On the other hand, it does seem appropriate to refer to a “revolutionary” movement among the samurai:
By degrees (the officials) decided to overthrow the Bakufu and supplant the daimyo class. In that sense, their action really did have a revolutionary character, given of course that it was pursued within the slim stratum of literate bushi : officials were repudiating the authority of their superiors in the service. (Akamatsu, p.304)
It seems that, if anything, a condition for the emergence of a “revolutionary” wing of the samurai class was the absence of revolutionary impulses in the rest of society. Certainly, whenever there was a risk that the commoners might even begin to assert their own demands and interests, then the “revolutionary samurai” were prone to take their stand again on their traditional authority: “When it was a question of maintaining the hierarchy of nobles and commoners, the revolutionary became a counter-revolutionary” (Akamatsu, p.305). And Norman (p.90) remarks, “The feudal character of the samurai opposition is clearly indicated by the fact that except where they were able to utilise peasant discontent for their own ends as in the revolts between 1874-7, they helped the government in suppressing peasant uprisings”; the samurai rebels against Meiji would also revert rapidly to agents of authority against any threat from commoners.
One possible approach to the characterisation of the Meiji Restoration would be to treat it as a case of revolution, but of a particular kind. The argument for treating it as a revolution is that an existing dominant social class was displaced from power, and an existing set of production relations was replaced by another. Yet the Japanese revolution was not a “social revolution”. Theda Skocpol (1979) makes a useful set of distinctions:
Social revolutions are rapid, basic transformations of a society’s state and class structures; and they are accompanied and in part carried through by class-based revolts from below. Social revolutions are set apart from other sorts of conflicts and transformative processes above all by the combination of two coincidences: the coincidence of societal structural change with class upheaval; and the coincidence of political with social transformation. In contrast, rebellions, even when successful, may involve the revolt of subordinate classes – but they do not eventuate in structural change. Political revolutions transform state structures but not social structures, and they are not necessarily accomplished through class conflict. And processes such as industrialisation can transform social structures without necessarily bringing about, or resulting from, sudden political upheavals or basic political-structural changes. (Skocpol, 1979, p.4)
On Skocpol’s criteria, since the events in Japan lack the element of “class upheaval”, they do not amount to a social revolution. Yet they also amount to more than a political revolution, since the Meiji Restoration eventuated in more than a change in the structure of the state alone: the social structure itself was transformed in significant ways, through legal enactment. In Trimberger’s phrase (1978) the revolution in Japan was a “revolution from above”. A section of the existing bureaucracy took over state power, using both force and persuasion; having dispossessed sovereignty from the hands of its former masters, it reorganised state power and wielded it for itself.
This “revolution from above” was more than simply a “coup d’état” or “palace revolution”, for it had a definite social character. The new Japanese state leaders systematically and purposefully destroyed the principal legal and political supports of the previous tributary mode of production and set Japanese society on a new road of development. Trimberger suggests that what occurred in Japan from 1868 onwards may be properly compared with the “revolution from above” led by Kemal Ataturk in Turkey, or with the “military revolutions” in Egypt or Peru. Others have pointed up parallels also with the unification of Germany under Prussian hegemony (Bendix 1967, Landes 1965). More controversially, parallels could also be drawn with Stalin’s industrialisation of Russia – though there the state and social structure that was reshaped by a section of the ruling bureaucracy was a decayed popular state that had emerged from another full-blown social revolution.
Japan presents us with an example of a transition, accomplished in politics, from a pre-capitalist to a capitalist mode of production, without benefit of a social revolution. What the Japanese case shows is that the process of restructuring the social relations of production in the shift from a “feudal” or “tributary” to a capitalist mode of production need not necessarily involve the active political participation of the lower classes. Indeed, the “social revolutionary” method of transition from pre-capitalist to capitalist relations is, historically, not necessarily the most common form. As Skocpol remarks, “social revolution ... (is) a complex object of explanation, of which there are relatively few historical instances” (1979, p.5). The masses are not necessarily active or organised agents in the process of transformation that initiates capitalist development.
A moment’s reflection suggests why this should be so. The shift from a “feudal” or “tributary” (or “Asiatic” etc) mode to a capitalist one is a shift from one form of social production in which the majority of society’s members are objects of exploitation and oppression to another form in which the same is true.
True, capitalism has been associated historically with the development of certain kinds of “freedman”, but within capitalism those freedoms are always partial and conditional in character. Where they are found, they are partial because they are combined with the continuation of exploitation and alienation. As for their conditional nature, two centuries of capitalist development have shown all too clearly that capitalism can co-exist with all manner of forms of political and legal repression, including forms of slavery, apartheid, fascism, military dictatorship, Poor Laws, etc. If there is a tendency for capitalist production to be associated with a world of “Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham” (Marx), that tendency is often powerfully contradicted by other very different ones. There is, in the character of capitalism, nothing which per se actively promotes legal and civil rights, democratic government and like. In some circumstances, capitalist production has proved “compatible” with the manifestation of partial freedom, but compatibility is not necessity.
Hence, as the history of numbers of countries reveals, a shift from one of exploitation to another need not involve the active, polity-shaping activity of those who are subjected to that change in the manner of their exploitation. We might also add that, in those cases where the mass of the population has been involved directly in attempting to shape the character of a new state emerging from the overthrow of existing social and political relations – e.g. in France in the eighteenth century – a regular feature of the social revolutionary process has been a “reaction within the revolution”. Through this process, the insurgency of the masses, the “revolution from below”, has been repressed or contained within limits compatible with the re-establishment of exploitation.
