Political Revolution and Cultural Change

Discussion

Source: Source: REVOLUTION AND CULTURE: The Bogdanov-Lenin Controversy by ZENOVIA A. SOCHOR, from 1988

Sochor:

"During the prerevolutionary period, a fundamental shift occurs in the values, attitudes, and beliefs of ever-widening circles. Political culture, once the pillar of stability, crumbles. As delegitimation accelerates, ruling elites and their supporting structures become irrelevant or displaced and the counterelites and masses converge on a common objective: crushing the remnants of the old. The seizure of power is accompanied by anarchy, both in politics and in culture. The counter- elites either are helpless to intervene or help eradicate the symbols and institutions of the previous political culture. A period of "revolutionary vandalism" sets in, with statues toppled, palaces trampled, and vestiges of privilege and repression obliterated. As Meyer notes, the Communist parties that tried to curb popular anarchy failed in their bid to power. The most effective alternative was to "succumb, temporarily, to spontaneous and widespread anti-authoritarian sentiments, to allow them free rein, and even to voice them and incorporate them."l0 The Bolsheviks were clever enough to share in this mood as opposed to trying to control it.

Precisely these conditions are the most conducive to radical change. Large-scale disruption and an internally distorted culture, argues Wal- lace, may lead to "revitalization," defined as a "deliberate, organized, conscious effort by members of a society to construct a more satisfying culture."l1 The potential for "culture-building," adds another analyst, is all the greater if there are "mass participation and revolutionary ideological activities among the masses.,,

In other words, the advent of revolution, with its upheaval in struc- tures and values, accompanied by an ideologically informed and pur- poseful leadership, establishes the most propitious circumstances for radical cultural change. The entire process is consistent with Deutsch's concept of social mobilization, which he defines as "the process in which major clusters of old social, economic, and psychological commitments are eroded or broken and people become available for new patterns of socialization and behavior."13 Although Deutsch refers to the consequences of modernization, a similar set of conditions is triggered by revolution.

The question that arises, therefore, is why the revolutionary fervor cannot be applied successfully to culture-building efforts? Surely, at the height of revolution, there is a union between revolutionary elites and a significant portion of the population. Why can it not be sustained? At what point do the dynamics of revolution diverge from those of cultural transformation?

Cultural Conservatism / Political Radicalism

Although revolution perforce implies some cultural change, it does not necessarily promise wholesale change. The concepts of culture and political culture, although related, are nevertheless distinct, and change in one does not automatically produce change in the other. Of the two, political culture may change independently of and more rapidly than culture. Cultural anthropologists, once again, offer some interesting suggestions on the diversity of change.

Spindler, for example, states that individuals in a developing country sometimes "become modernized in political attitudes and remain traditional in agricultural attitudes." Similarly, Geertz emphasizes the notion of "cultural discontinuity." Especially under conditions of rapid, disorienting change, individuals are "drawn to a double goal: to remain themselves and to keep pace, or more, with the twentieth century." This duality tehds to produce a "tense conjunction of cultural conservatism and political radicalism."

Transposed to the postrevolutionary period, this curious blend suggests a latent, and yet vital, source of tension. Although political sci- entists have focused on the dyssynchronization between values and structures before the revolution, they have paid little attention to this phenomenon after the revolution. All the same, it is entirely possible that new divisions and gaps may occur. New institutions may have been introduced, but have the values that legitimize them been absorbed? At a minimum, there is probably a lag between one and the other. Even more likely, the new elites and the population at large may find that they have rather different interpretations of shared values. What brought them together during the seizure of power were values of the least common denominator type, a watered-down version of ideology, useful for mobilizing large numbers of people. As the new elites draw upon a more complex and more comprehensive set of beliefs to formulate the program of action after the revolution, a distancing between them and the rest of the people is fairly predictable.

Moreover, the ideology that brought the counterelites into power usually has a strong utopian component: an attempt to institute radical, complete change. For the new elites, especially the intellectuals, the question is how best to implement utopia, how to prevent its deradicalization. For the population at large, however, the answer to legitimacy may very well be the opposite: how to transform utopia into something more familiar, more acceptable. Radicalism is thus pitted against syncretism.

Undoubtedly, this problem is one of the major ones of the postrev- olutionary period. The tension between cultural conservatism and po- litical radicalism must be surmounted if the goals of the revolution are to be achieved. People oriented toward the market and private property, religious in their convictions, attached to their families, and highly status conscious or authoritarian in their dealings with others cannot but set cultural limits to socialist programs. However, if politics out- strips by far what the population can accept or absorb, there may be a danger of delegitimation. How the relationship between culture and politics is resolved, therefore, may have a substantial impact on the outcome of the revolution.

Here an important clue emerges on why communist revolutions gen- erate an aftershock called cultural revolution. Faced with incongruence between cultural conservatism and political radicalism, leaders attempt to overcome it by initiating a cultural One Soviet analyst seems to be alluding to this very point when he explains that one of the basic features of the transitional period is the cultural revolution "to liquidate the gap between the social-political and the cultural level of development of the country.,,

Ostensibly, for all Marxists, a cultural revolution is a critical com- ponent of the revolutionary process. All revolutions involve a change in the political culture, but only socialist revolutions aspire to a change in the culture as a whole. From the Marxist point of view, change cannot be confined to the political level because there is an intricate relationship among politics, economics, and culture (or, in Marxist terms, between the base and the superstructure).

A cultural revolution, therefore, may be prompted by radical, large-scale visions of a new society at the same time that a program of cultural change is pressed into service to resolve more immediate problems, such as legitimacy and cultural backwardness. It is up to the revolutionary leaders to determine how much weight to accord political rad- icalism versus cultural conservatism. Which will yield the most? Will culture be transformed or politics deradicalized? Perhaps because there was no one answer that was completely satisfactory, Lenin and Bogdanov (as well as Stalin) outlined entirely different countercultures and yet called them cultural revolutions in keeping with communist goals."