Passive revolution revisited: From the Prison Notebooks to our ‘great and terrible world’

Abstract

Building on the recent fertile season of studies on passive revolution, this article argues for the (re-)increasing relevance of the concept in these times of capitalist crisis. However, it is also argued that this renewed relevance should be predicated on a narrower definition of passive revolution than the one generally used in recent debates in critical International Political Economy. Returning to the Prison Notebooks, four elements are identified here as the conceptual core of passive revolution, to which Gramsci’s admittedly varying uses of the phrase are implicitly anchored: an international precondition determining the necessity of restructuring on the national scale, a domestic precondition determining the specific form of this restructuring, a specific method through which passive revolution is effected and a specific outcome which entails achieving the passivity of subaltern classes through the partial fulfilment and simultaneous displacement of their demands. Thus redefined, passive revolution becomes a valuable instrument for grasping the challenges facing the emergence of a subaltern bloc in the current organic crisis of capitalism.