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From: carnes@gargoyle.UUCP (Richard Carnes)
Newsgroups: net.politics.theory
Subject: A Tale of Lenin and the Tsar, II
Message-ID: <275@gargoyle.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 13-Dec-85 18:05:50 EST
Article-I.D.: gargoyle.275
Posted: Fri Dec 13 18:05:50 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 16-Dec-85 19:58:41 EST
Reply-To: carnes@gargoyle.UUCP (Richard Carnes)
Organization: U. of Chicago, Computer Science Dept.
Lines: 78
Summary: 

I expect to be around to terrorize the net for a while yet.  But
having sacrificed my friendships, career, love life, health, and
finally sanity for the sake of reading and writing articles for the
net, I find it advisable to economize severely on the time I spend on
it.  Since like most people I can type faster than I can think, I am
posting another excerpt from John Roemer's article.  (The article is
not copyrighted, BTW; not that I care about bourgeois property
rights.) 
____________________

I choose to sidestep the question of collective action because there
are many other aspects of revolutions I think it important to study,
aspects which can be discussed while holding in abeyance the
microfoundations of collective action.  In particular, I am
interested in what one might call revolutionary ideology.  Ideology
is one of those dirty words in modern economics; it is usually
conceived of as an irrational or unfounded commitment which a person
has to a set of ideas.  One might think of an ideology as affecting
the utility function of the agent; but I propose here to conceive of
an ideology as a self-imposed limitation placed on one's feasible
set [of options].  An agent has a set of possible strategies in a
situation; ideology causes him to rule out a certain portion of that
set as beyond the pale, perhaps for ethical reasons.  An important
question, I think, is:  can we explain why people have the ideologies
they do?  

We frequently attribute certain actions of actors in revolutionary
situations to their ideologies.  Let me give two examples.  Think of
a revolution as a competition between the present ruler (whom I shall
call the Tsar), and a revolutionary entrepreneur, whose name is
Lenin.  Lenin and the Tsar are competing for support of coalitions of
the population, in a way which will become precise soon.  Frequently,
in such situations, we observe that the Tsar imposes very harsh
penalties on the poor for participating in revolutionary activity,
and somewhat lighter penalties on the more well-to-do who have
abandoned their comfortable stations in life and joined Lenin.  (An
example is provided by the elections in El Salvador two years ago [in
1982]:  nonparticipation was viewed, by the regime in power, as a
kind of revolutionary protest.  The penalties imposed for not voting
were inversely proportional in severity to one's wealth.  The poorest
people who did not vote were beaten up and lost their jobs, while
middle class people were censured in some fairly trivial way.)  This
behavior of the ruler might be viewed as ideologically (in the sense
of irrationally) motivated:  he hates the poor and feels more
friendly to the rich.  A second example:  Lenin, in trying to
overthrow the Tsar, usually proposes a progressive redistribution of
income, he promises to take from the rich and give to the poor.  Par
excellence, this behavior is viewed as the consequence of an ideology.

I would like to provide rational foundations for these ideologies.
For instance, I will show that if Lenin wants to overthrow the Tsar
-- by *any* means necessary -- it will be in his interest to adopt a
progressive redistribution of income.  And if the Tsar wants to
preserve the present regime against Lenin's onslaught, his best
strategy will entail assigning penalties for revolutionary
participation which are inversely proportional in severity to the
income of the participants.  My purpose is threefold:  (1) to
encourage social scientists to think of revolutions as events which
are amenable to rational analysis, they should not remain black
boxes; (2) to make the same point, more generally, about ideology:
that we should not rule out of court certain kinds of behavior as
ideological, but seek to explain the evolution of ideology using
rational choice models; (3) to re-enforce by example my point of view
that in part what should characterize Marxian social science is the
questions it concerns itself with, rather than the adherence to some
supposedly privileged logic, some dialectical or holistic approach,
which I think is more akin to the yoga of a mystical practice or
religion.  This is not my complete characterization of Marxian social
science, which I think also differs from non-Marxist social science
in its ethical posture.

Although the work described is quite technical, I will try to avoid
most mathematical detail, and will concentrate on the general
lessons from this tale of Lenin and the Tsar.  The interested reader
can get the full story elsewhere [in *Econometrica* 53 (1985)].
--John E. Roemer
-- 
Richard Carnes, ihnp4!gargoyle!carnes