peasants to have one or more sons

to support them in old age. It is also likely to be hindered by the value of children for supplementary household labor and by the influence of grandparents who live in the same private house. Among villages, the program will probably be most successful where urban contact is great, where incomes are high and there is thus less need for supplementary household labor, where there are many party members and retired servicemen to lead in the adoption of birth-control measures, and where key-point status in the birth-control campaign brings in extra administrative assistance. (For instance, one group of visitors found that adjacent villages had a birth rate twice as high as the key-point village that they were touring.)

At a minimum, then, the visitor and other analysts of China should inquire into the income level, the proximity to urban areas, the party membership, and the keypoint status of the places that they visit or study. If the circumstances are opportune, it would also help to look at the background of lead-❘ ers, the degree of leadership turnover, the revolutionary history of the village and how it fared in past campaigns, the number of demobilized soldiers, and the existence of surname and and ethnic cleavages that may create conflict. Only when this type of information is reported can we begin to generalize from the specific case to the nation.

THE SECOND ISSUE that deserves elaboration is the need to find a

• See Whyte and also Oksenberg, "Local Leaders...," loc. cit., for further discussion of pertinent background conditions.

Whyte's evaluation of the success of small groups in mobilizing Chinese society consists basically of comparisons of the actual operation and functioning of small groups to the government's ideal for small groups as detailed in books written for bureaucrats and urban intellectuals around 1950. Measured against such an extremely high standard, smallgroup practice cannot help but fall short, even within the party fall short, even within the party bureaucracy. Whyte does moderate this rigorous standard at times: partly by drawing comparisons with the Soviet experiparisons with the Soviet experience (in which there has been greater reliance on physical and economic sanctions), partly by drawing comparisons with the pre1949 past (which was much more disorganized), and partly by comparison with other societies (most of of which, he senses, have a greater number of competing subgroups and other means to impose sanctions on politically- and socially-deviant people). Viewed from such perspectives, small groups in China seem to have been rather effective in unifying the society. Despite this tempering the society. Despite this tempering of the 1950 ideal as a yardstick of evaluation, however, Whyte's heavy recourse to it for this purpose produces a view which may be bleaker than that which the be bleaker than that which the Chinese themselves, the originators of the ideal, hold about the successes of small-group undertakings. This is particularly true with respect to village political life, about which both Liu and Whyte write rather pessimistically. To come to a balanced assessment, one should recognize that the government's own ideal varies for different target groups, that some political values are learned in contexts not overtly political,

village have been more successful in the economic than in the political realm, and that a variety of comparisons, not just a single comparison, is necessary. Let us dwell briefly on each of these points.

The government attenuates its ideal of a strict political atmosphere imposed through an intense small-group life in the cases of both factories and villages. In factories, as Whyte notes, the government, operating from Marxist biases, tends to assume that the outlooks of workers pose fewer problems, and that workers are therefore less in need of intense political study. In villages, the shifts in political-study approaches from moderate to radical and back again suggest a division among the top leaders. The moderates do not want to apply to the villager immediately the strict political ideals that they find appropriate for bureaucracies and schools. And even the radicals may not hold an ideal quite so extreme as the one Whyte uses as the standard. For example, the otherwise extremist Tachai brigade-which the radicals have held up for national emulation-has now modified its methods of intense criticism and self-criticism. Though meetings to assign work points inevitably involve evaluation and implied criticism, the present Tachai ideal is that there should be no criticism of people by name. Whenever possible, praise is to be given to specific individuals, but criticisms are to condemn only the error and not the individual who has erred. This indirect ap

See "Using Mao Tse-tung's Thought in Labor Management," in the journal of agricultural technology, Nung-yeh Chi-shu (Peking), No. 11, 1967, p. 26.

plication of negative sanctions to individuals represents a moderation of the 1950 ideal for small groups.

Even when none of the more modest forms of political study and criticism exist in the village, it seems possible that values that the government espouses are learned through other channels, particularly through the economic meetings that everyone attends. The greatest changes in the village are the new economic arrangements, which include a much greater level of sharing and cooperation than in the past. It appears likely that the values of sharing and cooperation are regularly argued about and reaffirmed in village decisions to institute cooperative health programs or to enlarge the proportion of grain allocated according to need, for example, and such arguments must have some effect on individual values.

To be sure, the spirit of sharing is in some ways limited to one's own production team of 20 to 30 households, for the efforts to enlarge the unit of sharing to the township-size commune in 195859 and to the village-size brigade in 1968-71 generally failed. But the very success of the neighborhood-size production team illustrates the usefulness of small

group procedures in at least the economic realm. In the efforts to use the larger commune as the sharing unit, the "free rider" problem was encountered. Certain individuals who received benefits regardless of how hard they worked began to loaf. In the large unit, it was difficult to apply social and economic pressure to halt such behavior. However, the change to the smaller unit caused members to be more concerned about the problem because they were more directly affected, and it also gave them more opportunities to apply pressure in that they ties to apply pressure in that they saw the potential loafer daily. People may have acted as much out of economic self-interest as on the basis of political ideals, but the small-group approach solved the small-group approach solved the problem. Viewed in this perspective rather than in terms of the extreme ideals developed for bureaucrats and urban dwellers, the spread to the countryside of new political values and ways of organizing would probably appear even more impressive.

Besides modifying its own expectations slightly for different pectations slightly for different target groups, the government seems to maintain a tension between comparison with the ideal state of the future and comparison with the bad conditions of the past. Moreover, which past is

emphasized also varies depending on the audience. In public, officials tend to compare present conditions with the disordered civil-war years of 1948-49. In economic publications in the 1950's and in private today, we are told, they tend to produce a more moderate evaluation of progress by using the more stable prewar years of 1930-36 as the basis of comparison.

Either way, of course, it is difficult to make a balanced judgment.' The foreign observer can avoid the twin problem of creating too black a picture by comparison with an unrealistic ideal or too rosy a picture by comparison with a disordered past by comparing the Chinese society with other developing societies. Even if the conclusions that result vary according to whether one uses, e.g., India, Russia, or Japan as the standard of comparison, the flaws inherent in any society are still included, and one has a more realistic set of expectations as to what is possible. Unfortunately, there is no right comparison; hence, one should use multiple comparisons in evaluating the Chinese experience.

7 On the difficulties of such comparisons, see Harrison E. Salisbury, To Peking and Beyond, New York, Quadrangle, 1973, Chap. 6.

Sparing the reader a detailed account of historical events, the author has concentrated instead on an analysis of the Venezuelan guerrillas' ideological beliefs, tactics, organization-and mistakes. Valsalice deromanticizes the guerrilla by placing the blame for his failure squarely on him for his lack of organization and a coherent ideology, and for his general incompetence. Valsalice's insights and information support the reviewer's inclination to feel that Italian intellectuals have a special capacity for penetrating the Leftist mentality and comprehending the politics of MarxistLeninist parties.

Valsalice maintains that the Venezuelan Left was guided or misguided-by "revolutionism," which has nothing in common with the Marxist concept of revolution. "Revolutionism," he holds, was typified by Guevara's contention that if the conditions for armed struggle do not exist, they must be created. The fall of the dictator Pérez Jiménez in 1958 and the establishment of a leftof-center democratic regime in Venezuela took place almost simultaneously, it will be remembered, with Fidel Castro's victory in Cuba (January 1959). The largely spontaneous creation of nuclei of armed struggle in Venezuela over the next few years was, according to Valsalice, "both the cause and the effect of a new 'climate,' of a revolutionary atmosphere of young people impatient with formal democracy and sensing a duty to fight." The mentality of the radical Venezuelan Left in those early years of the lucha armada is little understood. Valsalice has succeeded in conveying the compulsion for action and the poverty of ideology that characterized those early innovators. "There

was," he writes, correctly, "a cer

tain romantic aspect in this first appearance of the guerrilla phenomenon; romantic, not in the sense of progressive, but simply irrational." A former leading participant in that movement, in conversation with the reviewer, used the exact same words to deprecate it-romantic, in the sense of irrational.

The most instructive and valuable parts of Valsalice's book are the final chapters, which analyze the guerrilla in the social and historical context of Venezuela. The author describes the ineptitude of both the rural and the urban guerrillas. The rural guerrillas selected areas for struggle that were mountainous, sparsely populated (containing only 2.2 percent of the population), and far removed from the country's communication centers. They were never able to control even these remote areas. It took them half a decade (until 1966) to begin to realize that there was a contradiction between fighting in unpopulated areas and creating a social base for a "revolutionary civil war." Incredible but true!

In his chapter on urban activity, Valsalice describes how the guerrillas' lack of ideological purpose and revolutionary goals led urban terrorism to become hardly distinguishable

from common

crime. He attempts to evaluate the charge of the Left that urban violence was a necessary reaction to police brutality. He concludes that if one side was to blame for making violence a "permanent element in the Venezuelan panorama," the responsibility must rest with those who adopted urban terrorism as a political tactic to achieve specific ends.

Summing up, the author defines the tragedy of the Venezuelan

guerrilla movement as its failure to distinguish between mass struggle and plain violence. The revolutionism of the guerrillas was in fact, he says, "petty bourgeois revolutionism"-i.e., revolutionary effort in which the goal of liberating the proletariat gives way to the conquest of power per se. Valsalice believes that the Venezuelan rebels, in pursuit of this "petty bourgeois" objective, demonstrated the vulnerabilities of the Castro myth, weakened the Left, and strengthened "formal and bourgeois democracy" in Venezuela.

This otherwise valuable work has one flaw, in that the author, in his concentration on the Marxist Left, fails to give due credit to the Venezulan government and to Acción Democrática (AD), the party in power from 1959 through 1968, for the collapse of the guerrilla movement. He correctly points out that the guerrillas, by failing to secure the support of the masses, violated one of the first principles of Mao Tse-tung and Ché Guevara. But he does not stress sufficiently that the Venezuelan masses, particularly the peasants and workers, were in fact preempted from the Left by the Acción Democrática through agricultural reforms and trade union activism. AD also managed to accommodate and reassure other elements that made up the institutional backbone of Venezuelan society, particularly the military. It was, first and foremost, the resilience of the regime and its support by the military that doomed the lucha armada in Venezuela.

THERE IS ABUNDANT scholarly testimony to the effectiveness of Venezuela's institutions and leftist democratic parties during and since the years of the insurgency.

One of the best studies on this theme in recent years is Daniel H. Levine's Conflict and Political Political Change in Venezuela. Levine's Levine's volume focuses sharply and with insight on the Venezuelan political system. Although it was not designed to explain the failure of the radical Left, it does serve as a counterpoint to the Valsalice book. Using a behaviorist approach, Levine is less concerned with who wins the conflicts than with "why the players act the way they do." He argues that Venezuela has avoided falling into the pattern of the clash-prone society described by Samuel P. Huntington-a "praetorian system in which social forces confront each other nakedly, no group is recognized as intermediaries to moderate conflict, and no agreement❘ exists on methods to resolve conflict." (This was also Ché's idea of a society ripe for revolution.) Using two aspects of the Venezuelan scene as case studies (church-state relations and students in politics), Levine demonstrates how the Venezuelan system of political parties has evolved so that "opposition is constrained to work within a set of common procedures and forms." It is the role of political parties to mediate and moderate conflict.

In his chapter on "Conflict, Conciliation and Exclusion," Levine contends that in the years 193648 a period of respite from Venezuela's previous history of harsh dictatorial rule-the several political parties that emerged penetrated all social spheres in Venezuela; however, there was no concomitant development of accepted procedures for resolving

2 Political Order in Changing Societies, New Haven, Conn., Yale University Press, 1968, p. 196.

In Levine's view, the ensuing ten-year dictatorship of Pérez Jiménez, followed by the challenge from the radical Left after 1960, set AD and other political parties

conflict. During the triennio (1945- | cluded his consideration in any 48) the period of Venezuela's depth of two major factors that first brief but ambitious experi- make for political stability in ment in democracy-the ruling | Venezuela: the oil wealth and the Acción Democrática thought that military. Largely as a result of her "even minimal accommodation" "black gold," gold," Venezuela has with other political parties was among the highest per capita inalien to the AD "mentality," and it comes on the Latin American failed to "establish a set of mutual continent. Despite the contrast beguarantees with major sectors of tween the riches of the urban the society, from the foreign in- suburbs and the poverty of the vestors to the Church and the burgeoning barrios, there is still military." upward mobility in the country, and one does not find in the city. slums the miseria that characterizes the poor of other Latin countries. Insofar as the second factor is concerned, it is fair to state that no party or coalition of parties of the left, right, or center could achieve or hold onto political power in Venezuela without gaining the support, or at least neutralizing the attitude, of the military. There is no acknowledgment in Levine's book that (1) military acceptance of AD was essential for the establishment of an open political system in the 1960's, and (2) this acceptance hinged on the top military command's perception that AD was ready to accommodate opposition, abandoning any aim of a oneparty monopoly of power.

including AD's chief democratic rival, the Social Christian Party (COPEI) on the course to accommodation. Levine argues, as does Valsalice, that "perhaps more than any other factor, the development of a left-wing strategy of insurrection and guerrilla warfare helped consolidate the AD regime." But unlike Valsalice and others, Levine looks upon AD's course in this period as one reflecting a maturing realization that it must extend its appeal to other sectors of the appeal to other sectors of the society rather than as a process of polarization in which AD recoiled to the right in reaction against the lucha armada.

On the basis of the Venezuelan example, Levine concludes that "a crucial vehicle for organizing political change is the modern. mass political party." He says that the Venezuelan system "works" because "it is open-ended and builds conflict and change into its operative mechanisms." The cost of such a system has been the need to forego more radical programs of social change.

One argument could be picked with the author-notably, the fact that his focus on the Venezuelan political system apparently ex

THE ESSENTIAL FALLACY of Latin American "revolutionism," as described by Valsalice in terms of the Venezuelan experience, is the demonstrated even more clearly by the failure of Uruguay's Tupamaros. In contrast to the conditions of relative economic health and political stability that confronted the guerrillas in Venezuela, the Tupamaros waged their struggle in a country which-after a long history of efforts to function as a viable social welfare statewas faced by the late 1960's with a failing economy, crippled politi