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The continuum of passive revolution.
Introduction
Within the Prison Notebooks on 'Americanism and Fordism' penned by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, we find the comment, 'In Italy there have been the beginnings of a Fordist fanfare: exaltation of big cities, overall planning for the Milan conurbation, etc.; the affirmation that capitalism is only at its beginnings and that it is necessary to prepare for it grandiose patterns of development' (Gramsci, 1971: 287, Q22[section]2). (1) Captured here with stark clarity are the territorial, spatial and geographical dimensions of uneven development, as well as the combined character of its crystallisation within a social formation. The reorganisation of the labour process enacted by the introduction of new methods of rationalisation, regulation and disciplining as well as their impact on familial arrangements, the gendered division of labour, cultural and ideological forms all manifested within 'Americanism and Fordism', led to a profound questioning of the spatial and temporal spread of capitalism. Presciently, this entailed '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" ... of the last century' (Gramsci, 1971: 279-80, Q22[section]1). As Leon Trotsky himself recognised, in a speech delivered on 14 November 1922 to the Fourth Congress of the Communist International, at which Gramsci was in attendance, 'We observe more than once in history the development of economic phenomena, new in principle, within the old integuments, and moreover this occurs by means of the most diverse combinations' (Trotsky, 1972 [1922]: 245). For Gramsci, 'Americanism and Fordism' was the latest phase of capitalist reorganisation understood in classical terms as an attempt to overcome the tendency of the rate of profit to fall through the implementation of 'Fordist' methods of intensification and rationalisation of labour (see e.g. Gramsci, 1971: 280, Q22[section]1; 310-13, Q22[section]13; and for further, detailed elaboration, Morton, 2007a: 63-73, 102-5). Yet, alongside the rise of Fascism, 'Americanism and Fordism', was also regarded in novel terms as the latest phase in Italy's history of modern state formation--as a passive revolution referring to the reorganisation of state power and class relations as well as the constitution of political forms to suit the expansion of capitalism as a mode of production. As astutely summarised by Buci-Glucksmann (1980:314), the condition of passive revolution is 'one of the richest and most complex concepts of the Prison Notebooks'. It is not the task of the introduction to this special issue to present a definitive survey and definitional statement of all the different modes of passive revolution articulated by Gramsci. (2) This would not least be counterproductive, since it might smother the diversity of readings produced by the independent contributions to the special issue. As a basic pointer, though, lest confusion reign about the condition and concept, here follow a few opening remarks. The passive revolution syntagma captures various concrete historical instances in which aspects of the social relations of capitalist development are either instituted and/or expanded, resulting in both a 'revolutionary' rupture and 'restoration' of social relations. 'The problem', as Antonio Gramsci (1971: 219, Q13[section]27) states, 'is to see whether in the dialectic of "revolution/restoration" it is revolution or restoration which predominates'. A passive revolution, therefore, represents a blocked dialectic (Buci-Glucksmann, 1980:315); or a condition of rupture in which socio-political processes of revolution are at once partially fulfilled and displaced, as usefully described by Callinicos in this issue. The term itself is a derivate and modified borrowing from Vincenzo Cuoco (1770-1823) and his account of the 1799 revolution or Parthenopian Republic in Naples, as well as the coupling 'revolution-restoration' coined by Edgar Quinet (1803-1875), the French historian, in his Le rivoluzioni d'Italia (1934 [1848]). According to Gramsci, after the French Revolution (1789), the emergent bourgeoisie there 'was able to present itself as an integral "state", with all the intellectual and moral forces that were necessary and adequate to the task of organising a complete and perfect society' (Gramsci, 2007: 9, Q6[section]10). In contrast to the instance of revolutionary rupture in France, other European countries went through a passive revolution in which the old feudal classes were not destroyed but maintained a political role through state power. Hence, [The] birth of the modern European states [proceeded] by successive waves of reform rather than by revolutionary explosions like the original French one. The 'successive waves' were made up of a combination of social struggles, inter...See the full content of this document
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