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Appendix 7: The Entropy of Victory

Last week we ended with victory for the revolution and defeat for the now former sovereign. This was the moment when one of our great idiots of history stepped forward and managed to screw things up so badly that despite every material, political, social, and ideological advantage, still managed to get overthrown. I mean, you have to be pretty incompetent to allow this to happen. And yet, here we are. It came down to that final test of strength, the regime failed it. And was transformed by the mystical trifecta of loss of faith, loss of trust, and loss of will from a regime into ancien regime.

Now, as we discussed last time, one of the truly remarkable things about our great idiots is how they managed to unite so many different people with so many different interests against them. Nobles and commoners, owners and workers, landlords and peasants, university professors and illiterate laborers. They all came to share a belief that the sovereign was an obstacle. An obstacle to what? It didn’t matter. Whatever it is the heart desired. And so this vast revolutionary coalition full of people with almost as many interests as there were individuals in the coalition came together to do this one thing: remove the obstacle.

Well, now, that unifying obstacle has been removed, which brings us today to one of the great recurring themes of the Revolutions Podcast. It has happened in every revolution to every class of revolutionary and every class of revolution: the entropy of victory, when unity of shared purpose turns almost immediately into the chaos of factional conflict.

Now, at first, there’s naturally a real wave of optimism and euphoria that follows the departure of the sovereign. The drinking is fueled now by joy rather than rage. Toasts to victory are raised in palaces and cafes and dormitories, and out in the streets, and whether people are drinking expensive champagne or grog from a communal barrel, it’s all singing and dancing and hand shaking and backslapping and partying. We’ve done it. The bad old regime has been overthrown; viva la revolución. In the parties and parades and events that follow, the defecting opposition part of the ruling class — the people who are about to step into the uppermost ranks of power in like the executive ministry — pledge to the people that they will do all that the revolution promised. The people in the streets greet this with cheers and say, yes, yes, it is good now that you are in charge, hurray, please go do the things we expect the revolution to do. Everyone agrees that everything is great.

But when the booze wears off and the sober and hungover light of day intrudes, our oh so recently unified revolutionaries gaze upon each other with fresh eyes. The naïve only belatedly realized after the fact that the revolutionary coalition will not hold after revolutionary victory. The more savvy and calculating have already begun making moves to ensure that their revolutionary program becomes the revolutionary program. And there are many programs to choose from. Is this the end of reform or the beginning of reform? Have we already gone too far and need to pull back, or have we not gone far enough and need to push forward? Differences of opinion about what the revolution is and what it means can break down along economic class lines or geography or religion or naked interpersonal conflict, but it does break down, and it will break down.

Now, this does not necessarily happen right away; sometimes it can take as long as several hours. But however long it takes, the revolutionaries will turn on each other. They’ll maneuver against each other, box each other out, and shut each other down.

Now one of the main recurrent lines of division that we’ve seen over the course of our revolutions is the divide between the salon revolutionaries and the street revolutionaries, a division defined mostly by economic and social class under the ancien regime. We can now firmly identify salon revolutionaries with those breakaway elements of the ruling class and their educated supporters, who do revolution by talking, writing, and moving money around. Meanwhile, the popular forces unleashed by the revolutionary trigger are synonymous with the street revolutionaries, who do revolution with barricades, paving stones and guns. Both the elites in the salon and the commoners out in the street need each other to win, but their goals and interests and motivations are very different. Especially because one of the first post-revolutionary goals of the salon revolutionaries is restoring order and getting everyone in the street to go home, while one of the first post= revolutionary goals of the street revolutionaries is to stay in the street and keep pushing until all the bastards have been overthrown, not just some of them.

But that said, this would be a very superficial analysis if we just said, oh, the elites in the salon are united in their class and the commoners in the streets are united by their class, and so now class conflict will follow this brief period of cross-class unity. Because the divisions that lead to post-revolutionary entropy are more subtle than that. So, for example, there are a few different species of salon revolutionary who will immediately join in combat with each other for post-revolutionary ascendancy. On a political axis, they range from conservative to radical, sort of hewing to their economic and social class, but by no means bound by that class.

So to start, on the most conservative side of the spectrum, we have our most reluctant of revolutionaries. These are the people who are revolutionaries bracketed by scare quotes; they are “revolutionaries.” Typically, they are grandees of the old regime who were fed up with specific ministers and specific policies of the former sovereign and who were ready, eager, and downright willing to accept even the mildest of reforms or compromises to head off revolution. But because a great idiot was in charge, they could not even get that much. So the program of these most conservative of revolutionaries is the absolute minimum number of changes and reforms necessary to resecure this sacred thing called order. They witnessed the explosion of popular forces into the streets as an unmitigated disaster. Whatever joy they took in victory was overcome immediately by anxiety and fear that these popular forces will be worse than the old.

Their first post-revolutionary object is to return as much of society as possible to the way it had been before, to get things back to normal. Get the people off the streets and back into their homes, get regular economic activity restarted, make whatever necessary alterations to the political structure need to be made, but other than that, let’s get as much as possible as quickly as possible back to normal. These guys absolutely do not want a social revolution, they barely want a political revolution.

Now, the complaints of these most conservative of revolutionaries are typically, as I just said, mostly matters of personnel and policy rather than deep-seated ideological conviction. But adjacent to them on the conservative radical spectrum are those who do have ideological convictions. They have abstract ideals and beliefs about how a polity should be organized and governed, but who view the recent revolution as the full achievement of these ideological convictions. That once a limited set of post-revolutionary reforms have been implemented, that’s it, that’s what we came here to do, and that’s what we’re gonna keep doing forever. To borrow some useful terminology from post-Revolution of 1830 French politics, I am talking here about a thing called the Party of Resistance. The revolution for them is the end point. That whatever the sovereign had been doing that was so offensive should be undone — and we’ll perhaps sprinkle in some reforms to ensure such things don’t happen again — but that’s it. This group is also terrified of the popular forces that have been unleashed, and they want to close Pandora’s box before social revolution escapes. In their minds, any campaign for additional post-revolutionary progress or reform has to be shut down. Because while their revolution to overthrow an intolerable sovereign was necessary, revolution itself? Is bad, very, very bad.

So sticking with our post-1830 nomenclature, the Party of Resistance is contrasted with this thing called the Party of Movement. And here we situate our old friend Lafayette, who was associated with the Party of Movement after 1830. Lafayette is our bog standard liberal noble. He has deep political convictions and believes that sometimes revolutions are justified and sometimes they are not. But if and when a revolution does happen, it is meant to establish a regularized framework for further reform and a continuous renewal of society. Movement. Now, generally speaking, Lafayette and his cohort of liberal nobles were not thrilled about revolution, and would also prefer order be restored and people in the streets return to their homes, but they believed that the way to maintain permanent order was to funnel all that energy into a political framework designed to facilitate reform rather than stifle it. The revolution was supposed to lay the groundwork for more reform and more change and more progress. The revolution was supposed to be the beginning of something, not the end of anything. The Party of Movement types are extremely hostile to more conservative Party of Resistance types, and downright mortified in fact, that if the forces of resistance prevail that it would just lay the groundwork for… another revolution. They believe that reform was a release valve, not a ignition switch. And if the Party of Resistance wasn’t careful, the Party of Movement might decide it had no choice but to call the streets back into play.

But sliding over to the more radical side of the spectrum, there are voices inside the salons who are not mortified at all by the popular forces out in the street. Who do not think the first order of business is order. These radicals are the link to the streets. They do not think that link is merely an alliance of necessity entered into with anxious trepidation and terminated at the earliest opportunity. No, no, no. They believe the revolution in the streets is the revolution, that those popular forces, the people ought to be the main focus of the post-revolutionary program. They thus tend to be far more democratic in their politics and happy to make promises that their other brethren in the salon would view as crossing the line from political to social revolution. With society in a scramble as a result of the revolution, the radicals in the salon see a golden opportunity to rethink not just a few political rules and ministerial portfolios, but how people relate to each other and how the wealth and resources of society are distributed. Against the Party of Movement types, these more radical salon revolutionaries believe the revolution that overthrew the anicen regime was not just about creating the conditions for more reform, but for more revolution. The ranks of this faction of salon revolutionaries look to the streets for power and possibility, even if they themselves come from different socioeconomic circumstances. Radical leaders like Lenin and Trotsky and Robespierre and Danton may have cheered the streets and riled up the streets, but they were not from the streets.

So let us leave the salons then and turn to the streets. Know in the main, the dominant emotion in the salons after the revolution was anxiety over how to restore order as quickly as possible. For the folks out in the streets, it’s not that at all. At least in the beginning, it continues to just be euphoria. It’s a revolution. We did it! Anything and everything is possible. The folks out in the street are often slow to catch on how much the elites in the salons want to limit the breadth and depth of the revolutionary outcome. Because remember, there was a prevailing unity built around a few shared simple ideas, like liberty, freedom, equality, bread, and land. In the wake of the revolution, the elites now stepping into power will continue to shout those same slogans and say, what we are doing now is fulfilling those promises. But those words always meant very different things, in the salon and in the streets. It will take days, weeks, months, and sometimes even years for the streets to realize that actually, we are not getting from this revolution what we thought we were getting. Everything on our list of grievances and our list of hopes has been dropped, while everything on your list of grievances and your list of hopes has been enshrined. Thus, the euphoria and optimism give way to anger and disappointment, and the seeds of the second wave of revolution are planted amidst the manure of unmet popular expectations.

But even had the elite revolutionaries of the salon say, you know what? Let’s advance the agenda of the lower classes first. After all, they provided the popular forces necessary to overthrow the old regime — you know, just, if they said that — We would still run into the entropy of victory because the people are not a monolith, and out in the streets there are many different kinds of people doing many different kinds of things. And even setting aside all The People from the people who don’t support the revolution or don’t care about the revolution, there are still many different people who make up The People. And so like on a very basic level, we have urban workers and rural peasants — they’re all a part of the popular masses, but that’s very different factions, very different classes. They all may be salt of the earth commoners, but they have very different expectations that are in fact often in direct conflict with each other. If we go talk to urban workers, what they want is cheap and plentiful bread, and in fact, a revolutionary policy they might support is sending armed cadres out into the countryside to requisition grain, to keep bread cheap and plentiful.

The peasants, meanwhile, hate all that. They absolutely hate it when armed people come around and take all their grain. What they really want is land, and to be paid more for their grain, and then to be left to their own devices. There’s also, of course, often a more conservative worldview out there in the villages, especially because the peasants in the villages are the peasants who stayed in the villages as opposed to the peasant who left the villages to go off in search of work elsewhere. So in those villages, we have people often rooted in old social traditions. They might be in favor of tossing out rich landlords and redistributing the land — they are, after all, hugely radical on that front — but in the smaller scale social order, in terms of husbands ruling wives and fathers ruling sons and the family structure and religion, they’re interested in keeping most of that intact. And so when it’s time for the revolution to pay off, things that are good for the urban worker wing of The People and things that are good for the rural peasant wing of The People are diametrically opposed, and will likely lead each side to conclude that they will have to fight the other side in order to get what they want.

So after the revolution is won, entropy is now entering the system along political lines and class lines: conservatives are looking to consolidate and hold, progressives are looking to change and advance. But hopping off the political axis of interest and the economic axis of interest, there is also, in any revolution, geographic divides. Once the fundamental binding ties of a former political regime are broken, everything can be called into question, especially when we are talking about revolutions that involve independence or national self determination. So we see this in South America, where Gran Colombia suddenly becomes Venezuela and Ecuador and Columbia. In the British colonies, remember, there’s Virginia and Massachusetts and South Carolina. Are these actually going to be bound together in a new polity after the overthrow of the old polity? Russia was a multinational empire. Overthrowing Tsar Nicholas meant we now have Ukrainians and Lithuanians and Georgians, who are thinking to themselves, hey, maybe Ukrainians and Lithuanians and Georgians ought to be in charge of Ukraine, Lithuania, and Georgia.

Who the us over here is and who the them over there is changes overnight with an ancien regime is overthrown, especially if it involves the expulsion of a foreign imperial power. Everyone’s brain immediately remaps everything and suddenly over here and over take on different meanings. So when they all rose up in independence, the people of Gran Colombia viewed themselves as separate and different and unified against Spain. But once Spain is gone, we’re Venezuelans and Ecuadorians and Colombians. These geographic divisions then feed into one of the great post-revolutionary political questions: where will power now reside? Should it be centralized and run from a large urban capital, or devolved down to the local level? This is that age old centralist/federalist divide. Because there will be those who think it vital and necessary to have a centralized authority, and in fact, maybe consider the goal of the revolution to be increasing the centralized power of any new sovereign. On the other side, there will be people who think the whole point of the revolution was to break such centralized power and let local regions and states and cities call their own shots. After the revolution, does Léon have to take orders from Paris? Do Bostonians have to take orders from Virginians? Do the Russians have to rule Ukraine?

Now, the interesting thing about all these political and economic and geographic divisions that are gonna lead to the entropy of victory is that it’s very difficult to map where any single individual is going to wind up on the post-revolutionary ideological spectrum. So some Virginia planters like George Washington and James Madison are gonna become political centralists, whereas other Virginia planters like Patrick Henry and George Mason are gonna become staunch federalists. When we look at Russian SRs, Bolsheviks, and Mensheviks through the lens of socioeconomic class, it’s nearly impossible to distinguish one from the other. They all look, sound, and dress the same. They all live in the same kind of places, they all had the same level of education, they all basically read the same books and do the same kinds of work, and yet, all of them are gonna want to kill each other. In the French Revolution, Jacobins and Girondins wind up at each other’s throats even though there’s no way socioeconomically to distinguish them. And then up in the upper classes, how does a Lafayette, who’s a wealthy noble, or a Jacque Laffite, who’s a rich banker, wind up in the Party of Movement after the revolution of 1830, whereas a simple bourgeois intellectual like Francois Guizot winds up in the Party of Resistance? Why in the case of post-tsarist Russia does one Georgian leader think that Georgia should be truly independent in this new thing called the USSR while another thinks that the USSR should be unified, and ruled centrally from Moscow?

These questions can’t be explained by where people grew up or what their socioeconomic class is. A lot of it comes down to individual biography, character, and choices. So we must admit that at a certain point, individual power and influences come into play. Material interests and even political ideology is always mixed in with interpersonal conflict and ambition, where it’s not solely about political or ideological differences between Mensheviks and and Bolsheviks and SRs, or the Girondins and the Mountain, but more about which people are actually going to be in power. Who is going to get to be the minister of what? Which faction is going to enjoy the perk of making final decisions? This stuff does matter, especially if you really don’t like somebody on like a personal level and don’t want them to have power. Those kinds of interpersonal conflicts can actually precede ideological or geographic or religious or class considerations — those all become post hoc justifications. People sometimes just don’t like each other. A lot of Mensheviks became Mensheviks because they didn’t like Lenin. Now, I took pains during the Russian Revolutionary series to establish that there are in fact political differences between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, but a lot of it was personality, not principle.

So the entropy of victory sets in as soon as victory is won. Well, okay, okay, it might take several hours. But it sets in so quickly because while it’s easy to agree that the great idiot needs to go — that he was an obstacle to all our hopes and dreams — it’s much harder to agree on what happens next, because there are so many competing hopes and dreams out there. And the entropy of victory sets us up for what we’re gonna talk about next week, because divisions among the various revolutionary factions are absolutely going to provide the opportunity conservative reactionaries out there in the tall grass have been waiting for, to undo the revolution. And that means civil war. The divisions between the revolutionaries are also going to inform, and be informed by, our new post-revolutionary regimes relations with their foreign neighbors.

So next week we’re gonna be talking about war. Because war always seems to follow pretty hot on the heels of revolution: international wars with neighboring powers, civil wars between revolutionaries and reactionaries, civil wars between competing revolutionary factions. It’s extremely difficult, though not impossible, to get through a revolution without a war.

And it is extremely difficult for that war to not spin around and further radicalize the revolution.