Volume 7, No. 1, January 2025
Editor: Rashed Rahman
While Third World revolutionaries attempt to set up liberated areas or ‘guerrilla governments’ in the countryside, the other side of the coin, i.e. incumbent governments or regimes, must be examined as to their modes of retaining power and their vulnerability and susceptibility to overthrow by revolutionary guerrilla insurgencies. In between these two lies the terrain on which governments or regimes attempt to retain power by hook or by crook. Is this achieved purely by repression? Certainly not. The broad experience of Third World regimes indicates that they obtain support or compliance not simply through coercion but through patronage and the development of networks of loyal collaborationist ‘clients’. This is a scenario familiar to us in Pakistan since this practice is visible in both civilian and military regimes in our history and continues to date.
Revolutionaries are most effective when they succeed in organising classes and social groups that the incumbent regime has not managed to (or is unwilling or indifferent to) incorporate into its political patronage ‘system’. On the touchstone of which side, the incumbent regime or the guerrillas challenging it, is able to mobilise important social classes and strata in its support lies the probable success or failure of the revolutionary overthrow of the former by the latter. In addition, the breadth of such revolutionary coalitions is determined not just by how many of the targeted groups the revolutionary cadre manages to organise, but also by the political space the incumbent regime makes available to revolutionaries because of the regime’s structural characteristics and political strategies of rule. The narrower and more repressive the regime, the broader the coalition potentially available to be mobilised by the revolutionaries.
This prompts us to examine the relative vulnerability of different sorts of regimes to revolutionary coalitions. Revolutionary movements do not emerge in a political vacuum. Political context is critical in determining whether such movements will or will not succeed. Revolutions are ultimately ‘made’ by revolutionaries, but not entirely of their own free will, not within political contexts they themselves have chosen, but within very specific political contexts that are not the same for every movement. History suggests that revolutionary movements coalesce in opposition to closed or exclusionary, organizationally weak (or weakened), authoritarian regimes. Democracies or even quasi-democracies, even in poor Third World countries, have not facilitated the growth of revolutionary coalitions. The ballot box, however corrupted, has proved to be the coffin of class consciousness and revolutionary movements. Historically, socialist revolutions were supposed to follow and build upon the foundations of bourgeois-democratic revolutions. However, one of the abiding ironies of history is that socialist revolutions so far have only occurred in countries that never established genuine, credible democratic systems. The reason is that after the 1917 Russian Revolution, bourgeois democracies weaponized the ‘appearance’ of the people’s will, expressed through the vote, to fend off a repeat of similar outbreaks elsewhere. The quandary confronting revolutionaries in the Third World, where few if any regimes can satisfy the label of genuinely democratic, is whether, and if so, how to engage in open democratic parliamentary struggles without getting swallowed up by the ‘system’, and how to link such open struggles with the ultimate aim of armed revolutionary overthrow of the incumbent regime.
Some so called ‘inclusionary’ authoritarian regimes, e.g. single-party corporatist ones, have so far proved immune to revolutionary transformations. Although such regimes lack civil or political rights, they sponsor mass political mobilisation or regulate the official representation of, and bargaining among, various social groups, including working class and other lower strata groups. They impose controlled forms of political participation on key social groups, co-opting leaders and handing out certain benefits in the process. This undermines the possibilities for political action independent of the incumbent regime. On the other hand, many authoritarian regimes do not bother to mobilise social groups, even in controlled ways. They leave the prerogatives of the state and the rewards of politics entirely in the hands of narrow cliques. Such exclusionary authoritarian regimes leave much room for the formation of broad revolutionary coalitions. The reasons are not difficult to understand. The economic grievances of groups excluded from the existing political system can be quickly politicised. Closed authoritarian regimes also provide a highly visible focus of opposition and a common enemy for groups and classes nursing a wide variety of political grievances. Political legitimacy is usually very problematic for authoritarian rulers. Even the weak or challengeable political legitimacy of authoritarian rulers is fatally undermined in the eyes of the people when the rulers orchestrate blatantly fraudulent elections in an effort to cling to power (Cf. Pakistan, past and present). Exclusionary regimes tend to radicalize, or at the very least neutralize, moderate and reformist political forces, including those who participate in pro forma, fraudulent elections. Such moderates can prove to be potential competitors with revolutionaries for popular support, but more often, lend themselves to a transition to an ostensibly more open or inclusionary system, typically through collaboration with the military (again, cf. Pakistan). Exclusionary regimes that attack and undermine such moderate elements turn out weaker. In Pakistan, though, the military has, since the turn of the century and based on the past experience of direct military rule, adopted a ‘pick and choose’ policy of promoting collaborators that are the flavour of the month (or year) and suppressing would-be collaborators that have, for one reason or another, fallen out of favour. This has proved to be a revolving door, whose day may not yet be done.
Closed authoritarian regimes unintentionally valorize the potential opposition role of armed revolutionaries. Because they are so closed, such regimes readily turn to vicious repression when faced with demands for even the most moderate political or economic changes. Thus closed authoritarian regimes place a premium on the very things armed revolutionaries are best prepared for, i.e. provide opponents of a regime with the means of self-defence such as weapons, underground networks, safehouses and even liberated territory within which to survive and carry on resistance. Obviously, the growth of revolutionary movements is helped immeasurably when the rebels can operate in peripheral areas that the authoritarian regime is unable to control. This happens when authoritarian regimes (or the state, per se) have never fully penetrated certain areas for historically determined reasons. The challenge today is that such peripheral areas may no longer be available, or at least not to the extent found in the past. Contemporary revolutionaries therefore may need to learn how to conduct armed struggle in close, literally cheek by jowl, proximity to the regime’s forces, including urban guerrilla warfare.
Experience indicates that ‘flexible’ political elites can avert revolutionary takeovers through ‘conservative change’ that does not essentially disturb the given political, economic and social structures. In the aftermath of decolonisation, the Third World is entrapped in a system of neocolonialism or indirect colonial rule. The military and bureaucracy raised under colonial rule to keep the occupying colonial power’s hold intact transmogrifies after ‘independence’ into a conservative oligarchy dedicated to preserving the status quo and the vested interests of the ruling elite, whether large landowners who owe their wealth to colonial largesse in return for loyalty, or a new capitalist class nurtured into existence by the state. In some countries, Pakistan being a defining example, this military-bureaucratic oligarchy itself acquires over time wealth and therefore a vested interest in ensuring the longevity of the existing neo-colonial order. Needless to add, the former colonial power exchanges direct control and rule for indirect protection of its political and economic (extractive) interests. After the wave of national liberation and revolutionary Third World movements passed towards the end of the 20th century, the suffering masses of the formally ‘independent’ Third World countries are still awaiting the dawn of a revolutionary transformation of the system they groan under and the misery of their day to day existence.
(To be continued)
The writer is the Editor, Pakistan Monthly Review (PMR).