The Social Origins of Socialist Revolution, Counterrevolution, and Passive Revolution: Latin America and Beyond

Simeon J. Newman, Max-Weber-Institut für Soziologie, Universität Heidelberg

After global capitalism was firmly established, revolutionary mobilizations tended to reach a branching point. If they proceeded after this point, they either took the form of successful socialist revolutions, which harnessed mass support to take power and reorganize society, or the form of anticommunist counterrevolutions, which took power on the basis of a mobilization of reactionary support and proceeded to halt the process of social reform. Sometimes a third alternative—passive revolution—stalled the revolutionary mobilization process at the branching point. The social origins of the first two revolutionary processes are pretty well understood: socialist revolutions resulted when revolutionary intellectuals were able to unify peasant insurrections with powerful workers’ movements, as in Russia and Cuba, whereas anticommunist counterrevolutions resulted when an alliance between generals and technocrats took power and, aided by reactionary mobilization, carried out a campaign of mass repression, as in Germany and Chile. But less is known about the social origins of passive revolutions. Why do some revolutions fail to proceed past the branching point? I argue that a social wedge is needed to keep the peasant insurrection and workers’ movement divided despite revolutionary intellectuals’ best efforts to unify them. I show that, in the Mexican passive revolution, rural-to-urban migrants and urban squatters—former peasants who, after migration, lived among urban workers—served as such a wedge, thereby stalling the revolutionary process before it reached the branching point.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 50. Commemorating Xiaohong Xu: Class, Culture, and Contingency in Historical Sociology