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4 - The greatest tragedies: reversed revolutions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2009

John Foran
Affiliation:
University of California, Santa Barbara
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Summary

To overthrow the old power is one thing; to take power in one's own hands is another.

Leon Trotsky

With this chapter, we cross the demarcation line of this study from success – always measured by seizing power long enough to undertake a project of deep social transformation – to failure. Here we will consider seven cases – three quite briefly – of reversed revolutions, which succeeded in the above sense, only to fail to hold onto power and complete a social revolution. The revolutionary governments range from three years in power – Mussadiq in Iran (1951–53), Chile under Allende (1970–73), or Grenada (1979–83) to just over a decade in the cases of the Bolivian revolution and Sandinista Nicaragua. As events radicalized, internal contradictions and external pressures reversed the revolution, often violently, always fatefully. It is important, then, to look at each revolution at two particular moments: its coming to power, to further test our theory of the origins of social revolutions, and then its subsequent fall from power, as we begin to discern the possible routes to failure, paths which will be pursued in different ways in Chapter 5 as well. Noteworthy also is that we enter, for the only time in this book, the understudied realm of outcomes, for to understand the reasons why an initially successful revolution fails requires us to assess their outcomes.

Type
Chapter
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Taking Power
On the Origins of Third World Revolutions
, pp. 151 - 204
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2005

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