Civil Wars

Civil wars

Alex S. Bliokh

Once walking through the halls of Los Alamos I noticed a photograph which was not known to me but which style and subject was painstakingly familiar to me through school textbooks and onwards: Russian Civil War. However, coming closer I spotted some differences in uniform and read the title indicating that these were Carranzistas in Revolutionary Mexico. This was a good opportunity to enter the office and ask its owner, a well-known scientist of Mexican extraction about the photograph and what else. “What were the reasons for the civil war? As always”- responded he- “an unresolved agrarian question.”
Much later I stumbled upon the observation by Amartya Sen (Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, 1998) who lived through the post-Independence hunger in Punjab that the starting point of his exploration was the realization that democracies rarely if ever had known starvation. I started to recollect until I could formulate another observation, which was equally improbable but wholly supported by empirical count, namely, that there was not a single civil war in an industrialized nation. On the contrary, civil wars frequently accompanied the triumph of industrial economic order over agrarian civilization, for instance, in the United States. Medical records of the American Civil War indicated that more than 85% of the soldiers indicated their social position as farmer or a farm hand. What then to speak of 1918 Russia, 1920 Mexico, or Central America, any time, any place.
Civil wars always seem to be magically attached to stubborn resistance or revolt of peasants against somebody: their masters the landlords, an occupying power, emerging urbanized and/or industrial agendas of the ruling elite, etc. etc. The only example of civil war, which can be remotely ascribed to urban political culture and interests would be civil war in Ireland (1922-1923) of which I (and most Europeans) know very little. However, Eire at that time was hardly an industrial nation and one can be sure, that bodies of peasant stock were largely responsible for manning troops and falling on both sides.
Third observation has to do with the particular ferocity of the peasant war. Nazi Germany seems to be the unique XX Century case in which urban society and government displayed propensity for genocide.[1] My explanation is that the genocide was an original form of warfare. Subsistence societies simply annihilated opposing tribes, or at least their male part. Preservation of female part as (sex) slaves also made direct sense for the small groups suffering from chronic inbreeding.
There seem to be many non-biologic, economic reasons for connection of warfare and land ownership, pointing in the same direction. First, the war brings only ruin and hardships for the majority of urban dwellers for them to start it on their own accord. On the contrary, for centuries, agrarian civilizations were attuned to co-existence with almost permanent warfare. Peasant going to war could either conquer more land or pastures in the foreign land or perish, in which case, his extended family would re-divide his plot at home. Hard-pressed burgher will likely prefer to pack and leave in search for the better. Not so a peasant, or a landlord. They can neither move their main asset, nor be separated from it, and prosper.
This argument has nothing to do with class warfare. Both roundheads and ironsides of the Civil War in England represented landowning interests with different political outlook. Great peasant rebellions in XVI century Germany and Hungary, or XVII-XVIII century Russia were led by the minor knights, or by the soldiers of fortune, hardly a serf. Chin (Qin), the first dynasty, which united China, collapsed in a series of peasant rebellions, but the victorious faction was commanded by someone Liu Bang, a minor civil bureaucrat, who then became Emperor Gaozu, founder of the Han dynasty. Certainly, class oppression stoked these rebellions, but few, if any of them had amelioration of the lot of the oppressed as an important part of their program. Dynastic troubles, foreign domination or religious impiety of the ruling classes figured much more prominently in the revolutionary rhetoric. And peasant generals frequently installed themselves in palaces of the overthrown nobility and surrounded themselves with slave servants and concubines.
Second, the accumulation of capital for the development of urbanized society almost seems to require the robbing of some agrarian order, at home or/and abroad. Britain paved the way by mass removal of tenant peasants from the estates in the late XVI-XVII centuries and later supported its own industrializing economy by exploiting of agricultural communities from North America to the British Raj. When the US achieved independence from Britain, despite inheriting boundless continent, they fought a bloody civil war and imposed reconstruction on a recalcitrant agricultural South. Yet, from 1920s to 1950s United States de-facto colonized many economies of the South and Central America in service of their own industrial development.
Not all paths from agrarian to urban society were that straightforward. Spanish Empire exploited its American dependencies, and Spaniards financed accelerated urbanization and modernization, though not in Spain, but in the Low Countries. City-states of Northern Italy, the early European leader in capital formation, were unable to subjugate or maintain significant pockets of agricultural exploitation and by the end of XVII century fell far behind their Northern cousins. In Germany, it seems that the obverse took place: predominantly agricultural, but militaristic Prussia annexed to itself urbanized and industrialized areas, first, mining towns of Silesia in mid-XVIII century, then Baden, Saar and Rheinland in the course of XIX century Wars for Unification.
Late Medieval and early Modern France was convulsing in the series of Civil Wars more or less continuously from the beginning of XV to the mid-XVII century. But given the largely urban character of later political culture in France, civil war component became subdued in all French political upheavals of XVIII-XIX centuries. Vendee was only a side show of the French Revolution. And the revolutionary age in France has ended with violent suppression of the workers’ French Commune by largely peasant soldiery of the French Army in 1871[2], after which it peacefully dispersed to barracks and farms never to return as a factor in domestic political life.
In Russia, the tsarist regime was unable to solve a development dilemma before the First World War, in part because the ruling bureaucracy was reluctant to run roughshod over agricultural interests: the landowning class still, like in contemporary Prussia and Austria, remained a backbone of the Empire’s administrative and, especially, military apparatus. Moreover, the leading landowners-bureaucrats, like Stolypin, were rather timid in their assault on traditional peasantry as well, because they perceived the peasants and their parochial outlook as the counterweight to radicalized urban working classes and intelligentsia. Only Bolsheviks with their blatant disregard for human life, established order and economic rationality, could expropriate peasantry to build their own urbanized utopia on Russian soil.
I do not suggest here, as Marxist historians in the East and West were prone to do and some revisionists still assert, that there was anything rational or even preordained in the Soviet ruination of Russian peasant society. This means, rather trivially, that the extremely violent path taken by the Russian revolution had its roots in the previous contradictions of the Empire, which entered its industrial age with more than 80% of an agricultural population. Metaphorically speaking, traditional Russian peasantry was doomed to be despoiled on the eve of 30s. However, if the Imperial military were more capable and the tsarist bureaucracy more intellectually curious, it could go down in the throes of the Depression like Steinbeck’s Okies, rather than perish in the Bolshevik terror and Stalin’s collectivization.
One must not view this rather grim outlook of the peasant societies as condescending. They were the only form possible under the economic circumstances of the times. Food, which is necessary to consume every day, had limited possibility of storage and transportation far from production areas. The only method of sustenance for civilization, i.e. a tiny elite of militarized aristocracy, with accompanying priests, scribes, artisans and merchants who were serving predominantly the ruling clique, was to resort to periodic armed confiscations in the years of scarcity. One would be hard-pressed to stop war, or require builders of the temple, or makers of the weaponry to dissolve and fend for themselves just because of draught or other inopportune circumstance. The prospects for the new technologies in agriculture were scarce. Increased productivity in the conditions of primitive storage techniques, lengthy and uncertain transportation, could only cause drastic price reductions, wiping out the economic basis of communities, which would adopt them in the years of plenty. For the peasant commonwealth to withstand systematic armed depredations of their overlords and occasional—of the nomads—it had to be organized in large family-style units with mechanisms of mutual support[3] under strong patriarchal authority. This presumed expendability of the weaker members of the community, predominantly the women.
If my reasoning is true, what this may hold for the future? First, India and China, which still have a large sector of subsistence agriculture, may be equally able to dominate our century as to collapse in bloody civil wars. Second, African continent is doomed to the continuing cycles of civil wars despite all good will and economic aid, until (1) its economies including agricultural sector will be thoroughly industrialized and (2) African cities will be transformed in the direction of the Western, business-oriented model of urbanism.
In the present state of affairs African cities are the social extensions of rustic communities. Members of the same villages and tribes populate same residential neighborhoods and maintain traditional power structures in the industrial/service setting. From the American prospective, cities of many an African nation, and the famous “Arab street”, are the federations of “urban” gangs. Like the gangs in the West, they have nothing “urban” in origin. With their emphasis of ethnic/racial origin, loyalty to a long-gone, or invented communal ideals, a hierarchy based on force and submission to a core group of aggressive armed males and collective economic and sexual exploitation of women by the members of this group, they represent a transplant of traditional agrarian order into modern industrial and postindustrial economy. [4]

Appendix A.

French banileues, which became the hotbed of Paris riots of 2005, are also quasi-village communities unlike most American suburbia. In one of the ironies, many an American suburb, which is a village in the urban planning sense, does not possess any trace of a social life of village community. Deer and raccoons may come to property in abundance, and an occasional mountain lion or a bear, and houses are all made of wood; but one’s next door neighbor may be a Chinese, another—an Israeli, third—a Korean, others—Americans from all over the continent, but one does not know anything about them. They nod politely, or ask to pet a dog; that’s it. Personal contacts are centered on professional and school networks. Common religious affiliation, which was the reason for suburban segregation in the first place, plays little or no role. The neighborhood does not define, nor does it interfere in, intimate contacts, or marriage contracts.
On the contrary, French Moslem banileue is a village, despite an artificial look of a collection of grim high rise concrete housing projects. The loyalties are ethnocentric; North Africans may mix with Turks, Bosniaks or Albanians as partners in crime and rioting, but when the contact with the “white world” around ceases, the ethnic melee immediately reforms back into ethnic crystals.
Primary groups are formed around a fundamentalist imam as an extension of a village elder. Sister of a member who goes outside of the network for dating is defamed and severely punished. Former members of the community, who prospered socially and financially, are long gone and remember their former origins with a shudder, not too dissimilar to the residents of immigrant ghettoes of XX century America. Remaining are unemployed, semi-employed or work in a local economy; their professional position is neither a sort of identification, nor of a particular pride. Traditional villages probably had some internal hierarchy based on relative level of prosperity and/or strict or lax adherence to the morality norms[5] of the collective, but the nature of agricultural labor was common for them all and imposed an artificial uniformity on their already drab existence.



Appendix B

If the above reasoning is true, civil wars in Africa and in the Middle East cannot be reduced with economic aid. In fact, most disastrous civil wars happened in countries such as England (War of the Roses and Cromwell Revolution), United States (1861-1865), Argentina (large part of XIX century) and Russia (1918-1920), which were at the time major food producers and exporters and did not suffer from agricultural shortages per se. In some of the above cases abundance could have actually increased because of the reduced possibility to export surpluses.
I suggest that more important than providing aid would be to break down patriarchal structure. Only when a state ceases to be an extension of patrimony, there would be hope that people will find other ways to manage their conflicts than to engage in neighborly genocide. I am not a sociologist, even less of a demographer to propose a solution. One of the pillars of the traditional order is polygamy and the existence of extremely large families. In the society with subsistence agriculture keeping large families makes sense because the mortality is high and there is no social safety net. The only retirement package available to subsistence farmer is to be supported by one’s children. In the modern subsistence economies, which graduated to the Internet and Stingers, this makes no sense at all.
Creating an artificial shortage of women may be a one way to try. Short of Stalinist methods, this can be accomplished by encouraging women to emigrate from Africa, Middle East, Balkans and the Caucasus, but placing strict limits on the emigration of men. Then, if the creeping abolition of serfdom in the Western Europe in the wake of the Great Plague provides any guidance, the “price” of women in the society will rise until their professional skills will replace reproductive capacity as a main source of value. Once this happens and women convert their newfound economic power into political leverage, the likely result would be for them to curb the traditional power structure of male-centered urban chiefdom with its militant tendencies.

[1] Among poorly understood vagaries of the Nazi regime is the fixation of their leaders on the grabs of agricultural land, which they proposed to distribute to German colonists and to cultivate by the slave workforce of subjugated Slavs. Out of all totalitarian regimes, the modeling of the ruling class on the chivalric (i.e. land-owning) caste was also the most prominent in German Nazism. I did not find successful explanation to this strange, in the modern industrial state, obsession with agrarian utopianism. Yet all the Nazi leaders lived through the austerity of the first Weimar years.
[2] By most accounts, the bi-weekly suppression of the Paris Commune in 1871 cost more lives than all the terror of the French Revolution.
[3] For instance, this included different forms of open-field system under manorial organization.
[4] One might remember in that regard, that, that an early medieval lord of the manor himself had very limited resources to spend on his armed retinue. Most of their reward probably was contained in the possibility to live on his grounds and procure unlimited food and sex directly from his tenants.
[5] This “morality” ought not to be interpreted in Victorian terms. At one time or another, accepted practices included almost universal polygamy, ritual prostitution, castration, infanticide, parricide, cannibalism and necrophagia. Hellenistic “master of the house” could be, from a modern point of view, a violent pedophile and a whoremonger, but this did not impugn on his moral standing. On the contrary, inability to keep slaves and women of the house in their place, neglect of community affairs, or lack of cultural refinement could be a reason for severe reprobation.