Introduction
The title of this article takes its cue from a remark by Antonio Gramsci in the Prison Notebooks regarding what he calls ‘universal concepts with geographical seats’.Footnote 1 In the context of his writing, Gramsci is discussing Italy and its lack of a fully developed national culture. Instead, he reflected, the peninsula was influenced by the cosmopolitanism of a small elite who remained detached from the masses.Footnote 2 In this article, I utilise both the generalised method of examining a social formation within the broader global context of which it is both constitutive and constituted by, but also the specific class basis for the national developmental projects of countries. I draw attention to how - throughout modernity - passive revolution has been a persistent and universal feature of developmental change. However, the way it manifests itself and unfolds has differed depending on the particular country or region involved. It is a process, therefore, that has been structurally conditioned by the broader global political economy, yet contingently articulated in various contexts giving the term its geographical seats.
Fred Halliday once opined that the study of revolution had been neglected within International Relations. He proposed that any such future enquiry should comprise the following three areas: (1) locating the place of revolutions and explaining their influence on the international system more broadly; (2) exploring the international dimensions of any revolution; and (3) reflecting on what theoretical issues the study of revolutions pose.Footnote 3 In this article I will contend that Gramsci’s concept of passive revolution allows us to do all of these tasks. Namely, it informs us of the dialectic relationship between national (and subnational) state formation and the international context (and subsequent ramifications that change brings). It also allows us to draw theoretical lessons from this with regards to a political strategy for emancipation by learning from history. In contrast to those who have sought to dismiss Gramsci as a theorist only of national politics,Footnote 4 this article therefore adds weight to the claim that Gramsci offers a foundational contribution to the study of International Relations.Footnote 5 The concept of passive revolution, moreover, is stressed to be a key complement to the notion of uneven and combined development (U&CD) that has recently gained purchase as an analytical category within the Historical Sociology of International Relations (HSIR). It will be argued that passive revolution helps to enhance and give wider political resonance to this latter concept, explaining the connection between wider processes of uneven development and the specific manner in which combination occurs during the capitalist epoch, as geopolitical pressures generated by this mode of production, in tandem with domestic social forces, become internalised into geographically specific state forms. Stated more concretely, passive revolution puts class struggle and preoccupations with societal transformation (indeed revolution) back onto the political agenda. Such a focus on revolution was integral to the original formation of U&CD by Leon Trotsky (as will be discussed later), but has been largely absent from the concern of scholars associated with the latest wave of scholarship on the topic. Thus, whereas current trends in U&CD can collapse into a detached structural commentary via the positing of trans-historical laws (from which there can appear little escape), passive revolution breaks with this. It does so by offering more modest claims, namely to explore the specific expression of U&CD within the capitalist epoch. Through the definite geographical seats by which the concept is rendered and operationalised, passive revolution focuses much greater attention on actual processes of class struggle and state formation, grounding the places and spaces of revolutions sociologically.Footnote 6 This obviously does include the stratagems of ruling classes that disaggregate and domesticate subaltern class struggles. However, this is analysed to the extent that intellectual efforts can be used to inform a philosophy of praxis that is anti-passive revolutionary in its orientation. Ultimately this needs to be done by moving debates away from a narrow circle of professional intellectuals to become an element of culture.Footnote 7
It has already been recognised that U&CD provides a bridge to wider social theory, including Gramscian thought.Footnote 8 More decisively, Michael Burawoy once suggestively stated that ‘[w]here Trotsky’s horizons stop, Gramsci’s begin.’Footnote 9 Building on this statement, it will be argued that the two thinkers’ key ideas (uneven and combined development for Trotsky and passive revolution for Gramsci) demonstrate a complementarity with one another, that, when taken together, are integral to explaining the core features of international relations under capitalism.Footnote 10 Used in tandem they can provide a powerful statement for historical materialism’s foundational contribution to the discipline of International Relations.
Before proceeding it is important to clarify some important meanings at this stage. To be clear, in claiming that passive revolution is a universal concept I am decidedly not saying that it is trans-historical in nature (as is the claim by some scholars regarding U&CD). As will be explained in more detail later, passive revolution is only capable of referring to the capitalist era. Rather, in invoking the term ‘universal’ I am implying that the term is equally applicable throughout the world. Furthermore, it should be noted that the phrase employed in this article ‘capitalist modernity’ is not without controversy. Ellen Meiksins Wood for example, has forcefully argued for these two terms not to be conflated as their meanings are not identical.Footnote 11 However, while one may not necessarily disagree with such a proposition, the claim here, following Burns, is that while the two terms are not historically necessary to one another, they have been contingently related in reality and this requires explanation.Footnote 12 Passive revolution therefore offers a theory of modernity that illuminates why capitalism has remained hegemonic in this epoch.Footnote 13
Prior to embarking on this intellectual endeavour, it should be noted that a host of preliminary objections needs to be overcome. These objections link to: (1) the suitability of having ‘universal’ concepts; (2) the related issue of whether the construction of universal arguments leads to a Eurocentric diffusionist viewpoint that denies other people(s) and places their own agency in the making of history; and (3) there is the objection that such an argument leads to the problem of ‘concept stretching’. Let us deal with each objection in turn.
Regarding the issue of universal concepts, such a notion has clearly experienced sustained attack from postmodernism. Reduced to its most basic propositions, postmodernism claims that no singular historical narrative exists and that furthermore, there is always a diversity of meaning and identities which problematise any easy comparison between traditional categories in the social sciences.Footnote 14 This epistemology has gained wider purchase in IR through the distinct, but related body of thought, postcolonialism.Footnote 15 This article is, by contrast, unashamedly trying to construct a meta-narrative of modernity, and indeed would make the case that the haste to discard any grand narrative is in fact misguided. Here the incredulity expressed by postmodernism towards grand theory can easily slip into myopia by its failure to see interconnections and the unfolding of distinct logics at work.Footnote 16 In defence of such a proposition, two key arguments can be marshalled. First, general abstractions are in fact necessary to be able to make any kind of meaningful comparative historical analysis. It is possible, therefore, to think of key elements of the social world that, while differing in time and space, still fundamentally constitute social reality.Footnote 17 The issue at stake here is how one thinks of such categories of identity. As Justin Rosenberg explains with regards to Trotsky’s philosophical premises on this matter:
Trotsky points out that no two cone bearings in a production batch will ever be exactly identical; but so long as their variation remains within a given margin of ‘tolerance’, they may safely be treated as if they were so. And something similar, he suggests, applies to concepts: they too have a margin of tolerance, within which their non-correspondence to their objects can in practice be disregarded.Footnote 18
Second, I do not discount the importance of localised experience and specificity that numerous postmodern and poststructuralist scholars have sought to draw our attention to.Footnote 19 Rather, the article highlights how particularity remains within a universal framework. This is the reason why seemingly discrepant phenomenon such as Keynesianism and Fascism can both be interpreted within the broader logic of passive revolution (as will be further detailed later). In each case the form is the same but the local content (the geographical seats) differ. Thus, as Gramsci declared, ‘Finding the real identity underneath the apparent differentiation and contradiction and finding the substantial diversity underneath the apparent identity is the most essential quality of the critic of ideas and of the historian of social development.’Footnote 20
The meaning implied by the term ‘universal’ clearly does matter however, which links closely with the potential objection of Eurocentrism. Eurocentrism is defined by the belief in the primacy of European development that is sui generis. Such a view downplays or ignores wider interconnections (including those of slavery and imperialism), while holding the European pattern of development as the superior standard to which other countries must inevitably aspire and be measured by.Footnote 21 A potential danger in the argument constructed here could be that the notion of passive revolution succumbs to a diffusionist reading of history that sees European capitalism transforming the world (unproblematically) in its own image, with social forces in other regions and states lacking any agency in this process.Footnote 22 Such an understanding, however, would be insufficiently dialectical on two separate counts. First, there is no need to assume that any form of development, including that of capitalism, takes place in national isolation.Footnote 23 Indeed, this was contrary to Gramsci’s formulation of the concept of passive revolution as will be detailed below. In this sense, passive revolution can be read as a method of incorporated comparison as it seeks to show the interconnections between social phenomena across time and space.Footnote 24 The method of incorporated comparison takes neither the whole (world system), nor its constituent parts (regions, countries, etc.) as fixed units of analysis. Instead, this method is attentive to the dialectic relation between them, and does not claim either as the prime locus of explanation. In Phillip McMichael’s words, the incorporated comparative method ‘progressively constructs the whole as a methodological procedure by giving context to historical phenomenon’.Footnote 25 The stress is on the cumulative process of history. Comparison therefore, ‘is ‘internal’ to historical inquiry, whereby process instances are comparable because they are ‘historically connected and mutually conditioning’.Footnote 26 This approach has the advantage of allowing us to appreciate the totality of capitalist relations (and the geopolitical pressures that it thereby generates) while being attentive to its different articulations at various spatial scales. Second, a diffusionist reading should be rejected owing to the stress that Gramsci put on the inevitability of resistance to the process of passive revolution. This rejects any simple notion of unproblematic and unilinear development. Rather than a one-way transmission of power and ideas, it is better to think of passive revolution as emanating from what Gramsci referred to as centres ‘of formation, of irradiation, of dissemination’.Footnote 27
Kamran Matin has usefully pointed out the contradiction between theory and method in postcolonial thought. On the one hand, it rejects the universalism or macro-historical explanation that is associated with Eurocentrism, yet on the other hand it relies on a method of understanding colonial societies as being forged through their inter-societal constitution. However, he argues that,
A unified theoretical comprehension of the social and the international must…be central to any attempt at supplanting Eurocentrism. This requires an explicit theoretical incorporation of the universal. But a conception of the universal that is fundamentally rethought away from being an immanent self-transcendence of the particular.Footnote 28
Passive revolution I believe is capable of such a form of universalism that maintains a focus on the cumulative process of shared history, but retains a focus on national particularity. To sum up, quoting from Gramsci, ‘the premise of an “organic diffusion from a homogenous centre and a homogenous way of thinking and acting” is not sufficient. The same ray of light passes through different prisms and yields different refractions of light.’Footnote 29
The final objection relates to the issue of concept stretching. This refers to the wider usage of a term beyond which it was originally intended, so as to rob it of its meaning and explanatory power. Such scepticism towards the wider usage of passive revolution has been raised by Alex Callinicos who is wary of the concept ‘just becoming another way of referring to the dynamism and flexibility of capitalism’.Footnote 30 Just as Neil Smith criticised the indiscriminate use of the term ‘uneven development’, there is the danger that passive revolution comes to explain everything, and therefore nothing.Footnote 31 I contend, however, that this criticism can quite easily be overcome. Of course, the term passive revolution is trying to tell us something fundamental – and thus generalisable – about capitalism and international relations. However, it also points us towards a political strategy, namely the critique of the state and the need to move beyond this form of organising social relations. As Anne Showstack Sassoon argues with regards to this, passive revolution functions on two different levels, ‘as a discussion of some historical events and as an expression of a theoretical problem’.Footnote 32 It is thus an inherently engaged and politicised concept that calls for reflection and alternatives as opposed to a detached form of academic commentary which some forms of U&CD analysis fall into.
With these potential objections overcome, the argument for understanding passive revolution as a universal concept with geographical seats will now be made in the following manner. First, I will set out the main claims and achievements of IR scholars associated with the concept of U&CD, before exploring some of the key criticisms that have been levelled against this school of thought. These include its ability to say something specific about capitalism, its shift away from being a concept designed to evaluate revolutionary possibilities and its aspatial nature. Second, I will outline the scope of passive revolution and, drawing examples from Gramsci and beyond, make the case for its universal applicability and various geographical seats. Finally, I conclude with a discussion of what passive revolution brings to such extant debates, demonstrating how the criticisms of U&CD can be overcome when deployed in tandem with passive revolution. Taken together as mutually reinforcing concepts, they demonstrate a powerful contribution that historical materialism can make to the discipline of International Relations.
The contribution of uneven and combined development
Over the last decade or so, U&CD has contributed to a major new research agenda, pioneering a third wave of scholarship within the Historical Sociology of International Relations.Footnote 33 Drawing from Leon Trotsky’s original development of the concept, Justin Rosenberg has sought to further advance the term by claiming that U&CD offers not just a universal, but furthermore, a trans-historical concept of what development actually is.Footnote 34 While scholars have operationalised the term in different ways, the array of literature on this topic is a testament to its powerful explanatory power on a diverse range of issues, including inter alia the state-system and geopolitics,Footnote 35 the origins of the First World War,Footnote 36 state-formationFootnote 37 and the possibilities of resistance in a transnational age.Footnote 38
What then are its principle achievements? First, U&CD offers a major statement about the causal importance of the ‘international’ in human history and development.Footnote 39 In this explanation, the international, ‘is marked by an inherent dynamism as more developed societies interact with less developed ones, causing combined development in backward societies, which reinforce rather than straighten out, the unevenness of world-historical development’.Footnote 40 In contrast to the unilinear conception of development offered by modernisation theory, U&CD offers a multilinear and interactive framework whereby world history is presented as an ontological whole, therefore collapsing the false distinction between international and domestic society, and instead looking at the sociological constitution of difference.Footnote 41 On this basis it becomes impossible to analyse a singular society without reference to its entanglement with others. This rules out methodological nationalism, and highlights how the so-called billiard ball imagery of societies – fully formed entities knocking into one another – can be rendered false.Footnote 42
Second, U&CD adds a greater dimension of sociological analysis to IR. It does so by providing a social theory of the ‘international’, which (it is alleged) has been neglected by hitherto existing theories, including those of a critical persuasion.Footnote 43 Therefore, the concept is claimed to offer ‘a much needed alternative conception of the historical process’.Footnote 44 In such a manner, U&CD offers a profound challenge to the dominance of Realism and its ontological primacy of anarchy. It does so by de-reifying this concept and instead demonstrating how it is an emergent property of uneven and combined development. In the place of anarchy as a foundational (yet unexplained) premise of international relations, it is argued that the conditioning situation of uneven and combined development serves to socialise state’s behaviour.Footnote 45
However, just as the concept has generated key research avenues it has also provoked intense debate. Some have argued that U&CD scholars – most notably Justin Rosenberg – are themselves remiss in failing to explain the foundational premises of U&CD – namely what the primary causes of uneven and combined development actually are, and how this changes during different epochs.Footnote 46 Following a similar line of argument, Alex Callinicos, has stated that we need to retain an analysis based upon historically-specific modes of production if we are to cash in on the general abstraction that is uneven and combined development.Footnote 47 This links to a much broader debate, namely the historical applicability of the term. For some, it is a concept that is only rendered meaningful within capitalist society and its particular dynamics.Footnote 48 For others it has a more generalisable, indeed trans-historical validity.Footnote 49 In many ways the disagreement in these debates link to the differing starting points of the respective authors. That is to say, they offer different explanations (explanans) owing to different explanandum (the phenomenon to be explained). For critics of the trans-historical position, it is claimed that this method of operationalising U&CD risks turning a triviality or truism (that nothing develops evenly) into an historical law. It thereby transforms an axiom and a theorem into a theory.Footnote 50 As Sébastien Rioux has argued trenchantly regarding Rosenberg’s propositions, ‘his conceptualisation of U&CD as a timeless structure of human development directly informs the poverty of his approach and its failure to move beyond descriptive generalisations’.Footnote 51 However, the prime motivation of Rosenberg’s intellectual inquiry is to contribute to a historical materialist theorising of the ‘international’, specifically as the ‘visualising and mapping of the international as a dimension of social causality’.Footnote 52 His main explanandum therefore does not begin from a set of questions that seek to only understand the present conjuncture (for example, whether multiplicity is or is not being transcended).Footnote 53 Rather, it is the more abstract question of why we have multiplicity in the first place. In Rosenberg’s words, therefore:
the point about ‘unevenness’ is not in the first instance that it posits inequalities and differences among coexisting societies; it is rather that, posited of social development, it makes sense of the existence of a plurality of societies in the first place – and with that, of the extension of a lateral field of interaction which is both intrinsic to and behaviourally distinct within the expanded conception of social development now posited.Footnote 54
The concept is therefore mobilised for different modes of explanation, but the question arises whether such a conception is still able to usefully tell us about contemporary capitalism? It would seem that the more stock that is invested in making U&CD a stronger general abstraction with trans-historical validity, the less it functions as a precise tool for analysing the specificity of capitalism (and how U&CD develops under this mode of production). As Neil Smith put it, ‘the potentially penetrating insights of the theory are dissolved when uneven development is seen as a universal metaphysics, its meaning reduced to the lowest common denominator’.Footnote 55 This is a lacuna that I believe passive revolution can fill and provides the case for why, to understand capitalist modernity, the two concepts must be used in tandem. Drawing from the work of Jairus Banaji we can say that conjoining the two concepts allows U&CD to be transformed from a ‘simple category’ – a term common to multiple epochs – to a ‘historically determinate category’, or so called ‘concrete category’, integral to understanding a particular epoch.Footnote 56 Passive revolution therefore gives the concept of U&CD a greater degree of analytical clarity to understand the specificity of capitalist modernity.
What can more plausibly be asserted as a form of critique (and flows from the above argument), is that the social purpose of this mode of trans-historical inquiry does differ from that which the concept was originally intended. Ian Bruff has noted that the current literature on U&CD is most comfortable when intellectual efforts are devoted to the study of pre-contemporary history (which marks its substantive field of research).Footnote 57 This usage, while contributing to academic debates clearly does move the concept away from Trotsky’s original intention, namely to think about the possibilities for revolution.Footnote 58 While Rosenberg believes this strengthens an historical materialist analysis of international relations, critics have argued that this has led to a shift from activism to academia that denudes a Marxist analysis of its core concepts of class formation and struggle.Footnote 59 Contrariwise, it will be demonstrated below that such notions are intrinsic to the notion of passive revolution.
Finally, despite the fact that spatio-temporal claims are integral to the concept of U&CD,Footnote 60 much of the prominent literature fails to engage with the vast amount of geographical scholarship that has been produced on uneven development and instead narrowly focuses on a few scattered phrases of Trotsky.Footnote 61 Space becomes an unexplored premise, a mere happenstance of developmental unevenness and combination.Footnote 62 As a result, there is inadequate consideration of spatial questions and little spatial analysis of U&CD in operation, for example, the spatial reorganisation of state power, or what Neil Brenner refers to as state spatialisation strategies and the contradictions that flow from this.Footnote 63 This lack of a spatial analysis is a major limitation of U&CD, if we take heed of Henri Lefebvre’s observation that ‘the social relations of production have an existence to the extent they have a spatial existence; they project themselves into a space, becoming inscribed there, and in the process producing that space itself’.Footnote 64 The reorganisation of social relations implied by the term ‘combination’ must necessarily translate into a reorganisation of space. However, as noted, this is insufficiently explored through the extant literature on U&CD. As Rosenberg himself has stated of U&CD ‘it lacks any tools for specifying the causal properties of those processes of social life to whose multiplicity and interaction it draws attention’. Consequently, ‘it cannot operate as a replacement for the classical social theories whose limitations we are trying to overcome’ and without these ‘it cannot reach down to the level of concrete historical explanation at all’.Footnote 65 Once again, when thought about in conjunction with passive revolution, this criticism can be overcome. It is to this concept that I now turn.
Passive revolution
The concept of passive revolution was developed by Antonio Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks.Footnote 66 It is intrinsically linked to the institutionalisation or expansion of capitalism (hence there is no possibility of its trans-historical extension).Footnote 67 A passive revolution, or a ‘revolution without a “revolution”’ occurs when social relations are fundamentally reorganised (revolution) but ultimately, popular initiatives are neutralised so as to continue class domination (restoration).Footnote 68 It therefore involves a combination of change and conservatism. ‘The problem’, argues Gramsci, ‘is to see whether in this dialectic ‘revolution/restoration whether it is revolution or restoration that predominates.’Footnote 69 As Peter Thomas has pointed out, the concept of passive revolution was developed in multiple stages or ‘cuts’ within the Prison Notebooks as Gramsci began to appreciate the wider purchase that the term could have.Footnote 70 Drawing from, but modifying Vincenzo Cuoco’s initial use of the term, Gramsci first deployed passive revolution to refer to the role of the Piedmont state during the Italian Risorgimento and the limited form of hegemony that emerged from this. Key here is the role of the state in displacing social groups in leading a process of renewal.Footnote 71 The term ‘passive’ was employed here to denote the difference between a national-popular movement from below, or what Gramsci calls ‘a political revolution of a radical-Jacobin type’ that overthrew the old feudal classes in France versus a revolution from above or ‘royal conquest’ that found accommodation with them in the case of Italy.Footnote 72 Thus, rather than confronting and displacing the old feudal classes as occurred in France, the Risorgimento resulted in a compromised bourgeois transition. In Gramsci’s words,
Restoration becomes the first policy whereby social struggles find sufficiently elastic frameworks to allow the bourgeoisie to gain power without dramatic upheavals, without the French machinery of terror. The old feudal classes are demoted from their dominant position to a ‘governing’ one, but are not eliminated, nor is there any attempt to liquidate them as an organic whole; instead of a class they become a ‘caste’ with specific cultural and psychological characteristics but no longer with predominant economic functions.Footnote 73
Two wider issues require dwelling upon here. First, the Italian Risorgimento, theorised as a passive revolution, was clearly placed within the broader international context of uneven and combined development. As Gramsci states, ‘It is also necessary to bear in mind that international relations become intertwined with those internal relations of a nation-state, and this, in turn, creates peculiar and historically concrete combinations.’Footnote 74 Capitalism was instituted therefore as a means of mimesis and (attempted) developmental catch up.Footnote 75 To cite Gramsci once more: ‘It was not so much a question of freeing the advanced economic forces from antiquated legal and political fetters but rather of creating the general conditions that would enable these economic forces to come into existence and grow on the model of other countries.’Footnote 76 Wider international factors were highlighted as vital to this, including foreign domination of the Italian peninsula, and in turn the influence of the French Revolution, not only in helping to ignite ideas of nationalism but later, with the sapping effect of the Napoleonic wars leading to a weakening of militant energy.Footnote 77 However, international factors, although influential, were not seen as determinant with regards to the Risorgimento’s outcome. Instead, the national peculiarities of Italy were also stressed as key factors in forging the sociopolitical consequences. Of particular note was the lack of major capital development in Italy, and, unlike the French situation, no organic link between urban and rural areas. Instead, there remained an important divide between the urban North and the rural South that, far from being overcome, was in fact perpetuated with unification, with a parasitic industrial North exploiting the agrarian South.Footnote 78 Gramsci concluded that the revolutionary leaders in Italy were ‘aiming at the creation of a modern state but in fact produced a bastard’.Footnote 79 This was owing to the new state’s limited hegemonic base, founded as it was on a compromise between the old aristocracy and the emerging industrialists. Lacking national-popular appeal, these classes only achieved a weak hegemony over the rest of society and therefore had a poor capacity to economically transform the country.Footnote 80 We can witness here how the concept itself (as with all of Gramsci’s concepts), was developed through historical and geographical specificity.Footnote 81 To return to Halliday’s key points about what the study of revolution should entail in IR, we can see that passive revolution is clearly able to locate the place of revolutions and discuss their importance for the international system more broadly. We can also conclude from the above example that ‘the notion of passive revolution is able to encapsulate specific processes within the general circumstances of uneven and combined development’.Footnote 82 It therefore covers Halliday’s second criteria by exploring the international dimensions of any revolution. Moreover, in being able to move through varying spatial scales (down to the level of the subnational in the discussion of the role of Piedmont), it is precisely able to reach down to the level of concrete historical explanation that Rosenberg has admitted U&CD cannot do. What then of Halliday’s third category of theoretical reflection?
Gramsci quickly came to realise that the term had far greater purchase as an analytical category beyond the scope of Italian history. The second usage of passive revolution then came from processes of state formation in Europe that had undergone a similar process to Italy, namely in trying to achieve developmental catch up and thereby transforming social relations, but without significant input from below. Rather these were ‘revolutions from above’ that sought to remake society.Footnote 83 Bismark’s Germany would be a classic example of this,Footnote 84 but, as will be discussed in the next section, European development in general post-French Revolution was seen as the history of passive revolution.Footnote 85 As Bruff surveys, the concept of passive revolution was, from its genesis, expansionary in nature, linked to the need to situate Italian development in the broader international context and second to analyse the contemporaneous transformations in other European societies.Footnote 86 It is the latter that then provide the basis for thinking about the diverse geographical seats.
Finally, in his discussion of Americanism and Fordism, Gramsci discusses how passive revolution can be used as a broader category of analysis and interpretation.Footnote 87 Here it refers to a generalised means of statecraft in the expansion of capitalism but with pacifying reforms (which are themselves a response to subaltern class pressures). As Peter Thomas has argued, in this final usage, passive revolution refers less to a specific event but rather to a more generalised process or logic of modernisation.Footnote 88 In sum, therefore, passive revolution is about the reorganisation and restoration of class power. This involves a process of transformism whereby there is ‘the formation of an ever more extensive ruling class within an already established framework’.Footnote 89 It includes elements of both revolution (in transforming the social relations of production) and restoration (maintenance/continuity of power structures without significant subaltern empowerment). Finally, its central feature is statisation, with the state replacing social groups in leading the process of renewal.Footnote 90 In all the instances in which it is invoked, passive revolutionary forms of state formation are tied to key events that serve as punctual moments of history.
What then is the case for thinking about its universal applicability? Gramsci himself noted that, ‘since similar situations almost always arise in every historical development, one should see if it is not possible to draw from this some general principle of political science and art’.Footnote 91 He also queried in his day whether passive revolution would have an enduring relevance, asking ‘Does the conception of the “passive revolution” have a “present” significance? Are we in a period of “restoration revolution” to be permanently consolidated, to be organised ideologically, to be exalted lyrically?’.Footnote 92 As Adam Morton has previously elucidated, to explore this issue requires that we do not simply apply Gramsci’s concepts mechanically to other historical eras and places, but rather we are required to think in a Gramscian way, asking, most importantly, whether ‘theory can advance a practical understanding of a concrete reality or situation that is different from that in which it originated’.Footnote 93 However, in this effort to find commonality and interpretative resonance we must be fully aware of the dangers of the not allowing over-generalised claims to lose their critical purchase.Footnote 94 It is here that I believe the strict geographical rendering of passive revolution becomes relevant and this will be returned to towards the end of the following section and in the concluding discussion.
The case for passive revolution’s universal applicability
Stefan Kipfer has noted that Gramsci was ‘particularly interested in conjunctures: historical moments that articulate the punctual temporality of the event with longer-term forms of historical duration’.Footnote 95 This is especially important when analysing how Gramsci came to develop the term passive revolution, from the Italian Risorgimento onwards. The key punctual moment for Gramsci was the experience of the French Revolution (1789–99) and its aftermath. This not only made the Italian Risorgimento comparable in terms of the distinct lack of a national-popular hegemonic project articulated in Italy as compared to France, but also allowed Gramsci to see the history of nineteenth-century Europe as a series of passive revolutions, or what he saw as reforms from above (owing to the cumulative process of history). This was achieved by ‘successive waves of small reform rather than revolutionary explosions’ (which nevertheless took on local characteristics), and were designed precisely to offset the more dramatic upheavals of the French case.Footnote 96 Here the conditioning situation of uneven and combined development was clearly noted. The example of revolutionary transformation could not be contained within isolated borders and stimulated a class-based reaction to it from other European countries, which in turn fostered the Napoleonic Wars.Footnote 97 However, a longer-term pattern of nationalism and reformism were to be the geographically specific reactions to this event, internalised within state forms so as to modernise on the continued premise of class domination.
Beginning in the 1930s but consolidating further with the end of the Second World War (beyond the lifetime therefore of Gramsci who died in 1937), Americanism and Fordism was identified as another era that ushered in a new wave of passive revolution. Lurking here was of course the threat of communism and the Bolshevik example, propelling governments to take reformist steps to absorb working class radicalism through limited means of wealth redistribution.Footnote 98 The Russian Revolution of 1917 therefore served as another key punctual moment of history. For most of the Western World, this new epoch of passive revolution was experienced as a relatively progressive, albeit contradictory, form of development (exemplified by Keynesianism). This served to statise discontent, expanding capitalism while offering real but limited concessions to the subaltern classes. It thereby displaced more radical demands while not offering meaningful political inclusion or economic justice (key hallmarks of passive revolution). It should be noted that Gramsci’s analysis of Fordism was prescient, arguing that the benefits of high wages were likely to be transitory and could only be secured so far as they corresponded to the early monopoly phase of capitalism.Footnote 99 He (correctly) predicted that they would soon be eroded via competition, which of course was to be a contributing factor to Fordism’s eventual demise and replacement with a neoliberal model, itself a further punctual moment in history.
Finally, it is worth noting that fascism in Italy was viewed by Gramsci as an alternative trajectory of passive revolution based on the same logic; namely, a defensive ruling class stratagem of developmental catch up that sought to augment their own dominant position while transforming social relations in line with the competitive pressures emanating from the international political economy. Fascism was therefore interpreted by Gramsci as being analogous (and connected) to the moderate and conservative regimes of the previous century in the sense of seeking to preserve the political and economic position of the old feudal classes by avoiding major agrarian reform.Footnote 100 Moreover, Italian Fascism was interpreted as a form of revolution from above, which while changing productive relations, did not offer significant empowerment for the subaltern classes. As Gramsci clarifies,
relatively far-reaching modification are being introduced into the country’s economic structure in order to accentuate the ‘plan of production’ element; in other words, that socialisation and co-operation in the sphere of production are being increased, without however touching (or at least not going beyond the regulation and control of) individual and group appropriation of profit.Footnote 101
This was linked to the need of Italy to compete with more advanced nations who not only had larger stores of raw materials resulting from their colonial possessions, but also had higher levels of capital owing to their earlier transitions from feudalism.
Beyond the specific cases provided by Gramsci, there are further examples that can be utilised to build the case for the universal experience of passive revolution (moving away from simply a phenomenon concerned with the West). An important category to include here is the wave of nationalist movements that occurred in the wake of decolonisation after 1945. These took place beyond the lifetime of Gramsci, but it is nevertheless revealing that he refers to Gandhi as having a naïve theoristisation of passive revolution.Footnote 102 Partha Chatterjee has gone so far as to claim that ‘passive revolution is the general form of the transition from colonial to the post-colonial national-states of the 20th century’, while Morton has described passive revolution as a hallmark of postcolonial capitalism.Footnote 103 In his specific analysis of India, Chatterjee refers to the nationalist movement as moving through three phases. First, there is the ‘moment of departure’ where struggle and rebellion open space for a new political project. This emphasises the strength of Western material conditions and progress but nevertheless claims a superior Eastern cultural quality. Second, there is the ‘moment of manoeuvre’. This involves the emergence of new elites in national alliance who seek to mobilise subaltern classes in an anti-colonial struggle, yet sustain the belief that only educated elites can provide the necessary cultural synthesis of East and West needed for developmental catch up. Subaltern elements are therefore distanced from the structures of the state. Finally, there is the ‘moment of arrival’ leading to exclusion, repression and the marginalisation of subaltern elements. Radical rupture becomes de-emphasised as a discourse of order is established.Footnote 104 Such an analysis has been utilised elsewhere to explain further forms of peripheral state formation.Footnote 105 The import here is to not only recognise the structural conditioning of the international system (as per U&CD) but to then focus our attention on the precise modalities of class forces constructing a national project. As Morton has argued, this enables us to construct an ‘interpretive method in historical sociology focusing on inter-related instances of state transition within world-historical processes, where the particulars of state formation are realised within the general features of capitalist modernity’.Footnote 106 To phrase this another way, the universal pressures generated by capitalist geopolitical competition are acknowledged but the geographical seats of class articulation remain the priority for analysis.
A final example to be invoked in order to demonstrate the universal applicability of passive revolution is the case of Latin American state formation in the twentieth century.Footnote 107 Robert Cox has noted that passive revolution and the associated notion of transformism are especially apposite concepts for developing regions.Footnote 108 Although this has already been established to a degree with regards to postcolonial societies in general, it is worth exploring the Latin American case specifically as formal independence in the continent had been achieved much earlier here, yet patterns of neocolonial domination remained crucial influences.Footnote 109 It has been widely recognised that Latin American state formation in the twentieth century was one that was clearly marked by the structural condition of ‘delayed dependent development’.Footnote 110 Resulting from this was the need to engage in developmental catch up so as to avoid stagnation or subordination. This was most clearly manifested, first through import-substitution industrialisation (ISI) and the associated populist political project, and secondarily with the turn to authoritarianism (which itself emerged from the contradictions of the previous strategy).
The international context of uneven and combined development was clearly vital for fostering the turn to ISI in Latin America in terms of the Great Depression and the Second World War. This cut the region off from previous markets and forced the continent, by necessity, towards greater internal production of goods. Furthermore, the changing character of hegemony at the international level from the Pax Britanica to the Pax Americana was also important (providing a changing centre of irradiation). Linked to previous discussions, American hegemony after the Second World War would presage the rise of worldwide industrial productive relations linked to Fordism, which entailed a much stronger role for state intervention in managing the economy.Footnote 111 These emerging economic ideas would be used to enhance the power of nascent elites in Latin America and provide an atmosphere convivial to their further expansion despite their small number. Gramsci was attentive to the manner in which geographical interlinkages such as these were integral to passive revolutionary processes, highlighting how, in many cases: ‘the impetus of progress is not tightly linked to a vast local economic development … but is instead the reflection of international developments which transmit their ideological currents to the periphery – currents born of the productive development of the advanced countries’.Footnote 112 In other words, the changing character of hegemony in the international political economy laid the foundations that were conducive for change in the character of hegemony at other spatial scales such as the regional and the national levels. This is not to say that the outcome of social struggle over the state form was predetermined by the international sphere, merely that the terrain was created in which certain modes of development could be more favourably articulated. The social compromise that was ISI can be seen as a response to ‘activated’ subaltern classes but one in which these subaltern classes did not fully come to author the process themselves.Footnote 113 Rather, populism combined nationalism with developmentalism in its rejection of the previous liberal, oligarchic model. However, populism was statist as opposed to socialist. Reformist, not revolutionary, and as a political project it appealed to the idea of social harmony rather than stressing class differences (for which appeals to nationalism helped provide the mediating ideology). Once again we can witness the role of the state in leading the process of change and mollifying more radical demands. The shift to authoritarianism in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s (largely in the southern cone) demonstrates well the example of further punctual moments of history spilling over into a regional setting. If it is impossible to write a history of Europe without the French Revolution, then it is equally impossible to write a history of Latin America without the Cuban Revolution. As Jorge Castañeda has noted, Cuba was the crucible of revolutionary activity for Latin America.Footnote 114 The failure of populism to achieve its stated aims of developmental catch up, combined with fears of the Cuban example spreading through the continent, led many states to forge an alliance with international capital and the domestic bourgeoisie to further expand capital accumulation.Footnote 115 This led to a new intensified pressure to achieve rapid social change from above, without subaltern class participation. In effect the state had moved from a process of controlled inclusion to one of coerced marginalisation.Footnote 116
If the above examples paint in broad brush stroke about its universal applicability to different regions, a survey of recent literature (that is illustrative rather than exhaustive) reveals that the concept has indeed had purchase on a variety of historical and contemporary processes of state formation and in various contexts demonstrating the richness of its theoretical import on the ground (its geographical seats). Within Latin America passive revolution has been used to analyse the Mexican Revolution as well as the period of neoliberal restructuring following the 1982 debt-crisis.Footnote 117 It has been applied to an understanding of Bolivian state formation since the Revolution of 1952, including that of the current Evo Morales administration.Footnote 118 Marcos del Roio has sought to ‘translate’ passive revolution into the Brazilian context, while Phillip Roberts has used the concept to explore the changing role of religion in Brazil’s development.Footnote 119 Passive revolution has also been invoked to analyse the role of the Chilean Socialist Party (as part of the Concertación) in helping to construct neoliberalism in the post-authoritarian era.Footnote 120 Finally, Massimo Modonesi has used the concept to analyse the role left-of-centre governments associated with the Pink Tide phenomenon more generally in the region.Footnote 121 In the European context, passive revolution has been used to explain the post-communist transition in in Eastern Europe and the increasing role of transnational capital,Footnote 122 and more recently the rise of the Justice and Development party in Turkey, headed by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.Footnote 123 In Southeast Asia, Japan’s Meiji restoration has been viewed through the lens of passive revolution as have contemporary Chinese labour struggles.Footnote 124 Finally, with regards to Africa, at a regional level, the general trend of democratisation in sub-Saharan Africa has been interpreted as a passive revolution as have the specific cases of state formation in South Africa under the African National Congress (ANC) and most recently Malawi.Footnote 125
These separate analyses speak for themselves in showing the diverse applicability of passive revolution (and as such should be read for their own merits). What can be discerned here is an affirmative answer as to whether the concept has purchase in explaining concrete situations beyond its initial historical formulation (as Gramsci predicted). It is, however, instructive to note that when initially developed by Gramsci, passive revolution was used to describe the origins of European capitalism as well as its intensification following the rise of Fordism. In recent years, however, it has undoubtedly gained more purchase as a mode of analysing peripheral capitalist spaces (as the above examples indicate). Instead, European state formation post the 2008 financial crisis has been analysed in terms of the shift towards ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’, as a response to the concomitant crisis of legitimacy of capitalist states.Footnote 126 An open question will be whether the longer-term response to this crisis, which has seen the so-called ‘return of the state’,Footnote 127 will augur a new wave of passive revolution within the capitalist heartlands or whether the potential exists for a genuine subaltern hegemonic project. As Gramsci wisely indicated with regards to this, crises do not in and of themselves determine historical situations, rather they provide the terrain on which such struggles occur.Footnote 128
Conclusion
Given the way in which passive revolution has been inextricably tied to the broader notion of uneven and combined development, what then does this concept add that is not already present within the former notion? In looking at the value of conjoining passive revolution to U&CD I believe three issues stand out, all of which are in some manner inter-related.
First, the usage of passive revolution can overcome the criticism of U&CD as being aspatial. Rather than setting up a broad trans-historical method of abstract inquiry, passive revolution forces us to explore specific cases (the geographical seats) within the framework. Passive revolution becomes the political method of analysis where uneven development results in combination within the broader capitalist global political economy. The very nature of the concept invites us to examine the peculiarities of national state formation linked to developments within the broader international context in a similar manner to U&CD itself. However, the originality here comes from the fact that passive revolution also enables us to explore the further ongoing consequences of uneven development that result from such a process, linked to the construction of hegemonic projects of new class alliances. The construction of state formation across multiple spatial scales is thereby revealed through this method.Footnote 129 This was integral to Gramsci’s method and it is precisely what allowed him to see Fascism as the result of the unresolved class antagonisms embodied in the Italian Risorgimento.Footnote 130 Concurrent with Morton, ‘Beyond an initial ruptural feature of modern state formation, a passive revolution has ongoing effects that subsequently shape the contingent and structural conditions of uneven and combined capitalist development.’Footnote 131
Second, with passive revolution there is a focus on class agency as opposed to only looking at the structural conditioning situation, something U&CD slides into quite easily.Footnote 132 To misquote Eric Wolf, the type of grand narrative offered by U&CD can unfortunately translate into a story about ‘the international’ and the people without history.Footnote 133 By contrast, passive revolution reverses this formulation. As Peter Thomas rightly claims, passive revolution ‘analyses the formation of determining structures through the activity of the determinate social actors’.Footnote 134 It reveals the political strategies of the state, therefore, in authoring such forms of class transition. However, this is not simply a narrative of despair and resigned fatalism that speaks to a timeless element of the human condition. As Gramsci reminds us ‘the conception remains a dialectical one – in other words, presupposes, indeed postulates as necessary, a vigorous anti-thesis which can present intransigently all its potentialities for development’.Footnote 135 In declaring that passive revolution is a universal concept we also need to explore the other side of this coin which is the active revolution or anti-passive revolutionary tactics of subaltern struggles.Footnote 136
This leads to the final advantage of deploying the term passive revolution – namely that it is more instantly politicised than U&CD. As noted above, it is concerned first and foremost with the institutionalisation or expansion of capitalism. This means that it necessarily relates to recent history and the immediate present as engaged critique (as opposed to a trans-historical social theory with largely academic value). Passive revolution draws our attention to the state form as an object of criticism and thus can aid our understanding of political struggle, not so much in providing an answer to Lenin’s famous question of ‘What is to be done?’ but rather in offering a strategic orientation as to what is to be avoided. As well as an interpretation of history, passive revolution is also a warning from history, and forewarned is forearmed. Against a so-called passive revolution, what is needed is an anti-passive revolution or an active revolution. Stephen Gill has argued that the concepts of passive revolution and hegemony should be thought of as ‘end-points in a continuum of actual historical (and indeed possible) transformations’.Footnote 137 Passive revolution therefore refers less to the strength of a dominant class, but rather the weakness of their adversaries in forming lternatives.Footnote 138 The construction of subaltern hegemony is therefore an imperative task. However, the challenge of how to do this needs to be informed by the logic of passive revolution. This requires that to go back to the fundamental Marxist critique of the state as a special type of organisation that is super-imposed upon society rather than subordinate to it.Footnote 139 What one must examine therefore is whether social struggles are reconstituting society as society or in fact reconstituting the power relations of the state.Footnote 140 The words of Henri Lefebvre are prescient here. Although he never used the specific term passive revolution, he nevertheless usefully points to the dangers of it, warning social movements of ‘the triple trap of substitution (of authority for grassroots action), transfer (of responsibility from activists to the ‘leaders’) and displacement (of the objectives and the stakes of social protest to the goals set by the ‘bosses’ who are attached to the established order.Footnote 141
Where does this leave social movements and those wishing to affect change? As suggested earlier in the article, one crucial element is to make the concept of passive revolution an element of culture, beyond professional intellectuals. In addition, we may also think about coming full circle to the relationship between Trotsky and Gramsci. Whereas the article started with Trotsky and U&CD, before moving on to discuss Gramsci and the manner in which passive revolution complements this theoretical notion to analyse capitalist modernity. I would now suggest that if we are to put an end to passive revolution as a universal characteristic of modernity then it requires that its antithesis be developed to the maximum possibility. An active revolution that reaches beyond borders must be based in something akin to what Trotsky called a ‘permanent revolution’. The modalities of how such a permanent revolution could and should be enacted remain, of course, another discussion entirely.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Adam Morton and Cemal Burak Tansel for their comments on an earlier draft of this article as well as the comments from two anonymous referees.
