«Successful revolution depends on what happens at the top, not on disaffected and impoverished masses from below. The chief ingredients are: first, a fiscal crisis of the state; the state becomes unable to pay its bills, and above all to pay its security forces, its military and police. State fiscal crisis becomes lethal when it is joined by the second ingredient, a split among elites over how to deal with it. We could add secondary factors, back in the chain of antecedents, typically although not always including military causes; a state fiscal crisis often comes from accumulated military expenses, and elite deadlock is especially exacerbated by military defeat, which delegitimates government and provokes calls for drastic reform. Splits among elites paralyze the state and open the way to a new coalition with radical aims.
It is in this power vacuum—what social movement theorists now call the political opportunity structure—that social movements are successfully mobilized. Often they do so in the name of grievances from the bottom, but typically such radical movements are led by upper-middle-class fractions with the best networks and organizing resources. As de Tocqueville recognized long ago, the radicalism of a movement is not correlated with the degree of immiseration; exactly what does determine the degree of radicalism is more in the realm of the ideological and emotional dynamics of exploding conflict, although just how to theorize this remains unfinished».
«Does Capitalism Have A Future?»
201 Λέξεις 