing anti-clericalism. As a prominent P.C.I. trade union official described it, The PCI in the South is a party of clienteles. This is true in the sense that they seek power through advancing the interests of their followers on the local level and within the established system. The party in the South partakes of the backwardness of the society947 In Indonesia prior to the massacre of 1965, the Communist party (PKI) underwent much the same evolution. Attempting to build its voting strength, the PKI came to reflect, in its local structure, the hierachical patterns of authority which its ideology aimed at supplanting. The party's access to the peasantry seems to have been predominently via channels of patronage, kinship, and traditional deference. 48 By 1955, when peasants had become a majority of PKI membership, party leaders were actually complaining that local wealthy elements were obstructing party policy. 49 The disintegration of the PKI in 1965 was not simply a consequence of the force brought against it by the army and Islamic militants but also a reflection of the obstacles to class mflitance which its own structure had created. Thus in those situations where a radical party is able to meet many of the concrete and immediate demands of the peasantry, it may end up producing not a revolution but rather a slightly more humane version of the existing order.

115 The evidence of peasant localism, the dangers of peasant "trade-unionism" and encapsulation have been taken by many theorists of revolution as an argument for a Leninist party structure whose leaders can resist such tendencies. Although there may be other reasons for Leninist party organization, this particular reason seems unwarranted. First, it is based on the questionable assumption that local and immediate interests are forcibly conservative. It is clear, however, that modest goals are often quite compatible with revolutionary action, that narrow interests may be pursued with great militance and violence. The peasants in the Huk movement of the Philippines may have only wanted lower rents and secure tenure. That d i d n o t prevent them (in fact, it impelled them) from launching, on their own initiative, a revolution which the Communist Party saw fit to endorse only a year later, after it had achieved some initial success. A strong case can be made that peasant revolutionary action is typically undertaken defensively and for what might seem modest ends - although taxes and rents may well be questions of life and death for peasants. Second, in as many cases as not, the goals of peasant rebels, which are to be read more from their actions than from party programs and manifestos, may well be more "radical" than those of their would-be leaders. The peasantry of Nghe-Tinh as well as the True Levellers in the English Revolution were clearly more radical in many respects than the radical intelligentsia above them. If there is a case for a Leninist party, then, its rationale must be as much to restrain the peasantry's revolutionary impulses as to create them - or, more ominously, to ensure that the revolution which is made is the revolution that the elite intends rather than the revolution that the peasantry might make on its own. Finally, it should be apparent that the villagers' view of revolution, for all its narrowness and localness, must be incorporated into the revolutionary project if that project is to acquire a mass rural base at all. It is only out of the demands and needs that are part of the experienced world of peasants that the kind of passionate commitment which large scale revolution requires can be generated. The cultivators of Morelos would not have risked everything for the moderate program of Carranza or for the demands of Villa's ranch hands in the north. The durability, the tenacity, of their long struggle was directly in proportion to its local meaning. As Womack asserts, "In this insistent provincialism was the movement's strength and its weakness." so This is as true for the early working class as it is for the peasantry. Thompson has vividly described how the nineteenth century English working-class movement in artisan villages derived its "coherence and stamina . . . from the involvement of the entire community in common occupational and social

116 tensions." s~ Only the sanction of community opinion kept the movement intact and fighting. Although the tapping of local sentiment and values may risk, or indeed court, the tensions of a revolution in the revolution, the alternative risks are far more serious - an isolated, if doctrinally pure, radical intelligentsia reduced to putchism or sterile debate.

2. Secession and the Closed Economy:

Whatever else revolutionary elites envisage, they are almost always wedded to the nation-state as a political unit, to a national structure of administration, and to the development of a national economy, s2 Here they may well part company with the revolution in the revolution which, as often as not, envisages the integrity of the local community, rule according to local custom, and a closed local economy. Not all peasant movements are incipiently secessionist. A great many appear to aim rather at a renegotiation of peasant links to elites, often a return to a status quo ante, in terms of rents, taxes, corv6e and other obligations. Where such movements are resisted, where there is a strong local communitarian tradition, or where a fairly autonomous peasantry is encroached upon, however, what we have called localism is apt to take the more strident form of separation or secession. Such separatist tendencies are evident in the village republics of Nghe-Tinh, in the insistenceupon local subsistence rights of the True Levellers and, more dubiously, in the resistence to taxes of Saya San's village followers. Secessionist rebellions are perhaps the most common form of traditional resistence by a peripheral peasantry facing an intrusive central kingdom or nation state, sa Historically, the focus of such rebellions is often associated with the creation of the absolutist state in the West and the development of colonial administration in the Third World. Lacking any strong historical or symbolic link to the political center, the natural reaction of the local community is not revolution but rather the defensive effort to secede. ~ A long view of this pattern would characterize it as merely the most active and extreme form of the evasion, passive non-compliance, and dissimulation which has often typified the peasantry's dealings with wider systems of authority. A brief analogy with labor responses to early industrialization may be helpful here. New factory workers, not yet socialized to industrial patterns of work and discipline, are not likely to respond to grievances by forming labor unions and bargaining for better conditions. Instead, they are more likely to walk off

117 the job and retum to the countryside when they become dissatisfied, ss Only when a permanent labor force, committed to factory work, comes into being can we expect a process of struggle to develop within the factory as an institution. To use Hirschman's felicitous terms, the initial response is "exit" not "voice". 56 In quite the same way, peasants may first react to the state by flight or its equivalent, the active assertion of autonomy. Thus the Saminists of Indonesia at the turn of the century reacted to the incursions of both the Dutch colonial regime and Islam by refusing to pay taxes (though they might make a "gift"), by defying colonial forest regulations, and by rejecting, in principle, the need to have Islamic officials solemnize marriages and funerals. s7 There is a sense in which such attempts at secession are more radical or broader in scope than revolutions, inasmuch as they implicitly reject the very unit of political struggle which revolutionaries normally hope to capture and preserve. s8 The idea of secession is inherent in a great many religious revolts which look to the establishment of a self-governing utopian community. Taborites and Anabaptists in Europe, sects in the Philippines, Antonio de Conselheiro in Brazil, all attempted to create new communities outside the reach of the state. Such communities may be seen as simply a more elaborate and organized version of the oft-noted tendency of a mobile peasantry to head for the hills when hard-pressed. The withdrawal in each case amounts to a local secessionist movement. While dissident urban elites, linked to the "great tradition" of the center, rebel to reconstitute the state, the peasantry, linked to the "little tradition" of the periphery, often rebels to evade or destroy the state. It is in this spirit, I believe, that we ought to understand the anarchist side of peasant rebellion. When English peasants under Wat Tyler in 1381 burned the manorial rolls on which were inscribed their obligations to their lords, when they assaulted tax collectors, lawyers, and officials, they not only envinced a dislike for taxes but also manifested a desire to do away with the apparatus of the state, s9 The burning of tax rolls in the Nghe-Tinh and Saya San uprisings represent an attempt to destroy what is the mark, par excellence, of the modern state - its tax records. The utopian vision which most often informs peasant revolt is one of local political and economic autonomy or, - to put it negatively, a world without taxes or the state. Lest one imagine that the impulse to secession is an historical anachronism, bound to disappear in the modern nation-state, it is well to recall the rural counterpart of the Budapest uprising in 1956.6o The process of state collectivization, following a popular post-war land reform, had been especially harsh

118 in Hungary. The peasantry bitterly resented the forced deliveries, "peace loans," and a host of petty regulations imposed largely by outsiders. Within a day or two of the Budapest uprisings, the peasants began dismantling the collectives: The party and government personnel were driven out of the villages and away from the state farms and kolkhozes . . . . Once in control the peasants destroyed party records, tax records, and any other documentation which could be used against them, but records of landownership were carefully preserved. 61 Here too, but now against a Stalinist regime, was an attempt to restore an older ideal - one of a community of small-holding peasants that would be self-governing. The economic component of the desire for political autonomy among peasants has frequently taken the form of the demand for a closed economy. Wherever land and labor have become commodities, both historically in Europe and more recently in the Third World, they have brought in their wake new levels of inequality, new market insecurities, the alienation of small holder and communal land, and the growth of a rural proletariat. Peasants have often reacted to the threatening forces embodied in the commercialization of agriculture by seeking the restoration of a pre-capitalist economic order. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the tension during the French Revolution between the peasantry on the one hand and the revolutionary bourgeoisie and urban sans c u l o t t e s on the other. While the revolutionaries in Paris and other large towns were faced with the nearly insurmountable problem of provisioning the cities, the popular movement in the Departments attempted to hold its grain supplies and institute a closed economy together with a whole series of pre-capitalist subsistence guarantees such as gleaning and communal pasturage. 62 By 1795 there was something of a new terror in the countryside as urban revolutionaries again resorted to coercion against localities which refused to supply the market. 63 Peasant attitudes in this respect were rooted in the pre-capitalist regulation of markets based on the principle that local consumption needs took priority over export from the community. The strong anti-capitalist tone of peasant radicalism can be seen in efforts to secede both from the national market and from the money economy. The Spanish rural anarchists, for example, aside from their dislike for a corrupt church, rapacious landowners, and the state, worked toward the restoration

119 of just such a pattern of economic autonomy. As Brenan notes, Rural anarchism is quite simply the attempt to recreate the primitive Spanish communes that existed in many parts of Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries . . . . There has not been a peasant rising in Andalusia in the last hundred years when the villages did not form communes, divide up the land, abolish money and declare themselves independent free that is from the interference of "foreign" landlords and police. 64 What "communism" meant to the Anarchists of Andalusia was both the liquidation of the cash economy which villagers regarded as responsible for the new inequities and the restitution of the subsistence guarantees of the older community. When the Anarchists rose in 1936, "Money was abolished and a central exchange bureau was set up in the pueblo which collected all produce and redistributed it in accordance with a system of r a t i o n i n g . . , the assumption of power by the Anarchists rendered the pueblo not only, theoretically, an exclusive political group but exclusive economically as well." 6s The autarky sought by the pueblo anarchists meant that even Anarchism was not spared a certain tension between its urban adherents and their rural compatriots. Much the same folk-anarchist message has inspired peasants elsewhere. In Mexico a national workers confederation, the CROM, appealed to the peasants' notion of a closed economy. Pedro Martinez, Oscar Lewis' peasant informant who fought with Zapata, recalled their message: We are going to reach a point where money will go out of use. So there will be justice, and injustices will not be committed . . . . The workers and the peasants will be the most important men. Then it will be, "You give me your seeds and I will give you clothing. You give me this and I'll give you that in exchange." . . . That is what they told me in 1921, in the CROM. Well, we believed it. 66 Pedro Martinez and other peasants in Morelos had a chance to act on that vision once their village communal lands were restored after the Revolution. A North American journalist visiting the state in 1923 found that peasants did not regret the ruin of the sugar cane economy. They said, "What was called prosperity for the state was misery for u s . . . We are [now] growing what we want to grow and for our own use." 67 Such forms of rural Owenism seem historically to have had great attraction both to artisans and to peasants with something of a communitarian tradition. The urban intelligentsia at the a?ex of most revolutions, on the contrary, has its sights set on an integrated

120 national economy, whether that economy is a liberal market economy or a planned, socialist economy. During the revolution itself this conflict is likely to f'md expression in the tendency of peasants to look first to their own, local well-being and only later, if at all, to the needs of outsiders. After a successful revolution the conflict may appear either in withdrawal from the market once land has been redistributed or in resistance to forced deliveries. Finally, the themes of localism, secession, and a closed economy are often part-and-parcel of a deep animosity toward the city. This animosity is in part, of course, the historical residue of both a cultural dichotomy in language, dress, religion, and work as well as the attitudes of easy superiority assumed by the city-bred. It is also, however, a consequence of the fact that the city is seen as the source of exploitation - taxes, law, absentee landlords, merchants, and the state. The "wicked city" is more than just a rustic stereotype; it contains more than a germ of experienced truth. For the peasantry of Burma, the city [Rangoon] was quite literally an alien presence. It was, at the same time, the seat of the colonial government; its population was largely non-Burman, and it was the cutting edge of the intrusive capitalist economy. For much of the Third World, the city, for all its attractions, is synonymous with the cash economy, with foreigners, irreligion, and government. Zapata called urban politicians cabrones (acquiescing cuckolds) and vowed only to go to Mexico City when absolutely necessary and then to leave as quickly as possible. 68 The weakest link in any revolutionary chain of command is that between the urban cadre and the villagers. Only a very few revolutionary movements, the Chinese and Vietnamese among them, have managed to forge a durable bridge across this chasm. Even under the best of circumstances, however, the link is a tenuous one, suject to suspicion and continual renegotiation and the middle cadres, brokers between the little traditions of the village and a national revolutionary party, walk in treacherous terrain.

3. Egalitarianism: In much of the Third World today and in Europe not so long ago, the difference in classes is (was) starkly reflected in the kind and quantity of food consumed. So close is this nexus between class and diet that, in many societies, the class of a person may be directly inferred from what he or she eats. 69 When we add to this the fact that the problem of famine and dearth is perhaps the overwhelming existential fear in an agrarian society, it should not be surprising that food and the imagery of food is at the center of peasant notions of equality. Equality and redistribution are also, of course, an integral part of the ideological vision propagated by revolutionary elites. As we shall see, however, what radical elites mean by equality and what peasants intend

121 by that term are not quite the same thing. In early Europe, the theme of an equal sharing of wealth and goods is very much embedded in traditional millenial thought. Peasant rebellions, Bloch observes, reflected " . . . a powerful preoccupation with the primitive egalitarianism of the Gospels, which took hold of humble minds well before the Reformation." 70 Pedro Martinez' notion of the revolution embodies just such an expectation of equality - in terms of food, clothing, and work. We all have to eat the same and dress the same . . . The landowners who are rich now will have their lands taken away from them and given to the poor to work. The rich will work also and everything will be stored up." 7~ It is hardly surprising for many peasants to assume, as they appear to, that the overconsumption of some is the cause of the poverty of many. The idea of a good society which grows from an essentially static (although fluctuating and therefore deadly) subsistence economy is not the production of new wealth but rather " . . . a just sharing of austerity." 72 The continuity and tenacity of this peasant perspective on equality may be seen in China where the relationship between food and population came closest to confirming Malthusian theory. Religious bandits in Chihli, Honan, and Shantung in the 1830s focused on grain. "Once famine occurs they, relying on their numerical strength, plunder collectively in broad daylight, calling their marauding activities 'equalizing the food'." 73 The great Taiping Rebellion in the nineteenth century also reflected the same conceptions. As in Nghe-Tinh, peasant rebels freely plundered the well-to-do families in their path and distributed their possessions to the poor. This report of an early nineteenth century rising in Kwangtung captures the classic pattern. Due to the generosity of some wealthy families contributions were at first made [voluntarily] to buy food for the [destitute]. But as time went on the catch phrase, "Share the famine" was invented; now whenever rice is expensive, it has become customary for poor people to assemble themselves in groups and beg for rice from door to door. If their wish is not satisfied, they promptly seize rice by f o r c e . . . Even families of modest means sometimes suffer great losses. 74 A similar understanding of equality is apparent in the Chinese Revolution of 1948 led by the Communist Party. Once land reform and the "settlement of accounts" began in the village described by William Hinton, the cadre were hard pressed, and often failed altogether, to restrain the poor peasantry from

122 enacting their vision of revolutionary equality. 7s What developed was a kind of popular treasure hunt for hoarded wealth. Peasants invaded the compounds of the rich: they pulled up floorboards and dug in the courtyards; they tapped the walls. Landlords and members of their families were grilled and beaten (and occasionally murdered) until they revealed the location of every valuable they had hidden away. 76As one such search took place on the first day of the Chinese New Year, the revolutionary crowd helped itself, with great gusto, to the landlord's feast. The symbolic significance was reminiscent of similar repas civiques described by Cobb in the French Revolution: So we decided to eat all the things that Ching-ho had prepared to pass the New Year - a whole crock of dumplings stuffed with pork and peppers and other delicacies. He even had shrimp. All said, "In the past we never lived through a happy New Year because he always asked for his rent and interest then and cleaned our houses bare. This time we'll eat what we like," and everyone ate his fill and didn't even notice the cold. 77 The "settling of accounts" was carried out at the village level and it was intra-village equality which preoccupied the villagers, not equality across villages. In fact, two members of one landlord family were beaten to death by villagers when it became known that they had hidden the savings of a relative and that a revolutionary crowd from that relative's village had come and spirited the money away. 7a As in Nghe-Tinh, the redistribution of wealth did not stop with the rich landlord class. Despite party warnings, rich peasants were expropriated and there were "tremendous pressures from below".for confiscating the land and property of middle peasants as well. The ultimate goal of the poor peasants appeared to be a complete leveling of property and income. Hinton catches the popular ethos when he notes that Without the Communist Party the poor peasants might well have divided everything down to the last bowls and chopsticks on the farmsteads and the last gears and shafts in the factories. 79 As his sympathies are with the party, Hinton criticises these "leftist excesses" because they alienated the rich and middle peasants, because they jeopardized production, and because they threatened the grand coalition on which party strategy was based. In doing so, he echoes Mao tse-tung's denunciation of errors in the land reform movement: (1) Erroneously placing in the landlord or rich peasant category many

123 laboring people who did not engage, or engaged only slightly in exploitation; (2) the indiscriminate use of violence against landlord and rich peasant families, "Sweep-the-floor-out-the-door confiscations, and a one-sided emphasis on unearthing landlords' hidden wealth; 3)serious encroachments on commerce and industry, particularly the commerce and industry owned by landlords and rich peasants . . . . We support the peasants' demand for equal distribution of land . . . in order to help arouse the broad masses of peasants speedily to abolish the system of land ownership by the feudal landlord class, but we do not advocate absolute egalitarianism. Whoever advocates absolute egalitarianism is wrong . . . . Such thinking is reactionary, backward, and retrogressive in nature. We must criticise it. 80 Looked at from the village perspective, however, such "excesses" had led to the realization of nearly utopian dreams. The value of the expropriated land, cash, and property represented roughly "five years average income for every man, woman, and child in the community." 81 The landless and the land poor had now nearly doubled their holding from an average of .44 acres to .83 acres. "It meant that they had moved from the ragged edge of starvation into relative security." 82 If, in the party's view, the expropriations had gone too far too fast, there was little doubt that they represented the enactment of the local meaning of justice in Long Bow and thousands of other Chinese villages. Given this clash of meaning and interests, the party encountered resistence and hostility from these "new" middle peasants when it subsequently attempted to make restitution to those whose property had been redistributed. 4. Millenial Thought: In each of the rebellions discussed earlier strains of millenarian thought played a significant role in the peasant reception of the revolutionary message. For the followers of Saya San, the millenial message was explicit, while for the Nghe-Tinh rebels it represented a popular theme that did not generally find favor among revolutionary elites. Millenial thought is not, of course, an' integral element in all peasant revolts but, when it appears, it colors the character of the movement. This is hardly the place to discuss the conditions under which miUenial themes are likely to appear in force. Suffice it to say that when outside forces or natural disasters overwhelm the peasantry and play havoc with the normal categories within which everyday experience is apprehended, millenial solutions seem especially persuasive, s3 Famines, the Black Plague, wars, and foreign conquest have each served this function historically.

124 The millenial tendencies of the peasantry have generally been seen as an anachronistic survival which is either an impediment to secular revolutionary faith or a precursor of modem totalitarianism, a4 On the other hand, as Hobsbawm points out, millenial movements are more readily adaptable to modem revolution than other forms of protest such as social banditry. The former already profoundly rejects the present order and projects a coming utopia and needs only a "secular theory of history" and a practical program for the seizure of power, as We should not imagine, however, that miUenial movements are completely at sea when it comes to the seizure of power. The German peasants under Thomas Miinzer or the Taipings in China might look to supernatural help, but each movement also developed an impressive army and military strategy within the limits of its resources. More important, it is doubtful if any peasant-based revolutionary movement could mobilize the countryside, were it not for the symbolic power of historically rooted utopian thought. Such utopian dreams are the classical form in which peasant exploitation is symbolically negated and transcended. The salvation themes of the various great tradition religions are appropriated by the peasantry and put to the service of a class in the mobilizing myths of a coming era of justice. 86 When what passes as a modem revolutionary ideology reaches the peasantry, it is integrated into these existing beliefs and values. Thus communism was understood by the Nghe-Tinh peasantry as a charter for the reconstitution of a just and autonomous village society. Thus anarchism was taken by the peasants of Andalusia to mean the liberation of the pueblo from the state and landlords. Thus nationalism was experienced by Saya San's followers as the promise of a just Burman king and the abolition of taxes. The utopian themes of peasant radicalism survive to attach themselves to new leaders and new movements. The Russian peasant belief in the "True Taar" or "Taar Deliverer" is a striking case in point. As a belief it reflected nothing more and nothing less than the peasant vision of social justice. Depending on the geographical location and time, the envisioned utopia could vary to suit the current oppressions experienced by the peasantry. Any bandit or prophet, if he promised deliverance might be taken as the "True Taar" and followed enthusiastically. In modern China, too, it is clear that Mao tse-tung and other revolutionary leaders were assimilated to a whole host of popular myths about the return of a just king who would end oppression. 87 The vitality of such liberating, utopian beliefs among the peasantry can be seen in the words of Pedro Martinez who, disillusioned by the failure of the 1911 revolution to bring justice to Mexico, continues to hope.

125 I believe that all the revolutions that we see on this earth come to us already destined from above. The next revolution is already w r i t t e n . . . Since Zapata many have tried but nothing happens. Everything is crushed because God has not given the word yet. Then suddenly, we'll see the revolution of the poor against the rich in Mexico. Not now, I don't think, but it will come. I can't say who will be the leader, but it must be Someone. 88 For some radical observers, the utopian strains of peasant tradition represent merely a way station to more "advanced" revolutionary beliefs or a "necessary social device" for generating revolutionary commitment. 89 Hobsbawm implies that a Leninist party with its superior vision may be able to manipulate these beliefs to good advantage. Millenarianism, in fact, is not merely a touching survival from an archaic past, but an extremely useful phenomenon, which modern social and political movements can profitably utilize to spread their range of influence and to imprint the groups of men and women affected by it with their teaching. 9o It is worth suggesting that millenial thought is far more than a convenient ideological opening to be exploited by a revolutionary intelligentsia. So long as the peasantry remains largely outside the symbolic hegemony of urban areas, it is likely to remain a durable feature of the normative landscape in the countryside. It is embedded, as Victor Turner and others have shown, in the rituals of profanation, the symbolic reversals, the rites of passage, the myths, and the folk religion of the peasantry. 91 As an expression of concrete human needs and values, it represents not so much an "inferior" ideology as an altemative idea of justice and decency. Revolutionaries who fail to take it seriously, do so at their own peril. As Pedro Martinez' statement implies, those aspirations outlive the revolutionary victory and continue to serve as a standard against which the new order may be judged. The same peasant beliefs which assimilate Mao to a tradition of the just emperor and his politics to a utopian vision of justice do not only legitimize the new order; they can just as easily be used, when circumstances require, to delegitimize those who have failed to live up to the revolutionary promise he was seen to embody.

VI. Conclusion This examination of what I have, with apologies to R6gis Debray, chosen to call "the revolution in the revolution" may help us to place the process of peasant rebellion in a new and hopefully more realistic perspective. It implies,

126 above all, that the historical evolution of peasant radicalism is more a process o f addition than o f substitution. That is, the growth of a radical revolutionary elite espousing modem creeds such as nationalism and communism does not so much displace the older forms of rebellion or the values they embody, so much as it adds a new layer of leadership and doctrine at the revolutionary apex. The degree of interpenetration varies from place to place and over time, but we can expect to f'md, as we move toward the rank-and-f'fle in the countryside, the expression of beliefs, values, and interests which distinguish the peasantry as an old and distinct, pre-capitalist class. Once again, the revolutionary amalgalm mimics the ritual amalgam which anthropologists have noted. While elements of the great tradition have become parts of local festivals, they do not appear to have entered village festival custom at the expense of much that is or was the little tradition. Instead, we see evidence of accretion and of transmutation of form without apparent replacement and without nationalization of the accumulated and transformed elements. 92 What we confront, then, are at least two revolutions which occur simultaneously with a greater or lesser degree of integration. The nature of each would-be revolution is a product of the social location and therefore the concrete interests of its proponents - the revolutionary intelligentsia on the one hand and the peasantry on the other. Here I obviously oversimplify inasmuch as one might distinguish among sub-classes (e.g. small-holders, tenants, farm laborers, subsistence producers, market-oriented producers), each of which fosters a distinct vision of the revolutionary stakes. Thus the "Folk" variant of the French revolution will vary from region to region and from sub-class to sub-class. And "the revolution in the revolution," considered as a whole, will vary depending on whether we are dealing with seventeenth century England, eighteenth century France, or twentieth century Mexico. Despite these critical variations, however, many of the themes I have developed seem remarkably durable, based, as they are, on salient features of the pre- and early capitalist peasantry. This is not to say that the relationship between the two revolutions is one of straightforward conflict. On the contrary, each is likely to share a series of aims on which their de facto coalition is based - eg. opposition to the existing elite, hatred of colonial rule, the redistribution of land and wealth. Beyond this common terrain, however, interests may diverge. This divergence may be a matter of merely separate interests. Thus the momentous issues for the revolutionary elite may be the nationalization of foreign firms and the creation of a strong state, while for the peasantry, the momentous issues may

127 be land reform, subsistence and local justice. Here there is still scope for a coalition since the claims of each revolutionary sector are not necessarily at odds. At another level, however, there may be potential conflict, the revolutionary intelligentsia may envisage a collectivized agriculture while the peasantry may be fighting for its small-holdings; the party elite may want a centralized political order while the peasantry is wedded to local autonomy; the elite may wish to tax the countryside to industrialize while the peasantry is committed to a closed economy with no taxes. There is thus a level of shared interests, a level of divergent but not competing interests, and a level of conflicting interests. The last may not be sufficient to jeopardize the revolutionary coalition but it will find expression both in the revolutionary process and in post-revolutionary politics. To ttqe extent that we accept these differences as the natural consequence of divergent, real interests, to the extent that we view them as an inevitable part of revolutionary praxis, it directs us away from an all too common definition of the revolutionary project. This definition implicitly or explicitly holds that the objective of the revolutionary party is to instruct or to socialize the peasantry (or the proletariat) away from its backward, petty-bourgeois, or adventurist (viz. Left-wing Communism: an Infantile Disorder) tendencies and toward a "true," "advanced" understanding of the revolution. Thus Hobsbawm looks for the replacement of more primitive values and forms of rebellion with the modem secular creeds taught by the party. Thus Migdal elaborates a model of revolution in which peasants move from individual and local interests to an identity with party goals. 93 While it is true that some revolutionary parties do create a cadre that does, to some extent, mediate or bridge this gap, they do not by virtue of this mediation eliminate it. The gap remains, in nearly every case, as a permanent structural feature of the revolution. Little tradition politics in the countryside will never live up to the cadre's expectations; it will often continue to be more spontaneous and reflexive than the party's desire for serried ranks implies; it will continue to reflect the durable local interests which arise from the peasantry's location in the social structure. In this context, we would do well to heed E.P. Thompson's analysis of the English naval mutinies of 1797: It is foolish to argue that because the majority of the sailors had few clear political notions, this was a parochial affair of ship's biscuits and arrears of pay, and not a revolutionary movement. This is to mistake the nature of popular revolutionary crises which arise from exactly this kind of conjunction between the grievances of the majority and the aspirations articulated by a conscious minority. 94

128 Barrington Moore has put the matter even more directly in his study of major revolutions: The intellectuals as such can do little politically unless they attach themselves to a massive form of discontent. The discontented intellectual with his soul searchings has attracted attention wholly out of proportion to his political importance, partly because these searchings leave behind them written records and also because those who write history are themselves intellectuals. It is a particularly misleading trick .to deny that a revolution stems from peasant grievances because its leaders happen to be professional men or intellectuals. 9s What this perspective suggests is that an appropriate and more historically accurate description of most peasant revolutions would focus on this con]unction of peasant grievances and aspirations and the activities of a revolutionary party. Such a conjunction does not necessarily imply complete integration either of the overall revolutionary forces or of ideological values. In fact, it is quite in keeping with the invariably divergent and contradictory forces at work in any peasant revolution. Party propaganda and Leninist aspirations to the contrary notwithstanding, the revolutionary party may, in a limited sense, "make" the revolution, but not just as it pleases. Quite apart from the descriptive superiority of this view of revolutionary conjunctions, it has a great deal of merit in normative terms as well. There is more than a trace of unwarranted arrogance in the assumption that only the party embodies "true historical consciousness" and that the vision of justice and order found among the peasantry are examples of "partial" or "false" consciousness. The concept of a vanguard party which has a monopoly on reality not only obviates the need for democracy in the revolution but it overlooks the very real possibility that the consciousness of the rank-and-f'fle may not be inferior but simply different. 96 A recognition that the values of a revolutionary peasantry are distinguishable from those of the party can form the basis for collaboration and leaming rather than a one-way exercise in "consciousness-raising." 97 This appears to be what Mao tse-tung had in mind in his report on the Hunan uprising in 1927 which was not begun at party initiative and which was taking a course of its own. The choice, Mao wrote, was: To march at their head and lead them? Or to follow at their rear, gesticulating at them and criticising them. Or face them as opponents? 9a An effective collaboration, a working conjunction, requires the party as much

129 to adapt itself to the demands implicit in peasant action as to socialize the peasantry to its values. For there is no peasant protest that does not implicitly embody a political program. Even the original "jacquerie" of 1538, led by Jacques Bonhomme, was not at all the directionless madness which the term "jacquerie" and other self-serving terms applied by elites to peasant rebellions (e.g. "tumultos," "mobs," "riots") are intended to convey. It was based on concrete grievances related to taxation and the failure of the nobility to perform its obligations of protection. 99 Similarly, the violent crowds who staged market riots in eighteenth century England were enacting an economic program; they saw themselves as "setting the price" and called themselves, in one instance, "The Regulators." 10o I do not mean to ascribe a privileged truth status to the political consciousness of the peasantry. Peasant rebellions, after all, have their full complement of such human weaknesses as opportunism, personalism, and ethnic prejudice. Neither, h.owever, does the "consciousness" of the party have any necessary claim to superior truth status at the level of values or even at the level of strategy. It is remarkable how often it has been the precipitate action of the peasants or workers, with their limited vision and limited goals, rather than party strategy, that has created a revolutionary situation. Without the rural and sans culottes uprisings, the seizure of power by a revolutionary elite in Paris would have been inconceivable. If the Bolsheviks, weak though they were, found power "lying in the street" it was largely because the spontaneous action of workers and peasants (i.e. factory and land seizures) had put it there. Despite, or perhaps because, the peasantry operates within a narrower purview, their action can have, and has had, revolutionary consequences. Only when there is a prolonged period of revolutionary warfare does the party's claim to superior strategic vision become plausible. And even then, it may well be that such warfare is better carried out by local units with great autonomy. The argument for the party as the progenitor of revolution is thus most persuasive at the level of the consolidation of the revolutionary state after power has been won. Although locally-based popular revolts have created revolutionary situations they have not, without the leadership and assistance of non-peasant elites, been able to consolidate a revolutionary state. This brings us to the question of how power and initiative are distributed after the revolution. In the interest of collaboration between the two sectors of a peasant revolution, there is something to be said for a revolutionary process in which the party is, initially at least, rather weak. If the Chinese and Vietnamese revolutionary elites have been particularly attentive to genuine peasant demands, it is in no small measure attributable to the fact that each party was, for an

130 extended period, dependent for its very survival on the peasant enthusiasm it could elicit voluntarily. Learning, like much else, follows power, and both parties had to learn from their rural base or perish. Thus the way in which a revolution is made - whether by a Leninist putsch at the center or by a mass peasant mobilization at the periphery - will influence the character of the post-revolutionary order. An accommodation or partnership in the revolutionary process will favor a post-revolutionary regime that learns as much from its base as it teaches. Party domination or isolation in the revolutionary process will favor a post-revolutionary regime that attempts to impose its will. Just as one might prefer a cultural system in which the "little tradition" percolates up as much as the "great tradition" percolates down, so one may prefer a revolutionary process in which peasant values ~nform the elite vision rather than one in which the elite always has the last word. In terms of Marxist thought, this notion of revolutionary praxis implies that the position of Rosa Luxemburg and Trotsky is to be preferred over that of Lenin and applied to the peasantry as well as the proletariat: [Luxemburg and Trotsky] remained faithful to the hypothesis of the revolutionary proletariat, took as its point of departure the dialectical idea of the identity of subject and object and of the spontaneous tendency of the proletariat toward an authentic, non-integrated consciousness and called for a democratic party whose fundamental core must be the proletarian base - even if its revolutionary consciousness was less developed than that of the leading cadres. It was this base that should control the party machine, made up of professional revolutionaries who had more experience and more complete political education, but who were always in danger of becoming bureaucratic, furthering their own interests rather than those of the working class . . . . 101 It is well worth remembering that, whatever else they do, successful revolutions almost always issue in a vastly larger and more hegemonic state apparatus. In this context, the continued vitality of the peasant values of localism, egalitarianism and autonomy may well represent a humanizing force. So too may the ancient peasant weapons of scepticism, evasion, and deception prove the best defense in depth against a state which seeks to recast everything in its image. In the Third World, at least, peasants are the main consumers and, presumably, the main beneficiaries of the revolution. The new order thus succeeds or fails to the extent that the needs and values of this vast class are directly incorporated into the revolutionary process. Should it fail, we may well have reason to applaud the fact that peasant resistance and "primitive rebellion" can frustrate revolutionaries as well as reactionaries.

131

NOTES 1. I have been much influenced by some of the work in this tradition, including: R.C. Cobb, The Police and the People (London: Oxford Press, 1972); Robert Mandrou, De la culture populaire aux 17 e et 18 e sidcle, (Paris: Stock, 1964); and Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (New York: Viking Press, 1972). 2. Richard Centers, The Psychology o f Social Classes (New York: Russell and Russell, 1961. 3. Philip E. Converse, "The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics," in David Apter, ed., Ideology and Discontent (New York: Free Press, 1964), p. 213. 4. Ibid., p. 249. 5. John Dunn, Modern Revolutions: A n Introduction to the Analysis o f a Political Phenomenon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), p. 4. 6. George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1937). 7. Ibid., pp. 176-177. 8. Richard Hoggart, The Uses o f Literacy (London: Chatto and Windus, 1959), p. 225. 9. E.J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels (New York: Horton, 1965), p. 15. 10. Marc Bloch, French Rural History: A n Essay on its Basic Characteristics, translated by Janet Sandheimer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), p. 169. 11. James C. Scott, "Protest and Profanation: Agrarian Revolt and the Little Tradition," Theory and Society 4, 1 and 2 (1977), pp. 1 - 3 8 and 211-249. 12. Christine Pelzer White, "The Peasants and the Party in the Vietnamese Revolution," to appear in Don Miller, ed., Peasants and Politics: Grass Roots Reactions to Change in Asia (Melbourne: Edward Arnold). 13. Mao's willingness to accommodate what more orthodox Leninists in the party regarded as anarchist heresies must be counted another major factor in the Chinese case. See Edward Friedman, "Backwardness and Revolution in China," in Friedman and Scott, The Promise o f Peasant Revolution (New York: Free Press, forthcoming). 14. Except where otherwise noted, most of this discussion is based on the official report of the rebellion, Government of Burma, The Origin and Causes o f the Burma Rebellion (1930-1932), 1934. 15. See India Office Records, Political and Judicial 5845, Criminal Appeal, High Court of the Judicature at Rangoon, Sept. 30, 1931, "Case of Saya San." 16. Much of the following discussion is based on David Sturtevant, Popular Uprisings in the Philippines, 1 8 4 0 - 1 9 4 0 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976), Chs 5, 11 and 12. 1 7 . Ibid., p. 287. 18. See the fine analysis by Benedict J. Kerkvliet, The Huk Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977). 19. A more extensive analysis of the causes of this rebellion, culled from archival sources, may be found in my The Moral Economy o f the Peasant: Subsistence and Rebellion in SoutheastAsia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976). 20. David Marr, Vietnam's Anti-Colonial Movements: The Early Years (1855-1925}, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968). 21. Alexander Woodside, Community and Revolution in Vietnam (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976). pp. 173-182. 22. Andr~ Dumarest, La Formation de classes sociales en pays annimites (Lyon: P. Ferreal, 1935), p. 113. 23. Gouvernement G~n~rale de l'Indochine, Direction des Affaires Politiques et de la Sfir~t~ G~n~rale, Contribution a l'histoire des mouvements politiques de l'lndochine francaise, Vol. 5, La Terreur rouge en Annam, 1930-31, p. 215.

132 24. "Weekly Report to the Inspector of Political Affairs at Thanh Hoa from Inspector Lagreze. 20 April, 1931," Paris: Archives d'outre mer. 25. Woodside, op. cir., p. 175. 26. Rapport de la Commission d'enqu~te sur les evenements du Nord Annam (Morch~ Commission Report), (Paris: Archives d'outre mer, N F 212-1597), p. 10, 20. 27. Ibid., p. 5. 28. Tran Van Lieu, Les Soviets du Hghe-T~'nh de 1930-31 au Viet-Nam, (Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1960), p. 52. 29. Ibid., p. 53. 30. Ibid., p. 52. 31. Mark Selden, The Yenan Way in Revolutionary China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), passim. 32. F.M.L. Thompson, English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge, Kegan Paul, 1963), pp. 18-20. 33. G. William Skinner, Marketing and Social Structure in Rural China, Monograph of the Association of Asian Studies (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1975). 34. Marc Bloch, op. cit., pp. 219-234. 35. Pierre Gourou, The Peasants o f the Tonkin Delta, HRAF translation (New Haven: Human Relations Area Files, 1955), p. 612. 36. Hugh Thomas, "Anarchist Agrarian Collectives in the Spanish Civil War" in Raymond Carr, ed., The Republic and the Ovil War in Spain (New York: MacMillan, 1971), pp. 239-255. 37. R.C. Cobb, The Police and the People: French Popular Protest 1789-1820 (London: Oxford Press, 1972), p. 180. 38. John Womack, Zapata and the Mexican Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1969), pp. 224-5. 39. On this subject see also Paul Freidrich, Agrarian Revolt in a Mexican Village (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1970), p. 110, and Robert Mandrou, "Les Soulevements populaires et la soci6t6 franqaise du XVII e siecle," translated by Linda Kimmer and Isser Woloch, in Isser Woloch, ed., The Peasantry in the OM Regime (New York: Holt Rinehart, 1970). 40. Cobb, op. cit., p. 130. 41. F.G. Bailey, Politics and Social Change: Orissa in 1959 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963) pp. 233-4. 42. Joel Migdal, Peasants, Politics, and Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), p. 210. 43. Justus van der Kroef, "Peasant and Land Reform in Indonesian Communism," Journal o f Southeast Asian History 4,1, p. 49. 44. Womack, op. cir., p. 87. 45. Benedict J. Kerkvliet, The Huk Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), p. 227. 46. Sidney G. Tarrow, Peasant Communism in Southern Italy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967). 47. Ibid., p. 240. 48. Rex Mortimer, "Class, Social Cleavage, and Indonesian Communism," Indonesia 8 (October, 1969), p. 6. See also Robert Jay, Religion and Politics in Rural Java (New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asian Studies, Cultural Report Series, 1963) and Donald Hindley, The Communist Party o f Indonesia 1951-1963 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966). 49. Rex Mortimer, "Class, Social Cleavage, and Indonesian Communism" Indonesia 8 (October 1969), 1-27. 50. Womack, op. cir., p. 228. 51. Thompson, op. cir., p. 21. 52. The major exceptions are, of course, sub-national ethnic internalism and anarchism.

133 53. Roland Mousnier, Peasant Uprisings in Seventeenth Century France, Russia, and China, translated by Brian Pierce (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), p. 348. 54. Edward Shils, "Center and Periphery," in The Logic o f Personal Knowledge: Essays Presented to Michael Polanyi on his Seventieth Birthday, 11 March 1961 (Glencoe, II1.: The Free Press, 1961). 55. Of course, if this is not possible due to labor repression or the lack of alternative means of subsistence, labor strife is quite likely. 56. Albert O. Hirshman, Exit, Voice and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970). 57. Harry J. Benda and Lance Castles, "The Samin Movement," Bi]dragen tot de Taal - , Land-, en Volkenkunde Vol. 125, part 2, !969. 58. See, in this connection, Max Gluckman, Order and Rebellion in Tribal Africa (New York: Free Press, 1963) and Georg Simmel, Conflict, translated by Kurt Wolff (Glencoe, Ili.: The Free Press, 1955). 59. R.H. Hilton and H. Fagan, The English Rising of 1381 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1950. 60. My information is drawn largely from Harris L. Coulter, "The Hungarian Peasantry, 1 9 4 8 - 1 9 5 6 , " American Slavic and East European Review (December, 1959), pp. 5 3 9 - 5 5 4 . 61. Ibid., p. 552. 62. See for example, Bloch, op. cit., p. 224, and Alan Davies, "The Origins of the French Peasant Revolution," in Woloch, ed., op. cir. 63. Cobb, op. cir., p. 252. Cobb also shows what a long historical memory the peasantry has of such appropriations. He writes: "When, in August 1944, the FFI from Paris came into the Bessin with authority to requisition butter and dairy produce, the local peasants at once talked of the men of the year II, (p. 299). 64. Gerald Brenan, The Spanish Labyrinth (New York: MacMillan, 1943), pp. 195-6. 65. Julian Pitt-Rivers, The People o f the Sierra, 2nd edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), p. 18. 66. Oscar Lewis, Pedro Martinez: A Mexican Peasant and His Family (New York: Random House, 1964), p. 128. 67. Womack, op. cir., p. 3 7 3 - 4 . 68. Ibid., pp. 2 0 5 - 6 . This recalls Juvenal, "What can I do in Rome? I never learnt to lie." Quoted in Raymond Williams, The Country and The Oty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 46. 69. In some countries, say India, the disparity in the consumption of high quality protein between classes would probably allow us to use red blood cell counts as an indicator of class! 70. Bloch, op. cit., p. 169. 71. Lewis, op. cir., p. 128. 72. E.J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels (New York: Horton, 1965), p. 82. 73. Kung-chuan Hsiao, Rural China: Imperial Control in the Nineteenth Century (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1960), p. 447, emphasis added. 74. Ibid., p. 445. 75. William Hinton, Fanshen: A Documentary o f Revolution in a Chinese Village (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966). 76. Ibid., pp. 135-7. 77. Ibid., p. 138. 78. Ibid., pp. 2 0 3 - 4 . 79. Ibid., p. 605. 80. Ibid., pp. 4 8 6 - 8 7 . 81. Ibid., p. 146. 82. Ibid., p. 155.

134 83. Michael Barkin, Disaster and the Millenium (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), passim. 84. Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millenium (London: Secker and Warburg, 1957),

passim. 85. Hobsbawm, op. cir., pp. 5 7 - 9 . 86. Scott, 1977, op. cit., Part II. 87. For an analysis along these lines, see Edward Friedman, "Backwardness and Revolution in China," in Friedman and Scott, op. cit. (forthcoming). Benedict Anderson in his analysis of the Communist Party of Indonesia points out that the ideology of a party as well as its leaders may be invested with miUenial significance. The PKI's ideology was seen by many of its adherents as a secret key to "Power" in quite the same way as the Islamic brotherhood fostered a belief in an initiation to secret mysteries. The discipline, secrecy, and educational hierarchy of the party only heightened this impression. See Anderson, "The Idea of Power in Javanese Culture," in Claire Holt, ed., Culture and Politics in Indonesia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972), p. 216. 88. Lewis, op. cir., p. 457, emphasis added. 89. Hobsbawm, 1965, op. cir., pp. 6, 60. 90. Ibid., p. 106, emphasis added. 91. Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago: Aldine, 1969), passim, and Scott, op. cit. 92. Hilton makes much the same point about medieval peasant movements: that when they become regional rather than local they do not lose their local and particularist character but merely add on new layers of interest, op. cit., p. 64. 93. See also, along these lines, Frank Parkin, ClassInequality and Political Order (New York: Praeger, 1971) and Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, translated by Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: M1T Press, 1971). Gramsci is a more interesting and complex case and his work permits of several interpretations. 94. E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1966), p. 168. 95. Barrington Moore, Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967). 96. The word "conscious" here seems to me unfortunate inasmuch as it is a question of a different consciousness, not a question of its presence or absence. 97. Peter Berger, with whose book I otherwise profoundly disagree, develops this argument against false consciousness and the elite project of "consciousness-raising." Pyramids o f Sacrifice (New York: Basic Books, 1974) Chs 3 and 4. 98. Hinton, op. cit., p. 517. 99. Rodney Hilton, Bond Men Made Free (London: Temple Smith, 1973), p. 131. 100. E.P. Thompson, "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century," Past and Present, No. 50, 1971, pp. 108-110. 101. Lucien Goldmann, "Reflections on History and Class Consciousness," in Istvan Meszaros, ed., Aspects o f History and Class Consciousness (London: Routledge, Kegan Paul, 1971), pp. 6 9 - 7 0 .

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