Passive revolution

Passive revolution is a term coined by Italian politician and philosopher Antonio Gramsci during the interwar period in Italy. Gramsci coined the term to refer to a significant change that is not an abrupt one, but a slow and gradual metamorphosis which could take years or generations to accomplish.[1]

Antonio Gramsci

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. However, Gramsci also associates Italian fascism with the notion of passive revolution.

Passive revolution is a transformation of the political and institutional structures without strong social processes by ruling classes for their own self-preservation. It 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’.[2] Gramsci also uses the term for the mutations of the structures of capitalist economic production that he recognizes primarily in the development of the United States factory system of the 1920s and 1930s. Though passive revolution is detailed by Gramsci as an elite process of state restructuring in Italy specifically, it has been used as a frame of analysis for viewing other transitions to capitalist modernity.[3]

References
  1. Gramsci, Antonio; Forgacs, David (1988). An Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings, 1916-1935. New York: Schocken.
  2. Cox, Robert W. (2007). Review of the book Unravelling Gramsci: Hegemony and Passive Revolution in the Global Political Economy, by A. D. Morton. Capital & Class, 31(3), pp. 258-261.
  3. Morton, Adam David (2007), 'Waiting for Gramsci: State Formation, Passive Revolution and the International', Millennium - Journal of International Studies, 35 (3), 597-621.

Further reading
  • Gramsci, Antonio; Forgacs, David (1988). An Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings, 1916-1935. New York: Schocken.
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