Social Movements in Leninist Regimes

Abstract

Sidney Tarrow (1991) deplored the failure of Western social movement scholars to predict the revolutions that swept Eastern Europe in 1989.¹ On the one hand, this should not come as a surprise. Revolutions are by definition surprise events that take on the appearance of necessity only after the fact. Tocqueville’s (1955:1) famous words on the French revolution, “so inevitable yet so completely unforeseen,” well apply to the revolutions two centuries later. On the other hand, the neglect of social movement scholars to study movements in Leninist regimes is a serious one.² This may reflect that recent social movement theories are in serious ways incapable of understanding the changes in Eastern Europe. Now it becomes clear that recent theoretical paradigms such as resource mobilization or political process presuppose the existence of liberal-democratic rules and institutions, without explicitly saying so. The pragmatic give-and-take between rational actors, as depicted by resource mobilization theories (see McCarthy and Zald, 1977), models political conflict on the logic of economic exchanges — evidently reflecting the, competitive and open style of conflict in the West for which there is no parallel in the East.