The Conscription Society: Administered Mass OrganizationsThe ability to organize millions of people for political purposes is a potent and relatively recent weapon in the struggle for power. Political scientists have studied two types of mass organization, the political party and the interest group. In this book Gregory Kasza examines a third type, which he calls the administered mass organization. AMOs are mass civilian bodies created by authoritarian regimes to implement public policy. Officials use them to organize youths, workers, women, or members of other social sectors into bodies resembling the mass conscript army. A network of AMOs produces a conscription society, a major force in twentieth-century politics in over 45 countries. Using comparative history and organization theory, Kasza analyzes the politics of the conscription society in both military and single-party regimes. He discusses the origins of AMOs in Japan, the Soviet Union, and Fascist Italy and their subsequent spread to China, Egypt, Nazi Germany, Peru, Poland, and Yugoslavia. He focuses on the use of AMOs to curb political opposition, to mobilize for war, and to shift control over the means of production. Kasza shows how, in the hands of despotic rulers, AMOs have contributed to the extremes of political barbarism characteristic of the twentieth century. |
Contents
List of Charts ix | 10 |
Definition and Historical Origins | 10 |
Founding Dissolution and Legal Status | 26 |
The Nature of Membership | 38 |
Finances | 46 |
A Weapon of War | 72 |
A Weapon of Socioeconomic Change | 103 |
Egypts Agrarian Reform Cooperatives | 124 |
Common terms and phrases
activities administered mass organization agrarian Akazawa AMO members AMO officers AMO Systems AMOS for youth Arab Socialist Union army autonomous base units bodies Bureaucracy China Chinese Cultural Revolution civilian collectives Comisso Communist conscription society create AMOS democracy democratic Dictatorship economic Egypt elections elite enterprise factory Fascist Italy forge German Labor Front Harik Hitler Youth ideology industrial institutions interest groups Italian Fascism Italy's Japan Japanese kakushin Kokubō Komsomol leaders Lenin Maoist military regimes military-bureaucratic regimes million Ministry Mobilization of Peasants Mussolini Nasser and Sadat Nazi Germany Nazi Party Nazism one-party leftist organizational party's percent Peru political parties popular power-sharing producers reform regime officials regime's Reich residential AMOS rightist Robert Ley ruling party Rusinow sectors self-directed participation Self-Management Sensō single-party regimes Smelser social Soviet Trade Unions Soviet Youth syndicates Taisei Yokusankai tion USSR wartime women women's AMOS workers Yokusan Undō Shi Yugoslav Experiment Yugoslavia