Passive revolution is a transformation of the political and institutional structures without strong social processes by ruling classes for their own self-preservation. The phrase was coined by the Marxist politician and philosopher Antonio Gramsci during the interwar period in Italy.
Passive revolution describes a gradual but continuous reorganization of the state and economy in order to preserve the power of the elite by incorporating or neutralizing the power of adversarial groups through transforming them into partners, all without overcoming the fundamental social contradictions. [1] Gramsci argued that when a social group lacks the strength to establish hegemony, it will instead choose a path where its interests and demands will "be satisfied by small doses, legally, in a reformist manner-- in such a way that it was possible to preserve the political and economic positions of the old ruling class." [1] This "avoid[s] the popular masses going through a period of political experience such as occurred in France in the years of Jacobinism." [1]
Gramsci uses "passive revolution" in a variety of contexts with slightly different meanings. The primary usage is to contrast the passive transformation of bourgeois society in 19th-century Italy with the active revolutionary process of the bourgeoisie in France. Whereas the French case is seen by Gramsci as an authentic revolution guided by social forces, the Italian case was 'elite-driven'; a process of modernization that did not disrupt the social arrangements of power in Italy but instead modernized it on the behalf of elite classes to secure their own position. The change described is not abrupt but a slow and gradual metamorphosis that may take years or generations to accomplish. [2]
In addition to his comparison of the French Revolution versus the Italian case, Gramsci also associates Italian fascism with the notion of passive revolution.[ citation needed ]
Gramsci also used the term for the mutations of the structures of capitalist economic production that he recognized primarily in the development of the US factory system of the 1920s and 1930s. Passive revolution is detailed by Gramsci as an elite process of state restructuring in Italy specifically, but it has been used as a frame of analysis for viewing other transitions to capitalist modernity. [3]
'Passive revolution has been characterized by the quote from Prince Don Fabrizio Corbera of Salina in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel Il Gattopardo : ‘Everything must change so that everything can remain the same’. [4]
Professor Yiching Wu writes that China's post-Mao reforms were an example of passive revolution. [1] The Chinese Communist Party under Deng Xiaoping coped with socioeconomic woes through consolidating its power, using market mechanisms and commodification to create controlled openings "to buy precious time in relation to both global capitalist competition and domestic popular discontent." [1] Through the "passive revolution" of the reforms, party bureaucrats and intellectuals created a new technocratic elite that won the support of rural peasants who wanted personal control of land and urban people who wanted more consumer goods and a higher living standard. [1]
In political science, a revolution is a fundamental and relatively sudden change in political power and political organization which occurs when the population revolts against the government, typically due to perceived oppression or political incompetence.
Hegemony is the political, economic, and military predominance of one state over other states. In Ancient Greece, hegemony denoted the politico-military dominance of the hegemon city-state over other city-states. In the 19th century, hegemony denoted the "social or cultural predominance or ascendancy; predominance by one group within a society or milieu" and "a group or regime which exerts undue influence within a society".
Antonio Francesco Gramsci was an Italian Marxist philosopher, journalist, linguist, writer, and politician. He wrote on philosophy, political theory, sociology, history, and linguistics. He was a founding member and one-time leader of the Italian Communist Party. A vocal critic of Benito Mussolini and fascism, he was imprisoned in 1926 where he remained until his death in 1937.
Political sociology is an interdisciplinary field of study concerned with exploring how governance and society interact and influence one another at the micro to macro levels of analysis. Interested in the social causes and consequences of how power is distributed and changes throughout and amongst societies, political sociology's focus ranges across individual families to the state as sites of social and political conflict and power contestation.
In Marxist philosophy, cultural hegemony is the dominance of a culturally diverse society by the ruling class who manipulate the culture of that society—the beliefs and explanations, perceptions, values, and mores—so that the worldview of the ruling class becomes the accepted cultural norm. As the universal dominant ideology, the ruling-class worldview misrepresents the social, political, and economic status quo as natural, inevitable, and perpetual social conditions that benefit every social class, rather than as artificial social constructs that benefit only the ruling class.
In sociology, the ruling class of a society is the social class who set and decide the political and economic agenda of society. In Marxist philosophy, the ruling class are the capitalist social class who own the means of production and apply their cultural hegemony to determine and establish the dominant ideology of the society. In the 21st century, the worldwide political economy established by globalization has created a transnational capitalist class who are not native to any one country.
Neo-Gramscianism applies a critical theory approach to the study of international relations (IR) and the global political economy (GPE) that explores the interface of ideas, institutions and material capabilities as they shape the specific contours of the state formation. The theory is heavily influenced by the writings of Antonio Gramsci. Neo-Gramscianism analyzes how the particular constellation of social forces, the state and the dominant ideational configuration define and sustain world orders. In this sense, the neo-Gramscian approach breaks the decades-old stalemate between the realist schools of thought and the liberal theories by historicizing the very theoretical foundations of the two streams as part of a particular world order and finding the interlocking relationship between agency and structure. Karl Polanyi, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno and Michel Foucault are cited as major sources within the critical theory of IR.
Nicos Poulantzas was a Greek-French Marxist political sociologist and philosopher. In the 1970s, Poulantzas was known, along with Louis Althusser, as a leading structural Marxist; while at first a Leninist, he eventually became a proponent of democratic socialism. He is best known for his theoretical work on the state, but he also offered Marxist contributions to the analysis of fascism, social class in the contemporary world, and the collapse of dictatorships in Southern Europe in the 1970s.
Charles Bettelheim was a French Marxian economist and historian, founder of the Center for the Study of Modes of Industrialization at the EHESS, economic advisor to the governments of several developing countries during the period of decolonization. He was very influential in France's New Left, and considered one of "the most visible Marxists in the capitalist world", in France as well as in Spain, Italy, Latin America, and India.
In postcolonial studies and in critical theory, the term subaltern designates and identifies the colonial populations who are socially, politically, and geographically excluded from the hierarchy of power of an imperial colony and from the metropolitan homeland of an empire. Antonio Gramsci coined the term subaltern to identify the cultural hegemony that excludes and displaces specific people and social groups from the socio-economic institutions of society, in order to deny their agency and voices in colonial politics. The terms subaltern and subaltern studies entered the vocabulary of post-colonial studies through the works of the Subaltern Studies Group of historians who explored the political-actor role of the common people who constitute the mass population, rather than re-explore the political-actor roles of the social and economic elites in the history of India.
In the People's Republic of China since 1967, the terms "ultra-left" and "left communist" refers to political theory and practice self-defined as further "left" than that of the central Maoist leaders at the height of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR). The terms are also used retroactively to describe some early 20th century Chinese anarchist orientations. As a slur, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has used the term "ultra-left" more broadly to denounce any orientation it considers further "left" than the party line. According to the latter usage, the CCP Central Committee denounced in 1978 as "ultra-left" the line of Mao Zedong from 1956 until his death in 1976. This article refers only to 1) the self-defined ultra-left of the GPCR; and 2) more recent theoretical trends drawing inspiration from the GPCR ultra-left, China's anarchist legacy and international "left communist" traditions.
Posthegemony or post-hegemony is a period or a situation in which hegemony is no longer said to function as the organizing principle of a national or post-national social order, or of the relationships between and amongst nation states within the global order. The concept has different meanings within the fields of political theory, cultural studies, and international relations.
Counter-hegemony is an attempt to critique or dismantle hegemonic power. In other words, it is a confrontation or opposition to existing status quo and its legitimacy in politics, but can also be observed in various other spheres of life, such as history, media, music, etc. Neo-Gramscian theorist Nicola Pratt (2004) has described counter-hegemony as "a creation of an alternative hegemony on the terrain of civil society in preparation for political change".
In political philosophy, particularly Frankfurt School critical theory, advanced capitalism is the situation that pertains in a society in which the capitalist model has been integrated and developed deeply and extensively and for a prolonged period. The expression advanced capitalism distinguishes such societies from the historical previous forms of capitalism, mercantilism and industrial capitalism, and partially overlaps with the concepts of a developed country; of the post-industrial age; of finance capitalism; of post-Fordism; of the spectacular society; of media culture; and of "developed", "modern", and "complex" capitalism.
The Prison Notebooks are a series of essays written by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci was imprisoned by the Italian Fascist regime in 1926. The notebooks were written between 1929 and 1935, when Gramsci was released from prison to a medical center on grounds of ill-health. His friend, Piero Sraffa, had supplied the writing implements and notebooks. Gramsci died in April 1937.
In Marxist theory, society consists of two parts: the base and superstructure. The base refers to the mode of production which includes the forces and relations of production into which people enter to produce the necessities and amenities of life. The superstructure refers to society's other relationships and ideas not directly relating to production including its culture, institutions, roles, rituals, religion, media, and state. The relation of the two parts is not strictly unidirectional. The superstructure can affect the base. However, the influence of the base is predominant.
Marxist philosophy or Marxist theory are works in philosophy that are strongly influenced by Karl Marx's materialist approach to theory, or works written by Marxists. Marxist philosophy may be broadly divided into Western Marxism, which drew from various sources, and the official philosophy in the Soviet Union, which enforced a rigid reading of Marx called dialectical materialism, in particular during the 1930s. Marxist philosophy is not a strictly defined sub-field of philosophy, because the diverse influence of Marxist theory has extended into fields as varied as aesthetics, ethics, ontology, epistemology, social philosophy, political philosophy, the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of history. The key characteristics of Marxism in philosophy are its materialism and its commitment to political practice as the end goal of all thought. The theory is also about the struggles of the proletariat and their reprimand of the bourgeoisie.
In Marxist theory, false consciousness is a term describing the ways in which material, ideological, and institutional processes are said to mislead members of the proletariat and other class actors within capitalist societies, concealing the exploitation intrinsic to the social relations between classes.
Richard Lachmann was an American sociologist and specialist in comparative historical sociology who was a professor at University at Albany, SUNY.
The Shengwulian or Sheng-wu-lien was a radical ultra-left group formed in 1967 during the Cultural Revolution. The rebel group became known for its opposition to local authorities installed by Beijing and for creatively re-interpreting the Cultural Revolution's official doctrine, becoming active during a period when the political trends of the Cultural Revolution were moving away from mass political mobilization.