A theory of revolutionary organizations
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A theory of revolutionary organizations Mario Ferrero1 Received: 28 March 2019 / Accepted: 29 May 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract This paper models a revolutionary organization committed to a project of radical social change over a long time horizon, and therefore, engaged in selling promises to both customers and workers in exchange for current effort and support. To build customer trust and provide members incentives, the organization structures itself as a producer cooperative and sets up a parallel sector that yields cash revenues and provides short-term benefits. This parallel activity, if successful, may represent a temptation away from revolution, but it is subject to competition from other providers or from the state. The main result is that, unlike a profit-maximizing firm, the cooperative reacts to increased competition by shrinking the parallel sector and specializing in revolution; hence, reform expands at the expense of revolution only if the parallel sector approaches monopoly. We find supportive historical evidence in a survey of socialist revolutions and social democracies, nationalist movements, and Islamist insurgencies. Keywords Revolution · Reform · Producer cooperative · Political competition · Socialism · Nationalism · Islamism JEL Classification D74 · J54 Robert Ryan: What were Americans doing in a Mexican revolution? Burt Lancaster: Maybe there’s only one revolution, since the beginning, the good guys against the bad guys. Question is, who are the good guys? Richard Brooks, The Professionals, 1966.
1 Introduction Despite the fact that the social science literature on revolution and kindred contests for political power fills up whole libraries, no theory as yet exists to analyze the working of a revolutionary organization—even when such an organization does * Mario Ferrero [email protected] 1
University of Eastern Piedmont, Vercelli, Italy
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exist. To be sure, many regime changes occur—and many more are attempted but fail—without the agency of a dedicated organization, either as the work of agents who already existed for different purposes, such as the military or other elite, or in the aftermath of exogenous shocks such as defeat in war and foreign occupation, or as the outcome of unplanned, spontaneous uprisings from the grassroots. Many successful or failed regime changes, however, do involve the work of a specialized, purposely designed organization; and often—though not always—such revolutionary organizations are committed to a goal of radical reorganization of society and are prepared to sustain a long-term struggle to achieve it. This paper offers a model of these long-horizon revolutionary organizations and then applies it to a sample of relevant historical cases. Besides being helpful in other ways that are incidental to the main concerns of this paper—such as providing some theoretical ground, as opposed to a list of circumstantial factors, to distinguish revolutions from other kinds of stat
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