The New Revolution: A Historic Review of Civil Conflict

By Richard C. Williams PhD.

The material has been assembled and updated from my doctoral thesis, Social Causes of Violent Revolution in Eighty-Six Nations Since World War II, written in 1978 (found on the dissertation shelves of Norlin Library, University of Colorado, Boulder). In this current update, I have enlarged the scope of the project to include nonviolent revolutions as well. South Africa has been the obvious model here and suggests that the most successful revolutions in the world have indeed been nonviolent. There have been a few others as well in the latter part of the 20th and early 21st centuries.

Examining the causes and developments preceding these revolutions and comparing them with political and social conditions today has convinced me that our own country may be facing some kind of radical social upheaval during the coming century. By examining more closely the causes of such upheavals in the world during the 20th century, I would hope we could then see how closely current conditions match those early ones. Remember that Thomas Jefferson said that this country would need a new revolution every twenty years. (God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion, Thomas Jefferson wrote to William Stephons Smith in Paris on November 13, 1787).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 22, 2014
• ISBN: 9781499082135

Richard C. Williams PhD.

Richard C. Williams, Ph.D. socio-economist, is founder and past president of Social and Economic Analysis Corporation. In this capacity he conducted and supervised extensive research on the impacts of military spending on the local economic and social scene, including a study of alternate futures for the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant. He has taught at Adelphi University (Long Island Campus), New York Institute of Technology, and University of Colorado. He assisted in the establishment of the Conflict Peace Studies Program at Iliff School of Theology and taught in that program for three years. He is currently serving on the affiliate faculty in the College of Professional Studies at Regis University, Denver, Colorado, where he teaches students both in the Master of Arts and the Master in Non-Profit Management programs. He teaches a variety of courses, including Global Justice, Impacts of Free Trade Agreements, History of Social Theory, Corporate Responsibility, Research Methods, Advanced Statistics, and Advanced Math with application to the social sciences. He was instrumental in the founding of Christian Peacemaker Teams, participating with his wife, Gretchen, and leading peace delegations to Vieques Island, Puerto Rico; Bogota and North-Central Colombia; Israel-Palestine; Eastern Tennessee; and Denver-Boulder, Colorado; to mention only a few. Dr. Williams’ publications include articles in refereed professional journals and assorted chapters in books on topics in socioeconomics. His most recent books are The Cooperative Movement: Globalization from Below, published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2007, in the UK; The Cooperative Solution: Toward a Just Economy, 2011 , University Press; and his own memoirs, Remember When? Reflections of a Wandering Mid- American, 2013, Xlibris.

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Copyright © 2014 by Richard C. Williams, PhD.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Preface

CHAPTER 1 — The Meaning of Revolution

CHAPTER 2 — Theories of Revolution: An Overview

General Theories of Internal Strife

CHAPTER 3 — Causal Models of Revolution: Indicators and Factors

Agritype

Degree of Industrialization

Discrimination

Religious Diversity

Potential Separatism

Anomic Conditions

Previous Conflict – Turmoil and Rebellion

General Social change

Deprivation

Potential Power of Regime

Potential Strength of Dissidents

Miscellaneous Indicators

CHAPTER 4 — The Models: Indicator Weights and Causal Theory

Indicator Weights and Causal Factors

Causal Theory

CHAPTER 5 — Case Histories

Successful Revolutions

Algeria

Cuba

South Africa

Unsuccessful Revolutions

Paraguay

Jordan

Summary and Conclusions

CHAPTER 6 — Developing the Models

CHAPTER 7 — More Recent Literature

Recent Social Movements

Summary and Conclusion

CHAPTER 8 — Predicting Future Revolutions

A New Revolution in the United States?

The Blue, the Red, and the Purple

Summary

CHAPTER 9 — Social and Economic Deprivation

Income and Wealth Inequality

Health and Food Availability

Education

Summary

CHAPTER 10 — The Power of Dissent

The Counterculture Movement

The Civil Rights Protests

Hispanic and Chicano Movement

The Peace Movement

What about the Economy?

Summary and Conclusion

CHAPTER 11 — A Third Way

Health and Education as Universal Necessities

Critiques of the Third Way

So How Is the Third Way Accomplished?

Summary and Conclusion

CHAPTER 12 — Collapse of the Soviet Union

Glasnost

Perestroika

Democratization

Ethnic Problems

Independence Movements in the Baltic States

The Final Soviet Conservative Coup

Russian Independence and the End of USSR

Summary and Conclusions

CHAPTER 13 — Another Quiet Revolution?

The Real Socio-economic Health of the United States

Educational Attainment in Various Countries

Summary and Conclusions

CHAPTER 14 — Taking a Closer Look

What Exactly Is Revolution?

The Path Models

Case Histories of Revolution

Predicting the Future for the United States

Can We Go the Third Way Now?

Conclusion

APPENDICES

Appendix I Complete Database: 86 countries, 57 variables

Appendix II List of Predictors Predictor Formulas

Appendix III Improving Predictive Results Using Curvilinear Models

Appendix IV Infant Mortality Rates

About the Author

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

So many people have made suggestions, comments, and corrections during the writing of this book that it would be impossible to include thanks to every single one of you individually. I do thank you all; you know who you are. However, there were several persons that deserve special thanks for the great amount of time and energy they spent on The New Revolution. First of all, I would thank my wife, Gretchen for proof-reading, giving suggestions, and most of all for her patience while I had my nose glued to the computer screen or to the pages of a reference book. I would also like to thank Adrienne De Forrest for her proofing the entire manuscript with a focus not only on typos or spelling errors but on flow of language, continuity, and comprehensibility. Thanks also to close friends and family, Cindi Fausel, our son Rich, and daughter Donna – all avid readers and full of helpful suggestions. I want to acknowledge that not everyone reads books these days, so sincere thanks to all of you out there. Hope you have a good read.

PREFACE

Recently in our city, there has been a dramatic influx of large chain corporations who are notable for low pay and poor conditions provided for their workers. Also there is concern about the remarkable increase in traffic in our city streets. The cause for this occurrence is traceable to the low pay for workers within our city and the high cost of living within it. People who work here cannot afford to live here.

For three years I served on a city council appointed task force to study the problem of affordable housing. There were about two dozen members of this task force. Our membership included a couple of business people who did not agree with our final recommendations, because they were afraid that an honest application of our report by the city council and staff would limit their income, then estimated to be typically between $500,000 and a $1 million annually. Their general attitude was that poorer people, who could not at that time properly provide food and support for their families, could do better if they would only try harder. I suspected also that many in that level of our socio-economic system would rather not have such scum in our city anyway!

These attitudes are an example of a general social disease infecting our society these days. Our city council is quite progressive but unfortunately not totally immune to this disease. With one or two notable exceptions, they tend to represent the more well-to-do in our community. The task force made a number of specific recommendations which were routinely ignored – after nearly three years of hard work on our part!

This story is not a rare one in our society and is not confined to our own local community. It represents the culmination of a series of events in our history, which I believe opens us up to the possibility of another revolution in this country – and perhaps other countries in the West as well. Let us pray that any such impending events will not be violent, as most of them have been in the past.

Now, where did I get all these peculiar ideas? The following chapters are designed to introduce the willing reader – and thinker – to a body of carefully collected and scientifically analyzed data. These data present a large number of revolutionary events around the world in the near past, all events just since World War II.

The material has been assembled and updated from my doctoral thesis, Social Causes of Violent Revolution in Eighty-Six Nations Since World War II, written in 1978 (found on the Dissertation shelves of Norlin Library, University of Colorado, Boulder). In this current update I have enlarged the scope of the project to include non-violent revolutions as well. South Africa has been the obvious model here and suggests that the most successful revolutions in the world have indeed been non-violent. There have been a few others as well in the latter part of the 20th and early 21st centuries.

Examining the causes and developments preceding these revolutions and comparing them with political and social conditions today has convinced me that our own country may be facing some kind of radical social upheaval during the coming century. By examining more closely the causes of such upheavals in the world during the 20th century, I would hope we could then see how closely current conditions match those early ones. Remember that Thomas Jefferson said that this country would need a new revolution every 20 years (God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion, Thomas Jefferson wrote to William Stephons Smith, Paris, 13 Nov, 1787).

Some broad changes have taken place in the world since the last study was conducted. Those changes doubtless began earlier in that century but became much more obvious in the last twenty years. A particular pair of these changes may have altered how we look at the world. (1) In the early part of the 20th century, social and economic movements were largely confined to individual countries whereas, lately, such movements have become global. (2) Although large corporations began to assume more importance in the economic scene just after World War II, their global influence did not become a huge factor until the last twenty years.

Technological developments in communication begun during and after World War II included what was earlier called the Turing Machine – the computer. We are now in the computer age where, by a computer application we call email, any two or more individuals in the world can be in touch instantly, via an imaginary electronic cloud called the internet. We should note two exceptions to that statement. First, some authoritarian governments, sensing a threat to their power over the people, have tried – mostly unsuccessfully, to limit their population’s access to the internet. Second, many individuals and families in the lower economic classes still cannot afford computers or any other access to the internet.

Television has provided news about the rest of the world to an even larger segment of the population than is reached by the internet. The electronic technology of television had only just begun to affect global consciousness after World War II, but now is virtually universal. It should be noted that language plays a large part in how much communication can be globalized. However, many more people in the world are now multi-lingual. It has been said that a person who can speak English, Chinese, and Spanish can converse with 99-percent of the world.

Regarding the emergence of the power of corporations, that factor also began in earnest during World War II but only came into full bloom as a result of events of the last twenty years. The most recent of those events was the United States Supreme Court decision, Citizens United v. Federal Election Committee, handed down in 2010. That decision established once and for all the equivalence of the corporation and the individual person. They, in effect, said that a corporation is a person.

Justice Stevens, in his dissenting opinion, referred to the decision as the most radical ever of the court’s decisions, overturning a century of precedents and legislative efforts to keep corporate money and power from corrupting democracy. Now even more elections, legislative actions, and court decisions can be bought and sold by any large corporate interest, simply because those corporations can always outspend any real, human individual or even most large social interest groups.

It is common knowledge that large, hierarchically structured corporations are the least democratic institutions in the world. Their almost unlimited, top-down power and influence seldom can be successfully resisted. Only those corporate entities that are concerned about their image -- not about the welfare of the common folk – will ever modulate their use of power and influence, and then they will do so only when it is to their own distinct advantage.

If you talk to an executive about all of this, you will hear some of the most creative rationalizations, such as, Just think, we provide jobs and upgrade the local economy. Could we honestly call those grossly underpaid menial tasks real jobs? There is even no existing regulation requiring corporations to limit the percentage of less than half-time employees, thus enabling corporations to avoid providing insurance, healthcare, and retirement funds for all of their employees. In effect, the rest of us must now see that our taxes are high enough to provide the most basic necessities for our working-class neighbors. We are all now supporting the large corporations – not the other way around!

More about this later, but even now we can see that the corporate economic system is increasingly passing its responsibilities on to the community, making those at the bottom of the heap even less well off. This particular process could explain much of the accelerating separation of the rich and the poor in this country; it may be why the rich are getting richer and the poor, poorer. Resentment of this process is bound to increase. Eventually something must give.

Why have not the broad system changes been initiated yet? It has been said that there are two kinds of people: (1) people who are excited about the possibility of positive socio-economic change and (2) those who are deathly afraid of any kind of change. The conflict between these two factions has been responsible for many costly delays in even small necessary improvements. We only have to look at what the conservative tea-party republicans cost us by trying to block the passage of the Affordable Care Act (known informally as Obama Care). The resulting 16-day shutdown of the government has been reported to have cost us all many billions of dollars (thousands each), and only modest improvements in our health care system have been possible. The over-arching reforms to our economy and culture that are really necessary now seem far over the horizon.

The approach to all these problems in this study will utilize essentially the same methods used in the original study. Well-established forms of empirical selection of hypotheses and of various appropriate statistical analyses will be explained in the early chapters. Then detailed case histories of both violent and non-violent revolutions will be examined. Following the case-histories, we will test the causal models developed in the earlier study on a substantial sample of more current revolutionary events, using the typology already developed in the early study.

Finally, in the last chapter, we will begin the discussion of whether, the causes and the models tested and refined in the previous chapters fit the social, economic, and political conditions of the 21st century. We will hope to approach a satisfactory answer to the question, "Are we soon to experience a ‘New Revolution’?" After all of this, one could also hope that there is a solution to what could be a slough of deep despond. It is my expectation that a clear solution or set of solutions will emerge from the case histories and the causal models.

It is already quite clear from the flow of history that Mother Nature’s call cannot be prevented or denied. In the spite of the blockages to progress imposed on us by the fear-mongering conservatives, I am confident that a way forward can be found that will inspire us all to new energy and new life. Come, join me in this investigation and together we will find that positive way forward.

CHAPTER 1

The Meaning of Revolution

Revolution is a particularly intense form of civil conflict, involving thousands of protesting citizens. A completely successful revolution involves a permanent change in political and social structure and leadership personnel of an entire country. Even an unsuccessful one, involving no major changes in governmental structure or personnel leaves a mark on the socio-political atmosphere and, most likely, a certain amount of instability in the leadership. There have, of course, been only partially successful revolutionary events that involved a change of leadership perhaps but no appreciable change in social or political structure.

A study of history shows that there are a number of different kinds of revolution, having to do with the goals and methods of the revolutionaries. Historians have tended to regard each revolutionary experience as unique, associated with its own particular set of conditions, causes, and results. However, history does repeat itself, and there appear to be common elements in sufficient number as to suggest a certain typology of revolutionary activity. For example, a socialist revolution, would be an uprising intended to evolve a socialist form of government and a nationalist or democratic revolution might be intended to transform an authoritarian form of rule to a more democratic one.

Such labeling might seem a bit contrived, but some sort of definitive approach would be necessary to formulate a theory of revolution. Studying the history of a large number of civil uprisings and revolutionary activities, we can come up with similarities and differences that will inform a reasonable and helpful typology of revolution. It might be helpful to stand on the shoulders of our earlier study in the 1970s to understand the meaning of numerous revolutionary activities in the 30 to 40 years since that time.

Before a useful typology can be developed, it will be necessary to define what is meant by revolution as opposed to more minor incidents of civil strife or protest. Unfortunately the word revolution has been used to refer to any number of non-violent cultural events such as the industrial revolution and the sexual revolution that have certainly overturned old paradigms and world-views. Such an approach would be an interesting historical exercise but would involve a particularly long and wordy empirical task.

How would we then define a truly large-scale revolution in a useful way? During the 1960s several attempts were made by political scientists to develop a complete and definitive set of factors associated with revolutionary-type activities.

The best efforts to classify revolutionary events made use of some form of factor analysis. The best of these were accomplished by a half-dozen or so scientifically oriented political and social researchers.

The earliest of these classification efforts was performed by Rudolph Rummel (1963) as he applied field theory to events from small civil skirmishes to full blown revolution. He factor analyzed conflict over a three-year period (1955 through 1957), beginning with nine theoretical types and emerging with three major factors which he named turmoil, revolution, and subversion.

Raymond Tanter in 1966 tried to replicate Rummel’s analysis using data from the three following years (1958 through 1960), he was only able to identify two major factors: turmoil and something he called internal war. In the light of Tanter’s study, Rummel repeated his own factor analysis on the thirteen variables identified by Harry Eckstein (1962 and 1966) on what Tanter had labeled internal war. He emerged again from this study with his same three factors: turmoil, revolution, and subversion.

In the meantime, Francis W. Hoole (1964) had analyzed data on thirty political variables gathered over a fifteen-year period (1948-1962). Five major factors emerged: demonstrations, simple change of office holder, riots, guerilla warfare, and strikes.

The most extensive analysis up to 1966 was done by Ivo K. and Rosalind Feierabend and Norman G. Little in two major works, Dimension of Political Unrest delivered at Western Political Science Association, Reno Nevada, March 1966, and

Aggressive Behavior within Polities published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution, Sept 1966. This study yielded the following factors: turmoil, palace revolt, power struggle, riots, election, diffuse mild unrest, guerilla warfare, and civil warfare. The first three of these – turmoil, palace revolt, and power struggle – accounted for a little over half of the total variance in the 30 variables. All factors accounted for 71.5% of the variance, leaving almost a third unexplained. This was a good try, but unsatisfactory for most further analytic purposes,

The only other study from that period worthy of any mention, in this context at least, was that of C. J. Friederick (1966), who essentially coughed up the much earlier work of George Pettee (1939). Friederick grouped conflicts into three types -- private palace revolution, conspiracy, and coup d"etats – without any demonstrable empirical reason for doing so. No data at all are brought to bear on Friederick’s classification process, which I have informally labeled as armchair science.

As can be seen from all of the above, what was needed was a clear, easily grasped method of classification which allows internal conflicts to be (1) distinguished and (2) operationally defined. Classifying small numbers of variables into clear and well defined categories is not an easy task. Applying factor analysis has the advantage of being well-understood by the average researcher. Another advantage is that it is relatively free of researcher bias. A rather large disadvantage, however, is that on a small number of variables, the error rate tends to be quite high.

Fortunately, several other clustering methods are available. One of the clearest methods is called hierarchical clustering. This method utilizes the familiar branching tree. A simple illustration is found in the following figure:

3.jpg

Beginning with five objects and using some predetermined criterion of how close each object is to the others, objects A and B are determined to be the closest pair of objects. They are then combined to reduce the number of groups to four with two in one group and each of the other three (C, D, and E) in its own group. Then using the same criterion, it is found that objects D and E are the next closest, so they are combined into a group to create three groups. Proceeding in the same way, it is found that group C and group DE are close enough to combine. Now, suppose that the groups AB and CDE are not close enough to combine into a single group, according to our criterion. We are left with two groups.

At each step we have used a certain statistical method to determine if we are left with an optimum number of groups. First the centroid