Righteous Revolutionaries

Righteous Revolutionaries illustrates how states appeal to popular morality—shared understandings of right and wrong—to forge new group identities and mobilize violence against perceived threats to their authority. Jeffrey A. Javed examines the Chinese Communist Party’s mass mobilization of violence during its land reform campaign in the early 1950s, one of the most violent and successful state-building efforts in history. Using an array of novel archival, documentary, and quantitative historical data, this book illustrates that China’s land reform campaign was not just about economic redistribution but rather part of a larger, brutally violent state-building effort to delegitimize the new party-state’s internal rivals and establish its moral authority. Righteous Revolutionaries argues that the Chinese Party-state simultaneously removed perceived threats to its authority at the grassroots and bolstered its legitimacy through a process called moral mobilization. This mobilization process created a moral boundary that designated a virtuous ingroup of “the masses” and a demonized outgroup of “class enemies,” mobilized the masses to participate in violence against this broadly defined outgroup, and strengthened this symbolic boundary by making the masses complicit in state violence. Righteous Revolutionaries shows how we can find traces of moral mobilization in China today under Xi Jinping’s rule. In an era where states and politicians regularly weaponize moral emotions to foment intergroup conflict and violence, understanding the dynamics of violent mobilization and state authority are more relevant than ever before.

A reexamination of one of the most violent and successful state-building efforts in history

Righteous Revolutionaries illustrates how states appeal to popular morality—shared understandings of right and wrong—to forge new group identities and mobilize violence against perceived threats to their authority. Jeffrey A. Javed examines the Chinese Communist Party’s mass mobilization of violence during its land reform campaign in the early 1950s, one of the most violent and successful state-building efforts in history. Using an array of novel archival, documentary, and quantitative historical data, this book illustrates that China’s land reform campaign was not just about economic redistribution but rather part of a larger, brutally violent state-building effort to delegitimize the new party-state’s internal rivals and establish its moral authority. Righteous Revolutionaries argues that the Chinese Party-state simultaneously removed perceived threats to its authority at the grassroots and bolstered its legitimacy through a process called moral mobilization. This mobilization process created a moral boundary that designated a virtuous ingroup of “the masses” and a demonized outgroup of “class enemies,” mobilized the masses to participate in violence against this broadly defined outgroup, and strengthened this symbolic boundary by making the masses complicit in state violence. Righteous Revolutionaries shows how we can find traces of moral mobilization in China today under Xi Jinping’s rule. In an era where states and politicians regularly weaponize moral emotions to foment intergroup conflict and violence, understanding the dynamics of violent mobilization and state authority are more relevant than ever before.

This volume departs both from approaches to revolution in Latin America that emphasize interests and those that emphasize socioeconomic and political injustice. Rather, it deals with real life, flesh and bone, revolutionary cadres: their thoughts, backgrounds, mentalities, and behavior. Going beyond cliches about Soviet encroachment in Latin America and "injustice breeds revolution," the contributors address the issue of the relationship between leaders and followers in a revolutionary context, seeing revolutionary leaders as the key to articulating and defining the agenda of the "revolution." In contrast to most theorizing, revolutionary leaders almost invariably come from the privileged, even aristocratic classes. The findings raise the issue of how well these leaders actually represent the peoples for which they claim to speak. They also prompt questions about the democratic nature of guerrilla organizations. If the leaders are so far removed, by social background and education, personal experience and ideological articulation, from their followers, how realistic is it to see the Left as a purveyor of progress? Perhaps it is more correct, say the contributors, to see their claims as manipulative tactics directed to resolving a struggle for power among competing elites. The selection of topics ranges from the historical development of revolutionary struggles since Che Guevara (Halperin and Ratliff) to the more specific application and motivation behind them (Ybarra-Rojas and Tismaneanu). Chapters deal with the attempt to define a typology of revolutionary leaders (Radu) and their Western supporters (Hollander). Some authors (Payne, Horowitz) combine .these approaches. Many issues examined in this volume are new, including an analysis of the gap between the internationalist outlook of the leaders and the parochial views of their followers. The violent organizations of the Left in Latin America are shown to be largely the functional result of upper- and middle-class leaders who combine an appeal to the lumpenproletariat at home with support of alienated Westerners to pursue their own elitist agenda.

SENSE OF OCCASION

This book, as the first volume of a multiple volume endeavor to analyze several revolutions of the “long” nineteenth and “short” twentieth century to show how revolutionary processes evolved, takes a closer look at the Atlantic Revolutions, that is, the American, the French, and the Haitian Revolution. It will therefore use a comparative ten-step model to emphasize similarities with regard to the revolutionary developments in different parts of the world. The book consequently aims at providing a general, but deeper, understanding of revolutions as a global phenomenon of modernity while explaining how revolutionary processes evolve and develop, and how they could and can be corrupted.

At this historic moment of global revolutions for social justice inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, the philosophy of Black Consciousness has reemerged and gripped the imagination of a new generation, and of the merciless exposure by COVD-19 of the devastating, long-existent fault lines in our societies. Frantz Fanon, James Baldwin, and Steve Biko have been rediscovered and reclaimed. In this powerful book Black liberation theologian and activist Allan Boesak explores the deep connections between Black Consciousness, Black theology, and the struggles against racism, domination, and imperial brutality across the world today. In a careful, meticulous, and sometimes surprising rereading of Steve Biko’s classic, I Write What I Like, Boesak re_ects on the astounding relevance of Black Consciousness for the current academic debates on decolonization and coloniality, Africanity and imperialism, as well as for the struggles for freedom, justice, and human dignity in the streets. With passion, forthrightness, and inspiring eloquence Boesak brings his considerable political experience and deep theological insight to bear in his argument for a global ethic of solidarity and resistance in the ongoing struggles against empire. Beginning with Biko’s “Where do we go from here?,” progressing to Baldwin’s “the _re next time,” and ending with Martin Luther King Jr.’s “_ere is no stopping short of victory,” this is a sobering, hopeful, and inspiring book