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Revisiting the Passive Revolution

In: Historical Materialism
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Panagiotis Sotiris Hellenic Open University

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Abstract

Passive revolution is one of the most debated notions to come out of the Prison Notebooks. It belongs to the notions that have been used as ‘established’ descriptions of historical and political sequences. However, a reading of Gramsci’s texts suggests that passive revolution is not a ‘historical phase’ and is not limited to the historical interpretation of a particular historical period. Nor is it part of an historical ‘canon’ that would suggest that, in the absence of a ‘proper’ Jacobin revolution, the only alternative is passive revolution. Rather it points to the experimental character of the Prison Notebooks and Gramsci’s confrontation with the profound changes in state apparatuses (and hegemonic apparatuses) and practices of politics and hegemony after WWI, in particular the new ‘mass’ forms of politics and ideological interpellation, and his attempt to elaborate a strategic–theoretical thinking suited to revolutionary politics in such a context.

Introduction

Passive revolution is one of the most widely discussed and debated of Gramscian notions. This has to do with the complexity of Gramsci’s elaborations and how Gramsci used it in different contexts and with different significations. Moreover it has become one of the most widely used notions from the Prison Notebooks, to the extent that Alex Callinicos has warned against the over-extension of the concept of passive revolution.1 In a manner similar to that of the notion of hegemony, it is generally taken for granted and is often used to designate particular historical and political sequences, in particular those that represent ‘revolutions from above’, through the state and without significant initiative on the part of the subaltern classes, or where such initiative is being co-opted or absorbed by the dominant classes and the state.

In what follows, I will not treat passive revolution as a notion with a well-defined contour and content. In contrast, I will first revisit Gramsci’s texts and how the notion emerges and is elaborated within the Prison Notebooks, and then outline some key interpretations and discussions of passive revolution, before ending with my own tentative conclusions.

Revisiting the various interpretations that have been offered of Gramsci’s notion of passive revolution will make evident that it is not a concept for which an ‘innocent reading’ is possible. Rather, we are dealing with a contested terrain of various interpretations. Consequently in both my reading of Gramsci’s texts and my concluding points I am not trying to offer a ‘definitive’ interpretation, rather just an attempt at re-reading these texts that are themselves experimental and open as part of Gramsci’s ongoing ‘research programme’. That is why my conclusions may only be considered as tentative.

Revisiting Gramsci’s Texts on the Passive Revolution

As it is well known, the term was first coined by Vicente Cuoco in his account of the Naples Revolution of 1799, and in its original use it referred to the particular limits and the character of this revolution as opposed to a more ‘active revolution’. For Cuoco, active revolutions can be more efficient because the people are more easily mobilised towards what they think is closest to their interests, whereas in a passive revolution it is the task of political representatives to ‘guess the soul of the people and present them what they desire and that they would not know how to obtain themselves’.2 For Cuoco if a revolution is active ‘the people join the revolutionaries’, whereas in a passive revolution ‘it is more convenient if the revolutionaries join the people’,3 by finding the right venues. Domenico Losurdo has stressed the importance of Cuoco’s analysis, as part of a broader literature of comparative studies of revolutions, and that ‘passive revolution’ does not signify ‘revolution from above’.4 However, Gramsci did not have access to Cuoco’s text and Fabio Frosini has suggested that his references came mainly from other sources, in particular Guido De Ruggiero.5

When first Gramsci uses the term ‘passive revolution’ it is in a note from November 1930 where he explicitly refers to Cuoco, but at the same time attempts to treat it in a more general sense:

Vincenzo Cuoco called the revolution that took place in Italy as a repercussion of the Napoleonic wars a passive revolution. The concept of passive revolution, it seems to me, applies not only to Italy but also to those other countries that modernize the state through a series of reforms or national wars without undergoing a political revolution of a radical- Jacobin type. Examine how Cuoco develops the concept with regards to Italy.6

There are two seemingly earlier references to the notion, but these are later additions by Gramsci. The first is one of the most important notes of Notebook Q1, §44, entitled ‘Political class leadership before and after assuming government power’, in which, referring to the Risorgimento, Gramsci stressed that:

This truth is clearly demonstrated by the politics of the Moderates, and it is the solution of this problem that made the Risorgimento possible in the forms and within the limits in which it was accomplished as a revolution without revolution [or, in V. Cuoco’s words, as a passive revolution].7

It is interesting how in this note, that refers to the Risorgimento and to how the Moderates emerged as the leading political force in a process that did not ultimately have a ‘Jacobin’ character, hence the initial description as a revolution without a revolution, we have this later addition of the reference to Cuoco and passive revolution. The second, later-added reference to the passive revolution can be found in a note from May 1930. Here we have a note on the role of the state and the role of intellectuals in the processes of state formation that followed the French Revolution and how these were to a certain extent a reaction to (and at the same time a transcending of) the French Revolution. It is interesting that in these two additions we can observe Gramsci attempting to see the relevance of the notion of passive revolution, both regarding concrete questions of Italian history and as a way to rethink broader nineteenth-century historical processes.

One may put it as follows: since the state is the concrete framework of a productive world and since intellectuals are the social element that identifies itself most closely with governmental personnel, it is characteristic of the function of the intellectuals to present the state as an absolute; thus the historical function of the intellectuals is conceived as absolute, and their existence is rationalized. This motif is fundamental for philosophical idealism and is linked to the formation of modem states in Europe as ‘reaction-national transcendence’ of the French Revolution and Bonapartism [passive revolution].8

The notion of passive revolution then appears in a note from early 1932 and here the reference to Cuoco is linked to Edgar Quinet’s formula of ‘revolution-restoration’, although Gramsci, who had only an indirect knowledge of Quinet,9 used restoration as a more general reference to the complex process of state formation after the French Revolution, a process that did not entail revolutionary upheavals, but at the same time did not include some recognition of the subaltern classes. Moreover, it is here that Gramsci stresses that what distinguishes the particular Italian sequence is precisely the absence of a popular initiative.

Look up in Quinet the meaning and justification of the formula according to which revolution and restoration are equivalent in Italian history. […] Is it possible to establish a similarity between this concept of Quinet’s and Cuoco’s concept of ‘passive revolution’? One could say that both Quinet’s ‘revolution-restoration’ and Cuoco’s ‘passive revolution’ express the historical fact that popular initiative is missing from the development of Italian history, as well as the fact that ‘progress’ occurs as the reaction of the dominant classes to the sporadic and incoherent rebelliousness of the popular masses – a reaction consisting of ‘restorations’ that agree to some parts of the popular demands and are therefore ‘progressive restorations,’ or ‘revolution-restorations,’ or even ‘passive revolutions’.10

This line of reasoning is expanded in a series of notes from the same period. Passive revolution is linked to the particular tendency towards transformism: ‘Transformism as one of the historical forms of “revolution-restoration” or “passive revolution,” already mentioned in relation to the process of formation of the modern state in Italy.’11 It is also presented as one of the concepts around which any discussion of Croce’s ‘historicism’ should take place: ‘Croce’s historicism has to be placed in relation to what has been observed in previous notes apropos the concepts of “passive revolution,” “revolution-restoration,” “conservation-innovation,” and Giobetti’s concept of “national-restoration”.’12

When in 1932 (April–May) Gramsci returns to Cuoco and Quinet, he stresses the limits of the ‘positive’ political conceptions of passive revolution:

When Vincenzo Cuoco’s formula regarding ‘passive revolutions’ was put forward (after the tragic experiment of the Parthenopean Republic of 1799), it foreshadowed events and was intended to create a national ethic of greater forcefulness and popular revolutionary initiative. Examination should be made of how it was transformed, through the mind and social panic characteristic of the neo-Guelph-moderates, into a positive conception, into a political programme and an ethic that, behind the glittering rhetorical and nationalistic tinsel of ‘primacy’ and ‘Italian initiative’, of ‘Italy will go it alone’, hid the unease of the ‘sorcerer’s apprentice’ and the intention of abdicating and capitulating at the first serious threat of a thoroughly popular Italian, i.e. radically national, revolution.13

The limits of such a conception are for Gramsci both political and philosophical. Gramsci seems to oppose the idea that there is some kind of ‘dialectical necessity’ in a process where a revolution is followed by some form of restoration, which somehow preserves some of the elements of the revolution. This highlights Gramsci’s opposition to any ‘mechanical’ conception of historical evolution. Moreover, this stresses how Gramsci attempts to delineate his conception from any fatalistic conception. Moreover, he is also critical of any attempt to treat intellectuals as the arbitrators par excellence of such a historical ‘dialectic’, something that points to Gramsci’s insistence that historical movements, including ‘cathartic’ moments, involve broader social forces.

Edgar Quinet defined this conception ‘revolution-restoration’, which is just the translation into French of the concept of ‘passive revolution’, interpreted ‘positively’ by the Italian moderates. The philosophical error (of practical origin!) of this conception consists in this: it is ‘mechanically’ presupposed that, in the dialectical process, the thesis should be ‘preserved’ by the antithesis so as not to destroy the process itself which is therefore ‘foreseen’ as a mechanical, arbitrarily preordained repetition ad infinitum. […] It may be observed that such a way of conceiving the Hegelian dialectic is typical of the intellectuals, who conceive of themselves as the arbiters and mediators of real political struggles, as personifying the ‘catharsis’ – the passage from the economic aspect to the ethico-political one – i.e. the synthesis of the dialectical process itself, a synthesis that they ‘manipulate’ in a speculative fashion in their mind, measuring out the elements ‘arbitrarily’ (that is to say passionately).14

Passages such as the above also are important because they point towards the way that Gramsci was attempting to use notions such as the passive revolution beyond their historical context. Gradually the notion is expanded beyond the scope of nineteenth-century revolutions and the questions regarding their history. Passive revolution is presented as one of the exegetical keys to understand modern history, with Croce’s Storia d’Europa presented as a ‘treatise on passive revolution’ and as a potential way to theorise fascism: ‘If liberalism was the form of “passive revolution” specific to the 19th century, wouldn’t fascism be, precisely, the form of “passive revolution” specific to the 20th century?’15 In the same note from April 1932, it is interesting how the notion of the passive revolution is linked to the fascist version of corporativism and the emergence of new forms of capitalist organisation of production:

One could think of this thus: a passive revolution takes place when, through a ‘reform process’, the economic structure is transformed from an individualistic one to an economy according to a plan [administered economy] and when the emergence of an ‘intermediate economy’ – i.e. an economy in the space between the purely individualistic one and the one that is comprehensively planned – enables the transition to more advanced political and cultural forms without the kind of radical and destructive cataclysms that are utterly devastating. ‘Corporatism’ could be – or, as it grows, could become – this form of intermediate economy that has a ‘passive’ character.16

This particular expansion of the notion of passive revolution towards the explanation of fascism is substantiated in a note from Notebook 10, from roughly the same period (April–May 1932), a note that is also part of the dialogue with Croce’s conception of ‘ethico-political history’, a certain conception of ‘liberalism’, and Croce’s reading of Italian history and whether it has ‘some contemporary and immediate reference’,17 with Gramsci posing the question of whether ‘under present conditions would it not be more precisely the fascist movement that corresponds to moderate and conservative liberalism?’18

The ideological hypothesis could be presented in the following terms: a passive revolution would be constituted by the fact that, through the legislative intervention of the state and through organisation in corporations, more or less far-reaching modifications would be introduced into the economic structure of the country to accentuate the ‘production plan’ element; in other words stress would be laid on the socialisation of and co-operation in production without thereby affecting (or at least not going beyond regulating and controlling) the individual and group appropriation of profit. In the concrete framework of Italian social relations this could be the sole solution for developing the productive forces of industry under the leadership of the traditional ruling classes, in competition with the more advanced industrial formations of countries which have a monopoly over raw materials and have accumulated huge amounts of capital.19

It is obvious that Gramsci here moves beyond the thinking of the Risorgimento or in general of state formation in the nineteenth century. Passive revolution is linked to the profound changes not only in the state, but also in production, by means of corporatism (a crucial element of the fascist state) and increased state intervention (that does not alter fundamental class relations of exploitation). In such a perspective, passive revolution becomes more like a thinking of the profound changes in capitalist social formations in the 1920s and 1930s, the new forms of expansion of the role of the state and the new forms of organisation of the masses and ‘totalitarian’ politics. Moreover, this also points to the possibility of a transformed form of hegemonic practice.

Whether or not such a scheme might be put into practice, and if so in what forms and to what extent, is only of relative importance. What does matter from the political and ideological point of view is that it can and really does have the virtue of lending itself to the creation of a period of hope and expectation, especially among certain Italian social groups, such as the great mass of the urban and rural petty bourgeoisie. The hegemonic system is thus maintained and the forces of military and civil coercion kept at the disposal of the traditional ruling classes.20

Moreover, it is on the basis of this that in the same note passive revolution in the political field is linked to the discussion of ‘war of position’, not only in terms of politics but also in regard to the international economic field.

This ideology would serve as an element in a ‘war of position’ in the international economic field (whereas free competition and free trade would here correspond to a war of manoeuvre), just as ‘passive revolution’ does in the political field. In the Europe of 1789 to 1870 there was a (political) war of manoeuvre during the French Revolution and a long war of position from 1815 to 1870. In the present era the war of manoeuvre took place politically from March 1917 to March 1921, to be followed by a war of position whose ideological representative for Europe, as well as its practical one (for Italy), is fascism.21

This is a very important and complex note. Gramsci is not making a simple ‘passive revolution’ – ‘war of position’ identification. On the one hand, war of position is expanded into the international economic field and to a conjuncture where it is not simply about free trade and competition, but about the new developments in the imperialist system and the new forms of state intervention in the economy, which then is linked to the notion of war of position. This leads Gramsci to suggest that sequences of war of position follow periods of increased revolutionary activity in the form of a ‘war of manoeuvre’. And it is in this sense that fascism does not only represent a form of passive revolution but is also the ‘ideological representative’ of war of position.

In a series of notes, written between March and May 1933, Gramsci returns to the question of passive revolution.22 Here, Gramsci attempts to offer a more general conceptualisation of the relation between passive revolution and war of position, a question that is simultaneously theoretical and strategic, since it is also here that Gramsci poses the question of the relation between war of position and war of manoeuvre not as an ‘absolute’ distinction, but in a much more dialectical manner. One might say Gramsci seems to suggest that at the same time the new conditions described as ‘passive revolution’ point towards the necessity of a ‘war of position’, yet at the same time the question of a ‘war of manoeuvre’ is not excluded and ‘war of position’ is presented as a necessary preparation.

Can the concept of ‘passive revolution’, in the sense attributed by Vincenzo Cuoco to the first period of the Italian Risorgimento, be related to the concept of ‘war of position’ in contrast to war of manoeuvre? In other words, did these concepts have a meaning after the French Revolution, and can the twin figures of Proudhon and Gioberti be explained in terms of the panic created by the Terror of 1793, as Sorellism can be in terms of the panic following the Paris massacres of 1871? In other words, does there exist an absolute identity between war of position and passive revolution? Or at least does there exist, or can there be conceived, an entire historical period in which the two concepts must be considered identical – until the point at which the war of position once again becomes a war of manoeuvre?23

Moreover, it is important to note that it is in this note that Gramsci also relates the reference to the passive revolution to molecular changes that modify the existing changes to the social relation of forces, in the sense of an ‘interpretative criterion’: ‘One may apply to the concept of passive revolution (documenting it from the Italian Risorgimento) the interpretative criterion of molecular changes which in fact progressively modify the pre-existing composition of forces, and hence become the matrix of new changes’.24 Moreover, the return again to the identification between passive revolution and war of position is at the same time posited and problematised by Gramsci in the following passage that points to a rethinking of strategy broader than a simple choice between insurrection and passive revolution, again using Italian history as background:

Nor can it be said that, for such an historical outcome to be achieved, a popular armed insurrection was an imperative necessity – as Mazzini believed to the point of obsession (i.e. not realistically, but with the fervour of a missionary). The popular intervention which was not possible in the concentrated and instantaneous form of an insurrection, did not take place even in the ‘diffused’ and capillary form of indirect pressure – though the latter would have been possible, and perhaps was in fact the indispensable premise for the former. The concentrated or instantaneous form was rendered impossible by the military technique of the time – but only partially so; in other words the impossibility existed in so far as that concentrated and instantaneous form was not preceded by long ideological and political preparation, organically devised in advance to reawaken popular passions and enable them to be concentrated and brought simultaneously to detonation point.25

It is in light of the above that we can see how the notion of passive revolution is treated as a part of a broader re-conceptualisation of ‘political science’, with Gramsci revisiting Marx’s 1859 Preface to the Critique of Political Economy. It is obvious here that Gramsci attempts to rethink the very notion of passive revolution beyond any identification with a particular historical sequence:

The concept of ‘passive revolution’ must be rigorously derived from the two fundamental principles of political science: 1. that no social formation disappears as long as the productive forces which have developed within it still find room for further forward movement; 2. that a society does not set itself tasks for whose solution the necessary conditions have not already been incubated, etc. It goes without saying that these principles must first be developed critically in all their implications, and purged of every residue of mechanicism and fatalism. They must therefore be referred back to the description of the three fundamental moments into which a ‘situation’ or an equilibrium of forces can be distinguished, with the greatest possible stress on the second moment (equilibrium of political forces), and especially on the third moment (politico-military equilibrium).26

The crucial aspect of this passage is precisely its emphasis on the necessary break with any ‘mechanicism and fatalism’. Instead of suggesting an inescapable historical dialectic, in the sense of necessary ‘historical stages’, Gramsci points instead to the need to observe the ‘equilibrium of forces’, a much more relational and historically contingent conception. This draws lines of demarcation in regard both to a teleological conception of historical necessity and to a voluntarist conception of social change depending simply upon political initiative. In light of this, ‘passive revolution’ becomes a reminder of both the constant effectivity of class antagonism and of the fact that revolutionary politics – and in particular the possibility of revolutionary sequences – depends on a complex and overdetermined relation of forces, which also entails the possibility of sequences of ‘passive revolution’ if the subaltern classes and groups cannot cross a certain threshold of autonomous political organisation, intellectuality and initiative.

Moreover, in such a perspective Gramsci can insist – making his break with any mechanistic and ‘fatalistic’ conception more explicit – that the question cannot be posed in terms of a ‘dialectic’ of ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ conditions, a position which runs the danger of reducing the strategic–political aspect to a simple adjustment to the objective dynamics, but as a relation between conflicting ‘subjective forces’, thus bringing social antagonism to the fore:

Still in connection with the concept of ‘passive revolution’ or ‘revolution/restoration’ in the Italian Risorgimento, it should be noted that it is necessary to pose with great precision the problem which in certain historiographical tendencies is called that of the relations between the objective conditions and the subjective conditions of an historical event. It seems obvious that the so-called subjective conditions can never be missing when the objective conditions exist, in as much as the distinction involved is simply one of a didactic character. Consequently it is on the size and concentration of subjective forces that discussion can bear, and hence on the dialectical relation between conflicting subjective forces.27

In a note from June/July 1933, Gramsci returns to the question of how to theorise passive revolution based on the attempt to analyse and at the same time to ‘generalise’ the experience studied in regard to the Risorgimento.

This fact is of the greatest importance for the concept of ‘passive revolution’ – the fact, that is, that what was involved was not a social group which ‘led’ other groups, but a State which, even though it had limitations as a power, ‘led’ the group which should have been ‘leading’ and was able to put at the latter’s disposal an army and a politico-diplomatic strength. […] The important thing is to analyse more profoundly the significance of a ‘Piedmont’ type function in passive revolutions – i.e. the fact that a State replaces the local social groups in leading a struggle of renewal. It is one of the cases in which these groups have the function of ‘domination’ without that of ‘leadership’: dictatorship without hegemony. The hegemony will be exercised by a part of the social group over the entire group, and not by the latter over other forces in order to give power to the movement, radicalise it, etc. on the ‘Jacobin’ model.28

This is an important passage in the sense that it connects the notion of passive revolution with the emphasis on the state, instead of the hegemonic function of a class. Although this passage can be read as referring to a situation where dominance replaces hegemony, it also points to that evolution which led to the state assuming hegemonic functions. This is stressed by the following passage from the same note, which makes it explicit that the ‘expansion’ of the reference of passive revolution to the twentieth century actually deals with a series of transformations in regard to the emergence of new forms of mass politics and mass forms of political representation. It also deals with the incorporation, especially in the period after the October Revolution, of forms which also include political and syndicalist forms of representation and recognition of the subaltern classes, and in particular the working class. In this sense, the notion of passive revolution has to be rethought in the context of these changes and the new forms of political – and in the ultimate instance, hegemonic – practice associated with these changes.

Studies aimed at capturing the analogies between the period which followed the fall of Napoleon and that which followed the war of 1914–18. The analogies are only seen from two viewpoints: territorial division, and the more conspicuous and superficial one of the attempt to give a stable legal organisation to international relations (Holy Alliance and League of Nations). However, it would seem that the most important characteristic to examine is the one which has been called that of ‘passive revolution’ – a problem whose existence is not manifest, since an external parallelism with the France of 1789–1815 is lacking. And yet, everybody recognises that the war of 1914–18 represents an historical break, in the sense that a whole series of questions which piled up individually before 1914 have precisely formed a ‘mound’, modifying the general structure of the previous process. It is enough to think of the importance which the trade-union phenomenon has assumed, a general term in which various problems and processes of development, of differing importance and significance, are lumped together (parliamentarianism, industrial organisation, democracy, liberalism, etc.), but which objectively reflects the fact that a new social force has been constituted, and has a weight which can no longer be ignored, etc.29

This theoretical confrontation with the notion of passive revolution in relation to the broader rethinking of historical materialism – including Gramsci’s constant re-reading of the 1859 Preface – reaches a certain crucial point in a note from July 1933:

The thesis of the ‘passive revolution’ as an interpretation of the Risorgimento period, and of every epoch characterised by complex historical upheavals. Utility and dangers of this thesis. Danger of historical defeatism, i.e. of indifferentism, since the whole way of posing the question may induce a belief in some kind of fatalism, etc. Yet the conception remains a dialectical one – in other words, presupposes, indeed postulates as necessary, a vigorous antithesis which can present intransigently all its potentialities for development. Hence theory of the ‘passive revolution’ not as a programme, as it was for the Italian liberals of the Risorgimento, but as a criterion of interpretation, in the absence of other active elements to a dominant extent. (Hence struggle against the political morphinism which exudes from Croce and from his historicism.) (It would seem that the theory of the passive revolution is a necessary critical corollary to the Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy.)30

The very fact that this note is entitled (by Gramsci) ‘First epilogue’, which suggests some initial conclusions of his research and elaboration, points to the importance of this note.31 Here the passive revolution is clearly delinked from the particular historical context of the Risorgimento and is presented as a conceptual elaboration, a ‘criterion of interpretation’, for broader historical tendencies and as part of broader rethinking of historical materialism beyond the 1859 Introduction and all forms of fatalism and towards a new insistence on the need for new forms of political practice that can counter the difficulties posed by such conjunctures and relations of forces. The rest of this note, which deals with the question of what form of political organisation can go beyond this ‘fatalism’, exemplifies the strategic character that the notion of passive revolution had acquired for Gramsci:

Revision of certain sectarian ideas on the theory of the party, theories which precisely represent a form of fatalism of a ‘divine right’ type. Development of the concepts of mass party and small elite party, and mediation between the two. (Theoretical and practical mediation: is it theoretically possible for there to exist a group, relatively small but still of significant size, let us say several thousand strong, that is socially and ideologically homogeneous, without its very existence demonstrating a widespread state of affairs and corresponding state of mind which only mechanical, external and hence transitory causes prevent from being expressed?)32

Consequently, passive revolution is no longer treated as an alternative political process. Nor is it treated as an analytical conceptualisation of particular historical sequences. Rather, it is treated as a ‘criterion of interpretation’ and, instead of something that is deduced from the basic premises of the 1859 Preface, it is presented as a ‘necessary critical corollary’,33 suggesting that it points to a broader rethinking of historical materialism, one that stresses relations of forces in social and political antagonism rather than simply ‘objective tendencies’ and their inescapable ‘dialectic’. In this sense, ‘passive revolution’ is not Gramsci’s interpretation of the 1859 Introduction; rather it is his way of moving beyond it.

In 1934–5, Gramsci returned to the notion of passive revolution. In Notebook 22, there is an important reference to passive revolution in relation to Americanism and Fordism. It is interesting that this is posed as a question – and indeed an ‘open’ one – and not as a position:

The question of whether Americanism can constitute an historical ‘epoch’, that is, whether it can determine a gradual evolution of the same type as the ‘passive revolution’ examined elsewhere and typical of the last century, or whether on the other hand it does not simply represent the molecular accumulation of elements destined to produce an ‘explosion’, that is, an upheaval on the French pattern.34

The interest of this note, which has been broadly debated, lies precisely in the fact that passive revolution here is linked also to the questions having to do with the changes that were induced by Taylorism and the Fordist regime of accumulation. At the same time, while Gramsci poses the question of whether it is indeed something that constitutes an ‘epoch’, he also suggests the possibility of a more ‘explosive’ accumulation of contradictions. As with the attempt to rethink fascism as a form of passive revolution, it is obvious that we are moving beyond passive revolution as an explanation for nineteenth-century historical developments, towards an attempt to rethink the historical tendencies and events of the 1920s and 1930s. When Gramsci in 1934–5 rewrites Q1, §44, the note to which he had later added the reference to ‘passive revolution’, he clarifies his position and at the same time presents a more complex theorisation of the Risorgimento:

The methodological criterion on which our own study must be based is the following: that the supremacy of a social group manifests itself in two ways, as ‘domination’ and as ‘intellectual and moral leadership’. A social group dominates antagonistic groups, which it tends to ‘liquidate’, or to subjugate perhaps even by armed force; it leads kindred and allied groups. A social group can, and indeed must, already exercise ‘leadership’ before winning governmental power (this indeed is one of the principal conditions for the winning of such power); it subsequently becomes dominant when it exercises power, but even if it holds it firmly in its grasp, it must continue to ‘lead’ as well. The Moderates continued to lead the Action Party even after 1870 and 1876, and so-called ‘transformism’ was only the parliamentary expression of this action of intellectual, moral and political hegemony. […] The formation of this class involved the gradual but continuous absorption, achieved by methods which varied in their effectiveness, of the active elements produced by allied groups – and even of those which came from antagonistic groups and seemed irreconcilably hostile. In this sense political leadership became merely an aspect of the function of domination in as much as the absorption of the enemies’ élites means their decapitation, and annihilation often for a very long time. It seems clear from the policies of the Moderates that there can, and indeed must, be hegemonic activity even before the rise to power, and that one should not count only on the material force which power gives in order to exercise an effective leadership. It was precisely the brilliant solution of these problems which made the Risorgimento possible, in the form in which it was achieved (and with its limitations) – as ‘revolution’ without a ‘revolution’, or as ‘passive revolution’ to use an expression of Cuoco’s in a slightly different sense from that which Cuoco intended.35

Leaving aside the fact that this passage offers Gramsci’s more elaborated conception of the question of political leadership before and after gaining power and how this is articulated into a practice of hegemony, it also offers a clearer conceptualisation of passive revolution, which is now treated ‘in a slightly different sense’ from Cuoco’s original formulation and in general from simply the question of a ‘post-Jacobin’ political practice. Quoco’s and Quinet’s formulations now appear as attempts both to describe the actual hegemonic dynamics within the Risorgimento and to theorise broader questions of a theory of hegemony and political practice. It is also important to note that here Gramsci makes it relatively clear that passive revolution does not refer simply to an absence of hegemony, but to a modification of the practice and content of hegemony; a different form of hegemonic practice, one that includes not a ‘Jacobin’ alliance between the bourgeoisie and the subaltern classes, but new forms of mass political organisation and ideological interpellation that at the same time recognised and disaggregated the subaltern classes.

We could also expand the discussion of Gramsci’s references to passive revolution with a discussion of more ‘implicit’ references to these questions, especially since Gramsci’s elaborations have connected these questions with other crucial aspects of his research programme: from corporatism and fascism to his confrontation with the emergence of Stalinism. One important connection is the one between passive revolution and Caesarism. As Francesca Antonini36 has stressed, there are passages in Gramsci where this connection between Caesarism and passive revolution is almost explicit. The following passage from a note written in January 1933 exemplifies this.

A very important historical episode from this point of view is the so-called Dreyfus affair in France. This too belongs to the present series of observations, not because it led to ‘Caesarism’, indeed precisely for the opposite reason: because it prevented the advent of a Caesarism in gestation, of a clearly reactionary nature. Nevertheless, the Dreyfus movement is characteristic, since it was a case in which elements of the dominant social bloc itself thwarted the Caesarism of the most reactionary part of that same bloc. And they did so by relying for support not on the peasantry and the countryside, but on the subordinate strata in the towns under the leadership of reformist socialists (though they did in fact draw support from the most advanced part of the peasantry as well).37

This passage suggests that for Gramsci Caesarism was a possible outcome in that period of political crisis and transformation, and that the importance of the Dreyfus movement lay precisely in it standing against a potential Caesarist dynamic. However, even this represents political processes that suggest the dynamic of passive revolution.

There are other modern historico-political movements of the Dreyfus type to be found, which are certainly not revolutions, but which are not entirely reactionary either – at least in the sense that they shatter stifling and ossified State structures in the dominant camp as well, and introduce into national life and social activity a different and more numerous personnel. These movements too can have a relatively ‘progressive’ content, in so far as they indicate that there were effective forces latent in the old society which the old leaders did not know how to exploit – perhaps even ‘marginal forces’. However, such forces cannot be absolutely progressive, in that they are not ‘epochal’. They are rendered historically effective by their adversary’s inability to construct, not by an inherent force of their own. Hence they are linked to a particular situation of equilibrium between the conflicting forces – both incapable in their respective camps of giving autonomous expression to a will for reconstruction.38

This is indeed a passage that can be related to the notion of passive revolution: movements that do not ‘make an epoch’ but are, nevertheless, ‘progressive’, not in the sense of an autonomous initiative (and ‘hegemonic project’) but of a specific relation of forces that enables some progressive character. At the same time, such relations of forces also entail the possibility of Caesarism, thus suggesting that both Caesarism and passive revolution are aspects of the same political transformations and changes both in political representation and articulation and the role of the state.39

What is also important is that Gramsci also described the dynamics that led to Fascism in terms that suggested thinking of it as passive revolution. This is evident in Q6, §138, one of the crucial notes on war of position, where the political transformations associated with war of position point precisely towards the changes in the role of the state and the new hegemonic practices associated with increased state intervention, viz. the very changes described as passive revolution.

The war of position calls on enormous masses of people to make huge sacrifices; that is why an unprecedented concentration of hegemony is required and hence a more ‘interventionist’ kind of government that will engage more openly in the offensive against the opponents and ensure, once and for all, the ‘impossibility’ of internal disintegration by putting in place controls of all kinds – political, administrative, etc., reinforcement of the hegemonic positions of the dominant group, etc. All of this indicates that the culminating phase of the politico-historical situation has begun, for, in politics, once the ‘war of position’ is won, it is definitively decisive. In politics, in other words, the war of manoeuvre drags on as long as the positions having won are not decisive and the resources of hegemony and the state are not fully mobilized. But when, for some reason or another, these positions have their value and only the decisive positions matter, then one shifts to siege warfare – compact, difficult, requiring exceptional abilities of patience and inventiveness.40

This description of situations where war of position becomes the only strategic option is very important. Gramsci here links war of position to a deeper transformation and expansion of the state, the emergence of what he describes as the state in its integral form. This is expressed by the emphasis on an ‘unprecedented concentration of hegemony’ and the emphasis on state interventions. This is also a crucial aspect of the Fascist state and its expansion of state hegemonic apparatuses along with an increased intervention of the state in the economy that is also an important aspect not only of Fascism but also of social democracy in that period. Although there is no explicit reference to the passive revolution in this note, the kind of social and political changes implied here point precisely towards those points that Gramsci has elsewhere described as passive revolution. At the same time this passage is important because it suggests that in such conjunctures we are still talking about a hegemonic political practice, and not as simple domination without hegemony. This also represents a broader emphasis by Gramsci on the fact that Fascism was not simply some form of ‘state of exception’. It was one of the forms that a passive-revolution process might take – authoritarian and with very extensive forms of dismantling of any autonomous organisations of the subaltern classes in favour of processes of disintegration – rearticulations by means of the state. This also gives to war of position a character that extends beyond that of a ‘tactic’ towards revolution and more as an apprehension of the exigencies and challenges for everyone attempting to engage in a revolutionary political practice in such a context and in such social and political relations of forces.

A similar attempt to think more broadly the political transformations associated with the passive revolution can be found in the two notes, §74 and §76, from Notebook 14, on black, tacit or implicit parliamentarism.41 These are particularly complex, with Gramsci referring both to fascist corporatism but also, ‘in Aesopic form’42 to Stalinism, something that also points toward the question of whether not only Fascism but also, in a different context, Stalinism can be considered a form of passive revolution.

Theoretically the important thing is to show that between the old defeated absolutism of the constitutional regimes and the new absolutism there is an essential difference, which means that it is not possible to speak of a regression; not only this, but also to show that such ‘black parliamentarism’ is a function of present historical necessities, is ‘a progress’ in its way, that the return to traditional ‘parliamentarism’ would be an anti-historical regression, since even where this ‘functions’ publicly, the effective parliamentarism is the ‘black’ one. Theoretically it seems to me that one can explain the phenomenon with the concept of ‘hegemony’, with a return to ‘corporativism’ – not in the ancient regime sense, but in the modern sense of the word, in which the ‘corporation’ cannot have closed and exclusivistic limits as was the case in the past. (Today it is corporativism of ‘social function’, without hereditary or any other restriction – which was anyway only relative in the past too, when its most obvious feature was that of ‘legal privilege’). In discussing this subject, care must be taken to exclude the slightest appearance of support for the ‘absolutist’ tendency, and that can be achieved by insisting on the ‘transitory’ character of the phenomenon (in the sense that it does not constitute an epoch, not in the sense of its ‘short duration’).43

The way that Gramsci attempts here to come to terms with Stalinism in this note from March 1935 is of particular importance in discussing the role that passive revolution plays in this conceptual nexus. The references to corporativism and a certain hegemonic practice, along with the acceptance that these forms of a more ‘authoritarian’ direction can be accepted as parts of a broader historical process, can indeed be considered to present a return to a certain thematic associated with passive revolution such as the importance of the role of the state, the absence of popular initiative and its substitution by state practices, and the modification of the forms and practice of hegemony in such contexts; all these point precisely to this relation with the discussions on passive revolution: ‘“Black” parliamentarism appears to be a theme which should be developed quite extensively; it also offers an opportunity to define the political concepts which constitute the “parliamentary” conception.’44

So one might say that Gramsci at the same time attempts to rethink passive revolution in the context of Stalinism45 and also tries to rethink how changes in state apparatuses, including changes in the parliamentary system, even in their authoritarian or ‘totalitarian’ versions, offer the political bases for the emergence of new forms of passive revolution, in a manner similar to how he had already worked on a potential reading of Fascism as form of passive revolution.

I believe that this attempt towards a reading of Gramsci’s passages on passive revolution points to how gradually this moves from a description or analysis of a particular historical sequence towards an attempt at theorising the particular modality of both mass politics and functioning of the state in periods marked by the emergence of new Fordist regimes of accumulation, an expansive form of the integral state, new forms of mass democracy and representation, but also new forms of totalitarian incorporation of social life into the state. This points towards an expansion of the semantic scope of the notion of passive revolution and important shifts regarding its context, application and connotations.

For Gramsci, this is part of a broader historical tendency, one that cannot be treated as a deviation from a norm (something that would have indeed called for a return to an ‘ideal’ parliamentarism and state functioning). Rather, it poses the challenge of new and original forms of integral autonomy and self-government of the subaltern, both as expansion of autonomous forms of political intellectuality, but also as their collective ability to ‘become state’, in a process that in the long run can indeed entail the ‘re-absorption of political society into civil society’46 – in sum an actual communist horizon.

The Debate around Passive Revolution

I have tried to show that from the beginning we are dealing with a notion that is not delineated in a definite or exact way and is open to many conceptual transformations and displacements. This has led to a variety of interpretative strategies. As Peter Thomas recently stressed:

At least four different understandings of the meaning of passive revolution can be identified in recent scholarship. First, it has been thought to represent a reformulation of the more established concept of ‘(bourgeois) revolution from above,’ understood as a process in which existing political elites instigate and manage periods of social upheaval and transformation. Second, passive revolution has been understood as a rival or complement to other macro-historical sociological theories of state formation, modernization, or decolonization. Third, particularly when viewed through the lens of the Italian tradition of trasformismo, it has been conceptualized as a specific political strategy and technique of statecraft, and sometimes related to theories of governmentality. Fourth, passive revolution has been argued to constitute a useful lens for analyzing the nature and transformation of contemporary capitalism, whether understood as ‘neoliberalism’ or in other terms.47

One could also say that there have been different registers for different readings of passive revolution in different conjunctures and contexts. First of all, in the 1970s, we had a more strategic approach to passive revolution. Of particular importance were two crucial interventions, both presented at the 1977 Instituto Gramsci conference in Florence, and both of them over-determined (but not limited by) the debates on the strategy of the Left in the 1970s and the emergence of Eurocommunist currents, along with the renewed interest in questions of power and more critical approaches to Stalinism.

The first one was by Franco De Felice48 and attempted to rethink both the theoretical and the strategic importance of Gramsci’s elaborations on passive revolution and in particular the nexus between passive revolution, hegemony, and war of position. For De Felice the first thematic nucleus of Gramsci’s reading of the passive revolution is to treat it as referring to what succeeded the French and the Russian Revolution respectively. For De Felice, the way Gramsci elaborates the category of passive revolution expands its scope with regard to the changes taking place globally, the impact of the Russian Revolution, and the implication of passive revolution as a global historical phase. The second thematic nucleus has to do with Americanism, Fordism, the different dynamics between Europe and America, and the new forms of organisation of capitalism. In this context fascism is part of the same ‘epochal dimension’,49 and a particular Italian ‘solution’ to the post-war crisis which could not be separated from the international dimension. This brings De Felice to the relationship between Fascism and Caesarism, but also what Gramsci referred to as ‘totalitarianism’, namely the new forms of socialisation of production, of standardisation of ways of thinking, of state intervention, a form of organisation of the masses, of corporatism, including the mass character of modern parties, along with the relation between ‘Americanism’ and ‘Fordism’.50 In this sense, for De Felice hegemony is reconstituted on the basis of the reorganisation of production and this offers the possibility to rethink the ideology of passive revolution, its reality and also the possibility of its critique. Of particular importance is how De Felice links this reconceptualisation of passive revolution to the changes not only in political forms, but also in capitalist production, thus insisting that ‘in the scission and recomposition between technical exigency and the working class there is the registration of the crisis of the nexus science–domination–capital as the highest and most decisive point of the struggle for hegemony and for the construction of a new State and as a critique of Americanism’.51 Fabio Frosini has stressed the importance of this reading, suggesting that one of its most important contributions was that this ‘invitation to reconstruct “totalitarianism” in terms of “hegemony” represents therefore the most important legacy of this work, which not only obliges us to reread it today, but also urges us to think the history of the twentieth century in terms that are not subordinate to the liberal-democratic ideology’.52

Christine Buci-Glucksmann at the time of the 1977 conference had already published Gramsci et l’État,53 in which she had stressed that passive revolution offers a conceptually significant ‘investigation of the new relations between state and civil society, seeing fascism as a mode of organization of society on the basis of an expanded state’,54 and also emphasised the relation between passive revolution, war of position, the enlargement of the state, and the new forms of Fordist organisation of production. In her 1977 intervention she returned to the question of passive revolution. For Buci-Glucksmann, ‘the passive revolution becomes a potential tendency intrinsic to every transitional process’,55 and its elaboration by Gramsci ‘is best described as transforming a historical concept into a general/theoretical concept in a way that sheds a fairly immediate light upon Gramsci’s Marxism’.56 For Buci-Glucksmann, passive revolution suggests a profound limitation of the hegemonic aspect:

The ‘passive revolution’ by contrast, issues in a kind of ‘statisisation’ of the transition which destroys the impact of every popular initiative at the base and of every alteration of the relations rulers–ruled within the superstructures and their institutions. When domination prevails over leadership, when the ruling class loses its own expansionary basis in the masses, when the state replaces class as the motor of socio-economic development. The inevitable result is what Gramsci calls a dictatorship without hegemony. Thereupon, the hegemonic apparatuses, including party and union, become ‘ideological state apparatuses’ as is the case with Stalinist or neo-Stalinist ‘transmission belts’.57

For Buci-Glucksmann the relation between passive revolution, war of position and fascism points to the importance of the economic field as the terrain for the articulation of such a ‘war of position’ in the sense of a reorganisation of production, including the introduction of elements of planning, in contrast to a ‘catastrophist’ reading of the evolution of capitalism. Consequently, what is important is for the working class ‘to develop a strategy of anti-passive revolution’.58 Consequently, what is needed is to define ‘the form of a transitional state that is capable of offering, in opposition to the various passive revolutions immanent to the crisis, a new political dialectic between representative democracy and that democracy of the base which is central to Gramscian thought’.59 It is obvious that Buci-Glucksmann attempts to link the debates around ‘democratic socialism’ and in particular her ‘left Eurocommunist’ position60 in favour of a combination of representative- and direct-democracy institutions, with a treatment of Stalinism as the passive revolution par excellence.

In the years that followed there would be many returns to the notion of passive revolution. A series of interventions would attempt to treat passive revolution as a means to analyse particular historical sequences. For Domenico Losurdo, ‘passive revolution is a category used in the Prison Notebooks in order to denote the persistent capacity of initiative of the bourgeoisie which succeeds, even in the historical phase in which it has ceased to be a properly revolutionary class, to produce socio-political transformations of significance, conserving securely in its own hands power, initiative, and hegemony, and leaving the working classes in their conditions of subalternity.’61

Partha Chatterjee has insisted on the need for an historical framework for the study of the Indian state that ‘attempts to locate, within a historical context of “passive revolution,” the problem of the autonomy of nationalist discourse as a discourse of power’.62 Moreover, he insists ‘that “passive revolution” is the general form of the transition from colonial to post-colonial national states in the twentieth century’,63 attempting to rethink the formation of the Indian state in terms of a passive revolution. For Chatterjee, ‘[c]onservatory of the passive revolution, the national state now proceeds to find for “the nation” a place in the global order of capital, while striving to keep the contradictions between capital and the people in perpetual suspension.’64

For Neil Davidson, who has offered an impressive reconstruction of the events that Gramsci used as points of reference, ‘[t]he concept of “passive revolution” is perhaps the most evocative one to describe the process of “revolution from above” developed within the classical Marxist tradition’.65 Moreover, Davidson has argued that there is an analogy to be made between passive revolutions of the nineteenth century and the Scottish bourgeois experience after 1746.66

Jan Rehman has linked Gramsci’s conception of the passive revolution to Weber and his critique of Caesarism as part of his attempt to reread Weber as a theoretician of passive revolution:

Gramsci, in turn, put Weber’s critique of Bismarck’s ‘Caesarism’ to use in his own critique of the ‘passive revolution’ that developed in Italy and throughout Europe as a ‘reaction’ to and ‘transcendence’ of [reazione- superamento] the French Revolution. One has the impression of reading a modified extension of Weber’s Protestant Ethic when Gramsci analyses the function of Puritanism within the framework of US Fordism as a component of a new type of hegemony, in which ‘the “structure” dominates the superstructure more directly’, and in which hegemony is ‘born in the factory and does not need so many political and ideological intermediaries’.67

For Rehmann, ‘Rather than referring to “backward” variants of development, Gramsci’s concept of “passive revolution” described processes that were endogenous to developed capitalism and showed its malleability in times of crisis.’68 The result is a book that is, in its own terms, both a highly original return to the possibility of reading German history, from Bismarck onwards, as passive revolution, and an equally original comparative reading of Gramsci through Weber and vice-versa.

Cihan Tuğal has used the notion of the passive revolution to describe the emergence of the AKP as a hegemonic political force. To that end he suggests a definition of this process in terms of a process in which political society transforms the dynamics of civil society, by means of absorption of the leadership, of dual power and of the collective imaginary, opposing this process to what he considers the blocked passive revolution in Egypt and the failed passive revolution in Iran.69

Another way to treat passive revolution would be through an articulation with questions of geopolitics. For Adam David Morton, despite passive revolution being ‘a portmanteau concept’,70 ‘the focus on unravelling Gramsci’s leitmotiv or rhythm of thought, about questions of hegemony, passive revolution and uneven development, promotes not only concrete analysis of the peculiarity of alternative historical phenomena but also an interest in actual practices related to present political activity.’71 Moreover, ‘the theory of passive revolution is therefore a nodal approach to the spatial division of geopolitics that throws into relief certain factors of state formation related to the emergence and transformation of the international system, thus contributing to our very understanding of “the international” in conditioning state formation.’72 In this sense, passive revolution ‘can be deployed with a “spatial sense” that reveals (as a transgressive theory) different insights about the uneven geography of state power’,73 but also about the specific historicity of particular state formations as passive revolutions ‘within the global circumstances of uneven and combined development’,74 such as the Risorgimento, the Meiji Restoration in Japan, the Mexican Revolution, or the formation of the modern Turkish state.

Bieler and Morton have insisted that the ‘essential form of a condition of passive revolution’ refers to ‘a revolution without mass participation, or a “revolution from above”, involving elite-engineered social and political reform that draws on foreign capital and associated ideas while lacking a national-popular base’ and ‘how a revolutionary form of political transformation is pressed into a conservative project of restoration in which popular demands of class struggle still play some role’.75 Moreover, ‘uneven and combined development as the structuring condition and passive revolution with its emphasis on class agency are affinal and internally related concepts addressing how capitalist development unfolds and how class struggles between state and subaltern agents have produced and transformed space across time throughout variegated cycles of revolution and restoration.’76

Passive revolution has been widely discussed in Latin America. One might say that the Latin American debates on passive revolution are by themselves not only a chapter in Gramsci studies but also an important page in the debate around theoretico-strategic questions in the Latin American context. It is here that we can find the close connection between analysing passive revolution and debating left strategy. After all, as Jose Aricó noted, the status of nation-states on the continent ‘had come about by virtue of a process of “passive revolution”’.77 Juan Carlos Portantiero offered a very interesting reading of passive revolution in one of the essays in Los usos de Gramsci:

This enormously encompassing ‘passive revolution’ as a proposition, that runs from the social structure and customs to the role of the state in production and its new compromise with the masses, is the long-term response of capitalism to a situation of organic crisis, something much deeper and dense than the catastrophic logic of the ‘three periods’ that the Third International proposed at the same time as the key to the analysis of capitalism.78

For Javier Mena and Dora Kanoussi, writing in 1985, passive revolution refers on the one hand ‘to the foundation of the new bourgeois state (the “modernization of the State” and on the other hand to the crisis and the attempts towards adaption to it on the part of the bourgeoisie of the advanced capitalism of his time (fascism and Americanism)’.79 In this sense it refers to an ‘analysis of the birth, transformation and development of the modern, capitalist and bourgeois, State’.80 Passive revolution is an example ‘of the “rhythm” of Gramscian Marxist analysis as a unity of the three levels, the historical, the philosophical and the political’.81 For Mena and Kanoussi, the crucial point is how the state becomes central, substituting for class in hegemonic practices and ‘transformism is the method par excellence with which a weak class becomes state’.82

For Carlos Nelson Coutinho, ‘the concept of passive revolution is, therefore, an important criterion of interpretation to be applied not only to the main episodes of the history of Italy and of other countries, but also to whole historical periods’, but ‘Gramsci very clearly rejected the possibility that the subaltern classes could use passive revolution as a programme’.83 Coutinho insisted on passive revolution being a form of transformation ‘from above’ and also has expanded the ‘dictatorship without hegemony’ aspect into his reading of Brazilian history.

In Brazil also, transformations have always been the result of a displacement of the hegemonic function from one section of the ruling classes to another. As a whole, however, they have never played, at least until recently, an effectively-hegemonic role as regards the popular masses. They preferred to delegate the function of political domination to the state – that is, to the military and techno-bureaucratic stratum – which assumed the task of ‘controlling’ and repressing the subaltern classes when necessary. Such an anti-Jacobin mode of transition to capitalism does not mean, however, that the Brazilian bourgeoisie did not complete its ‘revolution’: it did so precisely through the model of passive revolution.

‘Dictatorship without hegemony’, however, does not imply that the state acting as the protagonist of a passive revolution can do without consensus: otherwise it would have to resort to coercion and only to coercion, which in the long run would simply prevent it from functioning. It was none other than Gramsci who indicated the way to achieving the minimum consensus in processes of transition ‘from above’.84

Moreover, Coutinho has also opposed the tendency to treat neoliberalism as passive revolution, insisting instead it would be better if it were considered as a counter-reform. Coutinho insisted that we cannot find in the ‘“neoliberal age” […] the restoration/revolution dialectic that always, according to Gramsci, characterises passive revolutions.’85

Alvaro Bianchi has offered one of the most detailed readings of Gramsci’s texts on the passive revolution and on revolution-restoration. For Bianchi, passive revolution ‘was thus to occupy a strategic place in the Gramscian attempt to reconstruct the philosophy of praxis, purifying it of all mechanicism, economicism, and fatalism’.86 Consequently, it had particular strategic implications:

The war of position and the passive revolution are the setbacks that made it difficult for the subaltern classes to affirm their societal project. A programme of passive anti-revolution can only be achieved by means of a struggle that disarticulates the war of position of the dominant classes and accelerating historical time. The political action of the subaltern classes assumes the dimension of a struggle for the reappropriation of their own time that has been denied to them. To conquer this time is to change the relation of forces and define the conditions under which the struggle must take place.87

In contrast, Massimo Modonesi has offered a very important rereading of the passive revolution coming from the Latin American context. For Modonesi, it is important to stress the possibility of ‘progressive’ passive revolutions. This is based on his particular reading of the very notion of passivity.

The notion of passivity aims at this focal point, in its allusion both to the subordination of the subaltern classes and to its counterpart: the initiative and ability of the dominant classes to reinforce the continuity of a hierarchical order through reform of the structures and relations of domination. It is a concept that not only leaves behind the revolution– conservation dichotomy, but also introduces the anti-economistic and anti-catastrophist idea that the dominant classes can resolve situations of crisis, that they have room for political action that enables them to reconfigure their lost hegemony.88

For Modonesi, ‘[p]assive revolution can thus be understood, in Gramscian terms, as a subaltern revolution, or rather, a subalternising one, leading back to the condition of subalternity: a revolution of re-subalternisation.’89 Modonesi opposes the description of passive revolution as ‘dictatorship without hegemony’: ‘Gramsci never elaborated a general definition of passive revolution in terms of “dictatorship without hegemony”. This expression in the Notebooks refers to a particular, specific modality of passive revolution, albeit undoubtedly a fundamental one, since it represents the point of origin in Gramsci’s thinking: the case of the Piedmont in the Risorgimento.’90 Modonesi treats the wave of progressive governments in Latin America at the beginning of the twenty-first century as a form of progressive passive revolution, at the same time also stressing their more regressive revolution. Consequently, he insists that:

For Gramsci progressivity is related to political victory and not to the development of productive forces, to the narrowing of the gap between the subaltern classes and hegemony, a distance that can be bridged only with the construction of subjectivities, the activation of the masses, that pulls itself out of subalternity, through antagonism and autonomy. The measure is therefore ultimately subjective, related to political action, and antithetical to passivity and subalternity. A constant characteristic of passive revolution that encompasses all of Gramsci’s work should thus be a measure of its scope and use.91

On the other hand, more recent Italian research, based on all the various advances in Gramscian philology, has managed to offer important insights into Gramsci’s elaborations on passive revolution, instead of simply ‘applying’ it to particular contexts or conjuctures.

Pasquale Voza has offered a very careful philological reconstruction of Gramsci’s references to passive revolution and how this is also part of his dialogue with Croce’s conception.92 For Voza, ‘the concept of passive revolution, born as a radical re-elaboration of Cuoco’s expression, is always proposed, even when it refers to the Risorgimento, as a concept valid to connote and interpret the mode of formation of the modern States in the European and continental nineteenth century.’93 Moreover, Voza stresses the complexity of Gramsci’s elaboration and the tensions running through it.

From this point of view we can understand the complex articulation of the concept of passive revolution in the dynamic of Gramsci’s reflection: from the function of a warning, fuelled by moral energy, in Cuoco a political ‘programme’ of the Moderate bloc in the Risorgimento, to a criterion of interpretation (‘in the absence of other elements active in a dominant mode’) of the processes of the formation of the modern States (Italy-Europe), to a historical-political form of the present and main axis of a ‘science of politics’. It is not about the articulation of a temporal or logical-conceptual unfolding, but of tensive elements and moments, always intertwined, even when this does not explicitly appear [….] In a certain manner, Gramsci himself wants to draw attention to the theoretical-political tension linked to the ‘movement’ of the concept of passive revolution within his reflection, when on the one hand, he points to its ‘utility’ and the ‘danger’ of this argument and on the other hand affirms that ‘the conception remains dialectical’.94

Antonio Di Meo has offered a very close reading of both Cuoco and Quinet, which also enables a better understanding of the ways that Gramsci actually used both passive revolution and revolution-restoration in ways that were distanced from their original formulation.95

Giuseppe Vacca has also offered recently a very close reading of Gramsci’s notes on passive revolution. According to Vacca, ‘the concept of “passive revolution” can be considered a historiographical paradigm of the theory of hegemony’.96 To that end, he retraces how the notion of passive revolution evolves in the Prison Notebooks. Vacca insists on the importance of considerations that had to do with the situation in the Soviet Union and the world communist movement, stressing that ‘from the start, the research of the Notebooks revolves around pressing questions regarding Soviet Russia and the policy of the international communist movement’.97 Consequently, ‘[w]hile maintaining the original formulation, created to underline absence of initiative of the popular masses in the Risorgimento, the concept thence extends to the historical process of the world’,98 thus assuming the possibility even of progressive versions of passive revolution. For Vacca the introduction of the notion of passive revolution was a form of ‘paradigm shift’99 for Gramsci that enabled him ‘to demonstrate that the Risorgimento had not been the work of one side alone, but the result of a struggle and a correlation of forces: the concept of “passive revolution” serves to explain why the moderates and not the democrats got the upper hand.’100 Vacca then moves to the question of whether Fascism can be considered a form of passive revolution, insisting that the use of the notion of passive revolution points to researching ‘whether the corporative State is capable of performing a “reformist” function, or in other words, whether within the armour of the totalitarian State “molecular changes” are taking place’.101 He also stresses the way Gramsci extends the notion beyond the Italian context, towards Fordism in the USA, but also as it relates the USSR.

Alberto Burgio has also offered an important reading of the notion of passive revolution. In particular, he has stressed the way that it is connected to the theorisation of Caesarism and Bonapartism and the distinction between the authoritarian logic of a bonapartist Caesarism and a democratic Caesarism ‘without a Caesar’, a ‘collective and progressive Caesarism’.102 In regard to the passive revolution in the Italian context, Burgio suggests that there is a difference between the passive revolution in the nineteenth century, which can be characterised as ‘relatively progressive’, and the fascism of the twentieth century, which represents ‘an element of stabilization of a capitalism in crisis’ and hence a reactive process and a ‘stoppage of the historical dynamic’.103 Moreover, during the Risorgimento the crucial aspect is that the bourgeoisie was weak, whereas in the twentieth century we are dealing with the weakness of the working class arising from the fact that ‘the working class and the proletariat in general do not dispose yet their proper organic intellectuality’.104 In light of this, ‘fascism represents a paradigm of the twentieth century form of passive revolution, namely a restorative intervention deprived of progressive value.’105

Fabio Frosini has also written extensively on the subject, attempting to reconstruct Gramsci’s elaborations on the question of passive revolution. He has attempted to revisit the textual sources of Gramsci for his elaborations on Cuoco’s notion of the passive revolution in regard to the 1799 Naples revolution, suggesting that it is not mainly through Croce that Gramsci came across Cuoco’s passive revolution but through Guido De Ruggiero, and that it is from De Ruggiero that Gramsci takes the idea that the ‘entire cycle of Risorgimento has its origins, in the last instance, in the catastrophe of 1799’.106

For Frosini ‘the peculiarity of this Italian road to the Modern State consists, for Gramsci, in the passive character of the hegemonic processes’,107 and the apprehension of the longue durée of hegemony, especially through his reading of Bernhard Groethuysen’s book Origines de l’esprit bourgeois en France. Frosini stresses how Gramsci on the ‘molecular’ construction of hegemony, ‘diffused thanks to a labour on collective mentalities’.108 It is this research on the notion of ‘passivity’ that leads Gramsci to stress the importance of a unitary ‘revolution-restoration’ process, but also the fact that the ‘subversivism’ of the popular masses points to the fact that even the new form of hegemony associated with passive revolution also includes some element of popular initiative. In this sense, the passivity of the masses does not refer to the opposite of activity but to the absence of forms of organisation that could enable the emergence of a ‘collective will’. Consequently, ‘fascism is not a deviation in regards to the modern war of position, but a form of it most adapted to a determinate moment of this dynamic’, since ‘it does not suppress the organisations of the subaltern, but includes them in the State’.109 According to Frosini, for Gramsci the model for understanding political struggle in post-WWI Europe was Italian Fascism.110 It is here that the importance of corporatism in its particular fascist version emerges: ‘Organising syndicalistically from above, in an authoritarian mode, the entire working mass, and interpreting history as (necessarily) revolution-restoration, accomplishes the same consistent operation in negating the possibility of a real rupture’.111 For Frosini, this can also explain the importance of Gramsci’s reference to the Constituent: ‘This was the kind of war of position to be waged within the organisations in which fascism had locked up the Italian people: unblocking the mentality to retranslate the energy of the people-nation into the democratic language that fascism had managed to appropriate, distorting but also realising it for the first time in Italian history’.112

In another important text Frosini has focused on the notion of totalitarian politics in order to better understand the nature of fascism as passive revolution. Frosini insists that fascism did not just ‘atomise’ the subaltern mass, but also attempted to create a new one, a process that suggested ‘the hegemonic potential of the “totalitarian system”’,113 in the sense that the war of position did not enter a liberal but a ‘totalitarian’ scenario, since the conquest of hegemony could not be left to the ‘private’ terrain of civil society.114 For Frosini, this ‘idea of the incorporation into the activity of the state of the forms of “class autonomy” of the “subaltern classes” is an extremely dense concept which has not to do with a simplified notion of “dictatorship”, but re-launches the idea, sketched in 1926, of the “totalitarian system” which, as in other such instances, was paradoxically traversed by a plurality of conflictual forms’.115 For Frosini the important aspect was not whether this ‘totalitarian politics’ is ‘progressive’ or ‘regressive and reactionary’, but that it is ‘the only one capable of confronting the node constituted by what Gramsci defines as “democratic utopia,” namely […] the confusion between State-class and regulated society’.116

Francesca Antonini has attempted to link the notion of passive revolution to that of Caesarism, ‘insofar as both of these concepts describe a situation in which progressive and regressive elements are entangled and the course of historical development is anything but simple and straightforward’.117 Antonini offers a very careful reading of those notes by Gramsci that enable us to realise the analogies between Caesarism and passive revolution, and concludes,

there is a partial ‘overlap’ between Caesarism and passive revolution, insofar as both concepts are valuable for understanding situations that cannot be explained through the classical tools of sociological and political analysis, which do not grasp the nuances of ‘actual’ reality (or, in Gramsci’s words, ‘effectual reality’ [realtà effettuale]) […] Caesarism and passive revolution represent two different but complementary instruments for investigating how specific politico-social transformations unfold in a context of uncertain and contested hegemony or, in other words, of crisis. For this reason, both concepts are useful for conceiving the historical dynamics of the pre-modern period, but they are even more important for the modern one and its enduring ‘crisis of authority’.118

Finally, I turn now to how passive revolution has been read by the theorist who has contributed significantly to reviving interest in Gramsci in anglophone debates in recent years, Peter Thomas. And indeed, passive revolution plays an important role also in Thomas’s seminal Gramscian research. In the Gramscian Moment Thomas suggests that, ‘[w]ith the concepts of the “integral State” and “passive revolution”, Gramsci attempted to outline a research programme that could provide the historiographical resources to justify an abandoned perspective from the early years of the Comintern: the politics of the united front.’119 Attempting, in this book, a certain periodisation of passive revolution, Thomas suggests that we need to make a ‘distinction between these two phases or forms of passive revolution: while the first phase took a predominantly defensive form, the second phase was a form of cautious attack.’120 Thomas insists that passive revolution should not be dealt with in terms of ‘an equally fatalistic image, an image of modernity tout court’.121 In contrast, Thomas insisted that:

Passive revolution had not been necessitated by the economic structure of bourgeois society or inscribed in modernity as its telos. Rather, its successful imposition had involved conscious, political choices: on the one hand, the choice of the ruling classes to develop strategies to disaggregate those working classes and confine them to an economic-corporative level within the existing society, within determinate regimes of accumulation; on the other, the political choices of the subaltern classes that had resulted in a failure to elaborate their own hegemonic apparatuses capable of resisting the absorptive logic of the passive revolution. In other words, the working classes – for different reasons in different countries, but with the same result – had not yet been able to socialise the ideological forms that corresponded to their own experiences of the conflicts within the economic structure of bourgeois society and thus lay the foundations for transforming it. They had remained subaltern to the superstructural elements of the existing ‘historical bloc’, unable to find ‘a way to make an ulterior progressive movement’, as Gramsci called it in 1933, or as he had characterised it in early 1932, to pose themselves ‘as capable of assimilating the whole of society’ and thus to bring about ‘the perfection of this conception of the State and of law, so as to conceive the end of the State and law’.122

More recently Thomas has attempted a further reading of the passive revolution.123 According to Thomas most readings of the passive revolution tend first ‘“to narrativize” it; that is, to compose the chronologically sequential narrative of the “long nineteenth century” that seems to be dispersed throughout various notes in the Prison Notebooks in a nonlinear form’; secondly, ‘they assume that this narrative is a vehicle for revealing Gramsci’s “intended meaning”’;124 thirdly, ‘they suppose that passive revolution is a “concept” that is expressive of this narrative and intended meaning because it either precedes or completes them’.125 Thomas proposes, instead of ‘attempting to reconstruct passive revolution as a distinctive historical narrative, political concept, or theory of state formation, therefore […] to consider it instead as a “heuristic formula”’, in order ‘to emphasize the way in which the formula of passive revolution functions as an organizing perspective – in different ways at different times – in Gramsci’s ongoing research process, rather than the extent to which it represents a novel narrative, concept, or theory.’126 Thomas insists that at the same time as Gramsci is using the notion of the passive revolution, he is also returning to the notion of ‘permanent revolution’, or ‘revolution in permanence’. Consequently Thomas has attempted to offer a different framework, where passive revolution emerges as part of Gramsci’s broader research project:

This larger project did not consist in the first instance in the development of a novel theory of modern state formation. Rather, Gramsci’s more fundamental project in the Prison Notebooks consisted in the search for a political strategy that could be the ‘actual’ form of ‘the revolution in permanence.’ […] Gramsci’s research on passive revolution emerged during the elaboration of his own distinctive contribution to the debate in the international communist movement in the 1920s over the meaning of the notion of ‘permanent revolution.’ As a ‘criterion’ of historical research into the development of the modern state throughout the long nineteenth century, passive revolution is effectively a by-product of this more fundamental project; in its turn, the ‘punctual’ elaboration of passive revolution helps to clarify Gramsci’s specific understanding of the ‘permanence’ of the revolutionary movement required for the struggle against fascism. It is in this perspective that the heuristic nature of passive revolution can be understood, as a characterization of the challenges confronting attempts to renew the slogan of ‘the revolution in permanence’ in the changed political conditions of the interwar years.127

Thomas’s conclusion is that this allows Gramsci ‘to specify the utility of passive revolution, not as a theoretical end in itself, but as a diagnosis of the challenges confronting the attempt to renew the revolution in permanence in the changed political conditions of the struggle against Fascism’.128

Passive Revolution as Modality and Tendency

The above reading of Gramsci’s references to the passive revolution and of important aspects of their discussion since the 1970s makes it evident that passive revolution is not a ‘historical phase’ or a ‘historical moment’ and is not a concept limited to historical interpretation of a particular period of Italian or European history. In this sense, it is not part of an historical ‘canon’ or an inescapable historical dialectic that would suggest that unless there is a ‘proper’ Jacobin revolution, the only possible historical eventuality is passive revolution as some sort of historical ‘ideal type’. Nor is it part of a ‘typology’ of revolutions.

It is also obvious that passive revolution is an example of the experimental character of the Prison Notebooks and the fact that Gramsci is experimenting with notions, testing in a sense their particular theoretical and strategic efficacy. Such a perspective can explain why there are indeed semantic shifts and tensions in the different ways that Gramsci uses the notion of the passive revolution. The Notebooks are not just a ‘work-in-progress’; they represent a textual experimental site, a testing ground for concepts and conceptualisations, and this can account not only for Gramsci’s rewriting notes but also for the open-ended character of Gramsci’s particular conceptualisations. Gramsci is not simply ‘using’ or ‘applying’ notions or trying to envisage their particular analytical efficacy; rather, he is experimenting with the very theoretical vocabulary he is trying to articulate, constantly reconfiguring the various conceptual ‘experimental designs’ and in this sense transforming the theoretical apparatus he is attempting to define. And this can account for the semantic shifts or even changes.

At the same time passive revolution represents an important aspect of Gramsci’s thinking and his confrontation with the transformations of capitalist societies, especially in the period after WWI and the emergence of new forms of organisation, of state intervention in both the economy but also forms of collective representation, of new forms of mass social life and of new and expansive ideological apparatuses. These transformations enable the explanation of the emergence of fascism as an answer to the political crisis but also its extension into a different register, Stalinism. They also point to the need to elaborate new strategic alternatives for the revolutionary movement that take account of these transformations.

In this sense, we can insist that passive revolution refers more to dynamics, modalities and the profound changes in capitalist state apparatuses (including ‘hegemonic apparatuses’) and ‘bourgeois practice of politics’ in that period, and the way the political terrain was changing – and consequently the challenges for the revolutionary movement. Passive revolution does not describe a historical period, or a certain historical sequence, and it does not suggest some form of political/historical prescription. And this, rather than pointing to a ‘definite’ or final description of the passive revolution, points in my reading rather to a political-strategic-theoretical node or nexus of questions, a way of thinking rather than a well-defined concept.

This is indeed the crucial aspect of the thinking of passive revolution. We are not talking about a form of a revolution, or an alternative road to revolution. And it is not simply a description of certain historical periods or historical sequences. Furthermore, there is no evidence that Gramsci ever abandoned the idea that revolution is a process of ruptures or that socialism indeed requires some form of revolutionary process, including the aspect of violence and insurrection. However, the question about how to arrive at such a revolutionary situation, how to accumulate political, ideological, and organisational resources and capacities, how to actually affect the relation of forces and thus in a way set tasks that their conditions have incubated, remains open. The profound transformations in both the economic, political, and ideological relations of advanced capitalist societies, that are linked to ‘passive revolution’ in all its metonymic polyvalence, pose a major challenge for the revolutionary movement. This does not mean abandoning the main strategic horizon, namely the abolition of capitalist social relations and the transition to a form of self-government of the subaltern that includes a full socialisation of politics and politicisation of the political. And in this sense, ‘war of position’ can also be considered neither as a different tactic, nor as an abandonment of the idea of revolutionary rupture, but as a metonym for the profound changes in the articulation of a potential subaltern hegemony that such transformations of the very terrain of social antagonism entail.

The emergence of the Fordist regime of accumulation, the new forms of mass workplace concentration but also the new capacities for mass consumption, the new forms of the ‘totalitarian’ role of the state in terms of incorporating the subaltern combined with the new forms of mass democracy, the extended role of hegemonic apparatuses, this all created new forms of socialisation and politicisation of the subaltern. These forms included on the one hand the element of disaggregation of the subaltern classes, in the sense of the breaking-up of previous cultures of resistance and solidarity and undermining of their ability to create their own autonomous spaces, and new forms of hegemonic appeal and recognition (especially in the form of the expansion of totalitarian forms as combined recognition and disaggregation). On the other hand, though, these transformed forms of political interpellation and organisation of social life entailed new possibilities for the subaltern to move beyond the corporatist phase towards the possibility of articulating their own hegemonic practice.

I believe that this points towards the subaltern ‘war of position’ as the true ‘anti-passive revolution’ – to borrow Christine Buci-Glucksmann’s expression –, a period of confrontation with a changed terrain and the attempt to engage in forms of political practice that can actually deal with this transformed terrain, without this entailing an abandonment of an approach that focuses on revolutionary rupture. This is something evident in the Athos Lisa’s report,129 where Gramsci both insisted on a ‘classical’ conception of the ‘insurrection’ in regard to the revolution, but also focuses on the ‘Constituent’ and the idea of proposing a ‘Constituent Assembly’ as a concrete proposal in regard to a ‘war of position’ under the particular conditions of Fascism.

There were two scenarios for revolution in Italy, one more likely than the other. Gramsci held that the most probable would involve a period of transition. The tactics of the party should envisage this without fear of appearing not very revolutionary. It should make the slogan of a Constituent Assembly its own, not as an end in itself but as a means, before any other anti-fascist party adopted it. The Assembly would offer an institutional framework for its representatives to pose the most urgent demands of the working class, to discredit every scheme for peaceful reform, and to show the Italian working class that the only viable solution for Italy lay in a proletarian revolution. Here Gramsci liked to recall the ‘Association of Young Sardinia’ of Turin in 1919, when well-judged and timely action by the Party had rallied the poor against the rich, enrolling them in the Sardinian socialist educational society within the chamber of trade unions. As a direct consequence, soldiers from the Sassari Brigade of the army had taken the side of Turin’s working class. This, he said, was a bit like a small Constituent Assembly. He added that the first article in the Bolshevik programme for government had included the demand for a Constituent Assembly. To reach an agreement with the antifascist parties from a position of political independence and superior strength, the party must lay claim to the same idea. In this way our tactics would lead us, without worrying about labels, to achieve the aims the party had set itself.130

I believe that Gramsci’s thinking on the ‘Constituent’ represents exactly his thinking on the need to enrich revolutionary strategy with the apprehension of all the transformations included in the notion of ‘passive revolution’ and to elaborate more the strategy of the United Front, especially against fascism. However, it would be unfair to Gramsci to limit the political consequences of his thinking of passive revolution simply to an emphasis on the United Front as antifascist strategy, in the same way that it is a limited view to oppose ‘war of position’ to a strategy of revolutionary ruptures. I believe that a series of Gramsci’s contributions can all be considered the result of his confrontation

with the historical developments and phenomena included in the notion of the passive revolution. These range from the rethinking of the Party as collective laboratory of new antagonistic intellectualities to the emphasis on the complexity of hegemonic apparatuses and consequently on the struggle for subaltern hegemony in the context of the new forms of mass democracy and ‘totalitarian’ functioning of the State, and the attempt to insist on a renewed conception of subaltern self-government as the very end of revolutionary politics. What is important is that we recognise that whilst Gramsci was ready to accept tactical choices or even consider transitional phases (even to the extent of a certain understanding of ‘black parliamentarism’ of a Soviet type), at the same time he never forgot the strategic horizon of a communist politics. And this is what makes the passive revolution, in all its polyvalence and even ambiguity at certain moments, an integral aspect of Gramsci’s research in the Prison Notebooks.

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1

Callinicos 2010.

2

Cuoco 1913, p. 106.

3

Cuoco 1913, p. 163.

4

Losurdo 1989.

5

Frosini 2021a. We will return to this question later.

6

Gramsci 1992–2007b, p. 232 (Q4, §57).

7

Gramsci 1992–2007a, p. 137 (Q1, §44).

8

Gramsci 1992–2007a, pp. 229–30 (Q1, §150).

9

Bianchi 2020, p. 239.

10

Gramsci 1992–2007c, p. 252 (Q8, §25).

11

Gramsci 1992–2007c, p. 257 (Q8, §36).

12

Gramsci 1992–2007c, p. 260 (Q8, §39).

13

Gramsci 1995, pp. 341–2 (Q10, §6).

14

Gramsci 1995, pp. 342–3 (Q10, §6).

15

Gramsci 1992–2007c, p. 378 (Q8, §236). In the same note it is also stressed that, ‘A new “liberalism” under modern conditions – wouldn’t that be, precisely, “fascism”?’ (Ibid.)

16

Gramsci 1992–2007c, p. 378 (Q8, §236).

17

Gramsci 1995, p. 349 (Q10I, §9).

18

Gramsci 1995, p. 349 (Q10I, §9).

19

Gramsci 1995, p. 350 (Q10, §9).

20

Gramsci 1995, p. 350 (Q10, §9).

21

Gramsci 1995, p. 350 (Q10, §9).

22

For a reading of these notes, see Thomas 2020.

23

Gramsci 1971, p. 108 (Q15, §11).

24

Gramsci 1971, p. 109 (Q15, §11).

25

Gramsci 1971, p. 110 (Q15, §11).

26

Gramsci 1971, pp. 106–7 (Q15, §17).

27

Gramsci 1971, p. 113 (Q15, §25).

28

Gramsci 1971, pp. 105–6 (Q15, §59).

29

Gramsci 1971, p. 106 (Q15, §59).

30

Gramsci 1971, p. 114 (Q15, §62).

31

See also on this, Cospito 2016, p. 40.

32

Gramsci 1971, p. 114 (Q15, §62).

33

See on this the observations in Thomas 2020.

34

Gramsci 1971, pp. 279–80 (Q22, §1)

35

Gramsci 1971, pp. 57–9 (Q19, §24).

36

Antonini 2021.

37

Gramsci 1971, p. 223 (Q14, §23).

38

Gramsci 1971, p. 223 (Q14, §23).

39

For a use of the notion of Caesarism to explain the crisis of European integration, see Keucheyan and Durand 2015.

40

Gramsci 1992–2007c, p. 109 (Q6, §138).

41

There have been two suggestions regarding when these notes were written. Valentino Gerratana (Gramsci 1975, p. 2938) suggested they were written in March 1935. Recently, Gianni Francioni has insisted that the entire Notebook was finished by February 1933 (Francioni 2020).

42

Cospito 2016, p. 73.

43

Gramsci 1971, pp. 255–6 (Q14, §74 & 76).

44

Gramsci 1971, p. 256 (Q14, §76).

45

Recently Yohann Douet, in his impressive and important reading of Gramsci, has insisted that Gramsci does not treat the Soviet situation under Stalin as a case of ‘passive revolution’, since the Soviet regime had after all, as its starting point, an actual revolution with active participation on the part of the masses. For Douet, although Gramsci acknowledged ‘the loss of expansivity and of hegemonic force of the Soviet regime, which could only be accentuated by the authoritarianism and criminal brutality of Stalin […] he does not seem to have considered these elements as irreversible, since in his eyes the adoption of a hegemonic politics by the regime and more generally the transcending [depassement] of the economic-corporatist phase, remained concretely possible’ (Douet 2022, p. 295).

46

Gramsci 1971, p. 253 (Q5, §127).

47

Thomas 2020, pp. 119–20. See also Modonesi 2020a for an overview of such debates.

48

De Felice 1977. On the broader conjuncture around these debates, see Liguori 2022.

49

De Felice 1977, p. 179.

50

For De Felice, Gramsci’s emphasis on Americanism as an historical tendency is one of his most important insights. De Felice 1977, p. 214.

51

De Felice 1977, p. 220.

52

Frosini 2019, p. 281

53

Buci-Glucksmann 1980.

54

Buci-Glucksmann 1980, p. 310.

55

Buci-Glucksmann 1979a, p. 208.

56

Buci-Glucksmann 1979a, p. 215.

57

Buci-Glucksmann 1979a, p. 219.

58

Buci-Glucksmann 1979a, p. 232.

59

Buci-Glucksmann 1979a, p. 233.

60

Buci-Glucksmann 1979b.

61

Losurdo 1997, p. 155.

62

Chatterjee 1986, p. 30. For a reading of the formation of the Indian State as passive revolution, see Riley and Desai 2007.

63

Chatterjee 1986, p. 50.

64

Chatterjee 1986, p. 168.

65

Davidson 2012, p. 320.

66

Davidson 2010.

67

Rehman 2013, p. xiii.

68

Rehmann 2013, p. 9.

69

Tuğal 2009.

70

Morton 2007, p. 68.

71

Morton 2007, p. 108.

72

Morton 2007, p. 149.

73

Morton 2010, p. 331.

74

Morton 2010, p. 331.

75

Bieler and Morton 2018, p. 19.

76

Bieler and Morton 2018, p. 22.

77

Aricó 2014, p. 67.

78

Portantiero 1981, p. 58.

79

Mena and Kanoussi 2020, p. 114.

80

Mena and Kanoussi 2020, p. 116.

81

Mena and Kanoussi 2020, p. 119.

82

Mena and Kanoussi 2020, p. 125.

83

Coutinho 2012, p. 104.

84

Coutinho 2012, p. 179.

85

Coutinho 2012, p. 160.

86

Bianchi 2020, p. 243.

87

Bianchi 2020, p. 267.

88

Modonesi 2019, p. 89.

89

Modonesi 2019, p. 93.

90

Modonesi 2019, p. 135.

91

Modonesi 2019, p. 106; Modonesi 2020b, p. 258.

92

Voza 2004.

93

Voza 2004, p. 195.

94

Voza 2004, pp. 205–6.

95

Di Meo 2014.

96

Vacca 2020, p. 85.

97

Vacca 2020, p. 86.

98

Vacca 2020, p. 87.

99

Vacca 2020, p. 113.

100

Vacca 2020, p. 114.

101

Vacca 2020, p. 120.

102

Burgio 2014, p. 282.

103

Burgio 2014, p. 388.

104

Burgio 2014, p. 389.

105

Burgio 2014, p. 393.

106

Frosini 2021a, p. 217.

107

Frosini 2017, p. 299.

108

Frosini 2017, p. 302.

109

Frosini 2017, p. 311.

110

Frosini 2017, p. 312.

111

Frosini 2017, p. 317.

112

Frosini 2017, p. 328.

113

Frosini 2021b, p. 256.

114

Frosini 2021b, p. 258.

115

Frosini 2021b, p. 259.

116

Frosini 2021b, p. 268.

117

Antonini 2021, p. 139.

118

Antonini 2021, pp. 145–6.

119

Thomas 2009, p. 141.

120

Thomas 2009, p. 151.

121

Thomas 2009, p. 155.

122

Thomas 2009, pp. 156–7.

123

Thomas 2020.

124

Thomas 2020, p. 121.

125

Thomas 2020, p. 122.

126

Thomas 2020, p. 122.

127

Thomas 2020, p. 123.

128

Thomas 2020, p. 146.

129

Athos Lisa, a contemporary of Gramsci and a militant of the PCI, spent a period of his incarceration under the Fascist regime at the Turi prison with Gramsci. After his liberation from prison he wrote, in 1933, a report for the leadership of the PCI on Gramsci’s political views in prison. The report was kept secret and published only in 1964, after Togliatti’s death. On the history of the report, see Anderson 2017, pp. 151–5.

130

Athos Lisa in Anderson 2017, p. 162.

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