carnes@gargoyle.UUCP (Richard Carnes) (12/14/85)
I expect to be around to terrorize the net for a while yet. But having sacrificed my friendships, career, love life, health, and finally sanity for the sake of reading and writing articles for the net, I find it advisable to economize severely on the time I spend on it. Since like most people I can type faster than I can think, I am posting another excerpt from John Roemer's article. (The article is not copyrighted, BTW; not that I care about bourgeois property rights.) ____________________ I choose to sidestep the question of collective action because there are many other aspects of revolutions I think it important to study, aspects which can be discussed while holding in abeyance the microfoundations of collective action. In particular, I am interested in what one might call revolutionary ideology. Ideology is one of those dirty words in modern economics; it is usually conceived of as an irrational or unfounded commitment which a person has to a set of ideas. One might think of an ideology as affecting the utility function of the agent; but I propose here to conceive of an ideology as a self-imposed limitation placed on one's feasible set [of options]. An agent has a set of possible strategies in a situation; ideology causes him to rule out a certain portion of that set as beyond the pale, perhaps for ethical reasons. An important question, I think, is: can we explain why people have the ideologies they do? We frequently attribute certain actions of actors in revolutionary situations to their ideologies. Let me give two examples. Think of a revolution as a competition between the present ruler (whom I shall call the Tsar), and a revolutionary entrepreneur, whose name is Lenin. Lenin and the Tsar are competing for support of coalitions of the population, in a way which will become precise soon. Frequently, in such situations, we observe that the Tsar imposes very harsh penalties on the poor for participating in revolutionary activity, and somewhat lighter penalties on the more well-to-do who have abandoned their comfortable stations in life and joined Lenin. (An example is provided by the elections in El Salvador two years ago [in 1982]: nonparticipation was viewed, by the regime in power, as a kind of revolutionary protest. The penalties imposed for not voting were inversely proportional in severity to one's wealth. The poorest people who did not vote were beaten up and lost their jobs, while middle class people were censured in some fairly trivial way.) This behavior of the ruler might be viewed as ideologically (in the sense of irrationally) motivated: he hates the poor and feels more friendly to the rich. A second example: Lenin, in trying to overthrow the Tsar, usually proposes a progressive redistribution of income, he promises to take from the rich and give to the poor. Par excellence, this behavior is viewed as the consequence of an ideology. I would like to provide rational foundations for these ideologies. For instance, I will show that if Lenin wants to overthrow the Tsar -- by *any* means necessary -- it will be in his interest to adopt a progressive redistribution of income. And if the Tsar wants to preserve the present regime against Lenin's onslaught, his best strategy will entail assigning penalties for revolutionary participation which are inversely proportional in severity to the income of the participants. My purpose is threefold: (1) to encourage social scientists to think of revolutions as events which are amenable to rational analysis, they should not remain black boxes; (2) to make the same point, more generally, about ideology: that we should not rule out of court certain kinds of behavior as ideological, but seek to explain the evolution of ideology using rational choice models; (3) to re-enforce by example my point of view that in part what should characterize Marxian social science is the questions it concerns itself with, rather than the adherence to some supposedly privileged logic, some dialectical or holistic approach, which I think is more akin to the yoga of a mystical practice or religion. This is not my complete characterization of Marxian social science, which I think also differs from non-Marxist social science in its ethical posture. Although the work described is quite technical, I will try to avoid most mathematical detail, and will concentrate on the general lessons from this tale of Lenin and the Tsar. The interested reader can get the full story elsewhere [in *Econometrica* 53 (1985)]. --John E. Roemer -- Richard Carnes, ihnp4!gargoyle!carnes
janw@inmet.UUCP (12/17/85)
[Richard Carnes, ihnp4!gargoyle!carnes] >I expect to be around to terrorize the net for a while yet. Delighted to hear that ! >[Another installment of the tale of "Lenin and the tsar" >by John Roemer]. I realize these are two fictitious characters. However, the fact that they behave completely out of character for their historical namesakes *does* reflect, to me, on the value of the analysis. The author says: here is how two forces behave, let us understand why. The answer: because you invented them this way - leaves his conclusions without foundation. The fictitious "Lenin" has, as his main priority, the overthrow of the tsarist regime - which, however, treats him with relative leniency, and we are invited to understand that. Having this priority, he calls for "progressive income redistribution" to obtain the support of the people. All this, for historical Lenin and the tsarist government, is complete hogwash. If you read the complete works of Lenin - the pre-revolutionary part (not that I advice it) - you will discover that the bulk of them is polemical (and rather scurrilous in tone). And the bulk of this polemics is against fellow socialists of various shades. Out of the remaining portion, most is against liberals. Lenin was, of course, in favor of an anti-tsar revolution. He just con- centrated on a different task - organizing a small disciplined group for future action. (Some Bolsheviks did some fighting, along with other urban groups, in 1905. Lenin had no role in this). As for "income redistribution" - the error is even worse here. This was not *anywhere* on Lenin's, or the Bolsheviks', list of priorities. (Redistributionism and "petty-bourgeois egalitarian- ism" are among the swear words of Bolshevik theoretical jargon). Their agrarian program was very characteristic: the land of the landlords (about half of the land in use) was to be expropriat- ed, but *not* parcelled to the peasants. Rather, it was to be developed by the state ("bourgeois-democratic" state) with hired labor, because large-scale production units were more progres- sive. The Mensheviks' program differed in that the land was to be municipal, not central government, property. There was a party that wanted all the land to go to the peasants - the Socialist- Revolutionaries (SR) and some other parties with more moderate redistribution agenda. In 1917, after their coup, Bolsheviks sud- denly scuttled their own program and adopted the SR program - for the good reason that it had the overwhelming support of the peasants. Such lightning changes of policy were quite charac- teristic of Lenin. But of course that had nothing to do with de- feating the Tsar who had been deposed long since. What about SR - do *they* fit the role of "Lenin" in the fable ? They *did* fight the tsarist government a lot; and they *did* want redistribution. However, for them it was the land for the peasants that was the main priority; and the tsar was mainly the enemy because he stood in the way: quite the opposite motivation from the one ascribed to "Lenin" by Roemer. The "Tsar"'s behaviour is described as incorrectly - but I am tired of this now. So far, the only facts Roemer has marshalled are: (1) revolutionaries often promise to improve the lot of the poor and (2) police in many countries treat poor and obscure peo- ple more roughly than rich and well-connected people. Hardly a base for profound conclusions. Jan Wasilewsky